“By all gods, no!” he said. “I’ve sent her away to Thalangia. At least there’s no fighting there. I wish I was there too.”
I was sure he did wish it, since he had chivalrously sent the one person he might have talked to there. “Is it far to Thalangia?” I asked, and wondered whether, if I advised him to go there and let the Empire go to hell, he would listen to me. It was hard to see someone under such stress and not offer help.
“Far?” he said. “It’s two worlds Ayewards from here. And you can be sure I’ve got my best unit guarding that world gate. Those gates are so damned vulnerable, you know. The Telth gate went down in seconds. “Seeing me looking searchingly at him, he added, “I’m from that world – from Thalangia. Empire policy was that no soldier served in his or her world of origin. I had to come and serve here. But I’d go home tomorrow, except I know damn fine that hell would break loose in Thalangia too if there was no one at the head of things.”
“You’re certainly right there,” I said soberly. Then, as a last stab at getting things to go the way they were Intended, I said, “You could still solve that by taking the throne yourself. Why not?”
He gave me a long expressionless look. It almost seemed a look of hatred. “I’m not even tempted, Magid. There’s men on Telth and Annergam with much better families than mine, and they’ve taken power there, but they’ve not called it a throne, and they’ve not dared to call themselves Emperor. They know. I know. I’m not tempted.”
“All right,” I said dejectedly. “All right. Then you’ll just have to keep on looking for Knarros.”
He sighed deeply. “I know. Eight more dead.”
“Eight more poor fools dead,” I told Stan when I arrived home with a black ragged hole in one trouser-knee and my hands covered with sooty mud.
“Seven of them would have been anyway,” he said. “You know what the Empire’s like.” He was listening to Scarlatti harpsichord sonatas that week. He had gone through all Bach while I worked on the fatelines. Now it was Scarlatti. Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. There are over five hundred Scarlatti keyboard sonatas. I only had a few. In self-defence, I went and bought Stan three more CDs full of them that afternoon, in order to have a different tinkle-tinkle to listen to while I took another look at the Emperor’s disk.
I was hoping there was a clue to the whereabouts of Knarros somewhere on it. The Emperor had brought himself to make this secret record after all. Being Timos IX, he must have felt he was shouting the facts from the Palace roof. So why not go a bit further and put in all the facts? Even he must have realised that he might not be there to explain the program. I had hopes that there might be something hiding behind the lists. There was an awful lot of space left of that disk. But there really seemed to be nothing. And the darned thing was designed as a loop. Like the continuum itself, it kept bringing you back to the beginning. Babylon, I thought uneasily. First you got the graphics, with the world arranged like isobars, waving from one configuration to another, and then, superimposed on these, the semi-animated drawings of men, women and centaurs of both sexes.
The drawings were all in side-view and had, as I said, the look of having been taken from photographs of real people. I stopped each one and studied it, but I was none the wiser. They were all different unknown beings, except that two – a human girl and a young female centaur with rather similar features – occurred twice, but this seemed to be because the programmer had slightly botched the loop and put them in at both start and finish by mistake. The girl and the centaur-woman both had the strong-arched nose and the almond eyes you find on Greek vases and Minoan wall paintings, but this told me nothing, except perhaps that the graphics had stylised the real picture to conform with the fashion of beauty. Funny to think that the Koryfonic Empire was already flourishing when Greece and Minos were new. High time it broke up, really.
I froze each of the linear, isobar-like worlds then and looked each one up laboriously in my Magid database. They were a loop too, starting randomly with a different Empire world each time, and making a circuit of the Empire and forty-one neighbouring worlds, Ayewards and Naywards both. Apart from the fact that I incidentally learnt the Koryfonic isobars for Earth, this told me nothing.
“I give up!” I said to Stan.
“I think that’s what you’re supposed to do,” he said. Tinkle, tinkle.
All this put me in such a pessimistic mood that I was quite surprised when my fatelines started to draw in beautifully. They drew in all through the rest of March, just as I had planned. At least I got something right! I thought after NATO stepped in and sorted out the former Yugoslavia, and my Croatian candidate came to light manning a gun emplacement in the mountains there. Kornelius Punt returned to Holland. Fisk came out of her retreat (or clinic, or whatever) and seemed to be making plans to come to Britain soon; and my remaining British candidate flew in from Tokyo a week before Easter. When Rick Corrie or one of his colleagues sent me a sheaf of updates on the convention, I began to think I had wrought better than I knew. Mervin Thurless actually figured in it as ‘hopefully making a guest appearance’. The rest of the stuff was almost too strange to contemplate, but I hoped I could make sense of it once I was there. Almost the only other part I understood was the statement that the Guest of Honour was now confirmed to be ‘world-acclaimed writer Ted Mallory, the Grand Master of black humour’. For some reason, the name rang no bells with me. I went into Cambridge and bought a paperback by him called Shadowfall and fell asleep over it repeatedly.
I was preoccupied at that time with a premonition. This told me I needed Stan with me in Wantchester, and Stan couldn’t leave my house. We experimented. He could not go out through the front door at all. He could go a foot or so beyond the back door, but not as far as the barn. At the sides of the house, he tended to get sucked back in through the windows.
We gave up experimenting the day Mrs Gibbs arrived to find me leaning out of my bedroom window, calling to empty air, “Where are you now, Stan?” I don’t think she heard the croaked reply of “Round near your car. I just – oh bugger!” but we didn’t want to take any more chances.
“This is ridiculous, Stan!” I said, when Mrs Gibbs had safely gone, leaving the house scented with bleach and detergent. “The Upper Room sent you back expressly to help me choose your replacement, but they won’t let you come and do it! Do you think you could go back and point this gently out to them?”
“I could try,” Stan husked, after one of his unhappy pauses. “They don’t sort of think in these human terms, though, do they? As far as they’re concerned, I’m back and that’s it.”
“Go and explain,” I said. “I know I’m going to need you.”
“Precog?” he asked.
“Yup,” I said. I had absolutely no doubt.
“All right then,” he said. “But I may be away for some time, I warn you. It may take an appeal to Higher Up – not to speak of the way time goes odd that far outside the continuum.”
And before long, Stan was gone. It was a slow fading, nothing sudden. By mid-afternoon, the Scarlatti tinkled to a gentle stop and the house felt empty.
For the rest of that day, I enjoyed the sense of peace enormously. It was a relief not to have an invisible presence likely to look over your shoulder whatever you happened to be doing. It was a relief not to sense silent disapproval at my work on behalf of the Empire. Above all, it was a relief not to have to listen to Scarlatti all the time. The next day, I tried to enjoy the same feeling of relief, and even told myself I was enjoying it. The following day, the Wednesday before the convention, I couldn’t settle to anything. I told myself I was nervous of going to this strange gathering to make a selection on which the future of worlds depended – but it wasn’t that: it was Stan’s absence. On Thursday morning, I sat having breakfast and feeling truly desolate. It seemed to me that I had lost Stan finally and for ever, by my own insistence. Them Up There don’t like you trying to change their decisions (which never seems to stop us Magids trying, but there you go). Th
ey tend to say, “If you don’t like it, you can do without,” and turn their backs on you. I opened my newspaper, but I couldn’t concentrate on it.
The back door opened. Icy wind blew in.
I whirled round. I don’t know what I expected – Stan in some way more incarnate, I suppose – and I hope the smile of delight and welcome didn’t freeze on my face too obviously when I saw it was only Andrew. He was standing there, on my threshold, with that tranced look again. Damn! I thought, and told myself I should have been expecting this. Andrew had somehow got himself tied in with the other fatelines. He had been bound to turn up.
“I’m sorry, Rupert. I need you to drive me again,” he said.
“And I’m sorry too, Andrew,” I told him. “I can’t. Not today. Not till Tuesday. I’m going to be away till then, leaving this morning. But come in and have some coffee anyway.”
Andrew advanced a step, then stopped. “Where are you going this time?”
“Wantchester,” I said, “for a conference – I mean, convention.”
Andrew stood there with that air he has of consulting parts of his brain so distant that it takes time to reach them. Then he smiled and his face looked intelligent again. “I’ll come with you to Wantchester,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Andrew,” I said, truly exasperated, “this is a convention for readers of fantasy, and you have to book in advance.”
“It doesn’t sound like your cup of tea,” he remarked. “It’s not mine either. But I’d like to see round Wantchester. You can drop me off in the centre of town somewhere. I shan’t be in the way.”
“All right,” I said. What else could I say? “I’m aiming to start at twelve-thirty.”
“I’ll be there,” he said and went out and shut my back door, cutting out the icy blasts of wind, to my relief. It had been an unusually cold Spring. April had come in with snow. I poured myself some coffee that had cooled considerably despite Andrew’s patent pot, and muttered things about Andrew as I tried to drink it.
Stan’s voice said, “He was a fool not to have some of that coffee. It smells good. I wish I could have some.”
“Stan!” I said. “They let you come!”
“With conditions, Rupert. With conditions,” he said. “They’ll let me come with you, but I shall be bound to your car, just like I am to this house. When you want to talk to me, you’re going to have to come and sit in the car.”
“Why? What are they afraid you’ll do?” I said “Haunt people?”
“It’s not that, lad. Wantchester’s one of the really potent nodes, and they don’t want any more trouble than they can help. They’re pretty nervous about you choosing it, as it happens. They say things could blow up in your face if you’re not careful. I got torn off a strip for letting you choose it. They said I should have reminded you of your Roman lore, and I said I couldn’t, could I?, when I’d forgotten it myself. It wasn’t,” Stan said, “a comfortable meeting.”
I should have remembered Roman lore too. Any town whose name ends in – chester will have been an ancient Roman camp. And the Romans always built these on nodes if they could. It was like plugging into the power-points of the country they were conquering. Roman survey teams had augurs with them as a matter of course, and most of these could divine a node at least as readily as a Magid can. I have always suspected that their chief survey-augur may have been a Magid: he was so accurate. And if there was a choice between one site with a lesser node and another with a greater, you can be sure he chose the latter.
“Ah well,” I said. “It’s too late now. We’ll just have to be careful. At least I’ve got a sound system in the car. Let’s get you a stack of Scarlatti tapes.”
Maree Mallory’s Thornlady
Directory: further extracts
[1]
I haven’t had the Thornlady dream for two weeks now.
The ten-pound notes were genuine. I have been renovating my appearance with them. I had my hair cut and bought some clothes. Some of my old clothes were so terrible that I wasn’t even going to take them round to Oxfam, until Nick said he didn’t approve of throwing away clothes, because there had to be people worse off than me, so why not mix them with a bag of things he had grown out of? And I was glad I did. I found a really good leather jacket in Oxfam for only £5! I suppose it was too small for most people, but it looks good on me. And I’ve kept my old specs as a spare, even though I can hardly see through them since I’ve been wearing the new ones. I hadn’t realised how much my eyes had changed since I was sixteen.
[2]
Uncle Ted has been making the air loud with grumbles and indecision. It seems he was invited to a conference of some kind – last year, he says, when it didn’t seem real and, for all he knew, the world would end before a year as improbable as 1996 ever occurred – and now it’s only a week or so away and he doesn’t want to go. At least once a day, he thinks of a new excuse for not going. “I shall ring up and tell them Maree’s got meningitis,” was his latest one.
“Don’t be silly, dear,” Janine says. She says that each time. “You’re a Guest of Honour. You’ll let them down terribly if you cancel now.” Janine is very keen for him to go because she wants to bask in reflected glory. And she’s already got new clothes for it. Nick wants him to go because he’s going to fill the house with his role-playing-game friends while they’re away. I am the only one who’s neutral.
“Not cancel it,” Uncle Ted said. “They want me to confirm that I’m going. They keep asking. They’re getting quite neurotic about it, if you ask me, but of course I can’t go if Maree’s ill.”
“I refuse to fake meningitis,” I said.
“But you don’t understand!” Uncle Ted howled. “It’s interrupting my life! It’s interfering with my work. If I have to go and say things about the way I write, I shall end up thinking I mean them and not be able to write at all.”
“You always enjoy conventions once you get there,” Janine persuaded. “You meet a lot of people. You sell a lot of books.”
At this point I went away to a lecture (Robbie never goes to things where people just talk, so it was safe) and when I came back in the evening, rather depressed again, Janine had won. But at a cost. Uncle Ted had confirmed he would go to the convention on condition he was bribed with a weekend in Scotland playing golf. This doesn’t count as interrupting his life apparently. And Janine is a very keen golfer too. So off they both went, leaving me in charge of Nick “as an experiment”. Usually when they go away, they park Nick with one of Janine’s friends, but now they can use me. It’s just like the way Janine always used me when we were small. She left a list as long as my arm of things I had to do pinned to the kitchen board. I feel like Cinderella.
[3]
The whole thing was a disaster.
For one thing, I can’t cook – and anyway I draw the line at cooking for seven – so Nick did it. He ignored all Janine’s lists and Janine’s freezer-menus and made several hundredweight of spaghetti. For another thing, Nick decided to have a dry run for the convention weekend and invited all his friends. For a third thing, they got bored with role-gaming and had a party in the living room instead. Nick wasn’t about to have a mess in his basement, not he! So they used the living room and invited more friends and everything was rather noisier than the sort of thing I’d left Aunt Irene’s to avoid. Aunt Irene’s kids aren’t into pop music yet. I never thought I’d miss anything about her house! And for the fourth and worst thing, the weather in Scotland was lousy and Janine and Uncle Ted came back after a day.
They arrived about an hour after I’d come down from the attic and read the riot act. I mean enough is enough. Even more of my fellow-students don’t get as drunk as those kids were.
I was standing on the stairs, bawling orders, sarcasm and abuse, while great big lads ran humbly about with empty bottles, carpet cleaner, pans of broken glass, sleeping bags, disinfectant and the furniture they’d moved to other places. I still wonder how I’d got them so thoroughly cowed. They we
re all a foot taller than me. But I was furious. I knew I was the one who’d get the blame. And Nick had promised me that nothing like this would happen. And the mess was – or had been – phenomenal. Even then the whole house smelt of sweaty teenage boy – with detergent, alcohol and disinfectant coming in as poor seconds. I RAVED.
And broke off sharpish when I saw Janine and Uncle Ted in the hall.
I thought they were about to turn me into the street there and then. I swore I saw it in Janine’s eye. I had time to visualise myself wrapped in a blanket, shivering in a shop doorway along with Bristol’s other homeless, and not even a dog to provoke the pity of passers-by, when I realised that by some miracle most of the abuse was not being directed at me. Nick’s friends were kicked out almost instantly – but they had homes to go to, so that was all right – and I had to help Nick clean up the rest of a mess I hadn’t made – but that was all right too – and it was Nick that Uncle Ted went for. I hadn’t realised what a sense of justice Uncle Ted has. Janine made one or two efforts to stand in front of Nick and blame me, but they were not her best efforts, until she went into the kitchen and found it draped in pasta, and recognised Nick’s touch. Then she went, “Poor Maree,” she went, “Maree’s not up to this sort of responsibility!” she went. And then she joined Uncle Ted in shouting at Nick.
I let the injustice of that go, I was so relieved still to have a roof over my head. To hear Janine, you’d think she hadn’t heard a word of my Sergeant Major act on the stairs. And I’d got it all more or less under control by the time they came home.
Nick was in deep shit for nearly twenty-four hours. Much of it was Janine or Uncle Ted snapping criticisms of every single thing he did or said – which form of nagging Nick avoided any time he wanted by going to ground in his basement – but some of it was Uncle Ted angrily totting up how much of his whisky Nick and his friends had drunk and demanding to be paid for it. For some reason, this was the part that truly upset Nick. That boy doesn’t know he’s born. He’s had to sell two CDs to pay for the booze and he was nearly in tears over it.