 
The Long Walk Up From The Beach

by Andrew McEwan

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Copyright 2012 Andrew McEwan

Smashwords Edition

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Cover design by Andrew McEwan

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

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'Science-fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.'

Philip K. Dick

1 \- Umbrella Fargone

Cold as ice, soft as fire, the girl's eyes sucked at my soul. What was that reflected in them? A flower? A scythe? Her lips moved, formed a sunrise, its inverted reflection; and then, as toothy clouds appeared, 'That's my fucking pint you're drinking,' she said.

Chagrined, shamefaced, I climbed back in my shell, became another person, became himself: Sodium.

She was up and down in moments

pulling out her hair,

I was down and out in seconds

knocked right off my chair

Cold beer!

...run it again now

Cold beer!

i - The Amorphous Green

Her arms wore shoes

her skirt was lifted

her sideburns had me in stitches,

her lips were foamed

her ears like biscuits

her tits by wires were raised

Cold beer!

...what I like

Cold beer!

He stood in the doorway, one hand releasing the handle, one hand pulling the brass key from the lock. Noises had frozen him, grunts and shufflings off to his left, crude thumping sounds from the bedroom. Peering round the door he could see through a gap in the curtained window beyond a cluster of flaky brick chimneys balanced on a neighbouring roof like squat voyeurs. Then, chuntering out of the bedroom, hair trailing, down on all fours, came Clarissa, his girlfriend; and behind her, responsible for this clumsy locomotion, was Dan, his brother, face warped with pleasure, hands gripping Clarissa's reddened buttocks, pulling them apart as with each thrust of his busy hips he forced her farther across the worn carpet. Or was she dragging him like some fleshy engine?

Green watched, listened and observed. Dan's hands shifted over her back, slid under her breasts. His fingers tugged at her nipples and she gasped. Next he carefully lowered his damp arse to the floor that had burned his knees, and, drawing on Clarissa's shoulders like reins, righted her position, thighs splayed, hair falling sideways, eyes sharp and open, mouth frightened at first, then forming a smile as she saw what Dan (Green's brother in name, via adoption) wanted her to see. There was all of six feet between them - six feet, only two of which were Sodium Green's, his brother silent and concealed behind the open, lurid betrayal of Clarissa, whose flushed skin failed, as Dan must have known it would, to explode any pain in his heart.

Wrapped around you, darlin'

wrapped around yours,

wrapped around you, baby

wrapped around cars

Cold beer!

...do anything for it

Cold beer!

Green shrugged and walked through to the kitchen. He opened the fridge and took out and upended a half full tin of beans, each sauce-coated node slopping to the tiles like fluorescent hail. The empty can followed, turning hail to sleet. An orange puddle formed.

'You coming over Sunday?' asked Dan, fastening his shirt, pushing it in his jeans. 'Mother wants to see you,' he added casually.

Green edged past him. Clarissa was stretched out on the sofa, still with her legs open, as if in a trance.

Dan headed for the door. 'Girls like that...' he nodded sagely. 'You ought – '

But Sodium was already back in the kitchen, spooning up orange-coloured, tomato-flavoured spheres.

Like living cells, he thought, like worlds.

Dan slammed the door.

Clarissa laughed. She got to her feet, tossing loose strands of mousy hair from her face. 'I'm going in the bath,' she said loudly. 'Sody? Hey - I'm going to wash his stink off me, okay? Aren't you talking today; is that it? This is one of your no talking days. Right.'

He heard the water running on its liquid legs, rushing across the stained enamel, pooling to the required depth. He wondered if one day she'd drown. She was correct in thinking his silence intentional. Green, Sodium Green, named after his own once violent reaction to water, when as a child he would hide; months old and hiding rather than acquiescing to his mother's, his untrue mother's desire to bathe him. 'She tried to drown you one time,' Dan told him years later over a bowl of popcorn. 'But you bit her. I saw the blood. There was blood everywhere. You have fangs, Sody, like a vampire. Dad wanted to put you in a bucket and tow you out to sea; only she thought you'd return, green and slimy, green and Green, a mouldy ghost.'

The beans crowded his palms with stickiness and he held his hands under the tap, half expecting them to sizzle. He should hate Dan, he knew, he should hate his mother, Clarissa, himself even, but he didn't. What he felt was ambivalence. He cared, or sensed he cared, only what he cared about, the far and the miniature, seemed possessed of so little reality.

Green was concerned with detail. It interested him: the key in the lock, the door handle, how and which way it turned, the hinges, the faint pattern, lost in the worn carpet, the shapes of redness on Dan's and Clarissa's knees as the friction mounted, caused their skin to heat, a heat exceeding even that of their junctured loins, Dan inside her, Clarissa outside him, as a single independent unit, functioning. He discerned a beauty in that. They danced for him in their base fashion, their abstract manner. And their motives? Dan's were clear, he was scared of Sodium, a fear neither brother understood. It was fear that drove him, made him want to hurt his younger sibling, a fear, perhaps, of love. Clarissa on the other hand loved nobody. She tolerated Green because Green demanded nothing and expected less. She was happy, and as long as she was happy, she didn't give a shit.

'Wash my back!' she shouted from the bathroom. 'I want you to wash my back for me - hurry!'

And after? Maybe she'd want to fuck. Maybe not. Maybe she'd want to go out. Maybe she'd want to watch television, read a book, or some combination of the above. Maybe not. Green ignored her, slicing bread, the knife's motion through the white loaf not unlike his brother's through his girlfriend. It made him smile. He thought about killing her, but not for long. He shrugged a second time and pasted waxy margarine on his doorstep.

Girlfriend? Wait a minute. No girlfriend of mine. And I don't have a brother either, he realized; I'm the nobody Clarissa doesn't love.

Later, asleep, he floated. Tongues, Clarissa's, woke him. They slithered from her mouth, creeping, entwining him like manic worms. They strangled his cock and roped his legs, clambered on top of him. Smelling of perfume they heaved and sucked at him until he quivered, collapsed, jerked again and again; then retracted, dry.

Cold beer!

...run it again now

Cold beer!

When the sun found him, he was alone. No sign of Clarissa. No scent. No animal trace.

Only stains.

Green swung his legs out from beneath the covers.

Outside in the street bustle reigned. Town was actively seeking life, shape and form. He blended with its tide, became its human face. The people flowed past ten and twelve deep, every one a stranger, expressions ranging from sour to bored to delirious. They cast reflections in shop windows. On the far side of these panes of glass articles were displayed, bizarre wares, multifarious creatures in a plastic and aluminium zoo, fenced by stone and wood, held captive till a sympathetic consumer bought them from confinement. Sodium checked his pockets and found he had enough cash to liberate a cup of coffee (trapped in a steaming, hissing tower of bright steel) and a sticky bun.

It was October, and chill. His breath coiled from his nostrils as next he wandered down to the Quay. The river lay silent and brown, like Clarissa's eyes, shadowed by bridges whose ironwork and pillars cast alien geometries onto the dirty water.

Sodium turned his back on it and jogged toward Castle Stairs. Reaching the top, leaning on the central railing, he paused to catch and soothe his lungs and listen to the feet ascending behind him. The view down was mostly blocked by ancient walls, decayed fortifications, the stair itself passing through a sandstone arch only ten yards away. He wondered if the feet belonged to the same man who had been dogging his steps the previous day, his day of silence.

The sound abruptly ceased.

'I can hear your guts churning!' yelled Green. 'I can hear your breakfast!'

And mine, he added, and mine.

Somewhere nearby a traffic warden released a car wiper; it struck the windscreen wetly, the ticket pinned. He shook his head and snapped into a run. The breeze he created grew with his acceleration, divided to avoid him, a force which sought to mould, model his limbs and features into another guise, perhaps one of post-box or lamp-post, road sign or litter bin. It felt good whatever it was. His eyes streamed in the cold air and his lungs, newly recovered, expanded to accommodate the glut. The soles of his shoes turned moist, liquid, and the pavement softened, yielding to his toes. Faces swivelled in his direction. Green was the merest smudge on their hunting antennae, their scanning consciousness, an imprecise, non-registering fact of passage.

He devoured motion. Motion painted a grin. He veered sharply right into Mosely Street, on through the mindless traffic and next left up Grey, unwinding the flashing yards like watercolours, a realm ironically barren of detail, but one nevertheless loved.

Speed he had. In the crowded city centre he slowed, and here the detail flooded back.

Green approached the blue doors automatically. Shoving them open he felt a wave of heat.

Green was in the bookshop again, looking up worlds, places he might wish to visit someday. He'd bounced down the stairs to the basement, glanced sidelong to where he hoped to see the assistant, her dark eyes and hair, slim body and zitty neck.

She wasn't there. He didn't know her name; it didn't seem to matter. She'd worked in another bookshop previously and then vanished, leading Green to think he'd lost her. But this was a new shop, recently opened, and in its blue-shelved basement she'd emerged, thin and cute as ever.

'Remember me?' a voice said.

ii - Rain Rain Rain

He was broad and high and wore a tan raincoat. Sodium got the impression that colour was rust over grey. The fibre had an unnatural sheen to it. His shoes gave him away. Green had no need to see them move or hear the sound they made, he knew already.

How had he managed to catch up?

'You come here a lot,' the man said.

Sodium refused to answer. He glanced around, browsed among the titles, pulled a book out at random.

'And Then The Universe,' read the man in the raincoat; 'by Ernest Jackett. A good choice.'

'What do you want?'

It all started quietly enough.

'Want, Al? I've come to give.'

The mother of stars fluxed.

Green toted the book. The weight in his hand felt at once far and miniature, a borrowed sensation, as if through another's fingers. He stared at the blank cover and descried the sweeps and whorls of rainbow-hued grease those fingers had left; images dulled, close yet distant, near yet impossible to touch.

Streaming outward from the core

'My name isn't \- '

were a thousand brilliant

'Isn't what, Al?' goaded the raincoated figure. 'I said I'd come for you when I thought it was safe, and here I am - in the flesh.' He said the last loudly, stifling a laugh, a gesture both incongruous and false.

'Why have you been following me?' Green attempted to relax, his body having tensed involuntarily. He spoke as a means of defense.

gases, a thousand

'I wanted to make sure no-one else was. I'm sorry if none of this makes any sense right now, Al, but it'll come. You wired this yourself.'

colliding pathways and interconnecting hearts.

'I did?'

'Sure; all your own work.' The man's collar was raised, his neck thick and head bald. 'Had your reasons, I suppose.' He sounded unconvinced.

Sodium replaced the book on the shelf.

The man took this as his cue. 'Okay,' he said. 'You live near here. Let's go.'

And they went.

Outside the sun was lost behind a dense hedge of cloud. It must have been close to noon, and the only solid-looking person on the street, thought Green, was - who?

'What's your name?'

'Huh?'

'I said \- '

'Oh!' He shuffled about, confused. 'Rain.'

'Rain?' Rain? You?

'Yes.' The street appeared to disturb his equilibrium. 'Look, can we get out of this?'

It was Sodium's turn to be confused. 'Why?' He said it bluntly, stopping dead. 'Why the fuck should I go anywhere with you? Tell me something to make me want to move.'

Rain stuffed his meaty hands in his ample pockets and glowered a moment before producing in one a small misshapen globe overlaid with a crude map of the world and in the other, unmistakably, a gun. 'I don't want to shoot you, Al, but it could happen. So...'

Green wasn't listening. The globe was shaped roughly like a head; rounder, smoother, but a head. The map upon it was familiar, too.

Colour was everywhere.

'And everywhere was colour,' he said.

The man's posture steadied. 'Go on,' he encouraged. 'There's more.'

It lived. It died.

'It died. It lived.'

'Yeah, yeah - only now it's a mess, a big bright beautiful mess, eh? It rattles like an old man farting. It does this, it does that. It spews and it cracks. The universe, Al, is on its last legs.'

Green held Rain's gaze briefly. Sometime later he sensed water running down his back. It carried him away.

There was a briefcase on the sofa where Clarissa had been. In the cramped kitchen pans shone dully. The bed was made. Green walked around the flat as if to sniff the changes out, rediscover his recent past. He wondered what he meant by that. His earliest memory was of the ocean, the ancient caravan, the peeling-paint caravan park on the coast, where ended the land in undulating cliffs; like croutons, the land a hunk of moist toast afloat on a great bowl of cold soup, slowly eroding, prey to tides and currents.

Assailed, as Sodium was assailed, he thought, a pain skipping through his brain.

'Sit down,' Rain said. Green sat. 'Now.' The broad man opened the briefcase with a smile.

It all started quietly enough, Green recalled: he fell from his mother's womb and she wrapped him up. Then what? His mother left; he had a new mother, a family. Dan came screaming in from the snow, flakes of it melting into tears and running down his cheeks. Sody was caught off guard - Dan tipped cold ice...and he could remember nothing more after that. He was sick for ages, a fever, burning. Streaming outward from the core were a thousand brilliant gases, spiralling round his head, a thousand colliding pathways and interconnecting hearts, smashing into each other. Colour was everywhere. The room filled with colour. Everywhere was colour. It lived. It died. It lived. The mother of stars fluxed. Yeah...and the noise was unbearable, the sounds in his mind crushing his voice as it rose in protest, crushing his heart and leaving only the desperate coldness of the ice.

'Al? We can't afford to lose you a second time. We came so close before.'

Green peered at his hands, rubbed them, explored their shape and texture. His senses permeated his body. Looking, he told himself. For what?

You wired this yourself.

'Rain?'

'Here.'

'Did they bury me on Oyster?'

'I don't know. Maybe. I can find out.'

'Good.' He spoke quietly, measuring each word.

'The shrimps, Al,' Rain said presently. 'They did fine work. A first-class job, wouldn't you agree?'

The mother of stars.

On its last legs.

Al. Hey. Fuck - cold beer! Everybody wants some. Cold beer!

Coming unglued?

'This is a man-made universe,' Green said.

iii - New Boy Newboy

He'd felt uneasy on arriving. This was the real thing, his first posting. He'd graduated.

The old man he thought disgusting. His name was Miller and his carcass lumbered ungainly every time he chose to use its rubber legs. Newboy was proud of his own shell. It had been a present from his father; a fully operative, multi-purpose outfit with more than a few tricks up its sleeve. He revelled in it, the technology state-of-the-art, the design subtle and, in Newboy's opinion, devastating. It was almost a shame to waste such an outfit on what was little more than a routine tour of duty. The planet was normal enough, an off-limits tagged Fargone, its blue and green-brown superficies overflown by the (from the ground) invisible umbrella.

What Newboy needed, Newboy decided, was excitement, for something out of the ordinary to happen.

A screen blinked. Miller. 'A bulb in corridor six,' the old man instructed. 'Jump!'

Newboy uncoiled with a shimmer.

'Come on, Al. How close do you feel to all this?' Rain included the room and beyond in the sweep of his arm.

'I live here,' Green protested. He felt invaded.

Rain came and stood next to him. 'I thought I explained that. What did I leave out?'

'Proof,' replied the man who was not himself.

Rain brought the globe from his pocket, tossed it in his palm, then replaced it. 'Proof's waiting,' he said. 'You want proof, come and find it.'

'And Clarissa?'

'Shit. Suddenly you care? You care for umbrellas?' He grew fidgety, increasingly impatient.

I'm scaring him, thought Green, just like I always scared Dan. He has that flustered look in his eyes. What am I doing? Not staying, I know that now. So why the delay? Not Clarissa, surely? Something about Rain...

'We don't have that much time, Al. Everything's arranged for,' he paused, 'today.'

Green disappeared into the bathroom. His piss skated in a long curve around the bowl before slithering into the water at its bottom. He flushed the toilet, aware of the broad man, aware of the paths open and the paths closed to him, aware of his own beating heart, heavy in his chest like a cannonball, a shell primed and loaded, ready to be shot from this island's beach to another, some exotic shore, or perhaps no shore at all but an endless, punishing succession of unstable rafts, their inexplicable hulls floating like debris.

Suddenly he realized: he was frightened also. The moment of fear he'd detected in Clarissa's face when Dan had lifted her, naked, exposed, was simply a reflection of Green's disquiet, Green's inherent doubt. It accounted for his brother's hostility, his mother's desperate wailing, when, as a child, he'd offered only vague curiosity at his father's death. But here was a way out. Rain, whoever Rain was, provided him with an escape route. If he was to be shot from a canon, he reckoned, it might as well be a canon unknown to him and therefore one whose target, whose fuse, whose powder was equally a mystery, even if that very mystery (and perhaps because of it) was in a distant fashion responsible for his present ills, his past life. It had shape to it, he supposed, more shape than he had himself, more shape than ice and fire, more shape than lust.

'This is a man-made universe,' Green said. 'On its last legs.'

So get going. Fast.

Newboy rummaged in the dark, opening box after box and finding each one empty. It was ironic, he thought, that he should be stumbling about, sightless, in a storeroom used exclusively for light-bulbs. He had tried squeezing some rays from his fists, but had yet to master the finer points of this shell, and succeeded only in starting a small fire among the countless discarded packs, strewn over the floor like cast-offs from paper crabs.

Eventually, after wasted minutes, wasted bulbs crushed underfoot, he located a virgin batch. Tearing away the cover he had the peculiar sensation of being watched. The outfit, Newboy recalled, they had this way of haunting you, as if they were really alive. It was something more to get used to. It would fade in time, once the shell fully mapped itself to his true body, a thing Newboy had no wish to think about. But then who did? He shivered, unpacked a bulb and reached up in order to locate the fitting. That done, light bursting, he took a second crystal globe and, dumping the batch near the door, headed for corridor six and Miller's dream. A shade-twister was the old man; he belched sparks, fusing bulb upon bulb, faster than Newboy could replace them, the encroaching dark bleeding solidity from the umbrella, causing, in Newboy's opinion, the station to display its vacuous wounds to the outside, forms and signatures that might be picked up on watery Fargone. But Miller was the old man, he did what he liked. 'Nobody gives a shit what goes on out here,' He'd told Newboy. 'Least of all the umbrella'd. You know why we're sheltering them? Why they're off-limits?'

'Yes, sir,' answered Newboy, eager to please, the smell  of the old man yet to hit him. 'The gene pool. The umbrella'd represent human evolution at its most basic. No external interference can be permitted in order to preserve the natural  balance of competing traits and instabilities. It's vital \- '

'Garbage,' said Miller.

'Sir?' Newboy was taken aback, his idealism dented.

'Nobody gives a fuck about the gene-pool,' the old man told him levelly. 'That's just something they teach you in school, kind of propaganda; it's history, you understand? Down there, on that miserable planet, is nothing more than people. Stupid people. Okay? Take it from one who knows, kid: they're worthless, their planet's worthless; there's zero happening down there, hasn't been for ages. It's stale.'

Newboy scratched himself. 'And the umbrella?' My posting here? he added mentally, not wanting to hear.

The old man smiled. 'Garbage,' he repeated. 'But don't worry, kid, you'll get used to it.'

Used to changing light-bulbs, the graduate now knew, used to corridors one to nine, used to being used.

The dimness in corridor six was irritating. Newboy stood beneath the fused bulb, biting his lip. He could clearly see the readouts, projected as they were into his skull, and the readouts informed him there were others besides himself and Miller on board the station. He should have left the readouts when he went bulb scavenging. They still fed his brain with knowledge, its entirety useless until a moment ago, its total abstract and unremarkable, a mass of symbols, representative troughs and peaks, figures denoting the mutation of stock cells, the failure of earlier advances. Garbage, the old man said; and Newboy agreed. But this? Someone, some two, he corrected, had gained access to the umbrella, access where no access (direct from Fargone - umbrella'd to umbrella) ought to be.

His mouth was dry with excitement. He dropped the bulb and sprinted, ran straight into Miller and the intruders, the old man's feasting smile, sparks from his nostrils to put Newboy's lights out.

Temporarily.

'What did I tell you, Al,' said Rain. 'Brand-new!'

Green folded his arms. In trying to come to terms with the last few hours he'd discovered that folding his arms was about all he could safely do.

The raincoated man slapped his shoulder. 'Well, what are you waiting for? See if it fits.'

The other man, Miller, laughed. 'You're forgetting something,' he grunted, stunning Green with his breath. 'The shell has an occupier, eh? You'll have to winkle him out first before your friend here goes any further.'

Rain faced him. 'I thought you were supposed to take care of that?'

'Well,' dodged Miller; 'it's not so easy. Kid like that, he never steps outside. It's education; they raise them shy in his home enclosure.'

'Okay, okay. Al, give me a hand. You too, Miller. Hinge the arms - you got it? Right, on the count of four.'

Sodium grimaced. The old man wrinkled. Rain licked his lips.

'Ready?' He got no reply, only a squirming.

Pull, thought Green; if that's what it takes, do it.

The unconscious form juddered, became unrecognizable, pliant and strange.

'How's it feel?'

He bounced around a few more times, revelling in the experience, wondering what Dan would make of this. A shell, Rain called it. A body, to Sodium's mind, one he'd climbed inside, sealed and activated after its previous owner (feeble, disorientated) had been prised loose like a whelk. He wasn't dead, Miller reassured him, 'Just a little dazed; he'll get over it.'

Green wasn't sure if he should believe the old man. He tested his joints again, one at a time, a body-snatcher, a thief of muscle and, he guessed, secreted wiles, faculties over and above those normally endowed a man. He'd experiment soon, Green decided, and suss them out. For the present though, he make do with a new set of legs.

Wrapped around you, darlin'

wrapped around yours,

wrapped around you, baby

wrapped around cars!

Yeah – taken over

Cold beer!

...do anything for it

Cold beer!

...what I like: is motion, confirmed Sodium Green.

2 - Ball of String

i – Pinware

Sodium ate and slept, was hungry and tired. He dreamed of far places and miniature people, their ravenous, sleepy lives. He constructed worlds for them in his head built of rusty girders and hollow wire. His body writhed, curled inside his shell, and his mind took a long hard look at itself. What it found was a number of irregularities, foreign shoots, buds of an unfamiliar and related kind, recently awoken. Also, orbiting his brain like a satellite, was an altogether different kind of reasoning, something neither the old or new Greens could comprehend. Its name, this entity's, was Vod, and it was spawned of Enclosure Triultimate Prime.

Newboy would have understood it \- but Newboy was elsewhere, beginning, like Green, another life.

'You wired this yourself,' dreaming Sodium said. 'They had you, but you escaped. If only we hadn't visited Oyster,' he remonstrated. 'That was a mistake.'

Rain, listening, softened his features. 'You're right, Al, we should've chanced it, gone for the big one and not messed around. We couldn't be worse off. Dead maybe; but death isn't so bad. Only, sitting here, hearing you, Al, I get the distinct impression you're developing a conscience.' And a conscience, Rain knew, could slow a person down, make them hesitate. 'So up out of it, Al, or I'm going to kill you.'

ii - The Viewing Room

Rain had his briefcase open again. The last time, in Sodium's flat, this item of luggage had begun unfolding rectangular sections, transparent panes, first to one side and then another, building in ever larger pieces a hazy strata, a fraction above the floor, furniture upon it, next vertically, shielding the walls, squares covering doors and window; and finally, when all else was completed, the ceiling. Thereafter the sections grew opaque, as if someone had whitewashed the interior having initially blocked the symmetry-breaking apertures with sheets of hardboard or polythene.

When the pieces folded back Green's sofa, lamp, table and chairs were in a different room, one previously unfurnished, blank metal walls the shade of lead.

The severed light cord, its light-bulb popped as it struck the floor.

'It has only a limited range,' Rain had told him in response to his inquiries. 'And you need a specific destination in order to set up the receiver.'

Which was?

'You'll see.'

There was a snap, the sound paper makes when pulled suddenly taut, and they were on the station Umbrella Fargone, the purpose of which had left Green oddly perturbed. An almost welcome emotion.

They were in the lead room now. The furniture was still in place. A row of bulbs recessed into the ceiling provided the illumination. Sodium's wandering eye latched onto a roll of sticky tape. Must've fallen off the table, he thought, retrieving, dropping it a pocket of his reddish-brown shirt, sat with his forearms on his knees as he waited to see what rain had in store for him.

The briefcase exhibited no outward signs of activity.

But Rain was gone; Rain as Green had come to know him. Had he been paying attention he might have observed the woman's entrance. As it was, Sodium felt sure she'd materialized out of thin air. She was small, a size, he deduced, that could fit easily inside the broad and high, raincoated figure, the man whose shoes had met the city pavements all too soundly.

'Hello, Al.' she said. 'Been a long time.'

Her name, he knew, was Bella. If he were to lean forward, peer within the briefcase, he would see, impossibly, the emptied space of his living-room, in miniature.

'Well aren't you going to say anything?' she questioned testily. 'Did I wrestle loose of that outfit for nothing?'

Is this one of my silent days? he pondered.

Bella came and sat with him on the sofa, its floral pattern rejuvenated, set off against the dour backdrop like sprays of blossom before a gravestone. She frowned, reminding Sodium of tempestuous Clarissa. Had she returned to the flat? he asked himself. And if so, what had she made of the neatly cut light-cord, the missing furniture?

Bella kissed him. She was right, it had been a long time, longer than he knew.

'Your sense of the dramatic,' he pronounced, remembering with sudden, unexpected clarity, 'is as impressive as ever.'

She got to her feet, agile. 'Which, Al, is more than I can say about you. But then you were never the kind to remain in the same place - to remain still, housed in the same shell long enough for a change in the weather. Which,' she went further, 'is why I'm always having to steer you clear of trouble.'

What would you do without me, Green? she was really saying. Her obvious guile made him suspicious. Should he, could he trust her? How many lies had she fed him? How many deceits and inaccuracies had Bella, as Rain, triggered in his head? A disturbing feeling roused itself within. Me, thought Sodium, that's me in there, wriggling. He stared down at unfamiliar plates of muscle, barely concealed by his shirt. He wore loose trousers in hue more brown than red; older, he guessed, worn, coloured by that same rusty sheen (vaguely metallic) he'd detected overlaying the raincoat like some exotic veneer, its accretion one of iron-rich sweat.

And I'm naked in here, he added, out of control. Too new at this game, too vulnerable.

They didn't teach you that in school, baby,

how to make a fool from a man;

'cause all you got to do is smile, baby,

and their minds become unsound...

Did I wake up?

All the lights had fused; he couldn't recall when. He lay sprawled on the sofa, feet dangling, next stiff. There were only stray photons to fix in his skull. They rebounded off imaginary walls: green, blue, yellow, red. His breathing had slowed, and his heart - where was that? Green pressed his hands to his chest but could detect no telltale beat. 'Does this mean I'm dead?' he asked. 'Maybe. Maybe not.'

The pinpoints of light collected into a sphere, a tiny world, three-dimensional and irregular. He recognized the globe from Rain's pocket, the head. As it grew in size and definition, swelling like a balloon, he realized its map was neither crude nor of Earth, what Miller had called Fargone, but of another planet, one unlike any he had envisaged. Its holographic image swept beyond his eyes.

Fleetingly, as the planet's surface brushed across his face, he caught sight of the interior. Which blinded him; a world slave to no greater body, possessing no moons, it lit up like a lantern.

He screamed.

Dan, panting, unloading handfuls of ice and snow. A fever.

The room filled with colour.

iii – Rubbers

Clarissa found the boy swaddled in multiple layers of clothing, bed-sheets, towels and, amazingly, what appeared to be half a dozen toilet-rolls.

Fascinated, she began peeling him in stages. All that had been visible was a single glaring eye, unblinking in its panic. But her smile had reassured it.

She was terribly horny. If it had been her birthday then this trembling, clumsily wrapped male would have made the ideal present. She lingered over his unveiling, teasing herself with the denouement, building her practised seduction into the game.

He had been stacked on the bed. She had come home to find the furniture missing, Sodium vanished. But all that was forgotten. Clarissa had thoughts solely for the mystery which slowly, wonderfully, revealed itself before her ruttish persona.

He was like a baby. Smooth, he quivered. And she was hungry.

Clarissa ate babies. She paused only once, to fetch the bumper pack of condoms she kept for just such emergencies on the bathroom shelf. He'd turned a peculiar shade of pink when she got back.

She rode him expertly, entranced by his innocence, his silent charm. And later, collapsed in his delicate arms, his face transformed from shock to splendour, she discovered his soul, wedged like a piece of food in her teeth.

She planted a kiss on his mouth.

Sody? Dan?

She erased them.

iv - Calepokia 239

Fuck it, thought Sodium, let's cut some turf, bury some worries and see if they sprout some ideas. Or decompose.

Alternatively, sit here, Green, on a transported sofa, and wait for the pressure in your bladder to grow.

He tried to gauge the locality of his bladder. He shoved a hand down his trousers and seized his penis. It didn't feel like his penis at all, and wasn't.

Bella had left him, taking the briefcase with her. How long ago? Green stood, stretched, bent over backward, rested his forehead on a cushion. He snapped erect, turned, leapt the sofa and continued at break-neck speed out the door, into the passage beyond. It was empty; quiet. Not even the air made any noise as he rushed past it, through a second and third door, a hatch, a portal, an aperture. Surrounded by strange flesh, like a nut in its kernel, Green proceeded from room to room, section to section, area to area, until eventually (dizzy with purpose, tangled in memories) he came to an opening unlike the others, an oval breach that gleamed, reminding him of a clitoris. And plunged into it, the man-made universe that haunted his mind.

Vod came, too. Sodium, the entity said, could learn from him. Vod was a teacher, a shaper, a helper whose source was far removed, substituted by the pinware extant in Green's brain, the nanomachines wired by Al and manipulated by Bella, who Vod told him to forget; at least for now, as there were more pressing matters, most importantly the situation Sodium found himself in, the shock of incorporated space something he could ill-afford to blunder through on autopilot.

It was homologous, Vod said, occupying a position in relation to real space similar to that thought does to mind: it was in there, it was out there, he explained. It was weird. Sodium knew that truth already and held onto it as he entered his own borrowed head.

The distances between stars, he understood, were the distances between nerve-endings, synapses, loci, the infinitely big and the infinitely small, junctures across which consciousness leaped. It adopted solidity, was rationalized by the individual, formed into a physical whole. Green became his own spaceship. He flew like no bird, travelled at a velocity far in excess of light. Suspended in a state of illusion, as if hanging by wires amid a collage of giant, boisterous kites while under the malignant aegis of an hallucinogenic, he was conveyed, delivered, put down in a place that had everything to do with Wonderland and nothing to do with flat 2a, Fenkle Street, Newcastle.

Immediately he pictured Bella, smiling. She had done this, tricked him into some specially constructed cage, its bars those rusty girders of which he'd dreamt. And the wire, the slender wire by which he hung?

Hollow, a brittle strand joining him - to what? Green couldn't say. He asked Vod, but all Vod contributed was an impossibly roundabout supposition on the paradoxes of time and, you guessed it, incorporated space.

'Bitch,' Sodium said. He looked at his feet. Nudging one dull brown boot was the world-head. He picked it up.

'There is a way out,' the air told him. 'I had to be sure, Al.' Bella's voice. 'You wanted proof once, remember? Well, here it is.'

'What?' He thought back: an earlier conversation with Rain, the broad man tapping Green's skull. You live here, he'd enlightened.

'How you cope will tell me if the transfer, coupled with the necessary period of dormancy and subsequent readjustment, has been successful. I'm sorry to have my doubts, Al, but that's the way it is, okay? Good luck.'

Good luck, he repeated to himself. Shit.

'BELLA!'

There's no blowing out there,

no sucking great lungfuls of air –

there's only empty nothingness,

a stomach missing breakfast

There's no singing out there,

no tunes to swallow or share –

there's only empty nothingness,

a sound like blood in your ear

No fear, consoled Vod, this is my specialty.

'What?' Green said again, frozen by a kind of irrational serenity. His moment of anger, so long a diluted emotion, had faded, leaving only puzzlement.

Verisimilitudes, the entity announced. I'm your spy in the enemy's camp, if you follow my meaning; your secret ally, your undercover agent. Take my word for it, Al, this'll be a piece of cake.

'My name isn't Al,' said Sodium. 'It's Green - I think.' He started walking toward a distant stand of trees. The ground was hilly, swathed in yellow grasses. There were clouds in the sky like alien formations of geese, greyish outlines illuminated by a waning sun.

You're the unwitting victim of a deception, Vod told him that night as he sheltered among trees like dish-mops; distorted plastic tines, white and pale blue. They had no leaves as such, only smaller and smaller branches. They reminded Green of a model of the blood system inside a lung.

'I don't want to know,' he whispered, listening to the unseen, movements he detected in the almost nonexistent undergrowth. The magic forest lacked detail, he thought; must have been a rush job, a mass-market amusement into which he'd blundered, despite the self-professed talents of his companion, the voice of a demented tour-guide, the unofficial biographer of his (muddled, usurped) head.

They must've got you young, in the womb. Remember the womb, Al? Cosy. Anyway, as I figure it, the shrimps performed  then and later boosted your -

'Shrimps?' quizzed Green.

Right; this is their scale. Bella, shelled as Rain, she must've introduced the catalyst, eh...

Crap, said Vod.

Green's brow knotted. The pain he was experiencing sent waves of intense heat through his limbs. The shell's autonomic systems shut down, immobilizing him. Inside, Sodium felt his original body jerk spastically; his eyes, swollen, ruptured, and together with all other sensory input, vision ceased.

He floated.

He blinked in morning light. He'd hatched.

'Jesus,' he said, 'I'm a mother.'

The former Newboy's outfit lay sprawled and twisted. It was split from throat to groin, the former Sodium Green half emerged, half subsumed, jutting from it. And his, that skull had seemingly exploded. The latest Sodium Green reckoned he must be about a foot tall.

And Vod? Of the entity there was just useless static. A relief, he decided.

In the pearly glow of dawn the spindly trees appeared ominous, massive. Their highest branches dwindled, blurred into sky the hue of tainted platinum, and the trunks at their thickest, blotched, peeling, had the aspect of marble pillars. Green was a child. He wandered unsteadily, deeper into what he was coming to think of as a temple, himself some pathetic offering to whatever gods held court in this bizarre jungle, the floor of which became increasingly busy with individual plants and odours, scented flora that assuaged not only his burgeoning hunger but also his craving for minutiae.

Things moved fast. Keeping up with them wasn't easy; he had to stay on his toes, pure white like the rest of him. 'I must look like a figurine carved from soap,' he said, pushing aside a distended stem, the pink blossom topping it awash in thirst-quenching dew. As yet he'd seen no evidence of animals, fauna that would have to be monster-size and mechanical to fit his mental image of this wood. Or insects: giant spiders and lumbering worms, marauding ants and beetles, the drooping chrysalises of killer butterflies.

He walked all day. His second night among the trees was less eventful. As the sun rose, reddish, Sodium bathed in a shallow pool, its superficies darkened by shadow.

Later he arrived at the forest's edge. Without ranged more hilly country, scribing the golden landscape a road, its two lanes void at present of traffic. He followed the blacktop, headed up its easy camber toward a distant bruise of mountains whose flanks and tops seemed unnaturally coloured.

Turning at the sound of a vehicle, its bodywork glaring, he stuck out his thumb.

They drove on the left, he realized, smiling. What came along was a caramel Triumph Herald convertible, its white roof down, its driver a woman in her early thirties wearing a black leather jacket, jeans, t-shirt (Snoopy: I think I'm allergic to mornings!) and sandals.

Alighting from the halted car, she'd thrown up.

Green, who was as tall as the door with its window dropped, handed her the box of hankies he had spotted on the passenger seat.

'Thanks,' she said, looking him over. 'Don't you have any clothes? What happened to your clothes? Where're you from? Where're you going? Want a lift? Okay, I'll give you a lift. Here.' She took the leather jacket off and gave it to him, the blood returning to her face. 'Put it on; and some shorts, I've got some shorts.'

He shrugged into the clammy jacket while she fumbled with her keys, swearing quietly, opening the boot. The shorts were too big and smelled of sun-tan oil. They carried pictures of Superman apprehending a host of villains.

'Well, get in!' She slumped behind the wheel, ignoring her seat-belt. He did what he was told, wondering how old he appeared to this erratic woman. 'What's your name? You do have a name, don't you?'

'Green,' he answered in a squeaky voice. 'Sodium Green.'

'You're kidding?'

'No, I \- '

'What do your friends call you?'

He thought about that while she found a gear. 'Sody, I suppose.'

'You suppose? What's the matter, don't you have any friends? Family? Did you run away, Sody? No - don't tell me; it's none of my business, okay? I just like to know who I'm giving a lift to. It's not often you see anybody on this road; not naked, anyway.'

Green was silent, and she drove.

About an hour later, as the purple (veiled?) mountains grew, she said, 'Bridget. My name's Bridget. I'm starving. There's a place a few miles farther on where we can stop and get some food. If it's open. Are you hungry? You look it. Yes? Sody?'

'Uh?' He'd dozed off.

Bridget smiled kindly. 'What's that,' she inquired, 'behind your head?'

You can trust her, said Vod.

'Let me guess. An encyclopaedia. No?' She took her hands from the wheel and ran them through her brown hair, her brown eyes fixed on him.

She likes you, Vod went on. I think you remind her of someone; someone she loved who died, maybe.

'It tells you which mushrooms to eat and which to leave alone, doesn't it? I've heard of them but never seen one before. I read a lot of stuff. Books mostly. Magazines.'

Sodium reached behind his head and closed his fingers round the world-globe. 'It's been following me,' he offered. 'I'm from another...' He fumbled for words. Planet? Dimension?

Hi, my name's Eigstoooooooooooduzambeig and I'm an alien.

'You're from another town?' Bridget provided. 'Then you must have come a long way.'

'Yes,' he replied, 'a long way.'

'And that's your guide, sort of.' She poked a knuckle at the walnutlike sphere.

'Yeah,' Green said, tired.

'Right - no more questions,' she deferred, reading his expression. 'Just tell me one thing, Sody. Do you have somewhere to stay?'

'No,' he said truthfully. And, 'No,' again.

Easy, Vod put in. What did I tell you, Al? A piece of cake.

He saw roofs and buildings, a sign reading:

WELCOME TO CALEPOKIA . pop. 239

'I've this friend,' she said, 'in the mountains.'

They were in a small cafe adjoining a filling station. Green was acting his part, unloading half a bottle of ketchup onto his chips while Vod explained the inexplicable. The entity, it seemed, had wrested control of the globe which it described as a dumb machine. It didn't mention Bella; and Sodium, mouth full of chips, didn't ask.

But did it, like her, lie to him?

'Anyway,' Bridget was saying. 'He's invited me up for a while; so do you want to come? I mean, if there's no other place you have to be. How about it?'

Yes, advised Vod, say yes.

'Uh-hm,' said Sodium.

'Great. You'll like it. Lot's of space.' She sounded dreamy, as if tuned into another waveband.

The waitress approached their table, its stainless-steel legs and chipboard, and ruffled Green's fine white hair. She was fat, he decided. Her tits bulged out of her stained and frayed uniform and, and, and: he felt stoned.

The glass door swinging behind him Sodium sprinted from the suddenly oppressive cafe, head reeling, guts churning as he cut between the pumps, crossed the deserted road, fell flat on his face in a patch of what resembled daffodils, puking.

'You've torn my jacket,' was the next thing he heard. 'Sody? Look, we're moving. It helps, eh? I know, I know, it's the fucking air. Pollution! It affects me that way. Well, you saw.' She paused. Then, 'By the way, Sodium Green, whoever you are,' and I know, or think I know, her tone implied, 'as of half an hour ago you need a shave.'

'Yeah?'

'Yeah.' She accelerated, bringing the mountains nearer, their colour truer. They'd left Calepokia. She turned the Herald's wheel and they climbed.

Drupes.

'Drupes?' echoed Green.

Bridget hit the brakes, screeching the car to a stop. The gaze she laid on him was ice.

'Drupes,' he said. 'What about them?' He wasn't sure if he intended the question for Bridget or Vod. It didn't matter. A familiar chill enveloped his heart.

'The fucking air!' the woman shouted. 'The fucking polluted air!'

She's one of them, the entity said.

And so am I, thought Green. 'So am I.'

A fever.

Bridget unlocked her eyes and drove. 'We all head for the mountains. It's cleaner, fresher.'

'Right.' He felt the shorts tighten. 'Do you have any more clothes? Something bigger?'

She laughed. It sounded good to Green's ears.

'Can you wait? We're nearly there.'

'Fine.' He switched his attention to the scenery.

'Take them off,' suggested Bridget. 'Don't be shy.'

He gave up.

Enough said.

Vod: he, it, that. Vod settled onto the dash like some joke compass. Vod was smirking. Green folded his arms and unglued a buttock at a time from the plastic seat. As they climbed, as the day waned and the sun faded, he began to appreciate the lack of heat. Bridget was quiet. Drifting, guessed Sodium, like in the cafe, before he puked. A bird, the first he'd seen, darted to his right.

Bridget stopped the car once more, slower on this occasion, got out and struggled with the roof.

'Want some help?' Green asked, turning; but the strutted canvas thumped down, muffling her reply.

When she didn't get back in as expected Sodium opened his door and stepped gingerly to the blacktop. The failing illumination, coupled with a yellowish fog, unmasked the ghosts of this remote landscape.

Bridget was standing in the middle of the road about twenty feet from the car, jeans reddened by the brake-lights, gazing toward Calepokia, the town's own colours visible, nestled in an indefinable valley, mist-wrapped and blurred with distance. Yet it didn't seem that far. Not far enough, he reckoned, pacing.

When he reached her side, eyes level with her shoulder, twice her width, naked, Bridget said, 'They're coming for us. You saw the bird? They're winding us in.' She didn't look at him, but he could sense the tears in her words. Like tiny oceans they rolled down her cheeks, hung, dripped, broke on the dark asphalt like waves on a coal-heavy beach. And when finally they got back in the car it was several minutes before she could drive. Sodium would have taken the wheel, only her body was locked behind it, rigid.

And there was a disturbing tone in her voice as she said, 'We're the core, Sody; we make it our business, our duty to liberate.' The laughter hollow. 'You were easy - it's not always like that, sometimes we have to fight. It can be pretty dangerous.'

Drupes are the oppressed of this world, clarified the entity.

'Why?' Sodium wanted to know.

Bridget flicked a switch then and the headlamps bored twin passages. 'Why?' She pulled away. 'Because we're alive, Sody, all of us.' The night was blacker than the Herald's tyres and the Herald's tyres were blacker than the road. It was as if shutters had fallen. 'Stan - it's his place we're going to. Stan would give you the analogy of the ball of string. We're the core, like I said, and the others, the people who're against us, they're the string's outer end. You follow?' He nodded, not following, but patient. 'Now as the string gets used, gets cut, it shortens, right? And as it shortens the ball shrinks. The ball's the world, you could say.' She pointed at Vod the Globe. 'Anyway, in the past, when there was plenty of string, they - call then the Folk; Stan calls them that - they...' She shrugged. 'They, you know, were in charge. They took us drupes for granted.'

'Like slaves?' Green said, not sure what exactly was expected of him.

'Yes. Yes. I'm just not good at this; not like Stan; he's the one with the brains.'

Don't you believe it, Vod told him. Stan's a machine or I'm an elephant.

'How do you know that?'

'What?' said Bridget, gearing down. 'Shit!'

'I was talking to myself,' Green answered. 'Sorry. I do it all the time. Go on, please.' The globe's features had hardened, he noticed, become more defined, folds and ridges lit by the clustered dials.

Meaning?

He knew the seriousness of her clumsy explanation. Vod didn't have to tell him. He knew the question before she asked it. But that sphere unsettled him.

'When the string runs out, Sody, what do you think they find?'

'No core,' he supplied.

'Exactly.' She slapped the driver's window, drew arcane symbols in its moisture. 'We're the same. The string's end is the string's end, however you look at it.' Her voice sounded more confident now, her own and not Stan's. She'd warmed to her subject, got a good fire going. 'They put us down, Sody; they're frightened, so they put us down every chance they get.'

'Our masters.'

Are we as strong as they? Stronger?

That icy gaze. This - can be pretty dangerous...

'Amen,' said Bridget, softening.

Amen.

Drupes grew on trees, he discovered later, half aware. Trees were artificial, constructs of the Folk established for that purpose. Drupes were, by definition, artificial people. So? I feel real, Green determined. I am. The string ran out; out ran the string. No difference. And Bridget? Bridget picked Sodium up - by chance? Intuition?

They poisoned the air. They poisoned the air and now they closed, reeling us in, unwinding the string off one imaginary core onto a second, one they held in reserve.

Revolution...

OUT TIME - THE ALLIGATOR'S PIANO

or Sweet Diseases: the grass we ate

It all started quietly enough. The mother of stars fluxed and streaming outward from the core were a thousand brilliant gases, a thousand colliding pathways and interconnecting hearts, each the shade of dreams. Colour was everywhere, and everywhere was colour. It lived. A man-made universe. It lived.

Al put the book down and picked his teeth. Rising, he wandered out onto the hotel balcony and gazed at the stars, each pinpoint haloed without. To his right stretched the East Cliff, to his left the West. Bella was playing the West Cliff Saloon tonight. The wall told him it was nine o'clock. He had a meeting arranged for quarter past.

Pulling on a clean shirt over his ruffled grey fur Al headed for the door. Beyond was familiar, carpeted silence, the kind of hush his batlike ears found uncomfortable. He rode an empty lift to the roof terminal and from there a hospitality buggy to the shrimp's parked vessel, The Shop from which you could purchase anything, in a variety of currencies, via an array of long or short term, rental or installment plans. It never closed, The Shop; the shrimps were always ready to do business. And he had particular needs.

A gilded functionary showed him into a waiting room, it's domed ceiling opaque, its twelve walls displaying posters advertising a range of products from bath-oil to grooming agents. Al reckoned they must be worth a fortune. But then who other than the shrimps would buy them? The originals would be hanging in that part of The Shop no-one but shrimps got to see. A history of product-disposal, they switched every few seconds: Kyllo Beans - BEANS WITH ZEST! Come to Heaven, have Fresh Breath, chew on YESTERDAY'S AUTO DEATH!

He sat on the floor, thumping his prehensile tail.

A shrimp appeared. 'Hokay, hokay,' it said, puffing on a fat cigar. 'What can we do you for? Is that a new shell? Give you a good price for it - yessir!'

Al got to his feet. The shrimp was perhaps two feet long and suspended by its thread from the ceiling. As always, he found himself trying to count its little pink busy legs. The creature eyed him disdainfully, scrutinizing some inner clock. Have to hurry hurry, it was saying.

The alligator smiled. 'You do part-ex?' But it was no joking matter. 'Never mind. I'll tell you exactly what I want and I'll pay in advance - cash.'

'Skin?' the shrimp replied.

'Skin,' confirmed Al, thinking it was going to leave him pretty raw. 'But I want to wire it myself - this is special.'

'What?' The creature waggled several legs in what passed for an ear. 'Special?'

'I want to die. You know, lay low for a time.'

'Oh,' said the shrimp. 'Well, why didn't you say so? What's special about that, huh? We do fine work. You insult us! Wire it yourself? Ha!'

Al's tail thumped unconsciously. 'Yes. Myself. Cash up front. How much?'

'Extra?' That brought a smile to its pudgy face. 'Skin?'

'Right.' And he began detailing his requirements to the attentive shrimp, thinking: I hope I'm not forgetting anything; I hope I can handle this.

'Hokay, hokay,' it said, rising. 'Want us to wrap it for you or are you going to take it like it is?'

A life. It died - was born again, born into a world very different from the one it, as the alligator (Mad Hunger to some) had known.

Born like a sun.

&

Back, going back.

'That's the planet?'

'Yes. Yes, that's Oyster,' he answered. 'Doesn't look like much, does it?'

Bella examined her nails, ignored the viewscreen. 'Don't pass go - move directly to jail,' she said.

'What are you rambling about?'

'The planet, Al. It's an enclosure.'

'I know that.'

'So what are we doing here?'

'Research.' He swung his chair away and stood. Around them the shoe breathed with a slow intensity Al couldn't match. He was in no mood to argue, not after what they'd undertaken simply to get this far, what they had yet to undertake. 'We won't be going straight in.

'You said as much.'

'And I'll repeat it. We won't be going straight in. Not in this baby.'

'Then how?'

'There's a way,' he told her. 'There's always a way.'

'Yeah...'

My obsession, he thought, mine and yours. The green star, the Astral Chicken. Only what are your inner drives? What is it that impels you, Bella? I see neither greed nor glory in your yellow eyes. I see corn-cobs and honey, the reflections of your subtle disguise. We've fallen together, us two, and yet nothing of substance maintains that relationship, nothing but the passion, the desire to uncover what the shrimps in their incongruous romanticism term Aphra, the mother, the seed of the fire, its womb, the source of this house of dust, its builder. And yet that also is forbidden. I can believe your lies, but not recognize them.

Why? Why do I love you?

'Yeah, Al?' she persisted, not liking his vacant, fluid expression.

'You arrive via routine transit,' he said plainly. 'You immigrate.'

'And how do you get in, Al? You planning on switching gender? Hiding in my suitcase?'

'The latter,' he stated; 'in a manner of speaking.'

Back again.

Panicking: a factory-moon called Panicking, its no. 14 shelf.

'Are you still sulking, Al? Over a shell?'

'My particular favourite,' he said.

'An outfit's an outfit,' returned Bella. 'It's not as if you lived in it full-time.' She drew water from a flask and peered into the moon's lighted interior.

'It was my trademark,' he complained. 'You know that.'

'So have another made. There's plenty in the kitty after that run to Vicinity.'

His monkey face grimaced. 'It's not the same; it's just not the same.'

'Don't I know it, Al. You've lost your appetite. Come on, let's get down there before the maintenance crew pack up and leak the air out.'

Their goal was a distant one. To the alligator it was central, an end justifying the means, an illusive quest for an even more illusive grail. His search was long, and, as he saw it, fruitless. Then why continue? It was enough for Bella to be bouncing from system to system, chasing the slightest hunch, the merest intimation, tracking the faintest of spoors. But for Al? It was all he had. Increasingly, he resented Bella's intrusion. This was his private fantasy: this is a man-made universe, on its last legs. A big bright beautiful mess. It did this and it did that. It spewed and it cracked. And he could fix it. He could find it, the centre of everything. He could pull it back from the edge.

It made no sense - but what did? Bella, yellow-eyed, unscrupulous Bella, poured water on his head, rousing him. She had that psychotic cast to her features which particularly disturbed Al when, like here, the features were those of his elder brother, long-lost Max.

&

Forward.

The shelf curled away at an angle relative to the imported gravity. It was divided into strip sections each some fifty metres square and governed by an archaic computer the owners had installed at cost to oversee an array of vegetable, mineral and animal produce. The computer, its attendant frames, broke down frequently; thus the maintenance crew, the air (normal production was under the aegis of a nutrient-rich jelly) and light.

The jelly normally fluoresced, but its ethereal luminosity, the result of a constant bombardment of far-spectra emissions, was temporarily drowned by the cruder brilliance of a thousand plus inspection-lamps. But now they'd gone. There had been no problem, no fault. Al had simply relayed false data planetside through the computer's equally aged companion satellite in the hope (partly justified) of instigating a physical check. What he hadn't bargained on was the speed with which the maintenance crew would complete the investigation once the moon's interior was stepped down from its usual aggressiveness, and they could get in.

The shoe was parked at a safe distance. They'd walked the rest of the way.

Getting out was another problem. Immersed in blue-white jelly, breathing via its gluey medium, suspended alongside Bella and reading the scorn in her flamelike eyes, Al was pushed to come to any rational decision. They were free to move, free to paddle, but not, unless harvested, to leave. A smile assembled on her face. This had been his idea, it said, and they were no closer to finding what they had come for in the first place.

Al turned his back on her and half swam, half crawled in the direction of a wall of dark stalks like maize or cane. It was a world he was looking for, a world like the one he'd glimpsed briefly in the greasy palm of a mercenary allied to one of the warring enclosure fleets; Last Salvation or Total Complete In Time, he couldn't recall which. They were always fighting, the enclosures; perhaps the sole remaining institutions of any fixed configuration in recognizable space, and they were tearing each other apart: a boon for the universal economy and a neverending strain on their own not inconsiderable domestic resources that led to a corresponding demand for mercenaries (most of whom drank in the same bars whichever side they were contracted to) and breeders, women who were valued on their fleshy output of canon-fodder as the majority (though not all - thus one war) of the enclosed believed, on ideological grounds, the artificial manufacture of such to be unacceptable.

They were basically paranoid, was the alligator's review of the facts.

He and Bella, meanwhile, were in trouble. Panicking, was all the mercenary had told him, its no. 14 shelf.

A joke?

Al thought not. The world, the globe with its subtle features, the possible - factors haunting his mind like worms in an apple.

He wondered if Bella was following.

She's crazy, Al said to himself. We both are. He reached the stalks and pushed into darker folds, affording Bella a tunnel. We're diseased. We have obsession. A self-perpetuating condition; but a sweet one, because in manageable portions we unwrap the secrets of our joined lives, and in manageable portions we suffer. There were far worse fates, he knew; to be part of a maintenance crew must be one of them. But every cow to its pasture, and if the grass is greener someplace else, then the best of luck in climbing the fence.

But this is my tune. And the mother of stars, Aphra? A piano, a green piano across whose pristine keys my fingers, my thoughts must dance, do travel, to the joy of my heart, my ears. If only the universe doesn't fall apart...

A glimmer of light. A glimmer of light like a raindrop, one of many set off against this jellied sky.

And faces. Drupes. Among them, budding from stems the colour of cigarette ash, were tiny planets, likened but not any the same, as if somebody had used misshapen baubles to decorate a Christmas tree hung with unborn corpses.

Al certainly had his appetite back now. He moved from globe to globe, oblivious of the mock gestures his motions through the jelly stirred in slack lineaments, pathetic hands and countless toes. The whole batch was human. He didn't give a thought to where they were destined. Instead, forcing aside dull-hued trunks, snagging his tail in others, in roots, and gulping lungfuls of the supporting medium, an exchange of vital chemicals, trampling a maze he steadily widened in the field, within its false sky, he minutely examined each world in turn, searched for some clue to recognition he had only the vaguest grasp of in his head. Surely it was here, he thought, the mark of Aphra, the mother. Surely that mark dangled tantalizingly close, his to pick, to handle. The alligator had no doubts, he could feel it, the warmth of her kiss. It was beyond question, the caress of her cheek.

The languid, benign partygoers were no help. There was just Al, and his lost brother.

Yelloweyes? Where are you?

Of course, she had it.

Forward, forward once more.

&

'BELLA!'

3 - Problems Solved

i – Piecemeal

Enclosure Alfalfa Delores.

There was some tidying up to be done. The shoot-out had lasted a matter of minutes, but the consequences (various bloody deaths) would take substantially longer to scrape off the alley walls. Public Investigator Apple, 459, had been cast in his least favourite role, that of supervisor. It was his responsibility and therefore in his interests to see that the civilian crew did a satisfactory job, eradicating all signs of the operation.

But then order must prevail. And who better to experiment on than known enemies of the state? This new weapon certainly proved efficient; the subversives never stood a chance. Which was only right, after all.

He could feel a certain pride in a job well done, the kind of pride the civilian crew ought to show. They were all women, naturally, as every man had duties to Central Command, as Apple himself had duties to Public Investigation, branch 459. He was proud. Everybody was on the same team. And that team was winning. Wasn't it? He experienced a twinge of guilt at the thought. It was as if, little by little, his faith was being worn away, eroded by secret doubts, like the crew's wire brushes and coarse sponges wore away the blood and gore, vile abstractions stemming, he was positive, from a single disturbing event buried in the past, his own personal past, that should have been expunged by the voluntary re-education he had undergone - but which lingered yet.

Apple swallowed. They were at war, and outside influences, off-planet ideas, were crimes.

Looking around the alley, which was normal enough, brick and plaster, no windows below the first floor, his mind strayed dangerously. It pictured a face, Apple's, younger, surer, in control. The alley as it was prior to the gun-battle shone out of that face, radiant with idealism, pure, whole, stern and unblemished. But now the alley was sullied, it required the close attention of abrasives to give it that semblance of normality so cherished, that restoration of quality he was here to oversee.

One of the women had ceased work to watch him. A sudden fear crept through his skin. She might be a spy, he thought, an internal, someone from Investigation investigating him. In her gaze was calculation. What was in his?

The woman dropped her brush, wiped her stained hands on her apron, and approached. Behind, in the road, he could hear vehicles cruising. It was midday, his shadow, like the woman's lay pooled beneath him in a tight ball. She was young, without a questioning expression; still, her eyes invaded him. Apple said, 'You're not doing your share of the work.'

'The work isn't mine,' she replied, murmuring, beyond earshot of the others. 'It was you who killed these people. I can read it in your mind.'

I can read your weakness, she was telling him; and he could do nothing about it. She challenged him, one to one, dared him almost, to expose her, charge her, detain her on suspicion.

She knew he had the power.

He froze, recalling another woman, another such potent gaze.

She smiled then. 'You can find me better employment,' she stated calmly. 'I can warm your bed.'

'You're not registered?'

'Yes - but you can influence that. I have no living  husbands. In six days - '

He struck her. And when she raised her hand to strike him back he turned the weapon which had already proved its effectiveness within the cramped precincts of the alley on her thin, fine-boned configuration, disrupting her internal organs and heating her flesh till she exploded like some obscene firework, covering him, silencing the world, embedding shards of baked and brittle skin in his face, the face of the alley, the face of Alfalfa Delores, contaminating them all.

One of the women screamed, a sound cut short. Apple smeared a wet palm over his lips, spat to rid himself of the taste. Bit by bit, he felt his unsuccessfully divorced past catching up with him. It was everywhere he was. Superimposed over the alley were the snowy hills between which he'd fought. And won? No, no - that was the reason for his debilitation; he'd been cheated. Of what? Yes...the present, the present was swamped, submerged, sinking. A mad hunger ruled his world, a world of mad dogs.

And he, that, it was not dead.

'Clear it up I Come on! Move! Clear it up!' They were guilty, and would pay. He would finish the job.

ii - Just An Ordinary

'Joe? That you?'

'Yeah,' he said, folding into a chair. The room was small and spartan.

'What's the matter?' Oyster asked him, hanging in the blue-tinted air. 'Trouble, Joe? You don't look so good.'

He peered through the spectre, his assigned companion, one of millions, a thrall of the oligarchy that ruled them and named after the planet, that name ancient. He could trust it. It was there to trust. He could rely on it. So why had he, for weeks now seemingly, been evading its inquiries? If any might purge him, it was Oyster. Oyster was friendship, legal and healthy, tailored to his individual needs. Past mistakes had cost him access to his wives and children. Future mistakes would equate to death or banishment, maybe a frontline posting; dying repeatedly, replacing used cadavers.

I can read it in your mind, the woman had said; and here it was, Oyster, reading, assessing, judging.

Next?

'Talk to me, Joe. Talk to your conscience.'

'I killed some people today,' he said.

'Wrong,' said the image, displaying its tranquil scenes, absorbing man and chair. 'Today, yourself and others loyal to the enclosure, exercised your responsibilities as Public Investigators and law-enforcement agents in purging branch 459 of certain undesirable, subversive elements. You acted correctly in this instance and are to be congratulated. Your services continue to be in demand.'

'They do?' He shuffled nervously.

'You know they do, Joe,' said Oyster, fluctuating, a haze of reassurance in his mind. 'Wanna beer?'

'Yeah.' It arrived in his hand. Spiced, he thought. It tasted of prayer. His re-education had not ended, it seemed. Did it ever? The prayer would unlock his soul, remove and cleanse, replace it; those doubts he'd been feeling, no longer, no more.

You're okay, Joe, the beer told him. You're sound.

'I'm ordinary,' Apple said.

'You're in the best of company,' Oyster told him, adding its many voices to the chorus of angels, swelling their ranks, lifting their wings, spreading comfort. 'We love you, Joe. We love you and we care for you. You're ours and we want to you to take it easy, relax. Sleep a while, Joe. Sleep loves you. We are sleep. Enclosed you are protected. Enclosed you are warm and safe, safe with us. You're lucky, Joe; you're special; we admire you. Did you realize that you're special, Joe? You can be relied on, see, to function as we wish you to function, in accordance with our leaders' plans. And what makes you special? What extra quality? Why, your loyalty, your implicit honesty, Joe, your ability to follow orders and directives. You're special and we love you, Joe. So sleep, sleep for us, we want you to sleep. We want you to experience that which you've never experienced. We want to show you things, Joe, things only a very few special people get to see. Okay? Here we go...'

A garden by the sea. He knew it was the sea because the voices of the angels told him. Wrapped in their presence he strolled down to the sandy beach and watched the waves tumble in, one after another, strong yet patient as they surged toward land.

Remember it, read the words stamped inside his skull. His neck ached with the unfamiliarity, the unconscious/conscious state they'd imposed.

He did remember it. There was the garden. There was the sea. In trying to picture either he came up against a wall of fog, a mist that drove needles through his veins, puncturing limbs and forcing his retreat. They had shown him paradise, a vision now incomplete. To walk again its golden strand and gaze upon its liquid bounty he would need to attain the impossible. Joe Apple, obedient, unquestioning tool of the governing few, was to become an outsider, a traveller, was to venture abroad, far into the hostile void on a mission of great peril; to seek and destroy one who had brought shame upon those guardians of Enclosure Alfalfa Delores, to nullify the stain in their hearts.

Impossible, he thought. Why? Because they'd be leaving him naked. Worse, his nakedness would be that of a shell.

Even frontline troops were steeped in forgetfulness; they no longer felt, not the pain of separation, the trauma of infinite space.

But not Joe - this was his release: to find and kill, achieving paradise. Or: to lapse and fail, achieving hollowness and damnation.

The rocks by the shore are rounder now

although the pace of time remains unchanged,

for it is the sea and the tides

that wear their hearts to shale

There were enclosures, he knew, where shells were common, even compulsory.

Such were evil, and must be fought.

The universe, he knew also, was ranged against Alfalfa Delores, intent on destroying its singular purpose, soiling its waters.

It had to be withstood.

Joe Apple would strive to keep his sanity in his passage through the void.

'You're ordinary,' Oyster said.

I'm sold.

'You imagine things can be hidden, Joe?'

Yes.

'The ones who love you see all.'

I don't believe it.

'I love you, Joe.'

Then let me stay home.

'I'll miss you, Joe. Another beer?'

A room by a road. He knew it was a road because the voices told him; his own voices. Wrapped in their (his) presence he wandered down to the level pavement and watched the vehicles rumble past, one after another, flimsy yet determined as they powered toward some destination within the vast complex of buildings that was the city.

Already he was outside, Joe realized. His sole chance of redemption awaited. In his confusion and pain the vehicles appeared blurred, forming a continuous swell of enclosed passengers. He didn't know the identity of the one to be terminated; but suspected.

Oyster, the oligarchy of Alfalfa Delores, was purging him after all.

Women on the pavement below a pink sky paused nervously, Joe blocking their way.

Women produced, he recalled, produced for the war. He had fought the war in the snow. It was warm now, but he could not forget the snow.

Women. Wives he'd lost. Men. Ordinary men. Ordinary men unlike Joe Apple, not to be cast out. Ordinary men to be swathed in oblivion as they faced the enemy.

Joe wasn't ordinary; not any more.

'Another beer, Joe?'

'Yeah.'

The universe eats people, they say. He wondered what it was really like.

Big, they say.

At least out there he'd be free; but it was freedom that scared him most of all.

Free to die, he thought. How easy would his target be to kill?

'Drink your beer,' prompted Oyster.

Too many open questions in a closed space. Joe's skull. Too many scorpions, too much laughing-gas.

Enough.

'Ouch!' he said. And she'd exploded - side-splitting. He stank of it; blood and gore. 'I need a bath,' he said. Did I have a bath?

'Joe, you had a bath.'

'What? When?'

'Hours ago,' the spectre informed him brusquely. 'I had to pull you out. You nearly drowned.'

Drowned? In water, depression? Dragged under by a weight posing as his spine, when in truth he had no spine, was an invertebrate, lacked backbone.

He hated the pink sky and the blue air. He hated Oyster, suspended in it.

Alfalfa Delores he hated.

Himself.

iii - Mad Hunger And A $50 Hearse

Joe was uncomfortable. He was convinced something besides his sweaty carcass resided within the hideous shell. He could no longer feel his fingers; they were overwhelmed, nerve-endings subjugated by the artificial. The fingers he could feel, attached in turn to hands and arms and torso, were coloured an unsettling purple. Those fingers were strong. The outfit was new, he sensed, puzzling at its origin. He experienced a tacit shame, its point of source easily recognizable. There was pleasure in these springy joints, and wonder in these elastic limbs, control and potential in every plane and bulk and surface. A smile appeared on his face, his outward face; something which came naturally to his new flesh, its physical manifestation of humour. He was remembering the laughing gas. The scorpions would come later. Under one powerful arm was lodged an itch. He discovered a label on scratching.

Fifty dollars, it read.

On the reverse was a picture, a worm eating its tail, and regurgitating.

It was Mad Hunger of the snows he was to nullify, the monkey he'd thought dead, sacrificed by the woman, that woman, she of the yellow eyes.

Inwardly, Joe recalled her flesh as he explored his own; the way she had felt, a cold flame.

It was Mad Hunger Apple was to convey.

iv – Lunch

Lunch was a hamburger and milkshake aboard the shoe Gargantuan Fries. He ordered a second burger, this time without the house special, a coal-black relish, and finished off with coffee and ice-cream.

They'd given him credit, at least. The meal cost five cents. He paid in soldier-tokens. Soldier-tokens, they'd assured him, were transferable anywhere in the immediate galaxy. The war rolled by at a given rate, shadowed by a host of camp followers, of which Gargantuan Fries (whose owners redeemed the tokens for supplies and then upped their prices to achieve a profit on the next cycle) was one.

He'd have to make his own way from this galaxy to the neighbouring stars, their distant cousins.

Thence to paradise.

Another burger, Joe?

Yeah, why not; only make it a double, as I've two bodies to feed now.

And more faces, more voices than I can count.

Er...thadaway.

One problem solved.

Mad Hunger? Sure, I know him.

A second.

'What's it worth,' the mercenary inquired, canny, tossing a globe from hand to meaty hand, palms greasy.

Like bacon, Joe thought. Death was easy; the mercenary's. But he'd be wired into a drupe somewhere - this fatal encounter was unlikely to have been his first.

The hunger though, was a little nearer being assuaged.

Relish or no.

4 - A Little Unusual

Fact: the universe is a lot smaller than it appears. Certainly it has a large reputation, but that's besides the point. Fact: infinity is mostly empty space. Catch some and see. Then why, I hear you ask, does light take so long to travel from even the nearest star? Easy; light is a lot slower than you think. And relativity? Einstein's thing? No dice.

i - Tall Bridget Meets Candyfloss King

Green awoke with a headache. Unreal-looking light poured in through a murky window, wide creamy shafts that tried to plug into his face. He turned over. His balls felt swollen. The light moved too slowly, so he got up.

A wrought-iron pump discharged icy water into a chipped porcelain basin, cracks in its glaze that could have been woven by some kiln-hardy spider. Green drank of the water, rinsed his mouth and wiped his hands on his chest; it was still white, as was the rest of him - only tarnished, as if from prolonged use, like the basin. He wondered where he might shit.

The headache retreated slightly, the fading echo of a peculiarly vivid dream, filled with blizzards, bones, blood and...yeah, toothpaste.

He walked around the cabin in a daze. Vod hovered among the roof-beams, silent.

The door opened and a typewriter on legs came ambling in along with Bridget, her lank hair disturbed, her jeans and t-shirt replaced by jeans and jumper.

What did I tell you? Vod said. Stan's a machine.

On legs? Stan?

'There's a hole out back,' Bridget said offhandedly, 'if you feel like investigating. Stan'll be over in a minute; this is Ollie, our biographer cum historian. He's writing a book based on recent political developments.'

Ha! thought Sodium, the globe was wrong: Stan's a drupe and Vod's an elephant.

He left to discover the hole.

The cabin was one of four hunched together in the lee of a ponderous cliff, its arid stone a closer relative to oak, he considered, than granite. So far Green had seen no other people, but he reckoned the cabins saw no lack of use. They were high up and the air was good, tangy with a hint of the earlier frost that had the welcoming effect of contracting his oddly painful testicles. It was neither warm nor cold. In the valley, edged in low cloud, lay Calepokia, the town whose boundaries drew magically closer with the passing of time, its buildings the scales of some patient, lurking dragon.

Green allowed his mind to float, breath stretching its sail, the far horizon puckered with an irregular line of tiny islands, each an outpost, a fact in place, yet orderless; and the gulfs between, the reefs and currents made any meaningful connections difficult. He wondered at his next port of call, what it held in store, the route he would have to take and the cargo he might land on its unpredictable shore. He stuck blunt pins in an invisible map. He read a clock without hands or numerals. He shat.

Stan turned out to be a man about fifty, stocky below raven-black hair, a thick, curling mustache.

'We have to leave today,' Bridget said as the typewriter on legs, Ollie, noisily clacked, a roll of discoloured paper fixed above it like a rudimentary head. 'Soon, Stan; we can't stay and fight, it would be suicide.'

An argument raged in which Sodium took no part.

They're crazy, opined Vod.

'Run then,' Stan grumbled. 'But this is my home. I've no other place.' He folded his arms like a man missing his axe. 'I'll buy you time,' he added, frank.

Bridget sighed. To Green she said, 'We can be over the mountains in three hours. There's emptiness beyond, newer territories, room for manoeuvre.' She seemed exasperated, as if this were a long-standing quarrel. 'There are too many opportunities to miss - to end it here is not only ludicrous but a complete waste. It achieves nothing. A fleeting notoriety, maybe; quickly forgotten, on both sides...' She ran out of words.

And Stan's the one with the brains? Green thought. In that case, I fell in with the wrong crowd.

'This is my home,' Stan said.

Sodium kept his mouth shut. He shuffled on a crude wooden bench, elbows on a knotty table, hands round a tin mug of lukewarm synthetic milk, trying, with mixed results, to piece together several unknown, guessed at conversations in his skull, the ache it contained still present, the milk perhaps returning some degree of opacity to his skin. He had on a pair of Stan's jeans and a series of t-shirts, varying in colour, one for every day of the week.

He could be mistaken, but today was Wednesday, and blue.

Hey, wake up, pay attention, the world-globe murmured in its soundless fashion.

Sodium Green raised his eyes, found them witnessing a man's stubborn, protracted exit. The man paused at the door and smiled, a shape like that of a dead mouse under the dark, shady wings of an owl.

Bridget drove the car, its roof down and its tanks full as Green leaned back over the passenger seat to catch a last glimpse of the clattering typewriter in the road. He saw the noonday sun flash its polished chrome and the limp paper in the roller jerk as the machine dutifully recorded their departure, the parting of Bridget and Stan, Green from the remainder of his synthetic milk, its recipe lost somewhere in this world's unknowable history, bubbling in a scratched-bright pan on the gas range. He tried to guess what Ollie wrote, how the final chapter would read. He tried to guess from which direction the wind was blowing; but there was no wind, just the breath from his lungs to bloat the sail of his imaginary boat, the slipstream of the car as it sliced. And who was at the wheel? A woman whose vision was misted by glutinous tears, slowly expanding lenses of refracting liquid to either side of her nose, like joke glasses.

He watched to see if her eyes would fall out on springs; partners, in times past, to Stan's improbable mustache and Ollie's smooth, metallic cheeks.

Another nice mess - not Green's to rearrange, Bridget keeping the Herald on the road...

Soon enough, a corner.

He was hot beneath the varicolored layers, but she'd insisted, and it made a kind of sense, may have proved unwise, say, to have left behind the weekend. All the same, he removed Wednesday and Thursday, which was yellow, and sat quietly in Friday's somehow poignant black.

The road climbed steeply after that initial curve, the mountains becoming harsher, bleaker, denser, while the sky grew uniformly pale. There were no other cars, was no traffic of any description. Green said nothing, waited for Bridget to break her silence, listened instead to the note of the Triumph's uncomplaining engine, the fainter counterpoints of its tyres and exhaust. The brakes as she hit them, cresting the mountain pass, positioned in a v-shaped cut, a figure's unexpected presence blocking the carriageway.

Sodium's ears rang. He looked from the figure, a man, to Bridget and from Bridget, a guerrilla, to the figure, whose arms were raised in a gesture of friendship or parley. To Bridget again, and the certainty of recognition in her suddenly angry face.

'King,' she hissed, sibilant. 'I thought he was dead.'

She got out of the car, not glancing at Sodium, who nevertheless prepared to slide over into the driver's seat, wetting his palms with imaginary spit as he stared. He spotted a vehicle, a second and third off the road to his right, partially, hurriedly concealed, headlamps covered in day-glo plastic guards as a protection against wheel-bounced rocks.

So what was this, a showdown? Christ. He felt helpless in the car, but knew it would be foolish to join Bridget on the asphalt. She needed him where he was if she needed him at all. He swallowed hard and tried to read the man's, King's, lips.

He's a drupe, said Vod.

'You know what's happening?' Green had forgotten about the entity. It hovered under the dash nursing its injured pride, glowing dully as it considered a reply.

Isn't it obvious? Bridget knows him; the man's a turncoat, some desperado.

'That's your professional assessment?'

Silence.

Bridget turned and walked swiftly back to the car. She got in, wiped her eyes. Belatedly, Green thought. The ice was in place when she asked him, 'Forward or back, Sody? King says they're prepared to leave Stan's little dominion intact; only I don't believe him, you had better know that. Alternatively, you can get out of the car here and take your chances with the Folk, or, and this is the option I'm taking, you stay right where you are and we breeze through these bastards like hot butter through a knife - hm? You get my meaning? What do you say? What's it to be, Sody, a quick death or a slow one? Your memory wiped, your circuits revised, your every action from here on the pre-decision of a pin-happy xenophobe \- and that's if we can trust that snake Candyfloss!'

Which we cannot.

Sugar-sweet Sally

how're feeling today?

Feeling like a mountain

just can't move away

Didn't anybody tell ya

anybody show ya

anybody call ya

name?

She didn't leave him much choice. He'd already decided. I must be crazy too, he realized.

A piece of cake, Al - hot butter through a knife.

ii – Underwired

They drove. The cut widening, his breath stilled, the Triumph hunched on the blacktop, all served to make them an easy target for any weaponry the Folk might have trained...only nothing happened, nothing save a flood of green light as Vod the Globe expanded to surround both vehicle and passengers, an aegis of blinding fusion that snapped palms over faces and elicited screams from throats dry and seemingly estranged from tongues and ears. Sodium felt right at home. There was a gentle quality to the pain that, once the initial wave had shattered like crystal, couched his senses in a balmy reprise.

He could hear no sound. His eyes were sealed, but he saw with his mind through the entity's infused medium. The car passed unharmed, winding a descent into grassy country, land similar to that on the mountain's far side, its colours warm and effortless, shades of blue and yellow melting together like watery dyes.

A moment later and he was driving, the road bumpier, the Herald's tanks less than half full, Bridget curled up asleep on the back seat, the sun distantly low, the globe a weightless presence against the heel of his borrowed boot, all of them making a steady sixty along a road mostly flat and straight, flanked either side by boxy trees, patchwork fields overgrown with weeds and abandoned machinery, low hills crested with deserted buildings and what looked like rusted silos, their silhouettes eerily jagged, framed in the darkening sky, holed and part demolished, like standing-stones, dolmens erected to past gods.

Bridget stirred; rubbing her head, Green saw in the mirror.

'We made it,' he said, not turning.

She climbed into the front seat he'd left impressed with a negative mould of his thighs and buttocks, reshaping the cover. 'You'd better stop,' she said, one arm dangling over the door. 'It looks like rain ahead, and it's late. I hate the roof down at night; everything's so empty.'

Green pulled off the road and helped fasten the white roof in place. 'You want to drive?' he asked. Then, 'Do you know where we're going, Bridget?'

She smiled, just visible. 'No,' she answered, 'but we're getting there. I can take over if you're tired.'

He nodded. Sodium was far from exhausted, but the ghostly landscape drew his attention more than the disused road, its asphalt ruptured. Increasingly, he thought, diseased. Neither of them mentioned their miraculous evasion of Candyfloss, the Folk; not for a while...

'Your little round companion,' Bridget stated, swerving to avoid an upthrust slab of blacktop, headlamps probing like lighthouse beams, 'saved our bacon back there in the mountains.'

'Yes,' said Green. 'It's drained his batteries, though, eh?' He peered between his feet.

'I won't ask how he did it - but I'm grateful.' To Vod her words, slow in the delivery, slow like the car, herself crowded behind the wheel, must have realigned the scales of his dignity, for the world-globe bobbed from hiding and rose to the mottled canvas roof.

'Me neither,' Sodium agreed, winking at the entity.

'At least the air's breathable this side. I suppose you've noticed? Stupid question, right; it's just that a lot of stupid questions have surprisingly logical answers.'

When Green made no reply she went on, 'The Folk evacuated this area years ago. There was contamination. Biological, of sorts. Drupes go rogue, was the popular headline. I remember the panic, the fear and violent hatred. There were those who preyed on it, whipping up hysteria for their own ends. It's from that event that everything now stems. The battle-lines were drawn, here, in this territory.'

Genesis, said Vod. You drupes achieved an identity other than was designated. You stepped up, Al; congratulations.

Bridget kicked the flat.

'Isn't there a spare?' Green quizzed.

'No room; the boot's full of bread rolls and tins of soup. That and the auxiliary tank.'

It had grown cooler toward dawn and Sodium was dressed in Wednesday's blue again. Nails bent to ninety degrees and taped into bunches had caused the puncture. They were like sharp, metallic hail, strewn across both lanes of the cracked road.

This was no accident then. Green stared into the murky undergrowth sprouting from crumbled walls, half expecting something to jump out at him. Nothing did. It seemed only the rising sun moved, dragged reluctant shadows after it, speckling the nacreous ground.

'Get in the car,' instructed Bridget. 'It'll be rough but we can make a few more miles before the rim collapses.'

Sodium did as she asked. The expected rain had yet to materialize but nonetheless the windscreen misted with a kind of thick, heavy dew, like aspic.

Bridget throttled the engine and they were motoring, collecting a second puncture which served, ridiculously, to balance out the first. Only it left the steering unpredictable; so it came as no great surprise when, minutes later, the car slewed lazily off the road and fetched up in a ditch, front end buried, rear end off the fractured surface.

'Now what?' Green shook his door loose. The same gelid slime that had jammed the wipers stripped the purchase from his boots and they went the way of the Herald as he stepped out of the angled vehicle, dumping him unceremoniously, cheek grazed by a jutting screw-head, its point of ferric decay harsh in a surround of beaded chrome.

Bridget was more careful; she threw back the roof and stood with her knees braced against the seat. 'Are you okay? I think we walk from here. Want some breakfast?' She climbed over one seat onto the next, scrambled onto, slid off the boot, the keys in her mouth, rocking the car and splashing Green with clammy mud. 'I hope the stove works,' she added, fumbling with the lock.

Sodium clambered up the wet slope. Vod circled a short distance to his right.

Bridget held a tin of soup in either hand. She was biting her lip, gauging the various merits of tomato and leek. 'Sody, we're being watched,' she said.

'How many?'

'I don't know. How accurately do you think you can throw one of these?' She tossed him the leek.

He shook the tin, listened to its viscid contents. 'And the bread rolls?'

'Help yourself. We get to eat those, as many as you can, starting now.'

From out of a collapsed structure, perhaps once a house, loomed a tarpaulin-wrapped figure.

'Drupes?' questioned Sodium.

'Yeah,' Bridget said, reluctant; 'that biological contamination I was talking about. For some, liberation has its drawbacks. I'm sorry.'

Sorry? Green was amused. No cause, no world was perfect, he knew.

I count nine, said Vod. That's in a fifty metre radius. There could be more.

'Thanks.'

'Huh?'

'The globe,' he explained, pointing at the figure, 'says there're eight others, minimum.'

'Right. We'd better start walking. Carry what you can -the border can't be too far.'

She didn't say how she planned to cross it, or even what it was. A fence? A river?

Although, to be fair, he didn't ask.

The lone figure trailed them the rest of the morning, darting and weaving among the fallen buildings and ugly, squat trees while the others remained out of sight. Vod floated like a beacon above Sodium's head, uncharacteristically quiet, as if still low on energy. There'd be no miracle escape on this occasion. They could only trudge along the ruined blacktop, keeping a wary eye out for any change in their shadow's as yet harmless manoeuvres.

Like Bridget, Green toted just the one tin of soup. His belly was stuffed with bread rolls, however, and he wondered if he was, on reaching the border, going to throw up.

Sometime after noon the figure (man or woman?) disappeared together with the last of the ruined buildings that had lined the pocked road intermittently for miles. Green's feet hurt. He was thirsty, but had no way of opening the soup. The ground rose steadily for a while before levelling off under the dense coppery leaves of a contorted wood.

Bridget stopped. 'Listen.'

Green focused his attention on the silence. 'What?' He heard only imaginary sounds, those of the trees' breathing, their aspect that of a game of statues. If he tickled one, maybe? Then it came to him: a waterfall.

Golden leaves cloaked the ground. His boots crushed them like mints, releasing an odour of fruits, a pot-pourri of spices and herbs. Individual scents ascended, clinging to jerrybuilt rafts of sunlight and air; but in the time they took to reach his nostrils all save the heaviest had either mellowed or dispersed.

'This,' said Bridget, 'is the place to spend the night. Supposing there are no wolves or ogres.'

Green could vouch for that. No animal life, he recalled. No insects. Nothing. The bird that had tracked them from Calepokia - a machine.

They dropped from the trees like wind-fallen apples, shapeless and many. Green snapped awake in time to stand, but was too sleepy to fight. He felt his wrists bound, a cord stretched from his ankles that ultimately left him balanced on his knees. He shouted, looking around, head spinning, echoing a blow, but could not see Bridget. The last thing he remembered was being hoisted over a shoulder that smelled bizarrely of almonds and chocolate.

And then puking, puking, puking.

'Sody?' There was a bandage covering his eyes, muffling his ears: she was distant, invisible. 'Sody? I hate to ask, but I need to know. Are you an agent? A plant? Because ever since I met you my luck has been lousy.'

He laughed. His jaw hurt.

'It's no joke,' Bridget continued. 'I mean it. There's so much at stake, so much you haven't said; like where you came from, for instance.'

'You wouldn't believe me,' he answered. 'Do you know where we're at?'

'No. I'm blindfolded.'

'Same here.' He thought to hear her move, a desperate shuffle. 'I can't smell the water.'

'You could before?'

'Yeah - in my sleep.' Green moved his legs and arms one at a time, testing his joints, the ropes binding him. Was Vod near? he pondered.

There was another, separate noise. Someone paced round Green, Sodium tied to a stake or post. Inside, he reckoned, away from the nameless sun.

'King!'

'That's - ' His mouth suddenly filled. He shook his head from side to side, but failed to loosen the gag.

'King!' Bridget repeated with real venom. 'King, you traitorous, fucking, loathsome arselicker! How did you find us? What are they paying you? Shit!'

He laughed. Green's jaw hurt.

'Fucking choke!' screamed Bridget.

'Yeah, yeah, you'd like that,' King responded. 'Only I ain't so stupid, uh? My friends,' he paused as if to gesture the presence of others, 'they watch you, they follow you, they observe your path and report to me. They are my army.'

Sodium pictured him stabbing a proud thumb at his chest, grinning maniacally.

'Rejects,' she came back. 'Underwired. You think they're disposable, just as the Folk think you are.'

'Quiet!'

Blood trickled into Green's right eye.

'The truth, King,' pressed Bridget. 'You know it's the truth; you simply haven't the guts to admit it and be counted among the rest of us, where you belong, with your own people. You're scared shitless and they know it. They're using you. You're worthless, Candy. They're using you and you're using the rejects, the originals. And you're perfect for it, right? You know why? Because you're one of them, a mistake - which is no bad thing. If it wasn't for such mistakes we wouldn't be around today; we'd lack awareness. Yes? So you see, there's no shame in registering below the threshold, no disgrace in falling short, no reason to hate. We're equal, eh? Equality is what this is all about.'

In the silence between her words Green registered an alarming confusion. Her blindfold must be down, he thought, and she's struggling to measure his immediate reactions, his unconscious disclosures, whether or not they're favourable, the consequences if they're not - add to that King's knife (Green assumed it was a knife which had cut him) and the very real possibility that Bridget was deliberately goading him, their captor, and what transpired, figured Sodium, was a recipe for disaster. It remained only to determine what form that disaster might take.

'Well? Answer me, why don't you? Is there nothing you can think of to say in your defence, Candy? Is that it?'

'I could kill you, Bridget; slit your throat.'

'And what would the Folk say about that? You could tell them I fell on your knife, eh?'

Her voice had risen. Nearing panic, Green coolly noted, losing control.

'They wouldn't know,' said King. 'They don't even know I have you.' He paused. 'You're mine, Bridget, to do with as I please. You underestimated me, see? The underwired, we have a need to be resourceful. We find reasons to hate you; you, your pale friend here. We hate your arrogance, your deceit and self-righteous pursuit of tarnished ideals. You and the Folk, we play you one off another. It's our game, our means of survival. But you don't understand, do you, Bridget? For you everything is either black or white. You talk of equality when there is no equality, a concept as artificial as yourself, your companion. You chase perfection, an ignorant romance. I want none of it. I go my own way. And you, Bridget, I have something for you, something I have the power to give.' He paused once more. 'I have your deaths.'

iii - Grubber And Patience

'Sody?' There was a hand covering his eyes, muffling his pain;  soothing his mind...distant, invisible. 'Sody? I hate to – '

What? Bridget?

'Sodium Green.'

'Okay; grab his legs.'

'This is the one?'

'Sure. He fits the reading, anyway, although the shrimps reckon he wired this himself.'

'Yeah? Must be crazy. I'd never trust myself to wire a death. Too risky.'

He was lifted. Opening his nostrils he detected sweat, stale and unfriendly...

Grubber and Patience loaded the body and stood back. In moments it was reduced to particle-dust. Aboard The Shop Bella waited. She yawned, shelled as Rain, reached into one copious pocket and brought out the globe, weighed it casually in her palm while the shape became first tangible and second animate before her gaze. The shrimps had delivered, as Bella knew they would. She yawned. It opened its eyes. A great distance away Grubber stretched his companion's ribcage wide, as previously his own had been unhinged prior to Patience's entry, the two then one and the one zero: each inside the other, the other inside each, wrapped together like a contortionist's puzzle, some bored illusionist's parlour trick.

'Look in the mirror,' Rain said, 'and tell me what you see.'

He did.

Green was convinced. Slowly it came together.

Here was Rain and here was Bella. Here was Sodium and here, in the glass, was the alligator. And over there, slouched drunkenly in a corner, beaten but not defeated, was the doubt.

Didn't anybody tell ya

anybody show ya

anybody call ya

bluff?

'I wondered what you were up to,' the raincoated adventurer revealed to him later, in a hotel room, stars without, set beyond a containment field, a barrier. 'The shrimps too, Al. You made them nervous, paying cash. But that's not the real reason, just a story they fed me in the hope of securing any pertinent facts. They've a vested interest, I've discovered, in your quest.'

My quest? 'What do you mean?'

'The mother of stars, Al. They want it, and they think you can get it.'

'Aphra?'

'Precisely. You got a headache?'

'Nah.'

'Dizzy? Anyway, they broke faith, the shrimps, they panicked.'

And came to you, Bella? Why? Green peered at his scaled reflection as he remembered it from the mirror. There was something missing, the image he had seemed incomplete. Why? He stared back at himself from his mind, transformed. He tried to picture the person occupying this shell, and failed. It was all a little unusual, he decided; like looking for your shadow in the dark, stumbling blindly, grasping at nothing while your volume of space, that which you filled, grew smaller and smaller, able to fit inside itself less and less. It was all a little disconcerting.

And he was cold, Sodium, frozen.

5 - Rico

i - Slategut, Hex Spaceman

There she was

wrapped in mirrors

lookin' mighty fine,

there was I

spilling litres

asking her the time

Cold beer!

...do anything for it

Cold beer!

'That won't be necessary.'

'Excuse me?'

'Your weapon. It must be deactivated.'

'I don't have a weapon.'

Slategut raised a gleaming eyebrow. The subject of his investigations, a human outfitted in purple, made a splash inside his visor the size and shape of a considerable arsenal. He folded his arms, their many joints, and waited. The human looked around at the gates nervously; perplexed. He'd stepped onto wharf Rico several minutes earlier, fresh off a shoe painted the garish colours of Glorious 7. His weapon was a snap-together, Slategut reckoned, housed in either the left or right emergency stomach. The shell itself was ordinary; off the rack.

Floating ribs, they called it. Naive and unsubtle to a spaceman of Slategut's experience. All six of him.

A babe in arms...

'I don't have a weapon,' the newcomer, for surely he was that, repeated.

The wharf was near empty. At its end blossomed the hexagon of gates presided over by their robot doorman. And like doormen everywhere, Slategut had the right to refuse admission.

But this was the gaming season; the normal rules didn't apply, so Joe Apple was passed still loaded, a simple magnetic tag betraying his status as uninvited, and as a target for any who might try goading him to action.

Slategut lowered the eyebrow, smirking. He blipped a note to Central: refuse would need collecting...standby for the gaming season...code Rico...

ii - Space Station No. 5

The station hung in the void like some enormous chandelier, lit by innumerable bulbs, exhausting considerable candle-power, fashioned as if from the blackest crystal. No sun laid claim to it. It consisted of four main sections, or cliffs, known as North, East, South and West, and served an ever-increasing variety of purposes. A city that was permanent home to maybe twenty thousand and stopover to twice that, Space Station No. 5 formed an important, indeed integral link in the universal civilization chain - or so a history, a retrospective guidebook might say. In plain language: people and non-people came here from all over the place. It was the venue, the arena, the theatre, the stadium. It focused opportunity and broadcast information, was both doctor and patient. And the air, unlike everything else, was free.

Lucky for Joe he was now wired for credit. A points system operated whereby it was possible to score through sale of time. Thus, following his stint bodyguarding a clutch of rare and valuable computer eggs aboard the shoe Horrordyne, of the Horrordyne Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Falling Fish Vacuumlines Unlimited (NO INSURANCE REQUIRED!), he next found employment as a waiter.

6 - Gruds

Did you ever get the feeling your body was too small for you? Too restrictive? Well, now it's possible to have a bigger one, a stronger one, an improved all-terrain multi-functional you name it we got it one, as bodies, like shoes, come in a wide variety of sizes. They vary in specification, obviously, as well as shape, colour, price - but we hope to have the right one for you, to suit your pocket. A free fitting service is available on request...

i - Ray Guns, Projectionist

Green's problem was this: who could he trust? Not Bella; not the world-globe in her raincoat pocket. He was depressed, and hungry. Yelloweyes was absent, limbering up for her evening performance. And from the balcony with its wrought-iron rail, textured linoleum, all the stars looked the same. But he knew they weren't, that one in particular, Sodium's Star was very different. He wanted to find it more than ever. Al wanted to find it. The shrimps, in their mysterious fashion, thought he could lead them to it. Most puzzling, the sharpest needle in his haystack of thoughts, was the meaning of the death jaunt he'd apparently insisted on wiring. That made no sense; neither did the episode with Bridget, King, the Folk. Had he simply dived overboard? Was that like him?

'Like who, idiot?' He flexed his jaws, sloped around the hotel room he was pretty sure he'd occupied once before, and waited, upright on hind legs.

It was a familiar routine. When Green was twelve and his brother Dan a year older, Dan would be biting his nails, chewing his lip as their mother rubbed her nose in a gesture of cognition Sodium knew would result in a beating. It had always been so, only this day something changed. Instead of her shouting, which usually preceded the nose rubbing, Mavis, as she was called, maiden name Davis, stood quietly shaking her head from side to side. She was unsure, it turned out; both boys were taller than her, and one, the youngest, held an icy glint in his eye, a flaw that had crystallized the first time she had dropped him as a baby. He hadn't forgotten, she realized. Maybe it was stored away, unconscious, but he remembered, every detail. The lad was uncanny in ways. More and more, he frightened people.

The beating came eventually, but it was diluted, as if Mavis were too tired to raise her slipper and administer it properly. Green, and to a lesser degree Dan, had successfully outfaced her.

The meaning was not wasted on Sodium. Wait your moment, it said; read what is unwritten.

And he did.

The person on the other end of the line had some answers. His name was Ray Guns, he told Green. He projected an image of calm (slow-motion white horses, manes tossed, flanks glazed, eyes golden, equine angels) onto the room's wall-screen, an area of glassy opaqueness two metres square, framed in dark wood. The horses looked good enough to eat, thought the alligator, whose tongue was coarse and dry. They grew from the wall like snow-filled vases, condoms, a promise of flowers in their hooves and tails, a thing Ray Guns could deliver should his prospective client be tempted, the illegality of his wares overlooked at this time: the gaming season.

What he pushed were hardwire pins, gruds whose point of origin, design and effectiveness remained unsanctioned by the discriminating shrimps and therefore unguaranteed. Under normal circumstances the station's management went to elaborate and costly lengths to ensure no such merchandise was available within the aired precincts for fear of offending the creatures who might then park The Shop elsewhere, thus denying the space station a substantial percentage of its business.

But these were not normal circumstances, as we'll see.

Red rooters!

Red rooters!

Get your red rooters here

...full of sunshine

...full of moonbeams

red rooters spangle tears!

Red rooters!

Red rooters!

Get your red rooters here

...gonna make some

...gonna bake some

red rooters transpose fears!

Yeah – gimme some

gimme plenty

gimme red rooter

pie...

Red rooters!

Red rooters!

Gimme red rooter pie...

Green thought back to the first joint he'd smoked, the way he'd thrown up, what throwing up meant to him now.

Sodium bought some red rooter pie.

ii – Airspeed

Having feasted, Green walked. Presently the white horses were tethered in his mind, the hardwire from which they emanated turning slowly in his gut. He passed a sandwich-board man, an exhausted drupe whose suit and hat had seen better days. The sight brought back memories of Candyfloss and his knife, tall Bridget and her colleagues Stan and Ollie, tins of soup and bread rolls, the days of the week emblazoned across his milky chest. He paused, wondering what became of them, whether they had any existence outside of his head.

Bella Pateman, FOR THIS NIGHT ONLY, the sandwich-board professed. And there she was in a stylized picture, all yellow eyes and flaxen tresses.

Green took a brief shot - gazed...

A tide of puppies washed between his feet, coursed this way and that by the sweeping action of his tail as it flapped left and right like the elastic-girted arm of a pinball machine, the lights up ahead strobing, the drupe erupting, puppy after mottled, fluffy puppy, each about the size of a fist, bubbling into the arched passageway. They poured from the sandwich-board man's stretched open mouth, rolled, slid down his sandwich-board, obscuring Bella's picture and spilling onto the carpeted floor like the latest thing in vomit.

The man's form diminished. It emptied. As the last puppy foamed out of his slack features, chased its siblings, Sodium thought to hear his heart explode.

The sandwich-board man crumpled.

Green unplugged his wiry cord.

The sandwich-board man said, 'Code Rico. Message. Beware of waiters with too many hands.'

Green shrugged.

The sandwich-board man staggered off.

Green took the lift to floor pink-eighty and purchased a lapis lazuli and garnet-studded waistcoat, a false collar, a blue and white polka-dot bow-tie, an astrolabe on a silver chain and eight co-ordinated rings depicting scenes as varied as copulation (regular) and (in wonderful detail) coal.

Green walked.

He met Airspeed on an undesignated floor. The champ was working out, shelled as a machine, a scaled-down version of that which he'd utilize in true competition. There was a queue for would-be sparring partners that Sodium joined, largely ignorant of what was in store. He had watched a while from one of nine viewing galleries circumscribing the arena, a transparent sphere thirty metres in diametre, also to scale, suspended in a forty metre node, a pimple on the face of the North Cliff he had come upon by accident. His coal ring was full of rainbows. The queue dwindled, until eventually it was Sodium's turn.

A robot showed him the ropes. Then he bounced. Airspeed, winner of no less than three consecutive, seasonal knockout tournaments, came at him like a bullet, one Green was expected to catch in his teeth. He had little time to master the controls of his own machine before he was sent cartwheeling round the sphere's inner circumference, scoring heavily for the champ. Another such pass and he'd be finished. He melded with the surrounding, pervading instrumentation and braced himself for the coming encounter.

Forget pinball, this was airball, he remembered, as the white horses kicked in.

He had this dream, see. Dan buried him up to his chin on the beach and left him there, a blue plastic bucket with a yellow handle and little sailing ships round the side jammed on his head, a red-bladed spade with a wood shaft protruding before his calm eyes while the gulls swept above, their nests lodged high in the cliff. Sody (four? five?) watched the marvellous waves for maybe an hour, their foamy bodies transient, limbless, blind. They moved the sand, shifted its hidden layers a tiny amount each time they fanned out, slipped back, pulling his skin, tugging his arms and legs, toes and fingers. Then, as the sun rode its secret arc in the cloudless sky, he felt the drag of the sea in his throat, drawing his breath into his lungs, the oxygen into his blood. Almost level with his gaze, the rolling ocean fed into his mind an array of images and sounds, from the blackness of its depths to the song of its dolphins and whales...

He woke up in hospital.

Airspeed, in the next cage, shelled as a recuperative mould, said, 'I've never seen anything like it.'

He knew it was Airspeed by the champ's trophy collection hanging like a huge rosary in the hospital's dank air.

'They pulled your wires,' he added. 'That was some stuff, eh? Where'd you get it? No, don't answer that. I don't want to know - if it ever gets out...' He quivered.

Sodium Green saw his tail was bandaged, otherwise he was okay. But what happened? Had he knocked the champ off his throne? 'Did I win?'

'Sure you won; only you lost, too.'

'How come?'

The mould quivered again. 'You hit me with an illegal punch,' it reverberated. 'Don't you know the rules?'

Green's attention had diverted once more to his tail, which jerked spasmodically like it were a thoroughfare for volts, and took a moment to reply.

'Fuck,' he said, sitting up, leaning forward, turning his head to regard the mould. 'I really won? I beat you?'

'Don't rub it in,' warned Airspeed, speaking via his peculiar encasement. 'It was an illegal punch, like I told you. Reverse gear is strictly for amateurs.'

'Reverse gear?' questioned Sodium, fascinated.

'Yeah. That hardwire you dropped, it switched your mind with the machine's so everything functioned backward and you manoeuvred the exact opposite, like in a mirror. Your actions were therefore unreadable and with your mind spliced into the machine I was unable to effectively counter due to the unpredictability of the interface both through the gamesphere, its score-count, and my own offensive vehicle...'

Yawning, Green shut Airspeed's monologue from his brain and concentrated instead on his rings. They pulsed intermittently, beat with the rhythm of his thoughts, throbbed with lives and times, bones and the floral pattern on his mother's apron, a collage of sunflowers he was able to picture with a clarity he found disturbing: a field blossoming, a white-painted fence in the background, a barn, water-tower and windmill; and sat on the fence beneath a glassy sky, a child in dungarees with a piece of dry straw in his mouth, a pen behind one cabbage ear.

Dan and Sody had bought the apron one mother's day. It was torn and burnt, stained and frayed, the sunflowers, the farm buildings, the dungarees faded.

The pen was a Bic, he remembered.

'Death,' Airspeed was saying. 'Mad Hunger they told me. Hardwired they told me. Me! Airspeed! Shit' I'm dead. You've killed me. I told them, I'm dead I said, that alligator with the bow-tie and fancy waistcoat, he's run me over in reverse gear \- I never saw it coming. Me! The champ! Death,' the mould lamented. 'I died. I can't die, not yet; the tournament hasn't even started. Not yet.'

Death. Why was he talking about death? Green pondered, rising.

Death was no escape.

iii - Nitrogen Mustard

The bars of the cage bent easily. Presumably, when you were strong enough to move them you were fit enough to leave.

The mould had fallen silent. Maybe it slept. Sodium crept toward the doors, passed through Airspeed's trophy collection. He lifted the astrolabe from his breast pocket and studied its scales, wondering if they held any clues to the position of Aphra, the mother of stars. Did it move, the Astral Chicken? Was it alive? He shrugged and padded along a dingy corridor. At its end was a single lift. When the lift arrived, noisome, smelling of detergent, it was occupied by a skittery individual, a tall badger whose pointed snout was shaven, bearing a gramophone tattoo.

'Visiting time's over,' joked Green.

'Eh?' The badger stepped back and pressed his hands against the lift's rear wall, looked left and right, seemingly unaware of Green as he boarded, debating which of the many buttons to push.

'Do you have a floor programmed?' the alligator asked.

The badger tapped his foot to soundless music. 'What?' he replied. 'Somebody say something?'

'I did,' said Green. 'Me. Sodium.'

'Sodium?' the snout twitched, tattoo dancing.

'My name.' The doors closed and the metal box shuffled forward, then sideways, gaining momentum. 'Where are you going?'

'Yeah...' He appeared confused. 'The casino,' he said, 'I think.'

Jesus, thought Green; the casino \- where's that? 'Which cliff is it?'

'Frogammon.'

'Huh?'

'They call me Frogammon. I just got here. I put the wrong eyes in and can't see a thing, only the shoe I came in, so I'm a little lost.'

The lift halted and the doors opened to reveal a corridor identical to the one it had last stopped at. Green sighed and pushed another button.

'There's no display,' he grumbled, 'and all the buttons are worn so I can't read the numbers, and the colours all look grey, like they've faded.'

'The South Cliff,' Frogammon said. 'The shoe I came in doesn't have lifts,' he added. 'This is all new to me.'

'You've never been in a lift before?'

'Never. I prefer stairs, you know? Usually I stay frozen and send a drupe along to these things, but my last one went missing. So here I am, in person.'

In person, thought Sodium. The wrong eyes? He was both perplexed and intrigued. What was he seeing? When? A missing drupe? Perhaps it had been liberated. He hoped it had. 'What line of business are you in?' he queried.

The badger's wrong eyes (black as coal, filled with rainbows) fixed on him. 'Demolition.'

Green could see himself reflected in them, but apparently that was as far as his squamous image went. The lift stopped again. This time the doors opened onto a busy lane of traffic, mobiles and taxis criss-crossing like solid blocks of delirious light.

His stomach rumbled, echoing the lift as it shuddered once more to motion.

They hadn't fed him in hospital, he reckoned. How long was it since he'd eaten?

'Is there a restaurant at this casino?'

The badger didn't know. When next the doors opened there stretched beyond an auditorium the dimensions of a good-sized hangar.

'Ever get that feeling you were lost?' said Green, his jaws itching. He rubbed them absently.

'Yeah,' Frogommon replied. 'Here - now.'

'Me too. Want to get off?'

Before either of them could come to a decision a woman got on, her skull dangling between her out-thrust breasts, a limp blossom, her wide shoulders brushing the ceiling.

She had a gun. Snub and metallic, it jutted from her prickly fist like a telescope in a 3-D movie.

Green peered down its chimneylike barrel.

This is a cartoon, he figured, you can see the bullet.

'Okay,' said the woman, her angular teeth bared, her voice deep and gravelly. 'Which of you guys has the money?'

Mugged, thought Green; in narrow daylight, in a stupid elevator, the kind of elevator you could ride all your life and get nowhere. It had happened to him before, in Marks & Spencer's, with his brother. Then their assailant had brandished nothing more lethal than a fist, a few growls, a bad haircut, some chewing-gum which he threatened to detonate, its thin pink bubble...but that was more frightening than this. Because this, he realized, was ridiculous.

'What money?' Frogommon said, bopping, his music quiet, secret. 'Don't carry money, lady, don't believe in it.' His gramophone tattoo looked like a bruise, his shaven snout the result of a recent operation, surgery like that which had planted this whole scene in Sodium's mind. Along with his head they shook from side to side as if to admonish.

Green was forced to wonder where he was inside his shoe, what his brain was collating.

The badger smiled when she shot him. The sound was horrendous.

'Now you.' The gun spoke for her, weaving back and forth like it were possessed by the beat of departed Frogommon, his bequest to the alligator people.

He had this fantasy, see. Dan beside him in the elevator burst into tears when the skinhead grabbed his shirt, pulling three buttons off, grey discs that dropped to the floor. The two of them had been travelling the universe in their boxy spaceship, each place they stopped at a different galaxy, full of stars and planets, comets and meteors. Then this alien came along. It wore knee-length boots, polished ox-blood, scuffed, laced with bright yellow laces, dirty jeans inside them, wiry legs like blue yucca plants in pots that were too small, a pack of Marlboro in the waistband, crushed, a t-shirt which housed a paunch, erupting belches stinking of lager. And its eyes; its eyes were enormous, swimming behind thick National Health Service glasses, impossibly green. Dan was shaken, punched, his nose bloodied. His pockets were emptied and his watch, a Seiko, a birthday present, stolen. But nothing so bad happened to Sody. He witnessed his brother's humiliation, his complete failure to react, like he watched TV, only distantly conscious of the reality. Sody wanted Dan to do something, to fight back. He wanted the alien trodden on, but was too small and puny to do it himself - and it wasn't like he was really there. There was this voice inside him which said big brothers were tough, resilient, able; only this wasn't the case. The skinhead demanded cash. Sodium Green hadn't any. He was pushed. That was all: pushed. His brother never forgave him. In the fantasy, though, the alien chewed Sody's arms to the bone and sucked his intestines out through his ears; would have killed him had not Dan, stirred to action in defense of his young'un, eaten the alien skinhead, stains and all, before it could eat Sody, thus saving the department-store universe from a wave of similar muggings.

He woke up in jail.

'Hey,' Bella said. 'Why'd you do it, Al?' Her voice sounded strange, like she wasn't talking to him direct but through a phone.

'Do what?' he answered, blinking tiredly. The walls confining him appeared liquid.

'Eat that woman,' she said.

'I did that - you're kidding?' The liquid was sluggish and murky.

'You don't remember? Al, the hardwire you bought, what became of it?'

'They took it out in the hospital,' he told her. 'Ask Airspeed, he knows.'

'The airball champ?'

'Right...' He was dizzy. The walls stretched and sunk to form faces.

'That can't be true,' Bella asserted. 'Airspeed's history; it's common knowledge he joined an enclosure seasons ago. You imagined it.'

'Really?' The white horses echoed in his head. Somewhere he heard them beat a rhythm (Frogommon's?), gambol on the hems of countries, their damp strands.

The murky liquid faces resolved into the familiar walls of the hotel room. He'd never left it. Lying on the floor, staring at the screen, Sodium had feasted on red rooter pie.

That's what he'd eaten.

A woman? He looked around for Bella, but she wasn't there.

It would be nice to think he'd imagined her also. Maybe he was doped, pinned, splayed open on a theatre table while a gaggle of strangers performed with knives, danced in his cavities and organs, improving, rebuilding, making Sodium Green into another bionic man. These were his womb-dreams, a set of uncertainties surfacing. Or maybe reality lied. His feet ached, mistaking themselves for his skull - like they'd gone off without him, he thought, ventured abroad on their own initiative, on a purpose only they understood. He got up and paced in tight circles till the circulation returned, then collapsed on the bed, his undamaged tail alongside him like a bolster. He felt the hardwire still in his system. He would be guarded in future, less foolhardy.

But it was hard to melt the ice, and care. What he needed was some nitrogen mustard. He'd learnt about that in school. A powerful chemical, it attacked and killed cells, was more potent against tumour cells than ordinary ones, like a smart government agent, an assassin sent to root out and destroy those who (for whatever reason) posed a threat (real or not) to the status quo. And do it effectively, efficiently, with as little waste as possible. Rid the patient of the malignancy. Void the cancer. Eradicate that which ails. Negate. Snuff. Delete. Abolish. Then sew up the carcass.

Precisely...

Green slammed the door, hungry for something, neglecting to first soothe his feet.

They, together with everything else, could wait until later.

They, together with everything else, took a back seat, to hunger.

He passed the sandwich-board man. Code Rico. Message. Beware of waiters with too many hands, the drupe had said. Or had Sodium invented that, also?

FOR THIS NIGHT ONLY -

iv - Players And Eaters

The alligator was renowned for his eating frenzies, but this was something different, a whole new concept in mastication. Those at neighbouring tables gawped and ripples of conversation radiated outward, its subject as its source as Green tucked into an intimidating salad. He was in the West Cliff Saloon, its restaurant likened, for Sodium, to a supermarket. There were aisles and shelves, consumers and staff. Most importantly, there was food, and plenty of it, a menu varied and ample. He had yet to really test it.

The waiters were robots, so Green felt secure enough, despite the attention he was drawing - or perhaps because of it, as little could escape so many eyes.

Conveniently, just as he spooned the last of his trifle onto his multi-coated tongue, the evening's show began. Bella was fronting the bill and wouldn't appear until much later. Green belched and patted his swollen belly. He looked ready to lay a score and twenty eggs. A hovering robot zoomed over with a box of chunky cigars, and he sparked one, the robot doubling as a lighter.

The first act was a magician (no surprises there), some freak who pulled hats out of rabbits, his assistants.

Following the magician, who was booed off, pelted with cabbage, came a troupe of actors. The Unfinished Man, was their piece, the story of an individual whose life had been subjugated by a corrupt state on the brink of collapse. The tale was a familiar one, if somewhat oldfashioned for the corpulent alligator's taste.

Sodium, however, was fascinated.

A previous incarnation?

Urng...

v - The Sunday League

The gaming season brought people from far and wide: from a variety of worlds and non-worlds, for a variety of reasons. Prominent among these were a number of loosely associated teams, amateurs who congregated on the station to compete in an unofficial championship, where pride was heavily involved. Such meetings provided an arena in which old scores might be settled and new wounds opened up. Egos were at stake, and the normal rules no longer applied.

The Drunken Pilots' Association (pissheads) versus The Station Operatives (racks) got things under way. Other teams included The On And Off Station Entertainment Crews (girlies) and The Innkeepers (blubbers), chief among whom was Fat Harry, owner of the West Cliff Saloon in which Green sat.

Bored of the floor-show, Sodium had put his chair in gear and driven through to the bar where the aforementioned pissheads had assembled. A game of bingo was in progress.

'House!' a burly captain shouted, waving a tentacle in the smoky air and sucking the foam off his beer with his augmented penis.

Then the fight broke out.

Perfectly on cue, Green sampled the jukebox.

Shined a sunbeam on her nose

tears or rain?

A rack pitched onto a table, smashing it.

Gonna wake up on the dark side

and sleepwalk in the sun...

Sodium slipped his clutch, playing dodgems.

Cold beer!

...what I like

Cold beer!

The pissheads won, but by then Green had been propositioned, and left.

God invented the arsehole

God invented the brain,

women he gave one of each

men two of the same!

Emerging from his mud hut in the dead of night Primitive Man had no need to unbutton his fly. He pissed by moonlight and buried his turds with his hands, seldom washed or cleaned his teeth and dragged his woman around by the hair.

But he didn't live long.

Sodium Green, in conversation with an agent of the shrimps, would live forever, already had. He felt the gruds stir in his mind, the white horses whip their manes. The agent was tall and reminded him of Bridget, her icy stare at one with his, her blue eyes remembered as soft gems.

'What if I don't want to go on?' he said, picking his teeth.

'You must,' she answered; 'it's your life. The chances of success have never been greater.'

'And your employers? What do they get out of this?'

She shrugged, evasive. 'They have their reasons.'

'I bet they do.'

'You'll accept the contract?'

This was the part he didn't like. Why a contract? The idea of working for another made the alligator irritable, his skin dry and itchy. It's your life, she told him; but hadn't he tried, if not to end then to displace his existence? Put that life on hold?

Green squirmed inside. Sodium, wired, shelled, wanted, despite himself, to give up.

You wired this yourself.

I did?

'And Then The Universe,' read the man in the raincoat; 'by Ernest Jackett. A good choice.'

'What do you want?'

'Want, Al? I've come to give.'

'My name isn't \- '

'Isn't what, Al?' goaded the raincoated figure. 'I said I'd come for you when I thought it was safe, and here I am - in the flesh.' He said the last loudly, stifling a laugh, a gesture both incongruous and false.

'Why have you been following me?' Green attempted to relax, his body having tensed involuntarily. He spoke as a means of defense.

'I wanted to make sure no-one else was. I'm sorry if none of this makes any sense right now, Al, but it'll come.'

Green wasn't listening...

'The shrimps, Al,' Rain said presently. 'They did fine work. A first-class job, wouldn't you agree?'

The mother of stars.

On its last legs.

Green was thinking...

Where did I go wrong?

vi – Hinges

The shrimps ran things. In a universe too big and under-populated to come under the jurisdiction of any one organization or government, the shrimps held the keys. They didn't so much control as make possible, for without their singular talents, their brilliant, enabling technology, neither space travel or reality amplification would be common, and the inhabitants of this house of dust wouldn't know the difference between a star and a potato. The shrimps weren't aliens; there are no aliens. They were creatures, mysterious, aloof, benign, paradoxical, we-know-something-you-don't-know creatures, whose planet of origin was destroyed, legend had it, by an early experiment involving black holes and time displacement, as widespread now as background radiation.

At least, that was one theory. There were others.

These creatures hinged the doors, the doors through which things ran.

Shrimps invented Aphra.

Aphra, the mother of stars, the Astral Chicken, spawned the universe, the man-made universe.

Meaning?

Shrimps came first. Shrimps are people - or what people would be outside of their shells; peeled, as it were.

The problem, however, was one of scale, for just as our Green was housed in our Al might not another be housed in our Green and so on, forward and back? And shrimps, as our Al saw on board The Shop, were about two feet long. Or was what our Al saw not real? A projection maybe?

Food for thought, our reader.

Shrimps had Green by the short and curlies. Everyone, in effect, worked for them; including Bella, who had gone to fetch the (hors de combat?) alligator on their instructions, as he was the one drupe in a universe of drupes who stood any chance of saving the shrimps from a fate worse than death; that is: failure.

For they were people no more.

Such did Sodium conjecture.

Drupes, as Vod had said, had achieved an identity other than was designated.

Shrimps needed to restore the waning cosmos because its inevitable replacement might not include them.

They were scared, and angry. But they were also, like the Folk Sodium had encountered, divided.

Fear drove them, schisms and factions. Fear motivated them. Fear contained them. Fear was not something Green comprehended, its many uses.

Ordinarily...

Was there a fear of good?

'Wait a minute,' he said, regarding Bella, her yellow eyes pits of gold in the night. 'You tried to warn me. You left me clues. Why?'

She smiled at him dimly. 'You're all I've got, Al. I wanted to go on looking a while longer.' And they were hinged, an alligator and his mistress. Or was she leading him on, like Clarissa, only to admit countless other soft options? Legs open, mind shut, her weapons

They didn't teach you that in school, baby.

how to make love to a man;

'cause all you got to is groan, baby

and their minds become unsound

...run it again now: in greater detail, thought Sodium Green.

OUT TIME – WORLD WAR ZERO (white, pink, red)

'BELLA!'

Panicking: a factory moon called Panicking, its no. 14 shelf.

&

Wading through the snow, the blizzard unrelenting, caught in its chill embrace, reminded Al of the nutrient jelly, its blueness diluted here to a frozen white. They had escaped that situation after sabotaging a computer outpost, effecting the prompt arrival of both maintenance crew and atmosphere. Then, there had been the necessity of a skirmish. Now also, a battle he was losing.

It all started quietly enough. The mother of stars fluxed and streaming outward from the core were a thousand brilliant gases, a thousand colliding pathways and interconnecting hearts, each the shade of dreams. Colour was everywhere, and everywhere was colour. It lived. A man-made universe. It lived.

Fuck - Dan? Max? Sody was caught off guard. Dan came screaming in from the snow, flakes of it melting into tears and running down his cheeks...and he could remember everything: Bella and Public Investigator Joe Apple, the shrimps, their part in this, the parts of Tall Bridget and Candyfloss King, Grubber and Patience, who shadowed him, Airspeed who warned him against reverse gear. He knew them all, forward and back. Sodium Green, a drupe who went entire days without speaking, that lived with, ate with, slept with Clarissa, some girl he'd found, lost too. Suddenly his dreams and fantasies made sense; he had not to fix the mother of stars, he had to break it.

But how? Easy. Vod was the catalyst, the pollenating agent Green was charged with implanting. Vod was the seed, the fertilization.

Vod the Globe was genesis.

If you believed it.

Al, Green didn't know what to believe. Shelled as some bizarre monkey he fell face down in the snow, prehensile tail raised like a marker, batlike ears detecting the approach of the enclosed. He ceased breathing and became warm.

In his floating mind he saw yellow eyes twinkle. In his salt-tanged mouth words of oceans arose. And in his youthful heart beat the echoes of other, alternative chambers, as there was more than one truth. There were many. Thousands. And Green recognized them all as being valid. They were plugged in here, between his floating mind and his sinking. They all, without exception, demanded his full attention...

Which he couldn't give - never.

Meaning?

I got out, he recalled, smiling. I deserted them. I made for the beach, crawled from the sea, extricated myself from the massed sand, began ascending the cliff toward the caravan park, its peeling paint and rusted dwellings exposed to the outside elements, those of wind and rain, sun and snow, hail and time. I hid under my sheets, was lulled to sleep by the sounds of argument and laughter, fucking and snores; and far, impossibly far (although not in reality) distant my dreams were born in the glitter and sparkle of the Spanish City, its machines and rides, stalls and odours, a living thing hunched on the esplanade at Whitley Bay, wedged between the castles, the fortresses of sea and land.

I wanted to go back. Green wanted to go back. Neither of us cared for the alligator. Green wanted to climb from Al's shell and I wanted to climb from Green's. If I could. If it were possible. Together we wanted nothing of shrimps and entities and missions and universes other than our own - a contradiction there somewhere... Instead, Sodium and I wanted an early night in bed, some hot milk to dissolve our weary selves.

Tuck us in, Clarissa! Face down in the snow. Bleeding, the crystal water turned first pink then red. Bleeding colour and pins, pins and wire.

But still he was fighting; would fight forever. In his world, Al's world, this world, the war had no beginning, no ending. Another universe would be along in a minute. Did they come in alphabetical order? Aod, Bod, Cod, Dod, Eod, Fod, and so on. Not that it mattered. Al's brother Max and Sodium's brother Dan threw snowballs...and Green refused to drown; not in water.

The alligator arrived on this world, Oyster, via the briefcase Bella had brought with her. She was ageless and potentially good breeding-stock and so had no trouble immigrating.

The world was the wrong one, Al decided, wondering not for the first time at the forces that drove him. How would Bella get off? She must, somehow, Green concluded, floating, sinking. The shrimps must help her, eh? Or maybe Joe. Yeah, Joe. Yelloweyes was capable.

But he was out of it, for now.

This - can be pretty dangerous.

a n d

She's crazy, Al said to himself. We both are. He reached the stalks and pushed into darker folds, affording Bella a tunnel. We're diseased. We have obsession. A self-perpetuating condition; but a sweet one, because in manageable portions we unwrap the secrets of our joined lives, and in manageable portions we suffer. There were far worse fates, he knew; to be part of an investigation team must be one of them, hunting around in the driving snow for an illegal monkey. But every cow to its pasture, and if the grass is greener someplace else, then the best of luck in climbing the fence.

But this is my beach. And the mother of stars, Aphra? A strand, a green strand across whose undulations my feet, my thoughts must skip, do travel, to the joy of my heart, my eyes. If only the universe falls apart...

A glimmer of light. A glimmer of light like a snowdrop, one of many set off against this embattled sky.

And faces. Drupes. Among them, budding from stems the colour of cigarette ash, were tiny planets, likened but not any the same, as if somebody had used misshapen baubles to decorate a Christmas tree hung with unborn corpses.

They waited. All of them waited. But Green the alligator had lost his appetite.

For now he'd wake up in a coma, among the garbage of Fargone, beneath a redundant umbrella.

At war with himself. At war with opposable forces.

7 - View From A Fridge

i - The Plumbing Sisters' Leaving Party

Standing on a mountainside

smoking a cigar,

thinking 'bout a murder

in a Texas bar;

pulled the trigger on a farming man

who had too much to say,

kept taking 'bout my baby

like she had gone away

Cold beer!

...one last time now

Cold beer!

Now that Sodium knew the rules he felt in a position to break them. Firstly, and with a degree of nervous reluctance, he sloughed the alligator shell, shed its many tags and labels, but also its versatility and protection. He'd go it alone from here - whatever that meant. Stood before the bathroom mirror he saw his expression to be one of frank amazement. 'That's me?' his image said, pointing. 'Christ.' His skin was pale and oily, sagging, blotched under the arms and between the skinny legs. His nipples and penis were reddened and as he stared his balls dropped.

Dizzy, Green settled like a melted snowman to the cool, checkered floor, its plastic strangely reassuring. It was as if the shell retained all his latent energy, as if this body had been slowly dissolving in that other. He retched, but nothing came up, nothing save blood and mucus. He had this outrageous thought, to butcher and cook over an open fire his erstwhile outfit, to consume and dominate its onerous persona, to feed on it as it had fed on him, to nullify that past which haunted him and re-continue his chosen future; to start again, fresh and unloaded, high on potential.

He reversed to the balcony and peered at the stars. The cliffs of the space station echoed them. He wondered how far it was to the caravan park, whether the centre of the universe was closer. A string of hospitality buggies sailed by and he hailed one.

Guilt, he decided, sitting in a dingy cafe, had nothing to do with it. He owed nobody. Gloria had bought him the coffee. She was a chorus girl who didn't believe a word of it when he told her he knew Bella.

Maybe he didn't.

He yawned, shivered. He owed Gloria, Sodium corrected. Her outfit, like Bella's, was close fitting. He tried to guess what she would look like without it. With it she resembled a chorus girl out of a thirty's movie, a Ziegfeld's folly, all cute lips and blonde hair, silver brocade and toneless, white appendages. Green liked her. She didn't talk much, just smile, chin perched on hands as if at a table laden with cocktails, making eyes at Claude Raines or Humphrey Bogart.

The shrimps were after him. He knew it as fact. Green had signed their contract, as Bella must have before him. Or was that signature the alligator's?

'Sorry, Al.'

'Hm? You want more coffee?' Gloria asked, wagging a red-nailed finger at the percolator.

'Sure.' He sat back.

The percolator trundled over and steamed a moment. 'Milk and sugar?'

'No sugar,' said Green, embarrassed. He was naked, and somehow that seemed worse in front of a robot. He didn't mind about Gloria; if she noticed at all, she'd think it his usual habitat.

He started on his fourteenth cup.

It was like waking from a nightmare, he reckoned, Gloria's hand in his own. They stood together on the transparent face of an immense gamesphere, surrounded by hundreds of people, hundreds of non-people, part of the crowd that had assembled to watch the inaugural contest in this season's airball championship. The sphere was contained in one still larger, the whole positioned beyond the station, in vacuum. Three kilometres away, on the far side of the sphere, which was like an invisible planetoid, Green could just make out the clustered feet, hooves, flippers, tentacles etc., of the encompassing audience.

Inside the sphere fifteen numbered machines spiralled and rotated, flashing points and blazing scores in what was in reality a knockout competition. The duelling would come later. Jets and ricochets guided the players. Luck and skill arbitrated.

Sodium thought about his predicament. Certainly, he wanted no further contact with the shrimps, but how could he avoid their agents? He chewed a food-bar, methodic in its destruction. A fly settled on his nose and locked gazes with him. He remembered the bird he'd seen outside Calepokia when the only life there had been bipedal, and sneezed.

Dressed in a loincloth of tan leather, sandals on his feet and wax in his ears, Green waited for Gloria in a typically deserted corridor. He didn't feel much like Tarzan. He felt wholly apathetic. But Gloria was taking him to a party, the Plumbing sisters' leaving party - so maybe when he got a few drinks down him?

She manifested. He stared. He couldn't imagine her as Jane. Now all they needed was someone who didn't much resemble Cheetah and they could win second prize in the fancy-dress parade.

First prize, of course, would be won by Clarissa.

Clarissa always went to fancy-dress parties dressed as nun.

ii - Dumb Waiters

A lift ride later they waited at an oval door for Gloria's knock to be answered and the door opened, admitting them, shelled and peeled, to the party.

Green's flesh itched; he scratched it, dislodging flakes not unlike snow, each, he felt confident, a different shape.

A waiter appeared, swimming behind the translucent door like a killer whale. He raised a finger to a hidden switch and the barrier vanished; although whether withdrawn or deactivated, Green couldn't tell. They were ushered into a silent antechamber beyond whose shimmering, opalescent walls glinted a smudged panoply of forms, their contours diluted, their noise replaced by the surreal quiet of the waiter who handed each of them a tiny globe, like a smaller version of Vod. And, following Gloria's example, Sodium popped his in his ear, whereupon the full volume of the party exploded in his unready skull.

He came around, propped unceremoniously between a boxy pillar and a long curving table supporting a multitude of savoury hors d'oeuvres and creamy snacks. Gloria had left him, ventured into the press of bodies, her coiled blonde hair and silver brocade swamped by the greater mass of varihued heads, their separate broadcasts pooled together in a riotous babble merrymaking. Sodium pushed his little finger in his ear but failed to locate the globe that had seemingly made its way to the centre of his brain. Like Vod, he thought, barely able to hear his own cognitive processes: the journey to the centre, the seeding of a universe. A drink was deposited in his hand and he downed it.

'Another?' the waiter inquired, towering over him like a beetroot-skinned pelican.

'Yeah, why not.' Green swapped his empty glass for a full one. Truth was, he was thoroughly pissed-off. His eyes stung as if he'd been glued to the ceiling by them and his guts writhed somewhere near his clenched rectum.

'Is there anything else I can get you?' the grinning waiter asked, bent like a pin somebody had sat on.

He was making Green uncomfortable. 'One of those pastry things.' He pointed.

'Why not two?'

What was it with him? 'Okay.' Then, when the man's back was turned, Sodium ducked under the table, its draped cloth a shield, spangled, dancing, a glacier wall. The afforded space, a tent, reminded him of boyhood games, of long afternoons spent concealed beneath shrouded furniture peering at motherly ankles, the roaring Hoover as it went about its business of sucking up dead things and dust. A white tunnel invited him, curving right, and he padded forth on bruised, scabby knees.

The tunnel wound in a horseshoe. Toward its end squatted a girl rolling a joint, carefully folding the glued cigarette papers before tapping in a rough line of tobacco and finally dusting it with oily cannabis. She gazed at him momentarily, licked and sealed the tubular envelope, said, 'You got a light? They confiscated my matches.'

'They,' said Green, sitting.

'The waiters,' she told him. 'They're strange, don't you think so?'

He did, but was unsure what she was getting at.

'Anyway, on the door,' the girl went on. 'Are you a resident?'

Sodium was taken by the shadows that offered an infinity of contrasts to her waxen features and didn't answer. He wondered if the hardwire pins were still active, primed to project imagery through his bedazzled mind.

'This is a residents only party,' she said. 'If you were a resident you'd know that, eh? So I guess you're not; in which case, you gatecrashed.'

He remained sitting, mute, noise pounding in his skull, the girl's voice cutting a groove behind his nose, apprehensive as her face had warped into a mask of suspicion.

'I could have you thrown out,' she added, petulant, warning. 'Do you like my shoes?'

Green's eyes dropped automatically. He wished they hadn't, for instead of trim calves below her piled dress, its spillage crimson petals, were the shrunken, twisted facades of Gloria, both as he knew her (the chorus girl) and how she must appear devoid of paint and domino, a hideous parody of her outfitted self Sodium realized to be the true creature.

Gladly, he vomited.

Shrimps would make him pay. He was aware; his awareness was instinctive. Shrimps would cause him more pain than swallowed glass, more ill-fortune than countless broken mirrors. This was their realm, their universe. Not man-made, he understood, but shrimp-made. Because there were no men, only drupes, hollow casts, artificial people he'd seen growing on submerged trees, awaiting the harvest. The sides were clearly defined. It was the ultimate contest in this season of contests, a trial by nerve and resources that the shrimps had won long ago - but now their time was running out, and they'd panicked. Sodium Green was their weakness. Sodium Green, who had escaped them once, next to be hauled back. Sodium Green who wanted nothing of their survival even if it meant his own. Sodium Green who couldn't give a shit...

He dived from beneath the table and stumbled drunkenly about the wall-less room, jolted this way and that by cavorting partygoers, their expressions as one with those suspended in vitro on a factory moon, vacant, oblivious, their ignorance the shrimps' fiercest weapon, his motion through their jellied ambience stirring mock gestures in slack lineaments, amid the pathetic hands and countless toes.

A figure lunged at him, grazed his temple with a silver tray, its glasses toppled, shedding rainbows, facets, rings of expanding light and sound, its wielder grimacing, frothed with theatre-rime, teeth bared, purple skin sunk a deeper, ruddier beetroot as he brought the tray around in a rising arc whose intended nadir lay within Sodium's brain.

Green ducked, scampered backward crablike and turned to run. Or with the idea of running, as his sense of direction was overwhelmed by the unconscious press of loud bodies, drupes in shells and outfits, drupes in drupes, literally.

How many knew it? Suspected?

Few, was his answer. The waiter...the wrong waiter. A waiter collided with him, growling. Green side-stepped, delved into his past for the stability of cold, ice he could wrap his thoughts in, smooth his actions, a familiar detached chill that might save his life.

He climbed stairs in the hope of an exit but they led nowhere. He clambered along a lattice, its interwoven branches laden with rapidly growing vines, red and blue tendrils which delivered a neverending flow of refreshments as if from the veins of a disembodied giant, the fountains of liquor from its severed wrists, the drinking aggregate a preying infestation of maggots. A stronger blaze of light sliced his vision and the lattice collapsed, spilling him as it spilled the liquid it channelled. A second blast scorched the hide of a lizard, his spontaneous flames drawing applause.

Sodium crawled away. He'd spotted a door. The door filled his world and he became blind and deaf to everything but its promising contour and the very real need of flight. Only the door seemed impossibly far; he might never reach it, suffer his final demise at the whim of a man his frozen self had yet to identify.

Apple, he thought, Public Investigator Joe Apple, branch 459. A proud man, his a proud world, a world at war, at war from the beginning like Sodium. Oyster it was called, Oyster. Enclosure Alfalfa Delores. Here was the man that had dealt Al that fatal blow, the insane tool of an insane government, an oligarchy surely demented, its nitrogen mustard. Here was the man whose desperate condition mirrored the shrimps' desperate condition. And Green in the middle, a sacrifice to both. The outcome? He tried to laugh, but wasn't able. He jammed his soft fingernails into the barely discernible join and heaved the stubborn panels apart, their protests strangled.

He fell several feet, gashing his chin. The dumb waiter set to motion, jerky like the lift he'd occupied with bopping Frogommon - a non-reality, probably. A weight crashed on top of him. Green shuddered, but the purple-shelled investigator made no attempt to complete his mission.

In the dim light as the dumb waiter descended Sodium could see his aggressor's skull had burst open like a ripe horse-chestnut, the glossy fruit therein composed of two spherical halves, one of which dropped wetly against his cheek, delivering an unavoidable kiss.

He was aware of its nature, instinctively. The shrimps had got to Joe somehow; fried his shell. So was the original, the ordinary trapped inside? Going crazy, Sodium presumed, as Alfalfa Delores was a puritanical world. He tapped on the purple chest, its impressive musculature thinly veiled by clothing, and received taps in return. Dull echoes, but they sufficed. Maybe all was not lost. The dumb waiter slowed.

In the thickening darkness Green wondered how much Joe knew about emergency escape procedure.

His laugh arrived, late and unrepentant.

iii – Tyres

It may well have been a kitchen but it transported Sodium Green to an amusement arcade in the Spanish City. The flashing lights and trilling bandits stormed his abused psyche and he allowed his gaze to wander unattended amid the ovens and bright nodular equipment. Standing over the inert Joe Apple, who resembled a boiled lobster in tails, Green looked around for a means of transport. A roller-coaster swept through his head, in one ear and out the other. Robots fussed everywhere, hovering, throwing sparks, food-welders and dish-mechanics, ignoring these rejects from the party above.

He considered a tin-opener. The shell at his feet jerked, hissed, and with an unsettling series of messy contractions expelled its occupier.

Joe appeared wizened, confused. He glared at Sodium as if unsure of his eyes, rubbed them, then climbed unsteadily, his full height some sixty inches. The two regarded one another, and Joe shivered. Rising between them the world-globe spun on its tilted axis, its smooth features alert.

Gentlemen? the entity said.

'We don't need you,' Sodium rejoined. 'Eh, Joe?'

The investigator swallowed, assessing, grappling, deciding a suitable course. Green could almost read his mind. There was a knowledge behind his eyes, a resolution grown from ignorance (of the shrimp-made universe, its working) and doubt (of his role in its death, its struggle) that found an affinity with and a parallel to his own recent past, of ocean-fringed idylls, seas and continents, a paradise achievable through self-determined acts.

Sodium gambled with lives. His and others.

The mother of stars, the ultimate prize, Vod said; the  sweetest disease is -

'Quiet!' Joe's voice rattled. His eyes dropped to the gun clasped in the outfit's redundant hand. He seemed, thought Sodium, to have come to a conclusion. 'I have no wish to kill you,' he whispered. 'I have only my duty.'

Green waited for him to finish.

'That duty has passed,' he said.

'Glad to hear it.' Sodium's head swivelled so quickly he made himself dizzy. All he saw were yellow eyes, Rain showing his - her true colours.

Something snapped in Joe. Blurs flowered. Green was knocked aside as the investigator went for shelled Bella, his scrawny limbs no match for her enhanced speed, strength and reflexes, rigid and extended as his skull burst a second time and his debilitated form, racked by lifelong passions, canny enough to recognize her, crumpled to the kitchen floor like a disturbed sugar-tower, a brittle pastry castle the robots had conjured up, blood and brains decorating like marzipan and raspberries.

Green turned away, disturbed. He felt responsible. The shrimps would let nothing hinder their purpose, and he was as much an instrument as Bella, their relationship long and much tested, nearing its fulfillment with the inevitability, the gathering momentum of a runaway train.

'Was that necessary?'

'You know it was, Al - come on.'

'Don't call me that,' he insisted. 'I'm not him, you hear? I want nothing to do with you or the shrimps.'

She pocketed the gun, snapping fingers. She held the globe. 'And this, its inner meaning? You can't forget this, eh? It's not that easy.'

'I can try.'

She sneered. 'You already did.'

He pushed past her, past Rain, the industrious robots, the fuming ovens, and walked dejectedly till he found an exit.

'We leave as soon as possible,' Bella said, off to his right, waiting for him.

'And if I refuse?'

'You can't,' she answered simply. 'You know that. Wasn't it the reason for your sabbatical, to examine the framework, map the cosmological skeleton?'

Yes, he said to himself, inwardly thawing. And it had awoken the beast in him; or maybe he'd inherited that from Joe. Either way, he would do more than frighten people with an icy stare, an unnerving equanimity. From here on in, Green was altogether furious.

Incorporated space.

The pins in Green's head, long dormant, leaked him from star to star. Vod was nearby; Bella too, glued to him like twin antennae, function reversed as they monitored him and his mental responses, his sweeps and whorls through the shiny cosmic haystack.

'What?' Sodium thought back: an earlier conversation with Rain, the broad man tapping Green's skull. You live here, he'd enlightened.

'Something wrong, Al? You cried out.'

'My name isn't Al,' he repeated; 'it's Green - I think.' He started walking toward a distant cluster of rocks. The ground was hilly, swathed in blue grasses. There were clouds in the sky like alien formations of swallows, reddish masses illuminated by a waxing sun.

As dawn broke he saw the rocks to be unnatural, moulded vehicles, blunt and stony, whose access and use depended, he intuited, on you first locating the door. This Sodium achieved after several minutes, reminded of the dumb waiter he'd prised open at the party, the Plumbing sisters' leaving party. Strictly for residents. Yeah, but residents of what? The memory dragged others behind it, prominent among them the two faces of Gloria, cruelly arrayed in place of the joint-girl's feet.

Something else came to mind; nudged there, he guessed, by the entity.

Verisimilitudes, it said.

The shrimps were indulging him, Green reckoned. In his desperation, in theirs, they risked destruction, for surely he could induce his own death. Why not? He smiled at that question. Perhaps the shrimps understood him better than he did himself. Suicide was not on the agenda. Motion was, and the rocks, the rocks told him, could provide it in a tangible form - unincorporated...

Once inside, couched in darkness, he relaxed, allowed his puny body to familiarize itself with the nebulous controls, the nebulous (unfelt, unseen) controls to familiarize themselves with Sodium. It was like the machine he had sparred against Airspeed in, only here the gamesphere was bigger, the variable universe. And there were no rules, not any longer. Reverse gear was perfectly acceptable. And if he won? All bets were off. So he imagined an accelerator. Pressed it.

Tail chasing

fixing the fixers,

always behind

always in ditches

...hear the rubber burning?

Listen to the radio,

high on white smoke

low on amphetamines,

a mix up with the gears...

Tail chasing –

Green rolled his stone into a larger one, like in a movie, the truck's ramps scraping along the road, the hero's sports car driving up them and on board, the ramps lifted and the truck's rear door closed. It was a question of disguises. A problem, once more, of scale.

Green grabbed himself a fork from the drawer and set to on his beans, moving orange worlds from the plate to his mouth, chewing them, motioning the squash to his eager stomach. It satisfied more than his hunger, this ritual, as if the act of consumption were central to his progress, his filling-out on the tree of evolution. Someday he'd be eaten too, digested like the beans, his cells as theirs, recycled into a different whole.

fixing the fixers,

always behind

always in ditches

Now a larger stone, a mightier rock, Sodium tumbled through the void. Never for a moment was he alone, as the shrimps rode him, their errant meteor. They had wired this particular voyage; but he still hoped to shake them.

...hear the rubber burning?

Listen to the radio,

high on white smoke

low on amphetamines,

a mix up with the gears...

Mavis, his adopted mother, screamed. She'd dropped baby Sody and he'd landed on his head, giggling.

Dan was caught masturbating. He flew into a rage, flung the magazine he'd been pawing over at Sody whose innocent features his brother interpreted as sly and conniving, with more than a hint of blackmail in their creases, his pocket-money for maybe the next six months going to appease their smile.

Dagmar, his adopted father, blew smoke in his face, threatened to burn him. But little Sody had no fear of fire. He'd grown from a small rock to be a small moon, cold and barren, from a moon to a planet, and from a planet (frozen - temperate - warm - tropical - boiling - superheated) to a gaseous giant, a star in all but name.

No, Sody had no fear of fire...

Melting, he hugged the bends, gripped the blacktop with a tenacity the gods might've envied, had their been any gods near at hand.

Then he exploded. Debris was scattered in every direction, much of his original mass expelled, vitrified by the heat and annealed to the asphalt. The vehicle skidded uncontrollably and slewed off the road, burying its nose in a wall of ferns, roots, bushes, a jungle some amateur gardener had constructed in his spare time. The crash meant death for his father: Sody had grabbed the wheel.

Vaguely curious - no tears. The expression impressed into Dagmar's face was one of steering-column and dials, cigar lighter and switches. Grooved, patterned like a tyre; lacking a tyre's reinforcement, however.

Sody had grabbed the wheel.

'Little bastard,' said Mavis.

Little bastard, thought Dan, who loved him.

Sody had grabbed the wheel.

'Little bastard.'

Dagmar had been chasing tail. A mix up with the gears. Cold beer, an opened bottle of it, vomiting foam like a polluted stream, dribbling foam from his father's torn lips.

Cold beer.

iv - Lemmy Lemming

Green parked his rock and climbed out. He walked to the edge and peered down at the beach. Hands in pockets, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, all of eight or nine. He'd abandoned his Tarzan loincloth and sandals. The caravans to his rear, transmuted from stone to plastic and aluminium, sat hunched together like lemmings, their leader poised. The calmness in his lungs matched the stillness of the wind and the stillness of the wind symbolized the waiting void.

Where do we go from here? they were saying. Do we fall or fly?

Green, checking his thermometer, the temperature of his brain, arranged his toes, pointed them at the horizon, its deceptive flatness, and swayed - leaned forward over the lulling edge, swung back in the direction of solid earth. He wondered how long he could keep it up, how far, through how many degrees it was possible for him to travel before either gravity as invented by the shrimps, the nuts in humankind's kernels, or fate, as represented by any of an inexhaustible number of often contradictory factors from sudden buffeting thermals (forcing him arseward) to chance teleportation to an entirely separate and previously unconnected universe as the result of some computer aberration involving a trainee at a government-funded research station in Papua New Guinea (woolly-haired in Malayan), intervened.

Whatever his decision, the single prevalent fact remained.

Sody had grabbed the wheel.

Something entered his mind: we could be inside it, the mother of stars, the Astral Chicken, and all this struggling for supremacy and position might just be a preliminary, like the blending of unrelated genes in an embryo, the rudimentary shuffling of a freshly-broken pack.

Or maybe not.

One thing was certain: Green's thermostat must at some unknown point in the narrative have become stuck, damaged, as he had inadvertently frozen to the edge.

So perhaps it would be fitting to at last mention luck, that patent quality which arguably doesn't exist; that, like the vacuum of space, holds everything up. Or maybe...

v - The Landlady Of Shore

Green had landed. It had been time to move on, to explore new and unchartered waters, map exotic coasts. The natives it turned out where friendly enough, if, like himself, a little unusual, a little detached.

'Aphra? You're kidding? Forget that shit!' She folded her arms and hoisted her breasts. 'We get all sorts in here; freebooters mainly - pirates.' She winked. 'Anyhow, if it's the centre you're looking for what are you doing at the lip, on the brink, eh?'

He shrugged, hunched over his beer, the bar-stool he was perched on almost level with the bar, affording Sodium an unparalleled view of the landlady's ample cleavage. He imagined his face buried in its softness, his cock parting its seam like a knife through warm dough.

'Things are quiet at the moment,' she was saying. 'But it'll liven up, you'll see.'

He inquired about a room with a bath.

Rain appeared, pushing aside the saloon doors with a flourish.

'Crap,' said Sodium.

The landlady rattled on old biscuit tin and Green was forced to put some money in it. The money left round, square and triangular shapes on his palms and fingers where he had peeled it off.

'Shrimps,' he added, coughing up more skin, further enlightened as a result of the faux pas: the pink, many-legged creatures were despised in this neck of the woods.

The landlady's name was Fillmore, and she alone could swear on Shore, because she owned it.

Rain accompanied him to flat 2a, Fenkle Street, Newcastle. His room was a regular home from home, Green realized, picturing Bella, smiling. She had done this, tricked him into a specially constructed cage, its bars those he'd be strong enough to bend when he was fit enough to leave; as with Airspeed, shelled in his recuperative mould, surrounded by his trophies in the dank air of a (fictitious or otherwise) hospital.

For the first time in his contrived life Sodium Green was feeling like an accident victim. He ran his bath and eased into it. He had yet to look out the windows; the sounds of traffic sufficed. Bella arrived, unshelled, free of Rain. The smile she wore had vanished. Green blinked. The door slammed, and he supposed Rain the drupe to have departed on some private business or shrimp errand. Then, naked, calculating, Bella shed her close-fitting veneer and hung it on a towel-peg like a robe. Next she climbed into the bath with him, eyes not yellow but brown, hair trailing, skin flushed and inviting.

'Wash my back,' said Clarissa, who loved nobody. 'I want you to wash my back...'

And after?

Girlfriend? Wait a minute. No girlfriend of mine. And I don't have a brother either.

Later, asleep, he floated. Tongues, Clarissa's, woke him. They slithered from her mouth, creeping, entwining him like manic worms. They strangled his cock and roped his legs, clambered on top of him. Smelling of perfume they heaved and sucked at him until he quivered, collapsed, jerked again and again; then retracted, dry.

When the sun found him, he was alone. No sign of Clarissa. No scent. No animal trace.

Only stains.

Green swung his legs out from beneath the covers.

The beast was invigorated.

A new day had dawned. On Earth. On Fargone. On Oyster. On Shore. And Sodium had learned to walk.

Running, he already knew, was easy.

8 - Putting Out Feelers

Joe Apple hadn't known it, but the vital ingredient in his hamburgers aboard the shoe Gargantuan Fries was human. The shrimps produced an abundance of drupes, a high percentage of which were substandard. It would have been a crime to waste them, all that quality meat. They served as fodder for the best, the pick of the crop, those with smarts and ability, a good set of teeth. L'appetit vient en mangeant, as they say in France.

C'est la vie.

i – Vectors

Green was depressed. He knew too much. What he didn't know was just what to do about it. He badly wanted to get back at the shrimps, to hurt them, revenge himself. He was diseased, and it was they who had infected him.

He ruminated on the landlady's talk of pirates. On the fringe of the universe, laws might be circumvented. Was there a Shop in the vicinity? Could they, Sodium and these fellow revolutionaries, attack it?

'Worth a try,' he said aloud, buttoning his jacket. From the telly he understood it to be January outside. He might buy a spaceship in the sales and fly to Colchester, visit some friends - and why stop there? Why not Spain or Portugal? If he had sufficient speed he could even make it to Afrika. He'd always liked the idea of touring Afrika. But would it be there, where he expected it, when, if he arrived?

Green slammed the door.

Slow down, he told himself; put it in reverse gear and be ready, foot on the clutch, foot on the brake.

There was a lift at the end of the tunnel.

Some minor alterations, Sodium realized, had taken place in his absence.

Was the rent due?

He left the building and headed toward the centre of town, taking the Metro, he relaxed, once more occupying a moving body, the carriage a shell you could choose to stand or sit in. It was half empty. It shuddered between stations, clattering along the rails, fed by electricity and the fare of meaty passengers which it swallowed and regurgitated at sporadic intervals. Green had no ticket; he rode illegally, dodged an inspector at Palmersville, and arrived (no closer to Afrika) pumping adrenalin.

The sign read Whitley Bay, but he had no time for signs, walking instead by path and road till he came upon an arcade and a chippy.

Both were closed, however. He couldn't ignore the signs; they were everywhere.

He stared at his darkened reflection in countless dead windows and shuffled his toes in his shoes, his fingers in his pockets. His nose looked different, although he failed to recall its previous appearance; and his mouth seemed strange, lopsided, as if it wasn't Green's mouth at all. His features, his mirrored image, gave him the impression he wasn't staring at his reflection - but that it was staring at him from the cloaked recesses of the panes, and not liking what it saw, the inherent weakness. Oh, the voice might fashion brave words and the mind think thoughts of rebellion; only, where was the action, the deliberate, non-reflexive undertaking? Where lay the true direction?

Stop and listen, Green, listen and learn, then fill your tank with rocket fuel and begin again, his other self instructed him: blow some holes! Investigate...

'Easy for you to say,' groaned Sodium. 'You don't live in this head.'

He tapped his cranium.

On the return journey he sat eating popcorn, the carriage full of school-kids and conversation, the latter flowing past him like tides of backward-playing records, a flow that tugged at his distended brain. The school-kids were self-possessed and grinning, excited, off home to Coke and chocolate biscuits, bedrooms whose walls were shrouded in posters, irate parents and unwanted meals, cigarettes. Green envied their solidity.

They poured off the train like rats from a burning sewer, jammed the escalators, raced for the exits, Sodium carried along with them, spinning in their vibrant currents, slowing as they disappeared onto buses and into cars, leaving him no option but to wander back, find himself once more on the littered platform awaiting the next bout of transient incarceration, the next grinding train, the bum marks on its vacant seats like negative galaxies.

Disconnected, numbed by it, he glided through shops and department stores, buying nothing, touching nothing, seeing nothing, perfectly still as the shelves and counters, displays and customers blurred past, shifting to red. If I wired this myself, he thought, then surely there must be a way out, some exit? Or were the bars of this cage inviolable? He grabbed a passer-by, shook them, man or woman, he didn't care which, he didn't see it as important, and the world. Evaporated.

ii – Bent Light

'Okay,' said Bella. 'I guess you passed.'

Sodium scratched under his arm and looked around the room. He was slumped on the sofa, his sofa, its floral pattern worn and discoloured as it should be, aged by clothes, bodies, spilt drinks, ash, dust and sweat, the decayed husks of myriad tiny insects whose only crime was a fondness for skin cells and dandruff. The briefcase lay on the floor. He leaned forward and saw within the emptied space of his living-room, detailed in miniature, the perspective affording him a view of the kitchen and its tiled floor.

'Hello, Al,' she said. 'Been a long time.'

'Your sense of the dramatic,' he pronounced, remembering with sudden, unexpected clarity, 'is as impressive as ever.'

'Which, Al, is more than I can say about you. But then you were never the kind to remain in the same place - to remain still, housed in the same shell long enough for a change in the weather. Which,' she went further, 'is why I'm always having to steer you clear of trouble.'

The room filled with colour.

'I'm glad you're on my side,' he said, doubting his own conviction, the words overstated. 'The shrimps are really in for a roasting.'' His euphoria orbited his head like blue stars and pink elephants, as if Tom or Daffy had hit him with a bucket.

'You too,' Bella warned, 'if they catch you again. It's lucky for you I found you this time, that your mind isn't wired straight into a Shop window.'

He tensed at that. He tried to visualize Bella as Clarissa, but somehow it didn't work.

'Don't worry,' she softened; 'you came through the screen unscathed, you tested positive.' She sat next to him. 'Welcome aboard, Al. I've missed you.'

And he blew some holes, starting with Bella.

He lived, the alligator, Sodium Green. He lived for his enemy's destruction, the shrimp-made universe to be wiped out and the man-made universe to flourish, to rise up, uncluttered by the former's strangling roots, unshadowed by its trees of artificial hope. He refused to breathe the shrimps' repressive pollution.

'I've been busy,' said Bella. 'Everyone has.'

'Aphra?'

She laughed. 'Yeah, the chicken has come home to roost; and we're invited.'

Meaning?

The shoe Bent Light, following some much needed repairs, was to rendezvous with those revolutionaries affiliated to a collision course at the appointed hour, and armed, decide the fate of the cosmos by what amounted to a brawl in the galactic street, a tumultuous squabble.

'It's all set,' explained yelloweyes. 'We just didn't want to move without you.'

His heart felt warm. 'Thanks.'

'Don't mention it, Al.'

'I owe you one.'

'I said forget it.'

The alligator's neck went slack.

'Shit!'

He burned, the world-globe wrapping him in flames as a host of writhing, tangled arms exploded from his Adam's apple, a last-resort weapon of the shrimps.

Beware of waiters with too many hands, his red rooter dreams had warned. And here they were, skinny limbs, murderous digits, dormant for so long, now intent on killing.

Yeah, lucky, he heard himself think.

Vod escaped. The entity had been hovering silently near the ceiling.

Bella was torn to pieces; too many pieces, no opportunity to wire her whole again. No warning. She'd lowered her defences, was naked, vulnerable, careless this once. But the entity did succeed in getting Green out, dumping its own format personality in favour of his, shielding itself with fire and sustaining that blaze long enough to ensure that nothing remained of the countless hands, the ruined bodies, the furniture in a lead-grey room aboard the shoe Bent Light, but inert carbon, lifeless black chunks...

Vod stirred the gases to make doubly sure, analysed the residue, vented the room's disrupted contents, employing its backup circuits for the operation, vestigial tracts that would soon fade.

And I was a sphere - imperfect blackness, fashioned from ice and fire, distinct.

9 - Too Dead

If Green had been able to count (like Al hadn't the shrimp's little pink busy legs) the number of associated fingers lost to laser-knives in the non-shrimp manufacture of the hardwire pins, each reproduced, a flaw in the finished product as touted by Ray Guns, then he may have appreciated the extent to which his existence was grafted to Li, Wang, Fo and the boys, of Liquid Dragon Industries, Tsingtao, China, Earth, and sent them a postcard from a factory-moon called Glaucus where there had been a bumper crop of thumbs, a fact that has nothing whatsoever to do with little people or elephantiasis and everything to do with unemployment among robots.

Also: space is flat - sorry Riemann, but that's the way it goes.

I feel the urge to urinate

to piss in someone's tea,

I feel the urge to ejaculate

to sting like a bumble-bee;

so if my tongue is in your ear

and my hand upon your thigh,

remember these brief words of mine

as I am rather shy

Cold beer!

...one last time now

Cold beer!

i - The Men Of Lamp Rock

Floating along the corridor Sodium the Sphere mentally reappraised his circumstances. Bent Light was underway and he had real-time, that precious commodity, to occupy his seven major senses. Free of flesh and wire he proceeded to the bridge in vacuum and darkness, shoe's energy transferred from life-support to drive, the ailing vessel, its sole passenger, limping to a rendezvous both hoped would prove decisive.

Moral support from a shoe, Green thought, I never had that before.

Aphra had not existed in the past, where the alligator looked for it, the mother of stars. The Astral Chicken was a manifestation of the present, the future's preface. He shook his head - and felt the ghost of it, the way his eyes had moved in his skull, his tongue in his mouth, the hardness of his teeth as they ground together.

The past was dead; it had no relevance. All that mattered now was the shrimps' annihilation, and to a lesser degree, the consequences of it. Sodium Green was no longer interested in repercussions. He believed neither in the seeding of a new universe nor in the idea that he personally was the agent of this miracle.

It was easier that way. Hanging in vacuum, there was no friction. There could be no blood on his hands, in reality; for as we've seen, reality was often simulated.

He arrived.

At Lamp Rock, a space station without a number, without a Shop, Green alighted.

A drupe met him. 'We got your message.'

Good. What next?

'You're the last - so I guess we make a start.' He turned for the lift, its steel doors screaming open.

And Sodium followed.

The men sat around a large table, shelled as grotesques, amid a cloud of fabulous, spectral luminescence, wreaths of colour. They moved only slowly, time suspended, individuals hunched and squat, loose and fluid, smoking aromatic cigars, many of them (he intuited) women. The room appeared boundless. Green took his place among their fantastical number. A conversation happened, much of it untalked; and a bell chimed, inviting lost souls to the tryst, involving them, forming them in the milieu of shades.

This was it then: the finish.

Sodium observed, took it all in, spoke his piece to the mordant assembly and listened as others told and retold, as the forms dissolved and were cast anew, each a face he thought to recognize, each a signature, a code in his mind. Swollen in their presence was Bella.

Death suited her, he concluded, suited her smile. The vaporous constitution of her body, illuminated from within, enhanced the not entirely specious qualities of her unique style and persona. Unlike that of Rain, this outfit flattered her.

Which, when you thought about it, was funny.

ii - The Rockett Heel Bar

Green had lost his key and so borrowed Clarissa's in order to get another cut. Sparks flew as he waited, surrounded by blank keys, boots and shoes, hammers, cobbler's irons, knives and levers, tins of polish and smells of rubber and leather, the prices' board, a stitching-machine, a grinder, noise, people, some customers like himself, others out on the pavement, beyond the grimy window. He stared past these at the shops lining the far side of Clayton Street, clothes-racks and assorted rails, stands, staff spilling from their recessed egresses, their display windows cluttered with fashionable junk. And below the narrow band of sky, wearing a brown leather jacket, a cigarette protruding like a factory chimney from his worn brown face, stood a man selling socks. Sodium admired his patience, his vigil, his wares in one hand or both, his banter addressed to those passers-by who chanced a glance in his direction. But most ignored him. They walked deftly, skirted his imagined perimeter, vision taken by some obscure detail lodged like a dead pigeon in the crumbling Victorian ledges above. Green thought about going over and purchasing maybe eight or nine pairs of cheap, one-size nylon - another time perhaps, when he had less than keys to cut. Because today he felt the need to wander, maybe make it all the way to the ocean, all the way back.

Green parked his shoe and conversed with a mechanic, a swarthy man twenty-three feet tall with a wall-eye and a host of adaptations. They agreed a price. He hired a drupe and went walkabout, the heel bar a planetoid orbiting a blue sun. He followed the course of a river, his heavy boots leaving gridlike indentations in the soft red grass, the air in his borrowed lungs at once sweet and acrid. The team of four mechanics who ran the bar collected a variety of exotic flora, their pride, the shell's guide-memory told him, a tiny bell-shaped orchid that altered colour and form according to the precise conditions of its environment, thus providing a kind of advance warning of coming rainstorms or prolonged high temperatures, as programmed by the planetoid's native computer. A haze of languid insects, some the size of automobiles, others like sparkling dust, hovered above him as if eager to provide shade or companionship, their constant presence more comfort than threat, their composition solid, fluid, gaseous. Sodium felt right at home, at peace, wandering the timeless landscape, drifting with the mute clouds. He rode in the drupe's head, saw with the drupe's eyes, touched with the drupe's fingers and sensed all that the drupe sensed, the sheer aliveness of this nurtured paradise sprawling across the drupe's blank, impressionable mind. Soon, he thought, everything was going to be very different; the heel bar at which he paused for essential maintenance might be destroyed. Death, he recalled; death surrounded. There was death here in the wind and quiet seasons, as there was death, ultimately, in all places, in all things. It was the degree of violence, from zero upwards, he decided, stooping to pluck a handful of grass, which gauged the degree of finality. And it was that finality, however found, however sought, which measured in retrospect the degree of success, for whatever cause, in whatever venture. Chewing, he walked. Walking, he chewed. And far away, on another world, a man selling socks to the disinterested crowd, a freshly lit cigarette in his mouth, a mug of weak tea in his hand, freed for that purpose, knew instinctively that some day it would have to end, that one cigarette, one mug of tea would be his last; that having reached the top of his life, poised for triumph in his given concern, he would instead be faced with disappointment, with having to start all over again, with finding himself at the bottom of a succeeding ladder, its rungs maybe closer, maybe farther apart, his limbs arranged to compensate, toed or clawed, and his skull crowded, packed tight like a rush-hour train...that evolution, overstretched and underfunded (like the railway), had dispensed with his previous existence and replaced it with another, equally vulnerable, in the undying hope of achieving that elusive high-score...that nature's mother, tired of the game, had swept clear the board, gone back to basics, once more to fiddle with single cells in a primordial ocean, a sea as yet without a beach from whose future strands her creations might someday walk upright as before, raise their gaze to the faraway sky, and struggle.

iii - 6 am

For what? Sodium asked himself. A better deal? He floated once more, disencumbered. Maybe the next universe should be a machine universe, one the controller (Vod?) could switch on and off. It would have no function other than to sustain itself, no will but to remain.

It would be pretty boring, Green decided. Unalive.

Better a universe inherently flawed.

A kind of symbolic universe where meaning was subject to romance and romance in turn subject to prevailing fashion, thought, science.

That sort of universe was more fun.

Ain't got no money

ain't got no brains,

ain't got no good feelings –

ain't that a shame?

Fun was fundamental, after all.

We could be so good together

so sweaty and glued together,

we could be so good together

we could be in love...

It had no function other than to sustain itself, no will but to remain intact, vital and prolific.

Ran away again,

be back don't know when;

yeah, ran away again,

failed to find that girl

Cold beer!

...my glass is empty

Cold beer!

Shoe's time read 6 am. Sodium Green spun on his axis, put her into gear, and was gone.

iv - Forgotten Country

One.

Sun, sphere, image. I superimposed the three into one, just beginning to realize. Space herein, the streets at once clear and cooled, exactly as they had been on my first such visit to this city's peculiar interior, its oddest pileus rising above like a huge and concrete umbrella. Then there had surged fire. Now there was only calm, an element of order, lacking disarray, self-ruin, chaos; after a subtle fashion organized, like a living body of cells to some unwritten, unfathomable code.

How to decipher? I concentrated, guessing at a little, an obviously related sequence of similarly outlined shapes, forms of which each was an extension to its latter, a precursor of those to come in a ceaseless progression, a crude ring, without evident beginning.

As illusion, suggestion, feel.

This a numbers sequence? The sphere a visible equation? It had limitless combinations, points of cessation...

Two.

Petulant child.

Lights swam like blind fish round my head, my eyes giving chase, my place as then forgotten. I was standing on a plain floor, an expanse of grey metallics, an image in sorry reflection of a same sky. I held my prognostic loaf in my hands, aligning my forecast, placing my physical being into what was perhaps a quieter corner of forever, an ambience gaunt and lacking reference, a realm of specious plaster, theatre, wherein to run or walk, roving, as it were, through some monstrous machine sub-conscious...fascinating domain, my breathing heavy and laboured, long.

My pace was extraordinary, as the horizon towards which I now sped, with my cognition in alert circles, this a square. There was hurry and illusion. Alas, I could no more be sure of my eyes, their experimental similitudes. What monsters linger? They could not be ignored, as they stole and impinged on my thoughts even as I struggled to pin them, give them shape and form, gaps of mind, unlike memory, leavings that I tried to order and fill, those yet to show themselves, muddled in the preceding race, too many, oh, that I might not be moving at all.

Three.

Threaten me with ice and fire, punish me where I lie in the sands at the water's edge, and I will neither pause nor heed, but escape once more. Fish me out, if you can, and I will surely fight. String me up, if it suits you to do so, and I will break free. Take me apart, as you did once before, and I will laugh up at you from my table. I will not be had. Tomorrow and the day after, far past and gone shall I be, far from you and your knives, far from harm, in paradise. You won't be able to stop me, because you won't know how. I have it, what you want of me, I have it all, here behind my eyes, seeping through my brain, my vacant, body's shell, manoeuvring sidelong down the curving, writhing lengths of my veins, my distended arteries and capillaries wound about the soft cores of my flesh and organs, beneath my stretched skin of epidermal aspect, matted, layered, brushed over form, beneath the surface of me. You can look upon it now and a sullen image you see before, that which you perceive as mine...but it is not what you think, what you crave, for that spectre of he is lost, is forgotten, is elsewhere in this obtrusive scheme of things and levers, is hidden, beyond mere charade, is safe and is whole and is housed. And gone... And no person... As the wide world beckons these astute and challenging minds of mine. The mountains and the sea, they call. A forest urges, pennons flapping against the setting sun, for all the life therein to be shown; of the leaves curling, trapezing downward into mulch and arid dust; of animal leaping, prowling, killing a fellow inmate, drinking of his bloody wine, spotted, plain shapes and dark pastels, striped and swirling with fur, black and brown in the rousing wind. Clapping loudly, rising on forelegs to view the oncoming predator, friend or foe, any man, galloping wildly away, chasing, heated lozenges of light across your flanks as you pound the earth below you, jumping high on a steaming, headlong run, gulping air as you dance your merry way through the sequestered groves of the forest, beneath the sweltering clouds, their rain. The river's broiling reaches, its triumphal cascade, rolling white water, stone and rock to delve, shingle to muddy, sands and fish and weed, easy curves, lolling banks that slip and slide into the current as it dashes first these riparian shores, second from them in a host of conniving eddies, hurrying the deepening rush and fallover, the stands, the pools, the lakes ox-bowed and the wayside villages which weep polluted tears of waste, spitting, dredging, coils of foulest, sponges in great gangling spates. Colouring, to spread vast distances, borne along, aloft on waves crushed and mounting, ripples that trace circles and rumbling foams of laughter as crisp as tidal moons, forever the shift of the briny depths, this fabled ocean. Come nearer to me. A creator of havens left and right and centre. Her birds, but my singing. Nature... Sun, a hybrid realm. Of fauna and flora, and the sky's asking, too wanted, too lasting, the fun. Creatures all, us minds of mine. Servants all, incarnate.

Four.

I was miraculously unplugged.

Five.

Orbs content in each other, they were as a couple of indecisive lungfish thinking over a planned expedition, beyond this sea, this barren home. Minds puzzling, should they stay or go, fingers that sweated tightly; the warming land, its fertility theirs, for keeps and the asking, theirs and not a moment's pause.

On they pondered, occasionally narrowing their knitted brows or pinching their noses, the skin between their new-grown toes. At times whistling a song.

Six.

Surfacing, the dreams came upon me. There was by now the familiar nausea, the soreness generally associated with over-exposure, but that was all. It was of some small surprise that I should be in such good order after so long a journey. Nothing more.

Seven.

Now where was I?

Eight.

I was losing my mind, slowly vanishing.

Nine.

v – Rim

He fingered the grease-nipple behind his ear. Shelled as a robot, clad in plastic and metal, Green shuffled nervously in the caustic air, its poison already working on his outfit, infecting it with sores like rust. He was alone on board the shrimp's vessel, The Shop the biggest.

They'd attacked as planned, bombarding the shrimps without reply, illuminated by the mother of stars. Aphra cast her light upon them, wrapped them in green-tinted shade. But what of the enemy?

The shrimps had vanished, simple as that. They were nowhere, The Shop empty, populated by ghosts. Or so it was believed - he was here to make sure, to test that emptiness for himself.

He was Rim. Rim was the robot. The robot was inactive, unemployed, stashed in a locker aboard Bent Light. Bent Light was suspended in the void together with the assorted shoes of the men of Lamp Rock, come together with the aim of destroying the shrimps in the negative shadow of the Astral Chicken. But the shrimps were out...

Creatures.

Rim advanced along the darkened corridor, scanning left and right for signs of life: movement, warmth, odour. His head scraped the ceiling and his feet scratched the deck. Sodium had reactivated Rim with the idea of added protection as the robot was combat-equipped, but so far there'd been no need of weaponry.

The corridor wound on and in, twisted like a discarded hanging rope. Green sailed its reaches, hopeful of an egress, some doorway or hatch through which he might clamber. The robot's footfalls echoed distantly, changing in pitch as if the deck were hollow, filling and draining water, a bizarre musical instrument along whose keys he danced, as Al had wished to dance, to strike the notes from his starry piano. There was no time, no scale, no shifting balance; the Lamp Rockers could easily contact him, as he them, next to decide The Shop's fate, its dented hull so far intact, its owners seemingly vanished into turgid air. Or had they? Sodium didn't believe it. He sensed their presence, extant in the corridor's dim windings, the atmosphere's poisoned reality, the way both softened at the edges, absorbed Rim's loosened molecules, ingesting them, slowly eating. But Green didn't care. The temperature had risen, only he couldn't feel it, not the way he once had, cold and hot. Swelling also was the light, stripping the flat walls of what bare definition they'd possessed.

He was without reference to his surroundings. Rim's feet no longer registered the deck. They might be frozen in a bank of pure snow or else divorced from Green's occupation, his position behind the robot's eyes, hunched over the metaphorical wheel, puzzled at the stalled engine, the zeroed dials. Out of the white grew a deepening pink and Sodium was reminded of the blood leaking, the alligator's blood from the monkey with batlike ears.

'Sody?' There was a hand covering his eyes, muffling his pain, soothing his mind...distant, invisible. 'Sody? I hate to \- '

What? Bridget?

'Sodium Green.'

'Okay; grab his legs.'

'This is the one?'

'Sure. He fits the reading, anyway, although the shrimps reckon he wired this himself.'

'Yeah? Must be crazy. I'd never trust myself to wire a death. Too risky.'

He was lifted. Opening his nostrils he detected sweat, stale and unfriendly.

'You're right there. I wonder what he was trying - it obviously hasn't worked.'

'No accounting for taste,' said Patience. 'Remember that drupe we tracked to Oyster?'

'Joe something...'

'That's the one. It still bothers me, the way he looked at us like we were the fucking criminals.'

Grubber laughed, a bottomless, formless sound. It plunged Sodium into uncertainty.

'And this one here,' Patience added. 'You wouldn't think he'd succeeded in taking out an entire Shop - those innocent features I'

'Crap; they scare me.'

Sentenced to death.

'Deviant...'

Revolution.

'Yeah. One as yet unrepentant. But he gets his chance like they all do.' Grubber shook his head. 'If it was up to me I'd terminate the whole useless schlamoodle.'

Patience disagreed. 'Then who'd guineapig the shrimp's latest models? We need them, ones like this especially. He ain't ever going to find his way out, just fly around in circles, fight the same old battles, with the same result. He ain't going to change. At least this way the rest of us arseholes benefit. It's progress, Grub. Like it or not, the equipment he tests and the faults he uncovers are a positive boon to humanity. I even heard the shrimps redesigned an entire space station because of him.'

'The shrimps,' echoed Grubber, dropping his end.

Patience let go the other. 'What are you thinking?'

Problems solved. Problems highlighted.

'Huh? Oh. How long his batteries can last.' He scratched his neck.

'Maybe they fitted him with a new set,' Patience guessed. 'One not available to ordinary mortals. Or maybe there's a shrimp riding in there right now; I hear they sometimes do that.'

For fun, conjectured Green: they ride the intergalactic rollercoaster for fun. The little bastards own the theme-park.

The little bastards.

'Yeah?'

'Yeah.'

It costs them nowt.

vi - Joe's Café

Green wasn't able to get up. He was held in a vice, that of stool and counter. Next to him, lowering her coffee cup, Clarissa asked, 'What's the matter, Sody? You feel sick?' A glint sped from one brown eye to the other as a car passed the window.

'Uh-huh,' he replied, trapped.

'What was it, the chips?'

'I don't know.' His guts complained audibly, as if aware of the coming extraction. Like a child at the dentist, Green thought, unsmiling.

'And we've paid already,' moaned Clarissa. She drank her coffee and stood. 'Okay, Sody, you know where the toilet is, count to three and make a run for it.'

He didn't like her advice. It was a lot easier to give. But what choice did he have?

He could spew on his plate, refill it.

He could choke.

If he performed the former Joe would kill him. And if he took the latter option he'd be dead, too dead to raise a pint come evening, too dead to fuck tonight - and for that, Clarissa would have his balls.

Sodium vomited. Joe appeared from nowhere, wielding a cleaver, dripping saliva on his shirt. Clarissa was by the door. Sodium unstuck himself and calmly padded to the exit. Joe couldn't believe his eyes. Clarissa held the door open, an expression similar to pride or satisfaction between her jewelled ears as Sodium moved through it. Joe turned his hideous stare onto a thin man and a fat one who followed them out, suspicious of their rust-coloured clothes and spectacles.

If you find her, gotta tell her – hey!

Wanna wrestle?

REAR VIEW – OVERDRIVE

O, we got the rocket ships,

Yes siree!

We got the superior

Tech-nol-ogy!

Sodium had decided against the sunroof and electric windows and gone for the extra gear instead. It was all or nothing. Clarissa beside him in the passenger seat, examining her teeth in the vanity-mirror, he cruised the heart of the machine. So far it had been all green lights - throbbing stars, regulated suns. He swung through a valve system and crossed a rattling bridge.

'Did you know we were being followed?' Clarissa said, puckering.

Sodium put his foot down. No or yes?

&

Fast forward.

'Can you see them, Sody?' Her voice was small. Feigning distress, he reckoned, stood on the car roof, peering over a shadowy metal embrasure.

'A-ha,' he told her. In the middle distance, framed in a host of overlapping perspectives, surrounded by components and hardware, Grubber and Patience rested with folded arms against their vehicle.

This was it; the gloves were off. He caught sight of shrimps beyond the swollen lenses of their translucent bellies, pink goldfish in locomotive bowls.

He climbed down and got back in the car. 'Want to tell me something?'

She looked at him side on. 'What?'

Green, bedevilled, he considered, by mysterious, layered women, bit his tongue.

'I don't know why I'm here, if that's what you're asking; and neither do I particularly want to find out.'

'But you're not who you seem either,' he said.

She smiled. 'And you are?'

'Right.' The car shook. The engine, quietly idling, stalled. 'Okay - no more questions,' he mumbled, turning the key, shuffling for reverse. 'Let's keep moving.'

'Good idea.'

Sodium yawned and pulled away, rounded the part-lit grey embrasure and steered toward their antagonists.

'Are you sure about this?' Clarissa wanted to know, her fists making balls and her eyes peeled open.

'Just keep smiling,' he answered.

Grubber and Patience grew large in the windscreen. The shrimps inside them appeared bloated, as if they had just eaten, submerged leeches in their fleshy transports. Sodium gritted his teeth and drove straight at them, the vehicle's glassy structure promising a spectacular collision. But he was to be disappointed. They disappeared within, the two goons, were sucked into the car, whisked away as Green closed, chasing tail, braking hard, spinning the wheel, tyres leaving black markings, tapered arrows on the machined surface.

Clarissa said nothing, only fiddled with the buttons on her blouse.

He headed for a darker zone. The lights dropped behind in twos and threes. Grubber and Patience came up behind, hung there. The scenery altered. Things blurred. His neck was stiff and his fingers ached on the wheel, tingling with each fresh adjustment.

Okay, Green, ready? You have to tiptoe through this one.

