OBLIVION

‘Martle? What’s wrong?’

There was a ragged, desperate quality to Martle’s voice:

‘Roz? I’m at the Three Jade Shebeen in the settlement of the

fourth DHAI creeper-viper. Things have gone oogli-shaped real

bad. I need backup, Roz, and I need it…’

There was a sound from the comm link that was not the

distinctive chunk! of an Adjudicator’s MFG, but which could

only have come from some sort of projectile weapon. Then the

link went dead.

‘Fenn!’ The name was ripped from Roz’s throat seemingly of

its own volition. She turned to Logh. ‘This Three Jade Shebeen.

Where?’

‘I can show,’ said Logh, worriedly. ‘Not a good idea. Very

bad boys in Three Jade Shebeen. Very dangerous…’

Roz was almost snarlingat him now, in a way that made

him start away.

‘You take me there,’ Roz told him. ‘You take me there. Now.’

T

H

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N

E

W

A

D

V

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T

U

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E

S

OBLIVION

Dave Stone

First published in Great Britain in 1998 by

Virgin Publishing Ltd

332 Ladbroke Grove

London WIO 5AH

Copyright © Dave Stone 1998

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 20522 7

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.

This is for

Anne

and Corrine

and especially

for Laura.

‘In your arms, enfolded in your arms and safe.’

DUKE SENIOR

Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy:

This wide and universal theatre

Presents more woeful pageants than the scene

Wherein we play in.

JAQUES All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

Then the whining schoolboy with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover.

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. I he sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon.

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side.

His youthful hose well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank: and his big, manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion...

‘And, yea, like unto the Kingdoms of the World was my

sight, and all the Kingdoms of the World he spoil and sport,

bent to my will. And great indeed was the wailing of the

Damned doomed by my will and mine alone to Oblivion

unending ...

‘And then on Thursday,’ wrote Mr Kipling, ‘I made my

Famous Chocolate Brownies without the secret extra

ingredient.’

You were looking so serious there, for a moment.

The observant will of course have realized that this is the

third and final book in the ‘Clockwork Trilogy’, the one about

which I’m also always on; the one that started with Sky

Pirates! and Construction with a capital C, continued with

the Development of Death and Diplomacy, and now ends with

Deconstruction, dissolution, obliteration, misery, futility and

death. We’re going down the rabbit hole, boys, and it don’t

exactly lead to Wonderland.

But then again you’ve got to laugh. It does you good,

apparently.

(On the general subject of madness, incidentally, someone -

I forget who - came up with a useful easy definition for

clinical paranoia. You can think that every single person in

the world is out to get you and not be paranoid. If you think

that even one table lamp, or piece of Stilton cheese, is out to

get you, then you are.)

Also incidentally, in the researching of this book I finally

got around to reading When Rabbit Howls. The Howling

Rabbit woman had a grand total of 74 distinct personalities,

apparently, one of whom was a literary genius on a level with

Shakespeare and Joyce. Which tends to beg the question:

where the hell was he when she wrote the bloody book?

Mind my hat.

— D.S.

PROLOGUE

REFRIGERATED DREAMS OF ME

The dream again; the same dream. Waking cold and slick with

prickling sweat, the air pockets rattling through the ducts that

wormhole microtubularly through the Warren, now sounding

akin to distant thunder, an explosion behind the wall or

chattering teeth directly by the ear. Shadows twisting on the

walls; the imagined, half-heard sound of needle-teeth on

polythene.

In the dark the shapes take on a life of their own. The toys

one could not care less about — the threadbare, boring lumps

of ratty fur and polymer that seem to fade into nothing next to

the new bright things got for your new little brother - seem to

watch you with their big, bright eyes, talking in their wadding

heads (...a spoon and sharpen it and slide it inside. I want to

see what’s inside and I want...)

You can almost hear the voices, buzzing and tickling inside

your head, misshapen and uncrystallized, like half-formed

pupae crawling over the meat of the brain.

And woke.

For a long while little Simon Deed remained immobile,

absolutely still, his mind clicking over like cold clockwork -

although ‘cold’ is not perhaps the precisely correct

expression. It implies some sense of chilly, cerebral

calculation and, even for a five-year-old, Simon Deed was

simply not that bright. There was something broken inside

him, or not present from the start; an emotional dead zone

and a fundamental inability to comprehend a reality outside

of the self, without the intelligence or force of will to

compensate.

The imperfect mind of Simon Deed ticked and clicked

imperfectly over the facts of his life. The fracture that

precluded contact and made the giving and receiving of

simple human warmth inconceivable to him, even from his

mother and father. It was evident in the toys that littered the

sleeping cubicle with the chilly untidiness of neglect rather

than the innate entropic mess of childhood. The mother and

father of Simon Deed had bought him toys in the same spirit

as they fed him and tried to make themselves like him: it was

something they were supposed to do, and they were damned

well going to do it, even if they couldn’t find it in themselves

to put their whole hearts into it.

The toys, perhaps as overcompensation, were more

expensive in monetary terms than those ordinarily given to a

five-year-old child. They were also pristine and almost utterly

untouched. Simon Deed would pick them up (because for

some unconscious reason his mother and father would wrap

them and leave them on the floor rather than give them hand

to hand: they touched him only when they thought about it

consciously) - he would pick the toys up and unwrap them,

look at them blankly, take them to his cubicle because that

seemed to be expected, drop them and never so much as look

at them again. Simon Deed continued to participate in this

familial charade only because of the process of unwrapping

and seeing what was inside: he had the unformed notion that

at some point a package might contain something he actually

wanted, though what this might possibly be he could not

even begin to imagine. Simon Deed had barely the

imagination to conceive that a dropped object might at some

point hit the floor.

Deed’s mother and father were a perfectly ordinary and

amiable couple, a control-systems engineer for the Bane

Incorporation and a house-husband who in his spare time

sold product designs for the self same transub-lines upon

which his wife worked, which was why the Deeds were

eligible for subsidized space in the privately owned Bane hab-

warrens. They cannot in all justice be blamed for their

coldness toward their son: they were merely reacting on a

primal level to the deadness within him, and would have

been horrified and ashamed to learn that they were doing it.

Similarly, in the five years since their son had been born,

they had followed advisory birth-control procedures without a

Mingle unconscious lapse that might result in a ‘mistake’ for

the simple reason that their unconscious minds looked at

Simon Deed and flatly refused to countenance another one

remotely like him. They had another child only when they

actively made themselves decide to have one.

Now, this had happened. Simon had a little brother. He

was called Carl.

For the first time in the entire history of the universe (that

being the three and a half years, Simon Deed being a

particularly dense child, since he had first become aware of

the existence of his self) Simon Deed had a comparison for

the interactions of the only living creatures of which he was

really aware, saw how they touched and talked to the new

baby, and saw their genuine pleasure and joy. It would be a

mistake to think that made him sad and hurt, because that

would imply that Simon Deed was capable of feeling such

things. He simply didn’t think it was right. He didn’t like it

and he did not want it in happen, and so of course it

shouldn’t.

For nights Simon Deed had lain awake, the machinery of

Ins mind ticking and clicking over the facts of his life,

incapable of translating them into any active thought or

word. It was not inside him. He was not and would never, of

his own volition, be able to put his thoughts into action.

And then, on this particular and otherwise perfectly

ordinary night, something changed, hi fact, everything there

ever was, or would or will be, changed for ever.

It just didn’t happen all at once.

The man sitting cross-legged at the foot of the mattress was

tall and spindly, almost inhumanly so, so that his limbs

seemed to be semirigid, slightly supple wires. He wore a black

suit and a stovepipe hat. He grinned at Simon Deed with

sharp and vulpine teeth.

‘I expect you’re wondering why I’m here,’ he said.

To the extent that Simon could wonder about anything, he

didn’t wonder about anything at all. The man in the hat was

quite obviously a pervert, and Simon recalled the single

salient point that his parents had made in all their comments

about perverts.

‘Where’s my sweet?’ he said.

The man in the hat chuckled. ‘I’m not a pervert, though I

do have something for you. Something rather... nicer than a

sweet.’ lie doffed his hat in a sardonic little motion. ‘My name

is Mr Pelt. I’m pleased to meet you. And how are you this fine

night?’

Simon didn’t reply. Sweets apparently not being an

immediate option, he had simply dismissed this stranger

from his mind and let it wander, to such a degree that when

he happened to turn his eyes back, he experienced the

merest vestige of something remotely akin to shock to find

that the stranger, Mr Pelt, was still there.

‘Now I hardly call that polite,’ said Mr Pelt - and something

in his voice and the black light in his eyes cut through the

deadness inside Simon, sliced him with a small but jagged

shard of real emotion. It was fear. Simon didn’t like it. Mr Pelt

leant forward to plant his elbows on his knees and put his

face very close to Simon’s, pinioning him with his eyes. It did

not occur to Simon to flinch.

‘You’d better be polite to me, Simon Deed,’ said Mr Pelt,

‘‘cause I know what to do. I’m the oblivion gentleman; I’m the

man with the plan. I can give you something you want,

Simon Deed. You’ve been chosen, Simon Deed, because

you’re special. You’re only one, the only one who’s real - the

only one who’s really real - in the whole wide world. But then

you already knew that.’

Simon didn’t even nod. Mr Pelt’s statements were so

obvious that they did not merit a response.

Mr Pelt took his face away and began to fumble in the

pockets of his black suit. There were a lot of them. ‘Now I

know I had it somewhere,’ he muttered. ‘You know how it is,

though you personally probably don’t. There’s something

special so you keep it somewhere safe and then, when you

come to look for it you - aha! And there it is!’

Mr Pelt pulled a small object from his pocket and showed

it, proudly, to Simon. It was a jewelled egg, about the size of a

duck’s egg, its crust of sapphires, rubies and diamonds inset

in a pure-gold filigree. There was no clasp, but there was a

strangely complex clicking sound as Mr Pelt flipped the egg

open, and tilted it so that Simon could see what was inside.

For the rest of his life, such as it was, Simon never forgot

the feeling of pure, bright rainbow joy - he remembered how

it made him feel, without actually feeling it ever again. He sat

there, in his sleeping cubicle, surrounded by the things that

were supposed to make him feel like that, transfixed.

At last he was able to speak. ‘Want. Want it.’

‘Ah, the problem with the personal pronoun,’ Mr Pelt said

to someone nonexistent to his left. ‘Swimming.’ Then he

turned back to Simon and closed the egg with a snap.

Simon’s body made him jerk back as though he had been

slung, but Simon didn’t feel anything again. Not one thing.

‘This is for you,’ said Mr Pelt. ‘But not tonight. It’s for when

you’ve done the things you have to do. It’s your reward.’ He

looked at Simon with a raised eyebrow and a smile. ‘Will you

do the things you have to do?’

‘Yes,’ said Simon.

So Mr Pelt told Simon the first thing he had to do, and it was

so right and proper, so far as Simon was concerned, that he

just did it.

And later, as the Deed family went through their processes

of grief for their new child who had suffered cot death in the

night, as their minds very carefully prevented certain

thoughts from even occurring to them, Simon made himself

say and do and even think the right things, so that his

mother mid father started to like him, and realize that there

was nothing wrong and slightly frightening about him after

all.

Except inside, of course. Where such things really count.

ANOTHER PROLOGUE

GETTING INSIDE

One of the main differences between stories and reality,

thought Roz, is the different ways in which they spring things

on you. In stories, the surprises are foreshadowed and built

towards; they have a kind of narrative weight, and everything

important, if not absolutely everything, hinges on them. You

know they’re coming, on some emotional level, whether the

obligatory still of the Fateful Moment is on the cover of the

playback wafer or not.

In reality the surprises are merely inexplicable, like

glancing from a window to sec a dog, placidly gnawing its leg

off on the street and then simply hobbling away, and you

never learn precisely what it was about. Reality happens

without some arty simvid director lighting it and

choreographing it, putting it in context and making it

meaningful; it’s just something that occurs. It doesn’t affect

you or make any difference to anything; it’s just banal.

In the same way, every dramatic convention said that she

was supposed to actually feel something about her present

situation. Spiky young Adjudicator on her first off-planet

mission, suddenly finding herself in a world where you can’t

solve every problem with a wisecrack and a good slap, for the

simple reason that you never quite know who can be slapped

with impunity and who can’t. It was the stuff of a thousand

years of fictional cops, and every Smartarse Who Learns

Better story from the year dot. As it was, she just had a

headache from the stuffy, recycled air of the transport and a

greasy feeling on her skin, which was probably

psychosomatic. She had just been utterly unprepared for the

way that the self-enclosed and scaled world of a starship

smelt.

Fortunately, the Overcities of Earth were rich, more than

rich enough to support artificial-gravity generators for their

Church of Adjudication transport craft. Roz stood in the

changing cubicle and examined herself in the full-length

mirror - not from vanity but to consciously check that her

uniform and equipment were complete and fully functional.

Since she was to be a representative of the Church in foreign

climes, the uniform was new and pristine, the heavy boots

and the padding unworn. The only item not fresh out of its

wrappings was her ID plate, being unique to her and

unreproducible, and which she had carefully polished to a

high shine. Personally, Roz would have preferred her

ordinary uniform, or at least one she’d had a chance to wear

in slightly. This new stuff chafed at her wrists and ankles,

and if she wasn’t careful she was going to end up with a fine

new crop of blisters.

The ‘mirror’ was in fact a by-product of the same

technologies as produced the antigrav. and showed a true

image

without

reversing.

The

effect

was

slightly

disorientating, like looking at the output of a videocam

directed at oneself. The mind expected the body’s actions to

be, well, mirrored, and was kept wrong-footed, thrown slightly

out of kilter. Roz ran through the mental list: spare

ammunition in left biceps pouch, the same and a basic

maintenance toolkit in the right, the big Multi-Function Gun

it basically maintained snap-racked on the right thigh. The

lateral-grip baton, which was the end of the evolutionary line

of the police truncheon, was in its statutorily correct place up

the small of the hack (Roz never wore it that way on active

duty, agreeing ns she did with the general opinion that such

a position was tantamount to an injured spine when you fell

on it.) Microgrenades, comms and sensor pack in the belt-

webbing pouches. A membrane-thin gas-mask cowl folded

neatly into a little zipped pocket along the left side of the

collar. The heavy bowie-like hunting knife in the right boot.

Everything present and correct.

The transport’s intercom system chimed. They were nearing

the Zarjax Hook, ETA in twenty of the galactically accepted

time units that, with the current domination of Earth in

galactic affairs, translated directly into minutes. Time to be

strapping herself down and preparing herself for translation

into the freefall of three-dimensional space (which Roz

Forrester hated with a passion unseen) and the military-spec

crash-deceleration (which, if anything, was even worse). Roz

left the cubicle.

Adjudicator Martle was already strapped into his crash

webbing. His uniform was as new and pristine as that of Roz,

yet contrived to look spit-and-polish neater, tougher and

more businesslike - every inch the popular simvid image of

an Adjudicator rather than someone who just happened to be

one and was wearing the costume.

It was probably experience - Fenn Martle was twenty-nine

years old, nine years older than Roz, and had spent more of

his life in the Church. He had refused the elevation to Verger,

preferring the lowly life of a street Adjudicator where he could

do more good, and Roz had been partnered with him from

when she had first been fully Ordained at the age of

nineteen.

Roz owed him a lot from the last year, not least being her

very life on a number of incredibly sticky occasions. She

remembered a time when she had been left shackled in a

crawlspace after being discovered working plainclothes at an

illegal dogfight (which had involved small mutated,

cybernetically enhanced Chihuahuas flying lethally at each

other in especially constructed model aeroplanes) and had

taken the time to free her, even though it meant that the

ringleaders had taken the opportunity to make their escape.

That was only one of several times she’d got herself into a

mess and Fenn had pulled her out of it. She sometimes

desperately wished that she could return the favour - but

that meant wishing him in mortal danger in the first place. It

was all rather confusing.

Now Fenn turned his head with a friendly grin as she

strapped herself into her own webbing. ‘You look great,’ he

said, as though reading her mind about the discrepancies

between them. ‘You’re going to blow them away.’

Roz raised an eyebrow. ‘Literally or figuratively?’

‘Probably both. You know what our job is, here.’

Roz nodded. The Fnarok population of the Overcities was

currently being inundated with a hypnoleptic drug which,

under analysis, had been discovered to be partially derived

from an extract of the human pituitary gland. Further

analysis had shown that, rather than coming from Earth,

these pituitary glands had originated from the human

colonists of Zarjax, the Fnaroks’ home planet. The Church

had sent Roz and Fenn to investigate, calling on the Zarjax

law-enforcement agencies as and when, on the simple basis

that as Earth Adjudicators they outranked absolutely

everybody else.

At least, that was the ostensible reason. Roz Forrester

might have been only a year Ordained, but she had been

around quite long enough to learn something.

‘We go around knocking down doors,’ she said sourly. ‘Haul

in suspects for questioning, get our faces in what passes for

the local media, and generally blunder around making a lot

of noise. That’s supposed to divert attention from the sneaky

little buggers in Covert Ops, who’ve been on planet for weeks

now if not months, and let them do the real job.’

‘That’s about the size of it.’ Fenn Martle smiled, a little

grimly. ‘Then again, we might just give the bastards a

surprise and do it properly. Teach these...’ He made a little

speak-no-evil gesture of the sort that the public face of the

Church had adopted of late when referring to those of

otherworldly extraction. ‘Show ‘em what we’re made of and

teach them a lesson.’

Looking at him, for a moment. Roz was forced to quash

several thoughts and feelings and put them on hold. There

would be time for more personal speculation later. For the

moment she merely allowed herself the pleasure of

professional respect. He was her partner and she trusted him

completely, to do the job and watch her back, in the same

way as she watched his. She trusted him with her life. The

future could take care of itself and, in her heart of hearts,

Roz knew that, with this man beside her, the future was

going to be damned good.

The transport translated down to sublight and fired its

slam retros, flipping itself neatly into Zarjax orbit with an

adroitness unknown and unavailable to commercial vessels.

All the same, despite the presence of internal damper-fields,

the crash deceleration was rough. Roz blacked out

momentarily as the blood and oxygen were drained from her

head.

In a place that, now - in this especial and particular now - would

not be recognizable as any place on Earth, there was a

chamber. In the centre of the chamber there was a plinth.

Upon the plinth there was a stand, and in the stand there was

what might, at first sight, be taken for an egg.

The egg was of an artificial and a marvellous construction.

For all that it was ancient it was pristine, the chasing and

enamel of it bright and utterly untainted, as though it had

been freshly dipped in jeweller’s acid that had boiled away all

patina and impurity. Indeed, the egg shone brighter than can

easily be explained by mere reflected light - not lit from within,

but surrounded by a nimbus, a radiance that infused the air

around it on some level unconnected with the physical laws of

luminescence.

Within the egg a mechanism of surpassing complexity ticked

and whirred, reminiscent of clockwork but unlike it, in the way

that a map is unlike the actuality of the terrain it depicts.

This clock, if it could be called a clock at all, counted far

more than the concentric and recurring cycles of its own

mechanism. This clock counted entire worlds.

Counted them down, and counted them out.

STRIKE ONE

THE ONCOMING STORM

1

A FRACTURED SURFACE

There was nothing in the sky, even when it could be glimpsed

through the jungle canopy. It was flat and grey, not with

atmospheric cloud cover, but from the dark-matter cloud

that enveloped this entire sector of space - the Malanoor

system, out on the edge of the spiral arm and one of the

farthest from Galactic Centre. The Malanoor system was

named for its single inhabitable planet, as was the

convention in such cases. The planet Malanoor orbited a G2-

typc star roughly equivalent to Sol, at a distance of that of

Mercury from Sol, but the diffusive effects of its setting gave

it an atmosphere like a muggy English summer’s day.

In the jungle, creatures like invertebrate and slimy

marmosets slithered through the trees. Something roared

wetly, causing a commotion among slick-skinned, flightless

birdlike things in the undergrowth, so that they thrashed like

fish on a trawler’s deck, squealing like frogs skewered by the

claws of a particularly malicious cat. The sounds of panic

died back down to silence, save for the ever-present

ratcheting sound of larvae munching mildew-spotted leaves.

The bosky dusk of the rain-jungle, however, was pierced

by more immediate and rather more humanly, or at least

sentiently comprehensible, utterances:

‘Euuurgh, miss! Something crawled over my hand!’

‘Jalon keeps hitting me back, miss!’

‘There’s all this yuk all over my sleeping bag, miss!’

‘I need to go to the toilet, miss!’

‘Miss! Miss! Mabra’s eating all the yuk on her sleeping bag!’

In a hammock slung between two kugi-boola fem mushrooms,

Benny tried to shut her ears and mind to the outcries of the

little fu- the precious little darlings. Living fast and dying

young might be a perfectly valid and honourable philosophy,

she thought, until one added the corollary that living

expensively fast meant you sometimes had to take any old

job that came along to prevent yourself from dying in the

wrong way - in penury.

Her previous adventures had, once again, washed her up

upon the relatively safe metaphorical shores of the Dellah

University without a tin shilling to her name. Unfortunately

for her, the only paying little extra going had involved taking

a privately funded, supervisory position, escorting a

collection of richly parented children around the more

suitable archaeological excavations of Malanoor.

The arrangement was one of those that kept the

university’s finances balanced, was intended as more of an

adventure holiday than anything else. And on the skimmer

ride to the jungle camping site, here to spend the night

preparatory to entering the Malanoor dig itself, Benny had

entertained dark thoughts of subjecting said collection of

children to an ‘adventure’ they would never forget. If living

fast and dying young was the aim, she was at this point

perfectly willing to accelerate the ghastly little brats to

lightspeed.

The camping site was basically a part of the nascent

Malanoor tourist industry. There were chemical toilets and

standpipe water systems to prevent visitors dying of

dysentery, and an electrostatic field prevented the

encroachment of the relatively small amount of flora and

fauna actually dangerous to human life. In fact, the fields

extended around a large excavated section of the Lost

Temples of Malanoor themselves - long since mined of useful

data and artefacts, and now converted into what was to all

intents and purposes a subterranean cargo-cult theme park.

Lying in her hammock, beyond the squabbling hammocks

of the children, Benny could make out the faintly

phosphorescent forms of the Malanese guides standing guard

- here to provide exotic local colour more than anything else.

They were fungoid, squat and vaguely humanoid, like a

rather more plasticine idea of the mythological trolls of Earth,

the hooded dark caverns of their eyes, where and when they

were visible, turned permanently to the forest floor.

Benny knew that it was physically impossible for the

dominant species of Malanoor to turn its eyes up to the sky:

it had evolved under a sky where there was simply nothing to

see. They had sweeping carapace structures, encasing and

extending from their heads, that dealt with anything that

might fall upon them from the forest canopy above – but they

were fundamentally unable to think in terms of above. The

Malanese lived not on a ‘planet’ but in a ‘world’, an entire

universe of which they could only conceive of on the ground

or subterranean level. They were quite comfortable and

sophisticated with the idea of ‘extraterrestrial’ life – as was

evidenced by the fact that they had a tourist industry - and

they just thought that all these aliens came from an

incredibly long way off laterally, or from impossibly deep

below the ground.

Benny had thought she’d spotted the functional flaw in this

world-view. After decanting the children from the skimmer,

and keeping half an eye on them as they tried to drown each

other under the standpipe spigots, she had said to one of the

guides, ‘Look, you dig a tunnel going into the ground, right,

and you walk down it. Then at the end you turn around

again and walk back the other way. Which way do you go?’

The guide had looked at her as though she were mad. ‘Less

down.’

Implicit in the creature’s tone had been such an absolute

gap of referential meaning between less down and up that

Benny had decided not to push it.

The children were still awake, the excitement of spending

the night outside for possibly the first time in their lives

mixed with the fretful tiredness of being cooped up in a

transit ship and then a skimmer for the best part of the day.

Their squabbling had faded to the kind of shrilly whispered

conversation and collapses into stifled giggling that, to a tired

adult, seemed more piercing and annoying than the outright

squabbling. Eventually, Benny could stand it no more. She

swung herself out of her hammock and lit a torch. A swarm

of tiny flying sluglike things, with organically evolved rotor

blades rather than wings, darted out of the sudden light.

‘All right,’ she said to the slightly startled children blinking

in the beam of the torch. ‘It’s time.’ She lowered her voice so

that it was calmly conspiratorial, the voice of someone who

was going to impart a secret. ‘The time has come to tell you

some of the things you need to know about this place.’

The trick, Benny recalled, was never to talk down to children,

but to treat them with a frank if cordial dislike. The

hypocritical and self-conscious attempt by an adult to be

friends with them merely had them thinking of said adult as

a complete and utter twot.

Likewise, she felt, if one was telling stories, one should

never try to adapt them for the so-called fragile sensibilities

of the young. The things they didn’t understand either went

over the top of their heads, or sank in to help inform them

when the time came that they did understand. And things

like blood, guts, gore and terror they understood perfectly:

they lapped it up and thrived on it, nasty little creatures that

they were.

In the Malanoor climate there was nothing to bum, but the

portable primus stove, used to boil the water for tin mugs of

cinnamon tea, gave off a sufficiently flickering, bluish, eerie

light as the children sat around it and listened to Benny

detailing some of the juicier aspects of the history of the Lost

Temples of Malanoor. She told them of the thousands of

slaves who had died in their construction, from the work, the

sanitation, the cruelty of the overseers and, finally, when the

digging and construction were complete, the mass poisoning

of everyone who was left, overseers and all.

She told them of the Emperor Shon Yi Rambakagh, Jewel

of the World’s Core, the Light that Permeates the Tenebrous

Jungle Everlasting, the King of Kings and Slayer of Kings (but

in reality merely head of a jungle tribe that, what with the

depletions suffered through building the Temples, by then

numbered itself in the thousands at most). Said Emperor had

caused that, upon his death, he be entombed in their centre,

surrounded by the entire wealth of the tribe, and for that

matter the entire remains of the tribe, who were to wall

themselves up with him as Earthly attendants (the Malanese

thinking of ‘Earth’ as we would of ‘Heaven’) on the basis that

the last man left alive filled in the final brick before

dispatching himself.

Benny glossed over die small facts that nobody knew why the

tribe had done it - both the building and the suicides - for the

simple reason that there was absolutely nobody left to tell

them. In the same way, and for largely the same reasons,

nobody even knew the name of the tribe - the Emperor Shon

Yi having successfully caused the erasure of any other name

than his own. These were, however, the simple reason why

the Temples had become Lost.

Benny also glossed over that fact that they were found

again almost immediately: by other tribes, by robbers and

pretty much anyone else who happened to be passing

through. She neglected to mention that, by now, the

treasures of Shon Yi were pretty much evenly distributed

through this world and several others and the Temples had

been simply resealed, save for the tourist areas where the

traps had been carefully disarmed, and the more repugnant

remains and religious designs removed. Instead, she dwelt on

the fiendish and lethal cunning of those traps, complete with

all the gory details, and an only slightly bowdlerized version

of the nastiness of the suicides.

‘But that wasn’t the worst thing,’ she said, at length. ‘I

didn’t tell you the worst thing.’

The children looked at her expectantly. Anything worse

than water-wheel-powered machines that picked you up by

the cars, impaled you, shot spikes into your eyes and then

sawed your head off so that your body fell into a mincing

machine might prove to be very interesting indeed.

‘Was it a big rock?’ asked a small, blonde-tressed girl by

the name of Mabra, happily. ‘Y’know, like round, so it rolls

over you and squashes you up big at one end like a balloon

until you burst and -’

‘No,’ said Benny, making a mental note to keep a special

eye on Mabra when they were down in the temples and with

access to even declawed blade machines.

‘Was it like spikes that you fall on and go into your belly?’

asked a small boy with a slightly less nasty imagination than

Mabra.

‘No,’ said Benny.

‘Then was it big hooks that go up your bottom and pull your

insides out and wind them round on a -’

‘No it bloody isn’t, Mabra!’ Benny snapped. This was

heading into zones of horridness unmatched by most reality,

let alone anything she herself could invent. Not for the first

time, she thanked her culturally relevant local Zodiac that

what with one thing and another she had never got around to

having children. ‘You’re thinking about the wrong thing

entirely,’ she told the examples of that juvenile breed

currently before her. ‘I’m thinking of the other things the

Temples were built to keep inside. It seems that -’

Benny got no further. Something had caught the attention

of the children. She felt a moment of confusion, of something

somehow wrong with the world, before she realized that she

had allowed herself to become a little too immersed in the

local mindset on the subliminal level - and the children were

looking up.

A bright light detonated in the sky above, so bright that for

an instant shafts of light streamed through the jungle

canopy, even in the humid air, like the light of Revelation.

The thunderclap came bare instants later, like two balled

fists punching into the abdomen, like hands clapped against

the ears, a sound so loud and hard it was a physical,

bludgeoning thing.

Around the small party of teacher and charges, the

Malanese guides cast about themselves in terror, turning

their eyes right and left and down - any direction but above

them. There was a pulsing shriek that seemed to fill the

world, and a kind of instant, complex, smacking crunch as

something went through strata of foliage at such a speed that

the human brain could not comprehend the span of its

passing.

And something big came down.

2

SIGNALS FROM THE UNDERGROUND

The Malanese guides were still in utter confusion, their

carapaces milling about in alarm. It was common practice for

extraplanetary ships to arrive discreetly and covertly so as

not to alarm the local perceptions of the universe - and to

Malanese perceptions it must have been as though

something had simply appeared from thin air, rending it

explosively as it went.

From the direction in which the sudden arrival had landed

- or indeed where it had impacted - there was a faint and

pulsing glow diffused by foliage and then nothing but the

noisy, indigenous silence of the jungle.

The children were yammering with excitement, scrambling

over themselves in readiness to set off to investigate - no

doubt in the hope of finding some really interesting dead

bodies in what might or might not be the spectacular

wreckage of some crashed ship.

‗Shut up!‘ Benny roared. She snaked out a hand to grab

Mabra - who by dint of kicking and scratching more viciously

than the others was appreciably ahead of the pack - and

dragged her firmly back by the ear.

‗Aaow,

miss!‘

the

delightful

little

angel

yelled.

‗Letmegothat hurts!‘ She would no doubt have continued in

this vein had she not caught the expression on Benny‘s face

and lapsed into a sullen silence.

‗Just be quiet, all of you,‘ Benny said with a murderous

calm that quietened the children more than any amount of

shouting. ‗Let me listen for a minute.‘

It was a question of degrees, a question of being aware of

something only when it stopped. The noises of the jungle, the

dark shapes of it, had become in some way more distinct. The

unfelt tingle in the back of the head, on the other hand, of

the force-field generators that should be keeping the more

dangerous aspects of the jungle at an electrogravitational

arm‘s length, were now completely absent. The impact of

whatever had come down must have knocked them out.

‗You just sit there,‘ Benny told the children. ‗You say

nothing and do nothing.‘

She climbed to her feet and headed for the nearest of the

guides. She pressed him firmly on the carapace, making sure

she moved her arm laterally rather than tap him as one

might tap a human on the shoulder.

‗Have your people form a circle,‘ she said, as its stalked and

crablike eyes turned towards her. ‗Protect the children. Don‘t

let anything through.‘

The Malanese nodded, with the slightly weird dynamic that

meant that it was looking down, then returning its head to

an original position rather than looking up again. ‗We‘ll keep

them safe.‘

The voice seemed perfectly human - none of the ‗we keep

children safe‘ that one might expect from a nonhuman -

humans having the ingrained idea that anything unlike them

cannot master the art of the apostrophe. The Malanese as a

race were at least as intelligent as humans and, aside from a

mild tendency to commit mass suicide at the drop of a

chitinous membrane, demonstrably more honourable,

courageous and kind.

‗We‘ll die before we let harm come to them,‘ the guide said,

demonstrating several racial aspects in one go.

‗Thank you,‘ Benny said. She hefted her flashlight so that

the beam shone out into the suddenly predatory-seeming

jungle, and followed the line of light.

Human reactions, Benny thought sometimes, almost always

when the thought came too late to do any good, seemed to be

a kind of mixed and mutually conflicting assortment of

impulse, rationalization and true logic - the trick being to

work out which, or which, or which they were. She‘d had a

blind impulse to protect her charges. At least one of the field-

generators was down, and so she had to find and fix it. They

were human installations, and she had experience in dealing

with alien environments, so she was the only one qualified to

handle the task. The guides were more suited to protecting

the children, and to take even one with her would increase

the chance that some bit of inimical wildlife might get

through to harm them.

This, as she wetly crunched her way through fungoid

vegetation, was no help at all. Things seemed to be scurrying

away from the beam of the flashlight, like cockroaches when

one hit a switch - but she had the horrible feeling that there

were other things. Things that were moving rather more

slowly and sinuously. Things that were biding their time,

and, once they‘d bided it. wouldn‘t scurry away at all.

She knew that she was heading into areas of the Temples

that had not been renovated, remodelled and effectively

neutered for tourists. She was walking over ground that

contained tunnels full of bones, and the phosphorescence of

remains, and the kind of deathtraps that might sound

entertaining at a conceptual distance, but were lethal in

proximity, and from which the teeth had not been pulled. The

fact that they had been constructed several hundreds of

years ago and so were in a state of probable disrepair was no

real comfort. All it would take was for just one of them to be

in a state of repair. All it would take was a cave-in and a fall

into the dark.

The things in the jungle around her, the possibility of

mechanical death below, were the least of her worries,

however. The thing that preyed on Benny‘s mind, as she

pushed her way through a growth of fleshy tendrils that

seemed to cling to her face as though they were sinking

fibrils into her pores, was the thing she had been about to

tell the children before the big light had come down and

interrupted things.

There were stories, largely apocryphal, of the rediscovery of

the Temples, and how the remains of those therein had

been... not so much defiled as gnawed upon. Fed upon. Their

bodies actively eaten as opposed to the simple decomposition

that might be put down to the work of the local equivalent of

larvae.

Legends said that in his final act before he died, the

Emperor had caused his Magi to summon a Great Beast, who

would roam the underground tunnels and protect the

Temples from intruders. Details of its precise form were

vague – and not helped by any number of later investigators

and commentators inventing things like fangs, claws,

tentacles and extra eyes and heads without the benefit of any

direct evidence. The one thing universally agreed upon,

however, was that the Great Beast had appeared as if from

nowhere, out of thin air. Off-world commentators, of course,

held that this simply meant that it - whatever it actually was,

if it ever existed in the first place - had simply come down

from the sky, occasioning the same terror as the first off-

worlders themselves had caused in the days of Primary

contact. The idea of some hulking, nebulously formed

monster shambling through the sealed-off areas of the

Temples, though, had struck some archetypical chord and

taken on a life of its own - fed by probably apocryphal stories

of the hideous fates that had befallen unwary robbers in the

past, and later by a slightly disproportionate number of

disappearances and accidents among archaeological teams.

Logic said that any Great Beast had to be the end result of

a mixture of myth, coincidence and superstition -

archaeology is a risky business at the best of times, even

without the added dangers of a strange construction packed

with lethal traps. Logic also said that if there were any

factual basis, anything with a metabolism that lived upon

relatively fresh corpse meat must have died of starvation if

trapped, or migrated if not, centuries ago. Unfortunately, out

here alone in the dark, Logic was an aptitude increasingly

difficult to sustain.

Something ragged flapped past her face, and Benny

lurched back with a shriek of alarm. It was only then that

she realized how the formless tension had been getting to

her, tightening slowly and imperceptibly until she was all but

twanging with it.

‗Oh, this is stupid!‘ she snapped to the world in general.

She slapped at her cheek with the hand not holding the

flashlight and flexed her knotted shoulders, consciously

forcing her lungs to breathe deeply in and out. ‗If you keep on

starting at ghosts and things bumping in the night, girl, you

won‘t be able to see the jungle for the fungus.‘

She squared her slightly loosened shoulders and planted

her feet firmly on the mushy ground, preparatory to putting

the best one forward.

There was a muffled crack and the ground dropped from

under her. She dropped into a darkness even blacker than

the night around her, caught on an inhalation and too

stunned to cry.

There was a simultaneous, complex and multiple thwipping

sound from close by. Tendrils of something slimy wrapped

themselves around her and tightened like steel bands. She

was wrenched upward with such a sudden jerk that her

joints seemed to almost dislocate, the reverse acceleration

driving the blood from her head so that she blanked for a

bare instant and came round to find herself face to face with

the thing that was now gripping her with its tentacles.

Its form bulked and bulged obscenely. Ichor on its skin

seemed to glisten in the diffuse light from the torch that was

now shining from somewhere in the bottom of the pit into

which she had almost fallen.

The Great Beast, come to life from myth and coincidence

and her own imaginings, regarded her with a disparate

collection of mismatched eyes.

‗Is roar,‘ it said. ‗Is tentacular, fibrillating and distinctly

unconvincing roar.‘

3

THE INTERMINABLE SALUTATION

(ALTERNATE EARTH)

In a chamber, in a place that is, at this point, outside

everything and in the centre of it all, an inverted clockwork

mechanism inside an egg ticks over. It occasionally slips a

minute, ancient gear in its supposedly perfect decrementation.

Nothing is perfect, Platonically, in an Ideal sense, as any

number of Persian rugs consistently prove.

A hand, at that ‘present’ point, is currently reaching for it.

She came into my life on a cloud of crushed-beetle dust and

resynthesized elephant musk - the kind of perfume that hits

you in the gut like two fists balled together, with weight

behind them so that for an instant you‘ve forgotten how to

breathe. It wasn‘t splashed on, wasn‘t strong - you don‘t need

strength to have an impact like that. You just need money.

Jimmy Kiru caught it too. For an instant I thought he was

going to have an involuntary reaction.

She sat down on the stool beside me with a slither of dalon,

fishing in her clutch purse with an intensity that said that

anything at all inside it was at least three times as interesting

as me. ‗Mr Nathan Leshane, I presume?‘

Old money. Old and cultured money. Cultured enough for

elocution lessons to produce a smooth, low, unplaceable

accent like precise silk.

Two can play at wall-eyes. I nodded to Jimmy as he put my

usual on the counter - pastrami on black rye, pile the Dijon,

hold the mayo and the bunny food; two fingers of his almost

genuine Canadian, the cover napkin folded with that perfect,

almost Oriental precision you don‘t sec around much any

more - and cast my eyes around the diner and beyond.

Through the plate glass, across the street, I could see that

the Stenco-Hondai franchise had changed Overlords again.

The ersatz-antique neon was coming down and holographic

lotus flowers were going up. Mico the Rolling Custodian was

looking on, watching the work impassively - he knew his job

and knew the neighbourhood well enough to be irreplaceable,

whichever faction was now in charge. Bloodbaths in the

boardroom didn‘t trickle down far enough to hit him. A

change in the decor wasn‘t going to break his heart.

After a while I turned my attention to my new friend, letting

it travel up from her stiletto‘d feet, the legs that showed a

hint of suspender belt between the tops of her dalons and

what could only be a genuine leather skirt, the blazer cut to

make a male of several species want to be it, and finally to

her face. She was worth the wait. An émigré from one of the

Reptile worlds, with the soft and greenish-tinged skin that

comes from having warm blood, vestigial scaling feathering at

her skull, where a human woman might have hair. I‘d

expected by this time that she‘d be spitting feathers. Instead

she just regarded me levelly, one eyebrow raised.

‗Well,‘ she said, in that special, slightly arch tone of

someone who‘s once been told they always start their

sentences with ‗well‘, and so make a point of damn well

saying it anyway, ‗are you Leshane or what?‘ She

nonchalantly blew on a set of lacquered fingernails that

might, in a certain light - the certain light being any light that

fell on them - be taken for claws. ‗If you‘re not, I might just

have to put at least one pair of eyes out.‘

I shrugged. I know when I‘m outclassed, through daily

practice. ‗I‘m Leshane. Call me Nathan, why don‘t you?‘

‗I knew that. I received a quite complete description from

the young lady in the hole you called your office, together

with other information concerning your ancestry and

personal habits - which I must confess was slightly more

information than I wished to know.‘

My girl Suzi must have been on one of her periodic kicks of

gathering up her things and leaving. I have to admit that this

month it had been a choice between paying her or the rent,

and so I had decided on the sane and reasonable course of

paying neither. This was a regular occurrence, almost routine

by now - I just hoped this wasn‘t going to be the time when

I‘d be genuinely, honestly shocked to find she‘d said she was

leaving and meant it.

I put my best smile on. ‗So you know all about me, Ms...?‘

‗Chan. Lisa Chan. I know that you were good, once, and

that you still might be - if you hadn‘t managed to rub the

security services and a number of other important people up

the wrong way.‘ She looked at me like she was trying to

believe it herself. ‗I know that you don‘t do divorce, the

badger game or the Long Con. I know you‘ve spent time in

the tanks rather than betray a confidence or rat on a friend.‘

My best smile must have been looking slightly ratty round

the edges by now. For all I knew she might have meant all

that nicely, but so far as I was concerned it was like she was

picking off old scabs - just not so old that they didn‘t hurt

like hell and start to bleed again.

(The snout of a crocogator broke the surface and he caught a

glimpse of jagged, yellow teeth yawning back from a red wet

throat. He planted his feet on its head, driving it down into the

water with such a force that its breathing reed shot out of its

blowhole.)

‗That‘s ancient history,‘ I told her. ‗Now I‘m out for anything

I can get.‘

‗But only if it involves a degree of integrity.‘ The reptile

woman looked at me. ‗I‘ve heard you‘re stupid - with the kind

of stupidity that means that certain depths to which people

sink don‘t even occur to you.‘

I shrugged again. I‘m good at that. It‘s probably my only

skill. ‗And who told you that?‘

‗A friend I used to know. She‘s now called Bernice Kane, I

think. Before we lost touch.‘

I remembered the case. I‘d been trying to forget it, but I still

remembered, late at night, when the gut rot turned to glass

jammed into the back of the head and then the glass shards

turned to ice. I remembered how she had used me to find

what she needed and then turned my world inside out.

Weird thing was, I remembered how it had felt but when I

tried to pin down the specifics - what had been said, what

had happened, what I had done - it seemed to slide away.

Maybe the gut-rot treatment was working after all.

That reminded me. I pulled the origami-folded cover off my

drink and drank it. It went down like liquid gold - white-hot

and scalding enough to raise blisters. I blinked back a tear

and was pleasantly relieved to be able to still see when my

eyes opened again - Jiminy Kiru still liked me enough to give

me something uncut with wood alcohol on the tab.

‗Like I said,‘ I said, ‗ancient history. What‘s it to you?‘

‗I know how you helped her out and how you...‘ The woman

seemed to go blank for a moment, then recovered with a little

jerk and an instantly covered-up moment of bemusement. It

was as though she had been about to say something and

then had utterly forgotten what she was going to say.

‗I know how you helped... my friend,‘ she said at last, ‗and I

need that kind of help. The police won‘t listen to me, my own

family don‘t seem to care, and I need somebody in my corner.

I need somebody I can trust.‘

I knew the friend she was talking about - but strangely,

even though she had mentioned it bare moments before, I

had suddenly blanked on the name. Probably the result of

Jimmy‘s booze on a stomach that didn‘t have my sandwich in

it yet. I stopped worrying about it. The details would come

back to me, and probably with a killer hangover into the

bargain, but I knew who she meant.

‗What you see is what you get, doll,‘ I told her. ‗Not much,

I‘ll admit, but I don‘t lie about it and I don‘t make promises I

don‘t keep. Twenty a day plus expenses and no retainer. I

stay bought.‘

The lady nodded. ‗That‘s good enough.‘ She at last took her

hand out of her snap purse, and there was a thin fold of bills

in it. She slid it deftly under my plate - pastrami, lettuce and

mayo on white that I like well enough, but order more to

make Jimmy Kiru half seriously gag at the combination than

anything else. ‗No retainer, but I need you for a week at the

absolute minimum.‘

‗That‘s cool with me,‘ I said, picking up the sandwich. ‗Now

what exactly do you want me for?‘

4

FAIRLY STRANGE REUNIONS

‗You little bugger!‘ Benny shouted. ‗You nearly frightened the

life out of me.‘

‗Is apologies,‘ muttered the creature, blinking three eyes,

waving its tentacles and managing to look a little chagrined,

despite its obloid form. It whipped its manipulatory

appendages away, seemingly pulling them back into its own

insides, and slick grey skin closed over them. ‗Was going to

say lovely friendly hello to make monkey-hominid go hippity-

hippity with happy and thing, but sudden disappearance into

fetid black bowels of the ground-type stuff make time or

reasonable facsimile of very essence.‘

Benny regarded the creature sharply. ‗I notice you‘re back

on the ―is we is we ain‘t your baby-thing‖ again. You haven‘t

reverted have you, Sgloomi?‘

‗Nope,‘ said Sgloomi. ‗Is cultural-type identity thing, innit?

Is Sloathes have to carve niche in the panoplous coruscation

of sentient being-type life, and is not be seen as soulless

mimics of true self-aware consciousness which can be, quite

frankly, a bit of a bugger on occasion. Hooty hooty.‘

This last was spoken in candid, quite sardonic and

impeccably human tones. The Sloathe bounced up and down

a few times, irony bursting from its very movements, for good

measure.

‗Well I‘m glad we got that sorted out,‘ said Benny.

She had recognized Sgloomi Po instantly, and with that

recognition had come a whole cascade of memory - it was not

that she had forgotten about the Sloathe, precisely, but it

had been some years since a thought of hir had so much as

crossed her mind. It had simply not occurred.

The process was akin to coming into contact with a life

form that existed in the three-dimensions-plus-time to which

human beings are ordinarily accustomed. It was like looking

at a finger, pointing in some unexpected direction, that in

one sense seemed to be receding from you whichever way you

looked at it - but in another sense showed you something so

obvious that you kicked yourself for never noticing it before.

Until, of course, the extradimensional finger stopped

pointing, and you couldn‘t recall the direction no matter how

you tried.

Sgloomi Po was a Sloathe, one of a number of people she

had met in an extremely strange pocket of extra dimensions

called the System, and one of those who had escaped by way

of a quasi-sentient ship known as the Schirron Dream. So

where there was Sgloomi, thought Benny, there was sure to

be the Schirron Dream and the rest of its crew. She recalled a

big human man, a silver circlet around his head, with fierce

and feral mismatched eyes. A lizard woman with a quick and

white-hot temper and even quicker claws and knives. A slim

man in red and yellow silks, with a smile that never touched

deceptive eyes, that seemed cold as cinders and might have

denoted evil had one never spoken or spent more than three

seconds with him. Names sprang into focus - names she had

not so much as thought of in years, as she had not thought of

the name of Sgloomi Po.

‗Is Leetha around?‘ she asked. ‗Leetha t‘Zhan? What about

Kiru? Nathan? Nathan li Shao?‘

‗Is not have to be so definitive!‘ Sgloomi snapped. ‗Is know

who Leetha, Nathan is! Is know names of own sodding

family!‘

In terms of mass, the Sloathe was little bigger and heavier

than an adult human male - but for an instant it seemed to

swell and loom. Not a little menacingly. Benny took a step

back, not a little alarmed.

‗What?‘ she said, in a slightly unsuccessful attempt to

cover up an involuntary squeak of fear. ‗What‘s got into you,

Sgloomi?‘

Abruptly, the Sloathe seemed to realize the impression it

was giving and immediately deflated. ‗Apology thing,‘ it said,

a little uncertainly. ‗Is little-tiny tetchy. In fact is very tetchy.

Is evidencing an extreme and inordinate degree of tetch. Is

strain of present circumstances.‘

Benny looked at Sgloomi Po. The tone of voice had seemed

to carry an almost human degree of complexity, not least in

that it had a sense of being distraught but Sloathefully

attempting to master it. ‗What circumstances? What‘s

happening, Sgloomi?‘

‗Family is in danger,‘ the Sloathe said simply. ‗Nearly dead.

Will soon be dead. Leetha and Kiru and Nathan li Shao need

your help.‘

On the way to the ship Benny remembered about the

clockwork.

The System in which she had found herself years before

had affected her mind in strange ways. It was an artificial

construct, with qualities and physical laws that had affected

the human senses in ways with which they were unable to

cope, and the brain had been forced to integrate them by

throwing up the nearest applicable image. In practical terms

this had meant that the visible universe of the System had

seemed to operate on clockwork, a vast mechanical orrery,

with planets orbiting a solid sun on camshafts.

In the same way, Benny recalled, the actions and

interactions of matter and organisms had taken on a surreal,

even ridiculous quality - an ice world with little penguins

skating round a pond in little knitted mufflers, a form of

palsy that resulted in mass and seemingly choreographed

song-and-dance routines, villains of complete and utter

swashbuckling but suave and laconic evil that would have

Basil Rathbone biting through his stiff upper lip in envy.

Intellectually, with hindsight, she could see these phenomena

for what they were a subconscious mind desperately trying to

laugh rather than cry at a fundamental incomprehensibility -

but in effect it had been like stepping through the looking

glass, of finding oneself in one of those ancient cinematic

movies that mixed live action with variably crazed degrees of

animated cartoons.

The recollection solidified something she had noticed upon

first meeting Sgloomi Po, but which she had not been able to

put her finger on. The language constructions had been

similar, yet there was something subtle but important about

the Sloathe that was different from when she had met it last.

It was not that its character had changed, precisely - it was

more as if the character were being played by a different

actor, who was bringing out different emphases, in another

story entirely. It seemed that the tone of this story was rather

more serious than before, and cartoon-animated fun and

games were seeming increasingly out of the question.

Benny trudged through the jungle, out from the field-

generator, which she had insisted they pause to repair,

towards the landing site of what she was now convinced

must be the good ship Schirron Dream. Beside her, Sgloomi

scuttled on a variable number of spiderlike legs, its obloid

body constantly moving to produce eyes, ears and similarly

analogous organs as it scanned the night for any threat.

Thus far the Sloathe had shot out two spears, on lengths of

retractable sinew, to spear things that had attempted to

swoop down upon them.

At no time, however, had the shifting body attempted to

mimic something else, even though Benny knew for a fact

that it could make itself appear as virtually anything. It was

as if Sgloomi Po had decided that this was hir natural form,

and you could damn well like it or lump it.

The locked-off memories of the System and what she had

seen and done in it now seemed to fill Benny‘s head, a vast

chaotic mass that threatened to overwhelm her as if - as she

did - one knew the complete works of Shakespeare word for

word, and were suddenly forced to recall them in their

entirety, in a split-second go. She decided to just stop

thinking about them, let them surface when they naturally

would in context - which was, after all, the way that memory

of everything one‘s ever seen, or been, or done works in

normal life. One doesn‘t spend every waking second thinking

about every waking everything else.

She turned to Sgloomi. ‗So what exactly is this danger your

family is in? How serious is it? Where precisely are they?‘

‗Is big-big danger,‘ the Sloathe said. ‗Is big-big serious. Is

where they is... is big-big hard to explain to monkey-hominid-

type terms. Is take you to friend who can explain.‘

‗And which friend might that be?‘ Benny said.

‗Is friend of mine. Is friend of yours. Friend.‘

Sgloomi lapsed into an uncharacteristic - so far as Benny

recalled - silence. Benny tried asking hir more questions but

the Sloathe merely gave a kind of ripple that was the Sloathe

equivalent of a shrug - not unconcerned or unfriendly, but

conveying that it had currently too much on hir mind to

worry about than small talk.

After a short while, the glow ahead of them noticeably

brightened. They shoved their way through fungus vegetation

to find a crater that the Schirron Dream had knocked into the

soft Malanoor earth on landing.

And. down inside the crater, the Schirron Dream itself.

Benny had an image of the ship etched in her head - sleek

and slim, like the rocket ships of old pulp fiction, built from

burnished bronze that shone like reddish gold, inset with

panels of some ceramic substance that was as pure white as

porcelain. With its swept-back fins and glowing, podlike

thrusters, the image was almost perfectly archetypical, a

dream of what a spaceship should look like, rather than the

clunky blocks of superstructure, arrays and prefabricated

pods that made up a spacegoing ship as it actually was.

Looking down into the crater, she saw the Schirron Dream

just as she pictured and remembered it – but something

more as well. The sleek, Art-Deco-reminiscent lines were as

she remembered, and the form seemed solid, but it seemed

that other forms were occupying the same space

simultaneously, shifting insubstantially within it, as if

glimpsed from the corner of the eye even though the eye was

looking at them directly. Benny caught half-seen flashes of

something seemingly composed of interlacing tendrils of pure

light, something flatter, wider and alive, in shape something

like a manta ray, something of a shape so alien on the

human level that she could find no name. She realized that

this was the first time she had ever seen the Schirron Dream

outside of the System, and that her mind was attempting to

come to terms with something - as it had done on a larger

scale with the System itself - that did not fit entirely with her

world.

‗Is go down,‘ said Sgloomi, again with hir uncharacteristic

shortness.

They went down, into the crater.

Through the hatch and inside the ship seemed... not

precisely bigger than the outside, but incongruous, as though

the spaces inside operated on some subtly different order.

The balks were of a kind of polymerized substance that felt a

little like the surface of a fingernail, whorled with subdued

variegation like mother-of-pearl, which always seemed to be

upon the point of flowing and swirling like oil on water, but

never quite seemed to start.

As Sgloomi took her through tunnel-like, vaguely intestinal

gangways, Benny caught sight of various members of the

crew: originally based on creatures from the galaxy itself, but

evolved and intermingled by their isolation on the worlds of a

System outside ordinary space and time. Apart from the

Sloathes there were the saurian dwellers of the jungle world

that had been called Aneas; the Fnarok-based albino

inhabitants of the ice world Reklon; the mostly humanoid

nomads from the deserts of Shokesh; the frog-skinned

amphibians from the water world of Elysium. Among them

were several children, who it seemed were being prepared for

some mass exodus. The way the adults fussed over them put

Benny in mind of a scene she had seen, in a railway station

on Earth, when children were being evacuated from

something called the Blitz.

‗Children and nonessential peoples will be put ashore,‘

Sgloomi said in passing. ‗Is safer, hopefully.‘

‗Safer here?‘ Benny said.

The Sloathe shrug-rippled. ‗Here as anywhere.‘

Towards the prow they came upon a hatch, which dilated

without ceremony. Through this, they found themselves in a

smallish cabin-chamber containing a spare amount of

genuinely ornate, Victorian-style furniture, looking a little out

of place in its otherworldly surroundings.

Sitting on the chaise longue, a big, blond man was poring

intently over a slightly ragged collection of scrawled, actual

wood-pulp papers that were spread over a low occasional

table, from which a largish aspidistra had been shoved aside.

His clothes were modern and heavy-duty, but something

about their cut suggested that they had evolved from Oriental

styles, possibly those of an ancient Nipponese samurai. The

hatch had dilated without a sound. It was only when he

caught the movement of Benny and Sgloomi entering that he

looked up, his worried expression suddenly splitting into a

wide and friendly grin. ‗Benny!‘

‗Hello, Chris,‘ Benny said. ‗Saving the universe again?‘

Something glazed over Chris‘s smile and fixed it. ‗Not this

time, no.‘

Abruptly, with a little twitch of his head, the glazed look left

him. ‗It‘s really good to see you, Benny. I can‘t think of

anyone I‘d rather have when we -‘ He shot a look at Sgloomi

Po. ‗You have told her, haven‘t you?‘

Sgloomi extended a couple of eyeballs and regarded both

Chris and Benny simultaneously - though there was a sense

that hir attention was oscillating as if it were uneasily looking

from one face to the other. ‗Is thought that Benny-lovely like

to hear it from hunky Chris-boy. Is thought that Sgloomi

going whoop-whoop hippety all through sod-blimey thing

might be little-big bit too silly plus distracting.‘

Chris Cwej sighed. ‗I suppose you‘re right, Sgloomi.‘

Benny, by this time, had had more than a lordly

sufficiency. ‗Now you listen here,‘ she said to the pair

sharply, in more or less the same exasperated tones as she

had recently used on the children back at the camp. ‗I‘ve had

it up to here with all these mysteries, evasions and circum-

bleeding-locutions! If someone doesn‘t tell me what precisely‘s

going on pretty damn pronto, I‘m walking.‘ She toyed with the

idea of stamping her foot, decided that would be going

altogether too far, and glared at them. ‗It‘s obvious you need

me for something - so you‘d better tell me what it is before

I‘m suddenly not here to bloody ask! OK?‘

Chris seemed to have been taken a little aback by the

vehemence of her outburst. There was something about her,

it occurred to Benny, that had people assuming she would

never say anything stronger than ‗crikey‘, and it seemed to

shock people when she lapsed into the kind of language that

everybody under every available sun uses at some point.

Chris recovered his composure, but still looked at her with a

kind of indecision. It was as though he had something

important to tell her, but was unsure of how to convey the

seriousness of it.

‗When I said how I wasn‘t saving the universe,‘ he said at

last, ‗I meant that there‘s nothing I can do to save it. It‘s

being destroyed, in a sense, and there‘s nothing anyone can

do to stop it. The thing is, it‘s...‘

Quite what the thing was, Benny did not discover. She was

staring at Chris with the chilly but strangely mild alarm of

one who‘s been told the universe is being destroyed, but does

not yet know precisely what that means, when she became

aware that the hatch had dilated again and that someone

was coming through.

‗I‘ve been trying to get through to some of my people,‘ he

was saying. ‗No soap. Those who haven‘t been translated out

of existence don‘t know what the hell I‘m talking about, and

wouldn‘t believe me if I tried to explain. And those who do

know about it have their own problems and aren‘t interested

in helping. Let‘s just hope that Sgloomi gets back soon with

my damned -‘

By some freak of positioning, or possibly because his mind

had been wrapped up in something else, the new arrival had

failed to notice that there were others in the cabin than

Chris. Now he turned his head and caught sight of Benny.

‗Damn.‘

‗And I‘m so glad to see you, too,‘ Benny said to her ex-

husband. ‗Just what the hell are you up to this time, Jason?‘

5

MADE OF THIS

(ALTERNATE EARTH)

The hand is still reaching for the mechanism in the egg. It’s

like a snapshot, caught in a time that has no relation to

anything else.

It jump-cuts closer. And closer. And closer still.

The apartment block was on the rich side of town, towering

Art Deco hotels thrown up maybe fifty years after the Moran,

Deed, Capone and other dynasties had been founded - or at

least the time those families came into their money and were

in the process of parlaying and consolidating it into actual

wealth. In their heyday they had been a byword for opulence,

with a floor show on every floor and their respective

Overlords at the summit, in their penthouses, masters of all

they surveyed, which was pretty much everything.

Nowadays they were being supplanted by the structures of

the various scientific and technological cartels - the Morans,

Deeds and everybody else are still in charge of course,

ultimately, but they‘ve been Incorporated to hell and back for

so long now that you‘d have to look very close to find them.

The block I was looking up at, through the UV-filter

sunroof on my old Pinto, was owned by the Semco people,

who used it to house their jet-propelled fliers when they

weren‘t otherwise involved in coming up with the latest

gimmick on their accounting mills that nowadays fuel the

world more than anything tangible like reefer, cocaine or

liquor combined. I‘m not a brain but even I can see how the

numbers racket might supplant all the other rackets -

because you don‘t have to actually make anything to make

numbers.

Anyhow, the Semco machines specialized in quantifying

and processing human psychology - integrating all the

factors of what makes people jump, and spilling out results

that might be wrong for anyone you ask to their face, but

right if you want to know what people are going to do en

masse. The ‘en masse’ there wasn‘t me: it had come from my

new friend Lisa Chan as she had tried to explain to mc how

the machines work. Something about ‗vector analysis

through a four-dimensional decision-tree paradigm‘. I lost

count somewhere around the v in ‗vector‘.

The important stuff, so far as I was concerned, was her

father, who had died in mysterious circumstances - or,

rather, he had been found with his brains spattered against

three walls of his office from a scatter gun in a way that was

not mysterious at all. The mystery was precisely who had

done it. It was a professional hit - but every hit man in the

city works for someone, and always leaves his calling card,

like a monogrammed spent cartridge or a word scrawled on

the wall, so the cops had some idea of who to studiously

ignore in their investigation. I‘ve played that game myself,

down in the tank; with some bull sergeant reaching for the

classifieds you don‘t sing about what everybody knows: you

go into the song-and-dance routine that the both of you know

by heart.

The death of Ms Chan‘s father simply didn‘t seem to fit into

the world of cartel killing, where deaths are, although tragic,

as commonplace as being hit by a truck or some other

accident. This was like being hit by a truck that appeared out

of nowhere and then vanished into thin air. Nobody from the

cops to the cartels to their Overlords themselves seemed to

know what the hell was going on - and for Ms Chan herself

this had the effect of raising the stakes of her grief

unbearably. She was desperate, she had told me, to find

some handle. Not a solution, necessarily, not necessarily to

see those responsible brought to justice - some hopes of that

in any case. She simply, desperately, needed to know

something of the why.

All of which was why I was now sitting in my Pinto and

watching the block where her father had lived. The only clue,

Lisa Chan had said, was that he had been working on a kind

of information-storage device - something that packed the

power of several hundred valves into a lump of Bakelite as

big as a hand that he had called a ‗memory chip‘ - and that

the prototype of this device had vanished. The obvious

conclusion was that it had been stolen by whoever had killed

him - but Lisa Chan was convinced, from certain things her

father had said, that he had hidden it himself.

That meant a lot of people were going to be looking for it

from all sides - most sides being somewhat nastier than me.

Turning over corporate offices was out of the question, what

with the corporate security and the fact that it almost

certainly wouldn‘t be there in the first place. The apartment

block, on the other hand, was less secure and more

accessible by far - it was also highly unlikely that Ms Chan‘s

father would have hidden the memory chip there, but just

possible enough that it was worth checking. In those

circumstances, rather than breaking in and rooting through

drawers yourself, the intelligent course of action was simply

to sit, and wait, and see who went in and who came out

again.

So far, the intelligent course of action had been a total

bust. For half the afternoon I‘d watched a grand total of three

store delivery boys, one florist and two age-and-status-

mismatched couples going in and going out, with the delay

time and the before-and-after interaction discrepancy that (if

I‘d been working divorce) I‘d have pegged as perfectly

ordinary nooners. Plus a whole bunch of other people, quite

obviously going about their business of the day. The point

about looking for something just that little bit odd, or

something worth following up, is that it rings a bell. Any one

of these people could have been up to anything, from murder

to espionage to keeping barnyard animals for illicit sexual

purposes - it was just that none of them set off the bell I was

particularly wired for. Nobody I recognized; nothing I could

learn from them; no flash of recognition or awakening of

memory inside that made the back of my head bother to

follow up.

Thus far, all I had recognition of or insight into was that I

shouldn‘t have bolted that chopped-liver-and-onion sandwich

back in Jimmy Kiru‘s. It was starting, increasingly

repetitively, to repeat. The heat of the afternoon wasn‘t

helping - I read in some of the more Wobbler-oriented papers

that some pinko scientist guys are talking about a thing

called ‗global warming‘, some result of five hundred years of

dirt from heavy industry. They might be wrong and they

might be right, but the winters have been hotter than the

summers these last few years. Just ask anyone.

I was on the point of calling it an afternoon and giving up,

when I finally saw what I was looking for - or, like I said,

something that made the bit of my brain I was interested in

sit up and take notice. Two men, striding along the sidewalk

as if they were beaming in on something miles away,

suddenly stopped, and spun through ninety degrees, and

walked into the building. The mechanical nature of their

actions and their suits like razor-sharp malleable ash tipped

me off in jig time.

Billy Boys.

They could have been there for anything, and the Boys

usually are - but that was the thing that made the thousand

little stray thoughts come together and make me move. I

waited enough heartbeats to give them enough of a head

start, popped the door and crossed the street, dodging traffic.

6

GETTING UP TO SPEED

‗I was taking some time out in a monastery when Sgloomi

found me,‘ Chris said.

‗Monastery?‘ Benny was slightly surprised. The last time

she had met him he had been enjoying an energetic, not to

mention strenuous, relationship with a girl named Sara.

‗Forgive my scepticism, but I find it rather hard to picture

you as a monk.‘

They were alone in the cabin, now. Sgloomi had left with

Jason, ostensibly to deal with important matters that had

arisen, but more probably to allow Chris to continue his

explanation without the whole thing degenerating into a

patented vociferous ex-spousal bicker.

‗Sometimes things just hit me, and I need to sequester

myself away in a more contemplative, spiritual environment

for a while,‘ Chris said. ‗I got into the, uh, habit when I found

myself in sixteenth-century Japan. Ft was just after Roz had

died, and it had hit me hard...‘

With a visible effort, Chris brought himself back to the

point. ‗So, anyway, I was visiting the Beneficent Brothers of

Saint Sidney over on Dragos - they‘re an interdenominational

sect that uses koan constructions rather like jokes as a

means of finding enlightenment. I was tending the

Suspiciously Large Vegetable patch when the Schirron Dream

came barrelling down as though it were out of control, and

almost flattened it.‘

Privately, Benny wondered who had been at the helm, and

whether Chris had been picked up before or after Jason. For

the moment, though, she refused to let herself be

sidetracked. ‗So tell me about the destruction of the universe

– and especially what you mean by ―in a sense‖.‘

‗It‘s a little complicated,‘ Chris said. ‗You know as well as I

do how, in extradimensional terms, every possibility exists

somewhere. There are countless alternatives and parallels -

not an infinite number, but on an order so high that it might

as well be, in our terms. We‘ve both of us crossed into these

parallels in the spectacular way - crystallizing them into

actuality around us - but everybody docs it by just opening a

letter or answering the door.‘

‗Hang on,‘ Benny said. ‗Opening letters and answering the

door isn‘t interdimensional travel, certainly not in multiversal

terms. I suppose that at most you could think of it as

collapsing probabilities but it doesn‘t exactly change the

universe in the real sense.‘

‗You think not?‘ said Chris. ‗Everybody has inconsistent

memories of key events, everybody‘s found themselves

drinking a cup of cinnamon, say, when they‘re positive they

made chai. We travel interdimensionally all the time, put the

inconsistencies down to lapses of memory and then promptly

forget about them, because that‘s the way consciousness is

wired.

‘Now the entire system‘s catastrophically disrupted.

Something‘s bursting through from... outside. Something

other than the universe on such a fundamental level that we

can‘t think of it in dimensional or even extradimensional

terms. It‘s obliterating potentiality as it goes - though that

sounds far more violent than the actual process. It‘s more as

if the alternatives are being deleted - softly and silently

vanishing away.‘

‗You make it sound positively sedate,‘ Benny said.

‗Not in real terms. The knock-on effect has thrown the

entire universal mechanism into chaos. The timelines are

loose and whipsawing, fractured remains of the alternatives

are sleeting through the real - our basic reality is tearing

itself apart.‘

‗I think,‘ Benny said dubiously, ‗that people might have

noticed something like that. Great rents in the fabric of

reality, alternate universes appearing and disappearing out of

nowhere - that must be worth a modest GalNet slot at the

very least.‘

Chris shook his head. ‗Nobody on the human level‘s

noticing a thing, except for a lot of quantum theorists who

are going to get some incredibly weird readings from their

particle accelerators. Even those who‘ve found themselves

translated into pocket alternatives don‘t know about it – the

change in quantum states imposes new structures on the

memory. They‘re full of little glitches and incongruities,

apparently, but they allow the mind to continue to exist. I

think it‘s a kind of inbuilt survival mechanism – automatic

mental cover stories that last as long as they‘re needed.

People aren‘t even aware of the transitions.‘ Chris paused

momentarily. ‗Nobody‘s going to realize what‘s happening

until the entire universe simply shuts itself down. The vast

majority, at any rate.‘

‗Now why,‘ said Benny, ‗do I get the feeling that we‘re now

going to be talking about the other people?‘

‗People like you,‘ said Chris. ‗And me. And Jason. We‘ve

had direct experience with time travel and dimensions other

than our own. The physical structure of the brain is modified

by the processes of memory, consciousness is inextricably

linked to the fundamental processes of the universe - and

our experiences in the past make it neurologically possible to

experience the disruptions now. Not completely, of course,

but enough to affect or be affected by them. We‘re probably

going to suffer little memory loops and elisions, but at least

we can survive.‘

‗You seem to know a lot about this,‘ Benny said. ‗Just what

have you been studying in all your convent-hopping?‘

Chris grinned slightly. ‗I haven‘t been confining myself to

religion, Benny - and I‘ve only found myself staying in a

convent once, which was a story in itself and far too long.

Most of what I‘m telling you is from Sgloomi crossed with

educated guesswork. You can‘t see what‘s happening to the

universe yourself at the moment because of the dark matter

shrouding this planet. When you do, you‘ll see, believe you

me.

‗The Schirron Dream and its crew are the same. They come

from a completely different reality and so, like us, in a sense

they exist outside ordinary space and time. You know how

the Socratic process of potentiality and actuality works? It‘s

like being a doctor or some such...‘

‗Why a doctor?‘ Benny asked.

‗Why not? The point is that everybody has the potential to

be a doctor. That‘s the Potentiality, of course - but Actuality

has degrees. You might be a doctor but at the moment doing

something entirely different, like drinking yards of ale until

you fall over and throw up, putting bits of dissected bodies in

nurses‘ handbags, or dropping your trousers in an utterly

stupid student revue. That‘s the first degree. The second

degree of Actuality is when you‘re a doctor being a doctor,

tending to a patient.‘

‗I seem to remember something about that, now,‘ said

Benny. ‗It wasn‘t my field, you understand. Wasn‘t it related

to Platonic ideal states - something about how the third

degree of actuality was God?‘

‗I think that stems more from the age of absolutes,‘ Chris

said. ‗People saw the world with a lesser degree of

multiplicity, then. I do think that any third degree on the

scale might be a kind of archetypical doctor.

‗The principle is applicable for people like us, though.

Anyone has the potential for interdimensionality. Some

people actually travel between dimensions - and a minority of

those exist outside, over and above dimensional terms. Do

you remember how the Schirron Dream turned up for your

wedding - how a whole bunch of us turned up, for that

matter - even though it was being held centuries before the

subjective now? It seemed totally natural and unremarkable,

and that was a large part of making it possible in the first

place.‘

The mention of her wedding reminded Benny of something

important, which had puzzled her. ‗So why the hell is Jason

here?‘ she asked. ‗I mean, strange unknowable force deleting

whole alternatives and throwing the universe into chaos, fine,

but what‘s Jason going to do - try to shag it and nick its

wallet?‘ She suddenly remembered something else and all but

spat. ‗And him a married man, too.‘

‗Look, Benny, some things you‘re going to have to talk

about with the people concerned,‘ said Chris, with the air of

one utterly determined to remain uninvolved in certain

interpersonal areas. ‗In any case, I think I already said that

there‘s nothing we can do about it. I think that whatever we

do, the entire universe has one and a half to two billion years

left in it, if we can‘t do anything about it. Full stop.‘

‗Is that all?’ Benny exclaimed, without irony, having had

the point hammered home by being given a timescale, and

deeply shocked. ‗Look, what about all the people who have a

stake in this, the Old Gods, Elementals, Immortals and

whatnot? Aren‘t they going to do anything about it?‘

Chris shook his head. ‗Those that actually exist are by their

very natures above and beyond it all. They won‘t do anything

- they keep going on about something else, some imminent

Big War they‘re about. We have some more immediate

concerns, though. Human-level concerns.

‗The nexus of the disruption seems to be planet Earth - and

the Schirron Dream was visiting when it hit. Li Shao and the

others really enjoyed the place, it seems; so far as they were

concerned, it was as weird and silly as we found the System,

when we found ourselves inside it. Now li Shao, Leetha and

Kiru arc trapped down there, on a planet fracturing into any

number of pocket-sized hells. Nobody else down there is

going to notice a thing, until things go critical – but for people

like Nathan, Leetha and Kiru, it‘s going to tear them apart

and eventually kill them.‘

7

MINIMAL CUTTING

(ALTERNATE EARTH)

The hand has reached the mechanism. The egglike half-shell

that houses it is encircled by a number of grooves - a series of

concentric rings that, with some slight but significant effort,

can be twisted this way or that.

The hand begins to twist them slightly, this way and that,

making tiny adjustments that are reflected in the clockwork

Twisting worlds and changing them. Twisting them away.

Up the stairwell, the studs on my shoes ringing off cool

marble in a variety of multiple staccato, little ticks and clacks

coming back at me from several different floors and all the

way from the bottom to the top. I took the steps at an easy

kind of jog — I know how to deal with stairs; with elevators or

tractions you‘re too enclosed. You can‘t see what‘s wailing for

you, or coming up on you from behind.

Also, it was to increase the head start the Burroughs boys

had on me. It was a question of timing. Too late and they‘d be

gone with whatever it was they‘d found; too early and I‘d find

them long before they might have found something.

Everybody calls ‗em the Billy Boys now, even centuries after

the fact. In the old days they used to be called the Feds.

Federal Bureau of Investigation, which started out in the US

of A and then piggybacked itself across the world through the

covert infrastructure of the CIA and booze lines. The Billy

comes from the most famous Director of the Bureau, William

S. Burroughs, who took over from J. Edgar somebody after a

- for the time - repugnant and extremely notorious sex

scandal involving reefers and transvestisim. As a reaction to

that, maybe, Burroughs was renowned the whole world over

for his conservatism and blatant heterosexuality, combined

with an intimate knowledge of adding-machine technology

from his family connections and body-modification

procedures imported from the Neo-Prussian Reich. It was he

who caused the addiction of those under him to a series of

continually readjusted opium derivatives, which thus

afforded him complete control; and it was he who introduced

the induction of mild, structured brain damage to his agents,

chopping up their language centres so that they had,

effectively, an inbuilt ‗secret‘ code.

For a time the Boys had, ostensibly at least, been in

opposition to the Cartels. In the end, like everything else,

they had been subsumed. Now they operated on the very

highest levels - so high that they were in effect the personal

enforcers of the Overlords themselves.

The question was, just which of the Overlords was currently

running them? Who had sent these two?

Lisa Chan‘s father had lived on floor seven. I hit it and

trotted down a corridor walled and inset with the visions of

some barely restrained Egyptologist, keeping as many

muscles as I could loose and hyperventilating to counter the

fatigue from my climb. Lamp fixtures and sand buckets and

doors went by: 703... 705... 707...

The apartment I was looking for was 709. It wasn‘t hard to

spot on account of how the door was hanging half off its

hinges - the latest variant on the Burroughs boys‘ junk

seemed to pickle their meat solid and give them almost

superhuman energy, in short bursts, before they burnt

themselves out.

I went straight through - hoping like hell that these Boys

had been programmed for a simple search job rather than

search-and-destroy. Nothing particularly exciting about the

d6cor inside: standard Cartel hotel out of Vegas. The Boys

were in the process of tearing the sofa apart, jabbering to

themselves.

‗Cleat barted whelp,‘ one of them was saying. ‗Rocks sing

enter junk boy musty...‘

‗Slunk,‘ the other said.

It was not even as if a switch had been thrown. They simply

straightened up, and in unison turned to face me.

I tried to smile, friendly like, at their slack grey faces. ‗Hey,

guys. Don‘t mind me. Just here to take a look at the

plumbing or the wiring or whatever. You just get on with

whatever it was you were -‘

It was to no avail. They were heading towards me, like a

couple of blocks of sliding, flaking concrete.

‗Sing wilted,‘ one of them said in his dry and reptile-rhythm

voice. ‗Dragon asshole semen robot waves with meson-tenant

steel and Monday satellite —‘

It was then, and utterly without warning, that something

seemed to slice into the meat of my brain, and hook, and

twist.

‗Mr Deed does not like witnesses,‘ the Boy continued. ‗They

clutter up the world, says Mr Deed.‘

Something split the world apart; a ragged slash across my

sight and there was nothing behind it - not blackness, or

whiteness, or some form of neutral grey.

(Mischa took them up through the casino, where the roulette

wheels and baccarat tables and steam-driven one-armed

bandits were well attended - the distinctions between rich and

poor still obtained here, now, though scaled down to the point

of microcosm. The jewellery might be tarnished and the

clothing frayed, the vast sums of money inflated to the point of

being worthless, but there were, one felt, certain standards to

be maintained. One must be seen to keep one’s...)

Nothing. I was barely aware of the ragged flaps and tatters

of the Boys, the apartment, the entire world spinning from

me before my bones exploded through my flesh like shrapnel

and my organs and my brain meat spun away and there was

8

THE ELEVATION OF THE MASSES,

ALTOGETHER

‗Time to launch,‘ said Benny, ‗five minutes, assuming that

we‘re all still capable of comprehending something like ―five

minutes‖.‘

The bridge of the Schirron Dream was not exactly the same

as she remembered - again, the memory simply occurring, as

if it had been simply slotted in. That line of thought was

fruitless, though. Imposed or natural memories are

indistinguishable on the ever-moving point of now; as in a

dream, you can only ever treat them as implicitly if

oxymoronically real.

Aside from the disquieting sensation that they were

flickering and changing on some stratum above the visual

range, the forms of makeshift equipment that had once been

bolted on to convert the ship for largely humanoid use were

still visible, but seemed to have moulded themselves into the

surroundings. It was as if the Schirron Dream were eating

them - no, not eating, because eating tended to suggest some

kind of predatory viciousness. Absorbing, then, into its

structure. Going into symbiosis.

The giant, vaguely ovoid screen that dominated the bridge,

that seemed to switch from exterior views, to rear views, to

communication views to easily assimilable diagrams,

seemingly on a whim, was currently showing an outside view

of Malanoor. The jungle, several hits of ancient but rather

more recently ruined Temple and glimpses of the strangely

empty Malanoor sky. To one side, through the fungus, Benny

could make out lights, and just see glimpses of the children

and their guards.

The numbers of the children had recently been augmented

by several from the Schirron Dream, seven or eight in all,

ranging from babes in arms to toddlers, with two members of

the crew to help look after them. ‗Is safe here as anywhere-

thing,‘ Sgloomi had said, slumped a little mournfully on the

gangplank and watching them go. ‗Definite more safeguard

than where we go - which are surely very big-nasty death

with lots of entrails, innards and wobbles.‘

‗Thanks so much,‘ Benny had said. ‗You really know how to

give a girl confidence.‘

Clutched in the hand was her diary, which she had rescued

from the camp. She knew that if the universe suddenly

changed around her, the contents of the diary‘ would in all

probability change loo - but it was the nearest thing she

could think of as a kind of anchor. She would have felt even

happier about it had she been able to remember if the little

sticky notes, with which she habitually recorded different

and more agreeable versions of events, had been yellow or

pink. What colour had they been?

Now, Benny looked around herself at the other occupants

of the bridge - a relatively easy task, since she had no

experience with the controls and had been given an

incomprehensible screen to watch more or less as a courtesy,

towards the back and out of the way. At least the screen had

a countdown of sorts, in a scrawl that seemed to have been

dashed off as an afterthought, as if the ship were vaguely

trying to be nice. Chris and Sgloomi sat at other consoles,

which could have dealt with detectors, weapons,

communications, engines, the plumbing system or any

combination of all.

Sgloomi had transformed into a human form to deal, so it

said, with control modifications designed for humans. In fact,

it was more as if Sgloomi had lapsed rather than anything so

active as transform. An androgynous human, so perfectly

detailed that it was indistinguishable in anything other than

its grey pigmentation. The features appeared to be a mixture

drawn from those of Chris and... someone else. Almost

certainly a woman.

It was rather strange, thought Benny, that Sgloomi seemed

to be striving so hard to maintain a kind of stereotypically

Sloathey identity, when this seemed by its very detail far

closer to hir natural form. Chris, she noticed, kept passing

thoughtful, troubled glances at the Sloathe. He was probably

disconcerted by the similarity even more than she was.

At the helm, which disconcerted and surprised her even

more than somewhat, was Jason Kane.

‗I can‘t believe,‘ Benny said to the world in general, ‗that

someone like Chris isn‘t at the master controls. I seem to

recall that he can fly anything that moves, often extremely

dangerous and fast things. It strikes me that someone like

that might be extremely useful in filling Captain li Shao‘s

boots.‘

Jason - who had spent all of Benny‘s time on board

avoiding her, and their last hour on the bridge studiously

ignoring her in a way that was really starting to get on her

thruppennies - now turned in his captain‘s chair and

regarded her stonily. ‗It isn‘t a question of filling anyone‘s

shoes.‘

It wasn‘t so much what he said; it was the cold,

uninterested, even contemptuous tone in which he said it...

‗Um, the skills that come with flying skimmers and other

aircraft,‘ said Chris hurriedly and a little nervously, like a

referee wondering if it‘s a good idea to get between two

seasoned prizefighters, ‗are completely different to those

needed piloting a space cruiser. Jason‘s got the experience.

He‘s the man for the job.‘

‗Yes, well, you would say that,‘ said Benny. ‗You‘re far too

nice and amenable not to.‘ She turned in her rather

superannuated seat to glare at Jason again. ‗The experience

of one rather ratty scow that couldn‘t decide if it was a grotty

little trader, a garbage hauler, or both simultaneously.

Strikes me someone needs a bit more ―experience‖ than that.‘

Jason glared right back at her. ‗I‘ve commanded other

ships since then.‘

‗I can just imagine,‘ Benny said. ‗Not for long. I‘ll bet.‘

Jason‘s face clouded, more with a kind of self-loathing

regret, it seemed for an instant, than with the black and

thunderous anger that supplanted it, which he turned on

Benny. ‗You might be right about that, as it happens. And

can you please stop talking about me in the third person.

First person is for real life, third person‘s for books.‘

‗It‘s quite true, Benny.‘ Sgloomi, with hir transition into

human form, had adopted more human constructions,

cadences and rhythms. ‗So far as I can ascertain from my

own rather specialized senses, the ship appears to like him

and respond to him, so far as a semisentient quasi-organism

is, in fact, capable of achieving processes such as we

delineate respond.’

‗If you sprout pointy ears at this point, you‘re going to get

such a slap,‘ said Benny.

‗Pardon me?‘ said a perplexed Sgloomi Po.

‗Doesn‘t matter.‘

‗Mr Kane is simply the best person to pilot the Schirron

Dream,’ said Sgloomi, mildly.

‗Well, based on the landing I saw, he should try harder,‘

Benny said.

‗Um, actually,‘ Chris cut in, a little shamefacedly, ‗that was

me. I really wanted to have another go.‘

Benny recovered, she considered, beautifully. ‗So you trust

him, based on meeting him for - what? - a couple of days at

my wedding.‘ Yet again she glared at Jason and then back to

Sgloomi. ‗And, for that matter, why the hell is he here? He‘s

not exactly the first person I‘d pick to save the universe as we

know it - and if you knew you were coming for me, why the

hell did you stop off along the way for him?‘

‗Because somebody out there hates me,‘ Jason cut in,

gloomily.

‗I must admit to a small lapse of judgment,‘ Sgloomi said.

‗We normally parthenogenic forms of life sometimes find it

hard to think in terms of more multiple forms of sexuality.

One simply thought that humans mated for life, and that in

any events the partners might like to face those events

together.‘

Benny thought about it. ‗Yes, well, didn‘t the small fact that

we haven‘t mated for at least two years give you some sort of

hint?‘

‗No,‘ Sgloomi said. ‗Should it have?‘

‗It damn well should. Where did you find him, anyway? Let

me guess.‘

‗He was making his way through -‘

‗— one of the seedier bars on the lower-level Habitats in the

Proximan Chain-rafts,‘ Jason said. ‗You know how it is. One

of the port ladies got just friendly enough to rip off my

travelling money and I -‘

‗I‘m not surprised,‘ said Benny. ‗Am I surprised? I am

bloody not.‘ She looked at Jason with contempt. ‗And how‘s

the wife about that kind of thing? I‘ll bet, from what I know,

she has to take it. How does it feel to finally have the sort of

marriage you want?‘

‗How does it feel?‘ said Jason. Benny became aware that

while they were talking, he had smoothly pulled this,

punched that and twisted the other on his console, going

through what seemed to be a reasonably complicated

prelaunch check. ‗I‘ll tell you how it feels.‘

He pulled a lever and the savage acceleration shoved her

back into the padding of her couch.

Meanwhile, on planet Earth and slightly more than half a

galaxy away, a man named Bane sat in an especially

designed and shielded bunker, and contemplated his works.

As he sat. Bane knew that if he were to open the heavy

shutters of his bunker he would see nothing more

remarkable than his cultivated, biospheric gardens. He also

knew that, should he choose to step through the doorway, he

could wander through the arboretum, stand in the gazebo,

observe the variegated comings and goings of the carp in the

fishpond and that nothing bad would happen to him at all. At

least, so far as he himself was capable of perceiving.

The banks of viewers around the bunker walls showed him

the true picture. The viewers were extremely specialized and

had been constructed at considerable expense, over no

insignificant amount of time. The bunker also contained a

considerable number of modular units, with no clue as to

their function save the blinking readouts on their faces,

which merely showed sequences of high-order numbers

incrementing, decrementing or switching between.

These units were hooked by lengths of strangely glistening,

gel-like flex to the remains of Employee Zero – although

‗remains‘ might have been the wrong word. Employee Zero

seemed entirely intact and whole, the nomenclature

stencilled on his naked chest being his only blemish. The

only indication of malaise was that Employee Zero lay as still

as death.

Only the screens, again, displayed the true picture – and

the true picture was like nothing on Earth.

Employee Zero was in turn hooked to the Egg - and here, it

seemed, the dislocation of Bane from the actual fact of

things, as opposed to mere reality, fell slightly down. The

mechanism inside the Egg appeared to shimmer, constantly

transforming in states unknown to the physical, and possibly

even coruscating.

The Egg had proved something of a trial for Bane. No

matter what the design, no servo-mechanism had been found

that could move the concentric rings upon its shell that

served, after a fashion, to control it. They simply wouldn‘t

budge.

They could be moved at all only by a living human hand. A

specific human hand. When he had come to finally

experiment with his own hand. Bane had known a large

degree of apprehension. When the time had come for him to

touch it, he had been almost entirely convinced that the Egg

would fry him instantly - as it had done to the hands of

others, with which Banc had experimented before. Had he

not known, from deep inside himself, and from the

interpretation of certain other sources that he would not be

obliterated, he would never have so much as touched the

damned thing.

That, of course, and the size of the stakes.

The stakes were everything that is, or was, or ever will be.

The strange thing was, Bane reflected, that once touched

and survived, the process was strangely addictive. Even now

his fingers itched to grab the Egg and twist the rings as far as

they would go.

But no. That would be disastrous, both for a universe that

Bane did not care particularly much about, and for Bane

himself.

All the same, he could not resist making one more small

and almost utterly unimportant adjustment. Just one more.

That couldn‘t hurt at all.

Then he composed himself, and waited for the next time

that the moment was meet and right.

‗You complete and utter total bastard!‘ Benny shouted after

she could breathe again. ‗You did that on purpose!‘

‗Well you did ask,‘ said Jason.

Sgloomi Po had momentarily been squashed into a flattish,

doughnut shape by the acceleration, and now sprang back

into hir gender-neutral human form.

‗We had to clear the dark-matter clouds of Malanoor

quickly,‘ it said. ‗We‘ve found to our cost that a gradual

revelation of the current state of affairs is the one that leads

to psychotic episodes.‘

‗We have to show it to you in one lump,‘ Jason said.

Oh really?‘ said Benny. ‗Well you could have bloody told

me.‘

‗Yeah, well, you didn’t ask about that. You just look at the

screen.‘

Benny might have responded in a manner utterly unsuited

to the lady she patently was, had she not automatically

glanced at the screen in the way people do when told to look

at something - and it was at that precise point, as though a

light switch had been thrown, that the screen, which had

been relaying nothing but the subtly shifting blackness of the

dark-matter clouds, sprang into vibrant, dazzling life.

‗Oh my...‘ Benny breathed as she finally saw the new sky

and the truth of it sank in. ‗Oh, my...‘

STRIKE TWO

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN

NOW AND THEN

9

THE MYSTERIOUSLY ELUSIVE

VILLAIN, PART ONE

(ALTERNATE EARTH)

I must confess to a distinct sensation of profound if intangible

presentiment as I mounted the stairs of Professor Tzanov’s

house. The furnishings and fixtures were rather fine, both in

their taste and of a quality that denoted some expense in their

procurement, as befits a domicile towards the more refined

areas of the Metropolis. A sense of neglect, however, and a

notable patina of dust overlaid all. The late professor, a

widower, had clearly been a man for whom the activities of the

mind were predominant to those of mere housekeeping.

Indeed, since entering the house I had yet to encounter more

than a single manservant (the butler, who had taken no more

than a cursory perusal of my visiting card, and curtly imparted

the information that le Shadon was awaiting me in the master

bedroom) and would have been unsurprised to learn there

were no more than a cook and a bootboy below stairs.

My unease grew stronger as I attained the first-floor landing.

All visible doors were closed, and I had no idea of the house’s

precise layout, but I had a horrible suspicion as to which of

those doors might lead to the master bedroom – said suspicion

being compounded by a dreadful series of crashes, bumps and

other sounds of struggle that lay behind it.

‘Le Shadon?’ I exhaled, rattling the handle of the door to find

it unlocked. Beyond the door as it swung open I saw a sight

the like of which I may never hope to see again.

That great detective, Nathan le Shadon, lay, prone, upon the

floor. Sitting astride him, what I can only delineate as a

reptilian hybrid clawed and pummelled at his heart...

In his years of chronicling the adventures of le Shadon, Kiru

had upon occasion reflected, his own small investigatory and

observational skills had been not unnaturally overshadowed

by those of the great detective. This was only right and

proper, of course, but it tended to give the general impression

among the reading public that Kiru, in himself, was little

more than an unproductive nincompoop. Indeed, a number

of persons had had the effrontery to come up to him on the

streets, while he was going about his business of the day,

and offer their services as a replacement companion, on the

grounds that ‘You’re obviously not up to the task yourself,

old boy.’

Nonetheless - as befits an author capable of observing and

describing the exploits of a genius in entertaining detail -

Kiru had observational powers rather more developed than

most. After his initial shock, pursuant to the impression that

the reptile woman was attacking him and tearing out his

heart, he realized that she was merely, if frantically, giving le

Shadon artificial respiration, as a swimming-baths attendant

might give to some unwary swimmer.

‘Good Lord, Nathan!’ he cried. ‘What has happened here?

Can you speak?’

Le Shadon gasped a word that sounded like ‘Eck’.

seemingly modulating the air exhaled under the pressure of

the reptile woman’s hands. Moving closer, Kiru saw that the

reptilian countenance had largely been a trick of the light,

slinking through the crazy-paving cracks in the broken

window and giving her a mottled appearance. She was in fact

a perfectly ordinary if lovely woman, with merely a greenish

tinge in her skin to suggest that there was some small degree

of Sojourner in her ancestry.

Closer still, and the reason for le Shadon’s current

debilitation became evident.

‘Ye gods!’ Kiru plucked the blowpipe dart from le Shadon’s

neck and peered at the residue upon the tip. ‘Whatever it is

you’re doing, my dear lady,’ he said to the woman straddling

le Shadon, ‘please don’t stop.’

‘I found him here, and he was convulsing,’ the woman said,

her voice transformed into an uninflected growl by her

exertions. It was not exactly an uncultured voice, but it held

a strength Kiru had never previously encountered in a lady,

and it recalled just for an instant the vision of the monstrous

lizard female. ‘I’ve been trying to kick-start his breathing for

something like five... for no short while, and he just doesn’t

seem to be able to start.’

‘You have doubtless saved his life all the same,’ Kiru said.

He regarded the blowpipe dart once again. ‘Unless I miss my

guess entirely, this is tipped with distilled blooki-beetle juice,

from the far off climes of the Madagascan Oligarchy. I believe

it operates upon the same principle as curare - it paralyses

the lungs and the victim dies of suffocation rather than from

poisoning (which, as you’ll recall, is the induced inability of

haemoriferous substances in the blood to distil the life-giving

qualities of the Luminiferous Aether from the air).’

‘So how many... how much longer must I keep on doing

this?’ panted the woman.

‘I don’t believe it will be much longer, now.’ Kiru smiled

with relief. ‘Things could, I think, have been worse. The

venom might have been derived from a tincture of the finest

Patagonian puff-mongoose juice.’

‘And would I notice the difference?’

‘I believe, my dear lady, that you most certainly would.’

It was at that moment that le Shadon’s body gave a

convulsive judder and spasmed, knocking the hands of the

woman from his chest. The body of le Shadon drew in a

great, choking breath and then upon the instant began to

cough exceptionally violently.

When he was capable of speech, Nathan le Shadon raised

himself slightly and inclined his head towards the woman. ‘I

am for ever in your debt, madam.’

The woman raised a perfect eyebrow. ‘Miss.’

‘I do apologize. Miss Tzanov. I fear that I am rather

unaccountably light-headed for the instant. Allow me to

introduce my most trusted friend and companion, Dr James

Kiru, late of the Bengal Lancers, Queen’s College of Medicine

and Rugby, if not necessarily in that order.’

‘I’m charmed,’ said the lady, looking up at Kiru with a little

smile. For some strange reason Kiru thought that he should

know her, but, try as he might, he could not quite recollect

the time or place or circumstances in which they might have

met.

(She shoved him through erupting streets. In the sky

biplanes banked and wheeled; more than once they were

forced to skirt an area where the Samurai ground forces were

attempting a raid, creating an actual beachhead until, at last,

they came to a dome guarded by a pair of Seku , glowering

around themselves with barely contained belligerence. and

obviously wishing they were where the fighting was...)

‘As am I, my dear lady,’ said Dr James Kiru, late of the

Bengal Lancers and FRS. ‘As am I.’

‘Miss Tzanov,’ said Nathan le Shadon, ‘is, as you’ll recall,

the young lady I told you about, and the reason for my

asking you to come here. It now seems that her late father

was most cruelly murdered. The developmental engineering

workshops of his armament manufactory have been rifled,

but nothing, it seems, was taken.’

‘Why yes,’ said the lovely Miss Tzanov. ‘It seemed to me

that the evil Thuggees who did it must have been looking for

something quite consequential, which they did not find. It

seemed obvious to me that, if the object they were looking for

was truly important, then my father was aware of that

importance, and that he might have sequestered it in some

other locale.’

‘His home being the obvious choice,’ said le Shadon.

‘Rather too obvious.

‘You see, Miss Tzanov, I did not accompany you here with

the intention of searching for this mysterious object,

whatever it might prove to be. Even a most cursory

examination of the house showed me that it had not been

searched – and why should whatever nefarious element we

are pitted against fail to take that most flagrantly obvious

step? The answer is simple. This house was left as a trap, the

locale for an attempt upon the life of my own self!’

Miss Tzanov gasped and a dainty hand flew to her mouth.

Seemingly oblivious to the fact that Miss Tzanov was now

cursing vehemently and exceedingly crudely, having split her

lip on the back of her hand (she had, quite obviously,

misjudged her own muscular strength) le Shadon continued:

‘I decided, however, to lay my own trap. I entered the house

knowing that an attempt would be made, and purely with the

intention of drawing our criminal out into the open. In this, I

believe, I have succeeded.

‘For a number of... for some not inconsequential while, as

you know, Kiru, I have been ingesting small amounts of

various poisons, to which I have built up a certain immunity

- not enough to save me from their most deadly effects, you

understand, but merely to give me a few - a moment in which

I might take precipitate action. There was no way of

anticipating or avoiding the dart as such, but before the

paralysis hit me I was able to whip my head around in a

trice, and catch a glimpse in the direction from which it had

come.

‘Thus I was able to see the jet-propelled dirigible of scarlet

and lemon as it rose out of sight, dragging a rather startled-

looking Madagascan midget with it on a line. I need hardly

tell you, Kiru, which personage of our acquaintance flouts

the law of the land in such a flagrant manner that he always

uses a distinctive methodology to his crimes - not least being

the use of a red and yellow dirigible as and when appropriate

or possible.’

‘Ye gods!’ Kiru exclaimed, for the second time. ‘Can it

possibly be true?’

‘I believe,’ said le Shadon, ‘that it possibly can - for all we

thought we’d seen the last of the fiend when he plunged,

seemingly to his death, from the dirigible he was at that point

utilizing in what was called by some the Case of the

Purloined Parson’s Nose.’

‘That mastermind of criminality,’ Kiru breathed. ‘That

inveigler of whole nations in his iniquitously Machiavellian

schemes. That slinking foe who will never rest until the world

itself is clasped in his foul clutches - Doctor Simon Deed

himself!’

10

FOREIGN MUSIC

The first impression was that the blackness of space and the

light of the stars had reversed themselves - a blinding,

blazing plane as bright as burning magnesium, pocked with

darker speckles.

Then the mind adjusted itself - the light hadn’t blinded her,

Benny realized vaguely, because she was perceiving it with

some other sense than physical sight - and the white plane

devolved into the myriad of its component parts: a churning

vortex of brilliant, multicoloured points of light, so dense that

they filled the entire field of vision.

Over centuries of development, the technology of receiving,

storing and replaying images had been perfected.

Inconsistencies and imperfections had been eradicated - to

the point where creative artists in these respective media

were forced to rely almost entirely upon actuality and intent,

without the synergetic effects of accident. Benny, on the

other hand, was an archaeologist, and had direct experience

with archaic and long-outmoded technologies. The vision on

the Schirron Dream’s screen put her in mind of an ancient

television set tuned between transmitter stations.

Three-dimensional static was incredibly hard to imagine,

but then she didn’t have to imagine it because it was

happening right in front of her. The points she had first

taken to be black specks now seemed only dark because they

were constant, conflicting with the chaos around them, and

so they drew the attention like the differently pigmented

numbers that appear out of the apparent confusion of a

colour-blindness test. (Benny wondered if her tendency to

think, sometimes, in unorthodox and obsolete terms - colour-

blindness having long since been dealt out and trumped from

the genomic deck - was one of the factors in what Chris Cwej

had ambiguously described as her ‘special’ nature.)

In any event, these pinpoints of constancy seemed to tie in

with the layout she remembered of the stars from the general

galactic position of Malanoor. And - although it was almost

impossible to tell with the chaos that surrounded them – she

had the nasty suspicion that, while she was watching,

several of these points of constancy had quietly gone out.

‘Tell me that’s a malfunction,’ she said, quite quietly,

almost as if she were trying to convince herself. ‘A simulation

or something, knocked up by the ship. Something like that.’

‘It’s a simulation,’ said Chris, never taking his eyes from his

own console, ‘just not in the sense that you mean. If you

went outside and looked with the naked eye you wouldn’t see

anything out of the ordinary, you know?’

Benny knew what he meant. Even with the aid of a suit

and helmet to prevent the naked eyes exploding out of the

head, the simple fact was that you didn’t see anything without

the assistance of readouts and enhancement. The idea that

you’d see stars and constellations, hydrogen clouds and

merrily spinning beringed planets was purely the invention of

the entertainment media, and so ingrained in the human

psyche that even those who did go into space tended to forget

that it was complete and utter tosh.

‘What you’re looking at,’ said Chris, ‘is what is happening -

for people like us, at least. I don’t think anybody else is

noticing anything different or wrong at all; they haven’t got

the necessary mental toolkit. All the Schirron Dream’s doing, I

think, is integrating it into an image relevant to ourselves

that we can assimilate.’ He gestured to the screen. ‘Those

lights are the potentiality of suns, planets, physical bodies,

translating into our reality and then collapsing under

probability. In the quantum sense, they can possibly exist

and so they do.’

‘But in the real real sense,’ said Jason as he calmly worked

the helm, ‘it doesn’t matter if they do or not. We can go

through ‘em like a hand through soap bubbles ‘ He briefly

took his hands from the controls and did a complicated little

multiple-finger click and clap. ‘Kersplat-splat, no problem.

You don’t feel anything, do you?’

‘What?’ Benny exclaimed, a little alarmed by the half-

formulated implications of this. She tried to formulate them a

little further. ‘Let me get this straight. We’re ploughing our

way through suns and planets in their hundreds of

thousands, a significant number of them probably inhabited,

and we’re just blowing them apart as we go?’

‘Pass the lady a monkey nut,’ said Jason. ‘Only it’s millions

of billions at the very least.’

‘But that’s -’

‘Oh balls,’ sighed Jason. ‘Here we go with the misplaced

Little Sister of the Bleeding Heart routine again...’

‘You’re thinking in the wrong terms, Benny,’ Chris cut in

hurriedly, as Benny sucked her breath in for a belter of a

retort. ‘I mean, if you decide to eat a sandwich or a mixed-

fruit salad, do you give a thought to the countless people who

might die or not, or might never exist at all, in any universe

that might be created by the knock-on effects of that simple

choice? What we’re dealing with here operates on just that

level, effectively and morally.’

Benny caught herself and tried to think about it clearly.

‘No,’ she said at last. ‘You might believe that, but I can’t.’ She

gestured to the points of light flaring into existence and dying

on the screen. ‘I don’t know what to think exactly, but I can’t

think like that. You can see it.’

‘You are experiencing,’ said Jason, with an affected,

cultured drawl that Benny knew from bitter experience was

the prelude to another asinine bit of Jasonly showing off,

‘what is known as a Naked Lunch moment. You can see

what’s on the end of every fork, but that doesn’t change the

fact that it was there before you noticed.’

‘But once you notice,’ said Benny, pointedly, ‘you do

something about it and become a vegetarian - something I

have been, I might add, since a very early age, barring the

occasional lapse, and bacon sandwiches, which don’t

count...’

‘And didn’t I bloody know it?’ Jason said. ‘OK, Ms Morality,

how about this? Someone you love’s about to be horribly

murdered and the only way you can get to them is over a

floor crawling with cockroaches. Or squashy rats, or -’

‘Jason…’ Sgloomi said from hir own console, slightly

concerned. ‘Might I suggest that we discuss such things

later, when events allow?’

Jason scowled. ‘Yeah, OK.’ He shrugged and turned his full

attention back to the helm controls. He didn’t appear to do

anything different, but the Schirron Dream gave a little lurch,

correcting some small error he had allowed to pass unnoticed

in the heat of argument.

‘We have to keep our minds on the job in hand,’ said Chris.

‘We still have some people to pick up before we head into the

nexus of the disruption - but even this far out there are

effects in terms that will affect us...’

‘More space-time anomalies and weird wobbly things that

cat our engine emissions than you can shake a stick at,’

murmured Jason, absently.

‘Even this far out,’ said Chris, ‘it’s going to be a bumpy

ride.’

11

SUSPICIOUS GESTURES

The first thing Martle had suggested, on arrival in the landing

cradles, was that they split up. Roz had seen the logic of this:

working as a double-header might be safer in an alien

environment - but the acolyte who joined the Church of

Adjudication in order to be safe hadn’t been born. This way

they could cover more ground, and in any case, given

estimations of the local talent, it would take several hit

squads operating at their best to discomfit even a single

Adjudicator.

Now, however, she was beginning to have her doubts about

the wisdom of this. It was her first time off Earth, not

counting trips to the resort stations within the solar system,

which were the province of the richer of the Overclass from

which she had originally come. The sensation, now, was akin

to that she had experienced after joining the Church - from a

simple sense of duty and over the strident objections of her

family - when she had first found herself in the Underlevels

of the Overcities. The sense of dislocation, from the psycho-

sculpted and environmentally customized upper-level

chambers maintained by her family, to the bare Euclidian

spaces fractured by ducts, exposed mechanicals and

electrics, all overlaid by a grimy patina of what she was

vaguely aware had once been called house dust, but had

evolved by sheer weight of the numbers producing it in an

imperfectly ventilated environment into what the locals called

‘downside slime’ - the dislocation of it had been something

like this. The sense that she was in spaces she had never

experienced before.

This, however, was something else again. At least the

Underlevels of the city that had once been called Great

Britain had been built by human hands and, ostensibly, for

human needs. Or at least, Roz thought to herself, with a kind

of wry self-mockery, as near to human as some nice High

Caste girl who honestly believes she’s an egalitarian can

think, when she suddenly finds herself among the people

she’s always honestly been egalitarian about.

Here, even that simple, fundamental sense of human

contact was gone. And this was slightly odd, she thought,

given that Fnaroks were, aesthetically at least, a relatively

pleasant sight. One knew, admittedly, that there were teeth

behind the mobile, speech-capable lips, that there were claws

on the digitally opposable paws, but they were by no means

as unpleasant a race to look upon as some. It was the fact of

their movements, the fact of the smell that permeated the

lungs - the sheer mass of them on the streets almost

horrifyingly open to the naked sky. These... people occupied

their own space, on their own world, and it was a world

where she was simply not wanted by the very fact of the

shape she made in it.

The few humans she had seen were, if anything, even

worse. There was a Fnarok-like attitude to their postures,

their movements, their speech, as if they had been in some

way affected by the majority of creatures around them. Roz

understood that the human population on Zarjax had been

here for several generations - but didn’t they at least retain a

trace of the traditions of their family? She had also heard

that it was technically not unimpossible for a human and a

Fnarok to breed, but she found that frankly unbelievable.

The notion, though, made it increasingly difficult to care

about the humans that she saw in the crowd - she had to

keep it increasingly fixed in her head that somebody was

apparently going around and ripping bits out of theirs.

‘Family tradition?’ said Logh, in the skimmer beside her.

‘Ain’t got no family tradition. Hardly anyone come, anyone

you call family. Rags an’ hair an’ hank.’

Logh was one of the humans Roz was finding it increasingly

difficult to care about. He was a Militiaman Second Class,

what Roz thought of automatically as a Subdeacon and

proud of raising himself to that rank despite his species. He

had been seconded to her as an interpreter and guide

through the interconnected settlements - Zarjax did not even

have cities as such, but settlements that extruded along the

highways linking them. Roz had nothing against the idea of a

guide in principle: she just didn’t like being told where to go

and what to do once she got there.

‘You people are refugees?’ she asked Logh. ‘Where did you

come from? One of the colonics that were annexed in the

War?’

Logh made a little nodlike, ducking motion with his head,

caught himself visibly and then made his head shake with a

body-language he seemed unhappy with. ‘Nah. Mostly come

from Old Earth city-clearance. Think my umpty-great

horning female come from someplace called Espaina.’ He

gave a little simulated claw-waggle that roughly translated

into a human ‘don’t know, don’t care’. ‘Have different sorts of

family, now. It —’

Logh broke off and peered into the amorphous mass of

Fnarok, who seemed to be gathered in an open space

between low buildings. Roz assumed it might be a market of

some kind, but could not discern anything among the activity

that might be construed as buying and selling.

‘There,’ Logh said. ‘Big one making sign of three amorous

raghis with two gis down to smaller one with hoghi stone. He

middling big Dhai in Clan of Seven Small Saraghor.’

Roz had not the slightest idea to whom he was referring. ‘I

take it that’s someone we should be talking to?’

Logh turned to glare at her suspiciously. ‘You take what?

Big fight if you take thing. You betcha.’

Roz sighed. ‘I take nothing. We talk to this middling high,

er…’

‘Dhai in Seven Small Saraghor Clan. Yeah, we talk careful.

He not-so-good boy, you know. Can tell by three small scars

on

It was at that point that Logh was cut off again, not this

time by some observation on his part but by the squealing of

Roz’s comm unit. A number of Fnarok on either side of the

skimmer started in alarm and growled, possibly alarmed by

the sub- or suprasonics of an alert that had never been

designed with Fnarok ears in mind. It could only be a call

from the only other person on the planet with a comm unit

like that, and that person was Fenn Martle.

Roz waved Logh to silence with her hand, tuned out his

shocked protestations that he really wasn’t interested in

sexual advances at this point, and hit the comm switch.

‘Martle? What’s wrong?’

There was a ragged, desperate quality to Martle’s voice:

‘Roz? I’m at the Three Jade Shebeen in the settlement of the

Fourth Dhai Creeper-viper. Things have gone oogli-shaped

real bad. I need backup, Roz, and I need it -’

There was a sound from the comm link that was not the

distinctive chunk! of an Adjudicator’s MFG, but which could

only have come from some sort of projectile weapon. Then the

link went dead.

‘Fenn!’ The name was ripped from Roz’s throat seemingly of

its own volition - as seemed the hand poking uselessly at the

comm unit. She forced the hand to stop and turned to Logh.

‘This Three Jade Shebeen. Where?’

‘I can show,’ said Logh, worriedly. ‘Not a good idea. Very,

very bad boys in Three Jade Shebeen. Very dangerous...’

Roz was almost snarling at him now, in a way that made

him start away a little, even despite the cross-cultural

incompatibilities of meaning.

‘You take me there,’ Roz told him. ‘You take me there.

Now.’

12

THE MYSTERIOUSLY ELUSIVE

VILLAIN, PART TWO

(ALTERNATE EARTH)

The street outside the town house seemed disquietingly

normal: a refrigerated vehicle making its rounds,

replenishing the ice boxes of various households, the rattle of

some other tradesman delivering coal in some street nearby.

This being a workday, there were no couples promenading

arm in arm, no figures taking their ease in the floral square

behind the railings - all were about their respective workaday

business. The only persons actually evident were a scullery

maid beating a carpet from a third-floor window and a small

collection of children playing, in the area of the floral square

set aside for them, under the eyes of a watchful nurse.

Nathan le Shadon and Dr James Kiru escorted Miss Tzanov

to a more populated thoroughfare, where Kiru hailed a

hansom, which stopped promptly, venting its team of small

traction engines, which Kiru recognized as being of the newer

design, given their motive force by way of distilled water

passed over and heated by chemically refined radium.

‘Wotcha, governor,’ the jarvey said cheerily, pulling up his

goggles with one hand and removing his breathing mask with

the other. ‘Bleedin’ sultry this fine mornin’ and no mistake.

Where to, then, gov?’

His face fell as he saw that le Shadon was curtly motioning

to a passing bobby, and that said constable had paused

about his proceedings, and was now marching smartly

towards the cab.

‘Listen, governor,’ he said worriedly, ‘I didn’t mean anything

by the language - specially in front of the young lady here.

Just adding a bit of local colour, like. Furry wombat. Apples

and pears.’

‘Pay it no mind, my good fellow,’ le Shadon told him. ‘I

imagine that Miss Tzanov is a lady with a sufficiency of

stalwart spunk to take a certain degree of informality, if not

taken to the impertinent extreme.’ He turned to the

aforementioned gumption-sufficient lady. ‘I have taken the

liberty, Miss Tzanov, of informing Nova Scotland Yard of

things by way of your late lather’s radiophone, and they have

instructed this officer to escort you back to my own mere

lodgings in 455-b-101, Quadrant Seven.’

‘Oh, Mr le Shadon,’ said Miss Tzanov, fluttering her lashes

briefly in alarm, but to her immense credit bearing up well.

‘Am I to understand that you are to leave me bereft of your

protection?’

‘I fear it is unavoidable, my dear lady,’ le Shadon said. ‘If

Professor Simon Deed is indeed behind this distressing state

of affairs, I am no doubt to be his preferred target. To slay

with me would therefore place you in far more danger than

not. Never fear, however, for I have spoken to Chief Inspector

Bullstradd of the Criminal Investigation Division himself, who

will await you and provide quite competent protection to your

person.’

Directional instructions were relayed to the jarvey, and

Miss Tzanov and the constable embarked. Kiru noticed that

Miss Tzanov’s gentle hand lingered for the merest trifle more

than was necessary upon le Shadon’s as he helped her into

the carriage. Kiru experienced a strange admixture of

personal envy, and regret that his friend had sworn off all

intimate contact with the fairer sex, following the case that

Kiru had subsequently retold, at the request of the editor of

the Titbits Anthology, entitled ‘The Case of the Woman who

Ensnared the Great Detective with her Wiles, and Then Went

Around Conducting a Quite Unconscionable Number of Illicit

Affairs with Absolutely Everybody Else Behind his Back’.

Kiru fancied, in addition, however, that he also detected a

small smile from Miss Tzanov, before the traction engines

gave a multiple belch and the hansom rattled off, for him and

him alone.

Alone on the street now, save for the hurly-burly of the

faceless crowd, Kiru turned back to his friend. ‘Le Shadon,

old man, I cannot help but wonder if that was wise. Even

with the threat of constant attack, I feel that Miss Tzanov

would have been safer accompanying us than with a duffer

like Inspector Bullstradd.’

The great detective nodded thoughtfully. ‘I fear that would

ordinarily be the case, had I not concealed a vital piece of

information from the lady - a piece of information that must

take us where a lady even of her undoubted pluck might fear

to go. We must follow steps, Kiru, that even I am loath to

tread.’

‘Why, le Shadon!’ Kiru exclaimed. ‘Surely you do not

mean…’

‘Precisely, my dear Kiru. In my searching through the

house, prior to my being inconvenienced by the poison

injected in me by Deed’s minion, before he scuttled to his

waiting triplane, I chanced upon a secret compartment,

hidden behind a rather indifferent portrait of His Majesty,

our late King. There, I found the remains of Professor

Tzanov’s papers, which had been tampered with, almost

completely burnt to prevent a lesser mind from discerning

the merest iota of their content. Such scraps as remained

were all but illegible - but, among them, I discovered a

scrawled note written in quite another hand upon some

material that proved impervious to the ravages of fire.

‘The note contained a demand for payment in the matter of

effecting the precise knurling of a component for Professor

Tzanov’s calculating machine, couched in such aggressive

and vulgar terms that no man in this city would countenance

- or, I should say, no human man.

‘I believe that Professor Tzanov was constructing his

machine with the aid of a Sojourner of the most noisome and

disreputable sort - the sort that, as you’ll recall, our good

Simon Deed has so often used in the past.

‘I very much fear, my dear Kiru, that to solve this case we

must make a small excursion into the Downtown.’

13

INCIDENTAL ARRIVALS

The Three Jade Shebeen, like so much else in this alien

environment, seemed incomprehensible to Roz on the level of

things that had simply not occurred to her, and with which

she could not automatically cope. In the back of her mind

she’d had visions of some structural hybrid between a

fortress and a bar, like the kif-houses on Earth. This, from

the vantage point of the flier, seemed like an open-air maze,

built from partitioning and open to the elements. She

gathered that the climatic zones of Zarjax were remarkably

constant and, thinking about it, she could see how a world

with no erratic weather patterns to speak of need not evolve

the necessity for roofs and ceilings - but that was the point,

when you thought about it: she had to think about it.

Off to one side she could see the spaceport: the functional

hulks of human-designed transport craft, the splendidly and

uselessly ornamented forms of the Zarjax Interplanetary

Militia-patrol, and the strange shapes of ships built and

conned by other, alien, races. One of this latter sort was

grounding: a kind of manta shape that seemed, by its size, to

be either a patrol ship or an interstellar scout - Roz was not

up enough on the specs of extraterrestrial craft to hazard

more than a general guess.

She brought her mind back to the matter in hand and

gestured sharply downward to Logh.

‘Told you,’ he growled. ‘Don’t want to.’

‘Just take us down,’ Roz sighed.

Logh gave a little claw waggle. ‘Okey-dokey.’

He cut out the free-flight impellers and the flier dropped

like a stone, retros cutting in at a lower altitude with a

suddenness that jarred Roz into her cradle and, she felt,

could only be the result of a bit of personal maliciousness.

What the hell had she done to annoy the little skagger now?

From this lower vantage point Roz could see the activities

of the Three Jade Shebeen distinctly, in the areas that had

not been roofed over by flimsy strips of tarpaulin. Again,

though, she was left no wiser than she had been on the

settlement streets; she did not have the subconscious toolkit

that would instantly tag the motions of a Fnarok

perambulating through a corridor, or a gathering of Fnarok

around what seemed to be a large plant, its tendrils

intertwining through them, as anything at all - far less

anything overtly villainous. There was nothing that she could

see to get a -

Something finally occurred to her, as her observational

skills and intelligence finally overrode the blocks in her

thinking. The Fnarok had never had a need for roofs to keep

the rain off, granted, but there were other uses for roofs. And

the Fnarok had had space travel and heavier-than-air flight

for several centuries.

Rather than make yet another gestural sexual advance to

Logh, Roz kept her hands firmly at her side and just said,

‘Take us down, through one of those roofs.’

‘Which one?’ asked Logh.

‘Any one. I don’t care.’

Again the flier dropped, this time with a downward

acceleration that shoved her stomach up into her ribcage. It

burst through the roof covering which, under tension,

snapped back like a tensile soap bubble with an audible

smack. Just as Roz thought that the flier, Logh and her

insides were going to end up plastered radiantly over the first

flat surface they encountered below, the crash retros cut in

and slammed them to a halt.

Instinct took over, appropriate to the environment or not.

Roz dived from die flier and hit the ground flat, soaking up

the impact with two forearms and the flats of her hands, and

instantly snaked a now smarting hand back for her gun – all

the while performing a lightning kind of tier-observational/

response check that went something like:

1. Anything moving at all

2. Anything moving that might be a threat

3. Anything that might be a threat

4. Anything else...

...She was in an octagonal chamber that would have been

airy even if she had not destroyed its membranous,

translucent covering, which now hung in ruptured tatters

down the walls. The chamber was crammed with what

seemed to be old hospital beds from Earth, of the tubular

and paint-scuffed variety - looking, strangely, far more alien

in themselves because of their age and the alien

surroundings they were in.

All of the beds were occupied with what, at first sight,

seemed to be wasted, bedsore-ridden human bodies. On

second sight, by way of subtle differences in their bone and

muscle structure, they were recognizable as members of the

Zarjax human population. That was, Roz told herself, nothing

to do with their being worse, or anything like that. It was

simply the sort of qualifier by which you could tell that

someone was of African or European stock, or, say, from the

Underlevels of Earth.

Complicated units, seeming constructed of brass and

copper and glass, were strapped to their heads, rather like

the mind-probe headsets that were used in the Church to

ascertain the innocence or guilt of the accused. The whirr

and click of their mechanics made it hard to see, precisely,

what was going on under them, but Roz received the distinct

impression of needles inserted into the heads within.

Titration tubes ran from the headset mechanisms to the rock

floor, where they disappeared into small, flanged holes.

Further devices were fixed to their chests, obviously to

stimulate their breathing and other basic functions.

Roz scanned the walls for available exits and found none.

She had noted that instinctively, when she had been

checking for entrances through which some threat might

come, but now she consciously thought about it. The

octagonal walls of the chamber were smooth and featureless.

It was just possible that these beds and their horrible cargo

had been scaled in, simply to serve their purpose without

maintenance, but she wasn’t going to bet on it. At least one

of these supposedly featureless panels was in all probability a

door, but which one was it?

Her line of thought was disrupted by a bellow of rage. She

swung her gun round in alarm, before she realized that it

had come from Logh, of whom she had been dimly aware but

discounted in the sense that he might pose some active

danger. Now, she saw, he was standing over one of the

bodies, his face clenched with the kind of atavistic rage that

went straight back to his ape ancestry and wiped out the

patina of acclimatization to an alien culture.

‘People,’ he snarled. ‘Is people!’

‘What?’ said Roz, momentarily nonplussed.

Logh made a backward gesture that meant he was in

actual fact gesturing towards Roz. ‘Thought they used people

like you. People from off planet.’ He made the same reversed

gesture to one of the bodies. ‘Didn’t know they were real people.

Didn’t know they were still alive.’

Roz vaguely recalled that on the Fnarok world there was no

crime analogous to grave-robbing or defiling the dead - so far

as the Fnarok were concerned, the body after life had left it

was a worthless husk. She suddenly understood Logh’s

blazing rage - how much worse for him it must feel to realize

that matter was being extracted, not from corpses, but from

people who were still, if only technically, alive.

‘Listen,’ she said urgently. ‘We have to get out of here and

find who did this. I have to find out what happened to my

partner, if he’s still alive. How do we get out of here and find

him?’

‘Easy,’ Logh grunted. ‘We go out. We go get ‘em. Maybe find

your friend.’ Without seeming to pause to think about it, he

headed for one of the panels - which without warning

slammed back, and the bolt of a blaster beam from the

darkness beyond struck him squarely in the chest and sliced

down. His insides exploded out of him and his body blew

apart in a strange, splayed way from the initial point of the

blast that, had it been rendered as a cartoon graphic, might

have seemed almost comical. Had it not occurred in the

reality of meat and flesh and viscera.

It was not a question of the suddenness taking Roz aback.

From the instant she had seen the panel move she had been

bringing her own MFG around and up to fire - but it was that

microscopic, fatal distinction between stimulus and reaction.

The reaction was to fire upon whatever had killed Logh. The

stimulus was a second blaster beam, fired at the precise

same time as the other, which smashed into her own chest

and exploded every nerve with agony until, mercifully, her

brain shut down.

14

A SMALL SOJOURN IN

SUBTERRANEA

The beings who eventually became known by all and sundry

as the Sojourners had originally come to the planet Earth at

the end of the nineteenth century. They had come, it had

been eventually ascertained, from one of the worlds orbiting

the star of Alpha Centauri - but at the time, the general

understanding of spatial relationships was such that they

were instantly assumed to have come from Mars. This

impression had been compounded by the pigment of the

fungus that they cultivated to cat, spreading outward from

the landing site of their screw-top capsules upon Clapham

Common, its crimson tendrils extruding to a point only

slightly behind the advance of their massive, stilt-walking

colonization machines.

In fact, of course, it had been this ‘red weed’ that had

proved to be their downfall. The so-called Martians, whatever

else they might have been, were not entirely bloody fools.

They had inoculated themselves against all known Earth

diseases that might afflict them before setting out in the first

place. The real problem had been that the red fungus, grown

from the nutrients of Earth, had thus been altered minutely

in its composition - producing an effect, when eaten, rather

similar to the effect Kiru recalled shortly after eating his first

curry on the Indian subcontinent.

This had weakened the advancing creatures to the extent

that the ordinarily technologically far inferior military forces

of Great Britain and Europe, after several long and bloody

campaigns, were able to defeat them. It is to be noticed that

the United States of America lent their invaluable support,

after the fighting was nearly over, to the extent of several

platoons who, to a man, partook in the cracking open of the

colonization machines after they fell over, and fainted dead

away at the sights contained therein.

Now, some hundred years later and almost by definition,

that was all ancient history. The vast majority of the

Sojourners had integrated themselves into society much to

the credit and accomplishment of all. Indeed, it had been the

Sojourners who had provided the technologies that had

resulted in such marvels as the clockwork monorails that

traversed the city, the radium-powered airships that floated

above it, the giant steam-driven catapults that lobbed crates

of cargo in their tonnes from one side of it to another. It was

a relief in some sense, Kiru thought, as the big elevator cage

rattled down the shaft that led to Downtown, to get back to a

world where such things were -

Now why had he thought that?

Back to what world, precisely? This was the world, and it

was the only world he had ever known. What other world

could there possibly be?

Possibly it was the strain of recent events - even, possibly,

the fiendish Simon Deed had found some way to introduce

some mind-befogging drug by some nefarious means in the

house of Professor Tzanov - but in any event there was a

sensation in Kiru’s head that was not quite right. Images

came and went like the vestiges of some half-remembered

dream: a massive sun made of some burnished metal, a

fatuously smiling face upon it as from some lithographic

satire... impossible airships, shaped like the denizens of the

deep, against a black sky pocked with variegated stars... a

kind of fabulous city, seemingly floating, without the slightest

evidence of what might support it, over endless jungle... The

images slid away from him as he tried to put a mental finger

upon concrete specifics.

Kiru turned to speak to le Shadon - and again, in the gently

flickering galvanistic lamp that illuminated the elevator cage,

it was as if he caught some different... persona that informed

his stalwart friend, as transient as a little grin and quip after

some prolonged and sonorous pronouncement. Someone who

might share the same body but might assume a different

name. The vague sense of some warrior-hero from ancient

myth - no, not precisely a warrior: the image that flashed

across his mind seemed more piratical, somehow, than that -

assuming some concealing guise.

‘Le Shadon,’ he said, ‘do you perceive a sense that things

are not quite right?’

The great detective nodded slowly, catching his meaning

with the aptitude of long acquaintance. ‘An intimation of, let

us say, unreality? A sense that the world is in some manner

slightly unfitting, like an imperfectly tailored suit of clothes? I

must confess to feeling something of that nature. I’d put it

down to the remaining effects of the venom dart.’ Le Shadon

glanced around himself, at the walls of the shaft as, in

relation to the two men, they rose behind the elevator grille. ‘I

believe that it might be the result of our destination. We are,

after all, descending to where no human man should ever go,

and is not wanted.’

That was in all probability the case, Kiru conceded.

Although the shaft itself was unremarkable, their mere

proximity to the Downtown environs now seemed to make it

loom forebodingly, in a manner that was not entirely

connected to actual sight.

‘And I believe,’ remarked le Shadon, as the cage lurched to

a halt and a pulsing, reddish ambiance overpowered the light

from the galvanistical lamp, ‘that we have finally arrived.’

While the majority of Sojourners had eventually integrated

themselves into polite society, there had remained, in the

years after the War, a number of recalcitrants, who had

chosen to remain in the internment camps that had been dug

for them - Sojourners preferring to live below ground if at all

possible, and the victors of Earth being not entirely without

heart. Over the years, these die-hard elements had extended

and refurbished their tunnels and chambers to produce the

caverns that were now termed the Downtown.

By now the situation was such that what had once been a

prison now needed no guards, either inside or at the few

remaining exits. Those below made it a matter of pride never

to ascend into the open air, and those above feared to go

below for their very lives.

All the same, over the years, there had been several

instances and a far larger number of apocryphal stories of

some poor soul going down unwarily into his cellar to find a

renegade Sojourner tunnelling up the other way. It was also

known that if a denizen of the Downtown could hurt one of

those above - either human or those who now lived with

humans, the latter of whom were regarded as degenerate,

assimilationist fops - then that denizen would. This was why

the villainous Simon Deed (so far as the activities of such a

villain could be determined with any degree of accuracy) had

made so many allies here, and, so word had it, was allowed

to pass through the Downtown with relative impunity.

For Nathan le Shadon and Dr James Kiru, however, it was

another matter entirely. As they made their way through a

maze

of

tunnels

lit

with

the

pulsing

crimson

phosphorescence of the red weed that permeated them, Kiru

could hear things slithering, always out of sight, always

frighteningly close by. He was glad, by sharply increasing

degrees, of the trusty service revolver that he carried in a

pocket on his hip.

It was also becoming more and more difficult to keep in

mind, precisely, their reasons for being here, the events that

had led up to them, their eventual destination. His head was

pounding fit to burst under this palpitating alien light, there

was a queasy sensation in the pit of his stomach and,

pervading all, a sense of unreality similar to that of an

incipient migraine. He was becoming increasingly convinced

of his notion that Simon Deed had contrived to poison both

him and le Shadon in some manner - either that or he was

suffering from some illness that was in the preliminary stages

of making itself evident.

He quashed the sensations forcibly. ‘How do we find the

creature we are looking for, le Shadon?’ he asked.

‘Simplicity itself, my dear Kiru,’ the detective said, striding

along with a firm determination. ‘Isolationist as they might

be, the denizens of the Downtown commonly do work for

those above in return for certain luxury goods that they

cannot ordinarily obtain. Orders are sent down by the

elevators, together with the directions to the relevant party.

The communication I discovered in the…’ His voice faltered

momentarily. ‘The communication I discovered before, while

couched in terms of threat and abuse, was the equivalent of

an invoice - and the name and address of the party

concerned was inscribed upon the letterhead. It is simply a

matter of - and here, I believe, we are.’

They had turned into a chamber that seemed to be a cross

between a blacksmith’s forge, an engineering manufactory

and the very pit of Hades. The dark shapes of Sojourners, who

had the aspect of ambulatory, fifteen-appendaged squid, were

slumped over turning lathes and furnaces. The air was heavy

and sweltering with the reek of creatures who had never so

much as made the slightest compliance towards human

tastes and decencies.

Le Shadon plucked the invoice he had mentioned from his

pocket, glanced at it to refresh his memory, put it away again

and then clapped his hands resoundingly.

‘I am looking,’ he declared, as several hundred eyes in a

score of heads turned to glare at him suspiciously, ‘for a Mr

[and here he made a series of rapid clickings with his tongue

while simultaneously and complicatedly snapping his fingers]

Amuga. Might I enquire as to where he might be found ?’

The hubbub of the alien creatures around them had risen

alarmingly in pitch, even before he had begun to speak, even

as the hulking shapes advanced. And now, as one, and with

murderous intent, the monstrous Sojourners flung

themselves upon Dr James Kiru and Nathan le Shadon.

Kiru dodged a serrated tentacle that shot straight for him,

the saw teeth set into its side grazing his cheek as he flicked

his face away. He pulled a blade from the sheaths slung

across his chest and flung it at the main body of the creature

to which the tentacle belonged, piercing an eye that was

utterly unlike that of a squid for the simple reason that it did

not appear remotely human. There was a spray of some clear

substance and the creature went into spasm - catching Kiru

with yet another outflung limb, this one, fortunately, without

teeth.

(An eye stalk forced itself from the bundle of rags and

tracked round to regard him. ‘Is okey-dokey, pretty much.

Funny woman little damage, much. This woman bigger

damage, take a bigger lot of time...’)

Kiru rode the blow, half somersaulting to land on his back,

simultaneously whipping his blade back on its lanyard and

swinging it around with a control so fine that it laid open the

body of a second attacking creature.

Off to one side, le Shadon was dealing a series of precise

jujitsu chops to the nerve points of those creatures

surrounding him, causing them to slump silently as though

they had been supported by wires that had then been cut.

‘Nathan!’ Kiru shouted as yet another monster lunged at him

from directly behind and out of his line of sight.

(They were on a flat and perfectly featureless white plain,

stretching to infinity under a burning desert sky. Their

surroundings remained utterly blank and the blankness ate

into their minds: they could have walked for hours or days

or...)

Nathan li Shao hauled his sword from its scabbard slung

across his back and depressed a small stud set into the hilt.

Tiny, toothlike blades extended from the curved, scimitar-

like, serrated cutting edge of the blade with a shik, and began

to vibrate. With one smooth backhanded sweep, li Shao

sliced through the tentacles that were reaching for him -

while simultaneously spinning and ducking, to finally bring

the sword up and slice the truncated and whimpering

monster all but in two.

‘All right, you sods,’ he roared, the circlet about his head

glinting and his strangely disparate eyes blazing in the

hellish light of the manufactory. ‘Who wants some?’

The action, thus far, had taken bare moments – long

enough for the score of attackers to be diminished by at least

one half-dozen, and for the rest to realize their error in

attempting as an unconcerted mob to attack two men who

fought as one. The alien creatures backed off hurriedly.

‘Fine,’ li Shao said, shutting off his sword and retracting

the blades. ‘As I was saying, I’m looking for -’ Again he made

the complicated finger snaps and clicking with his tongue.

‘Where is he. Or she? Or hir? Or it?’

(The figure put its splayed and bone-white fingers into its

cowl, presumably pressing them against the horrid face

within. ‘I... they are concealing something. They have told the

truth so far as it goes, but they... they have another agenda

yes? They think that they are...’)

There was a moment of subdued, even shamefaced

conversation between the creatures. Eventually, one of them

shuffled slowly forward.

‘I have reason to believe,’ said li Shao, still hefting his

sword meaningfully, ‘that you can help us with our enquiries.

Kiru, you take him back to the city and the constabulary, so

that he can have a word with the good inspector...’

He trailed off. His face took on a glazed, uncomprehending

look as if he were forcing his mind to think of something that

kept slipping from it, like a lump of thawing ice from the

hands.

(They prowled the bowels of the freighter, galvanistic

lanterns slung from their shoulders, weapons at the ready,

eyes open wide and ears straining for any sounds of nearby

combat. Their protective clothing had been battered and ripped

in the confusion of the initial fighting, but neither of them had

sustained particularly serious damage. A claw had grazed

Kiru’s ribs, and an apparently badly aimed throwing axe had

laid open li Shuo’s upper arm through his padding, but he had

stitched the wound with a curved bone needle and a...)

There was something, somewhere, utterly wrong about this.

Kiru felt his own mind seize. He stared down blankly at the

weapon thing he still held in his hand. He knew it was

supposed to be either called a service revolver or a knife - but

somehow he was unable to recall precisely which it was.

(Turn the world.)

His final thought, before the world split apart and tore him

with it, was to wonder where he was going to find a constable

at this time of night.

15

DISPLACED RELATIONSHIPS

(HYBRID TIMELINE)

‗Are you all right, Roz? Are you all right?‘

Roz resurfaced into consciousness. Fenn Martle was

looking down at her. He had lost his helmet and face guard;

the left side of his face was bruised and blackened, but filled

with living concern. He was pulling away one of the helmet-

like units Roz had previously noticed on the bodies - had it

been on her? Her forehead burnt with nonspecific pain. She

tried to reach up and touch it, and found her hands

restrained.

‗Don‘t worry,‘ Martle said, loosening the straps that were

securing her to the bed. ‗They didn‘t get as far as drilling into

your head.‘ He jerked a hand to indicate several blackened

corpses, taken out by way of the flamer attachment of an

MFG. ‗I managed to scare the rest off, but they‘ll be back. We

have to move.‘

Roz swung herself off the bed, moving gingerly at first and

forcing life back into creaking joints. She noted that she still

had her uniform, but that she had been stripped of

weaponry, comm unit and her other equipment. ‗What

happened here?‘

‗I‘ll tell you about it as we go.‘ Martle tossed her something.

It was her gun. ‗At least they left you this behind. Lucky, eh?‘

* * *

The Schirron Dream was something of a strange amalgam: a

haphazard mixture of its basic alien stuff combined with

other objects and technologies that seemed to have been

acquired from all over the galaxy and from several different

times. In contrast to the bridge, where things seemed to have

been assimilated into the basic structure of the craft itself,

the other areas seemed more like a junk yard in which people

lived. A gangway balk might be hung with tapestries from

Earth‘s fourteenth century, giving way suddenly to a mosaic

that seemed to have been constructed from shards of an

Olabrian joy-luck crystal stuck in resin (Benny resolved to

keep a sharp eye out for Olabrian warships determinedly and

lethally wanting them back) which then gave way to a mural

depicting, in abstract, the story of Kloi-kloi Seki and his

Thousand Young, in a neo-primitivist manner reminiscent of

an Australian aboriginal rock painting. It was as if, rather

than this collision of cultures, ideologies and world-views

combining into a single, all-pervasive fusion, it was the

collision itself and its dissonance that were important.

The galley was a similar mixture of the familiar and the

strange. Cooking utensils and equipment from any number of

worlds were crammed into it, as were cutlery and crockery

applicable to any number of metabolisms and applicable

equivalent of mouths. Benny wandered through the galley,

nodding to several acquaintances she remembered from

those crew members gathered here. In a vague sense she

knew that they had duties ranging from maintenance of the

engines to hydroponics - but their chief duty, if a duty it was,

was simply to be here. The Schirron Dream was not primarily

a military or financial concern: it was the home of the various

intersecting circles of an extended family. The atmosphere in

the galley seemed subdued, as might be expected from what

was, effectively, a nomadic tribe with its leaders missing and

in mortal danger.

Foodstuffs in any quantity were stored, in bulk, in the

ship‘s holds. There were, however, a wide variety of snacks

and beverages on offer. After a few moments‘ hunting, Benny

prepared a mug of sklaki, a kind of liquorice-infused hot

chocolate to which Chris was partial, and a cup of cinnamon

for herself, crumbling the sticks into a strainer and leaving it

in hot water to infuse. Her first impulse was to entirely forget

about the pint mug of freeze-dried Earth coffee swimming in

milk and with four brown sugars favoured by Jason, but then

she decided that would be petty and unworthy of her. Having

decided, she was irked to realize that her hands had made it

anyway, seemingly of their own accord.

She plonked all three mugs on a tray and took them

forward to the bridge, arriving just in time to hear the tail

end of an animated anecdote from Jason, complete with

hand gestures.

‗So there we were,‘ he said, ‗halfway up a sodding

mountain, Mira out for the count, Ben squashed flat under a

Norn Stone and with the Salik Gha industriously setting up

base camps half a mile below. If Volan hadn‘t been on the

ball with his Excision Squad, we‘d have none of us made it

out alive.‘ He grinned. ‗Of course, what with Mira being

unconscious, and hallucinating like the very buggery before

that, I was able to play my end of things up a bit. Don‘t think

she believed me, though, and - ah, this is nice. Tea and

muffins all round?‘

‗Yes, well,‘ said Benny. ‗I thought I might as well do

something useful here. Don‘t get used to it - this is a one-

time-only special offer.‘

‗And very nice, too.‘ Jason took his mug (a brand-new-

looking, faithful representation of the head of Marvin the

Martian, from the old Warner Brothers‘ cartoons, with a

handle on it) and slurped noisily.

Benny handed the sklaki to Chris. ‗Any change?‘ she asked,

indicating the big wall screen, which currently swirled with

lazy, abstract, pastel patterns no doubt intended to be restful

but as cumulatively irritating as the inside of a lava lamp.

‗Nothing,‘ Chris said. ‗No change.‘

They had come out of the translation over a planet that

none of them had recognized. Sgloomi Po had proved

uncommunicative: they were simply to land via the port‘s

autobeacon, it had instructed, set hir down and await hir

return.

‗Is reason,‘ it had said, lapsing back into hir more Sloathe-

some form and way of talking. ‗Must do tippity-top important

thing. Must go like poor little thing on very own.‘ It had

sprouted three pseudopodia, and gestured to all three of

them simultaneously. ‗Must not go out. Is very, very bad

thing you go out here, now, in present temporal climate point

in momentary time.‘

Other than this, the Sloathe had refused to be drawn.

‗I have a bad feeling about this,‘ Benny said, gazing

absently at the somniferous and quite inscrutable spirals on

the screen. ‗For some reason. Just what in all the names of

the Goddess is Sgloomi doing out there? Why can‘t we know

about it? What‘s so important about it?‘

‗I had my guide take me round some of their fermented-meat-

juice bars,‘ Martle said. ‗You know, the sort of places where

they liquidize up parasitic livestock lice and use ‗em as a

mixer. I didn‘t want you around ‗cause I was going to be

leaning on a couple of names I had heard - and something

like that can go wrong incredibly quickly. I didn‘t want you

caught up in that.‘

They wound their way through the maze of the Three Jade

Shebeen, ever alert for potential attack. The few Fnarok they

encountered, however, seemed to pose no threat, simply

going about their incomprehensible business. (Roz tried to

keep it fixed in her mind that an alien race interacted in alien

ways, so that the blameless and the criminal mixed freely in

a way that would never happen among humans.)

‗You didn‘t have to leave me out of it,‘ she told Martle, a

little hurt. ‗I can look after myself. You know I can look after

myself.‘

‗I know you can.‘ Martle tracked his gun around warily

towards a Fnarok who sat happily sorting through and

cleaning pelts from some small animal. It ignored their

presence utterly. ‗But if we both caught one then that would

leave no one to finish our enquiries — and you wouldn‘t be

around to act as backup for when and if things went

seriously oogli-shaped.

‗They did. I hammered out the location of this place from

one of the middle-string Dhai guys, and got inside being

pretty slick and sneaky about it - only to find that they were

waiting for me all along. That‘s when I called you.‘ He pulled

out the scorched and partially melted remains of his comm

unit. ‗I was lucky that it took the brunt of the first charge -

think I might have lost a hand otherwise.

‗I was stuck in one of the refining bays and pinned down. I

was just about able to hold them off, but I was boxed in and

it was only a matter of time before they racked me down. All I

was hoping for was that you got enough to make it here.‘

‗Just about,‘ said Roz. ‗Bit of trouble working out exactly

what I was supposed to do when I got here, but I worked it

out in the end.‘

‗I‘m glad you did. You drew a bunch of skags off from me,

and that let me take care of the rest. After that I just followed

your integral tracker - which was one hell of a lot more

difficult than it sounds, believe you me, what with the twists

and turns of this place. When I finally caught up with you, I

found a bunch of them strapping you down and getting ready

to suck bits of your brain out. I fried a couple of ‗em and the

rest ran.‘

‗You should have gone after them,‘ Roz said.

‗Yeah, well…‘ A slightly shamefaced grin crossed Martle‘s

face. ‗I couldn‘t just leave you there, delightful as the picture

of a big strong girl strapped to a hospital bed might be.‘

Roz smiled a little. ‗Up yours, Martle.‘

‗You‘ve got the equipment, I‘ve got the time.‘ Martle gave

Roz cover as she dodged in a kind of shuffling crouch around

a particularly acute corner, then followed. ‗I think the

operation‘s over here, now. All we have to do is get to working

communications, then let the local boys clean it up. They‘ll

pull in a couple of skags who aren‘t quite quick enough on

their feet, but I‘ll bet the big boys are now long gone and

relocating.‘

‗Bit of a waste of time in the end, then, basically,‘ Roz

opined.

‗Yeah, right, but at least this place is going to be -‘

‗Ha-ha, puny Earthling!‘ cried a horribly glutinous voice.

‗Prepare to meet extremely bone-crunching munchy doom-

type thing!‘

Before them suddenly stood a lumpen, slimy creature, eyes

on stalks exploding from its body, together with, and far

more immediately, suckered tentacles that proceeded to

shoot directly for Roz and grab her by the throat.

Sgloomi Po would be the first sentient being to admit that it

was not the best at understanding monkey-hominid thought

processes. It was not that the Sloathe was unintelligent or

without sympathy, merely that they were alien to hir, and in

some cases utterly biologically incompatible. Even among hir

family aboard the Schirron Dream, among Nathan, Leetha and

Kiru, Sgloomi would sometimes make a blunder so basic as

to have the other members falling about with laughter. This

was of no matter, since it was all in good pulmonary pump

thing and, after all, family was Family. The problems came

when it had to deal with other people.

When hir friends had been lost on Earth, Sgloomi had been

almost frantic. While having certain insights denied to others,

it had simply been unable, in the rush of events, to think of

what to do. Hir only thought had been to try to find old

friends, who had helped hir, hir kind and hir family before

and hope that they might find some solution, on the monkey-

hominid level, that would not end up simply killing them all.

In this Sgloomi had been fortunate in the semi-sentient

nature of the Schirron Dream, which seemed to understand

hir needs and take hir through the disruptions to find the

people that it needed - guiding the impulses to hir

manipulatory appendages on the controls in some fashion

that seemed partly luck and partly instinctive hunches, for

which the reasons could be worked out, with hindsight, only

later.

Sgloomi had been fortunate in that the first friend he

located had been Chris Cwej, who, it seemed, was involved

with such matters on a galactic level, and had thus been able

to fill in certain pieces of the puzzle drawn from Sgloomi‘s

own observations. It had been Chris himself who had

suggested that they pick up Jason Kane, who was engaged in

broadly similar but slightly more ambiguous work, and who

in relative terms happened to be conveniently close by.

Sgloomi would have found and picked up Jason anyway. Had

it not attended the pair-bonding between Jason and another

friend? Was he not in the same potential danger? It was

inconceivable, whatever happened in the disruption, that

they would not wish to face together whatever came.

The problems had started when they had found Benny -

and Sgloomi realized that, in ways it was completely unable

to understand, they didn‘t.

The strange thing, Sgloomi had observed, was that while

they seemed to snarl and hate and want to kill each other, at

the same time they seemed to like it like that and love each

other because of it. The way they moved their bodies, when

they were together, was as if they wanted to simultaneously

strangle each other and do that thing where one monkey-

hominid puts a bit of himself inside the other one. The whole

business confused Sgloomi so much that it thought hir

cognitive ganglia were going to prolapse.

That mistake, on the other pseudopod, suddenly seemed as

nothing compared with this.

Roz Forrester, along with Chris Cwej, had been the person

who had formed Sgloomi‘s intelligence, the person who had

informed hir. Over weeks of proximity, on the ice fields of

Reklon in the System, Sgloomi Po had learnt what it truly

meant to be self-aware, to be an individual, to become a

being capable of action and responsibility for hir actions,

when for all hir life before it had been a mere automaton,

automatically parroting whatever living form had come to

grappling hook on a line. It had been Roslyn Forrester and

Christopher Cwej who had truly brought hir to life - the first

of the Sloathe race to fully be so, and from whom the other

Sloathes had learnt. Now, after all this time, Sgloomi had

honestly expected Roz to be pleased to see hir.

There seemed, though, to be certain discrepancies. First

and foremost, while being obviously Roz, she seemed to be a

little taller, less decayed, most of the more interesting lines

and ridges that Sgloomi remembered gone from her skin.

There was a springy vitality to her movements that Sgloomi

could not quite recognize. Her hair was as short, but without

the brittle curls of grey; springier and more glossy.

Of course, the major difference was that, previously, Roz

hadn‘t ever taken one look at Sgloomi, and screamed

something at her similarly attired monkey-hominid

companion, who then proceeded to shoot at Sgloomi with a

powerful and incredibly painful blaster.

On the bridge of the Schirron Dream, a trumpet-like and

elderly speaker protruding from the communications console

blared to life:

‗Is coming in,‘ the voice of Sgloomi Po snapped urgently.

‗Have to go and get out now, chop-chop as all matey get out!‘

The voice seemed shaky and exhausted.

Jason slapped at a control. The ever-present hum-vibration

of the engines rose by several degrees.

At his own console, Chris hit a switch and an alarm rang

from back within the ship. ‗All hands prepare for launch.‘

‗I‘m going aft,‘ Benny said. ‗There might be something I can

do to help...‘

‗You stay here,‘ Jason told her. ‗This could be rough. Last

thing we need is you smacking your head open under a high-

level bounce.‘

It was the condescension that got her; the sense that he

was oh-so superior and that she was inferior by the simple

fact of existing. She recalled the tone from when they had

been married, on occasions where she had failed to pick up

on his meaning, simply because he was unable to express

himself in remotely intelligible terms. She remembered how,

even though the fact of matters was quite the reverse, he had

been able to insidiously undermine her confidence and make

her feel so worthless that she felt like bursting into tears.

‗Don‘t you tell me what to do,‘ she said, snapping open the

harness that held her in her seat.

The main hatch of the Schirron Dream was equidistant from

the bridge and the engines. Halfway there, the deck bucked

under her and the launch acceleration slammed her down.

Benny had been on more spacecraft than the hot dinners

eaten by somebody who always had a nice hot dinner; she

rode the extra weight and the crazily shifting inertia and

carried on.

There were several figures gathered by the hatch: a

Reklonian, some humans and a Pygmy from the long-razed

jungles of Aneas. They were fussing over a bulky thing that

could only be Sgloomi and another, dark-skinned, human

figure who lay sprawled on the deck unmoving. The strange

thing was that, before she got close enough to see that the

figure was female, before she recognized the remains of an

Adjudicator uniform, on some deep unconscious level, Benny

knew who this unconscious woman was.

‗Roz?‘ she breathed, and then wondered how in the various

names of the Goddess she could possibly think that.

16

DEGREES OF ATTRITION

(ALTERNATE EARTH)

The clocks were chiming thirteen to the dozen as Nathan L

made his way, at last, back out to the street. It was the end

of this Sector‘s food break, and on the precise end of the

chimes the doors of a refectory opened and those within

poured out. Nathan L, with some unconscious aptitude that

surprised him, pressed his back to the cinder wall directly by

the door and waited for some moments before joining the

throng, as a precaution for being instantly recognized as a

figure already outside.

The people here were low-grade Workers, in the drab and

unfinished-looking uniforms of the sort that he, Nathan L,

had donned himself as a precautionary measure. Their work

on the great Apparati that, in this Sector, reclaimed and

reconstituted paper from the whole of the City had given

them a sallow, frail and exhausted demeanour - more from

the fumes of chlorine, ammonia and arsenic attendant to the

process than from the already back-breaking physical labour.

In all probability, though, they looked no worse than Nathan

L himself, whose own last weeks had brought him a severe

degree of debilitation. The lines in his face, the patchy,

greasy, straggled look to his hair, spoke of the well-nigh

unbearable tension in which he existed; the crushing weight

of a fear that nestled deep in his bones.

Even now, he still felt his heart lurch and a glassy crawling

in his spine as the flow of the crowd took him under a

Watching Post. Its screens carried a stunningly beautiful

News Service announcer, detailing the latest administrative

triumphs of Simon Deed and their effects upon the Market,

as unexplained but impressively grand-looking figures of

numbers scrolled upward behind her.

(This isn‘t real, you know.)

The attention of Nathan L, however, was riveted by the

Tannoy system‘s horns that sprouted between the screens

like rusting and imperfectly set, slightly wonky orchids (he

had seen the picture of an orchid in a News Service

handbook of images of a prohibited psychosexual nature, and

so must thus be watched for and immediately quashed). At

any moment Nathan L expected those horns to blare, to

scream his name and brand him as a saboteur, plotting in

some nebulous but officially proscribed way to throw the

solid rock of the Market into chaos. There would be no need

even to summon the People‘s Patrol. The people - with a

diminutive appellation - around him would simply turn on

him, enraged, and tear him to pieces.

The crowds were thinning, now, in perfectly regulated

quanta, as the various Workers turned into the grey edifices

that housed their assigned Apparati. Soon Nathan L would

be entirely conspicuous again. Fortunately, in the weeks

since meeting Lisa T, and the plans they had formed in

watchful secret, he had made this trip numerous times

before. There was an alleyway between two specific buildings.

Praying to... hoping that this would not be the time that his

actions might be picked up by one of the roving Patrol

microlites, hoping that this would not be the time that his

actions might cause remark that would, eventually, be heard

by the all-hearing ears of the Patrol itself, he worked his way

diagonally to the alley, darted into it and ran, stripping off

the jacket of his uniform to reveal the simpler shirt of an

Underclasser underneath. The trousers could wait, he

judged, until he made the relative safety of the alley‘s other

side.

So far as he had ever been able to ascertain, there were no

real barriers between the City and the territories of the

Underclassers. Oh, there were physical difficulties, brick

walls and the projections of buildings in the way - but that

was for the precise same reason as there were no guards. It

simply never occurred to people to cross the borders.

Unless, of course, one had the impetus. Unless one had a

reason and the need.

Nathan L had, he supposed, been happy enough in his mid-

level Service post as a Researcher. He had, so far as he had

ever thought about it, seen the Tightness of his work; the

Market must be protected from the elements that might

destroy it, and plunge the entire City into the living hell that

was to be an Underclasser.

The mechanics of his work were simple. In his cubicle on

the seventh floor of Information House, his screen would

show the subject for a News item to be put out. ‗Sales Down

on Luxury Item #102044‘, it might say, or ‗Shortfall Means

Cut of Dietary Ration #2‘. These were modified by the latest

outputs from the Market, and it was Nathan L‘s job to search

the automated files for articles matching the resulting Index

that would guide the population as a whole towards

whichever end was needed. In the example of Luxury Item

#102044 (which happened to be fashionable little cardboard

hats fitted with small battery-operated cooling propellers) the

solution might be for the public to buy them for all they were

worth, or to stop buying them at all and remainder them out

to the Underclassers.

Once the template article designed to achieve the

designated end was retrieved, and the blanks filled in, the

process had left Nathan L‘s domain. Editorial corrections to

perfect it were handled several levels upward in the Service –

but Nathan L had prided himself that he had some small

creative input. Indeed, on a few occasions, where the Index

demands had been extreme, he had been forced to cut and

paste together a template from the Dormant files, that

repository of now obsolete journalistic material that

numbered items in their hundreds if not thousands.

It had been on one such occasion, working on a way to

promote a certain colour of underwear as opposed to one of a

precisely similar cut, that Nathan L had stumbled upon a

template article tagged as DORMANT-CI.ASSIFIED://IOI –

and the world around him, so it seemed, had blown apart.

The Underclassers‘ world — for such it might be termed, so

different as it was in state of mind if not geography – always

gave Nathan L a sense of unreality. The makeshift repairs to

ancient architecture, the proliferation of the remaindered

product dumped upon them by the City, scavenged, twisted

and recycled into uses never intended or imagined, were so at

odds with the life into which he had been born that no degree

of more recent exposure could take away their strangeness.

(‘My dear li Shao!’ something pale and bloated said from a

bank of steam. It was a blubbery voice; it sounded like an ice

whale being flensed. ‘I gather that your recent, ah, exploits

have been something of a success...?’)

But what, precisely, had he been born into? He

remembered the City and the Market throughout his life —

but now he recalled events and News that nobody else

seemed to remember, memories of a time before the mass

Corrections of the Patrol seemed to have stopped and been

forgotten. And were even the City and the Market really

true...?

DORMANT-CLASSIFIED://IOI had obviously been intended

for someone on a level far higher than that of himself; he had

tried to reaccess it a number of times, but his Service

Classification had been refused. It had detailed, in stark and

précis form, the mechanics of how the City operated:

processes like subliminal conditioning and Horst-Skinner

Retro-amnesiac Inducement had been mentioned - and, while

Nathan L had been unable to even barely grasp the specifics,

the simple idea that his own memory of the world and the

events in it could be altered had been shattering. It had,

quite simply, never occurred to him. Without knowing the

specifics, he could feel vast masses of memories inside him,

locked away but now hammering at the locks, desperately

trying to burst through. That had been the start of his

adventures. The wanderings, in the times set aside for the

rest and recreation of those of his Classification, of that first

trip into the unthinkable zones and of the subsequent

others... and how he had met Lisa.

(The respirator mask burst from Mr Pelt ‘s face with the

pellet’s impact, to jerk, then hang by a leather strap. His left

cheek bulged. A spray of spittle and blood and shards of

impacted tooth burst from his mouth to hit her in the face, and

then the left side of his head exploded.)

Now, as he skirted a group of the more degenerate

Underclassers - those who could not even sustain a roof over

their heads - as they fought among themselves for scraps of

food and rags on the street, it seemed as if these memories

were actively starting to surface. Insane images and half-

glimpsed mental images of worlds. Worlds that seemed to be

run by saboteurs. Worlds in which horrific monsters walked

the streets without eliciting revulsion and terror. Worlds that

seemed, in some strange way, to be merely one of several -

but how could there be more than one? At least, in the sense

that Nathan L wasn‘t having several simultaneous visions of

them.

(The first thing that they came to as they crossed the

shaking floor was Yani. The Pygmy girl was lodged against

the side of a large and now freespinning electrical device,

unconscious and as white as paper, an expression of absolute

horror still on her face. From her position it seemed that she

had been frantically trying to work her way into the

nonexistent gap between the motor and the casing, before her

mind had simply switched itself off.)

Were any of them even possible? Was there any possible

way they could have been real, even accepting the fact that

his memory could have been altered to forget about them?

The sense of them was now so strong that, if he let himself,

he could quite imagine one eventually supplanting what he

thought of as the real world of the Market, the City and the

Patrol, which by degrees was seeming more insubstantial,

less specific in its concrete detail. More wrong.

(For a moment, as the monstrosity advanced upon him, he

was transfixed by the sheer horror of it.)

Even his body trembled, in a way that felt unrelated to its

physical matter, the muscle and the bone within: flickering

between states; fatter, thinner, iller, fitter, dead and dying

and alive... In desperation his fragmenting mind struck out

for the one thing that seemed solid in this physical and

mental chaos. It was a name.

He found himself outside a building, its crumbling face

cadaverous and cankerous with detrital patches of eaten-out

brick, its lower floor comprising one of the stores where the

Underclasses bartered what they could not immediately eat.

Beside the entrance to this were a side door and a flight of

dark and crumbling stairs, which he ascended shakily, his

head still spinning from his immediately recent bout of

dementia.

She was waiting for him, in a tiny room with plaster fallen

from the walls to reveal the rotten lath. The room was bare

save for scavenged clothing, piled against the wall in the neat

way that he had come to know and love, as though they were

the latest product from the City‘s mills, and must be kept in

all perfection until worn, and then discarded. The only light

was that which filtered through the window, screened off by a

miraculously intact and unsoiled sheet of the sort of paper

utilized in the City‘s public conveniences. Whenever he came

here, Nathan L, who had experience with this paper‘s

designated use, was privately overjoyed that it could in fact

be used for something useful. Aside from the rag-mattress,

the only other item was affixed to the wall: a largish, cracked

and tarnished mirror, amazing not so much for its condition

but by the fact that it had survived the years of Underclass

scavenging at all.

(The jackal on top of him spat out a lump of partially cooked

flesh. ‘Privatization is still the only viable option!’ it shrieked.

‘Would you like to see an additional prospectus?’)

And on the mattress, Lisa, smoking one of the foul ‗roll-

ups‘ to which she was partial - the noxious substance that

the City had long since forgotten had ever existed. Lisa with a

body that seemed thinner, meaner than the idealized women

of the City screens and whom, at that precise moment,

Nathan L was unable to remember having actually met.

There was a wiry strength about her, though, a sense of

something blazing from her eyes that had made him love her,

utterly and completely, from the first moment he had... he

had... she had been... and he had...

(the pocket of his shredded rubber robe)

He was unable to speak, unable to feel. Dimly, he was

aware of sobbing, and that it was coming from his body, but

he was unable to feel how it was doing it - it seemed remote

and unconnected, nothing to do with him. He collapsed on

the mattress and the only thing he felt was Lisa gathering

him into her arms.

Later, in the darkness, he walked naked to the window and,

very carefully, folded back a section of the screen. No detail

outside save for the glow of occasional fires, the indistinct,

indecipherable murmurs, shouts and screams of people in

the dark. The night held a kind of unique stillness, no matter

what violence there might be happening in it.

Warmth beside him and the gentle touch of flesh as Lisa

joined him, silent as ever - he tried to remember if she had

ever said a word to him, and failed. From the edge of his

mind he seemed to receive an impression of extreme and

forceful verbosity; he just could absolutely not imagine it

here, or now.

(‘Kill you!’ the reptile woman snarled. ‘Kill you now and

make you dead.‘)

‗I think,‘ he murmured, gazing out at distant fires, ‗that we

might be damaged in some way. I try to think, and I can‘t

think of things. There‘s nothing. Nothing inside.‘

‗Nothing inside,‘ said a voice behind them. The sound of a

frame hitting the wall and shattering glass. ‗Nothing.‘

17 RETROGRESSIVE DEFINITIONS

‗Oh, God...‘ Chris stared down at the unconscious form of

Roz Forrester, Though seemingly unharmed save for the odd

cut and bruise, she lay unnaturally still, a kind of pallor

about her, as if a coating of ash had been applied to the

underside of her dark skin. Sgloomi Po had rifled through the

mismatched equipment of the Schirron Dream’s medical bay,

and had finally inserted an intravenous needle, plugging into

her the clear-cloudy contents of a surgical pack hanging from

an antique umbrella stand. The effect was disquietingly

similar to scenes Chris had witnessed, once, on the planet

Minos, where a catastrophic plague had necessitated the

medical appropriation of anything that came usefully to

hand.

For all that she looked like death, that wasn‘t the worst

thing.

‗What have you done, Sgloomi?‘ he said in a quiet, tight

voice. He was frightened by what it might sound like if he

loosened it up even a little. ‗What have you done?‘

‗Is had to shoot with happy stuff.‘ Sgloomi Po waved a

pseudopod, from which a small bony needle extended. A

minute drop of clear liquid drooled from the tip. ‗She is shout

and scream, make lots of shake-your-bootie. No fun-thing

happen, what she make sick poundy headache in my head...‘

‗Don‘t you fuck around with me, Sgloomi!‘ Even Chris was

slightly shocked by the vehemence of his outburst. ‗I saved

your life, once, back in the System. You owe me – and if you

don‘t stop bullshitting me this instant I‘m going to have a

damned good try at collecting.‘

Whether an unarmed man, no matter how furious, was

capable of killing a Sloathe was debatable - but Sgloomi

caught the sheer force of Chris‘s emotions. It retracted hir

various limbs, and assumed hir androgynous humanoid

form. Chris felt as if his heart had been kicked by some pack

animal - a strangely painless, solid thump that was pure

hurt rather than a physical pain. Even interblended with his

own features, the amalgam looked more like the Roz he

remembered than the... child who lay on the medical bay

couch.

‗Is sorry,‘ Sgloomi said. ‗Is knew was going some point in

space-time where Roz-person was, but didn‘t...‘ The Sloathe

paused, consciously forcing hir mind to think in terms with

which it was, for all hir acquired human attributes, still, even

now, fundamentally unfamiliar. ‗Didn‘t quite think of how

such thing might happen. Didn‘t realize quite how much

monkey-hominid people might get upset.‘

Chris looked down at the body. Even in its deathly sleep,

the face was set in firm lines that denoted the strength of

character he had known, and come to depend upon and...

there was a softness there, too. A vulnerability that had yet to

harden over, to be wounded by the world. Had he ever

seemed as fragile as that, to the Roz Forrester he had

known?

She was so beautiful.

He rounded on Sgloomi. ‗We have to take her back. Now.‘

The Sloathe bowed his head, shamefaced in the almost

archetypical way that only a human child, or a human with a

neurological impairment, or an alien trying to be human,

without the subtlety of control to dissemble, can achieve. ‗I

don‘t think we can. Benny made us try, after she told you

and you ran from the bridge. I think the ship wants her here,

and won‘t let us say no.‘

On the bridge, the chaos on the main screen had resolved

into an image of them powering through a starscape, with

only a faintly overlaid, vortex-like shimmer to show that the

disruptions still occurred. Whether this was a result of Benny

finally managing to find the combination of controls on the

console she now manned, or whether the Schirron Dream had

sensed that the chaos it had shown before was too confusing,

she didn‘t know. Either way, she knew that these images

were just as illusory: even an ordinary ship, under ordinary

circumstances, translated itself through intergalactic space

in a manner that was abstract, not entirely bound by the

temporal laws of cause and effect and visually inconceivable.

This was merely a simulation with which the mind could

cope.

In the same way, while the console was vaguely comparable

to the sensor rigs with which she was more or less familiar,

the operation of it seemed more instinctive than anything

else. She was reminded of a plug-in virtual-reality wafer

whereby one might be, for example, a musical virtuoso, and

one could revel in the experience of making an instrument

produce whatever glorious music one wanted, whatever one

actually did. She had the sneaking suspicion that her only

function was to provide the Schirron Dream with company as

it did what it was going to do anyway.

This also, naturally, raised the sneaking suspicion as to

what Jason actually thought he was doing in the pilot‘s

chair.

‗You know,‘ she said, ‗I‘ll bet you really don‘t have to keep

pushing this, pulling that and twiddling the other. Do you

think you‘re Captain Scrim, Hero of the Space Patrol, or

what?‘

‗I don‘t think I‘m anything.‘ Jason looked at her and

sneered. ‗I told you years back that this isn‘t science fiction.

You still don‘t really get it, do you? Look.‘ He waved a hand

meaningfully. ‗I don‘t carefully work out all the nerve

impulses and the muscle contractions needed to do that. My

brain just does it. That‘s basically my function here.‘

‗Brain?‘ Benny snorted. ‗You?‘

‗Ah, yes,‘ said Jason. ‗I was forgetting that I‘m just this

lunkhead who needs a booster shot of seratonin to scratch

his backside and whistle at the same time. Can‘t think how I

forgot that — you kept reminding me often enough.‘

Yet again, Benny found herself rising to the bait despite

herself. ‗I never did anything of the kind,‘ she bristled.

‗Oh yes you did,‘ said Jason. ‗You just continuously beat

me over the head with the fact that you got an education and

all the, like, refined things in life - just precisely where you

got ‗em from is another matter entirely, of course. Blown the

ink dry on your latest doctorate, yet?‘

‘What?’

‗You heard. You never gave me a break. It got to the point

where I was thinking of getting a T-shirt saying ―Blame Me‖

printed up.‘

‗Oh, yes, like you never made the slightest mistake,‘ Benny

snapped. ‗Like that time where you went blundering through

a Morlonia Prime burial ground and had yourself - and me,

too, I might add - deported and barred for life from ever going

back. That looked marvellous on my visa codes, let me tell

you.‘

‗You forget,‘ said Jason, ‗that there was a squad of Dragan

mechanics after me, getting set to blast my arse off and yank

the wafers with their infiltration plans on — wafers which,

come to think of it, you had with you all the time.‘

‗And a fat lot of good it did us or Morlonia Prime. You only

lost the Dragans because even they weren‘t stupid enough to

go through a Place of the Dead. That‘s the first thing I learnt

as an archaeologist: until it‘s explicitly allowed otherwise, you

don’t violate the dead.‘

At least Jason had the decency to be defensive. ‗Well that‘s

my point. OK, you have knowledge and training that I‘ve

never had - but you never seemed to accept that I might

sometimes have the sort of specialized knowledge you don‘t.‘

‗Specializing in what?‘ said Benny acidly. ‗Having it away

on your toes at the first sign of trouble? Shagging everything

and anything that moves, like that extra wife you picked up

and this Mira I keep hearing about?‘

‗You leave my ―wife‖ out of it,‘ said Jason in a tight, cold

voice. ‗You don‘t have the slightest idea what you‘re talking

about, so just leave it. And as for Mira, you‘re barking up

completely the wrong banyan there. She‘d be more interested

in you than me.‘ He glowered at her. ‗Then again, maybe not.

She goes more for fem - and you‘ve got too many balls,

assuming you actually kept the ones you whipped off me.‘

‗Do you want to really see what I can do to your balls?‘

Benny snarled murderously.

‗Just you try me,‘ Jason said, every bit as murderous. ‗You

might just get a nasty shock.‘

‗Is everybody happy?‘ Sgloomi Po bounded on to the bridge,

in the shape of a large and cheerful collie dog. There was a

sense of slight dejection about the imposture, as if the

Sloathe knew that any attempt to lighten the mood would be

about as much use as a chocolate fire guard. ‗Is hope that

people is not going to do horrible nasty violences on each

other

The interruption served at least to break the rapidly

escalating tension to some extent, however; with a start

Benny remembered what was happening amidships and their

new arrival. How could she have forgotten about that, even in

the snide face of her damned ex-husband?

‗Don‘t worry about it, Sgloomi,‘ she said, narrowly beating

Jason to the punchline that she knew he was going to

perpetrate, given half the chance. ‗Jason‘s talking bollocks

again.‘

In the medical bay Roz rose gently into consciousness – then

tried to hurl herself from the couch, only to find that she had

been strapped firmly down. She felt a number of muscles

sprain.

‗Look, please calm down!‘ A gruff voice tinged with

desperation said. ‗You‘re strapped down just so that you

don‘t do anything stupid. If you don‘t calm down and let me

explain then I can‘t let you up!‘

A face hove into view. Roz snarled up into the face of her

abductor. ‗If you touch me I‘ll kill you. With my teeth I‘ll kill

you. Who are you? Where‘s Martle? What the hell is going

on?‘

The blond man looked down at her, his expression a weird

mixture of what looked like fear, concern and pain. ‗My

name‘s Chris Cwej,‘ he said. ‗And as for what‘s going on, hell

is probably as good a word for it as any.‘

18

JANUS WAKING

(ALTERNATE EARTH/S)

The man on the screen was thick-set, jowly, with little piggy

eyes behind the glint of his pebble-stone spectacles. The

sigils of a People‘s Patrol officer were visible on his epaulets.

Behind him, the majority of it obscured so as to be

unrecognizable if one did not already know deep in the bones

what it was, a grainy monochrome blow-up of the People‘s

Hero, Simon Deed.

‗We have watched you,‘ he was saying. ‗We have watched

you from the day you were born. We have known precisely

what you have eaten and drunk, precisely where and when

you have excreted and defecated and the precise composition

of each...‘

( ‘I’m a foundling,’ Nathan said. ‘The Shi Noor found me as a

baby, apparently, in the broken shell of a meteorite, sitting on

a bed of mariposa and playing a reed flute to a noble

cormorant - a sight most surpassing odd, because the noble

cormorant is indigenous to other climes and you couldn’t get

flute reeds for neither love nor money, what with the embargo

on reed-flute reeds, at the time of which I speak. Strange but

true.’

Leetha looked at him sideways. ‘You’re having me on.’)

How could memories that at least seemed vaguely self-

consistent and logical seem less real than memories that,

quite frankly, seemed utterly stupid and ridiculous?

(Li Shao grinned. ‘That’s what my adoptive father said - but

then again, my adoptive father’s name was Rha-Ghang-Sung-

Kha, which in the Shi Noor tongue means: He-Who-Speaks-the-

Inveterate-Shit-of-the-Baldy-Headed-Behemoth, which might

give you some idea.’)

‗It was we ourselves who fed you the DORMANT-

CLASSIFIED://I0I file,‘ the face on the screen was saying.

‗We must test those we suspect, after all - but, ultimately,

their betrayal is their own.‘ It smiled; a little self-satisfied

smirk. ‗Had you conformed we would have been satisfied;

had some realization of the more basic mechanics of the

world in which you lived led you to join us, we would have

welcomed you with open arms. As it was, what did you do,

Nathan L? You attempted to escape us, even knowing that

there would be no escape allowed - and it was, if I may say

so, a paltry escape attempt at best. What did you do with

your (admittedly) entirely illusory freedom? Did you try to

invest your life with some meaning and dignity? Did you even

try to use what you had learnt to fight back against the

processes you found so repugnant? You did not. You frittered

it away in a squalid little affair with one of those who…‘

Nathan L just wished the man would shut up and let him

think. The sense of other worlds and lives was like a

hailstorm of such force that the hailstones shattered into

fragments which were, in turn, pounded relentlessly through

his living brain.

(Images of the Dirigible Cities of the Anacon. Rakath, in

flames. A confused multi-sensual vision of jackals that seemed

to be able to talk, taking lumps out of him with their hooked-

back jaws. Planets whose respective courses were each

wound by clockwork...)

Even the fractious details of this world, the world of the City

and the Market and Patrols, seemed to tangle and re-form: a

list of people he had known, things he had done to bring

himself to this place and time - things that had happened

days, or weeks, or years ago but, in some impossible manner,

had happened days, or weeks, or years ago only in the last

instant.

(‘Was there any mention of a caul?’ Leetha asked him. ‘Were

you born with a caul?’

Li Shao shrugged. ‘Probably. Means I’ll never be drownded,

so long as it is kept secure within a firmly stoppered jar,

preserved for that especial purpose.’)

Nathan L shook his head to clear it, turned to look at Lisa

T and almost screamed at the shock that passed through

him. It wasn‘t horror, simply an overload of the senses as her

clothing, posture and physical form flickered and strobed. It

was as if a reel of cellulose film, such as was used to project

upon the largest public viewing screens, had been composed

of a single shot, of a single person, but each one taken at a

completely different time.

But underneath it all (like one frame repeated at regular

intervals through all the others) he thought he could discern

a true, or at least a consistent form - and it was utterly

impossible and wrong. It didn‘t look like a City dweller or an

Underclasser; it didn‘t even look human. It looked reptilian

and vicious and it. frightened him far more than if there had

been just nothing there at all...

(‘Problems?’ asked Kiru, when Nathan li Shao and Six finally

returned to the bridge.

‘Not really.’ Li Shao absently fingered a bruise and a couple

of scratches on his face. ‘I just had to lock them in for their

own good, that’s all. Everything was going fine till I mentioned

my name. Can’t think what was wrong with me mentioning

my name...‘)

‗And do not think -‘ it might have been entirely Nathan L‘s

almost entirely pixilated imagination, but the Patrolman on

the screen seemed slightly peeved at being so obviously

ignored ‗- that your compatriots in treason have been allowed

respite. They have been apprehended, as you. yourself can

plainly see...‘

(Only stories are logical. To make people believe in them.

Only the real is allowed to be ridiculous.)

Nathan L became suddenly aware that, while he had been

trying to contain his thoughts, other figures had burst into

the room. Now, he turned to see a collection of Patrolmen, of

the utilitarian, brutal and highly lethal sort, three in all.

Between two of them, semiconscious and hanging limply

from their grip, was a beaten, ragged figure. A kind of wire

cage was strapped to his face, containing, for some reason, a

large gerbil. Quite what that reason was, Nathan L had no

idea, because the creature seemed harmless enough, running

round happily in its little wheel as it was.

Any further thought along those lines, however, was shut

off by the shock of recognition.

(The sight of him, helpless, on a table in a cell, as a

Degenomancer advanced. How he had allowed himself to be

captured, saving li Shao’s life, knowing that li Shao would

come to save him in his turn...)

‗Kiru!‘ It wasn‘t Nathan who had shouted. It had been Lis-

no, not Lisa, it was - it was -

‗Leetha!‘ he cried, the word bursting from him seemingly of

its own accord.

(The child, the first hatched one. as it sucked in croaking air

and then bawled. The knife she sometimes held to his throat,

point tracing lazy arabesques.)

And then the battered figure hanging between the two

Patrolmen jerked his head up, and stared at him with

astonishment. ‗Nathan!‘

(The wit of him. The taste of his mouth.)

‗Kiru!‘ Nathan exclaimed - again, as if the name had

sprung, fully formed, from something other than his mind.

(The people he loved.)

‗Leetha!‘ Kiru shouted, recognizing her in what, if it had

occurred within a fictional telescreen entertainment, might

have been taken for a classic double take.

(The people he needed.)

‗Nathan!‘ Leetha broke in, urgently, having finally turned

her bewildered eyes from Kiru. ‗What is this place? What are

we...‘

(Their sweet bodies, spiky minds, locked together with his,

eternal. As necessary to him as his heart and good right arm

and -

Who do you believe?)

Afterwards, Nathan could never quite decide if it had been

purely a question of luck that the three had been in the

precise mental state for their memories to fully, finally

surface - or whether it had been the fact of bringing the three

of them suddenly together while in a similar mental state. In

either case, it was as if a critical mass had been achieved.

Throughout it all, pervading it all, there was an immense

sense of effort, the sheer personal triumph of lifting some

heavy weight, or snapping some constricting cord. He knew,

also, with a sudden and unthinking sense of connection to

something outside himself, that the others must be feeling

something similar, too.

It was the opposite of an explosion. The inner, raging chaos

that threatened to engulf him, instead, suddenly left him,

discharged instantly like a charge of static galvanism that

made the nerves sing until one brushed a metal pipe with a

hand. Nathan stared at Kiru and Leetha, just as Kiru and

Leetha were staring at him, and simply, almost quietly, just

knew who they were.

And who he was.

‗…you shall learn the unending futility of resistance to the

inexorable march of Market forces…‘ the face on the wall

screen was saying, seemingly all oblivious to the change that

had occurred.

Leetha looked at Nathan. ‗Do we have to stand for these

creatures of the utmost slime?‘ she said.

‗It doesn‘t do that much for me, either,‘ Kiru said. With an

ease that belied his previously weaker, more ravaged and far

more sartorially challenged body, he effortlessly extricated

himself from the two Patrolmen holding him and backed to

join his friends.

‗Join the raiding party,‘ Nathan told him.

‗...you will prepare for your fate,‘ the voice on the screen

was saying, ‗and your fate shall be everlasting. Imagine a

particularly large elephant jumping up and down on

someone‘s bottom, for ever...‘

The Patrolmen had by now recovered from their confusion

at this turn of events, and were advancing angrily.

Simultaneously, moving as one, Nathan li Shao, Leetha

t‘Zhan and Kiru met them halfway, planted three feet in three

respective groins, lightly hopped over three suddenly foetal

and agonized bodies and piled out through the window.

In his shielded bunker Bane watched the readouts with

alarm, as the readings from the world outside went,

momentarily, haywire. Then, as quick as an alarmed and

indrawn breath, they settled down again.

Some unknown factor? Something for which, for all the

years of calculation and anticipation, he had been

unprepared? No. In all probability it had simply been some

transient fluctuation, some mechanical glitch to which all

machinery that existed on the merely physical plane was

prey.

No matter. The subjects were still, and would not be going

anywhere. Bait for a trap of which, in one sense, they

themselves were the materials. The trap was still primed and

waiting. Others would be coming soon.

And then, at last, after almost an entire lifetime, the

Conversion could begin.

STRIKE THREE

FINAL APPROACH

19

CROSSMATCHED COVER STORIES

Under ordinary conditions, there were as many variations in

the time factors involved with interplanetary and intergalactic

travel as there were ships doing it, and for what purpose they

were used. A cruise liner might take several weeks to make a

quite short interplanetary hop, for the simple reason that this

was precisely what the passengers had paid for. A corvette

Patrol might take months about its rounds because it is

constantly called to answer to the dictates of gunboat

diplomacy. A science ship is limited in its methods of

propulsion by the delicacy of its instrumental payload, as is,

for broadly similar reasons, a colonization vessel with a load

of genetic materials. Cargo and passenger transports are for

ever stopping at their respective stops. Deep-space probes

have the sole function of probing deep space and so must

have the time in which to do it. Space Fighters are essentially

a part of the human „game‟ of war, as much as any number

of mounted knights in battles that took place in fields

delineated by a picket fence, with substitutes, half-time

refreshments and spectators – Space Fighters needed by their

very nature to operate upon the level of human reactions.

None of which makes any odds if the function you‟re

currently after is simply to translate yourself from here to

there.

* * *

The Schirron Dream popped back into space-time, such as it

was, slightly out from the orbit of the Tenth Planet. This

major solar body had been discovered rather later than the

other nine, at a time when human civilization had become

less centralized, and so it had gloried in any number of

names, depending on cultural whim - from the prosaic

Decadon, to the fanciful Ultima Thule, to a brief and

ultimately futile attempt by one of the major Earth

entertainment corporations to name it Goofy.

„That‟s as far as we‟re going to get on star-drive,‟ Jason

said, locking a couple of controls. „We‟re coming up on the

event horizon of whatever‟s doing all this. I have a nasty idea

that if we try to go in over sublight, we‟ll end up disappearing

up our own singularities.‟

A thought struck Benny, and for a wonder it had nothing

much to do with the already patent shortcomings of her ex-

husband - she was really pleased about that; it showed that

she wasn‟t obsessing about him, or something perfectly

ghastly like that. She recalled how, in the System, the

Schirron Dream had been propelled by what had been

described as „orgones‟ and - given the unreal nature of the

System, where physical impossibilities were not just possible

but entirely probable they had in all probability been just

that. But what propelled the ship in spaces where such

things were impossible? She asked as much.

Jason shrugged. „Don‟t ask me. I just think in terms of the

thing-that-makes-us-go-fast and the thing-that‟s-slower-for-

going-between-planets.‟

„Your dedication to learning the mechanics of your so-

called trade is quite remarkable,‟ said Benny. „I am shocked

rigid at how remarkable it is.‟

„Yeah, well, what more do you need? If you want to twat

about with vector analysis and log tables then get someone

else. Lovely word, when you come to think about it, analysis.

I don‟t give a toss how we get there, basically. I‟m more

interested in where we go.’ He scanned the swirling overlay

on the screen with a kind of teeth-sucking nonchalance that

you‟d have to know him very well indeed to know that it

denoted worry. „Only trouble is, I don‟t have the faintest idea

where I‟m going to end up. This close the disruption‟s going

to affect us directly; God alone knows what‟s going to happen

when we hit the wave fronts head-on.‟

„I suspect we‟ll encounter strangenes,‟ said Sgloomi Po from

hir own console, momentarily lifting the articulate flaps it

had sprouted to protect hir ear-equivalents from the worst of

Benny and Jason‟s bickering.

„How very elucidating,‟ said Benny. „So how long till we

reach Earth, then, what with the going-slowly thing and the

turbulence?‟

Jason shrugged. „How long is a superstring? Couple of

days, maybe. Hang on to your Reality Hat.‟

„But how‟s it going to affect us?‟ Benny said. „If this thing‟s

tearing Nathan, Leetha and Kiru apart, what‟s to stop it

doing the same to us?‟

„We know what it is that is happening,‟ said Sgloomi. „This

prepares menial strengths to counter worst effects. I-‟ (It was

more as if Sgloomi were hunting for the tactful thing to say

than anything else.) „Interactions between you and Mr Jason

being part of that. All big arguments and thing.‟

„What?‟ said Benny, genuinely mystified. „What do you

mean, arguments?‟

„“You always were a detestable little oik like that,”‟ said

Sgloomi in an imitation of Benny‟s voice, though rather,

Benny thought, more snotty and pompous than she really

sounded. „“That‟s just the sort of thing I‟d expect from

someone with the vocabulary of a small retarded pig.”‟

Sgloomi continued, in a voice that was spot on with that of

Jason: „“Yeah, right. At least I don‟t go around all flappy

scarves, jolly hockey sticks and Rag Week, like it‟s something

to be proud of.” Thing like that.‟

„Oh, that?‟ said Benny. „We don‟t mean a -‟ She broke off

and thought about it. She was going to say, without thinking,

„We don‟t mean a word of it‟ - but it was more complex than

that. Most of the time they meant every word: it was a

spiteful little game they played, and a lot of the time they

played it to genuinely wound - but for all that there was a

kind of angry, indefinable joy about it, something addictive. A

few years before, Benny had smoked a variety of tobacco

stick (the archaic habit was repugnant to her, but she had

found herself for various reasons stranded on a planet where

the practice was universal, and not to do so would have

instantly branded her an outsider). There had been

something about the sensation of smoke in the lungs,

whether you liked it or not, that was utterly different from

anything else and sometimes, just occasionally, you missed it

even years later. In some confusion, Benny said, „We just do

it. It‟s who we are.‟

„And it helps you remember who you are,‟ said Sgloomi.

„Keeps a basic sense of self inside the head.‟

Jason looked thoughtful. „I get you. It‟s like a method actor

making sure he stays in character.‟

„Which certainly explains,‟ said Benny, „how certain people

- mentioning no names - are behaving like particularly

unattractive caricatures of themselves. „

„Speak for yourself, sweetheart,‟ said Jason, and Sgloomi

put the flaps over hir ears again.

Benny was about to reply when an uneasy thought struck

her.

„An uneasy thought,‟ she said, „has just occurred. We went

back through space-time to pick up .. . Roz.‟ The hesitation

was because she still found it hard to equate their most

recent addition to the woman she had known. „She‟s no more

than twenty if she‟s a day - and that‟s way before I first met

her and she was taken out of time. We‟ve had the experience

and we‟ve got the defences, but what in the names of the

Goddess is going to happen to her?’

Sgloomi had uncovered hir ears when it had been evident

that the Benny/Jason marathon was not going to go an extra

furlong for a while. „Morphic signal resonates back and forth

through individual timelines. What she will become in her

future is already there, in traces - besides, Roz has been

taken out of time. Out of her personal locus for some

interval, now. I think she will survive.‟

„Yes, but what‟s going to happen to her?‟ asked Benny.

„That is rather more problematical,‟ Sgloomi said.

„So what we‟re saying here basically,‟ said Benny, „is we

don‟t have the slightest bloody idea.‟

„We‟re going to find out in a - moment,‟ Jason said. „There‟s

a wave front coming up in five - very soon.‟

Chris looked down at the tethered Roz Forrester, and tried to

think of precisely what to say. If he didn‟t find a way of

explaining things to her, let alone getting her to believe him,

she would have to spend the foreseeable future strapped

down like this, and the idea did not appeal to him at all.

Eventually, he settled on pulling his own Adjudicator ID from

his jacket and showing it to her. The card was one of several

that he owned, and the only one on which the details were

entirely genuine - he had kept it for years, or at least

replaced it with as perfect a copy as possible every time he

lost it, as a kind of sentimental reminder to a previous fife.

„Adjudicator Chris Cwej,‟ he said. „Covert Ops. I‟m sorry

that we had to bring you on board in this manner, but we

had to keep things under wraps. Security had to be airtight.‟

He hoped like hell he hadn‟t overdone it - he sounded like a

bad actor in any number of old spy actioners.

„On board,‟ said Roz, thoughtfully. „That means we‟re on a

ship.‟ She peered suspiciously at the card before her face. „A

ship with people who didn‟t do their homework. A name like

that should be pronounced Schvey.’

„It is,‟ said Chris. He grinned a little, involuntarily. „People

seem to have an incredibly hard time dealing with it, though,

so I started using it phonetically.‟

In the way that a little piece of personal truth can cut

through any amount of suspicion, he fancied he saw the faint

twitch of an answering smile in Roz. A little hint of mutual

sympathy.

„The, uh, matter we retrieved you for is of a delicate and

confidential nature,‟ he said, improvising generally and

wildly, „involving corruption at the very highest levels of the

Church. We had to wait until you were out of contact with

Earth and then, um, detail one of our Extraterrestrial

Auxiliary operatives to pull you in...‟

Roz was nodding thoughtfully to herself, then looked up at

him frankly. „Let‟s just say I go along with this. Let me look at

that ID again, yes?‟ She waggled her strapped hands

meaningfully.

Chris could see her point. The sight of the badge-card

seemed to have to some extent convinced her of his good

intentions - Adjudicator ID was almost impossible to

duplicate, and the card was indeed genuine, obtained by way

of certain influence Chris had acquired comparatively

recently. But in order to check that it was genuine, Roz

would have to examine it closely. Of course, even freeing one

hand could be risky, but he felt that Roz might trust him just

a little, simply because she was Roz - and if she didn‟t, well,

he had at least ten years‟ experience on this version of her.

In any case, it came down to a simple matter of either/or.

He decided to risk it and freed one of her hands.

He came to with the kind of duller, deeper pain, the sort

that sets in to really make your life a misery after the initial

shock of impact, in his forehead and groin area, together with

a vague and pain-filled memory of Roz jabbing her stiffened

hand into the latter and, as he doubled up, grabbing him by

the hair and slamming the former into the side of the bunk.

She had then, self-evidently, used her free hand to unstrap

her other limbs, but he only worked that out later.

For the moment, the more immediate pains were coming

from the weight of Roz on his chest and the flat of her arm

across his throat.

„Very clever,‟ she was saying. „That bit with the ID. Thing

about you... people, though, is you get the most simple

things wrong and you don‟t even notice. That mugshot was at

least ten years out of date, and the Ordination date is ten

years in the future. How do you explain that, then? What is

this? Some kind of half-assed Fnarok attempt at softening

me up for probing?‟

I must be slowing down in my old age, thought Chris. This

was, however, one of the few coherent thoughts he had. He

was confused, not by pain and the shock of this sudden

reversal of circumstances - but by the fact that there were

some things it was just impossible to sum succinctly up.

Some things were just too big to get out of your mouth.

What could he say? Hi, Roz, you won‟t know me until ten

years up your timeline, most of which will be spent with this

creep called Martle, who used your inexperience as a kind of

convenient cover for the fact that he was on the take with

anyone who would pay - didn‟t you ever catch on how many

times he charged in and saved you rather than stop the

criminals you were after from getting away? And when you

finally couldn‟t ignore it any more, you had to kill him or he

killed yourself...

And then you met me, and we found ourselves caught up in

the hyperspatial disruption that turned half the City psycho,

and damn near brought it down around our ears. And we

were chased off Earth and had adventures, bringing law into

places where it was neither asked for nor wanted. And we

travelled through time. And we stayed together until the day

you...

All in all, it was rather convenient for Chris that all he

could say under current circumstances was, „Ak!‟

This state of affairs was abruptly cut short by an alarm

squealing from the archaic Tannoy system that was mounted

throughout the Schirron Dream.

„Wave front coming up,‟ crackled the voice of Jason Kane.

„Looks like a biggie and we have no real idea what it‟s really

going to do. Hang on, people, and just try to remember who

you are.‟

„That has got to be the most fatuous bit of advice I‟ve ever -‟

said the voice of Benny before the Tannoy shut itself off.

There was a sensation, supposedly impossible, of the folds

of his cerebellum splitting apart and writhing, crawling over

each other like a sackful of tapeworms. Jagged rents tore

across his vision, not like lines of static on a screen but more

organic-seeming, as though the membrane of the cornea had

split to reveal a raging fire beyond from which he had been

previously shielded. The deck under him shook itself and

warped, slamming into him again, again and then again.

Then he realized, with a peripheral, isolated awareness of

trauma-detachment, that it was in fact his own body going

into spasm, nerve impulses firing blindly and at random.

The flare before his eyes died and, again, he felt the strange

nonsensation in his brain - this time the perception that its

very living matter was fusing together. The self that he had

always known, and had never truly known existed until it

had momentarily gone, flowered back through him, and with

it came his body sense. False memories flashed across his

mind, whole other worlds and lives, but he knew that they

were false, his true self overrode them.

Chris Cwej, late of the Adjudicators of Earth, ex-pawn on

the intertemporal board and now a troubleshooter for Space

and Time, looked up into the face of Roz Forrester, who by

rights should be several decades older and dead. The face he

saw was not as it had been before - still young with the basic

features that snagged hooks across his heart - but changed.

The complex interplay of facial muscles, and the cumulative

shocks that flesh is heir to, had shifted to produce the face of

someone new. Harder round the mouth than even the Roz he

knew in later life had been; looser and more haggard round

the eyes. A broken nose and a vestigial scar across the

forehead. Chris had no idea if the change was

psychosomatic, the result of muscles forcing the flesh to

conform to some all-pervading inner image, or whether it was

physical, matter transmuted on the cellular and even the

atomic level. All he knew was that it was the precise mirror of

the soul within, the person who Roz Forrester now was, and

that it was a person he didn‟t think that he could ever learn

to like.

„Who the frik are you?‟ she snarled. The word was

unfamiliar, but it held none of the self-consciousness, even

after half a century of use, that overlaid the Church‟s use of

null-words rather than to actively blaspheme. It was quite

obvious that the word would inflect automatically into such

ejaculations as „you stupid fricker and „what the frikking frik!’

The voice that used it seemed more brutish, less intelligent

and alive, as though its user had been trained from an early

age by the sort of schooling that stunts the mind.

Chris tried to focus upon the insubstantial false memories

in his own head beside his own, and received a vague

impression of martial esprit de corps, vast ranks and files of

uniformed figures, warships razing everything in their path,

but no coherent image came to mind.

The stranger who had once been Roz hauled him roughly to

his feet and slapped away imaginary dust from nonexistent

epaulets. „Come on, soldier,‟ she growled. „There‟s something

funny going on here, and damn me if I don‟t find out what it

is.‟

20

PAST TIMES CATCHING UP

(ALTERNATE EARTH)

The first thing to do was get off the street, to find somewhere

to hole up and hide. The world they were in might have been

different from the ones they had known, but in immediate

terms they could feel and touch and taste it, and to be hurt

or killed here would no doubt be as painful, inconvenient and

final whether the world it happened in was ultimately real or

not. Avoiding the Patrols and the heavy armoured caterpillar-

treaded prowl cars was easier than they had expected. The

darkness was one factor, but the far more decisive factor was

that the forces of this world seemed to be innately geared

towards an utterly predictable populace - whether of the

dronelike, psychically cowed City or the savage,

fundamentally ignorant and so effectively stupid Underclass.

The methods of dealing with intelligent, responsive

individuals, who were more or less in the saddles of their

minds and wills, were simply not in place.

In a patch of waste ground they found a dying-down

garbage fixe and banked it up. Other figures lay huddled,

wrapped in blankets or in makeshift huts of cardboard, ply

and plasterboard, but nobody more than vaguely stirred.

They remained undisturbed.

„I just can‟t think how we didn‟t notice,‟ Leetha said.

„Hm?‟ Li Shao had been lost in looking at her face in the

firelight. It was a face of someone he knew and loved, but,

while humanoid, the red eyes, reptile skin and saurian

features were in no way human. He wondered how he could

have possibly not noticed a small detail like that. The

comment, meshing as it did with his own thoughts, pulled

him back from his reverie. „Notice what, exactly?‟

Leetha reached over and touched his steel-reinforced

jacket. „All that red leather you wear, the bloody big sword

slung across your back. I‟m sure I should have noticed that.

Did it all appear out of thin air? That seems... impossible,

somehow, even with the strange things that have happened.‟

She flexed cramped shoulders in her own leather corslet, in a

manner that would have had anybody standing stock still

and noticing in almost any world.

„I don‟t think we could notice,‟ said Kim, who was wrapping

his silk robes around himself carefully, trying to eke out the

best benefit from them in the now chilly air for which they

were not entirely suitable. „Our minds threw up memories of

events and personalities that had to be, if we were to be

where we found ourselves. Anything else was incompatible;

our minds wouldn‟t let us see them. I think we could only

break out of that under moments of extreme stress.‟

„You‟re right, in all probability.‟ Li Shao recalled the instant

when he had returned to his true self, briefly, during the fight

with... something about being underground, fighting

monsters that physically, he now seemed to recall, were

certainly no worse than members of his own family, even, but

at the time he had thought to be repugnant.

The memories of these other worlds seemed to recede. He

could remember the specific places he had been, the things

he had done, but the whys and wherefores seemed

increasingly elusive. He looked around him at the hovels and

the huddled figures, the crumbling buildings beyond. They

were obviously among the dregs of the slums in some post-

industrial world, but the history of it, the understanding of it

that comes from simply having lived in it since birth, escaped

him. Whatever happened from this point on, he was going to

have to face it with nothing to guide him but his own,

internal, resources.

Nathan li Shao looked around at two of the three people

who were the closest to him in his life and, strangely, felt

awkward. It was as though he were meeting them again, after

years of separation, and that the issues between them were

so big that he quite simply did not know how to start. From

their faces, he knew that they were feeling it too.

„Do you remember...‟ all three said simultaneously, and

promptly stumbled over their words in the time-honoured

fashion that probably obtains wherever there are sentient

beings. In the half-heard mumble of apology, li Shao was

inordinately pleased that both Leetha and Kiru turned their

eyes to him, willing him to break the deadlocked silence.

The burst of warm joy inside him, which had nothing to do

with conscious thought, served to loosen his tongue a little. „I

was just going to say, do you remember how we used to live

back in the System? There were physical laws that nobody in

this universe, even now, could believe. We went into new,

well, call them “worlds” all the time and we just got on with it

because that‟s how we lived.‟

„Such as?‟ Leetha said.

„Oh, I don‟t know. An Ice Wanderer next to a world of water

- when the silly laws of this universe mean that the ice should

melt or the water freeze, or some such thing. The way the

sun was something you could land on. Do you remember

how we were almost going to land on a sun when we first

broke into these spaces?‟ He looked at Leetha, half smiling. „I

also remember how you went from a world where the dread

Captain li Shao was the Barbarous Bloody Buggering

Butcher of a Billion Bloody Battles and Evil Incarnate, to one

where you knew the facts of matters.‟

„Yes but that doesn‟t have anything to do with changing

universes and worlds,‟ said Leetha. „That was just a

confidence trick you used to strike terror into the hearts of

your enemies. I just happened to believe it.‟

„And that made it true.‟ Kiru rubbed, reminiscently, at a

long-healed injury on his arm, the result of Leetha imposing

her particular world-view on both him and Nathan, the first

time they had all met. „In the short term, at least.‟ He

gestured about himself. „All this, the System and the universe

we found outside, the changes that it seems to be going

through - it doesn‟t have to change us, and I don‟t think it

really can in the end, because we each of us carry round our

own world with us, inside our heads.‟

„Then again,‟ said Leetha, „I do detect a kind of universal

constant, in all these real, imaginary and hypothetical

worlds.‟

„And what‟s that?‟ said li Shao.

„Complete and utter shit of the baldy-headed behemoth.‟

The talk wound on, now that the ice had been broken -

reminiscences and shared jokes from the years they had

spent together, none of them meaning anything other than to

help fix who they were inside their minds. Their travels and

adventures both inside and outside the System, trifling

incidents from their lives - bringing out the truly vast things

like their marriage and family, the birth of children, the sense

of loss and grief for friends who had died, purely by the

details that held the whole in their specific parts. In the

course of this, naturally, it was expected that they would

gesture to emphasize a point, would touch each other, lightly

trace an old wound or rub a tense muscle, or rest a hand

against a cheek in pure companionship.

To hold your loved one to you and feel your pulse align with

theirs. To taste the distinct sweats that formed on different

areas of the skin. To feel the scratch of day-old stubble and

to run the fingers through feathered hair as soft as down. To

feel the shudder and indrawn gasp as you nipped with teeth

and dug with nails. To feel the flesh that is not yours but

sings with yours. Another and another‟s breath; another

soul, or souls, made flesh. The yawning in your stomach as

you freefall into joy.

They were subdued: silent and mindful that there were

others nearby. There was a sense of exploration, the re-

discovery of a tactile shared reality beyond that which any

words could state. There was a calmness, a mammalian

warmth that spoke of nothing but the good; of trust and love

and kindness. You are fine and strong and beautiful. You are

wonderful. You are the light and you are gathered to me and

there is nothing that can hurt you. You are healed and whole

and safe.

In the fullness of time, curled and twined together, they

slept.

„Wake up, li Shao. I think you really have to see this...‟

Nathan li Shao grunted and blinked eyes that stung in the

now painfully bright sunlight, rolled over to find himself

looking directly up Leetha‟s kilt. Not, as he‟d be the first to

admit, entirely the worst way to wake up of a morning, even

after a night in the cold and on hard ground - but there was

a fear and urgency in her voice that had him instantly alert

and not a little worried. The voice also sounded odd in a way

that he could not quite pin down: mushy, as though he had

water trapped in his ears after a long, hot refreshing bath

with scented oils and unguents.

Putting vain thoughts of ablutionary luxury out of his head,

li Shao sat up and worked at a crick in his neck. „What‟s

happening?‟

„Better you should see,‟ said Leetha.

Kiru was standing, several items of clothing still in his

hand, as if he had been in the process of dressing and then

forgotten about it. „Look over there,‟ he said, gesturing with

the hand holding his cloak, indicating a direction rather than

a specific thing. The first thing li Shao noticed was the sky.

He had initially thought that his eyes were still accustoming

themselves to the light of day - but now he realized that,

whatever else it was, this light was not the light of any sun.

The sky blazed with a white and seemingly sourceless light.

The second thing he noticed was the skyline, the roofscape

of the dingy buildings that devolved from the open patch of

waste ground. In the distance there were taller buildings, the

blocky towers of the city, and one by one they were

dissolving, disappearing into thin air, eaten by the light.

„What is it?‟ li Shao said, his voice roughened by a low

vibration in the pit of his stomach. He realized, then, why the

voices of the others had sounded so odd: they were disrupted

by a constant roar, like the howling of a gale, but on the very

lowest levels of hearing.

As he watched, the last of the tower blocks disappeared.

The buildings between this descending curtain of light were

lower, masked by the buildings immediately before them -

there was no way to tell how fast or far the destruction might

advance.

„Is it some sort of bomb?‟ li Shao breathed.

„I don‟t think so.‟ Kiru pointed to one of the denizens of the

waste ground, shambling along in his, her or its (it was

impossible to say) rags and absently poking through the

refuse with no care in the world other than malnutrition,

scabies and a severe case of rickets. „Look at these people, for

want of a better word. They haven‟t seen it. They haven‟t

noticed anything wrong. I think the world‟s changing again.‟

„It wasn‟t like this before,‟ Leetha said in a small, tight

voice. „I would remember. I remember how I got out of a

hansom cab and went into a house and found myself in a

dirty room and the outside was different. It wasn‟t like this. I

don‟t remember anything like this...‟

„But we didn‟t know what was happening to us before,‟ li

Shao said. „This is the first time we‟ve really seen what‟s

happening. We survived before and we‟ll survive now. Isn‟t

that right, Kiru?‟

„Who knows? We have no evidence that this is what

happened before, and even if it is, who knows what it will do

now that we...‟ Kiru became aware, by way of li Shao and

Leetha both turning to glare at him murderously, that this

was not quite the response that was called for at this present

point. „I mean yes,‟ he said, „of course we‟re going to be all

right. Probably.‟

The line of buildings nearest to them disintegrated. They

just had time to see that they exploded, their brickwork

fragmenting under enormous force and the fragments

bursting into their very atoms. Now the whiteness was a wall

of light, given a solid visuality by its edge as it traversed the

ground towards them, ingesting everything in its path.

„Nowhere to run,‟ li Shao said. „No time to do it. We have to

stay together. We have to remember who we are.’

The three clutched each other tightly, arm in arm, in arm

in arm, and waited for the end.

21

A HELL OF A LIFE IN THE

GLORY HOLE

„So what the hell do we do now?‟ asked Benny, looking at the

thing that had materialized on the screen.

„Don‟t ask me,‟ said Jason. „You‟re the one who‟s supposed

to be up on all this interspecies communication stuff. Open

diplomatic relations with it or something.‟

„I would,‟ said Benny, „if I had the slightest idea of what it

was talking about.‟

They had come through the wave front to find themselves

in what appeared to be normal space; nothing exceptionable

about it at all - apart from the three large and nasty-looking

battle cruisers that were currently bracketing them in what

were obviously attack postures. The construction and

configuration of these ships was utterly unfamiliar, save for

the weapons arrays, which were distressingly large and

pointing at them in a manner that was depressingly not

unfamiliar, to anybody who had ever seen a space war at the

blunt end, in the slightest.

The thing on the screen was also not a sight to inspire

confidence. Any even remotely human aspects it possessed

were confined to the level of suppurating boils and sores,

hairy warts and cancerous-looking growths, and the

collection of several needle-toothed mouths and fifteen eyes

reminiscent of those of a spider under a microscope seemed

hardly any more sympathetic. Looking more closely, Benny

saw, the impression of a lack of humanity about the creature

was not exactly accurate. A necklace of human ears and

other easily detachable appendages was clearly visible. She

decided to stop looking any more closely.

‘Graghi-haagh, maghi koli moghra tghan da vroorst da kunto

si de glaan!’ the creature was saying, its different mouths

speaking the words simultaneously, but in different, distinct

tones, and with inflections that seemed to range from a

shriek to the kind of suave drawl used by the villain in old

movies when he says, „At last I have you at my mercy, dog of

a thousand cheese weevils.‟ The overall effect was disjointed

and dissonant, and, if anything, came slightly below

everything else thus far in the reassurances-of-safety stakes.

„Have we got any weapons systems?‟ Benny said.

„Is no weapon-thing, not really,‟ said Sgloomi from hir own

console, who had lapsed back into hir more amorphous state

in alarm. „Is we happy family and lovely Schirron Dream is

just for us, not big old nasty warship and we never feel the

need.‟

„I think there‟s a couple of cannon for emergencies,‟ said

Jason, „but they‟re holdovers from when the ship operated in

the System, and they‟re only useful if we‟re surrounded by

air. You know how it is.‟

Benny did. The simple fact of the matter with interstellar

transport was that a ship was just a mechanism for taking

one from here to there, and it must largely conform to its

specific reason for going there in the first place. A ship might

be refitted as a battleship, with torpedoes, plasma blasters

and tractor beams coming out of its portholes, but that was

only practicable if that was to be its sole purpose, with those

inside pursuing it and nothing else, twenty-six hours a cycle.

The Schirron Dream was fundamentally a tribal home, and no

more carried heavy armaments than a twentieth-century

camper-van carried an integral ground-to-air rocket-

launcher; it did not go actively looking for combat, and relied

for the most part on the speed of its unorthodox propulsion

to get out of any trouble in which it might happen to find

itself.

Unfortunately, as the unidentified alien battle cruisers

jockeyed for position to cut off any means of escape, making

a run for it did not at this point seem much of an option.

„If anyone has any ideas at all,‟ said Jason. „Now might be a

good time to hear them.‟

„Get away from those controls!‟ an enraged voice snarled.

Benny, Jason and Sgloomi turned to see a crazed and

haggard-looking Roz Forrester in the gangway hatch, an

Adjudicator-issue blaster in her shaking hands which

pointed, with the minor degree of latitude attendant to her

shaking, directly at Jason‟s head.

„Roz?‟ Jason said, confused. „What do you think you‟re -‟

‘Don’t say a word,’ Benny hissed. „I‟ve seen a face like that

before. In the eyes. If you do anything, she could -‟

„Enough!‟ this strange new version of Roz snapped. She

motioned Jason over to Benny with a flick of the gun, and

glanced back to where Chris was frantically making „settle

down‟ gestures to the others. „Lieutenant Rodonante. Take

these traitorous scum off my bridge and throw them in the

brig. I‟ll deal with them later.‟ She turned to Sgloomi, who

had promptly reassumed hir human form, sprouted

something that appeared to be a beaky military cap, and now

snapped off a sharp salute. Benny really hoped that the

Sloathe was being quick on the uptake and playing along,

rather than being in some way infected by whatever had

affected Roz.

„Ensign, blank that screen,‟ Roz told hir. „Let them stew a

minute.‟ She turned away, and seemed to become aware of

Chris, Benny and Jason again. „Did I not make myself clear.

Lieutenant? Move.’

„Um, right,‟ said Chris. „Come along, traitorous scum.‟

„Marvellous,‟ Benny said, as the three of them went down

the gangway from the bridge. „You do realize, of course, that

we are all now dead. Why did you have to go and do a stupid

thing like that, Chris?‟

„Look, I had to humour her,‟ Chris said. „The way she was

acting, she was going to start a bloodbath. I think her mind‟s

trying to make sense of all the images and memories being

imposed on it. All we can do is play along.‟

„But. how the hell did she get loose?‟ Benny wondered. „And

how, for that matter - just asking for the information, you

understand - did she get hold of her sodding gun?‟

Chris looked shamefaced. „I, uh, left it on her when she

came on board. I wasn‟t thinking - I mean, she‟s Roz and I,

um...‟

Benny snorted. „Famous last words.‟

„Hey, listen,‟ Jason told her. „It‟s not like we‟re in any more

danger than we were, really, and there‟s nothing we can do

about it anyway. Another wave front‟s going to hit us

sometime soon - we just have to hope we live long enough to

see it. When things are unavoidable, all you can really do is

relax.‟

Benny snorted again. „Hello, Mr Fatality.‟

„I think the word you‟re groping for is fatalism,’’ said Jason.

„Not necessarily, „cause if you come out with one more

asinine platitude like that I‟m going to -‟

„I‟d better get back,‟ said Chris, hurriedly. „She seems to

have incorporated me into her mental construct as someone

on her side, so...‟

„You do that,‟ Benny said. „Try to keep her from blowing the

living daylights out of the helm.‟

„Hopefully, that isn‟t going to happen,‟ Chris said. „She

seems to think the blaster‟s of a different design than it

actually is, and I couldn‟t help but notice that she still had

the safety protocols locked.‟

He darted away, probably more to avoid Benny‟s incipient

explosion than anything else.

Benny noticed that they had backtracked to where the

hatch led off into the galley. For some reason, the threat of

possible attack and obliteration by alien ships did not feel

real to her. Possibly the fact that, in a sense, it wasn’t real

had short-circuited her emotional responses. Either way, she

found herself completely unable to work up any emotional

response to it either way.

„Bother it,‟ she said (only later realizing that she had

reverted to what might be described as the true and ultimate

core of her being). „What I could really do with now is a big

drink.‟

„What was that about, back on the bridge?‟ Jason asked,

plonking a bottle of what seemed to be genuine twentieth-

century Czech lager on the galley counter. The Schirron

Dream appeared to be stocked with potables and

consumables from all over, the only common factor being

that they were of a high quality rather than the processed

and additive-laden muck also available throughout the

galaxy in any time or place. The crew of the Schirron Dream, it

seemed, liked to live unostentatiously but well.

„What are you talking about?‟ Benny said, around a snifter

of three-hundred-year-old brandy, three-quarters filled in the

manner of one who knows it shouldn‟t be drunk like that,

but is damn well going to do it anyway.

„About seeing a face like that before. I get a sort of idea -

she frightened the sodding life out of me when I turned

around and saw her standing there - but what did you

precisely mean?‟

„It was from when I was drafted into the Legion,‟ Benny

said. „They put us through basic training, and basically

hammered the stuffing out of us, tried to break us down and

build us up again in ways they wanted. A lot of it was a kind

of rough-and-ready bog-psychology, but there was one thing

that they did do for a fast turnaround.‟ She took another belt

of Oolonian brandy. „They justified it by the fact that the War

was going incredibly badly at the time; it was banned by

treaty later, and even then it was incredibly iffy. It was called

the Haze.‟

„Iffy?‟ Jason said. „How so?‟

Benny realized that he was looking at her with genuine

concern. She supposed that she was showing some last trace

of the anger she thought she‟d expunged a long time ago. In

herself, though, she didn‟t really feel a thing about it either

way. Not any more.

„The Haze was an offshoot of the Bane Industries

interactive virtual-reality rigs,‟ she said, „juiced up with

transputer-generated biofeedback, intravenous psycholeptics,

long-term memory suppressants, other little tricks like that.

The upshot was that the subjects experienced visions that, at

the time, they could only think of as real. The subjects were

streamed images psychoprofile-calculated to tip them over

the edge, turn them mad with grief and pain, whatever, and

have them kill in the most extreme and brutal manner. The

idea was that, once they‟d crossed that line, even though it

happened purely in their minds, even though they learnt the

truth of things afterwards, there was no turning back. The

result was that the Legion got a crop of killers - people who

were killers in their heads, who could kill without

compunction or regret - on a cheap and industrial basis.‟

Jason looked at her. „Not to put too fine a point on it, that

hardly describes you. That‟s never described you. So what

went wrong?‟

„I was one of the failures. Possibly there was some error in

the psychoprofiles -‟ she smiled „- or maybe I was just so nice

and lovely that any amount of conditioning couldn‟t make me

cross the line.‟ She found her teeth gritting, seemingly of

their own accord, as she remembered. „The sequence they

streamed me involved an alien trooper killing my mother with

a bayonet after... doing other things. It hadn‟t seen me, and I

happened to have a bread knife in my hand. It couldn‟t cut

through body armour, but the trooper had its helmet off; its

throat was exposed and I...‟

Benny shuddered. „The thing was, I don‟t know why they

decided to feed me that specific image - I suppose it might

have been from stock, something so, well, archetypical as to

make almost anybody lose their mind. The thing was, you

remember how I told you what really happened to my

mother?‟

„I remember,‟ Jason said, quietly.

„I watched the trooper do things in front of me, and I

couldn‟t remember anything from my past because of the

suppressants - but all I could think was that this isn’t what

happens when your mother‟s killed by an alien; your mother

being killed by an alien simply doesn‟t happen like that... I

didn‟t know why, but everything felt so utterly wrong that I

was unable to act. I didn‟t do anything the whole time except

be there, and I think that‟s what saved me.‟

Benny realized that she was shaking, a reaction to picking

the scabs off memories on deep but distinct levels: the

genuine childhood loss of her mother under the guns of an

alien war craft, and the anger at what the Legion had tried to

do with her. „They didn‟t boot me out, of course. The failure of

the process just kept me off the fast track and added to my

already solid resolve to duck out at the first opportunity. The

point is, the people for whom the process worked, they had

faces just like the one on Roz when they came out of it. They

were the people who went straight into shock-commando

training, the people who had to be locked away after the War

because they were damaged beyond repair.‟ Benny gazed into

her empty brandy glass. „I just wish I knew exactly what was

going on inside her head.‟

Captain Roslan Forestar of the Terran Fleet cruiser Simon

Deed glared about her bridge with cold satisfaction. The

pitiful attempt at mutiny in the face of the enemy had been

quashed, the perpetrators removed, to await her pleasure

and their correction - a lesson that would begin in this world

but would terminate in the next since it would, in all

probability, involve keelhauling without the aid of a suit.

No, she decided; the letter of Maritime Law was too

impersonal to make an effective example and, besides which,

was far too quick. She would string „em up before the crew,

and blind them with her own bare fingers preparatory to

enough lashes with the heavy cat, its tails especially knotted

about small iron dumbbells, to flay the kidneys from the

back. The Articles made provision, and had never been

rescinded, and an example must be made.

But that was for later. For now she had business to attend

to. „Screen up, Lieutenant Rodonante,‟ she ordered. „Let‟s see

what these wretches have to say for themselves.‟

The screen flowered to show the form of the Shelaarg

captain of the lead ship of the three that surrounded them.

‘Wrighi da tegh la mon sa ve roghi-an,’ it said.

„Give me translation,‟ Forestar snapped to the Ensign at

comms, not troubling herself to turn to see that he did so;

when Roslan Forestar said jump, her crew jumped that bit

higher to be on the safe side.

‘Sasah grogh ga rooghi na pe los,‟ the Shelaarg said. „I must

therefore advise you to hold your position. An Outer Planet

Patrol craft will rendezvous shortly to escort you under guard

from Shelaarg space. I repeat: unidentified vessel, please note

that you have violated treaty-sanctioned space while refusing

to answer hails. I must therefore advise you to...‟

Forestar‟s palms itched at the sound. Even with

translation, the voice dripped with the sly cunning that had

enabled the Shelaarg immigrants, even restricted by prudent

Terran policy to a certain number of trades, to build up, over

a scant few centuries since their arrival, cartels so powerful

that the honest workers of Terra could not compete. The

alien breed should have been wiped out, back during the

Reclamation, when proud Terra had at long last grown sick

to its stomach at the lies and infiltration, sick at being

swindled, and had finally decided to fight back.

Far too late, though, Forestar knew from bitter experience,

as it happened. A certain squeamishness in the founding of

interment and extermination camps had led to vast numbers

of the Shelaarg getting out from under the wire. They had

made it out into the solar system by means of stolen Terran

technology (their mother ship having been irreparably

damaged in the crash that had brought their infection to

noble Terra, all those centuries before) and they had holed up

in the squalid remains of the gas-mining plants orbiting

Neptune. And there they had remained, a constant thorn in

humanity‟s side, sneering at the good people of Terra from

where they thought they were safe.

They would be safe no longer, Forestar thought. The Simon

Deed was merely the first of many ships of the Fleet, refitted

in the Ceres yards for a particular, specific purpose. The

Simon Deed had little in the way of armaments, in the

conventional sense, but in another sense was lethal indeed.

The Simon Deed was, effectively, a single, massive, nuclear

bomb, flung out from the inner planets with the single

purpose of making the orbit of Neptune and detonating,

taking the remaining Shelaarg and their fetid little bolt hole

with it. It was, Forestar knew, a suicide mission, but she was

more than happy to die, to the greater glory of humanity and

proud Terra, and the rest of her crew should be damned glad

to die into the bargain.

„The hell with it,‟ she muttered, gazing on the Shelaarg

captain as it repeated its interminable demands yet again.

„We don‟t make it through, those behind us will. Ramming I

speed. Lieutenant! We‟ll take an honour guard of the slime-

gobbling scum with us before we go!‟

„Jesus Christ!‟ Jason shouted as the deck bucked and heaved

under them. „Then again,‟ he continued, in slightly more

reasonable tones, „forget I said that. The way reality‟s being

messed around at the moment, the bugger‟s probably going

to be turning up.‟

„Was that the wave front?‟ Benny asked, more in hope than

expectation of the prospect.

„I don‟t think so.‟ Jason hefted the half-finished bottle that

had cracked into his tooth, the foam that had fizzed out from

it dripping down his hand. „Last time it felt different.

Somebody‟s playing silly buggers. Give you three guesses

who?‟

Several confused members of the Schirron Dream crew were

in the gangway outside the galley, heading in the direction of

the bridge. „Go back,‟ Benny told them. „When there‟s

something you can do, we‟ll let you know.‟ Possibly it was

simply her tone of command, or possibly a recognition of

actual command, for the time being at least, but they obeyed.

Benny and Jason ran up the gangway, brushing the crew

aside and being occasionally thrown against a vernacularly

embellished bulkhead by the lurch and yaw of the ship,

finally to burst through the hatch, jamming it momentarily

each tried to squeeze past the other, back on to the bridge.

Chris was wrestling with Roz - a process in which he was

hampered by the fact that he was trying to restrain her

without seriously wounding or killing her, while Roz was

giving it everything she had, which on the evidence seemed‟

to be quite a lot. Already Chris had several bruises am

scratches on his face, his left eye had closed up and blood

ran from his nose.

„I‟ll hang your guts across the bulwarks!‟ Roz was shouting.

„I‟ll lop your head off and plant it on the bowsprit as a

warning to all lily-livered turncoats who‟d betray the honour

of the Fleet

„Is make like hoppy bunnies and give Sgloomi lovely hand,

would be quite felicitatious at this present point!‟ cried

Sgloomi Po, who had extended several pseudopods to try to

deal with the helm controls and two other consoles all at

once, and was looking as it were a little stretched.

Jason dived for the helm and wrestled with it. „It‟s no good,‟

he snapped. „The silly bitch has thrown us on a collision

course with one of those ships out there. There‟s no way I

can bail us out of it in time.‟

„Bitch, am I?‟ Roz roared, without breaking from her fight

with Chris. „I‟ll give you bitch when I‟ve finished off this swine!

I‟ll stick a belaying hook right up your arse, you see if I don‟t!‟

„Chance would be a fine thing, madam,‟ muttered Jason.

At another console. Benny was tracking the apparent crawl

of radar blips as the Schirron Dream continued on its collision

course. „I don‟t suppose there‟s any chance that these ships

aren‟t going to just disintegrate when we hit them?‟

„Us sadly people is in universe where they can exist,‟ said I

Sgloomi, still helping Jason with the helm. „Here and now, we

hit them we go crunchy-bang...‟

„Well, with a bit of luck we won‟t be here and now, by then,‟

said Jason. „Look at the screen.‟ On the main screen an

explosion of brilliant white light was expanding. „New wave

front coming up - and it looks like a biggie.‟

The person who had been Roz Forrester (or, in another

sense, the person who would become Roz Forrester) chose

this moment to take Chris out with a killing blow. He rode it,

but it was enough to knock him out. He collapsed on the

deck in a nerveless slump. Either assuming she had killed

him, or judging him to be sufficiently incapacitated that she

could turn to other matters, Roz. bounced to her feet and

flung herself towards the helm.

„Jason!‟ It was nothing to do with time or reality

disruptions, but Benny knew with the absolute certainty of

premonition what the immediate future would hold. Jason

had none of the combat training of an Adjudicator as had

Chris, and certainly none of the training of the Marine that

Roz apparently thought she was. In a vision so clear that it

was as though it were already happening, she saw Roz grab

him by the head in a strangely comfortable-looking hold, and

twist, and snap the neck as easily as pulling the claws from a

crab. Thinking about it, later, she knew that it was not

exactly to do with the actual feelings she had for her ex-

husband - the love and hate, the liking and irritation and any

number of other things that were mixed up in an inextricable

mess in any case. It was simply that she knew him; the fact

of him in the world had a reality for her on a level shared by

few others in her entire life - and now he was going to die in

front of her.

All in all it was a bit of a surprise when, without seeming to

look in her direction at all, Jason casually brought around a

hand and hammered a couple of lingers, twice, into the neck

of the advancing Roz. You would have had to be watching

incredibly closely to perceive the sheer controlled and focused

energy behind the blows, their accuracy as they hit the nerve

points. Roz continued in the arc of her dive, and landed in a

relaxed unconscious heap.

After a moment, Benny realized that she was just staring

blankly at Jason without a thought in her head. Jason

grinned at her.

„And for my next trick...‟ he said, just as the wave front

finally hit them, and the world exploded into white.

22

COULD BE YOU (PREMONITIONS OF

THE NEXUS)

In the light he could not remember. He could not recall a

point of origin - some big stone egg spat uterine slick from a

fissure in Mount Fuji? Hatched by sun and acid rain;

autonomic, anthromythic primate...?

(The strings of RNA detach and shift and relocate, the meme

in the machine supplants and segues, supplants again like a

set of nested cones twisted through Dimension X - where the

loathsome cilia things squat and watch, in this particular

palsied end of the millennium, through their fiendish and

segmented telescopes - recurring and perpetually evolving.)

The canisters are coming.

He no longer had a name. He inhabited a world without

sequence or names; the meat machine like a philosopher‟s

axe; replace the head and change the pole...

(In Cuidad Barranquilla we did coca cut with methyl-dex

and pigshit till our hearts stopped cold, sold still-warm Leetha

for our own implants, caught the uplink to the Hook for

hypoxia and calcium depletion and polycarbon substrates shot

through bone. Convected airborne oestrogen in the geodesies

on the Mare Iridium, our swollen glands and our burst and

haemorrhaging eyes. Kiru died there – Kiru who?)

That wasn‟t him. That had never been him.

Images invaded him; fragments that sometimes seemed to

hiring together - but was that only form within himself? Was

lie desperately trying to impose order, playing little, lonely

sequence games here on his own, in a chaos where no law

was never asked or wanted for and could never hold?

(Took the freezer up and out for cryogenic renal shutdown.

Took the Infra to C7 and it excised the CNS and ate it. Worked

the meat rax of the Chain, up on poppers built from Bophal

ketones; in the mouth for food and airspace, up for credit for

lymphatic system-swap before the virus went syndromic... I

don’t, I don‟t recall. Periodic inert plugs of biomass to plug the

minor spirochaetal holes...)

If living beings were to stay alive here in these spaces, he

vaguely sensed, they had to leave their bodies and their

brains behind, shearing them off in dislocated fragments

tinder an abstract acceleration. Perpetually renewing, a

perpetual disconnected death of memory-attrition. The very

nature of this place informed the shapes of those within –

and those parts that didn‟t fit were simply sliced away.

Instants from entire lives flared, complete and perfect in

their circumstantial detail, and just as quickly died.

(An Underlevel backroom in the southern continental colony

arcologies, hermetically sealed from the irradiated grave pits.

Ectomorphic, parchment-pale and worn black suit and

stovepipe, hat. Curled around my neck the remains of a

modified spider monkey, picked up exactly where I can’t recall,

its remaining flesh desiccated and partially mummified. It can

still move, and think, but there’s nothing much, I think, inside.

Other things are here, all entirely unlikely. I think-process

they’re human, but how does one tell?)

There was a yawning ache inside him, so strong that it was

akin to what one might physically feel, in those few seconds

before death, when one‟s heart has been ripped from the

body. For all his life he had never been entirely alone – for

the simple reason that he existed in spaces where some other

living thing was possible. Here, he was utterly, inutterably

alone and -

There was something else.

(She is human in precise detail, down to the DNA. Her

disguise is complete. And. she’s looking at me with eyes at

once both dark and flaring, like polished onyx. A deep one,

this; a strata angel, impact-fractured. You can see down to the

animal core.)

That wasn‟t it. That wasn‟t right. That was just his mind

trying to make sense of something so familiar and ordinary

that this place twisted it into madness. It was the simple

sense of someone...

Someone else.

Something other than himself. The sweet, sweet shock of it

made him want to scream, whether with agony or rapture he

neither knew nor cared. Thoughts that were not his

thoughts, flesh that was not his; words he did not have to

invent. The presence (he did not perceive it by means of any

of the usual senses) flowed about him, and he felt something

in him come alive.

„Dreams,‟ it said. „It‟s all just dreams, and it‟s time to wake

up. The things in here will kill you if you don‟t wake up.‟

(Mandible-glands extend into the throat, skeening complex

and febrile, pumping a thin sugar-syrup down a gullet that

swallows, convulsively, on its sweetness, and something

inside fractures

and

we‟re suddenly

outside.)

He was outside - he couldn‟t see, or feel, or hear or smell or

taste, but he knew he was outside, and knowing things in the

same way as one sees a table, or an animal, or a profiterole

and knows just what it is. He „knowed‟ that there were things

around him, floating in a deprisensory gulf. They were the

remains of something that was not organic, not alive, but

that he had to think of as a creature because no other word

came close enough to fit.

It was dead, smashed into fragments. Several parts of it

still feebly moved, clutching tendrils of it still attempting to

gain purchase on him. With a shock of realization, he was

aware that this thing had enveloped him. His sense of lives

and life itself draining away from him had been akin to that

felt (he imagined) when a Vampyre sucks the blood: one

merely feels the mesmeric enervation, not the actual reality of

the bite. He felt the life return inside him, his mind throwing

up distorted representations of it as it tried to represent

stimuli with which it had not been entirely created to cope:

(Shot from geodesies into grave pits dug in rotting folds of

cerebellum flesh. She’s shucking nonessentials left and centre

as she hauls me through the mud and ruptured coffins, past

the thieves, new-gutted, hanging from their ropes; past the

Shamen with their mortified and wormy hearts. The

schimiraras an th’ tomajawks an knifs with grey hairs stick to

the heft. She’s positively glowing.)

And all the while the other, friendly presence was talking,

in words that seemed to resonate from its very soul to his. He

„heard‟ a kind of grim triumph in that nonexistent voice - had

this other been the agent that had killed the thing that, in its

turn, had tried to kill him?

„You made this,‟ it was telling him. „Do you see? A big light

machine. You made it and you own it and it‟s yours. You

don‟t have to be inside it.‟

(I slipped on something - momentarily lapsing back.

Ointment made from monkshood, deadly nightshade, hemlock

blended with the fat of unbaptized, unchristian children. They

use it, apparently, to fly.)

What did she mean? He was outside, now, and free... or

was that sense of freedom, too, illusory ? Like the clever little

boxes they had made in (the name of which I can’t recall). One

inside another, in another and another -

(She dips a wafer in the stringy half-clotted mess - it’s

something else, now, something not entirely pleasant. She

proffers it - I’m kneeling, now, before her; begging for

something that I cannot now recall.)

The presence avoided the feebly clutching tendrils of the

dying creature. „You really don‟t,‟ it said. „You have no idea.

You are in danger. You made yourself forget. You have to

remember, now.‟

(Her fingers taste of earth and shit and chemicals as she

shoves them into my mouth, and works it open, and, at last,

administers the Antilethe.)

„Remember who you are.‟

„How are you feeling?‟

The voice was soft but strangely reverberative, as though it

were speaking from just behind and, simultaneously, from

some distance. For a moment s/he could not remember what

name or sex or age s/he was - and then the self came roaring

up the backbone and burst to burgeon in his head. Nathan li

Shao opened his eyes.

Leetha and Kiru were looking down at him - the recognition

of them fixing his identity even more solidly than before. And

if it wasn‟t ultimately the real one then what the Multiple

Hells. It was the best there was on offer. It would do.

„We thought we‟d nearly lost you,‟ said Kiru, relief suffusing

his impassive features in the way in which one would have to

know him intimately to be aware of. „When the lightwall hit

us you seemed to haze and stream apart – and then you were

back. What happened?‟

„I... don‟t know.‟ Li Shao ran through the chaos he had

experienced before coming back to himself It was as though

another „world‟ of the sort they had experienced before had

been trying to cohere itself around him. No, not quite like

that: it had been trying to get inside him, like a fever or

infection crawls through the body and -

Another, not entirely pleasant, thought struck him. „Those

different worlds we experienced,‟ he said, thoughtfully, I

think they tried to damage us in some way, diminish us. I

think that, in a sense, they were trying to eat us.‟

„Are you seriously suggesting,‟ said Leetha, dubiously, „that

worlds can be carnivorous?‟

„Sounds reasonable to me,‟ said Kiru. „I‟ve always said that

the world plays you like a lynx torturing a sandmole, and

when it‟s had enough of playing with you it kills and eats

you...‟

„Yes you have, haven‟t you?‟ said Leetha. „Repeatedly.‟

Kiru‟s basic personality was one of the darker of their family,

leavened by the fact that he sardonically played it up.

„That‟s something of what I felt,‟ li Shao said. „Call it what

you will, I felt that something was getting inside and eating

me - and then something else came along and saved me.‟

„What sort of something?‟ Kiru asked.

„I don‟t know. It was like a memory but in a... different

direction. A memory of the future? Something other than a

memory of the past, in any event.‟ Li Shao frowned. „I got the

impression that it was female, black as a shadow, very

strong. That‟s all.‟ He climbed to his feet. His body felt

enervated, but fell precisely the shape he thought it should

be. „So where are we, then?‟

„Look for yourself,‟ said Leetha.

In the way that one can spot a familiar face in an

amorphous crowd, li Shao‟s attention had thus far concerned

itself almost entirely with Kiru and Leetha. Now, for the first

time, he surveyed the... place in which they had found

themselves.

„Well it makes a nice change, I‟ll say that much,‟ he said.

23

PEELING BACK THE SKINS

The Schirron Dream powered on towards Earth, ploughing

through the wave fronts segueing through the possible

universes they presaged, past the orbits of Neptune, Uranus

and Saturn, skirling the orbit of Jupiter - which during a

transition had suddenly appeared directly in front of them -

and making easy headway through what was ordinarily the

Asteroid Belt, but, in the pocket Alternative in which they

found themselves at the time, was the orbit of a single,

unfragmented

planet

that,

they

learnt

from

the

communications coming from it, was apparently called

Hestia. In the normal course of events, the size of astral

bodies being almost infinitesimally small compared with the

spaces between them, it would have been highly unlikely that

their course should intersect so much as a single one. Here

and now, it was as if the damned things were following them

about.

As (hey drew closer to Earth, the pressure of the disruption

grew stronger, images and memories of ghost worlds invading

their heads so that it might be dangerously easy to become a

part of them, rather than simply experiencing the external

phenomena of their transitions. Universe-worlds where the

asteroid had missed the Earth in the Cretaceous period,

leading to a galaxy populated by evolved ammonite

cephalopods in mankind‟s stead. Several thousand variations

upon the theme of Nazis emerging victorious from the

Patriotic War, all of them, without exception, unutterably

banal. A world where Napoleonic forces were victorious,

resulting in a limited but remarkably enlightened form of

accountable government to the British Isles several centuries

early and, incidentally, seeing to it that every hat thereafter

was worn at a rotation of ninety degrees from otherwise. An

Earth where the Vikings consolidated their hold on beach-

heads such as Berwick and Dunkerk, eventually spreading to

become the dominant culture of a third of the globe.

The

Cool

Cheese

Millennium;

the

Perennial

Multimatriarchy of the Fifty Daughters of Selene; the

Kingdom of Eros... On the Schirron Dream’s bridge Benny felt

that if she was not to be subsumed by these world-visions, in

the same way as had the unprotected Roz, she had better let

her mind defend itself and focus on who she really was, even

if that meant yet another interminable bicker with Jason.

Sgloomi was off the bridge, readying the crew for what they

might find, and a back-and-forth with her ex-husband was

the only potential resource she currently had.

The problem was, now that she self-consciously knew

she was doing it, it became almost impossible. As she

looked inside herself and found the ephemera of irritation

sliding away, she realized, uneasily, that she was uncovering

areas of genuine pain - incidents and feelings she hadn‟t let

herself really think about for some time because they hurt so

much. She was left with a choice between letting herself give

in to personality fragmentation and risk losing herself

perhaps for good, or picking the scabs off old, deep wounds

and poking them, bringing things out into the light that, once

said, could not be unsaid. Neither choice seemed particularly

palatable.

„I‟ve been thinking of how we split up,‟ she said, at last, to

Jason. „I didn‟t deal with it very well. I said some things I

shouldn‟t have, and I at least owe you a proper explanation.‟

From his position at the helm, Jason turned to look at her.

There was a kind of sadness about him - not precisely that of

pain or anger, more of a sense of seriousness and

acceptance, a sense of comprehending the true extent of

some wound rather than the violent reaction to its infliction.

She realized that he had no doubt been doing the same kind

of inner searching as had she.

„Go on,‟ he said, the shortness seemingly more out of that

same, bleak seriousness than the curtness of animosity. „I‟m

listening.‟

„I couldn‟t forgive you,‟ Benny said. „Even though I knew

it had been a mistake, even though I knew that you weren‟t

some monster. I just kept seeing all those people dead. I just

had to get away.‟

Jason frowned. „I don‟t remember it that way at all.‟

„What?‟ For an instant Benny thought he was just going to

flatly deny everything - then the thought occurred that, what

with the current confusion concerning timelines and world-

views, it was just possible that he might in all honesty have

no clue. „Your failed attempt at time manipulation. The

people who should have lived but died - are you going to try

to tell me that none of it happened?‟

„I don‟t mean that,‟ Jason said. „I‟m not trying to weasel

out of it. I had the incredibly bad luck to get a second

chance, to do things over differently, and I‟ve been paying

for it ever since. I was talking about how you took your

love away from me when I needed it most. I know that‟s

selfish, but it‟s how I felt and it damn near broke me - did

break me, and it took a hell of a long time to put the pieces

back together.

„I‟m not saying I didn‟t deserve it. It was just that there

was a side of me that needed you to stay, whether I deserved

it or not. I remembered hearing on the news, back when I

was a kid, how the wife of some serial killer stuck by him,

because she loved him and there simply wasn‟t any choice -

I remember how my mother stayed with my father despite all

the shit he put her through.‟ He gestured helplessly with a

hand. „It‟s not about responsibility, or culpability or blame. I

needed you, in the same way I need my arms and legs, and

you walked out and left me a basket case.‟

He wasn‟t asking for forgiveness or understanding, Benny

realized: he was merely stating how things were. She tried to

think of some response that would not come across as

asininely castigatory or flippantly defensive. „I just couldn‟t,‟

she said at last.

„I know you couldn‟t,‟ said Jason. His mouth curled in an

empty grin. „In a funny way I‟m glad. If you‟d been able to

ruin your life by staying, I‟d have probably let you.‟ His

expression softened with a degree of human warmth - and if

it was a contrived patina, it was a patina that had been

carefully applied over years to make it functionally

indistinguishable from the real thing. „What the hell. Life‟s

just an arse-kicking party with wooden legs and whatever

you do you‟re wrong - and speaking of which...‟ A proximity

alarm was sounding. He shut it off and hauled on the lever

that cut the propulsion. „We‟re coming up on Earth. We have

better things to do.‟

In a large cabin that, he knew, had once been communally

occupied by the family cluster of li Shao, Leetha, Kiru and

whatever party or parties that might be appropriate at any

particular point in time, Chris was finding it slightly hard

going. For one thing, while knowing, intellectually, that

the crew of the Schirron Dream conducted their private

lives upon a varied but commonly polyamorous basis, his

essentially simple nature found certain items of the decor

rather distracting. He was torn between not wishing to make

insensitive and uncalled for assumptions concerning the

purposes of certain items of furniture, while entertaining the

sneaking notion that he damn well knew what they were for.

The major problem, however, was of course Roz, who sat

on the edge of the roomy mattress, grey-faced and shaking,

hugging herself as though desperately attempting to stop

herself from flying apart at the seams.

„Can‟t connect,‟ she chattered through her teeth. „I

can‟t...‟

She had been like this since collapsing on the bridge. The

sudden transitions between the quasi-universal Alternatives

brought by each wave front had hit her unprotected mind

hard, again and again and with increasing rapidity, and

seemed to have shaken something loose inside her.

„I went inside the Temple,‟ she was saying. „My feet were

bleeding in my clogs and I... when General Bayberry called

me into his office I was expecting something big, but not

as big as... the Stilton mines were founded when the

biogeneticists realized that... die Cybermenschen und die

Klumpenschaumendhass!. .. and then the foul evil of Deed‟s

minion turned the Earth black with its -‟ Abruptly, she began

to slap at herself, smacking her open palms into her face

with a force that rocked her head. „Can‟t connect and can‟t

remember, like I‟m ill or mad or -‟

„Roz,‟ Chris snapped, hoping profoundly that his tone

would get through to her no matter which name she

currently believed to be her own. „Try to fix it in your mind.

You‟re suffering from something like aphasia or the opposite

of senility. Your long-term memories are shifting, but your „

short-term memory‟s still OK. You can remember what

you‟ve done in the recent past, what you‟re doing now - try to

focus on that.’

Roz stopped slapping herself.

„My mind‟s affected and the fear and confusion of it are i

making me act strange,‟ she said, in a calm and reasonable-

seeming voice that belied the absolute and white-hot force of

control needed to produce it. „I have to be strong. I have

to... I have friends who are in danger and I must help

them.‟

„That‟s good, Roz.‟ Chris rested a hand against her cheek

and was rewarded by a smile at this simple comfort that

seemed independent of memory and identity. His own mind

shied away from letting himself think about how he felt

about it. He resolved that he would get her through this, even

if it meant that he would have to be near her, constantly

supporting and reinforcing her, every second.

„...affected and the fear and confusion of it are making

me act strange,‟ Roz was repeating. She was interrupted by a

ringing from the shipwide Tannoy system, which was in turn

accentuated by the lessening of the ubiquitously heard roar

and thrum of the Schirron Dream’s engines.

* * *

„My Goddess,‟ Benny breathed. It occurred to her that she

had been breathing „my Goddess‟ rather a lot of late - but

this was no doubt the perfectly natural result of the number

of surprises she‟d had to assimilate. Every time, just when

she thought she‟d got a handle on things, some new surprise

was sprung. She hadn‟t given a lot of thought to how

the Earth might look, even filtered through the imaging of

the Schirron Dream itself - whatever she might have half

imagined, though, it had been nothing like this.

It was as if the planet Earth were a vast and rotting onion,

shown in inexpertly drafted, exploded-diagram form. Layers

linked away and spun lazily about themselves in complex

semiorbital patterns. The facts of distance and position

meant that none but the grossest geological features should

be visible - but the facts of distance and position seemed for

the moment to have been knocked into a cocked ontological

hat. It was possible to see — or to imagine one saw -

buildings, forest vegetation, even individual people.

The shattered conglomerate of matter seemed held together

only by thin energy tendrils of light, which pulsed in a

manner reminiscent of blood vessels - were they, in some

sense, the very veins and arteries of some living Gaia? hi any

event, the pulsing seemed febrile, the fluttery beat of a

damaged and strain-exhausted heart of the world. One of the

ancient Greeks - Benny thought it might have been Aristotle,

but whether through the effects of the disruption or a natural

lapse in memory, she wasn‟t quite sure - had said that all

things that moved had limbs and that the Earth, having

none, simply couldn‟t move. Aristotle (or whoever it was) had

been quite clearly wrong on both counts - the Earth was now

moving in no uncertain terms, and she had the nasty feeling

that it was currently on its last legs.

The communications console squealed and jabbered with

the voices of Alternatives in their thousands, not a one

distinguishable amid the cacophony. Benny shut it off. „All

right,‟ she said. „Now that we‟re actually here, what are we

going to do? How are we going to find Nathan, Leetha and

Kin in this lot - and for that matter, what in the name of

every hell are we going to do if we find them?‟

Jason shrugged. „We‟ve gone this far by trusting the

Dream and instinct, such as it is. I say we just let her have

her head - and if the worse comes to the worst we‟ll try to

improvise.‟ He grinned, suddenly, a genuine and generally

untrustworthy humanity breaking through his recent mood.

„What the hell! We‟ll make it all up as we go along.‟

24

LIGHT COME DOWN (A MEETING

OF MINDS)

Fragments of the world spun lazily through the variegated

sky, seemingly, at one and the same time, wedge-shaped

lumps of fractured rock and complete, microcosmic worlds

in their own right, like a hologrammatic slide (they had

learnt of such things, the majority of them explained by one

Bernice Summerfield) after it was shattered - each fragment

containing a distorted whole. Was this the actual fact of

things,

now,

or

some

shared

and

hallucinatory

representation of something even more unknowable, cooked

up by the mind? For that matter, Nathan li Shao wondered,

had their transitions into other worlds been a matter of

stepping from one to the other, or a question of falling off the

edges? The lack of resultant, overt symptoms like broken

bones, a sense of falling and the attendant lack of sense of

having the body plastered over the landscape like strawberry

preserve tended to argue against the notion, but how could

one ultimately tell?

At least, for its own part, the ground here seemed firm

enough: rock crags through which wound strange, fleshy

vegetation, creepers that seemed oddly tubular, from which

little sucker-like leaves protruded, but of which there seemed

no point at which they ended or began. Their roots and tips,

if they existed at all, were somewhere else and masked by

promontories of rock.

Gingerly, as if it might twitch itself from his grasp, Kiru

ran a hand along a creeper. „There‟s a pulse. It doesn‟t quite

feel like a vegetable, and it‟s not quite meat.‟

„Well, it‟s not as if we‟re going to eat it,‟ Leetha said. „I say

we leave whatever it is well alone and hope it returns the

courtesy.‟

The mention of eating reminded li Shao that he hadn‟t

done so since the sandwich he‟d had back in the world where

he‟d been a freelance investigator of some kind. He couldn‟t

quite remember what kind of sandwich it had been, but he

was almost certain it had been a sandwich. The subsequent

confusion of transitions had driven thoughts of hunger from

his mind, but now his stomach recalled them by rather

pointedly growling.

„At least the cruder functions of our bodies seem to

have remained unaffected,‟ Leetha said. „I seem to recollect

remarking upon that very fact last night, when your bottom

went to sleep.‟

„I, for one,‟ said Kiru, „certainly heard it snoring a number

of times.‟

Li Shao essayed a little bow and flourish to the two of

them. „I beg your very pardon.‟

„Just attempt to contain yourself in future,‟ said Leetha.

„Lest the bottom suddenly fall out of your world.‟

None of this meant anything at all; it was simply the

running, almost purely thoughtless and reflexive dialogue

kept up by those who shared familiarity, reinforcing who

they were by verbally brushing up against each other. During

the course of it, by unspoken common consent, they had set

off in a certain direction, almost certainly at random since

they had no idea where they were in any effective sense, and

notable only in that all three had picked it at the same time.

It was not precisely a path they followed: they merely wound

their way through the rocky landscape together, keeping eyes

and ears open for anything that might prove useful.

Presently, Kiru said, „Do you hear something? There‟s

something up ahead.‟

They halted their progress and listened. From nearby came

a kind of abstracted jabber, as if the speaker were urgently

using the air as a palimpsest, pressing his thoughts into it

before they evaporated from his head.

„And in the Calibrian part of Italy, I am led to believe, the

women saved a few drops of the fluid in a small bottle which

they carried wherever they went. It was believed that when

such drops were secretly administered to the man of their

choice the man would be bound to them for ever. Yes, I‟m

sure that is correct. The Elixir Rebeus, as I live and breathe!‟

There followed a kind of happy gurgle; one could imagine

the speaker doing a little dance with glee at his (the voice was

high but undoubtedly male) own extreme cleverness. „Very

good, very good,‟ it said at last. „We shall give ourselves a

little star...‟

Leetha looked at Kiru and li Shao. „You know, it may be

not too late to go back the way we came.‟

Li Shao shook his head. „We might learn something

useful.‟

Leetha snorted. „I somehow doubt that very much.‟

They made their way around an outcrop. The source of the

voice might, at one point, have been human, but it was as if

he had in some manner devolved. He crawled on his belly,

which had swollen, his limbs atrophied and his features

smeared together under a taut and glistening skin so that he

looked in part like a raw butcher‟s sausage and partly like

a skin-covered slug. Several of the fleshy creeper things

sprouted from him and trailed off, in a manner that left some

doubt as to whether they were protuberances of his own

anatomy or were some other parasitic or symbiotic life form

that either fed him or fed from him. The distorted face leered

up at them, exuding an air of desperate and completely

joyless cheer.

„Visitors!‟ it burbled - somehow managing to do so even

though the word consisted almost entirely of sibilants.

„Come to avail themselves, no doubt, of the facilities! How

very nice. How very nice indeed...‟

Li Shao fought down the sudden urge to stomp the foul

thing flat. „We just want information, Where is this place?‟

„Now that,‟ the thing said, with a rather insufferable sense

of satisfaction, „is rather the point, don‟t you think? A quite

solipsistic point, at that. I think - and I could, I must confess,

be wrong - that this is inside my head. I made this all up and

I made you up to go along with it. Am I a king dreaming I‟m

a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I‟m a king? A rather

interesting dichotomy, don‟t you think?‟

For himself, li Shao thought that, king or butterfly or not,

this creature was certainly a blasted idiot. He was about to

say as much, but it (it was becoming increasingly difficult to

think of it as a he) continued, sinking by degrees back into

its own internal world: „I was a man of substance. I‟m sure I

was a man of substance. Jackie Pelt, my name was. I honed

my skills and I applied them. They called me Mr Pelt. I was

about, I do believe, my magnum opus.

„It was vital that she remained immobile, you see,

absolutely still. Saline drips and bloodpacks. I inserted a

catheter and I fed her through a needle. I kept her alive for

months. It was quite difficult. Slaying skin and muscle and

glucaea a single tiny shred at a time. A fragile tangle of veins

and arteries and lymph ducts. Lymph and bile and cephalic

fluid stored in individually labelled, refrigerated vials... and

then... and then...‟ The dreamy expression and cadences

vanished, to be replaced by a shrieking, spittle-flecked rage.

„He brought me here! Simon Deed! He got out of my head

and put me inside it and took me here and changed me!‟

Leetha, who had been following the creature‟s ramblings

with a kind of horrified fascination, as though to a degree

mesmerized, now started, as though stung by a small

galvanic shock. „Simon Deed?‟

„Simon Deed,‟ echoed Kiru, equally startled. He became

thoughtful. „Everywhere we‟ve been, every... alternative

we‟ve found ourselves inside, that name keeps cropping up.

He always seems to be pulling the strings.‟

„This Simon Deed,‟ li Shao growled at the thing that had

once, apparently, been called Jackie Pelt. „Who is he? Where

is he to be found?‟

„Oh, you‟ll find out,‟ said the creature, slyly. „Simon‟s in

the Citadel, in the centre of it all. Inside and outside and

nowhere at all, and believe you me, you‟ll find him.‟

And then, without warning, the creature exploded,

showering the three of them with loose and stringy matter

and blood.

„I don‟t want to talk about it,‟ Leetha muttered angrily, trying

once again to brush the semisolidified gunk from her but,

once again, merely succeeding in redistributing it somewhat.

„We should find some water, somewhere,‟ Kiru said. „Or at

least something we can use to scrape it off.‟

„I said I don‟t want to talk about it!‟

By slow and almost imperceptible degrees, the landscape

had shifted around them as they made their way through it,

cairns and tool-fashioned stone supplanting the natural rock,

structures and statuary becoming more and more

sophisticated in construction. If they were buildings, then

they were buddings only in the most abstract sense - built to

leave an impression of such things rather than for their

utilitarian purpose; it was impossible to imagine anything

actually living in them. They passed porticoes and gables and

buttresses and cupolas and exposed rafters and joists and

joints and beams and statuary and cornices and lintels and

fixtures and mantles - all there as though placed by

someone, or something, that knew they had to be there, but

had forgotten precisely why.

All the same, there were signs of life. The fleshy creepers

that had presaged the semihuman creature they had met,

this „Jackie Pelt‟, grew in abundance. In the darkness of

doorways, things stirred. There were muffled, subdued

sounds, almost on the edge of hearing but somehow

overwhelming in a way that belied their volume, as though

things in their thousands were murmuring to themselves,

whimpering in some particularly timid delirium.

„I don‟t like this,‟ li Shao said. „I can feel a pressure

building. Something‟s coming, and I think it‟s something big.‟

As if on cue, there came a detonative crack that seemed to

fill the world from end to end. The concussion of it knocked

them off their feet and sent them sprawling into the fine dust

that covered the floor and in which their feet had sunk up to

the ankles. Any potential fall-breaking properties of this dust,

however, were obviated by the fact that the ground it covered

seemed to be solid granite. In the structures that seemed

both more and less than buildings, things skittered and

shrieked, what sounded like claws scrabbling and clicking

against stone.

„What‟s happening now?‟ Leetha snapped, torn halfway

between shock and pique. „Some new cataclysm? Some

manifestation? The appearance of this Simon Deed we hear

so much about?‟

„I don‟t think so,‟ li Shao said, hauling himself around to

gaze up into the fragment-strewn sky, from which a bright

shape was now spiralling. „I do believe that somebody up

there likes us.‟

25

GROUNDING OUT

The Schirron Dream settled on its landing struts which,

originating as they did from a culture that placed a value

upon symbol and ornamentation, were of the aspect of the

talons of some great bird. The talons were articulated so that

they seemed to grip the stone of the blocky structures on

which the ship landed, like a parrot gaining purchase on a

perch.

A hatch on the belly of the ship opened and a rope

ladder unrolled, closely followed by, and climbing down it, a

figure in a workmanlike jumpsuit and heavy polymerized

windcheater. It was notable, from its motions, that the figure

fought against the blustering wind of some storm - and this

was slightly odd, for the air here was perfectly still.

Li Shao, Leetha and Kiru ran for the dangling end of

the ladder, recognizing Benny Summerfield long before she

reached the bottom of it and meeting her as she did. Up close

she seemed younger than li Shao remembered - or, at least,

not so old as she should be, given the length of time he

recalled since their last meeting. There was no particular

shock about that, of course - the crew of the Schirron Dream

and Professor Bernice Summerfield existed, to a large extent,

independently of each other in the common flow of time. The

confusion would only really set in if either met the other

before they‟d first actually met, and li Shao was sure for his

part he‟d recall something like that.

Additionally, he saw, there was a slight hardening about

the eyes, some inner sense of past pain that had not yet been

completely expunged - though whether it was something

specific, or merely the cumulative pain dial simply comes

from being alive, it was impossible to say. The eyes were

protected by tinted goggles, and her short hair whipped and

thrashed in the nonexistent wind.

„Benny!‟ li Shao exclaimed. „It would be a tale extremely

and not to mention dreadfully overlong in the telling to say

how pleased we are to see you.‟

„Yes, well,‟ said Benny. „What I‟m really after is all the

silverware you ripped off from my bloody wedding. Let‟s get

you out of here and then we‟ II work out what to do with all of

this,’ she continued brusquely, waving with a hand at one of

the serenely floating world-fragments in the sky. Her other

gauntleted hand gripped a rung of the ladder as if there was

no tomorrow; a notion that, given the events thus far, was

not entirely undebatable.

„Why all the hurry?‟ li Shao asked. „I mean, I thank you

for coming here to rescue us, but for the moment we don‟t

seem to be in immediate danger. You‟re acting as though

everything‟s coming down around our ears.‟

Benny stared at him, aghast. „Do you mean to tell me that

you can‟t feel all of -‟ She stopped and peered around at

them more closely. „Do you know, I really think you can‟t.

You look like you‟ve been 3D-matted on to a holostill...

Never mind,‟ she continued as they returned her gaze

blankly, having completely missed the reference. „Just take it

as read that for some of us this is feeling like an earthquake

on an octopus ride, so can we please just hurry up?‟

„Nathan,‟ Leetha said, suddenly, in a small and worried

voice. She was staring at something directly behind him. „I

think we really might like to take her advice

„This is getting right on my wick,‟ Jason chattered through

his teeth. „I only hope the Dream can hold herself together.‟

„Is no worries,‟ Sgloomi said, with the classic, firm and

fragile confidence of somebody desperately trying to convince

hirself. ‘Schirron Dream is big-strong matriarchal-type thing.

Is merely equipoising potentialities of reality.‟

„What?‟

„The ship‟s discharging potentials,‟ explained Chris, who

had arrived on the bridge with a dazed and vaguely wooden-

looking Roz in tow. „It‟s the same kind of thing as when

aircraft build up a static electrical charge, or time craft build

up a temporal charge - only this one‟s operating on an

entirely different direction on the space/time/gravity axis. It‟s

energy just like everything else, but it‟s in a form as different

us kinetic and thermal. I don‟t think there‟s any real way we

can conceive the form it takes.‟

„Which means,‟ said Jason gloomily, „that there‟s no way

we can compensate for it.‟ He recalled a number of craft, at

least two of which he had actually seen, which had

spontaneously exploded owing to faulty compensation of even

something as simple as static electricity. „We‟re gonna have

about time for a swift chorus of “Jesus wants me for a

Sunbeam” before baby go boom.‟

„Is hokey-dokey,‟ Sgloomi Po reiterated, shooting out a

tentacle to frantically hammer on a console until a display

stopped flashing alarmingly. Whether it was because the

cause of alarm had gone away, or that the hammering had

simply broken it, was difficult to say. ‘Schirron Dream is

strong!‟

On the main screen, from a high angle, the figure of Benny

clambered down the ladder. Below, three figures had

gathered to meet her. Jason had instantly, subliminally

pegged them as the three they had come to rescue, but at

this distance he was having second, third and any number of

other thoughts, which tended to make the initial flash of

recognition seem less sure.

„Can we zoom in on them or something?‟ he said.

Sgloomi fiddled with a control and the image expanded, in

a slightly flowing manner that suggested that whatever was

viewing this was moving closer for a better look, rather than

mechanically zooming in. Some kind of free-floating „eye‟

arrangement? Or did the Schirron Dream have actual eyes on

stalks, in some way? He made a mental note to ask at some

point.

Closer, he could see Benny jerking under the energies of

the discharge, her hair and clothing rippling and whipping as

though caught by the wind. Despite everything, he felt a pang

of shame for himself and terror for her at having let her do

this. This was not in any sense that it might or might not be

a man’s job, more in a kind of reverse of the sense in which,

as he frequently averred, he didn‟t care who did the cooking

and the washing and the bringing up of screaming bloody

kids, just so long as it wasn‟t him. But as the pilot and

temporary body-double for the captain, it was his duty to

stay at the helm, ready to get them the hell out of here the

moment li Shao, Leetha and Kiru were back on board.

Besides, there was the small matter of the short but

extremely vehement argument, in which one Professor

Bernice Summerfield had vouchsafed to one Mr Jason Kane,

that if Mr Jason bleeding Kane thought he was going to have

all the bloody fun while she sat on her bloody (but in actual

fact quite lovely and perfectly formed) arse then Jason bloody

Kane had another bloody think bloody coming. And,

furthermore, if said Jason bloody Kane had anything further

to say upon the subject, she was going to rip his bloody head

off and attempt to replace it by inserting it into the

antipodean hole.

Now, Benny was on the ground, having failed to be

instantly vaporized on contact with it, as Jason for one had

secretly and seriously worried she might. With one hand held

grimly on to the ladder, she was talking with the three, who

were now obviously those they had come here for. The first

flash of instant recognition had proved ultimately correct.

„What‟s taking them so long?‟ Jason asked the world in

general. „If I was them, I‟d be pigging my way up here like a

rat up a -‟

„There‟s something happening.‟ Chris was watching another

display and had little time for the metaphorical blending of

the porcine and the rodential.

„Leetha seems to be trying to - Hang on, something‟s

startled them and -‟

„There‟s something moving,‟ Chris said worriedly. „There‟s

something moving in the buildings. Oh my...‟

From out of the stone structures they came: malformed

lumps of human flesh, trailing tendrils of some alien flesh.

Some were merely atrophied, like furless, glistening seals.

Some were wraithlike, trailing their skins like loose and

ragged cloaks. Some were corpulent and bloated, like

epidermal capsules filled with fermenting pus, the bones of

their limbs piercing through the outer layer and jutting,

lopped off at the elbows and knees.

Some seemed misshapen on the level of anatomical

scale - a head, a hand, a foot, a progenitive member swollen

to enormous size, from which the withered remainder of the

body dangled. Some lacked skin entirely, their surface raw,

red muscle tissue over which crawled traceries of veins. Some

seemed nothing more than a collection of footballs, clustered

colonies of crusted, hairy cancers. Some seemed perfectly

ordinary, sound of wind and limb and strolling through their

atrociously distorted brethren without a care in the world -

save that a dead expression on their faces, a lack of

something in their eyes, spoke of an inner, yawning

emptiness that was somehow more disturbing than the

grosser, more corporeal horrors through which they walked.

They came forth in their hundreds, in their thousands, a

swelling wave of degenerated humanity - and as they did

so, they seemed to flow together, fuse together, each one

melding with another, and another, and another until they

formed a massive heap of corruption. The heap undulated.

Its surface roiled. The mass heaved, hoisting itself on two

great legs. Arms sprouted, to dangle apelike. An

approximation of a head evolved, split open, opened up a

cavernous mouth and eyes. From all three orifices burst a

blazing, pure-white light, its searchlight beams so bright as

to seem almost solid.

The monstrous creature stood, towering over the now

diminutive bulk of the Schirron Dream and, pursuant to this,

entirely over the four far more diminutive figures huddling in

its shadow.

„It‟s him!‟

Jason, having been lost in the transformations occurring

on the main screen of the bridge, now turned in alarm at the

frantic voice behind him. „What the... ?‟

The past-tense version of Roz, who had remained

inconspicuous thus far on her return to the bridge, seemingly

lost inside her own internal world and muttering

determinedly but inaudibly to herself, was now shaking

violently, working her mouth and staring at the vision on the

screen as if her eyes might burst.

„It‟s him!‟ she blurted. „It‟s Simon Deed! It‟s him!‟

„I suppose,‟ Benny said, looking up at the monstrous

apparition, „it‟d be too much to ask for me to be the only one

who‟s actually seeing this.‟

Off to one side of her, Leetha was snarling up at the thing,

reverting to a feral, atavistic, mindless impulse to fight tooth

and claw to survive. In the same manner, though on a

basically more human level, on account of his basically being

one, li Shao had hauled his sword from his back, activated it

so that it roared like a chain saw, and matched its roaring

incoherently in a berserker rage. Thus it was Kiru, in his

cooler, more sardonic way, who said, „I think it might be too

much to ask, Benny, though by all unholy Gods I wish it

wasn‟t.‟

The creature gazed down with its searchlight eyes, and

then it spoke. There was no question that it was its voice,

even though the words seemed to fill the entire world,

locking into place like monolithic blocks of granite;

resounding deep inside the head without having entered

through the atrium of the ears:

THE OLD GODS ARE DEAD. I HAVE KILLED THEM. I AM

YOUR GOD AND I AM THE GOD THAT IS TO COME. I DID

NOT CREATE YOUR WORLD, BUT I CONTROL YOUR

WORLD, AND CONTROL IT UTTERLY. TO THE GREATER

GLORY. I GUIDE THE STARS IN THEIR COURSUS AND THE

STONES THAT SPIN AROUND THEM. I CONTROL THE

POSITION OF EACH MOLECULE, THE VERY LAWS OF

THEIR CONTRIVANCE. NONE LIVE OK DIE BUT A T MY

COMMAND. THE WORLD AND ALL THE KINGDOMS

THEREOF EXIST UPON MY SUFFERANCE, AND THEIR

DISPOSAL IS A MATTER FOR MYSELF AND SELF ALONE.

„Is it just me,‟ Benny said surreptitiously, out of the side

of her mouth to Kiru, „or is this getting needlessly self-

referential and messianic?‟

SAVE THE WRETCHES THAT NOW COWER BEFORE THE

ANIMUS OF MY OMNIPOTENT MIGHT. THOSE WHO

DISOBEY, THOSE WHO ARE NOT CAPABLE OF THE

UNDERSTANDING POSSESSED BY E‟EN THE MOST

LOWEST OF THE LOW. IN THEIR PRIDE THEY HAVE

SOUGHT TO FIGHT AGAINST MY POWER, YEA, EVEN IN

THE VERY FACE OF MINE OWN DOMAIN. THEY ARE

ABOMINATION IN MY REALM AND IN MY SIGHT.

„Goes on a bit, doesn‟t he?‟ said Jason on the bridge of the

Schirron Dream.

„It‟s him,‟ said Roz, firmly. „It‟s Simon Deed. It‟s him.‟

„Yes, well, that‟s what you would say.‟

„It seems to be some kind of nexus,‟ Chris put in, tapping

frantically on a console keyboard that appeared to have been

put together from an old Underwood typewriter. „Some kind

of fulcrum for the energy release of the disruption

„Is big silly stranger to talking properly type-thing,‟ said

Sgloomi Po. „Is certainly is make not much-type lovely

feeling of grammatical and contextual sense in all big shouty

thing…‟

THEIR

IMPRECATION

CANNOT

BE

ALLOWED

TO

CONTINUE. THEY CANNOT CONTINUE TO EXIST IN MY

UNFATHOMED SIGHT. THEY CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO

LIVE AND MUST, PERFORCE, BE ASSIGNED NO MORE

THAN MERE OBLIVION.

* * *

The searchlight beams from the giant‟s eyes struck the

Schirron Dream arid obliterated it. It shattered apart,

dissolving in a manner strangely reminiscent of some

effervescent tablet dissolving in a glass of water. The force of

its destruction was deceptively gentle - it might not have laid

waste to miles around and left a smoking crater in the

ground, but the force of it was enough to blow the flesh from

the impact-fractured bones of li Shao, Leetha, Kiru and

Benny, and superheat the moisture in their lungs to explode

them even before they could draw the air to scream.

26

A BREAK FROM UNREALITY

The butterfly shutters interlaced themselves home with the

small charging-cap concussions of electromagnetic bolts.

The locking mechanisms were largely automatic, keyed to

his precise DNA pattern and activated by vector analysis so

that the fact of his, and only his, approach, as a living

entity, would open the shutters again. For all this, he turned

and punched a numerical code into the keypad sunk into

the smooth wall of the bunker. This additional level of

security was so minuscule as to be worthless to the point of

ridiculousness, but he felt better about it all the same, in

some unacknowledged part of the back of his mind. It made

him feel better, in the same way as does double-checking the

door that one knows one has locked, and there was an end to

it. Bane punched in the sequence three times, just to be sure

he‟d got it right, then turned his back upon the bunker and

went out into his geodesic gardens.

He spent an idle few minutes by the fish pond, watching

the sedate interplay of the carp, the way they seemed to glide

precisely where they wanted to go, occasionally breaking the

surface with their mouths to ingest fly larvae, yet slide by

and orbit each other without the slightest hint of a possible

collision. It had to be by some mechanistic means; the

process held none of the indecision of conscious thought

and self-awareness, which the brains of carp were far too

rudimentary to achieve in any case.

Bane paused by the rockery, as he liked to call it, giving a

more homely name to what was actually an extensive Zen

garden. The whorls and ridges of its sand floor were sculpted

with a precision that no human could ever achieve, being

tended by sub-nanonetic (or in the true sense being super-

nanonetic, being larger than the complex-molecule machines

that were actual nanites) machines that did the work when

there was nobody there to see. The positioning of the fifteen

rocks was a precise copy of the Kyoto Ryoan-ji garden, but

for all that it was not a true work of the Kare-sansui art. The

effect was spoilt by the fact that Bane had ordered the rocks

themselves to be colonized by varieties of adapted lichen in

several pastel shades, for no other reason than he wanted it

that way.

An antique, mechanical seventeen-jewel hunter chimed in

the fob pocket of the waistcoat of the archaic three-piece suit

that Bane commonly wore. He didn‟t need to take it out. It

called him to an appointment he had made with himself less

than ten minutes before. Without hurrying - by his very

nature he was a man who made appointments rather than

kept them - Bane strolled through his arboretum, which was

of the nature of a maze, picking the correct route with an

absolute certainty, until at length he came to an airlock in

the side of the geodesic bubble that, in turn, itself enclosed

the sanctum of his gardens and his bunker.

This was, in fact, the farthest he had travelled physically in

several years. He knew, inside himself, that through the

airlock he would still find himself in the effective centre of

the several hundred hectares of land that he owned (not

counting the several thousand hectares of planet Earth that

he owned elsewhere), but the thought of crossing this portal,

for the first time in years, filled him with a nameless dread

and made him feel ill.

He would have to do it, however. It was in a way similar to

checking and rechecking the lock on the door. The plans that

Bane had laid so many years before, the pursuance of which

had cost him more than half of his exorbitantly prolonged

life, were coming to fruition, and he could not bear not to be

in a position to supervise their penultimate stages.

On the other side of the airlock was an area of levelled

ground. In the middle distance were the manufactories that

contributed in part to Bane‟s enormous wealth, but when he

had secluded himself in his bunker, he had ordered this ring

of demolition, the equipoisal point between as far as he could

bear to go and the world outside.

Bane crossed the waste ground, a stooped, thin old man in

ancient clothing, a monomolecular covering wrapped and

sealed about that with its own integral oxygen supply,

balancing his frail form on a cane that would be burnt rather

than return to his geodesic enclave.

Around him towered the huge forms of the sensor

installations, capable of pinpointing the morphic signal of a

specific individual over trans-light speeds and up to a galaxy

away. They bloomed like massive steel and polyceramic

buttercups. Though they were static by way of their

surpassing delicacy of construction, there were additional

installations slaved to them, situated at strategic points all

over the globe, so that the loci of their detection intersected.

What they couldn‟t cover of known space wasn‟t worth

talking about, and certainly not, for the purposes of Bane,

worth covering.

Further out were the forms of what appeared to be multi-

directional weapons arrays, based upon missile launchers

such as might be found among the ground-to-air defences of

any sufficiently developed planet. In place of warheads they

carried what appeared to be cannon but were in fact pulse-

pump transmitters, capable of sending tight-beam tachyonic

emissions to any point in the galaxy, in much the same way

as the sensor installations received.

The transmitters were currently aimed at something rather

less than a galaxy away. Their „muzzles‟ pointed at a raised

platform on which - supported by talon-like shock absorbers

that gave it the aspect of some giant raptor - sat a ship. The

ship was of a construction that might not be alien, but that

had patently not been constructed by the humans of Earth,

or on any of the known colonies. It was built from smooth

ceramics and gold and what appeared to be burnished

bronze. In shape it was something like the long-extinct

manta ray and appeared to be a thing complete in itself, like

a living organism. The brass-rimmed portholes and the

propulsion nacelles seemed to hark back to some

archetypical idea of a spacegoing craft, as opposed to being

something that was consciously designed. All in all. Bane

thought, it would make a marvellous ornament to his

gardens, after he had caused it to be moved inside the dome.

That was, however, a matter for later - and might not prove

to be necessary after all, once his power and his plans were,

in turn, absolute and complete.

For the moment, the important matter was that of excising

and decanting the contents from the ship. Medical

technicians in membranous polysilicate coverings similar to

Bane‟s own (for the express purpose of limiting their contact

with Bane himself, rather than out of any sense of staying

sterile for the living things that they manhandled) were

hauling the apparently lifeless forms of the Living Material

from the ship. For all its ultimate coordination, the initial

impression was one of confusion and chaos — and Bane

momentarily reeled with something akin to alarm. If being

this far from the safety of his bunker made Bane feel ill, the

fact of actual people here made him sick to his stomach (he

did not for a moment count the Living Material being

salvaged from the ship as „people‟). He would have preferred

to engage the services of automata, but automata did not

have the particular, specific skills required for this kind of

work. In these penultimate stages, in dealing with the Living

Material, something approaching human sympathy was

required.

The Living Material was being taken to prefabricated

sterilization and preparation facilities off to one side, where

they were inoculated against bacterial and viral infection,

scrubbed completely free of germs and stockpiled in stasis

crates reminiscent of coffins. Bane saw that four of these

coffins were already occupied: the three subjects that had

been utilized as bait and one other. He hobbled over to the

decontamination facilities to observe the process.

A series of human, humanoid and alien forms were now

arriving. Each was unconscious, its features completely

relaxed so far as, by its species, could be recognized, each

showing no higher mental activity - a situation that was

currently maintained by the damper units affixed to their

skulls or other applicable areas of anatomy. A creature, for

example, that seemed nothing more in repose than a grey

obloid sported a netlike tracery of wires, connecting damper

electrodes over its entire surface.

„Everything seems to be proceeding according to schedules,‟

Bane mused. It was not his habit, whether communicating

remotely with those who actually ran his business concerns

on a day-to-day basis, or here and now in person, to address

others directly. He simply made his thoughts and wishes

known, and those concerned jumped to obey as a matter of

course. „I trust that there have been no unforeseen obstacles.‟

„Seratonin and neuropeptide levels and their equivalent are

optimal across the board,‟ said a technician whose ID tag

proclaimed him to be the Chief of Operations, Project

Ouranos. „Fifty-four warm bodies. Before being put into

stasis almost all displayed the precise fugue state as per

specifications.‟

„Almost all,‟ mused Bane. „I believe I would like some

clarification of that statement.‟

„Fifteen anomalies, primarily due to nonhuman physiology,

all compensated for with minor adaption of the neurocortical

processes, save two.‟ The Chief Technician indicated the

obloid alien creature. „This subject is of a physiology too

dissimilar to Horn sap for the, uh, stimulation to produce the

desired results. The other is slightly more strange.‟

„I would like to hear about this latter subject,‟ mused Bane.

„A woman. Human. The stimulation produced erratic and

unpredictable results. Her entropic profile is disrupted out-

side of usable parameters - it seems she‟s been occluded

from her indigenous space-time point quite recently, in the

last few days, and her tachyonic distortion factors are off the

scale. She‟s useless for our purposes.‟

Bane pondered for a moment whether he should have these

useless anomalies in the material simply... deleted. He

decided against it, for he was a merciful man. Besides, the

operatives on this particular stage of the Project were under

the impression that the subjects would not be physically

harmed. To have that done here and now might cause

inconvenient talk. Within Bane‟s bunker beyond the walls of

the dome there were facilities enough to take care of such

imperfections, conveniently and out of sight of a world that,

for the moment at least, must at least be held in

countenance.

„I wish to have the anomalies clearly marked, and taken to

the bulk-access point with the rest,‟ he said, as though

making a small mental note to himself.

The technician nodded. Bane turned away. He hobbled

back towards the dome, an old, sick man whose motions

spoke not just of infirmity, but of some mortal sickness so

advanced that he should not even be alive, far less upright. It

was the motion of a body kept functioning only by the sheer

force of will.

In himself, Bane was quite unaware of his debilitation. He

dismissed it from consideration. The final stages of the

Project that might require human intervention other than his

own were all but completed. Once the Living Material (again,

in his mind, they were not classed as anything more than

„Living Material‟) was delivered to the access point, the

resources of the bunker were quite sufficient to complete the

processes that had begun outside.

The processes that would culminate in the Conversion, and

the birth, death and Dominion of worlds.

STRIKEOUT

THE NEXUS OF ALL

POSSIBLE EVENTS

1

Jason in the Real World:

The fox looked at him, and Jason knew that it had seen him,

but did not class him as any kind of threat. There was no

sense of friendliness or trust in the regard, merely a

recognition that the distance between them was too great for

anything but a thrown stone that would glance harmlessly

off. The fox turned on its tail and flow-trotted back into the

smallish plot of conserved, sparse woodland that was fenced

off rather more purposefully than the land around.

Maintained barbed wire and a scrapwood sign nailed wonkily

to a tree: PRIVATE scrawled in tar in an inept fashion so that

the already cramped E ran off the side.

Talk had it - especially among all the nice middle-class

commuter people who lived on the Estate, those who knew

about it — that, this particular little bit of land was fenced off

to protect the wild daffodils that grew there in the spring, in

the same way as the area of the village green around the old

Tudor-brick building that had once housed a water pump

was protected, for the sake of some rare plant the name of

which Jason had never bothered to find out. For himself,

Jason suspected that it was protected for the same reason as

certain fields around here, just in this area, still had

hedgerow around the edges rather than ditches and wire -

barbed and, in the last year, razor. The little sealed-off plot

was to keep a working population of foxes for what he

automatically thought of, not having any real feeling about it

either way, as the Chinless Twats of the Bastard Hunt.

Jason watched the point where the fox had gone through

the wire, its tail whipping out of sight into the edge-piled

undergrowth with a casual ‘up yours’ flourish, and settled

back into his own Protected Environment.

The pillbox was one of those squat, octagonal, concrete

structures thrown up in the southeast of England at the start

of World War Two, during the early, ‘phony’ stages when, it

seemed, the greatest danger lay in terrestrial invasion rather

than simply bombing the hell out of the country till the losses

and demoralization forced it to capitulate. Their intention,

like the massive concrete cubes strewn across beaches like

Southwold and Yarmouth, had been to slow any cross-

country advance. After the war they had proved by their very

nature too hard to be simply demolished - they occupied no

vital land and so they had been simply left. Strangely, when

Jason had first seen an example of them, from the road in a

car driving into Suffolk for the first time and at about the age

of five, his first thought was of the bunkers used by the Dirty

Japs in war comics.

This pillbox was further out of the way than most, being

accessible only via the main farm-factory tractor track,

across a couple of cow pastures in the grounds of Shelford

Hall, across a dried-up weir and up an overgrown lane that

would eventually lead into the Backton quarry. (At the age

when Jason and a few playmates had found it, roads were

something that happened to adults. In adult terms it was a

few hundred yards from a gate on the side of the Backton

Road.) It was of a cavernous doughnut-like construction,

from the central hole of which rose a concrete pillar, inset

with a brass fixture on which had once been mounted a

machine gun. In those eight-year-old days, finding it in its

relative seclusion, Jason had been convinced that it must

have

been

simply

forgotten

about

rather

than

decommissioned, that it must have been left with all its

armaments and weapons intact, and he’d been horribly

disappointed to find out that it hadn’t been. Even now, four

years later, one of his fondest daydreams was to go home

with a fuckoff big machine gun and...

At the age of eight, the bunker had been a place to come, to

repair the damage by the elements to the boards over the

central hole and rebank the turf clods dug from the cow

pastures, the dirt and bracken and long grass that

transformed it into a perfectly camouflaged Den - the centre

of operations for a play-war with other kids, in the time

before the fighting between the local kids and those of the

Estate had become far more fundamental and actually

bloody.

At the age of twelve, it was a place to come when one

simply couldn’t bear to take the bus or bike into the Middle

School in Backton, and face yet another day of being beaten

to a pulp by the six-toed, gap-toothed, swivel-eyed local

inbred Suffolk morons. One’s childhood friends, of course,

having long since found ways to get along with said gap-

toothed etc. morons, and having dropped the last Outsider,

to the point where they joined in with the general

persecution.

Not that he didn’t have friends. It was just that he had the

wrong sort of friends. Because he sometimes, for example,

liked to talk with the only Black (he really tried not to give it

a capitalization in his head but he still somehow did) girl in

his year, he would have people shouting ‘He3’, Jason, what’s

a black bitch screw like!’ at him across the Little Shelford

Road.

None of which mattered a toss. He knew enough to know

that all of this was standard sensitive-outsider wank. He

could deal with it. It wasn’t really important and it never

really touched him. The real reason he was here was that

there were still marks on him that couldn’t be explained

away by that, and that they weren’t quite healed enough to

show, no matter what his mother said. It was as if she

couldn’t quite see them, somehow, and packed him back off

to school too early.

In himself, Jason didn’t think anything of it either way. It

was routine. He had just said that he was going to take his

bike and packed a couple of textbooks in a bag, together with

two cans of Abbot Ale (the most he thought that he could get

away with from the sideboard) and a half-pack of Marlboro

from the guy with the Transit in the Phoenix. Then he had

come here and just killed time. He had even finished the

books - a chemistry text and the second part of Paradise

Lost - and it occurred to him that he was getting a better

education like this than if he actually turned up at school.

Speaking of the time, it was about time that he was

heading home. The school bus would have dropped people at

the Estate and, owing to its circuitous route around the

villages, his mother would be expecting him at around the

same time.

For some reason he was reluctant to take his bike back

down the easy way of the lane, through the gate and the

roads from which he had come. It wasn’t a bad feeling; he

simply, in a remote sort of way, didn’t want to do it. He

shrugged to himself, hauled the bike into the bunker and

hoped that nobody would chance on it before tomorrow. He

chucked the beer cans over the wire into the PRIVATE wood,

tucked the remaining cigarettes into the shoulder pocket of

his cagoule and, bag slung over the other shoulder, he set off

up the lane and to the weir and fields, following the route

that he had taken when he was a little kid.

2

Roz Dreaming:

There was a black iron machine hanging in a hot, red sky.

The machine was her, and as she tried to comprehend the

vast internal maze of ducts and conduits, the churning,

interdependent processes that gave it life, she realized that it

was lurching, out of balance, accelerating out of control.

(A woman with vulpine eyes ranged an amorphous

landscape of ponderously interflowing molten glass, her feet

on fire, clutching the ragged bundle of a child to her and

sobbing. The face of the child was featureless, perfectly

smooth.)

Visions invaded her, piercing her and sleeting through her,

leaving white-hot trails that scored her insides like blaster

beams. They went in but they could not get out: caught and

thrown back by the inside of her skin - some inner surface

like a mirror reflecting laser light. They struck and

rebounded, deflected off each other, splitting into their

component parts.

(A splintered, wooden parody of a dog flexed tendons

seemingly wound from lengths of oiled rope, dragging its

flaking, faded, painted bulk across the scraggy patches of a

lawn burnt black and yellow. A wasted man, nearby, in

striped blazer and a tattered straw boater, regarded the dog

for a while, until it had dragged itself from sight, then turned

his mad, black holes of eyes up to the sun.)

Image upon image, stuttering and palsied in her. Some-

thing burst inside her head. She dropped like a stone,

spinning out of control through what appeared to be a cavern

walled with red and glistening mucus membrane, shot

through with metallic, segmented, cilia-like tendrils. Clusters

of what might have been gemstones glittered in the walls,

dazzlingly lit from within. Through torn openings, what

might or might not have been ghost faces built from the grey

whorls of fog. Voices babbled inside her, threatened to drown

her own self out:

(‘...we stumbled through the tunnels till we found the

husk of Nail: desiccated and flaking and propped against

the wall, crumbling into paper-grey ash. The Strata Angel

was there, a construct now, like a sort of glassy gel, shot

with wormholes filled with lambent fluid. Shadowplay on

translucent surfaces, macroforms splitting and flickering and

pulsing. Somewhere somebody was shrieking, clawing at his

face in the room of the broken machine...’)

As she fell she felt her body twisting - and she realized

that she now had body sense. Skin and musculature

sloughing and re-forming, sliding over itself and igniting,

burning with an energy that crackled through her veins,

transforming, transmuting into something altogether new

and rather fine.

(‘...she pirouettes in midair, screaming tactile subsonics

from her eyes and mouth, down corridors and catwalks and

vast brick vaults with chessboard floors and halls hung with

shredded membrane and the false backs of cupboards and

skylights and holes in the wall. A dark room hung with

burning kites. The death of the hollow age...’)

She smashed head first into the slippery flesh at the

bottom of the pit, the impact, throwing her on to her back,

gasping for breath. The air was cold and crystalline, perfectly

clear. For a while she stared numbly at her hands, at her

arms, at the body to which they were connected. They were

an absolute black, sucking in the light that seemed to be

beaming from her eyes like searchlights. She turned the light

on her surroundings:

Clawed hands affixed to forearms sprouted around her

like particularly noisome flowers, their flesh rotted away to

expose new, white bone and fragile tangles of veins, lymph

ducts and even the wisps of motor neurons. They snapped at

her, plucked at her, threatened to haul her down into her

midst and engulf her.

‘No,’ she cried, struggling against their slithery and

clawed embrace. ‘Let me... let me go!’

An explosion of energy burst from her, blasting the

obscene skeletal limbs to shreds - the force of it opening up a

great rent in the membranous wall of the shaft.

Lights swirled through the hole, spinning slowly about

themselves in complex, fascinating orbits. Roz gazed at them

in wonder, losing herself in their interplay. She rose from the

charred remains of the clutching hands, and moved towards

the light.

3

Benny in the Real World:

The barracks hut was still asleep when Benny (PFC-

0188172-DB-0182-77-142-PROVISI0NAL) woke up, the

pale nimbus of dawn barely making its way through the

unglazed but slat-shuttered windows. That was one of the

useful hangovers from the nights spent sleeping rough in the

woods. You tended to fall into a natural cycle of day and

night — waking up when genes on watch for predators told

you it was right to do so, rather than a Reveille carefully

calculated by the military mind to be Too Early, whatever

time it actually was. Getting the jump on them was effectively

the equivalent of five extra minutes in bed.

She was drowsily aware of a surreptitious wrist-timer

alarm going off and the clumsy stumbling of a few people

creeping back to their own bunks in the near darkness, but

she paid them no heed. It wasn’t any of her business. She

was more concerned with flexing back and forth in her

own sleep-warm bunk, trying to work some life back into

muscles still cramp-locked from the training exercise the day

before. Forty-five-kilometre route march, alternating single

and double time, in full kit. It’s a hell of a life in the army.

Benny possessed a remarkably accurate internal clock -

not quite as accurate as the picosecond-synchronized atomic

clocks used by the Space Legion, but near enough on the

human level so that it was on the dot of five, so far as she

could tell, that the lights clashed on and Sergeant Jani

Scrimshaw, who in, the last weeks she had come to know

and loathe with a passion unseen, came storming into the

hut. ‘All right, ladies, fingers out, it’s another glorious day in

this girls’ army. Mess drill in four minutes so let’s get - Not

you, 0182-77-142 Summerfield.

Benny paused in the act of pulling on a pair of lace-up

combat boots (intentionally contrived as a little extra

difficulty in place of standard Trooper-issue snaplocked

boots). ‘Sarge?’

‘No food for you. Report to the MO, seven hundred hours

prompt. That means you get a lovely long lie in. Isn’t that

nice?’

The extra rest was welcome, the reason for it far less so. In

a pattern that varied to avoid being predictable, but

averaging every second morning, one of the members of the

platoon would be called ‘to see the MO’. Quite what went on

with this nobody knew; rumour had it that it involved

something called the Haze, but those who returned remained

tight-lipped, and there was a new hardness about them that

tended to preclude questions. Those, that is, who returned at

all.

Benny surmised that this Haze thing involved some kind of

psycho-conditioning. She spent her extra time in bed

mentally centring on herself, sinking into her head and

building what mental blocks she could, processes she had

learnt from the Applied Psych classes at the Institute before

she had skipped. She was stuck here for the duration, but

she was damned if she was going to give them any more than

she could possibly allow. As she dog-trotted around the

perimeter of the parade grounds where the various strata of

the platoon were drilling, she ran over a number of simple

techniques that countered most forms of what she thought of

as brainwashing: displacement, deflection and detachment.

The focusing on one particular primary sense, whatever some

other sense was telling you. Concentrating on some abstract

thing like recalling a page of prose, or solving a quadratic

equation, no matter what someone else was trying to make

you think. The elevation of secondary senses: temperature,

balance, joint positions, muscle and tendon stretch and

pressure as opposed to the classic Aristotelian five. She did

not care to which end conditioning might be the means - she

was perfectly willing to fight for humanity with the best of

them - it was the process of conditioning itself that she found

unconscionable; she would rather die or be broken

irreparably by it than submit.

4

Roz Dreaming:

Interlocking abstract forms against a deprisensory gulf - it

was not a colour, not black or white, not even something that

could be expressed as dark or light — it was the complete

absence of colour in any form. Distinct objects seemed to

hang, drifting lazily - she thought she could recognize what

there were but the recognition slid away. It was as if they

triggered something in the mind, which attempted to sort

them out as images but collapsed under the weight of their

impossible contradictions. She caught impressions of

fabulously transformed fish, lanterns hanging from them on

poles, dead tables, eyes, telephones and barbed wire,

monster doctors, rubber dolls, horses, walls and globes,

bathtubs, skeletons, Vishnu idols...

It was only after a while that she realized she could fly. The

realization had her dropping like a stone in panic, before the

further realization that there was nowhere to fall. The

dimensions here were skewed around in a way that she was

unable to comprehend - she was somewhere else and she

only knew that she could move through it. For a while she

swooped and whooped through the abstract space, turning

somersaults, lost in the joy of unrestrained kinaesthesia. So

lost was she that it was some time before she realized that

this impossible place was inhabited, that some of the objects

that floated through it were in some comparative sense alive.

And when she finally did, she really wished she hadn’t.

The creature was not vast, precisely - she was in a place

where size had no meaning; it could be smaller than an

amoeba or bigger than worlds. It was literally indescribable.

She looked at it and images flickered through the mind

behind the eyes, constantly mutating, splitting apart and

crawling and re-forming, then only common factor being one

of fear and revulsion: a squirming nest of spiders; a hulking,

leathery form slathered with a viscous ichor; a great mass of

clotted pus from the crust of which fresh discharge mixed

with blood broke, like magma through the crust of a diseased

Earth. A massive, putrefying head of the corpse of a little

girl, pale hands hanging from the pupils of her eyes, tiny

mouths opening on the skin of her lips like sores, each with a

minuscule throat and tiny teeth, her body atrophied and

hanging from the head by a string of vertebrae. A vision of

smashing your mouth into a rough bright wall and scraping

your teeth along its face at speed. Some stringy substance

drooling from a barbed, bone needle. Enraged insects. Being

buried alive, tearing off your nails as you scrabble against

the coffin’s underside. Even a morbid and irrational fear of

getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of the mouth...

Whatever you were frightened of, everything of which you

were frightened, when you looked at it, that was what it was.

It had something. By what might have been its talons, or

its tentacles, or insect limbs - whatever the thing used for

manipulation - it clutched something with them, tearing at it,

tearing it apart. Something bright. With a shock of

recognition she saw that it was human - not in shape, it

might have been a mind, or soul, or whatever those things

might look like in this place, but it was something human.

(friends... I have friends who are in danger and I must…)

There was no sense of thought or decision involved. She

simply dived towards the monstrous creature, her body

singing, filled with an absolute and burning rage. Energy

crackled through her. All thought shut down. She struck the

thing and blasted through, bursting it like a high-velocity

round fired through a rotten apple. The paraspace about her

shattered, fragments spinning off in every null direction,

leaving a blank and blinding whiteness that seemed to fill

every sense, let alone that of mere sight.

She hung against bright nothingness. Nothing to see.

Nothing to hear. Nothing to taste, or touch, or -

Something else.

A presence. Human. Male, she thought. Was it the human

thing that she had ‘seen’ before? The human thing that she

had tried to...?

(Oh gods... oh gods... where am I... where...)

It’s inside, I think, she tried to say. The words seemed to

come out like thoughts in her mind. They kept shying away,

twisting into incoherence, no matter how hard she tried to

control them: It’s dreams, I think. Something inside. A big

light machine. Wake up, I think Big light. Have to remember.

Who you are. Who I am. Big light have to remember. We have

to remember. Time to stop. Wake. Up time. Time to wake

up...

The presence drifted closer. They brushed together. There

was a jolt like a static charge earthing itself through the

body, and-

And just like that, Roz woke up, and saw the thing that

was looming over her, and screamed.

5

Chris in the Real World:

With no small degree of regret, Christopher Rodonante Cwej

stowed his Patrol Adjudicator uniform in the locker. It was

not so much affection for the items in themselves, more of a

sense of loss for what they signified: a rightness and an ease

of mind that you never missed until you realized that it was

gone. It was like realizing that there were other people in the

world besides your mother and your father, other places than

the inside of your childhood home. When he had worn the

uniform he hadn’t had to think about who he was, because it

was so patently obvious - he was one of the Good Guys.

Leaving it behind was like leaving behind your childhood,

and finding yourself out in the big, wide world, without

being quite grown up enough to cope.

‘Come on, kid.’ He grinned at his furry, body-beppled,

teddy-bear face (yet more childhood imagery, now he came

to think about it) in the mirror set into the obverse of the

locker door. ‘You’ll be talking about wanting to go back into

the womb if you don’t watch it.’

He shut the locker door and pressed his thumb against

the pad to seal it. Every item of the uniform and equipment

was tagged to his DNA signature, and he would be

expected to keep it safe, whether he wore it again or not,

until the day he died. Besides, there was a good chance

that he’d be back inside the uniform in a couple of days,

back on traffic patrol and firmly chastened for ever getting

ideas above his station.

It was that last thought, or the possibility that the opposite

of it might happen, or simply his innate cheerfulness

resurfacing, but as he pulled on the heavy-duty polymer

jacket of a Plainclothes Adjudicator - as uniform and

distinctive, in actual fact, as the uniform he’d worn before,

just better cut - he found himself whistling. Or, at least,

trying to whistle through pointed teeth implanted to set off

his currently fashionable ursine appearance. He walked from

the locker room and caught the riser, ascending through the

Temple of the Righteous and whatever his new life might

bring.

6

Roz Awake:

It was like the difference between wandering around a large

but elaborate and cluttered room with a candle, peering at

whatever one might find in the dim and flickering

illumination, and simply switching on the light. She was

back again, complete and whole, her memory intact up to the

point on Zarjax where she had come face to face with a bug-

eyed slimy monster and -

That was when she screamed.

The creature looming over her whipped seven separate

manipulatory pseudopods, three eyes on stalks and what

looked like a perfect copy of a human hand on a string back

into its body. ‘Is watch it matey Roz-person!’ it squeaked. ‘Is

life out of lovely Sgloomi make go fright to bottom falling

off!’

The intervening memories resurfaced. It was like

remembering a headlong plunge into delirium - save that she

could recall her words and actions through it, like a thread

through chaos. She recalled the people she had met, the

things that had been said —

(...in danger and I must...)

- and realized that, though her perceptions of them might

have been faulty, an approximation of those events had

actually happened. Whatever danger she was currently in

was not hallucinatory. It was, so far as reality could be

inferred, completely real.

‘You’re the one behind all this,’ she growled at the alien

creature. ‘You’ve been doing something to my mind. Well

I’m here to tell you that it hasn’t worked. You won’t get

anything from me.’

Said alien creature seemed a little taken aback. ‘Is not!’ it

squeaked vehemently. ‘Is lovely Sgloomi Po what is name

and is friend! Is on same side as Roz-type person and is not

nasty-bugger want to do horrible thing. Is on same side.’

‘Yeah, right,’ said Roz. ‘Prove it.’

The pseudopods of Sgloomi Po retracted and it lapsed into

contemplative silence for a moment. Then without warning it

warped itself into something monstrous that seemed to be all

claws and slavering mouths full of teeth. The baleful orbs

of what might have been eyes erupted from its remaining

surfaces, like frog spawn squeezed through a grating, and

glowed with a demonic inner light.

‘Is true,’ it snarled simultaneously from multiple larynxes.

‘Sgloomi is extremely nasty villainous slimy evil monster of

unutterably evil evil, and if Roz thing does not do precisely

what Sgloomi say and listen to proper story, Sgloomi will

bite off all soft bits and make gobbly munching mincy thing

with! Okey-dokey?’

Roz considered her options. Strangely, this over-the-

top performance from the alien had almost precisely the

opposite effect from that which had probably been intended.

Anthrocentric or not, Roz prided herself upon having a keen

judgment of character, and anybody who could put on a

performance like that could not be, she judged, a villain

entire. Besides, at this point she had nothing to lose by

playing along, and anything that might change her basic

incarcerated situation could only be a gain.

‘All right,’ she said as Sgloomi Po retracted into what

seemed to be its amorphous default state. ‘I’ll listen to you.

Tell me what’s been going on.’

‘...is put electrode stop-thinky thingies on Sgloomi, and

take in with everybody else,’ said Sgloomi Po. ‘But is make

mistake-type thing and Sgloomi is too clever and moves

thinky-things around. Is just pretend to be not thinky-thing.

Is wait until robot-thing put Sgloomi in little room and go

away, then sneaky-thing out and find room with Roz in. Is

hearing that Roz not wanted and so is worried

As Sgloomi Po had almost impenetrably related events

since she had last been what passed for conscious, Roz had

been going through her clothes and then the cell for anything

that might prove useful. She had drawn a complete blank:

concrete wall and steel-plate door, the bench, the discarded

headset electrodes of a neural damper and that was it. Her

weapons and equipment had been stripped from her, and the

cell was as bare as it had seemed when she had woken up.

The door did not even have an excitingly technological

computerized lock which might be shorted out with ease,

given access to something metallic with which to do it. It was

locked mechanically and entirely solid. Roz had listened to

Sgloomi with slightly less than half an ear - until it

mentioned the fact that it had wandered around whatever

was outside looking for her.

‘You were out there and you came in?’ she said. Perhaps as

a result of her tendency not to see alien life forms entirely as

people, she had just assumed that Sgloomi had been brought

in with her and dumped in a corner. ‘How exactly did you get

inside?’

‘Is came in with this.’ Sgloomi Po extended a thin pseudo-

pod, the end of which transformed itself into a bony

projection that might serve perfectly as the hasp of a key. ‘Is

lock door again so that nobody notice and see.’ The Sloathe

paused. ‘Is what Roz looking at lovely brave Sgloomi like

for?’

Through the door they found themselves in a plush-carpeted,

curving corridor walled with oaken panels. Old-master oil

and watercolour landscapes hung on the walls, spot-

illuminated by antique brass light fixtures that were, in all

probability, almost as expensive as the pictures themselves.

Along the corridor, before it curved out of sight, could be

seen an occasional table, on which stood a marble figurine,

probably dating back to ancient Rome. The understated

opulence was a slight shock after the Spartan steel and

concrete of the cell.

They picked a direction at random and followed the

corridor around, Sgloomi Po shifting into a more human form

to make perambulation easier. They encountered no doors on

the outer edge of what Roz suspected was going to be a large

ring. The inner doors led, in turn, into a luxurious-looking

bathroom with gold-plated plumbing and an alabaster tub, a

closet packed with dusty junk and a large, extensive, auto-

mated kitchen. The automation worried Roz. While it went

some way to explaining the fact that they hadn’t met anyone

yet, either servants or security staff, she couldn’t believe that

an establishment like this would go unprotected, and the

sophistication of the automation in the kitchen suggested the

security was also cybernetic, and might be very sophisticated

indeed.

The third door they tried looked promising. It opened up

into a very large chamber that obviously served as a lounge

or parlour. One wall was entirely taken up by bookshelves,

containing without exception antique, cloth and leather-

bound books. In a corner, and vying with the library shelves

for sheer available space, was a drinks cabinet stocked with

every potable one could possibly imagine — provided one’s

imagination ran to crusted bottles, peeling, brittle labels and

an exorbitant price.

Every item of the furnishings and ornamentation continued

the general theme, save one object which seemed strangely

out of place. It was a life-sized bronze-cast bust of a man,

naturalistic - though bearing the slight but ultimately

flattering stamp of a portrait paid for by the man it

represented. The forms of the eyes (painted, as was Classical

statuary in its original state) and the lines around the mouth

were obviously the product of artistic convention rather than

life.

‘Looks like this is the guy who owns the whole shooting

match,’ Roz mused. ‘I just wish I had clue one as to who the

hell he’s supposed to be.’

‘The name, my good woman, is Bane. Randolph Bane.’

The voice had come from another direction than from the

door through which Roz and Sgloomi had come. Roz spun

round to see that a section had slid silently back from the

bookshelves to reveal a wall screen.

On the screen was an elderly, feeble man, in an archaic-

looking three-piece suit, his face the spitting image of that of

the bust, though at least half a century older, deeply lined

and flaking, his eyes with the slightly crazed look the elderly

get when they don’t let them droop. Roz - who was still not

quite up on her personal space-time differential -

momentarily gaped.

‘Indeed,’ said Randolph Bane, his voice as clear as if he

were speaking from the same room, ‘you are right. And I

consider it particularly ill-mannered for some utter stranger

to invade my privacy - especially when my work is at such a

crucial stage. Such things cannot go unpunished.’

Bane made no gesture or command but, on the instant,

segmented tungsten tentacles burst from the walls, whipping

themselves around Roz Forrester and Sgloomi Po and

completely immobilizing them.

‘Ah yes,’ said Bane, regarding them. ‘Your correction shall

be long indeed. I have a mind to extend Eternity so as to

prolong it.’

7

Chris Goes to Hell:

Cwej didn’t bother to hit the suspect hard. You didn’t have to

hit hard to break the snout. There was a wet crack and blood

gushed down to stain the man’s skinny chest.

‘Groke,’ the suspect blubbered. His name was Tghan wa

Wiggi - a Piglet Person and low-grade street kif dealer.

Hardly worth the effort. ‘Oo groke by dose!’ Also pretty

much a master of the bleeding obvious.

‘Settle down, sonny.’ Cwej produced the envelope he had

‘found’ behind the sofa, which Tghan wa Wiggi had

technically not been holding at the time he had made the

bust. ‘Lot of stuff here. Looks like it- isn’t even with intent to

deal. Could be with intent to supply.’ The difference was in

degree, the effective difference being a multiplicatory jump

in the number of blows in the flogging and years served in

the Church’s tanks. Tghan wa Wiggi looked desperate. There

were now two practical options open to him. Unfortunately

for all concerned he chose the wrong one.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I can give you people. I can give you

names and -’

‘Hello?’ Cwej rapped him sharply on the side of the head.

‘Try again.’

Tghan wa Wiggi shrugged. ‘Usual?’

‘Triple,’ said Cwej. ‘Otherwise some people might find out

you sort of tried to give them up.’

Cwej left the conapt and headed for the InterTrans, keeping

an eye out for potential threat. Some years before a wave of

mass psychosis had swept the Overcity, taking the

psychometric-profiling division of the Church completely by

surprise. The resources had not been in place to deal with it,

and the result had been utter, bloody chaos. The knock-on

effect had led to a sharp increase in the levels of violence and

things had yet to fully settle down. A lone Adjudicator,

whether in plain clothes or not, was an easy target for

anyone who felt like having a pop, and Cwej was quite

relieved that his shift was almost over.

In the Sector 7 Chapel, he met up with Martle and fell

into step with him, strolling through aisles of the Temple

that were quite by chance less frequented than others. ‘No

problems,’ he said. ‘The Widows and Orphans’ Fund is

healthy as ever.’

‘I’m glad to hear it, Chris,’ Martle said. ‘Look for a little

something extra when we spread it out.’

Cwej nodded. Fenn Martle had been his supervising

Adjudicator years back, when he had first transferred to

Plainclothes. He had shown Cwej the ropes and kept an

almost paternal eye on him thereafter, giving him a hand up

after he himself had made Subdeacon. Every operation of the

Church worth talking about went through Martle - at least,

every operation that involved the unofficial lining of the

pouches of the Adjudicator on the street. He was a good

friend to have in your corner, what with the changes that of

late split the Church into a number of factions, each

contending for ultimate control of its forces.

Martle stopped by a drinking altar, made an automatic

supplication and drank. His eyes, however, flicked from one

end of the aisle to the other, making sure that they were

effectively alone.

‘I hear that one of the lambs in the division has gone

astray,’ he said.

‘Breen?’ Cwej said. Breen was one of the Novitiates, who

had come straight into the investigative division of the

Church without first getting a solid grounding on the streets.

It was a measure the Church had been forced increasingly to

adopt by lack of available manpower. ‘I know him. Friendly

enough, just a bit too fond of being shocked to the knickers

at the minor sins of the world. He’ll wise up.’

‘I hear a rumour that he might be Covert Ops.’

‘Really?’ Cwej became thoughtful. ‘I don’t know. I don’t

think so. I usually have a nose for these things.’

‘Unless they’re running him on deep-cover.’ Martle

shrugged. ‘Well, maybe he is and maybe he isn’t. I do know

for a fact that he’s tried to make a couple of appointments

with the Archdeacon, and he won’t take a telling. I’m minded

of a partner I once had, nice girl by the name of Roz. She

wouldn’t take a telling either, when she finally caught on. I

think Breen needs to be told a bit harder, you get me?’

Cwej nodded. ‘I’ll take Carter and Doyle.’

‘You do that,’ said Martle. ‘Just make sure the body’s

never found.’

8

Roz and Sgloomi in the Real World:

The robots were archaic: all hydraulics, hissing servos and

whirring Waldo manipulators. They were of stainless steel

and brass and lead-crystal glass, were functionally allowable

hand-crafted and they had been built to last They were also,

once one was in their implacable grip, impossible to break

free from, no matter how one might try.

After a while, Roz stopped trying.

‘I get the feeling,’ she said as she and Sgloomi were

dragged along, ‘that this Banc guy is going to be trouble.

He’s not going to just have us taken back to our cells and

forget about us.’

This much was so patently true as to really need no telling.

They had been dragged by the metallic tentacles through an

opening in the wall, as perfectly disguised as the wall screen,

to be taken into the charge of the automata. Thence they had

been taken down through a gently descending tunnel that

seemed to delineate a large and outwardly expanding spiral.

The decor of the tunnel had initially been every bit as plush

as the chambers above, continuing the idiom of oaken panels

and antiques, but at one point this had abruptly stopped, as

though somebody simply had got tired of the idea, to be

replaced by rough concrete and old, occasionally flickering

and buzzing fluorescent lighting. The ponderous pace of the

automata and the lack of anything interesting to look at had

begun to prey on Roz; she found herself growing increasingly

bored with the tedium of it, and was talking simply to

pass the time. The robots didn’t seem to care either way.

‘Was I unconscious long after you took the neural dampers

off me?’ she asked Sgloomi. ‘I had some... well, I suppose

you might call them dreams. Did I take long to come out of

them?’

‘Is no time at all,’ Sgloomi said. The Sloathe was still in

hir human form, seemingly, somehow locked into it. It had

certainly made just as much show of struggling and failing to

escape from the robotic grips that pinioned them as had Roz.

‘Sgloomi take head-thingies off, next thing Sgloomi know

Roz going shouty-shouty and doing thing with eyes going all

big like wide-mouthed frog.’

‘No time at all?’ Roz was slightly surprised. The visions,

dreams or whatever they had been had been detailed and

extensive. Even allowing for the perennial differential

between dreams and reality, she must have experienced them

for a real-time hour or more. Was it possible that she had

experienced them in the confusion before her capture?

No. When the monstrous creature that she had for some

reason instantly recognized as ‘Simon Deed’ - without quite

knowing why, in the same way one can’t quite explain the

instant recognition of the colour ‘blue’ - when Simon Deed

had supposedly obliterated the Schirron Dream, she had seen

all those around her drop as though hit by an electrocution

bolt, had herself felt the charge from her spine to her nerve

endings, but she had remained conscious if a little stunned.

Admittedly, as some hangover from the chaos that was

disrupting her long-term memories, she had thought that her

name was Rochelle Kirkwarden, and that she was a member

of an interstellar gang of eco-terrorists who smuggled viable

foliage on to worlds that were fanatically Industrialist. But

she remembered the physical facts of what had happened.

She remembered the armed men breaking into the ship,

hauling the others out and then, when they realized that she

was not quite as inert as the others, slapping the neural

dampers on her.

The point about dampers was that you couldn’t dream or

think in any cogent sense at all while under them. The brain

did nothing more than keep the heart pumping and the lungs

sucking. She knew all this because the Church occasionally

used them, during the Penance of those rare psychopathic

geniuses who, given the chance, would otherwise spend their

time plotting how to escape with nothing more than their

own spit and fingernails, and what they would do to any

number of people after they did. It was impossible to think

under neural dampers.

So that meant her dreams had to be in some way in-

dependent of thought. Or possibly, if she had experienced

them in the split second of waking, independent of time?

Had she travelled in some chaotic fashion in time, into the

seething chaos of the before or after from the solid now?

The thought of it made her head hurt. Time travel was

impossible. It had been proved to be impossible any number

of ways.

‘Is coming something up,’ said Sgloomi, breaking Roz

from her thoughts. Up ahead of them, the tunnel was

blocked by a set of shutters. As the automata and their

charges approached, they opened up and out to let them

pass.

The first impression was of space - a cavern walled with

ridges, like a beehive in reverse. Roz realized that its walls

were, in fact, the outer walls of the coiling tunnel from which

they had emerged.

The cavern was filled with bodies, stacked on racks, sur-

rounded by items of modular machinery and sprouting wires

and tubes. With a start, Roz recognized several of the people

she remembered from the Schirron Dream: the woman called

Benny, the man called Jason, Chris. The majority of the

cables ran to the centre of the cabin, terminating at a console

of an odd design, situated just before the precise centre and

a circular pit, from within which came a shifting, reddish

glow.

The console contained the usual assortment of controls

and readouts. Its oddness came from its centre, from which

sprouted a stand like an antique chemist’s retort, which in

turn supported what appeared to be a large, highly polished

egg of some golden substance if not actually gold. Nearby,

slightly off to one side, a rack similar to those holding the

other bodies supported what appeared to be a mummified

corpse - a thing of grey and flaking leather, wasted away

almost to the bone. As with the other bodies, cables sprouted

from it - from a headset remarkably similar to the neural

damper that had incapacitated Roz, and from electrodes

buried in the flesh - and connected it to the console.

The strange thing was that even as an object, even as a

horror-show corpse, the figure remained nondescript and

negligible. The eyes seemed to slide from him of their own

volition, the attention to wander. It was the visual equivalent,

Roz thought, of the family retainers with which she had

grown up; they became invisible unless consciously thought

about, and, despite the best of egalitarian intentions, the

mind forgot them the moment there was anything more

interesting to see...

To the other side there was a couch, of the sort used in

hospitals for treatment, surrounded by medical equipment,

blood exchangers, bioregeneration units, each item seeming

almost prosaic compared with the other equipment in the

chamber - not that this other equipment was entirely alien,

simply that its function was not obvious. You could tell what

the medical equipment was simply by looking at it.

The hospital couch supported what at first sight seemed to

be a corpse as dead as the other - until Roz recognized it as

the man they had seen on the screen in the parlour above,

Randolph Bane.

In the flesh he looked even worse than he had on the

screen. At one time he might have been a big man, strong

and virile, the kind of dynamic and charismatic wielder of

executive power such as most of those with executive power

privately imagined themselves to be. Now the flesh had

atrophied to stringiness, the skin seamed with the scars of

implants and grafts, its elasticity lost to the point where no

degree of cosmetic surgery could fully hide the joins. He was

plugged into the medical units, which were obviously working

overtime. As the automata hauled Roz and Sgloomi through

the cavern, their splayed hydraulic feet picking their way

between trailing cables, Bane stirred, and with an effort

sat up to regard them with his slightly crazed-looking eyes.

They were the eyes of a man willing his body to function,

to stay alive in spite of all the physical evidence. Looking at

them, Roz was reminded of the age-old definition of the

fanatic: redoubling the effort when one has long since

forgotten the original point.

‘You are come to witness my hour of triumph?’ he said in

an ageing, slightly vague and slightly tremulous voice. He

seemed for the moment to have forgotten who Roz and

Sgloomi were, and why they were here. Then he remembered.

‘Ah, yes... the imperfections in the Material. The Subjects

who Proved Unworthy In my Sight.’ The capitalization was

obvious in his voice - and Roz started to become worried

indeed. People who tended to throw in capitals as if they had

an extra box of the things tended to be ultimately madder

than a lemon-scented rat on a pogo stick.

‘I see now,’ Bane continued, ‘that my first Estimation was

indeed Correct.’ He waved a liver-spotted hand negligently at

the automata. ‘I shall deal with Them in the fullness of Time,

once the Conversion is complete.’

The automata remained stock-still, having not been

actually ordered to withdraw. Bane lapsed back on to the

couch, muttering to himself in a way reminiscent of the kind

of grandparent whose favourite chair, after his or her demise,

would have to be thoroughly cleansed and fumigated, if not

taken out and burnt. The moving parts of the medical units

accelerated a noticeable notch, compensating for movements

which, at this point in Bane’s degeneration, must have called

for some extreme degree of exertion. Bane lay there,

exhausted, nodding feebly in the warm and firelight-like

glow from the pit, only occasionally turning his head to

regard with a kind of senile triumph and love the golden egg

that sat atop the console.

He seemed to have completely forgotten about Roz and

Sgloomi again. Roz had no idea whether it would be a good

idea to remind him of their presence or not - in this erratic

state he would be capable of simply snapping and having the

both of them killed there and then. Eventually, she decided

that if she was going to get any sort of explanation at all,

she’d have to risk it. She opened her mouth to speak... but

Sgloomi Po had beaten her to it.

‘Is wondering and most very interest-type thinky things,’

the Sloathe said, gently, hir tone an absolutely perfect copy

of that used by a psychiatrist or psychologist to elicit answers

before the subject for questioning had even realized that

questions were being asked. Roz could never have managed

to simulate it so perfectly - she thanked Oberon that the

Sloathe seemed to be a natural mimic, attendant innate

irrationalities of syntax or not.

‘Is very much like to hear-see what it is that happen,’

Sgloomi continued. ‘Is like to know in full is fullness of the

works of Mr Bane type-thing

‘Yes,’ Bane said, absently, his mind on whatever was

actually happening inside his head, more or less as one

might absently explain the techniques utilized in the painting

of a picture, or explain the tricky manoeuvring of a vehicle,

articulating the basic process as one performs it. ‘I can

see that people must know. There must be witnesses to

see, and to remember, to tell the tale when I have passed

through Elevation. There must be some to proselytize the

New God...’

9

Benny in Hell:

Colonel Summerfield (0188172-DB-0182-77-142) gazed

absently from the window of her quarters in Camp Beldame

as she adjusted her uniform, straightening the cap and the

alignment of the medals over her breast, working by sense of

touch that was a far better indication of physical neatness

than any image in a mirror. Through the window she saw

mannered, manicured countryside: a sunny blue sky and

cumulonimbus. A little brook trickled through pastures and

woodland broken by hedgerows, weathered timber fencing

and the occasional stile. The wheel of an old mill turned

ponderously in the waters of the brook. A flock of sheep

drifted aimlessly, occasionally bursting apart and re-forming

in complex interrelated whorls at the urging of a pair of dogs

under the command of the distant figure of a shepherd.

The holowindow had been installed at the behest of the

previous incumbent. Commandant de la Salle - part and

parcel of the distressing trend towards sentimentality that

had eventually resulted in his purging by the powers that be,

and the recommendation that his place be taken by an

experienced Line Officer, who would treat the business of the

camp with the importance it deserved. The window would

have to be torn out as soon as possible, Summerfield noted.

Commandant of a Reclamation Camp might have been

seen as something of a downgrade for a War veteran with a

string of commendations as long as your arm, but

Summerfield knew that the position was merely temporary.

She was here as a troubleshooter, to get things back on an

even keel after the lassitude of de la Salle, and then it was

back to the sharp end. Promotion into Central Command,

even the War Council itself had been hinted at, and a quick

turnaround here might be just the thing to put on the shine.

There was a tentative knock on the door. ‘Come,’

Summerfield snapped perfunctorily.

The door slid back to admit a Sergeant of the Guard - not

precisely the procedurally correct adjunct for an inspection,

but the Captain of the Guard was unfortunately detained. Or

rather, five minutes after her arrival, Summerfield had

hospitalized him in the course of discipline for a sloppy

turnout when greeting a superior officer - mutilating his face

in such a way as to make it unclear if it had actually sported

a stray hair of stubble or not. The effect of the captain’s

punishment upon his underlings was more than worth any

shred of satisfaction that might be felt by the Clients

themselves, at any injury done to a senior member of the

custodial administration - any satisfaction the Clients might

feel was, in any event, going to be brief indeed. That was

what the coming tour of inspection was calculated to achieve.

As it was, the sergeant — a grizzled veteran with an

artificial hand and eye, of the sort that were of correct

military issue and did not attempt to hide what they were -

stood stock-still, at rigid attention, the insignia on his

spotless, razor-creased uniform spit-shined to within a

micron of its life. His face remained hardly impassive, the

manner innate rather than of one too frightened to move.

Summerfield liked the looks of him. The captain had been a

prissy little pencil-pusher, a pasty faced near-youth of the

sort who had enough family influence to land him with a

sinecure like the camps, not enough to keep him out of the

Legion entirely. Summerfield tagged the sergeant as a

possible replacement on a permanent basis when - as she

knew with a sudden premonition - the captain unfortunately

failed to recover from his wounds.

‘What’s your name, Sergeant?’ she said. The Guards at

Camp Beldame wore nothing to personalize them to the

Clients.

‘Jelks, ma’am,’ the sergeant said.

‘You’ll call me sir. Ma’am still does not carry quite the

proper respect, even now. That’s the last time I’m going to

mention it.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Summerfield nodded. ‘I believe we’re ready to begin the

inspection.’

They left her quarters and were joined by two of Jelks’s

men. As they crossed the compound, Summerfield indicated

the razor wire of the fence. ‘I assume that this is charged.’

‘Yes sir,’ said Sergeant Jelks. ‘It’s a useful example for

anyone who might want to try their luck.’

‘I have a better example. Have the charge switched off. I

expect you to make damned sure that nobody will ultimately

escape. Set up a force wall further out and out of line of sight

if you have to. You look like you have something to say.

Speak up, man.’

‘I was going to say, sir, that that’ll lead to a rush of Clients

trying to go over, even though they know that we’ll be on our

toes and that it’s pointless.’

‘Quite so,’ Summerfield agreed. ‘I want the bodies relatively

intact, not fried to a crisp. Then I want you to take the

bodies, take their heads off and waistcoat ‘em -’

‘Waistcoat, sir?’ asked the sergeant.

‘Use your imagination, man. It’s perfectly obvious. And

then I want you to hang the torsos on the wire and leave

them there indefinitely. That’s the sort of example I’m talking

about. Are we clear. Sergeant?’

‘Clear, sir.’

Summerfield allowed herself to warm to her theme. ‘The

problem with processing humans, rather than aliens, is that

they still can’t quite believe it’s happening, even when the

ash goes up the furnace chimney. They react inappropriately.

We have to instil a realization, a sense of terror. To treat the

stockpiled Clients humanely, as it were, is simply counter’

productive.

‘The extermination lines are anything but arbitrary —

they’re about as arbitrary as the eventual death of every one

of us. For the Clients it’s the dying-of-old-age-in-bed upper

limit. And since, for them, that limit has been drastically

lowered, the level of our own arbitrary cruelties must be

drastically raised. There is so little time, after all, in which

the uncertain can occur.

‘It is not enough, for instance, Sergeant, should a female

Client offer her life for her child, to simply kill the child and

then her. One should wound her mortally, allow her the flare

of hope, then torture the child to death before her, before she

dies. That’s just a simple example. I envisage potentially

infinite progressions. I believe, however, that a more practical

example may suffice

They had paused, briefly, in the shadow of the covered

traction belts that ran from the loading bay to the

reclamation plant. Now Summerfield set off, with the

sergeant and the guards in low, towards the long, low sheds

in which the Clients were stockpiled.

10

Bane in a World of his Own:

What does it profit a man if he gain the world but lose his

soul? It profits him the world, of course. Don’t ask stupid

questions.

Randolph Bane had owned such a world: everything upon

which his eyes rested was his, his every thought found

concrete expression, to do with as he willed. With holdings

that spanned a significant span of Earth, with interests on a

thousand planets, with minions in their millions to perform

his will and his alone, how could it be otherwise. To be sure

there were other ‘worlds’ which he could not control directly

- but Randolph Bane did not count them. His power, his

influence was sufficient unto itself. His world, of which he

was the arbiter, the guiding tight, the - not to put too fine a

point upon it — God.

Even so, his godlike powers could not change the laws of

thermodynamics and the irreversible processes of biology.

Entropy tends to increase, metabolism tends, inexorably, to

catabolism. The young grows old and withers, leaf and

branch and stump. With the passing years the realization

dawned on Bane that he was growing ever closer to the point

where even the best medical and regenerative therapies that

money, power or influence could buy would fail him, leaving

nothing but the prospect of a final dissolution and mere

oblivion.

It would be a mistake to assume that, with his all but

godlike power, Randolph Banc imagined that he had the

right to live. It was simply that he damned well didn’t want

to die - and that he had the resources to do something about

it. Other aspects of his empire collapsed as he sucked them

dry and poured all his wealth into the search for longevity if

not immortality. Breakthrough after breakthrough was made

- processes Bane held jealously to himself, not out of

anything quite so active as malice, but simply that he didn’t

care about anybody else. This was evident in the recent War,

when under the guise of providing medical and psycho-

conditioning assistance to Spacefleet, Bane’s companies had

availed themselves of what was, in effect, a captive collection

of warm bodies for research. A significant number of those

‘missing in action’ had gone missing as a result of something

quite other than the fighting - though they were now just as

dead as if they had been.

The thought of sharing the discoveries and enhancement

his riches had brought about simply never occurred to him.

The basic fact of his ethos for controlling his vast industrial

and commercial empire - his minions carrying out his orders

without a second thought, applying their initiative only

within those orders - meant that only the merest scraps of

benefit made it out into the galaxy at large.

Each new direction proved, ultimately, a dead end. The

searching tendrils that were in a sense an extension of Banc

himself cast about ever more frantically, in increasingly

improbable, manic and some might say preposterous

directions. Faith healing, alchemy, magic...

The breakthrough came with the discovery of the Egg

together with certain related alchemical texts, in the remains

of the Grey Museum of what had once been called the

Shadow Directory - a covert organization supposedly

shrouded in the deepest secrecy; but Bane’s own

organizational resources had proved more than adequate to

obtain the item in question. Bane’s technical, theological,

archaeological and linguistic staffs had worked for decades to

crack the alchemical codes and discern the true functions of

the Egg and, like the Philosopher’s Stone, the Egg had at last

turned their labours into gold.

The Egg was not a source of power in itself, merely the

control mechanism for directing and controlling extra-

dimensional energies as incomprehensible in their magnitude

as it would be impossible to count, by increments, to infinity.

The channel for such forces was the mind of Man itself -

although it had to be a specific, precise kind of Man.

Consciousness is inextricably linked to the very fabric of the

universe, and there was a certain sort of mind, a precise

alignment of the electromagnetic impulse-web of the brain,

that constituted a ‘thin’ region of space-time, through which

these energies could travel.

The impact of these energies affected the quantum process

of the universe itself, and, by judicious manipulation of the

controlling Egg, these changes could be controlled. The Egg

was the key. Randolph Bane existed in a universe that, by its

very nature, insisted that he must at some point die. So Bane

decided that he must change the basic nature of the universe

itself!

A personnel search through all the millions he commanded

resulted in the preliminary Subject: a man named Simon

Deed, a nonentity to the point of abstraction, almost literally

a hole in the world. Although he had been in Bane’s employ

since birth, being born into a Corporate family that were little

more than chattels. Deed had barely made so much as a

mark on the personnel records. He had actually been located

only by the conscious act of turning everything anyone could

possibly want to look for on its head.

Bane caused Simon Deed to be brought to him, and by

application of electroneurological processes that had been

known, in crude form, as the Haze he had obliterated Deed’s

mind in the precisely correct manner. Deed’s mind had

already been sociopathic and tending to catatonia; Bane’s

processes regressed it to a point in the past and applied the

necessary stimuli, twisting Deed’s subsequently remembered

life to a perceived ‘present’ where his already feeble sense of

identity was obliterated. Deed’s mind shattered under the

strain and imploded, and opened up a conduit for the forces

outside of reality.

The process had proved less than perfect, however. Deed

had been the best subject available to Bane, but was not

quite good enough. The reality-changing forces unleashed

had been localized and relatively minor, able to change the

nature of the universe only over a radius of kilometres, and

each change was corrupted by the last vestiges of Deed’s

minimal personality and mind. This partial success, however,

had provided Bane with the tools he needed for his ultimate

plan. He could use Deed as his Animus.

He expanded his search of suitable subjects - and found

them of a whole other order. There were certain people who

were displaced in time, or who had originated in a different

set of dimensions entirely. These people, when put through

the same process of Conversion as Deed, would provide

energy conduits so powerful in comparison that they might

as well be stars against a single atom. With subjects such as

these, the transformation of galaxies would be in Bane’s

grasp.

Such potential subjects were independent and erratic, how-

ever. Bane would have to be circumspect. He would have to

lay a trap, wait for such people to come to Earth at random,

ensnare them in realities created via the remains of Simon

Deed and hope, thereby, to lure in others until a critical

number of subjects was achieved. Then, channelling his own

identity and control through the Animus-puppet of Deed, he

could spring the trap and gather them in.

The plan was slightly more complex than that, involving

the escape of some to draw more in, the pulse-pumping of

subliminal images to convince these others of a disruption

that did not yet, to any significant extent, exist. But the day

would come when enough were gathered, the preliminaries

complete, and Bane could transform the universe - or so

much of the universe as was comprehensible to Man, even a

Godlike Man such as Bane - into one where he didn’t have

to die.

For a long time Roslyn Forrester and Sgloomi Po remained

silent.

‘And that’s it, is it?’ Roz said at last. ‘You bring us here,

you mess us all about, you kill, and you destroy minds, and

you’re getting ready, so you say to destroy the universe - just

so’s you don’t have to bloody die? That’s it?’

‘Is to be careful, Roz,’ Sgloomi said in a worried

undertone. ‘Is Bane feller two pennies short of big special

artichoke, if any judgment-type thing by Sgloomi Po...’

‘Balls.’ Roz snorted and turned her attention back to the

medical units and Bane. ‘I’ve got two words for you, sun-

shine. People die. And here’s eight more for you: Get used to

it, you senile old git!’ She tried to wave a hand at the racked

bodies, forgetting momentarily in her anger that she was still

restrained by the automata. ‘You can’t treat people like this.’

Not the most sophisticated and cerebral of lines, she’d be

the first to admit, but she was not exactly in a mood to be

cerebral. She was simply burning with an absolute and

unthinking rage at the abuse of power, the strong misusing

the weak. It occurred to a detached part of her mind, how-

ever, that this might not be a particularly useful approach

towards an old loony who could have both her and Sgloomi

Po ripped apart by large and nasty automata at the merest

gesture or word.

Bane, it seemed, though, was still lost in his reverie. ‘The

process of Conversion is more sophisticated, now, more

refined. More precise. I have taken each subject back into a

perfectly recreated past, calculated so that one twist of it will

send them to their precisely relevant hell, from which it is

then extrapolated. One by one, their minds will destroy

themselves utterly rather than continue to live. One by one

the holes will open up, and through them will pour the

energies I need to turn the world...’

He became aware again that he was not alone, though not,

quite yet, with querulousness or animosity. ‘Would you like

to see the world that I shall make? The world in which I shall

exist, perfect and eternal and in Life Everlasting? Would you

like to see?’

He did not wait for a reply, but feebly waved a hand. As

one, the automata holding Roz and Sgloomi Po advanced

towards the pit in the centre of the chamber. For an instant

Roz entertained visions of being flung into hellfire, but the

automata came to a halt at the edge, allowing her to look

down into the depths.

‘Oh shit,’ she said, in a small, hollow voice.

The pit seen up close and at this angle was a relatively

shallow crater. It was lined haphazardly with more than

a thousand screens, of every age and technological state,

from ancient cathode rays to holostill displays. Each screen

showed a section of an overall image, so that in the sum

of their parts they showed it prismatically fractured but

It was the vision Roz had seen before waking in her cell:

an abstract, interlocking crystal metastructure that stretched

to infinity, overlaid with the flickering, constantly

transforming forms.

This was mere background. The foreground was filled with

a swarming mass of creatures, of the sort she had

encountered when she had saved what might or might not

have been a human soul. Creatures so foul, so inimical to

humanity that the mind could not bear to assimilate them,

mutating their image into vision after vision of escalating

nausea and horror.

They swarmed in their millions, squirmed together like

maggots in ajar. Whether the fractured image on the screens

was a representation of something that might happen in the

abstract or on the cruder, physical level Roz neither knew nor

cared. The obscene creatures scrabbled and hammered and

gnawed at the wall of screens, as if they were trying to burst

through, desperately longing to come through. Waiting to

come through and eat the world.

11

Jason in Hell:

At the end of the street, Jason realized the vodka bottle was

empty and that he was dying for a slash. It was a simple

matter of putting two and two together. It was too exposed

and public out here on the main road, even at two in the

morning, to piss up against a wall. He had an empty bottle,

so he unzipped his fly and tried to piss into it. This was

somehow easier said than done. He couldn’t get inside it

properly and the piss sort of sprayed out, like from a hose

when you put your thumb over it in the garden back at...

He dashed the half-bottle against the wall of someone’s

garden and put himself away, shaking his hands to get rid of

the worst and then wiping them on his jeans. Fuck it. It

wasn’t as if there was anybody around to pull. A couple of

cars went by, one after the other; he glared at them, daring

them to stop and make something of it, but they speeded up

just before they went past. Jason flipped a finger at them

(people sometimes stopped when he stuck out a thumb,

saving the four and a half odd miles to Backton when the

buses stopped running at five).

He couldn’t quite remember how he’d got here. Some pub

Or other, and then he was certain he remembered being

shoved out of the queue for a club ‘cause of the half-bottle he

was trying to take in to save money, and after that, not a

blank, but a kind of confused fast-forward. Flashes of clear-

ness, smacking into a pavement after tripping on the kerb,

black grit jamming into his hands. Story of his life.

After that night, after his father had gone for his mother,

and he had somehow managed to get in the way and had

picked up the kitchen knife - that was when things had first

started to seriously blur. Before that, if he’d wanted to, he

could have taken everything in his life and made a sharp,

clear picture; afterwards things fell apart and stopped fully

making sense. A confusion of being taken to the family

solicitor and then being allowed to stay home for months,

and then the remand centre, and smacking the queer who

came into his room, which was somehow worse than why he

was there in the first place and had him staying there longer.

Scabies. The first hint of smoke off the Felixstowe line that

was a freebie. The wet rot that made the paint come off in

flakes. The sound of things scuttling up in the lath. The pool

of burning lighter fluid in the chained-up underground

cavern that had once been Dukes, under the roundabout

near a smoked-glass building with a swimming pool, lit up

from within like a fantasy citadel...

The moments of clarity, he was dimly aware, the step-by-

step of them, Strung together in a way that still made some

kind of sense without drink. That was why he drank, he

supposed. When you came right down to it.

It was later. The chill of the night had seeped into the back

of his neck, bringing with it a different kind of clarity - the

kind where you remember what happened, what you did and

said, without quite remembering what you felt and why.

He thought of Liora, how they had met that drunken night

in Jades, and screwed outside and somehow stuck together;

how they had been together, curled together until benefit-

capping do you part, and how he couldn’t think of anything

to say, but how she seemed to know what he meant, anyway.

Even when he’d had to smack her, she had known that was

because it was how he felt, and it wasn’t her fault, and that it

was nothing really to do with her. And he hadn’t done it

much. And he hadn’t really hurt her. He knew what hurting

felt like, and it hadn’t been like that. It hadn’t felt like that

at all.

After the restraining order, after he had realized that she

would not be coming back for the clothes and other shit she

had left behind, he had taken a long, hard look at himself

and realized how he had acted, what he had done. What he

had thrown away. If he could only have a second chance, if

he could just, have a chance to explain, he could make things

right again. He could change. He could make her see and

make everything all right.

Days were filled by spending as much of them as possible

in bed, drifting out of sleep and forcing himself back - he

knew it was stupid, like trying to evoke a kind of sympathetic

magic, trying to recreate the times when he woke up and she

was there in bed beside him. Nights were spent in the few

places they had gone when they went out together: the pubs

and Backton’s grand total of two clubs; the homes of friends,

which, he had long since learnt, were the homes of the people

who had been her friends. It wasn’t that he was hoping to

bump into her by chance, precisely - he knew that she must

be avoiding him - it was more that she must know where

he’d be, and at some point turn up so they could talk.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t know where she was. He’d known

that for a week now. A couple of girls in the Phoenix (straight

for years, now, after the couple of queers who owned it had

nearly gone bust, and had finally wised up to what normal

people wanted in a place like Backton), whom he vaguely

recognized as friends of Liora’s younger sister, had kept

looking at him and obviously talking about him. In the lull

between two mixes, and quite by chance, he had caught one

of them using the word refuge. It had gutted him. He had just

assumed, without checking up on it, that she had gone back

to her parents in Gaventing. Things between them hadn’t

been anything like so bad that she would have to go into a

refuge.

The thing was, Backton wasn’t a city, or even a really large

town. It had one place that could be described as a Women’s

Refuge, on the Chaterham Road, run by a couple of old

dykes from London, who had moved there in more or less the

same way as had the queers who owned the Phoenix. It

wasn’t exactly official, but the social services had been

known to refer people there since it Was, basically, the only

game in town. Jason remembered his mother taking him

there once, one afternoon, years ago, in an abortive attempt

to check it out. He knew where it was.

Now, he realized that he was standing on the Chaterham

Road. He still could not quite recall how he had got there, but

that didn’t really matter. The drink had worn off. He was

stone-cold sober. She might be here or not, she might want

to talk or not. Either way, it couldn’t hurt to see.

The bell for number 44 was of an old type, like half a

marble in a metal flange. When he pressed it he thought he

heard a mechanical clacking somewhere deep inside the

house, but he couldn’t be sure, so he knocked. Nothing

seemed to happen so he knocked harder. A splinter from the

frame buried itself in one of his knuckles. He swore and

started kicking at the door, feeling with a kind of vague

satisfaction that it gave a little, at the lower right-hand

corner, with every kick.

The door was wrenched back, blasting him with light. A

menacing, bulky figure loomed at him shouting, ‘It’s three in

the bloody morning, I’ve called the -’

Jason struck out blindly and unthinking, smacking the

figure full in the face and it went down as though pole-axed.

Later, thinking back, he recognized it: it was the mannish-

looking woman who had once given him a sort of lemonade

she had made herself, showed him her axe-tattoo and had

seemed like an amiable giant. She was older now and shorter

than he was - she had seemed like a giant, now, only because

he had moved back off the doorstep. He barely gave the

fallen body a glance as he dived into the hallway.

It had shrunk and been redecorated since the one time

he had seen it. He charged up the stairs shouting Liora’s

name. Possibly it was something that he couldn’t consciously

recognize like her smell, or possibly there was some actual

but intangible bond between them - either way, he knew

where she would be. He went past two doors without looking

at them, kicked open the third.

She was there, wearing nothing but a large, loose T-shirt

with the word BOBOX printed on it in blocky letters, caught

at a shocked, stricken point between coming to see what the

noise was about and cowering back in fright. Defensively, in

her left hand (she was left-handed) she gripped a half-full

glass bottle of mineral water, bottom outwards so that she

could use it as a club if need be.

Jason looked at her as if in revelation. She had never told

him. She had never told him and he had the fucking right to

know...

In that instant he stopped thinking. All he could do was

feel. He hurt so much that all he could do was show people

how much he hurt. The bottle glanced off his shoulder, but he

hardly felt it. He was too busy driving his fist, with all his

weight behind it, into the slight but obvious bulge of Liora’s

belly that had hurt him the most.

12

Things Breaking Out:

In the gardens in the geodesic dome that protectively

surrounded the bunker of Randolph Bane, the Schirron

Dream sat, quite dormant, at a point between the fishpond

and the ersatz Zen garden, having been deposited there by

automated haulage vehicles remarkably similar to those that

transported Gemini rockets from their hangars to the

launching pad in the later twentieth century. If she was alive,

she gave no sign of being so. If she was asleep she gave no

indication if she dreamt, or what she...

Something inside woke up. A number of lights on the

consoles in the bridge blinked and rippled. Certain

adjustments were made. Something, after a fashion, began to

think.

‘Roz? Is Roz all right?’

Roz realized that she had been staring at the image on the

screens for some time now, quite how long she was not sure.

It was as though her mind wanted to lose itself in horror at

the squirming creatures, sink itself into fear in a way that

was almost luxurious. She shook her head, attempting to

clear it. ‘Sgloomi?’ She frowned. ‘You seem to be getting a bit

more coherent, Sgloomi.’

‘Sgloomi can always be coherent,’ said the Sloathe tartly,

but still keeping hir voice low. ‘Sgloomi just playing silly

buggers so as Bane-man underestimate.’ Roz turned her

head to see that Sgloomi, still in human form, was rippling

slightly. ‘Is same way that Sgloomi really don’t need to keep

the monkey-hominid form.’

Roz looked at hir and counted slowly to ten. Then she

counted to ten again. ‘Do you mean to tell me that you can

change your shape and get out any time you like?’

‘Is possible,’ said Sgloomi. ‘But Sgloomi isn’t strong

enough to free Roz. Roz be in big danger if Sgloomi just

escape.’

Roz nodded to herself. That made the sort of sense she

liked, on account of how it resulted in her keeping her life

and all her limbs more or less intact. The fact that Sgloomi

could get away from the clutches of hir restraining

automaton, though, gave them an edge. What they needed

now was some kind of plan with which it could be capitalized

upon. ‘If only,’ she mused, ‘we could get our hands on some

sort of weapon. Even a maintenance laser cutter would do.

Have you noticed anything like that around that you could

reach?’

‘Is nothing like that.’ Sgloomi paused thoughtfully. ‘How

about knife and gun-thing what is yours?’

If she hadn’t already recently gone insane and then sane

again so she knew what it felt like, Roz would have thought

in that instant that she was going mad. ‘What?’

‘What about gun and knife-thing. Sgloomi find them when

looking around for Roz and secreted about Sloathey person.

For later.’

‘I don’t suppose,’ Roz said, with an icy, perfectly controlled

and murderous calm, ‘that it ever occurred to you to

mention that before?’

‘Is not mention,’ the Sloathe said, seemingly genuinely

puzzled. ‘Is thought Roz knew or thought. Sgloomi knew...’

In her head Roz cursed and damned for all eternity all

aliens, with an alien way of looking at things that could go

for days at a stretch all unnoticed and then turn round and

bite you hard. Out loud, she kept her voice low and calm,

although it was an odds-on favourite in the stakes for the

hardest thing she had ever made herself do in her life. ‘I

think that now might be as good a time as any to use them,

Sgloomi,’ she said. ‘You know how to fire a gun, right? Well,

what I want you to do is...’

It was at this point that Bane, who had been muttering

to himself all the while, suddenly galvanized himself into

action, with the erratic lucidity and purpose of the senile. He

shuddered, stared at Roz and Sgloomi, still dangling half

over the pit from robotic claws, and began to snarl.

‘What are these objects doing here?’ he spat. ‘Remove

them.’ This obviously to the automata. ‘Remove them from

my sight and eliminate them.’

‘Now!’ Roz shouted as the automata began smoothly to

comply. ‘Do it now!’

The Schirron Dream was fully awake now. It would be a

mistake to assume that she conceptualized in a manner

applicable to humans or any generally humanoid being.

Perceptions of position, and whether these were favourable

or unfavourable, something to be desired or shunned,

simply fell into place. The Schirron Dream was merely

aware, if such it could be called, that things that should be

inside her weren’t, and that these things were somewhere

else.

She contemplated the position of these things. She

intimated the other things that were between her and those

things. She complicated the composition of the things that

were between. She contemplated things that she could do to

those things.

Silently, the bluish glow from her propulsion nodes taking

on a hue that had not been observed before, the Schirron

Dream rose gently through the cramped space of the geodesic

and reorientated herself.

(Brigadier-General Bernice Summerfield, following the

collapse of Terran forces under the combined might of

the Offworld/Independent alien and human colony-world

alliance, has been convicted of Crimes Against Sentient Life.

Her sentence, utilizing alien slow-time technology and an

adaptation of the processes used by Terra in the Haze, is to

relive via sensory immersion the deaths of those to which she

directly contributed. The sum total of these deaths is in the

tens of millions.)

For the second time in as many minutes, Roz was brought up

short by a realization of the problems in dealing with alien

perceptions at the sharp end. Sgloomi was staring at her,

simply unable to work out, in the heat of the moment, what it

was she wanted hir to do. Roz was saved only by way of a

completely different set of nonhuman perceptions. The auto-

mata had been told specifically to take Roz and Sgloomi out

of Bane’s sight and then kill them - and they were still in

Bane’s line of sight.

‘Shoot the robot,’ Roz roared. ‘Shoot the robot and shoot

me free.’

It was as if Sgloomi Po had been wired to an electrical

charge. Instantly hir human form dissolved and shot

from hir restraining automaton’s clutches. Simultaneously, a

hole opened up in hir side and spat out several items of

Adjudicator standard-issue equipment, including — gripped

by a handlike, slick-looking pseudopod - Roz’s MFG. There

was the slam of a blaster discharge; Roz felt the bolt fry the

hairs on the left side of her head as it went past, and

something exploded behind her in a shower of sparks.

Fortunately the force of the impact was directed away from

hen the back of her head was merely stung and sliced

by the blowback. The automaton lurched to a dead stop,

immobilized.

A klaxon alarm began to sound. The noise seemed to fill

the entire cavern.

Two further shots from Sgloomi (who had sprung back

into a human form) took care of the claws seeming Roz’s

arms, and with more speed and precision than would have

been possible for a human. Perhaps there was something to

be said for alien reactions after all. Sgloomi now turned the

gun to the automaton from which it had escaped and which

was closing in on hir rapidly.

Breathing heavily and trying not to think about how much

damage had been done to the back of her head and neck, Roz

glanced around herself - and saw something that made her

wish she hadn’t. Panels had slid back around the wall of the

cavern, perhaps as a direct result of the alarm, and more

automata were coming through them. For all their ponderous

motion and the care they took to avoid the cables trailing

from the stacked bodies, she judged that they would arrive

in -

Something smacked at her from behind, taking more skin

off her already abraded neck. She spun around to face the

ravaged face of a madman.

Bane clawed at her with his hooked and palsied hands. He

screamed at her, spraying her with foul-smelling yellow

spittle, going for her eyes.

(Christopher Rodonante Cwej has fallen foul of the New

Reformation, in which he has been found guilty of wholesale

usury, extortion and several counts of homicide. The crimes,

though true enough, are not the true reason for his downfall

- they have been prosecuted as an official response to an

attempted coup d’etat by Cwej against the incumbent High

Justice, Fenn Martle.

The punishment is to be excommunicated, branded,

stripped and set loose in the Overcity’s Underlevels. By a

series of coincidences that might seem fortunate only in one

sense, Cwej survives, with his life, for some considerable

time.)

The engines of the Schirron Dream flared as she hung over

the main mass of the bunker. Pencil-beams like lasers but of

a bluish hue that pulsed almost organically - seemingly the

very stuff of the ship itself’s own life - struck the tungsten

skin over ferroconcrete and it began to vaporize. Keeping a

tight rein on its energies to prevent the inadvertent

destruction of the things it wanted inside it but were below it,

the Schirron Dream began to bore its way into the bunker.

(Jason Kane is beginning the first day of a life sentence with

a recommendation of thirty years without the option of

remission. He will lose an eye, three teeth and half an ear

within forty-eight hours, during a gang-rape incident involving

four other inmates and the tacit approval of the guards. This

will be the first of many such incidents. He will also contract

HIV, but will remain unaware of this for several

years, though the prison doctor will learn of his condition

within four months.)

Bane might have been frail in one sense, but years of various

rejuvenation treatments had given him a tough stringiness. it

was like being attacked by the common idea of a vampire: all

bone and claws and parchment skin.

‘I am your God!’ he screamed. ‘Unworthy! Oh, you’ll pay!

You’ll pay! Kill you make you go to Hell and make you

dead!’

The automata horde was almost upon them. ‘Try to hold

them off, Sgloomi,’ Roz snapped. She shoved Bane from her

and ran for the console and the Egg. There was one way to

end this - end it now.

‘No!’ Bane screamed, crawling after her. Something burst

inside his lungs and blood and mucus sprayed from his

mouth.

‘Oh yes,’ said Roz. ‘Oh yes.’

The Egg seemed to hum as she neared it. She felt the tingle

of its charge. She got her hands around it and the discharge

knocked her back, spasming, things exploding in her head

and tearing it apart. She forced herself to cling to it even as it

killed her head. She hit the rocky floor flat on her back and

forced herself to roll. With the last of her strength, with the

last of her will, she forced herself to her knees and dashed

the Egg against the floor. It was more fragile than she had

expected. It shattered instantly, clockwork spilling out and

scattering.

* * *

(In the minds of almost fifty people, almost fifty artificially

imposed dreams of hell shattered soundlessly, as they were

wrenched out of their inner worlds like rotting teeth pulled

from a head.)

From the crater came an almighty, multiple detonation as

every screen exploded, whatever lay behind it lost to sight.

The sound of the explosion, however, was instantly drowned

out as all the bodies in the racks, every single one, lurched to

life and screamed as if their lungs would burst, slapping and

clawing at themselves in extremis.

From the remains of the Egg, jagged forks of what might or

might not have been lightning burst. One of them struck the

remains of what had once been Simon Deed. The corpse gave

a shudder, and opened its eyes, and with a great lurch

swung itself from its bier and, trailing the cables and

electrodes punched into its flesh, walked toward Bane, who

now sat numbly, the last of his insane strength gone, and

lapsed back into dementia. The walking corpse of Simon

Deed put his hands around Bane’s throat. He had barely

snapped Bane’s fragile and calcified neck when a final

discharge from the shattered remains of the Egg struck them

both, obliterated them both.

For an instant, however, had anybody not been far too

busy with their own concerns to see, know or care, it was as

if the action had been reversed, as though a localized pocket

of time were looping back upon itself.

Sgloomi Po had often wondered, when others had talked of

hell, precisely what they meant. It was one of those human

things that seemed to need no actual explanation, and the

Sloathe had no concrete frame of reference. Now Sgloomi

knew. As hir numerous eyes simultaneously took in the still

and possibly dead form of Roz, the screaming, jerking forms

of his friends Benny, Jason, and Chris, li Shao, Leetha, Kim

and all his other friends and family... as hir eyes took in the

electrical fires burning in the pit, the ululating shriek of the

klaxon alarm and the fact that the automata had not

stopped, that they were still converging, casting around,

looking for something, anything to kill... as hir eyes took in

all this, Sgloomi realized what hell really was. It was here.

Sgloomi was in it. And there was no way out.

Sgloomi darted to the Mend who was nearest to hir. It was

Benny. Sgloomi shook her with a tentacle, trying to snap her

out of the screaming that racked her body. ‘Is stop it! Please

stop now!’

Abruptly, as though a switch had been thrown, Benny

stopped screaming. She looked at Sgloomi with dazed,

bruised-looking eyes.

‘It wasn’t me, you know,’ she said in a perfectly calm

voice. ‘It wasn’t.’

Then she started screaming again.

‘Sgloomi!’

Hir attention focused on Benny, Sgloomi had momentarily

forgotten about the others. Now he saw that li Shao, Kiru and

Leetha were on their feet. They seemed groggy, near

hysterical, but not as entirely debilitated as the rest.

‘If this isn’t reality then I don’t want to know about it,’

snarled li Shao. ‘The last one was a complete rat’s arse. If it

hadn’t been the last in a whole mad string of ‘em I don’t

know if I could have handled it. This is much better.’ lie

looked around himself at the carnage, at the advancing

automata and his face fell a little. ‘Then again, I could be

wrong. How in the Multiple Hells are we going to get out of

this?’

And it was at that point that the roof of the cavern fell in.

It was a strangely gentle fall, merely what seemed to be a

collapse of glittering dust, as though thousands of separate

substances had been finely powdered and mixed together.

From the huge hole that had opened up came a bluish glow -

and a series of blinding, pencil-thin beams burst forth, each

to strike one of the advancing automata and destroy it

utterly.

The brilliance of the beams faded back to a lambent, bluish

but somehow warming glow, which seemed to pulse, slowly,

like a massive, insubstantial heart.

And through the hole in the cavern roof, gently came the

manta form of the Schirron Dream.

DENOUEMENT

RESET ENDINGS

The Schirron Dream hung over the whole, healed Earth - or,

rather, it hung over an Earth showing the mould-like

proliferation of jungle that now spread across most of

western Europe - with the odd still-radioactive crater actually

visible to the naked eye from orbit, the smudgy blemishes of

combustive-waste smog, the haze of free radicals, the

catastrophically chaotic weather patterns, the lack of any

kind of ozone layer and a landmass that hadn’t at the very

least been split in two.

It was, in short, the world that they knew. The Earth from a

time frame that at least a functioning minority of them called

home.

The atmosphere on the Schirron Dream’s bridge was

subdued rather than anything else. A kind of pervading,

quiet misery as those here probed the mental injuries they

had sustained, like a tongue probing a broken tooth, finding

some small comfort in a precise evaluation of the topography

of damage. Making it real so that one could ultimately decide

what to do about it: try to ignore it, or have it filled, or yank it

out in its entirely.

As Nathan li Shao, Kiru and Leetha took their accustomed

places at the controls, Jason lounged moodily at a spare

console that had no important function - the attention and

responsiveness, as it might be called, of the ship had moved

away to the consoles manned by those who were supposed to

be in control. At least li Shao, Leetha and Kiru now had

something to do. Jason, now basically feeling like the spare

leg in the trousers, had nothing to fall back on but the pain.

He had been taken to hell and, like the rest of them, he had

been taken out of it again - but there was no way that

anybody else could understand that extra turn of the screw

for him and himself alone. How it was to be sent to hell by

way of having a second chance.

He made himself shrug and made things slide off, adding

yet more to the mass of things that one of these days, as sure

as eggs was protective avian embryonic support mechanisms,

was going to come back and kill him stone-cold dead, if he

was lucky. There was no way he was going to add to anyone

else’s misery at the moment by spreading his own around. It

wasn’t that he couldn’t do it if he wanted to - it was just that

it would put the tin lid on everybody’s idea that it was

something that he could.

He tried to think some Happy Bunny thoughts. Benny, for

example. Even in the time when they had been going at it

hammer and tongs, that aspect of them enhanced if not

actively exaggerated by the disruption, he had still felt a

connection - a deep sense of sympathy between them that

might not have been entirely pleasant, far from it in fact, but

might stand in for love until the real thing came along. After

they had split up he had been certain, desperately, stridently

certain that they would get back together again. It was

impossible that they would not. It was only now that he

recognized the elements of blind denial in this, a denial so

strong that it was almost madness. Now he realized it, the

feeling was replaced by a faint, but far more comforting and

conceivable, hope. It was what he wanted more than

anything else in the world, this or any other. Maybe it would

happen, and maybe it wouldn’t, but now he felt it to be at

least a possibility rather than a flat impossibility that he had

hysterically refused to believe. At least it was back on the

cards.

As if to save him working this small and fragile sense

of hope to death, the console before him lit up with an

incredibly large number of communications signals. ‘There’s

a whole shitload of people on Earth wanting to know who the

hell we are, why we took off like a bat out of hell and what

we want,’ he said. ‘Do we answer them? Do we want to go

down again?’

‘What I want is to get out of this place,’ said Leetha from

her position. ‘I’ve seen enough of this planet Earth to last me

for the rest of my life.’

‘Several lives,’ said Kiru, calmly working a number of

switches on his own console and seemingly as cool and

sardonic as ever. ‘I agree.’

‘Certainly gets my vote,’ said li Shao from the helm. ‘And

my vote’s the one that counts. We have a number of people to

get home. Let’s go. Drop you somewhere, Mr Kane?’

‘I’ve got some unfinished business in the Catan Nebula,’

Jason said. ‘If it’s actually there and ever existed in the first

place, of course.’

‘We can but hope.’

Roz had been laid out in li Shao, Leetha and Kiru’s cabin -

the Schirron Dream’s medical facilities were overcrowded

with members of the crew who had suffered mental damage

during the abortive Conversion and physical damage during

the exodus to the ship. Besides, Roz seemed to be suffering

from a malaise that no conventional medical skills could

heal.

‘Is she going to be all right?’ Chris asked, in the hollow

tones of one who is certain that the answer is going to be in

the negative. He sat on the bed beside Roz, gripping her

hand in an immovable grip that would probably add severe

spraining to the Adjudicator’s other injuries, should she ever

recover sufficiently to notice. His own face was pale and

there were purple trauma bruises under his eyes. There was

also a hint of shamefacedness about him (he had confided, to

Benny, earlier, mentioning something of his experiences in

hell, that he was a little chagrined to find his soul to be so

simple as to find its worst nightmare simply that of turning

into a Bad Man).

Sgloomi Po, now lapsed into an amorphous blob so that it

could concentrate upon producing some extremely

sophisticated chemical processes within hirself, pulled a

needle-like pseudopod from Roz’s eye socket, through which

it had been pushed up into the brain.

‘Is don’t know,’ it said, hir speech betraying a concentration

that left little effort over for syntactic control. ‘Is have

tried to repair brain-cell things, is make head better. Is have

idea how should be - Sgloomi remember how Roz and Chris

once make Sgloomi think and be real self. Is maybe think

that Roz go back to own time, timeline pull her along and

make Roz think things inside again and...’ Sgloomi paused,

seemingly at a complete loss for words. ‘Is just don’t know.’

Benny sat in the Schirron Dream’s galley, staring blankly at a

cup of what might be coffee or tea, or some synthetic

stimulant beverage - she was too far gone to know or care.

She was completely shattered. The hours since the ship had

flung itself away from Earth she had spent helping those

worse off and more badly wounded than herself in the

medical bay. It was only when she reached the point where

she couldn’t see, or think, or stand straight, and knew that

she might do more harm than good by mistake, that she had

made herself stop.

She hadn’t helped them purely out. of altruism. The taste

of that other Bernice Summerfield, who could countenance

the killing of millions on an industrial scale, the Bernice

Summerfield who was not precisely dead inside, but hard

and smooth and so unutterably cold, who was not this

Bernice Summerfield through sheer happenstance... the taste

of it was still in her mind. She had to wash it out.

She became aware of a presence in front of her. She looked

up. A haggard Jason stood on the other side of the counter,

watching her.

‘Li Shao’s going to be dropping me off soon,’ he said. ‘I

just thought I’d drop in and say goodbye.’ His mouth curled

up in a shadow of his trademark who-cares grin. ‘We’ll

probably run into each other again, yeah? Next time I

suddenly need my bum pulled out of the burner.’

A muscle in her face tried to twitch, attempting to return

the grin of its own accord. It failed, but the attempt was

there.

‘What are you going to do now?’ he asked her.

She tried to think about it. ‘Back to wherever it was, I

suppose. That place with the Lost Temples - where was it?’

‘Lost Temples?’ Jason said. ‘Could be anywhere. Shokesh?

Diorindi IV? Malanoor?’

‘That’s the chap,’ said Benny with a sense of relief. ‘Thank

the Goddess for that. I was worried for the minute it had

been... wiped, rather than me just being too tired to

remember.’ A nasty thought struck her. ‘Everything seems to

have reset back to how we remember it - but how far can we

trust our memories? I mean, how much has been lost and

we’ll never know about it because we can’t remember? How

can we ever know?’

Jason shrugged. ‘I don’t think we ever can. I think we’re

all time travellers, even if we just go the one way. We’re

swept along by events, we have to do what we can and hope

we don’t screw it up entirely. Then we just have to count our

dead, pick up the wounded and carry on.’

And the universe carried on, continuing on its merry way

from Big Bang to Big Crunch. Some things were there that

weren’t there before, some things that had once been there

were gone, and everything and everybody in it saw things

and remembered things in a different way. Everything was

different and everything the same. Such is the fate of

universes, and everything and everyone in them.

In a tiny extradimensional fragment that had looped in

upon itself and sealed itself off from the main fabric of

space-time so that, in extradimensional terms, from the

outside, it might look like a smallish and misshapen Egg, a

man named Bane found himself living and reliving an

instant, where the remains of a man who had been named

Simon Deed snapped his neck, and snapped it again. And

again. And again. And again. In the dim thread of

consciousness that survived this infinitely repeated process,

he knew that he was here for all eternity, that it would never,

ever end.

* * *

‘Roz? Are you awake? Are you there?’

(...in danger and I must... must friends... danger

friends help must in... friends...)

She surfaced from the chaos of dreams. Images of some-

thing black as night with burning eyes, shapes and faces,

faces and names, jewels with lights behind them living in the

Big Light, make the bind to tie it tight, say leave, don’t leave

me like an electric meal and -

(friends... I have friends and they are in danger and I

must help them. I have...)

‘Roz?’

Roz Forrester opened her eyes to see the concerned face of

Fenn Martle looking down at her. Memory snapped into

focus; the rush of events from the then to the now picked her

up and dragged her along like some implacable automaton.

She looked up at the Zarjax sky, turned her head to see the

partition-side of some Fnarok structure. On the other side,

another side. She was in the equivalent of an alley, Martle

kneeling over her and touching her, looking down. Looking

worried.

‘What... happened?’ her mouth felt mushy, not quite

under her control.

‘We were making our way out of the building,’ Martle told

her grimly. ‘Then this thing grabbed you. I didn’t recognize

it. Looked bioengineered to me - maybe something bred up

to use as an enforcer.’ He showed her the tracker unit

he carried, linked to the transceiver implanted under her

sternum. ‘I got a lock on you, but then I lost you. It was

maybe ten minutes before I picked you up again.’

Roz hauled herself up into a sitting position with a groan -

and realized that she was naked save for her undershorts

and singlet. ‘Oh shit. My stuff. My gun. The bastards got my

gun!’

‘Hey, don’t worry,’ Martle said. ‘The sort of fire power

some of those creeps out there have access to, an

Adjudicator’s MFG or two extra won’t make any difference.

There’s no real damage done.’

Roz thought about it. The events of the past few days,

while by no means a resounding victory, had not entirely

been a defeat. They had broken the pituitary-running Fnarok

ring, and while their alien defences had allowed the

perpetrators to escape, she had done the best she could in

the circumstances and she could not be held entirely to

blame. There would be an Prelatical Inquiry by the Curia, of

course, but there was a fair-to-middling chance that they

would weather it with little more than a smudge on their

records. As Martle had said, no real harm had actually been

done, and possibly even some good. At the very least, she

would know better next time. As the initial shock of losing

her weapons and equipment faded, she knew that she would

find the strength to face the future, whatever the future

might bring.

And life went on.

Exeunt all but Rosalind

ROSALIND (to the audience) It is not the fashion to see

the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to

see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs

no bush, ‘tis true that a good play needs no epilogue. Yet to

good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove

the better by the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in

then, that am neither a good epilogue nor cannot insinuate

with you in the behalf of a good play! I am not furnished like

a beggar, therefore to beg you will not become me. My way

is to conjure you; and I’ll begin with the women. I charge

you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much

of this play as please you. And I charge you, O men, for the

love you bear to women, as I perceive by your simpering

none of you hates them, that between you and the women

the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many

of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked

me, and breaths that I defied not; and I am sure, as many as

have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will, for

my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.

Exit

As You Like It, William Shakespeare, 1564-1616

APPENDIX

Jason and the Big Mauve Cloud of Stroky Fluffy-Nurture Love - A

Real Life True Adventure

The basic structure and the function of the universe, as we

have seen, suffered no more than minor, transitory damage

due to the machinations of Bane and Project Ouranos.

Certain minor fragments of quantum potentiality were

indeed detached, flaking off like dandruff from the corpus of

space-time, and just as little missed. Since nothing can,

however, he ultimately destroyed, these fragments had to end

up somewhere...

It started in alternative 27-943-D-17X-0071010.32.1 or

thereabouts. Somewhere over there. (Unreconstructed 3D-

types should imagine a pointing finger receding from you

whichever way you look at it, but receding in a concrete and

specific direction, which is vitreous and smells nostalgically

of nitrous oxide, broken glass and glycol.) Don’t blame me.

You might as well ask how a quark can be suave and

engaging and sophisticated as shit. It just does. 27-943-D-

I7X-0071010.32.1 is one of the tangential Zones, basically,

where the substrata of the quantum mesh go a little

schizophrenic on the quiet - like, you know the Machine

Germans can’t be controlling the inside of your head; it’s

just, like, that you can’t get it quite straight in your mind

because, you see, the Machine Germans are controlling your

head. Things get a little dislocated and strange.

(Before the Fracture, before our particular little sheaf of

supplementary reality peeled off and went weird, people were

getting increasingly worried about the culture-shock inherent

in their infotech: the dislocation, schizoid breakdown, the

psychosensory

overload

of

all

those

simultaneous

alternatives on a human mind that couldn’t cope. You

couldn’t move, say those who know, for asinine and doom-

laden quasi-fictions about a bunch of RISC-architectural

counting machines hooked together on the phone. Printed on

paper. The poor dears. The heart bleeds. They didn’t have to

deal with anything, much, for the simple reason that your

basic, actual, physical experience was of ultimately sitting in

a comfy chair, somewhere, with stuff plugged secondarily and

electrochemically into the senses. Nowadays - and note the

language-lag, even nowadays - nowadays we have to deal

with the literal and physical truth of every available

alternative happening at once.)

But specifically, in the Alternative of which I speak: it

seems that two of the itinerant, nomadic, radium-driven exo-

k’Ans who inhabited it were going at it hammer and tongs,

thundering ‘cross the steppe, crushing things and whatnot

under iron heels or whatever the hell it is they actually do

there - when a round mauve light, like tasteful, pastel ball-

lightning, was seen to appear, seemingly out of nothing and

nowhere. But then again nothings, if you haven’t already

noticed, ain’t quite what they used to be.

It drifted across the landscape with the hiss and crackle of

scorched-earth pampas, singing in, by all accounts, a dulcet

and most soothing tone, before drifting into the left ear of

a k’An Hetman - who promptly fell off his superheated,

feather-and-leather-fetish bedecked traction engine, and

went into spasm. He jerked and gurgled and clawed at his

eyes. He juddered and thrashed on the ground.

And then he sat up, regarded his assembled lieutenants

and minions and dragomen with a look of such unearthly,

and not to mention rapturous, beatitude as to have any

right-thinking man hunting around for the nearest handy

claw-hammer, and said, ‘Hey, guys, why can’t we just stop all

this fighting and shit and just sit down together and be

friends with each other, yeah?’

And then he made that little quote-mark gesture with his

fingers.

Of course, they took him out to the salty mud flats and

waistcoated him: and cauterized the sockets with a flaming

brand and tar, and bloody-eagled him and left him for the

lugworms, but by then, of course, it was far, far too late. The

damage had already been done.

I got the call as I was winding down in a dark bade room of

the Fatigue Shebeen - way down in the electrogravitationally

secure levels of Zero Control - which as we all know,

when we’re capable of remembering, is that one small island

in the post-Fracture chaos where one can retain one’s

morphic signal and sense of identity without serious

assistance. The stable Zone. The crossover Zone. The Zone to

which, at some point on their disrupted lifelines, everybody

comes.

The no-hope Pellucidean support had come and gone back

to their hole, and I was taking in the sounds and absently

cruising the freefloating interfacing node of one of the gestalt

joy-luck troupes as They worked the room with Their

universal connection sockets - the correct pronoun is, of

course, They - when my connection to the Limbo Angels

bleeped. Procedure said I should lock on and translate out.

Instead I said, ‘Listen, I’m on downtime. That business last

cycle with the Albion Freikorp Special Service Agents and the

Legendary Lost City of Mu was worth at least two semi-solid

weeks of biomorphic bandwidth-lease, and I’m going to

spend every last picosecond of it You tell Volan he can get

some other sorry sod to do it.’

My contact wasn’t having any of it.

‘Volan wants you on this excision,’ she said, ‘and he wants

you under personal control. He’s waiting for you at the Inject

Gate. In person.’

And that, of course, put an entirely different complexion

on things. If this was important enough for Volan to leave

that bloody bathroom of his then it was big. Seas-of-fire big,

rivers-of-blood big. Maybe big enough to get my automemic

pattern-signature out of hock for good. I whistled softly and

thoughtfully through my teeth and they fell out.

That was just me picking up secondary radiation-case

resonances from a rogue Big One blip in one of the JFK

Alternatives. (That’s a generic name in the Service for an

Alternative that peeled off from the median with the failure

of an assassination-attempt, followed almost immediately by

all-out full-scale thermonuclear war. There are a hell of a lot

of them, for some reason - and their harmonics play merry

hell even in Control Zero.) I sorted out the canines from the

molars on my palm, jammed them back in their sockets and

then switched my biosignal to something sleek and black and

bursting with vitality. What the hell. I was on energy/mass

expenses again.

The only problem with expenses, though, is that while

you’re on them you tend to die in shrieking agony at the

imminent drop of a dodgy State Vector.

Then I reorientated myself through a supplementary sheaf

of quasi-dimensions and flipped. It’s quicker than walking,

unless you miscalculate the dimensional shift and find your-

self sucked into an Oblivion Alternative, which can be, quite

frankly, a bit of a bugger.

The name’s Jason li Shao. I excise Alternatives. It’s a

living.

People often ask: Will you please stop following me around

and drooling with that ghastly thing hanging out? Other

people, on the other hand, say: So, hey, Jason, what’s it like

being, technically, a fictional character?

To which, I say, how the hell should I know? One minute

so far as I’m concerned, I’m walking down some particularly

mean and nasty streets a man must go, one eye out for the

glint of cold steel and the other slightly glazed after an

incredibly strenuous and not to say entirely improbable

encounter with Dixie de la Bouche, the paraphilic table-

dancer with her tub of clarified beef dripping and her

sinuously fish-oiled leather Russian kout - the next I’m

waking up in the secure Ground Subzero Underlevels of the

Zero Control Hypodome with the Hollow Men looming over

me and reaching for me with their horrible Hollow claws of

solid-state cybernesis and cultured fungus.

Things got incredibly confused there for a while, before

Volan and some of his shit-hot Incorporation track-and-

pullback guys got a lock on me and pulled me out and

stabilized my pattern-ID matrix - and it was only some time

later that I learnt that I was, in fact, to all intents and

purposes, the physical incorporation of a couple of guys from

a bunch of pre-Fragmentation novels - and not even the

heroes of ‘em either. Somebody, somewhere said that we’re

all of us just walk-on characters in the story of our lives, and

that just about sums it all up.

What with the drastic lowering of actuality levels, of course,

that kind of thing happens all the time: incorporations,

resurrections, ‘time-travellers’ popping in out of nowhere with

their amber-resin goggles and their stovepipe hats. It works

on degrees of potentiality. Gods don’t exist, for example, and

thus need some external support-system in which to live -

something to explain them, in effect, or at least explain them

away. People in general do exist, and thus the idea of a

person, technically fictional or otherwise, can achieve a

degree of physical actuality with little additional external

effort, natch. Nobody makes much of a deal of it, in the

various shielded crossover Zones scattered over what was

once a globe, and once you’re actually integrated, stabilized

and tagged.

It all came as a bit of a blow at the time; I thought I was

‘real’ — if that word means anything anymore. I also thought,

for some reason, I was a Master of Tai Kwun Po, which is

like this totally fictitious martial art form - as I found out on

my first job for Volan, when I came up against Doogie

Portillo and his Whistling Ninjas. It was three and a half

cycles before I was out of that full body cast...

The important point, however, is that the people like me

are incredibly valuable in Zero Control. Out there, out in

the Zones, an aboriginal simply cannot cross from one

alternative to another without massive physiological and

psychological collapse as his, her or hir biomorphic matrix

desperately tries to come to terms with the ontological

equivalent of suddenly being an oblongatic peg in a

tesseroidal hole.

People like me, who never existed on this point on the

meta-timeline in the first place, can survive the transitions

with our core identity-matrices relatively intact. That’s why

the control Incorporations integrate us and lock us down.

And of course, when we do die, it’s no real loss. They can

regenerate our matrices from file. So you can do anything

with us. We’re incredibly valuable because we’re also utterly

expendable.

Arbitrary Base was crowded when I got there; anyone who

was capable of being aware that something was wrong, and

could make it out, was ejecting from the peripheries of the

peripherally affected Zones for dear life; the crossover pads

were a blur of people flipping in and reorientating, flipping

out and, occasionally, exploding spectacularly as more than

one of them tried to occupy the same quasi-physical Nexus

space.

Techs in diffractive, fibrotic, fibre-optic coveralls were exo-

jointed Waldo’ing in and calibrating in the massive bulk of

the Injection Ram, the cantilevered, parahydraulic arm that

would take me over the lip of the catastrophe curve under

control. In a curtain, if subjective, but very real sense I was

going to be stuck with it - connected by bolt-clamps punched

through the skin and sunk into the bone. Volan was already

there, in his VR command-control suit, linked to the Ram

mechanics via radio-remote. One of the oddities of excision is

that the controller, who never leaves what we laughingly like

to think of as reality, has more actual mobility than the poor

sod actually in there at the blunt end. He waddled over to

me, his pasty glistening suet-sausage-skin-stuffed skin

bulging his support corsets badly. Behind him slithered the

mercury-pool puddle of a Sterling-model AVAI.

He gave me the rundown, and you already know about

that. All the while the Techs shot me with microcustomized

retroviruses so I force-evolved comms sockets in my scalp. It

felt like they were digging out half-healed scabs.

‘It’s bad,’ Volan concluded. The AVAI rippled and reared,

forming itself into a 2D screen. On it, a pinpoint on a

convoluted, abstract representation of the Zones opened and

flowered - insubstantial, possibly human forms jerking and

squirming in a haze of twinkling purple lights. Occasionally

one of them fell to pieces as his field lost cohesion, skin

flaking away in a drift of desiccated scales, wobbling flesh

and viscera sloughing off from crumbling bones. And then

another. And another.

And another and another and another. The process was

accelerating.

And yet something still remained of them - some abstract

outline that had nothing much to do with actual, visual

information. The dissipated creatures flowed and swirled

together in the miasma, falling on and sucking on the

more corporeal and catastrophically diminishing cohesive

‘Is that what I think it is?’ I breathed, shocked and

shuddering despite myself.

Volan nodded. His jowls almost subcutaneously prolapsed.

‘Orgones,’ he said.

‘You can forget it,’ I shouted. ‘Just forget about it, OK?

There is no way you’re going to get me in there.’

The Techs and several nearby automata had restrained and

clamped me by then. There was no way out but my

autonomous self-destruct - the collapse mode that would

snap my submolecular bonds catastrophically open and

smear me over the entire spatial/gravitational continuum

like a static charge being earthed.

‘I’ll suicide,’ I told Volan. ‘Baby go bang-crack.’

Volan pressed his face very close to me. The electrodes in

his own scalp rattled. There was a gloating, knowing look in

his eyes and, secured by the clamps, I couldn’t look away.

‘Somehow,’ he said, a fleck of spit hitting my chin under

the comer of my mouth, ‘I don’t think so. I put together your

reclamation specs and I really don’t think you have it in you.’

‘You know what’s going to happen the moment I get in

there?’ I said. ‘I’m going to be engulfed. A miasma of

fever-heat will pervade my tissues, driving me to my knees

and leaving me wide open for those things.

‘Once, perhaps, they might have been human, but they’ll

have been changed. Who knows from what rogue alternative

those vestigial, parasitic energies leaked - but they’ve fed,

now, twisting anything organic to their monstrous somatic

form. They’ll pull me down and slither over me and sodding

subsume me, matey.’

‘Now listen here,’ Volan said. ‘You saw as well as I did

how things were going critical. That vector’s going to col-

lapse and whipsaw, taking its peripherals and several

primary alternatives with it. The knock-on effect could even

rapture the Nexus - and you know what that means.’

‘Bang goes the entire vestigial shooting match into

primordial chaos and the unending howling night,’ I said.

‘So what? If that happens, we’ve all got a couple of cycles,

tops. I go in, I’m going to last about as long as a lead-

weighted slug on a razor blade. There’s a lot of things you

can do in a couple of cycles.’

Volan rubbed tiredly at one of the pustular sacs under his

eyes. ‘You’re going in. There’s no two ways about it while

I’m in control. You don’t have any choice. Can’t you show a

bit of backbone for Christ’s sake?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,’ I said. ‘I go into an

Alternative, I’m still subject to a small set of personally

customized physical laws. You know that.’

Volan, meanwhile, had quickly sidestepped the miniature

thunderbolt whilst simultaneously doing the spectacles-

testicles-wallet-and-watch routine that has by now become

instinctive. That particular bastard’s incredibly petty and

vindictive, now that he’s started to actually exist. In doing so,

Volan collided with a tech carrying a hastily nailed-together,

foil-coated box roughly the size of my head.

I nearly wrenched my head out of the clamps staring at it.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ I said, with remarkable restraint, I

thought, considering the circumstances. ‘You’re going to fit

me with a bleeding Reich box?’

‘It’ll give you some time,’ Volan told me.

‘Just enough to hit the suicide switch,’ I said. In that

moment I really meant it. ‘Blow myself into several billion

different Zones and switch it off.’

Then I stopped.

Possibly what passes for my mind was working overtime

at this point - desperately hunting for a way, any way out -

but I suddenly had the first faint glimmerings of an idea.

Something to do with the readouts Volan had. shown me on

his Sterling.

‘Hang about,’ I said. ‘Show me the AVAI again.’

Volan snorted. ‘More time wasting?’

‘Just do it, OK? Count it as a last request.’

Volan grumbled, but the 2D display appeared before me.

There, on the wireframe abstract, was what I was hoping

against hope I had remembered.

‘Volan... ?’ I said. ‘The suicide switch. Can you disable

the cohesion-collapse factors? Eject me from the Alternative

on a single vector, in one piece?’

I heard Volan gasp. ‘Impossible!’ he exclaimed. ‘If you

weren’t diffused, you’d tear the entire Alternative open, and

that’s just what we’re trying to prevent. It would rupture

wide.’

I tried to shake my head. ‘I’m talking about a controlled

rupture. Look at the display. You see that peripheral Zone

out in the left field?’

Silence.

‘I see it,’ Volan said at last.

‘That’s one of the JFK Alternatives,’ I said. ‘Nuclear

winter. Entirely different energy slope. Open it up and it’ll

suck that orgone energy out and scream for more. It’ll warm

them up a bit, and the rogue Alternative’ll collapse like a

balloon with the knot cut off. Either that or they’ll establish

equilibrium. Either way it’s contained.’

It seemed like a cycle before Volan spoke. And then it was

to shout at one of the Techs now hovering about like spare

knobs: ‘You! Hit that suicide pack with a spanner or some-

thing.’ And then to me: ‘I think we might just do it.’

And so we did.

Sometimes, just occasionally, if you’re ever going to get

anything done, you have to break a few rules. And the same

to you, too.

Document Outline

Front Cover

Back Cover

PROLOGUE

ANOTHER PROLOGUE

STRIKE ONE

1 A FRACTURED SURFACE

2 SIGNALS FROM THE UNDERGROUND

3 THE INTERMINABLE SALUTATION (ALTERNATE EARTH)

4 FAIRLY STRANGE REUNIONS

5 MADE OF THIS (ALTERNATE EARTH)

6 GETTING UP TO SPEED

7 MINIMAL CUTTING (ALTERNATE EARTH)

8 THE ELEVATION OF THE MASSES, ALTOGETHER

STRIKE TWO

9 THE MYSTERIOUSLY ELUSIVE VILLAIN, PART ONE (ALTERNATE EARTH)

10 FOREIGN MUSIC

11 SUSPICIOUS GESTURES

12 THE MYSTERIOUSLY ELUSIVE VILLAIN, PART TWO (ALTERNATE EARTH)

13 INCIDENTAL ARRIVALS

14 A SMALL SOJOURN IN SUBTERRANEA

15 DISPLACED RELATIONSHIPS (HYBRID TIMELINE)

16 DEGREES OF ATTRITION (ALTERNATE EARTH)

17 RETROGRESSIVE DEFINITIONS

18 JANUS WAKING(ALTERNATE EARTH/S)

STRIKE THREE

19 CROSSMATCHED COVER STORIES

20 PAST TIMES CATCHING UP (ALTERNATE EARTH)

21 A HELL OF A LIFE IN THE GLORY HOLE

22 COULD BE YOU (PREMONITIONS OF THE NEXUS)

23 PEELING BACK THE SKINS

24 LIGHT COME DOWN (A MEETING OF MINDS)

25 GROUNDING OUT

26 A BREAK FROM UNREALITY

STRIKEOUT

1 Jason in the Real World:

2 Roz Dreaming:

3 Benny in the Real World:

4 Roz Dreaming:

5 Chris in the Real World:

6 Roz Awake:

7 Chris Goes to Hell:

8 Roz and Sgloomi in the Real World:

9 Benny in Hell:

10 Bane in a World of his Own:

11 Jason in Hell:

12 Things Breaking Out:

DENOUEMENT RESET ENDINGS

Exeunt all but Rosalind

APPENDIX