Rites of Passage
Eric Brown


Rites of Passage gathers four long stories, one of which is original to the collection. “Bartholomew Burns and the Brain Invaders” features a Victorian London facing the threat of alien invasion and the mysterious ‘Guardian’ who saves the day. “Guardians of the Phoenix” is set in a near-future, post-apocalyptic world where water is in short supply and roaming bands will do anything to obtain it, while “Sunworld” is about a strange world where the sun is fixed eternally overhead and Yarrek Merwell makes a discovery that will change everything. The longest story in the collection, “Beneath the Ancient Sun” has never appeared before and is set on a far-future Earth where giant crabs and a swollen sun threaten humanity’s very existence.

Eric Brown’s stories combine memorable characters, fascinating settings, and a passionate concern for story-telling that has made this BSFA award-winning author one of the leaders of the field.


Eric Brown

RITES OF PASSAGE


Introduction


I like writing long stories (between around 7,500 words and 15,000 words). I find that they give a little more creative leeway than the short story; I can expand on the setting, the characters, and the actual story. There’s a bit more elbow room to explore ideas. Interestingly, I find that when I start a short story, I have no idea whether it will grow into a long story (though when I begin a novella, I know very well that it will reach the fifteen, sixteen thousand word mark and go well beyond). As I write what I think is going to be a short story, along the way it grows — either the characters demand a bit more room to develop, or the story requires more scenes in order to do justice to the plot. What I do notice about long stories is that the setting becomes more important to me than I initially realised; it almost becomes a character in its own right. This happened in three of the stories in this volume.

“Bartholomew Burns and the Brain Invaders” (10,000 words) was my very first attempt at steampunk (in the very loosest sense of the word), and it’s the only story in the collection  in which the setting did not become a character in its own right. It features the enigmatic Bartholomew Burns — saviour of the Earth on many occasions — and his young sidekick Tommy Newton, who together thwart an evil alien invasion. While in all the other stories collected here it is the central characters that undergo the titular ‘rite of passage’, in this story it’s Tommy Newton who learns much from his travails. The story saw light of day in the online serial magazine, Aethernet, edited by Tony and Barbara Ballantyne.

“The Guardians of the Phoenix” (13,000 words) began as a short story — I thought it would come in at around six thousand words — but expanded in the telling. I rarely write post-apocalyptic tales, but I was gripped by the idea of a bunch of good people travelling across an inimical desert in search of water. Even after I finished the story, it kept on growing in my imagination, and a year later I expanded the story by some eighty-seven thousand words and it became the novel of the same title, published by Solaris in 2010. The story appeared in Mike Ashley’s anthology Apocalyptic SF (End of the World in the US).

“Sunworld” (11,000 words) is not only a rites of passage tale but one of conceptual breakthrough, to which the genre of science fiction is admirably suited. I enjoy writing stories in which the central character undergoes a journey the events of which, by the end, will subvert everything he or she thinks they know about themselves and their world. This tale is another which begs to be expanded, and some day I would like to write Sunworld, the novel. The story was first published in George Mann’s anthology The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction 2.

The closing tale in the collection is “Beneath the Ancient Sun” (16,000 words), which appears here for the first time. Again it’s a rites of passage tale and a story of conceptual breakthrough, as Par and Nohma — who inhabit a deep valley in what was the sea bottom on a far, far future Earth — embark on an initiation quest and along the way learn a lot about the past greatness of their race and their place in the world. While the story in itself is complete, and I have no plans to expand it into a novel, I do hope one day to write more stories about Par, Nohma, and the brave troupe of cavern dwellers battling inimical conditions beneath a vastly swollen sun.

I hope you are as entertained by these long stories as I was while writing them.


Eric Brown


Tyninghame


East Lothian


April, 2014


Bartholomew Burns and the Brain Invaders


Bartholomew Burns presented himself at the side gate of Buckingham Palace at three o’clock on the afternoon of the 1st of February, 1851, at the start of what was to prove a fateful few hours in the history of the world — though for good reasons the annals of the time have very little to say on the matter.

He was escorted by a guardsman across the grounds and delivered into the stern custody of the head-housekeeper who, after ushering Burns along interminable corridors, passed him on to the head butler. Two minutes later the butler opened a pair of double doors and announced his arrival, and Burns hurried into the capacious drawing room which overlooked a snow-covered garden.

He bowed to the diminutive figure on the chesterfield. “As ever, your Majesty, it is an honour to receive your summons.”

“Burns,” said Queen Victoria, “you have served me well in the past; I do hope that on this occasion your capabilities might prove as efficacious.”

“I will do all within my powers, your Majesty,” Burns murmured.

“Draw up a seat,” she said, “and consider what I have to impart.”

Burns did as instructed. For the past six months, since his last adventure, he had been kicking his heels, allowing his thoughts to dwell on the events of the past — which was never a healthy state of affairs. The Queen’s summons had pulled him from a period of introspection, during which he had occupied himself with scotch and Macaulay’s History of England.

A door opened at the far end of the room and Prince Albert, dressed for the weather in a greatcoat and boots, hurried across to Victoria. He nodded to Burns and took his wife’s childlike hand.

“It’s past the time I was at Hyde Park, my dear,” he said with a pronounced Germanic intonation. “Burns, forgive me, but matters are pressing.”

Burns waved. “By all means.”

“The Exhibition proper opens in May, but on the morrow I will be showing a group of financiers and industrialists around the exhibits, and there are many preparations to oversee.”

The Prince, Burns thought, seemed pale and unwell, his normally sanguine features assuming the wan hue of the finest parchment. The Queen squeezed his hand, and not for the first time Burns was moved by the evidence of their obvious affection.

The Prince swept from the room and Queen Victoria smiled to herself. “The Great Exhibition, Burns, is quite taking up all his time and energy. I do fear for his health, especially so over the course of the past day or so. He does not quite seem himself.”

“The Exhibition, by all accounts, will be a marvel to whet the most jaded palate.”

Victoria gestured to a maid to hurry with a tray bearing a silver tea-pot of Earl Grey. The girl deposited the tray on an occasional table, curtsied and departed.

Burns poured, as was custom, and Victoria joined him in partaking of the beverage in a small china cup.

“Now,” she said, “a singular matter has come to my attention. It is quite beyond the wherewithal of my ministers, I am sure. Therefore, it occurred to me instantly that it was a phenomenon more than suited to your expertise.”

“You have my undivided attention, your Majesty.”

“To state the matter simply, a visitor was apprehended just over a day ago. He vouchsafed a remarkable story, claiming that the peace of the realm was at stake, and that, moreover, these shores faced the imminent threat of a singular invasion.”

“A singular invasion?” Burns echoed.

Victoria inclined her head. “I have instructed Travers to meet you at Newgate Gaol at five. He will be able to furnish you with further information.”

“I will report back to you at your earliest convenience, your Majesty. You have the communicator to hand?”

She opened a small bag and withdrew the tiny ear-piece, a miniaturised marvel of technology. “As you instructed, Burns, it never leaves my side.”

She rang a bell and, when the maid appeared, instructed her to have the butler show Burns out. He bowed and bade her Majesty farewell.

“I have every faith in you, my mysterious Mr Burns. God speed.”

As he stepped from the palace, instantly accosted by the icy chill that had gripped the capital for weeks, he tightened his muffler against the wind and trod circumspectly across the iced cobbles. A minute later he was aboard a Hansom and heading for Newgate, staring out upon a twilight quickened by the winter fog. As the cab rattled along the Strand, busy with broughams and pedestrians, Burns considered the Queen’s careful words. A visitor… a singular invasion…

But why, he asked himself, had the word come from the lips of the Queen, and not from the usual source, a Sentinel?

~


Little realising the leading role he was about to play in the events of the next few days, Tommy Newton swaddled his chapped feet in rags, bound them tight with cord he’d fingered from a bale of linen aboard the H.M.S. Fortitude the day before, and jumped from the brandy barrel in which he had made his home for the past year.

He lifted the metal grille from the wall, poked his head through to ensure the alley was deserted, then scrambled out and replaced the grille. He set off at a clip down the sloping alley towards the river. It was odd, but today he felt drawn to the Wapping stretch of the river — it was as if a voice were summoning him there, promising him a pretty haul.

Life, at present, was good for Tommy. He had a warm, dry home to call his own, wedged as the barrel was next to the furnace wall of the smelting factory. He’d even managed to garner a few valuable possessions: three blankets, a bundle of candles and matches, and a spoon he’d filched from the unattended galley of a Russian steamer. And to think, it was less than a year since he’d arrived in London and fallen in with Ratty and Miller who’d introduced him to the dubious pleasures of mudlarking.

Things had been difficult all winter, but a month ago his luck had turned. He and Ratty had hauled a ship’s binnacle from the mud near Woolwich, and a bent chandler down Bermondsey way had given them three shillings apiece for it.

Three shillings — and just as winter was beginning to bite. He’d been tempted to buy himself a right feast on the first day, but sense had prevailed — prompted by the gnawing memory of hunger pangs last winter — and he’d rationed his spending to a penny or two a day. Even so he’d eaten well, able to afford a loaf that lasted three days, some old jerky from a butcher in Bow, and a pint of pale ale as a treat.

All in all, he thought as he emerged from between the crowded buildings and skidded to a halt on the icy cobbles beside the river, it was a good life.

The tide was out, revealing a flat expanse of black, jellied mud. The far bank was invisible behind a grey fog. A few small boats, moored to the walls, tilted this way and that, fixed in the river-bed. So far as he could see, there was no one else scavenging for the occasional treasure. No doubt the bitter cold was keeping the shiftless abed, but the cold was no deterrent to Tommy. A Bradford tyke, he’d braved winters up north cold enough to freeze the balls off a tom cat.

There was no sign of Ratty or Miller, which was all the better for Tommy. He could get an hour’s searching in before his friends, bleary-eyed and the worse for the bad navy rum they’d palmed the day before, turned up for work.

He still had sixpence of the three shillings left, which if he were careful would last him a week, but after that…? He smiled to himself. Something would turn up. It always did. If you work hard, you’re rewarded. Which is what his old Dad had always told him, before he was crushed to death in the sandstone quarry where he’d worked as a labourer.

Tommy wondered if it was lady luck that was calling him today, urging him to scour a stretch of river he’d left alone for a good week.

He climbed down the rusting iron ladder stapled into the quayside. The mud greeted his swaddled feet with enthusiasm, sucking him in up to his shins. He tucked his sack into the belt of his trousers and took a step. The mud didn’t want to release him, but the secret was not to pull too quickly: lift your foot slowly and evenly and it’ll come out still shod. Pull too fast and you’ll leave your boot behind, if you were lucky enough to possess boots.

Taking great high, slow steps, Tommy moved away from the wall, past the canted prow of an old coal steamer, and headed towards a section of the river-bed beyond.

The mud gripped his legs and froze him to the bone, and with his next step his foot came down on something hard and flat, perhaps an inch or two below the surface.

He crouched and, with a cupped hand, scraped away the mud from whatever it was beneath his feet, and his heart quickened at the sight. God in a galleon, but there was a great sheet of copper or brass beneath the muddy balls that were his swaddled feet.

The mud oozed back over the metal, stealing its lustre, and for a second Tommy wondered if he’d dreamed the sight of the dully glowing surface.

Instead of using his hands, he slid his feet across the metal, wiping a temporary swathe through the mud. More golden metal was revealed, and Tommy was astounded by its extent. Lord, but it went on for yards!

The trouble was, how would he be able to shift something this size all by himself?

Greed battled with his innate good nature — Ratty and Miller had taken him under their wings, after all. He’d go fetch them, tell them what he’d found, and they’d work out how to shift the brass and then share the booty.

He felt a curious sensation of warmth creep up his legs, and again that sense of being summoned filled his head.

He was in the process of lifting a foot and turning, gripped by sudden panic, when the gold surface of the metal gave way beneath him and he plummeted with a frightened yelp.

He saw a square patch of foggy daylight above him and he realised that he was in some kind of container, looking up. But the strangest thing was that, although he’d come to a sudden halt, he had no sensation of having landed. He blinked and looked about him and moaned aloud, for he was by some miraculous process suspended in mid-air, spread-eagled, in what appeared to be a… a what? A railway carriage, the cabin of a sunken ship?

Though it was like no railway carriage or ship’s cabin he had ever beheld. All the surfaces were black, and curved in an odd way, and flashing lights like orderly candles dispelled the darkness.

Above his head the hatch closed silently, and oddly the brightness in the container increased, as if to compensate for the sudden absence of daylight.

Only then did Tommy, bobbing and struggling in mid-air, make out the creature studying him from across the sable container.

He yelled with fear, and increased his struggles — to no avail, as whatever was restraining him would not let him go.

“Who… who are you? What do you want?”

He stared at the little man, who must have been a hundred years old. He was naked, and white, and his tallow-coloured skin seemed to be wrapped too tightly around his protuberant bones. The creature’s head was massive — almost as long as its torso — and possessed two great staring eyes as big as Tommy’s fists.

This abomination could only be a Spaniard, and the vessel a sunken galleon, and surely the Spaniard was dead by the look of him?

But then the Spaniard blinked, and Tommy noticed a great green vein upon the creature’s head pulsing in rhythm with its undoubtedly living heartbeat. And he noticed how the being’s thin body was imprisoned within spars and struts, as if but for this containment he might fall in a heap on the floor.

“Please, let me go!” Tommy cried.

The creature spoke, but did so without moving its lips; then Tommy realised that the words were in his head, more like thoughts than sounds.

Do not fear, Tommy. I mean you no harm.

“What are you?” For his first assumption, that the manikin was a Spaniard, he now seriously doubted. “How do you know me name?”

That need not concern you, the creature continued. I simply require your assistance.

Tommy’s heart ceased its racing, and he began to calm. He wondered if that earlier sensation, drawing him to this place, had been the doing of this being.

It was indeed, Tommy.

“But how…?”

I need your help. When you leave my vessel, make your way directly to this address: 25 Garnett Place, Kensington, and there ask for one Bartholomew Burns. Recount your experiences, and impress upon him the urgency of his returning here with you. Do you understand?

Tommy nodded.

The address, again? said the voice in his head.

Tommy repeated it.

And the name of the gentleman?

“Bartholomew Burns.”

Very good. You are a brave and resourceful creature, Tommy Newton. You have a long and interesting life ahead of you.

A square of light appeared above him, and then he was rising through the air. He emerged from the hatch, into the welcome environs of the river-bed, and he wondered if there might be anyone abroad to witness his miraculous ascension from the depths.

The hatch closed beneath his feet and watery mud sealed above the golden square. Tommy wondered if he’d dreamed the encounter with the skeletal manikin.

His first impulse was to flee and never return; his second, after much thought, was to do the creature’s bidding.

He felt, as he squelched from the Thames and made his soggy way through the fog-shrouded streets of London, as if some strange force were compelling him towards Kensington — the very same that had drawn him to the submarine being in the first place.

Onward, in thrall to the strange skeletal creature, Tommy plodded.

~


For a high-ranking civil servant, Travers was an unprepossessing physical specimen. His girth exceeded his height and his moon face was cratered with a rash of burst boils. Added to which, his teeth presented evidence of unchecked decay.

However, as if to compound the paradox, Travers’ diction was precise to the point of primness. “It’s an honour to meet you again, Bartholomew,” he fluted. “And maybe this time you will be a little more forthcoming on the question of your provenance?”

They were in the Governor’s office at Newgate Gaol, and though situated as it was in the west wing of the building, Burns made out the distant clanking of chains, and the occasional ignominious howl, as of a banshee.

He ignored the inquiry with a smile. “Her Majesty intimated that time was of the essence in this matter. I would be grateful if you would furnish me with the requisite facts.”

Thus rebuked, Travers stirred himself to lethargic action. With much wheezing he prised himself from the chair and rolled over to the door. “If you would care to follow me, Bartholomew, I will show you a sight to set your blood a-racing.”

Without further explanation he led Burns from the office and along a white-washed passageway. They descended a flight of stairs, then passed through a corridor giving on to cells; low moans issued from these, along with the stench of human excrement. Not a second too soon they came to a barred door, which Travers unlocked. They proceeded down another flight of stairs, each stone step worn like a butcher’s chopping block. The cries of the condemned, and their concomitant stink, diminished as Burns and Travers descended into the bowels of the building.

At the foot of the steps Travers opened a thick door onto a wide, vaulted tunnel, off which opened a series of long, damp chambers; Burns spied chains and manacles affixed to the brick-work, and shuddered at the thought of the crimes committed here in the name of justice.

At the end of the tunnel, Travers paused before a great timber double door, withdrew a key the size of a spanner from his jacket, and proceeded to tackle the lock. He flung open the doors with the flourish of a stage magician, revealing a cavernous chamber, almost empty.

Almost empty, Burns observed, but not quite.

A ship with the appearance of a deep sea fish, all polyps and pendulous barbels, perhaps thirty foot from prow to stern, sat at the far end of the chamber.

Travers cleared his throat. “Have you ever, Bartholomew, seen anything like it?”

Burns had, as a matter of fact, but kept the knowledge to himself. It was, if he were not mistaken, a Vorpal Interspatial Craft. His curiosity quickened.

“And that’s not the end of it,” Travers continued with what almost amounted to lip-smacking gusto. “Wait till you see what we found within.”

He led the way towards the craft. At their approach, an oval section in the vessel’s mottled flank irised open. They stepped inside, into a sourceless opalescent light, and Travers gestured — needlessly — to the creature seated, limbs a-dangle, in a strange cupola atop a short pedestal.

The being was small and brown and wizened, and resembled nothing so much as a hairless gibbon. It was dead, as evidenced by its bloated torso and the putrid stench that emanated from its person.

Utilising his perfumed kerchief, Burns advanced and inspected the creature. There was no obvious indication as to how the being had met its end, no signs of physical injury, and Burns knew that Kyrixians — for a Kyrixian it undoubtedly was — were an oxygen breathing race who should have had no difficulty with the atmosphere of Earth.

“The devil of the matter, Bartholomew, is that the craft was discovered by the janitor in this very chamber, though how it managed to get here is beyond me.”

Burns nodded. “Strange indeed,” he said, though it was no mystery at all: interstitial craft were capable of travelling through the void in order to arrive at any sequestered destination.

“The creature was alive when Hobbs discovered the craft. It asked — in plain English, if you please — to meet a person in command.”

“And Hobbs met its demand?”

“He ran harum-scarum to the Governor. He was in quite a state, and no mistake.”

“And the Governor immediately informed Her Majesty?”

“The Governor called me,” Travers said, “knowing I had the ear of the Queen. I contacted Her Highness, who in turn informed Prince Albert. Then I made my way here to see what the creature had to say for itself.”

Burns glanced at him. “And that was?”

In reply, Travers reached into his waistcoat and produced a leaf of note paper, covered on both sides in his neat copperplate hand. “I took extensive notes, Mr Burns.”

He passed the paper to Burns, who read quickly.

It appeared that the Kyrixian had come to Earth on an errand of mercy, to warn the human race that invasion was afoot. According to the creature, a vessel from Qui was destined to land in London anon: only one being was aboard the Qui vessel, but he nevertheless had the means to bring humanity to its knees.

The Kyrixian exhorted the authorities to destroy the Qui vessel before its occupant could carry out its intentions.

“The creature was in a state of some discomfort,” Travers said. “Its breathing was laboured, its eyes misted. Its words grew quieter as it repeated its warning. In the event, His Highness arrived bare minutes before the being expired.”

“The Prince does take a serious interest in these matters,” Burns murmured to himself; ever since the strange affair of the Lyran land-crab last year, which had almost cost the monarch his life…

He took a turn around the chamber; other than the pedestal chair, and what he suspected was the control panel, the room was empty. He made out what might have been some kind of rack against the far curved wall, but, if it had ever contained anything, it was empty now.

He read Travers’ transcript again, and then handed back the sheet of paper.

“What now, Bartholomew?” Travers enquired.

“Lock the vault. Allow no one entry, is that understood?”

Travers nodded. “Yes, sir. And about what the creature claimed, the invasion?”

Burns stroked his chin. “It cannot be dismissed, Travers. I will contemplate a requisite response; and I will be in contact with your department if necessary.”

“Very good.”

They left the chamber, Burns with a sense of foreboding, and Travers led the way up through the noisome gaol. Burns took his leave of the government man with a firm handshake and rode a Hansom back to Kensington.

Once settled in the reassuring comfort of his garret, he brewed a pot of Earl Grey and seated himself in his armchair before the window. All London was spread before him, a sprawl of streets delineated by the glow of gas-lamps appearing one by one as darkness descended. It was, without doubt, a jewel and at the same time a foul cess-pit of a city, depending of course upon one’s perspective.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on the problem at hand. He knew little of either the Kyrix or the Qui, and he was troubled by his ignorance.

The fact was that the Kyrixian’s story could not be dismissed: but how, he asked himself, how in all this great and crowded city, might he locate the invading Qui ship and nullify its threat?

And why, for the love of all that was sacred in the universe, had a Sentinel not alerted him to the danger?

~


Tommy Newton peered around the corner of the square and watched the Hansom draw up outside number Twenty-Five. A very tall gentleman alighted, paid the driver and proceeded up the steps of the imposing townhouse and let himself in through the front door.

Tommy thanked his stars: a minute longer in the biting cold and he would have frozen to death. One hour ago he had rapped on the door of number Twenty-Five, only to be told by a disdainful housekeeper that Mr Burns was not at home.

Now he ran across the cobbles, climbed the steps and knocked again. A minute later the haughty matron favoured him with another pained grimace.

“Please, ma’am, it’s urgent I see Mr Burns quick sharp.”

“Your business?”

Tommy wracked his brains to come up with a suitable reply. At last he said, “A manikin wishes to talk to Mr Burns, ma’am.”

“Well, I’ve had stranger callers than the likes of you,” the matron sniffed. “Come in while I consult Mr Burns.”

Tommy stepped into a large vestibule adorned with paintings and stood as instructed on a doormat as the housekeeper bustled off. Only now, in the warmth, did he realise how cold he’d been outside; he hugged himself and began to shiver.

Presently the housekeeper returned. “You’re in luck, young sir. Mr Burns will see you. But first–” she went on, pointing to the blobs of mud that disguised his feet, “take those disgusting things off or you’ll ruin the carpets!”

Tommy knelt and unfastened the rags that bound his feet, then stood and beamed at the matron. She seemed unimpressed. “Lordy, young sir, your feet are almost as black.” She looked about and found a pair of Persian slippers. “These were for the rag and bone man, but they’ll do for now.”

Tommy slipped his feet into the silken slippers, thinking he’d never felt anything as luxurious in all his life, and followed the housekeeper along the hall and up three flights of stairs to the very top of the house.

She opened a door and announced, “The guttersnipe, sir,” waving Tommy into the room and closing the door as she left.

Tommy stopped dead and stared about him in wonder. The room was large, but seemed smaller on account of all the ornaments and knick-knacks and paraphernalia that cluttered it: Tommy could not name much of what he saw, but he did recognise a set of African spears and a shield, a suit of armour, a stuffed animal of some kind, a hundred pictures from all around the world.

Only then did he become aware of the figure seated in an armchair before the window. As he stared, the figure rose to its full height and regarded him.

Bartholomew Burns’ face was thin and sallow, his hair jet black, his eyes as dark as Indian ink, and piercing. He emanated an air of other-worldliness, and Tommy found himself stammering.

“Mer-Mr Burns, I’m Ter-Tommy, Ter-Tommy Newton.” He glanced down at his feet, then, and blushed when he beheld his skinny shanks disappearing into the ridiculous pink slippers.

Despite his severe aspect, Mr Burns smiled and gestured towards the roaring fire. “Take a seat, Tommy, and recount your business. You told Mrs Hopkins some story about a manikin?”

“That I did, sir. See, I were mudlarkin’, or about to, when I come upon this… this thing in the mud. It were hard, like, where the mud shouldn’t have been hard, and the next I knew I were fallin’.”

Burns held up a hand, took Tommy’s elbow and eased him into an armchair. He sat in the chair opposite and smiled reassuringly. “Now, calmly, from the beginning — but first, a mug of Earl Grey, perhaps?”

Soon Tommy was warming his hands on a cup of the finest tea he’d ever tasted. Between sips he recounted his story.

“So I fell, sir, only I didn’t hit anything. I were floating in mid-air. I were inside some kind of ship under the mud, and this creature, this manikin, he were staring at me with eyes like saucers, no word of a lie!”

Burns’s jet eyes seemed to ignite as he leaned forward and said, “This manikin, describe him to me, if you will.”

Tommy nodded. “He were small and skinny, smaller than me, and bone white, but with a big bonce. And when he spoke I didn’t hear the words normally — they kind of sounded in my head.”

“And the carapace of his ship was golden, did you say?”

Tommy deciphered Burns’s meaning and nodded. “That’s right, sir.”

Burns then said something under his breath that Tommy did not understand, “By Heavens, it is a Sentinel if I’m not mistaken.” He said to Tommy, “And what did this manikin say to you?”

“He told me not to be afraid. He wouldn’t harm me, he said. Then he said I had to find you, Bartholomew Burns, and he gave me your address and said I had to come and fetch you and take you back to the craft.” Tommy shrugged. “And here I am.”

“And here you certainly are, m’boy — the answer to my problems and no mistake!”

Tommy blinked. “Your problems?”

“A long story — but one I’ll apprise you of in due course.”

Tommy gulped his tea, afraid that Burns would dismiss him before he’d drained the cup. “And the manikin? He a friend of yours?”

Burns laughed. “Not a friend, as such, but shall I say a colleague? Very well, there’s no time to lose, Tommy. Can you take me to the river and point out the exact whereabouts of the ship, d’you think?”

Tommy puffed his chest. “Never forget the position of a treasure,” he said. “It’ll be high tide now, but in another hour we’ll be able to find it and no mistake.”

“Then let’s take a cab to the riverbank and prepare for an audience with the Sentinel,” Burns said with a cryptic wink to a bemused Tommy.

~


One hour later Burns knelt beside the capstan and watched as the moon-silvered waters of the Thames slowly receded to reveal a shining expanse of jet black mud. And to think, he mused, that Tommy and hundreds like him scraped a meagre living from wading through this filth in search of scant pickings.

The ragamuffin said, “It were there, just by the prow of the coaler. A minute and we’ll be able to reach it.” He glanced at Burns’s footwear. “Make a right mess of your fancy brogues, though, Mr Burns.”

“The least of my concerns right now,” Burns murmured to himself.

The boy looked at him. “What were that odd creature, Mr Burns, and what does it want with you?”

“That, m’boy, we shall soon learn.”

His mind was racing with the events of the past few hours, the arrival of the Kyrixian, and now this — the appearance of a Sentinel, if he were not mistaken. It was beginning to make a kind of sense; but the next few minutes would prove him right, or wrong, on that score.

“Right-oh,” Tommy said. “Follow me, Mr Burns.”

They climbed down the ladder and set off across the mud, Burns sinking almost to his knees with every step.

“Easy does it,” Tommy said, “or the mud’ll have your shoes.”

Burns adapted his gait, taking a lesson from Tommy’s slow, high steps. They approached the canted coaler and ducked beneath its prow, and Tommy pointed. “Right there, Mr Burns. Just where that cockleshell sits.”

Burns stepped forward, and instantly the surface beneath his feet solidified reassuringly. He scraped his right foot, and made out a dull copper gleam before the mud oozed back.

Tommy joined him. “I were standing here when all of a sudden–”

Burns’s stomach lurched…

He fell, and beside him Tommy yelped as they found themselves beneath the surface of the mud, suspended in mid-air within the curved confines of what looked very much like a Sentinel ship.

His suspicions were confirmed when he beheld the wizened, etiolated form of a Sentinel, regarding him from its orthopaedic brace, Earth’s gravity being too injurious for the creature’s delicate frame.

The manikin gestured with a thin hand, and the force that levitated Burns and the boy lessened and lowered the pair into padded seats opposite the Sentinel.

The creature gestured feebly. “A forced landing, Mr Burns,” the alien said in lingua galactica. “Forgive me. I would have been in touch much sooner, but for the gravity of this confounded planet. My ship suffered various mechanical failures upon entry. One of them being my communicator.”

Burns smiled. “But you managed to contact me nevertheless.”

The manikin’s great head turned towards the staring Tommy. “I exerted mental pressure. The boy, though not a prime specimen, does have virtues to recommend him.”

Burns replied, diplomatically, “The iniquitous social structure of my world quite arbitrarily deems that some of its members are disallowed the privileges enjoyed by others. But I take it that you did not summon me to discuss Earth’s political plight?”

The Sentinel grimaced hideously in what Burns took to be an attempt at a smile. “Quite correct, Burns. More pressing matters demand our attention.”

Beside him, Tommy said, “What’s the lingo you’re speakin’? It don’t sound like no Spanish I’ve ever heard!” He leaned forward. “And just what is that… that thing, Mr Burns!”

Burns gripped the boy’s arm and said, “Fear not, Tommy. We’re in friendly company.”

He returned his attention to the wan Sentinel and said, “A Kyrixian ship with a single occupant materialised beneath London one day ago. The creature passed away, but before doing so warned of a Qui ship bent on invasion. Its motives now become clear: it wished to alert the authorities to your very own arrival, so that they might attack and destroy your craft.”

The Sentinel shifted uncomfortably in its brace, a vein like an earthworm pulsing upon its osseous skull. “The very reason I am here, Burns. The Kyrixian is an alien known as Turqan; his planet is dying, and he wishes to relocate his people to a more clement world. Turqan is well known to the Galactic Council, and the Kyrixians an implacable warlike race–”

Burns interjected, “But I assure you that Turqan was quite alone, unless his compatriots came aboard other ships.”

The Sentinel paused; a wispy, cartilaginous tongue moistened thin lips, and he proceeded, “You are behind the times, Burns. Turqan stores his people in the matrices of what, for the want of a better name, I call memory crystals. It is my assumption that soon he will effect their dissemination from the crystals — into the minds of innocent Earthlings. “

“But if I might say so,” Burns interrupted, “you forget one thing. The creature — Turqan — is dead.”

The Sentinel leaned forward, its massive eyes staring. “Such he would like you to assume, Burns. But I assure you, though its somaform might very well be lifeless, it is my guess that Turqan effected the transfer of his mind to a victim Earthling, one, perhaps, in a position of power whose influence he might use to effect the dissemination of his fellow Kyrixians.”

Burns smote the padding of his seat. He recalled the fact that, according to Travers, none other than Prince Albert himself had been present at the death of the alien.

He recounted these facts to the Sentinel. “I saw the Prince just hours ago,” Burns said. “He seemed decidedly ill.”

The Sentinel said, “It would have taken a little time for Turqan’s mind to achieve total integration with a host body; you no doubt witnessed the psychosomatic symptoms of the cerebral invasion.”

“But if the alien now inhabits the Prince’s very self, and he has in his possession the means to broadcast his fellows into the minds of the populace…” Burns shook his head, then asked, “How many Kyrixians are stored within these crystals, Sentinel?”

“They number, at a conservative estimate, around twenty thousand.”

A terrible thought occurred to Burns. “Sentinel, the Prince is organising an event in London at which Turqan will have ample opportunity to disseminate a number of his fellows into the minds of the throngs who attend.”

“When does this event commence?”

“The Great Exhibition, as it is known, will not open until May. But tomorrow none other than the Prince himself will conduct a tour of politicians and heads of industry around the various exhibits.”

“A perfect opportunity for Turqan to effect the transfer to supremely influential hosts!” The Sentinel leaned forward, veins pulsing feverishly in its egg-shell skull. “We have no time to lose. Together we must apprehend the invader.”

Burns hazarded, “I think, sir, that your singular presence might be commented upon adversely by the populace of London.”

“I am a Sentinel, Burns. My kind is gifted with many powers–”

“I am aware…” Burns began.

“One of which is the temporary ability to inhabit the mind of a certain subject.”

Burns opened his mouth to object. Now he understood what the Sentinel had meant by their having to apprehend the alien together.

He had experienced much in his five years as a Guardian, but never had he given up residence of his body. “But what autonomy will I possess with you riding in my skull?” he demurred.

“Burns, this will likely take the two of us, physically, to bring about Turqan’s arrest. I plan to inhabit the person of the boy, of course.”

Burns glanced at Tommy, who was looking from the Sentinel to Burns as if intuitively aware of the turn of the conversation.

“I will reside in his sensorium, in control of his body, and he will know nothing of this. It will be as if he were asleep.”

“And he won’t be harmed?”

“There is a certain danger in the procedure,” the Sentinel allowed. “I can sustain the link for perhaps two hours, perhaps a little longer. After that, if I did not return, my body here would perish — as did the Kyrixian you observed earlier. And I would remain in Tommy’s corpus, his identity subsumed by my own.”

“Then we must do what we must inside two hours,” Burns said.

Tommy spoke up, “What’s he sayin’, Mr Burns? He’s talkin’ about me, I’ll wager.”

“Tommy, you have nothing to fear. You will sleep for a period, and when you awaken all will be well.”

The Sentinel reached out, and with claw-like hand depressed a set of keys on a console to his right.

Burns felt a certain frisson, as if a charge of electricity filled the ship, and instantly the Sentinel’s head flopped back on its rest, and its great eyes fluttered shut.

Beside him, Tommy sat suddenly upright and beamed at Burns.

“Oh, to inhabit a form possessed of youth and vitality!” cried the Sentinel through Tommy’s lips; and the incongruity of the fine words expressed in Tommy’s Yorkshire brogue made Burns smile.

The Sentinel-in-Tommy leapt to his feet and pulled two short-barrelled devices from a rack; he brandished the first at Burns. “A disequaliser. This works very much like a crystal in reverse; one shot at the subject and it will eject the interloper’s mind from its host and capture it in this chamber.” He tapped a bulbous glass container beneath the gun barrel. “Then I can return with Turqan in custody and hand him over to the Galactic Federation for trial.” He passed Burns the second weapon. “This is a simple stunner. One pulse will render the victim comatose for up to an hour. You might find it of use.”

Burns tucked the weapon into his waist-band.

“Now,” said the Sentinel, “how to locate the individual you call Prince Albert?”

“Leave that to me,” Burns said, withdrawing a communicator from his waistcoat pocket. He activated the device and slipped it into his ear.

A second later a high, querulous voice said, “Burns? What is it? I’m entertaining the King of Belgium.”

“Your Majesty. My sincere apologies, but it is vital that I enquire as to the whereabouts of his Highness the Prince.”

“Albert? But why–?”

“Time is off the essence, your Majesty. If you could apprise me of his whereabouts?”

Burns willed Victoria to tell him that Albert had taken to his sick-bed, and his heart sank when the reply came. “Why, he is presently at the Crystal Palace, overseeing some technical business or other.”

“Thank you, your Majesty. Forgive me, but I will explain everything at our very next meeting.”

He pulled the communicator from his ear before Victoria could reply, and turned to the Sentinel. “As I feared, he is at Hyde Park.”

The hatch opened above their heads and they rose to the muddy surface of the Thames.

“To Hyde Park we go,” cried the Sentinel in the guise of the urchin mudlark, “for the very safety of the country, and the world, is at stake!”

~


They took a Hansom first to Kensington, and bade it wait while Burns dashed to his garret and changed his ruined boots and breeches; at the same time he affected a quick disguise, donning a false moustache and a fair wig he kept for such occasions. Five minutes later they were rattling south towards Hyde Park.

“I made the acquaintance of Turqan-in-Albert’s-guise earlier today at Buckingham Palace,” Burns explained. “Albert knows of my work as a Guardian, and as Turqan has access to his every memory… With luck he will fail to recognise me in this get up. But how to go about this business, Sentinel?”

After a moment’s contemplation, the Sentinel replied. “It should be, if all goes well, a simple matter. We need merely apprehend the Prince long enough for me to get one shot on target. After that, of course, we will need to locate the crystals.”

Burns gazed out at the passing streets, the buttery light of a hundred gas-lamps reflecting off piled snow and illuminating the continued fall. It should be a simple matter, but in his experience it boded ill to presume victory before the event. They were, after all, in opposition to a skilled practitioner in the ways of deceit and subterfuge. He fingered the butt of the weapon and told himself to keep his wits about him.

Five minutes later they arrived at Hyde Park, alighted and paid the driver. Despite the late hour, crowds still thronged the park in order to witness the architectural miracle of the Crystal Palace. Burns, with the Sentinel-in-Tommy skipping along beside him, hurried across the snow-covered grass towards the rearing edifice of the Palace, shining like a vast diamond against the night sky. Almost two thousand feet long and five hundred wide, it rose to a height of a hundred feet — a wonder indeed in which to exhibit the myriad marvels of the modern age.

Burns pushed through the crowds milling around outside the Palace. Tall, arched entrance-ways lined the length of the building, each one posted with a guard of Peelers pacing back and forth and stamping to ward off the cold.

Burns led the Sentinel along the length of the palace, to where the crowds thinned; he spotted an entrance patrolled by a lone bobby, and saw his opportunity.

He approached the bewhiskered custodian and concocted a sorry tale. He was exhibiting an invention within — none other than the Greenwood Helical Elevator — but had left earlier without assuring that it had shut down correctly; he needed now to return, with his apprentice Tommy, in order to ensure its safe deactivation.

“And your exhibitor’s pass, sir?”

“That’s the very deuce of it, my good man. In my haste to return I quite forgot the pass, but I can offer this.” And from his waistcoat he produced a crisp pound note.

The bobby goggled, then looked right and left to ensure the transaction went unobserved. He took the proffered note with alacrity and hissed, “Now slip inside, sir, and the boy. Quick smart!”

Burns and the Sentinel needed no second telling; they passed through the arched entrance, from cold and darkness into the warmth and gas-lit illumination of a veritable wonderland.

Crowds of workmen and supervisors filled the glass-walled Palace, milling hither and thither with the industry of ants. Right and left, seemingly as far as the eye could see, great displays of industrial, scientific and technological wonder receded into the distance, cordoned off by heavy red braid as if they were museum exhibits. Burns beheld bulbous tanks and pistons, engines and cranks, a multitude of industrial muscle miraculous — from his perspective — for its primitive might. Truly the human race combined indomitability and curiosity; to progress from an agrarian culture to this in so relatively short a time was little short of wondrous.

A tug at his sleeve brought him back to the present. A muck-smeared face grinned up at him. “There,” said the Sentinel, pointing.

The footprint of the Palace was laid out in the form of a great cross, at its centre a transept in which stood the base of a tiled fountain, currently shut off. In the fountain itself, which looked for all the world like a shallow paddling pool, a dozen workmen were hauling on ropes and pulleys as a sprawling, resplendent chandelier was hoisted, inch by inch, high into the glass dome overhead.

Burns and the Sentinel made their way towards the fountain, which was surrounded by other workmen who had downed tools in order to watch the laborious ascent of the chandelier.

They were standing beside a sweating workman who smiled at their astonished expressions and commented, “We had it up not two days ago, sirs. And then what? Just today Albert hisself, bless his whiskers, ’ad us haul it down and replace all the blessed gas-lights with some new-fangled bulbs. Strike me dead, but it isn’t as if his Highness has to do the haulin’, is it?”

The workman moved off, mopping his brow, and the Sentinel hissed to Burns, “Look! Behold the pendant crystals that form the mass of the chandelier.”

Burns stared. “Not the memory crystals?”

“The very same. My guess is that when the chandelier is in place and activated, the dissemination process will commence.”

Burns scanned the workmen hauling on the pulleys, and beside them a group of dignitaries. Among them was the tall, ramrod straight figure of Prince Albert himself, staring at the chandelier and making the occasional comment to an aide.

Burns nudged the Sentinel and pointed.

“Our man,” said the Sentinel. “Very well, follow me.”

He elbowed his way through the crowd and hurried around the central fountain. If anyone saw the importunate urchin, clad in mud-soaked rags, they failed to comment as they watched the gradual ascent of the chandelier.

The Sentinel ducked under a cordon and approached something which resembled a loom, and Burns joined him. He peered out, across the floor, at the Prince.

From the waistband of his ragged trousers, the Sentinel pulled the disequaliser, and aimed. “One quick shot,” he breathed, “and who knows how many human lives will be spared.”

The urchin sighted along the length of the weapon, and his grubby finger depressed a red stud. A short hiss was the only result; Burns looked at the group of dignitaries. The Prince remained standing, chatting to an aide as if nothing untoward had occurred.

The Sentinel cursed and looked up at Burns. “I hardly dared fear this outcome–”

“It didn’t work?” Burns ventured, his heart racing.

“The devil is utilising a soma-shield, Burns, rendering my disequaliser useless. I underestimated the resolve of my foe.”

“Is there nothing we can do?”

The Sentinel considered, then said, “By the very fact that Turqan inhabits a new body, this means that the shield is portable — some device the Prince has about his person. If we could in some way wrest the shield from him, then the disequaliser could do its business.”

“But how to do this without alerting Turqan to our presence? He will no doubt be armed.”

The Sentinel nodded. “Armed and deadly.”

Burns considered for a minute. At length he said, “I have an idea, but it would mean delaying the attack until much later, and gaining entry to Buckingham Palace.”

The Sentinel looked up at him. “You can gain admittance?”

“I think so. One moment.” He plugged his communicator into his ear and reached Queen Victoria for the second time that night, chancing her ire.

“Burns, what is it this time? We’re just about to start the desert course.”

“My apologies, but events necessitate the interruption. I have a vital request to make, one on which rests the very future of the nation.”

“Burns, I have never known you overstate the case, and Heaven knows how extraordinary past cases have been! Very well, my good man, out with it.”

A minute later Burns terminated the conversation and pulled the communicator from his ear. “Done,” he said.

“There is one small problem,” the Sentinel said. “I am afraid I might not be able to sustain my habitation of the boy for much longer. Perhaps another thirty minutes, an hour at most. Any longer, and I would fear for my safety.”

Burns nodded. “I’m sure the boy and I can capture Turqan — though immediately we have the small matter of the memory crystals to deal with.”

“I have given this due consideration,” the Sentinel said. “Hand me the stunner.”

Burns guessed the Sentinel’s intent and passed him the weapon. Above the fountain, the chandelier was reaching the apex of the dome. Burns made out three sets of pulleys attached to the central boss of the fixture, controlled by three teams of two men situated equidistant around the transept. Now the Sentinel aimed at the first of these teams.

In an aside to Burns, he said, “I have no qualms about extinguishing thousands of Kyrixian individuals. If you could have seen the crimes his kind perpetrated across the galaxy…”

He fired twice, quickly, and the two workmen at the first station collapsed instantly and released their grips on the ropes. Overhead, the chandelier canted with a rattling, glockenspiel tintinnabulation.

Cries arose from the watchers below.

The Sentinel took aim and fired again. The second set of workmen collapsed, and the chandelier — suspended now by a single rope — swung like a pendulum.

Burns saw the third set of workmen hauling upon their ropes like a desperate tug-o’-war team, their heels skidding across the tiles.

Turqan-in-Prince Albert ran towards them, exhorting effort…

The Sentinel fired a third time, the workmen collapsed, and amid high-pitched screams the chandelier commenced a sudden plummet.

Those spectators directly below the object scattered in short order, and the dignitaries could only watch as the glittering missile of brass and crystal dropped a hundred feet and crashed into the tiled fountain with the sound of musical thunder.

The crystals shattered into a million pieces and scattered across the floor of the Palace like an explosion of diamonds.

Burns gazed across at the figure of Prince Albert, who had given vent to a soul-rending cry and folded to his knees. His hands sifted through the shattered crystals and they fell through his fingers like water.

Dignitaries and aides rushed to his side, attempting to console the stricken Prince, little realising that no consolation would be sufficient.

Burns said, “Now to Buckingham Palace!” and together he and the Sentinel left the cover of the loom and slipped through the chaotic melee.

As they crossed Hyde Park at a run, the Sentinel said, “I fear my time in this guise is limited, Burns. Here, take the disequaliser. You know what to do.”

A minute later they climbed aboard a Hansom and sped north.

~


Tommy Newton would recall the next fifteen minutes for the rest of his long life.

The last thing he recalled was the interior of the strange sunken vessel, the wizened, staring manikin, and the sudden lethargy that had overtaken him. Then, as if suddenly awakening, he found himself no longer aboard the vessel but crouched behind a screen in what he took to be a toff’s bedroom, going by the bulky outline of the four-poster bed illuminated in the dim lamp-light.

The next he knew, someone was gripping his elbow and breathing into his ear. “Fear not, Tommy,” said Bartholomew Burns. “All is well. Keep quiet and do exactly as I say. Understood?”

Tommy nodded, then realising his gesture could not be seen, whispered, “Understood, guv.” He paused, then said, “One thing — where the ’ell are we?”

Burns murmured, his breath hot in Tommy’s ear, “You might find this hard to believe, Tommy, but we are in Queen Victoria’s bed-chamber.”

“Bleedin’ ’ell!” Tommy expostulated. “And how did I come to be here?”

“That, Tommy, is what is known as a long story. Suffice it to say that we are engaged in a mission to save the life of Prince Albert himself.”

Tommy goggled up at Burns’s dim outline, and only then noticed that the man was gripping what looked like some sort of bulbous pistol.

“You mean, someone’s going to break in and threaten his Highness’s life?”

It was a second before the reply came. “Not exactly, Tommy. Soon, I hope, Prince Albert will return, and then I will render him… unconscious.” Burns gestured with the weapon. “That, I hope, will be sufficient to save the day.”

“You’re talking in riddles, mister, is all I can say.”

“Shh!” Burns said.

Tommy stiffened as, from beyond the screen, someone gave a muffled moan, and then resumed snoring. Tommy chanced a peek around the brocaded screen and made out a humped figure lying on its back in the bed, genteel snores issuing from its small, pointed nose.

“Is that…?” he began.

“No other,” Burns responded.

“Lord strike me sightless!” Tommy gasped.

He shook his head. Just this morning he had slept the sleep of the innocent in his barrel home, and now here he was in Queen Victoria’s bed-chamber.

Burns gripped his arm again, warning him to caution. A sound came from across the room, the quiet lifting of a latch. The door creaked open and a tall figure appeared briefly in the doorway. It crossed the room, illuminated by the covered lamp beside the bed. Tommy was aware of his increased heartbeat — wait till he told Ratty and Miller about this… not that they’d believe a word, of course.

Prince Albert paused by the bed. He seemed stooped, not his usual upright, imperious self. His hand went to his brow and he wept quietly. It was as if he were a broken man, and Tommy wondered what tragedy might have occurred to bring about this transformation.

He glanced up at Burns, at the weapon in his hand, and he wondered if he should leap out now and warn the Prince, for all Burns’s assurances that good was on his side.

He was wracked by indecision as he crouched behind the screen and watched as Prince Albert slowly disrobed. Soon the worthy was down to his unmentionables and his garters, and then even these had been removed — and Tommy felt grateful that the light from the bedside lamp was dim.

All that the Prince now wore was a chain about his neck, at the end of which hung a shining silver oval.

Beside Tommy, Burns murmured under his breath, “Take it off, take it off, damn you.”

After a second, as if the Prince had been contemplating whether or not to do so, he finally reached up and slipped the chain from his neck and laid it atop the pile of discarded clothing on the chair.

Tommy was aware of Burns, tensing beside him, and he knew that if he were to act, then he should do so now — or forever regret his inaction. In the event he was caught in a funk of indecision — for which, later, he was eternally grateful.

With a sickening feeling in his gut he watched as Burns leapt up, levelled the pistol at the startled Prince, and fired.

Tommy heard a hiss, whereupon the Prince, after a frozen second in which he regarded Burns with horror, toppled forwards across the bed.

In a trice Queen Victoria sat up and exclaimed, “Burns, it is done?”

Burns strode from behind the screen and examined the prostrate Albert. He gestured to his weapon. “The deed is done, your Majesty. Disaster is averted.”

The queen was sitting up in bed, clothed in night-gown and sleeping cap, and clutching a counterpane to her throat. She gave Tommy an imperious glance, which had the effect of freezing him to the marrow. “And who, might I enquire, is this?”

Burns clapped Tommy on the shoulder. “Meet Tommy Newton, your Highness, without whom the country — nay, the very world — would be in a parlous state.”

Not understanding a tenth of what was going on, Tommy nevertheless felt a glow of pride as the Queen’s gaze softened and she favoured him with a smile.

Burns was bending over a groaning Albert, who was slowly coming to his senses. He eased the Prince further onto the bed and draped the counterpane over his long form. “I think his Highness will require a spell of rest and recuperation, your Majesty. I will call anon and regale you with all the details.”

He was brought up short by her Majesty’s words, “Burns, I don’t know who you are — or more precisely what you are — but I feel that the gratitude of the nation is owed to you, yet again.”

Burns bowed. “I am forever in your service, ma’am,” and so saying slipped quickly from the royal bed-chamber.

Soon they were outside in the freezing night.

“And now,” Burns said, “all that remains is to return the disequaliser to the Sentinel, and all will be well with the world.”

“The Sentinel?” Tommy said. “You mean that skinny little chap in the underwater ship — and just what is he, and the disequaliser? And as for all that malarkey in the palace…”

“I will explain everything in time, Tommy.”

Tommy shuffled uncomfortably and said, “I’ll meet you again, Mr Burns?”

Burns smiled. “Meet me? Why, what makes you think you might not?” He considered for a space, and then said, “I have a proposition to make, m’boy. There is a spare room to be occupied at 25 Garnett Place, and you seem to be a handy soul to have on hand. How does a shilling a week, three square meals a day, and a bed for the night sound to you?”

Tommy stared at Burns, open-mouthed. For once in his short life, he was speechless.

~


Burns sat before the blazing fire in his garret with Tommy stretched out on the chesterfield at sleep’s door.

The boy had finished a huge mug of cocoa, and Burns was sipping at his china cup of Earl Grey.

Now the mudlark — or should that be, the ex-mudlark? — said, “Who are you, Mr Burns, and what in the Lord’s name was that craft doing under the Thames?”

Burns smiled and took a breath. Where to begin, he wondered? Why not at the beginning?

“Who am I, Tommy? Well, I am a Guardian,” he said. “You see, the universe out there is a very big place, m’boy, and many strange and various alien races inhabit the stars beyond this one, and not all those races have the best interests of the so called ‘lesser’ races at heart. Now planet Earth and the human race are relative youngsters on the scene, unaware of the teeming cosmos beyond, and therefore must be protected from the dangers that beset it.” He paused there, then said, “Tommy?”

He looked across at the silent figure of the boy, but Tommy was fast asleep.

Smiling, Burns rose and moved to his armchair beside the window, and stared out at the night sky.

For a while he contemplated planet Earth, and the stars beyond. Then, when he was sure that Newton was sleeping soundly, he crept from the room and left the house.

~


One hour later he was seated in the cushioned seat opposite the braced form of the Sentinel. He passed the disequaliser, and the manikin stowed it carefully upon the rack at his side.

“You have once again shown endeavour and initiative, Mr Burns.”

“I was not alone,” Burns reminded the shrivelled being.

“True — Tommy Newton, despite his size, his somewhat haphazard education, is… shall we say… an asset we might utilise.”

Burns smiled. “The same thought occurred to me, Sentinel. I have accordingly acquired his services.”

The Sentinel regarded Burns with a piercing gaze. “You’ve guessed, of course?”

Burns nodded. “Turqan, if I am not mistaken, is but the first?”

The Sentinel gestured wearily. “I have information to the effect that Turqan is the advance guard, that others of his kind, transporting memory crystals, are at this very second making their way across the void towards this planet. The intelligence is that they might very well be aided by other nefarious races. We need, my friend, to be vigilant in the days and weeks ahead.”

“You have my reassurance on that score,” Burns murmured.

The Sentinel nodded its over-sized head. “I will remain here and in contact for as long as this confounded gravity allows, Burns. There are others in this city who will aid you over the coming weeks. They will be in contact.”

“And they are?”

The Sentinel waved. “You will find out in time, my friend. For now, go home and rest, for the fight ahead will be long and hard.”

Presently Burns said farewell to the manikin and took his leave. He climbed from the muddy gully of the Thames and strode through the cobbled lanes towards Kensington, suddenly tired. Once he paused long enough to turn his gaze towards the massed stars, brilliant and icy overhead, and thought of home.

Then he shivered at the thought of the battle ahead, shrugged deeper into his greatcoat, and hurried to a planet far away.


Guardians of the Phoenix


It was dawn when we set off from beneath the twisted skeleton of the Eiffel Tower and crossed the desert to Tangiers.

We travelled by day through a blasted landscape devoid of life, and at night we stopped and tried to sleep. I’d lie in my berth and stare through the canopy at the magnetic storms lacerating the troposphere. The heat was insufferable, even in the marginally cooler early hours. When I slept I dreamed of the women I had seen in old magazines, and when I woke in the searing heat of morning and Danny started the truck on the next leg of the journey, I was silent and sullen with melancholy longing.

Two days out of Paris, heading through what Edvard informed us had once been the Auvergne, we picked up the fifth member of our party.

~


Around sunset, as the horizon burned and a magnetic storm played out in a frenzy overhead, the truck stuttered and came to a halt. Danny hit the steering wheel. “Christ! It’s one of the main capacitors.”

“Not again?” Fear lodged in my throat. This was the third time in as many weeks that the truck had failed, and every time Danny’s desperation had communicated itself to me. He tried to disguise it, but I could see the dread in his eyes, in the shake of his hands. Without the truck, without the means to cross the ravaged land in search of water, we were dead.

Danny was our leader by dint of the fact that he owned the truck and the drilling rig, and because he was an engineer. He was in his fifties, small and lean, and despite what he’d been through he was still optimistic.

I’d never heard that word till I met Danny, four years ago.

I stared through the windscreen. We were on the edge of a city: its jagged skyline of ruined buildings rose stark against the dying light. Over the decades sand had drifted through the parks and esplanades, softening the harsh angles of the buildings, creating beautifully parabolic curves between the shattered streets and vertical walls.

“Edvard!” Danny called. “Kat!”

Edvard’s balding head appeared through the hatch. A little later, on account of her limp, Kat joined us. Her lined face wrinkled even more as she peered through the windscreen.

Danny indicated the scene before us. “Do you know what happened here?”

Edvard looked at the map on the seat between Danny and me. “Clermont-Ferrand. It wasn’t a nuclear strike. I know that much. Too small a place to be a target, nuclear or biological.”

Danny looked at him, scratching his greying beard. “So you reckon it’s safe?”

Edvard thought about it, then nodded.

Kat said, “I just hope there’s no one out there.”

Stalled like this, we’d be easy pickings for marauders — not that we’d come across any of those for years.

“Okay,” Danny said, “come on, Pierre. Let’s see what the damage is.”

I took my rifle from the locker, hung it over my shoulder, and followed Danny from the truck. Even though the sun was on its way down, the heat was ferocious: it was as if we’d stepped into an industrial oven. We walked down the length of the truck, pausing at the foot of the ladder welded onto the flank, and Danny gingerly picked open a small hatch. He pulled out a toolbox and two pairs of gloves and passed one pair to me. The rungs of the ladder would take the skin clean off our palms if we ascended unprotected.

Danny nodded, and I followed him up the side of the truck and across the top. The heat radiating from the solar arrays and the steel surface of the truck hit me in a blast. I picked my way carefully after Danny, wary of allowing the exposed flesh of my legs to get anywhere near the hot steel.

Danny stopped at the apex, hauled open an inspection cover and passed it back to me. For the next ten minutes he rooted around inside, grunting and cursing as he checked each capacitor in turn.

I unslung my rifle and scanned the darkening city, wondering what this place might have been like fifty or sixty years ago, when the streets and buildings had been full of people going about their everyday business — before the nuclear and biological wars, before the governments collapsed under the strain of trying to hold together a dying world.

I heard the hatch open below and saw Edvard limp out of the truck and across the sand to the nearest building. He paused before it, looking ragged and frail, staring up at the ruin before stepping inside

I scanned the horizon, looking for signs of life. A part of me knew it was a futile exercise. I hadn’t seen a live animal for months, or other human beings for three years now. Even so, I searched the ruins with hope, and a little dread — for if we did happen upon humans out there, then chances were that they’d be as hostile as the last lot.

“Pierre!”

I started. “Sorry, I–”

“Just pass me the cover.”

He took it from me and slipped it back into place. “Fixed?” I asked.

“For now. Don’t know how long it’ll last.” He shook his head. “But we’re lucky. If it’d been something major…”

I nodded. Danny laughed, trying to make light of his own relief. I backed down to the ground and, as Danny slipped into the truck to tell Kat not to worry herself sick, I waded through the sand towards the shattered buildings.

Edvard had moved into the shadowy interior of the nearest shell. I followed his dimpled prints in the drift and leaned in the doorway, watching him.

Edvard was Norwegian, and he’d had to explain to me what that meant, now that nations no longer existed. He’d been a doctor in Oslo before the colony died out. He was slow and wise, and as ghostly-pale as the rest of us. It was Edvard who had taught me how to read and write.

He had aged quickly in the four years I’d known him. He’d slowed down, and the flesh had fallen from his bones, and when I’d asked him if he was okay he’d just smiled and said he was fine, for an old man. I reckoned he was in his late forties.

The room was empty, but for drifts of sand, scattered paper, and a skeleton in the far corner. The bones had collapsed, and the skull had rolled onto the floor and come to rest on its right cheek; in the half-light of the room, the empty eyes seemed to be staring at us.

“Ed,” I said. “The truck’s okay. A blown capacitor. Danny fixed it.”

He turned and smiled. “Excellent.” He seemed distant, lost in thought.

“What?” I said.

He pointed at the skeleton. “I remember when I would have taken those bones, Pierre. Can you believe that? Nutrients, you see. The marrow in the bones. Boil them up, make a soup. Pretty thin, but nourishing…” He shrugged. “No good now, of course. All dried out, desiccated.”

He knelt slowly, and I could almost hear the creak of his joints. He reached out and picked up a scrap of paper. He rose and joined me in the doorway, where the light was better, and held out the old newspaper.

“Christ, Pierre. 2040. What, fifty years ago? Look, a headline about the peace pact with China. Lot of good that did!”

He’d told me about what had happened to China. The military had taken over in a bloody coup, overturning a government they accused of not doing all they could to feed the people. And then the people had overthrown the junta, when the military had proved as useless as the government.

Not long after that, China invaded India, and Europe came to the aid of the subcontinent, and a world war broke out. It lasted five days, according to Edvard. And after that the world was never the same again.

That was the beginning of the end, Edvard said. After that, there was no hope. What humankind had begun with wars, the planet finished off with accelerated global warming.

He stared at the scrap of newspaper. In his clawed hand, the paper crumbled.

I took his arm. “C’mon, Ed. Let’s get something to eat.”

~


We sat around the fold-down table in the truck and ate spinach and potatoes grown in the hydroponics trailer, washed down with the daily ration of water. Danny talked enthusiastically about the maps he’d found in Paris.

Kat’s smile was like a mother’s watching a favourite child. She was sixty, grey and thin and twisted like a length of wire. There was something shattered in her pale eyes which spoke of tragedy in her past, or knowledge of the future, and Danny loved her with a tender, touching concern.

He jabbed a finger at the map. “There’s the trench, right there, just north of the African coast. I’m sure if we drill deep enough…”

“We could use some fresh stuff,” I said. “I’m tired of drinking recycled piss.”

Danny smiled. Edvard raised his glass and examined the murky liquid, smacking his lips. “I don’t know. As victuals go, this is a fine drop. Good body, a hint of mustard.”

I watched Kat as she ate, which she did sparingly. She’d given herself a small portion, and didn’t eat all of that. Before the rest of us had finished, she pushed her plate away and left the table, limping to the door of the berth she shared with Danny. He watched her go, then followed her. I looked at Edvard, as if for explanation, but his eyes were on his food.

After the meal I moved outside, taking my rifle with me, and in the spill of light from the truck I had a bath. I sat naked in the sand, taking handfuls of the fine grains and rubbing them over my body. I felt the grease and sweat fall away, leaving a fine covering of sandy powder. I dug deeper, finding the cooler sand, and poured it over my belly and thighs.

I thought about Kat, and told myself she’d be fine. Minutes later, as if to confirm that hope, the truck began rocking as Danny and Kat made love. I found myself thinking how Kat must have been good looking, way back — like the naked women in the old magazines. But I stopped those thoughts as soon as they began, stood up and pulled on my shorts.

I was about to go inside when a door opened along the flank of the truck and Edvard looked out. “Pierre?”

He stepped from the truck and climbed down. We sat in silence for a time and stared into the night sky. The storms were starting high above the far horizon, great actinic sheets of white fire.

At last I said, “Is Kat okay?”

He flashed a glance at me. “She’s ill, Pierre. We all are.”

“But Kat–?”

He sighed. “Cancer. I don’t know how advanced it is. There’s nothing I can do about it, apart from give her the odd pain-killer. And I’m running low on those.” He paused, then said, “I’m sorry.”

I said, “How long?”

He shook his head. “Maybe a year, two if she’s lucky.”

I nodded, staring through the darkness at the dim buildings. I wanted to say something, but the words wouldn’t come.

“You think Danny’s right about the Med?” I asked at last.

Edvard shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.” He was silent for a time. “I do recall when there was sea there, Pierre, and magnificent towns and cities. The rich flocked there.”

Not for the first time I tried to imagine the great bodies of water Edvard had described, water that filled areas as vast as deserts, and heaved and rolled… I shook my head. All I saw was a desert the colour of drinking water, flat and still.

He looked into the heavens as the night sky split with a crack of white light. It was Edvard who’d explained to me why, despite all the storms that raged, we never experienced rainfall: the little rain that did fall evaporated in the superheated lower atmosphere before it reached the earth. I thought of the storms, now, as mocking us with their futile promise.

I stared around at the buildings. “You think we can rebuild? I mean, make things like they were, before?”

Edvard smiled. “I like to think that with time, and hard work… Like Danny, I’m an optimist. I really think that people, at heart, are good. Call me a fool, if you like, but that’s what I think. So, if we could band together, always assuming there were enough people to feasibly propagate the race… then perhaps there would be hope.”

“But to get back to where things were… civilised?” I finished.

“That’s a big call, Pierre. We’ve lost so much, so much learning, culture. We’ve lost so much expertise. So much of what we knew, of what we learned over centuries of scientific investigation and understanding… all that is gone, and can never be rediscovered. Or if it can, then it’ll take centuries… even assuming the planet isn’t too far gone, even assuming that humanity can reform.”

I thought about that for a time, then said, “But with no more oceans, no more seas…”

He smiled at me. “I live in hope, Pierre. There might be small seas, underground reserves. I heard there are still small seas where the Pacific ocean was–”

“Couldn’t we…?” I began.

He was smiling.

“What?” I said.

“The Pacific is half a world away, Pierre. This thing might get us to the Med, if we’re lucky. But not the Pacific.”

I considered his words, the barren vastness of the world, and the little I knew of it. At last I said, “If we’re the last… I mean, I haven’t seen another human for years.”

“We aren’t alone, Pierre. There are others, small bands. There must be.” He was silent awhile, and then said, “And anyway, even if life on Earth is doomed…”

After a few seconds I prompted him, “Yes?”

“Well,” he said, “there’s always Project Phoenix.”

He’d told me all about Project Phoenix, the last hope. Forty years ago, when the world governments had known things were bad and getting worse, they pooled resources and constructed a starship, full of five thousand hopeful citizens, and sent it to the stars.

Towards the east, where the sky was blackest, I made out a dozen faint glimmering points of distant stars. I thought of the starship, still on its journey, or having reached its destination and the colonists settled on a new, Earthlike planet.

“What do you think happened to the starship?” I asked.

“I like to think they’re sitting up there now, enjoying paradise, and wondering what they left behind on Earth–”

He stopped and looked up into the night sky, then fitted his hand above his eyes to cut out the glare of the magnetic storm. “Dammit, Pierre.” He scrambled to his feet.

I joined him, my heart thumping. “What?” Then, as I scanned the sky, I heard it — the faint drone of a distant engine.

Edvard pointed, and at last I made out what he’d seen.

High in the air, and heading towards us, was the dark shape of a small plane.

I reached out for my rifle, propped against the side of the truck, and shouted at Danny and Kat to get out here.

“It’s in trouble,” Edvard said.

The engine was stuttering as the plane angled steeply over the distant buildings, a dark shape against the flaring storm. We watched it pass quickly overhead and come down in the desert perhaps half a kilometre beyond the truck.

Danny and Kat were out by now. “What was it?”

I said, “I’ll go and check it out.”

Edvard’s hand gripped my arm. “It’s no coincidence. A flyer doesn’t just drop out of the sky so close. They knew we were here. They want something.”

We all looked to Danny. He nodded. “Okay, I’ll go with you. Edvard, Kat, stay here.”

Kat nodded, moved to Edvard’s side. Danny entered the truck and came back holding a rifle. We set off across the sands, towards where the flyer had come down.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, bubbling with excitement. “Wonder who it is?”

Danny flashed me a look. “Whoever it is, chances are they’re dangerous.” He raised his rifle.

I could see he was thinking more about the flyer, and what might be salvaged from it, than who the pilot might be.

My mind was in turmoil. What if the pilot were a woman? I recalled the images of models in the magazines I’d hoarded over the years, their flawless, immaculate beauty, their haughty you’re-not-good-enough gazes.

My heart was thudding by the time we crested a slipping dune.

In the stuttering white light of the magnetic storm we could see that the flyer had pitched nose-first into the desert. Its near wing was crumpled, snapped into flapping sections.

I thought of the irony of finding a beautiful woman sitting in the cockpit… dead.

I took a step forward. Danny said, “Remember, careful.”

I nodded and led the way.

We approached slowly, as if the crumpled machine were a wounded animal.

“A glider,” Danny said, “jerry-rigged with an old turbo.”

I lifted my rifle and we stepped cautiously towards the shattered windshield of the cockpit.

“Oh,” I said, as I made out the figure slumped against the controls.

It was a man, an old, wizened man, thin and bald and stinking. Even from a distance of two metres I could smell his adenoid-pinching body odour.

Danny cracked the cockpit’s latch with the butt of his rifle. He hauled back the canopy, checked the pilot for weapons, then felt for his pulse.

“Alive,” he said, but his gaze was ranging over the craft and the supplies packed tight around the cockpit.

I reached out and gently eased the pilot back into his seat, his head lolling. I looked for injuries; his torso seemed fine, but his left leg was snapped at the shin and bleeding.

Danny thought about it. I guessed he was calculating the worth of the glider and the supplies against the long-term cost of giving refuge to another needy stray. “Okay, go back to the truck and tell Kat to get it over here. Tell Ed to have his equipment ready.”

I took off at a run.

Five minutes later Kat braked the truck beside the glider and we jumped out. Edvard limped through the sand and knelt in the cockpit’s hatch. After examining the pilot he did something to the leg, binding the shattered limb, then nodded to Danny and me. We eased the pilot from the glider, trying to ignore his sour body odour, and carried him over to the truck.

On the way I realised that he wasn’t as old as I’d first thought. He was in his forties, perhaps, though his skeletal frame and bald head made him look older. He wore tattered shorts and a ripped t-shirt and nothing else.

We installed him in the lounge and Edvard got to work on the leg, aided by Kat. Danny fetched the toolkit and for the next couple of hours we took the glider apart and stowed it in the cargo hold. We ferried the supplies, packed in three silver hold-alls, to the galley.

“Water,” Danny grinned as he passed me the canisters. “And dried meat, for chrissake!”

“Where the hell did he get meat from?” I wondered aloud.

Danny shook his head. “We’ll find that out when we question him. If he lives.”

I looked across at Danny. “You hope he dies?”

He weighed the question. “He dies, and that’s one less mouth… He lives, and what he knows might be valuable. Take your pick.”

It was late when we returned to the lounge. The pilot was still unconscious, his leg swaddled in bandages. “Broken in a couple of places,” Edvard reported. “He’ll pull through. I’ll stay here with him. You get some sleep.”

In my berth, I stared through the canopy at the flaring night sky, too excited at the prospect of questioning the pilot to sleep.

~


The rocking of the truck brought me awake. Outside, the desert was on fire. I pulled on my shorts and lurched into the lounge. Kat must have been driving because Danny was sitting in his armchair, leaning forward and staring at the pilot.

“You don’t know how grateful…” the invalid said in heavily accented English between sips of water — a half ration, I saw. He indicated his leg with the beaker. “You could have left me there.”

Guarded, Danny said, “We reckoned it was a fair trade, the wreckage of your plane, the supplies. We’ll feed you, keep you alive. But you’ll have to work if you want to be part of the team.”

Edvard sat on the battered sofa against the far wall. He said, “What can you do?”

The man’s thin lips hitched in an uneasy smile. “This and that, a bit of tinkering, engineering. I worked on solar arrays, years ago.”

I said, “What’s your name?”

He stared back at me, and I didn’t like the look in his eyes. Hostile. “What’s yours?”

“Pierre,” I said, returning his glare.

He nodded, increasing the width of his smile. “Call me Skull,” he said.

It was obviously not his given name, but considering the fleshless condition of his head, and his rictus grin, it was appropriate. Skull.

Danny took over. “The meat you had in the glider. Where’d you get that?”

“Down south. Still some game surviving. Shot it myself.”

“South?” Danny sat up, hope in his eyes. “There’s water down there, sea?”

Skull looked at Danny for a second before shaking his head. “No sea. The place is almost dead.”

Edvard said, “Where did you come from? With supplies like those, a plane? My guess is a colony somewhere.”

I didn’t like the way Skull paused after each question, as if calculating the right answer to give. “I was with a gang of no-hopers holed up in what was Algiers. Conditions were bad. The only hope was to get out, move north. But they didn’t want to risk it.”

“So you stole the supplies and the plane and got the hell out,” Danny finished.

That sly pause, again. A shrug. “A man has to look after himself, these days.”

I thought of the failing colony in Algiers, confirmation that there were others still out there.

“You’re one lucky bastard you spotted us,” Danny said.

Skull made a quick pout of his lips, as if to debate the point, then said, “Where you heading?”

“The Mediterranean,” Danny said, and left it at that.

The stranger had this way of trying not to show any reaction, as if to do so would give something away. I wondered at the company he’d kept, where he’d had to hide his emotions like this, wary and mistrustful. At last he said, “You’re joking, right?”

Danny shook his head, serious. “We’ve crossed Europe I don’t know how many times, drilling for water. I think it’s just about all dried up. My reckoning is, at the bottom of the Med, or where the sea used to be, there’ll be a better chance of striking water.”

“Salt water. Undrinkable sea water.”

Danny smiled and played his trump. “So what? I have a desalination rig all ready if that’s the case.”

“But south… the Med?” Skull shook his head. “You’re mad, you know that? You heard about the scum down there? The feral bands? They’d kill you for what you got, no questions asked.”

Danny shrugged. “We can look after ourselves,” he said, and the confidence in his voice made me feel proud.

Skull licked his lips. “Madness.”

Edvard said, from the couch, “Well, we could always leave you here, if you don’t wish to accompany us.”

Skull lay his head back, staring at the ceiling. “I’ll take my chances with you people,” he said.

~


The following day the desert gave way to high bare hills, and then a range of mountains. I sat with Danny in the cab as we drove along what might have been a highway, years ago; now it was little better than an eroded track. According to the map, we were travelling through a range of mountains called the Cevennes. We passed remnants of what had been forests, stunted trunks that covered hillsides like so many barren pegs, dead now like everything else.

This was as far south as we’d ever been, and it seemed brighter out there than I’d ever experienced. This high up, we had a perfect view of the plains to the south, a drift of golden sand that stretched all the way to what had been the Mediterranean sea.

The sun was going down when I said, “What Skull said about feral bands…”

Danny snorted. “His sort — the kind of bastard who runs out on a colony and takes their supplies… his sort are cowards. Anyway, he’s a liar.”

I looked at him. “He is?”

“There’s no colony in Algiers. I heard they died out way back, twenty years ago or more.”

“But he must have run from somewhere?”

“Yeah, but not Algiers. He didn’t want to tell us where he came from.”

“Why? What’s he hiding?”

“We’ll find out in time, Pierre, believe me.”

For the next hour he concentrated on driving, as we wound down the crumbling highway and left the hills behind us. As darkness fell, Danny braked and the truck came to a halt. After the drone of the engine, the silence was resounding.

We left the cab and moved to the lounge.

Last night Danny had allocated Skull a tiny berth at the rear of the truck, and served him his meals there. This cheered me — I wasn’t alone in not wanting mealtimes spoilt by Skull’s presence.

“Meat’s on the menu tonight,” Edvard said. He carried a steaming pot and set it down before us.

He ladled broth into our bowls and the smell sent my head reeling. For a second, I almost welcomed the arrival of the mysterious stranger.

“You okay, Kat?” I asked.

She smiled at me. I was encouraged by the way she was spooning the broth; she seemed to be enjoying the meal. I glanced at Edvard. He was chewing with his eyes closed, as if savouring not only the meat but the memories of past times it conjured.

After the meal, for the first time in months, my belly felt full.

Later I excused myself, wanting to be alone with my thoughts. I left the truck, dug myself a little hollow of cool sand, and settled down.

The night was silent, the sky unusually still. No storms ripped the heavens, for once. The air was heavy and hot, oppressive. I controlled my breathing, enjoying the cooling sand, and considered the journey south.

A sound made me jump. I thought it was Edvard, come to join me. But the skeletal figure that came hobbling out on crutches, fashioned from lengths of metal cannibalised from the wreck of the glider, was the pilot.

He eased himself down onto the sand beside me and nodded. “It’s cooler out here.” The little light spilling from the truck made his face seem even more skull-like. I took shallow breaths, not wanting to inhale his acid stink.

“That’s why I’m here,” I said.

A pause. Then, “Maybe you’ll listen to sense, Pierre. I’ve tried the others. They’re too old, set in their ways.”

“They’re my friends,” I said, and then as if to make it clearer, “my family. We’re in this together.”

I looked at him. His sly eyes appeared calculating. “Listen to me, Pierre. You’re no fool. If we head south, to the Med…”

“Yes?”

A pause. He licked his lips. “There’s dangers down there, things you haven’t encountered in Europe.”

“You said. Feral bands–”

“Worse!”

“Worse than feral bands?”

“Much worse. Feral means animal. You can deal with animals, outwit ’em. These people… these people are no fools. They’re evil, and calculating.” I wondered, for a second, if he were describing himself. “You ever seen what human beings can do when they’re desperate?”

I thought back to the ruins of Paris, before the desert engulfed the city. I considered the people I’d lived with, and why I left. Yes, I almost told him, I’ve experienced desperate people, and survived. But I said nothing, reluctant to share with Skull what I’d never told anyone else, not even Danny or Kat or Edvard.

“Like Danny said,” I murmured, not looking at him, “we can look after ourselves.”

Skull spat viciously. “Fools, the lot of you!”

I considered what Danny had said last night. Into the following silence, I said, “What are you frightened of, Skull? What are you running away from?”

He looked at me, then grinned. “No, you’re no fool, are you?”

“Well?”

I didn’t expect him to tell me, so I was surprised when he said, “People so fucking evil, so purely bad, you cannot imagine, Pierre.”

And he left it at that, as if challenging me to enquire further.

~


I was at the wheel of the truck the following day when we came to the escarpment overlooking what had once been the Mediterranean sea.

Danny said, “Would you look at that.”

Kat and Edvard squeezed into the cab.

The land before us fell away suddenly to form a vast, scooped-out crater bigger than the eye could encompass. The dried-up sea bottom was cracked and fissured, as steely grey as the pictures I’d seen of the lunar landscape. The horizon shimmered, corrugated with heat haze.

I glanced at Danny. He was staring, speechless. I realised that before him was the goal he’d set his heart on months back, when he first had the idea to journey south.

“We’ll drive on another four, five hours, then stop for the night,” he said. “Over dinner we’ll look at the map, plan the next leg of the journey.”

Edvard and Kat moved back to the lounge. I was pleased that Skull had not bothered to show himself.

I mopped the sweat from my face. It was sweltering in the cab: the thermometer read almost thirty-five Celsius. Next to that dial was the outside temperature: fifty-five, hot enough to bake a man in less than an hour.

Danny took the wheel and drove along the coast, parallel to the escarpment, looking for a shallow entry down into what had been the sea. Five kilometres further on we came to a section of the coast which shelved gradually, and Danny eased us over the edge, moving at a snail’s pace. Baked soil as fine as cement crumbled under the truck’s balloon tyres. We lurched and Danny eased back the throttle, slowing our descent.

At last the land flattened out and we accelerated, the headwind blowing the dust behind us. A great plain stretched ahead, rilled with expansion cracks and dotted with objects I couldn’t at first make out. As we drew nearer I saw that they were the rusted hulks and skeletons of ships, fixed at angles in the sea bottom. We passed into the shadow of one, a great liner red with rust, its panels holed but the sleek lines of its remaining superstructure telling of prouder times. I found it hard to imagine that so great a vessel could actually float on water: it seemed beyond the laws of physics.

Danny pointed. In the lee of the ship’s rearing hull I made out a pile of white spars, like bleached wood. We drew closer and I saw that they were bones. The domed orbs of skulls sat amid a scatter of ribcages and other bones.

I shook my head. “I don’t see…”

“My guess is that there was a colony on the ship, ages ago,” Danny said. “As they died, one by one, the survivors pitched the bodies over the side.”

“You think there’s anyone left?” I asked, knowing the answer even before Danny shook his head.

“This was probably thirty years ago, at a guess. Back when the drought was getting bad and nations collapsed. Tribes formed, the rule of law broke down. It was every man for himself. People gathered on ships, while the oceans still existed — away from the wars on dry land.”

I shook my head, thinking of the horrors that must have overtaken the shipboard colonies in their last, desperate days.

We drove on, heading south.

A couple of hours later, to our right, the sea-bed rose to form a series of pinnacles, five in all. They towered above the seared landscape for hundreds of metres, their needle peaks silhouetted against a sky as bright as aluminium.

Danny glanced at his map. “They were the Balearic Islands, part of old Spain.”

“People lived up there?” I asked, incredulous.

He smiled. “They were small areas of land, Pierre, surrounded by sea. Islands.”

I shook my head, struggling to envisage such a configuration of land and sea. On the summit of the nearest peak I made out the square shapes of dwellings, the tumbledown walls of others.

We left the stranded islands behind us.

Three hours later the sun went down to our right in a blaze of crimson. Ahead, indigo twilight formed over Africa, the sky untouched by magnetic storms.

Kat called from the lounge, “Food in ten minutes!”

Danny brought the truck to a halt and we moved back to the lounge. He unfolded one of his maps and indicated our position.

Kat served us plates of fried potatoes and greens — rationing the meat. She was carrying a plate across the lounge for our passenger when Skull emerged from his berth and limped to the table.

“Don’t mind if I join you folks tonight? I was getting lonesome back there.”

I returned to my meal without a word. Edvard indicated a chair and Skull dropped into it, wincing.

Danny stubbed a forefinger at the map.

“This is where we are now, and this is where we’re heading — a hundred kilometres north of what was the coast of Africa, off a place called Tangiers.”

Skull stopped chewing. He looked across at Danny, uneasy. “Let me see.” He leaned forward, peering.

He looked up. “I don’t like the sound of it.”

I took a swallow of water, aware of my heartbeat and the sauna heat of the room.

Danny nodded, considering. “And why not?”

“Like I said before, there’s feral bands down there. We’d best avoid them.”

“There specifically, Skull?” Danny asked. “How come you’re so certain?”

Skull chewed, not looking away from Danny’s stare. “I heard stories, rumours.”

Danny lay down his knife and fork in an odd gesture of civility that belied the anger on his face. “Bullshit. Tell us straight — what the hell do you know?”

Skull’s eyes darted from right to left, taking in Danny and Kat, Edvard and myself. He looked uneasy, a rat cornered.

Edvard said quietly, “You didn’t come from Algiers. So where did you come from?”

The silence stretched. Skull used his tongue to work free a strand of fibre from between his teeth. “Okay, okay. I was travelling with some people. Only they weren’t people. Animals more like, monsters. A dozen or so of them. They had a vehicle, a collection of solar arrays lashed together around a failing engine. Anyway, they were heading west, towards Tangiers.”

Danny nodded. “Why?”

Skull shrugged. “They didn’t say. They invited me to stay awhile. They needed an engineer to help out, they said. So I travelled with them a few days, a week.”

“Why did you leave them?” I asked.

“Because I reckoned that soon, once I’d helped out with the arrays, I would’ve outlived my usefulness and they’d kill me rather than have me using up food and water. They were that kind of people.”

He looked around at us, then bolted down the last of the food, stood with difficulty and hoiked himself from the lounge.

“So what do you think?” Danny said. “He telling the truth?”

Edvard voiced what I was thinking. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could spit. Which isn’t far, these days.”

“We’ve come across gangs before,” I said. “We just have to be careful, that’s all.”

Kat nodded. “I second that.”

“What I’d like to know,” Edvard said, “is what’s so important about Tangiers that this mob was heading for it?”

~


I was in the cab with Edvard the following day when we came across the hovercraft.

It was late afternoon and we were roughly a hundred kilometres north of the trench, our destination. The sea bottom desert stretched ahead for as far as the eye could see, flat and featureless.

I was nodding off in the heat when Edvard slowed the truck. I sat up and looked across at him. He indicated the horizon with a silent nod.

I scanned. Far ahead, coruscating in the merciless afternoon glare, was the domed shape of a vehicle, entirely covered by an armature of solar arrays. At this distance it looked for all the world like a diamond-encrusted beetle.

It was not moving. I guessed its occupants had seen us and halted, wary.

Edvard brought the truck to a stop and called out to Danny.

Seconds later Danny and Kat squeezed into the cab and crouched between us.

“What do you think?” I said.

“Big,” Danny said under his breath. “Impressive arrays. Of course, they might not all be in working order.” He screwed up his eyes. “I don’t see any evidence of a rig. Wonder what they do for water?”

Kat said, “What should we do?”

“Break out the rifles, Pierre. Ed, take us forward, slowly.”

I slipped from the cab and hurried into the lounge. I unlocked the chest where we kept the rifles and hauled out four. I carried them back to the cab and doled them out as the truck crawled forward.

The occupants of the other vehicle were doing the same, advancing carefully across the desert towards us. We slowed even further, and so did the other truck. We must have resembled two circumspect crabs, unsure whether to mate or fight.

“It’s a hovercraft,” Kat said. Despite her years, she had sharp eyes. Only now, with the vehicle perhaps half a kay from us, did I make out the bulbous skirts below the layered solar arrays. As Danny had said, it was big; perhaps half the size again of our truck.

“Okay,” Danny told Edvard. “Bring us to a stop now.”

The truck halted with a hiss of brakes. Edvard kept the engine ticking over.

The hovercraft stopped too, mirroring our caution.

My heart was thudding. I was sweating even more than usual. I gripped the rifle to my chest. Minutes passed. Nothing moved out there. I imagined the hovercraft’s occupants, wondering like us whether we constituted a threat or an opportunity.

“What now?” I asked Danny. I realised I was whispering.

“We sit tight. Let them make the first move.”

This was the first time I’d seen a working vehicle, other than our own, in more than three years.

“What’s that?” Kat said.

Something was moving on the flank of the vehicle. As we watched, a big hatch hinged open and people climbed out. I counted five individuals, tiny at this distance. They paused in the shadow of the craft, staring across at us.

Minutes passed. They made no move to approach.

Edvard said, “Looks like they’re armed.” He paused. “What do we do?”

Danny licked his lips. “They made the first move. Maybe we should match it.”

“I’ll go out,” I said.

“Not alone.” This was Kat, a hand on my arm.

Danny nodded. “I’ll come with you.” To Edvard and Kat he said, “Keep us covered. If they do anything… fire first and ask questions later, okay?”

Kat nodded and slipped the barrel of her rifle through the custom-made slits in the frame of the windscreen. Edvard crouched next to her.

Danny and I left the cab and hurried through the lounge, grabbing sun hats on the way. Danny cracked the door and we stepped out into the blistering heat. I stopped dead in my tracks, drawing in a deep breath of superheated air, thankful for the shade afforded by my hat. This was the first time in months that I’d ventured from the truck in the full heat of day and I felt suddenly dizzy.

I expected the ground to be like the desert, deep sand making each step an effort. Instead it was hard, baked dry. We paused by the truck, staring across at the five figures standing abreast.

“Okay,” Danny said.

We left the truck at a stroll, our rifles slung barrels down in the crooks of our arms. Ahead, there was movement in the group. One of the figures ducked back into the hatch and emerged with something. At first I assumed it was some kind of weapon; evidently so did Danny. He reached out a hand, staying my progress.

As we watched, four of the figures erected a frame over the fifth. It was some kind of sun-shade. Only when it was fully erected, and the central figure suitably shaded, did the entourage move forward.

“Christ,” I said. We were a hundred metres from the group now, and I saw that the central figure was a woman.

She was tall, statuesque, like one of the models in the old magazines. She was bare legged and bare armed, wearing only shorts and a tight shirt which emphasised the swelling of her chest. As we drew within ten metres of the group, I saw that her face was long, severe, her mouth hard and her nose hooked. But I wasn’t looking at her face.

Something turned over in my gut, the same heavy lust I experienced when looking at pictures of long-dead women.

Danny said, “Do you speak English, French?”

“I speak English,” the woman said in an accent I couldn’t place. She looked middle-eastern to my inexperienced eye.

Her henchmen were a feeble mob. They looked starved, emaciated, and a couple were scabbed with ugly melanomas which covered their faces like masks.

“We’re from the north,” Danny said.

“Old Egypt.” The woman inclined her head. “My name is Samara.”

“I’m Danny. This is Pierre.”

I glanced at the hovercraft. I saw the barrel of a rifle directed at us from an open vent. I nudged Danny, who nodded minimally and said under his breath, “I’ve seen it.”

The woman said, “Do you trade?”

“That depends what you want.”

Samara inclined her head again. “Do you have water?”

Beside me, Danny seemed to relax. We were in a position of power in this stand-off. He said, “What do you have to trade?”

The woman licked her lips. I found the gesture sensuous. I gazed at her shape, the curve of her torso from breast to hip.

She said, “Solar arrays.”

I sensed Danny’s interest. “In good working order?”

“Of course. You can check them before the trade.”

“How many are you talking about?”

She pointed to a panel which overhung the flank of her craft. “Four, like that.”

Danny calculated. “I can give you… four litres of water in return.”

“Ten,” she said.

“Six,” Danny said with admirable force, “or no deal.”

I stared at the woman. She needed water more than we needed the arrays. I saw her look me up and down, and I felt suddenly, oddly, vulnerable.

She nodded, then spoke rapidly to one of her guards in a language I didn’t recognise. Two of her men returned to their craft, the weight of the sun-shade taken up by the two who remained.

I was reminded, by her regal stance beneath the shade, and her henchmen’s’ quick attention to duty, of an illustration I had seen in a magazine of an Ancient Egyptian Queen.

Her big, dark eyes regarded me again. She smiled. I found myself looking away, flushing.

Her men returned, hauling the solar arrays. They laid them on the sand and backed off. Samara gestured, and Danny stepped forward to examine the arrays while I covered him.

He looked back at me and nodded.

“They look okay,” he told the woman. “We’ll take them.”

“I’ll have them placed between our vehicles,” she said. “If you bring out the water, we will meet halfway.”

Danny stood and rejoined me. To Samara he said, “What have you been doing for water?”

She paused before replying. “There is a settlement with a rig about two hundred kilometres east of here, along the old coast. They have a deep bore. We trade with them every so often. You?”

Danny said, “We trade with a colony up in old Spain.”

The woman nodded, and I wondered if she’d seen through the lie. She said, “And how many of you live in the truck?”

“Five,” he said. He nodded at the hovercraft. “And you?”

“Just six,” she said.

“We’ll fetch the water,” Danny said.

We turned our backs on the woman and her men and began the slow walk back to the truck. I felt uneasy, presenting such an easy target like that, but I knew I was being irrational. They wanted water, after all; they would gain nothing by shooting us now.

“You hear that?” Danny said. “A mob has a deep bore, east of here. So there is water.”

He unlocked the hatch on the side of the truck where we stored the water. We hauled out two plastic canisters and carried them back to where the woman’s lackeys had placed the arrays. She stood over the shimmering rectangles, watching us as we placed the canisters on the ground.

She snapped something to one of the men, who opened the canister and tipped a teaspoonful of water into his palm. He lifted it to his cracked lip and tasted the water. After a second he nodded to Samara and said something in their language.

I could not keep my eyes off the woman. Her legs were bare, long and brown, and I could see the cleavage of her breasts between the fabric of her bleached blouse. She saw me looking and stared at me, her expression unreadable. I looked away quickly.

She said, “Where are you heading?”

Danny waved vaguely. “South.”

She looked surprised. “Tangiers?”

“In that direction, yes.”

She calculated. “Then we should travel together, no? There are bandits in the area. Together we are stronger.”

Danny looked at me, and I found myself nodding.

“Very well, we’ll do that. We stop at sunset, set off at dawn.”

Samara smiled. “To Tangiers, then.”

She said something to her men and two of them took the canisters. She turned and walked towards the hovercraft, flanked by her sun-shade toting lackeys.

I watched her go.

Danny laughed and said, “Put your tongue away and help me with these.”

We hauled the arrays across the sea-bed and stowed them in the truck.

~


We stepped into the lounge to find an altercation in progress.

Skull was standing at one end of the room, Kat and Edvard at the other. Skull’s face was livid with rage, his lips contorted, eyes wide with accusation.

“You told her!” he yelled across at us as we entered. “You contacted her and told her I was here!”

I looked across at Edvard, who explained, “He came flying from his berth, shouting insane accusations.”

“That’s because you bastards told her!”

I was glad he had a broken leg; able-bodied, he would undoubtedly have attacked us.

Danny said, “Calm down. We told no one. Listen to me — we don’t have a radio, okay? How could we have contacted her if we don’t possess a damned radio? And anyway, why the hell would we tell her we’d picked you up?”

Skull let go of his crutch to gesture beyond the truck. “So how come she’s found me?”

I moved into the lounge and sat down, watching Skull. Danny joined me, gesturing Skull to a seat opposite. Glaring at us, he stumped across the lounge and sat down. Kat and Edvard joined us.

Danny said, reasonably, “Are you sure it’s the same mob?”

“How many hovercraft you think are out there?” Skull snorted. “And you think I wouldn’t recognise the queen bitch herself?”

Kat said, “It’s a coincidence. They saw us from a distance. They needed water.”

Skull shook his head. “Some coincidence! Do you know how big this desert is? The chances of two tiny vehicles meeting like this…”

Edvard said, “We didn’t contact them, Skull. So it has to be coincidence, no? What other explanation is there?”

“The plane,” Danny said. “You took it from them, right? What about this: that she had it tagged with some kind of tracking device? It’d make sense, a valuable piece of kit like that.”

Skull held his head in his hands and sobbed.

I said, “What have you got to fear?”

He looked up, staring through his tears. “She’s evil. They all are. I ran out on her because I didn’t like what she was doing. She won’t rest till I’m dead. And now she’s found you, she won’t stop at just killing me.”

“You make her sound like a monster,” I said.

He nodded. “Oh, she is. She might have traded solar arrays now, but she’ll be scheming to get them back — and more. Right now they’ll be working out how to kill us and take the truck.”

Danny shook his head. “I don’t think so. There’s only six of them — and we’re well armed. The truck’s armoured. We can defend ourselves.”

Skull brayed a laugh. “Six! Is that what she told you? She’s lying. There were a dozen of the bastards with her when I left.”

I looked across at Danny, who said, “Like I said, we can look after ourselves.”

“Okay, but the best defence is distance. Let’s get the hell away from her before she attacks us, okay?”

Danny considered. We had agreed with Samara that we would travel south together; it would be hard to shake her, especially if Skull was correct and she had come for him.

Danny nodded and said to Kat, “Okay, start us up. Let’s move on.”

Kat and Edvard moved to the cab. Skull nodded, gratefully. “Thank Christ,” was all he said before hiking himself upright on his crutches and hobbling back to his berth. I watched him go, wondering what his reaction might be when he discovered that Samara was following us.

I sat with Danny. The silence was broken by the drone of the engine as Kat kicked the truck into life.

I said, “What do you think?”

Danny rubbed his beard. “I think we trust no-one but ourselves, Pierre. We keep Samara at arm’s length, and as for Skull…”

“Yes?”

“As Edvard said yesterday, I don’t trust him as far as I can spit.”

~


I moved to the rear of the truck and sat before an observation screen, staring out across the sea-bed. Through the sandy spindrift of our wake I made out the scintillating shape of the hovercraft. It was perhaps half a kilometre behind us, and keeping pace.

For the next couple of hours before sunset, my thoughts slipped between Skull’s warning and fantasies involving Samara. I interpreted the way she looked at me as indicating desire on her part, and told myself that her henchmen were less than prime physical specimens.

The sun went down, replaced by the deep blue of night shot through with the raging flares of magnetic storms. Kat brought the truck to a standstill and Edvard fixed a meal.

The hovercraft slowed and came alongside, sinking to the sand a hundred metres from us with a curtsey of rubber skirts.

I moved to the lounge and joined Danny and Kat. Edvard ferried plates from the galley and slid them onto the table. The heady scent of braised meat filled the air.

We ate quietly, subdued. Danny had told Edvard and Kat about the travel pact with Samara, and from time to time I saw Kat glance through the hatch at the settled hovercraft across the sand.

I said, “What do we do when we get to the trench?”

Danny chewed on a mouthful of tough meat. “We stop.”

“But we don’t set up the rig, right?”

“Of course not. I don’t want her knowing anything about the rig. We stop the night and in the morning feign a mechanical fault. And if she doesn’t go on without us, then we know she wants something.”

“Skull?” Kat said.

“And maybe the rest of us,” Danny said in a low voice.

Five minutes later Skull emerged from his berth. I was waiting for his reaction when he saw the hovercraft, but evidently he was already aware of its presence. He said, “You see, she’s following us. She knows I’m here. Tonight, they’ll come across…” He seemed resigned to his fate, no longer angry.

Danny said, “You don’t know that. Anyway, the truck’s secure.”

Skull considered a reply, but merely nodded his acknowledgement of Danny’s words, grabbed his bowl of food and returned to his berth.

We finished the meal in uneasy silence.

~


Later I took my rifle outside, broke up the surface crust, and scooped myself a hollow in the sand beneath.

The hovercraft squatted a hundred metres away, an ugly beetle armoured in a patchwork of solar arrays. Evidently the crew had exited and were having a party on the far side of the vehicle. I heard the sound of drunken voices, raised in revelry.

I undressed and rubbed myself with sand, ridding myself of the day’s sweat and grime. I lay back and closed my eyes.

Minutes later a sound startled me. I opened my eyes. Someone had cracked a hatch on the flank of the hovercraft and was crossing the sand towards the truck. I judged I had no time to get dressed before they arrived, so instead reached out and grabbed the rifle.

Then I paddled a heap of sand onto my groin, covering myself.

I stared into the darkness, making out the figure as it emerged into the light falling from the lounge behind me, and I set aside the rifle.

Samara halted about three metres away, smiling down at me. She had discarded her shorts and blouse of earlier. Now she wore a thin white dress which hugged her chest, flanks and belly and flowed around her bare legs.

And there was something else about her, something I had not noticed on our first meeting. She smelled of flowers.

My heart banged like a faulty engine.

She moved closer and knelt, tossing a strand of dark hair from her face. Her scent almost overwhelmed me. “I saw someone out here. I thought it was you.”

I opened my mouth. I wanted to ask what she wanted, but no words came. I was very aware of how ridiculous I looked, torso and legs emerging from the hollow I’d dug in the sand.

She sat before me, cross-legged. “So I thought I’d come over, say hello.”

It struck me then that, unless she was a consummate actress, she was as nervous as I was. A catch in her voice, a hesitation in her gaze as it flicked from the sand to my upper torso.

The dress was low-cut, and I could not keep my eyes from the swelling of her breasts.

“You know, I get lonely, surrounded by…” she gestured over her shoulder with a long-fingered hand, “those animals.”

I said, “It must be…” I shrugged, “difficult to control them.”

She smiled. “Oh, I have my ways.” She wasn’t beautiful, nor really pretty, but when she smiled her face changed, became suddenly attractive. She shrugged, and the way her breasts moved…

I responded. The sand at my groin stirred, disturbed.

She saw it, reached out and took me.

I surged upright with a moan, and she lifted her dress, pushed me back onto the sand and straddled me. I closed my eyes as she eased herself around me, impossibly warm and fluid. I reached out, dug my fingers into her bottom as she rocked, leaning forward and pressing her breasts into my face.

Then it was over. I spasmed in ecstasy and cried aloud, then lay back in the cool sand as she gripped me and shook, her teeth biting the flesh of my shoulder.

I was near to tears. I thought back over the long, lonely years, the years of thwarted desire, of wondering if I would ever experience such intimacy.

She whispered something to me, then rolled off and pulled her dress down over her nakedness. Before I could protest, she stood and padded back to the hovercraft.

I stared into the storm ripped night sky. Beyond the hovercraft, her crew was still partying. A hot wind blew. It was like a hundred other nights, a thousand, I had experienced in the hell that was my world, and yet tonight I felt an elation beyond description.

I considered what Skull had said about her, and contrasted his words with what I had experienced. How could she be the evil woman that he claimed she was, when she gave herself like that, and parted with such words? It was her farewell which convinced me.

“Thank you,” she had whispered.

~


I was woken in the early hours by a shout.

I sat up, listening. I heard the sound of a scuffle in the lounge, loud footsteps and something crashing to the floor. I pulled on my clothes and pushed open the door. I made out movement along the narrow corridor to the lounge.

In the dim light I saw half a dozen figures, and someone struggling in their midst.

I hurried along the corridor, regretting having stowed away my rifle in the locker.

I stopped dead when I came to the lounge.

Three individuals had Skull bound and gagged, and another three stood guard, armed with rifles. They faced Danny and Kat, who had just emerged from their room. Seconds later Edvard appeared.

One of the men saw me and gestured with his rifle. “Move. Join the others.”

The point of his weapon tracked me as I rounded the group and joined my friends. From this angle I could see more of Skull. He was on his knees, arms tied behind his back. A gag obscured the lower half of his face, but above it his eyes blazed with the anger of betrayal.

Kat clutched Danny’s arm, and I understood her fear. Too late, I knew we should have listened to Skull.

Calmly, Danny said, “What do you want?”

I looked around the faces of the men. Many I did not recognise from our meeting the day before; so evidently Samara had been lying when she claimed a crew of half a dozen.

One of the men, bigger and meaner looking than the others, nodded down to Skull. “We’ve got what we came for.”

I felt an almost incredulous relief — then checked myself. He must be lying, surely? They could kill us and ransack the truck, taking our water and provisions and laying claim to the vehicle itself.

A scrawny African looked around the lounge with evident disgust. “We’d as soon kill you all.” There were mutters of assent from those around him. “But she doesn’t want that. She said just take the bastard.” He grinned. “It’s your lucky day.”

Skull struggled, tried to say something. Someone cuffed him around the head. Their leader grunted in their language and they kicked open the hatch and left the lounge, dragging Skull with them.

As soon as they were gone, Kat hurried across the room and closed the door. The lock was smashed. “Don’t worry about it, Kat,” Edvard said. “I’ll fix it.”

We sat down around the table in silence. I think each of us felt pretty much the same mix of emotions: relief that we were still alive, a kind of retrospective dread of what might have become of us, and guilt as we thought back to the reassurances we had given Skull.

Eventually, Kat said, “So… what do we do?”

“We leave right now,” Danny said. “Head for the trench as first planned. Lose them. We were lucky, just now. Let’s not push that luck. Yes?”

He looked around at each of us. Edvard and Kat nodded their agreement.

“Pierre?”

I thought of Samara, the ecstasy I had experienced with her just hours ago. At last I nodded. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

Danny drove, Kat in the cab beside him. Edvard retired to his bunk in an attempt to catch some sleep. I tried to sleep, but visions of Samara’s body, and the look of terror in Skull’s eyes as he was dragged away, kept me awake.

I moved to the rear of the truck and looked out through the observation screen. The sun was coming up ahead of us, casting our long shadow far behind. As I stared, I made out the glinting, glimmering shape of Samara’s hovercraft, following steadily in our wake.

My stomach lurched with a sensation that was not wholly dread.

~


We made steady progress during the day, south-west towards the trench. The hovercraft tracked us all the way, a constant presence. I moved to the cab in the early afternoon. Danny glanced at me. “Still there?”

I nodded.

He eased the throttle forward gently and we accelerated. Kat slipped from the passenger seat and moved to the lounge. I sat beside Danny as we crawled over the sea-bed. Ahead, the sun was a blinding white explosion high above the horizon. All around us the sea-bed was barren, utterly lifeless.

Kat returned. “They’re still there, keeping pace.”

“What the hell do they want?” Danny muttered. “I mean, they could have taken everything we had back there.”

“Perhaps Samara was being truthful,” I said. “She wants us to travel together, for safety. And she just wanted Skull back, for her own reasons.” It sounded lame, even as I spoke the words.

Danny shook his head. “I don’t buy it. They want something.”

Two hours later, as the sun sank and ignited the horizon as if it were touch-paper, Danny signalled ahead. I made out, perhaps a kilometre before us, a dark irregularity in the sea-bed, a mere line widening as it ran away from us.

We had arrived at the eastern end of the sea-bottom trench. Danny slowed and veered so that we were travelling parallel to the widening rift.

“I reckon Tangiers is around a hundred kays south-west of here,” he said. “I’m going to stop here… and just pray that the bastards keep on going.”

He eased the truck to a halt beside the lip of the ridge. After the drone of the engine, the silence rang with its own eerie volume. We sat quietly as the truck ticked and cracked around us, and minutes later saw what we were secretly fearing.

To our left, the hovercraft moved into view, slowed and settled a couple of hundred metres from us.

Danny said, almost in a whisper, “I just hope Skull didn’t tell them about the rig.”

The idea filled me with dread. I stared out at the hovercraft’s array-encrusted carapace, expecting at any second a hatch to crack and Samara’s men to come pouring out.

After ten minutes, with no discernible movement from the vehicle, I began to breathe a little easier.

We ate the evening meal in silence: potatoes and spinach. As I ate, I wondered if Kat and Edvard had been unable to bring themselves to prepare Skull’s gift of meat. We hardly exchanged a word, and afterwards I moved to the hatch and peered through the window.

The hovercraft was a huge, domed shape in the darkness. Samara’s crew were partying again. They had lit a fire on the far side of the vehicle, and the flickering crimson illumination danced above the uneven crenellation of the solar-arrays.

I made a decision. I turned to where my friends were still seated. “I’m going over there. I want to talk to Samara, find out why they took Skull.”

Kat looked shocked. “I can’t let you go–”

“I… Samara won’t harm me,” I said. “I’ll try to get a promise from her, that her men won’t attack us.”

Kat made to protest further, but Danny laid a quick hand on hers, and nodded at me silently. Something in his gaze told me he was aware of what had passed between me and Samara the night before.

Edvard said, “If you’re going, then for God’s sake take this.” He moved to the weapon’s locker and withdrew a small pistol.

I hesitated, then nodded and tucked it into the band of my shorts.

I nodded and slipped from the truck. I stared across the dark expanse of sand to the hovercraft, my heart pounding. I was about to set off towards the vehicle when a door hinged open in its flank and a figure stepped out.

She stopped when she saw me, a hand still on the door.

I crossed the cooling sea-bed towards her.

I came within range of her heady scent and my senses reeled. She stroked my cheek. “I hoped you’d be out, Pierre. I was going to invite you over… It’ll be more comfortable here, yes?”

“What about…?” I gestured to the far side of the vehicle.

She smiled. “They’re having their fun, Pierre. We won’t be disturbed, okay?”

I could only nod, all thoughts of asking what had become of Skull forgotten.

She took me by the hand and led me into the hovercraft. We moved down a warren of tight corridors, past tiny stinking cubicles where her crew slept, and a rack containing the canisters of water we had traded with her. We ducked through a hatch into a larger chamber — evidently the engine room where the dangling leads of the solar arrays were coupled to banked generators.

Samara’s room was beyond this.

I stopped on the threshold and stared.

The room was twice the size of the lounge back at the truck, and sumptuous. A vast bed occupied the centre of the room. To the left was a small window, looking out onto the sea-bed. Through thin curtains I made out the flare of the fire and the sound of voices, loud and drunk.

Then I saw, in the far corner of the chamber, a clear perspex kiosk. I crossed to it, then turned to Samara with a question.

“A shower,” she said.

I repeated the word.

She smiled. “It’s a water shower,” she said.

I looked at her. “But how can you…?”

“I make sure we’re well supplied, Pierre. And of course it’s recycled after I’ve used it.”

I could hardly conceive of the luxury of having sufficient water to use for bathing.

She took my hand and pulled me towards the bed. We kissed. She reached behind her, unbuttoned her dress and let it fall. I stared like a fool as she rolled onto the bed and smiled up at me.

I pulled off my shirt and dropped my shorts. Samara laughed.

I reddened. “What?”

“I see that you have more than one weapon in there, Pierre.”

I struggled to explain the presence of the pistol. “Ed… he said I might need it.”

“A wise move in these times.” She reached out and pulled me onto the bed.

We made love, Samara urging me to slow down, take my time, as she opened herself to me.

Time was obliterated. I had no idea how long might have passed. I lost, too, all sense of self. It was as if I were an animal, indulging in primal appetites, oblivious of anything else but the pleasures of the flesh. Samara was ferocious, biting me, scratching. I felt a heady sense of accomplishment, almost of power, that I could instil in her such a display of passion.

Later we lay in each other’s arms, slick with sweat and exhausted. She sat up, left the bed and padded to the shower. I watched her, overcome with the sight of her nakedness. She gestured for me to join her.

We stepped into the cubicle and stood together, belly to belly. She touched the controls and I gasped. Cool water cascaded over our heads, and I experienced both a sense of pleasure at the silken warmth of the water, and guilt at the profligate use of such a resource.

She passed me something, a small white block. “Soap,” she explained. “Rub me with it.”

I did so, surprised by the resulting foam, and we made love again.

We dried ourselves and lay on the bed, facing each other. I stroked her cheek. Even then I knew that this was a passing pleasure, unexpected and delightful but hedged with danger.

Then, as if reading my thoughts, Samara traced a finger across my ribs and said, “You can stay here, if you wish. Leave the others, travel with me. The life is hard, but I have my comforts.”

I stared at her, at her hard eyes, her cruel mouth. Even then I had wits enough to wonder if she harboured ulterior motives.

I said, “And leave my family?”

“You’d have me, Pierre,” she said. “We’d want for nothing. We’d eat well.”

I wondered if she had a hydroponics expert aboard. I’d seen no evidence of things growing in my brief passage through the hovercraft.

She leaned on one elbow, staring down at me. “And things will get better, believe me.”

I shook my head. “How?” I asked, wondering suddenly if she had information about a thriving colony somewhere.

“We’re heading to Tangiers,” she said.

“There’s a colony there?”

She smiled. “There was once a successful colony at Tangiers, Pierre. It died out, I’ve heard, a few years ago.”

“Then…” I shrugged. “Why go there?”

She paused, stroking my chest. “The colony was religious — one of those insane cults that flourished as civilisation died. They called themselves the Guardians of the Phoenix.”

I shook my head. “I’ve never heard of them.”

She looked at me. “But you’ve heard of Project Phoenix?”

“Edvard told me about it,” I said. “A ship was sent to the stars, hoping to find a new Earth.”

She was smiling. “That was the plan, anyway.”

“The plan? You mean…?”

“I mean the ship was almost built, in orbit, before the end — but the funding ran out, and governments lost control. The project became just another dead hope–”

“How do you know this?”

She rolled from the bed, crossed the room to a small wooden table and returned with a sheaf of papers.

“A read-out,” she said, curling next to me. “I obtained it years ago from a trader. It’s an official report about the winding up of the Project, and the resources that remained.”

I leafed through the papers. They were covered in a flowing script that made no sense to me.

Samara said, “It’s an Arabic translation.”

I laid the papers to one side. “And?”

“And it contains information about the spaceport at Tangiers. It’s a copy of the so-called sacred papers on which the Guardians founded their cult.”

“I don’t see…”

“Pierre, the Tangiers spaceport was where the supply ships would be launched from, before the departure from orbit of the Phoenix itself.”

“Supply ships,” I said, suddenly understanding. “You reckon they’re still there, the supply ships, full of everything the colonists would need for the journey — food, water.”

She laughed suddenly, disconcerting me. “Oh, I’m sorry, Pierre! You are so naïve. No, the colonists would not need such supplies as food and water.”

“They wouldn’t?” I said, puzzled.

“The supply ships at Tangiers, some dozen or so, were full of the colonists. But they were frozen in suspended animation, and would be for the duration of their trip to the stars. Five thousand of them.”

I stared at her. “Five thousand? That’s… that’s a city,” I said. “Christ, yes… With so many, we could start again, rebuild civilisation.”

Samara brought me up short. “Pierre, you’ve got it wrong. We couldn’t sustain a  colony of five thousand. How would we feed them? What about water? Pierre, face it — the Earth is almost dead. It’s every man for himself, now.”

“Then…?” I gestured at the print-out. “What do you mean? You said there were colonists?”

She stroked my jaw, almost pityingly. “Of course there are, but we couldn’t just revive them to… to this. That would be… cruel.”

“Then what?” I began.

She jumped from the bed and crossed the room, kneeling beside a curtained window and gesturing for me to join her.

Bewildered, I did.

She eased the curtain aside and inclined her head towards the revelry outside. A dozen men stood around a blazing fire, singing drunkenly. They were swigging from plastic bottles and eating something.

I turned to Samara. “What?”

Her hand, on my shoulder, was gentle. “The fire,” was all she said.

I looked again at the fire, at the spit that stretched across the leaping flames, and at what was skewered upon the spit.

I felt suddenly sick, and in terrible danger. My vision misted.

I said, “Skull?”

Samara murmured, “He was a traitor. He was against our plans. He stole supplies, water.”

“But…” I said, gesturing to what was going on out there.

“Pierre, Pierre. Life is hard. The Earth is dying. There is no hope. We must do what we must do to survive. If that means…”

I said, “The colonists.”

She did not say the world, but her smile was eloquent enough.

Meat.

She led me back to the bed and pulled me down, facing me and gently stroking my face. “Pierre, come with me. Life will be good. We will rule the Mediterranean.”

Despite myself, I felt my body respond. She laughed, and we made love again — violently now, like animals attempting to prove superiority. This time, I did not lose my sense of self. I was all too conscious of Skull’s words, his warnings. I was in control enough to know that, however much I revelled in the pleasures of the flesh with Samara, this had to be the last time.

She gasped and closed her eyes. Fighting back my tears, I rolled over and reached down beside the bed.

“Pierre?” she said. She sat up, but she had no time to stop me. She merely registered sudden alarm with a widening of her eyes.

I shot her through the forehead, sobbing as I did so, and only in retrospect hoping that the sound of the gunshot would go unheard amid the noise of the party outside.

I stood and dressed quickly, then moved to the door. On the way I stopped, returned to the bed and picked up the print-out.

At the door I paused, and forced myself to take one last glance. Samara was sprawled across the bed, the most beautiful thing I had seen in my life.

I fled the room. I passed through the chamber housing the solar arrays. Despite the desire to get away, I knew what I must do. I spent a long minute looking over the couples and leads, then judiciously snapped a bunch of connections and removed a capacitor. The hovercraft would be going nowhere for a long, long time, if ever.

I hurried along the corridor until I came to the water canisters. I grabbed as many as I could carry, then made it to the hatch and stumbled into the night, gasping air and hauling the canisters towards the truck. I imagined some drunken reveller finding Samara and chasing me, catching me before I reached safety.

I barged into the lounge, startling Edvard, Danny and Kat. They stared wide-eyed as I staggered towards them.

“Pierre?” Kat said.

“Start up! We’ve got to get out of here!”

Kat, closest to the cab, needed no second telling. She scrambled through the hatch, slipped into the driving seat and kicked the engine into life. The truck surged, heading west.

Sobbing, I dropped the canisters and collapsed into a chair.

Danny and Edvard knelt before me. “Pierre…?” Danny reached out and touched my shoulder.

I passed the print-out to Edvard and told them about Samara and her men.

Kat took my hand.

~


For the next four hours, as the truck headed along the ridge of the crest, I was paranoid lest the cannibals repair their vehicle and follow us, crazed with the desire to avenge their dead queen. I sat at the rear of the truck, staring through the dust of our wake. I thought of Samara, and what she had given me, and I relived again and again raising the gun to her head and pulling the trigger, and through my tears I told myself that I had done the right thing.

An hour or two before dawn, Danny turned the truck and we headed nose-down into the trench. We bucked down the incline, then straightened out and accelerated. A little later he judged that we had put enough distance between ourselves and the hovercraft: he slowed the truck and stopped with the sloping wall of the trench to our left.

I joined Danny and Kat, and together we set up the rig and dropped the longest bore through the crazed surface of the old sea-bed.

“Where’s Edvard?” I asked as I locked the final length of drill column into place.

Kat nodded back to the truck. “In there, trying to translate the print-out.”

Danny stabbed the controls that dropped the drill-head, then stood back mopping the sweat from his brow. It was still dark, but the sky in the east was turning magnesium bright with the approach of dawn and already the temperature was in the high thirties.

Dog tired, I returned to the truck to catch some sleep.

An hour later I was awakened by a cry from outside. I surged upright, thinking we were under attack. I launched myself from the truck, into the heat of the day, and stared around in panic.

Kat and Danny were standing in the shadow of the rig, holding hands and staring at the bore.

As I watched, the trickle of water bubbling from around the drill column became a surge, then a fountain-head. I ran to join them and we embraced as the water showered down around us.

I opened my mouth and drank, expecting to taste salt. “It’s fresh!” I shouted. “My God, it’s fresh.” I held Kat’s thin body to me, looking into her eyes and crying with more than just the joy of finding water.

We dismantled the rig and stowed it aboard the truck. Danny marked the position of the bore on the map, and the three of us sat in the cab as we accelerated up the incline of the trench.

Later, Edvard joined us. I glanced at him as I drove.

Kat said, “What is it?”

Edvard seemed subdued. He sat between us, staring down at the print-out in his lap.

Danny said, “Ed? You okay?”

He lifted the sheaf of papers. “The colonists,” he said in barely a whisper, “number some five thousand five hundred, and they were selected to found a new world on some far star. Among them are…” his voice caught “…are doctors and scientists and engineers, specialists in every field you can imagine.”

He looked around at us.

“We could revive them in groups,” he said, with tears in his eyes, “start a colony, small at first, but in time, with the water we’ve found…”

We drove on in silence, into the blazing sun.


Sunworld


It began with a personal revelation for Yarrek, shortly after he graduated from college at the time of his twentieth cycle, and ended in an even greater revelation which was to affect every citizen of Sunworld.

On the 33rd brightening of St Sarrian’s quarter, Yarrek passed from the portals of Collium College for the very last time. He paused on the steps, ignoring the crowd of students surging around him, and peered up into the sky. Kite-fish were taking advantage of the approaching dimming, spreading their sails and floating high above the spires of the town as the heat of the sun diminished. He watched the multi-coloured, kilometre-wide wings glide before the face of the sun directly overhead as it changed from dazzling gold to the molten, burnt-umber of full-dimming, and he knew then what it must be like to be as free as a kite-fish.

No more college, ever. Adult life awaited him, with all its promised mystery and romance.

He elbowed his way past a gaggle of fellow graduates and boarded an open cart hauled by four lethargic lox. As the cart set off through the narrow streets of Helioville, heading for the open farmlands beyond, Yarrek watched the town pass by with the heightened clarity of someone witnessing the familiar for the very last time.

Who knew what the future might hold? One thing was for sure — in a brightening, maybe two, he would be away from the family farm, heading by sail-rail all the way to Hub City.

The knowledge was like a warming coal, like the sun which burned at the centre of the world. He watched the city folk go about their quotidian jobs, pitying them their lives of servitude, their changeless cycles of work and play, ignorant of what might lie beyond.

He sat back and let the somnolent lollop of the lox lull him into slumber, as the cart left the town and took the elevated lane through fields of golden yail.

~


“Yarrek Merwell, your stop!”

The cry of the lox jockey yanked him from sleep. He hauled himself upright and jumped from the coach. As the lox were prodded into motion, farting and lowing in protest, Yarrek stood at the end of the path and stared out over the land that was his father’s, and which in time would be passed on to Yarrek’s elder brother, Jarrel, as was the tradition among the farmers of the central plains.

The Merwell estate stretched for as far as the eye could see, a vast golden patchwork of yail fields in various stages of ripeness. Ahead, like a galleon becalmed, stood his family’s ramshackle farmhouse. The timber had been parched by the sun for countless cycles, warped cruelly by the merciless heat that prevailed this close to the Hub. For all its ugliness, a part of him loved the place. He would find leaving it, and his family, more difficult than he cared to admit.

There was a time, in his youth, when he resented the fact that his brother would inherit the farm, that he would have to practise a profession other than that of a farmer. But, as the cycles passed and he grew older and wiser, he came to thank the tradition that would force him to leave home and fend for himself.

He set off along the path, brushing against the yail plants and knocking from them the intense fragrance of  pollen. He passed a threshing platform, with its troupe of labourers led by Jarrel.

His brother smiled down at him, called him a lazy lox as always, and added, “Hurry, can’t you! The folks are wearing their Blacks.”

He stopped and stared up at Jarrel. “Their Blacks? So soon?”

“You graduated, didn’t you? Your future needs discussing.”

Yarrek hurried home. Tradition among the farming caste had it that discussion of matters of destiny between parents and children necessitated the wearing of black gowns. It was a ritual of the Church that Yarrek took for granted, despite his friend Yancy’s irreverent ridiculing of religious orthodoxy.

He had foreseen his parents’ wearing of their Blacks, but had assumed they would leave it a brightening or two before they broached the subject of his future.

He took a jug of yail juice from the cooler, slaking his thirst. His mother and father would be on the Edgeward deck, as ritual decreed. He made his way up the two narrow flight of stairs to the third floor and paused on the threshold of the deck, nervous now that the time had come to tell his parents of his plans to enter the offices of an architectural firm in the capital, Hub City.

They had their backs to him, staring out over the flat central plains towards the mountains of the Edge — though the Edge was so distant that it could not be seen by the naked eye. It was an act of obeisance they performed every dimming, this turning towards the Edge — and one which Yarrek too, despite Yancy’s joshing, often found himself performing, albeit cursorily.

They had heard his creaking progress through the house, and his father gestured for him to step between them and sit on the stool positioned before the rail.

Solemnly, he did so.

They were grave-faced, unsmiling. His father was fingering his Circle of Office: he was a part-time pastor of the Church and he took his duties seriously.

“Son,” he said in greeting.

His mother said, without smiling, “We have heard. Congratulations. A second grade. No Merwell for five generations has attained better than a third.”

His parents had always been distant. They were loving in a remote, stern kind of way, solicitous for the welfare of their sons, but wary of showing emotion, still less anything so exhibitionist as physical affection.

Unlike Yancy’s parents, Yarrek thought, who showered the girl with such gestures of love that he found their displays embarrassing, not to say impious. But then Yancy’s folks were from the Hub, where tradition was lax.

“The time has come,” his father said, “to speak of what lies ahead. For so long now the future was college, and the attaining of success in your studies. Now that you have achieved more than we could ever have hoped, together we take the next step.”

Yarrek swallowed nervously. “I have considered my future,” he said. “I thought perhaps… well, I’d like to study to become an architect.”

Silence greeted his words. His father’s grim expression did not waver; his thin face might have been carved from wood.

His mother said, “Of course you have dreamed, Yarrek. Such boyish fancies are to be expected, and are excusable. But as the Church says, one’s destiny is often beyond the scope of the individual: there comes a time when the experience of Elders must shape the course of disciples.”

Yarrek bowed his head. “My plans are more than dreams, mother. I’ve heard that architectural offices in the Hub are crying out for skilled draftsmen–”

“Yarrek,” his father said, in a tone that stopped him dead. “Hub City is a den of vice, the playground of the heathen. No son of mine will venture there.”

“But,” Yarrek said, resenting the note of desperation in that single word, “you know yourself that I am pious. I attend regular church. Why, to deny me the right to go to Hub City suggests that you think me weak, your instructions insufficient.”

His mother stared at him. “My son, we of flesh are forever weak. Do you not consort with the daughter of the Garrishes?”

“Yancy is a friend,” he began, angry at the disdain his mother had loaded onto the word consort.

“She is the product of the Hub,” said his mother, “and the thought of your being surrounded by crowds of such people…”

Yarrek stared from his father to his mother. “Then where else might I study to become an architect?”

His mother allowed herself a minimal smile.

His father said, “Tomorrow at mid-brightness you will take the sail-rail Edgeward to Icefast.”

He echoed, “Icefast,” in horror. The very name of the city filled him with cold dread. The sun would be distant there; the outside temperature intolerable without layers of protective garments; his shadow eerily long.

“And there I can study–?” Yarrek began.

His father said, “It has been arranged for you to sit an entrance examination for the office of the Inquisitor General.”

His mother allowed another smile to crack her features: she could not conceal her pride. His father’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction.

Icefast and the Inquisitor’s office? His parents’ plans for him were so contrary to his own that Yarrek was unable to grasp his sudden change of destiny. He thought of Yancy, and wanted nothing so much then as the consolation of her arms around him.

“I have no say in the matter?” he asked.

His father reached out and, with a hand as strong as a bailing iron, gripped Yarrek’s upper arm. “It is an honour to be so chosen, as you will come to appreciate.”

Yarrek bowed his head and whispered, “I’ve heard that the methods of Inquisitors are Draconian.”

His father said, “Since Prelate Zeremy came to office, things have changed. He has curbed the power of the Inquisitors, put an end to their worst excesses. Now they truly are a force for good, instead of being a conflicting schism within the Church itself.”

Yarrek nodded. “May I go to my room?”

“Go,” his mother said, “and pack in preparation for your leave-taking.”

He stood and hurried from the deck, making his way through the cool, dark house, and reached the refuge of his room. There he lay on his bed, too gripped by shock even to cry.

For he knew, even then, that he would do as his parents wished; he knew that Hub City was the dream of a juvenile, that his true destiny was in the ice-fields of the Edge, in the office of the Inquisitor General.

The door creaked open. It was his father. He had removed his Blacks, and now stood above Yarrek in his homely farmer’s garb.

“Yarrek,” he said. “Yarrek, I must tell you something.” He sat down on the bed next to his son, and Yarrek stiffened at his father’s unaccustomed proximity.

He stared into the old man’s face, wondering at his father’s nervousness.

And the farmer, pained by a duty he would rather have forgone, told him the truth.

“Twenty cycles ago,” he began in a voice heavy with weariness, “a family in Icefast, a rich and influential family high up in the hierarchy of power, broke the edict of the Church and sired three children.” Yarrek did not yet comprehend the import of his father’s words: the thought of a rich family contravening Church Edict was shocking enough.

“Had the Church discovered the birth,” his father went on, “the child would have been put to death, according to the Law of Conservation. But the family had power, as I said, and managed to spirit this child, a boy, out of Icefast in the depth of dimming and send it with paid agents Hubward.”

His father could not bring himself to look Yarrek in the eye. “These agents arranged for a family to take in the boy, to raise him as their own.”

Yarrek said, “No.”

“The truth, Yarrek, is sometimes almost impossible to bear. But remember this: that truth, duly weighed and considered, makes a man stronger.”

“You…” Yarrek said. “I… I am that child? You took me in? I am not…?” It was too vast a concept to take in. His parents were not his parents? Jarrel was not his brother? He felt the certainty of the world tilt beneath him.

And then his father — or rather the man who was not his father, but had acted as such for twenty cycles — did something which he had never done before: he reached out and took Yarrek’s shoulder in compassion. In a small voice he said, “Your mother had just miscarried. A son. She was grieving. We were poor, then. The farm was yet to prosper. When the agents of aristocrats called and made their offer, we could not refuse. They paid us well, but money was not our motive. We looked upon you, and knew that if we were to refuse, then there was the possibility that you would die.”

His father paused, and went on, “Your progress at college was monitored by the interested party in Icefast, and they arranged for your apprenticeship.”

The irony! He, the illegal third child of aristocrats, was to be seconded into the very arm of the Church responsible for the policing of such edicts!

The hand tightened on his shoulder. “But be assured of this, Yarrek. Despite everything, we love you as our own.”

It was the first time his father had ever spoken such words of affection. With that, his face averted, he stood and left the room.

Yarrek lay on his bed, staring through the open window at the baleful eye of the rapidly dimming sun. Unable to sleep, he thought ahead to his time in Icefast. Though much of what lay ahead would be a mystery, he resolved upon a course of action that would give his future some purpose: during his time in Icefast he would attempt to track down the people who were his rightful parents.

~


Much later he was awakened by a sound.

He sat up quickly, the revelation of his past, and his future, brimming in him like sour wine. He blinked. It was still dark, though the sun had reached the extent of its dimming, and was little by little beginning to brighten.

It came again, the sound.

“Yarrek!” A mere whisper, from the direction of the window. He turned on the bed and saw, beside the nodding dark-blooms that wound in around the window-frame, Yancy’s round face staring in at him.

“Yancy?”

“I heard that you’re leaving for Icefast. Jarrel told me over at the platform. When you didn’t turn up, I thought… Well–” she shrugged “–here I am.”

He hurried across the room and embraced her. She was standing on a thick twist of vine that clung to the façade of the manse. Her presence here, as it did every time she came for him, amazed Yarrek, for Yancy Garrish was blind. Her massive eyes were skinned over with a milky meniscus that only served to accentuate the beauty of her face.

She raised a small flagon. “I’ve brought some yail acid, from my father’s locked cupboard,” she grinned. “Come to the platform and tell me everything.”

She was already shinning down the vine, and he straddled the windowsill and followed her.

He jumped the last metre and ran after Yancy as she disappeared through the yail stalks. Minutes later they emerged at the platform. It stood stark and empty in the umber light of the slowly brightening sun. Full brightening was hours away. He would have plenty of time with his friend, before returning home.

They climbed onto the platform and fell back onto piled sacks of yail. Yancy unplugged the flagon and took a quick slug, then passed it to Yarrek. The spirit burned his throat, filled his belly with strangely comforting fire.

He said, “What did Jarrel tell you?”

She chose to ignore him. “Are the kite-fish swarming?” she asked, her sightless eyes staring in the direction of the brooding sun, and the flotilla of kite-fish that basked in its gentle pre-brightening warmth.

He took her hand. “Perhaps twenty, maybe thirty. Massive ones, mostly male, putting on a show.” He watched the intricacy of their aerial dance. “They’re performing their mating rituals, flying circles around the sun.”

Yancy sighed and squeezed his hand. “And on the other side,” she said. “What can you see there?”

Yarrek narrowed his eyes, peering past the sun and focussing on the other side of the world. Directly above him he could see that side’s Hub City, and radiating from it the web of lines that were the sail-rail tracks, with a great checkerboard of farmland in between. Overland, as his people called it, was a mirror image of the plain on which Yarrek lived; he had never met anyone who had ventured there, though he knew that ships plied back and forth across the frozen seas of the Edge.

So he described it to Yancy in great detail, omitting nothing.

She snuggled close to him, her warmth in turn warming him, banishing his fears.

He asked again, “Yancy, what did Jarrel tell you?”

She was a while before replying. “He said you were to go to the Edge, to Icefast, at mid-brightening. There you had a job awaiting you. A very important job.”

“Did he tell you what it was?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t know. Your parents had told him only so much, to prepare him for your leave-taking.”

His silence prompted her question. “Well, Yarrek, will you tell me?”

He braced himself for her ridicule, even her disgust. “I will sit an exam for the office of the Inquisitor General.”

He turned and stared at her broad, pretty face in the light of the brightening. It was as if her features were frozen. Her hand remained on his, though her grip had slackened appreciably.

“Yancy?”

“You’ll be a lackey of the Church?” she said. “And an Inquisitor at that!”

He shrugged. “I have no say in the matter. Do you think I want to leave here, leave you?” And he felt a twinge of treachery at these words, for he had planned to venture to Hub City without her, after all.

She was silent for a long time. He watched the kite-fish perform convoluted arabesques with vast, lethargic grace.

He wanted to tell Yancy that he was not a true Merwell, that his blood family were aristocrats in Icefast — but he could not bring himself to do so.

“You’ll change,” she whispered. “You’ll become like them. Hard. Unforgiving. You’ll forget what it is to love, to feel compassion. For how can those that rule by the Edict of the Church have room in their hearts for the forgiveness of human frailty?”

He took her hand. “I won’t change, Yancy.”

She turned to face him, and her soured eyes seemed to be staring at him. “But you already believe, in your heart, Yarrek. You have been indoctrinated by your parents. And from belief, it is only a short step to pressing your belief onto others, by force if necessary.”

“No!”

She laughed. “But you take in every word the Church spouts, and believe it for the ultimate truth!”

Yancy and her family belonged to the caste of Weavers. From an early age Yancy had woven fabulous tapestries of such colour and intricacy that they left Yarrek breathless. He had wondered how someone without sight could create such things of visual beauty. She had explained that she felt the colours, and kept the complex patterns in her head as she weaved.

The Weavers were renowned for their lack of convention, their irreverence, but because of the importance of their position in society, producing carpets both aesthetic and utilitarian, the Church chose to ignore their heterodoxy.

“Tell me again what the Church believes,” Yancy whispered now, mocking him. “Tell me that we are a bubble of air in a vast rock that goes on for ever and ever without end.”

He thought about that, even as she laughed at him, and as ever the concept of infinity dizzied him. “Tell me,” she went on, “that the Church believes that the bubble was formed from the breath of God, as He breathed life into dead rock, creating us, and the animals, and everything else in existence!”

“Yancy,” he pleaded, squeezing her hand.

She embraced him quickly, and he realised with surprise that she was weeping. “Oh, Yarrek, I will never see you again, will I? And if I do, you will be so changed I’ll never recognise the boy I love.”

And he could think of no words to say in response, no gesture he could make to reassure her.

A little later they removed their clothes and came together and made love slowly, under the eye of the quickening sun, and Yarrek wondered if it would be for the very last time.

~


He stowed his luggage in the warped timber carriage of the sail-rail train and found a window-seat. He stared out at the busy platform, and among the crowd picked out the unmoving trio of his father, mother and brother. They looked solemn in the glare of the mid-brightening sun. He lifted a hand to acknowledge that he had seen them, but only Jarrel responded with a wave.

He scanned the crowd for any sign of Yancy. Mere hours ago, as they lay limbs entwined on the yail sacks, she had promised that she would see him off at the station — but there were so many citizens swarming back and forth that he despaired of seeing her now.

Then the cry went up from the ship’s captain. The lox were whipped into motion and the chocks they were pulling sprang away from the rails. The carriage creaked as the great sails took the strain and eased the train slowly, at first, along the rails.

Desperately now Yarrek cast about the surging faces for Yancy — and then he heard the cry. “Yarrek, goodbye!”

She had shinned up a lamp-pole and was waving furiously in the direction of the train. He called, “Yancy, farewell!” and waved even though she would be unable to see the gesture.

She smiled, and waved all the more, and Yarrek turned to the tableau of his family and was heartened by the disapproving expressions on the faces of his mother and father, though Jarrel was grinning to himself like an idiot.

The train gained speed, the wind from the Hub sending it on its way. Yarrek felt tears stinging his eyes as he waved to his family and the small, clinging figure of the blind weaver girl.

He sat back in his seat and closed his eyes.

~


He awoke a little later to the thrumming vibration of the train’s wheels on the track.

Yarrek had never before been further Edgeward than his farm, and now, mixed with apprehension at what should await him at Icefast, he was fired by the excitement and curiosity of adventure. The future was a blank canvas on which he would paint his destiny; he knew neither what to expect from Icefast, though in books he had seen engravings of dour, stone buildings, nor what exactly might await him in the office of the Inquisitor.

The train had gained full speed now, and fields of yail and other crops sped by in a golden blur. Yarrek slid open the window and poked his head out, staring up at the bellying sails bearing the great green circle of the Hub Line. Almost directly overhead, the sun had attained full brightness and the heat was merciless.

He wondered how he might cope in Icefast, where the sun was a speck on the inward horizon, and the temperature never rose above zero.

He glanced around his compartment and tried to guess how many of his fellow passengers were bound all the way to Icefast; not many of them, judging by their scant luggage. Indeed, as the hours elapsed, and the train stopped at the stations along the way, many travellers alighted to be replaced by others who remained aboard only for short durations.

He began a letter to Yancy — addressed to the weaving house where she worked, and where a friend would read it out to her — describing the voyage so far, and promising that this letter would be the first of many.

Later he ate an evening meal packed by his mother, then went for a stroll along the corridor and up a flight of steps. The view from the upper deck, beneath the taut swell of the sails, was spectacular. He could see for what seemed like hundreds of miles in every direction: a sprawling panorama of yail fields, with here and there the spires and steeples of towns and villages.

Towards dimming, as he was contemplating going below and setting up his bunk, there was a rush of activity over by the starboard rail as a dozen passengers gathered and pointed.

In the distance, perhaps a mile away, Yarrek saw the humped remains of ancient buildings, tumbled stones upholstered by centuries of creeping grass and ferns. He recognised the ruins from picture books at school: this was the old city of Hassaver, the only existing remnant of the war that had almost brought the end of civilisation on Sunworld. Dreadful weapons had been brought to bear by implacable armies, fighting for territory long forgotten.

The history books said that the war had been fought perhaps ten thousand cycles ago, and that, after the devastation, strange beings had come among the people of Sunworld — beings that ecclesiastical scholars later claimed were angels — and brought about the formation of the Church, which in turn had brought lasting peace to the world and the eventual rebuilding of civilisation.

He hurried below, constructed a bunk from his extendable seat, and settled down to sleep as the sun dimmed quickly far above the hurtling train.

He was awoken in the early hours, and at first he couldn’t make out what had brought him awake. It felt as though ice had invaded his veins, and his body was rattling in a manner he had never experienced before. Instinctively he pulled the thin sheet over him, and then realised what had happened. He had read about this in books, but had never experienced the phenomenon of cold, the dead chill that enveloped him now. He exhaled, and his breath plumed above him like smoke.

Teeth chattering, in a way he might otherwise have found amusing, he sat up and peered through the window.

The landscape surrounding the trundling train had changed alarmingly. Gone were the reassuring fields of yail, to be replaced by smaller fields of some stubby green plant, and over everything lay a coating of what he would later learn was called frost, a scintillating silver dusting like powdered diamond.

He noticed that other passengers were straining to peer ahead, and he pressed his face to the icy glass and did likewise.

What he saw sent a throb of surprise and fear through his being. Ahead, stretching for the extent of the horizon, was a range of grey mountains capped by what he knew was snow. The rearing phalanx was forbidding, austere and steel-like in its breadth and total dearth of living colour. This, then, was the Edge, and the range before him the famous mountains that circumnavigated this plane of Sunworld. The thought that he was actually here, witnessing this sight, took his breath away.

At the next station, vendors boarded the carriage selling mugs of hot broth, and Yarrek gladly purchased one. Behind these vendors came others hawking thick clothing, serge pantaloons and padded jerkins, caps with ear flaps and things called gloves which you fitted over your hands to protect the fingers — according to the spiel of the vendors — from something called frostbite.

Yarrek ignored the vendors and opened the case his mother had packed. He dressed quickly, pulling thick garments over his old clothing. He felt at once constricted but snug, and wondered if he would ever become accustomed to being so lagged.

He settled down, more comfortable now, and stared in fascination through the window at the wonder of the passing world.

Two hours later Yarrek caught his first glimpse of Icefast.

If he had found the sight of the mountains a thing of wonder, then Icefast doubled his awe and sent his senses reeling. The engravings of his youth had done nothing to prepare him for either the scale of the city or the severity of its aspect.

Like the mountains, Icefast was grey, and like the mountains it reared stark and abrupt from the land. The uniformity of the tall grey buildings, the fact that constructions of such enormity had been planned and undertaken by his fellow man, made the sight of the serried facades all the more daunting.

Icefast filled the horizon between peaks as though the very mountains themselves had been found wanting and had been replaced. Yarrek made out ice-canals between the monolithic grey mansions, and on the canals the improbable sight of people skating back and forth, and others riding sleds drawn by teams of shaggy lox.

In due course the train slowed and entered a canyon of buildings. On the station platform Yarrek made out a thousand souls muffled to their ears, their breaths pluming in the cold. Strange cries and shouts came from the throng, vendors selling everything from cold cures to water-heated boots, mulled yail to grilled lox.

That morning, his father had given him instructions for his arrival in Icefast and directions to the House of the Inquisitors, where he would be given a bed in the apprentices’ dormitory. He would take a lox cart to the Avenue of Creation, and present himself to the porter at the House.

As he gathered his luggage and stepped from the carriage, his breath robbed by the severity of the cold that wrapped around him and invaded his lungs, he realised that his heart was pounding with both excitement and dread.

He hurried to a lox-cart stand, climbed aboard and gave his destination to a muffled dwarf of a jockey. The lox set off and he was gliding smoothly — no jolts on this ride — across the silvered canals of Icefast, and everything he beheld seemed new and wondrous. He saw nothing familiar, no fields of yail, or timber buildings, or kite-fish sailing around the sun. Instead all was drear and austere, the gaunt buildings hewn from great stone blocks, the thoroughfares filled with ice. It was the start of dimming, and while back home the air would still be bright with sunlight, this far away from the Hub the sun was but a distant disk. A strange twilight filled the air, and the city was illuminated by naked flames in great sconces set atop pillars flanking the ice-canals.

The cart slowed at last and halted before the tall, pillared entrance of the House of Inquisitors; Yarrek paid the jockey and climbed down. Keeping his footing with difficulty as he negotiated paving stones slick with ice, he stepped towards the ancient timber doors and passed inside.

He was met by a grim-faced porter, who escorted him without a word to a tiny cell furnished with a hard, narrow bed and a trunk for his clothing. He passed a fitful night, tossing and turning, and dreaming — when sleep came in the early hours — of home and sunlight and Yancy. At dawn, a loud rapping on the door of his cell awoke him, and the porter led Yarrek, along with a dozen other would-be Inquisitors, to the lecture halls overlooking the Avenue of Creation.

~


For the next ten brightenings — though this near the Edge the word was something of a misnomer, for a brightening never achieved much more than a pewter half-light — Yarrek rose early and hurried from his spartan cell to the lecture halls.

There, along with his fellow students, he pored over ancient manuscripts and studied more modern apologia. In the afternoons, after a short meal break during which he ate slabs of cold porridge and watered wine in a silent refectory, he returned to the lecture halls where he would listen, along with the other bored and nodding novices, to a different tutor every brightening who spoke at length on varying aspects of Church law and judiciary practice. At the end of the lessons he would sit a written exam on what he had learned so far, and he would have to dredge his memory for the arcane and abstruse tenets of ecclesiastical lore.

At dimming, after a substantial meal of meat broth and yailbread, he would retire to his cell and compose letters to Yancy and his family. To the latter he would paint a picture of diligence and interest, but to Yancy he would tell the truth; that he found his studies tedious, and life in Icefast at best alienating. He missed the warmth of all that was familiar, he wrote, but most of all he missed Yancy.

He made no friends among his fellow apprentices, for fraternisation was forbidden. Meals were taken in silence, and silence was the rule during study periods. At dimming, Church porters escorted the novices back to their cells, and, though their doors were not locked, Yarrek suspected that guards were posted at the end of the corridor to discourage nocturnal wanderings.

On his eleventh brightening in Icefast, the rules were relaxed. Nothing was stated overtly, but Yarrek noticed that whispers at mealtimes were not admonished, and the porters no longer escorted the novices from the lecture halls. He made friends with a fat youth from a city around the Edge of Sunworld, who pined for the flat ice-fields of home just as Yarrek pined for the sun-parched plains of the Hub.

Upon Yarrek’s fifteenth brightening as a novice, the lecturer announced that for the first time they would be allowed outside after lessons. That dimming Yarrek, along with his new-found friend, hired skates and for an hour attempted to remain upright along the Avenue of Creation, before the cold became too much to bear.

The following afternoon, in the great library, he consulted a gazetteer of the city, searching for the official building where he might find a listing of registered births. That evening after lessons he slipped out and skated shakily along the Avenue towards the House of Public Records

He came to the building, like all the others in the metropolis a sheer, towering construction with high slit windows and a massive entrance. He removed his skates and passed inside, only to discover that he had just thirty minutes before the records office closed. He hurried, sweating in the furnace heat of the building, to the room which housed the rows of mouldering ledgers containing the names of all who had been born, lived, and died in Icefast for the past five hundred cycles.

He knew, of course, that his name would not be among those listed, for he had been a third born, and thus an illegal issue. He hoped, however, to come across some clue that might help him in his search for his true parents. He reasoned that if he could find the names of all the families who had sired two children, and their addresses (for he knew his parents to be high-born, and assumed they would have lived in exclusive precincts) then he could furnish himself with a list of families who might possibly have birthed him against the law.

But thirty minutes was no time at all in which to accomplish this mammoth task. No sooner had he found the relevant ledger and scanned the first page, than a dour, cloaked official appeared at the door and announced that the House of Public Records was closing in five minutes.

Skating back to the House of the Inquisitors, with the sun a tiny disk on the horizon, Yarrek told himself that on his next free brightening he would search the ledgers from first light to closing time.

~


There was a surprise in store for the novices the following brightening. At the end of the afternoon’s lessons the lecturer, a wizened old vulture known as Dr Kellaway, rapped on his lectern and called for silence. His rheumy, censorious gaze raked the thirteen pale faces of his pupils as he announced, “For sixteen brightenings you have studied hard and completed a series of testing examinations. That phase of your education has now ceased. Your papers have been assessed, your ability established, and it is my duty to announce that just three of you have attained the standards required to be admitted to the Office of the High Inquisitor. The ten of you who have failed will be found posts in the Inquisitor’s halls of administration, which I might add is no disgrace.”

He paused, his gaze moving from face to expectant face, and Yarrek knew that his name would not be among the three who had passed. He could expect to pass his brightenings in dull administration, and the thought of such work in the half-light and chill of Icefast filled him with despair.

Dr Kellaway consulted a list upon his lectern and read out three names. “The successful novices are Burce Madders, Kareen Holgen, and Yarrek Merwell. You will report at first brightening to the porter’s lodge, and an official will escort you to your new study rooms.”

Yarrek hurried to his cell as class was dismissed, wanting neither the congratulations of the failed candidates, nor their recriminations. His only friend was not among the three, and Yarrek knew that his commiserations would be met with stony resentment.

The truth was that Yarrek was amazed at his success, for in his own estimation he had failed miserably to reproduce in the exams even half of what he had retained of the information supplied in the lessons. Could the failed ten have done even worse, he wondered with incredulity?

Thus began a new phase of study for Yarrek.

~


The three successful novices attended seminars given by the eminent Dr Bellair in his private suite at the very summit of the House of Inquisitors. Their presence was required only in the mornings, while the afternoons were left free to fill as they desired.

In the mornings, Yarrek absorbed as much information as he thought possible on the abstruse subject of Church edicts. Every third brightening, the novices were expected to read out essays, to which Dr Bellair listened with an air of studious absorption, and then commented upon with clinical acuity. Yarrek came to understand the extent of the revolution that had shaken the Church. The old guard had been replaced, swept aside by Prelate Zeremy and his followers; traditional, Draconian ways had ceded to more liberal codes of practice. Beliefs that had held sway for cycles were now considered legitimate subjects for discussion, and even for reasoned dissent. Yarrek found the sessions with Dr Bellair heady stuff indeed, after the dull lessons of ancient history, and for the first time he thought he might find work in the Office of the Inquisitor to be ultimately rewarding.

In the afternoons, after a period of private study, Yarrek made his way to the House of Public Records, and there pored laboriously over one dusty ledger after another. Over a period of a dozen brightenings he succeeded in compiling a list of fifty names of families of high standing who had sired two children in the cycle of his birth. He stared at the names and wondered if one of them might bear his rightful title.

~


The following brightening, as he sat in Dr Bellair’s fire-lit study with his fellow novices, listening to the Doctor describe in detail the Prelate’s position on Church infallibility, a sharp rapping upon the door startled them all.

Dr Bellair, ruffled at having his monologue interrupted, issued a testy summons and a poker-faced porter slid into the room and passed the Doctor a folded note.

Dr Bellair read it once, and then again, and then looked up and across the room to Yarrek, who started in surprise.

“Merwell,” the Doctor said, “you will accompany the Church Guard from this building forthwith.”

Dry of throat, Yarrek climbed unsteadily to his feet. Watched by the incredulous students and a puzzled Dr Bellair, he followed the porter from the room.

He was escorted down the switchback staircase from the twelfth floor to the spartan foyer, where two tall guardsmen, outfitted in the resplendent golden uniforms of the Prelate’s office, awaited him.

“Yarrek Merwell?” asked the taller of the two. “Please, this way.”

Yarrek passed from the building between the two guards. In the ice-canal, a liveried coach-sled awaited them. He climbed into the lavishly upholstered cab and sank deep into a cushioned seat. The lox jockey yelled a command and the sled sped off, the guards standing on running-boards to either side of the careering vehicle.

They turned from the Avenue of Creation onto the Avenue of the Prelate, and shortly after that the sled halted in the shadow of an edifice which stood at the very end of the boulevard, almost enclosed by an impressive backdrop of snow-capped peaks.

Yarrek knew the identity of the building, but did not believe that he might ever be requested to step within its hallowed precincts.

And yet this was precisely what the guards now suggested. On watery legs he climbed from the sled and the guards escorted him up a flight of steps and into the private residence of Prelate Zeremy.

They climbed a winding staircase and paused before a double-door inlaid with lacquered frostwood. Suddenly Yarrek knew then that his identity as an illegal third child had been discovered, though quite why that should entail an audience with the Prelate himself he could not guess.

The doors swung open, revealing a prosaic room filled with shelves of books, and an armchair illuminated by a gas reading lamp.

A small man, seated in the armchair, lowered his book and gazed the length of the room.

Yarrek felt a sharp prod in his lower back, and then he was in the room and cowering beneath the gaze of the most powerful person in Sunworld.

~


“Tisane, or would you prefer something stronger? Yail wine, perhaps?”

The face was avuncular, kindly, and the enquiring tone of voice not one Yarrek would associate with the agency of punishment.

“Tisane, thank you,” he said in a small voice. He perched on the edge of a chair opposite the Prelate and stared at the old man in wonder. He was familiar with Prelate Zeremy’s features from portraits, but oils failed to do justice to the man’s warmth. The Prelate wore the scarlet robes of his office, and his hair was long and silver-grey. His eyes, as he stared across at the awe-struck boy, twinkled with what Yarrek chose to interpret as kindliness.

A footman poured two small cups of perfumed tisane, then quietly withdrew.

The Prelate laid his book on a small table beside the guttering gas lamp. “My informants report that you are excelling at your studies, Yarrek Merwell.”

Yarrek stared into his tisane, at a loss for words. At last he said, “I… I try to do my best, sir.”

“We live in an age when the certainties of the past have been stripped away, Yarrek. Study, in such times, is more problematic than usual. Who to believe; indeed, what to believe? The solid shibboleths of past times, or the fashionable mores of the present?”

“We have been taught both,” Yarrek began, and cursed himself for starting something that the Prelate must obviously know. “Perhaps,” he ventured, “we could not appreciate the Church’s present enlightened position if we knew nothing of its more conservative stance in the past.”

Prelate Zeremy smiled. “Well put, my friend. My informants were not wrong in their assessment of you.”

Yarrek coloured and turned his attention to his tisane.

Zeremy watched Yarrek closely. “You are by all accounts open-minded.”

Uncomfortable, Yarrek made a non-committal gesture.

“You will consider improbable notions and not dismiss them out of hand.”

He felt his heart begin a laboured thudding. What was the Prelate trying to say?

“Five cycles ago, Yarrek, we discovered certain facts pertaining to our place in the nature of existence, facts which threw into doubt the very sanctity and dominion of the Church’s teachings.” He smiled and shook his head. “I, personally, found the revelation shocking. Like you, like everyone in Sunworld,  I knew with absolute certainty the provenance of our world. We lived within the shell of an embolism embedded in the substance of rock and earth which went on forever without let or termination.”

Yarrek found himself whispering, “And five cycles ago?”

“Five cycles ago a discovery was made on the outer edges of the very Edge, beside the frozen circumferential sea. A discovery which changed everything.”

Yarrek’s pulse pounded in his ears. “Why,” he said at last, “are you telling me this?”

“You are a brilliant student,” Zeremy said. “You are the future of the Church, I might also say a future arbiter of the laws that govern Sunworld. As such, it is incumbent upon you to know the truth.”

Yarrek could only nod, wondering if his fellow students would also be vouchsafed the truth.

“Five cycles ago,” Zeremy said, “we received a report here in Icefast of a sighting of a creature, let’s say, in the marginal lands beyond the mountains. A harl-herder observed a tall figure loitering in a crevice in the cliff-face, whence it vanished. The herder was too frightened to follow, but reported it to his foreman who in turn notified the bishop. By and by the bishop reported the sighting to the Inquisitor’s office. It was not the first such sighting in the area.”

“But what were they?”

“Five cycles ago,” Zeremy said, “I was a Deputy Investigator in the Inquisitor’s office. We convened meetings to discuss the matter. One theory was that we were being visited by beings — sentient, perhaps — from another world, from an embolism in the matter of creation adjacent to our own.”

Yarrek realised that he was staring at the Prelate open-mouthed, and shut it.

“It was decided that Investigators should be despatched to the margins to explore the possibility of other-worldly visitations. Duly I assigned my sons, Harber and Collan, to the task. They were eager and experienced Investigators, and shared my liberal inclinations. I might add that we were opposed by the more traditional elements within the Church council, who feared discoveries which might subvert the traditions — and I mean by that the power — of the Church. Be that as it may, my sons set out to explore the marginal lands.”

Yarrek found himself perching upon the edge of his seat. “And they discovered?”

Prelate Zeremy smiled, and Yarrek thought he detected sadness in the old man’s eyes. “They reported what they discovered to the council, but it was never disseminated for public consumption. The traditionalists had their way, and had the discovery effectively silenced.”

He stopped there, and then went on, “Three brightenings after Harber and Collan returned from the marginal lands, they were found dead in the wreckage of a lox-sled. My Investigators found evidence of sabotage: a rail had been sawn through, turning the sled into a death trap.”

Yarrek leaned forward. “And the culprits? Were they found and tried?”

Zeremy nodded. “Two known criminals did the deed, but they had been commissioned by elements within the traditional wing of the Church.” He smiled sadly. “It could be said that my sons’ deaths propagated the initial stages of what would become the revolution that brought me to power, the overturning of the old ways and the establishment of the new, liberal Church. Gradually, more tolerant views gained sway, and I had behind me a powerful lobby of like-minded bishops and priests. Investigation into the sabotage proved to be the final straw — the traditionalists responsible were rounded up and exiled, though none of this was made public. To all intents, the revolution occurred quickly and without a single objection, violent or otherwise.” Zeremy’s fingers strayed to the circular symbol that hung on a chain about his neck. “I like to think that my son’s deaths were not in vain.” He glanced across the room at the portrait of a handsome, grey-haired woman. “Nor that of my dear wife, who passed on soon after the accident.”

Yarrek allowed a respectful silence to develop. It would be crass, he felt, to jump in with the question he needed to ask.

In due course he ventured, “And the discovery made by your sons, sir? What of that?”

Prelate Zeremy smiled. “After the revolution, I convened my new council to discuss the ramifications of the discovery, and how it might change things here in Sunworld. I had hoped that my sons might have guided me and my council in decreeing how the truth of their findings might be promulgated. In the aftermath of their deaths, that matter was set aside as too sensitive a subject to be rushed before the people. Cycles of planning might be required to pave the way for what would be a conceptual breakthrough.” The prelate laughed at Yarrek’s slack-jawed expression. “Yes, lad, I choose my words without hyperbole. What Harber and Collan discovered beneath the mountains of the marginal lands will in time change the world.”

Yarrek opened his mouth to speak, but fear robbed him of words.

Zeremy supplied them for him. “And what, you are thinking, was that discovery?”

Yarrek could only nod.

“Words,” pronounced Zeremy, “would fail to do full justice to the phenomenon.” The Prelate stopped abruptly and stared at Yarrek. “Tomorrow, at mid-brightening, I will send a sled for you. Then, Yarrek, we will meet again.”

As if at some invisible signal, the footman appeared silently at Yarrek’s side; the audience with the Prelate was over. Yarrek could only murmur his inadequate thanks, and bow, before he was led from the room and escorted back through the torch-lit ice-canals to the House of Inquisitors.

~


He could not sleep that dimming, his mind roiling with all the Prelate had told him. He did eventually fall into a fitful slumber, but woke early and wondered if their meeting had been nothing but a vivid dream.

He found himself unable to concentrate the following morning in Dr Bellair’s study, for lack of sleep and an excitement that filled his chest like fermenting yail. He was aware of his fellow students’ scrutiny, and even the Doctor himself looked askance at Yarrek, as if wondering at the reason for his summons the morning before.

That afternoon he sat in his cell, jumpy with anticipation. Three times he began a letter to Yancy, but was unable to pen the trite words of affection, his mind full of his meeting with Prelate Zeremy and the enormity of what might lie ahead.

A loud rapping upon the cell door made him jump. It was the same pair of guards, and they marched him quickly from the cell like a condemned man, and Yarrek wondered if indeed that was what he might be, condemned to some terrible understanding denied all others of Sunworld.

The same sled awaited him on the ice-canal, though this time it was occupied. As Yarrek climbed inside, at first he did not recognise the swaddled figure ensconced upon the piled cushions in the back seat. The man wore a thick jerkin and quilted leggings, and a cap pulled down over his head.

“Yarrek,” came the command, “sit down before you fall down.” And at that second the lox-team started up and hauled the sled along the ice, and Yarrek pitched into the plush seat beside the Prelate Zeremy.

Smiling, Zeremy handed him a thick overcoat, which Yarrek dutifully struggled into. “Where we are going,” the Prelate explained, “this will be necessary.”

Where they are going… Yarrek could guess, but was too fearful to ask.

He stared out through the frosted window at the blur of Icefast passing by, a series of smeared torch-lights, monolithic blocks of buildings; the only sound was the swish of the sled’s runners and the indignant harrumph of the reluctant lox-team.

He noticed that, this time, the two guards did not accompany the sled as it sped down the ice-canals. Beside him the Prelate sat back in the seat, his eyes hooded as if in contemplation, his finger-tips joined in his lap.

Yarrek turned his attention to the landscape outside. They were passing through the outskirts of Icefast, past a series of low, mean buildings huddling in the shadow of the mountains. Soon they left behind these suburbs and headed towards the rampart-like foothills, iron-grey ice-fields stretching away to right and left. Yarrek thought of the meadows surrounding the Hub, and the brilliant sunlight. Even though it was after mid-brightening now, the air was lit like twilight. Far behind them, the sun was as small as a pea held at arm’s length.

Then they were plunged into sudden and startling darkness, and Yarrek wondered if they had been swallowed by the very mountain range itself. He realised, then, that this was what had indeed happened: torchlight at intervals illuminated the curve of a tunnel bored through the heart of the rock.

The tunnel seemed interminable. Yarrek judged that they travelled its length for at least an hour, and marvelled at the feat of labour required to accomplish such an excavation. He realised with excitement that they would eventually emerge on the far side of the mountains, and that for the very first time in his life he would set eyes upon the circumferential sea.

In due course he became aware of light up ahead and peered out at the arch of grey sky beyond the hunched figure of the lox jockey. They emerged from the tunnel and the sled slowed. Yarrek peered forward in amazement.

Beside him the Prelate stirred. “Is it not a sight to behold?”

Yarrek could only nod.

They were high up on a road that switchbacked down through the foothills. Far below was the breathtaking expanse of the rim sea. It stretched for as far as the eye could see, flat at first, but, as it followed the curved plane to meet the rim of Overland, rising to form a vertical wall. More amazing than this, however, was the fact that the sea was absolutely still, the waves frozen in great shattered slabs of ice that would never break upon the shore.

He looked up. Here on the rim, where the two plains of Sunworld converged, Overland seemed like a low ceiling. Directly overhead he made out mountains and townships hanging upside-down, as if defying the laws of gravity.

With a shiver he lowered his gaze.

The lox were digging their hooves into the inclined track, to slow the sled in its descent. Little by little they negotiated the tight turns of the switchback road, and perhaps an hour later emerged on the great grey margin of the frozen shoreline.

Zeremy leaned forward and called to the jockey. “Slow, now. To the right you will observe a cutting in the mountainside. Halt there.”

The jockey yelled a command and the lox shambled to a stop. “This is as far as we go by sled,” Zeremy said. “The rest of the way is by foot.”

Yarrek nodded, his mouth dry, a hundred questions frozen on his lips.

They stepped from the sled, emerging into the teeth of a wind that bit like razor blades. The lox jockey had lit a torch, and this he passed to the Prelate.

Yarrek stared about him. The mountainside reared overhead, so sheer he was forced to crane his neck to make out the jagged peaks high above. He peered into the cutting Zeremy had mentioned, and saw a jagged rent like the mouth of a cave.

Prelate Zeremy led the way, torch aloft, its flame flagging in the wind. They passed into the cave, and deeper, the slit narrowing so that they were forced to squeeze between vertical planes of rock. Soon the corridor widened, and he saw that the slabs of natural rock had been replaced by obviously man-made squares of stone.

Zeremy halted before him, and indicated a flight of stone steps that disappeared down into the darkness.

Yarrek found his voice at last, and was ashamed by the note of fear that made it quaver. “Where… where does this lead?”

“This is the way my sons ventured, five cycles ago,” the Prelate said. “I have been here only once before. We are following in their footsteps, and will behold soon what they discovered.”

He began the steep descent, and Yarrek followed.

There was something odd about the steps, he soon realised. The treads were too high for comfortable descent; his stepping foot dropped too far, and his standing leg almost gave way before he made contact with the step below.

Perhaps thirty minutes later, the muscles of his calves paining him as if slit by knives, Yarrek was relieved when Zeremy came to a halt. They seemed to have hit a dead end. Before them was a great square of what at first looked like rock — though as Zeremy stepped forward, and the light of the torch played across its surface, Yarrek saw that it was not rock but some silver-grey substance like metal.

Zeremy reached out, and miraculously the slab of metal slid aside to reveal a tiny, featureless room.

They stepped inside, and Yarrek was startled to hear the metal door swish shut behind him. His surprise was compounded when a lurching motion punched his stomach into the cavity of his chest, and he yelped aloud.

Zeremy could not help but smile. “We are descending through miles of rock at great speed,” the Prelate pronounced. “The technology which bears us is far in advance of our own.”

Yarrek nodded, though understanding had fled long ago. He could only hold his stomach and guess at what other wonders might lie ahead.

Then the room stopped falling with a sudden, bobbing lurch, and before him the metal wall slid open.

This time, Yarrek found himself frozen on the threshold, unable to take the step that would carry him into the chamber.

Behind him, Zeremy said gently, “Go on, you have nothing to fear,” and placed a hand on Yarrek’s shoulder and eased him firmly forward.

They were in a vast chamber or auditorium, bigger than any Yarrek had ever experienced, or thought might have existed. It had been constructed, and was not a natural cavern in the rock, for the curving walls were of metal, ribbed like the inside of some great cathedral. He felt like a fly as he stepped forward, timorously, into the immensity of the yawning dome.

“Where are we?” he whispered. “What is this?”

A hand still on Yarrek’s shoulder, Zeremy steered him towards what appeared to be a rectangular plate set into the side of the dome. As they approached, the plate slid aside to be replaced by a vast window, a plate of clear glass as wide as an Icefast building was tall.

Yarrek stared, but was unable to make sense of the scene revealed.

They moved closer, until they were standing at its very ledge. Beyond the glass was an enormity of darkness, with at its centre a whorl of glowing light.

“What is it?” Yarrek asked in a tiny voice.

Zeremy said, “You are about to be given the explanation that, five cycles ago, my sons were privy to, and myself not long after that. Behold.”

Yarrek turned in the direction Zeremy indicated. Between where they stood, and the door through which they had entered the chamber, a strange and silent figure had materialised.

“Do not fear,” Zeremy said in a whisper. “For all its appearance, it is not hostile.”

Yarrek nodded, evincing valour he did not feel.

The creature was hairless, with an emaciated, naked body supported in some kind of floating carriage; it was not the emaciated state of the being that so shocked Yarrek, nor its nakedness, but the size of its cranium, supported by padded rests on either side of the carriage. Its head was almost the length of its body, a great bulbous pink dome threaded with veins, with at its centre a collection of tiny features that seemed pinched and mean: two tiny eyes, a thin nose, and lips like a bloodless hyphen.

“Welcome,” it said in a croak.

“It speaks our language!” Yarrek said.

The creature’s lips lengthened in what might have been a smile. “You have come so far, and we hope that you will take what you will learn back to your people.”

Zeremy stepped forward. Yarrek hesitated, and the Prelate murmured, “Fear not, for the creature is but some kind of clever projection. A ghost, if you like — not flesh and blood as you and I.”

Not comprehending, nevertheless Yarrek did not want to be parted from the Prelate, and hurried to his side.

They stood before the creature as it bobbed in its metal carriage, and Yarrek was amazed to see that, somehow, he could discern the outline of the entrance through the being’s pink nakedness.

“You deserve an explanation for having ventured so far, and having witnessed so much that must be incomprehensible to you.”

“What is this place?” Yarrek asked.

“You are at the very edge of the Ark,” the feeble creature announced.

Yarrek shook his head and echoed, “The Ark?”

“Your world,” the creature explained, “is but one of a thousand such worlds ranked side by side, like coins along the length of a tube. In each world a different race exists, examples of the thousand races which once inhabited the universe.”

Yarrek glanced at Zeremy, as if for explanation, but the Prelate had closed his eyes, a serene smile upon his lips.

Sunworld, but one of many — like a coin in the barrel of a gun? His senses reeled.

The emaciated being went on, “Hundreds of millennia ago, we began the process of salvation, moving through space from planet to planet.” The creature gave its thin-lipped smile again. “But the concepts I describe are of course alien to you. The universe, space, planets, even millennia.” It lifted a weak arm and gestured. “Beyond the viewscreen is the universe, a vast emptiness scattered with galaxies, each comprising millions of stars, and, around the stars, planets, worlds like your own world, though existing on the outside of spheroids of rock and earth.”

Yarrek felt dizzy. He stepped forward, surprising himself. “The process of salvation?” he said. “Why did you collect us like animals in a zoo?”

The creature stretched its hyphen lips. “The analogy is valid,” it said. “We collected races which were on the cusp of extinction, races torn by futile enmity, which we feared might perish but for our intervention. The history of the universe is that of races coming to sentience and destroying themselves in needless warfare. We could not allow that to happen.”

“And then,” Zeremy said, “you engineered our society away from such warlike tendencies.”

“When we had installed you safely abroad the Ark,” the creature said, “we sent agents amongst you to effect such results.”

Yarrek wondered then if these agents were the angels of yore, which allegedly had founded the Church. What irony if that were so — the formation of a Church which might have brought about lasting peace but which, over millennia, had fossilised to the point of denying the existence of the Ark.

The creature continued, “The experiment, if you wish to call it that, has been deemed successful. Now we can commence the next step of the programme.”

“Which is?” Yarrek found himself asking.

“The time has almost arrived to seed the planets again, to empty the Ark of its precious cargo and allow the races, now hopefully improved, to evolve as they will.”

“You are playing God,” Yarrek said.

The creature inclined its head. “If you wish to use that term, then so be it. We are playing God, in order to save and perpetuate these races.” It gestured, and all around the creature, stretching back towards the walls of the cavern, a great crowd of beings appeared, insubstantial as ghosts.

Yarrek stared, taking in beings of every conceivable size and shape. He saw creatures like crabs, and four legged beasts like lox, and things that resembled kite-fish floating in the air, and great birds, and bipedal hairless individuals with domed skulls.

And then he saw, in the silent crowd, tall, furred creatures like his own people, though more elongated of limb, and grey instead of brown.

The naked pink being went on, “We are the Controllers, my friends, though once, long ago, we called ourselves humans. Our intention was not to wield the power of God, but to empower others to evolve peacefully, to inhabit planets in harmony with nature and with themselves.”

“But when will that be?” Yarrek asked, wondering what it might be like to stand on the surface of what the creature called a planet.

The human gestured to the viewscreen. “The time has almost arrived to seed the cosmos. Perhaps, in a hundred of your cycles, the races of the Ark will be ready and the process can begin.”

A hundred cycles? He would be an old man then, Yarrek thought, if he lived to see the wondrous event. Oh, he could not wait to return to the Hub, and tell Yancy of his find, blind Yancy who had always been more far-sighted than himself.

“Now go,” said the human, “and inform your people of what awaits them.”

And so saying, the manifestation of the enfeebled creature, and the host of the saved, vanished in an instant.

Yarrek turned to Zeremy. To his surprise the Prelate was weeping.

“But you were aware of the truth, sir,” Yarrek said, “and yet you did not tell the world.”

“When my sons told me of what they had discovered,” the Prelate said, “I thought that it would be they who would tell the world… but of course that was not to be. I had to wait, then, until…”

Yarrek stared at the old man, awareness slowly dawning. “Until?”

In reply, Prelate Zeremy laid a loving hand on Yarrek’s shoulder and steered him towards the exit. “Come, my son, together now we have a duty to tell the world the truth.”

And Yarrek, bearing a freight of understanding greater than the mere fact of a race saved from itself, made his slow way back through the rock and ice to Sunworld and the task awaiting him there.


Beneath the Ancient Sun


We sat around the glow-coals and Old Tan, our Storyteller, told us about the time when water filled the valleys and people lived on the mountaintops.

“Millions of people,” he said in a whisper.

“But what is millions?” I asked.

Old Kahl, who was respected for his wisdom, said, “Pick up two handfuls of sand, Par, and let the sand trickle to the floor. That is a million.”

Dutifully I scooped up two handfuls of fine sand and felt the grains squirm from my grip. But I could not imagine that each grain was a person. “Surely it was impossible,” I said. “So many people could not exist.”

Old Tan was exaggerating, of course; he was known to make great claims to enhance his tales. For the next hour he told of mountain peaks that had teemed with people, of valleys filled with more water than could be imagined.

“But how do you know?” Kenda asked with his usual arrogance. He was a big-boned youth a winter my senior, who hated me — and for good reason.

Old Tan shook his head and said, “Long ago Old Old Old Marla, my mother’s mother’s mother, told of her Initiation. She did not go Below, but Above.”

I was aware of the sudden silence that greeted his words. I looked around at the fifty dark faces in the feeble light of the glow-coals. They were all staring at Old Tan, eyes wide, many mouths hanging open in wonder. Beside me, Nohma gripped my hand. I could see her teeth in the glow, smiling at me in excitement.

“And what did she find?” someone asked.

We knew, of course; Old Tan had told the tale many times before. I recall my disbelief the first time I had heard the story; the wonder and the thrill. It had made me aware that there was more to our world than just the Valleys, the Caves and the Bottoms.

“Old Old Old Marla found dwellings high up on the mountaintops, places where the ancient people lived.”

“But didn’t she burn to death!” a youngster exclaimed.

Old Tan smiled. “She wore crab-shells during the twilight hours, and travelled only at night.”

“But the people who dwelled on the mountaintops many, many winters ago — surely they would have burned to death!”

“This was many, many thousands upon thousands of winters ago,” Old Tan said, “The world was cooler then. Our people could live on the mountaintops in safety.”

Our people?

“But how did Old Old Old Marla reach the mountaintops?” someone else asked.

Old Tan smiled. “She climbed,” he said.

“But how! The mountains are steep! And crabs patrol the slopes!”

“She made her way through the upper plain,” Old Kahl said, “where our people lived many winters ago, before we came down here. From the upper plain she climbed to the eastern valley. From there she picked her way through mountain passes to a far away escarpment.”

“And the crabs?” I asked, even though I knew full well how Old Old Old Marla had escaped being nipped in half and eaten.

Old Tan took up the tale: “She took a live goat, and sacrificed it to the first crab. And then, while it was eating, she climbed onto a high rock and, with her sharpened staff, jumped onto the back of the crab. Her weight drove the staff through the creature’s shell, killing it instantly. Old Old Old Marla and her companions ate well that night, but set aside some crab meat to bait other crabs they might meet in the days ahead.”

“And at the top?” a child asked.

“At the top she found dwellings, and…”

“Go on!” we chanted.

“And she found people still living within the ruins of the dwelling places.”

We who had heard the tale many times before smiled as Old Tan said this, for we knew it to be an exaggeration — or call it a lie — with which he spiced the stew of his story.

“She found small blackened people, burned by the sun, who did not need water to survive. They stared at her for a long time, but did not have the power of speech, these poor people, and then they moved off and disappeared. And that is the end of her story, as she once told me.”

“But what became of Old Old Old Marla?”

Old Tan smiled. “She became a skilled Waterwoman, and gave birth to my mother’s mother, and lived a long and productive life. She now gives life to a pearly tree on the Goat Skull Terrace. Its marker bears her name.”

Not long after this the meeting broke up, and I scuttled back to my hollow. Nohma snuggled in beside me and we made love, and later I stared into the absolute darkness and thought about Old Old Old Marla and the people who had dwelled on the mountaintops.

~


At twilight that evening, as the sun went down and the stars showed in a long bright strip of night sky between the high canyon walls, we made our way up to Goat Skull Terrace and toiled. Nohma tended the cacti, cutting slices for the communal meal later that day, and I allotted precious water to the pearly trees.

Nohma was excited. She danced between the spiky plants. Her big eyes shone in the light of the stars.

Tomorrow we were to be interviewed by the Elders, and we would choose our Initiation. Nohma was still undecided: would it be the Bottoms for her, following the trail of a thousand Initiates before her, or more daringly the Eastern Valleys? I had decided to join her in whichever path she chose, but now I was having second thoughts.

I moved along the row of pearly trees, tipping a skull-full of water over the gnarly roots of each plant. I could almost hear their relief, and imagined them begging for a little more. These days the trees were looking thin and tired, and every harvest they gave fewer fruits.

I had been a Farmer for five winters now, and in that time I had watched the land we tended become less and less. Five winters ago we had farmed all the way up to the high Terraces, but that soil had become dry and useless over time, and our crops had withered and died, and then had not grown at all. So we had moved further down the slope, farming land that bore the brunt of the midday sun, but which had not been farmed before. Now that land produced fruit, but wise heads wondered for how much longer. I tried to think of life without the occasional app and pearly, but the very notion frightened me.

I carried water along the row of a hundred pearly trees, and when I reached halfway I rested.

I looked down the valley, and the beauty of the sight brought tears to my eyes. The land was silver in the moonlight, marked by fields and Terraces. And in the valley my people worked tirelessly, all fifty of them, men and women and children, tiny figures bent and busy. I imagined our people toiling in the canyon like this for a hundred winters, a thousand, and the thought reassured me. If we had been here that long, then we would be here, working the land, for a thousand winters to come.

I sat and leaned against Old Old Old Marla’s pearly tree, reached out and touched the marker that bore her name. She had been alive long before my birth, and had defied convention and climbed the mountain to the very top. The thought of it stirred some strange emotion deep within me.

“Wake up, Par!” Nohma said, dancing up to me and cuffing my head. She dropped down beside me and said, “It didn’t really happen, you know.”

“What didn’t?”

“Old Old Old Marla’s adventure. Old Tan made it up. You know how he lies.”

“That’s not true. We’ve all heard Old Old Old Marla’s story many times before.”

Nohma looked at me, her head tipped sideways. “So that makes it true, does it?”

“But why would he lie?”

“To entertain us, to scare us. To make us glad that we live safe lives in the Valley and the Caves.” She paused, then said, “I recall the first time I heard it, when you were still a babe in arms. The story was different then. Old Old Old Marla did not kill a crab — she ran away from it. And she didn’t meet blackened people on the mountaintop. All she saw was skeletons and skulls.”

I stared at her, aghast. “But why would Old Tan make these things up?”

“To make his story more interesting, Par. More frightening. More entertaining. You must admit, everyone was wide-eyed and breathless during its telling.”

I shook my head and stared up the slope of the far valley wall. It climbed and climbed until the high edge became a dark line against the star-filled night sky. “There must be things up there. Things we can’t even dream about.”

She shrugged. “They don’t matter, Par. All that matters is the Valley, the Caves, the Bottoms.”

Her words made me angry, even though they had come from the girl I loved.  “No!” I said.

Nohma sighed, and called down to the next terrace where Kenda cut dead branches from app trees. I tried to stop her while the shout was still on her lips, but not in time. “Kenda! Join us for a rest. Talk some sense into Par, here!”

I boiled with frustration at her invitation. I disliked Kenda. He had loved Nohma before me, being the same age as her, until they had argued and she had chosen me. I feared that one day she might be tempted back to him. He was older than me by two winters, and stronger.

He climbed to our terrace and stood before us, his very posture arrogant. “I’d have difficulty talking sense into Par’s thick skull.”

“Tell him that Old Old Old Marla didn’t really kill a crab and meet blackened people on the mountaintop, Kenda.”

He looked at me. “He thinks that? He believes the lies Old Tan tells? Then you’re a bigger fool than you look, Par.”

I wanted to hit his big smug face, as he stretched out before us, smiling at Nohma. Instead I said, “I suppose you think there’s nothing up there? No dwellings of the old people, no strange blackened beings still living on the mountaintops?”

Kenda stared at me as if I were not worth the effort of arguing with. “Grow up, Par,” he said.

I looked at Nohma. She was smiling to herself. I felt something nasty squirm within my chest, a hatred of everyone, but more than that a hatred of myself.

I stood quickly, picked up my waterskin and returned to work.

~


Day came.

The heat in the valley bottom increased so that soon it was hard to breathe. Overhead the stars were replaced by white light. The sun blistered over the edge of the canyon, striking the far valley and turning the upper, abandoned terraces to molten gold.

We fled underground, to the cool refuge of the Caves. We shared a communal meal of sliced cacti, a sliver of crab meat each and a cup of pearly-flavoured water as the temperature dropped and we sat around the glow-coals.

Old Tan told of how the first Waterwoman — who wasn’t a Waterwoman back then, of course, just a woman — entered the Caves and descended and eventually found water — a cavern full of the cool, life-giving liquid. He told how she, and the team she led, stood at the edge of the cavern illuminated by the glow-coals they carried, and stared at the silken expanse of water.

He told of how the Waterwoman took a step forward, her advance held in check by her fear that the water would be salted.

She took another step forward, and knelt, and reached out a cupped palm. She dipped her hand in the water and slowly, slowly, watched breathlessly by her fellows, raised the water to her lips and took a tiny, experimental sip.

He told of how she stopped, then stood and looked back at her team and said, weeping, “We are saved, my friends.”

All around me a great cheer went up as fifty throats rejoiced at the very first Waterwoman’s triumph.

“And that,” said Old Tan, “was long ago, over three hundred winters gone.”

I leaned over and whispered to Nohma, “And I suppose you’re going to tell me that that never happened, too?”

She found my thigh and dug her nails into my skin, hard.

Later the gathering broke up and I moved to my sleeping hollow — but Nohma was a long time following me. I lay staring into the darkness, my thoughts racing dangerously, until I heard a breath and felt Nohma’s naked skin press against mine.

“Where have you been?” I hissed.

She did not reply immediately, then said, “To Kenda, to see what he has decided about his Initiation.”

“And what is he doing?” I asked, slipping a finger between her legs to reassure myself that Kenda had not been there before me. Her slit was dry and my heart hammered with relief.

She said, “As I expected, he’s descending Below, but to the western system.”

“And you?” I asked, rubbing her.

She hesitated. “I’ve not decided yet. You?”

“Yes, I’ve decided.”

She took my stalk and slipped it into her. “Tell me.”

“No,” I said, and we made love.

~


The Elders were three: Old Kahl, Old Jemma, and Old Old Theka, who was so old she was just a bag of bones propped against the rock. Moonlight made their flesh seem even older, etched with deep lines and fissures.

A dozen Initiates sat before the Elders, awed and silent.

Behind us, filling the terrace, our people sat and waited.

Old Jemma told the story of the First Initiate. This was long, long ago when our people lived on the mountaintop, she said, and youths on the cusp of adulthood descended into the valleys to bring back crab meat and so prove themselves.

Now we did not have to return with crab-meat — that was the job of the Meat-Farmers, who scoured the valleys for stray animals and penned them and reared their young. Nowadays Initiates were sent out to prospect for new water courses Below, or sent to the far Valleys to search for edible plants that might be brought back and cultivated.

Then Old Old Theka, in a voice cracked and almost inaudible, said, “One by one stand and say your name, and answer Old Kahl’s question.”

I sat cross-legged, my heart hammering. I wondered if I would have the courage to go through with what I intended when my name was called. I carried the knowledge within me, burning like a dangerous flame.

The first Initiate was called, and she stood before the Elder and said her name.

“And what is your decision, Valla?” asked Old Kahl.

“I will venture Below, to search the eastern system,” Valla said, and a cheer went up from the watchers.

One by one we were called, and the tightness in my chest became almost unbearable.

Then it was Kenda’s turn, and he stood up and swaggered forward — enjoying the attention of the Elders.

“My name is Kenda,” he said.

“And what is your decision, Kenda?” asked Old Kahl.

“I will descend below and search the western caverns,” he said, and returned to the waiting Initiates.

I smiled to myself. Trust Kenda to go for the easy option.

Old Kahl’s gaze found mine and he nodded. I stood, heart thudding, and stepped forward.

I said my name, the sound catching in my throat.

“And your decision, Par?” asked Old Kahl.

I took a breath. “I will climb,” I said, aware of the indrawn breath of my people. “I will climb into the eastern valley and from there ascend to the mountaintop. There I will follow in Old Old Old Marla’s footsteps and return with wondrous stories.”

I felt the Elder’s eyes bore into me as a commotion passed through my people.

Old Kahl inclined his head. “You have decided. So be it,” he said.

I returned to the Initiates and sat down beside Nohma, and only then, as I turned to smile at her — and beheld her shocked, wide-eyed expression — did I understand the full enormity of what I had done.

Then Nohma was standing and approaching the Elders. She told them her name, and they asked her to state her intentions.

In a daze I heard her say, “I, too, will ascend to the mountaintop with Par, and follow in the brave footsteps of Old Old Old Marla.”

Another hubbub arose from the crowd behind me, if anything louder than the commotion that had greeted my decision.

The Elders conferred, and Old Kahl turned to Nohma and said, “You have decided. So be it.”

She turned and strode back to my side, a look of triumph on her face.

Secretively, so that the gesture would not be seen, she reached out and gripped my hand.

If that were not sufficient drama for the day, Kenda then leapt to his feet and approached the seated Elders. “Beg my forgiveness,” he blurted. “But I wish to alter my decision.”

A gasp went up from our people.

The Elders stared at him. Even Old Old Old Theka roused herself and leaned forward, staring at the tall youth.

They fell into a huddle and debated, and a minute elapsed, then two, and a tense silence prevailed along the terrace.

Fear lodged in my belly like bad crab meat.

At last the three straightened up, and Old Kahl stared at Kenda and said, “Please state the reason for your change of mind, Kenda.”

Kenda swallowed, and flung out an arm to gesture behind him, indicating Nohma and myself. “I… I think that Par and Nohma have made a brave decision. Who knows what wonders they will find up there, wonders which might be to the benefit of our people. But… but I think it will be safer if three people were to make the ascent.”

I lowered my head. I could have wept.

“I wish to accompany Par and Nohma to the mountaintop.”

The crowd erupted. The Elders called for silence while they conferred again, and I willed them to find against Kenda, to rule against his spiteful change of mind.

I wanted the glory of the ascent to myself and Nohma; I wanted generations of our people to talk of our exploits around the glow-coals for many hundreds of winters to come. And I did not want the insufferable Kenda to share in that glory.

Then Old Kahl looked up, straight at Kenda. “So be it,” he said. “There is wisdom in your words. You will join Par and Nohma on their ascent.”

I wanted to cry out in disgust, but restrained my protest. Much to my comfort, Nohma squeezed my hand again.

As Kenda turned and walked back towards us, he found my gaze and smiled.

~


We set off at twilight.

A procession of our people, mainly children, followed us to the upper plain, cheering us on our way. Their enthusiasm had not been matched by the reaction of the adults: some had shunned me in the hours of preparation before we embarked; others had called me a fool to my face, and questioned the wisdom of endangering others besides myself. I declined from stating the obvious: that it was not my decision, but Nohma and Kenda’s.

We each carried a giant crab shell, scraped thin to make it lighter; these would protect us from the worst of the sun if we failed to find adequate cover during the daylight hours. We also carried three gourds of water each, no more and no less than the quota allowed those Initiates descending Below. I had protested to Old Tan when he had doled out the water. “But those who go Below do not have the heat to fear, and at journey’s end they might find water.”

He had merely smiled and said, “Argue with Old Old Old Old Old Tenka, who made the rules hundreds of winters ago.”

In my backpack fashioned from dried cactus skin I carried three chunks of sun-dried crabmeat, dried app and pearlys and some strips of cactus flesh. We would be away for fourteen nights, and I knew that these rations would not last that long. We would be forced to find food on our travels.

We trudged through the sand of the upper plain, and one by one our followers fell away. Kenda forged ahead, the fool, expending energy in trying to impress Nohma. With the broad shell of the crab on his back, and his thick legs pumping away through the sand drifts, he looked like a crab that had taught itself to walk upright.

Nohma and I walked side by side, conserving our energy, the edges of our crab shells occasionally clanking together.

At one point, no longer hearing the chatter of our followers, I stopped and turned.

The moon-silvered sandy plain was quite deserted. The stars were out in their millions, and along with the gibbous moon they were our only witnesses. I thought of our people back in the caves, enjoying the warmth of the glow-coals and Old Tan’s stories.

I shivered and felt suddenly lonely.

As if sensing my mood, Nohma reached out and took my hand.

We left the upper plain and climbed the slope of the eastern valley, following a path worn over countless winters by first crab-hunters and then by our own crab-farmers. Mountains loomed close on either side, shutting out the starlight. Many hours passed as we climbed steadily. Ahead, limned against the first light of morning, I made out the distant mountain peaks. According to Old Tan, Old Old Old Marla had found a track that led from the eastern valley and zigzagged up to an escarpment beyond the central mountain. It was here, so the story went, that she had stumbled across the ancient dwelling places and the blackened people.

The light in the east intensified, gold at first and then white. The heat increased, the humidity making the air as thick as broth. We slowed, despite having to reach the foothills that reared a thousand man-lengths before us. We were panting, Nohma and I, and the shell was a dead weight on my back.

At one point Kenda turned and shouted, “Hurry up! Do you want to burn to death when the sun comes up!”

I ignored him and glanced at Nohma. Sweat coursed down her face. She gave a brave smiled and we trudged on.

The rim of the sun showed itself over the mountainous horizon, glowing as red as an old coal and spanning the escarpment for what looked like a million man-lengths. As I stared, before I could take the glare no more and had to look away, I made out strange tendrils and loops that rose from the hemisphere and whipped about like the antennae of a dying crab.

The valley narrowed. The sandy path inclined and climbed. The sun rose, and with it the punishing temperature. We faced the prospect of walking the last few hundred man-lengths under the full glare of the sun. The shell felt like two men upon my back. I wanted nothing more than to stop and take a long, long drink of water.

What seemed like an age later we came among tumbled rock, and I said to Nohma, “I can’t take another step. I know what — let’s place our shells across two of these rocks and shelter until nightfall.”

She looked about her, then shook her head. “And roast to death? Not me.” She pointed ahead. “Look, the hillside climbs. A short walk and I’m sure there’ll be caves.”

I looked, and said, “Where’s Kenda?”

There was no sign of our companion on the path before us. “I’m not bothered where he is,” Nohma said. “Come on.”

We trudged on, climbing the rocky, twisting path between boulders taller than a man. The sun was beating down upon us now without mercy, and I felt my exposed skin burn beneath its glare. “It’s no good,” I panted. “We must stop. There, look, between those rocks.” I pointed to a likely fissure which would afford — with our crab shell canopies — a small measure of cover.

Nohma paused to look, and shook her head in disgust.

“Then what do you suggest!” I cried out in frustration.

At that very moment, a call from high above prevented Nohma’s angry reply.

“You down there! Look up!”

We did so, and beheld Kenda standing in what looked like the mouth of a cave high above. He was leaning against the arched rock, as if he owned the place, and he seemed to be laughing at our discomfort.

Gratefully we struggled up through the tumbled rocks and joined him.

“We thought we’d never get out of the burning sun!” Nohma greeted him, and looked into the dark, cool shade of the cave. “You’ve found a fine retreat here, Kenda!”

“I wonder if Old Old Old Marla made use of it,” he said, throwing a glance my way.

I ignored him. I dropped my crab shell, my backpack and gourds, panting hard.

We retreated further into the cave and unpacked our evening meal of cactus flesh and flavoured water. I ate slowly and in silence, relishing every juicy mouthful. Later we watched the sun climb, magnificent in its fiery entirety — before the heat drove us further into the cave’s shadows.

That day, in the darkness of the cave, I made love to Nohma with greater passion than ever before, making her shout and squeal and hoping that Kenda could hear everything.

At one point during the night I woke, in need of emptying my bladder. I moved to the entrance of the cave. The sun was on the other side of the sky now, and soon twilight would be descending. I was surprised to find Kenda crouching in the natural arch of the rock, staring down the long valley.

I stood beside him and pissed across the hot rock.

When I’d finished, I leaned against the rock wall and asked, “Why did you decide to join us, Kenda?”

He stared down the valley. “As I said, there is safety in threes. In twos, if one of you were to have an accident, then the one remaining might lose heart, and courage, and weaken. With three, that is less likely to happen. The two survivors would give each other support, succour.”

“Fine words, “I said. “But I for one do not intend to meet with an accident.”

He did not reply immediately. But then he shifted his gaze from the valley and stared at me. He smiled. “You can never be too sure about such things,” he said.

I pushed myself from the wall, moved back into the shadows and pulled Nohma’s nakedness to me.

~


We set off at twilight, moving through a pass in the hills, and all night walked the length of a rock-strewn valley slung between two peaks. Towards dawn, with the sky roseate in the east, we made our way through another pass — scouting all the while for suitable cover. Unlike the previous day, we found none until we had passed between the peaks and emerged on the other side. Here it was I who found the long, low crevice between two great slabs of rock — high enough to allow us to stand, and deep enough so that we could sleep in its nethermost shadows.

We ate sitting on the flat slab of rock overlooking the high plateau that we would cross that evening. I was feeling pleased with myself at having found the cave, levelling the score between Kenda and me.

As I chewed dried crab meat, Nohma leaning against me, I swept an arm at the expanse before us. “Hundreds and thousands of winters ago,” I said, “all this, everything we can see apart from the mountain peaks themselves, was submerged beneath more water than you can imagine. Old Tan tells of the time, many winters ago, when explorers found the bones of armless animals that lived in the water — great long things twenty times as big as the biggest crab! Imagine that!”

Beside me Nohma was staring into the distance, wide-eyed. Kenda looked unimpressed.

“And you know how Old Tan adds fanciful details to his stories,” he said. “For all we know there was no water filling the valleys; there were no dwelling places on the mountaintops. And there were certainly no people living there.”

I wondered if he were arguing against me because he really believed what he was saying, or because he wanted to ridicule me before Nohma.

I stared at him. “Very well, then, what do you think, Kenda? Where did we come from? Was there water filling all the valleys, all across the face of the Earth?”

He sneered at me. “Old Tan’s a fool, an entertaining fool, but still a fool. And Old Hath before him — whose stories were even more fanciful and absurd! They tell such tales to amuse children, to while away the daylight hours so we don’t get bored and fight amongst ourselves.”

“That’s rubbish!” I said. “Their stories are true, or are based on truths. Who knows, even greater things than what they tell might have happened, long ago. Wonderful things! Why, Old Hath says that our people, many winters gone, came across the shell of a… a thing… that moved across the desert like… like a crab on wheels!”

Kenda flung his head back and snorted with laughter. “Listen to him. A giant crab on wheels! Whatever next, Par? You’ll be telling us that our ancestors could fly!”

Enraged, I stared at Nohma. “What do you think. Nohma? You believe, don’t you? You believe that there was more than just what we have now? You believe that once we lived on the mountaintops and had more water than we could possibly drink, and we had things that moved across the deserts on wheels!”

Nohma was watching me, as I ranted, with a sweet accepting expression on her face. She smiled and said, “To be honest I don’t know what to believe. But I do believe that, one way or the other, we might find out over the course of our initiation. Now, I’m tired. Are you coming, Par?”

And so saying, she rose from her cross-legged position, unfolding herself with a sinuous grace, and padded deep into the cave’s shadows.

Ignoring Kenda, I pushed myself upright and joined her.

~


On the third night we crossed the silver sands of the high plateau, passed through a range of serried hills and came to yet another saddled plateau hammocked between two lofty mountain peaks. Ahead we made out, against the full moon, the rise and fall of the mountains beyond which Old Old Old Marla had made her discoveries.

I tried to discern the shapes of dwellings on the distant skyline, but the horizon was too far away to see anything but the line of jagged mountain peaks.

“Where are your dwellings and wheeled crab-things now, Par?” Kenda sneered. “Come to that, where are all the other things that would be lying around if we had covered the Earth in our millions?”

I ignored his taunts and trudged on, staring ahead.

His words made me uneasy. Where was the evidence of teeming life on Earth? Surely millions of people would have left behind some trace of their existence? When you looked about the Valley where we lived now, and looked closely at the Caves, you could see all manner of things that denoted our presence, from carved bones to discarded wood, from the way we farmed in stepped terraces to the trees we planted in orderly rows.

But all there was at this rarefied elevation, between the mountain peaks, was sand and more sand, and tumbled rocks and giant boulders — no sign that humankind had come this way at all, never mind settled and tamed these wild lands.

Perhaps, I fell to thinking as we slogged on through the drifting sands and daybreak approached, as the heat increased and the humidity became almost drinkable, and the crab shell weighed heavily on my shoulders — perhaps Kenda was right and all the fabulous stories told by Old Tan were no more than lies spun to while away the daylight hours and keep our people amused. Perhaps humankind had always scrabbled for existence in caves at the very bottom of the world.

~


Perspiration ran in a cataract down my chest and soaked the waistband of my loincloth. Every step was a painful labour. The crab shell weighed twice as much, I swear, as it had when we set off. It was the fourth night of our travels and we were halfway across the silver plateau.

Kenda called a halt. We caught up with him and squatted, breathing hard. We looked ahead.

Kenda voiced my fears. “Daybreak is about two hours off. How long before we reach the next range?”

We stared ahead, at the jagged line of mountain peaks that sliced into the night-sky. The foothills were many hours away, and I said as much.

“So why don’t we walk on for another hour or so, and then pitch camp for the night?” He dug his bare heel into the sand and said, “The ground is soft. We’ll dig a trench, as deep as we can, and arrange the shells across the top. This way we’ll be in better shade than merely lying under our shells above ground.”

We nodded; what he said made sense, though I resented him for taking the initiative. I saw Nohma regard Kenda with renewed respect.

We drank a little water and then set off again.

We strode three abreast. I ensured that I was between Nohma and Kenda.

At one point he said, “So much for all Old Tan’s tales.”

“What do you mean?” I snapped.

“Dwellings, artefacts — and people no longer human? I don’t see any evidence of these, do you?”

I said, “We aren’t there yet. We aren’t where she saw them. When… when we reach the far escarpment,” I panted, “then… then we will see all these things, and more.”

Kenda laughed. “And what about the crabs? The giant crabs that Old Tan said Old Old Old Marla encountered — three times the size of those back at the Valley? Where are they?”

I shook my head. “I’ve no doubt they exist.”

Kenda sneered. “I have every doubt. And the absence of giant crabs makes me doubt everything else Old Tan told us about Old Old Old Marla’s journey, and every other story he told us.”

“There’s no reason to disbelieve–” I began.

“I mean, all his fine words about the world filled with water! Where’s the evidence, Par?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I turned to Nohma. “What do you think?” I asked her.

She stared ahead. “I honestly don’t know, Par,” she said with a tired sigh.

We walked on in silence for an hour. Not for the first time I was thinking how much better the journey would have been without Kenda to spoil things. It would be just Nohma and I, without Kenda’s constant undermining of my certainties. I had no doubt that he didn’t believe half of what he was saying — he was playing the naysayer in order to rile me.

At our backs, the sun whitened the eastern sky and we stopped and scraped a trench in the sand. When it was waist deep we arranged the three shells across the tops like shields and huddled in the welcome shade. I had ensured that the ditch was wide enough to accommodate the three of us with room to spare; I did not want to have Kenda too close to Nohma that day.

We ate a little of our provisions, drank a little water, then settled down to sleep — as the heat increased and the crab shells tinted the light within the trench a nacreous pink.

Kenda was soon snoring, and then Nohma was asleep against my shoulder. I lay awake unable and, I admit, unwilling to sleep: I did not trust Kenda being so close, and anyway my thoughts raced with resentment. I suspected Kenda had suggested this sleeping arrangement — as opposed to our huddling individually under our own shells — in order for him to be close to Nohma. I had seen the glances he had cast at her breasts and buttocks as we walked.

The heat increased, and hours later I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.

I was awoken as the sun set on another searing day. The twilight deepened. Kenda was fast asleep, but his left leg was outstretched and he had lodged his foot beneath Nohma’s bottom.

I kicked out, viciously, shifting his legs and waking him instantly.

“What?” he shouted, startled.

“Watch where you’re putting your filthy feet!” I spat.

Instead of arguing, or denying what he had been doing, he merely gave a sly, sidelong leer and said nothing.

Nohma woke and stared from Kenda to me, aware that something had passed between us. I suggested that we quickly eat and be on our way.

~


I reckoned that we were just two hours from the mountain range — the last one before the escarpment. The night cooled around us as we walked, and I felt a renewed confidence. This was night five of our Initiation, and we were perhaps another night away from Old Old Old Marla’s escarpment.

I said as much to my companions as we walked.

“We’ll be there by day six. That means we can stay a day before we must head back.”

Kenda looked at me. “And our rations? Don’t you realise that we’ve consumed more than half already?”

I shrugged. “So, we’ll have to eat and drink less on the way back.”

“I think we should get to the next range, then see how far ahead the escarpment is. If it’s more than a day away, then we should turn back.”

He was being deliberately provocative. I kept my anger in check and said, “But we know how far away we are — less than a day.”

He gestured ahead. “You don’t know that. You’re guessing. You can’t see the escarpment from here, Par.”

He was right, in that the escarpment was not visible.

“Very well,” I said, “we’ll reach the range and then see how far away the escarpment is. If it’s less than a day, we continue, agreed?”

He nodded. “Fine. But if it’s more than a day away, we turn back. Agreed?”

I acceded, angered by his mocking tone.

~


I was the first to make out the insubstantial, moon-etched shape that loomed ahead of us. I slowed, excitement building in my chest. The thing was about the length of a long terrace from us, but even at this distance it was huge.

“Look!” I cried, pointing ahead and to our right.

We stopped and stared, and then I led the way, walking fast in my eagerness to be the first to reach the bleached spars and struts of the… thing.

I slowed, my steps retarded by wonder. I looked up as I approached, craning my neck to take in the high vaulting immensity of the curiously bulky and yet insubstantial framework.

We drew together and stared.

“Bones,” I whispered. “It’s the skeleton of some… some great beast!”

“And look!” Nohma said, making a sweeping gesture that took in the creature’s length. “It had no legs!”

The largest bones I had seen before this were those of a goat, white and curved in miniature compared to this colossal beast. I walked its length, and rounded the long, serrated jawbone. I walked along its far side, reached out and touched a high arching rib that curved above me, five times the height of a man. Within the bleached cave of its ribcage I made out its great spine, long and knobbled like some freakish tree-trunk. Through the bones I saw Nohma and Kenda on the far side, reduced by the immensity of the creature’s remains.

I stepped under the arch of the ribs, walking towards my companions through what had been the creature’s belly, and stopped before them. I stared at Kenda, unable to keep a smile of triumph from my face.

“Do you believe Old Tan’s stories now?” I asked him. “Do you think that Old Old Old Marla was lying?” I looked from him to Nohma. “This was one of the beasts that lived long, long ago — many thousands of winters ago — the legless beasts that swam in the waters that filled the valleys — just as Old Old Old Marla claimed they did!”

I moved off, having made my point, and walked towards the creature’s tail-bones.

I was aware that Kenda had followed me only when he said, “Par.”

I turned. He was staring at me with ill-concealed contempt.

“This proves nothing,” he said. “It’s mere bones. Who said the creature swam in water?”

“Do you see its leg bones?” I said.

“Leg bones? What does that prove? Does a slug have legs — and do they live in water?” He flung a gesture at the skeleton. “This doesn’t prove that the valleys were filled with water — just that giant creatures once roamed the Earth.”

Behind him, I saw Nohma approach, an expression of concern on her face. Emboldened by her arrival, I laughed at him. “And yet you were the one denying the existence of giant crabs just a night ago!” I jeered.

“You little–!” he began, and unable to find a suitable expletive he pushed me in the chest.

I was not expecting his assault, and staggered backwards — tripping over one of many tailbones and falling hard against the segmented spine. I saw red, and in rage reached out and snatched up a long, white spar. Without thinking, and to Nohma’s horror, I leapt to my feet and swung the makeshift club at Kenda.

The blow hit the rim of his crab shell before striking his brow, or I might have crushed his skull. Even so, the injury was not slight. He cried out loud and staggered away, clutching his head as he fell to the ground.

“What have you done!” Nohma cried, and rushed to help Kenda to his feet.

“But he pushed me first,” I said pathetically, a sickening sensation churning my gut. I wished I could have relived those last few seconds, wished I could have taken back the strike — and knew it for a turning point in the journey.

Kenda hauled himself to his feet and faced me. Blood streamed from a gash on his forehead, dark in the moonlight. He stared at me, hatred in his eyes, then turned and marched away.

Nohma flung me a withering glance, then turned and hurried after Kenda.

Sickened by my actions, heart thudding in my chest, I set off slowly after them.

~


I allowed them to put the distance of a terrace between us, not wanting to be anywhere near Kenda and jealous that Nohma had elected to accompany him.

My pace slowed as the day broke at my back. We were climbing towards a pass in the mountain range. I stared around at the desolate landscape, thinking that I could have been far underground and cool, prospecting for water. Ahead, Nohma and Kenda were tiny figures, side by side.

In time they disappeared from sight as they climbed between two jagged walls of rock. I began to feel uneasy, out there all alone. I realised, to my surprise, that I was still clutching the tailbone with which I had hit Kenda. I looked around me and hefted the club: if a giant crab should attack me now, I would be prepared. However, despite my brave resolve I felt far from confident.

I passed between the slabs of rock. My shadow sprawled ahead. The sun had risen, and I was thankful for the protection of my shell. We had only just made the range in time.

I came to the crest of the pass and stared ahead. I saw a steep upward slope which terminated in the escarpment, no more than two or three hours distant. Elation swelled in my chest. I looked around for Nohma and Kenda, but they were nowhere to be seen.

I felt a moment’s panic, and resisted the urge to call their names.

Then, to my relief, I heard Nohma called my name. “Par. Up here.”

I looked up. Nohma was standing on a boulder before the dark entrance of a cavern. She gave a brief wave and retreated into the shadows.

Wearily I climbed over the tumbled rocks, wondering at my reception. By the time I reached the opening, I had decided what I should do.

Kenda sat in the mouth of the cave, sullenly eating his rations. He didn’t look up as I climbed over the boulder and looked down at him. Nohma sat opposite him, her small teeth tearing at a strip of dried crab meat. Her gaze flicked my way, her face expressionless.

Then Kenda looked up, glancing from me to the bone I was still gripping. “Are you planning to hit me again, Par?”

I looked down at the bone, then tossed it aside.

I licked my dry lips and found my voice. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have hit you. That was wrong.”

He stared at me. I was aware of Nohma’s eyes on me, too. Kenda said, “You should have thought about that before you attacked. Contrition is all very well after the deed.” And so saying he stood, picked up his backpack, and retreated into the darkness of the cave.

I looked at Nohma. “I am sorry, but he shouldn’t have pushed me. You saw him.”

“He should not have pushed you, but you should not have struck him, Par. Your action was the worse. I hope you know that.”

I felt my stomach turn. Of course I knew that. “I’m sorry,” I said.

She stared at me. “No, you’re just sorry for yourself.”

She stood up and, without another glance at me, turned and walked into the shadows of the cave. I watched her go, gripped by impotent fury and self-pity.

I sat in the mouth of the cave and stared out across the slope towards the escarpment, protected from the burning sun by the bulk of the rock at my back. I ate a little dried cactus and drank a few mouthfuls of water, wondering if Nohma had elected to sleep with Kenda. I was too afraid to sneak into the darkness of the cave and find out for sure, and yet not knowing was an exquisite torture.

I retreated a little way into the cave as the temperature climbed, curled up on the hard ground and slept.

~


I awoke with a start as twilight descended, then memories of yesterday rushed in to fill my empty mind. I recalled attacking Kenda, and Nohma’s reaction. They were back there together, I realised, and felt sick to my stomach at the thought.

I moved to the entrance of the cave and stared out.

I saw movement to my left, the quick darting of a slight, black shape — there and gone in an instant. I stared at where I thought I had seen the movement, but saw nothing. I wondered if I were hallucinating.

I stared ahead again, towards the escarpment — and there it was again, on the periphery of my vision. It was not so much a shape, a figure, as a dark flicker of motion — like the quick flicker of a lizard as it darts into the safety of a crevice. As I stared, something else flicked on the edge of my vision, and then another. I turned my head again and again, but I was never fast enough to catch a full glimpse of whatever was playing games with me.

I was about to retreat into the cave and tell my companions, when I made a far greater discovery.

I wondered why I had not seen it before, then realised that only the strengthening starlight had revealed the object. The length of five terraces from where I sat, on the opposite embankment that rose to the escarpment in a scatter of scree and larger boulders, was a dark, rearing V-shaped object. It was clearly not natural, and I was gripped by excitement at the discovery.

I leapt to my feet and stumbled into the darkness of the cave. I came across the shadowy form of Nohma first, my heart bursting with joy at the fact that she was not curled with Kenda.

“Nohma!” I cried. “Come and see this — quickly!”

She rose and peered at me. “Par?”

“I’ve found something!” I said. “Come and see.”

Kenda emerged from the back of the cave, scratching his armpit. “What have you found, Par? Another giant slug?”

I ignored him, turned and led Nohma to the entrance of the cave. “Look!” I said, pointing.

She stared. “But what is it?”

I shook my head. “Whatever it is, it’s vast. Look, it reaches up halfway to the escarpment.”

“I… I’ve never seen anything so… so…”

She was lost for words, and I supplied, “So regular, so unnatural, so human-made.” I excited myself with the phrase.

“But what is it? Why would anyone make such a thing? And from what?”

“It can only be wooden, Nohma,” I said, and glanced at Kenda who had joined us. “What do you think?”

Scratching the area around his scabbed forehead now, as if to remind me of my moment of violence, he looked across the ravine. I could see that he was trying not to be impressed, despite himself.

“Well?” I prompted.

He shrugged. “A trick of the light,” he said. “How come we didn’t see it at sunrise?”

“A trick of the light?” I laughed. “Look at it! It’s there — you can’t deny that!”

Nohma said, “It’s no trick, Kenda. It’s certainly there.”

I turned quickly. I had seen a shape flicker at the extremity of my vision. “What?” Nohma asked.

“You didn’t see it? A… a quick shape, a black flicker.”

Kenda laughed. “You were too long under the sun yesterday, Par. You’re seeing things. There’s nothing there.”

I stared at him, then back at the rearing V-shaped thing across the ravine.

“There’s only one way to find out for certain,” I said. “Come, let’s set off and see for ourselves.”

I shouldered my backpack, and then lifted my shell and shrugged it onto my back, arranging the straps for comfort.

Kenda made no move. “Well?” I said.

He stared at me. “I’m not coming,” he said.

I was taken by the sudden, rash urge to hit out at him again — and I was glad I had discarded the bone yesterday. “Not coming?” I said in disbelief.

“I’m turning back. We’ve been out here long enough. It was a fool’s errand, from the start. We’ve almost run out of provisions, and I don’t think we’ll find any out here, do you?”

“You can’t turn back yet.” I gestured hopelessly across the ravine. “What about…?”

He shrugged. “What does it matter, Par? So what if we find some scraps left behind by our people, long ago? So what? What does it matter, what does it mean? It can’t feed us, it can’t make the crops grow any better. It’s useless!”

I just stared at him, speechless. I was unable to articulate what it meant to me, what wonder swelled in my chest at the thought of previous generations dwelling in this realm, and constructing great things that we had never even dreamed about; I could not refute his claims, and this angered me.

“But you said that if we could reach the escarpment in less than a day, then we’d continue. And we’d reach it in a matter of hours…”

He smiled at me. “That was before you proved yourself to be a homicidal maniac, Par. I’ve changed my mind. The sensible thing is to turn back now.”

“But I apologised,” I began, impotently.

“I still don’t want to spend any more time with someone who wants me dead.”

“I… I don’t want anything of the kind!” I cried.

He stared at me. “Oh, don’t you?”

And, of course, under the harsh scrutiny of his gaze, I had to look away.

I said, “I’m going. I’m crossing the ravine and investigating the… whatever it might be. And then I’m climbing to the escarpment to see what Old Old Old Marla found there.” I turned and stared at Nohma, and my heartbeat almost deafened me. I took a breath and said, “Nohma, are you coming with me?”

She looked at me, her lips parted as her brain worked. I could not read her expression as conflicting emotions warred behind her huge brown eyes.

To provoke her, one way or the other, I turned and picked my way over the boulders and down into the ravine. I held my breath all the way, not daring to look back. I did not know, then, in my young heart, whether I loved the slight, beautiful girl called Nohma, or hated her.

Long seconds later I heard her call out. “Par! Wait for me. I’m coming!”

Then I did turn and watched as she shrugged on her crab shell and hurried down to meet me, and my heart surged with a combination of victory and love.

Then I saw Kenda move behind her. At first I thought he was preparing himself to leave us, but then I saw — once he had donned his backpack and then his shell — that he too was making his slow way over the boulders to join me. I smiled to myself. I would rather he had retraced his steps and left us, but I knew that his capitulating like this meant that I had won a significant victory.

Nohma joined me, found my hand and squeezed. Under the constant light of the massed stars we made our way across the ravine towards the mysterious, ancient object.

~


Only as we climbed, and the great dark wedge became outlined against the starry night sky, did we realise how colossal it was. I refrained from turning to Kenda, who dallied in our wake, and asking if he thought it was an illusion now.

We stopped at the very foot of the great V and stared up in awe. The thing was embedded in the side of the hill, and I could see that the V that presented itself to us was but part of a much greater object. I approached the sheer face that sloped away above us, reached out and pressed a hand against the surface. It was pitted, and was covered in some granular but dusty substance. In the starlight it appeared as red as Old Gren the Waterman’s hair.

I stared up at the V as it broadened towards the stars; it was fully fifty men high, or the height of two terraces laid end to end.

“What is it?” Nohma whispered.

I glanced at Kenda. Despite his earlier scepticism, he was staring with big eyes at the object.

I said, “It is something… something made by our people, long ago, Nohma.”

“Yes, but what can it be? Why did they make such a thing?”

I could only shake my head and admit my ignorance.

I turned quickly as a fleet shape disappeared behind a boulder to my right. Kenda took the opportunity to say, “Seeing things again, Par?”

I ignored him and gestured towards the slope. A gully or natural cutting rose beside the left-most flank of the V, climbing towards the escarpment. The way was strewn with scree of all sizes, from small stones to boulders as big as crabs. The going would not be easy, but that would not prevent my ascent.

I led the way.

As we climbed, from time to time I stopped to inspect the great curving flank of the V. I made out a line of small protuberances, perhaps the size of my fist, positioned at regular intervals across the surface. As we approached the mid-point of the V — with the length of a terrace to the lip of the escarpment high above us — I made out an aperture in the object. From this hole emerged a series of thick oval objects, each one curved around the next in a great interlocking chain, like a necklace Nohma had once woven from winterflowers. This chain dropped vertically from the top of the V and disappeared into the earth at our feet.

“What is it?” Nohma said, shaking her head.

“I know,” I said.

Kenda stared at me. “Listen to him!” he said. “How can you possibly–”

“It’s a ladder,” I said. “Just like the Watermen use to reach the lower caverns.”

Kenda snorted. It was a strange ladder, I’ll admit that — but I could see how someone could climb the chain by inserting his feet in the holes between each link. And to prove the point I slipped my right foot into the first link that emerged from the ground, then my left foot in the one above that.

Then, wanting to impress Nohma, I swarmed up the chain until I was fully ten man-lengths above my companions. I stared down at them, and then waved, holding onto the chain with my free hand.

Nohma seemed tiny, far below me. “Please, Par, come down!”

“There’s nothing to fear,” I said. I craned my neck and made out where the chain curved over the edge of the aperture perhaps forty man-lengths above my head. “Watch!”

I climbed the chain, inserting one foot above the other and pulling myself up, halting only once to stare down at Nohma and Kenda. They were much reduced now, like tiny ants as they stared up at me.

I looked up. Another ten man-lengths and I would reach the aperture. I wondered what I would behold then, as I reached the very summit of the V?

Taking deep breaths, as the ascent had exhausted me, I resumed my climb. Five minutes later I approached the horizontal slit in the flank of the V, then made the last push towards the top and slipped through the slit. I lay on my belly and stared down the other side. A short drop below me was a level surface, manufactured from the same material as the flank of the V, though the jagged edge of the platform suggested that it had suffered some great calamity. I stared past the torn margin of material, but made out only darkness beyond.

I jumped down and landed on bended legs, and looked around me. I was on the inside of the construct, surrounded by the shell of the material, which was marked by horizontal and vertical ridges, and more of the fist sized protuberances. I approached the aperture through which the great chain curved, stood on tip-toe and inserted my head. I stared down, called out and waved.

“Nohma!”

They stared up at me, their faces pale in the starlight. They were impossibly tiny, and oddly foreshortened from my perspective.

I called down, “I know what this is! A dwelling where our ancestors lived. A great space like a cavern, but above ground. The rest of the dwelling is buried in the side of the mountain.”

“Be careful!” Nohma called out, her voice made tiny by the distance.

I waved again and moved from the hole. I turned and, cautiously, approached the torn lip of the surface on which I stood, and peered over the edge.

I made out a shadowy space, vaster than any cavern I had beheld.

I heard a distant voice: Nohma, crying out. I turned and darted towards the slit and peered down. “Par!” she cried. “Above you!”

Heart thudding at her alarm, I looked up. Above my head, where the sloping ground of the ravine continued above the edge of the V, a huge crab stared down at me with eyes on the end of waving antennae.

It was perhaps two man-lengths above me, its pink shell pulsing up and down on multiple legs. Two great claws, one larger than the other, made pincering gestures in the air.

I lost control of my bladder and felt hot piss course down the inside of my leg.

Far below Nohma was screaming something, but I could not make out what.

The crab moved. It scuttled forward quickly, then stopped. Its claws waved, as if gesturing at me, asking some form of question in crab semaphore. At first I had thought the creature no taller than a man, and perhaps as broad, but now I could see that it was twice the size — a giant crab indeed. Old Old Old Marla was right, I thought, and had time to wonder what Kenda might be thinking now.

I heard Nohma, screaming my name again and again.

The crab pulsed up and down on the suspension of its multiple legs. It eyed me speculatively. I wondered if it had ever seen a human being before, and what it might make of me. A source of food, or a threat?

I had left my club outside the cave, and I sorely wished I had it now. In lieu of that weapon, I utilised my crab shell. Moving slowly, so as not to alarm the creature, I loosened the shoulder straps and pulled the shell over my head, holding it before me in the manner of a shield. Above its serrated rim I watched the crab as it moved tentatively towards me, then attacked.

Pain shot through my arm as its claw impacted with my shield. I staggered back with the force of its attack, then rallied, darted forward and battered at the advancing crab. I managed to knock it sideways, so that it was parallel with the edge of the chasm. It faced me, claws waving, but did not advance. Emboldened, I stepped forward and swung my shield, connecting with a loud clash of chitin. The crab staggered backwards, dancing on its nimble legs and teetering on the brink of the chasm. The momentum of my attack carried me forward. I stumbled and fell… and saw, as I dropped, the midnight shape of the crab come tumbling after me.

Then far below I struck something hard, and very painful, and all consciousness fled.

~


Sunlight brought me to my befuddled senses.

I cried out in alarm and attempted to move myself from the direct glare of the sun. I gasped as pain shot the length of my right leg, and glanced down. A long gash greeted my shocked gaze. The flesh of my thigh was peeled back to reveal strips of red meat and, shining white, a length of bone.

I glanced up. The rim of the sun was edging into the man-made chasm. Its merciless rays struck my lower leg, and its burning touch vied with the pain throbbing higher up. I had come to rest in a seated position, my back against the sloping inner plane of the V. I looked around me in panic, and realised that if I could move further to my right then I should be out of the direct line of the sun, for a little while at least.

I braced my arms against the ground, gritted my teeth, and attempted to drag myself into the shade. Pain clenched my thigh as if my leg was being amputated. I cried out, yelling at my foolishness in trying to show off to Nohma and Kenda. I collapsed against the wall of the V, and realised that, in spite of the pain, I had succeeded in dragging myself into the shade.

Though it would be only a matter of an hour, I reckoned, before the sun caught up with me again.

I looked around for my crab shell, so that I might cover myself in its protective dome, but it lay five man-lengths away, and anyway had split into two equally useless halves. Beyond it, I saw without the slightest satisfaction, my attacker lay on its back, claws spasming in death as semen-coloured ichor leaked from its cracked shell.

As much as I was suffering agonies of physical pain, it was nothing beside the mental despair that gripped me soon after. I calculated that hours had elapsed since I had fallen — for the night to have passed and the sun to have climbed so high — and yet what of Nohma and Kenda? Surely by now they should have climbed the chain ladder and attempted to rescue me?

Then it came to me that perhaps they had made the ascent, peered down and seen me lying inert, seemingly lifeless.

I thought of them leaving me for dead and climbing the rest of the way to the escarpment, then beholding the wonders that awaited them there. Or perhaps, as Kenda had wished earlier, they had turned tail and were making their way back to the Valley.

I felt for my backpack. Perhaps, if I nourished myself on my remaining provisions, drank the water I had saved, this might give me strength to crawl over to the crab, force apart its shell and feast on the meat within. Perhaps, with luck, if I could find sufficient shade, I might bide my time until my leg healed and I could escape from this man-made prison.

But my backpack was no longer on my back. I looked around in desperation and made out its hunched shape three man-lengths away, roasting in the rays of the sun.

I felt despair wash over me in a terrible wave.

I thought of Nohma, and the life she would lead without me. I wondered if she would grieve for long, and how soon it might be before she would consent to share a sleeping hollow with Kenda.

The notion only added to my pain.

I must have passed out then, because when I next opened my eyes I saw that the sun had crept across the ground towards me and was now only a hand’s breadth from my left leg.

I cast about for a welcome pool of shade, and saw none. The entirety of this ancient dwelling place, if such it was, was filled with the molten glare of hostile sunlight — other than the tiny slice of shadow in which I huddled.

I began to weep. I thought of my mother, long dead now, drowned while prospecting for water in one of the lowest caverns — drowned, what irony! While her only son would roast to death…

My father I had never known, though people told me that he was a tireless farmer, taken before his time, a victim of the green plague.

I thought of Nohma, and the life we might have had together.

Then I thought of Kenda, and how he might have seen me lying here, and instead of descending to see if I were alive or dead had instead returned to Nohma and told her that there was no hope. And now he would enjoy the girl I loved, would partner her and raise a family… The thought was unbearable.

I had no idea how much later it was when, the creeping sunlight a finger’s span from my foot, I heard a distant sound.

I shifted my position against the wall and managed to crane my neck and look up.

And what I saw filled me with hope.

A head, dark against the glare, peered over the edge. I raised a hand and called out weakly, “I’m here.”

A hand lifted in acknowledgement and I watched as the figure swung itself over the edge and climbed down the inside wall of the V, using the fist-sized protuberances as hand- and foot-holds.

I saw that the figure was Kenda and I felt a surge of relief, and then a quick shame that I had assaulted him the other night. I watched him climb down slowly; he was still wearing his crab shell to protect him from the heat of the sun, and this impeded his progress.

At one point he paused and peered down at me, then resumed his slow descent.

With Kenda’s help, I told myself, I would be able to climb out of this prison. He would bind my leg, bring water from my backpack. Within minutes I would be on my way out of here.

He paused a man’s-length above me, then jumped the rest of the way and landed in the narrow strip of shade.

“What happened?” he said, leaning against the wall of the V so as to be out of the direct glare of the sun.

“The crab,” I said, my throat parched. “It attacked me.” I pointed to the crab, its ichor bubbling now. “I fought with it, but we both ended up…”

He stared down at my leg, a look of distaste on his face. “That’s nasty.”

“Why… why did you take so long?”

“Crabs attacked us. Three of them–”

“Nohma!” I cried.

“We managed to beat them off. But it was unsafe on the slope. We climbed to the escarpment, hoping to find shelter where Nohma might hide while I came back for you.”

I stared at him. “What did you find?”

He looked away, fixing his gaze on my backpack as its material scorched in the sun. “Not much.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Things.”

“Dwelling places, like this one.”

“Not like this. Smaller.”

“But dwelling places?”

He shrugged. “Anyway, I left Nohma up there. She’s safe, in… in some kind of shelter.”

Elation swelled in my chest. “Wait until we get back to the Valley!” I said. “Wait until we tell our people!”

Kenda towered over me, staring down. His face was expressionless.

I said, indicating my backpack, “Do you think you could…? I have a little water, and some cactus. I’m thirsty.”

He looked from my face to the gash on my thigh, and remained standing there.

I said, “Get my backpack, will you? We can tear it into strips, bind my leg.”

Without a word he nodded and stared across at my backpack. It had been in the sunlight for so long that a small thread of smoke was rising from the material.

Kenda adjusted his crab shell and scuttled across to where my pack lay, reached out and grabbed it and returned to the scant margin of shade.

He looked from the backpack to me, then knelt and tore the shoulder straps from the pack. He hesitated, then said, “Lean forward.”

I obeyed, wondering at the reason for his command when he should have been attending to my leg.

He reached out with the strip of material and swiftly, before I could move to stop him, slipped the strap between my teeth and knotted it behind my head — effectively gagging me. Next, with the second strap, he bound my wrists together. I moaned and put up a feeble struggle, but succeeded only in aggravating the pain in my leg.

Then I was lying back against the sloping wall, staring at him as he opened my backpack and took out my gourd of water, the strips of cactus and three small chunks of crabmeat. These he stowed in his own pack and stared down at me.

I cursed him past the choking gag, but all that came out was a muffled sob.

I expected him to sneer, to gloat, but his face was expressionless as he said, “Nohma will grieve when I tell her that you’re dead — but only for a while. She’ll get over it.” Then he did smile. “I’ll make sure of that.”

I tried to speak again, begging him not to leave me.

“If I were you,” he said in parting, “I’d roll over into the sunlight now, and get it over with.”

Then he turned, glanced up at the sloping wall above him, and commenced his ascent, lodging his feet on the protuberances and hauling himself little by little up the slope.

I watched him go, hatred in my heart; I prayed that he would slip and fall to his death, but his ascent was slow and assured. More than anything I wanted to curse him, but all I could do was gag and sob. Rather than give him the satisfaction of hearing my pitiful protests, I fell silent as he reached the top and disappeared from sight without a backward glance.

I felt a stab of pain and looked down at my leg. The blade of sunlight had reached my thigh and was burning the flesh. I gasped and dragged my injured leg into the narrowing margin of shade. I was pressed up against the wall now. In minutes the sun would reach me again, and there would be nowhere to hide. I leaned over, into the glare, and reached out for my empty pack. The sun stung my exposed arm, a foretaste of the exquisite pain to come, as I dragged the material towards me and draped it over my left leg.

I wept. I had granted myself a reprieve of minutes only. I might as well have taken Kenda’s advice and rolled into the sunlight to hasten my inevitable death.

I watched the material of my pack turn brown and smoulder as the sun burned down. I could feel the flesh of my leg grow hot beneath the material. Soon the sun would reach the exposed flesh of my torso and burn me to a crisp. In an hour, perhaps less, I would be dead — and a day from now the sun would have cremated me, roasted my flesh and boiled my innards. I had once stumbled across a goat that had strayed from the caverns, fallen down a ravine and broken a leg. After one day in direct sunlight it was no more than a pile of bleached bones in a mess of charcoaled meat.

Something moved on the periphery of my vision. I looked up, sure that I had seen a black flash high up the wall of the V. I turned my head quickly. Something had moved to my right, on the facing wall.

I stared and moaned aloud as I made out fleet shapes swarming down the incline on both sides and crossing the sunlit ground towards me, nebulous shadows when in motion and only substantial when they halted.

I stared, incredulous. If crabs were not enough, now these… At least crabs were a known and familiar enemy.

Half a dozen small, stick-like beings faced me. They were half my height, and thin, with limbs like charcoal sticks and disproportionately bulbous heads. Their skin was black, as if burned, and as I stared I overcame my fear enough to wonder at how they could stand as they did in the full glare of the sun.

So Old Old Old Marla had been right — she had come upon small black creatures no longer human.

When they moved, they were a blur. Three of the six vanished in a smudge of motion, and reappeared beside the cooking corpse of the crab.

The remaining three regarded me with tiny black eyes. I pushed myself away from them, pressing up against the wall at my back.

One of the creatures reached out. Its fingers flickered towards my bound wrists and the knotted strap fell away. I reached up and tugged the gag from my mouth. “Who are you?” I asked. “What do you want?”

They were silent, regarding me with their heads tipped to one side.

Then a second figure reached out and passed me something — a tubular black column as thick as my arm and half as long. I took the object and stared at it.

Across from us, the other three beings were dismembering the crab. In seconds they had sliced its shell in two and scooped the meat from its innards. They piled the flesh on the ground, where it cooked in the sunlight with an aroma that set me salivating.

I stared from the black column to the being that had passed it to me. “But what is it?” I asked.

The creatures looked at me, and then stared at each other. One being reached out, took the column from me, and tipped it up while holding it to his mouth. I saw a droplet of liquid form upon the column’s rim and slip into the being’s slit of a mouth.

He passed me the column and indicated that I should copy the action.

I tipped the column to my mouth, and liquid slid into my mouth — sweeter than water, and much thicker, which quenched my thirst immediately.

The three remaining creatures picked up the crab’s shell and vanished, reappearing at my side. They tipped the shell on to its side and worked it into the earth so that it effected an efficient shield between the sun and myself.

Next, one of the tiny black beings knelt and lifted my leg, while another reached out and, faster than I could discern, wrapped something around my gashed thigh. I stared, incredulous. I could still see my leg through the dressing, but the wound had closed and the pain had abated to no more than a dull throb.

Now all six stood before me, staring with their tiny eyes.

And then, instantly, they were gone — but not before piling before me the cooked flesh of the crab.

I called out, sobbing, “Thank you. Thank you, whoever you are!”

It was as if the liquid had revitalised me — though how a simple fluid had done this was a mystery. I touched the invisible dressing that bound my injured thigh; I could feel something there, a smooth substance that resisted my fingers. Through the dressing I could see the line of the gash, which already appeared to be healing.

I picked up a gobbet of succulent flesh and tore at it with my teeth, then took another drink of fluid, feeling its cool sweetness fill me with life and energy.

I laughed aloud at my luck and marvelled at the fact of my salvation. I tried to imagine the expression on Kenda’s face when I apprehended him, when I came back from the dead and exposed his lie to Nohma.

I ate and drank and rested, relatively cool in the shade of the crab shell. Experimentally I flexed my injured leg. I could feel no pain now, and even the ache was diminishing. Perhaps an hour later I felt sufficiently recovered to attempt to stand, and did so fully expecting my leg to collapse beneath my weight. To my astonishment it held firm, without a tremor or spasm of pain. I sat down again quickly, as the sun was burning my face.

I collected the straps that had bound and gagged me, and fashioned them into a harness which I affixed to the crab shell. As I worked I thought ahead, to the time when I would locate Kenda and exact my sweet revenge.

I filled my pack with crab meat and hung it around my neck, then stood and lifted the shell onto my back. It was heavier than my old shell, as it had not been scraped thin, but not so heavy that I was unable to bear its weight. I slipped the liquid column into the band of my loincloth and stared up at the sloping face before me.

Then, taking a deep breath, I began my ascent, using the same protuberances that Kenda had employed. It was a long climb and hard, but the thought of Kenda’s reaction to my resurrection spurred me on.

Once at the top I rested and took a swallow of sweet fluid. I flexed my injured leg, feeling nothing, and climbed through the horizontal slit and down the hanging chain.

There, I knelt and examined the ground. I made out the scuffed marks of footprints, ascending the slope to the escarpment. I looked down the slope, noting the tracks we had made on our ascent but seeing no evidence of footprints heading in the other direction. So Nohma and Kenda were still above me, on the escarpment.

Smiling to myself in anticipation, I stood and began the climb.

~


One hour later I reached the lip of the escarpment and scrambled over its sandy, crumbling lip. Panting, I climbed to my feet and stared out across the sun-blasted plane.

There was nothing but bare earth for twenty man-lengths ahead of me, but then…

Dwellings, Old Old Old Marla had called them — but I had never seen their like before. They were grouped together before me, similar in shape to the domes of a crab but transparent, each one as high and as broad as a cavern. I counted twenty of these vast dwellings, where our ancestors had lived long ago when the sun was small in the sky and water filled the valleys. Now these domes were cracked like bloodshot eyeballs and scoured opaque by centuries of wind-borne sand.

I wondered at what marvels might be found inside, and for a time all thoughts of revenge were forgotten.

Then I saw the double trail of footprints leading from the lip of the escarpment towards the closest dome, and I set off in eagerness to tell Nohma of my wellbeing and assure Kenda that his crime would not go unpunished.

I slowed as I approached the dome, not wanting Kenda to be aware of my arrival. Their footprints made for a triangular rent in the fabric of the dome. Cautiously, my heart beating fast, I approached the accidental entrance and peered inside.

Sand had drifted through the gap and formed a dune, hiding the interior from view. I ducked through the rent and approached the sliding sands, aware by the divots in the slope before me that Nohma and Kenda had passed this way.

I climbed the drift, wondering what I might find on the other side.

I neared the crest and fell on my belly, advancing cautiously and peering over.

The dome was empty, or almost so. Around the edge of the dome were strewn the blanched skeletons of human beings, some complete while others consisted of scattered, disconnected bones. I stared in wonder at the closest, not a man’s-length from where I lay.

And tears came to my eyes, then, as I felt a strange emotion. I was not mourning the passing of these wondrous ancestors who had created things beyond the dreams of puny beings like myself; no, I was mourning the people we had become — for the skeletons of these humans, identical to our own remains in every respect but one, were fully three times the height of those of my own people.

Truly, these people had been giants.

I wondered at the dramas played out in this dome, at the enactment of the tragedy that had ended in the extinction of these people.

And now, in the amphitheatre before me, another drama — on a smaller scale but no less imbued with heartfelt emotion — was being played out between two tiny, puny creatures.

Nohma faced Kenda and cried, her words echoing around the hollow dome, “But I want to go back, find his body and return with it to the valley. He deserves that much.”

I listened to her and wept.

Kenda said, “It’s too dangerous! It was all I could do to climb out of there myself. We’d never manage it with a body.”

“But… But I loved Par! I can’t go back without him!”

My heart swelled, and before Kenda could reply I climbed to my feet and stepped over the edge of the dune, sliding silently down the other side towards them.

Kenda, facing me, looked up and stared. His mouth hung open, and fear entered his eyes.

Alerted, Nohma spun around and saw me, her expression one of utter disbelief.

I moved slowly through the scattered bones of our long dead ancestors and halted a man’s-length from where Nohma stood, staring as if at a ghost.

“Par?” she whispered, tearful. “Par?”

I looked past Nohma at Kenda. “He lied, Nohma. I was not dead when he found me, but he left me for dead, and lied to you.”

Kenda appeared frozen in shock. “You,” was all he could manage. “But how…?”

I said, “I was saved, Kenda, saved by beings with more compassion and more… humanity… than you will ever possess.”

“Beings?”

“The creatures Old Old Old Marla met on her journey here.”

“No,” he screamed, and launched himself at me.

His attack took me by surprise; he knocked me off my feet. I fell onto my back and he dropped on me. We rolled, fighting like maniacs. I was filled with the fuel of the righteous, Kenda with the fear of the damned.

He hit me in the face and I almost blacked out, and he dived upon me and pinned me to the ground. He stared around him, searching for a weapon with which to finish me off for good. He reached out for an old human bone, grabbed it and raised it above his head. He stared at me in hatred and swung his improvised club. I raised a hand in hopeless defence, and the bone cracked painfully against my forearm.

I gasped and saw movement behind him as Nohma approached, lifting something high above her head. Kenda raised the club again, aiming for my head — then screamed, his mouth wide in pain. I stared as a length of splintered bone erupted through his chest and drenched me with his lifeblood.

I tipped him off me, climbed to my feet and approached Nohma, who stood wide-eyed and staring down at what she had done. I pulled her to me as Kenda’s eyes glazed over in death.

“I… I killed him,” Nohma said, staring at his corpse.

“You saved my life,” I told her.

I led her from the amphitheatre, aware of flickering movement on the periphery of my vision. I wondered what the blackened beings had made of this, the latest human drama to be played out in this ancient, ruined venue.

“I see them,” Nohma murmured. “I saw them earlier, but I thought I was hallucinating.”

We huddled in the shade of the excoriated dome and held each other, and I described what had happened in the V-shaped dwelling down the slope, and how the tiny blackened beings had helped me. We ate crab meat and drank from the black column, and as twilight descended and the sun sank, we left the dome without a backward glance at Kenda’s corpse or a single word to commemorate his passing.

We made our way out into the cooling night and set off on the journey home.

~


Our return trek was not without drama.

That dawn, as we approached the cave on the far side of the ravine, we were attacked by two giant crabs. I despatched the first by tipping it from a high rock with my own shell, but in doing so I fell and twisted my ankle. I was entirely at the mercy of the second crab until Nohma, screaming in rage, attacked the advancing crab with a rock the size of her head and managed to crush its mandibles; then together we beat it off and retreated to the cave.

We slept the day and at twilight hurried outside and sliced the cooked meat of the dead crab and stored it in our backpacks. Now we would have sufficient food for the journey home, and the sweet water from the black column.

The following evening passed without incident, and at sunrise Nohma marvelled at the qualities of the black column. We were sitting in the entrance of a high cave, watching the dawn light creep across the valley far below.

“This is miraculous,” she said, tipping the column at her lips and taking a mouthful of the fluid. “It feels, Par, like drink and food combined.” She stared at the column. “And another thing. Think about it, Par — if it were water in here, then it would be empty by now, wouldn’t it? I mean, A gourd holds far more water than this thing, and still it’s not yet empty.”

I shook my head. “It’s magical,” I said, and thought of the dressing on my thigh, and the idea of these wondrous things possessed by the blackened beings made me, for some reason, very sad.

The following day we came across a tall green plant growing in the sand, which I was sure had not been there on our outward journey. From its thin branches hung small blue berries. I tried one, and found it succulent and sweet. We gathered more, filling our packs; we would dry the seeds and plant them when we returned home.

On the day before we reached our valley, we encountered crabs again — but these were no more than half my size, not the giants we had fought earlier, and they kept a respectful distance as we passed.

That twilight, as we set out on the last leg of our journey, I became aware of increased motion on the periphery of my vision. Nohma noticed it too. “Par?” she said, looking around her with a frown.

We were passing down a narrow valley, with high banks to right and left. As we stared, a strange thing happened. The flickering motion to right and left ceased suddenly, and the midnight blurs of activity became corporate. Nohma gasped, and I laughed aloud. A hundred silent, blackened beings looked down at us, utterly motionless.

I lifted a hand in farewell.

And then suddenly they were gone in a swarm of motion, flowing like liquid midnight up the valley and away from us.

That day we slept, and as twilight descended that evening we set off again, eager to reach home now and tell the tale of our Initiation.

Hours later we passed through the high plain, and came to the cutting and stopped on the crest, staring down. Tears came to my eyes as we beheld our home valley, with its stepped terraces rising on either side, and the orderly rows of app and pearly trees. Our people toiled on the terraces, and as we made our way down into the valley they looked up, and then stopped work and called to others in the caverns, and then hurried up the valley to meet us with embraces and a thousand questions.

That dawn, as we sat in the cavern around the glow-coals, I told my people of our exploits, of the giant crabs and the great dwellings made by our giant ancestors, of the blackened beings and their miraculous possessions. Fifty pairs of eyes stared in wonder as I described the vast V-shaped dwelling, and the domes on the escarpment. I told them of Kenda’s treachery, and how Nohma had saved my life as he attacked me, and how later she had saved me again when I had been at the mercy of a crab.

Later, I sat with Nohma at the entrance of the caverns, and stared out as the line of the sun edged across our valley. After a period of silence Nohma asked, “What are you thinking about, Par?”

And I replied, “The future.”

A short while later, Old Kahl and Old Tan approached and sat beside us. “Par,” Old Kahl said, “the time has come to appoint a new storyteller.”

Old Tan went on, “I am old now, and my memory is failing, and it is time I gave way to someone new. You have heard all my stories, and now you have brave tales of your own, and a way with words that I could never match.”

“Will you accept the honour?” Old Kahl asked.

I thought of all the storytellers over the years who had kept our history alive, who had recounted the exploits of previous generations, who told of the time when we did not live like insects in the caverns below ground.

“I accept,” I said, “but not immediately.”

Old Kahl frowned.

I said, “First, with your permission, I wish to mount an expedition. I want to take a dozen of our youngest, fittest men and women and journey back to the escarpment. I want to make contact again with the blackened beings, for they have much to teach us, and we have much to learn, and our people will benefit from the encounter.”

Old Kahl and Old Tan listened with bowed heads, and when I had had my say Old Kahl said, “We must take your proposal to the Elders, and discuss it with wiser heads than ours. But, in principle, I cannot see an objection to the idea of an expedition.”

And then they left us and we sat in the entrance and stared out across the valley.

I looked at Nohma. “And you will come too?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Because if I do not, then who will be on hand to save your life?”

I smiled and fell silent, gazing out across the moon-silvered terraces.

Nohma asked, “What are you thinking about, Par?”

“The big skeletons we saw in the dome,” I said, “and the blackened beings.”

“What about them?”

“Nohma, what if many, many thousands of winters ago, the tall beings were the only race that lived on the Earth, and the sun swelled and burned up all the water, and humankind divided into two tribes. One tribe went underground, to the caverns, and the other… the other remained above ground, and became the blackened people.”

I would mount an expedition, I thought; I would march into the mountains with my brave band of men and women and we would meet the blackened beings, and I would find some way of communicating with these kindly creatures and I would ask them, as we shared food and drink beneath the stars, if we — the cavern-dwellers and the blackened people — were truly once, long ago, one people and the same.

My head swirled with the enormity of the idea.

Later, as the sun burned its way across the valley and the heat increased, we hurried below ground to my hollow and made love.


The Author


Eric Brown began writing when he was fifteen while living in Australia and sold his first short story to Interzone in 1986. He has won the British Science Fiction Award twice for his short stories, has published over fifty books, and his work has been translated into sixteen languages. His forthcoming books include the SF novel Jani and the Greater Game, the collection Strange Visitors, and the crime novel Murder at the Chase. He writes a regular science fiction review column for the Guardian newspaper and lives near Dunbar, East Lothian. His website can be found at: www.ericbrown.co.uk


Acknowledgements


“Bartholomew Burns and the Brain Invaders” first appeared in Aethernet #5, #6, #7, #8.

“Guardians of the Phoenix” first appeared in Apocalyptic SF.

“Sunworld” first appeared in The Solaris Book of New SF 2.

“Beneath the Ancient Sun” is original to this collection.


I’d like to thank the following editors of the online magazine and anthologies where these stories first appeared: Tony and Barbara Ballantyne, Mike Ashley, and George Mann.


By the same author


Novels


Murder at the Chase

Salvage

Satan’s Reach

The Serene Invasion

Murder by the Book

Starship Seasons

Helix Wars

The Devil’s Nebula

The Kings of Eternity

Guardians of the Phoenix

Cosmopath

Xenopath

Necropath

Kéthani

Helix

New York Dreams

New York Blues

New York Nights

Penumbra

Engineman

Meridian Days

Novellas


Famadihana on Fomalhaut IV

Starship Spring

Starship Winter

Gilbert and Edgar on Mars

Starship Fall

Revenge

Starship Summer

The Extraordinary Voyage of Jules Verne

Approaching Omega

A Writer’s Life

Collections


Strange Visitors

The Angels of Life and Death

Ghostwriting

Threshold Shift

The Fall of Tartarus

Deep Future

Parallax View (with Keith Brooke)

Blue Shifting

The Time-Lapsed Man


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“A minor masterpiece that should usher Brooke at last into the recognized front ranks of SF writers”

    
—Locus


“I am so here! Genetopia is a meditation on identity — what it means to be human and what it means to be you — and the necessity of change. It’s also one heck of an adventure story. Snatch it up!”

    
—Michael Swanwick, Hugo award-winning author of Bones of the Earth


“Keith Brooke’s Genetopia is a biotech fever dream. In mood it recalls Brian Aldis’s Hothouse, but is a projection of twenty-first century fears and longings into an exotic far future where the meaning of humanity is overwhelmed by change. Masterfully written, this is a parable of difference that demands to be read, and read again.”

    
—Stephen Baxter, Philip K Dick award-winning author of Evolution and Transcendent


~


The Fabulous Beast


by Garry Kilworth


www.infinityplus.co.uk/book.php?book=gktfb


A set of beautifully crafted tales of the imagination by a writer who was smitten by the magic of the speculative short story at the age of twelve and has remained under its spell ever since.

These few stories cover three closely related sub-genres: science fiction, fantasy and horror. In the White Garden murders are taking place nightly, but who is leaving the deep foot-prints in the flower beds? Twelve men are locked in the jury room, but thirteen emerge after their deliberations are over. In a call centre serving several worlds, the staff are less than helpful when things go wrong with a body-change holiday.

Three of the stories form a set piece under the sub-sub-genre title of ‘Anglo-Saxon Tales’. This trilogy takes the reader back to a time when strange gods ruled the lives of men and elves were invisible creatures who caused mayhem among mortals.

Garry Kilworth has created a set of stories that lift readers out of their ordinary lives and place them in situations of nightmare and wonder, or out among far distant suns. Come inside and meet vampires, dragons, ghosts, aliens, weremen, people who walk on water, clones, ghouls and marvellous wolves with the secret of life written beneath their eyelids.


“Kilworth’s stories are delightfully nuanced and carefully wrought.”

    
—Publishers Weekly


“A bony-handed clutch of short stories, addictive and hallucinatory.”

    
—The Times


“Here is a writer determined and well equipped to contribute to the shudder-count.”

    
—The Guardian


For full details of infinity plus books see www.infinityplus.co.uk/books


Some reviews of Eric Brown’s books


“Brown sketches a complex world full of bitter idealists and fantastic landscapes where nothing is as it seems.”

    
Publishers Weekly


“Eric Brown spins a terrific yarn.”

    
SFX


“This is the rediscovery of wonder.”

    
Stephen Baxter on Helix


“Brown’s spectacular creativity creates a constantly compelling read.”

    
Kirkus Book Reviews


“SF infused with a cosmopolitan and literary sensibility.”

    
Paul J. McAuley


“Eric Brown joins the ranks of Graham Joyce, Christopher Priest and Robert Holdstock as a master fabulist.”

    
Paul di Filippo


“Eric Brown has an enviable talent for writing stories which are the essence of modern science fiction and yet show a passionate concern for the human predicament and human values.”

    
Bob Shaw


“There is always something strikingly probable about the futures that Eric Brown writes… No matter how dark the future that Eric Brown imagines, the hope of redemption is always present. No matter how alien the world he describes, there is always something hauntingly familiar about the situations that unfold there.”

    
Tony Ballantyne


Copyright


Published by infinity plus

www.infinityplus.co.uk

Follow @ipebooks on Twitter

© Eric Brown 2014

Cover images © Spectral and Man In Black

Cover design © Keith Brooke

No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

The moral right of Eric Brown to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.