© 1991-1998

About the Book

The story concerns two civil servants, Julia Hewlett and Jack Henderson. One ordinary day, their comfortably meaningless existence is disrupted by a terrorist bomb that flattens their office. Rather than Heaven, Hell, Purgatory or Limbo, they find themselves in a parallel universe, which they are expected to save from a great evil. Jack reluctantly agrees to make an attempt, but Julia thinks that she's in this world because her subconscious has gotten confused about what a near-death experience should look like. Along the way to their goal, they meet many perils and a host of oddball characters. Nothing is quite what it seems in this surreal world, and even the evil that threatens it is not what Jack and Julia have been led to believe...

This book is not finished, and I'm not convinced that it's worth finishing. That said, reading over it again before I posted it here certainly made me laugh :-) It grew out of a radio series I wrote and produced when I was at university, and it's illustrated with some scans of posters I drew to promote the broadcasts.

My plan is that there will be another six chapters, once Chapter Three is done, for a total of nine chapters plus the prologue. The other chapters should be about the same length as the ones here. This is mostly because of its origins in radio, where each episode of a series has to be the same length.

Each chapter, except the unfinished Chapter Three, is about 120K, which may take a few minutes to download.

(Incidentally, the Lucifer Jones of the title has no connection with any other character of that name that you may have come across.)

Contacting the Author

If you have any questions, comments, criticisms or even praise for me about this book, please email fiction at pembers dot net.

Licence Agreement

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You may distribute an extract of the book, but if you do this, you must state prominently that you are distributing an extract, and state that the original is available at http://www.pembers.net/fiction/lj_prologue.html. You may not sell the book or any extract of it or any accompanying graphics, although you may charge a reasonable fee to cover any costs you incur.

Arguably, you cannot be bound by this licence agreement, because you have not signed it. However, it grants you rights that you would not normally have, and you cannot receive those rights unless you accept the agreement.

With that necessary unpleasantness out of the way, let's settle down and enjoy the story...

Scene One

Somewhere in a twenty-first century that didn't quite work out as expected...

...pip-pip.....pip-pip.....pip-pip.....

As the sound of the alarm doggedly wriggled through the mechanism of her right ear, and the subtle filtering apparatus that backed it up, and casually slipped through the unguarded, half-open door of the auditory centre of her brain, Julia K. Hewlett recited to herself, at the rate of one syllable per pip, her favourite list of swearwords. [picture of Julia]

....pip-pip.....pip-pip.....pip-pip.....piiip.

Slowly, Julia rolled over, not really wanting to have to face the horrible truth that would confront her: the alarm's Eezi-Reed time display. Forty-two bright red light-emitting diodes, each three centimetres long, which gave the alarm a power consumption to rival that of the average home hi-fi. Julia vaguely remembered having read in literature classes at school that forty-two was the answer to something. The answer to what, though? It escaped her at present, unless it was: "How many LEDs are there in an alarm's Eezi-Reed display?," which it wouldn't have been, because everything you read in literature classes was written long before the invention of the alarm. How on earth did they manage? she wondered. They didn't, obviously. If they'd been able to cope without the alarm, they'd never have invented it.

Slowly, Julia opened one eye, hoping to discover one digit at a time what the display read. The first digit was a zero. That was OK. The one after that was a seven. That was OK, too. The third digit -

"Are you awake? It is now seven fifteen hours - time to get up and prepare for work."

Julia sighed and opened both eyes all the way. The alarm was right, as always: seven fifteen and twenty... twenty- something seconds. The display's last digit danced and flickered like the flames of Hell. She prepared to ask the alarm a question. She knew it would say no. It always did. But she would ask anyway. One day, perhaps, the answer would be yes. The question was this: "Can't I have another five minutes?"

Almost before she had finished, the alarm replied firmly: "No. It is already five minutes past your regular rising time and, not counting last night and this morning, your sleep account for this quarter is currently two hours and four minutes in debt."

This last piece of news was quite a shock. Julia sat up. "Two hours and four minutes?" she gasped. "How the hell...?"

"Administration charges," said the alarm, with the enormous smugness of something delivering bad news to someone it doesn't like, and which knows that there is nothing she can do about it.

Bastards, thought Julia. It made sense, in a way: time was money, after all, and how better to pay the vast running costs of the Timekeeping Department than with a small charge deducted monthly from each account? Bastards.

"Got me right where you want me, haven't you?" she muttered, throwing back the sheets and jumping out of bed. "All right, stop the clock, I'm on my feet!" She squatted down by the alarm and squinted at the Eezi-Reed display. The last digit was still dancing its inane ten-step. She shook her head in an effort to clear the early-morning fog from her brain, and looked again. "Seven fifteen and fifty-seven - fifty-eight - fifty-nine - stop moving, dammit! Seven sixteen and two - three seconds," she said, with an air of desperation, as if by proving she could tell the time she might somehow clear her sleep account debt.

The alarm briefly twiddled its hour and minute counters to display the word GOSH, and then replied in its smug little voice: "Seven fifteen and fifty-one seconds, to be precise."

Julia rose shakily to her feet and looked down on the alarm. It was just asking for strong hot coffee to be poured into its ventilation slots. "Trying to make me feel grateful, are you?" she sneered. "Want me to thank you for stopping the clock when my feet touched the floor, and making me..." She tailed off, as part of her brain feverishly tried to subtract seven fifteen fifty-one from seven sixteen zero three in base sixty. It gave up and reported an arithmetic overflow, before nipping off in search of some breakfast.

"Twelve seconds?" the alarm offered. Its intonation chip was about the simplest you could get, but it somehow managed to convey scorn as well as smugness with those two words. Strong, boiling coffee, a full pot, with extra milk and sugar...

"Yeah, twelve seconds less in debt than I thought I was," she said. "You cheap clockwork toy! What difference does that make?"

The alarm turned its smugness and scorn up to maximum, threw in some moral superiority for good measure, and uttered Bureaucrat's Mantra Number One. "I am merely following regulations," it said.

That was it.

That really was it.

Coffee was too good for this little electronic Hitler.

"Regulations?" Julia shrieked. " Regulations? I'll give you regulations, you cheap piece of foreign trash!"

She grabbed the alarm from the bedside table and began hitting it against the wall. Unfortunately, the alarm hadn't been fitted with motion sensors, and so it was unable to feel her blows. It probably didn't even know that she had picked it up. It just uttered its reply to her last sentence, in its smug, pedantic voice: "I think I should point out that, as a device which is of great importance..." Julia stopped beating the alarm for a moment, and looked at it. She'd cracked its casing, and several of the LEDs had gone out. But the bloody thing was still talking! "...to the operation of a major Government department..." She pulled the plug out by the cable. The Eezi-Reed went dark, but the alarm's voice continued uninterrupted: "...my components are required to be manufactured and assembled by companies..." She took the alarm in both hands, raised it above her head, and threw it as hard as she could against the far wall: "...in which the Government has a majority sharehokzzk-!" The alarm shattered, showering the floor with wires and bits of circuit boards.

Julia sank slowly onto the bed. "God, I needed that," she muttered.

What felt like several seconds passed. The world, or at least Julia's part of it, seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for something to happen.

"Err... excuse me..."

"What?" she gasped. She was too startled to jump to her feet. The voice had begun to speak again before she had so much as figured out where it had come from.

"I don't think you should have done that, you know," it was saying, in a tone that suggested that its owner knew that she knew that she shouldn't have done whatever it was, and that she wouldn't take too kindly to being reminded of the fact. "I mean, those alarms are connected by microwave radio to Timekeeping Headquarters, and you should surely know that you get debit markers on all your computer files if you so much as breathe on one of those things, so... can you imagine what would happen if you actually broke an alarm - especially with you being a civil servant..." The intruder tailed off, having realised that Julia was subjecting him to close scrutiny.

The man - well, "man" was a bit generous: he was barely out of adolescence. The teenager, then. The teenager was about one metre seventy, with thick, mousy hair, cut in a "pudding basin" style which had been enormously fashionable for a few months, thirty years ago. The redness in his cheeks was, Julia guessed, about one part acne, one part razor rash, and four parts acute embarrassment. Apart from his black knee-length boots, he was dressed all in grey. By some sartorial oversight, his trousers were too small and his anorak too big, which gave him the appearance of an undernourished mushroom. His left hand rested on top of a long black object, which he held like a walking stick. Julia tried very hard not to think about what it might be.

Julia rose slowly to her feet in what she hoped was a dignified manner, as if to give this intruder the impression that he was only the most recent in a long line of strange men who had appeared unannounced in her bedroom first thing in the morning. "Kid," she said as calmly as she could, trying with that one word to deliver the message: "I'm the one who's in charge here, so you'd better not try any funny business, because I have the weight and authority of an entire Government department backing me up, and one word from me will land you in an Atlantic Ocean's-worth of untreated industrial sewage," even though none of it was true, "there's nothing to worry about. The Government recognises that our job is a very difficult one, and so we get a few concessions. One of them is a free dummy alarm, which we can abuse and maltreat as much as we like. Let me tell you, it's very therapeutic."

"Oh..." said the teenager. "That's all right, then." He looked down at his boots, and then at Julia for a moment, and then blushed and looked very deliberately at his boots again. Fairly obviously, it wasn't all right.

A long, awkward pause staggered by. Julia couldn't help feeling sorry for the boy. He clearly knew that he had no right to be here. Probably the fact that she was a woman wasn't helping: he was at just that sort of age where the contest among the males ceases to be for the hottest porn magazines, and turns instead to the best-looking girl (or better still, girls) and the race to the bedroom. A race in which he stood about much chance as a fell-walker in a Formula One Grand Prix. The fact the Julia herself was hardly one to inflame the carnal passions - attired as she was in a long, aggressively plain night-dress, and sporting greasy, tousled hair (unfashionably short and unfashionably brown), bushy eyebrows, chipped fingernails that had forgotten what nail varnish felt like, and all those other ghastly imperfections that advertisers so love women to worry themselves into anorexia over - didn't matter. What mattered was that Julia was of the same gender as the Swedish teenagers, the Italian housewives, the Page Four and Five girls whom this boy had ogled over when he'd thought no-one was looking. And she knew about this crass chauvinism. And he knew that she knew. Which was why he was still looking at his boots, and clutching that long black thing at his side. Julia looked again at the long black thing, and stopped feeling sorry for him.

"Kid," she said, trying again to give him the "Atlantic Ocean's-worth of sewage" subtext, "let me ask you a few questions."

"All right then," he replied, still looking at his boots.

Julia looked levelly at the top of the boy's head, and asked: "Who are you?" It wasn't a very good start to an interrogation, but she had to begin somewhere.

"Well," the boy said, "my name is Timothy... Timothy Stanton."

"How did you get into the building?"

"I... rang the doorbell."

"And the servant let you in, did it?" Julia asked.

"Yes," he answered. "It asked me what I was doing here, and I told it, and... well, it started making a very strange noise - a sort of 'Heh! - Heh! - Heh!'"

"It was probably laughing," she sighed. That sound, often likened to a machine-gun sneezing, represented one of the triumphs of artificial intelligence research - the endowment of machines with a sense of humour. Unfortunately, the servant knew this as well, and considered most household chores to be beneath a being of its intellectual capacity.

"Well," Timothy went on, "then the servant keeled over, so I called a 'droid doctor, who should be here in a few minutes."

"I see. Now," she said, in a tone that implied that if he thought the inquisition had been bad so far, he hadn't seen anything yet, "what are you doing here?"

"Well," he began, shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other, "I'm here as a representative of Red Fist. It's a youth movement, a sort of continuation of the Boy Scouts."

"That's the uniform you're wearing, is it?"

"Yes," he said. "There is something else - a sort of cap." He reached into a pocket and pulled out a black shape, about the size of grapefruit. Julia guessed it was a balaclava, probably wrapped in a nylon stocking. "It's a bit itchy," Timothy explained, "so I take it off whenever I can."

That long black thing in the boy's left hand was practically screaming for Julia's attention. It could be ignored no longer. She took a deep breath and said: "Timothy - this may seem like a stupid question, but - why are you holding an automatic rifle?"

She let him um and er for a few seconds, and then continued: "Let me guess. You've come to kill me, right?"

He looked at her. A smile began to edge nervously across his face, and then discovered that his mouth wasn't responding, and jumped back behind his ear. "I... do recall... there was... some mention of that..." he said. Clearly, the killing of an unarmed civil servant - an unarmed female civil servant - was rather too big a step up from Knot-Tying (part two: Immobilising Hostages) and Advanced Baked Bean Cookery.  [1] Julia guessed that he'd prefer something like wrestling naked with a well-greased alligator in the middle of a column of army ants.

"This is some youth movement you've joined," she said. "You know what's going to happen if you kill me?" (Atlantic Ocean again...)

"You'll be... uh..." Timothy couldn't bring himself to say "dead," and something else leapt into its place: "...uh... late for work," he concluded.

Brilliant, she thought. "Worse than late," she replied, "I won't arrive at all. And I won't arrive tomorrow, or the day after. And in about a week, someone will begin to wonder where I am, and begin to make enquiries, and call my doctor, the local hospital, my relatives, popular honeymoon resorts, that sort of thing. And when they draw a blank everywhere, the matter will rest for a few more days. Then it will occur to someone to try to contact me here. Of course I won't answer the phone, and after they've tried a couple of times, they'll eventually get authorisation to come and visit my home, to see what the hell I'm playing at. First time, of course, they won't get past the servant, because it won't recognise them. Nor will it tell them anything about me, partly because I told it not to, but mostly because it won't know - it's an old model, which can't climb stairs. So by the time they manage to get the servant deactivated, and find me lying here, rotting in my night-dress, with enough lead in me to shield a fission reactor -"

"Well, actually," Timothy butted in, "these bullets are lead-free. We may call ourselves 'Red Fist,' but... we're quite green too, you know."

"Well, thank you!" Julia snorted, hands on hips. "Nice to know someone cares, isn't it? I mean, I may spend a long time bleeding to death as a result of your third-rate marksmanship, but at least the matter won't be complicated by lead poisoning. The point I'm trying to make is that by the time I'm officially dead, it will have been four or five weeks since you actually shot me. That'll come out in the post-mortem, even if it's not immediately obvious, so my work and sleep accounts won't suffer much. But even so, during those weeks, they've been working on the assumption that I'm still alive, and that, theoretically at least, I'll be able to catch up once they find me. But once they realise that I'm dead, that leaves the Department, and indeed the Government and the country, with a net deficit of four or five person-weeks' work and sleep. They can't recover it from me - not for the foreseeable future, anyway. So who are they going to come to in order to get it back?"

There was a pause while Timothy took all of this in. Then, slowly and carefully, he gulped.

Realising that this was about as far as he was likely to get by himself, Julia said nonchalantly: "That's right."

Struggling for breath, Timothy uttered: "I've got to do all the work they've been saving for you?"

"That's right." she replied, more nonchalant still.

"All five person-weeks of it?" Timothy was now beginning seriously to work up a proper panic. "But I haven't sat behind a desk since I left school!"

"That won't bother them," Julia said, her voice so laid back that if her civil servant's survival instinct hadn't been propping it up, it would have fallen spread-eagled on the bed. "The cost of training you will be added to your deficit. And don't forget all that sleep you owe," she added, almost as an afterthought.

"Sleep!" he squawked, and the automatic rifle clattered to the floor. "No sleep for five weeks!"

"Yeah," she said, "because Timothy has murdered sleep, you see." She wondered if he would recognise the quote, and went on: "All this talk of 'the criminal's debt to society' is more relevant now than ever. Plenty of people have killed a civil servant, but very few of them have ever had the time, never mind the desire, to kill another one."

A sob wrenched itself from Timothy's throat. As if he had already been tried, found guilty and sentenced, he wailed: "But I didn't mean to do it!"

"Well," said Julia, as though considering a plea of mitigation, "you haven't done it - yet."

Timothy gulped again - in surprise, this time, rather than fear. "Haven't I?" he gasped. "Well - don't let me - please."

"I have no intention of doing so," she said dryly. "Now - I think the most sensible thing for you to do would be to go along to the nearest police station, tell them you want to give yourself up, and offer them the names and addresses of your fellow Red Fist members, in exchange for police protection."

"Yes," he said firmly, "that sounds like a good idea." His voice returning to its usual timid self, he added: "You're very clever, you know."

"I have to be," she replied impatiently, "people try to kill me all the time. Oh - by the way - before you go, you'd better take the magazine off that gun. The police might get the wrong idea otherwise."

Timothy looked rather surprised that she thought such a thing necessary. "Oh, it's all right," he said, "it's not loaded. I mean, I'm terribly clumsy - like a baby in charge of a tank with anything mechanical. Can you imagine if this thing was loaded - if I tripped and accidentally pulled the trigger? Good grief - I could kill somebody!"

You bastard, Julia thought. Abandoning all pretence to a cool, laid-back, streetwise image, she collapsed slowly onto the bed. As she did so, two words slipped quietly out of her mouth: "Oh, God."

Scene Two

Picture a broad, high passageway, extending perhaps a hundred metres in either direction from the viewpoint, and lit with smouldering torches at about five-metre intervals. Make the ceiling arch gently - not too much - so that the passage has roughly the same cross-section as a railway carriage. Support the ceiling with arches, whose pillars protrude about fifteen centimetres from the walls, and whose subtle curves might suggest, to the half-closed eye and the over-active imagination, unfinished statues of phantasmagorical creatures, or people clad in diaphanous garments. Be careful - the footnote will spoil this. [2] Cover the floor with a dense pattern in black and dark shades of green. The floor covering looks like the skin of the Asset-Stripping Lizard, [3] but it's actually lino. The patterning makes it a bugger to clean, though, just like the real thing. Add a smorgasbord of graffiti, in the languages of half a continent, to the once-smooth stone walls and to the pillars of the arches, and some half-hearted attempts to paint over, or in some cases fill in, the more offensive and libellous parts of it. Allow the eye to look along the passage, towards the point where perspective joins the walls and the floor and the ceiling together. Notice how, even though you can see the end of it, it doesn't seem to run in a straight line? As if it exists in more than three dimensions of space, and is being quite ostentatious about the fact. Or maybe it's just the smoke and the heat haze from all those smouldering torches on the walls.

Now, picture two people, half-walking, half-running towards the viewpoint. The schoolboys - for such these two are - are about thirteen years old. Both are scruffy and unkempt, although more from boisterousness and a surly adolescent rebelliousness than from genuine poverty. Their uniforms, which cost enough to feed a family of twelve for about a year, held out for approximately four days before assuming the natural state of all school uniforms, which is to resemble a blanket that an incontinent terrier with no sense of smell has thrown out of its basket.

The school is one of those which has a motto in some long-dead language, and all of the teachers and pupils can translate it, even if not all of them are sure of what it actually means. It's a boarding school, and quite a select and expensive one too. No parent wants children like these under their feet for longer than is absolutely necessary, and they're prepared to pay whatever it costs to ensure that.

The pupils are always complaining to one another about how tough life is at the school, mainly because it is. No teacher here ever stops to ask himself if cuffing a boy for not doing his homework will (through Delayed Subconscious Post-Traumatic Shock Syndrome) make the lad start beating his wife ten years later, or if doling out a detention for putting a Management Consultancy Spider [4] down the back of someone's vest will turn the culprit into someone who corners people at parties and shows them his collection of warts. Well, maybe some of them do, but they punish the boys anyway.

In another time and place, this school would turn out prime ministers, generals, chiefs of industry, spies, big time drug dealers, and heirs of aristocratic families that have fallen on hard times. Here and now, it turns out wizards.

The shorter and more thickly-built of the two, whose name is Morfina, is beginning to show the first wisps of a moustache, thus providing him with the hope of some small relief from the ravages of acne, and his companions with another target to bombard with abuse. The older boys will taunt him for looking like a girl, and the boys of his age and younger will taunt him for looking like a werewolf.

The other, Kyolin, is by contrast tall and slender; one of the tallest in his year, in fact, although it gives him little cause for pride, for it has earned him the much-hated nickname "Willow." Admittedly, the boy who thought it up had to explain it to everyone else, but it got around quickly enough. Kyolin wouldn't mind if they used it as a real nickname, like "Ace" or "Strong-arm," like you read in Enchanter magazine, because in an ironic sort of way he is rather graceful in figure and movement. Or rather, he would be if the bigger boys didn't call him a fairy for it. So he has taken to walking about with an exaggerated stomping motion, as if he has some special grudge against the ground that he walks on. It hasn't stopped them calling him "Willow," though. These kids know when they're onto a good thing. And they use it as an insult, in much the way they would use "Zit-Face," or "Worm-Brain," or "Turd-Breath." He tries to retaliate, giving as good as he gets, or better, in his opinion, far better. But their insults never seem to hurt them as much as theirs hurt him. But he keeps trying. Somebody has to keep up standards in such matters, after all, and it's only fitting, really, that it should be him.

There are two problems with a narrative like this. The first is that it is a very slow means of imparting information, which nevertheless must be given if what follows is to make sense. The second is that because of its slowness it is deceptive. During the time that you have been reading the descriptions of Kyolin and Morfina, they have had to walk towards your viewpoint in silence, without looking at one another, and in fact without doing anything other than walking, for any such action would have been missed during the descriptions of these two characters. The narrative would be requesting you to suspend your disbelief a little too high, were it to ask you to accept that two schoolboys could simply walk along an otherwise deserted corridor for anything like the time it has taken you to read the start of this scene. In fact, before their footsteps alerted the narrator to their approach, they had been preoccupied with a bitter insult-hurling match. Now that each has had a minute or so to lick the wounds that the other has inflicted on his pride, and to consider calmly and collectedly the other's weak points and raw nerves, the battle will continue. Please stand well clear...

"Your trouble, Kyolin," said Morfina, seizing the initiative, now that his voice had decided that it had broken for the time being, "is that you're too pretentious."

"Pwetentious? Ich?" scoffed Kyolin, his voice a good half-octave above Morfina's. "Au contwaire, Morfina, 'tis thou who aht too common."

"Are you insinewaiting about the way I speak?" replied Morfina.

"Yes, thou guttersnipe, I am."

Resisting the temptation to ask what a snipe was and why it lived in gutters, the shorter, feeling that he might able to find a weak spot here, said: "Well, you're a one to talk, with your affected speech impediment, and your archaic verb declensions."

Like the crack of a whip, Kyolin replied: "Conjugations, ignowamus."

As if Kyolin had just uttered a sentence in perfectly grammatical Ancient Anorene, [5] Morfina took half a step backwards, gawked briefly, and then said: "You wot?"

Warming to the invitation, Kyolin said, with exaggerated slowness: "Con-ju-gay-tions," and then in his more usual voice: "One conjugates a verb, and declines a noun."

"Yeah?" said Morfina. "Well this one here declines the way you speak." Repartee was one social skill that a boy picked up very quickly at this school, if he didn't want to be labelled as thick and slow-witted, on top of everything else the others pinned on him.

Fiend, thought Kyolin. Why do they always pick on that? They know I haven't got a good defence against it. He decided to try mockery. "Oh, how fwightfully amusing," he crowed. "How absolewtly pwiceless. I suppose thou wouldst have me speak pwopah, like what thou dost?"

Morfina's brow furrowed, making him for a moment look much older. "You're winding me up, aren't you?" His adolescent spitefulness was beginning to turn into anger.

Kyolin was surprised. His gambit had worked. If they taunt one for being diffewent fwom them, he thought, one can as easily turn their twick back upon them. Following through, that was what was important. "I am loath to shatter my colleagues' illusions, Morfina," he said snootily, "but I feah that I must appwise thee that I do not perceive thee to be a gwotesque clockwork toy - though if 'tis twuely thy heart's desire, I shall gladly wegard thee as such."

Morfina raised his fist, and then pointed the index finger at his opponent. "I'm warning you...!" he breathed.

"Of hwat?" inquired Kyolin, wielding the second word like a fly-swat. Repartee and following through, that was what was important. "I should warn thee not to essay to stwike me with thy fist, for I have mastahed the incomplete casting of spells of the first level, and at but a word fwom me, an invisible, impervious shield shall spwing into being awound me, and thou shalt find thyself nursing a sorely bwuised fist."

"No I won't," growled Morfina, his voice dropping a couple of semitones even as he spoke, "because the moment I sense that shield 'spwing into being,' I'll simply dispel it."

It was working. Taunting a wizard about his magical ability is rather like taunting a Mafioso about the Italian Book of War Heroes. It's worse if you're another wizard, because then your victim doesn't feel so inclined to be lenient, on the grounds that you can't help your own ignorance of the true nature and strength of a wizard's power, besides which it does no harm to have a few singed idiots and talking toads wandering the world as a warning to others. Kyolin, though, knew himself to be Morfina's superior; the practicals had consistently born that out. More to the point, he was the better bluffer. "Wilt thou vewily?" he asked. "I must confess that I would vewy much like to see thee accomplish such a feat."

"Would you now?" Morfina replied, perhaps sensing that the tall boy was playing for time. "Well, then, cast your shielding spell, and you will see it."

"Well, fwiend wapscallion," said Kyolin, "if thy desire to be humiliated is so fervent as that, it shall twuely gladden my heart to oblige thee." Resisting Morfina's attempts to dispel the shield would be very tiring, so he would have to time this carefully... He uttered two syllables, thus completing the spell that he had begun some ten days ago, and which had been at the back of his mind ever since, pawing to get out. He felt something akin to relief as the shield formed around him with a quiet whoosh of displaced air.

"Right," muttered Morfina. Slowly, with quiet determination, he began to utter his cancellation spell. He had managed about ten syllables when Kyolin gave a very loud and sudden cough. Startled, Morfina halted his enchantment. His ears reddened as he felt the soft fizz of magical fallout around them. "You bastard!" he shouted. "You made me lose concentration!"

Knowing that Morfina was now too angry to cast accurately, Kyolin proceeded to needle him further. "I pwesume," he began, "that in accordance with the vogues of the vernacular, thou hast employed the term 'bastard' as a general term of abuse, and not with specific wefewence to the legitimacy of my birth?" He paused briefly, and continued: "In any case, distwacting a sorcewer's [6] attention is a perfectly valid method of pweventing him fwom completing an enchantment."

"It bloody well is not, you cheat!" Morfina yelled.

Kyolin looked strangely at Morfina for a moment, as if wondering whether he had possibly grown a third arm. "A cheat?" he asked. "Thou nam'st me a cheat?"

"Yes, thou wimpish bastard," said Morfina, a little more calmly, "I dost."

Kyolin looked again at Morfina, more seriously this time. "Morfina," he said gravely, "thou hast insulted mine honour." Not to mention, he added to himself, centuwies of gwammatical twadition.

"I insulted you, Willow, " he said. "What are you going to do about it?"

Kyolin was by now beginning to worry slightly, thinking that perhaps he had ventured a little too far. Pwolong the aggwavation, he thought. What was the phwase the wogue used? Wind him up, that was it. Wind him up. "Thy tone and thine uttewances seemeth to imply that some kind of contest, some kind of twial, is necessitated - what we might, for want of a more apt term, style a... duel."

"Yeah..." Morfina answered. His voice was quiet, but Kyolin could not tell whether his anger had cooled, or was about to explode. "That's what I'd call it."

Realising that he had now all but talked his way into a fight, Kyolin tried one last ploy, a sure sign of an insult-hurler who realises that he has hurled one insult too many - a veiled admission that he had been wrong. "The pwopah authowities would, natuwally, have to be wepwesented," he said, in a tone resembling humility, "to ensure that there was... no... cheating."

Never concede anything: your opponent will make you pay doubly for it. [7] Kyolin realised this a moment too late, as an impish grin spread across Morfina's face, and the boy said in a smug, triumphant tone: "All right, Willow - you're on."

Scene Three

Having directed Timothy Stanton to the local police station (eight kilometres away), and consumed a typically hasty breakfast (unsweetened black coffee and a slice of warm bread that passed for toast), and dealt with the 'droid doctor (who had flipped open one of the servant's service panels, adjusted a trim screw, and put the machine back on its feet with the words: "It should be fine now - its sense of humour was set too high. The invoice is on its way."), Julia Hewlett was now about to begin what was, in some ways, the most difficult task of the day. She was attempting to enter her car.

She pressed the button by the door handle. There was a pause, as the computer kicked its Artificial Half-Wittedness circuitry into action. From a speaker concealed in the wheelarch, the speech synthesiser uttered its familiar mantra: "Hi there. I am your friendly Juniper Automobile Corporation Kamikaze Automotive Security System. Please speak your password." The deep, gravelly voice was supposed to sound macho, but it had been produced by slowing down the voice of one of the machine's programmers, with the result that it also sounded very stupid.

Her knees creaking, Julia crouched down and said, to the microphone hidden within the door handle: "Walrus."

"Sorry," said the computer, in a tone that brought back memories to Julia of strong, boiling coffee, "that's not right. You have two more attempts before I call the police and electrocute you," - and here a note of anticipation entered its voice - "not necessarily in that order."

Bloody literal-minded machine, Julia thought. Then, slowly, distinctly, and with more than a hint of irritation, she said again: "Wal - rus." (She had been in rather a bad mood when she had familiarised the computer with her voice.)

Had Julia been slightly less preoccupied with sea-dwelling mammals, she might have heard the light, quick footsteps of someone a few tens of metres along the street running towards her and her car.

"Sorry," said the computer, "that's not right. You have one more attempt."

Muttering a few choice swearwords, Julia moved a little closer to the microphone, and said, a little more quickly than before: "Walrus."

"That is correct," said the computer, in exactly the same tone as its threats of electrocution, and Julia very quickly stood up and jumped backwards to avoid being pitched into her front garden by the opening of the gullwing door. "As the rightful owner of this vehicle, you may take control of it, and enjoy the unique driving experience which it offers. Drive on."

Assuming, that is, she thought as she walked towards the car, you can find a road which is clear enough to let you get so much as halfway towards the speed limit. Before she had taken more than a pace or two, the owner of the light, quick footsteps mentioned a few paragraphs ago, about whose significance, and the narrator's memory of which, the reader was doubtless beginning to wonder, skidded to a halt a few metres from Julia. "What's this?" Julia asked, turning to face the interloper.

"This" was a small girl of about seven or eight, dressed in faded, torn jeans, and a T-shirt, a little too small for her, that had once been white, but which had since been pressed into service as a sort of impromptu diary of the places the child had been and the things she'd done there. In one hand, she held a box, perhaps the size of a compact disc case. "Here, Missus," she asked, "are you a civil servant?"

"Yeah," sighed Julia. "you want a few forms to pester your Mummy and Daddy with?"

"No," said the child, demurely. "Mummy and Daddy gave me this to give to you." She threw the box to Julia, cried: "Catch!" and then turned and ran down the street even faster than she had come.

Julia caught the box, somewhat clumsily. It felt heavy, and there was a faint ticking coming from it. She was vaguely aware of the hum of an electric motor somewhere to one side of her, and the clank of a locking mechanism sliding into place. A time bomb, she thought. How considerate. Nine seconds on the clock, too - very considerate. Hurling the box down the street towards the retreating child, she called: "I'm too busy right now, kid - try again later!"

Even as she turned away, and threw up her hands to shield her face, there was an explosion some metres away, and a high-pitched scream. Resisting the voyeuristic temptation to look and see what had happened, she muttered: "Assuming, that is, that you can get out of hospital before Mummy and Daddy wring your sweet little neck." She sighed, and said, a little more loudly: "The things kids get up to these days. It's about time toy shops were stopped from selling those things. Someone's going to be killed before long." She took another pace forward, and stopped just in time to avoid bumping into the now-closed door of her car. "Bugger," she muttered. "Timed out." It was supposed to stop would-be car thieves from waiting for the rightful owner to open the door and then mugging him. The idea was that if you could delay the thief for about twenty seconds, the door would close again, but the manufacturers had discontinued the feature after lawsuits from elderly and disabled drivers who'd had limbs crushed. Newer models had a voice command to close the door. [8]

So once again, Julia pressed the thumbprint button, and waited for the words: "Hi there. I am your friendly Juniper Automobile Corporation Kamikaze Automotive Security System. Please speak your password."

Scene Four

The van in front began to crawl forward again. Once it had moved about half a metre, the drivers behind hit their horns in a ragged chorus of frustration. "What's your hurry?" Julia muttered as she eased off the handbrake and slid the gear lever into the "forward" position. "Relax a little, take in the view."

"Was that a command, Julia?" asked a female voice that came from somewhere on the other side of the dashboard. The navigation computer's voice had obviously been designed by a sexually frustrated young man, who had probably frittered away many tedious hours by making it utter various crude double entredres. The voice could have been described as "husky," and even, at a pinch, "seductive," but for a machine that was supposed to direct you from A to B it was ludicrously inappropriate, and to Julia it sounded not so much sexy as desperately in need of several packs of throat lozenges.

"No," she said, in reply to the computer's question, "I was just talking to myself." The van stopped again, and Julia jabbed at the brake pedal.

"That is illogical," the computer said sensuously. "The purpose of speech is to give information. If one speaks to oneself, one must already have the information which one gives to oneself, and so the act of speaking is redundant."

Julia made an effort not to hit the screen in the centre of the dashboard. It's only a computer, she told herself, it can't help its programming. Its remark about the pointlessness of speaking to oneself made it obvious that the computer had obviously never heard of currently-fashionable theories of consciousness. These theories held that only beings made up of several subpersonalities could be truly conscious, and that some of those subpersonalities were not above lying, or being economical with the truth, in their dealings with the others. It had never even heard of good old-fashioned schizophrenia. "Maybe so," she replied. "But you should know by now that humans don't always behave logically, especially in conditions like these."

"Please clarify," the computer requested. "Which aspect of present conditions?"

"This damned traffic jam!" she half-shouted.

"I understand," it said, calm and husky as ever. "Do you wish me to search for a more optimal route?"

"No," Julia said firmly. "We're already on the best route you could find. And even if the road alongside this one is deserted, there's not much point in knowing that when the next junction is three hundred metres away."

"I understand," replied the computer.

She sighed. It had nearly worked, so very nearly: fit a radio beacon and a route-planning computer to every vehicle in the city, and use a central co-ordinating computer to divert traffic away from roadworks or accidents, and onto less heavily-loaded roads. It had worked, to begin with: journey times had been slashed, and people living on what had been busy roads were amazed at how quiet they had become, and how much cleaner the air was. The trouble was that the system had worked too well. People who would never have used a car in the city, because of all the congestion, now used one regularly. So did their wives and husbands. So did their children. The authorities built more roads to relieve the congestion. The people bought more cars to drive on them, and used them more often. And before long, the traffic computer's responses became so slow that, unless you were planning an attempt on the endurance record for travelling round the city's ring road, you were better off with one of those old "route planner" books and a compass.

The van centimetred a little further forward. Julia, serenaded by the drivers behind, followed it. She noticed a large, ten-axle, two-trailer lorry parked outside a department store. The tailgate was open, and two delivery 'droids were scurrying back and forth across the river of pedestrians, trying to unload it. Just think, Julia thought, if we could move people around in one of those things, instead of washing machines. You could fit everyone in our room into just one of those trailers.

The van moved again, and this time the brass section was quite deafening. She barely heard the computer saying: "The traffic lights have changed, Julia."

"What into?" she snapped. "A forty-centimetre deep-pan pizza with extra mozzarella?"

"I don't understand," the computer said. "Please rephrase that."

"Oh, shut up," Julia snarled.

"I understand," the computer replied, in exactly the same tone as before. "Do you wish me to enter 'a forty-centimetre deep-pan pizza with extra mozzarella' as a synonym for 'shut up' in my phrase bank?"

"No," she said curtly, jerking the handbrake and slamming down the accelerator. A moment later, she had to hit the brake again, to avoid shunt-ramming the van, which was now joining the queue for the next set of traffic lights.

"Julia," the computer told her (how did it manage to make her name sound like a chastisement, given the unvarying nature of its inflexion?), "you should not drive so carelessly in traffic situations such as this. You very nearly collided with a stationary vehicle just then."

Neither of them said anything for a few moments, and then Julia asked: "You know what really bugs me about you, computer?"

"No, I don't know," it replied. At least it now knew what "to bug" meant.

"You're so bloody serene," she said. "You're so calm and laid-back - you never get worked up in these goddamn traffic jams - you didn't so much as bat an LED when we got stuck in a forty-kilometre tailback on the motorway last summer - you-you're inhuman, damn you!"

There was a barely tangible pause while the computer parsed all of this, and consulted its lexicon and context memory. Then it replied: "I don't understand. Please rephrase that."

"No, of course you don't understand," Julia said, a little calmer now. "You're only a machine, aren't you?"

"By Marvin Minsky's definition of that term, yes. I am a physical model of an abstract process." If computers were programmed to be religious, Minsky would doubtless be one of their major saints.

"Yes," said Julia, a touch of cynicism in her voice, "all brain and no mind. I mean... I mean..." She took her hands from the steering wheel (a perfectly safe action under the circumstances), put her left hand on her sternum, held the other in front of her as if auditioning for the part of Hamlet, and declaimed, in a mock-oratory style:

"There was a young lady of Riga
who went for a ride on a tiger.
They came back from the ride
with the lady inside
and a smile on the face of the tiger."

Returning her hands to the wheel, she asked: "Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"I am afraid not," it said, poker-voiced as ever. "My gazetteer has no listing for any place called 'Riga,' nor do I know what a 'tiger' is."

Julia felt that what she was about to say would merely end up adding to her frustrations, but thought that it might be worth a try. Sighing, she said: "I'll try to explain, shall I?"

"If you wish," replied the computer.

"We've got plenty of time, after all," she muttered, "there's another three kilometres to go yet." 

Scene Five

The discussion between Julia and her navigation computer continued for some time. Eventually, however, she arrived at her place of work. Having battled her way to a parking space through the usual shifting maze of diggings, diversions, delivery trucks, and the occasional pedestrian, she proceeded to confront the building's elaborate security system.

The employees' entrance was a small, narrow door at the side of the building, well away from the far more impressive main entrance, which was used only by VIPs. (Civil Service slang for Visiting Idiotic Persons.) It was staffed during office hours by a single doorman, who, by an unfortunate quirk of fate had been named Norman. He was a short, wiry man, whose uniform had always seemed a little too big for him. He was not particularly strong or tough, but he was quick on his feet and he knew where the alarm button was, as several would-be intruders had discovered to their cost. Norman was seen as the human face of the Civil Service Internal Security Department, which, in Julia's opinion, was a bit like describing the common cold or a stomach bug as the human face of the Black Death.

As she was walking towards the entrance, Julia noticed that somebody else, besides Norman, was standing there. The two of them appeared to be arguing, and that could mean only one thing.

"I'm sorry, Sir, but rules are rules," said Norman, looking up at this tall, gangling man who, his doorman's instinct told him, was trying to pull a fast one on him. "I can't allow you in unless you're wearing a pass."

"Hell, don't you people trust anybody?" the man asked. His name was Jacob Henderson, although everybody, himself included, called him Jack. The narrator will not be giving anything away if he says that Jack will be playing a significant part in the rest of our story, and so feels obliged to furnish the reader with a description of this character. [picture of Jack] He had that peculiar shabbiness about him that comes not from not having enough money to live on, but from having enough and not being sure of how to manage it. His hair was a reddish brown, and longer than that of most women - not so much because he wanted it long, but because he never quite got round to going to a hairdresser. A few months ago, he had trimmed the fringe, which had been flopping into his eyes, but it had already encroached back over his eyebrows. His moustache, had this office been the kind of place that Kyolin and Morfina were at, would probably have earned him the nickname "Blue Whale": it was well below his top lip, and did an excellent job of filtering undissolved lumps of powder out of cups of cocoa and packet soups. His beard, which had not felt a razor in the last five years or so, lay mostly beneath his chin, as if it was afraid of coming out into the open. His manner of dressing was similarly lackadaisical: he tended to put on whatever was on top of the pile of clothes in one corner of his room. This morning, for instance, he was wearing a pair of grubby white plimsolls (complete with the de rigeur odd socks), a pair of jeans with a tear in one knee that owed nothing to slavish following of fashion, and pale grey T-shirt whose front bore the words: "After all, you should surely know...," and whose back: "...there is always an alternative explanation." Who (if anybody) had originally said this, and what (if anything) it had originally meant, Jack had not the faintest idea. He had, however, rather liked the sound of it at the time, which was why he had bought the T-shirt from a flea market. [9] Jack's untidiness was not deliberate, nor even caused by having nothing to keep him occupied, but rather by having far too much to occupy him, and as a result having very little time left to look after anything so trivial as his appearance. He was, in fact, a student, or rather an ex-student, having just completed a PhD at the recently-established University of Invercraigie, and he had taken a temporary job in the Civil Service to support himself until the results were announced. That, however, was some distance from his mind at the moment.

"These days, Sir, we can't afford to," said Norman, in response to Jack's question at the start of the previous paragraph. "The stories I could tell you of what people got away with here, before security was tightened up" - at this point, he chuckled slightly, and winked in what Jack found a very patronising manner - "'cept I'm not allowed to, of course."

"It's not as if I'm a terrorist or anything," Jack protested.

"I don't know that, Sir. You could be anybody - I mean, I wouldn't know you from the Queen of Sheba" - he looked more carefully at Jack - "though on second thoughts..."

"Look," Jack said heatedly, "what do I have to do to convince you that I work here?"

"Show me your pass, Sir," said Norman, as though singing a line from some favourite song, "and this building is the mollusc of your choice." He was proud of that phrase, and used it whenever he could. He tried to let people think he'd invented it himself, although he'd actually found it in one of those strange books his wife was always reading.

"But I haven't got a pass, have I?" said Jack, uttering each word as though hitting a nail. "I've left the bloody thing at home!"

Norman gave him a wry grin, and answered, chuckling a little: "That's what they all say, Sir. For all I know, you could have come here with the sole intention of jamming the canteen vending machine with foreign coins."

"Don't give me ideas..." breathed Jack.

"Sir," Norman said firmly, "with all due respect, you are wasting your time as well as mine. Good morning, Miss Hewlett!" This last remark was addressed to Julia, who had just squeezed past Jack and into the corridor.

"It soon won't be, at this rate," she called back, before disappearing into the murky depths.

Jack looked, puzzled, at her retreating figure for a second or two, and then turned back to Norman, his expression a mixture of incomprehension and indignation. Norman, smirking slightly, said: "I know what you're going to say, Sir. Why did I let her in without taking a proper look at her pass?"

"Yes, why?" asked Jack, further annoyed that Norman had stolen his line from him.

"Well, Sir, it's different in her case. I know her."

"Yeah?" said Jack, his hope lifting its head again. "Well so do I. Her first name's Julia, right?"

Bloody-minded as ever, Norman replied calmly: "That, Sir, is patently obvious to anybody with an eidetic memory who regards the telephone disc as bedtime reading."

"God, give me strength," Jack growled.

"I think I should warn you, Sir," Norman said, a hint of worry entering his voice as he edged towards the alarm button, "that you are likely to regret any attempts at violence."

Realising what the doorman was about to do, Jack felled him with a swift straight right. "Not before you do, mate," he muttered, as he stepped over Norman's unconscious form and into the building.

Scene Six

The lifts, as usual, were out of order.

After ascending four flights of stairs and walking along several hundred metres of Möbius corridor,[10] Julia finally arrived at her office. A glance at the clock on the far wall told her that she was now precisely fifty-seven minutes and twelve seconds late for work. It was as well she was on flexitime. She would just have to cut lunch short, and put in another forty-five minutes after everyone else went home. She walked down past the rows of desks and filing cabinets, saying a few surly hellos to various colleagues. She reached her own desk, pulled out the chair, and sat heavily, but gratefully, down. As she opened her eyes again, she was struck by the number and size of the tottering towerblocks of casepapers that the assistants had piled into the trays at the end of her desk. Where does all this work come from? she asked herself rhetorically. I need another row of in-trays for mornings like this. Better get the computer going.

She reached behind one of the monitors and flicked the on-off switch. The computer terminals in this building, like the Juniper's voiceprint security system, were a hiccup of technology: someone in the Department's procurement division had been rather taken with the twin-monitor design of the BB Corporation XL-II, and had ordered eight hundred of them. In theory, the terminal could display twice as much information as one with a single monitor, but in practice it didn't manage even half as much, because (in order to avoid cluttering the screens) it put most of the information you wanted on the screen you weren't looking at.

The terminal gave a subdued "beep," which is every computer's way of saying: "I'm alive," and then uttered, in a stereophonic undertaker's voice: "Civil Service Energy Tax Assessment Operational Support Environment version 2.196 revision 4. Copyright Jenix Logic Incorporated. Please identify yourself."

Julia sat back and said to it: "I was born this way. What's your excuse?" For all the faults of its double vision, the XL-II did at least have a fully-fledged voice recognition system.

After a momentary pause, the terminal replied: "Identity confirmed. Julia K. Hewlett, Assessment Officer Grade 2, staff number 424-77-1190. Attempting to log on to host computer. Please wait."

"Should be fun at this time of day," Julia said to herself.

"Terminal logged on to host computer IR6 at 0929 hours," the computer told her. "Please select a function from the menu on the left-hand screen."

"Keyboard input," she said firmly.

"OK," the terminal replied. It fell silent, and there was at least a chance that Julia might actually get some work done.

For the n-th time, she thought: I don't know - voice input for office computers has to be the daftest idea since - well, since the last daft idea the technos had. There's enough noise in here with people talking to each other, without their talking to the computers as well. She took one of the bundles of paper from the towerblock, and tapped the identity number into the computer. She was immediately thankful that she had switched to keyboard input, for a message flashed large on the right-hand screen: This case has no action pending. [Press CANCEL to return to identity number input.] With voice input and output, this message was accompanied by a loud raspberry, which alerted the rest of your room, and indeed the rest of your corridor, to the inaccuracy of your speech.

"That must be the twentieth this week," she muttered. "It's only just come in... Did I actually ask for it, or has that new assistant had another brainstorm?" Of late, the Department seemed to be recruiting its assistants using the same criteria as a stage magician: they had to be young, pretty, and like the kind of clothes that a nudist would feel only mildly ashamed about wearing; and their only purpose was to distract you from what was really going on. She opened a drawer, and pulled out a large log-book, in which she recorded what she had asked for, so as to keep an independent check on how well the assistants were doing their jobs. She leafed through the pages for the last couple of days. As she suspected, the case wasn't listed. She put the papers on one side, as a reminder to bring the matter up with the assistants over coffee break, and took the next set of casepapers from the pile. She entered the identity number, and was rewarded with a summary and status screen. "Ahh," she said, "that's more like it," and began seriously to work.

"I say, Julia..."

She looked up at the newcomer. He was tall, and slim without being bony; well-dressed, and handsome in a fine, delicate sort of way, but Julia felt no attraction towards him: his head was as empty of thought as a nuclear containment vessel was of lime jelly. His name was Claude, and he was regarded, in perfect fairness, as the office incompetent. He was probably the token idiot; having obtained equality of opportunity with regard to gender, race, religion, social class, regional accent, sexual orientation, political affiliation, musical taste (or lack of it), height, weight, obesity, favourite cricket club, and all the other prejudices that made history and job-finding such a complicated business, the minority rights activists had now begun their assault on the last bastion of discrimination: intelligence.

"Yes, Claude," Julia said heavily, "what is it?"

"Well," he replied eagerly, waving a bundle of casepapers at her, "I have a person here - well, of course, I don't mean a real person, just some information about a person - "

Cutting into his perfectly-modulated, received pronunciation tones - the kind of voice which people adopt to disguise the fact that nothing they have to say is worth hearing - Julia snapped: "Get to the point, Claude."

"Well," he said, "the point is" - (pause for emphasis: another public speaking trick) - "the computer and the paper files about this person agree on all details except two."

"Which are?" she asked, suspecting that she knew the answer already. She hated people who used the word "person" when they meant "customer."

"The address, and the surname."

Thought so. "I'd be inclined to think," she said, her patience beginning to wear through, "that we are talking about two different people."

"But their identity numbers are the same," he replied, as if it was somehow her fault.

"All right," she sighed, thinking: How foolish to think I could get through a morning with less than half an hour wasted, "let's have a look."

Claude handed her the piece of paper on which he had scribbled down the anomalous details, and she tapped out the identity number on the keyboard. The screens filled with information. "Yes," he said, almost immediately, "those are just the details it gave me."

"Hmm... you do realise, of course," she mused, knowing perfectly well that he didn't, "that the number on the paper file could be wrong." He looked at her as if she had suggested that a pink elephant might suddenly turn green. Looking back at the screen, she tried to explain: "There could well be a Caroline Smith living at 28 Brockleton Avenue, Birchwood, and a..." She looked at the piece of paper, and struggled for a moment with Claude's handwriting.

"Caroline Weaver," he said, being helpful for once, "5 Carsharlton Crescent, Invercraigie."

"Yes," she went on, " and they might have identity numbers which are similar enough to allow a semi-literate assistant to mix them up. That seems rather unlikely, though. Let's see if we can find Caroline Weaver on the computer..." She entered Caroline Weaver's name and address, and got the raspberry message in response. "Nope," she said, "not listed."

"So," Claude ventured, "these are the same person, then?"

"Looks like it," she replied. May God have mercy on you, Caroline, she thought. "She's probably married since we registered her." You were probably one of those who voted to keep the Civil Service human-staffed. "Question is - who and where is she now? Does the paper file have a phone number?" I hope you're pleased with the service you get from Claude here -

Claude leafed through the bundle of documents, dropping one or two of them in the process. "Err... no," he said after a moment.

- when he eventually finds you - "And nor does the computer," said Julia. "Well, it's worth a try. Phone."

At that, there was a high-pitched ping, and the lump of grey-coloured plastic next to the computer leapt into electronic life. "Hi there," said a cheerful digitised face on its miniature LCD screen, "what can I do for you?"

"Directory Enquiries," she requested.

"OK," it said, "whose number do you want?"

"Caroline Smith, 28 Brockleton Avenue, Birchwood."

Pause. "Sorry - not listed."

"OK," said Julia, "Caroline Weaver, 5 Carsharlton Crescent, Invercraigie."

Another pause. "Sorry - not listed."

"Disconnect," she ordered.

"OK. Bye," said the phone. Its screen went dark.

"Bloody ex-directory people," she growled.

"Well, you're ex-directory, aren't you?" asked Claude.

"Yeah, but I need to be," she replied, wondering how he knew. "I mean, I'm a civil servant. I need all the anonymity I can get. Only this morning I found a terrorist in my bedroom."

"Really?" he asked, as if all she'd said was: "I thought Republic Street was a bit disappointing last night."

What we're paying this "person" to deal with your case, Caroline, probably amounts to about three times what we take from you in energy tax. "Yeah. Bit of a wimp, actually. He thought the group he'd joined was a sort of Boy Scouts for the over-18s. Said the balaclava made his nose itch. I eventually sent him to the police station."

"Really?"

"Yeah. He said he'd come to kill me, but he hadn't even loaded his gun." She suddenly realised that Claude was trying to sidetrack her, and said firmly: "Anyway - about this Caroline Weaver-Smith - I think the only thing you can do is send out a 20-37/15B to each of those addresses, and wait for one of them to come back with a yes answer." Robots - by definition - will never be able to do everything that a human can -

As if she'd said: "Bitte schicken Sie ihr ein zwanzig siebenunddreißig funfzehn B," (which she might as well have done, for all that he'd have understood), he asked slowly: "What's a 20 - 37/15B?"

- but... "Uncertainty over address and uncertainty over surname, of course."

"Oh..." he said, still trying to wriggle out of taking responsibility, "I think we ran out of those last Thursday..."

"Well?" she demanded, her patience suddenly developing a Claude-shaped hole. "Do I have to do your job as well as mine? You know how to complete an 11-18A, don't you?" ...Claude here presents compelling evidence...

Lamely, like a child confessing to having broken a window, he asked: "What's one of those?"

...for a reappraisal of the list of the jobs that they're allowed to do. "Form to request clarification forms," she told him, having to exercise considerable restraint to stop herself from shouting. "Now get on and do it! And see if we've run out of anything else while you're at it!"

"Right away, Julia," he whimpered, raising his hands as if to ward off blows.

She watching his hastily-retreating figure for a moment, and stage muttered: [11] "God preserve me from morons and university graduates!"

Scene Seven

Of course, they had run out of 11-18A's, as well. At her third attempt, Julia got through to Stationery Store on the telephone, and the grumpy old man who answered said that they didn't have any, and told her to try again in about a week. The next room grudgingly let her have one of theirs, in exchange for a sheaf of PF12's and half a carton of powdered milk. She sat down with Claude and filled it in. She made him take notes, although she knew that they would just end up being doodled on the next time he was on the phone. They sent the 11-18A through the internal mail to Stationery Store. About an hour later, the man from Stationery Store phoned Julia to explain that they didn't stock clarification forms at this office, and that she should have sent the 11-18A to the Stationery Store at an office in another town twenty kilometres away. She thanked him for pointing this out, and asked if he would mind forwarding the form for her. He said that if he forwarded every form that people had sent to him by mistake, he would never get anything else done. Julia replied that, from where she was sitting, he seemed not to be doing anything anyway. The 11-18A returned to Julia's desk about ten minutes after that, carried by a messenger who asked her, nervously, not to blame her for the state it was in. It appeared to have been screwed up into a little ball, smoothed out, torn up, and stuck back together again, although not necessarily in that order. Julia sent it to Stationery Store at the other office. Half an hour later, Stationery Store at the other office phoned [12] to tell her that yes, they did stock clarification forms, but no, they couldn't comply with her request because (a) the version of the 11-18A she'd used was obsolete, several of the clarification forms having recently been combined into one, (b) the 11-18A needed the signature of a Section Supervisor grade three or higher, and (c) what the hell made her think that they would supply three hundred 20-37/15B's for one room anyway? Julia excused herself and went to the ladies' for a short screaming fit.

At about one o'clock, she decided to break for lunch, and made her way to the staff canteen. She joined the queue for the food counter. Julia would have brought her own lunch, which would have been cheaper, but she never had time in the morning, and anyway, by lunchtime, sandwiches would have tasted much the same as everything else on offer. She paid for her meal, picked up a knife and fork, found an empty table and sat down.

Looking around the tables near her, she saw no-one whom she knew, but the building was a large one, so this was hardly surprising. The canteen was very broad and long, with a ceiling that was low in comparison to the room's other dimensions. This gave it something of the appearance of an aircraft hangar, although any aircraft larger than a microlight would have had some difficulty in entering and leaving by the double doors at either end of the room. The tables, chairs and ceiling supports would have had to be removed, too, and then of course the canteen was on the fifth floor, meaning that this hypothetical aeroplane would have had to contend with the lifts and the stairs, not to mention Norman the Bloody-Minded Doorman, so perhaps the canteen didn't bear so great a resemblance to an aircraft hangar after all.

"Hi, Julia," said someone a little to her right.

She looked up and saw Jack Henderson approaching, a small plastic bag in one hand. She greeted him, saying: "You got past Norman after all, eh?"

"Yeah," he replied, sitting down opposite her. "Stubborn little bugger, isn't he? Wouldn't let me in even after I recognised you."

"Well," she said, hoping that Jack had learned his lesson, "that doesn't prove anything. You could be my next-door neighbour, for all he knows. You could even have found me on the phone disc, except that I'm ex-directory." She paused, realising that the neck of his T-shirt looked strangely bare. "Where's your pass?" she asked.

Not again, thought Jack. "Like I kept telling Norman," he said patiently, "I forgot to bring it."

"Then..." Julia fumbled about for words, "how did you get in?"

"Well," he replied, "I got fed up with Norman's attitude, so I belted him."

If Julia had been standing up, she'd probably have had to grab something to stop herself from falling over. As it was, she leaned back, and then forward again, managing to put her elbow squarely on her plate, spattering the surroundings with thin gravy. "You did what?" It was like sending hate mail to Father Christmas.

Wondering what all the fuss was about, Jack repeated: "I got fed up with his - "

"You bloody idiot," she whispered.

"Look, I didn't hit him that hard," he said, beginning to be pushed into a defensive position. "I mean, he'll only have a few bruises..."

"You bloody idiot..."

"...I think it was the surprise more than the force of the blow that made him fall over..."

"You bloody idiot."

It was the emphasis that she put on "idiot" that caught Jack's attention. People with letters after their names don't like such epithets. Jack was not really a belligerent person, so instead of saying something provocative (and idiotic) like: "You talking to me?" or "Did you call me an idiot?" he asked politely: "Something wrong, Julia?"

"Wrong with you, yes," she replied. "What on earth possessed you to hit him?"

"Well," he said, on the defensive again, "I admit I may have acted a little rashly, but... well, the police are sympathetic about this sort of thing nowadays..."

"It's not the police I'm worried about," said Julia. "It's Internal Security. If they don't already know who you are, they soon will, and when they catch up with you - oh boy, when they catch up with you..." She spoke pityingly, but tempered her voice with just a hint of smugness. Julia was, in a fair-minded sort of way, pleased that for once today she was the deliverer and not the recipient of bad news.

After a moment, Jack, clearly puzzled, asked: "Yes - when they catch up with me - then what?"

Julia was a little annoyed by this. The clause was supposed to end in an ellipsis. However, beginning to enjoy herself, she answered in a more sinister tone than before: "Well, it's probably more than my job's worth to tell you."

Jack, who had heard this gambit many times before, in many different guises, countered: "You don't know, do you?"

"Well, no," she said, put on the defensive all of a sudden, and then rallying again with: "But I've known a few people in this Department who had disagreements with Security, and I've never seen any of them since..."

"You mean they were sacked?" he asked innocently.

"Yeah," she replied, the sinister tone returning, "but I think you can consider yourself to have got off lightly if that's all that happens..."

Jack, beginning to gain some inkling of what a "disagreement with Security" might involve, said, somewhat nervously: "Well, I don't know that I'm really all that bothered about this job... I mean, I'm planning to leave in a month or so, anyway - it's only a summer job for me, this. I just need a bit of money to tide me over till the PhD results come out. The exam papers and the open essays and the thesis take four months to mark, you see."

"PhD, eh?" said Julia, suddenly impressed, and glad in a way for a chance to lift the conversation out of the murky machinations of the Civil Service Internal Security Department. "What subject?"

"Analytical Retro-Synthesis," he replied, sounding rather proud of it, and he had a right to be, for the department was the only one in the country, and one of only six in the world, and it took only three scholars per year, "at Invercraigie University."

"Invercraigie?" Julia asked, the name holding out the hope of an answer to one of the day's little mysteries. "You wouldn't happen to know a..." she struggled to remember the woman's name, "Caroline Weaver, would you?"

"Well," said Jack, trying to show off his memory, "I think there was a lecturer of that name at the Uni, but she left about a year ago to get married. Smith, I think the guy's name was. I bet that looked suspicious in the hotel's register - Mr and Mrs Smith..." Suddenly recalling that there was a point to this bit of nostalgia, he added: "Why do you ask?"

Julia never got the chance to tell him, because as she opened her mouth, several alarms and klaxons leapt into action at ear-bleeding volume. Several of the people nearby stood up and began to walk calmly but hurriedly towards the nearest exit. "What the hell's that?" Jack yelled.

She leaned forward, being careful to avoid the pool of gravy in front of her, and replied: "Don't worry - it's just the bomb alarm."

"Oh, thank God for that," he said. "I thought Security had caught up with me."

Julia sat back a little, and raised her voice over the din of the alarm and the people filing out: "We're supposed to leave the building as quickly as possible, but you can finish your lunch - it's sure to be another false alarm."

Jack nodded uneasily, and took another bite out of his egg and tomato sandwich. He was halfway through chewing it when the public address system boomed into life, nearly making him choke with surprise.

"Now listen here, you lickspittle capitalist pigs!" cried a voice whose owner, to judge from the distortion, must have been almost swallowing the microphone. "Communism is alive and kicking," the voice went on, "and right now it's kicking you! We, Red Fist, have planted a bomb as big as the National Debt in the middle of this obscene monument to you masters' decadence! We thought it only fair to give you a chance to escape from this dunghill with your worthless, pitiful lives before we blow this building into pieces so small you money-grabbing bastards could market it as a new kind of unbleached flour! So we're gonna blow this place to republic come in one hour, right? You got sixty minutes to put as much ground between yourselves and this cesspit as your fat, overfed legs will let you - so get moving - but then, you may as well stay where you are and enjoy yourselves, 'cos you're all gonna die anyway - we've put all the lifts out of order!" The voice began to laugh harshly. Others joined in, and then the speakers abruptly cut out.

Julia considered her options. "On second thoughts," she said to Jack, trying her best to remain calm.

"Yes?" he enquired.

Panic gripped her, and she yelled: "Run for your life!"

They did.

Jack and Julia hurtled down the corridor. They caught a glimpse of a few people in front of them, who almost immediately turned a corner and were out of sight. Jack moved to follow them, and felt Julia grab his arm. "No, not that way!" she gasped. "The lifts are all out of order, remember?"

"So what else is new?" he gasped back.

"Come on, down here," she urged, pulling him towards a slightly narrower corridor on the left. "Shortcut to the staircase," she explained. As they resumed their dash, Julia noticed the large blue arrows on either wall, which pointed in the opposite direction to the one they were running in. We'll just have to take the chance, she thought. Not even they could be that narrow-minded.

"How much further?" Jack asked.

"Another couple of hundred metres," she replied.

At this point, a loud, crackling fizz passed overhead, like an irritated lightning bolt looking for somewhere to strike. The two civil servants found that darkness had suddenly plunged on them. Before they were able to slow down, they had managed to bump into one another, and had fallen over. As they were trying to work out which limbs belonged to whom, a beam of light played over them. A moment later, a voice uttered: "All right, you two. Stand up and put your hands in the air."

The voice must have been talking through a loudspeaker, Julia decided. There was no way it could have sounded like that naturally. There are some loudspeakers that are designed for what the technical people call "flat frequency response," and what the marketing people call "neutral tone," "lack of coloration," or "remarkable honesty" - in other words, what comes out is as close as possible to what goes in. Whereas this loudspeaker was designed to make its user sound as though he had swallowed a packet of razor blades and several handfuls of gravel. [picture]

As they disentangled themselves and obeyed this order, Jack said to Julia in a quiet, grim voice: "We're done for now - they must have sent in a suicide squad to make sure no-one gets out."

"No talking!" the voice snapped. "You - the tall one. Take five paces towards me - slowly. Keep your hands up." It spat shrapnel with every word.

Jack did this, walking towards the disembodied point of light. He could just make out the silhouette of a human-shaped figure underneath it. Although the figure was too much in shadow for him to see any detail, it was wearing a heavy helmet with a lamp attached to the forehead, and a black, skin-tight, leather-look bodysuit. It was also holding a large and extremely unpleasant-looking pistol.

"Look here, you commie creep," Julia called, figuring that she and Jack were as good as dead already, "we're all going to be dead anyway before long, so if you want to kill us instead, you'd better be quick about it."

"I said no talking!" said the figure. "Not unless you want to end up on a charge of insulting a civil servant."

You bastards, thought Julia. You would, wouldn't you? Rules be followed though the heavens fall. "Bloody hell," she groaned. "Of all the times to have a run-in with Security!"

"I said, NO TALKING! " screamed the figure. There was a loud bang, and something whistled over Julia's head.

The figure began to walk towards them, his heels making an unpleasant clicking which, to Julia, suggested bones being moved in way that Nature had never intended. "Now, tell me, filth, before I start spring-cleaning the insides of your skulls," he said, his voice seeking out the pressure points of their auditory systems, and ruthlessly kneading them, "just what were you doing running north along a south-facing one-way corridor?"

Neither of them said anything. He took a few more paces and said: "Well?"

Jack stepped forward and said angrily: "Look here, you narrow-minded fascist bully-boy - just put that over-sized phallic symbol away for a minute, will you, and listen. I don't know if you were listening to the PA system just now, but a group of terrorists have planted a very large bomb somewhere in this building, which is going to explode in under an hour. Now I know it's not in the regulations or the timetable, but we have got to get the hell out of here right now, or the rescue workers are going to be scraping us off the walls. Understand?"

There followed a long, terrible pause, which was partly for dramatic effect, and partly to allow the man from Security to digest what Jack had said. Had the man not been wearing a helmet with a tinted visor, Jack would have seen the grotesque leer draped across his craggy face, rather like a withered crone in a bikini reclining on the bonnet of a hearse. Maybe the helmet was a good idea after all, but the leer trickled through into the man's voice. "Pull the other one, filth," he said, "it's got handcuffs on it."

"Oh, well," Julia sighed, "after this, things can only get better." It might have surprised her to know that this was one of the less accurate statements she was to make on this particular day.

In a tone steeped in malicious smugness, a tone compared with which Julia's alarm seemed positively benevolent, the Security man told them: "In accordance with Civil Service Internal Security Department regulations, I hereby place you under arrest for (1) violation of Civil Service internal traffic regulations, name running north along a walking-speed-only south-facing one-way corridor, and (2) insulting a civil servant, namely (a) 'commie creep' and (b) 'narrow-minded fascist bully-boy'."

He unhooked two pairs of handcuffs from his belt, and made Jack and Julia stand side by side, one arm in front, the other behind. So as to make running harder should they try to escape, he handcuffed them together - Jack's right hand to Julia's left, and his left to her right. "Now," he said, as if suggesting a Sunday afternoon stroll in the park, "if you'd like to lead the way, we'll pay a little visit to my office so you can fill in your arrest forms, and then we'll take a little trip to the interrogation suite..."

Scene Eight

In the Junior Yard of the Fire College of the Wizards' Guild of North-East Alarien, Kyolin and Morfina were preparing to defend their honour. Word of the duel had travelled quickly, and a good two-thirds of the College's two hundred and fifty or so apprentices had gathered to watch. As the challenged party, it was Kyolin's right to choose the type of duel to be fought. He had chosen the rather misleading-named Liars' Contest, so-called because of its similarity to contests between tellers of tall stories. In this, the wizards did not attack one another directly, but instead took turns to cast spells of a basically showy nature. Each strove to outdo the other in terms of technique, artistic flair, the number of illusory Morris-dancing octopuses he could control at any one time, and so on. The College's Chancellor was explaining the rules to the two boys. He was a tall, loosely-built man with more than a hint of a beer-belly under his flowing, spangled robes. His hair and beard were generally considered far too short for a man as old as he claimed to be; dormitory rumour was that he bleached them. "There will be five rounds," he was saying, "and each of you will cast two spells in each round. You may not attempt to overload your opponent's senses, nor stun nor weaken him in any way, mentally or physically. You may not attempt to distract his attention while he is casting a spell - "

"There, I told you!" Morfina butted in. "Cheat!"

The Chancellor furrowed his brows at the boy, and said sternly: "Nor may you taunt your opponent with verbal abuse."

"'Ere, that's not in the rules, is it, Sir?" asked Morfina, surprised and a little put out.

"Not at the moment," replied the old wizard. "But if you persist in this insult-hurling and name-calling, it may well find its way into a future edition of the regulations. In the meantime, as your Chancellor, I'm telling you to keep your mouth shut when you're not casting. Now, where was I? Yes - most importantly of all - no hitting below the cerebellum. Now, Kyolin - as the challenged party, you have the right to choose who casts first in each round."

"Thou shalt cast first, Morfina," said Kyolin nonchalantly. "I wish to see of what thou art made."

"Oh, you will, Willow, you will," replied Morfina. He had managed to utter the first syllable of a spell before the Chancellor reproached him with the words:

"Wait for the bell, Morfina. Both ready? Good. Then we shall begin round one." He gave a nod to the timekeeper, who rang a handbell. A ragged cheer went up from the audience, and a few of them began to chant: "Fight! Fight! Fight!" Then the Chancellor gave them a steely glare, and they fell silent.

Most of what happened in the next fifteen minutes or so was fairly uninteresting. As Kyolin had suspected (he would have prayed, but all religions regarded wizards as heretics), Morfina was outclassed, but not so much as to make his cause hopeless. He managed to struggle through to the last round, and was now about to cast his final spell.

"Is that the best you can manage, Kyolin?" he asked, breathlessly, as his opponent's Morris-Dance of the Pink Octopuses fizzled away. "You're wearing out."

"I should vewy much like to witness a suitable weply fwom thee at this stage, Morfina," Kyolin answered smugly.

"You will, Kyolin, you will..." he breathed. "I've been saving this one..."

Morfina looked down at the ground between his feet. He wondered whether he dared cast this final spell. But he'd used all the other non-offensive ones that he knew. The choice was simple: cast it and face the consequences (whatever they might be) or be forevermore remembered and ridiculed as the boy who'd challenged Willow and lost. The matter was settled, then. There came a few shouts of "Gerron wiv it!" from the crowd. He looked up, and gave them a look of undisguised contempt. He looked to Kyolin, and a little pity leaked into his expression. Poor Willow. He'd never know what had hit him - metaphorically speaking, of course.

Morfina put his feet a little further apart, and touched the tips of his middle fingers together. He unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and rolled the sleeves up to his elbows. (He wouldn't be allowed to wear the robe and the hat until he had graduated.) Someone who's paying for a wizard's service likes to feel that he's getting value for money, and so dramatic effect is one of the first things that wizards learn. Then he threw back his head and uttered the words of his spell.

It was surprisingly short, considering what it would eventually achieve. To begin with, it appeared to have achieved nothing. One or two of the boys began to snigger, perhaps thinking that Morfina had swapped over a pair of adjacent syllables, or had let the pitch of his voice rise instead of fall. The rest, Kyolin included, simply stared uncomprehendingly at him. Not one of them recognised the spell, nor could any of them so much as begin to hazard a guess as to what it might be supposed to do. But the Chancellor had a fair idea, and he suspected that before long, Morfina was going to have a lot of explaining to do. Some of the inflexions were supposed to be unknown even to undergraduates. His voice a mixture of anger and disbelief, he demanded: "Boy! Where did you find that spell?" Even as he spoke, there came from all around a low-pitched whooshing noise, like wind in a tunnel.

Realising now what the consequences might involve, and reasoning that he might as well be fireballed for a spell as a charm, Morfina answered cockily: "PhD section of the library, Sir - research papers." The whooshing was growing louder, and it appeared to be coming nearer. Those boys near the edge of the crowd noticed that the dust was beginning to stir, and bits of litter were being jostled along, as if by a slow, circling wind.

"You have no right to cast such a high-level spell!" the Chancellor told him "You can't possibly know how to control it!"

The whooshing was now definitely circling, and definitely closing in. It was also getting louder, and higher-pitched. The crowd had by now begun to take the hint, and some of the boys started to run for the safety of nearby buildings. Some of them lost hold of their outdoor cloaks, and these the wind caught and whirled round and round like demented wraiths. Morfina decided it was worth a chance, and ran off in the direction of the dining hall. Before he had gone more than three paces, however, he felt someone grab the hood of his robe. "Going somewhere, Morfina?" said the Chancellor's voice close to his ear.

"Err, no, Sir," he replied, "just trying to get out the immediate area of effect, Sir. After all, Sir," he added nervously, "we don't know what it might do."

"No," growled the Chancellor, marching him smartly in the direction of the staff building, "but I suspect we will before very long..."

The whirlwind, for such it had become, was closing in on itself, and rising in volume, until it seemed that it must surely deafen them. Then, as its circle tightened further, the whirlwind suddenly popped out of existence, along with all the dust, litter and cloaks that it had been carrying. 

Scene Nine

Jack and Julia sat hunched on the small suspect's stools in the Security man's office. His name, they had discovered, was Sergeant G. Stazi. These days, everyone in the Civil Service was on first name terms, even with people they'd never met before, and so they instinctively knew that it would be unwise, and quite probably terminal, to ask what the G stood for. Both of them were massaging their wrists, partly to remove the indentations left by the handcuffs, but mostly to relieve the cramps brought on by having had to complete the eight-page arrest form in quintuplicate. [13] Forms have always been a principle weapon in the civil servant's arsenal, and Internal Security was no exception. Sergeant Stazi was now checking them, to make sure that all six copies were accurate and self-consistent. Julia's, he reluctantly conceded, were flawless. (She knew this would annoy him.) On the last page of Jack's fifth copy, however, he discovered what he had been looking for.

"You vandal!" he shrieked. "You philistine! Your pen blotted there! Look!" He shook the form under Jack's nose.

Jack couldn't see anything wrong. His vision had begun to blur a little, after all that frantic writing. Or maybe it was just the way that the Sergeant was juggling the form up and down. "I'm sorry," he said, "I - "

"You'll be sorry, all right, you vile, filthy lump of excrement," sneered the Sergeant. He was always proud of an insult with the word "excrement" in it; it sounded much more thought-out and scornful than: "You little shit." "Right," Stazi continued, "add a further charge to section two, box D, namely '(3) Defacing Government property,' and amend sections three, four, five, and eight to nineteen and box A of section twenty accordingly."

Jack stared at him incredulously. "Defacing Government property?"

The Sergeant whipped his pistol from his holster and clicked it into firing position as he pointed it at Jack. "Of course," he smirked, "If you have any grievances, you're free to take them up with my over-sized phallic symbol..." God, how that had rankled! God, how good it was to see the little smartarse' face fall when his education turned round and kicked him in the guts!

"Well, if you put it like that..." said Jack, smiling nervously.

God! How bloody cool they think they are!

Somewhere far below them, there was a distant thud, and the room shook, as if something large and heavy had struck something in the basement that was connected to everything else in the building. "What was that?" Jack asked, afraid that he knew already. Under the circumstances, the three of them could have been forgiven for not noticing the faint current of air which had begun to circle around them.

"That," said Julia heavily, "was the detonator. We have about fifteen seconds to bring a meaningful conclusion to our relationships before the main bomb explodes."

For what seemed to him to be a long time, Stazi looked from Jack to Julia and back again. They couldn't be trying to create a diversion, could they? Surely they'd have run by now... It is quite possible that during those seconds, Sergeant G. Stazi invented several new swearwords.

Jack glared at Stazi with undisguised hatred. He began to say: "You see, I told you so, you obstructive bloody-minded bastard." He had got as far as the first "you" when they found themselves enveloped in a maelstrom of dust and paper and dark cloth. He had begun to utter "see" when he, Julia, Sergeant Stazi and the whirlwind all disappeared.

Thirty milliseconds after that, the Civil Service Energy Tax Assessment Office was ripped apart in an explosion that was heard at the other end of the country.

Scene Ten

"Err... Chief..."

"Yes, Urkl, what is it?" said Olympyus, Queen of the Gods of Felintor, to her dogsbody Urkl, Demigod of Minor Inexplicable Happenings.

"Well, err, Boss - milady -" Urkl began clumsily.

"Chief," Olympyus reminded him. She was going through a Red Indian phase at the moment, and had taken to dressing in a blanket and sticking seagull feathers in her hair, and demanding that everybody address her as "Big Chief Olympyus Mons" ("Chief" to her friends, who were becoming rapidly fewer, mostly because of this very phase). If anybody had thought to ask her why she was doing this, she'd have replied that you had to occupy the time somehow, and a change of look every few centuries did no harm.

"Err, yes, Chief," Urkl began again, "it's those humans again. One of their wizards has cast Polbathos' Spell of Transportation over Great Displacements of Time and/or Space. "

"Which version?" she asked.

"The, err, summoning one, boss, er, chief," replied Urkl.

"Damn that human curiosity!" she breathed. "Do we know where the spell is focusing?"

"Err, yes, boss, the planet Terra, chief, in the star system Sol."

"And what's the spell bringing through?"

"Two Terrans, Ma'am, one male, one female."

"Why?" she moaned, putting her head in her hands. She uttered a long word, which no human alphabet has ever been able to represent adequately, "isn't due back for another three centuries. The Unbeliever and the Landless One shouldn't even have born yet! We'll just have to send them back." She stood up and walked over to what she called her "Mirror of the Worlds." It bore a startling resemblance to an overflowing toilet. "Get me Jehovah," she said to it.

There was a sound like water gushing down a pipe. The face of an old man with long white hair and beard appeared on the surface of the water. Boring old fogy, she thought. Hasn't had an image change in aeons. Bet his worshippers are bored with it.

"Oh, it's you, Olympyus," said Jehovah, in the tone he would have used to greet a double-glazing saleswoman. "What do you want?"

"One of my wizards has summoned two of your humans into Felintor," she replied. "The spell is only supposed to be used when" - she uttered that unrepresentable word again - "is threatening the world - my world, and it isn't due back for another three centuries of our time. I want to send your humans back."

"Not possible, I'm afraid," replied the other god. "The summoning has rescued them from being killed by a terrorist bomb in their office block. According to my calculations, the time they spend in Felintor saving it from" - that word again - "should ensure that when they return here, the dust is settling and the emergency services will find them just before the building collapses completely."

Olympyus wondered briefly what a "terrorist bomb" or an "office block" might be. That was the trouble with these dictators: besides surrounding themselves with Demigods far less able than themselves, they tended to invent languages of their own, in which it was impossible to express dissatisfaction with the status quo. "But," she replied, "the point is that Felintor doesn't need saving. I can't have two of your humans wandering around my planet with nothing for them to save it from. My humans will start asking questions."

"I take your point, of course," he replied. "But they can't come back here yet. It would upset my world's causality."

"What are we going to do, then?" she asked.

"Why not make something for them to save it from?" he suggested.

"Jehovah!" she exclaimed. "You know we can't interfere like that!"

"Oh, I'm not suggesting that you invite" - that infuriating word - "back early or anything," he said nonchalantly. "But these two people were standing rather close to a third one who might just fit the bill. He'd make a perfect mad dictator - "

"And you'd know, wouldn't you?" she interrupted.

"This reality is governed by a committee now," he said sternly, "lead by Allah, Brahma and myself. We got fed up with all the bickering, so now we settle our differences amicably - one god, one vote."

"And I suppose your reality has suddenly become a good and happy place?" Olympyus asked, making no attempt to hide her sarcasm.

"Well, we're still working on that part of it," he admitted. "The humans don't seem to have taken much notice so far. Buddha suggested that we start at the bottom and work our way up. Like reincarnation, he said. Never got the hang of that, myself. We've got the jellyfish sorted out, at any rate, and we're going to make a start on the molluscs next year."

"Where does Buddha figure in this... committee of yours, then?"

"Non-executive director. Anyway, this third man. Being a mad dictator was his childhood ambition. If you were just to extend the reach of the summoning spell a little bit so that he was drawn in too - no-one would ever notice - and just drop him into the middle of one of your world's powder kegs, [14] I'm sure he'd more than justify the presence of the other two."

"Yes..." she mused, "I rather like that idea. Thank you, Jehovah."

"You're welcome," he replied sarcastically. The water went brown again.

Olympyus turned round, and studied her relief map of Felintor, which showed the political status of each area. After a moment, she turned to the Demigod of Minor Inexplicable Happenings and said: "Come on, Urkl - we've got work to do."

"Yes, err, boss, milady, err, chief," stammered Urkl, quite overawed by this new dynamism.

"Don't call me 'chief'," she told him disparagingly. She struck her chest, and the blanket disappeared in a flash of theatrical flame. She threw her head back, dislodging most of the seagull feathers that had survived the incineration of the blanket, and, ignoring the soot marks on her cheeks, declaimed: "From now on, I am General Olympyus!"

Scene Eleven

The people of the small nation of Tyrania were, they told one another proudly, a peace-loving race at heart. They would no more kill a man without reason than attempt to level the volcano Sullin, physical and spiritual centre of their country. Their favourite sport was grasshopper-baiting, in which one Tyranist would taunt the insect with a red and white gingham teatowel, in an attempt to make it rush at him, whereupon his assistant, clad from head to foot in tough leather, would drop a brick on the creature. Frequently, however, the grasshopper was scared off by the teatowel, not to mention the noise made by the onlookers, and would run away, and the adjudicators would declare victory by default for the humans.

Unfortunately for the sake of peace and harmony in the region, Tyrania was surrounded on all sides by extremely hostile and warlike nations, all of whom wanted nothing better than to steal her wealth and resources, slay most of her inhabitants and indulge in deviant sexual practices with the rest (and then probably slay them, too), claim the ruined land for their own, and eventually even lay waste the sacred Sullin.

And so it was that from the age of six, every Tyranical male was trained, efficiently and brutally, to carry sword, shield, and bow. (From the age of eight he was taught how to fight with them. The Tyranists reasoned that it was no good trying to run before you could walk.) And they were formed into lean, ruthless fighting units, ready to march at a moment's notice on missions of revenge, deep into enemy territory. Of course, they brought back timber and food and precious metals and gems, which was only fair, because they were only reclaiming what was theirs. (The boys, to introduce them to the art of war, were sent on window-breaking and orchard-robbing sorties.) And if, in the months following one of these revenge raids, a few children were born to the enemy's women with a telltale Tyranical slant to their eyes, well, those bastards would do the same to our women, wouldn't they, lads?

The Tyranists thought of themselves as a very fair-minded people. They were careful to take back only as much as their enemies had stolen, and to impregnate only as many women as their enemies had on their last raid.

Inexplicably, however, Tyrania's neighbours took the view that they were the peace-loving ones, and that Tyrania was the belligerent, destabilising power in the region. Fortunately for the Tyranists, it never occurred to Tyrania's neighbours to try to gang up on her, because they all mistrusted one another as much as they did Tyrania.

All of this changed, however, a few years prior to our story, when Prince Kahtoun ascended the Tyranical throne. He was a man of rare perception and intelligence, and had spent a year or so abroad in his youth. This had broadened his mind considerably, so much so that he had begun to get an inkling of why Tyrania's neighbours were so hostile towards her. His radical policies met with some resistance from High Priest Kariuhn, the then ruler of the Tyranical Church, but this obstacle was removed when Tyrania's gods, in recognition of Kariuhn's faith and devotion to duty, summoned him away from his mundane earthly existence to sit with them in the Oscular Halls. His successor, Lord Stentor, was much more sympathetic to Kahtoun's views.

And so, when Prince Estradytes, ruler of the neighbouring land of Androdyne, next ordered a cross-border orchard raid, in retaliation for an unprovoked graffiti attack on one of the villages in Androdyne's East Walking province, King Kahtoun and the High Priest Lord Stentor issued a joint edict to the effect that, unprovoked though the orchard raid was, no Tyranist was to take any kind of retaliatory action against Androdyne or any other land, on pain of being introduced to Red, Tyranical God of Fire, who was popularly believed to reside in the Crater of Sullin.

To the surprise of a good many people, this edict actually worked. [15] Not one apple, not one copper coin, was lost to Androdyne through that orchard raid. Not one lavatory wall had "Estradytes lives here" scrawled on it in rather obviously Tyranical characters. And such was the surprise (not to say confusion) resulting from Tyrania's non-act (which the Androdynes took to be a new and fiendishly devious stratagem, doubtless learned by Kahtoun during his time abroad), that, rather than follow up their advantage, Estradytes and his War Cabinet were paralysed into inaction. And when Queen Fad and her Farded Warriors came rolling over Androdyne's northern border, Estradytes likewise ordered that there be no recrimination. And Queen Fad too was at first confused, and then decided to try this new strategy herself. And so it went on, and peace gradually infected the whole region, becoming endemic within about two years. The people's confusion over why they weren't fighting anymore began to fade, and be replaced by mute acceptance of the status quo. An optimistic commentator on the region's affairs might have said that, left to themselves, the nations and provinces and loose alliances might never fight another war again. But he or she would have been failing to take account of human nature.

The root of the problem (or, at any rate, what history would eventually regard as the root of the problem) was that the Tyranists were terrible grudge-holders. They deeply resented not being able to take their just revenge on the Androdynes for that unprovoked orchard raid, and it was only the threat of being introduced to Red that had stopped them. Few of them believed that Red could really have endorsed Kahtoun's and Lord Stentor's edict. A lot more of them were beginning to believe, privately of course, that their King and High Priest were soft in the head.

And so, about three years after that vicious, unjustifiable theft of citrus fruit by Estradytes' mongrels, as King Kahtoun and the High Priest Lord Stentor were overseeing the Ritual of the Summer Solstice, [16] it came to pass that a black bolt, roughly the size of a man, descended from the heavens, killing both of them instantly. It should have come as no surprise to our hypothetical commentator that a great, bloodthirsty cheer went up from the watching crowd.

Scene Twelve

Slowly, wondering all the while whether it was a good idea, Jack Henderson opened his eyes. It came as something of a surprise to him that he still had eyes to open, and that they could still see things. They told him that in front of them was an area of washed-out, dirty blue, with grey splodges here and there. He guessed that perhaps he was looking at a cloudy, overcast sky. It surprised him also that he was still under the influence of gravity; he was lying on his back, on a hard, somewhat uneven surface; something with a lot of corners was digging into his left shoulder. He tried to shift away from it, and heard a metallic clatter as the object skidded away. His shoulder fell back onto the surface.

He slowly became aware of sound in this place: a slow, mournful whistling, which he guessed to be wind; a distant, hollow booming - the sea striking a cliff, perhaps?; a weak, nearby groaning -

Slowly, he turned his head to face where the sound seemed to be coming from. He could only turn it far enough one eye to be pointing in roughly the right direction. He saw several dark, crumpled shapes on the ground, which he took to be pieces of cloth. Beyond them was what looked to be a human form, lying on its side. Its short brown hair tumbled over its face, and another piece of dark cloth was draped carelessly over its torso. Beneath this, Jack could see that the figure was wearing a loose, pale orange shirt. It was also wearing cream-coloured slacks and a pair of brown shoes. It groaned again, more loudly this time.

"Julia?" he asked, surprised at how weak and thin his voice his voice sounded.

She opened her eyes. All that she saw at first was hair. She managed to brush it out of the way of one of her eyes, and saw another figure a couple of metres away, lying on his back with his head tilted towards her. "Jack?" she responded, in a voice that hardly sounded like her own. "So you're dead, too, huh?" she added after a while. It seemed rather a stupid thing to say, but it was all she could think of.

Jack managed to roll over onto his side. His eyes fell upon what he assumed had been the object under his shoulder. It was a tin can. "Well - I guess so," he replied. "I mean, we couldn't possibly have survived that explosion, could we?"

"Not a chance." Julia tried to raise herself into a sitting position, but her arms gave way halfway through, and she collapsed with a jarring thump. "Like you said," she continued, letting her muscles relax, "the rescue workers will be scraping us off the walls."

Jack extended his arm to try to help her, but she was too far away, and he found that even holding his arm horizontal was strangely tiring, so he let it drop back to the floor. "If they can find a piece of wall big enough to scrape, that is," he muttered.

"Well," Julia said after a while, a touch of smugness in her voice, "at least we took that bastard from Security with us."

Jack tried to smile, but the muscles wouldn't respond. "Yeah, serves him right - narrow-minded fascist bully boy."

"Where is he, anyway?" Jack asked himself, struggling to lever his torso off the ground. Propping himself up on both arms, he managed to take a good look round. They were sitting in the middle of a kind of bowl, perhaps five metres across. All around was a circular, crenelated wall about one and a half metres high. He could now hear distinctly the harsh calls of seabirds. Sergeant Stazi was nowhere to be seen. Jack had not realised until now how strange all of this was, considering that he was supposed to be dead. "Come to that," he whispered, "where are we?"

As if Jack's question had been some sort of cue, a mighty, echoing voice boomed: "Mortals, you are in Felintor. My name is Zorian. I am the Messenger and Herald of the Gods, and Guardian of the Way into this World." Julia afterwards remembered thinking that this was rather odd, because voices shouldn't echo outdoors.

As Zorian spoke, Jack and Julia felt themselves suddenly invigorated. Without wondering why or how, they stood up and turned to face the direction from which the voice had come. All that they could see of its owner was his face, which was perhaps just as well, for it hung in the sky, and must have been a good hundred metres across. The face appeared to be sculpted out of cloud, or perhaps cotton wool, which was all right, but it was as detailed as a photograph, and it moved, which wasn't all right. They couldn't tell how old he was, not that that matters to a god anyway, but his hair and his beard were black, and at the edges he had even managed to obtain the effect of loose, stray hairs. Zorian was secretly very proud of his earthly manifestation; it always impressed the mortals, without being overawing or showy. Not like Olympyus, for instance... [picture]

"I'm sorry," Julia said to Zorian, feeling that if this piece of soft sculpture was trying to impress her, it had better try again. "There's been some mistake. We appear to have got our afterlives mixed up. Could you point us in the direction of Heaven and Hell? I think we'll be able to find our own way from there."

Zorian resisted the temptation to sigh. They were always like that at first, these saviours. "There has been no mistake," he boomed. "This is not the afterlife of any religion."

"So, it's a sort of near-death experience, is it?" asked Jack.

That's more like it, thought Zorian. "In a manner of speaking," he replied.

"So," asked Julia, "what are we doing here?"

"You have been summoned to Felintor to save it from a great evil," Zorian announced.

"Oh, terrific," muttered Julia.

Trying to bolster the mortals' enthusiasm, he continued: "Nameless things lurk near worlds such as these, these tiny islands of light in the immense, terrible, chilly darkness that is the cosmos. It is against such things that you must now defend Felintor."

"Why us?" Julia demanded.

"You are not of Felintor," Zorian explained. "Though you are but mean, petty little creatures in your own world - "

"Thank you!" she snorted.

" - in Felintor you will find yourselves possessed of powers beyond your wildest, most delirious dreams."

"I was afraid of that," she said heavily.

"Use them wisely," he went on, not really paying her any attention, "for the might which can be Felintor's salvation can just as easily be used to compass its utter ruin." He was particularly proud of that injunction. Not many people knew that "compass" was also a verb.

"I was afraid of that, too," Julia responded.

"Go now," he commanded, "and do what you must. Remember, the fate of all of Felintor is in your hands."

"Well," said Julia, as Zorian's manifestation dissolved as if it was just an ordinary cloud that had been blown away by a gust of wind, "that just goes without saying, doesn't it?"

Jack breathed out very slowly, and then realised that he would have to breath in again if he wanted to speak. "This is one tall order we've been given," he said quietly.

Julia spun round to look at him and replied: "Will you get back in your skull?"

"What are you talking about?" Jack asked, puzzled. "We've got a world to save."

"Hell," she snapped, "don't tell me you believed all that garbage."

"You mean you didn't?"

"Not one word of it. I don't know how we've come to be dreaming the same dream, but the point is we are dreaming."

"How do you know?" he asked. That usually demolished argument like that.

"It's just so completely unbelievable," she replied. "I'm sure we've both seen video-novels about something like this - our subconscious minds must have been searching for something to present as a near-death experience, and got this by mistake."

"Well," said Jack carefully, "it's probably going to be the last experience we'll ever have - we may as well make the most of it."

"What do you mean," she asked, looking at him mistrustfully, "the last experience?"

"Well, we agreed, didn't we, that that bomb must surely have killed us."

"Or left us terminally injured," she countered.

"But even if we're alive, we'll be dead by the time the rescue workers dig us out."

"But if we're awake, maybe we can figure out a way to let them know where we are."

"Possibly," he conceded. "But how do you plan to wake up? I mean, have you seen where we are?"

"Let me just take a look." She walked around the wall, pausing now and again to look through what Jack supposed were arrow slits. "Well," she said, once she had completed her tour, "as far as I can tell, we appear to be at the top of a very tall, thin, tower, which is on the edge of a cliff, with the sea crashing on the rocks, several hundred metres below."

"That's just what it looks like to me."

"Problem solved," she said, a little smugly.

"What do you mean?" Jack asked nervously.

"Have you ever noticed how, in a dream, just before you get to the most horrible bit, and you think you're about to die," she answered, "you always wake up?"

Realised her intentions, and having very different ideas about their outcome, Jack said urgently: "Julia, no."

"Why not?" she asked. "All I have to do is climb over the parapet and let gravity do the rest."

"Please," he whimpered, "don't."

"I'm not asking you to come with me," she said huffily. "You're quite welcome to bleed to death in a rubble-filled Internal Security office, if you want." She had by now clambered onto the parapet and swung her legs over into the emptiness. She turned back to him, and added: "I'll see you in about fifty years. Goodby _eeeee..."

The end of the word was lost to the wind.

Jack buried his face in his hands. He wanted to vomit, but his stomach felt empty. "Oh, you bloody idiot," he whispered.

Now, read on: Chapter One is at http://www.pembers.net/fiction/lj_ch1.html.

Footnotes for the Prologue

[1] Timothy had never been much good at this, either: The advanced course used those tins that have the little sausages added, and his troop had always ended up arguing over how they were going to share them out. [Back to main text.]

[2] Actually, the curves in the pillars are the result of their being leaned against rather too often. [Back to main text.]

[3] You don't want to know how it got its name. [Back to main text.]

[4] Being bitten by a Management Consultancy Spider renders the patient unable to reach a decision about anything in less than a month. In extreme cases, the patient will hold a series of workshops with up to a dozen interested parties, and follow-up sessions a few weeks later to pick up on anything that's changed since, or that wasn't covered properly. There is a simple, if tedious, way to diagnose the affliction: just ask the patient: "How are you feeling?" Until recently, the standard treatment for the bite of the Management Consultancy Spider was the spittle of the Recession Owl, but this seems to have become less effective of late, and there is some speculation that the spider is developing an immunity. Current research is focused on an extract of the blood of the Trade Union Fish. (Also known as the Paper Tiger, because of its thinness, and black and yellow stripes.) [Back to main text.]

[5] Notorious for the way in which choosing the wrong one of a thousand or so adjectival endings for case, mood, aspect, person, gender, number, and tense could transform a warm compliment into a challenge to a duel - hence Ancient Anorene. [Back to main text.]

[6] This, too, was an insult. The difference between a wizard and a sorcerer is comparable to that between, say, a lion and a tiger, but wizards are acutely status-conscious, and to them, it's more like the difference between a lion and a dead kitten. [Back to main text.]

[7] Insulter's Handbook, chapter one, section one, paragraph two. [Back to main text.]

[8] If you're thinking that perhaps Julia's car wasn't exactly state of the art in terms of its security features, you're quite right. It had been state of the art some five years ago, which meant that it was now positively prehistoric. Voiceprint security had been quite a fad at the time, because it was a new technology. The manufacturers had, as always, rushed to put it into production, which had meant that they'd bolted it onto existing models, without much thought given to the effect that this might have on the car's user. The very early models, of which Julia's was one, would recognise only a single word (instead of anything spoken by the right person), and that had to be spoken at the right pitch, at the right speed, and with the right intonation. To be fair, when it was learning to recognise its owner, it did ask him or her to speak the password several times, and would take a sort of "average." Unfortunately, a bug in this component of the alarm's software meant that the "average" it computed was often unpronounceable by a real person. Another bug meant that it was likely to regard attempts to remove it for replacement (or, more likely, disposal), or even to reprogram it to correct the other bugs, as hostile interference of the kind accompanied by a respray and a change of number plates. Its response to this was to empty the battery (specially uprated for the purpose) into the filigree of high-voltage wires that enveloped the car.

Of course, once a few people had been killed by these systems, and road accident and death statistics had acquired a new category, manufacturers had responded by launching a "completely new generation" of voiceprint security systems, which fixed, if not all the faults of the first systems, at least the embarrassing, headline-grabbing ones, with the result that Julia, squeezed by the vast increase in her insurance premiums, couldn't have given her car away. [Back to main text.]

[9] It was, in fact, a line from a radio comedy which had been a huge cult hit about ten years ago, and had then leapt to mainstream obscurity when the second series turned out to consist largely of ideas from the first one, rearranged. [Back to main text.]

[10] In which you could walk along the same passageway twice in opposite directions without ever being aware of having turned round. The worst of it was that a lot of the corridors were one-way. [Back to main text.]

[11] Like a stage whisper, only muttered. [Back to main text.]

[12] You're right, their internal mail system is very efficient. They tried fax and electronic mail a few decades ago, but had problems with proving the identity of the sender. [12a] They therefore set up a network of fast vans, motorbikes and, for the very big offices, marathon runners. It doesn't mean that they get things done quicker, though..

[12a] I.e. they couldn't prove who was to blame when something went wrong. [Back to main text.]

[13] With a copy for files. [Back to main text.]

[14] This was another of Jehovah's neologisms. Olympyus wondered if it might be a catering-size tub of make-up. [Back to main text.]

[15] If only because it's hard to take revenge on someone when you're dead. This hasn't stopped people trying, though; the famous miser Quinqualto the Expeditious of Dargeth [15a] managed to take revenge on most of the world when he left everything he owned [15b] to anyone who was prepared to spend the rest of their life locked up by themselves in his treasure room.

[15a] Noted for foreclosing on mortgages whose contracts hadn't even been signed yet. Somehow he always made sure it was perfectly legal, and very expensive for the would-be borrower.

[15b] Most of that side of the continent. [Back to main text.]

[16] This involved barbecuing one thousand, five hundred and nine grasshoppers in order to rejuvenate the Fires of Sullin. No-one really knew how the one was supposed to assist the other. [Back to main text.]