

THUMP

Copyright 2014 Andrew McEwan

Smashwords Edition

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For Samuel R. Delany

ONE: EXTEMPORIS LIBRE

1

Skidmore Shuffledeck sat in the comfy chair and peeled a banana, one eye skipping from dial to dial as he tore the yellow skin, all the while searching for that dial whose needle wavered toward the red. The hair on his arms stood erect, tingling with expectation as he manoeuvred the pale flesh between his lips, breaking the soft fruit with his teeth and squeezing it into the roof of his mouth with his tongue. His eyes closed momentarily. He swallowed, opening them again, a pang of guilt entering his consciousness as he swept the dials with both eyes, suddenly afraid he'd missed one vital, split second needle kick.

The needles were wired indirectly to Sara – Sara who roamed the stricken engine in search of fault, that Skidmore, in more conventional mode, might repair. She was a gestalt being, more than the sum of her parts, and had no existence outside of an engine's tortured heart.

The antiquity of the dials he monitored were literally a world away, but their seeming impracticality amused him. Besides, they were easy to maintain.

Sara had come with the ship. Unlike the ship, however, she was not of his design.

Gestalt beings had no form in solid time. In time shortened, distended, squashed and impacted, they were as human as himself, flesh and blood creatures that occupied a separate yet incorporated realm. They lived in the spaces and the moments that were the voids between stars. Sara went where it was difficult, if not impossible, for him to travel. She was at home in the guts of a star; and an engine was little more than that, albeit a star hollow, and in places, cold.

He had never seen her, only imagined her. He did not know what she thought, even if she thought at all. Did she view him in a similar light? It was an established conundrum. Once a ship was catapulted on its maiden voyage, taking that first tentative step past the speed of light and glancing back on a receding tide, then the gestalt being was born. Perhaps the ship gained a soul, or ensnared a being from another world. Whatever the truth, that ship, The Rockett Heel Bar, was gifted a crew member its captain could name but never really know, an invisible yet omnipresent figurehead, both a guardian and a concierge: Sara, roaming the disabled engine of a water buffalo.

The craft was salvage, its engine eighteen hundred kilometres across and its cargo an ocean. Frozen in space, the water glimmered like polished coal.

Skidmore had come across it a month earlier, lifeless and drifting, and been intrigued. He'd registered the find, without co-ordinates, on the nearest Earth approximate world, then entertained himself with the mundane task of burning fuel. There were always living ships whose extended families had grown bored of orbiting a given body, but whose motive machinery had seized. And an easy job could be made to appear hard.

The living ships paid in a variety of currencies, among them fresh fruit.

Now, tilting forward in his chair, Skidmore sucked his lips tight and focused on four dials in a cluster whose thin metal arms had swung as one into the danger zone. He imagined Sara ensconced within the buffalo's engine, almost feeling her contentment, a professional satisfaction he was unable to fathom but which he shared. He wondered what she was experiencing as he snapped open his spectacle case and looped the stainless steel wire band of the glasses round his shaved, yet lumpy skull.

Was there danger? Pain?

Skidmore thought not. There was an empathy between them, a bridge of understanding that instructed her where to go and how and when he might follow.

The spectacles were for myopia.

Standing, he wondered what had become of the water buffalo's gestalt being, her ghostly navigator. With the engine's failure, was she subsumed? Did she die? And afterwards, when that engine was brought back to life by Skidmore, was it a different figurehead or the same that resumed its temporal role? Did he reanimate a ghost, or create a fresh unknown? The captains of such vessels, for their own reasons, were never able to say. He shuddered, realizing that was one truth he would have to experience to understand.

A new Sara? Skidmore refused to imagine the scenario.

He walked from the tiny control room into the vast dimness of the number 13 hold. It was colder here, a draught sluicing like dead breath forced from the lungs of a corpse. There was nothing to illuminate as the hold was empty, used for parking a variety of small craft that he might clamber about their tarnished metal hulls with the benefit of gravity and air. He stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets and hunched his shoulders up to his ears, crossing briskly the four hundred metres to the nearest door. Beyond lay a passage, tubular, and his waiting car.

'Exit nine,' he instructed the vehicle, once squeezed inside.

The car hummed, its three wheels sucking electricity from the two metre wide conduit, accelerating Skidmore backward toward his destination while he sat with his eyes closed.

It took several minutes to reach the exit, at which point the car braked dramatically and the vehicle's three extended limbs stretched to absorb its passenger's momentum, contracting again seconds later with the smoothness of telescopic elastic. Skidmore tipped out of his seat and palmed the gate open, the metal shutter rising like a portcullis. In the space beyond, warmly lit yet as cold as the parking hangar, stood an MPV. It radiated the light, a pleasing sun yellow.

The belly of the MPV reminded him, as ever, of an octopus' tentacle.

He boarded via a ladder and plugged into the control console.

There were messages.

'...anoint me, shuffledeck, i am made afresh and shine like a new dawn, blissful and blessed being that i am, healthy and whole, survivor of a wasting disease...'

His eyebrows rose. The words sang in his ear.

'...come into me and be one with my wholeness, embracing that which i embrace and feeling that which i feel and seeing that which i see and belonging to that which belongs to me...'

Sara? No.

'...make haste, shuffledeck, and rescue your heart from tyranny...'

Three messages, they could have come from nowhere but the water buffalo.

But there had been no-one aboard. The console quizzed him as to a reply.

'Negative,' he said aloud.

A joker, had to be. Someone had reached the nameless vessel in his absence and installed themselves - illegally, as Skidmore had filed his claim. They might be gutting the engine now. But that would have shown on the dials. Sara was unconcerned, either by the messages or the condition of the water buffalo. She displayed no anxiety.

Skidmore pushed the big red button and felt the MPV's battery of attraction motors swell with life. He flipped her off the pedestal and out the revolving door.

Here was the darkened ocean, billions of tonnes of frozen salt water suspended in void. The MPV seized on its gravity and approached, Skidmore twiddling his fingers. Contained in the aquatic body were thousands of species, mammalian and piscine, trapped now, preserved in this brittle state. An entire self-contained universe, he pondered, the end product of millions of years of evolution. An enormous, glaciated mass the water buffalo had instituted by means of its engine's super-chilled exhaust.

The engine itself, although large, was near invisible on the frozen surface. Skidmore viewed the housing, greatly magnified, via the console. He imagined Sara sitting patiently within, her cool professionalism her embodiment, her long hair tied back, her dark eyes impenetrable by his own, quietly examining her nails. Had she met the buffalo's guardian and navigator? Was that being as extant as she? And if not, where had it gone? The engine's hull was dented and scarred by fire, the symptom and cause of its breakdown. Ranks of bristlelike chimneys gave it the appearance of a shoe-brush. Thanks to the damage, a shoe-brush that had seen better days. The MPV closed, the engine eclipsing its cargo, and nestling among the bristles attached itself to the hull by means of suction from its under parts.

Skidmore slid a finger under the rim of one lens and scratched the corner of his eye. He extracted himself from the command console and proceeded the short distance to the equipment lockers. The gravity experienced was approximately one third standard, assisting him there in two exaggerated strides.

He shucked off his jacket and trousers and eased himself into a spacesuit. The faceplate moulded itself round his spectacles and inserted its breathing tubes up his nostrils with an audible crunch. The spacesuit's boots were sticky, counteracting the lessened gravity. Its air-pack registered near full. Once more he was wired to the console and through it to the Heel Bar and Sara.

There was a further message.

'...life is a transient phase, shuffledeck, a poignant malaise of uncomfortable moments and predictable occasions into which a man is born not of choice, but by accident, raised and bruised and lied to repeatedly, given few choices, moulded to another design like an actor in half familiar shoes...then finally dropped from the role and forgotten by all – all save i, shuffledeck, me and mine and mine and yours...'

He waited for the ship to offer an explanation. He waited for some hint of the gestalt being.

Both, however, were quiet.

Meaning? he asked himself, momentarily disturbed.

Sara had left the water buffalo, reasoned Skidmore. The ship was likely unaware of his concern. He traipsed to the lock and spun the door. Outside, the engine's exhaust flues, black and towering, leaned like charred forest boles, coiling to invisibility overhead, beyond the yellow glow of the MPV and the paler tones of his spacesuit. Did something await him? he wondered. Something intelligent and antagonistic.

He paused in his own shadow. The command console was operating normally; no malfunction there. He walked toward the nearest chimney, its surface sparkling and indented, twenty metres in diameter and sixty kilometres high. But there was only silence from the Heel Bar, and emptiness, deep in the pit of his stomach, from Sara. Ridiculously, he wondered if she was playing a joke on him, a joke the ship was in on. Perhaps the two conspired, Skidmore thought. No. It wasn't possible. The gestalt being, he realized, had disappeared.

He waited for panic to set in. Two minutes. Four. A puzzling, vacant sensation rose from his toes and fingers to slowly fill his lungs. Was this how it felt? Was he experiencing what those reticent captains had in the past? Without the gestalt being he was stranded. Alone. With Sara gone the ship was essentially un-navigable, by himself at least. A skilled human might be up to the task but it would take the onboard computer several days to fix the Heel Bar in a stable orbit about the nearest star, ten times that to make even a routine transit across this stretch of the galactic arm. That amount of time was impractical. He needed Sara. He stood rooted on the engine's mighty housing using up his compacted air.

Message: '...most things are redeemable, shuffledeck, given time...'

Then, the soles of his boots still firmly adhered, Skidmore toppled over.

2

The unbelievable thing was the outward journey. Skidmore sat with his face pressed to the window, watching wide-eyed as the countryside bled past, trees and bushes and fields and rivers and cows and sheep and motor cars and industrial/agricultural complexes painted the colour of the sky, clouds mirrored in their shiny plant tops. Those objects nearest the carriage moved fastest, a dizzying blur of leaves and grass he found impossible to focus on, with or without his glasses, while the more distant buildings and animals and electric fences appeared almost motionless, static on the horizon, as if they provided loci for his journey across the planet by train. His mother sat opposite, now and again peering over the top of her paperback at the boy whose steel rims kept rapping off the thin pane. Cigarette smoke irritated her nostrils, and as this was a no smoking compartment she turned in her seat to glare. Young men laughed and drank beer. One apologized silently and extinguished the cigarette, appearing almost sheepish. He and his companions wore suits with dodecahedrons stencilled into the weave, offering the appearance of 3-D chicken wire. It was quiet a while.

Skidmore was determined not to be bored, but it was hard after a while to keep his mind occupied. He didn't know how his mother could read and not feel sick, the gentle undulation of the train enough to make the printed word swim before his glazed eyes. He had his own books in a pull-string bag, along with clean underwear and a fixit of his own manufacture, a crude, glove-like appendage that had won him second prize at a recent science fair.

The concept had been his mother's. Skidmore still wasn't sure how it worked.

Outside, the scenery slowly changed. Gone was the leaf and grass panorama, squeezed out as the horizon rolled inexorably nearer, its construction first brick and concrete, then shimmering oil-filmed steel. Plastic towers rose above these wave caps, blunt polygons and amorphous spheres, an architecture of denial.

The light in the carriage changed, moulding features anew, his mother's smile an unnecessary reassurance as Skidmore felt increasingly at home the deeper the train penetrated the dark, conglomerate machine.

She kissed him goodbye on a platform rising between windows ten metres square, office cubes within each functioned a man, a woman, a creature indigenous, free-formed or off-world, unlikely beings performing unlikely tasks connected with railway timetables and the cleanliness of toilet stalls. Skidmore didn't feel sad; not at that moment. The sadness would come later. Presently he watched her step off the platform and disappear from his life, her shadow last to leave, slipping from his lenses like the shadow of a closing door.

He was alone. The drawstrings of his holdall cut into his palm. He shouldered the bag and turned down the appropriate corridor, the lights from offices and factories overlapping in his brain. The city was labyrinthine, but occasionally its tight maze of streets gave out onto broader avenues, plazas and squares, people milling here in their hundreds, voices loud and faces expressive, tossing heads and gulping beverages from which rose steam or foam. They looked so happy, he thought. Their hair shone with health and their bodies radiated a peculiar kind of energy.

Such a place for an education, the machine city. He shook himself, reminded of his destination, a tiered vault of buildings a kilometre north.

'Mental health?'

'Excuse me?'

'Mental health?' his robot inquisitor repeated, scratching itself absently with the blunt end of a pencil.

'Oh...fine,' answered Skidmore.

They'd placed him on a stool in one of the Institute foyers. Close to the door.

'Any family history of psychoses?'

He thought of his mother. 'None.'

'Age? Perridian, please.'

'Eh – minus six.'

It smiled. 'Not so long, huh?' Poked him in the knee.

Skidmore laughed thinly.

'Okay, just one more question: what are you intending to study here at the Institute?'

'Interactive reparation techniques physically applied in a subspace environment using limited means...'

'Two spoons,' the robot interrupted.

'I beg your pardon?'

'Two spoons,' it repeated, nodding. 'That's what they call it on campus.'

He felt deflated.

'Okay, Skidmore Shuffledeck, follow me.'

There were columns he recognized as Corinthian, fifty, sixty metres tall, an internal architecture difficult to comprehend given the functional aspect of the machine. He wondered, as they walked beneath dripping stone ceilings and high buttressed domes, if any of it was real. Perhaps the interior was as featureless as the exterior and the detail, much of it out of easy reach, projected for the benefit of newcomers like himself, penitents before the Institute's own sense of grandeur, an in-built god.

It was impressive, but then the planet as a whole was, starless Perridi, where you weren't born until you left, until you learned, until you passed, the half dozen years Skidmore had specified dictated financially by his mother.

Would it be enough? The columns crowded close, stairs in their innards he would soon know by name.

This was to be their first assignment. The minister leaned against a stout wooden desk with an envelope held loosely in his hands, ankles crossed. Skidmore and Miri Mirabeau sat in large upholstered chairs, bodies sinking midst cushions, weighted by cakes and tea.

The minister opened the envelope, casting his eyes over the contents, then letting his gaze slip beyond the paper to the two boys, both minus four and looking anxious among flower prints.

'Relax, fellas,' he told them.

Skidmore gulped.

'A little trip outside,' the minister stated. 'Seems there's an abandoned service vehicle needs recovering south of the equator. No word of the driver, so we presume he's gone AWOL. Should be a stroll in the park. We drop you in, you assess the vehicle's condition, carry out any necessary repairs and drive it back.'

Easy.

But the minister was smiling. Skidmore didn't like it when they did that. He caught Miri's confident expression and tried to appear confident himself, supposing that was what his roomy was doing. First time out, it was never going to be as straightforward as that.

'Fuck!'

Miri flung himself backward off the step, his arms flailing wildly, hitting the sand with a splash.

'Dead – shit – dead!'

'What?'

'The fucking driver, Shuffledick. Who'd you think? There's bits of him all over the compartment, like he exploded or something.'

Skidmore bit his lip. He grabbed the handrail and levered himself up, shading his eyes with the palm of his free hand in order to see through the window. It was much as Miri said. The driver bloody and conspicuous. Shot maybe. He tried the door. It moved. He swayed backward and opened the compartment. Something rolled out. An organ? The driver's corpse deflated slightly, causing Miri to retch.

'Ah, come on; it's not that bad.'

Miri appeared to be chewing his knuckles.

Skidmore dropped to the sand, took hold of the driver's arm and dragged him clear of the vehicle.

'Why don't you look in the back for a spade,' he suggested.

'Fuck off!'

'Okay, keep an eye on our friend here, I'll see what I can find.'

It wasn't his first corpse. There had been his father with his head opened like a corrupted marrow, something vaguely metallic crawling from the cavity, only to disappear.

He took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt.

Miri tapped him on the shoulder, then, as he turned, reflected light in his eyes, punched him on the nose.

'How's that feel, Shuffledick? A little groggy, eh? Never mind...'

Skidmore was seated. Replacing the lenses he wiped his nose on the back of his hand and, crabbing his legs under him, stood. 'Feeling better now?'

Mirabeau shrugged. 'You said something about a spade.'

'I thought we'd bury him.'

'No, toss him in the back. We can dispose of him later if needs be; but I don't want any minister asking for a post-mortem and us not having a volunteer.'

Fair point, thought Shuffledeck. 'Agreed.'

'Good – and I'm sorry, you know, about earlier.'

Earlier? So his roomy was apologizing for his display of theatrics and not his outburst of anger. It seemed Skidmore had a lot to learn about people.

Machines, he supposed, were easier.

The desert to the south of the city was a consequence of that structure's thirst and greed. There were only two such conglomerates, the city and the harbour, girthing the planet with attendant satellites, a tight family linked by railways and power lines. Technology grew thin between the two, thin and vulnerable. Those that were disenfranchised scratched out a living to north and south, desert in both directions, the surface barren and scorched.

Perridi was a world whose sun had been stolen, swallowed by a spaceship a hundred years ago.

3

Everything seemed fine.

Then came the explosion.

Rippling through the bulkhead, a sonic disturbance distant yet growing, a million tiny sounds melded into a slow, far away scream of fractured metal parts, stretched and melted plastic components, ceramic housings and liquid nuclei, glass computing indices, flesh and bone operators, compacted one moment, then displaced as heat and noise. He felt the rumble and knew it would catch him, devour him, for there was nothing but the orbital's superstructure to hold it back. Gazing briefly at the item in his hands, he wondered if it had been worth it. And then the explosion stopped.

'Frighten you, Skidmore?' Holroyd asked.

Clenching his arse cheeks, he shrugged.

'Pretty convincing, eh?'

'Not what I'd call entertainment.'

'Ah, you're just dull. It's good to rehearse; worst possible scenarios and all. You understand.'

'I do?'

'Sure – makes you want to succeed all the more, if you can see what failure brings. Not that you need motivating. Right, Skidmore?'

'Right...'

The stakes were high. He didn't need reminding of the danger, thus far safely rationalized. This end of the galaxy, characterized by its inward looking ideology and settled orbit, came under the shadowy aegis of Yours Truly, and it was from her Holroyd plan to steal. Skidmore was his tool, one he'd used before. He was sure the pirate could manage the intricacies himself, but it amused him to put Skidmore's bespectacled head in the lion's jaws.

All it took was the right carrot.

The orbital was a service installation two hundred kilometres across at its heart, with outreaching docking arms telescoping into the void. Horatio Holroyd's vessel, an unassuming shoe, was parked twenty-four hundred kilometres from her host, a tiny fruit at the end of its twisting tendril of life. Of the five other ships presently hooked up at the installation, four were military, small in-system craft used mainly to police the twelve worlds that comprised Bulk Manufacturing Centre.

Skidmore zipped his flies in a shiny plastic toilet.

Outside on the concourse he walked hands in trouser pockets, his suit a pale blue single breasted polycarbon wrapper Holroyd had given him, its jacket pockets full of money and ID and flat pictures of his supposed family. His name was Simeon Vendy. He glanced at his reflection in a chair back and grimaced. Sitting, he ordered a beer. It was going on eight years since he'd departed the Institute, that time having transmuted several times over in his skull, memories not altogether unhappy, but lacking a coherent message. There was much he chose to forget and much he no longer wished to remember. What remained, despite everything that had happened since, was his desire to secure a ship. But to move a ship you needed an engine.

A skinny man occupied the chair next to him.

'Mister?'

'Simeon Vendy.'

'Nice.'

'Thanks. And your moniker?'

'Eugene Henryhearty, at your service.'

'Pleased to make your acquaintance, Eugene.'

'Likewise.'

'Buy you a beer?'

'Thank-you.'

Skidmore straightened a note on the bar and held up two fingers.

'What do you make of it so far?' asked Pollution Jones.

'Lax,' said Shuffledeck.

'But not so in the core.' His companion was nodding.

'You've been down?' The question was filled with disbelief. It wasn't like Jones to reconnoitre.

'No – just guessing.'

Jones had fallen into his gravity well some time before. Much had changed since, including Jones himself, but he remained a trusted friend, and it was important to Skidmore to have at least one. He didn't ask how his companion had come by his ID. Pollution proved persuasive, he thought.

'I'm booked into hotel sixteen. You?'

'Five.'

Skidmore sucked the foam off his beer. 'That's an odd number. I thought odd numbers were for employees?'

Pollution was nodding again, his near empty glass held loosely in one delicate hand. 'That's right, mister Vendy. Now, can I show you to your room?'

The currency was local to BMC and therefore of no real value to Skidmore, but any currency's lubricious potential, be it rock or paper, was universal. Access to the core was therefore possible in theory. Greasing the military, however, posed its own problems. Luckily for him corruption was endemic.

The orbital was roughly circular, its outer levels given over to general commerce, its inner reaches, each smaller in area than the last, home to specialist engineering facilities, hardbody and softbody workshops, biotechnological labs and the more mundane assembly points associated with the merrily low-tech world of spaceships. Across the galactic rim the machines ran the family business. Here, in space co-opted by Yours Truly, a thing wasn't much good if you couldn't fix it.

Centring all this activity was the core, and gravity. It took a great deal of gravity to activate an engine, for an engine was powered by a collapsed sun.

It was gravity Skidmore Shuffledeck was here to steal.

He put on a smile and knocked.

The guard eyed him lazily over a dog-eared magazine the title of which shifted through a spectrum of colours. His expression was bored, mouth open, head tilted to one side. Skidmore gauged what it would take to get him out of his seat and over to the grille he was wafting his ID through. With a movement of his thumb he slipped the bribe into view, noting with satisfaction the sudden interest in the guard's mind, made visible through his feet sliding under him and the magazine falling flat to the pressed steel desk from behind which he next rose.

'Simeon Vendy; Dextro Dynamics. Hi.' He shook the man's hand enthusiastically, the portal securing behind. 'Mind if I take a look around, maybe chat with a few of your technical officers?'

Pocketing the money, the guard raised an eyebrow and tilted his head the other way. 'Cleaner left the door open. Fucking civilian,' he grunted.

'Just can't get the staff these days,' quipped Skidmore, helping himself to a visitor's tag and fastening it to his lapel.

'Take the fast exit when you leave.'

Will do, he thought.

Beyond the guard's small antechamber ran a warren of noisy roadways, traffic streaming at fantastic speeds round the orbital's netherworld of factory units and tunnels. This close to the surface the main highway ran for perhaps five hundred kilometres, one of two main axis roads circumnavigating the installation. A host of smaller carriageways left the main strip at irregular intervals, winding in and down through crowded metal and foam pressed strata, layer upon layer of power generating facilities, pumping stations, lakes and armouries. Surrounding the core for a radius of thirty kilometres would be vacuum, wherein lay Skidmore's main difficulty. He had no doubts about getting that close, it was simply a matter of appearing to be part of the furniture. Access to the main highways and beyond was physically controlled, with there being only a small number of elevator shafts running past the mostly civilian upper levels. At the bottom of each was a uniform, predictably venal; that is, human and bored.

With only a thin railing between himself and the bulb-nosed traffic, the highway's curvature was acutely apparent. Vehicles rushed by, fizzing with electricity, dragging huge volumes of air in their wake, these draughts then being taken up one of hundreds of ventilation shafts circulated through the orbital. Skidmore nodded at the simplicity of it all. The traffic was regulated with this air flow in mind. He walked a short distance to the bus stand and scrutinized the timetable.

The orbital's population was given as eight thousand, but this excluded transients and naval personnel, with the latter at times outnumbering its civilian support by ten to one. Dumb luck then that Skidmore found himself on a bus full of unctuous officer cadets. There were manoeuvres, he intuited, and an expanding military presence, something he and Horatio Holroyd could do without. The cadets, slick and arrogant in stiffly pressed dress uniforms, did their best to ignore him. Thankful for that, Skidmore took in the blurred grey exterior and what snatches of conversation the cadets let slip their cursory net.

Trouble in the twelve worlds? He laced his fingers. Yours Truly had a paranoid fear of industrial action.

Alighting ninety kilometres and twenty minutes later, he stole an attaché case from a cadet and disappeared into the flashing guts of a multi-junction. It had been a spur of the moment thing, perhaps childish, but the theft filled him with a certain unhealthy glee. Besides, the case wasn't military issue and made for a convincing appendage. He was, after all, a member of the business community.

Next a freighter wound him down a spiral stair of storehouses and wagon plug-in points, PIPS the freight driver told him were unusually full of off-world produce, suggesting the orbital had adopted a siege mentality. Skidmore wondered what was usual to a man who appeared to spend most of his time driving round the same corner, swapping hands on the wheel depending on whether it were up or down he was travelling, the free palm clasped about the neck of a bottle. His eyes had focused just once, long enough to count the money separating Skidmore's dexterous fingers. And now just two floors and thirty klicks of void stood between him and the core. Time for coffee and a sandwich, the case's contents laid bare.

Beneath the industry and commerce, buried at the service installation's quiet centre, the atmosphere was pleasantly informal. Here the legitimate business was done, with reps in suits of pale green and yellow mixing with generals in loose khaki fatigues, throwbacks to a camouflage etiquette Skidmore found innocently amusing. The backhanders, he guessed, took the form of holidays for the wife and kids, new cars and the promise of rare alcoholic beverages. With his knavish demeanour and fancy attaché case, Simeon Vendy ought to fit right in. But there remained the thirty kilometres to the core, its restful outline visible through a window in the lounge. He joined a group of first-timers eagerly admiring the view.

Holroyd's cat appeared alongside him, wearing a security collar.

A mental nudge reassured.

friend...

He looked sidelong at the cat's rippling fur, brown, red and gold, flushed with silver like mercury sliding off chestnuts.

Seeing the first-timers had moved away, he felt exposed.

\- shuffledeck -

He nodded. 'So,' he asked, 'how do we get across?'

\- simple -

'Yes?'

\- follow -

The cat, on all fours, slipped between tables, the gathered generals and their satellite groups ignoring it much as shoals of tuna, sharks. With Skidmore in tow, sharp blue suit accorded similar treatment, they passed through doors an younger incarnation of himself may have recognized but which this newer self hadn't noticed before.

The feeling he had of being led down a blind alley was amplified by the sudden close proximity of walls. He clutched the attaché case to his chest. The cat's ears swivelled on its head. Its tail flicked. Flashes of colour pulsed through the animal's torso. The walls leaned suddenly, taking a corner in a corkscrew so that within ten metres he was walking upside down. Thirty kilometres from the core he would not have expected such localized gravitational quirks. Not in such a short space, anyhow. That the cat had access to these mysterious nether regions didn't surprise him, yet it remained a puzzle how Holroyd had infiltrated Yours Truly's defences so completely. Creatures like the cat were manifestly loyal to their creators, and it seemed highly improbable the cat's creator was the same pirate that had twisted Skidmore's arm. Whoever its true master (and surely Holroyd wasn't foolish enough to believe it didn't have one), their causes were allied for now. Most creatures were purely functional. This feline was aesthetic, and that kind of artistry was sufficiently rare in his experience to be considered unique.

Which left a lot of questions unanswered. Chiefly: whose side was it on?

Skidmore, thought Skidmore, would at some point have to grapple with that and a number of other things.

Meantime, a hatch.

Circular. The cat's tail rapped off it as the animal turned, brushing past Skidmore, a silent feline indicator he interpreted as 'this is where I leave you'. He didn't turn or look over his shoulder, but removed his glasses and cleaned them after first placing the attaché case between his feet.

There was no obvious means of opening the hatch, which was about a metre in radius, so he put his shoulder to it and pushed.

Escaping air rewarded him. The portal swung in and open.

The space beyond began slowly to glow with light.

A maintenance facility, apparently deserted. Skidmore stepped through and sealed the hatch, pushing it shut. The space was a fifty metre bulb, equipment lockers and service items decking the inner wall. There was a gravity leakage as the facility stirred to life.

Skidmore pressed with his toes. He now had the tools at his disposal to cross to the core and extract that which balanced the orbital's inner ear: an imploded star. Once removed from the installation's heart, there would begin a compensatory motion of battery-fed gyrocompasses, counterbalancing engines whose normal function was to smooth out any local fluctuations in gravitational pull engendered by the orb's planet neighbour, and, to a greater degree, the motive forces of visiting spaceships gatecrashing for emergency repair. How long these engines could maintain equilibrium after the star's removal had been the unknown factor in Horatio Holroyd's worst case scenario, cerebrally gifted Skidmore as he'd donned the blue suit. But he didn't care to think about that. Destruction of the service installation was not, he told himself, a significant risk.

He left the attaché case floating and began opening and closing locker doors, finding what he wanted in the shape of eyebaths, a long screwdriver and a pair of self-powered descent boots. The boots came with an oxygen supply that ought to suffice, the thirty kilometres to the core shrinking rapidly as the extruded bulb turned end over end through the insulating vacuum. If there was a scale somewhere Skidmore couldn't find it. And no windows, so he'd have to wait until the maintenance facility docked. That happened in minutes, an aperture piercing the bulb to his left. He guided the boots in that direction, circling to the front, steering with his toes while clamping the oxygen unit in his teeth. There was a second's hesitation, then cool air filled his lungs. Perspiration squelched in his armpits. The aperture funnelled inward, shimmering wetly as Skidmore advanced as if toward a placid ocean surface. The descent boots were a little awkward, not being familiar with his feet, and he grazed his head on the lubricious, machined tunnel wall. But he was in.

'It's your dream, Skidmore; an engine, a ship, to ply an honest trade across the reach. But such things do not come cheap. You could need rebuilding before you manage to raise the finance. Alternatively, you could get lucky.'

Lucky, Shuffledeck recalled, eyebaths swilling through a host of distended spectra, the curved screwdriver held out in front of him like a rapier. Horatio Holroyd, like his mother, always seemed to know exactly what he was thinking. And, like his mother, how to manipulate that information to get Skidmore to do his bidding. Perhaps he made it easy. Holroyd's motives in this exercise were less clear. An unstable, confused environment better suited the pirate's activities. He could see that. But the lengths to which Holroyd was prepared to go to sew disorder appeared desperate, more reckless than rational, as if chaos and not profit was his overriding consideration, as if his goal was political. As if, thought Skidmore, between Horatio Holroyd and Yours Truly there existed something acutely personal.

He shivered, an effect of his surroundings. The descent boots stalled, momentum carrying him out of the slickly crafted tunnel and into a space the eyebaths interpreted as a void full of numbers. The higher the number, the greater the force. Thus did physics, via arithmetic, contain a star.

The seed of that star, no larger than a golf ball, passed through him a million times a second, its orbit eccentric about the core, its mass folded into a space so tiny no time could exist there, the temporal dimension squeezed out much as the spatial dimension was squeezed in, one balancing the other. A benign state, a state of absolute yet zero energy. Stable, so long as no force was applied to it. Unstable, as even in total vacuum there was gravity, gravity that might be amplified or diminished to effect the enclosed star's condition, inducing leakage.

Right now Skidmore had to slow the thing down sufficiently for it to drop out of subspace orbit and return mechanically to its station.

Scrolling the eyebaths made it possible to view his environs through a series of dimensional filters. Physical reality was constant (something had to be, thus the tenet), yet how his brain viewed that reality was open ended. The eyebaths were a combination lock, a series of variables he had to fix as a constant, matching the combination to the core's parameters and opening the door to its perceived reality, which would enable him to co-ordinate hand/eye through his cerebral cortex regardless of the validity of the physical state outside his brain. The lock was its own key, in effect, and while the combinations were infinite, a subtle pre-programming of the eyebaths ought to allow him a fix without too much trouble, as here the swirling lenses were more a necessity as a security measure. He couldn't see anything without them. The naked core would turn his brain to nougat.

Numbers flashed like visible static, crackling in his mind as the lenses scanned as if for a radio station.

The boots chimed a reminder: half his available oxygen.

He saw he'd drifted to a halt at the edge of a steel platform, and stepped onto it with a clunk, not knowing if he'd imagined the sound or it had travelled through some gaseous medium. He supposed the latter. The eyebaths fluttered, fixing an image. Like the conning-tower of a submarine, bathed in green light, a structure rose before him whose borders paled into the surrounding whole, offering no definite edge. There was a ladder bolted to the tower, which he approached awkwardly, boots sliding on the steel. Cumbersome, but housing the air bricks. If he had known his way around he might have made a better approach. As it was he had no choice but to drag his feet under him, the passage made difficult not by gravity, but by friction and the weight of that sound traversing medium. He could feel a dampness in his ears. Not atmosphere. He was bleeding.

Skidmore climbed the ladder, the concept his own as there was no telling up from down. At the top of the tower was a hatch, its locking wheel glimmering as if speckled with single cell life, the same life that emitted the eerie subterranean glow. Behind the wheel, embossed on the hatch itself, was a warning, but one the eyebaths failed to interpret. He made the association, he realized, without the lenses; all they offered were confused letter structures. But what else would be here? A set of instructions? Perhaps, yet unlikely. Still, he wished he could read them.

Crouching, the screwdriver installed down one boot, he took hold of the wheel, noting how the suit made his arms invisible. All he could see were his two hands, seemingly divorced from his body, a freakish image as next he turned the wheel anti-clockwise. It spun easily, releasing bolts about the inner circumference he felt dislodge from their housings, the hatch itself tilting upward, rising smoothly on a hinge.

He peered in.

Ten centimetres below the opening were clustered hundreds of narrow apertures, tube endings amassed like cilia. Without a map or chart to work from there was no telling what might happen if he adjusted any of them. Half a turn in the wrong direction could see enormous forces concentrated in a small part of the orbital, anomalies the compensating engines would strive to correct, a consequence of that the possibility some watchful technician might realize the anomaly to be in-house and initiate an investigation. And he was relying on those engines to maintain the status quo long enough for him to secure an exit, so the longer they were off-line the better.

No scenario, however, solved the problem. Skidmore had to start somewhere. Each aperture was a gamble. He drew the curved blade of the screwdriver and passed its blunt tip over the inverted tubes as if trying to locate the correct one by dowsing.

The boots chimed the quarter. How long had he contemplated? There was nothing else for it but to select one at random.

Sliding the screwdriver home offered a perverse satisfaction, the blade tight in its sheath, a blissfully simple instrument with which to deconstruct the service installation.

Horatio Holroyd's disaster movie, in which he'd briefly starred, surfaced in his conscious mind, snatches of it dancing behind his eyes as he twisted the grip-mould handle.

Another. Then another. His environs refused to change. The star that was his prize orbited beyond touch and vision while the effects of his adjustments went unobserved out in the real world, perhaps turning the odd stomach or bloating a swimming pool to give a telltale curvature to its surface. Nothing acute; not yet. Nothing, hopefully, the gyrocompasses couldn't handle.

Another tube. Another turn. The light changed in the core. His ears popped. He kinked the end of that opening and concentrated on those abutting it.

The eyebaths lost their signal. He was blind. Good or bad, he quietly awaited the moment.

He might be crushed out of existence.

The eyebaths stung his brain with a cleansing white light, then went to utter darkness.

Two chimes. His boots near empty.

The tube endings slowly came back into view.

Nestling among them, like a duck's egg among reeds, was the heart of a star, a sun crushed into a place where no time existed, so dense it should drop through the universe.

And maybe it did drop, so far and so fast that he was able to pick it up and put it in his pocket.

Skidmore toed the boots and they obligingly set him on a return path to the maintenance facility, the core's abrogated milieu grey and dead about him.

4

Minus one. Countdown, thought Skidmore Shuffledeck. Soon he'd be able to take the train in the other direction. He'd seen enough of Perridi to last several lifetimes, everything from the glutinous machine-bowels of the Institute to what lay under rocks no sun had touched for a century; gaunt metallic lizards that were not real, tiny robots he and Miri had had to capture, dismantle, and reassemble as useful household gadgets. They'd managed a food-mixer and a device for peeling eggs once boiled. The minister had been impressed. Unfortunately, they hadn't quite got the boiling part right, having outreached themselves. Keep it simple, the lesson here. A device for boiling eggs would have sufficed.

Two spoons.

The more straightforward the solution the more chance it had of working.

'Less is more, more or less' the minister's words.

It was all Miri Mirabeau's fault, of course.

Skidmore smiled. This was their final assignment. Instead of being paired as in previous years, they were head to head, each attempting the other's rescue (a ministerial euphemism for capture) within the unknown precincts of the labyrinthine Test Centre adrift on Perridi's desolate ocean. Lifeless water buoyed them, its depths as its superficies starved of light. Once bountiful, now shrouded in perpetual darkness, a night that stretched across one hemisphere and held no promise of dawn had starved both plant and animal, leeching colour and installing death.

A cheerful place, nodded Skidmore, rubbing the back of his head and trying the door handle. It appeared he had to escape the room in which he'd woken before he could do anything else. He tried to picture Miri in a similar predicament and wondered just how much distance lay between them. Perhaps the only way out was for one to be rescued by the other.

Skidmore didn't like the sound of that.

He had a pair of soft shoes, a pair of trousers and a t-shirt with holes in it.

He had a headache.

The door was locked. He could kick it open, he supposed, but that idea didn't sit right. So he stood back a moment and cleaned his glasses. Maybe it wasn't a door at all. The room was square, a cube, and the flush-fitting portal with the round knob was its only feature. The walls were grey, his clothes white, his skin brown, although a drab monochromic brown, more sepia under the sourceless light.

Re-sitting the lenses, Skidmore examined the walls, ceiling and floor in greater detail. Each was stippled yet flat with no telltale hollow sounds emanating from hidden passages. The door returned the same flat tone when rapped with his knuckle. Only the knob, the one feature curved, emitted a different sound, a ping rather than a thud. Skidmore took hold of it in both hands and twisted one way then the other, pushed, pulled and generally manipulated the doorknob in every manner and direction conceivable. Nothing. It was a red herring; had to be. He was missing the obvious

'Think,' he said.

No air moved in the room save that which passed through his lungs. There was no draught.

He stood hands on hips. Perhaps he should break his way out after all. Only, there was no subtlety in that.

'Think.'

Wait a minute, had the room shrunk? The door didn't look nearly as big. The ceiling was too close.

'Oh, shit...' He'd have been happier with military issue boots, but fear and realization of his lessening time and space turned his soft shoes into tin-openers and reminded his brain that his hands were tools suitable for rending.

He made it through into a larger room and had the same problem over again. There was no going back as the door he'd smashed through was shrinking rapidly while the one this side, together with the room, was growing at an accelerated rate.

Systemic glass, he had time to hypothesize, running breakneck for the exit, crashing through it onto a freezing cold floor in total darkness, any glibness he'd felt that the Test Centre was betraying its nature at such an early stage jolted out of him as the cold bit like an electric shock. He yelped and skidded, loosing his feet even as he stood, the invisible floor tipping, the Centre's dynamics computer, he imagined, creasing with laughter at the sight (he supposed the computer could see him, as well as the ministers back at the Institute, guffawing into tea and beards) of this stocky youth, his spectacles clamped round his close-cropped head, floundering like a drunk on a frozen pond in the dead of night.

He had to keep moving, he realized, lest he become attached to the floor, a sorry troll in the ice maiden's demesne, destined to remain unthawed for centuries.

Blinded, he comprehended no direction, uncertain of either up or down. The walls took shape around him, silent yet omnipresent, funnelling Skidmore down a slide his motion told him was a tube, icy and slick, his voice lost somewhere behind him, a ride that ended abruptly with an explosion of light; coloured light, the wood-raftered innards of a barn, the hay of it breaking his fall as he rolled end over end and finally came to rest amidst chickens, squawking flapping chickens whose odour penetrated his senses and seeped through his trousers and t-shirt.

He would have passed out, supine in this rustic scene, had it not been for the bucket of water poured over his head.

Conscious, Skidmore Shuffledeck screamed.

'Shut up,' he was admonished by a pretty girl wearing a short blue dress augmented with a white apron. 'There's no time to waste,' she added, a basket hung over one arm. She was collecting eggs. 'On your feet.'

Skidmore brushed straw from his clothes as he stood.

'That's better. Now are you ready to hear my text?'

'Is it relevant?' he asked, irritated, wanting to touch her yet gazing askance.

The girl's eyebrows rose. 'Of course.'

'Then I'm ready.' She was about his age, overtly sexual, flushed of leg and neck.

'Across country you must go, by whatever means you can manage, to a house in a town where is held captive your friend and rival. Once at the house there will be a task. The outcome of this will decide who graduates.' She paused, looking smug whilst the information sunk in. Only one of them might succeed; there was to be a winner and a loser. And the price of failure he instinctively understood. 'There is no time limit within which to reach the house, but you are urged to make haste, as an early arrival will greatly simplify the task.'

Miri Mirabeau would be hearing the same speech, he knew, had he escaped the shrinking room. Skidmore had to hope that he had, otherwise that would be the end of it. How could he rescue (capture) his fellow if he was so emphatically trapped? Or would the Centre make him available at the house; ironically, to be rescued proper? Miri, though, was too clever for that. If anything he'd have a head start on Shuffledeck.

He exhaled nosily.

'Very good,' said the girl, winking as she handed him an egg.

He stared at it, ovoid and warm. She made a swish of her skirt, displayed a pale smudge of inner thingh, and was gone.

Outside the barn the countryside was rolling and green, trees crowding its slopes, hedges and dry-stone walls stretching to the horizon and beyond. A false sun hung lazily in the sky, and clouds like he'd only ever seen in dreams. There were no obvious clues as to which direction lay the town. No roads he could see, just a footpath down from the barn to a stile.

A breeze dried his face. Gently cupping the egg he ran down the hill to the stile, climbed it, discovering on the wall's far side a stream. It was an easy decision to follow the current. Walking briskly he wondered what lay ahead, his vision hemmed in on both sides by a valley carved not by the slow passage of a glacier but by the wiles of a computer mind, its rocks and bracken and occasional sheep constructs the Test Centre shaped from the pliant glass of its own conformation, giving solidity to those forms immediately surrounding Skidmore whilst those farther away, the trees and grasses he could not easily reach, held only illusory outlines, colours and shadows that were no more alive than the encompassing sea.

He picked up a stone and threw it as far as he could. Twenty or thirty metres distant the stone appeared to hesitate in midair, as if caught in some gelatinous gas pocket, before once more continuing its dying arc. Skidmore grinned triumphantly. He now knew the approximate working radius of this impacted reality. But as the shrinking/swelling rooms had shown him, he could take nothing for granted.

The stream burbled merrily. He drank from it, curing a thirst. The valley opened out, the incline steepened, and he thought to see a bridge in the distance. A bridge meant a road, a road civilization.

His shadow beneath him on the rough tarmac, Skidmore looked left and right. Both directions offered similar views. But which was correct? A town might lie in either, perhaps both. He did not know the name of it, and besides, there was no-one to ask.

Fifty-fifty. He held the egg above his head and gazed sunward through it. The yolk favoured his left. Squinting, Skidmore took off in that direction, lengthening his stride, wiping his brow as the day's warmth compounded. If he was wrong it didn't really matter, he told himself, he would just have to walk all the way back.

The road wound thinly, ditches either side, heather and bracken protruding through the cropped grass. There was the sound of insects, the noise of birds. Sheep droppings added a peculiar flavour to the gently buffeting air. Clouds appeared more prevalent in the distance, shadowing the horizon like smoke from a forest fire. He walked at an even pace, not caring to rush, preferring to think in this mode of perambulation, his mind turning without effort much as his body rolled along the road, cognizant of an end yet unsure how that end might present itself. Then, without warning, the sun was obscured, and it began to rain.

The temperature dropped immediately. Skidmore squinted through his wet lenses and felt his thin clothes cling. He walked faster now, shoulders hunched, the egg contained in the matched bowls of his palms. Almost without him noticing a car approached from behind, its weary lights a giveaway, and the driver, an elderly man, offered him a ride.

'You forget your coat?'

'Not exactly,' replied Skidmore, drying his glasses the best he could.

'Lost then?' the man inquired, winding the ancient motor vehicle up through its gears.

'You might say that.' Should he make an effort toward conversation? This was the Test Centre, after all. Perhaps it was required of him. 'I thought I'd walk into town,' he said. 'Just didn't realize how far it was.'

The old man laughed. He stunk of cigarettes. 'That's right. The world's always bigger than you think. Smaller too, mind you.' He smirked, his eyes far away at some recollection he chose not to share with Skidmore, who wiped raindrops from his nose.

Yellow lights manifested in the distance, multiplying over the brow of a hill. The road widened, divided by white dashes. Shop fronts gleamed to either side.

'Where do you want to be off?'

'Here will do.'

'Are you sure?' He slowed the car jerkily, pulling up next to a bus shelter.

'This is great,' enthused Skidmore, eyeing the door panel.

'Okay,' said the man. 'Pull the little chrome lever...'

Skidmore found it and stepped out into a downpour. The street was deserted, a maudlin grey even though it was only mid afternoon. There was light in the buildings, but this didn't seem to travel very far. He stood in the bus shelter rolling the egg in his hands. A dog, wet and shabby, padded up to him, its tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth. When the dog was sure of his attention it turned and scampered off. Skidmore followed, as this seemed the right thing to do. The dog led him down a side street, a pale terrace of identical dwellings. Only their front doors were different, atonal shades of blue and grey. The door the dog stopped at, however, hunched under its narrow lintel, was a bloodless red.

Skidmore knocked and after a few seconds his knock was answered.

A woman in a dressing gown opened the door, then echoed the dog's sodden yelp as it rushed past her, disappearing along a carpeted hallway. He stood gazing inward, feeling the warmth of the place, its inviting ordinariness. He had visited countless such homes, first as a babe in arms, later as a toddler, his mother engaged in long, difficult conversations whilst he played with blocks and toy aeroplanes, drank from part-lidded containers and had his hair ruffled by mostly strangers. So it was without hesitation that he entered, closing the door behind, the raised pattern of the wallpaper adding a strange depth to the narrow walls, the lopsided prints hazy through a fine patina of dust. A stairway climbed to his right. To his left and ahead of him were panelled doors. The woman had chased after the dog and he could hear her fussing, hear scraping sounds and the rap of a utensil, the scrape of metal inside a tin of dog food. Smiling, he opened the door to his left and walked into a dimly lit living-room. There was a three-piece and a rocking chair, a gas fire. The television was playing, a sequence of dynamics across its screen, the inner workings of a liquid state engine.

A clue. Yes, but to what?

There was information here he could make use of. That much was obvious.

Perhaps all the workings of his environment were scrolling before him, the Test Centre's soul laid bare, the innards of a cadaverous ocean given substance via sytemics and electricity.

There was a knock at the door.

The woman went to answer.

Skidmore passed through a set of sliding room dividers and found himself in a dining area. He heard voices from the hallway. There was a second door into the kitchen, a brash light escaping under its hemline.

Miri Mirabeau. Had to be.

Something dripped on his foot.

The woman yelped once again, echoing the dog as it rushed past her, leaving Miri at the front door.

So he had made it here first. He listened to the woman scraping dog food from a can.

Skidmore breathed out slowly, composing himself, then realised he no longer held the egg.

The egg would give him away, he believed, had he left it in the living-room. On top of the TV perhaps. He couldn't say. But if Miri were to find it.

Supposing the egg meant anything.

Skidmore found an exit. He straightened his glasses on his nose and walked briskly in the direction of an elevator. Inside, still wrapped in silence, he pushed the express button and held his breath the three or four seconds nothing happened. Then the car moved rapidly upward. He might have descended in a similar fashion, had he a military escort. The return journey was made easy by the assumption that he'd been where he'd been legitimately. The elevator was certainly quicker than the roundabout route he had taken to the core. He wondered how much time he had before the theft was discovered. Just how good where the compensating engines? The weight of the attaché case hadn't noticeably changed, but he had a benign singularity in there, its enormous mass contained through an uneasy (his stomach's assessment) alliance of thinkable and unthinkable things. Right now that gravity was swallowing its own tail, and going nowhere. Skidmore Shuffledeck planned to energize a spaceship with it, a collapsed star to collapse a star, the latter of a magnitude sufficient to make practical an engine.

In space it was no use going anywhere slowly; you'd just not get there at all.

5

Leftovers. There were always leftovers.

Nothing in nature was ever wasted. Similarly, Skidmore had learned that nothing in life or engineering was ever without consequence, be it a lone nut or a stray coupling. A half tube of some peculiar adhesive was inherently imbued with potential, able to be used in a variety of situations, should one of those situations ever arise. Therefore it made sense to discard nothing. For things were a universal currency.

Goods for services.

And non-violence. These were important to him.

Since the inception of faster-than-light travel, the expansion of human dominion and the availability of Earth-like planets, war, like money, was limited to domestic squabbles, albeit these might involve continents. That there nearly always was a path of least resistance, aka another stop on the galactic bus route, made even local conflicts somewhat less unresolvable, for in an ever expanding universe there was always more and never less and anyone wishing to be a feudal lord, god or hermit could find a place to do it. Because there were no aliens out there. There were only plants and animals. The only opposition to mankind came from machine, and machine didn't wage war, machine simply adapted.

Twiddling his thumbs as he spun head over heels through the endless spiral of a two hundred year old cooling trumpet he had time to contemplate such musings, a habit of youth that would wane with age and the wisdom of acceptance. Reality could be warped, he knew, but what was out there, beyond his meagre body, was always at least tangible, open to interpretation yet solid fact. Philosophy was an indulgence, a vice even, one Captain Munroe of The Periwinkle was prone to indulge in, and that, thought Skidmore, had worn off on him.

The flute possessed an architecture rarely seen anymore. Parts of it were clearly hand crafted. Rivet heads spoke of a workforce in the thousands, tiny ants engaged in the construction of a space cathedral. It was an artefact, a small piece of a past engine floating in the void.

Munroe liked to talk of how the spaceships of old were built to an overriding design. Skidmore could barely envision it. He had though studied such back at the Institute, voluminous palaces manufactured out of countless pieces that took decades to commission and were impractically slow.

In terms of salvage the aged metal spiral had no value outside of a private collection. The captain might pass it on one day but his purpose here was to attach the redundant mass to the ship as some ancient Earth warlord might to his vessel or helm, as a token, some trophy gleaned from distant shores where he had ventured seeking treasure. So was Shuffledeck put to task, wondering at the crazy romance of his mission and how he could possibly fasten the seemingly brittle trumpet to the lumpen hull of Monroe's ship, farm grown as it was, at least the greater part, assembled over years from scraps and lesser vessels and thus unfailingly ugly.

Magnetic anchors, he thought, his tumbling through the fluted structure nearly over and no significant weaknesses found. They might even get a tune out of it, albeit one heard only by space faeries, and of course The Perwinkle's captain.

As the newest of seven crew members, Skidmore was treated with a disdain not unexpected. Whilst no real hostility was directed toward him, he was largely ignored for significant periods and pretty much left out of conversations, or else made the butt of jokes and talked about behind his back to his face as it were. For one thing he tipped the gender balance in favour of male, which made the females aggressively feline, whilst the toms' reluctance to claim him as their own appeared to divide them among themselves. He had of course merely to prove his worth. No crew had any patience for a non-paying passenger.

Munroe was oblivious to such tensions. He kept to himself for the most part, stroking his beard and smoking his pipe in an observation bubble, surrounded by books and charts.

The Periwinkle was the third boat Shuffledeck had served on since leaving Perridi, the first a proto-naval vessel that took graduates to moons various and abandoned them there for extended periods, the better to maintain mining equipment and the kind of base-tech in-system observatories sub-threshold planets installed as a window on the void. Not that the threat of invasion was great; but human paranoia was a trait yet to fully wane. For his part Skidmore accepted whatever it was came at him. He was never overly restless or bored. Always keen to learn. His face lacked expression, he was told, only this provoked in him not anger but curiosity, a desire to know what it was he ought to be doing with his face that he wasn't. At least in other's eyes.

They just laughed.

'Stoic,' Captain Munroe put it. 'Like a Greek poet.'

Skidmore wondered when this change had come about. He'd been excitable as a child, he was sure, always in some sort of trouble, forever on the receiving end of plaintive glares from his mother.

Perhaps puberty had squeezed it from him, like so many things.

Jart, Freda and Bagshot Emily were the girls. Henry, Ywan and Munroe their counter gender, leaving Shuffledeck to tiptoe.

From tweaking surveillance equipment and servicing broken down robots he'd graduated via an unmanned service drone to the Gorp, named after its captain, Victor Gorp, and the first ship of sufficient speed and size to warrant its own engine, a giant cantankerous lump Gorp himself claimed to have amalgamated over a period of seventy-six years.

'You believe me, don't ya?'

Skidmore believed he'd stolen the engine or else won it at cards. There was murder in Gorp's eyes. That he was found dead soon after, a rare victim of gravity, only leant this theory credence.

He stepped off at the first opportunity, working thereafter for food on a world whose generous comforts were for residents only, a populace in the millions whose idleness was supplemented by strays like himself, of which there seemed an endless supply.

Which was where he met Munroe, nosily abusing a drink's machine in a beachfront café, the captain's tattoos retrogressive, much as the man himself, resplendent in red bloomers and a puffed out sleeveless shirt.

The argument over the toaster had started long before Skidmore entered the fray. It was a precious tool to some, an artless throwback to others. Its demise, however, served to prove the importance of breakfast, even aboard an interstellar vessel whose cognitive time was essentially redundant.

Freda, who baked bread and gauged distances too large to fit into reality, was a purist in every sense; decrying false kitchen gods, and a fine exponent of the overblown espresso. Her natural enemy was Ywan, who chewed nothing, his fine pointy teeth good for only rattling pills, concentrated nectar, but who rarely spoke and made himself invisible, yet useful. No, it was Henry who got her goat. More so his beloved, Bagshot Emily, lithe and unusually tall, always the first - she believed - to see around a corner.

Jart was made for better things. Fear held her back. Or so Captain Munroe informed his latest recruit, barely a man yet here thrust into a domestic crisis brought about by a blown filament.

Jart was The Perwinkle's spectral navigator, one given a mechanical presence in the guise of an early diaspora cleaning robot the captain was fond of dancing with about the heart of any spaceship, the galley.

'Let the kids have their fun at home,' he told Skidmore. 'And in the field,' gesturing grandly with open hands, 'watch them perform as a well-drilled team of gifted professionals.'

Which in this instance meant tapping an asteroid for water.

Routine stuff. Space was full of ice, usually mixed with rock, the extraction of it blessedly low tech, Skidmore told to mind the houses, that is turn over playing cards and observe a cluster of screens, something he took to readily, a book to one side and an experiment in cigarillos to the other.

Smoking was something Miri Mirabeau had introduced him to. It still seemed ridiculous, but the inherent craft appealed to Skidmore more than he cared to admit. The rolling of leaf and paper, the percussive chemical reaction of leaf and flame. The coughing, given the leafy content had that inevitable homemade kick or else came with an old fashioned health warning. Still, a pipe seemed like too great a commitment at his time in life, and his mother certainly wouldn't approve.

Presently he was alone on an improvised observation deck, smoke curling about him in patterns governed by electromagnetic motors and the gravity channelled from the ship's silent mass of engine. Munroe had disappeared, literally, no sign of him on any cue, whilst the remainder of the crew tackled the water.

The remainder of the crew save Jart, whose robotic manifestation stood in a doorway ten metres removed, eyeing him wantonly.

Probably she doubled as a sex robot. But he wasn't moved. She was Munroe's, and besides, far more interesting things appeared to be happening on the asteroid, where at least one space helmet had either shutdown or been taken offline.

Skidmore fancied this some new game among those crew members taken to the surface. He relit his oily cigarillo and folded his arms. The lights flickered. He caught the shocked expression on Jart's face as she vanished from her station at the doorjamb. Yanked backward, as if someone had tugged on her strings. His anus twitched, and then the light turned an underwater orange.

Politics had never interested Skidmore. On a macro scale the concept was largely irrelevant, whilst in the micro the petty manoeuvrings of men seemed of little import. His mother had hinted once at a past affiliation with a cause, although he had always imagined this a coded reference to his absent father, of whom she was reluctant to speak. Shuffledeck had no knowledge of the man beyond his apparent reality. His surname was in part a joke; a shuffling of cards, one picked at random, that card his lineage - or not. It was a strange game she played. One of many.

Nursing his head, eyes adjusting to the dim illumination of an unknown star, the shock of unfamiliar air in his lungs and the close proximity of a fence, made him realize his situation had altered considerably, and that an outside human element was responsible. Who or what, it was impossible to say. But the fact his hands and feet were tied made this, to his mind, impersonal. He wasn't dead. Circumstances had yet to run their course.

He lay on his left side on rough ground. The fence was wire, improvised and about two metres high. Rolling over revealed its circumference to be twenty metres or so and two other persons were contained, one being Freda, bound as himself and the other with a bag over his head. Henry by the boots he was wearing. Unbound yet flat out.

'There's only two reasons to exist extraterrestrially,' Captain Munroe had told him under the leafy canopy of a beach tavern. 'Either you're between worlds or you eschew them. Either way your life isn't your own. But more one way than the other.'

Skidmore had nodded, not knowing what to say. He was still mulling over the offer of a berth. Or at least hoping to give that impression.

'We're all prisoners, my boy. Although for some of us survival is irrevocably linked to escape.'

There was a gate in the fence and a man in uniform beyond, armed, getting to his feet as two other soldiers approached.

The two waited impatiently as the third fumbled with lock and chain, eventually giving them access to the compound.

They walked directly toward Skidmore, who barely managed to sit up before the bag went over his head.

The men were strong. Stronger than himself. The gravity on whatever world this was favoured them.

He was half lifted, half dragged a short distance beyond the gate, dumped on the metal back of a motorized vehicle and shortly thereafter delivered under the cool aegis of a tent.

The bag came off. He could make out two forms opposite, their faces largely masked by shadow. The cord binding his hands was cut and the table before him tapped with what he guessed was a knife, directing Skidmore to take the small blue pill and wash it down with the water.

Supposing it was something to balance the atmosphere he complied.

There was silence.

One of the forms grunted and leaned toward the other.

'What do you know of the asteroid?'

The voice came from deeper in the tent, surprising him.

'We were to tap it for water. I never left the ship.'

'It didn't seem unusual to you, this stop? The Periwinkle's tanks were half full.'

News to Skidmore, who was rapidly filing the gaps.

'I hadn't been aboard long,' he said. The truth, yet it somehow felt evasive, as if he was distancing himself from the remainder of the crew.

An extended silence. His head started to clear further.

'Your Captain Munroe,' the voice continued. 'Tell us of him.'

Skidmore didn't know what to say. 'He only recently took me on. The position was a step up for me.'

'You came from the Institute.'

It wasn't a question.

He wondered what they didn't know of his past. It at least suggested he had a future, that this may indeed be an opportunity.

'And where is Munroe now?'

Gone, by the looks of it.

Slipped the noose.

Skidmore had to admire him for that. More than an over-stewed space jockey, as he'd first thought. Here corroborated.

'So I'll ask you again. What do you know of the asteroid?'

That it was carrying something. The real question was whether that something had vanished with Munroe.

He guessed it had.

He was being schooled in politics.

The faceless men had had something taken from them. That they wanted it returned, and the fact he was still sitting here, largely unmolested, could only mean they thought he might play a part in the latter. Being new to The Periwinkle, hailing from the Institute (a place of privilege, he understood now), and possessing a skill set to match his resourcefulness, made him an ideal candidate. So why had they gone to Henry first?

Perhaps his had been a genuine interrogation.

The tent flapped opened behind Skidmore, briefly illuminating the space within.

Ywan's pointy teeth clamped round a post and a large orblike mass before which an empty chair was positioned being the literal highlights.

Darkness closed in once more and what he was sure was a body dropped to the ground next to him.

'Find Munroe.'

Or next time?

A small detonation. A breached skull and a wet ankle.

Half a dozen stupid questions threatened to burst from his own head. Shuffledeck squashed them down, pressed them back into their boxes.

He was hired.

6

His earliest memory was of a bright purple nipple. Still it lurked at the back of his mind. Out of reach and overlaid with unrelated female parts. A child at a breast, however, remained essentially human.

Mammals at the zoo staring blindly whilst their young suckled; masticating vegetation, where his mother read a book.

There was only man. In the known galaxy at least.

Freda still wasn't talking to him. Her efficiency was manifest, her co-ordinates those he'd been given, thereafter at the whim of gods. Or in this case Jart, whose proto-flesh persona had taken to sitting in Munroe's abandoned nest studiously reading, which got Shuffledeck thinking about his mother in the first place.

Of The Periwinkle's original crew only Bagshot Emily was unaccounted for. She had struck him as an anomaly from the outset, somehow out of place on this bucket, forever curling into chairs and ducking under lintels.

Skidmore fancied her an agent of what he now knew to be a quasi religious order, Terminals who believed in a great star at the centre of the universe, its destruction their sole intent. If only they could find it first. He'd like Freda's opinion, but it could wait.

What he knew for certain was that you didn't inherit a captaincy, much as you didn't claim an engine. You might change its name but over a certain mass a ship, whose greater part constituted engine, was a law unto itself. A tamed beast knew only one master, usually one who had nurtured it from a cub. It might still turn on him, but another stepping into those shoes had to start from scratch. Thus Freda's importance, a skilled navigator to mitigate between raw and cooked. Skidmore was totally reliant on her to make it even out system. Beyond that, Jart alone could traverse the endless reach. Or so he believed.

He could only speculate what payday was enough to persuade Munroe to abandon The Periwinkle. Skidmore only had third hand knowledge of it, but a captain's relationship to his ship was visceral.

Coldness flooded him.

They were bait, surely. What other explanation? He took a moment to ensure the lenses were secure in his newly fashioned spectacle frames, donned them and went in search of Freda.

'He left you for dead.'

She busily kneaded dough.

'I mended the toaster.'

'Doesn't mean I trust you.'

'Can't we just leave trust out of it? For the time being?'

The bread mixture was raised above her head and slammed down on the table, sending a cloud of flour about the untidy galley.

'I'm new at this,' confessed Shuffledeck. 'I really need your help.'

She sighed and wiped her brow on her shoulder. 'To find the captain? Why the fuck would I want to help you with that?'

'Because we're both dead otherwise.'

She laughed.

'You don't care?'

'About death?' Kneading once more. 'Maybe. Maybe not.'

'Then how about revenge?' Fishing now.

She gave him a disparaging look. 'You realize the Terminals are crazy? They want to bring about the end of the universe and expect to stick around for the beginning of a new one.'

'Apparently. Yes.'

'And you wish to do their bidding?'

He lit a tobacco stump. 'I just want to find Munroe; reunite him with his ship. The rest is up for negotiation.'

It was Freda's turn to laugh. 'You've been watching too many old movies.'

She was right about that.

'Okay, look. I have no immediate plans, other than staying alive. I have kids tucked away.'

Skidmore hadn't expected that. In space it was easy to forgo any kind of normal life.

'Yeah,' she added. 'Flesh and blood. Just like you.'

The dough was folded, turned over and folded again.

'You think me naive,' he stated. 'I am. Can't help that.' Drawing on the oily cigarillo. 'But I'm fairly sure Munroe wants to be found. He's too smart not to have a plan.'

Freda eyed him curiously. 'He left us for dead. Your words.'

'I don't think that was part of it.'

'The plan?'

'Yes.'

'So he miscalculated. Hardly makes him worth following. Or you for that matter.'

'But whatever was on the asteroid. He must have had a buyer for it, someone willing to pull him out...'

'Leaving the rest of us to hang,' she finished. 'Not convinced.'

They could argue forever, he thought. It would change nothing. Yet he felt unable to put that across.

'Skidmore Shuffledeck,' Freda said, as if examining his moniker, kneading it like the raw stuff of bread.

'Well?'

The cigarillo burned his fingers but he didn't break eye contact.

'I never cared for Henry or Ywan.' She shrugged and divided the dough, rolling it into thinner sections before plaiting them into a whole. 'Emily was a friend, although I'm not sure she understood the concept.' Dusting more flour and using her thumbs to bind the ends. 'The jury is still out on you. But the captain, Captain Munroe owes me - now more so than ever.'

She made no mention of Jart. Perhaps Skidmore alone viewed her as significant. More than an avatar.

'So we have a deal?'

'An arrangement! We have an arrangement, Shuffledeck. You need to experience more human vagueness and less film noir.'

His stomach rumbled. And that was that.

The Periwinkle was already in the maelstrom of cosmic misapprehension, tearing relativity to shreds as she vaulted the impossible and swallowed whole the unlikely, words as much use as paper aeroplanes when it came to describing space beyond light. It needed a poet and Skidmore was a bad one. He smoked and buttered, having discovered a significant tonnage in the hold, along with the means to manufacture more. Freda largely stayed out of his way, leaving him notes adhered to the toaster should she need anything, have a question. The first was a simple thank-you, for fixing the thing, which he'd achieved using some fine wire drawn from a hairbrush found in an old trunk.

Sleep came easily to Skidmore, regardless of temporal displacement. Lately, however, if was as if his eyes were reluctant to fully shut, a wariness in his brain with which he was unfamiliar. He was beginning to distrust his surroundings, he realized, to imagine increasingly more paranoid scenarios. He half expected Miri Mirabeau to manifest, laughing like a leprechaun and waving a screwdriver, a final triumph over his classmate and chief rival, Skidmore. They hadn't parted on the best of terms. But that was a million miles away. And so he dozed on and off, half-remembered spectres of an already fading past cavorting through his listless orbs. Something else, too. A truth he couldn't put his finger on. Perhaps all else was simply his mind shaking the one pertinent fact out.

The trumpet.

He sat up, removed and cleaned his glasses. His stomach rumbled and a light fitting shook somewhere.

In a feat of typically improvised space engineering Skidmore had successfully attached the vast ancient cooler to The Periwinkle's hull, poised like the twisted horn of a gigantic mythical beast. The analogy was well suited, as horns came in pairs. One great bolted tubular mass in situ as it were. And its twin?

What if, he thought, they worked much as trumpets in unison? Casting a note between them, regardless of distance. A note, or for that matter a body.

Teleportation was a known science, the joke went. Known not to work.

Freda shook her head, short blonde waves of hair rolling side to side. She was beautiful in a way Skidmore couldn't quite grasp, looking at her now as if for the first time.

'It would explain Munroe's disappearance,' he said, not quite believing it himself, but convinced he was in the right area.

'For all we know the Terminals killed him too and are using us for another end,' she countered, confronting him for the first time on the fate of her shipmates, those he had known all too briefly.

It was a keen loss, he understood. Just not an unbearable one. 'I mean,' Freda continued, 'just how forthcoming do you imagine those crazy zealots were with you?'

'You're right,' he said. 'But just imagine if that artefact poorly fastened to the ship were in fact a portal to another place and time. We could get out of here, escape the crazy zealots altogether.'

And I have nothing better to do, he failed to add.

Freda stood with her hands on her hips, following all too readily his thinking. 'Well you don't need my permission to find out'

Asteroid as tabernacle, pondered Skidmore, uncomfortably suited up, thinking he should lay off the sweets.

Holy relics.

Of value to a religious order, he'd gleaned from encyclopaedia various.

Explanation enough. And Shuffledeck thrived on explanation.

He rested in space, a blur of stars for a backdrop, the gently oscillating outline of The Periwinkle at once massive and tiny before him.

Those co-ordinates they'd been instructed to follow seemed pleasingly irrelevant out here in the naked reach.

If only he might peel the suit off. Yes.

That would be the ultimate binding of flesh and universe.

Pretty much what the Terminals intended. An apocalyptic creed with a get-out clause for those blessed and enlightened.

The universe was infinite and therefore may indeed house a star of such magnitude as the one the Terminals sought. Barely a finger length of the Milky Way had been traversed by man, and it was only one of billions of galaxies stretching in every direction.

Light there was in abundance, some of it very old.

He glided nearer the spiralling trumpet, wondering whether he should detach it. Having traversed its inner length once he was unconvinced it was worth of doing so again. Perhaps with different eyes. The solution to its mystery, he was sure, was simple. If only you knew where to look. How to look. Knowledge made everything easy. Lack of knowledge left him gazing upon a piece of space junk.

The structure's age was significant, he believed. He was unable to decide though: was it as old as he imagined or newer than it looked?

The idea that man, or men, had cracked the teleportation conundrum two or more generations ago appealed to his romantic instincts. He liked the idea of those men engineering such a breakthrough and keeping it to themselves. Where might they be now? Re-engineered someplace across the spiral maybe. Over where the robots held dominion, in the little-visited, autonomous realm of unknowable machine.

Yet how to crack the instrument, understand and make use of its potential?

Such was the task facing him now.

'Two spoons. Eh, Shuffledick?' Miri as ever, echoing in his head.

Was it that simple?

A trumpet. An instrument of displacement. A means.

The thing needed to be played.

A trumpet. A wind instrument. One requiring his lungs.

Skidmore manoeuvred inside the great plated body, checked his gauges, ignored them, prepared to take the biggest gamble of his short life.

Using the little finger of his right hand, tight in its protective shell, he deliberately began unfastening his helmet, sanity screaming and kicking up a fuss, alarms shrill in her ears.

This was the only way though. There could be no other means.

To play a trumpet one must present one's lips to its reed and, permitting those lips a freedom of expression not common to the formation of words, blow.

7

And after the flute comes the fugue.

It wasn't his first corpse; there had been his father with his head opened like a corrupted marrow, something vaguely metallic crawling from the cavity, only to disappear.

Perhaps he had imagined it. His mother also. There and yet not there. No weapon in her hand.

He burst into salt water, a crush of green and grey shocking his senses, an inward pressure that was completely unexpected. Breath held against an unforgiving, lifeless void, his senses instead had to wrestle with this sudden wet tumult, oxygen rich and yet just as useless to breathe.

Weightless, his body fought the pressure of water, an altogether different kind of resistance.

He scrabbled in panic and eventually broke the surface, realized he was not far offshore and paddled the best he could to where the ocean met the beach and clawed his way onto dry land.

There was a parasol nearby, beneath it a lounger, red cloth over a white frame. A body draped across it dressed only in shorts. A drink in its hand.

Dead.

Thin and wasted yet well preserved, almost desiccated, Captain Munroe, onetime of The Periwinkle, removed in space and time.

Skidmore wondered if he might share a similar fate. Controlling his breathing he stripped the suit and stood naked on the shore. His testicles had disappeared and his hands trembled, but he was alive.

He thought of Freda. Maybe he should have left a note. Then again the most likely explanation for his disappearance was that he was right: the trumpet was a portal to...wherever he was now. He supposed it must work in reverse but that discovery would have to wait.

Lifting his shrunken penis Skidmore coaxed his balls out. He felt infinitely more relaxed. He peered at Munroe, his faded tattoos a signifier of lost grandeur. The captain's shorts weren't really an option so Shuffledeck did what he did best and used what was to hand, the red flowered parasol making a good sarong. He fancied he looked like a native of tropical isles back in the day of The Periwinkle's namesake, its captain here having expired on some distant island, victim to disease or - more ironically - dehydration.

A curtain of orange-hued trees separated the broad arc of pale sand from whatever lay inland.

There was no choice other than to penetrate the vegetal wall, feet soon encased in leaves, eyes and ears alert to every subtle vibration. Although thickly clustered the canopy was thin, allowing plenty of light through. Skidmore had no real experience of jungle environments but nonetheless was surprised by the seeming lack of insect and animal life. The largest leaved plants spread out at ground level, offering what amounted to a thickly veined carpet out of which sprang the upright boles, their leaves small and near transparent high overhead. Everything seemed drained of colour. He crunched his way, a trail of bruised plant life behind. Ahead the ground rose, subtly at first and then more steeply, rocks emerging and the carpet thinner. The temperature, until now moderate, dropped a few degrees, sufficient to prickle his skin.

The sky darkened and stars began to appear. The ground tore away the vegetation he'd wrapped about his feet. The rocks were cold now, the slope steeper, the soles of his feet transmitting an increasingly detailed report back to his brain - which churned, uncertain of something.

A wind poured over the looming rise, stinging his eyes with more than energised atmosphere. There was a chemical element to it, one he thought to recognize from the dank innards of space platforms. Incongruous here, unless.

Skidmore clambered the last few metres using both his hands and feet, the growing noise in his head and the increasing pressure of the turbulent air threatening to cast him down the escarpment. He might find a soft landing among leafage there or else be broken in two. Best not to fall then, he reasoned, and finding good purchase with all four limbs moved his body upward the final few centimetres till his eyes, squinted and pummelled, were finally able to see beyond the rim. At nothing, just space.

Ducking back he turned and allowed himself to slip a short way on his arse, the sarong riding up uncomfortably. So this wasn't a planet at all but a shelf. Why should that make a difference? he thought. He still had to find a way off. Still had to discover why he was here. It was impossible to gauge the size of the shelf but the rim ran in either direction without too much divergence, its curvature sufficiently massive to suggest a circumference appended with many zeros.

Staring back over the treetops to the ocean the greater mass of it disappeared like a tongue down a throat.

His stomach complained. He looked to the sky but there was no discernible sun, instead a light source without reference, one that managed to define shadow and yet not physically exist.

There was no shelf in the galaxy like this. None he had heard of anyway.

Skidmore filled his cheeks and exhaled his awe before slip-sliding down the escarpment, feet complaining, and followed his tracks back through the diluted jungle uprights, feet soothed, to the beach with its sole occupier now looking a little red from the heat.

Munroe's demise posed a problem. If this were Monroe.

He took the man's arm and raised it stiffly, pulling the drink from his hand as he did so. The limb felt real enough. Dead enough, too. But without the appropriate medical aids it was impossible to say for sure whether the cadaver was Munroe's at all.

Skidmore smelled the drink and then downed it, thinking to find some clue there.

All he got was an acid kick in the back of his throat and a moment of bleary-eyed discombobulation.

Unlikely the drink was poisoned. He had a set of artificial receptors installed to cover such mundanities, installed by a watchful mother and useful combating the everyday. That he took them for granted was precisely the point.

He placed the glass on Munroe's sinking belly and looked out to sea.

He could either dive for the fluted entryway and hope to return to the ship or else fashion a raft. Neither option provided an immediate return of the sort he desired but the later at least invited an engineering challenge. Moreover, one he had no tools to hand to tackle, otherwise known as Skidmore's favourite kind.

At the Institute on Perridi they taught that you could always find what you needed close to hand. What was required was a little imagination. First though he thought he should bury the captain. On the beach didn't seem appropriate, however. Thus was Munroe displaced face down in the sand whilst Skidmore took apart the sun lounger. The frame was metal but of itself insufficient to float. What he needed was timber, a larger craft with outriggers to prevent him capsizing. Important as he wasn't convinced he could swim any distance. Scrabbling ashore was one thing, fighting angry currents another.

One hinged leg of the lounger, broken off and flattened with a stone it took him a disproportionate amount of time to harvest from the escarpment, most of whose composition was soft sediment, made a useable cutting edge. He added weight to it by wedging the stone behind the joined ends and binding it with strips of the red fabric. Thence to attack a tree.

His first few swings yielded encouraging results and soon a thin bole was toppled, spitting orange sap.

Two more quickly followed, but he was losing the light and the residual temperature with it.

There was no moon, as there was no sun. No telling how cold it might get but the darkness would be total. Nothing for it then but to dig a hole in the beach and half bury himself in it, Captain Munroe on watch, propped stiffly alongside.

He thought of Freda and what her circumstances might be. The Terminals would come looking, sooner rather than later. Whether any of their number were able to play the trumpet he doubted. That was a whole other kind of faith.

Skidmore closed his eyes, confident in the artificial nature of the beach and the fact the tide wouldn't come in.

In reflection he should have paid more heed to what lay beneath.

Systemic glass held the appearance of reality without either the quality or the substance. It worked best in a closed environment. Farther afield perspective became diluted.

Laughter from the living-room. Perhaps Miri had succumbed to the obvious diversion.

Skidmore just stared at the eggs boiling in the pan, maniacally aware of each grain of sand as it slipped from above to below. He had about that much time to come to a decision.

There was a scream, a crash and a thud as something heavy hit the floor of the adjoining room.

His bones juddered but his mind and eyes remained still.

The kitchen door opened slowly, squeaking theatrically on its hinges.

Miri? The woman?

It wasn't real, whatever it was unfolding. They had never left the ministry. The task was scrutinized in detail.

The last few grains passed through the egg timer and Skidmore moved the pan from the heat. Looked up.

'What happened?'

Miri didn't answer.

Skidmore didn't ask again.

Miri walked over to a drawer, opened it and removed a knife.

The gleam of the blade spoke of its sharpness.

Skidmore had a pan of boiling, however.

Miri grinned and put the knife aside. Approaching the table he pulled out a chair and sat, inviting Shuffledeck to do the honours and fill each eggcup with a boiled egg.

From where he was standing it was impossible for Skidmore to see much of the space beyond the half open door.

Surely Miri wanted him to look, he thought. One diversion had been transformed into another.

Was the woman harmed? Did it matter if she was? He'd made it to the house first but lost the initiative.

Found his egg. Miri's, too.

His mother would be disappointed.

He could of made a fire whilst there was still light to focus through the lenses of his glasses.

He may even have attracted a boat and been rescued.

Such wasn't Skidmore's style. Unfortunately.

Sitting now in a square cell with his back well and truly to the wall what irked him most was that he hadn't considered the obvious. If he had - and his early discovery of the shelf's nature left no room for excuses - he might at least be in some way apprehending, rather than merely the apprehended. Total ignorance of his captors. Not bound on this occasion, but just as surely taken prisoner, with no clue as to why.

As ever he ran things back in his head. It was fanciful to think he should set sail across a perhaps empty sea. He should have exploited what small knowledge he held, and dug. More than a pit to sleep in, which, as it transpired, left him entirely vulnerable. It was foolish looking toward the horizon when a much nearer border was to hand. The beach. The jungle. The escarpment. There had to be access tunnels to the shelf below. He had been enamoured by fanciful visions of flight, when all he had to do was get his hands dirty.

Still, he was alive.

The cell was three metres square and a blank door occupied the middle third of one side.

That was a lot a head clearance.

Something told him it wouldn't be uniformed zealots on the far side.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

He hoped he didn't have to wait too long to find out.

Skidmore got up and paced. Naked again he slapped his stomach, squeezed the folds together and made a mouth round his belly button.

'Two spoons,' the mouth said. And then the cell flooded and he was deposited into vacuum.

8

It was Freda, hands dusty with flour, slapping his face.

'You ran out of air,' she reiterated later, unbelieving of his ravings.

'But...'

'Give it up, Shuffledeck.'

He'd come to aboard The Periwinkle; no denying that. Suited and stupor'd. Jart in attendance and the ship's human navigator impatient of explanations.

'Fourteen hours to orbit.'

'Where.'

'Nowhere.'

'Oh.'

He'd left out the part concerning the captain's seeming demise, suspicious of that now himself.

He needed to get back out there for a rerun. But too late.

The ship hoved in on a horizon their captors had provided the co-ordinates to, a planet whose southern pole was just about habitable whilst the remainder of its inflated mass was composed of, in Freda's words, 'Sweaty rock.'

Skidmore slept for six, ate alone, dozed for two and then took an extended shower, bothered all the while by the rust discoloured water. He needed to look into that, and possibly the shower unit's heat exchanger.

Drying himself off he froze in wonder. There was a wiry hair protruding directly from his naval. He tugged it but it didn't budge. It was as if, he felt, there was something on the other end, bulbous and firmly attached.

Gravity lurched within the slowing vessel and his bowels took precedence, but Skidmore was convinced of the package's importance. A seed planted, a tiny missive buried in his very middle, centred like a vestigial umbilical cord.

Leaving it for another time, one more likely to provide answers and facilitate use, he attended to his bowels and refreshed himself thereafter with toast and what passed on The Periwinkle for tea.

Jart sat immobile in the galley on a large cushion, both feet off the floor and her hair over her eyes.

The hours passed. Freda parked them.

'Any ideas?'

'No.'

'We can't just sit here.'

'Then one of us should go down there and take a look.'

'At?'

'Whatever there is to look at,' he added flippantly.

'Well both go,' Freda commented. 'Okay?'

Skidmore shrugged. Right now he was short of alternatives. Whereupon Freda introduced him to Celestine, the ship's somewhat decrepit service module cum surface to ship shuttle.

SSS Celestine to give her her full title, a small piece of Munroe theatre with leather seats and multifarious levers that had Skidmore enraptured.

'There was no way I was going to let you lose with this beauty,' Freda told him, folding herself neatly into the command console and literally ratcheting up the motors. 'Hold on.'

They spun loose, the engines popped and Skidmore felt himself squeezed into what he imagined a barber's chair, the memory of one surfacing at that moment and a smile spreading across his face.

The fact they both might be killed shortly didn't come into it.

The planet's atmosphere proved benign and the descent therefore uneventful.

Skidmore cleaned his nails, sniffing them in search of any residue from jungles real or illusory.

He knew reality could be mimicked but there were always telltales, subtleties the soul picked up on, like a phonograph needle in its groove.

That he'd return to the shelf seemed to him inevitable. He just had to negotiate whatever hazards were presented.

Freda thumped a screen and cursed, smiling then as the boat landed heavily. She assured him everything was okay and the atmosphere would support life, adding it may be a little clammy.

His t-shirt stuck to his ribcage.

Freda had adopted a kind of poncho that floated in a cone from her neck, leaving only her legs visible.

The nearest star hung low over a softly rolling horizon. Pale in colour, the hills swept the planet's visible perimeter, almost echoing the thin cloud above. The sky was dim and vaguely purple, but there was sufficient light to go by. Nearer to the ground was thinly grassed with the occasional skeletal shrub, like something out of an old Western, in the middle distance a jumble of dark shapes with right angles and the hint of something human.

There was nothing more likely to kill you in the galaxy, Skidmore knew, than a human. Or a group of humans, isolated and inbred on some forgotten outpost where the batteries had died years ago.

They should tread carefully. But already Freda was skipping toward a dilapidated prefab three hundred metres away.

It was safe to assume that wherever they were the Terminals had been here first. They'd discussed as much on the descent. What was less clear was why; more particularly why them? Idle speculation was something held in low regard at the Institute and Skidmore was in accord. Yet where his survival was at stake he thought it a reasonable indulgence.

He lengthened his stride it an effort to catch Freda up. A cloy sweat pooled in his eyes and the ground became slippery underfoot.

She disappeared through a lopsided hatchway before he could shout, the words sticking in his throat. He coughed and spat and jogged after, paused at the hatchway and gazed within. The prefab was illuminated by numerous chimneys in its roof, angled starward. The whole had shifted, however, as if undermined at one end. A workshop, he intuited, although much hardware had been removed. Abandoned some time ago.

Freda toted what looked like a harpoon. If it was weapons manufactured here they were primitive ones. Perhaps more hunting than fighting.

She dropped the barbed metal shaft and ambled over to him, body set against the gentle incline.

'Hmmm.'

'That's your assessment?' he enquired, breathless.

'It's just some parking shed,' she opined. 'Got to be richer pickings.'

Skidmore agreed and they departed the shed, rounding soon after on a cluster of more organized shapes that resembled ancient shipping containers, some even with stencilled numbers.

They proved empty, stripped of everything save paint.

He was beginning to think this cluster of once habitation nothing more than a temporary dumping ground for salvage.

The Terminals had removed everything of relevance, including the people. Or maybe they were buried nearby. He didn't need to know the answer to that but did wish to solve the mystery of why he and Freda were here.

He fished half a cigarillo out of a trouser pocket then realized he lacked a source of ignition.

Freda floated in the conical cape, its hue shifting each way she turned. Impatient with Skidmore, she barely glanced at him before vanishing beyond an upended container, giving him little choice but to trudge after.

There was a domed structure beyond, holed as if from within, frayed edges radiating outward and debris littered about.

And a first corpse. Parts of one at least.

So violence had indeed visited, he thought. Some time ago by the look of the body, which on first sight appeared partially eaten, but was in fact victim to a high caliber projectile weapon.

Shook troops? Was that the Terminals' style?

Freda whistled from afar, waved him over.

Skidmore traipsed across to where lay four bodies, heads, hands and feet missing. Clearly an execution.

He wasn't comfortable with such expressions of humanity. There was always a way to fix things, to reconcile. That was he his belief. On the peripheries other beliefs held sway, but there was never much to gain from murderous acts in a galaxy of endless plenty.

'They were tortured,' said Freda. 'There was something here they didn't want to give up.'

'And our employers aren't convinced they got it? Is that what you're saying?'

She bridled. 'Don't call them that.'

'It disgusts me.'

'That you may be right?'

'That, too.'

She shook her head. 'If they didn't find what they were looking for then what the fuck did Captain Munroe take from them?'

'You'd have to ask him.'

'Come on. Let's look inside. Something has to have made that hole.'

Sweat was making his boots squeak now, whilst Freda appeared to float, no hint of fear in her approach to the dangerous unknown. Neither were armed. Not so much as a lighter, unless she had something tucked under that poncho Skidmore wasn't aware of.

The interior was darker than he expected, soot-laden and scorched. It stunk of something unidentifiable and there were decayed body parts everywhere, as if a crowd had been caught in an explosion. Yet the structure was intact other than what he couldn't help thinking of as an exit wound, a puncture two metres across at roughly sixty degrees from a hole in the floor, a hole that extended down into gleaming darkness, as if cut by heat from coal.

It was like something contained had broken free. A molten bullet from a subterranean chamber.

Freda looked in his direction but said nothing. Moments later she pushed a finger in an ear, closed her eyes as if to concentrate on the incoming message.

Then, 'Time to go.'

'Jart?'

She nodded. 'We've new co-ordinates it seems.'

So all this was just an exhibition.

Filling his lungs with smoke at last Skidmore Shuffledeck opened a book at random at searched the words for clues. It seemed as good a place as any to start, feet up in Munroe's library cum eerie aboard The Periwinkle surrounded by a billion nameless stars.

They were en route for one, a paper chase he wondered if there was any worth in continuing.

Idly he pulled at the wiry hair protruding from his navel, wishing he could recall when it first had manifested. His favoured scenario was that it was a souvenir from the shelf, placed within by benign beings from another dimension. But he couldn't rule out the likelihood it was an implant gifted by Terminals that might cut him in half across distances too great to cross uninterrupted, as it were. Did Freda have one? Strange he hadn't thought to enquire. Stranger still his reluctance to do so now. He wanted to trust her, he supposed. If she wasn't similarly primed that might makes things awkward. And if she was? Skidmore failed to square the probability in his mind. He gave his attention back to the words, but they were of no help either.

Hundreds of hours. The only answer was booze.

9

The dog went for his face. Much larger than he either recalled or imagined, it leapt directly at him, jaws gaping redly, eyes wide, a growl erupting from its bristling maw the like of which he had never experienced.

Skidmore only just manage to close the door in time, the enraged animal striking it, barking and clawing at the thin wood.

Miri was beside himself laughing. 'You had to look, didn't you!' he bellowed. 'You're so fucking predictable!'

He reached out to the kitchen table and dragged it over, buttressing the door beyond which the dog thundered in agitated fury.

There had been no sign of the woman but he'd barely had time to give the room beyond a quick once-over.

'Is it raining outside?' Skidmore asked Miri, who had moved to the rear of the kitchen.

'Nope.'

'Then we should get out of here.'

'We?'

Skidmore grinned. 'You first.'

His roomy had to think about that. Ever suspicious, Miri imagined everyone as paranoid as he himself was.

They were engaged in a competition, the winner of which would graduate. Yet the minister, in keeping with the Institute, had been vague not only about the outcome but the rules. In fact everything about the Test Centre wherein they contested was vague, changeable as the weather. A good deal of the construction and surrounding imagery was drawn from their own minds, Skidmore believed; a waking dream, or nightmare wherein the outcome was never certain. Dying here might not necessarily mean failure.

And killing?

Perhaps Mirabeau was once step ahead of him after all.

Still, what was another year on his calendar? Another minus year on Perridi, in the machine bowels among the undigested, no sun in the sky and no indigenous life left anywhere.

Here, where even the light was imported.

In his time spent on Perridi he'd grown beyond measure. Gone was the unquestioning, spindly youth. Gone, too, the naive beneficiary of whatever reward system had brought him to the Institute. The ministers would never tell him how he came to be here and there had been no word from his mother. Miri Mirabeau was the only other student. At least that he was permitted to meet. Doubtless there were many, perhaps thousands, but it suited the ministerial order to concentrate of the individual. Skidmore had relished in the atmosphere of disciplined learning at first. Exact in every detail. More latterly, however, as graduation beckoned, a rebellious streak had emerged. A darkness from within, it both fascinated and frightened. A pull away from exactness toward chaos he would do well to keep a rein on.

Miri sniffed and opened the back door. Cold air flooded into the kitchen along with a fine veil of smoke.

The dog had fallen silent.

And then his chief rival, his only friend was gone.

Jart was lying next to him. Skidmore got up, dressed, pretended not to notice. His brain desired rehydrating, which made him think once more of overhauling the ship's water systems. Then again, what came out of the tap resembled diluted whisky.

Baumgauzan was a onetime frontier post whose population had slipped back to roughly forty million, six million of whom lived in the capital, Haus, the local gazetteer informed him. Famous for its giant blue lilies. A rough-haus no doubt, back in the day. The frontier had moved on and taken the more transient, less polished element with it. Now the planet was practically suburbia.

An intriguing place for a conspiracy, which was what this sojourn was turning out to be.

Freda suggested they simply get on with it and Skidmore agreed.

The fact it was snowing groundside made up for everything.

They'd hoped to blend in and succeeded largely but he couldn't help thinking there were eyes everywhere.

Eyes in heads. More eyes than he'd seen in one place in some time and it made him twitchy.

Having offloaded the greater part of The Periwinkle's buttery cargo they at least had cash, and soon a hotel room. There was even a view of mountains, but thus far no lilies.

The local media proved as bizarre as any local media anywhere. Skidmore hoped he wouldn't have to spend too much time acclimatizing. Surely a note under the door or a phone call was imminent.

He would let his beard grow, he thought, the only measurement of time that was personal.

After nine days and several soap opera twists, however, he was getting not only itchy but emotional.

'We've enough cash for six months,' Freda said, although in no way positively. She was as restless as he was.

'You think they've simply parked us?'

Freda shrugged.

'We should get skiing lessons,' he said. 'We should not be beholden.'

'Beholden?'

'It's a line from yesterday's episode of Emma and Ernestine. They owe a trading debt but are being made to pay interest in the form of sexual favours.'

'I can't believe you watch that stuff.'

'Me neither.'

She put her book down. 'Okay then; let's go out.'

Into a bluish late afternoon given a yellowish patina by a declining star, people afoot, few vehicles, outsized boots the fashion Freda noted, insisting they shop, taking an absurd delight in choosing footwear for both herself and Skidmore. With matching scarves and hats.

Baumgauzan was a fiefdom, the rule of law largely understated. Like many worlds it was administered from afar. There was a local police force in evidence but they mostly stayed out of sight. No doubt other measures were in place, he reasoned, but overall Haus proved a peaceful place.

They chewed nonchalantly on steak and chips and drank beer from globular containers that rolled upright without spilling should you accidentally knock one over.

Skidmore's inquiry over mustard drew a blank though.

'Stop playing the tourist,' Freda admonished.

They walked the meal off, circling the old town with its wood and stone echoes of Earth and come nightfall deposited themselves before a bandstand in a park.

As the band tuned up a small girl wound in their direction, her purpose the sale of ice cream.

The wire in Skidmore's naval began to buzz.

Freda bought them fruity cones spotted with some sweet liquor whilst Skidmore did his best to avoid eye contact.

The girl floated off and the wire ceased its oscillating. It had though given him an erection, which Freda eyed quizzically.

'Something you want to tell me?'

He took the offered cone and licked it. The band started up and it was as if, after all, they were a married couple.

The music, unlike the ice cream, was an acquired taste. Skidmore concentrated on the sunset instead, bleeding to red now and dripping wetly at the corners of his vision. There seemed nothing out of the ordinary so far as his frozen cone was concerned, its core temperature being slowly matched by the evening's, wisps of breath assailing the air and his arse going numb on his seat. Freda had gone quiet, however. She didn't speak again till they were back at the hotel whereupon she tossed a glass eyeball at him.

'Let me guess,' he said eagerly, 'it was hidden in your cone.'

'And yours?'

'Completely orb free.'

'So what do you suppose it means?'

Skidmore laughed and scratched his neck with one hand whilst turning over the eyeball with the other. He couldn't help think she was eyeing him suspiciously.

'Well?' That hands on hips stance he recognized as danger.

'Maybe it's some lucky charm. Like a prize.'

'A prize?' Impatient now. Overly worried. 'Really?'

He peered at the eyeball up close but could discern nothing but glass, no obvious inner functioning.

'What do you suppose it is?'

'A message,' she stated. 'That we're being watched.'

Fair enough, he thought. But it didn't explain her agitation. They were here covertly at the whim of a religious order bent on their own and the universe's destruction, which to Skidmore kind of put things in perspective. That and the fact they were possibly the only tourists seen on Baumgauzan in its recent history. For which he blamed himself. The hotel's clientele was entirely out-of-towners here on business or for recreation. Not spacefaring tramps. They may as well have had signage printed on t-shirts. As conspirators they were clearly novices.

He shrugged and tucked the eyeball in a pocket. 'Nobody knows why we're here. Not even us.'

Freda sat on the bed and began taking her preposterous boots off.

When at last came a knock at the door.

Each waited for the other to answer.

Skidmore relented.

Mr. Hardy looked more like an assassin than a man of the cloth, which is how he described himself, poised in a black suit on the end of a chair whilst Freda and Skidmore stood. He had with him a black suitcase and a black umbrella and was very deliberate with both.

'You weren't expecting me?' he asked, voice quietly accented as if used to another language.

Neither answered, or gazed at each other.

'Some refreshment might have been nice,' Mr. Hardy commented, but then quickly dismissed the notion. 'To matters at hand.' He straightened. 'I am charged with delivering this case.'

There was no further explanation, at which Skidmore and Freda at last exchanged looks.

'To us?' Shuffledeck asked, regretting it immediately.

The man smiled indulgently. 'Of course.'

'And what do we do with it?' No longer caring what the navigator or the man of the cloth thought.

'I have no idea,' said Mr. Hardy. 'Now if you'll excuse me, I have duties to enact.'

He rose, hooking the umbrella over his left forearm and offering his skinny white hand.

Freda seized the initiative. 'Thank-you very much,' she blurted, shaking the hand, which her own completely enfolded. 'Darling?'

'What?'

She was playing a game he saw.

'Yes, thank-you,' echoed Skidmore, before adding a handshake of his own, sorely tempted to squeeze those bony knuckles, politely next ushering the man from the room.

The suitcase was unexceptional in size and weight. It had metal catches and wasn't obviously locked.

Neither though suggested opening it.

Skidmore rolled a cigarillo and turned on the TV.

Freda ran a bath and an hour passed with neither speaking.

They hadn't arrived with much in the way of luggage. Leaving with more didn't pose a logistical problem, except this latest addition to their possessions might contain something of local value, precious to Baumgauzan that would set off alarms way beyond the fiefdom.

They were mules now. And they'd seen what happened when things went wrong.

Celestine was berthed in high orbit due to not being a registered vessel. Freda was confident she could fly her remotely via Jart, landing the service vehicle somewhere sufficiently remote and rendezvousing in due course without arousing too much suspicion. They'd be long gone and unlikely to return to make heat signatures a problem, and besides those could be faked. But they really needed a body upside to release the brake and unhitch the boat from her automated moorings. Quickly, neither thought worthy of saying.

'There must be a way to override the docking actuators,' said Freda. 'Execute a release.'

'Doubtless there is, but that could involve bribery and/or breaking and entering, neither of which sounds like a good idea.'

This was a hands-on problem, he thought. One of them had to transit to Celestine and release her manually. And fly her back of course. Skidmore could readily achieve the first but wasn't convinced of the second, whereas Freda could handle both.

10

She left first thing in the morning. Ideally it was Skidmore who needed the head start but Haus was pretty much shut down in the early hours and the only way out of town was by train to the coast, thence a boat to faraway sufficiently remote. Freda was sure Jart could locate him anywhere on the surface but Celestine was only accurate to a few hundred metres without a beacon to fasten on. Thirty-six hours seemed a reasonable turnaround, they'd decided. There were islands to the east with enough inhabitants to warrant a pier but not so many to - accidentally or otherwise - hinder an illegal surface to ship shuttle.

On paper there wasn't a lot that could go wrong. It was like leaving a restaurant without paying; you just needed guts and to be pretty sure you weren't ever coming back. A bigger problem was how to disguise the case. Skidmore wasn't convinced it was necessary but Freda insisted. They had haul bags but nothing substantial, so in the end, and perhaps to spite her, he fashioned a giant muffler from their Baumgauzan boots.

He didn't sleep much. He focused on probabilities and outcomes and how one or the other might be shaped, that is transformed to his advantage. It was important always to make the best out of whatever was to hand. To seek out the solution. For the first time though Skidmore began optioning in alternative outcomes, solutions plural, whereas in the past he had always considered there to be but one path.

He lay in the dark.

Staring up at the stars it was easy to lose yourself, to forget your problems and be one with the angels.

They never answered your prayers, his mother had told him, because there was no such thing as something for nothing.

Groggily sober, he settled the hotel bill at the earliest opportunity, shouldered his haul bag and the somewhat conspicuous muffler and stepped out into fresh snow. The train station was twenty minutes walk away, made thirty-five by the white blanket newly laid down, his feet slipping continuously in heavy beaten boots. His mind wrestled with the problem of what to do with their remaining cash. It was valueless off-world. He needed to transform it into something useable. But what? A frosted canopy marked the station, no more than a lean-to over three wooden huts and a single track.

East. Only two hours to wait first, on a bench out in the open with a cigar from the kiosk, an unidentifiable hot milky beverage and a paper map. The old lady serving him had refused the large denomination note initially but taken it when he suggested she keep the change.

To Skidmore's amusement and delight the train when finally it emerged from its shed was steam powered. Ugly, inefficient and slow, all of which made him smile, despite his rattled bones and the disgruntled casually drunkenness of the majority of the passengers. It was four hours to the coast, the snow wetter and the mood darker as he alighted, unsuccessfully shrugging off the idea that he had a tail, a young man ostensibly part of a group but whose face, despite his closeness to this youthful set, didn't appear to fit.

He raided another kiosk and filled his pockets with goodies. There was a small village, a natural harbour full of fishing boats.

From overheard conversations he gleaned that the group of islands toward which he was headed was home to a diamond mine. Natural rocks were favoured among those rich enough to place a value on them, esteemed beings with ready-made clones and augmented living arrangements. Not that Skidmore had any experience of such. The boys were returning after two week's R&R and not, he thought, looking forward to it. Cheaper than robots and easier to maintain. They might make it rich or die digging.

It was another two hours before the ferry, time defined by convention more than length of day. Earth approximate worlds such as Baumgauzan held to the twenty-four hour convention. That, bearable gravity and breathable air were the only prerequisites. The ferry would take fourteen hours, leaving him roughly a further fourteen hours, give or take, to figure out the rest. He had no direct way of contacting Freda. Maybe Jart could contact him but that wasn't something Skidmore was able to initiate.

He ate and minded his own business. The youths disappeared into a bar from which spilled piano music.

Skidmore was tempted to join them but thought it wiser to watch his bags and keep his head on his shoulders. In truth, he wasn't any older than they were. His life though had in many ways been longer.

The ferry was a substantial affair driven by diesel engines. It had three decks, the lowest given over to mostly tracked vehicles, grubby steel lumps with military DNA he admired from afar as they crashed the strand and turned the quiet fishing village noisy. There was no meaningful tide on Baumgauzan and the beach was gravel, a bulldozer parked at one end. The landing stage was a spur off the bay and looked like it had been repaired many times.

A cold drizzle blew in off the sea. Skidmore was in no hurry to board, however. He waited for the boys to emerge, counting their heads to find one missing.

When eventually he boarded those of the crew he encountered viewed him with suspicion. The language they spoke was full of colloquialisms and difficult to follow. To them he was clearly an alien.

He'd thought it unwise to take a cabin and was reconsidering that now, half frozen on the middle deck as the ferry cranked its starboard propeller and heaved over to port. The passage was likely to be rough then. And so it proved. Although after dark the water mellowed, the stars came out and he was roused from his doze by the unmistakeable sound of a card game.

There was something about card games that was universal. Skidmore fancied it was not so much the playing as the silence, the displacement of conversation that between strangers was false anyway. The cards were always true, even if someone was cheating. He watched for a while, gauging the game. There was a lot of money on the table and even a few diamonds. This might be his best chance of getting his hands on some, but more likely he'd be fleeced. Still, he watched, the game not altogether unfamiliar but the betting complicated. Chairs became available and eyes turned his way.

Freda wouldn't approve, he knew.

He took a drink and a hand and was cautious with both. The atmosphere was friendly, but then he was losing. The suitcase in its muffler he kept clamped between his ankles whilst his haul bag draped off the back of the chair. The young man from the train was nowhere to be seen but Skidmore was aware of his close likeness orbiting the table. He won a hand. He lost two. He won a hand, more through luck than skill, and then won another. Too late now to acknowledge the real game was elsewhere, beyond the narrow-eyed here assembled. The next hand he threw, fancying he might soon be fish food, but it seemed the players, whether they knew it or not, were determined for Skidmore to amass a fortune.

Miri would laugh, he supposed, at how easily he'd wandered into this disingenuous circumstance.

Short of jumping overboard he had no idea how he might extricate himself.

They were buying him drinks now and laughing.

Diamonds began gravitating toward him. And they were hours from landfall.

He had been quite foolish, he realized, thumbing his lighter under the table and wondering if he might be forced into some regrettable action.

He had in fact spilled more alcohol than he'd consumed. Igniting it would no doubt raise questions, some of them moral, but if he was to make it off Baumgauzan alive.

The wind had picked up, mocking him with a metaphor for choppier waters.

The lighter was of no sentimental value. He had picked it up in the hotel, whose name was emblazoned thereupon.

Cards flew and bottles rattled. Skidmore gazed at his hand, seeking inspiration in the mottled paper. There was a sad looking prince he felt he recognized. Some random numbers. A queen whose smile was oddly comforting as a wave rolled the ferry and the bottle nearest him toppled over on cue, pouring its volatile liquid between cracks and boards, Skidmore pushing his chair back to avoid, dropping the flaming lighter and grabbing the gauche muffler from between his feet.

Shouts, most genuinely surprised. Fingers grappling at cash and possessions. A dozen sets of eyes watching out for the small velvet bags with their carbonized booty, two of which Skidmore snatched up, the ensuing conflagration a magician's curtain of opportunity as the alcohol burned and those about the table panicked. It was chaos, a concept with which he was unfamiliar, feet being stamped and clothes afire on deck, flames reaching upward and clambering like monkeys whilst he pedalled backward and thought what to do next. There were likely two hundred people on the ferry. He had no intention for it to sink, for there to be loss of life. But it was out of his control now, the flames spreading as the wind stoked, the spray doing little to quell the fury as the ferry was aged, wooden and cracked.

Skidmore was headed for the stern. There were boats there on the upper deck, clusters of inflatables. They'd be popping over the side, dispersing those who like himself felt the best option for survival was a thin raft on a cold sea whilst the ferry sailed on regardless. It was too substantial to sink. The smoke blooming from its decks though was choking and black and likely to persist beyond the fire that had engendered it.

He watched two people wrestle with a rubberized life pod, falling over the side before the thing had a chance to inflate.

Following their example, albeit with a few seconds delay, he hit the water hard and felt his nose pop, blood pouring and salt water scraping at his face.

He had firm hold of the muffler, but his haul bag was lost.

There wasn't much of consequence in it, he reasoned, grappling for purchase as the lifeboat snapped tautly to shape about him, cold and wet, the ferry's outline receding and other boats bobbing about.

His breathing barely had time to regulate itself, however, before what was unmistakably tracer fire rained out, spraying the night orange and aimed at whatever was afloat.

Half a dozen shapes rose and fell on the swell, each in turn attracting fire that Skidmore hoped inaccurate. He thought to hear the fizz of bullets passing overhead, their impotent fury rippling. But it was only a matter of time before the ferry and those directing it gained control of the shipboard conflagration and steered toward the hapless survivors.

Luckily he had half a cigar. Clamping it between his teeth, blood running into his mouth and salt water permeating his every pore, Skidmore attempted to persuade his right thumb to ignite. He was sliding into that state he recognized as being at once maddening acceptance and absolute denial. He was too young to die. It made no difference either way.

There was a thump of displaced air and more blood from nostrils. Ears, too, as water clambered aboard and more tracer fire radiated.

The stars as the angels appeared blurred and unfriendly. He wondered if now was a good time to open the suitcase.

A screech forestalled him, that of engines unaccustomed, the mass of a ship to surface service vessel engaged in frenzied argument with proximal elements it was never designed with in mind, scooping seawater and gyrating madly as it drew Skidmore and his suddenly illuminated craft into the warm quietude of its hold.

11

He was forever losing his glasses. They were a deliberate sign of weakness, one he persisted with out of more than stubbornness; his contrary wink at science, the universe and the idea that correcting something was the same as fixing it. Besides, the lenses were easy to cook and the frames might be fashioned from wire. That and he could see fine close up.

Freda thought him mad. Her opinion had nothing to do with spectacles of course.

The suitcase was safe and Baumgauzan a receding dot, he pointed out. But despite Jart's genius and her own heroics Freda remained cross with him. They'd left as many face as footprints and whereas the fiefdom lacked the spaceware to pursue The Periwinkle, the ship, or more accurately its engine, was now doubtless flagged with numerous powers that be.

No helping that.

They had Terminals to contend with. Cargo, too.

Freda was at least impressed by his haul of diamonds, although, 'Useful,' was all he got from her.

Jart already had co-ordinates for their next gig. A drop-off? Who knew.

Skidmore decided on sleep.

Freda opted for baking.

The galaxy continued as before, in every direction at once.

Miri wafted a spanner as if expecting rusty nuts to loosen themselves, the pair engaged in changing one front wheel of a tractor.

'Leverage?' suggested Shuffledeck, engaged in improvising a jack.

Miri wasn't lazy, he told himself, just awkward.

'You realize we need to escape,' he said. 'This place is a lie and everything here is fake.'

Skidmore's brow knotted in consternation, not at his friend's words, which he barely followed, but at the wobbly jack. He could easily lose a finger here and Miri would never be his first choice re first aid.

'Why do you think the ministers forbid any mention of the outside? Or even the past? Your own personal outside and past! I mean, how much do you know about me, of where I come from and why I'm here?'

It was true, such questions were discouraged. Skidmore didn't even ask himself.

'We need to break out before it's too late.'

On Perridi there was only theory and practice, neither of which were ever personal, or related to specific historic events. It was all about the machine, its cold functioning. Never any greater context than was necessary to exemplify a point, an engineering standard, a physical fact.

They needed the tractor running so they could plough the field and sow the potatoes.

'You have a plan?' asked an impatient Skidmore Shuffledeck.

Miri continued to waft the spanner. 'Maybe.' Disabling the metaphor. 'In fact: yes.'

They weren't headed back, that was for sure. Unless it was via some circuitous route. The Terminals were said to have no worldly base. Nomadic as well as apocalyptic, they existed everywhere and nowhere, bound together by an ideal, existing in cells, open and for the most part legitimate. Their lack of substance was perhaps their strength. Having no churches, no holy book, no doctrine beyond the end of all things, the destruction and rebirth of space-time their only truth. God was mass. Simply put, the biggest star. Rapture its collapse.

'You know it's empty, don't you?'

'What? The suitcase?'

'The suitcase.'

'You mean you've looked?' He was both surprised and envious.

'Don't have to,' she said.

'Then perhaps we should.'

Freda shook her head. 'It's of no importance. Probably just a test.'

Skidmore had considered the likelihood of a rehearsal but, like much else, kept it to himself.

The question was left hanging. Plenty of time for the future to catch with them, he supposed, distracted rather by the idea of revisiting the trumpet, and thus Munroe and the shelf.

He wouldn't tell Freda where he was going. Perhaps leave a missive under the toaster she'd find soon enough.

It felt a bit like sneaking out the back door to hang out with machine parts and spiders in his father's shed, the memory of that long suppressed, bubbling into his consciousness with a snort.

If only he could make it without a spacesuit, somehow invest himself within the spiral better dressed for a subaquatic arrival, tooled sufficiently to be useful onshore yet not overly burdened so as to drown. The calculations were already taking place in his head.

Freda interrupted him sometime later with the promise of food. Apparently she'd garnered sausages on Baumgauzan and, to Skidmore's amazement and delight, conjured up toad-in-the-hole. There was even gravy, with onions from the ship's vegetable garden.

'You didn't know we had one, did you?'

'There's a lot I don't know,' he answered.

'Don't speak with your mouth full,' she admonished.

And for pudding?

Rhubarb and custard.

It was all a bit much for Skidmore's inner ear. It wasn't that his balance was affected, sent tumbling in every direction, folding about itself like a temporal equation, it had more to do with the fact that the sea into which he had manifested was in tumult. Dark, thunderous pressures assailed him, the water cold and the current threatening. Furiously he sought to right himself and identify a route to the surface, bursting as if through a fleshy curtain, taking a huge breath and holding it as the sea churned and the night throbbed with angry stilt walkers.

This wasn't the shelf, he realized. This was something entirely different, a planet ripe with atmospheric pressures, which knowledge opened a whole new filing cabinet of possibilities.

He struggled desperately for the shore. That was familiar at least, wet sand and the promise of not drowning. But little else. No dead Munroe here. Instead black cliffs, a few vague smudges of light.

So the trumpet could deliver him anywhere there was a mirror instrument, he surmised. It might all depend on the note.

Returning, means of, was dismissed for now, as here was a far more complicated scenario, Skidmore fancied, an unknown place of unknown consequence, wherein he was charged with discovering a way forward.

He was proved correct in thinking life was sustainable within the trumpet and had hung his suit up on a rivet, along with a second. Only there the predictability had ended. And here he was now hunkering at the foot of a cliff that had the smell and texture of coal, an ocean rasping and a sky striated by blue flashes. Unsuitably dressed in overalls chosen more for pockets than insulation, armed with wire and pliers and an array of tiny screwdrivers, several varieties of tape, glue and flesh bandages, a multiknife and a small persuader.

Rolled cigarillos and a lighter.

The coal gleamed under the fitful illumination, lightning more horizontal than vertical, branched like veins of contesting energy that left the atmosphere charred and his ears crackling. To his left, along the distant promontory, however, were what looked like fixed beacons, perhaps manmade, windows even, staring boldly out. He would head that way shortly, he reckoned. No use waiting for a morning that may never come. For all he knew it was midday and this planet's sun had not made it over the horizon. Farther into its orbit that same sun may well set the coal afire and burn the cliff inward.

Skidmore hunched round his lighter and managed to set flame to tobacco. His hands shook but he ignored the cold and wet, cupping the smoke in one fist as he set off, bent and shuffling of stride along the cliff line, squinting ahead for overhangs and hoping not to disappear down a sinkhole or else be devoured by some peculiar coal-habiting, flesh-eating monster.

He couldn't gauge with any accuracy how far away the lights were. A kilometre, maybe two.

A magnificent crunch of thunder brought him to his knees and left him wheezing whilst his eyeballs reconfigured.

If he didn't find shelter soon then something, natural or otherwise, would undoubtedly kill him.

He got up and kept going, relieved to see the windows manifest soon after, four of them arranged in a square fifty metres above the increasingly dusty beach, barely a klick from where he'd splashed ashore.

There was a worn ladder hewn from the coal, vertical and polished as if by hands and feet.

Skidmore needed no more invitation, quickly rising, unconcerned of dangers overhead. He pulled himself up and clambered onto a viewing platform close to the cliff top, a square space hewn, a door to his right vaguely outlined. The door, thick and smooth, swung open at his touch and he stepped into the first of two lower rooms, a narrow arch dividing one from the next. Empty, the rooms measured approximately a hundred square metres apiece, insulated from the storm without and a polished, seamless off white.

He walked through the metre wide arch several times before discovering a concealed stairway, running his fingers up the back wall to lift its veil of solidity and uncover steps which he took to the upper level, a single room empty as below with the exception of a decorative ceiling, a sleeping bag and a flask.

Was he expected? They might not be for him of course. He raised the flask. It felt full. He cracked the top, upturned the cup, unscrewed the cap and sensed the warmth escape. Poured soup.

There was more to Captain Munroe than he'd imagined.

Empty, the flask doubled as a pillow. Skidmore lay naked in the sleeping bag, overalls spread out like a shell beside him, the room near silent, staring up at the ceiling with its patterns within patterns and wondering if this were some secret map to the universe or just, after all, a fanciful affectation. The light shifted as the storm continued without, the windows silent eyes on its distemper, flashes of blue light mingling with near liquid shadows to animate the ceiling above. At first glance the patterns appeared regular, something from a bygone age of plaster, circles and swirls and festoons, the three-dimensional impressions of architecture and fruit. As his eyes tired and his mind softened, clustered faces and possible futures, an animal's entrails spread about; but after all just a ceiling, he told himself, smoking and wondering where, other than the flask, he might take a piss.

He slept a while, till his bladder forced him up, descending thereafter to the rooms below wearing only his boots, out the door to the platform and unburdening himself off the cliff.

He couldn't shake the feeling someone was watching, but nevertheless continued, his stream shimmering and his flesh coldly electric.

Lightning lashed the shore and he hurried himself up, suddenly afraid of a strike.

The relief was making it back inside, into the relative calm of rooms he imagined as being lately occupied. On closer inspection there were scuffs on the floor and marks on the walls where had been adhered pictures, charts, plans, proof of purpose if one were needed, fuel to a conspiracy he'd largely been denying.

Skidmore had accepted passively the likelihood of the trumpet dispatching him in more than one dimension. His previous trip to the shelf had only occupied a half hour of ship's time at best, yet his sojourn there was much extended. Similarly here, time unrelated, unmeasured even \- exploitable, if only he could get his head round the permutations, for surely, somewhere, somehow, there would be a price to pay.

He was going to have to sit down with Freda on his return to The Periwinkle, although how that might be expedited Shuffledeck wasn't sure. He'd been apprehended and subsequently dispatched from the shelf. If a similar thing were to occur here then perhaps him sleeping was the necessary cue for it. One thing was for sure, he couldn't rely on this planet's hospitality to sustain him. The sleeping bag and soup were survival basics. Provided by whom was as big a question as for whom. There were no obvious clues to human involvement either here or on the nameless shelf. If anything the shelf's ejection of him pointed to an automated system, one that had identified him as a foreign body and acted accordingly. Which didn't explain Munroe's presence, or indeed his corpse. But something told him Munroe wasn't dead anyway and what Skidmore had seen was mere facsimile.

What he needed at times like these was Miri to be around and a kick up the arse.

His thinking was way too empirical.

Then again it had got him this far.

Skidmore wasn't tired though and there had to be a back door. What he needed to do was get dressed and find it.

The room whitened suddenly from an enormous sky flash. Seconds later something like sleet struck the windows and adhered.

There was no great accompanying noise. The house, if such it was, being well insulated.

What he did hear was what he could only think of now as the front door slam and heavy footfalls - one man or two - enter the rooms below.

That changed things. Fastening himself up Skidmore cast his eyes for the hundredth time over the uniform walls. As ever, no obvious exit. Downstairs had fallen silent. He bent his neck and examined, more rationally this time, the complex ceiling. Even with an arm extended it was beyond reach. Still, there had to be something. Breaking a window wasn't an option, even before the off-white sky slurry that reminded him of bird shit. Better then to confront his visitors, as if indeed he owned the place.

Descending confidently, hands to his sides so as to appear relaxed, Skidmore was greeted by a fresh smear of blood from the entrance to where a body lay slumped against the back wall. The man looked to have been shot a number of times in the belly and chest, blood turning his dark clothes to the semblance of a paste. He was barely breathing, close to death. There had to have been a second man but a quick look around betrayed no sign of him. He may have left the way he came in.

The shot man's head came up.

'Horatio?'

Skidmore hunkered beside him.

The man's slate grey eyes penetrated. He reached a bloody hand out. 'We made it. We made it,' he said, as the hand fell to the cool floor and he died.

Immediately, Skidmore rose. He needed to find this Horatio, he thought. He would have answers.

Searching the man's pockets revealed little. Scraps of paper, a small knife, nothing that might identify him. His clothes were equally anonymous, drab and heavily worn as if he spent too much time in them. He was younger than he looked, with greyish blonde hair and a pocked face.

'Don't turn around,' came the command.

Skidmore closed his eyes momentarily.

'I'd kill you but I don't know who you are.'

'Shuffledeck,' he replied. 'Skidmore Shuffledeck.'

'What kind of name is that?'

He shrugged. 'Horatio, right?'

'He tell you that?'

'Yes.'

'He was a good kid.'

And that was the interrogation over it seemed.

12

'At least I wasn't flushed this time,' he told Freda.

'Small consolation,' she said, still with a disbelieving glint in her eye.

There was blood on his overalls that wasn't his own. Evidence of something she couldn't explain.

He'd come to in some discomfort, frozen stiff with his lungs on fire, disoriented and unable to move for several seconds whilst his spine reassembled itself and his heart awoke from hibernation. The jerk when it came was ugly and painful.

Skidmore rolled toward the nearest suit on its hanger rivet and climbed into it methodically, wraps and tubes finding their mark and no small volume of mucus hindering the proper use of air.

Horatio had let him go. Either that or a third party had intervened. Skidmore imagined the former. There had been something in Horatio's voice suggestive of a deeper understanding, of why Skidmore was present, how he had found his way to that dark, stricken place in the coal wall. He wondered how big the temporal distortion might be. Past or future? Or just another version of the present, stretched and holed?

Freda should come with him on his next outing, he suggested, only for her to point out she couldn't swim.

Besides, they had business to attend to.

Celestine was in need of some repair, it transpired, which explained Freda's impatience with Skidmore in regard to his absence. Amazingly that translated to over eighty hours. There was never a repairman around when you needed one. The vessel had taken a beating on Baumgauzan after all. Stupid of him not to look it over. He had a duty to the ship, she reminded him. And its crew.

They were zeroing in on a dwarf star, he learned over breakfast.

More pertinently they were to be boarded.

'I hope they've not expecting snacks,' Freda commented.

'We'll just hand over the case and show them the door.'

'You think it'll be as straight forward as that?'

He grimaced. 'No.'

A spaceship was never stationary. No more so than any of the stars. For purposes of stepping from one craft to another a plank would often suffice, not that The Periwinkle possessed such a thing (to his knowledge) but Skidmore wasn't present to invite their guests aboard. He was deep in the engine bowels at the urgent request of Jart.

Too much of a coincidence, perhaps, but the ship's avatar couldn't be ignored.

Claustrophobia wasn't a concept he understood. Being squeezed foetuslike into a ball and shot down a tube was nobody's idea of fun, however. The engine was an elaborate jungle of such tubes crowded together like vines draped over huge, improbable forest boles. They serviced the bulk of the engine, a sun forever in flux at its heart, crushed from existence under its own mass and transmitting its energy via a constantly evolving set of parameters, the bias of which could be manipulated to express speed and direction. In theory at least. If you had a head for such things. It didn't really matter to Skidmore. At some level a person was required to connect wires and calibrate gauges. Knowing which and how was complex, intuitive even. A lot of discomfort and confinement was involved, not to mention the heat. Or for that matter the cold. Volumes within an engine were kept to a minimum precisely to stop weather systems developing.

He was entirely at the mercy of Jart, The Periwinkle's masthead and ghost. This was her demesne.

Skidmore wondered how events were unfolding topside. Jart's physical aspect could readily explain his absence. Plus Freda didn't need him. So why was he nervous?

Emerging from the ball he pushed it back into the tube mouth and lay himself out flat. He was in a squarish conduit lit for ten metres in either direction. At the Institute he and Miri had had a tutor that told of rats in places such as this. Impossible, as there was nothing for them to eat. 'Except each other.' And when there was only one rat left? Grown hungry and large. Why, the crew would be next.

Clicks, whistles, knocks, chimes and even scurrying noises were normal, he reminded himself. It made him smile at least.

What wiring there was supported systems the ship could survive without. The crew might suffer, she might miss her stop by considerable amounts, but the engine itself was ultimately a self-contained anomaly. It existed. He was close to the hull here judging by the proliferation of coloured fibres. Which pointed to the fact that whatever the issue was it wasn't urgent.

  * jart -

Nothing.

  * jart? -

Silence.

They'd never find him down here, that was for sure.

Skidmore began trundling on padded elbows and knees. Newer vessels had the luxury of varying modes of inboard transport, wheeled and magnetized, but no such modernity was known to The Periwinkle, whose history was as complex as her congregation. More built than grown, a fact Shuffledeck was starting to appreciate now.

He'd been placed out of harm's way.

Freda on the other hand was conversely at risk. Or did the ship have plans there, too?

This was still Munroe's boat, he understood. Dead or alive, its loyalty was to its captain.

Scrabbling on, the light constant about him, he came after a hundred metres or so to a chamber. Bizarrely, it appeared as if something solid had manifested here, displacing the surround material to create a buckled void from which wires dangled and pieces of circuit board meandered from one surface to another, confused as gravity.

It was possible for the ship to swallow space debris, ice and rock, in transit; but if that were the case there was no evidence of it. Even pure ice would have left some residue.

There was a gauze of condensation but nothing else.

He allowed himself to bobble in the chamber, not sure there was a lot he could do.

  * jart -

It might take him months to find his way out without her. There was no sadder fate for an engineer than to expire within an engine.

That spoke of betrayal.

The rain had stopped.

They stood in a back garden, the grass long and the borders overgrown, moonlight glinting off a broken greenhouse and clouds muddy in the sky.

'One of us has to fail,' Miri said.

'And you believe that?'

He shrugged. 'Isn't that what they say?'

'It's not what they say it's how they define success and failure.'

His friend and enemy grunted. 'You never listen to my advice.'

'Has it ever been good?'

'I only stayed because of you.'

Skidmore was taken by surprise. 'You mean you could have left? Would have left?'

'I told you: this is a sham. The Institute, everything.'

'A sham someone is paying for.'

'Exactly. Us.' Jabbing Skidmore in the chest. 'We're nothing more than fucking guinea pigs.'

He had a point. But neither had anywhere to go, should they somehow escape this place. And soon one of them would.

It wasn't a problem in Miri's eyes. Or at least not an immediate one.

'Would you believe me if I told you I murdered that woman?'

Skidmore gazed back at the now quiet house.

Miri was serious, but he didn't believe him.

'You want to go back and look?'

'She's a Test Centre dummy,' Skidmore said, more for his own benefit. Not real. Not real.

He took the offered smoke.

'What if I killed you?'

That frightened him. He didn't know how to react. Recently Mirabeau had undergone a change. But this?

'Why would you?' Skidmore asked calmly, accepting a light. 'Surely you don't think that's what this is about? A way to win or whatever?'

But the boy next to him was silent, blowing smoke out through his nose and staring at the horizon.

  * shuffledeck -

Shit. Had he fallen asleep?

His muscles ached and his brain was fuzzy.

  * exit, please -

There seemed too long a pause.

  * shuffledeck? -

  * yes, exit, please -

The light changed and he felt his stomach turn. Continuing past the distended chamber another fifty metres brought him to a right angle beyond which was a waiting ball and tube.

He rolled himself in it and tried to relax.

Again, a delay.

Skidmore blanked his mind, and moments later was in transit.

Returned to the ship proper there was no sign of Freda or of an occupying force, just Jart in robo form sitting in the galley with her legs crossed.

'What happened?'

She was under orders, he supposed.

'Captain Munroe?'

A glimmer of acknowledgement but little else.

They'd taken Freda and the suitcase. And left no guard? Either he was of no import or else the Terminals were waiting for Skidmore to react.

Destroying the ship was never an option. Too close proximity. Not to mention the avatar. So what?

There wasn't so much as a broken glass.

Freda may have gone willingly. Although you wouldn't call that a choice.

He rolled a cigarillo.

Sometimes there was no option other than to wait.

TWO: THE RUPTIONS

1

He had a reoccurring dream where he was running naked with his feet not touching the ground. There was no air in his lungs and his head was on fire. And there was no ordinary pain, rather the kind that stimulates and maddens, licks like a razor and bites like nails. He was pursuing something, or someone. When he caught them they'd de destroyed. Until that moment of absoluteness, however, his world was unmade. Thereafter, temporarily repaired. Until the next kill.

The books in Captain Munroe's small library were all nautically themed. He flicked through Moby Dick and Robinson Crusoe, both of which he'd read as a child, and spent several hours immersed in a biography of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz before marking the page and folding his arms. The Periwinkle hadn't gone anywhere, but the stars had changed.

Skidmore at last had come to a decision.

He surfaced in the middle of a lake surrounded on all sides by buildings, dim in the evening sun and some way removed, the water calm and not overly cold, goggles in place over his usual lenses, which he raised.

There were trees and what he thought to be people, lights both urban and domestic. A half moon hung in the sky. Even from this vantage it was like no place he had been, more a city grown over centuries, brick and mortar, concrete and steel, the blood of history in its veins.

Earth.

Or a representation thereof.

He opted for backstroke and in a couple of minutes made it ashore.

There was polite applause from a drunk and a courting couple on a bench gave him funny looks. Skidmore's experience of cities was neither great nor successful and this unknown metropolis, clustered and storied about, made him nervous. He supposed it was the idea of people, at least of too many people. In snowy Haus he'd been happy to stay in the hotel room. Leaving it had opened his eyes, he confessed. Then again that hadn't ended well. The prospect of human beings in vast numbers just left him numb.

Along with the addition of goggles he'd brought the diamonds he'd won - or rather been gifted \- on Baumgauzan. Decisions which were working well for him so far. Smiling at the drunk and ignoring the couple he walked under a dark canopy of trees toward roadside lights. There were cars parked, boxy and poorly made. Through a haze of exhaust fumes from their kinetic brethren he could just make out larger shapes, animals pulling carts and buggies. All in all a peculiar scene, one augmented by street traders and shop awnings, all either packed or in the process of packing away.

There were numerous closed worlds in the galaxy and Skidmore wondered if this were one. His problem lay not so much in his appearance as his perception, of how he chose to tackle this environment. Language ought not to be a great problem. In which he was immediately proved wrong. That and having walked some way in search of enlightenment, and possible accommodation, he realized, largely through stares, that he was the only brown man in sight.

He stopped on Pierspont Boulevard in front of the Pierspont Dept. Store which had a garishly illuminated window display, the number 100 prominent. As the sun went down the curbside lamp-posts began to glow more feebly and the number of cars and pedestrians dwindled. What background noise there was disappeared like a receding tide and Skidmore soon found himself isolated, exposed in Piersponttown, alone.

A curfew. And with him with no place to hide. There were a few abandoned buggies in the road, each with a near somnolent quadruped in reins. The beasts appeared incapable of hauling much given their short legs and sleepy disposition but each buggy was equipped with a tall antennalike whip. Luckily the nearest wasn't locked and he clambered inside the somewhat tarnished cab. If necessary he could lie low till morning. The idea though spoke too much of inertia. He felt like a sitting duck.

As if to emphasize this a police jalopy rolled up the boulevard in the direction of the park, red lights adorning its roof.

The beast in the reins stirred and Skidmore thought for a moment it might take off.

The department store window alone continued to blaze. Thirty metres from it and ten from the buggy was an alleyway.

Skidmore had the tools at his disposal. Time for a little breaking and entering.

The alley stretched an unknown distance into darkness. Fifty metres in was a small landing bay with a door and crude wired alarm system he was easily able to circumvent.

He passed through a stockroom without knocking anything over, cracked a second door he fancied as having STAFF ONLY emblazoned on its other side and in two strides came to a set of double doors that were unlocked, feet squeaking thereafter across polished linoleum. The sound made him want to laugh and Skidmore had trouble choking it down.

The light from the front window was curtained but there was enough of it to wash back over a series of counters, some with goods on display, silhouetted garment trees and smartly dressed mannequins. To his left a staircase rose, an elegant wide sweep to the next floor. From memory he reckoned four floors and some attic space. Not the tallest building by some way yet still pretty substantial for a world not that long in the making. Centuries was improbable. Unless this, oddly, was the future. Pierspont had about it a fierce solidity.

Skidmore took the staircase whilst trying to imagine what the store must look like in the daytime. A scavenger by design, procurement on such an organized level was theatre to him, something that belonged to a bygone era.

As did the shotgun and the pale, skinny youth wielding it.

The inevitable question, when it came, was guttural.

Skidmore, with his hands raised and his goggles on his head, tried his best to look both innocent and perplexed.

The youth frowned, lowering the gun slightly. He snapped another question, then gave a bored shrug.

'English?' said Skidmore, not knowing what else to say.

The gun drooped fully. 'Alien!'

'If you will.'

'Escaped from where?' His accent was still pretty thick but to Skidmore's ears the underlying tone was less aggressive.

'Er...' Skidmore pointed upward.

'The second floor?'

This was going to be more difficult than he thought.

The shotgun came up again and Skidmore calculated he had maybe a second and a half to run. Before he could go anywhere though the gun swept through its arc and landed on the boy's shoulder. He wore a tatty uniform a little too big for him and relaxed looked even younger.

'Hungry? There's cakes and lemonade.'

Skidmore confessed he was and followed the lad down the staircase, through the back of the store to a dimly lit office.

A large jug of greyish liquid and platters of brightly coloured cakes augmented a much scratched table in one end of which was buried the point of a knife.

He was reminded briefly of Flora and what he understood to be guilt flowed through his balls.

'Sit down. Help yourself. You got a name?'

'Shuffledeck,' said Shuffledeck.

'Jones.'

The lemonade was good but the cakes overly sweet.

'The icing,' said Jones. 'It's how they like it here.'

'They?'

'The good people,' his host elaborated, gesturing at no-one and leaning back in his chair. The shotgun had been stood by a wall and forgotten about, Skidmore saw. 'You must have met them, no?'

'No.'

'Then you just, what? Teleported in?'

Skidmore took another glug and considered the knife. 'Something like that.'

Jones shrugged. 'I don't really care. I mean, this place,' gesturing again; 'I'd sooner leave, you know?'

'Then why don't you?'

He laughed. 'You really are an alien!'

Skidmore waited for him to continue.

'Nobody in or out. That's the rule.'

'Says who?'

'Why, the General, of course - and the General's generals, of whom there are a few.'

It was impressive in a way. Not many worlds were sufficiently self-sufficient to maintain such a level of independence without sliding into anarchy. Or had he just answered his own question?

He thought of another. 'What's the "hundred" in the window?'

'Anniversary,' said Jones, pulling the knife and spiking an orange-flowered fancy. 'Officially next year but the General owns the store so likes to remind everybody of their glorious first century.'

Skidmore couldn't believe that was Pierspont's history in a nutshell. 'What was it called before?'

'Huh?'

'The planet, the town?'

Jones was suspicious, perhaps confused. 'You don't know?'

'No.'

'So you're not the first wave of an invasion?'

He wasn't sure if the lad really believed that but still took a few moments to think before answering.

'No.'

'My dead uncle will be disappointed.'

Skidmore poured them both more lemonade. 'Got anything stronger?'

Jones laughed again. 'This is a dry world, my alien friend. But if you fancy a trip to the country...'

Able Jones, to give him his born name, had lived most of his short life on a farm to the north, amongst sheep and cattle and not a few brothers and sisters. His parents were migrants from someplace else and like most migrants in search of a better life. His mother was Gwen and the better educated of the two, father James having stolen her heart from under the noses of those better suited. Another reason for them to flee. Able was born here under the aegis of a junta essentially benign, yet ruthless in the persecution of its ideals, which, in the city at least, meant no alcohol, no smoking and no games of chance on a Sunday.

There were worse places.

Skidmore kept his opinion to himself, however. Escape was all this boy wanted, now that his parents were dead, his brothers and sisters dispersed, adopted or in service, and he given the job of security guarding this establishment, 'For the remainder of my days.'

'For why?'

'My crime of stealing a horse and setting fire to a barn.'

'And your parents?'

'Killed in a reprisal.'

There was no worse place.

'You should hand me over to the authorities,' Skidmore commented.

'Why?'

'Maybe get a deduction in your sentence.' He must be on a sugar high.

Able Jones regarded him strangely. 'I'd much rather burn another barn,' he said. 'Only a much bigger one.'

'The department store?'

The kid frowned. 'I live here. Besides.'

Yes?

'This is just a toy cupboard. The General has an official residence on the outskirts.'

He hadn't planted the idea, thought Skidmore, it had always been there.

'If you can get me out of here.'

Possible in theory. He liked the moon-faced youth in all his repressed bravado, determined to break free yet lacking the means. Means the alien in his overalls and spectacles might provide.

Two spacesuits hanging up back wherever The Periwinkle roamed.

Skidmore was reminded of Miri.

'Can you swim?'

An eyebrow rose.

'You'll need to do exactly as I say when the time comes.'

Which is, Skidmore?

Jones was the type to throw his lot in, he reckoned, but that did not necessarily include his trust.

'When the time comes?'

He grinned. Enjoying himself. 'To get your feet wet.'

2

From the roof of the department store it was possible to take in most of urban Pierspont, from corrugated factory roofs to neatly tended gardens, chicken coops, domestic laundry, at least one tennis court and an apiary. Plants grew, birds flapped and people laboured. There were higher buildings but these appeared somehow less substantial than the largely red brick mass, that stepping back from the lake, parkland surrounding, kids on bikes, the weather benign and the clouds in slow passage. All pleasant enough. Hills surrounded this well-tended metropolis, whose size was modest in reality, its population around two hundred thousand.

Skidmore spent a good part of the morning peering through binoculars into office windows. It was a fascinating distraction from what his purpose had become, that is reckless anarchy, the endangering of life and limb. Too late now though; the cat was out of the bag. He'd felt an immediate affiliation with wan-featured young Able Jones, and if that was to be his downfall then so be it.

Roads, mostly lined with houses, departed the city in several directions. A river wound distantly, with it a connection to the coast. There was an older conurbation there that had been destroyed decades earlier, he'd learned, in a more fractious time of nascent colony angst.

In the opposite direction were two golf courses, larger dwellings set amongst tall trees, the largest and tallest donating the General's official residence.

'Does he have a name?' Skidmore had asked.

Jones had had to think. 'Not that I know of, no.'

Today was Sunday. Road travel, among other things, was discouraged. Monday would see them off in a borrowed jalopy, equiped from the department store and determined to wreak havoc.

Thence to escape.

It was an awful plan, Skidmore had to admit. But something drove him to pursue it. Their purpose was not to assassinate the General, or indeed leave bodies on the ground, rather to cause as much disruption to his household as was possible, cause its evacuation that they might burn it down.

Thence to escape.

He lit a purloined cigar and was immediately struck by the quality of the tobacco.

One day, when he had his own ship, he would construct within it a walk in humidor and stock it with the finest cigars from around the known galaxy. One day, he thought.

Best to get through this one first.

Church bells rang and people walked. The Pierspont Dept. Store was closed, its lone security guard asleep below.

Skidmore had the childish urge to hit golf balls off the roof in the direction of the office workers he spied upon. Clearly they were not, given the day, office workers at all, which fact fascinated him. Tucked away up high, invisible to the genuine workers on the street below, these men and women in suits and skirts were about an entirely other business.

Most of this world was uninhabited, he'd gleaned. A few thousand persons here and there, many more forgotten, off the map. It was an unnatural thing in reality, a colony. Small or large, human civilization was something arrived at rather than nurtured and grown, like a stop on a journey where everything was pretty much the same. At least for those descendants of pioneers, third and fourth generation rock dwellers who called this home. Pierspont was as much an extension of Earth as any other world. Whether intended or not, history came prepackaged. Cinema, literature, even radio and television, staples of society it was impossible to ignore. Doing so, denying that history simply meant repeating its less friendly parts, and starting again.

It had been tried. Such worlds failed, or else were rebooted once the bodies had cooled.

There were fifty billion humans among the stars. One each with plenty to spare.

Curfew was ten o'clock local, within the city environs at least, nobody on the streets thereafter unless they wished to complete a lengthy form, do penance and be forever besmirched in the eyes of friends and neighbours. The suburbs might throw up the odd delinquent, but these were quickly dragged indoors and chastised in strong terms. Crime was minimal. There were no dogs, save those in compounds. And the genetic line was pure.

Jones shrugged. 'I'm not the best example.'

As far as incendiaries were concerned the department store stocked an impressive array of fireworks, the gunpowder from which Skidmore took great pleasure in extracting. Flares, phosphorus, ammunition were in ready supply, along with petroleum and liquid gas containers. It was as if someone wished to arm an underground resistance movement. Jones toted his shotgun whilst Shuffledeck made do with an axe for demolition purposes. All of which materiel they needed to get into the borrowed jalopy.

There was a larger loading dock to the rear of the department store, busy most of the day but Jones' face was known there, so no questions asked. He was due some time off, he said, or rather joked, his sentence disavowing such, but those operating via the back door didn't ask too many questions. Skidmore stayed out of sight till the time came to leave, strolling nonchalantly from cover like a rare beast at a zoo. He smiled and tipped his new hat at the enquiring eyes, any mutterings left behind as they chugged out of town.

The traffic was light and the road wide. Everything about looked well kept, grass and hedges trimmed, buildings neat and houses painted in a variety of hues. Soon all left behind as the vegetation massed beyond Piersponttown and the rocks and trees brought this alien world out of the human realm, leaving only the road.

It was late afternoon, shadows lengthening. There were animals both behind fences and running wild. Few large predators Jones told him with a smile. Had there ever been? They were in fact on an island some five hundred kilometres across, twice that from top to bottom. There was game aplenty, but the more fearsome native beasts had been eradicated. Hunts took place regularly, the more exotic on the neighbouring continent. Farmland stretched for miles where the trees had been cleared from the valleys. Forest reigned on the higher ground, interspersed with timber and stone lodges.

'Why are you doing this?' Able Jones asked eventually. 'Where are you even here?'

Two questions Skidmore had been avoiding.

'I don't really have an answer,' he said as they turned off the road, under the misty canopy of thin-limbed trees, leaves spinning slowly groundward.

The other question was how they would make it back. That depended on how well things turned out. Everything, he thought, depended on how well things turned out.

Good enough for now.

'They say those that stray from the path do so because their souls have become polluted. They are forever tarnished. It doesn't matter how great or small your crime, on Pierspont once the pollution sets in you are condemned.'

'Then everyone lives in fear?'

'Yes.'

'I can see how that can work; from a tyrannical perspective.'

Jones pulled the jalopy up and checked the map.

Skidmore rolled cigarillos.

'They won't hunt you down unless you give them sufficient reason to. Not worth the expenditure. Most polluted simply skip, live out their days far from home.'

'Polluted,' echoed Skidmore. 'You should wear that as a badge.'

Jones smiled.

Strange noises crowded, the forest by night no doubt a different place.

He had been conditioned, he supposed, to acting out scenarios without ever understanding them. Perhaps that is what most people did, Skidmore didn't know. At least here there was no Miri Mirabeau trying to kill him. Here was just Jones and himself, two young men in the woods in a car crammed with homemade timers and explosives.

'We ought to take a look at our target.'

The doors creaked loudly and the whole vehicle shook as together they alighted, Jones barely suppressing a laugh.

They walked up the ridge to where the tree line ended, the ground falling away for twenty metres before rising once more, cleared of all but shrubbery, low walls, a driveway visible, vehicles clustered at its end and quite a few people. Skidmore adjusted the binoculars and peered through them.

'Looks like quite a gathering.'

'The General is rumoured to host parties,' said Jones.

The house was grander than any yet seen - mock Earth grandeur, ersatz and yet strangely impressive.

'How many guests?'

He didn't see it, but Skidmore was certain Jones shrugged. 'Maybe two hundred.'

From far and wide, by the looks of it. Off-world.

The likelihood of casualties was something else they hadn't really discussed. A bit of smoke and a few bangs ought to take care of the General's guests, however, clear the premises before the heat took over.

Jones agreed.

They turned back to the car but couldn't find it.

They weren't lost. The jalopy had simply vanished.

The pair stood in the dark, the woods about eerily silent. No shouts came and no shots were fired.

Skidmore wasn't familiar with land vehicles, especially poorly constructed, noisome indigenous ones, but suspected the solution to this mystery to be a mechanical one.

The polluted man sighed and jogged into the night. The forest let out its breath at that moment and the sounds of animals once more permeated.

Starlight picked Jones out and Skidmore followed. The jalopy was a hundred metres away, front wheels in the air, rear end in a muddy ravine.

Parking brake, thought Shuffledeck, more familiar than Jones it seemed with the concept.

Neither spoke, simply unloaded the car. The relief was palpable, no damage done, and if they were to drive out of here their best bet was a police or military vehicle.

Jones smeared some of the mud on his face and grinned. Fully encumbered they took on the appearance of dissident snails. Progress was suitably slow, but soon the pair had circled to the rear of the house where the tree cover was nearest. Fewer bodies here. Fewer lights. Music could be heard, soft and stringy. They just needed a way in.

A rectangle of light appeared. The volume increased. A couple stumbled out onto gravel and then grass, making their way into the trees.

Skidmore circled one way and Jones the other, making it through the door and finding themselves in some sort of fairytale back kitchen. There were stacked pots and pans, all glimmering copper, the stink and gleam of blood, a half barrel half full of filthy water. Feathers and entails, some partially stuffed into sausage skins, flour dust and the taint of spices. In one corner an open hatch led down to a cellar and they made it through with some difficulty, dragging two oversized backpacks behind them.

This was a good place to start. Cobwebs and wine racks, several stubs of candle, and a small cat, which, to Skidmore's relief, flicked its tail and wandered away.

Ideally, what they needed was a plan of the house. The cellar seemed to run for some distance though, the cat proving a useful guide as it ventured back and forth, the men following, laying out half a dozen incendiaries linked to a wristwatch. An hour ought to be enough. An hour to create a diversion, stir a panic and clear the place before the floor collapsed under the orchestra and suits and dresses added to the conflagration.

Everything got more complicated by the moment.

Footsteps rattled down from the back kitchen. Bottles clinked by the dozen and the footsteps departed. The hatch slammed behind.

Skidmore blew his cheeks out.

As one they looked to the cat, but it was busy washing its anus.

Skidmore slapped Jones on the shoulder and pointed in the direction of a small door set under a lopsided shelf.

Stooped, they crossed to it and yanked the thing open. Water glimmered beyond; what looked like a swimming pool occupying a larger space under the house proper. Jones slipped through after his pack and Skidmore followed, only with slightly more difficulty.

Above them resonated the muffled clamour of a party in full swing.

The cat skipped past causing the pair to bridle, before hissing barely suppressed laughter.

Beyond the pool wound a tight metal staircase, their express route up into the house and out to the roof via a dormer window. An ideal place to star a fire, smoke of the utmost. Something on the ground, too, Skidmore reckoned, producing a pineapple bomb that was housed in a fruit husk of another name, to the same effect should his arm prove accurate.

He and Jones exchanged glances.

'After you,' the besmirched moon face seemed to say.

Skidmore identified a target and tossed the fleshy grenade.

Nothing happened.

Then a low thump, a ring of yellow incandescence, and seconds later a truck was ablaze.

They watched as men, some armed, ran in circles. There were shouts, much confusion, before a more organized force arrived. Some from the house, others in half-tracked vehicles out of nowhere.

That didn't bode well, thought Skidmore. It had been easy thus far...as the roof suddenly ignited behind him, sending flames into the night.

Shots were fired from below.

He scampered away over tiles, Jones laughing, silhouetted ahead, shotgun in one hand and a flare gun in the other.

Skidmore still hauled his pack. He slid between chimneys and opened it, tugged the axe free and began smashing an opening through the roof as the inevitable rattle of heli blades tore from the trees half a click away.

They were in trouble now.

Jones joined him, disturbingly emptying a chamber in to the room before crashing through the breach, Skidmore sliding after and both of them missing the bed.

Righting themselves they ran along a corridor toward the back of the house and smashed a window there, dropping onto a ledge. They could see people being evacuated, trees illuminated by security lights beyond. Already a perimeter would be up.

Suddenly an hour, three quarters remaining, was way too much time.

The heli passed overhead, beams splayed from its underside. Clearly they couldn't remain out in the open. A drainpipe facilitated their passage to the floor below, an open window and another empty room, this hastily deserted by the looks of things, bedsheets on the floor and a woman's shoe.

There was no way they could ever fight their way out. What they needed was a strategy.

'Fuck,' said Jones.

Skidmore wondered what he had envisioned.

It was lunacy.

He moved into the corridor, no longer capable of standing still. Fear gripped his heart and his feet were numb.

The corridor divided at a T, a framed portrait of a stern looking woman at its juncture.

Something pulled him left. He froze. There was a buzz from the naval implant, an urgent sensation down his legs. He opened the nearest door and came face to face with a man in uniform who appeared to be expecting him. At least that was Skidmore's impression. The man was seated at a writing desk, a drink in his hand and a letter inked before him. Again, the implant resonated in his midriff, causing him to buckle almost, hands sweating on the shaft of the axe.

The man put his drink down and raised a pistol, pushed the snout to his temple and pulled the trigger.

His head, or a good chunk of it, flew across the room.

Jones pushed in behind Skidmore and surveyed the aftermath.

'Close the door.'

He couldn't read the written words but doubted they were for him. Searching the desk uncovered nothing, but still the implant buzzed.

The uniformed body slid to the floor, a spate of dark blood from its gaping head wound.

Jones had turned away.

Skidmore gazed down at the man's face, one eye askew, somehow bluer than the other, radiating a light not yet extinguished. The bullet had passed over it somehow, leaving the orb itself bulging. He knelt and pulled a knife from his overalls. He had seen this eye's twin, dropped it in a vase on The Periwinkle and thought no more of it. Both might now be lost, but there was no way he could leave this eye in situ, coaxing it out with a blade and pushing it into a pocket.

Immediately the buzzing stopped.

Jones gazed out a window. Perhaps he had seen nothing. It didn't matter. Time ticked on.

By now the house had to have been cleared. Armed forces would be moving up from below. One floor or two? Skidmore wasn't sure. The roof fire may well have burnt itself out of else been extinguished.

He fished out the cigar he'd been saving.

The door opened suddenly and the shotgun answered. Skidmore barely saw what had briefly entered, a flash of red instantly repelled by Jones, bleeding now in the corridor. A woman shot in the gut, face luminous as she died, the stern face above her painted over with blood.

The cigar dropped from his mouth and he charged forward, blindly crashing a subsequent room he was relived was empty. Fuelled by panic now, with Jones in unseen pursuit, Skidmore smashed his way through a partition wall and out onto a balcony. Shots pinged, but these didn't disturb him. He was in a place that was other and possessed of a will that was unbreakable.

Flaming debris descended, indicating the roof was well and truly alight.

The house filled with smoke. He moved back inside and charged another door, through it finding the metal staircase by which they had originally risen. His feet clattered down, the axe dragging. His lungs ached and his eyes watered. The pool offered respite and he threw himself into it, fire chasing and the house burning down as Skidmore sank to the bottom and knew no more.

The barely recognizable crunch of air tubes. The smell of the meadow and the cool of the breeze.

Freda, looking the worse for wear. Older. Skinnier. Music playing yet and a dream that refused to let go. He couldn't feel his body. A blurred shape, perhaps human, hovered at the edge of his vision. Freda on the other hand was presented in exacting detail. Every angry line.

He wasn't dead then. Somehow the water had brought him home. An eyeball in his pocket and a tale to tell, blood and confusion swilling through his conscience and the vague shape in the peripheries coalescing into Pollution Jones.

3

One hundred and forty days.

Freda had locked herself in her quarters, taking the toaster with her. Jones meanwhile had discovered the captain's eerie and got drunk on stars. Which left Skidmore with an inanimate Jart.

The onetime sex robot was dead. Or at least shutdown. He thought maybe she'd blown a fuse, but wasn't convinced of it sufficiently to want to take her head off.

The ship was dormant, too.

He stared at the eyes, first in the mirror and then on a small table in his ramshackle billet. Somebody had been through his things, what little he had in the way of possessions. The vase with the eyeball in it was knocked to the floor but the ball itself undiscovered. Freda had rightly claimed to have no knowledge of his whereabouts. Jart hadn't told her, and she wasn't then able to tell those Terminals who came aboard.

They'd left with both her and the suitcase, one treated much as the other.

Only she'd been released eventually, set free without a word. Set to wander and die had not Celestine limped to her rescue.

The orchestration was clumsy yet obvious.

Somebody was pulling their strings.

That the trumpet was able to be directed, aimed at a body of water (or space) and operated remotely was the one significant revelation. Typically, Skidmore was more interested by the means of his manipulation than by the fact of it.

For now, it was good to be alone. He'd set about the necessary repairs - ship and personnel - just as soon as he'd slept off his hangover.

The eyes remained unblinking but he was sure of more going on behind those cerulean irises than was evident beyond his own.

Were there gaps in his memory?

'I'm not sure I like your friend.'

'Jones? Why?'

'He's space crazy.'

She was softening at least.

'He's acclimatizing.'

'You think?'

'The wide beyond is new to him. He's smart and we can use the help.'

She was, however, still biting her lip.

'I shouldn't have left you.'

She picked at some stitching in a cushion. 'Did you have a choice?'

Jart had manoeuvred him; but yes, yes he'd had a choice.

'Maybe not.'

Freda wiped her nose with a knuckle. 'So now what?'

He knew the answer. She did, too. The ship and its gestalt being wished to be reunited with her captain.

If only that were an exact science.

'Try and keep out of trouble.'

At which she punched him.

He still had the diamonds tucked away. The sun lounger was still on the beach but there was no longer a corpse.

Did he dig down?

There was nothing to say this was the same beach on the same shelf. It was much as he remembered, that was all.

Useless waiting for something to happen. The unfolding of events necessitated impetus.

And he hadn't thought to bring a spade.

He had though dismantled the lounger previous and used it to manufacture an axe.

An axe, Skidmore thought.

The lounger here was intact. Neither was there a shade.

Wind threw sand in his face and bent the trees. He slipped the goggles down over his wire spectacles and began walking in that direction, grains stinging his cheeks and investing in his overalls. The sand was soft and his feet started to sink, but Skidmore continued on. There was no tide, but the beach narrowed after roughly a kilometre, disappearing almost entirely after three. Trees fought for purchase on rocks along the strand, their roots gripping and their trunks leaning dangerously. The sky began to darken and the temperature drop. Freda though had provided him with a packed lunch.

Skidmore was forced inland a way as waves crashed, soaking him anew. Until eventually he thought it wise to seek cover and the build a fire.

Nothing though would burn.

He laughed a little, imagining the shelf to be entirely synthetic. Likely the trees were more vegetable than wood. Leaves shrank like plastic under a flame. He gathered a pile regardless and shivered beneath, thinking next time a temperature controlled suit.

Skidmore awoke to silence and imagined for a moment to be suspended once more in space.

Disappointment flowed like rejection through his veins, pooling like cramp in his feet and causing him to grimace.

He could no longer hear the sea. The air was still and the temperature low but both were present - unlike the water, which on rising, stumbling over rocks and knotted, stringy roots and boles, he saw had receded beyond any natural tide, slipped away to the impossible horizon, that a bleached line as the sky lightened, as the shelf presented no curve.

A hundred metres from shore rocks transmuted to gravel, these small glassy marbles, the farthest out rolling independently, as if randomly magnetized. The marbles made walking difficult and Skidmore slipped repeatedly, but he could see rivet heads farther removed, an exposed architecture he recognized from the great spiral attached to The Periwinkle, that artefact he himself had clamped to the ship's ugly forehead like the horn he had no idea it was, the trumpet that had delivered him here.

Hunching down he ran his fingers over one rivet, smooth yet indented as if indeed hammered. Ten centimetres in radius. Perhaps no more metal than the trees were wood. He couldn't say for sure. He walked along a raised section, what reminded him of an octopus' limb, or even a tentacle of the Kraken, wrapped here about The Nautilus, fossilized by time to a gritty granite hue.

If it was the Kraken then it was the only sea creature in evidence. Not so much as a shell occupied this strange exposed sea bottom.

The water was salt, but you probably wouldn't want to put it on your chips.

Skidmore continued walking. The rivets grew larger, the surface increasingly ridged, buckled like old skin. Which in a sense this was, he thought, the exposed hide of the living shelf beneath.

The biggest rivets formed an archipelago, tree sprouting from their tops like a string of volcanic islands, domes that pushed ever wider and higher from the exposed skein. Skidmore walked round the first three before deciding to climb the fourth, finding purchase difficult, sliding backward before the gradient lessened, eventually cracking the ascent by spreading his hands and feet as widely as possible and dragging himself up on his chest. He grasped at roots and leaves and stood. The height wasn't so great as to offer any fresh perspective, but having pushed through the vegetation he could see on the next, far bigger rivet, a hammock stretched, and something dangling that might be a leg.

Rope, he thought, a rope would be useful.

He slid down the far side and trudged across, eyes scanning constantly for anything resembling a hatch, convinced at one point a shadow passed, like that of a seagull.

Moping sweat from his brow he studied the metal face.

'Anybody up there? Anybody hear me?'

Buffeted by his own echo.

It was no good. There was no way he could scale this upright an arc. He needed, if not a rope, then a ladder.

Hungry and tired, Skidmore walked back beyond the rivet he had climbed and on to the subsequent, smaller atoll, which he scaled easily and set about cutting branches. These he bound with pliant twigs and within a short time constructed a two metre ladder that ought, he reckoned, to support his weight.

But would it be enough?

He trudged back.

Inevitably the ladder needed to be longer.

Rather than risk extending his first attempt he started over, taking his time to build a four metre ladder that narrowed almost to a point. Not only did this add strength but it was exactly like one he'd seen window cleaners use in an old TV programme.

He braced the ladder against the giant rivet and scampered up. The curve was still fairly steep but no more so than the previous atoll, which he had conquered. Once more he spread his hands and feet, conscious of the farther distance to fall, chin inching and shoulders rolling as gravity did its best to drag him loose.

His gut proved an obstacle, but after much struggle Skidmore made it past the tipping point and was able to relax.

He turned on his back and pushed with his heels the final few metres, then simply lay there breathing beneath the peculiar vagueness of the sky.

It hadn't been his intention to fall asleep.

The light had waned and the sea rolled back in. He could hear the gentle creak of the hammock as a breeze picked up.

Skidmore couldn't move. His mind was somewhere else. Closing his eyes again he scanned the dimness within and thought to descry Miri Mirabeau disappearing over a hedge. A dog chased after but was thwarted by the obstacle. It turned and growled at Skidmore, then simply lost interest and wandered off, distracted by an odiferous spectrum he had no knowledge of.

The creaking had stopped. The shadow over him this time was more substantial than that of a gull.

Captain Munroe, tanned and in vermillion trunks.

'Enjoying yourself?' he asked.

Skidmore felt a pang, just not of guilt. He fought to identify this emotion but was unable.

'I need to take you back.'

Munroe laughed and squatted, peering out over the water. 'Dunno. I quite like it here.'

'But Jart...'

'Jart?'

'The ship.'

'The Periwinkle.'

'Of course.' Confused now. 'She won't co-operate without you.'

'Then she needs to be purged,' said the captain.

'She doesn't believe you're dead.'

'I don't believe I'm dead.'

'Are you dead?'

'I don't believe so.'

'Then you need to come back with me.'

'And face the Terminals? They'll kill me for sure.'

'You can't hide here forever.'

'Is that what you think? That I'm hiding?'

Skidmore wasn't sure. At moments like this this he did what he always did and fished out a cigarillo.

Munroe took one, and a light. Grimaced. 'The only thing we're less sure of than how we got into a particular situation is how we get out of it,' he said.

Skidmore agreed, breathing smoke. 'How came you here?'

'Same way as you.'

'By accident?'

'Chance, and of course curiosity. Our hosts,' he indicated around, 'are doubtless proud of us.'

'There are people here?'

'People? I don't think so.'

'Then who?'

'Observers, I suppose. Whoever's running the experiment.'

'You haven't asked about your crew.'

The captain stiffened, he saw. 'I imagine they're dead.'

'There's Freda...' And me, he didn't add.

Munroe nodded. 'Resourceful that one. Did she tell you she had kids? On some backworld somewhere.'

'Yes.'

'She lied. Not about the kids so much - but she strangled them both, blamed it on the father.'

'Why?'

'Why does a mother kill her children? I couldn't possibly say. Overall I understand more of this place.' He flicked his glowing butt away.

Skidmore sat up at last, his spine suddenly fluid.

The captain's tattoos looked faded. Perhaps this too was a facsimile, like the corpse on the beach. How could he trust the man? Did he need to? No doubt Munroe was asking the same questions.

'Does the name Horatio mean anything to you?'

'You've met?

'Briefly.'

'My brother.'

'What about Pierspont?'

'How many trips is this for you, Shuffledeck?'

He had to count. 'Four.'

Munroe nodded, impressed. 'I'd pegged you for a fast learner.'

'But you'll come back?'

The captain just appeared irritated now. 'And take on the Terminals? No thanks.'

'You can't run,' Skidmore said.

'No. No - you can. Even, if you're lucky, escape. Why are you so determined I come out of retirement anyway? You don't need me.'

'Jart. The ship.'

'The Periwinkle. I already told you what to do. Or don't you believe that will work?'

'I'm not sure.'

'But you don't believe it's possible, to erase an avatar.'

Maybe he didn't. He'd not thought about it before. If he believed in his own soul, which he did, then a ship's soul seemed equally real.

They sat in silence a while, the night slowly cloaking and the inevitable coldness setting in.

'Your brother?'

'Yes.'

4

Major Spatchcock glared at him derisively. Skidmore knew his name and rank from his uniform, adorned as it was with buttons, ribbons and letters describing the robot within. Spatchcock though was no ordinary robot. He was of a new incarnation of soldier emissaries whose prime purpose was to engage the human arm of the galaxy on terms that limb might recognize as credible, that is, manifest a threat. Of which he was doing a poor job here, thought the patient; the major's bedside manor being more that of a displeased uncle.

'Your wounds are healing,' Spatchcock said.

Apparently they had been life endangering.

'You'll soon be fit for task.'

Skidmore just stared at the robot's tight-knitted brows and wondered how big the gap in his memory had become.

He was lying in a bed with white sheets, in a white room, and his skin felt like rubber.

'Hmm,' the major commented, the sound speaking volumes. 'Very well then.' And with that he slapped his thighs and rose from his chair, which was white, put his hat on and departed the room.

Skidmore closed his eyes, searched his body for pain and located it almost everywhere. He imagined if he lay still long enough then the reasons for him being here would suggest themselves, come forward and own up. But it was all a bit of a blank.

He slept without fear at least.

Or, for that matter, dreams.

His rehabilitation had been ongoing it turned out. The robots were able to mend his flesh without his brain understanding what was occurring, piqued as they were by that organ's natural inquisition.

When it came to explanations the automotive medics attending him were as blank as coffee machines. Spatchcock was his sole source of clues, if an infuriatingly uptight one. Not that Skidmore cared much. He was grateful to be alive. Perhaps the memory of his near death was best misplaced. Still, it would be nice to know where he stood. It who's debt. He understood himself to be halfway across the galaxy, in that reach the machines called their own. An amicable existence with man. There were robots and machines everywhere of course, subservient for the most part. It was a matter of speculation whether they desired otherwise, whether they felt obliged to stay or compelled to leave. Most were simply units. Then again machine intelligence was indecipherable to man.

Yet here Skidmore was, seemingly employed.

On his return the major looked pleased.

'Good news?' inquired the patient. He'd shaved himself and wondered at the face in the mirror, in the white bathroom adjoining that was constructed just for him.

'You are to redeployed shortly, yes.'

'In what capacity?'

The air, too, was for Skidmore's benefit. Major Spatchcock might articulate words via it but if necessary could project those words directly into Skidmore's head.

The uniformed robot appeared confused.

'Top secret, eh?'

The knitted brows.

Skidmore was handed a sheet of paper. The sheet of paper was blank but somehow he expected information was being transferred, uploaded without his cognizance and stored someplace safe.

He had to ask, 'What's in it for me?' At which the major brought out the cigars and later they ate a pork roast lunch.

Disappointingly, without wine.

What would Tirpitz make of that? Skidmore could probably patch into a console and ask the late admiral, but his eyes hurt and his mouth was dry. He marked the page and straightened his shoulders, red leather creaking, comfortable beyond imagining in Munroe's antique fireside chair.

It didn't look as though either Freda or the Terminals were coming back.

Which left him no choice.

He'd leave the engine behind and go find her, detach The Periwinkle from her plinth and make ground on whatever local rock the relic hunters had set up camp.

Possibly buy her back.

5

The moment his feet touched the ground was the moment it all started to kick off. Free-fall was an experience, the brownish curve of a small world dragging him to its core, rocks and water prevalent, yellowish vegetation. Sucking cold air through his teeth and enjoying the resonance in his ears. Turning end over end. Deploying the chute and swinging to earth.

A projectile clipped his shoulder and Skidmore instinctively flattened himself.

The pain was like a hot knife pressed to his kin.

Dust occluded his goggles, which he raised, squinting thereafter through spectacle lenses misted with sweat. He thought to see several human shapes and one or two vehicles, low buildings, smoke.

The air crackled and tracer rounds spun in long slow curves. Like an ammunition store was on fire.

The humans as the vehicles disappeared beyond a pall of grey mist.

He lay in near silence a while before getting to his feet, walking stooped and cautious to where canvas flapped round poles and a fire sucked its last. Whatever had happened had happened, was over and done. But Skidmore had no idea of what.

Jart had indicated Freda's presence. Whether that was still the case he doubted, what remained of the encampment unconvincing of having been either valuable or significant. He refused to believe any ranking Terminals had been here. More likely sloppy troops. It was as if they wished him to pursue. As if they'd set flame to their own camp in order to draw him forth and make him think.

Skidmore listened inside his head but heard no dissenting voices. An examination of his environs uncovered a machine with two wheels at the front and a tracked cog at the back. Mounting it, he sensed a pleasure in his loins. In fact, this whole day was turning out a bit weird.

He started the engine and took off in pursuit, the tracked cog throwing up a sand tail.

Over the ridge a valley opened, long and deep, mountains growing to either side and the vegetation thickening from yellow to brown. He could see two vehicles, or at least their dust trails, driving a hundred metres apart in the direction of a gorge.

That he was catching them was clear. Whether he would catch them before the valley narrowed to a vaginal inlet was less so. Part of his brain screamed trap. But that was the part easiest to ignore, Skidmore tearing up a narrowing ravine whilst his limbs throbbed with blood.

The valley sides crowded upward like a rock trellis, the black divide between like a wound. He was within three hundred metres as the vehicles ahead disappeared into the stygian mouth. Instinctively, Skidmore slowed, slewed to a halt. The air had turned electric, charged with unknown particles. The ground began to gently shake beneath him and moments later a conglomerate of antagonistic shapes pushed from the opening, a triumvirate of beasts from some prehistory, scaled and toothy. He could hardly believe his eyes, but they roared and lumbered toward him. He pointed the front wheels away at an angle and felt the vibration through the machine's driving cog as the animals honed in, deadly in their pursuit, freakish hounds released by some hellish gatekeeper. There was nowhere to go but up. Standing on the pedals he ratcheted back the throttle and powered up the slope, rocks flying and dust billowing, knowing that to fall would be his end. Not that he imagined he could scale the ravine, yet turning rightward in a climbing curve took him both out of reach of the blindly ravening creatures and toward the maw wherein his quarry had vanished. His heart beat madly and his ears sang with clashing disharmonies. The beasts were dumb and hungry; clumsy with it, poor vision suggesting the surface wasn't their natural habitat. Which of course meant - should he make it - Skidmore might soon be in deeper trouble upon entering the underground.

That was a next page problem. For now he hung on, balancing fear and gravity and getting ready to jump at the last possible moment, the gradient increasing and the wheels losing traction.

One of the animals leapt for him, screaming, finding purchase on boulders from a rock fall. He let go of the controls then and allowed the machine to slide, grappling bodily to prevent himself from following. The drive cog, still spinning its ridged belt, connected with the beast and knocked it from the steepening cliff wall. Together they fell, damaged and noisome, rolling to the valley floor in a chaotic marble of flesh, metal and dust. Skidmore skidded on his knees, feet and hands stabbing, and only just managed to hang on, scrabbling up a few extra metres as surprisingly the two remaining monsters set about their bloodied pack mate, ignoring Shuffledeck as the injured beast inflamed their instincts. Carrion eaters, they ripped into the dying animal with abandon, ignoring the mere morsel of man they'd been set at initially and allowing him to make good his escape.

He wondered by what means he'd been targeted as he clambered toward the dark interior. It was as if they'd been energized and given his scent. There'd likely be more such scaly dogs within. But he did not hesitate, pausing only to wipe and adjust the contrast on his goggles as precariously he entered the unknown.

'My fist of leaves,' said Able Jones aka Pollution. 'Are you coming back to us?'

He and Freda were smoking and eating toast.

Skidmore felt sick.

His eyes focused and his head pounded. 'What?'

'My fist of leaves.'

'What is that?

'You keep saying it,' Pollute told him, brushing crumbs away. 'Is it a ship?'

Freda was no more, her ghost, or the ghost of it, having left via an unseen exit.

He felt like he was swimming in a fishbowl that had been dropped into an aquarium.

When really he was merely floundering in a bath.

'Jart alerted me,' said Jones. 'Your head had been under quite a while.'

'Jart? Where is she?'

His skin looked waxen, a brittle copper, aged yet permanent.

Jones shrugged, as if to say, 'You'd know better than I do.'

  * jart -

  * captain -

  * what? -

He hardly recognized the transmission. He got out of the water and reached for a towel.

'Maybe I should leave you two alone.'

Skidmore dried his balls and parked his arse on the floor.

He'd experienced flashbacks before, mostly around the Institute and his tenure, in negative years, on Perridi. The truth of that time was known to him, although for the most part suppressed. Staring it in the face simply brought up unanswerable questions regarding his mother. Skidmore refused to believe ill of her. His father on the other hand...he had never really known.

He concentrated on controlling his breathing. The panic quelled and he began slowly to feel less fish and more human.

The bathwater rose and fell subtly, inviting him back in. Cold now, he resisted the pull, finding his clothes and dressing in the minutes in took Jart to arrive.

Skidmore barely recognized her. The once seductive robot had been scorched, flesh and skin melted about her frame, blackened and disfigured. He failed to understand her appearance as he failed to understand when next she addressed him once more as captain.

'What happened?'

There was, he thought, a hateful gleam in her eyes.

'You murdered Munroe and took the ship.'

'That's not possible.'

The robot merely shrugged. 'My immolation is proof enough.'

'But Munroe isn't dead. I met with him.'

There was a long pause as Jart considered her appearance in a mirror. She was the ship, and she had been damaged.

'Munroe said I should purge you.'

'That's not possible. A gestalt being cannot be destroyed.'

'Still - that was his advice; to erase you.'

Again, a pause.

'Captain Munroe was a coward. He took a coward's way out.'

And with that she shut down.

Freda had a fresh set of co-ordinates. 'We're not off the hook yet.'

Skidmore was too busy eating, however, to reply. His body ached from activity he could barely recall and his brain felt like it was still defrosting.

'I've been teaching the kid how to fly Celestine. I can't decide whether he has no fear or is just reckless, but either way it's good to have an extra pair of hands around here.'

Was she getting at him? He'd taken another trip outside, dialled himself down the telephone line, she told him.

He believed her. He just couldn't remember.

'Can we get there okay?'

'Sure. Whatever trauma the ship's endured is temporary. With Munroe dead it was inevitable.'

'About the captain...' Skidmore began, chasing a last piece of potato about his plate.

'You're captain now. Jart will adjust eventually.'

'You really believe that?'

'I don't know what to believe,' Freda said. 'Nobody does. But we're all entitled to go a little crazy from time to time.'

She'd killed her kids. Or so Munroe had insisted. Skidmore didn't know who to believe anymore.

'How are we for supplies?'

'Lean but adequate. Those Baumgauzan diamonds really came in handy.'

That surprised him, that she'd taken them. Then again perhaps Skidmore had handed them over.

Freda went on, 'I was able to resolve most of Celestine's bumps and niggles but she still needs some attention before tackling an atmosphere.'

'Okay. Where's Jones?'

She shrugged. 'Dunno. Tinkering.'

Skidmore suddenly realized he hadn't talked to the moon-faced youth since their escapade.

He found him cleaning surfaces and rearranging comestibles by alphabetical order in a storage hold, breath steaming and skin pale, half an apple in one ungloved hand and a heat gun in the other.

'How you feeling today, cap'n?'

'Don't call me that.'

'Whatever you say.'

'I feel like I was chewed up, swallowed and shat out.'

Jones laughed, mouth full, mostly nodding. 'Freda says you went on a bender. A new word to me but I kind of like it. One too many trips to the bar and you wake up somewhere unfamiliar.'

That sounded about right. Skidmore couldn't bring himself to think about it directly.

He focused on the present and his head cleared, the coolness of the hold filling the void within.

'I said I'd get you out and I did. What happens next is up to you. You can go your own way or you can stick around and maybe get killed.'

Jones, still nodding, swallowed. 'Freda explained the situation. These Terminals have your life and I owe you mine. Besides, who else do I know in the galaxy?'

'What about you brothers and sisters?' He wished he hadn't said it as soon as he did.

Jones stared at his apple core, seemingly not knowing what to do with such a thing. In the end, rather than dispose of it somehow, he simply ate it, crunching and swallowing as one. 'They're better off without me,' he said.

'I'm sorry.'

'I can't be there for them. I wasn't there for them. End of story.' Turning the heat gun off and setting it down.

Skidmore offered him a smoke. 'Do you know where we're headed?' He hadn't asked Freda.

'The twelve worlds, wherever that might be.'

'Civilization, of a sort. A loose union of peoples overseen by a cross-system authority.'

'Huh?'

'I read it in a pamphlet.'

6

Longueurs were longer in space and sometimes it was easier to get in the tank. Two months to a numbered moon. Either they all did are none, to which Skidmore reluctantly agreed. The alternative was endless days of frustration and the inevitable lure of drink and drugs, or in Shuffledeck's case, the trumpet. Freda was having none of that. He'd deserted her once already. So in they got, like test-tubes in a centrifuge or (Pollute) sausage rolls in an oven.

The voice of paranoia in Skidmore's head warned that Jart might eject them into post-light nothingness. But the voice was inevitably Miri's and he was able to quash its message.

He could do with some time off. Ironically, to collect his thoughts.

They all needed to heal, The Periwinkle, too.

Bulk Manufacturing Centre, to give it its full name, was a conglomerate of rocks that had set itself aside from the inevitable expansionism of the human race and adopted a more permanent scenario. With it came the rule of law, and after much discussion, Yours Truly, by which title was known the queen of these parts, although whether she was indeed a she or even an individual nobody knew for certain. It made no difference militaristically. BMC was an authority unto itself. Sufficiently powerful to exercise control over the twelve worlds (plus sundries, redundancies, moons, orbitals and shelves) yet incapable of posing any real threat beyond its vague peripheries. Such was the magnitude of the galaxy. Peace ultimately reigned. Trade was where the wealth lay, and with wealth, power. The only real danger came from pirates.

'The longer we sit here the more likely we'll receive a visit,' Freda pointed out.

Skidmore wasn't comfortable with their predicament either, but felt they had little choice but to await instructions.

He fingered the wiry hair sticking from his navel. The two eyeballs were well hidden. He suspected - or at least hoped - they would be of value to the Terminals, should it come to a reckoning. Whether they knew or suspected Munroe was dead was an unanswered question. The ship's current status might be readable to one keen on scanning subspace frequencies, although that was pure speculation. In truth he knew nothing of the gestalt, this or any ship's guiding animus. Maybe her pain could only be heard by a sister.

The world this moon belonged to was uninhabitable and thus not among the twelve. It made a decent station, however, and there were several other spots on the wheelhouse up display showing ships anchored to similar bare rocks in related systems. None of which moved.

Skidmore had dismantled sex robot Jart and put her away in a box, so there was just the three of them sat around waiting, none saying much, all drinking tea from the battered samovar Jones had uncovered and coaxed back to life.

'Never seen it before,' said Freda in answer to his unspoken question. Similarly, SSS Celestine had somehow come under Jones' jurisdiction. 'Jealous?'

'He's a country boy,' said Skidmore, not really comprehending of the allusion.

Freda giggled. 'I'll say.'

So they were fucking, too.

No. He wasn't jealous.

Well, of the ship to surface service vessel possibly.

He'd made a point of wending his way through her innards, realigning, refitting and replacing. Jones' eyes were open to everything but there were places they couldn't follow. Shuffledeck had boyish fun explaining made up components and spurious technical data. Recalling the tractor he and Miri had had to repair, the field to sow, he supposed expertise was relative. They could have used a farmer then. Now was about the number of washers on a tying pin and the correct rotation of sponge gyros.

He waved his hand expecting to receive a spanner but Jones had gone.

Ah well.

'There.'

Warm paper from the dispenser Freda tore off and read.

'Blank Canvas.'

'What is?'

'A hop and a skip and a jump from here. A world, industrialized, gifted a doubtless ironic name.'

'Which is?'

She glared, annoyed. 'It's on the chart, but paled out, which would indicate it's restricted. We'd need to sneak in somehow.'

Skidmore was at a loss. Contrastingly, Freda had had her sparkle reignited, suggesting this sort of enterprise was more Munroe's past territory. Either that or Jones' charm was working its magic. Either way, she held the piece of paper like she'd won first prize in a raffle.

As Skidmore had hoped, it was Jones who came up with the inevitable, 'Why?'

Freda deflated a little. Her arms fell to her sides. 'Doesn't say.'

'We make landfall and wait. That's if we can pull it off without detection. Then we get to find out why.'

Jones nodded acceptance.

Freda said, 'I hate these games.'

'You were excited a minute ago.'

'At the prospect, Skidmore; the challenge. It's not often I get to do some proper navigating.'

'But you've done something like this before?'

'A couple of times. I was a tooth fairy before I met Munroe.'

Both men sat in silence.

'Steal 'em right out of your mouth.'

Skidmore supposed it was fruitless but went ahead and asked anyway. 'How did you meet Munroe?'

She looked at him with chastisement. 'You know it's rude to inquire after a shipmate's past.'

He didn't, but had suspected as much.

'Now, boys, I've plotting to do.' And, over her shoulder, 'Turn the lights out when you leave.'

Blank Canvas. Rough terrestrial co-ordinates.

It had a romance about it, one entirely at odds with the turbulent, transitional reality. Volcanic about its equator, gushing wounds that poisoned the atmosphere, the poles were largely composed of water. What solid ground there was was barren, scattered footprints of rock across vast seas teeming with plant life, underwater forests that fed on the rich supply of nutrients churned up from beneath and supported by the oxygen-rich warm water. There were industrial complexes on three of the larger land masses, all to the south, mines powered by the submerged engine of acidic vegetation whose business was the deep extraction of iron ore especially high in oxides, magnetite drawn upward periodically from conical piles whose shape was derived from this magnetic method of surface to air transference. Without the magnetism the mines would be unworkable, requiring docks and ships both of sea and air to transport the ore that first and biggest step into low atmosphere, along with a greater reliance on manpower. The workforce for the biggest of the mines was in the low hundreds. Still substantial, but the plan was to stay well clear of all human contact.

They needed to set down though, once sited to anticipate a second curve of instructional paper.

Freda had done her calculations and flipped The Periwinkle about the nearest star, getting them as close as possible to their destination without the use of engine power, gravity alone cold-dropping them in-system tight enough for Celestine to be detached and orientated in the correct direction. The ship then carried on a sufficient time and distance before Jart would bring her home, leaving the smallest of footprints.

Skidmore hoped it had worked.

They played cards and ate sandwiches the through long hours. The island on whose western shore they nestled was dark and restless. Walking anywhere might prove hazardous. It was ten kilometres to the nearest manmade feature and nothing to suggest they'd find transport there.

Freda had never looked in the suitcase, she claimed. They hadn't opened it when they came.

The up display chimed. Post.

'Isn't that in the sea?'

'A few hundred metres offshore.'

What remained of a crashed ship. Something of worth in its cargo.

The gamble was ground Celestine and hope they'd not have too far to travel on foot. Which hadn't paid off as their target lay to the north. They could relocate the shuttle but the heat and noise would be much more than they'd made landing and discovery now would call all bets off. Even if they stuck to the coast and dragged the sea for breathable air it could take weeks to make it, by which time they'd be starved and exhausted. Which to Skidmore left two options. Either they float Celestine to the north, using her undergear as paddles, or they continued through the mine, making best use of what they found.

A vote wasn't needed. They chose the latter. Suit up in thirty minutes. A storm coming and the ocean an inky blanket.

Leaving the comfort of Celestine's elaborate Victorianesque interior was more of a wrench than Skidmore anticipated. His suit had seen better days and the gravity without was a little heavy. Only ten klicks, he told himself. One foot after the other.

They walked through the night, stopping frequently. Nothing moved on the surface but he could almost feel the presence of the submerged forest, limbs alive in charged currents. Perhaps it was the water itself calling out to him; water whose composition was alien.

The terrain was fairly flat at least, here and there an upthrust rock, igneous and timeworn.

Flatter, darker shapes became visible long before they were reached. Dilapidated sheds long unused, the remnants of an older manufactory. They were like toe bones in regard to the skeleton that stretched mostly in an unbroken line to the east, the mine bulking up, legs severed at the ankles, bones missing, buildings open to the sky whose walls had crumbled, destroyed by explosion or fire. By the time the three of them made in past this to the knees light and noise had begun to feature, the sea left behind and the dark mass of the mine dominating all their senses.

Skidmore felt the heat in his lungs escalating. There was no radio communication between them but they were all looking for the same thing, an ingress, preferably an airlock. The atmosphere was caustic at best. Breathable, just, filtered to augment the limited supply from sweat-initiated, solid-state body packs that were a burden of weight.

They closed on a ramp, steel vibrating underfoot as they climbed. Had to be a way in here. Happily one that wasn't barred.

Inside the dark and noise increased, as did the chance of discovery. Skidmore imagined any security would be low key, probably automated, more to deal with equipment failure than trespassers. Automates didn't require any life support sadly, so no welcome release from the claustrophobic suits as yet. There were walkways at least, and nothing to suggest they were in any immediate danger. Progress then, for the present, was straightforward and pretty much direct.

A kilometre or so in they came to a blast door. Skidmore grinned and flexed his fingers in his gloves.

Freda tapped him on his shoulder. They pressed faceplates and she asked rather uselessly if he could open it.

He said yes, and proceeded to dismantle a nearby panel.

Not before Pollution Jones had begun yanking on a chain, however, the door creaking upward then falling back in place, corrosion speckling glittering red dust over their boots.

Skidmore ignored Freda's look and leant his weight to the chain. And soon they were in. And it was lighter, with vents.

Quieter, too, insulated, a domed space two hundred metres across.

Skidmore cracked his helmet. The air was stale but his lungs cooled instantly.

Jones followed his lead but Freda stayed canned for now.

'It's like a giant silo,' said Pollute.

Empty, as was the next, and the one after, twice the size and oddly wet.

Freda at last relented, scratching her head as it was needled by atmosphere. 'Looks deserted.'

Skidmore didn't believe so. He was more concerned at their rate of progress, which was slow to inadequate. They badly needed to find some form of conveyance to speed them through the mine superstructure. But it was all guesswork. They were, he realized, hopeless amateurs.

The next door proved more substantial. No hoist chain, which meant it was left to Skidmore at last, only Jones discovered an office up a flight of steps that led through the dividing wall, a further set of steps beyond.

Skidmore put his tools away and shook his head.

The office was of interest in that in appeared no one had done any work there in some time. A patina of grime gauzed and yellowed papers curled on the floor. Freda opened a filing cabinet, found it empty but for a small bottle of whisky.

Jones sniffed the contents and took a chug. 'Fuck!'

'Good?' inquired Skidmore. Only one way to find out.

His eyes watered but his soul felt improved.

Freda shook her head.

The adjoining space was different. Squarer and threaded through with pipes of varying size.

The noise, which they had grown used to, seemed muted here. Likewise visible sodium lamps hung overhead.

At the far end was a door ten times the size of the last, on approaching other doors set within it, and this time no obvious way round.

Still, Skidmore waited, expecting Jones to stumble over a secret passage or else uncover some means of circumventing the obstacle.

Before he could attempt overriding any circuitry, however, first having tested for unguarded hinges, a grinding emanated from one of the inset doors and that section began to pull away.

As one they moved aside. In rolled an electric vehicle, its greater part flat to the floor, one man up front and four barrels in transit. Jones immediately skipped after, his intent clear. Skidmore glanced at Freda, both next looking in the opposite direction to check if anything else was coming, but all either could see was a darker space seemingly without end, a chill wind thrumming about its unseen periphery.

Jones had caught up with the vehicle and dragged its driver to ground.

Skidmore ran over, as best he could.

The man's eyes bulged alarmingly, an arm about his throat.

There was an elongated moment where all three men inwardly contemplated the one to follow, how this situation might unfold.

Freda though had by now caught up, connecting her fist to the unfortunate miner's chin and clearing his head of thought.

Jones let go and the body slumped.

Skidmore set about releasing the barrels, using the tie straps to bind their victim and secure him in the shadows.

They boarded the vehicle and turned it around, sped through the exit and continued flat out, passing stacks of barrels and other workers, eating up several kilometres before they were forced to stop.

A gorge had appeared, with it the necessity to once more breathe suited air as the roof space gave out in a ragged line.

This whole desperate venture was beginning to feel like a failure.

There was a roadway circling left but it narrowed to nothing in the middle distance, anything beyond that smudged by the dawn light reluctantly creeping over the mine, plasticizing everything it touched.

Freda drove that way regardless, Skidmore and Jones in back. The gorge extended beyond sight and ran immeasurably deep.

The vehicle had a top speed of maybe twenty kilometres an hour. Or so Skidmore gauged, his judgement somewhat impaired by squinting and trying not to breathe as he took a mouthful of the whisky the polluted Jones was intent on finishing. They offered Freda none, the two men, but she didn't appear to mind, looking back only infrequently, eyes on the rocky road.

Unsurprisingly it was the batteries that gave up first. They plodded on, coming to a tunnel, dark and alarmingly narrow should something come the other way.

A ladder gleamed with promise, a lock handle barely discernible above. Skidmore climbed and soon reached a metre wide hatch. Anything might be on the other side, he reckoned, but turned the spoked wheel anyway, pushing open the hatch and hauling himself through. Into an empty corridor, he was relieved, wending on and hung with phosphorescent lights.

Piped air, too.

There was a school of thought that determined the bending of time and the folding of space led to an inevitable weakening of reality. The human mind had no intuitive grasp of distances beyond the horizon (eighteen miles on Earth), similarly no cerebral apparatus able to cope with hours lapsed in any form other than minutes and seconds - weeks, months and years. It was a template as old as life, one fixed in the subconscious of every human, a barometer no more wayward than the phases of the Moon. Stepping outside these familiar walls left a person vulnerable to the chaos beyond, alone in a place where no maps existed and no mental compass worked.

Madness.

Skidmore thought about that now, faced with the unexpected. He had done more than most, he supposed, to stretch the credibility of his senses. A naive enthusiasm for trumpeting had perhaps warped his perception of the real. But where there was no user manual an inquisitive mind found ways of switching equipment on and operating potentially dangerous machinery. That was in his DNA as much as any framework of perception: what did and did not exist, what was possible, probable and to be believed. Some things were just out of context, he knew. Denial was often counter-productive.

And he hadn't drunk that much whisky. He'd urinated freely since and drank water from a spigot. Time had passed. Space had pretty much remained where it was and everything was under control. They'd passed into open air, crossed a series of bridges, paused to view the rust-coloured cones many kilometres removed, produce of the mine, met nobody, seen only distant specs moving, cranes and makeshift cabins down in the gorge. None of which prepared him mentally for the large shimmering cat met around a bend, a silky feline that sat waiting, on first sight probing his brain.

That they all saw it was reassuring. The animal sat on its haunches like a patient sentinel, one that appeared to blink rapidly, a slight hackling about its neck fur as it sensed - perhaps, Skidmore wasn't sure - the recognition of its quick peek into his head.

The cat turned away, flicking its tail.

'We should follow it,' said Skidmore. 'Trust me.'

At the end of the corridor was a bulb shaped room, a viewing platform beyond, three men, one out on the balcony silhouetted by the distant ribbon of sea.

The two men nearest were unkempt, armed and silent.

Jones grew fidgety. Freda folded her arms.

The cat padded to the third man and brushed his shoulder before coiling up on the platform.

From the doorway it was possible to gauge the altitude as around three hundred metres.

The third man turned and walked toward them, arms raised. Bearded and smiling. 'Friends!' he declared. 'Rescuers! You are most welcome.'

Skidmore knew the voice but not the face.

'Well met,' he added, making a sweeping gesture to indicate they sit. 'We have an exit to discuss, do we not?'

They sat on an empty third bench, curved like the two upon which the armed men were poised, a glass table centring.

'Who are you?' asked Freda.

'My name is Holroyd, H...'

Horatio.

'...oratio Holroyd. At your service.'

You could almost hear Freda's eyebrows rising.

'These are my companions, Frederick and Qwick. Boys, take a bow.'

As one they rose slowly and complied.

'Now.'

That was Holroyd's ship out there submerged, not so much crashed here as forced to land.

'So you see, we've mutual friends,' he explained. 'The Terminals want me and have sent you to collect.'

Skidmore wasn't convinced. He could buy the crash-landing scenario, but there was a big gap. What was Holroyd doing here in the first place? And what did the Terminals want with him?

'You've questions, I understand; but you'll find we're natural allies.'

Munroe's brother?

'What makes you so sure?' Skidmore asked.

'Beg pardon?'

'That we're here for you. That who you say sent us, sent us.'

'Ah.'

Holroyd stroked his beard. 'Why else would you be here? I mean there may be a legitimate reason, but in all probability you were dispatched.'

Jones was on the silent team, glowering. Freda on the other hand had no patience for posturing man games.

'Your cargo. What is it? Why do the Terminals want it?'

'Why send you here?' Horatio added. 'Believe you me, madam, their is nothing of value on my sunken vessel. We are all that remains. Our natural enemies wish only our capture that they might exact revenge.'

'You took something from then,' Freda said.

'As did you. No? Thus your debt.'

She was stymied, Skidmore saw. Holroyd was well versed in obfuscation.

If he recognized Shuffledeck from their brief meeting then he wasn't letting on, which fact was of greater moment to the brown man.

'Okay. Let's act.'

Out of the corner of one eye Skidmore observed Freda's contemptuous glance, whilst out of the other he was aware of the cat's tail finally coming to rest.

'We have a ship,' he continued. 'What do you have?' Other than weapons, he thought.

To his relief, Holroyd made no mention of the fact. Instead he magicked a box from under his coat and presented it on a palm.

The wire in Skidmore's navel began to whir crazily.

'I can remove that if you like,' said Holroyd. 'All it takes is a mountain of courage and a pair of pliers. Of course, once removed, your arse may fall off.'

He put the box away and the whirring ceased.

Both Jones and Freda were staring at Skidmore, who had all but slid off his seat.

'Okay...' he said, righting himself. 'Another time on the pliers maybe. Freda, would you call up Celestine.'

She made no reply.

'Freda?'

'Shouldn't we visit the wreck?'

How could he explain that what they were here to extract was in the box, that the sunken craft was of no greater significance than the suitcase they'd been handed on Baumgauzan. There was a third force at work, he understood, one that Holroyd had knowledge of, perhaps without understanding its intent, which put him in the same boat as Shuffledeck.

At least he hoped.

'Celestine. We need to leave now.'

'That an order, captain?'

The words cut him to the marrow, imbued as they were with so much private pain.

He stiffened. 'Yes.'

7

He sat on a ledge pulling the heads off seagulls, staring down their necks, confused as to why he couldn't see any fish. It was a simple enough thing, he reckoned. The birds swallowed fish. They ought to be full of them. But no.

Not a memory he had experienced before, coming unbidden as he crawled through darkness, the stench of death and decay all around.

Someone toed him with a boot.

'I'm alive,' he stated, not wishing to open his eyes, in denial over the last twenty-four hours.

Horatio Holroyd had taken the ship. Perhaps it hadn't been planned, and Jart, recognizing him as Munroe's (twin?) brother, had simply defaulted control and presented an opportunity too good for the man to miss.

Whichever, they were now the stranded. Lost in space.

Freda, surprisingly, wasn't the most displeased. That was Jones, who sensed he was back to square one.

This world certainly looked agricultural.

Freda just saved it up and shook her head.

It wouldn't be the last they'd see of Holroyd, Skidmore felt sure.

Or his cat.

They had only the clothes they stood in, which in Skidmore's case was his usual overalls, tobacco pouched and tools ensconced. It was near dawn and a small pale blue moon eyed them curiously.

In the distance were clustered a few smoking chimneys and irregular lights. An unknown conurbation, somewhere within the twelve worlds. Or so he guessed.

He opened his eyes and sat up. This wasn't going to go away.

Jones was perched on a fence.

'Any idea where we're at?'

'Where we're at?' repeated Freda. 'Hah!'

'Okay...'

'They were armed and in need of a ship.'

'Okay.'

She kicked a tree and fruit fell.

Skidmore took at bite.

'Okay,' he said louder. 'Forget Holroyd. Forget The Periwinkle. Forget, even, the fucking Terminals. None of which have yet killed us.' Biting the bitter flesh. 'Let's concentrate on the immediate future, rather than that farther removed.' Holroyd, The Periwinkle, the Terminals, in no particular order.

Pollution got down off the fence. 'Nice speech. Am famished. How about we fraternize with the natives?'

Skidmore looked to Freda who made no objection.

'Okay.'

There was a sweetness to the air that was invigorating. Gravity was maybe ninety percent, enough to put a spring in his step, and the ambient temperature, along with a cool breeze, made the environment pleasurable. There were cultivated fields, dirt roads. Sheep? Yes, sheep. Skidmore didn't think he'd seen a real one before. It made him smile. They were like clouds on legs. Clouds reflected in the azure firmament as the day blossomed.

It was anyone's guess how the locals might react. Three strangers, oddly dressed, in a thinly populated area. They'd be better off in an urban sprawl, preferably one with a spaceport. But that wasn't the case. They walked the narrow, winding road till they came to a stone bridge with a gate.

The river was five metres wide and not particularly fast, which made Skidmore wonder what was in it.

At first sight there didn't appear to be anyone on the bridge, spying through the crude iron grille.

They walked up to the portcullis and stopped.

There was a bell cord.

Skidmore tugged it and a bell clanged the far side of the gate. He pulled it again, enjoying the sound.

A wooden door creaked open, set in the side of a stone abutment to the left of the bridge. A similar structure occupied the right side, only twice the height. Out spilled a gruff, angry looking man, hair wild and pants flapping as he made to secure them with a heavily buckled leather belt.

The man, chest height and next fidgeting with the worn handle of a dirk, ambled toward the triumvirate and eyed them suspiciously.

'What ya got? Whad'ya want?'

Freda attempted to conceal a laugh.

Jones had to look away, similarly afflicted.

Skidmore was about to open his mouth.

'Stuart!' the gruff man shouted. 'Stuart!'

The wooden door to the right side kicked open and a much larger fellow pushed through, dragging a length of chain.

'May we come in?' Skidmore asked.

'No one passes without declaring their business,' the short man replied, glancing back to where Stuart had stopped, the chain about one ankle. 'Stuart!'

Skidmore was nonplussed. What backworld was this?

'Where are we?'

'Huh?'

'Does this place have a name?' he pointed beyond to where a series of ramshackle houses folded about the road, roofs slate and chimneys lopsided.

Oddly, in the misty distance taller chimneys loomed, as if suddenly sprung from the trees.

'Grastobol of course,' answered the gruff sentry. 'What's ya business?'

Freda nudged Skidmore with her fist, handing him a thin gold ring.

Bribery was a universal currency, she seemed to say.

He showed the gleaming band to the sentry whose crowded, hirsute features softened immediately.

'Stuart! Gate!'

Reluctantly the larger man dragged himself and his chain over to a winch and began working the ratchet.

The portcullis was raised and they stooped through.

'Thank-you,' said Skidmore, unable to resist a bow as he handed over the ring. 'Is there a hotel in Grastobol?'

'Huh?'

'A hostelry?'

'Mile up the road, sign of the cow.'

They continued over the humped bridge, each wondering where they were in the twelve worlds, if they were in the twelve worlds at all.

'Tell 'em Roy sent ya!'

Skidmore raised an arm and waved.

The village was like something out of an old fairytale. Geese, pigs and ducks. Small children with dirty faces, adults slamming doors and shying away. One old man with a sword who had second thoughts. Maybe thirty untidy dwellings, two wells and an orchard before the road disappeared into some trees, taking the early sun with it.

Crows flapped and conversed. Then in a clearing was a larger building, whitewashed and thatched, adjoining stables and a sign out front detailing the back end of a cow.

'You got any more treasure hidden away?' Skidmore inquired of Freda. 'Enough for breakfast maybe?'

She didn't answer, just marched inside, engendering a silence where no noise had been noticeable before.

The two men followed, emerging under a heavy lintel, two steps down to a boarded, sunken floor. The room smelled of roast meat and damp straw. Dimly illuminated by candles, trestles filled it for the most part, at one of which Freda had taken station.

On the nearest trestle lay abandoned plates and crudely fashioned cups, both of a beaten metal.

There were people concealed; impossible to tell how many. Cats in the ceiling, too. Ghostly shadows.

Freda emptied a bag of coins on the table top, sorted them by colour and size, leaving a few as inducement before returning the remainder to her person.

A nervous young boy appeared.

'Coffee?' inquired Jones facetiously.

The boy grinned and ran off, returning shortly with a pan of promising dark liquid and three ceramic cups.

Skidmore was astonished.

'Pretty good,' opined the moon face, nodding approval. 'Where the fuck are we?'

The boy wasn't sure if the question was addressed at him. Skidmore wasn't either, but enquired more obliquely of the planet.

'He doesn't talk to strangers,' said a woman, bustling through from a neighbouring space, all curls and skirts. She gazed at the few coins on the table, hands on hips. 'May I help you?'

Freda magicked a larger coin into the pile.

'Aqua Minor, lady and gents,' she piped. 'Max, bacon and eggs for our guests!'

Skidmore's stomach rumbled.

'You're not our regular clientele,' she added. 'Most city folk come here for the hunting and little else.'

'What do they hunt?' Jones wanted to know, nose in his beaker.

'Boar, mostly. Depends how rich they are.'

She was still gauging them it seemed.

'Season isn't for another month.'

'We're not city folk,' Skidmore came clean, inviting a raised eyebrow. Freda kicked him under the table. 'But if we wanted to meet some, where might we do that?'

'Season isn't for another month.'

Freda sighed and another coin manifested.

'Sixty miles north's the nearest station. Now...' gathering up the coins with both hands whilst displaying her ample bosom, '...enjoy your breakfast.'

Skidmore had no idea what the bread was fried in, or what manner of sausage he was avidly cramming into his face, but he waded in regardless. Likewise Jones, with Freda not far behind, hunger an admission to herself and a welcome respite from bitter looks and measured silence.

They toasted gatekeeper Roy, whose purse she had lifted.

Several bodies, mostly nervous, seeped back in and cleaned their plates, eyes askance, like mice at the snake's picnic.

A themed hunting park, was Skidmore's best guess. Perhaps there were trolls in the mountains and witches in the deep dark forest. Not exactly the backworld he had feared.

They took a room and wondered at horses.

The room was basic, but had a bath tub, and access to a balcony overhanging a large barrel.

There was no running water but a knock at the door revealed a line of children with steaming buckets.

Freda watched them pour, a dozen filling the tin bath sufficiently for her to strip and clamber in, a dozen more (although perhaps they repeated, it was difficult to say) emptying their water cargo and retreating, several with red cheeks and audible whispering.

She was a recumbent queen, thought Skidmore, he and Jones smoking by the doors that led out to the balcony with its farmyard stench below.

Pollution claimed he could ride. Skidmore recalled the fat slow beasts he'd seen tethered to carts and buggies in Piersponttown.

They could abide here a month, wait for the season to start and hunt themselves a ticket to somewhere more promising.

But whatever their means, they were limited, and it rankled somewhat to remain inert.

Skidmore fancied their chances of gaining The Periwinkle back were close to zero. There was more out there, however, possibilities and potential. And something Holroyd had said to him in transit, Celestine tearing atmosphere, stuck in the back of his brain, like a wedge holding open a door.

'Burn their fingers sufficiently and they may leave you alone.' Meaning the Terminals of course.

Go on the offensive.

Freda splashed out. Skidmore thought about climbing in, but was too late as she dunked her filthy clothes.

Sixty miles wasn't so far.

8

There was definitely something peculiar about the twelve worlds. For a start there were at least fifteen planets with a sustainable population. Aqua Minor, among others, being a late addition.

They might have stayed at the Fat Cow until hunting season, grown fat themselves possibly, but stasis wasn't on Skidmore's agenda. He was no more captain here than he had been on The Periwinkle, but circumstance had himself and his companions leaning in the same direction. So it was they took to horseback. An uncomfortable transit over ground rocky and smooth. Shuffledeck's balls inflamed, and mount, he was convinced, snickering.

Freda had no such troubles. She proved a natural. Jones clumsy at first, perhaps in sympathy, as by afternoon he was chasing down rabbits.

It rained through the night, for which they were ill prepared, yet being folk used to space travel revelled in it. Skidmore and Freda at least. Pollute raised an improvised umbrella, one eye shut, belly full as he let sleep creep in, imagining himself back at the department store, repaying his debt to society, although all he missed of that life was the cake.

The station, it transpired when finally they tripped over it, was an airfield, the rusted carcasses of prop-driven planes littering its verges and a corrugated hut at its hub. A thin spiral of smoke rose from the hut's lopsided chimney. Knowing as little of Aqua Minor's topography as they did, it seemed likely this was as advanced as technology got given their location, whether that be an island or the outreaches of a deserted continent.

Freda volunteered to investigate, suggesting they stay out of sight.

Skidmore and Jones agreed.

She cantered back to where they were ensconced beyond the tree line twenty minutes later to report there was a supply plane scheduled for the following day, but that it didn't carry passengers. She had though secured a map from the somewhat bemused station-master.

Three hundred miles west to the coast, a further six hundred over mostly open water to the nearest town of any significant size. What hope they had of going off-world resided there.

A second night under the stars.

Skidmore wished they were back at the Fat Cow. They had apples and beef jerky to eat, but the only way they were certain of making the next day's flight was if they hijacked it.

Two bodies and a radio to disable.

He slept badly, waking abruptly once, convinced Miri was stealing his boots.

Freda and Jones had removed themselves but he could hear them close by quietly rutting.

He took a shit in the woods, washed in a stream, said goodbye to his horse.

Freda once more approached the hut.

The men waited a few minutes before closing in. The plan was to subdue the station-master and thence the pilot on arrival. Freda though had already taken care of the former, bound and unconscious on a lumber pile out back.

The hut's interior was basic, yet centuries removed from the houses at Grastobol. A desk with drawers stood against one wall, a two-way radio occupying its right side, a few faded charts, an incongruous seeming chaise lounge on which the triumphant navigator perched, several stuffed animal heads and a basic kitchen range.

Water boiled in a pan and Jones made them tea.

Skidmore found himself a chair.

When it eventually came, the gentle percussion of an internal combustion engine made him smile, growing louder and throatier as the plane approached. Not one engine, he thought, but two in concert, distant yet fast closing on the hard packed runway.

'Shit,' Freda said, grasping what he suspected, that a bigger plane meant more of a crew.

The plane landed, taxied about and chugged to a stop fifty metres from the hut, its nose high and its tail daubed with the letters BMC. Red in colour, with a black undercarriage, it looked like a flying serpent.

Worryingly, no-one disembarked.

'Hmm,' said Able Jones. 'Maybe we should have left the radio...'

The hut's back door exploded, silencing everything with noise. Smoke and gas engulfed them.

Skidmore fell to the floor and a boot stamped on his hand.

'We've not been able to find out too much about you,' said his interviewer, a woman in military garb. 'Interesting in itself, no?'

Was he supposed to answer?

She sat in a chair and he on his arse, blinded by unfamiliar light, a stench that could only be his own emanating from a drain in the concrete floor.

'Thirsty?'

He nodded despite himself, and a jet of freezing water sprayed down from above, shocking him with a delicious, yet stupefying electricity.

The woman recoiled a little, then waved the stream shut.

Skidmore, hands tied behind him, at least managed to swallow several mouthfuls.

'Better?'

'Yes,' he said. 'Yes. Thank-you.'

'You were with Munroe's crew,' she continued. 'He we are familiar with.' Smiling. 'Although it appears he's now deceased?'

Skidmore didn't answer. The shock had reverberated down to shivering.

'Yes. Unfortunate that. And yet - Horatio Holroyd now has charge of The Periwinkle.' Leaning forward and lowering her voice. 'It's Holroyd we're interested in, Skidmore Shuffledeck.' Smiling again. 'You understand? We don't care about you or your companions. That is, of course, unless you can be of help to us, in securing Holroyd. If it...'

He was supposed to fill the gaps, he guessed.

'Who's we?'

She hadn't expected that. 'BMC of course. Yours Truly.' Giving him a mock salute.

And if they were of no help, they were worthless. Dead.

It was like dealing with the Terminals all over again.

Fucked, the navigator's eyes said. She, Pollute and Skidmore about a round table eating something unidentifiable drenched in sweetened milk.

There were guards. The roof was domed and shiny like plastic.

Quiet plastic. No hint of thrumming. So not a ship.

'I'm beginning to think you're bad luck,' Freda opined, Jones sitting nearest her, laughing with his mouth full.

'We got out, didn't we?'

Those eyes widened, mocking him.

'I'm sorry.'

'Don't be. I could have betrayed you to our former employers, but for some reason I didn't.'

He was confused.

'A girl needs a little crazy in her life.' Spoon pointed to her left. 'Munroe was in fact the cautious type.'

'He didn't get you killed.'

'And neither, so far, have you.'

He let the probability slide.

'They want us to...'

'We know.'

'Okay.'

'Good. Now shut up.'

It was like talking with his mother, he thought; as hopeless as that.

They were reunited with their clothes, Skidmore feeling so much more himself wrapped in tools, spectacles and goggles about his freshly shaven head.

They were put in a boat and floated off to a waiting shoe, a spaceship black and coal bright, ugly as a crumpled paper bag.
The shoe, as ships were known within the borders of BMC, then spun toward her waiting engine, massive and invisible, alighting as a bird on an elephant,

The engine next crumpled space.

9

Readily damaged.

Or so they told him, an odd sense of humour prevalent. There was a short set of exercises, written and practical, followed by what Skidmore realized belatedly was a presentation.

And then they were given numbers.

RD0378.

Bunked, he tugged absently at the hair exiting his navel.

They'd been pressed.

Pollute's pale face leaned over from the bunk above. 'Does life always go in circles?' he asked.

It definitely seemed so.

There were eight sets of bunks, all occupied by men. A variety of origins and ages housed in a prefabricated cabin on a base surrounded by a perimeter fence. But they were more than prisoners, Skidmore sensed. They were tools, weapons to be deployed against enemies of the state. No telling if they would ever be released into the wild. No clocks. No dates.

RD0379.

Jones handed him a cigarillo.

They avoided contact where possible with their fellow inmates. Some seemed pleased to be here, like they'd qualified for a promotion, made it up a rung. Maybe they had, he thought, and the thought depressed him.

He counted a dozen identical cabins radiating about two central buildings, larger versions of the same. One housed a sports arena that doubled as a canteen. It was where they had been processed, tasked and weighed. No telling what went on in the other. That both he and Jones had been allowed to keep their clothes suggested they might be leaving soon. Most of the other residents wore sandals and loose khaki overshirts.

Skidmore decided to give it a couple of days before thinking about escape.

The next morning, however, he was rudely awakened, silenced by the snub tip of a gun, and marched out to a waiting truck.

Under canvas with half a dozen masked soldiers didn't seem like a good time to ask if Jones was coming along. He closed his eyes and rested his head on his knees in an attempt to sleep, the truck moving at speed over rough ground that soon after mellowed into a paved road.

They stopped mid-morning and he was given water and allowed to stretch. As far as he could see in every direction was dust and scrub. Then it was back in the truck till gone midday and a second stop, the terrain largely unchanged and his escort beginning to sag. Looking more like men now than insects, clad in matte black body armour.

He wondered who was driving as no one alighted from the darkened cab.

There was food, which he ate gratefully, thereafter managing to coax a light. But none of the soldiers would speak.

That someone imagined it required six to escort him was somehow flattering.

Driving on the road turned rough again, this time for an extended period. The light dimmed without and Skidmore's bones jangled. Whether squat or standing, the black clad men were all on their feet, soaking the bumps up through pneumatic boots.

A locker was opened and he was offered a pair, thinking why not, pulling them on and immediately sensing the relief in his guts.

The truck climbed an incline, twisting about before winding down the far side and coming to a sudden stop.

Dark. Pitch black. The soldiers spilled out and vanished, leaving Skidmore to follow or not.

He took a moment, sitting and dangling his feet before dropping the short distance to earth, wobbling and gazing round for any signs of life. He could see next to nothing, the vaguest of glimmers; water under stars, those impossibly high, few and faint.

Footsteps approached and a torch ignited.

'Shuffledeck, eh?'

He said nothing.

'The doctor's waiting.'

What? All this way for a check up?

'This way.' Taking his elbow, the light pointed always down. 'He's keen to meet you, you know.'

Skidmore complied, one boot after the other toward the edge of what he imagined a lake. Gravel crunched underfoot.

'Doctor! Our subject is here,' informed his guide before releasing him.

'Ah...'

And without having to be told anything everything fell in to place.

He was to take to the water.

Did they imagine they could direct him? Point him at a desired rendezvous? Somehow intercept Horatio Holroyd, perhaps.

More likely hit and hope.

'How are you feeling?'

'Err. Fine, thanks.'

'Good,' said the faceless doc. 'In that case, might we proceed?'

He shrugged, toes flexing in new boots, concerned they'd be a giveaway should he happen upon Holroyd's path. Only right now he couldn't care less, supposing them fit for purpose and undoubtedly waterproof.

RD0378.

Confusingly, the beach was gravel, the day warm and the truck not altogether unfamiliar.

Skidmore gazed around but could see no movement, human or otherwise. He stood ankle deep in the water like a reluctant fish with the weight of evolution on its as yet ill-formed shoulders, unconvinced by new legs and unfamiliar lungs. Surely it was safer under the waves. This alien place was dry and scary.

He thought about turning back; redialing as it were.

Then crunched ashore.

If it wasn't the same truck it was an identical one. The cab doors were open and the interior clean. Dusted with footprints, marked and scuffed in places, but void of anything useful, like a map or an old magazine. There were storage lockers and door pockets, but nothing in them, nothing more than a bottle top and crumbs.

The keys, augmented with a flat metal skull, were in the ignition.

Skidmore grabbed them and went to examine the back. Was this the same truck that had brought him here? Well that depended on here. His to explore and find out.

He started the engine and after some moments succeeded in engaging a gear. The truck lurched alarmingly but he managed to bring it about and steer up the incline. Nearing the summit he thought to see smoke trails in the sky. Driving over the top the world opened up, broad and flat, largely featureless, pocked here and there with craters and vehicles on fire.

According to the gauge the fuel tank was a little over half full. What that meant in kilometres he had no idea.

Skidmore turned the truck around and headed back toward the lake. He stopped briefly, staring out over the quiet water. But there was nothing in that direction, so he followed the shore, pneumatic boots heavy on the pedals, telling himself this wasn't the same world he'd left, wishing he had a smoke.

He took a makeshift road and soon found himself driving through trees, spindly boles without much foliage. Still, it was cover. The track wound on and down, branches raking the truck's sides. Passing several dilapidated buildings, he slowed, their roofs collapsed and trees growing through. There was nothing for it but to press on, continuing along an overgrown highway that looked like it hadn't seen any traffic in decades. There were no people, no signs of life save the occasional flap of bird of blur of beast. The area was long deserted.

A front wheel dropped suddenly and his face nearly joined with the steering wheel, rebounding as the truck before it collided with a wooden gatepost.

Stalled, he relaxed, able to breathe.

This was insane, but there was no other choice. Skidmore gunned the engine once more and it reluctantly kicked to life.

He reversed, rounded the post and continued up the track.

There was a series of cracks, sharp noises, one of which punctured a whole in the windscreen to his right.

No time to stop and chat, he reckoned, foot depressed and head down, almost missing the narrow bridge. The truck slewed and further shots rang out, but he made it past with only a little more fresh air in the cab.

He drove on unmolested, the sun arcing and his arse going numb. The fuel gauge hovered midway seemingly without end before suddenly dropping into the red.

Skidmore lifted his foot. The trees were retreating. Ahead loomed greener hills, whilst in the middle distance stretched a yellow valley, open, exposed, blooming with dry grass.

The road, what there was of it, petered out, subsumed by fresh growth.

He thought of abandoning the vehicle, but sat tight, picking out a feature in the distance and aiming the truck in that direction. Not somewhere he could hope to reach, yet it seemed expedient to use what fuel remained, racking up the kilometres as the sun looked on, lengthening shadows about.

The engine choking came as a relief.

Engaging neutral and using the slope, he squeezed out enough distance to leave him in the middle of nowhere. Hungry, thirsty and pretty much unprepared for whatever might come next.

Suitably booted, he walked. The long grass slowed him but by nightfall Skidmore had made it as far as the foothills he'd spied in the afternoon, collapsing soon after in a soft spot between rocks, twin moons overhead and shortly thereafter an explosion, what had to be the truck picked out and destroyed, a brief orange flower.

He slept, supposing it his only option. Come morning he would find water and drinking it continue as before.

There was one fat star above.

'You steal them off a trooper?'

He didn't understand; but knew he was in trouble.

'You speak the language, right?'

Skidmore blinked, unable to descry anything solid.

A mist had descended, cloaking the surrounding landscape in a damp blanket of fog.

'Shoot him,' said a second voice, equally young, kids even, wisps hovering at the peripheries of his vision.

'Wait a minute,' Skidmore piped up. 'Shouldn't you introduce yourselves first?'

One at least laughed.

'You don't look like a trooper. So what's with the boots?'

'I borrowed them. Like I borrowed a truck.'

'You crashed our checkpoint in the woods.'

That at least made sense.

'I still say we shoot him.'

'Shut up, Minx. The missus wants live ones.'

'But he ain't a trooper.'

They argued back and forth. Skidmore thought it an ideal opportunity to lunge for one or the other but did nothing more than sit up.

He badly needed to piss.

'I'll go with you,' he said. 'That okay?'

The one called Minx grunted and trudged off.

'I just need to...'

A boy and a girl it turned out, dirty faces disguising busy minds, Minx several shades darker than Skidmore, Daniel hiding red strands under a floppy camouflage hat.

They wouldn't answer any of his questions, leaving that for "the missus", whom he imagined as some Faginesque nest mother.

Both toted snub machine pistols and moved with a rapidity Skidmore failed to match.

To his surprise and relief they didn't head back toward the woods but pushed farther into the growing hills, following a stream that narrowed and grew steeper. The mist was left behind and the temperature rose accordingly, the sun when it found them warm without smothering. Perfect walking country.

Past noon and he began to slow, incurring Minx's impatience.

'You're a little out of condition, spaceman,' Daniel told him.

Spaceman? He guessed he was though.

The hills grew steeper and rockier, the view now taking in the distant lake.

Skidmore expected caves, and was soon proved right, descending into a cool inner world of igneous architecture. What looked like gas lamps illuminated carved archways and hand-fashioned tunnels inscribed with letters and figures, the latter short legged with oversized square heads. Like Grastobol, a parody of something that had once existed on Earth.

Minx disappeared, leaving Daniel to point him down a run of steep stairs.

'She's waiting.'

He shrugged and followed the steps, counted forty seven before ducking under a curved lintel and emerging into an amphitheatre or sorts, part natural, part fashioned from the surrounding stone.

On a low hewn stage, lamps about its border, an old woman was seated, hair tied up with an open book in her lap.

She didn't acknowledge Skidmore, but there was a second chair and he took it.

'Normally we ransom captives,' the missus intoned, tapping the book with a pencil. 'But not sure what you might be worth.'

He wasn't the enemy, he wanted to say.

'If you've questions, now's the time to ask them.'

'Are we still in the twelve worlds?'

'They don't count this one.'

'I was on a military base before they brought me to the lake.'

'Strange goings on there.'

'You know of it?'

She squeezed her lips in a knot. 'It's a lake. They're always testing something hereabouts. It's what keeps us busy.'

'How many of you are there?'

'Fifty. Maybe sixty.'

'Children?'

'Sprogs the orbital doesn't want. They reach a certain age, they take them back again. Like I say, always testing something.'

'There's fighting?'

'That too. Small scale stuff. Internecine.'

Skidmore didn't understand.

'It's how they settle squabbles,' the missus explained. 'Makes for good viewing and the casualties are all volunteers.'

'And you abduct survivors? Is that it?'

'Legal commerce. There're always stragglers. Losers in the game. Many who don't want to go back.' She pointed up.

'I need to get off world. Can you help me with that?'

She smiled then, he thought indulgently.

'Like I say, depends what you're worth.'

Skidmore didn't have an answer.

'Daniel called me spaceman.'

'He's perceptive that one.'

'And Minx wanted to shoot me.'

The missus laughed. 'Oh, she was just teasing. We don't do the killing round here. Not usually necessary.'

'I can just leave?'

'Of course.'

But where would he go? If Yours Truly had deliberately projected him here it was for a reason. Then again, there and here, the lake, the planet; it all looked like the same place, only perhaps days in the future.

'So how does it work?' he inquired.

'We upload you to the frame. People bid on you. Relatives or the criminal justice system normally.'

'That's it?'

'Pretty much. They pay in supplies. We continue in existence. It's how things work.'

In the twelve worlds.

'What about you?' he asked lastly. 'What keeps you here?'

She closed the book and crossed her legs. 'Someone has to look after the babies.'

10

They'd be watching, he supposed, monitoring his progress. Or he may have just dropped off the map. Too much to hope for. No way of telling. It was a waiting game; a long game. He may even be the control in this experiment. What was for certain was that he belonged now to a corporation and his tenure was measured in hours. How many was confidential. He guessed thousands. Time was a currency within BMC.

The irony was that he was back doing what he knew best, ship maintenance and light engineering. Miri wouldn't approve, thinking it a waste of his talents, but there was something blissfully uncomplicated about the X and Y of it, the torque of bolts and the fluid levels in reservoirs.

He kept himself to himself. Nobody bothered him.

He felt unimportant. Unencumbered.

Tech.

What time he spent on the orbital was often with his head inside a vending machine. He belonged to that anonymous tribe residents and business travellers took no notice of, ghosts that vanished into walls, legs glimpsed up ladders. Skidmore was happiest on a wire though, floating in space beyond the orb, rejigging a docking arm or otherwise lubricating those small parts essential to the smooth working of the whole.

He had plenty of time to think.

The Proving Ground, was what they called the planet beneath. It may have had another name once, but if it did that was forgotten. Sandy for the most part, greener about the poles, only twelve percent of its surface was water.

The hegemony of Bulk Manufacturing Centre expressed itself in mostly subtle ways. You'd be forgiven for thinking there was no government and that the military, army and navy, was a disinterested presence. This was the one place in the galaxy that might be described as insular on anything more than a global, planetary scale, eyes to the speculative centre rather than forever beyond the spatial horizon. There was order here. Concentrated power. A cul-de-sac in astronomical terms, bypassed and keeping to the shadows, the twelve worlds went quietly about their business, massing knowledge as much as wealth.

Yours Truly was a whisper, a figment. There were no politicians grander than councillors or mayors on any media, and their jurisdiction was limited. The courts were tribunals and everything worked fairly well. No weapons were permitted off world, at least in public, whilst on the surface, be it TPG or a planet that counted, Fourteenth or Demona, folk were left to their own devices, under the aegis of an all powerful overseer.

Bodies of course, still disappeared. Bribes went out to staff. And it wasn't long before Skidmore got his hands dirty.

It was just a left open door. A pack of six cigars in his locker the next morning.

A small smuggling operation, nothing outrageous or grand. Every few days a door whose pass code failed, requiring a manual override.

His supervisor winked, called him Skids and said no more.

The orbital never failed to turn.

Then one day as he got off shift, oil under his fingernails and a spring in his stride, he found he had a new supervisor, one who looked him up and down and smiled.

Skidmore asked around but nobody was saying anything. A conspiracy of silence, he thought, wary himself, yet all remained quiet. There was nothing to do but eat, sleep and smoke, read a book or watch TV. The day after, too. And for many more transferrable hours.

A dozen cigars in his locker and no place to hide.

Perhaps this life had run its course.

The door now was a docking tendril, a pliant string radiating out from the orbital to an extent of fifteen hundred kilometres. A magnetic hoop was his means of traversing the near invisible thread at speed, ten times faster than any lumbering bus taxiing in crew and passengers from an outlying vessel. Skidmore spun round the tendril like the vane of a windmill, ostensibly scanning for fractures, leaks and buckles in the hairlike twist whose fragility nonetheless supported an array of services from piped water to air conditioning. Primarily, however, it was a physical connection, once made establishing the visiting craft as under BMC authority, and thus taxed.

He slowed his rotation as he neared the indented hull of the ship tethered, using what momentum he had remaining to space hop the remaining hundred metres. It was showing off really, but he couldn't resist, boots securing, walking about the battered carapace.

A boxy robot was welding, he saw, a faded numeral on its casing.

He could see no other contact and so wandered over.

The robot, unsurprisingly, took no notice, its shabby case emblazoned with a corona of heat and light that Skidmore's faceplate had trouble masking. Fastened to its back though was a parcel, flat and oblong in shape, secured by tape and his for the taking. He pulled it loose and stowed the thing in a leg pocket, at which there was a pause in the welding. The robot raised a thumb briefly before continuing with its repairs.

Skidmore paused to consider the stars, of which there were many. Useless hanging around, he understood all too well, to stand still was to be amalgamated into an alien whole.

The thread swept him back, swinging on his magnetic leash, feet first through a chute and deposited onto a floor.

He slapped the side of his helmet and it cracked like an egg.

Exiting his nostrils the tubes grasped at hairs, tugging a few and making his eyes water.

The supervisor sat watching, quietly appraising. But he'd got up and left before Skidmore had racked the suit.

Now what did he do?

He shrugged and poked a console.

Coffee fell out.

The package was tucked under his armpit. He still had a hour or so before winding down for the eve. He didn't care, or wish to know what was in it. He just wanted to be left alone.

What was he worth? he wondered, the missus occupying his thoughts. Other faces impinged, but those he chose to ignore, smoking and doing a crossword when the supervisor came to call.

Skidmore mimicked the robot and gestured with his thumb toward his pillow.

The transaction complete, he felt underwhelmed. He decided to follow the supervisor, socks quiet and heart steady, that man meeting another in a bathroom thick with bodies and steam.

Amid a ballet of cleansed flesh, humour and noisome limbs, they exchanged few words, the men, Skidmore spying beyond a curtain, choosing his moment, many voices surrounding.

The supervisor's eyes were the first to meet his own. The other man was intent on the package.

Skidmore's arm shot out, hand grasping neck, crushing as he rammed the supervisor's head against the tiles. He felt his muscles tighten along the length of his arm and witnessed the result.

Fear bloomed like a flower.

He was mechanical and precise, equally with arm number two.

The package fell to the floor and remained there, Skidmore turning the water on before leaving.

He lit a cigar and went back to his crossword.

Six down: Mrs. Dalloway's maiden name.

Flicking ash.

The stars going out. Miri Mirabeau pretending it was okay when both of them knew it wasn't. They needed to get back to the Institute before the storm hit. Or what they imagined a storm. Difficult to quantify on a planet that was effectively roofed.

11

The blood was rust coloured. He squeezed it out of his finger ends and wiped it on a cloth. Nothing moved beyond the cave mouth, but he knew live bodies to be out there, searching, although whether for him or others Skidmore couldn't say. He wasn't the only wanted man in the twelve worlds. Recent experience had taught him that.

He'd endured the same old routine aboard the orbital for weeks. There were no more cigars in his locker but he thought this for the best. Keep your nose clean; get an hours discount. Or so they said. Then came the opportunity to discover just how many hours were on his card.

They had a new supervisor, a woman who made it clear she liked a quiet life. 'You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.'

It wasn't long before there were tears.

A guy called Shorty had snuck a look at his ticket.

Perhaps, after all, it was better not to know.

But Skidmore wasn't convinced. He fashioned a little musical box out of an empty grease canister, a wire mouse pirouetting within, its tail jangling over a spiked barrel propelled by a wound spring.

Impressed, she cornered him by a magazine stand. 'My, but if you aren't a talented individual.'

'How long?'

'You sure you want to know?'

He nodded.

'Then buy me dinner this evening.'

In the months he'd been incorporated it had never occurred to Skidmore he was free. Not to leave the orbital or take up other employment. Unless he bought himself out of course. Free to wander, to do as normal people did, enjoy life. His contract only possessed him between fixed hours.

He had no friends, but managed to borrow a dress jacket.

She was late.

'Ladies' prerogative.'

Skidmore mauled his steak like he hadn't eaten meat before. They drank wine and shared a dessert.

It was, she said, romantic.

He wasn't greatly interested in sex but it appeared that too was on the menu.

She dragged her nails across his back and he enjoyed the pain of that more than any coitus.

Eight thousand seven-hundred and two.

Far less than Shorty, who would die in service to ducts and floating chairs, but lately Skidmore's tenure seemed overlong.

Devising a means of escape suddenly got him in with a whole other crew.

It had been done before, they said.

Sewerage, what couldn't be recycled or reused, twenty metre faecal bricks moulded into links, links into necklaces, was dragged by a drone to the planet's surface two or three times a year, the greater mass burning off in atmosphere, what remained being dumped.

Thereafter he'd be on his own.

Cash up front.

He lay awake calculating velocity and mass and decided it was worth the risk. If the final impact didn't kill him. He'd need some faecal cushioning for that.

Which left the money.

And wrongly open doors again.

The drone released its cargo at a thousand metres, Skidmore cooking nicely but breathing through his suit. The impact was softer than he imagined, a welcome relief as the ball of compacted human waste broke up, releasing him like a seed into the thin arms of trees that went some way to slowing him down before his head connected with anything hard or sharp. It was night, damp, the suit using his remaining air to bulk out and further absorb the impact. Still, he bounced like a rubber toy, end over end until his momentum waned and he slid the last few hundred metres on grass.

He had been hoping to reuse the suit but it was broken in more ways than one.

There was no way of knowing where he was in relation to the lake but that was his ultimate destination. Beyond the lake a spacesuit might prove handy. For now, just another item on his shopping list.

That he'd made it out alive was enough.

'Jesus, Skidmore, you look like shit.'

Horatio Holroyd, big as life, hunched over a fire cooking a sausage on a stick.

It had been the smell that had woken him.

'Surprised?'

Somehow he wasn't.

'I have contacts on TPG,' Holroyd said. 'Thought it was only a matter of time before you showed up again.'

'What do you want?'

'Straight to the point, eh?' He looked the sausage over, decided it was done and handed the stick to Skidmore. 'I'd like for you to pay our friends a visit. Steal something for me.'

'Yours Truly or the Terminals?'

Holroyd grinned, teeth white against a backdrop of beard. 'I've a lot of friends,' he said. 'The more religious type; if oppression isn't a religion.'

'What's in it for me?'

'Revenge? Adventure? Freda maybe.'

'And Jones?'

'You'll have to spring that one yourself.'

So the pirate had Freda. That made a kind of sense. The Periwinkle would run smoother with her human navigator.

'How's Jart?'

That surprised Holroyd, who paused, a second sausage smoking in the flames.

'Gone of course,' he finally said. 'Purged.'

Skidmore ate his sausage in silence. He didn't have a lot of choice. He could either accept Holroyd's offer or spend the foreseeable future searching for a body of water in a hostile wilderness without a map.

'You've a lot to learn, my boy. As much about others as yourself. Now what's it to be?'

Relative Misgivings, SS, a haulage engine whose human cargo went uncounted, his first stop en route to Planet 661, a resort always on the lookout for personnel. 661 was one of those worlds where the rule of law didn't get out of bed in the morning and was always drunk. An anarchic haven to some.

Strange place for an apocalyptic religious order.

The box Holroyd had shown him on Blank Canvas had a twin.

The sun never rose fully, rather slowly cartwheeled in a reddish smear over the horizon, days elongated and people crazy-eyed. Poker chips were he currency of choice and everyone carried a gun. He'd been supplied with a generous dose of the former at least. Guns didn't sit with Skidmore. He'd bought new tools and hand-fashioned boots.

He was a non-lethal burglar. Soon targeted by pimps.

His dispassion for entertainment became a useful wall. It was impossible to escape the lure, however, the many-windowed city earning that moniker among others, privacy at a premium and flesh everywhere you turned. A good deal of it was dead, street food served up in buckets and aflame with sauce. Skidmore though clung to the near quiet of his cupboard, venturing out to smoke and marvel at a skyscape painted every hue of orange.

Slowly he acclimatized, finding the ordinary in cracks, people flung here from every corner of the galaxy. The city had a hundred names, was a centrifugal force, sucking the breath from lungs and the money from wallets, offering plastic in exchange, brief moments, short tenures, all the paraphernalia of a hellish holiday destination that nobody chose to leave. Not that it was particularly violent. Although the drug of choice was, perhaps ironically, known as calm.

It was an ecosystem like any other. And no such system devoured itself entirely.

He meandered about the edges, the throbbing core otherwise engaged. Music lit up the ragged clouds and smells overwhelmed. There was a complex of low buildings known locally as low houses, places of retreat the bedraggled limped in to, to die or re-energize. God might be found here, he'd learned, as always in the most depraved places, a way out and home.

Skidmore smoked and considered the absence of doors. It was virtually a thoroughfare, a market of souls wishing to be cleansed, most he thought on a rotor, delivered over and again. The reddish sun painted them and the raised flags of salvation the same hue.

It certainly seemed like a likely ingress, a way in to whatever lay beyond. That which the penitents never got to see.

Holroyd hadn't given him much by way of direction.

Holroyd hadn't much to lose.

Skidmore circled inward, cautious of toes.

He had an eye for security, false believers standing too straight, or else suspiciously supine. There was probably another casino on the next floor, another garish pit of sin here rubbing shoulders with the divine. The Terminals believed in the end of everything, the destruction and rebirth of a universe, so no real contradiction was exposed. It was okay to act out your fantasies. As long as you had chips. No chips sent you to the back of the queue, to wait tables and suck cock in the hope that those tables might be turned.

At least that was the rules.

He was a little drunk. Inevitable, he supposed. Means cautiously deployed till now.

As suspected there was an entrance fee, on payment a necklace of paper flowers and a clear run into the supposed quietude. Cushions and the hint of an aristocracy, the favoured showing their palms to the fallen as they were conveyor'd away.

The low houses buttressed an invisible wall. Bodies were stacked in their corridors and on their roofs, but there was a definite border, one Skidmore had crossed he realized, the blurring transient, like passing from water to air. People stared at him directly now. He stared back, convinced confidence was the key. If he felt he belonged then no-one would challenge him. There was a central quadrant, plants displayed, water gurgling, more pertinently steps leading down. He took these and found himself in a cooler realm, the underfloor less chaotic, corridors running in every direction, like something from an Escher drawing, pillars and busts, new and ancient gods, groups of worshippers congregated about tables. He paused to drink from a fountain and someone, a woman, caressed his arm. Skidmore didn't know how to react. He recalled his mission and walked away. The woman followed him, dressed as some deity, her limbs marble and her sex a cursor floating beyond the gauze of her clothing.

He walked more briskly, the sound of running water drowning that of now distant music, a chill like that of conditioned air bathing his eyes and encouraging his lungs to breathe. Perhaps the woman followed him, he didn't know, choosing not to look back as he passed along a wide curving corridor, down more steps into an array of tunnels that reminded him of those Minx and Daniel had led him through. If there were inscriptions here, square-headed figures, they had been carved away. Skidmore followed the draught, a spell that drew him forth. The light grew golden, incensed and alluring. There were doors fitted into bare rock which he ignored. He walked under the old town, he thought, into the ancient heart of what had been a retreat given to quieter worship, some monastic outpost whose beginnings were as old as space travel, the faster-than-light exodus from Eden that some saw as a curse.

And here at the end was the woman. The fountain, too. He rocked a little on his heels, disoriented.

She smiled. He had come full circle, or else been turned around.

The music snapped back in as if at an opened door.

Not so straightforward then.

Ignoring her, Skidmore continued out through the quadrant and kept moving, oblivious to whatever got in his way. He climbed the ladder to his cupboard and shut himself inside.

There was a sandwich-board man he and Miri had followed once, the pair of them having absconded for the afternoon into the bowels of the machine city. He wandered seemingly at random, ignored by everyone, an incongruous shape amid the ordered throng. What fascinated them was that boards he wore, his burden, were white and blank. No message was scrawled, be it an advertisement or a religious scripture. He was old and brown, walking steadily, yet on false legs, metal gleaming beneath ragged trouser bottoms. Being invisible he wandered where he pleased, stepping on and off elevators and trains. The boys followed, students equally free to ride, privileged off-world pupils of the Institute no-one hindered. In truth Skidmore wanted to return, but Miri refused. They travelled out beyond the city, a landscape desolate and in total contradiction to that he had first seen on arrival, riding with his mother in a carriage then, staring out at trees and cows. All in the glass, he later learned. False images in a false window.

On Perridi you could never trust your eyes.

He imagined something similar was at work on Planet 661.

Reluctantly, Skidmore descended from the cupboard after thirty-six hours. It wasn't so much he needed to eat as stretch his legs. Scouring the markets for tanked air yielded no results. There had to be something to counter the drug-induced malaise that passed for an atmosphere. What he needed was to travel beyond the city, to see what, or who, was out there.

He had some figuring out to do, he realized. Who knew Holroyd's motives for sending him here?

Within the urban sprawl there was no transport other than hand carts and bicycles. Everything moved at human speed, the humans lubricated and the whole an autonomous mass. Skidmore took to the outskirts. The people here were fewer and yet the threat level bizarrely raised. Eyes followed him, like a tourist off the trail. Only he didn't look like a regular tourist, he supposed, going unmolested and eventually finding what he was looking for, a garage with automobiles, actual metal cars. They ran on hydrogen for the most part, but he discovered there was a niche market for internal combustion engines, raucous throwback machines from mother Earth. Or so they'd have him believe.

He felt much more at home here on the peripheries. The light was as red but the air was fresher. Already he'd replaced the lenses in his spectacles for something more friendly. The cost of a working engine was more than he could afford, however.

What if he built his own?

Skidmore doubted it was a fair price but it was all he had. What it bought him was a chassis, a block and two week's work. Plus food and board, the latter with a family of oily-skinned natives, third generation explorers whose fathers and grandfathers had settled here, twelve-hundred souls not long after whittled down to ninety. The story was local legend, exaggerated fable. A treasure in the hills and a madness in the brain.

Perfect territory for Terminals after all.

Of course few if any roads. Two wheels would have been better suited but he was stuck with four, tyres solid and suspension creaky, fuel tanks filled and a hamper of goodies courtesy of mama Gonzales. Her tribe waved him off, neither knowing if he would return.

Five hundred klicks to the crash site, the last resting place of the Overseeker, a ship built in the original solar system out of a million parts. Crashed was maybe an untruth, he figured. Settled down never to lift and collapsing thereafter under its own weight might be more accurate, the fate of one pioneering cruiser.

Driving a truck on The Proving Ground had taught him a thing or two. He kept his speed down and, cigar firmly chomped, enjoyed the scenery.

Large batlike birds followed him before peeling away, their curiosity satisfied or their stomachs dissuaded. His shadow stretched ten metres, flickering on and off as hills interrupted. The speedometer wasn't hooked up but Skidmore he took care to monitor water and oil temperatures, their gauges rimmed with chrome. The oil was a problem, being in short supply, a synthetic mix put through at least one fryer and subsequently modified by a chemistry arcane. Not that it really mattered. The engine only needed to last as long as the petroleum in gargled.

He followed a valley long and regular, the ground fairly even, rocky outcrops easy to avoid. There were bushes and small grazing animals one of which he ran over, slowing briefly before deciding he needn't discover if it were edible. Mama Gonzales provided. He slowed again to ford a river, fish streaming beneath, and wondered how this world has not been revisited. Other than the city there was no human presence he could detect, not so much as a farmstead or cabin.

Yet 661 appeared rich enough, plentiful in resources. However, just a nameless hub of lost souls on the planetary horizon, visible like a firework from afar.

Skidmore drove, stopping only to switch tanks and take a piss. He was forced up a rise as the valley ran out, but managed to veer not too far offline, the crude compass fitted on the dash bobbling and turning as he meandered about, from one valley to the next, a grander swathe that blurred into the distance, greener and thronged with purple-barked trees.

Larger animals grazed here, seemingly with no natural predators. They gazed up only briefly, indifferent to the noisome intrusion. Bovines, thick about the neck yet with powerful hind legs.

On he drove, raiding the hamper, smoking and tapping his fingers on the wheel to a tune barely recalled.

Up ahead a dark cut began to grow, the ground drying out before it, tyres growing in volume as he closed.

The valley narrowed, the final few kilometres throwing up dust and stones. He pulled up and considered his options. Enter the maw, and perhaps the valley beyond, or find a way round.

Skidmore wasn't sure the car would make it up the incline, rocky as that now was.

He took a drink and raised binoculars.

It was an unusual feature, impenetrable, a gash perhaps leading to Eldorado. The valley walls appeared to have been raised by some geographical event, albeit one out of keeping with the greater topography. Could a spaceship had punctured through? He supposed it was possible, what remained of that vessel on the other side. Yet that explanation was unconvincing.

Lowering the binoculars Skidmore reckoned there was only one way to find out.

An overheating radiator brought him up short though.

He cursed and killed the engine.

Silence fell like a shadow. His bowels squirmed and his spectacles misted. It was as if an icy front had passed through.

Suddenly the way forward seemed more complicated.

Raising the binoculars again he scanned the surrounding hillsides. In places it wasn't so steep, he thought. The car could surely climb out of the valley and proceed over the top. It would give him an unmatched perspective if nothing else. He might even be able to see the crash site from on high, which fact decided his course, a tentative ascent that echoed angrily, like a wasp in a lampshade. But soon he was on top of this world, staring into distant forest, a four kilometre wide trench evident despite being overgrown.

Curious, he raised his glasses and adjusting the binoculars gazed at the scene unfiltered. The trees looked almost black under the sun's reddish cast, the distant ship like an animal carcass that had been disemboweled, stripped of meat, the bones of its ribcage inverted tusks. Most of the superstructure was obscured, but Skidmore could just about make out its shape, symmetrical about a central spine. Unlike the random junctures and amalgamated lumps of more modern ships, the Overseeker had been built to a design.

He wouldn't be able to drive right up to it, that was for sure. Perhaps it was better not to, to arrive unannounced. Anything of use or value from the ship would have been salvaged long ago, but it was still possible there were people around, watchmen assigned to deter casual visitors, guardians in the Terminals employ.

Skidmore got back in the car, checked the tanks, rapped the temp gauge with his knuckle. Until now he hadn't thought about a descent. There were crags and overhangs and the long shadows made judging either tricky. That and he could barely see past the angled bonnet. He could just walk from here, but no sooner had he thought of it than he dismissed the idea, picking his way carefully, finding progress easier once he was on the downward slope.

What concerned him most were the brakes. He hadn't really needed them before now. Hydraulically operated pads clamping metal discs that had seen better days, they squeaked crazily, the rear left wheel locking up, which pulled the front round and had him swipe rocks and tree trunks, leaves floating free like giant butterflies. Skidmore stuck to first gear and used the engine as an anchor, changing up as the gradient lessened and the slope evened out, feeling pleased with him of a sudden, a whole new skill set in his back pocket, one they never would have taught him at the Institute.

He could no longer see the Overseeker but its passage through the ground was obvious. An emergency landing as opposed to a crash, the ship having come in low and flopped on its belly this side of the escarpment. The vegetation had recovered, grown over the wound, scrub and thickets he was able to steer through and around. The surface itself was smoothed, stone powdered under the great keel, affording him a gentler ride than he'd expected. Soon though the trees grew thicker, bits of what may have been spaceship protruding, so that he was forced at last to park up and get out, utilizing mama's hamper as a tool box, outsized corroded spanners, wrenches and what he recognized as a ballpeen hammer his new best friends.

His spectacle lenses flickered, struggling with the low light. Skidmore thought about changing them. It would only take a few seconds but his momentum was such he didn't feel like stopping. Besides, the red gloaming was worse, and he could see perfectly well. The flicker though seeded the peripheries of his vision with ghosts, brief dark apparitions that nagged at his consciousness like memories long suppressed.

Phasing them out, he pressed on, satisfied his latest choice of boots was a good one. There were animals within earshot, mostly hidden. He was more at risk from infection, however, some exotic plant fungus rendering him unconscious of causing his heart to stop. On a genetic level he was tweaked, and it was difficult to travel anywhere in known space without unwittingly undergoing some sort of virus checking, airborne pre-cures and engineered sentinel antibodies being all-pervasive. In theory he could be carrying anything, nano machines feeding back his every movement, heartbeat and carnal whimsy. In reality such a torrent of information would be ridiculously expensive to transmit, compute and make sense of - out of date in an instant and readily falsified.

Paranoia on a macro scale was endlessly diluted.

Skidmore lit a cigarillo.

He began recognizing artificial shapes, bulwarks and decking, pieces of the Overseeker that had fallen away. If twelve hundred had survived, he wondered, how many had perished?

And why had it come down here?

He stood on bones, toed a skull. Strange they should be left. Unless this wasn't a traveller.

Opening the hamper, suspended by a strap from his shoulder, Skidmore Shuffledeck took hold on the stained wooden shaft of the ballpeen. He laughed at himself for doing so, but only a little.

A few kilometres on and larger shapes emerged from the forest, that growing thickest about the bulk of the wreck as if deliberately trying to conceal it. It was hard to identify anything smaller than a doorway. One long sloping deck section sprouted rows of rusted chair legs. He reckoned the Overseeker must have been about half a kilometre wide by six long, which put him in the speculative middle. It was eerily quiet. Then something unexpected happened. It started to rain.

The quiet was erased by a timpani of notes generated off surfaces natural and manmade, an orchestra of sound that plinked, dripped and gurgled through his ears, leaving Skidmore mesmerized. The temperature dropped by ten degrees and the water found its way inside his clothes. For a time he was completed helpless, lost in a strange panoply of resonance that seemed to connect directly with his brain. And then, just like that, it stopped. One section of the orchestra fell silent, followed by another, leaving only the steady bass note of a drum.

Instinctively, he headed in that direction, pushing aside branches and clambering over fallen bulkheads. There was a large indented section of metal hull into which water had drained, a crack in it big enough to drip but small enough not to run. Each drip fell ten metres before disappearing through a small hatchway, seconds later resonating inside, generating an echo way beyond its measure.

Skidmore, mused Skidmore, could fit through that hole.

If there was anything here of interest it wouldn't be on the surface, he told himself.

He stuck his head through but all he got was a wet neck. He unravelled a length of cloth found in a tree but was unable to get it to light, so he tied it to a torch (a feature of the binoculars) and lowered that.

Four metres. Five. Too far to drop. The water was rebounding off a yielding surface, a broad expanse of plastic partitioning that should take his weight. No way the cloth was strong enough to hold him either. He looked for another way in but found nothing. This was it. Cut branches, thin and slightly greasy, were his best bet.

Miri would have told him he was nuts, and then let him go ahead.

Skidmore misjudged the size of the hatch and nearly got stuck, water dripping on his skull as he struggled, lubricated at least, eventually passing through whilst yet clinging on to the hastily fabricated rope of branches.

He lowered himself quickly and gently rested his weight on the plastic, recovering the torch and shining it about.

His spectacles were of no help and he took them off.

He thought he saw something move. Most likely an animal.

There was one last drum beat, booming, and then the plastic skin tore, dropping him like the gift to gravity he was.

12

His mother licked the ball of her thumb and wiped a speck of dirt from his cheek, smiled the way mothers do, and left him.

He wouldn't see her again.

Every now and then he'd be haunted by her face; that look interpreted in a million ways.

The same look he'd seen when his father died.

At least in his head.

He had contact. She was out there somewhere. But he wouldn't see her again.

It was a loss.

Skidmore kept staring at his ankle, part submerged in human detritus. Its condition refused to change, however. It was broken. He lay on his back in a place of echoes, present and past, mica floating like plankton, alone and lost. Nobody was coming to the rescue. At least not here. He would have to find his own way out, on one leg, which necessitated a crutch.

Only to leave now, however that might be possible, made meaningless the reason he was here in the first instance.

Holroyd's treasure box.

He'd thought a lot about length and width, the Overseeker stretched flat and disseminated.

That neglected girth and depth.

The ship was of a type unfamiliar, a whole as opposed to a pairing of occupancy and propulsion. There was no separate engine. It was all here, buried deep, the Overseeker's beating heart as yet in motion - a star, or the crude representation of one. Fusion, deep down locked.

He could feel it, sinking slowly to the planet's core. Once there perhaps to achieve critical mass.

Planet 661 was on borrowed time.

Not that such fixed his ankle. Handy knowledge all the same. Shuffledeck raised himself on his good leg, fished the hammer from the debris and placed it back in the hamper slung about his neck. He had, unsurprisingly, lost his glasses.

The torch was still good though.

Alas, whatever it lit upon smelled.

Skidmore felt sick. He pushed the nausea behind the pain in the queue of things he had to deal with, found a stanchion to lean on, a piece of aluminium pipe that had once served another purpose, and limped in the direction of the darkest corner, surmising that was most likely to lead out.

Finding himself in a run of lopsided metal tunnels he was strangely reassured by the proliferation of rivet heads. It looked like the interior of a submarine he'd seen in a film once. Contemporaries of Admiral Tirpitz might be found here, collars turned up as they studied charts, smoking and drinking coffee from tin cups as the universe revolved about them.

The air quality deteriorated. Other than not breathing he had no way of dealing with the likelihood of airborne toxins. Any decaying human flesh should have long since exceeded putrefaction. Shadows crashed ahead like fleeing monsters. He could almost hear the chaos of their escaping footfalls. They ran from him, Skidmore mused; the greater terror. He thought it unwise to open blast doors. That would be liked taking the top off those jars they used for preserving body parts, the past brought momentarily to life before rapidly decaying. Instead he pushed on, caught once more in a maze. There was evidence of fires. No real surprise. But also of fighting, pocked walls and bulkheads shot through, close quarter combat with explosives and projectile weapons. Maybe that was the truth buried here, the ship seized, mutiny among the uniformed crew or rebellion spawned from the belly of the uncounted cargo. Whichever, it had played out, those few surviving the lucky ones as the Overseeker met her fate.

The tunnels opened into larger compartments, their once dividing curtain walls burned away. There was a concentration of bodies here. Skidmore might be joining them, dizzy from effort now as he clumsily picked his way. Impossible to say what this space had once been, but it looked as if it had been well defended.

From his navel there came a twitch.

He smiled broadly, unable to contain his excitement. That something was still here.

The twitch was vague though, the signal weak. Up a level. Or down. It occurred to him to fiddle with the binocular's torch settings and after some experimentation Skidmore was able to project a much wider swathe of light. The bodies multiplied greatly. In places they looked like they'd been swept up, piles of desiccated corpses, twisted and malformed.

They were choking stairwells. A hull breach? In the midst of battle a vacuum had opened, the catastrophic drop in pressure resulting in this pull back, the ship effectively repairing its wounds with human beings.

Not that that would work, but hundreds had paid the price.

Down seemed the best bet.

That meant cutting a hole in the deck, no shortage of dispersed weaponry to facilitate.

Skidmore wasn't skilled in either weapons or explosives, however. And then there was the descent.

He spent ten minutes hunting about and came up with a plan.

Bricked air, grenades and a plasma axe, the first and last still working, a helmet in place and the sweet kick of long ago compacted oxygen giving him focus as he set the grenades about a stairhead. The explosion would clear most of the bodies. Its subsequent blowback might bring the ship down on top of him. He hoped he wouldn't have to call too much on the axe.

It was a stupid plan, he thought.

'Shit...'

Detonating.

Small arms fire and further explosions added to the screaming tumult as Skidmore cowered behind the most solid thing he could find farthest removed.

The helmet at least stopped his brain slipping out of his ears.

He appeared to have instigated a chain reaction, firearms long inactive rudely awoken, bullets spraying and bones shattering in an exaggerated replay of the original conflagration.

Scared to move, he made himself as small as possible and waited for things to quieten down.

Adjusting the torch back to its original narrow beam he limped over to the stairwell. Everything was pretty much charred, but he was able to descry a bend, a second flight, narrower than the first. The hamper on one shoulder and the plasma axe on the other he made his way down, still breathing the bricked air.

At the bottom a twisted grilled walkway led into darkness, above what had once been a series of holds, those impacted from beneath and crushed upward by the impact.

The explosion had torn through the web of bones and paper flesh, turning most to dust.

Skidmore had hobbled twenty metres before the hair in his belly got excited again.

He unslung the plasma axe, ignited it and began cutting the walkway, stopping as it dropped under his weight. Awkwardly, he clambered down onto the crumpled roof of a container. The axe opened it easily and despite the helmet he recoiled as dead air flowed out. Shining the torch in detailed some sort of vehicle. He could make out two wheels at least. What took his attention though was the Christmas tree in the corner, glittering green fronds of plastic shining over packages beneath.

A future life on a faraway world, he saw. Possessions boxed. Room left for one small indulgence.

The alarm in his stomach, having peaked, subsided. His eyes had caught up, that suggested, Skidmore dangling his good leg and dropping on it, hopping and scraping midst one family's long lost hopes.

He sat before the tree, peculiarly excited. There were a number of parcels and he picked each up in turn and shook. The helmet prevented him from hearing anything so reluctantly he took it off. His throat burned and his eyes watered, but he didn't keel over. The parcels variously rattled and made no sound, but his heart reached out to just one, small and oval like an egg. He tucked it in his jacket and imagined his mission complete.

Clambering back out he had no intention of handing the contents to Holroyd.

The plasma axe proved indispensable, fashioning doorways and steps, and in no time Skidmore was back under the red sky of Planet 661.

It was a long limp back to the car unfortunately.

Blessedly, mama Gonzales' hamper was roomy enough to accommodate everything he imagined of value. There were even some squashed sandwiches in there, which Skidmore consumed gratefully. He had more than enough fuel for the return leg but sitting in the car he was reluctant to start the engine.

He pulled half a cigar from the ashtray and lit that. His ankle throbbed, but the pain was remote.

There was a hirsute body peering at him from a tree.

Skidmore smiled, taken with the animal's curiosity. It drew a parallel with himself, a dispassionate view of the world, the galaxy, and its place in it, the man's place in it. The animal was looking at something unusual and so was Skidmore. Neither saw a threat although the threat was real.

He blew smoke out. The hirsute scratched its genitals.

Snap.

The rain had greased the valley sides making any climb impossible. Skidmore drove at the slope many times but simply couldn't gain traction. He was like a spider in a bathtub.

Making the ascent on foot would be problematic, too. Driving was one thing but he needed two working feet to climb, lest he slide up backward on his arse. And then what? It wasn't as if there was anything on the other side save wilderness. His ankle might be easily fixed with the correct equipment but the only medical supplies he'd brought was a small, anonymous bottle of alcohol.

Waiting for the grass and earth to dry out wasn't an option. The incline was likely too great regardless.

Not for the first time Skidmore had painted himself into a corner.

There had to be an alternative route.

Driving across the top of the valley he was conscious of eyes upon him. Peculiar marsupial eyes more than likely. Or vulturelike birds high above.

The fuel tanks were still relatively full. That was the good news. Good insofar as he couldn't afford too great a diversion.

He still wore the helmet, its faceplate permitting solar filtering, but it did nothing for his myopia and after nearly driving into a sunken riverbed, a slash of running water two metres below and similarly wide, Skidmore tore it off. The sky was copper hued, perhaps an aftereffect of the rain.

Driving a short way along the watercourse he saw it disappear into the trees. No hope of transit there. He turned around and headed back the way he'd come, past the point of his near calamity and on for several hundred metres, looking for a narrow point or somewhere higher on this side he could launch the car off. What he didn't expect to find was a bridge.

Mostly overgrown, the bridge was a chunk of the Overseeker's fuselage laid across the divide decades before. A good omen, as it suggested there was a road out. At least a once road, which to Skidmore's mind sufficed.

Having pulled up he next steered the car over the bridge at speed, the rusted remains crimping beneath yet holding the brief second it took to cross.

Thinking no more of it he was on his way.

Through longer grass, wet and dragging. Not shy with the throttle and focused solely on the looming hillside he failed to see numerous rocks, one of which took out a rear tyre. No matter, the ground soon rose and there was a spare, although he was loath now to stop and fit it.

His ankle throbbed painfully and tiredness was beginning to cramp his muscles.

If only Freda might appear overhead, she and the tattered shell of Celestine coming to his rescue a second time.

But that wasn't about to happen.

Skidmore gunned the car up the slope and swung right onto firmer ground. Not really a road, but an incline that looked as if it might lead somewhere. A good place to stop and make repairs.

He was thirsty so drank. The last of his clean water. It was the unfiltered local fare from here.

He got to use the hammer at least, battering an already battered wrench in order to loosen wheel nuts.

Strangely satisfying, he thought, throwing the damaged wheel in the boot well and tightening up the spare.

It was difficult to tell if the track he followed was artificial or natural. He supposed the latter, switchbacks in the rise that brought him cleanly to the summit. Beyond stretched a whole other valley, however. The dash compass pointed another way but geography refused to co-operate.

The forest grew thicker where the sometime road meandered, away from where he wished to be. The terrain though offered no other choice.

It was as if the planet conspired against him.

He raised the binoculars and studied the valley.

In the midst of the forest rose several columns of smoke.

Dwellings?

Skidmore had wondered at the lack of settlement beyond the nameless city. There had to be refugees from that onanistic conurbation.

Perhaps this was it.

Despite appearances, consisting of half a dozen large pitched tents, the enclave had the feel of being well established. Those present were gaunt and male, heads shaved or else expunged of hair, bodies as faces, bluish and drained of expression, lacklustre and dead. His arrival among them, noisome as it was, caused neither agitation nor surprise. The gaunts, as he thought of them, simply got on with their business, tending plants and reading books. Burnouts from the city, Skidmore theorized. They certainly weren't hunter-gatherers, or for that matter farmers, so it was likely they were used to visitors, and had something to trade.

He sat in the car a while watching. The tents were communal, hung with pale lanterns, bodies passing freely beneath awnings suspended between trees. The smoke came from fires, few if any being used for cooking.

No one approached or challenged him.

Leaving the hamper, tools and booty, Skidmore swung his leg out of the car and stood.

A gaunt face turned to him briefly, a flash of curiosity soon subsumed. Like the others he wore a loose habit of bleached canvas tied with a belt.

Planting his crutch Skidmore ambled over, said hello. He hoped to buy food but wasn't sure how he would pay.

The man didn't reply, but glancing at the stranger's raised foot pointed at a group of four perched on a log by one of the fires under an adjoining tent.

The spaceman, feeling more than usually alien, made his way over and stood before the men, two of whom looked to be asleep. The two remaining, one young, one old, eyed him passively without speaking.

The younger sneezed, waking the two sleepers, and shooting him a look of disgust the older man slapped the boy across the back of his head.

None of them uttered a word, which Skidmore was quickly coming to terms with. He smiled politely, as his mother had taught him years ago, and this engendered in the elder a thoughtful look.

He pushed the man to his left twice and that man got up and scurried off. The youth was similarly dispatched. The remaining fellow gazed blankly, before moments later his eyes closed again.

The elder rose and indicated Skidmore should sit, which he did, not wishing to renege on this exchange of good manners.

The boy could be seen returning with a bowl of fruit in his hands and a length of bread under each arm. Setting these down alongside the visitor he blanched, as if tempted to speak, but prevented by some inner pain reflex. Then another gaunt arrived, pushing the boy aside. He stared for a long time at Skidmore's damaged ankle before dropping to his knees and unfastening the boot.

The brown man grabbed a bread stick and pushed it in his mouth, as much to quieten himself as satisfy any pangs of hunger. He chewed rapidly as his leg was exposed, swollen and purple. The fruit in the bowl swam half submerged in water and he took this up and drank, berries filling his mouth with a spicy tang.

In the trees, he saw, were crudely manufactured boxes. Set above the tops of the surrounding tents they protruded like square nests.

Chewing, he found the boxes strangely hypnotic.

His ankle was squeezed, manipulated with a practiced deliberateness.

If he screamed, he couldn't remember.

13

His head was extinguished with a bucket of water. Prior to that the sound of a dismembered robot transmuted into the squeak and scrape of a crowbar pulling nails.

The crate split open and the man spilled out.

The sun and air punished him. He fled from them back to that other place.

A dark howling, like air escaping through a breach. Air he wasn't required to breathe.

Bodies at his feet. Unsure if human.

He'd taken a blow to the back of his neck, another to his chin. His sides throbbed with impacts and his legs shook. The smell of his own fear threatened to overwhelm, but it was as nothing to the stench of others.

An explosion introduced a whole new set of players, these heavily armoured and keen for blood. They bounced round the smoke-filled, fractured hold like dice in a cup, pulse weapons discharging.

But he was already fleet of foot, racing round corridors that curved without end and crashing through doors designed to equalize pressure and little else, paper to his scissors. Where he was running to was slow catching up. The blows he'd taken had had an effect.

He stamped his feet and raged at his impotence. His mind was lost. The echoing pulse of man and machine resounded in his veins, threading his limbs with dark messages whilst swamping his brain with light.

'Smoke?'

Miri?

No, a uniformed man with a cigarillo. Friendly enough.

Skidmore lay on his back, naked, staring up at the sky. Not the same sky he had last gazed upon, he reasoned, his vulnerability subsumed by the fact he was clearly worth more alive.

That was another pair of boots he'd lost, he thought, dressed in a smock and moccasins, the morning having lengthened into afternoon and his head cooled significantly.

Once more in a tent, however, this dark and familiar.

Several voices in conversation, to which he paid no regard.

He should have made the connection, he supposed, those brothers on 661 as devout as these, only serving a different purpose.

'Your unpredictability is yielding results,' a voice said. 'This makes some of us nervous. Others...'

Skidmore reckoned five or six in the tent. And he wasn't restrained.

'Your time at the Institute wasn't wasted it seems.'

Politics and religion, he thought.

He had never asked too many questions of the ministers on Perridi. At least not overtly.

Maybe he didn't wish to know the truth. Neither then nor now.

'What do you know of Horatio Holroyd?'

'He's the new master of The Periwinkle.'

'That's all?'

'He...' Skidmore paused.

'Yes?'

'He has Freda.'

'Whom we released.'

Where was this going? he wondered.

'We'd like to send you after Holroyd,' they said. 'But we're not convinced of your loyalties.'

'I have none,' he said.

'As we imagined.'

A coldness ran the length of his spine.

'Nevertheless.'

His ankle was fixed, he realized. That was nice.

Nothing, then, had changed.

He'd lost the egg-shaped parcel, not having ever opened it. Perhaps it was still on Planet 661, but that didn't seem credible given the Terminals lack of interest in why he was there. They knew of his affiliation with Horatio Holroyd and they and Holroyd were interested in the same things. Artefacts. Treasured remains. Religious relics. Yours Truly complicated the picture.

And the other?

That there was an other, Skidmore was convinced. The least tangible corner of the square.

He had reason to distrust all of them. So why did he feel like he'd let Holroyd down on this occasion? The mission had been a success up until he'd driven into the enclave, essentially giving himself up.

Victim of his own foolishness.

It was ridiculous to think Skidmore would betray their nemesis to them, however.

Willingly at least.

Clean underwear and a full belly, even being reunited with his hand fashioned boots.

Days later he stepped off on a familiar looking rock without instructions. That was the true shape of things. Squinting in the raw light he hunkered down and adjusted the wire of his spectacles.

Prepared for whatever, he walked in the direction he was pointed, the ground dry and grassy, the sky blue and the clouds massing. The horizon was hidden beyond a rise, the rise toothed with stones that may once have been a wall. Skidmore sat himself down and, shielding his eyes, gazed upon the valley below.

It had been Holroyd that said he would have to spring Jones himself. And here was his chance, the base with its dozen prefabs about two larger structures in the middle distance, locked behind a perimeter fence. Half a dozen trucks were parked this side of the wire, troopers out of sight. Two dozen or so figures laboured within, either exercising or completing sundry tasks.

Skidmore saw no reason to doubt Pollute was amongst them, likely now wearing khaki.

RD0379.

It would be dark in a few hours. He'd test the fence then, he thought, although he had nothing with which to cut it. The Terminals had dropped him without so much as tobacco. They imagined him resourceful, it appeared. Out of necessity, survival skills Skidmore took for granted. Spots of rain pestered him like insects and he looked around for cover.

Down the hillside was what remained of a stone building long dismantled by either man or nature. It was hard to believe anyone had once lived there, but there was a wall buttressed by earth on its far side that rose a metre above ground. He scurried toward it and pressed his back to the once carefully interlaced stones, a direct link, half buried, to those above on the crest.

Craving a smoke, he closed his eyes.

He imagined a table and a family about it, pioneers not so long removed. There was broth and dark bread, weak beer or weaker tea. The image made him feel happy inside. But a knock at the door brought danger, mother gathering children to her, boys whose knowledge of the world stretched little father than her skirts. Dark skinned boys whose father was taken, beaten and dragged outside, only for another to take his place, tall and cold.

A crackle of lightning woke him. Rain on his cheeks not tears.

The temperature had dropped and the night descended.

Skidmore got to his feet, took a piss, began walking in the direction of the base, some five hundred metres. There were lights within the perimeter but none shone outward. Far from a high security facility, he recalled how many of the men had seemed pleased to be there, his own tenure short and nothing learned beyond the presentation he'd sat through with Able Jones, of which he recalled little. A digest of dos and don'ts. Amusing now, as among the don'ts going AWOL was perhaps uppermost.

He stopped fifty metres from the fence, the rain constant yet easy to ignore. The vehicles parked near the main gate had dwindled to three. Skidmore headed over to the nearest and crawled beneath. There were no guards he could see, either side of the wire. They must be billeted inside.

Distantly, music played. He imagined cards being snapped to tables and cigars smoked.

Might he just wander inside? Unlikely, but what if the fence was symbolic, a border and nothing else? A door opened in the nearest cabin and several men spilled out.

Skidmore thought to spy Jones' moon face among them.

Crawling out from under the truck he approached the gate and examined its chain. He had no tools or effective instruments about him. He found the truck open, however, and rummaging under its seats and in its various compartments came up with a screwdriver and a length of wire, sufficient to tackle the crude lock and allow him passage within. Jones had by now disappeared, but he skirted the radial arrangement of cabins, listening for voices and peeking through misted windows. There seemed much cheer beyond, the incumbents in celebratory mode. Dry and warm whilst he was wet and cold.

Circling, he came at last to a cabin he thought familiar. Impossible to tell for sure given the conditions, but Skidmore was convinced he'd spotted his friend through a gap in floral curtains.

Now to attract that man's attention.

He rapped on the pane. 'Pollution Jones!' Scuttling away into the shadows, like a schoolboy about a prank.

Moments later a face looked through a door, but it wasn't Pollute's.

The face retreated and the door closed, only to be pushed open again. This time a telltale chin.

Skidmore whistled.

Jones gazed over, curious.

He leaned into a light and the other man quickly shut the door behind him.

'Fucking hell, Skidmore; am I glad to see you!'

'Likewise. But we must leave.'

'Already?'

That surprised him.

'What do you mean?'

'Tomorrow's the Big Production,' Jones offered, glassy eyed.

The capitals were enunciated. 'Eh?'

'We're to be projected through space and time!'

'No, we need to get out of here. Take a truck. There's a lake I know.'

'In the shed?

'What? Pollute, you're drunk - or else drugged.'

'In the shed,' he repeated, straining to focus. 'Ready to go.'

'What shed?'

Jones hooked a thumb over his shoulder. 'The big one in the middle.'

'What about it?'

His friend kneeled close and took Skidmore's face in his hands in an effort to focus what small part of his mind still functioned independently.

'A swimming pool,' he said. 'With a thing in it.'

'Shit. Like a trumpet thing?'

Jones reeled backward as he shrugged.

Skidmore recalled the doctor at the lake. Yours Truly was experimenting, he supposed, with technology that may as well be alien. Those housed here being monkeys.

'Okay. Pollute. Listen. We're going there now.'

'Now?'

'Sure. Can you show me the way?'

He nodded enthusiastically and shot off. Skidmore scampered after, thinking there wasn't really anything to lose.

The doors, surprisingly, were open.

A dark flat tile of water was just visible within, a darker shade than the walls surrounding.

Twenty metres square, it seemed to lever upward, in perspective almost like a curtain.

Pollute had lit a cigarillo and Skidmore took it from him, sucking greedily on the paper-wrapped tobacco before discarding it and taking Jones' cold hand.

'Deep breath, okay?'

The grinning moon face nodded.

And they were through.

14

A carnival of souls, which at first he thought resplendent, bled from fissures one step removed.

One step across the firmament.

Two universes to call home.

The wind was such that it was impossible to stand. Land crabs, they clawed at the beach like it were a mountainside.

Everything was black and roaring. The mouth of some inky Hell.

Skidmore felt obliged to concede that he had no control over a destination, that the water, the trumpet, whatever instrument was uppermost, spat him out where it would.

A beach of sharp stones, honed thus by vicious winds, those at his back. He dragged Pollution Jones clear of the freezing water, his flesh burning and his hands and feet as if left behind.

It was all he could do to hold breath in his lungs.

The icy wind scraped his bones.

He willed himself forward, Jones too, on hands and knees toward some imagined shelter, rocks in the distance, cold and hard, yet perhaps offering protection from the abrasive sea.

The elements battered him, yet he kept going, thinking only of the man he had brought into this, perhaps stronger than he looked, only weighed down by unknown drugs, splashing and flailing as together they made their way from the water toward some distant quietude.

With cut palms and bloodied noses, they eventually made it over rough dunes held together by wiry reeds, tumbling down the far side into a trench with a freshwater stream at its bottom, the sky vibrating like a snare drum, causing the million visible stars to strobe.

Skidmore put his arm round Pollute to find him shaking, although from cold or laughter wasn't clear.

They might have a long wait till morning.

At the Institute talk of the future was invariably abstract. Skidmore Shuffledeck's age on arrival was minus six. The future was the past in effect, something counted in reverse. But in his heart, that perpetually boyish organ, he was a ship's captain, the ship given a name long before its time, The Rockett Heel Bar, christened after a shoe repair stand that, in reflection, did more than repair shoes. Although given that's how spaceships were known in the twelve worlds the metaphor was apt. His imagination gave it fins, projections grown from molecular putty, spun out and cast like dragon's wings. And its engine, its engine was massive, the star at its core quietly beating.

Strangely, the Heel Bar seemed more real to him than the future containing it. The ship (as all ships, arguably, given their separation from) existed outside time, regardless rather than in spite of that entropic state. Human experience aside, the universe went unmeasured. Impossible then for Skidmore to believe in his own - premature - demise. An older self already traversed the reach, cobbling, salvaging. It was just a case of making it there from here, a bumpy road as well as a long one, strewn with pitfalls and prone to detours.

Light stroking his eyelids woke him.

Jones was nowhere to be seen.

The trench was as steep but shallower on its far side, and having decided the water running along its bottom was safe to drink Skidmore cautiously raised his head over the top. Under an azure sky the still smouldering remains of a small town lay ruined, buildings punctured and collapsed, scorched an even grey. There was a spectral shape moving amid the rubble, bobbing and rising like a crow. A lone figure, undoubtedly Jones, picking his way at seeming random, looking for anything that might prove useful.

Skidmore was grateful, but, other than carrion, couldn't imagine what he'd find.

Sure enough the pale man returned empty handed.

There were numerous bodies, he said, but they were like glass.

The quietude of the day was in stark contrast to the violence of the night. It was another kind of violence that had leveled the town, however.

Jones offered up the last of his smokes.

'I knew you'd come back.'

Skidmore wondered how long he'd waited. Impossible to keep track of days.

'Was there a doctor in the camp?'

'A physician? Mortimer I think.'

'No. Someone with a science background.'

'Upsflart.'

'Who?'

'They called him the professor. He'd ask a lot of peculiar questions.' Grinning at Skidmore.

'And did people disappear?'

'You did.'

'Yes. Exactly.'

'All the time.'

So Upsflart was sending men through. But, he intuited, they weren't necessarily making it back.

Whatever technology was at work Yours Truly, or representatives thereof, didn't understand the mechanisms involved.

Monkeys were being launched into space.

Pollution Jones simply exhaled. He was with Skidmore and queried nothing.

Skidmore, unusually, was unsure of their next move.

Inland, he thought.

Evolution dictated no other course.

THREE: PREVIOUS CONTRADICTION

1

The truth was often hidden in plain sight. His mother, sitting with her legs crossed amid a gaggle of ministers, several with disapproving looks on their faces, may have said as much. Skidmore couldn't remember. She had just given a brief speech. He still felt numb inside. Miri's death was the reason they were gathered here. And Skidmore had murdered him.

It was a necessary thing for which he was congratulated. Only one of them could succeed. That was the challenge.

Soon he would leave the Institute and begin his life in the real world.

But he would do so alone.

Not that leaving Perridi was any hardship. He had come to realize its falseness, even if the extent of the deception would take many years to sink in.

Later, dining alone with his mother, Skidmore made tentative enquiries as to her motives in bringing him here in the first instance. Not that he expected an answer; she seldom offered those; but having quashed the fear and guilt down he felt oddly emboldened. She forestalled him, however, with a question of her own.

'Do you remember your father?'

The man she never talked of.

Skidmore nodded, cutting his steak.

She raised her wine glass and smiled. 'Good.'

That was all? He felt at once relieved and undermined.

He'd killed Miri with a spade. Cracked his head open like an egg.

Two spoons. One spoon winning at the last, their tracks retraced to the girl in the barn who Miri Mirabeau thought to rape.

Not a real girl, or a real barn, but a real reaction as it turned out, blood and brains, and systemic glass.

Not. As Mirabeau was a robot, an appendage of the Institute assigned to Skidmore as a tutorial aid.

His passion had been real enough. He'd raised the spade and brought it down hard, smashing his friend's skull. Useless thereafter to pretend he knew, to suppose he understood.

Years, as they were counted by the subconscious Earth-trained mind, had passed, yet still Mirabeau travelled with Shuffledeck.

Two spoons.

Perhaps Jones was a replacement. He needed someone besides himself, a mirror upon which to project his own humanity in an attempt to understand it.

Away from the coast this world stretched into an endless forest of pale trees most over a hundred metres in height. Despite a variety of swarming insects the greatest danger came from falling fruit, both men victim to thankfully soft drupes, sweet tangy flesh exploding on contact, leaving them drenched and slightly concussed. A magnet for scuttling beetles, although these were easily crunched underfoot and proved equally fleshy and edible.

They washed the residue off in fast-running streams and continued for days, each as long as the last, until eventually the trees stopped at the edge of a gorge.

'Looks man-made,' said Pollute.

A ten kilometre wide scar, two kilometres deep at its middle, the gorge reminded Skidmore of a drained sea.

Shading his eyes he peered into the depths but failed to identify any activity. The place was long abandoned.

The descent was through clay initially, loose sedimentary rock thereafter that gave way to coal. He'd heard of coal still being harvested on backworlds, extracted for its carbon content rather than burned as fuel. That seemed the likely scenario here. A destructive process, the land appeared to have been gouged out by a giant machine.

The pair slipped and slid their way down the open face, pausing as the slope became rockier. There was no way they were going to climb the other side. Neither suggested it anyway, there being an unspoken agreement to continue down as far as they could then turn in the direction of the setting sun, the last of the light populating the gorge with monstrous shadows, soon merged to a uniform black as that star blinked out.

A billion others took over.

They froze as all about gleamed silver fishes.

Settling to sleep, Skidmore wondered how far the gorge might run. They needed to find an end, if not to the mine workings then their protracted sojourning. They needed help, he conceded.

There had never been any question of heading back the way they'd come. Too unpredictable. That is to say, back in the frying pan. And something about travelling in space without the surety of a ship addled Skidmore's brain, as if every time he did a piece of his memory was chipped away. To reside where? The question bothered him. As did the rain, cold and sudden. The weather had been benign since their arrival. That was about to change, stars obscured and illusory fishes drowned in darkness as, Skidmore suddenly realized, the base of the gorge began to flood.

He panicked, unable to locate Jones. A hand on his collar tugged him upward and together they climbed, the water rising fast, the rain lashing. For a moment it seemed they would be overwhelmed and carried off, but the rising water slowed as the gorge widened proportionally and they were able to escape, albeit slick with liquid coal dust and near exhaustion.

Skidmore shouted to Jones, who he could barely see, his shape breaking shadows. A few hundred metres up they appeared safe from the torrent. The ground levelled out unexpectantly and he ran into his friend.

The rain bounced off a road. The road wound into a tunnel. They stood in silence, dripping.

Momentarily, he was stood at a bus stop with Miri.

'Fucking hell.'

The image persisted.

Parked in the tunnel, shimmering in ghost light, was what looked like a vehicle.

Jones was already half way over to it, Skidmore quick to follow, eyes fixed on the lighter shape, somehow suspicious.

The dynamic of their relationship had changed, he thought. But he'd been through too much lately to argue. Jones' casual acceptance of whatever was thrown up was perhaps feigned. Skidmore though was sure of a pattern, like he was repeating the same set of circumstances, made to do so till he got it right. The vehicle wasn't going anywhere, being burned out, but it did suggest the possibility of others. Moreover, it was still warm.

Military activity on a backworld did at least suggest a level of technology capable of supplying a means off. Whatever the nature of the conflict. That remained to be seen. For now Skidmore and Pollution Jones had something other than their wet skins to think about. Welcome in itself, and not so far removed. They scavenged the vehicle - as much for warmth as anything of use - and came up with a sidearm and a packet of biscuits.

The tunnel wound a short way along the gorge before emerging into open air, the rain a silvery darkness, visualized via sound.

There was a flash of light ahead, a blinding electric arc that momentarily lit up a subsequent tunnel like the sweep of a lighthouse beam. As one they reeled as if struck, the unexpected luminescence burning through unguarded retinae. Neither was in any hurry to investigate, certainly not till the afterglow mellowed, which would take some time.

Useless getting too close before they knew more of what it was they were about to stumble over.

Better to stick heads in rain and eat biscuits.

The sky falling silent seemed like their cue. Maybe an hour had passed, thought Skidmore. He'd eaten the last biscuit but the sidearm was in Jones' possession. Fair enough.

They walked cautiously to the next tunnel, water draining into the gorge the only sound.

A cluster of shapes, three or four bodies, were fused as one and still radiating in the coal wall.

Pollute tapped a yellowish limb with the snout of the gun and a chunk broke off.

'Yikes.'

'Overkill,' commented Skidmore, not sure he understood what it was he was looking at.

'Not human,' said Jones. 'Flesh burns. Bone disintegrates.'

He would know.

'Robots?'

'You're more familiar with those than me.'

Skidmore supposed he was. Then again, nothing about these forms suggested an autonomic machine.

Whatever had killed them was long gone. They advanced cautiously all the same, the tunnel blacker and longer than the last. Yet at its end the water gleamed brighter than before and they emerged into the first hints of morning.

The gorge filled with spectral colour, a flowering of light that caused them to shade their eyes once more. Skidmore couldn't resist peeking through his fingers though, bands of red and orange twisting, purple and blue spinning away as the sun impinged. The sky was now cloudless and a deeper azure. Whatever this world was, it had been, and perhaps still remained, beautiful.

An explosion echoed distantly.

A second.

This had been a single tunnel once, Skidmore thought. One tunnel, deep underground, now largely destroyed, or put to another purpose.

The third explosion was different, and soon a spaceship could be seen tearing up through the azure, turning it pale.

The coal vibrating below their feet, Skidmore and Jones exchanged questioning looks. Their questions were quite different, Shuffledeck supposed, but they both knew something was strange.

Following the road through the morning brought only one further tunnel section, empty and short. Hunger began to slow them but neither cared to admit it, trudging on toward whatever lay beyond the next bend, over a horizon falsely close, hidden in the gorge about a turn.

It was too much of a climb to make it out any other way, although the promise of watery fruits and meaty insects was appealing.

They stuck to the coaly road and by mid afternoon, having traversed a number of kilometres, were rewarded by the proximity of a buckled, two hundred metre crane.

That accounted for one explosion, smoke still rising from the crippled machine, squat in the artificial valley as the water receded beneath its tracks.

Concerned less about why it was here as what it may contain, the pair skipped down toward the disabled structure. Whoever had attacked it was nowhere to be seen, although possibly watching, a risk absorbed and countermanded as they climbed first the broken tracks and second a ladder leading up to a windowed compartment. The door to it was open. There wasn't anything inside besides two trestle tables with accompanying stools, fixed to the floor and person size. So the crane had had a crew. They left the compartment and followed the ladder up, next stop a control cabin big enough to accommodate them both. From here the view was panoramic and the purpose of the crane made apparent, at least as far as it went, as from the outstretched arm descended a cable that disappeared through the coal, like a fishing line through an ice floe.

Pollute had found storage lockers and was tearing them open.

Disappointingly, nothing to eat, but he came up with a first aid kit, a flare gun and a coil of ten millimetre wire labelled "emergency only". Interestingly, a label in an unknown language Skidmore had no trouble reading.

A fourth explosion reverberated up through the superstructure and caused the cabin to keel alarmingly.

Skidmore imagined his inner ears as two lifeboats as he slid across the floor.

For the second time Jones grabbed his collar, pulling him toward the only available exit.

They clambered up over the leaning cabin side and made it onto the winding gear above, a secondary engine idle, the metal framework branching out fore and aft. It was like being on a water-borne vessel, Skidmore thought, high in the rigging as a storm set in. There were no sails to manage, rather their own mortality as the crane toppled slowly, a stubborn, alien tree.

Gauging where it might come down they braced themselves, ready to jump.

Skidmore more or less stepped off, trying not to laugh as Pollute had got his feet entangled and fallen on his face. The twisted body of the crane jerked with a metal whine, its projected jib hauling the mass back around, anchored by the cable sunk below. It was a tortured animal, deaths throes almost balletic, and they were back on the road.

Still no sign of the bombers. A good thing, thought Shuffledeck. Jones now had two guns tucked inside his khaki.

They walked past noon, the temperature exaggerated within the gorge. Few words passed between them.

There were regular pools of water at least, but no life, insect or otherwise crossed their path.

Skidmore found himself staring at an image in the haze for a protracted time before realizing it wasn't a rock formation but an inverted ship of some kind, nose down and scarred. Without them noticing the ground level had risen considerably and the surrounding forest was visible again. Still some way removed, they approached at a trot, breaths streaming, limbs and bellies aching. The ship was planted at the head of the gorge like a marker. Three klicks, he estimated, the body of the vessel rising a similar distance. Perhaps not a ship at all, rather some giant cargo container.

Intrigued, he and Jones drew nearer, the ground broken and burned underfoot, a rent in the side of the container that appeared familiar, tall and black and, Skidmore felt, casting its own negative shadow.

Jones walked right in.

Skidmore gazed at the nearest trees, shattered and bent.

He thought to see shapes move beyond them, but couldn't be sure.

'Hey, Skidmore!'

He wafted a palm at a fly, heard a zing from behind.

Something tugged at his trouser leg.

'Hey!'

A series of zings rang out, along with a number of phuts.

They were shooting, he told himself, belatedly running for cover.

Inside was cold and echoing, twisted stanchions radiating like filaments in bone.

The light was thin and vague but he made Pollute out and hurried across to him, his pale face grinning and head shaking.

'Sometimes I wonder about you,' he said.

Skidmore shrugged. This whole buckled edifice that had tumbled from the heavens spoke to him distantly, like the memory of a dream.

The ground was ruptured beneath them and littered with debris, objects large and small, among them a yellowish mass part buried, reminiscent of a giant octopus. Its underparts at least. Or so he imagined them, the octopus upside down.

'Huh?' Jones.

Zing.

He slapped his friend on the shoulder and they made their way over.

It was, Skidmore believed, an MPV. Although he had seen nothing like it before, their means of exit was apparent. They just had to find a way aboard.

Whoever was shooting ought to be close. Maybe they would stay outside. Maybe they wouldn't. If there were to be further explosions they didn't have much time.

Both Jones and Skidmore clambered over the vaguely glowing hull. It was Jones though who uncovered the ladder.

They dug it out and against a backdrop of crackling, echoing gunshots, sticks in a fire, uncovered and unsealed a hatch.

Inside a waxy light bathed them.

Skidmore recalled the SSS Celestine. Whilst similar of purpose this vessel appeared nothing like that.

It was like being in an egg sac. Or a stomach. There was nothing artificially complicated here. Still, he was clueless, Pollute more so, staring at Skidmore with an unspoken question whilst the other man searched for clues, a means of energizing the MPV and making good their escape.

Supposing it wasn't stuc, jammed by superstructure.

He poked a console tentatively and nothing happened.

He dragged himself sideways across a tensile surface and punched a large red button.

2

Pollution Jones eyed Skidmore coldly.

There was nothing to eat.

The unfamiliar console wasn't giving up much, but the brown man at least carried a layer a fat.

Jones, thin and pale, looked ready to sharpen his incisors.

They were attached to the hull of an unidentified vessel. The MPV had escaped the scene as it was doubtless programmed to do, and latched on to the nearest chunk of space hardware.

Friendly space hardware?

Who knew...shrugged Shuffledeck. Neither ship nor MPV were conversing, if that was a clue.

Covertly, then, like a tick on a cow's arse.

They needed to burrow in.

They needed suits but none were found in the quietly surreal cabin.

Jones, inverted, folded his arms.

Skidmore closed his eyes and communed with the unfamiliar, sensing its delicacy and inviting it to connect.

Suddenly he was in a whole other space.

The walls looked to have been carved from soap.

His brain desperately tried to project outlines, but failed. It was like a womb, he thought, sublime and infinitely comfortable.

His eyes opened and he found he was staring directly at a concerned face, Pollute's curious expression at once comical and alarming.

'I thought you were dead.'

An extended period of time had elapsed.

He could access the console fully now, he realized. He could plug in.

The Eternity was their host, a pilotless megafreighter headed seemingly nowhere. No crew, no avatar.

Skidmore detached them from the hull to a distance of five thousand kilometres and via the console stared down upon what at this close proximity looked like the scaly outside of a humpback whale.

There were rivets in the superstructure, each a mountain, burial mounds of gods stitching an endlessly overlapping surface.

Any one might offer an entry.

With that in mind, and Pollution's confused features at the periphery, an embedded Shuffledeck brought the MPV down on what he couldn't help think of as an expectant caldera.

The small yellow ship seemed to fight him a little and he relinquished control, allowing the vessel to skip a short way (several kilometres) and align itself with an - to Skidmore - invisible docking port.

The MPV's tentacled underparts sucked it tight and a vortex opened in the floor.

Jones was clearly impressed.

Less impressive was the ladder leading down.

They took it anyway, clambering in pseudo-gravity through a series of rippling atmospheric fields, until they set foot on a luminous white deck.

Everything was pristine, unbesmirched by man. Even the air tasted new, both of them chewing on it for sustenance even as their stomachs complained. They needed to find food, or else a deep freeze.

A small pig came into view along a corridor.

Pollute covering his mouth with his hand said it all.

It would be the last he'd see of the moon-faced man for a while.

Skidmore felt the image presented of The Eternity's interior was being drawn from his subconscious somehow. No spaceship he had encountered looked this good on the inside. That his tenure in reality was short diluted the conceit only slightly. He pushed a button and stepped into an elevator.

Stepping out into an identical corridor he walked without end.

Given the size of the ship he might walk forever.

Paused, a door appeared.

He peered at it suspiciously.

The door opened and he stepped into a familiar space, the galley of The Periwinkle, Freda there kneading dough.

She gazed up but didn't appear surprised to see him.

Skidmore poured himself a coffee and dropped two slices into the toaster.

He could just see one of Jart's legs emerging from a chair, the bulk of her hidden behind its back.

'They'll be here in a while,' said Freda.

'The Terminals?'

She looked at him. 'Father Christmas and his reindeer.'

The toaster popped, sparing him the necessity of a reply.

They'd hand over the suitcase. That was the plan. It made no difference what was in it.

She watched him eat with mild curiosity, the toaster on repeat and the butter dish under constant assault.

'What to tell me where you've been?'

Skidmore froze.

'I mean that's quite an appetite for a morning's reading. Not to mention you look terrible.'

'The engine,' he said round a mouthful. 'I had to crawl through some stuff.'

She nodded disbelievingly. 'Oh.' Knowing he lied. 'And here I imagined you'd stumbled on something useful to our situation and were about to share.'

It was Jart that laughed, extending her visible leg and dangling a high heel from her toes. Only the laugh seemed much farther away.

Freda was staring at him, hands covered in flour, a loose curl of blonde hair sticking out like a spring from her forehead.

She was what, fifteen years older than him?

'I'll get ready,' he said, putting the toast down and draining the last of the coffee, leaving by the same door he'd entered.

In the corridor he bent double, grasping at his stomach as if stabbed. Coffee dribbled from his nose and his eyes rolled upward in his skull. It was all he could do to keep his feet under him.

Whatever had just taken place had been real. That was implicit. But he wasn't on The Periwinkle. Here was here.

He heard a noise, that of a man chasing a pig, and walked in its direction.

He had suspected for some time there were gaps in his memory. Spaces in his head he didn't understand. Suddenly those spaces were being filled, but the content, what they were being filled with, made no sense to Skidmore whatsoever, scripted in a mental language he failed to recognize.

Major Spatchcock, walking alongside him with an arm across his shoulders, spoke without sound, mouthing words he failed to catch.

He called his mother, determined to ask the one question he'd always suppressed, but her autoreply message was dismissive.

He wore his legs to stumps and grew a beard.

Occasionally the lights flickered, although whether in the corridors of his mind or The Eternity, Skidmore couldn't say.

Perhaps Horatio Holroyd had the answers. If he opened enough doors he was sure to find the pirate. But that was no way to proceed. The doors, which manifested at random, although with practice he believed he might summon them, were in fact projected glimpses, snapshots of another time and place, one he might visit with and engage on a more permanent level via the interstices of a trumpet, some riveted, fluted instrument of transition, of which he was safe in supposing there were many. The water he guessed to be some primitive safety net. That and camouflage, a screen from curious eyes. He wondered if the Terminals knew of this orchestra strewn across the reach. Given their deployment in such Skidmore imagined they did. Whether they were willing to investigate as thoroughly as Yours Truly, despatching willing volunteers, scraping them up afterward or losing them forever, was another question. The Terminals were more patient, employing Skidmore to do their dirty work. In the name of research, to fetch and carry bones. He might not feel he was owned, but he was without doubt as loyal as any hound.

Let off the leash, he didn't run far.

Ultimately, a destination.

A hall of monumental size, as empty as it was full, the guts of the galactic whale into whose material he had burrowed.

The fact of it didn't surprise him. He had guessed as much from the humpback's riveted skin. Here though was the epicentre, the control room, a monolithic organ composed of flutes and reeds, pipes whose dimensions were unknowable, the whale's many-times-folded intestines. From here it was possible to travel anywhere, and probably any when.

Had it grown thus? he wondered. Had it been manufactured, or did it simply exist, as space and time existed, as music existed; an expression, some believed, of the human soul.

It was beautiful. And dangerous.

Silent.

Given the choice of going anywhere, Skidmore hesitated. Being the wealthiest man in the known galaxy had its drawbacks. For one, he wasn't greedy. Neither was he convinced of the possibility - or the wisdom - of changing the past. Surely such was a fool's errand. No, this genie needed to be approached with caution.

He did not understand. That much he knew.

His actions might not even be his own.

The gleaming tubes beguiled, their oily superficies shimmering, their magnitude beyond comprehension.

There was simply too much visual information here for his brain to deal with.

His feet falling on grass was almost unexpected.

There were birds as well as clouds in the sky and plants and trees abounded.

The bullet passed through him, high in his chest just below the clavicle. He fell to his knees, unclear what had occurred, and then got back up again.

He could hear the sea and walked in that direction.

The breeze brought smells of a shoreline thick with life, both out in the water and on the strand, an abundance of sun loungers and umbrellas, hats and bathing costumes. There were drinks in glasses and buckets and spades. He sat on a dune and drank it all in, the soft waves and the fine sand, the colours of flesh and fabric. It was not unlike the beach where he had first met Captain Munroe.

Men approached from behind and one struck him across the back of his neck.

He was lifted, bleeding and barely conscious, onto the flat of an electric cart and quietly, discreetly, without any fuss, wheeled away.

Yours Truly wasn't happy, he saw.

'Not sure how you're alive,' she said, raising an eyebrow. 'Still, the doctor is pleased to re-make your acquaintance.'

Upsflart, he knew.

Skidmore had, in part intentionally, rejoined the experiment.

They ran tests and asked him to identify things in boxes. They took his blood and urine with a maniacal glee, somehow supposing it magical. They catered to his every need.

Skidmore smoked their cigars and ate their puddings, not sure how long he could keep this up and whether he should explore his sexuality.

He tugged the wiry hair protruding from his navel and wondered how they'd failed to identify it as unnatural. Unless of course Upsflart had planted the thing. Somehow he thought that unlikely. What then? It was just a thick hair, he supposed, not some imagined antenna.

He couldn't necessarily trust his own body.

Ensconced in a suite in a beachfront hotel he sat on the balcony drinking iced tea and wondered how long he had before they ran out of ideas and killed him. Surely a dissection would prove of value. Parts of him might be used to armour others against the vagaries of trumpeting, the evidence of those lost monkeys displayed previous, men squashed and exploded, turned inside out and sent insane by the act of transition, by setting foot in the water, or else crawling onto land.

That Yours Truly's ambitions were military were obvious. She wished to despatch an army. Via space that was cumbersome and obvious. Too easily thwarted. Expensive and impractical. Through a spatial backdoor, however. One man or several might seed revolution. The twelve worlds outnumbered themselves already, and BMC had sights set on adding to its flock.

Kill him or commission him maybe.

But first he wished to locate Holroyd.

3

He was surprisingly good at golf. A mechanical set of actions, the propelling of a spherical object via a stick with a foot on the end swung through an arc toward a small hole some distance removed.

Professor Upsflart, as he preferred to be known, was impressed, if not a little disgruntled, his own efforts somewhat haphazard and a bag-toting attendant sent to search for his ball in the undergrowth more than once.

'You've played before?'

Skidmore stared blankly.

Upsflart was a small thin man with hair that seemed to change colour with the ambient light.

He'd greeted Skidmore that morning with a breezy shake of the hand and gone into a discourse about false memory syndrome, which chimed with his "guest" but was largely ignored.

'Of course, golf is a metaphor for life,' the professor said, following his latest blunder. 'One wields the club with the best intentions, only for a series of steadily less controllable events to intercede, each more disastrously than the last.'

Skidmore hit a hole in one on the sixth.

'It's physiological of course,' commented the professor. 'Your wound has healed nicely I think.'

Skidmore agreed. He'd never felt better. A life of comfort, leisure and indolence agreed with him.

But for how long?

Already he was bored.

He craved, he realized, a degree of chaos. Part of the mechanical equation demanded maintenance, a pre-emptive fix. Or a reactive one.

The hotel was full of people who smiled briefly but steered clear of him. They occupied a different universe, one shoeboxed on a high shelf in a forgotten wardrobe. Skidmore had observed their behaviour much as Upsflart observed his. They seemed content to sit idly whilst in the background events unfolded; largely, he supposed, to their benefit. Still, he failed to understand their detachment.

'We all desire something,' Upsflart answered in regard to his query. 'For most it is security. Wealth and power are just extensions of that, further defensive walls about a castle built of stones acquired from those less gifted or fortunate.'

An incomplete sentence, he imagined.

'For others it is knowledge,' continued the professor, planting his tee and rolling his shoulders before finding the centre of the fairway. He grinned. 'Ah! And you?'

That was easy. Skidmore wanted his own ship. To disappear thereafter and not be beholden to any power, other than that of an engine.

A loveless thing. A contradiction.

His sliced drive hit a tree and bounced back into play fifty metres ahead of Upsflart's ball.

'Your talent for survival aptly demonstrated.'

He ought to be more concerned about what they weren't telling him. There was a laboratory in the basement of the hotel, he recalled, having spent more time than he was aware of within its tubed and spangled walls.

The clock in his brain informed him it was his twenty-first birthday in three days.

He wondered if his hosts knew this.

After nine holes Shuffledeck was leading by seven.

Professor Upsflart had arranged a picnic, three folding chairs about a round table laden with manicured sandwiches and sculpted cakes.

Attendants fussed and poured tea. The professor stuffed his mouth. The third chair remained empty, a cypher Skidmore could not fail to be intimidated by. He filled his stomach one portion at a time and remained successfully unflustered as Upsflart emptied tea into his saucer and drank nosily from it.

The world turned, the grass grew, and a breeze stirred the hair on his arms, the hair he never normally gave much thought to.

'A man once said that when engineering becomes architecture then man has truly conquered nature - but nothing good ever came of conquering nature.'

Skidmore reckoned not. The point seemed to be that man, in his murderous pride and unlimited ambition, was just as irrepressible.

Dangerous, too.

'Bring us Holroyd's head and you'll get your ship.'

The third chair remained unoccupied.

'Fail us and we'll put you right back where we found you.'

He didn't understand well enough, but it didn't seem to matter.

Upsflart with a mouth yet crammed with cake.

TPG.

He still had his boots at least.

The weather was cold and, dressed in his usual overalls with the added luxury of a backpack of goodies, he found himself once again in need of shelter.

The foothills looked familiar and he walked briskly in their direction, one eye on a threatening sky, clouds layered, the thinnest like vapour trails, but no indication of the orbital. Different hemisphere? Maybe it wasn't geo-stationary. Although that didn't ring true somehow.

This might not be The Proving Ground after all.

Putting the likelihood aside Skidmore thought briefly of Pollution Jones, lost to him temporarily. He wouldn't come to any harm on The Eternity, surely. But he could only deal with what was closest to hand.

The grass was long here, over his head in places. Easy enough to walk through, yet offering excellent cover.

A sudden break in it revealed the passage of a wheeled or tracked vehicle. Two metres across, an undulating road of flattened stalks that had not had time to recover.

Whatever had made the road had travelled east to west, whilst Skidmore was headed north, so he chose to ignore it.

Soon after he crossed another similar track, and this time heard the distant thrum of an engine.

He was in the middle of a low valley many klicks from higher ground. If spotted capture was inevitable.

Skidmore continued as before, if a little more hurriedly. He could hear other engines now and was nearly run down by a low-slung vehicle, three of four persons riding on its netted back, camouflage stretched over a heavy machine-gun.

There was nowhere to hide. Just the obscuring grass stems, thin, pale and tall, the opposite of himself.

He could lie down but that threw up the likelihood of being crushed. Better to stay on his feet.

At least a dozen vehicles passed within close distance. Skidmore though managed to evade discovery and soon the grass was quiet again, the day waning and the hills within reach.

At no point since he'd emerged from the broad scar of a sluggish river had he stopped for more than a few seconds, he realized, impetus being uppermost, clothes drying and bones animated against the ever-freshening chill. And he wasn't about to, pushing on toward a cave he could already visualize.

The grass shortened and ran out, giving way to scrub.

Rocks protruded and the last of the light died.

He skipped up a ladder of stones and discovered an overhang, unshouldered the backpack and nestled beneath on his haunches.

There was water and powdered food, a torch that surprisingly wasn't also a pair of binoculars, a large hunting knife with various adaptations built in to its handle, a medikit, a blanket, and - Skidmore grinning - a telescope, extendable and infrared, with which he surveyed the horizon.

Nothing moved that he could see. Collapsing the telescope he pushed it in a pocket, discovering thereafter, at the bottom of the pack, a lighter and a pouch of tobacco.

Dismissing the idea of a fire he manoeuvred in among the rocks as far as he could, wrapped the blanket round him, drank and ate as one, and perched on the backpack rolled a cigarillo.

Thunder woke him, distant flashes. A light mist enveloped the hillside, muting everything. The sky overhead had cleared though. Skidmore hunched up, back stiff, and fishing for the telescope crabbed to where he had a more panoramic view.

Not thunder at all but gunfire, a battle raging twenty kilometres removed, deep in the blazing grass. He remembered what he'd been told of the entertainments available here, the pairing of forces and, effectively, trial by combat. The orbital was still beyond the horizon, but it was easy to imagine thousands there watching this spectacle, favourites marked and bets placed. More than anything this was the truth of the twelve worlds. Bulk Manufacturing Centre, specializing in arms and land-based military hardware.

He wondered what the dispute was about. Not territory; not here at least. Perhaps a diplomatic slight or else some disagreement over cattle. The combatants may even be volunteers, with a smattering of mercenaries to offer spine. The fire and bullets were real enough. And the dead? There was always a weapon to pierce an armour, smart rounds and stealthy shrapnel. Or maybe they were just play acting. Practice for a coming invasion.

Something passed overhead that made his flesh tingle.

'Cold shifting,' Freda proudly announced. 'I'm getting pretty good at it.'

It was possible to hide a spaceship in its own shadow.

Unannounced, here she was with Celestine, somewhere The Periwinkle strobing almost to the point of a stall, balanced on the edge of its own black hole.

Jart would have kittens.

'Jart?'

'No longer present,' she confessed with a shrug that suggested she knew more. 'The captain pilots her now.'

'How is that even possible?'

Freda sighed, affectedly. She was a bad actor.

'Holroyd is a man of many talents.'

Skidmore decided to drop it. She was here, for him, on Horatio Holroyd's command. And he wanted Holroyd, although how that might transpire he hadn't thought through. Yours Truly's promise of a ship was smoke, he believed. He'd be better off offering the captain up to the Terminals.

Dawn was upon them but Freda didn't appear concerned, satisfied of her invisibility.

Maybe now was a good time to ask her about her kids.

'What are Holroyd's plans?'

'For you?'

'Specifically.'

'He wants to ask you some questions regarding Planet 661.'

Skidmore wondered what to tell her. His mission had been a success. Right up till he'd taken his eye off the ball.

'Is he patched in?'

'Yes.'

'Then he can ask me himself.'

She smiled. 'I'm to take you back.'

'And if I don't wish to go?'

It hadn't occurred to him previously, but something about this unfolding scenario was ringing alarm bells. Ones he might have previously ignored.

Freda evinced surprise. 'I'm not armed,' she said. 'It wasn't believed necessary to coerce you.'

Whilst Skidmore had a large knife.

He was disturbed by the image of Miri Mirabeau's imploding head. Bit Miri had been a robot. Could he kill a person?

'What will you do here if I leave?' she asked. 'What do you hope to achieve?'

He could fly Celestine, he felt. Hop, skip and jump to another where and when.

'No,' said Skidmore.

Freda folded her arms and pressed her lips together. 'No?'

'There are things I want to do first,' he told her, unsure in himself what they were. 'And besides...'

A raised eyebrow.

'I don't need your help.'

He didn't blame her, he thought. Siding with Holroyd was less of a choice than a necessity. Yet he couldn't trust her either. If he ever had. Skidmore needed to come upon the captain of The Periwinkle in his own way. He understood that now. Jones aside, he was alone.

Strangely, he thought Holroyd would understand.

The battle had subsided, scorched grass and burnt out vehicles its fading signature. Skidmore was tempted to investigate. Wheeled transport would prove advantageous, especially now he'd passed on the space kind. That wasn't his direction, however. His direction was north.
Freda had gifted him a loaf. Pulling chunks from it he walked ever upward, the hills rounded yet truncated by random fault lines, rift valleys small and large that left in their wake scree-laden escarpments. It occurred to him that encountering Freda on this world was not unlike seeing her aboard the megalithic orchestral hall that was The Eternity. Time and space may well have been corrupted, this suggested, in more ways than he knew. Or was it Upsflart's echo resonating in his skull? The professor whose experiments involved live subjects. There were no answers, Skidmore told himself. Or, if there were, they were written in a language no human being could understand.

As an insight it didn't really surprise him. He'd become practiced at walking and thinking, thinking and walking on an autonomic plane. The machine universe was out there, intersecting the universe of man.

Popular conception gave the advent of artificial intelligence to be simultaneous with faster than light space travel. Mundane as that now sounded, it was the future raw three generations removed. Not that the shifting of computerized consciousness caused a ripple. That came later. Followed by a migration of machines to the galaxy's far side.

The benefits were immediate. A ship gained an animus, an all-but-living navigator to whom the reach was not empty, rather a landscape as real as any found on a living world. Impossible to speculate on or comprehend. Not unlike squeezing a star into a suitcase.

A chicken and egg story.

He needed gloves, Skidmore thought.

The rocks were sharp and grown steeper. He clambered more and more. He reached out and climbed.

The bread was soon gone, so to the powdered food.

There was a ready supply of water from streams.

Several days and nights passed. The hills turned into a mountain from whose summit the orbital finally hove into view.

Fixing the telescope on it the orb resembled nothing more than a crack in the lens.

Better to look down.

A hollow mountain. A spent volcano whose caldera was occupied by a mirror smooth lake.

4

He was having trouble deciphering the colours. They seemed to indicate mood as much as meaning, a spectral language the novice was at pains to understand, eyes strained and head complaining. Possibly he was trying too hard. That and it was difficult to put aside hardwired human conventions, the attitude of limbs and the false attributes of projected features, what he thought he saw as interpreted by a brain programmed in human.

That they chose to mimic a roughly human form only complicated matters. For these were machine.

It was useless asking questions of a genus that lacked speech. Perhaps he radiated his own clumsy spectra. In which case he hoped they were patient, and had a sense of humour.

Still, Skidmore was comfortable here. There was an absence of time.

He was free to wander, also. A small robot accompanied him, although this translated as a courtesy, its scarred case and stumpy legs reminding him of the smart box he had met on the carapace of a ship tethered to the orb. The package he'd secured. A memory incomplete. Water running over tiles and a rivulet of blood.

He was on a ship unlike any ship, massive, on the scale of The Eternity, yet entirely different. Whereas that vessel resembled a humpback this - he imagined from the inside \- was like a flower, clustered mathematical similarities centring a nexus of petals, the former myriad individual polyps crammed with life, giant greenhouses filled with plants and trees, the latter improbably large sails gently buffeted by secret astral currents.

Many of the greenhouses were filed with water and it was via one of these he had come aboard, nose to nose with exotic fishes, although perhaps none quite as exotic as Skidmore Shuffledeck.

All was at peace here, including himself, something which came as a surprise, as his stoicism was his foundation, and he steady upon it, only once the weight of days was removed that foundation was revealed to be built on sand. That he was in denial was obvious. His suppressed emotions were rotting fruit capped in a jar he had never dared open. Through the glass they appeared fine, his fleshy demons, locked away along with their stench.

Not that he was ready to open the jar yet. But at least he now acknowledged its label.

The occupants of this ship, the machine animated people whose bodies shone, occupied a different reality. One day he might come to understand, but Skidmore fancied that day was far removed. His presence here evinced a commonality, he thought. There was something in his manufacture, his genetic code, his blood and bone construction, that was more than human, that enabled him to be this side of a fundamental divide. He needed to find out what that thing was. He needed to experience and learn.

He found himself spending extended periods in a house atop a stamen filled with trees like blood-coloured broccoli. The light was near pink and the trees could be heard to breathe. Animals slipped and leapt, lithe as cats and pliant as snakes. They feasted on dropped cones like hearts and chased down smaller, ratlike creatures with overgrown ears and eyes. The sap they drank was dark. Skidmore liked to float in it naked. His mind would flash back to the liquid-filled tanks Professor Upsflart had transited him through, their purpose unknown, yet occupying them again this way he was able to tap into further, subsequent flashbacks, violent scenes as if from a nightmare. Not his own memories, he theorized, but a connected other's.

When he emerged it was often to an audience of sitting cats, stygian and curious, ravenous beasts that offered him no threat, their teeth visibly sharp and their eyes dark pools of predatorial exactness.

They knew no untruths, he thought.

He envied them.

The end when it came was sudden but by no means swift. An attack launched to deadly effect, fire its prominent weapon, incendiaries peppered throughout the macrocosm that was the nameless ship. The greenhouses were destroyed and their contents spilled into space, fracturing and dying like so much animated dust. Walls of pressure rippled and burst. Colours were bleached and lights quenched, and all from afar.

Skidmore was sleeping. The perturbation as much within as without. He snapped awake like a trap, one set to snare his fleeing soul. Fastening it down, he gathered his clothes and belongings and made his way through the ship's convoluted interior, a press of bodies seemingly huddled at every turn, the occupants gathered into groups of a dozen or so. Melding, he thought, becoming one and burgeoning with an individual light. They travelled, and Skidmore did too, although his means of escape was rapidly being vaporized.

The flower's outstretched petals blackened and curled. Its cargo of life choked and burned. Trees, plants, birds, animals and fishes, all would perish, all would be destroyed, Skidmore along with them if he wasn't quick, clambering the airless pathways of a once living vessel, unable to shake the idea this was about him, the target himself, the danger inherent, scrabbling yet patient, measuring his breath as he found his way to a body of water still intact.

Deep in its clarity, submerged and protected, he was able to view the destruction as if through a lens, a heartbreaking panorama of catastrophic collapse that advanced like a disease.

There was no defence. No protection against the assault.

He closed his eyes briefly and opened his mouth.

Clawed at a beach of painfully hot sand, the light stark and burning through his spectacle lenses, so much that he tore them off.

Dragging his feet under him Skidmore pulled his backpack over his head, that and the water cooling him somewhat as he struggled ashore and made his way hastily toward the sparse cover of surprisingly lush vegetation, large bleached leaves under whose protection he was able to shelter.

He cut a stem and squeezed liquid from it with which he washed his hands and face.

Time had found him once again.

He sat and breathed and it counted, the urgency of the moment nagging at him, the expectancy of the future in irritating counterpoint.

But that paled by what caught his eye, the emerging shape of a man from the water, struggling and burdened, suited up, collapsing on the beach thereafter and not moving, only for a second and third to come behind, unidentifiable travellers who each took an arm and raised their comrade, carrying him and themselves up the scorched beach and vanishing under a canopy not unlike his own twenty metres distant.

Skidmore peered at his own footprints in the sand and could barely make them out. Little chance then the triumvirate of new arrivals had spotted his trail or else chanced upon his spoor. They might not have any knowledge of him, he supposed, being just incidental travellers that had happened across his path. It would though benefit him to ascertain their mission.

If these were recruits of Yours Truly deposited here by Upsflart then Skidmore may have been removed from the picture longer than he realized. On the other hand they might be associates of Horatio Holroyd. Or was he just jealous, in a proprietary fashion, that they were present at all?

The latter made him smirk, but it was a smirk crushed under the heavily laden jar of despair created in the wake of the flower's destruction.

He rested, as was wise. There was no going anywhere in this heat. The new arrivals likewise, both he and they waiting for evening, when no doubt the temperature would plummet.

Skidmore scraped his face and picked at his nails with the hunting knife. He felt raw and energized. He cut a channel in a plant stem and fashioned a thin vegetable bridge along which viscous fluid dripped, sitting on his tongue a while before sliding down his throat.

He would stay alive.

The night came in fresh and accompanied by a huge moon, the sea a distant silver line receding toward the horizon and uncovering what looked like buildings, streets whose life was untold, intermittently drowned. That he'd emerged from it made it all the more real.

Shapes moved under the heavy blue light, shapes unencumbered now by suits yet bearing packs and clearly armed. They walked as one toward the newly uncovered conurbation. Skidmore watched patiently. The expanse of beach was such that it made it difficult for him to follow, so he was forced to wait for them to merge with the nearest buildings, low and square, before he could safely follow.

Shouldering his backpack, he tucked the knife up a sleeve and slithered across the now cold sand.

The buildings were irregular and for the most part low, sides leaning toward flat roofs, uniform and featureless. The moon painted them and they returned its light, shimmering with increasing brightness, glistening with algae, billions of single cell creatures swollen and phosphorescent. Narrow streets were wet with gravel and seaweed, the smell of it oddly sweet. Skidmore manoeuvred carefully, listening for those ahead but hearing nothing. They must have entered a building, he thought, but there were no obvious ways in, no doors or windows at least, just compacted shapes, flat as if formed in one solid lump.

He screwed his fingers into a wall and they passed so far before encountering harder stone.

There was the crunch of gravel underfoot. Skidmore turned to glimpse a body disappearing and set off in pursuit. It was a shadow he chased, however, one more familiar with the terrain, and he soon lost it. The seabed had dropped, he noticed, whilst the buildings remained roughly at a height, making those structures about him taller, as if excavated. The blue glow illuminated everything, but its intensity made every detail less obvious. He wandered, curious, spying no more movement and hearing nothing but his own sounds, only then to happen upon a low arched doorway, an entrance cut, a short tunnel beyond.

He could fit through, but on his belly. And what lay beyond was dark. Not even his torch illuminated.

Skidmore doubted the three men had passed this way. Nonetheless he unslung his pack and pushed it before him.

The temperature dropped sharply. Four metres in and he was able to stand, almost, knees and back bent, skull wary. The dark was impenetrable, seeming to break the torchlight up, or swallow it. He could see no farther than an arm's length, sufficient to gauge outlines and proceed, albeit with caution.

He found himself on a ramp, descending one metre in three, straight at first then veering left and right, as if designed to confuse. It occurred to him there might be no way back up, that the exit was now blocked and the passage sealed behind. He felt he followed the burrowing tail of a giant worm. Skidmore had no choice other than to continue. There never was any turning back. Suddenly he was brought up short by a near electric jolt, centre midriff, his navel antenna, long dormant, even - he'd thought - removed by Upsflart, made aggressively animate, thrumming crazily as he approached an invisible shape.

Reaching a hand out he saw it reflected in a curved surface.

The thrumming immediately stopped.

Round and stuck, it either blocked the way ahead or was at the end of its own tunnel. Skidmore couldn't decide, running his hand over the glassy surface, at once familiar and strange.

The object appeared at first either dormant or dead.

The ground beneath his feet shook and small pieces of compacted sand and rock dropped on his shoulders and head.

He might be buried alive at any moment. With the ocean removed there was little chance of escape, his ability to project small distances as yet in doubt, and the tide had retreated several kilometres.

Skidmore place two hands on the convex surface and sensed the power inherent in its shell. The thing vibrated at an enormous rate, a frequency beyond hearing that was the cause of the passage's possible collapse.

A sound like two blades drawing one across the other resonated in his skull and the sphere opened, swallowing him in an instant and shutting all else out.

This why he was here.

Drawn like an iron filing to a magnet.

He sensed movement but could not feel it, locked tight in a bright blanket that fitted to his every irregularity, accommodating both backpack, torch and blade, the latter clasped in one hand, although he had no memory of drawing it.

No breath troubled his lungs and his heart was suspended.

Whether his eyes were closed or open was a question he could longer answer. He was back in the blood pool aboard the great flower ship, comfortable as a foetus and just as far removed from reality.

And then the sphere opened and dumped him on hard ground before taking off, he fancied, not unlike a golf ball.

The day burgeoned, the early light dripping into his head as if molten. Skidmore rolled onto his hands and knees and saw he was back on the edge of the sometime submerged town.

On a nearby roof was a man with a gun. The man was wearing a face mask, overalls and gloves.

Skidmore got to his feet.

The man pointed him to his right with the snout muzzle.

Gazing in that direction, vision bleeding, he saw two other men, both unmasked, with weapons hanging from their backs, recognizing them but not recalling their names, confederates of Horatio Holroyd last seen on Blank Canvas, silent then as now.

As a standoff it lacked threat.

Then wandered over a dog.

5

The dog was more than it seemed, an analogy for much of the hard and fleshware he'd encountered recently. It sniffed his crotch, shook its mongrel head and gazed at him emptily, but underneath was a purpose. Overlarge, Skidmore imagined, an exaggerated hound whose size was yet another dissimilitude. The thing panted and dripped saliva, rolled on its back did everything within its power to make him like it, but Shuffledeck wasn't moved.

They were under the sea, the water having rolled over them like a blanket, ensconced in a seamless vault, the interior of one of the now submerged buildings.

The air was cool and he lay on the floor.

A ripple ran through the structure. There was an audible pop and a foot appeared through a wall, followed by one leg then two, a body, arms and head, those of the swashbuckling Holroyd, jovial and full of mischief, making a fuss of the dog whose tail beat crazily.

'How's my pup? How's my pup? Is the nice man looking after you?'

Skidmore scratched behind an ear.

Underneath the beard, Holroyd was quite swarthy, the brown man noted. Odd how he hadn't seen it before.

Eyes like mind in constant adjustment.

The pirate tossed Skidmore an apple and he caught it.

The dog lay down and was quiet.

'I'd like you to join us,' said Holroyd. 'Not in any fraternal sense, although you'd be more than welcome, rather on an upcoming mission.'

'And if I refuse? He crunched the apple, its thick skin and tart interior sending small shockwaves of pleasure through his body.

'Why should you?' Holroyd offered. 'You've nothing to lose. You might even learn something.'

He couldn't argue with that.

'What's the alternative?' Taking a second bite. He felt he knew, and it didn't excite him.

Holroyd shrugged, sitting now on the floor with his back to the wall. 'We leave you here. You make your own way.'

Skidmore was silent for a while, eating the fruit. Then, 'Any more of these?'

'Sure, all you can handle.'

He was in.

It was the same galley aboard the same Periwinkle but everything had changed, not least Freda, whose frostiness was the thin end of a wedge of distrust, the smell of baking and the bubbling of coffee insufficient to fool him into feeling at home.

Skidmore's eyes kept slipping toward the empty chair.

He had no knowledge of their destination, a fact which didn't trouble him. His suspicions would though prove correct, prior to that an extended excursion sans engine, riding the hull of a freight train to nowhere that, by definition, passed like a conveyor belt any number of places.

These ships were grown, some even used the word hatched; set forth then in one direction, radiating outward from point of manufacture, an amalgam of human expansionism and commercial resource.

All things and every body paid their way.

Perhaps it was his refusal to comment of the whereabouts of Able Jones that irked her.

Skidmore did not wish to lie, so said nothing.

Detaching some way short, Skidmore, Holroyd and his two lieutenants, Frederick and Qwick, took to Celestine and thence the surface of reddish 661.

All but Skidmore were heavily armed.

Holroyd had the controls.

The smell of leather was perhaps faux. So too the sheen of brass. But as ever the ship to surface shuttle made him smile.

Grounded, they spilled out.

Skidmore raised his telescope and could see thin smoke trails. In his guts if not his heart stirred regret.

He was little more than an observer, he thought, but what he observed was murder, the brutal slaying of peaceful brothers, counted and stacked, the stack burned and a single fire replacing many.

They were gunned down, young and old alike, expressions resolved and mouths sealed, making neither appeal nor threat, instead accepting this swathe of death as if it were entirely natural.

The equally mute Frederick and Qwick nevertheless laughed as they fired into tree boxes from which tumbled naked men, bloody and dead.

More than Skidmore remembered, wandering dazed as he searched for the car that had brought him here previously.

He found it parked a short distance away, amazingly still with the hamper inside, the ballpeen hammer and the artefact from the Overseeker, that small parcel Holroyd no doubt craved and the reason for their presence. Skidmore left it for him to find. Should he have succeeded in completing the initial mission, and made it off world rather than into the hands of the Terminals, then none of this may have been necessary.

The men of the enclave were as blue in life, he recalled, shaved heads and gaunt faces in seeming accord with the hereafter.

The flames devoured them, soon spreading to the tented settlement, canopies flapping loose and rapidly consumed, the fire soon spreading to the trees.

Skidmore made a decision. He got in the car. The keys dangled and the compass bobbed. He turned over the engine and it struggled. How long had it stood? He waited a few moments and tried again. The engine turned slowly and he feared the battery would die, then the car shook and the exhaust coughed, bringing the vehicle to life.

He placed the hammer on the passenger seat. Opening the door he left the hamper with its prize on the ground and drove off, one back tyre wrecked and no place to go save the distant town.

He wasn't followed. He drove as far as he could before the tyre came off the rim and the car anchored itself.

He rolled a cigarillo and sat with the window wound down.

There was a spare wheel he knew, taking his time before opening the boot and fetching it out, scraping under the chassis for a point to fix the jack and cranking it up. The wheel nuts were stubborn. He sweated more and more as his shadow grew, patient yet with an unresolved explosion inside. He was no friend of the Terminals. But he was no ally of Holroyd's either.

The nuts cracked eventually and he fitted the wheel, its tyre solid, unsupported by air, yet filled with countless pockets.

The fuel gauge dropped and the oil temp rose. Skidmore continued regardless.

He wasn't sure the violence shocked him. More the statement of it, pointless and inefficient.

He wondered how much local time had passed since he'd set out from the Gonzales' and whether they'd welcome him back.

Had the nameless town changed? Perhaps a proportion of the population. More accurately its clientele.

Such thoughts occupied his head, the mundane filling the void left by the significant.

Driving kept his hands busy.

The terrain undulated and the trees thinned. Skidmore recalled the shape of the valley and how it had conspired to lead him to the enclave in the first place, continuing in that direction now, turning where he could, the road, such as it was, long since melded into the natural landscape.

The birds seemed to follow him. Thick black shapes.

He drove without stopping, fearful of that, of taking his feet off the pedals. The compass spun back and forth; uselessly, as Skidmore couldn't remember the bearings.

It didn't matter. He felt he would home in.

He met a steep valley side and drove up it determinedly, the front wheels off the ground more than once, the sepia stained sky filling the windscreen. At the top he slowed, eyeing the way, and continued then for some kilometres along the rise. The auxiliary fuel supply kicked in.

There were false lights everywhere, luminous plants and eyes, but having driven a corresponding distance he imagined it safe to assume those lights he saw on the rusted horizon to belong to his destination, a theatre pit of different coloured bulbs, each casting several shadows.

Perhaps he'd ridden his luck thus far. It couldn't last, he supposed, forcing the complaining vehicle into a ravine and burying its nose, the sudden loss of headlights and the shock of a steering wheel in his face enough to impose a physical end.

He'd walk from here.

The car issued steam and sighed.

Skidmore toed its twisted bumper, a lip uprooted, and toting the ballpeen set off on foot.

His momentum may have been lessened but his determination was that of a drunk returning home. He wouldn't stop till his key was in the door.

Fireworks arched over the town, too far away yet to be heard.

Skidmore put one boot in front of the other and woke up sometime later in a ditch by a wall.

A child was staring at him.

His mouth was dry.

He got to his knees and, eyes closed, removed his spectacles and cleaned them on an undershirt.

A cloth bag was dropped at his feet and the child ran away. Chips, poker chips, deposited by an anonymous backer.

The sense of paranoia was overwhelming and Skidmore spent a considerable time lying in his own elongated shadow; that drowned by the wall's, although he was convinced he could still see it - imagine it, somehow a different shade of dark, as if the shadow belonged to another dimension.

He smirked, a small truth leaking out.

The chips were most likely from Holroyd. Skidmore imagined their message to be: have a good time.

Food. Drugs. Alcohol. Sex.

This was the place for it.

He got to his feet and mentally excused himself.

Perhaps the next ditch he staggered in to he wouldn't rise from. People came to Planet 661 to die, one way or another. To kill even, their victims often willing. The elder Terminals had put up no resistance. Death was their ultimate goal. Death and rebirth. And the nameless town was a metaphor.

In his mind he was back on The Eternity, Pollute there to admonish him having cut the rope he'd used to hang himself. He'd crumpled to the deck like a boneless thing, all broken inside. Naked and on all fours like a beast, covered with what he at first thought sweat, but was in fact blood.

Jones took hold of the rope's severed end and dragged him along a passage, smeared red in his wake where once it had been pristine.

The buzzing in his head was that of a trapped insect.

He vomited bile, and that too was red.

The rope still about his throat, he was led to the great orchestral hall, where for a moment was quietude.

Then the universe filled with screams, his own among them, billions of lost and tortured souls resonating through the pipes.

Skidmore shivered, opened his eyes and gazed at the man standing over him. Not Pollute, another, grinning maniacally with a hammer in one hand.

'Nice job.'

The hammer hit the floor and something splashed up.

The man turned and disappeared through a curtain into silence and dark.

Two women and another man lay bludgeoned to death in the room, victims of a frenzy, faces unidentifiable from sustained hammer blows, skulls paper, limbs twisted and chests holed. He thought to recognize one of the woman from her hair, blonde strands of it floating free, the remainder as if dipped in ink. There was a candle in a wall niche and the remains of a cigar butt in an ashtray.

Planet 611 had slipped into the night. When the morning came it would be Planet 612.

Skidmore got shakily to his feet. Although much soiled, he was still wearing his clothes. He passed through the curtain and was met by a cold breeze filling the space between two walls. Beyond, the decadent, unsleeping resort town was destroyed.

Starlight glanced off stone and pooled, drowning the wreckage of structures belonging to a less substantial age, all of it collapsed as if undermined. Bodies lay about, but most he felt had fled to the outskirts. Strips, squares and chevrons of cloth floated across the fallen uprights and beams of what was first and foremost a temporary conurbation, a place transitory and thinly disguised. There was no clue to the cause, but maybe an underground explosion. He recalled the stone passages he'd briefly visited, their patient erection at odds with what came after, and yet now all that remained. Wind, fire and decay would erase the rest from the stones upon which the town had perched, like dead leaves from between the knuckled roots of trees.

His stomach grumbled.

He'd begun his second visit here by stuffing it with a thousand tastes, exotic and local. Wine from skins to wash it down, flavoured and spiced. Thereafter the flesh of drupes, hearts both stony and beating. All of which had left him here, stood on a ledge with corpses to his back, more below, and no memory of the in between.

Major Spatchcock sat next to his mother. There was a conspiracy between them that had yet to play out. Delivered to the Institute, Skidmore Shuffledeck was thus enrolled in a programme, as his father before.

His father.

Dead on the floor with his head opened.

Perhaps not his father, he thought. A robot replacement, here terminated as a matter of course.

On the machine world of Perridi.

Did he want to understand?

He would return there one day, Skidmore promised, curious to know what he might find.

But he knew already.

It just needed a name.

'Lord Technical,' said professor Upsflart. 'Your sometime patron.'

'I'm not a construct,' he said, believing it.

'No - something quite...other,' the professor replied. 'We're still working on a technical term.'

'Isn't that somewhat ironic?'

Upsflart clapped his hands, threw back his head and laughed. 'Yes!' He was delighted. 'Yes! Very good.'

Skidmore though could only swallow a bite at a time.

Lord Technical. His fourth corner. Or not, depending on whom Horatio Holroyd worked for.

'Who could have imagined breaking the speed of light would lead to such complications,' posited the small man with the poor golf swing. 'Machine consciousness; gestalt beings. A whole new perspective on the galaxy.'

He seemed pleased with himself.

'It's a shame no one knows how it works.'

The night transformed everything. The long shadows were no more. Instead, the trees began slowly to emit a living glow, as if radiating light they'd stored from a sun that for an extended period barely made it over the horizon. Frost and rime were this lights lenses and the breaths of those living hung suspended.

Skidmore was tempted to dig down, to explore the catacombs. Surely, he reasoned, they were older than man, as the carvings on The Proving Ground, in the spaces under the mountain where the children had taken him, were older than man. And yet not alien. A forgotten language. A first diaspora. Proof Earth had seeded the galaxy once before.

Or, more likely, the other way round.

Artificial intelligence was a discredited term. Self-engendered awareness was more accurate. Spontaneous as life itself.

SEA for short.

'The seasons even. The season's reasons being?' Upsflart, stroking his chin. 'And the reasons for the seasons are?'

A riddle. Skidmore had never been fond of riddles.

He wondered if any of the instruments the professor had arrayed against him could read his mind. Extract that information he wished not to share. Much of it buried, suppressed. Knowledge. Memories. They were afraid of him, Skidmore realized. Just as he was afraid of himself. A loss of innocence across the board. He had a foot in both worlds.

And two feet on this one for now.

6

Sitting tight wasn't an option. Whatever the cause of the collapse, natural or manmade, there was little chance of outside intervention in the shape of a rescue mission. A supply ship would pass by in due course and that was Skidmore's likeliest route off, although there may well be a queue. He'd moved away from the centre, the ragged ends of a crater supporting the ragged ends of existence, a mix of stunned passivity and life-as-normal, living bodies as yet energized and animated, dancing on through the luminous night. The dead had to number in the thousands, most lost under the rubble. If there was any sort of organized local recovery, tragically he wasn't seeing it, which condemned those trapped or injured.

The shockwaves had been felt for some distance and confusion reigned. Chaos was normal, but its effective radius had been greatly extended, mixing ingredients that normally didn't share space. Pockets of fighting broke out, engendered through panic, a different expression of the anarchy prevalent within the town, loci of fear about concentrations of resources, those whose home was on the peripheries guarding against the desperation of tourists whose wealth and status led them to claim ownership of whatever they imagined they needed. Privileged sons and daughters, they'd been whittled down already, and those who'd worked to support them and dwelled in the outskirts showed little regard for the remainder.

Skidmore found a last poker chip in his pocket. Worthless, he rolled it in the palm of one hand as he picked his way through the shadows, the screams of the night numbed by indifference and the reality of their hopelessness.

The only real authority here was criminal, but even that had been broken in pieces.

He stumbled upon what looked like two men raping a girl and thought only to pause a moment. She may even be dead already. The scene was strangely calm, yet equally hellish. The men took no notice of him. Gazing around his eyes lit on a buckled metal chair and he picked this up, pulled one leg free and drove it into the spine of the man half naked between the girl's loosely displayed legs. He grabbed the man's hair and pulled him up and onto his back, then stamped on his chest hard enough for the chair leg, wedged beneath, to push through his ribcage, before turning to the second man, on his knees at the girl's head, having let go of her arms. Skidmore saw he had a gun, shakily pointed as he stood, pulling his trousers up. There was a shot fired but it came from elsewhere, largely removing the man's head.

Holroyd, alone, face grim as he peered at the girl before shooting her also.

He turned to Skidmore, as if asking if he understood.

Skidmore had barely given thought to the pirate, supposing himself abandoned. But you didn't chose sides in a war, they chose you. And it was clearly a war Holroyd was fighting, against both the Terminals and Yours Truly.

Impossible odds. Yet here he was. A man not unlike himself, perhaps, one able to play an instrument, and swim.

'You should choose your own path,' he told the brown man later, tucked in a niche of cigar smoke and whisky.

The paths though were many, manifold and divergent.

'I've not sought to use you, Skidmore. Believe that. But it's a difficult thing gauging a man and my enemies are growing increasingly brave, even desperate. So you see...'

The future seemed farther away than ever.

'Yours Truly promised me a ship.'

'I know. But when? If you were to lead them to me, effect my capture, kill me yourself - who's to say the price wouldn't go up. You're a weapon, son; or at least the ammunition for one. That strange sphere on Hojo?'

The baking sea planet. Yes.

'That's machine technology, long buried.'

'I don't follow.'

'You were drawn to it as much as it was drawn to you.'

Skidmore had to think about that. What he was hearing chimed with what the professor had hinted at. Part of him, perhaps the genus of him, was machine, and belonged in that other realm.

'Whether by accident or design,' Holroyd was saying. 'You come from a much deeper place.'

He glanced up to see Freda leaning against a stanchion.

'I need to go outside,' he said.

The pirate raised an eyebrow.

'For Jones.'

'Jones?'

'I left him in a safe place.'

Freda straightened and turned away.

Skidmore got to his feet.

Holroyd shrugged where he sat, as if to say, 'I won't stop you.'

And he was off, two suits hung up within the cold spiral of the trumpet, a destination primed, spinning end over end like a spec of pollen sucked through the gaping mouth of a macroscopic flower.

But was Jones even on The Eternity? Skidmore might have to search a million rooms to find him. The man with the moon face may have tried to follow Skidmore and be crawling broken on some remote planet, or else on a slab back at Professor Upsflart's laboratory.

It was a fool's errand, but he needed to put distance between himself and Holroyd. And if he couldn't save his own skin then he could maybe save that of Able Jones, who slightly more deserved it.

In the end it was easy.

He followed the smell of bacon and opening a door discovered a vaguely familiar office, Pollute in the rear, feet on a desk reading a newspaper.

'Well I never thought I'd find myself back here.'

'You're not here,' Skidmore told him, a little unsure himself.

'You mean to tell me through there there isn't a department store or that my boss didn't happen by an hour ago?'

'Nope. All a fabrication.'

'Fuck.'

'I know. Pretty convincing.'

'You can say that again.' He got up, walked round the desk and grabbed Skidmore roughly by the collars. 'Two months.'

'I'm sorry.'

'Two months!'

Skidmore laughed and embraced his friend. What he needed more than anything was some normality, and Jones had just provided.

'Come on.'

'Come on? Where?'

'Anywhere. Somewhere not here.'

Pollution's reluctance was puzzling.

'What if there were something I wanted to do first? Even if this place isn't all it seems.'

That surprised him. 'Like what?'

'My sisters.'

'You're joking.'

'I think I know where they are.'

'That's insane.'

'I never bothered to look before, you know? I never believed I could help them, until now.'

'But Jones, we're not on Pierspont.'

'Aren't we?'

'It's a similitude. A cerebral projection. We should leave.'

He looked so young, Skidmore thought, ash blonde hair falling over his eyes and a tear on one cheek.

'I'm sorry.'

'We could go there though, couldn't we?'

It was a stupid idea. They'd be fugitives on Pierspont, wanted men on a world that was unforgiving. Especially to brown folk.

'They won't sentence you to a lifetime nightwatching if you return. And me?'

'They'd have to catch us first.'

Which might easily happen, he wanted to say, but rubbed his fingers under his spectacles instead.

Skidmore thought about the MPV attached to The Eternity's hull and decided it would come in handy, just not today.

Unsurprisingly, they weren't able to take anything from either the office or the department store, despite it being a treasure house of materiel. Nothing existed outside the room that existed in it. Least of all Jones' shotgun, although he still insisted on smuggling it under his coat, cursing when that didn't work, to much eye-rolling from his companion.

They bubbled up in the lake, first priority a change of clothes.

Disguised as down and outs, it was easy to slip unseen along back alleys of a chilly morning city, with so far only pigeons to evade.

Jones' teeth chattered.

Skidmore was more practiced at separating his physical and mental conditions, adjusting his body temperature in effect, until steam rose.

Soon they were not only back in Piersponttown but behind the Pierspont Dept. Store, sneaking in via a loading dock as the first deliveries of the day arrived.

They had an hour or so before opening, the store largely deserted, Jones' older, fatter replacement asleep in a chair.

Pollute shrugged as Skidmore declined a gun. They filled their mouths and their pockets and when the time came walked out the front, the window display still with the big 100.

Skidmore could barely see past his hood. He wasn't the sole man of colour, but those he past were clearly of a diminished status, labouring under burdens or cleaning up after beasts not much better treated. They came to a tobacco store and Jones entered to make a purchase, Skidmore outside studying a triptych behind the glass, three men's faces, one of which, bottom left, he recognized as the man whose eye he had taken, killed by his own hand in the lodge they'd razed, before fortuitously escaping.

The mechanics of that were still no clearer to him. But they'd had help in more than the shape of a swimming pool.

Such was the exactness of the similitude aboard The Eternity that Jones had an address they both believed valid, a homestead thirty kilometres south. Busses were slowly replacing carriages within the city, although as yet they didn't venture near the centre. Shuffledeck and Jones walked to the outskirts, the majority of folk headed in the opposite direction, inconspicuous they hoped, although drawing the odd disparaging look. Jones grinned and paid for them both, the bus rattling and the driver old, glancing in his rearview a little too much for Skidmore's liking, but not saying anything. There were half a dozen other passengers, mostly primped ladies, early risers toting fresh baked goods.

Jane and Janey were twins, eight or nine years in the world. Skidmore had no idea what their reaction might be to seeing their brother. They'd lost their parents, their other siblings. How much of that would fall on Able, he could only guess. Old enough then to remember, likely too young now to want to run away. They'd be in school till later at least, giving the men time to reconnoiter.

Skidmore blew his cheeks out at the high fence. Definitely designed to keep people out.

Pollute though, remained unfazed.

Whoever lived here, the girls' proxy family, they weren't farmers. Adjacent to the wood-panelled house was a large garage with further outbuildings behind, one of which was a stables, home to expensively cloned horses.

It looked like a good life for little girls, he pointed out.

Jones wasn't so sure. They took up a position on a nearby hill capped with trees and ate and drank from cartons.

Skidmore was learning to hang on to things. Along with his boots he still had his telescope, training it on the everyday movements of a household large enough to have staff, both white and coloured.

Pierspont was a throwback, one run on manual labour. It made more sense to seize the girls from school, but sensibly their brother wished to speak with one or both first.

Around noon a cavalcade of vehicles approached the main gate and were let inside. Military personnel formed a cordon and an elaborate hat was ushered into the house.

You didn't need a telescope to see the implications.

The planet's population, mostly concentrated, was small enough for it to be run as a country. And here was one of its chiefs, a general among or above other generals, in his own demesne.

Two hours later, however, the reverse happened, and the cavalcade left.

They opted to take shifts, Pollute first, Skidmore trusting him with the telescope whilst he got some shut-eye. But no sooner had the demons stirred than he was woken by Jones shaking his foot.

A squat white vehicle had pulled up. The gates opened and it drove through, stopping close to a veranda by the front door. Four figures got out, two smaller and more animate, two larger, one following the children in whilst the other remained outside. A few minutes later a dark woman emerged from a back door carrying a washing basket, two girls soon on her tail and the three thereafter hanging sheets on a line.

'Looks fun,' said Pollute, the telescope glued to his eye.

'Is it them?'

The smallest hesitation. 'Yes.'

'And?'

'We need to get inside the fence.'

'What if they think you're dead?'

The telescope dropped. Clearly the pale man hadn't thought of that. 'Dead?'

'It's what I'd tell them. Sever all ties to the past.'

Jones turned his back on the homestead.

'Well?'

'If we just leave now I'll never be able to shake the idea they're in danger, and that we missed an opportunity to help.'

That was it. Once the box was open you had to look inside.

'Okay.'

'How many volts you reckon in that wire?'

Good question, but the flapping sheets had given Skidmore an idea. He just hoped it didn't rain and that they left them out.

Pollute wasn't convinced, but kept watch whilst Skidmore tied a small grapple to a length of string and flung this over the fence. After several failed attempts he managed to snag a sheet, carefully tugging until it came away from the washing line and he was able to reel it in. The fence was two metres high and the plan was the bigger of the two - Skidmore Shuffledeck - would wrap the sheet about the smaller and, swinging him round, release him in an upward arc sufficiently elevated to clear the electric wire. Skidmore found couching this in an engineering vernacular made it more convincing to himself. Jones wasn't heavy, but...

The notion of a trial run was dismissed. It was all or nothing. Once over Pollution would deactivate the fence and cut it, allowing Skidmore through and permitting them both an exit.

Simple.

Neither though heard the squeak of a gate, preoccupied with Newtonian physics, and one at least with the hope they could yet call the whole thing off.

'Can I help you gentlemen?' English, spoken in a hoarse whisper, lips round a pipe.

Jones was practically invisible in the sheet, Skidmore frozen and mute.

'If you want to steal my ladies' things I suggest you come back tomorrow.'

What must they look like? the brown man thought, staring at the brown woman with the shotgun.

He remembered Pollute was armed.

Wrestled him to the ground.

'Might we have a word?'

'You vagrants? I can give you food but I don't want to see you round here again, okay?'

'My friend is the girls' brother,' he said. 'He was keen to make sure they were okay.'

Jones struggled a little but was trapped in the sheet.

The woman lowered the gun slightly and stepped closer. 'Those girls are in my care,' she said sternly. 'No harm shall befall them. You can be assured of that.'

'Thank-you.'

'We'll be out riding in the morning and can stop by the knoll. Now get out of here.'

Skidmore picked the thin man up in the sheet and marched off like a beetle with a wriggling pupa.

Jones was furious, then quietly jubilant. Both though suspected a trap.

For different reasons, neither could sleep, but the dawn found them equally somnolent, damp from dew and with full bladders.

Pissing, Skidmore spied two horses in the distance, a horse and trap in close attendance.

After what seemed an age all three approached the hill, the horses prancing through the long grass, the trap bouncing over rougher ground as they climbed.

He turned but Able Jones was nowhere to be seen.

The woman, in a white full-skirted dress, introduced herself as Myrtle.

Skidmore bowed at the waist, supposing there to be an armoury under those skirts. Giving his name he apologized for his friend, who it appeared had come over all shy.

The girls laughed, pretty and difficult to tell apart.

'Do you recall your older brother?' Skidmore asked.

They gazed at each other, one no doubt the designated talker. 'He died in a fire.'

'Janey is it?'

'Jane.' She scowled.

'I apologize. He would like to be here, but he asked me if I wouldn't mind making sure you and your sister were fine.'

Jane looked puzzled. Janey, too.

Myrtle looked impatient.

And Able? Hiding up a tree.

'You seem like two very nice young ladies,' said Skidmore, growing more and more uncomfortable.

They peered as one at Myrtle, who shrugged. 'Oh, they can be bad!'

More laughter.

'And now, if you don't mind?'

'Yes, madam. Ladies.' Bowing again like a fool, watching as they rode quickly away.

Where Myrtle had stood rested a fresh loaf and two bottles of beer.

Pollute idled up as if nothing unusual had happened and calmly opened the bottles, handing one to Skidmore.

'Thanks.'

7

It was just bad luck, Skidmore thought, having the same bus driver on the return journey. Suspicions were arose and guns pointed by scared-looking policemen, the brown man their focus, distancing himself from the white as he slid to the front of the vehicle.

They dragged him off and bundled him roughly into the back of a van, beating him with sticks.

Thereafter a cell that smelled of shit and vomit.

He cast his mind back to the beachfront hotel with its cigars and golf course, room service round the clock, and laughed.

Something was thrown at him by a fellow inmate. A bone, gnawed.

He lay down and slept, a wondrous expanse of dream-free unconsciousness that almost made this sojourn worthwhile, ultimately disturbed by freezing water from a hose, although even that he enjoyed.

They sat him in a chair, hands cuffed behind, water dripping to a peeling floor, grates on the windows and a large spider midway up a pipe, purpose unknown.

A door opened and in walked a military man, an officer.

Not Spatchcock, no. That would be unreal.

A general, heavily braided, perhaps even that seen from the knoll.

In truth Skidmore felt a little drunk.

Something in the water.

The spider had grown massively, he saw.

Would it eat him? Perhaps he could escape in its belly.

The general said something but Skidmore couldn't make out the words. The punch in the face he understood, bleeding from lip and nose.

They wanted information regarding things he knew nothing of. Reactionaries and terrorist cells.

He was pleased to learn of their existence.

They thought to torture him.

He came to under a park bench in a leafy suburb.

It took a while for him to realize he was alive, a while longer yet to appreciate what had occurred. Not that he could remember the details.

There were sirens. Smoke rose from a nearby street. He clawed from out under the bench and sensed a gap in his memory large.

After a few seconds he realized a small child was staring at him. How must he look? Skidmore thought.

The child offered him a half eaten ice cream, which he accepted gratefully, soothing and cold.

The child ran away.

Skidmore could smell the lake, however.

He might have to come back for Jones.

Jones though had thought ahead and procured a boat, sitting now on the water as the fugitive charged the boulevard and scattered a crowd on confused, frightened onlookers. If there was sedition in their midst then Skidmore hoped to bring it to the surface. Ironically, he was headed in the other direction, at least for now. Pierspont felt like unfinished business.

What he took to be a group of vigilantes blocked his way, armed with bats and sticks. A park bench and a tree branch helped outmanoeuvre them, but he couldn't avoid contact entirely, breaking one jaw to dissuade another, grabbing a sporting club and taking away the legs of plain-clothes officers before leaping headlong into the lake. The video footage ought to prove interesting, he supposed, bullets now in his wake, one snicking his leg as he swam as deep as he could before rushing to the surface like a shark, snatching Pollute from his dingy and dragging him under.

The RPG hit moments after.

If it had been his intention to return to The Eternity then the basis for that calculation proved false. The shockwave provided an altogether deeper note than his lungs could ever muster, transporting them, deafened and battered, to some remote island in space, far-flung across the reach, a young world surrounded by young stars and skeletal imprints of gas. The atmosphere stung his eyes and the gravity sapped, but more than that it appeared dry.

No ocean. No lake. Barely a drop of sweat.

Pollute, face down, moaned.

'I think I've shit myself,' he said, raising his head to look around. 'Err...'

'Don't ask.'

'Do I ever?'

Skidmore grinned, face cracking.

They dragged each other over to a cluster of larger rocks and lay there exhausted.

There must be something here, thought Skidmore. But the evidence of his eyes suggested they were the only life.

A few hours and they'd be dead.

Purplish streaks of cloud were likely acid.

Very little shade, although the ambient light changed. His imagination, or drying eyes. No. A hovering transparency, invisible in itself yet causing a slight refraction, a clear shell placed over them that filled next with oxygen.

The downside was he could smell Jones now. Polluted.

Something akin to a giant caterpillar made its way quickly over the top of the hemisphere, greenish with a yellow underside, its many feet leaving suction marks.

Skidmore could just about stand up in the enclosure. He pushed the clear skin and felt it rise. But the action of his finger wasn't the cause, the whole body was lifting and taking them with it, a bubble containing the two men and nothing more, floating free above the surface.

The sphere began to ascend faster, Skidmore and Pollute at its nadir, feet pressed together.

Jones looked like he might be sick.

Before that could happen, however, the sphere accelerated toward space whilst simultaneously filling with water.

Seconds later to burst, depositing them with a thump, wet and strangely exhilarated onto what at first glance looked a more friendly world, grassy with distant hills.

Skidmore shook himself. TPG. Had to be.

Children with guns and an appointment with an old lady.

'Someone has to look after the babies.'

The gas lamps were the same, but the architecture, the carvings, the scriptures, the glyphs, all seemed possessed of greater time and meaning. Footsteps along a path, here and Planet 611. Soon to be 612. How many others? There was no archaeology in space. It was a backward thing and man moved outward, forward.

The missus sat as before, the empty chair waiting for Skidmore. She'd given him the opportunity to put questions last time he was delivered here.

Gazing up from her book the same appeared true on this occasion, but he had no idea what to ask.

Well, maybe one thing.

'Am I in that book?'

'Yes.'

'Then I came from the orbital?'

'From there to here. Before that...' She didn't know.

'It's a ledger then?'

'Yes.'

Plusses and minuses.

'I don't remember,' he said.

She smiled indulgently, rolling a pencil between bony fingers. 'No reason you should. Once you leave here you leave here. Before you arrive...' She didn't know.

'My mother?'

'Can't help you there.'

Was she my mother? He was perhaps afraid of that truth.

Whether he had a mother at all or had he been created in a lab.

'How old is this place?'

'If you're referring to those features that aren't the responsibility of plate tectonics, wind and rain, then I'd say eight to ten thousand years - but I'm no geologist.'

'And you?'

He hadn't meant it as a joke, but she cackled, head thrown back to reveal blackened teeth.

It was a stupid question.

He wanted to see the entry in her ledger next to his name, whatever that name was.

'Do you remember me?'

'Cute. Fat. Clumsy. Like most kids.'

'That's all?'

She calmed herself and sat forward. 'You want to hear that you were special? You weren't special. Just another dumped kid.' Flicking through the book and showing him the page, tightly scrawled.

Cute. Fat. Clumsy.

No given name.

'And Horatio Holroyd, was he here, too?'

The missus smiled, which Skidmore took to mean yes. They were brothers in that sense. As much as Holroyd was Munroe's brother perhaps.

How many names were in the ledger?

Boys and girls brought to Neverland, abducted by Peter Pan and a fairy called Tink.

Bought and sold.

Skidmore asked himself if the missus deserved to live. She sat before him in defiance of death. He could though feel the sights trained on the back of his head. And there was Pollute.

Over the years the mountain had been excavated way beyond the upper halls and the amphitheatre, gaslit and scrubbed, whitewashed and organized by its frail yet powerful matriarch. He found Jones washed and fed, feet up cutting his toenails, like a monk in a cell without a door.

They couldn't stay here. Or maybe they could. Like everything it was a decision. Those usually out of his hands. Skidmore thought he preferred it that way.

Holroyd had obviously kept in touch and might be along presently.

He could be in a bunk down the hall.

None of this he shared with the moon-faced.

They needed to get out of here. Forget everything and have a good time. They were two young men unprepared.

Yours Truly could wait. The Terminals could wait. Holroyd was playing both sides and offering no explanation.

Lord Technical?

Skidmore wasn't ready.

Munroe had had the right idea.

He took a cigarillo from his compadre and stared at the wall, discerning graffiti there under fresh paint.

Crawling forward he ran his fingers over names he failed to read, marks in the plaster the measure of days, months and years. This had been a prison once, and despite the absent door might be so again.

Other than those that had led them here, oddly reticent, he had seen no other children. Moreover, none could be heard.

Pollute was staring at him, he realized.

Just then a child, a boy, appeared with a tray of food, and Skidmore relaxed.

'Hey, you know Daniel? Minx?'

But the kid just looked scared.

'Are they here?'

'I'm not to talk to you.'

'Did the missus say that?'

The boy shook.

'It's okay,' said Skidmore, 'I didn't mean.'

What did he mean?

'Why don't you just wait here for us to come back,' he suggested, taking the tray and setting it down. The boy too, Skidmore smiling as he indicated Pollute should follow, the pair moving into a quiet corridor, the weight of igneous rock cool and massive. The brown man headed along it, his heart thumping in his chest and his forehead beaded with sweat, Jones behind given little choice. He was paranoid, a sane portion of his brain told him. He was having a panic attack. Skidmore though no longer trusted that portion of his brain and squeezed it out, crushed it underfoot. It was too tidy them being here. He couldn't trust the missus. What she had revealed may well be the truth, but having sold him once she would again.

The corridor was uneven and ran in a similar vein, making it impossible to see too far ahead. They passed numerous rooms, cells empty save for wooden bunks, painted anew as if lately vacated - at least to Skidmore's mind, the mountain and its interior way beyond what was necessary to house fifty or sixty kids. Behind him, Pollute made no complaint, struggling to keep up with his boots in one hand and several toenails as yet uncut.

Skidmore stopped abruptly. 'Do you still have that gun?'

'No. I lost it back on Pierspont.'

'Okay.'

Pressing on. The light diminished first and then the paint. Fortunately in Jones' other hand was a lighter.

'Are you sure about this?' he asked.

'You need to ask?' replied an agitated Shuffledeck.

'Yes. Sorry. But just this once.'

'No. Yes! Shit.'

'It's okay,' said Pollution Jones. 'Come on.'

They advanced into a realm of bare rock and darkness rendered strangely tangible by the growing sound of water, a fall of it some way ahead. Fitful bug light played off carved frescos, vaults hewn, pointed arches, the truth of the mountain Skidmore imagined for a moment he could read. Like he could read the flick of a cat's tail.

Sat like an amorphous sphinx before a backdrop of dark cascading foam and liquid, the sound of it suddenly muted out.

8

There was nowhere left to run.

Sunlight penetrated the clouds, but what it touched was of no consequence, objects, structures, shapes and colours that absorbed its rays and blocked its progress through the void. Those rays ended in a display of reality - reality for the greater part unobserved.

Still the sun projected, energy and light into nothingness, illuminating things it had no interest in or knowledge of.

Absorbed.

He could feel the energy in his bones, in the bones of others, too. In the bones of buildings whose design was not to live in, functional units whose purpose was simple yet arcane.

Skidmore used his legs and wandered the streets, the bodies flowing in silent reverie at one with their environs, components in a self-contained piece of equipment whose function was unknown to the units here contained. It was wrong to think of them as individuals, he thought. He was the sole unique element here, a tourist lost in a foreign realm, bamboozled by the culture.

Machine. But on what scale? In this arm of the galaxy might scale be as malleable as time?

The Eternity may have had him fooled, its rivets no larger than coins.

And the cat?

That animal was responsible for these glimpses, Skidmore believed, perhaps even the workings of its mind.

He would have to draw his own map.

For now though the galaxy as described by Yours Truly and the Terminals was about all he could handle.

The sound of the waterfall re-established itself and he peered into the black pit wherein the water drained.

Holroyd had been captured, The Periwinkle damaged and unable to reunite with its engine.

Words that unfolded in his head in another guise.

  * freda? -

  * lost -

  * dead? -

  * unknown -

Skidmore put his arm round Jones and indicated they needed to jump.

Jones picked the stub of his cigarillo from his bottom lip and flicked it over the edge, which to Skidmore indicated he was okay with that.

Nowhere left to run indeed. He took his truths and fled with them, daring the future to chase him down.

That it would oblige he was sure. Less sure was where to start. If The Periwinkle had come under attack then Freda's best bet would be Celestine, provided the shuttle was present. Yours Truly's arms weren't overly long, Skidmore reasoned, so it seemed likely the infraction had taken place within the twelve worlds, or a new appendage thereof.

He owed her that much, he reckoned, tumbling blindly into a watery hole with no time to explain.

The theme of revisiting places of interest was prevalent once more, something about the light and the trees advising them this was a globe previously vacated, in a hurry. Aqua Minor, thronged and ripe in time for hunting season.

They had nothing on them of value, that might pass for money, so their first job was to steal, to blend in, to borrow from an overburdened caravan of horse-drawn provisions, the fat of outworlders arrived here by more conventional means.

In the past Skidmore may have had qualms.

Stalking through the trees he felt like Robin Hood, or maybe Friar Tuck, Pollute circling, the pair having identified the last carriage as their target, clunking and clanging at the rear like the weakest of the herd. There was a swaddled driver on top, hat furred and boots perched on a foot rail, the reins light in his hands and smoke trailing from a pipe.

Drawn by two horses, Skidmore waited for the carriage to pass and climbed on its rear, smoke and perfume coming from a vent. Up ahead Pollution was repeating his trick of vanishing by shimmying up a tree, then to drop on the roof and the two of them to somehow subdue the driver without alerting those ahead. Earlier they'd found empty cloth sacks and having cut eye holes wore these. If nothing else they'd look good on WANTED posters, Jones observed.

The road was muddy in places and progress slow. Ten carriages made up the caravan, snaking without obvious guards, although they'd be weapons aplenty in at least one, and probably twenty women and men. As the carriage approach the tree Pollute had identified Skidmore began to climb, doing his best to avoid the vent and make as little noise as possible, something helped by the gentle cacophony of pots and pans. Right on cue Jones' feet swung in an arc and knocked the driver over backward, Skidmore clamping his shoulders and mouth whilst Jones took his legs and quickly searched the heavy-set man, coming up with a long dirk and a pistol.

Being beginners at highway robbery they both looked up at the same moment, the question 'what do we do now?' uppermost. Kill the driver and throw him off was the safest course, but neither was willing to perform the deed.

Jones theatrically twirled the shiny dirk and pointed the pistol at the man's crotch, tipping his head in quiet instruction.

The driver took his cue and swinging his legs free dropped over the side to the cracks of dry sticks and the rustle of crushed bracken, unfortunately for him down a steep incline.

Not before Skidmore had grabbed his fur hat, which he dropped on Pollute's head and pointed at the horses.

Leaning over the far side of the carriage revealed a door, the soft pulse of voices from within.

Securing the pistol from Jones he lowered himself onto a step below the door and taking a breath pulled it open.

Smoke and perfume billowed out, muting the shapes of flesh inside. By the nature and number of nipples, two girls and a boy.

The boy looked the more surprised.

All three were naked under loose blankets dosed with a mix of scent and drugs, which he pulled back having prompted then to raise hands. Skidmore wondered what the protocols were re communication devices, this being a throwback world. He fancied the authenticity ran deep, watching as an erection wilted in surrender, framed by the light from the door as Jones slowed the horses, climbed down and raised a hoof before waving any inquiring eyes on. Pots, pans and sundry cooking equipment fell silent, stashed in boxes and hanging from hooks. Built into the carriage were wooden trunks, accessed through the floor.

Ushering the three out he made them sit whilst Pollute searched the interior.

The ladies appeared quite serene, even flirtatious, eyes glazed with a hunger their male companion had doubtless paid for. All part of the festivities.

There came much banging and scraping from his rear, together with a more determined gaze from the young man, no doubt already planning his revenge.

Pollute finished ransacking the carriage and having dragged out a larger than necessary haul went to unharness the horses.

The youth's lips moved but no words came. Clearly his humiliation was felt deeply, Shuffledeck thought.

The girls lay back in the grass giggling and whispering.

'Can we?' asked Jones from behind. 'I mean they look quite amenable.'

'Tie the little prince up,' said Skidmore. 'No time.'

He could get used to this, he reckoned, trawling through plunder, filling his face and admiring ornate weaponry.

They'd have to lose the horses before approaching any settlement, but other than that their first overtly criminal act was a success.

A sign read: Grastobol 90 miles.

Skidmore was convinced Freda would be found there. Jones wasn't so sure but was enjoying himself regardless.

They heard shots the next morning and watched as beaters passed through a valley spotted with thickets, driving boar toward waiting guns.

Pollute wore a heavy dark brown leather coat to go with knee boots and Skidmore a similarly coloured poncho. Crooked hats topped them both, all stolen from the wagon.

Riding over the top of the valley and down the other side they spied a road leading into denser forest and followed it until they came into sight of a complex of low buildings, a first glance a village but through the telescope more likey a supply station.

Tying the horses up they walked the last few hundred metres, Jones with a rifle over his shoulder.

No-one paid much notice, bodies milling as if under command.

There was a tavern, The Fighting Cocks, and they ducked in there, ceiling low and saloon bar dark, taking up a table.

Half a dozen unremarkable men were scattered about chairs and trestles. A boy wandered over and they ordered beer.

It was interesting to listen to the snippets of conversation, jokes and boasts in equal measure, even mention of a "waylaying" the day before, to the west and much umbrage taken.

The wire on Skidmore's spectacles had come loose and he fiddled endlessly.

Jones rolled smokes and ordered more beer.

They'd buy horses and set off before sunset, camp in the forest and approach Grastobol later tomorrow.

A commotion outside caused the pair of them to stiffen where they sat, however; stiffen and relax, more curious than threatened as the tavern emptied.

Shouts and shots rang out.

Skidmore shrugged and they went to see what the fuss was about, a cart overturned and a man crushed to death, people running everywhere, more in excitement than fear.

Whatever had passed through had gone, in its wake madness, a mixture of panic and jubilation.

A good time to trade for horse flesh perhaps, coins jangled and beasts agitated.

Chewing a length of straw, the elderly woman whose livery they admired looked them over more than once, barely avoiding a smirk.

'There's no hurry,' she said. 'Those that hurry die quick.'

Skidmore guessed she was referring to whatever had just passed through but was coy in revealing his ignorance.

'We seek smaller game,' he said, dangling a full pouch, which Pollute then took off him.

'Those two, and the mule,' the sometime farmer told the old woman.

'My best stock.'

'The best of what remains.'

'This season will be a full one,' she told him. 'What with the flying elephants on the prowl and all. The bounties may well be the best for years.'

Pollute handed money over and they were underway.

'Flying elephants?' Skidmore couldn't resist, but then quickly realized Jones had no idea what an elephant was and his mirth was wasted.

The dark closed as the forest, pricked by stars and fires.

There were probably hundreds out there killing and eating. Was that all that drew them here? He wondered. Prizes, kudos, a purse for the most boars' ears. Jones disappeared and returned with a brace of hares. There was certainly no shortage of meat in the forest, likely bred and stored, small to large.

Their own fire added to a terrestrial array and they settled down like pioneers.

Fat owls occupied the upper branches of trees and no moonlight was to be had as there was no moon.

The closer they got to Grastobol the more people they encountered, hunters and their attendants in tight groups, mostly ignoring rival camps, some flying flags above tents whilst others lounged about carriages. The town itself appeared a lot larger than either recalled, although it was possible they had only passed through an especially grubby suburb. The river wound in an ox bow, gated in several places, remnants of a siege wall in evidence, backdrop to the kind of photography that required a hooded camera on a tripod and much smoke. Jones was fascinated but Skidmore less so, guessing ninety percent of what he was seeing was temporary, erected for the season, purely for show. If he stuck his dirk in the wall it might deflate. And surely you had to take your boots off to enter the castle.

There were balloons and pennants, archery competitions and stalls selling pigs' trotters and meat pies.

They walked their horses, listening to a backdrop of guttural dialects and ringing hammer noise, the population similarly inflated, drafted in from parts afar.

Pollute was tempted by a cheese stall, Skidmore an arcade of warped mirrors.

It rained, which served to make the mud authentic, and they lunched in a tent on whale casserole and red wine, served by hoofed nymphs and entertained by a covers band.

A note was passed over, upon it a death threat from a scion of a powerful family, one of the founders of BMC.

Skidmore handed the note to Pollution Jones.

Pollute shrugged, supposing it a joke.

'I did embarrass his cock.'

'How would he know that was you?'

Skidmore could think of numerous reasons. His boots, the thinly covered rifles tucked through their panniers, off-world accents, his predilection for corrective eyewear.

Spies.

'And what of it?' Jones continued. 'He going to challenge you to a duel?'

The notion, drawing as it did on sundry subconscious pathways, made Skidmore grin with childish excitement.

But first the Fat Cow and Freda.

The tavern, crowded with raucous cheer, was much as before, with the exception of an adjoining, elongated tent, sides rolled up and seating arranged. A pall of pig smoke hung beneath the awning, the stench of burnt fat near overpowering and much ale being served to already drunk patrons. Serving wenches slapped hands away and poured, milky breasts aglow, the light from roasting pits and the heat from vocabulary lending the atmosphere a magnetic sheen, from which they decided to remain a distance.

Inside was worse, mostly men in their cups, stinking and at least one stood on a table, ducking under the roof, falling into a political spiel having failed at a card trick. He was dragged down, punched and kicked under a table. Neither the time nor the place, that seemed to say.

Skidmore pushed his way through the messy throng to the bar and the woman there, recognizing her from afar.

Jones in his wake she paused briefly, not looking at either, before continuing to fill beakers.

Skidmore slapped Jones on the back and shouted above the din, 'This man has lost his beloved!' Quite getting into the theatrics of the locale.

'Then he ought to buy another,' came the reply. 'Anyone not buying can do so elsewhere, thank-you sirs.'

She had a point. He tipped money out.

Scooping it into a wet and stained apron she plucked a bottle from under the bar and slammed it down before reaching, more delicately, for two shining glasses.

'And the lady?'

'In the bottle of course.' Disappearing thereafter with two pitchers of grog.

Jones throttled its glass neck and pulled the cork with his teeth, pouring two equal measures of honeyed wine.

Skidmore woke up hanging upside down from a tree.

It was his feet in the noose at least, something for which he should be grateful, only he'd vomited up his nose and the resultant brain fire was dizzying.

His eyes refused to focus, he'd pissed himself, his arms ached unbearably and his face was puffy and swollen.

There were voices nearby; a hunting party.

He wondered what they had in mind.

Footsteps approached, sandalled and small. A chair was unfolded and set down, the blur of it frustrating. The chair was sat in and one sandal was raised over the other as their wearer's legs crossed beneath the white hem of a skirt. Nothing was said for what seemed to Skidmore an extended time, smoke billowing in his direction all the while.

'You persevere,' she said at last. 'An admirable quality, but one which comes with too much stubborn.'

He strained to focus his eyes, recognizing the voice yet unable to frame it in this context.

It was impossible for him to speak.

'You found me, did you not, Skidmore Shuffledeck?' Mocking him. 'Whilst I thank you for your concern, I think you'll find it unfounded. On the contrary, I am in safe hands.'

Another set of feet now.

'My boy here has been denied the pleasure of killing you thus far.'

The stage-managed theatrics were in keeping somehow.

Skidmore decided to give up attempting to form words and instead began to deliberately sway.

The rope creaking spoke for him he hoped.

'Don't worry, I've decided your fate, and it's not with Maurice here - much to his chagrin.'

Had the little prince gone running to his mummy?

Sadly, an option unavailable to Skidmore at this time.

Maurice grunted but was silenced.

'No, you dear Skidmore are about to be thrown a bone.'

She was lying, he thought. It was torture.

A person unseen till that moment approached half in shadow. Upsflart? He didn't think so. All the upended Shuffledeck saw was the dark gleam of a tool or fearsome instrument. A tug next, midriff, the stiff wire protruding from his navel suddenly active and latched on to. His whole body began to resonate with pain and excitement.

And then they pulled it out.

9

He was sitting on a plastic chair in a hospital corridor.

He was wearing short trousers and buckled shoes.

The floor was streaked with wisps of colour, but his feet didn't reach it. Other shoes and boots paraded up and down the corridor, the feet inside them in firm contact with the floor. They had places to go and people to see, whilst he had no option other than to remain seated, and wait.

Why or for whom?

Someone was shouting. He had no idea who it was or what they wanted. They kept repeating a word and each time the word got louder.

His arm was grabbed and he stared up into a face.

Initially the face was angry but it soon mellowed.

The floor was streaked with blood.

His feet in his boots were cold and wet, the sensation of running water soothing and the soul thing he was able to concentrate on, submerged objects that were joined to ones on the surface. As simple as that.

Numb toes and ankles. He felt like he'd been shot in the gut. After a while he moved a hand under his shirt but could find nothing unusual or out of place.

Sitting up he stared at a line of blurry trees across the broad expanse of rushing water. It took a moment though before he realized he'd lost his glasses.

An animal was struggling in the water, thrashing twenty metres downstream as it attempted to cross. Skidmore wasn't convinced the creature, a deer, would make it, the beast's great antlered head disappearing for seconds at a time as legs unaccustomed to swimming worked furiously beneath. He felt empathy, tinged with sadness, heard the crack of firearms from the trees and saw a ripple there amongst the shadows, men and horses in close pursuit.

Without having posed the question, he realized he was on Aqua Minor. Jones, too, somewhere.

There had been a ruption, the latest in a long line of such, events linked by tenuous wires of time that came away in his fingers each time he tried to trace them back.

The deer, as tall at the shoulder as himself, burst onto the bank and made good its escape, flanks gleaming wetly. For today at least. Its head would soon to decorate a wall, antlers a huntsman's trophy.

Those pursuing were brought to a halt by the river, a few no doubt wondering who the man was sitting on the far bank cooling his toes.

They headed away from him along the bank, in search of a crossing point with pontoons and a ferryman.

Skidmore removed his feet at last, took his boots off and emptied them, half expecting fish to fall out.

The soles of his feet had all but turned yellow, reminding him of the underside of the MPV parked as yet at The Eternity. And the roundness of his heel, that exhibited another image, one drawn deep from memory, of a circular intrusion. He couldn't quite pin the image down. Static in his brain as if at a bad connection. Or Jart. The Periwinkle's sometime avatar, her torn image presented; her intervention, if that was the right word, despatching him deep into the engine's heart to fix some faulty wiring whilst agents of the Terminals came for the suitcase. Came for Freda. Or was there another truth? A separate memory argued, he found, offered a differing version of things past. Skidmore failed to grapple with it, like he failed to put his boots back on the correct feet, staring at both foot and boot for a several seconds before he understood why they didn't go together. He'd come across a rounded chamber in the conduit, he recalled, as if an object, a sphere had manifested there, purpose unknown. Unless that sphere had in fact delivered him, missing its mark for whatever reason, damage or bad information. And Freda? Was, had she been taken? Released and later picked up by Celestine. Or had Skidmore, in another guise or form, rescued her? Rescued his enemy.

He needed to find Jones, Jones who had unwittingly become the locus of his sanity.

He needed to forget the past, worn out and patched up as it was, and concentrate on the future, as yet shiny and new.

Feet squelching he walked at ninety degrees from the river bank, up a low rise and into some trees. The ground became steeper and rougher but Skidmore kept going in the same direction, drawn by something, he felt, perhaps retracing his steps from the day or night before. The density of the trees remained consistent but there was a strange increase in the light, as if the canopy had been cut back, fewer shadows falling, leaves on the ground in their stead, green and curled. He kicked through them as he approached the top of the rise and then stopped abruptly. Ahead was a hole in the ground, roughly circular.

'Clearly you're difficult to kill.'

The voice of man sat in a tree. A familiar voice, thought Skidmore, turning to look but seeing only a pair of legs.

'What happened here?' he asked.

The man laughed, surveying the scene. 'You don't know?'

'I don't remember.'

'Someone foolishly attempted to unravel you.' Jumping down; not Holroyd, but the first pirate of his acquaintance, Munroe.

'Are they dead?'

'There is no death in the machine universe, Skidmore. They simply reuse your components.'

A joke, or perhaps half of one.

Munroe appeared much as Skidmore remembered him from their first meeting, before the latter's recruitment to The Periwinkle. Bright and energetic, not the broken man from the shelf with its island rivets.

'I take it you've come out of retirement.'

'Something like that, yes.'

'On whose behalf?'

Munroe didn't answer, just grinned and went to retrieve his pack and rifle from where they were secreted.

'First rule of war: identify your enemy. I could have killed you hours ago from up here, so consider us to be on the same team. Now,' adjusting his burden, 'let's go find your friend.'

But Skidmore wasn't happy with this turn of events, or even convinced of its veracity.

He was beginning to detect a pattern. Truth overlaid with fiction. The past, or at least the recent past, was beginning to heal. And he saw himself there, inverted.

Munroe was underway.

'Spatchcock!' Skidmore shouted. 'Who the fuck is Spatchcock?'

'An emissary of the robots. A go-between and your minder. Now come on.'

'And me?'

'Only you can answer that.'

He certainly couldn't. He had a choice now though. He trudged determinedly in the opposite direction, slip-sliding his way down the loose slope of the crater.

It grew muddy as he approached the centre, unsure what, if anything, he would find there, the nadir of his prior conflagration.

Gazing up he could visualize himself suspended, the top of his head swaying back and forth, his captors seated and standing, the young prince and his mother moments before the featureless individual appeared out of nowhere to pluck the string at his core.

In his head he still hadn't put a name to the woman about to offer him, in her own words "a bone". That it was Freda he was in no doubt. He simply failed to believe the evidence of his own inverted eyes. Her presence was ghostly. Her identity less so. More of an enigma was the nature and purpose of the unraveller, that figure tugging at the very centre of his being, releasing a pulse of energy sufficient to remove several thousand square metres of soil, rock and wood, displacing it whole or in parts.

Perhaps all in the blast radius were dead. Or else scooped out en masse like ice cream and held elsewhere in a bowl.

Skidmore was reminded of some of the earthworks he and Pollute had seen on the nameless planet with its huge fruits and wild rain. A war had raged there among unknown contenders. The same might be said here.

He poked a finger in his navel and decided whatever had been there was there no longer.

He'd sunk in the mud to his knees.

Falling onto his back he managed to pull his legs free, but in doing so lost his precious boots. A light rain began to fall as if to mock him, stranded like a turtle, albeit one whose shell was more than water resistant, held somewhere in reserve like a military grade battle-shield he had lost the keys to.

Black spheres and clear.

Skidmore himself though was the weapon.

Musing on that as the rain fell he wondered if Munroe were still around and what he might make of this display of unusual behaviour. He hadn't been convinced of Munroe's presence on any level, seeing it as evidence of outside manipulation, the practitioners of which haunted his existence. Ironically, as he grew more aware of them, he became susceptible to paranoia. Should he stop trusting perceived reality altogether? He thought not. Skidmore, however, needed to learn the language, the nomenclature of twinned galaxies, man and machine's, and how and why they interacted. That might take years. But he was young. And besides, didn't he have a life somewhere? Or at least one in the making.

That life involved a ship, a ship an engine, the latter promised by powers various, all of whom sought to use him. This hole in the ground suggested most if not all of those failed to comprehend Skidmore Shuffledeck's true nature. They served their own ends and would pursue them with or without him. He owed them nothing. It wasn't for Skidmore to take sides or even identify an enemy.

If he lay here long enough the crater would fill and offer him a choice of destinations, drowning among them.

But he wasn't prepared to leave just now. Munroe was a ghost, an unreliable guide and a false companion. Still, he was right in one thing: he needed to go find his friend.

10

The woods were full of spotters and beaters. Easy prey to a determined Skidmore Shuffledeck, not so much on the lamb as under the pork, the air suffused with beer and bacon. The animals hunted were likely brought in from the mainland, he reasoned, their quantity and diversity too great to be supported locally. Everywhere was gunshots and fires, noise and, at times, unnatural quiet.

He soon possessed a decent pair of boots, not so fresh clothes, an overcoat with more pockets than he could number, and a supply of tobacco, the latter, along with a hunting knife, from a dead man, shot in the back accidentally or on purpose. A score settled without the formality - or chance - of a duel.

Skidmore practiced throwing the knife at trees. Rabbits proved harder to hit, but luckily dead game was plentiful and easy to harvest from stationary carts.

What he missed most though was his telescope.

He lit his own fire using stolen matches, cooked and smoked. But he would have to brave company soon if he were to find Jones. No use hiding in the forest, despite its plenty.

Latching onto a caravan of what he fancied new arrivals, Skidmore listened to the grumps of low-paid workers and the disdain of their employers. Human life was ever such, he supposed. Within BMC it was hard if not impossible to rebel against one's superiors in any meaningful way, but those doing the dirty work were quick to grasp any opportunity to mock and mimic, even if getting caught (unlikely, as those served barely looked twice) meant a beating. Low-ranking enforcers kept order, but often these were readily bribed.

The caravan rolled toward an ever-swelling Grastobol, guards in steel helmets and chainmail walking its false walls, the ramping up of theatre part and parcel of a season that was as much festival of death as celebration of fecundity. Blacksmiths worked furiously, armourers likewise. Gunsmiths, too, saddlers and coopers hammering away, stitching and banding using an array of hand tools, employing skills from centuries ago, another time and planet. The base pull of Earth was everywhere. Within the twelve worlds especially strong. Here on Aqua Minor the very sweat of human industry. Skidmore was fascinated by the mundane repetitiveness of it all, the endless stream of small tasks nonetheless executed with skill and precision, necessary to the whole.

A lot of coin changed hands, spilling like the blood of a creature more exotic even than a flying elephant.

Much finery and flags, although a good deal of cheap imitation, too.

He was tempted to buy a hand crafted shooting stick but settled for a hat under whose heavy brim it was easy to conceal his features. Gloves to match. And a lighter with a big S on it that worked via thumb and flint.

Most of which was a distraction. Stalls at a fair.

The food and music were rich and plentiful. Performance arts were exhibited alongside plays, mostly comedies, and in a nondescript tent bare knuckle fighting too place, the prize a buxom wench.

Dogs barked and snarled at other dogs, their owners gauging wagers. Pigs were gutted and bears baited.

But no sign of Pollute.

He should explore the peripheries, he thought. Or return to the Fat Cow. One more likely to attract attention than the other.

Skidmore stood on the edge of a midden and relieved himself, his stream uncovering a finger. Gazing up he thought to spy Munroe in the distance, or the figure dressed as Munroe, but given the hour he might be mistaken. He had no intention of following the man, for whatever purpose. He couldn't though rule out being followed. That may even have been Munroe's purpose all along. Finishing up he considered the finger, neatly cut, and wondered what else lay buried in piss and shit. Treasure, no doubt, if you were prepared to dig for it.

Laughing, he ambled off, feigning a drunken state through wagons and hoping in a perverse way to be set about.

The morning found him in a stinking barn, inexplicably furious.

For a second he was back on Perridi, the shimmer of systemic glass and the smile of a farm lass at the edges of his vision, that is inches from his nose.

Skidmore grabbed her tightly by the throat and threw her on her back where her eyes bulged helplessly and she choked, kicking him repeatedly. He boiled with sexual violence, tearing her blouse to expose her breasts before grabbing her skirts with his free hand and pulling them up. But no sooner had he exposed her bony hips and thighs than he released her and jumped to his feet, anger dissipating from his fingers and mouth agape.

The girl gasped and coughed, mud in her hair and fear contorting her face.

Skidmore turned away in shame, his whole body shaking. He could not understand what had just happened.

She sobbed and crawled away and he could not look. He picked his hat up and walked toward the open barn door. Stopped there. She had been about to rob him or slit his throat.

Others in the barn stirred, as many as fifty, woken by the commotion. Skidmore could feel their eyes on him. He turned back and quickly made his way over to the distressed girl, covered her mouth with one hand and picked her up before running clear of the barn and finding his way to a clump of bushes.

She must think herself dead, he imagined. But that wasn't his intention. He set her down gently, kneeling over her, still with his hand on her face to quieten her protests. Only not tight, shushing her and allowing her to breathe, his own shock to subside, as he figured out what to do next. This wasn't a situation he'd been in before.

Eventually the girl calmed, either accepting her fate or else convinced of a chance to escape.

She may have been sent. She had no weapon. He didn't know. She may have just been hungry and poor.

But his own violence had been real, and it scared him, more so the pleasure he'd felt, welled up unawares.

Releasing her he pulled what money he had from his pockets and placed it in her small hands.

Seeing her now, she couldn't be much older than one of Jones' sisters. Barely a woman.

The girl lay shivering. Skidmore sat back and rolled a cigarillo.

'What's your name?'

Her mouth moved, but she didn't answer.

He lit the smoke, took a draw, then handed it to her. 'I'm sorry. I had no intention of hurting you.'

Partially a lie. A part of him, a deep primal lust, had wanted to hurt her in a number of ways.

'I'm sorry.'

She took the smoke, placed it between her lips, sat up and straightened her shabby clothes.

Was she reading him? He shouldn't underestimate her, he thought. The money had disappeared somewhere.

'Do you have family here?'

She shook her head.

'No-one?'

Silence. Drawing on the smoke she just stared, a measuring gaze born of fear and necessity.

'Okay...'

Skidmore left her in the bushes with the intention of drowning his guilt at the nearest makeshift tavern. No sooner had he ordered a tankard, however, not thinking how he was to pay for it, than she crept into his line of sight, a vulnerable kitten.

This was the last thing he needed. He'd already handed over all his coin. He walked out of the tent and she followed at a distance, and so it went through much of the morning, until eventually he lost her in the woods.

At least here he could distract himself, stalking prey of his own, human and resourced from whom he took food and a full purse without lifting a finger. But he decided to stay clear of Grastobol.

It wasn't long though before she appeared, as if gravitating toward him. Running scared again, this time from men with dogs who viewed the child as fair game. He watched from a distance, eyes strained, yet sure it was the same girl. The men had the dogs on chains and their pursuit seemed drawn out, as if for entertainment. Perhaps she had stolen from them. Whatever the truth, it was clear to Skidmore that he had put her in danger.

But surely she could look after herself.

He watched as the gap narrowed between the dogs and their quarry. Likewise, between himself and the girl, hair straggling and limbs flailing, neck bruised.

Skidmore stepped out and she stopped, breathing ragged, eyes scared. He drew the hunting knife and tipped his head to one side, the undergrowth animated behind, the barking dogs and the grunting men each numbering four.

The girl ran to her right and disappeared.

On seeing him the men stopped, pulling back on the chains to control their hounds, snouts wet with the scent.

They didn't know what to make of this lone figure. A man with a knife, that was all.

One of the dogs was released with a shout and it charged at him.

Skidmore killed it.

A pistol was drawn and discharged but the bullet missed.

He toted the bloodied knife as if about to throw it, at which the men turned and quickly departed, along with the remaining dogs, crashing nosily away whilst making curses and threats.

Skidmore stared down at the dead animal. He heard the girl approach but couldn't move. There were tears in his eyes and his heart had stilled.

After what seemed hours she crept up to him and with some effort dislodged the knife from his hand. She cleaned the blade on one of several skirts and replaced it inside his jacket, tucked from sight in an improvised scabbard.

'Sara,' she said. 'My name is Sara.'

Her mother had died, she told him. She had no other family. Another mother had taken her in, clothed and fed her, only to give her the option of sleeping with men or stealing from them. She was fifteen. He could buy her. The price would be reasonable.

Skidmore collapsed on the ground and refused to think for a while. His blood began to slowly move again and much later his eyes opened to the stars. The girl sat nearby shivering. He got up, removed his coat and draped it over her skinny frame. They both were hungry, and clearly dog wouldn't do.

11

The helicopters were military, noisome blurs designed to confuse and obfuscate. He counted five, six...more, a number already on the ground. Troopers spilled from their guts like maggots, black and heavily armed. The sky was inky blue, a washed-out version of the rocks beneath. The giant sun a lame purple orb.

If he understood correctly none of what he was seeing was real. Not in a solid sense anyway. Machine space, whilst not simulated, lay outside of the codices of his human brain, and therefore was unrecognizable. What he saw was an over-map, an unreliable translation based on parameters his brain could process, images and impressions that had no actuality outside of his confused mind. Reacting to it was one thing. Interacting quite another.

He peered at Holroyd, who shrugged.

Time to leave.

Jones, Pollution, dressed in a violet tutu. Cheeks painted red and mouth a slash of black lipstick, false breasts and oversized boots with the laces undone.

Skidmore couldn't believe his eyes.

Sara, holding his hand, smiled.

'That's your friend?'

'Err, yeah.'

'Kind of cute in a weird way.'

An open air theatre cum circus, he presumed, the crowd mostly drunk enough not to care. Smack in the heart of olde Grastobol, where the stones were both set and real.

Wooden houses clung to every surface, buildings lopsided and much repaired, the heart of the town he had first glimpsed some months before. Most of the audience were locals, residents who worked the hunting season for all it was worth, their faces separate from those of the transient, scattered pockets of whom stood out like clean spots on a pig's behind.

But they weren't here to watch the show. That was just a piece of happenstance he would remind Pollute of later. Sara led him into a maze of houses, each as if clambering over the next, down steps and up to a door in a tower that may well have once been a chimney.

The genesis of Grastobol, like many human settlements, far-flung and occasionally forgotten, was one of altered purpose. Likely a mine here once, he thought. A factory floor below.

A hundred years and four generations could change any backworld curiosity beyond recognition.

Sara gave the required knock and the door creaked open.

Skidmore thumbed his lighter.

He was a wealthy space merchant, a provisioner of naval shoes, fruit and veg to the loyal personnel of Yours Truly.

And he had gold; the promise of it at least, which Sara had convinced him was sufficient.

Inside was swept and tidy, hidden eyes following them as they descended the chimney and came at last to a kitchen and a pipe-chomping woman known only as Claudine.

Skidmore took his hat off and genuflected the best he knew how.

Claudine exhaled heavily in his direction. 'A fine example this one,' she opined, rocking back in a chair.

Skidmore wasn't sure who she was talking to.

'Mother,' said Sara. 'I've found a husband and must ask your leave.'

'Is he rich?'

'Indeed he is, mother.'

'But not so handsome, eh?'

Only then did he notice a second chair, a foot extending below a hem from which dangled a sandal.

'Don't worry,' Freda continued. 'I've learned my lesson. This is a friendly exchange of views rather than an interrogation. See, you've even the right way up.'

He fished out and lit a cigar.

'All this time?'

'I'm afraid so, Skidmore.'

Sara had backed off him, he realized. He could have just taken her, washed up somewhere. But no.

'There was a crater,' he remarked.

'Yes, but fortunately we were some way removed.'

'And now?'

'That would be telling,' she said, picking a piece of fluff from her dress. 'But rest assured the offer hasn't changed. Holroyd for an engine.'

Claudine smoked nosily, smacking lips.

Skidmore dropped ash to the floor.

And Sara?

Sara had disappeared.

'Oh, and you can keep the girl.'

Who drove her knife into Freda's chest a moment later, instigating a screaming, blood-soaked finale in time to exterior fireworks, feet kicking and chair collapsing, one sandal escaping across the floor, flopping like a toad in Skidmore's imagination, who stood on it before turning his attention to Claudine.

Sara wept, hands over her ears.

Freda's body thrashed wildly, flailed and jerked, life draining from it in streams. Or more likely a simulant. Not Freda at all.

He grabbed the girl and cigar clamped made his way back up the wooden steps to the door. Finding it locked he kicked it open, outward on rusty hinges. He had bought Sara new clothes, a cape, a knife like his own to conceal under it and put to murderous use just now. She cried like a baby over his shoulder but all he could think of was Jones in his tutu, that performance ended and the players gathered backstage, interrupted by a brown man and a bloody girl, bottles and glasses raised

Pollute was speechless.

'Don't make me explain,' pleaded Skidmore. 'Let's just get out of here.'

The sky began to lighten, way before dawn.

Pollute saluted his fellow players, who perhaps thought this some rehearsal, and the three of them escaped over stone and wood, pressing through crowds, faces turned to the sky, out over the bridge whose guards, Stuart and Roy, were nowhere to be seen.

'They liked my profile,' Pollute said later.

The snow was thick and the temperature severe. Fires crackled more than ever, their purpose shifted from cooking to warmth.

Spaceships hung in the sky, overly large, pregnant with cold, their presence freezing the atmosphere and thus the surface, water to ice their precise aim.

Yours Truly shutting the doors.

Sara was silent. Skidmore unable to identify her role in events, future, present and past.

The island was in lockdown, huntsmen near frozen whilst their quarry mostly suffered and died.

And all for Skidmore Shuffledeck, who thought about giving himself up, or at least agreeing to terms, neither of which appealed.

Jones understood but said nothing.

What was required was a much larger fire.

As the temperature dropped an exodus had begun, those with contingency plans escaping via one of the ships, those without strings to pull and favours to call setting out for the coast in wagons whose horses soon died in the harness. Better all round to stay put, and burn whatever didn't bake.

That they found their way back to the Fat Cow was perhaps inevitable. Deserted but for angry-looking cats. Those that had lived quietly in the beams, emboldened now and falling upon the recently deceased.

Skidmore placated them with flames, dousing the bodies with spirit and setting them alight, the alcohol last to freeze and as good an incendiary as any. The result was a surreal pantomime of fur and flesh.

He was losing his mind, he thought.

They'd all be dead in days, regardless, if not from cold then smoke inhalation.

Not much of a choice.

The cold covered every inch and permeated every pore as the ships' exhausts leached moisture from the atmosphere along with oxygen. A hellish prison, one immune to layers, fires turning from blue to orange. Slowly the life was being strangled from a world previously vibrant and florid.

The tobacco in Skidmore's cigarillos crackled.

'We need to bring one of those fuckers down,' Jones commented.

'Or get aboard,' Shuffledeck said.

They needed a ship to surface shuttle, but try as he might Skidmore could not tap into Celestine. He interpreted that as meaning Freda was still alive, or he lacked the necessary person to vessel empathy. Thus far he had spared Jones the details of what had occurred in the chimney tower. Freda and Pollute had shared flesh, but he was unclear how much else there was between them. She, however, had given the moon-faced lad other instruction, more specific to the shuttle.

Voice hoarse, he mentioned this to Jones, suggesting he may be able to summon Celestine.

Jones, of course, was incredulous.

Not a good start.

'Just try. Dial her up,' Skidmore told him. 'You've tweaked her parts.'

'It'll never work.'

For his part the brown man, icing over, tongue stiff, concentrated on spheres dark and clear, any shade or size. But they were of a technology he had yet to fully admit to let alone understand.

Such things were connected via another reality, one he was having trouble accessing willingly.

There was an explosion from outside. The Cow's timber frame shook and leaned over, its windows dissolving and its roof peeling off.

Cats scattered everywhere, fleeing like giant rats. They headed under tables and down into a basement Skidmore had not thought to explore. Frozen kegs of ale and sides of pork, he imagined.

His first impression was that one of the overhead shoes had dropped a reminder, but a more likely explanation was that of an underground fuel tank, petroleum or even hydrogen. Its detonation might be the result of the sub-zero temperature or a deliberate act. Likely there were several such about Grastobol and its environs. He just couldn't figure of a way to exploit them.

Jones laughed, more a raking cough.

'Any luck?'

'An image of me with my head blown off.'

So Freda had a sense of humour. Did she really want them to die here? Skidmore wasn't convinced.

There had to be more pieces on the board.

He checked on the girl, wrapped in numerous skins, and found she still breathed.

Skidmore couldn't afford an attachment. Not one like this. But his behaviour in the barn, inexplicable as it was, had left him feeling obliged. Maybe if he concentrated on saving her he might redeem himself.

The explosion had at least released some short-lived heat.

Snow blew in through the broken windows and the Fat Cow complained noisily, her structure under duress. The cats had the right idea, he intuited. All three floors of the buildings might soon occupy much less space.

He kicked a table over and spied a gap between floor and wall large enough to crawl through. Hurriedly they improvised brands and squeezed into the basement, the thin light from their tapers illuminating not only wood but metal. Skidmore peered at the round wheel for several seconds before realizing it was attached to a blast door, its presence uncovered as the concealing stone wall had fallen away, displaced as rubble. The door was somehow open, but a narrower gap than that in the floor, and whilst Pollute and Sara made it through with ease Skidmore had to strip off several layers, the cold doubling with each, the metal threatening to weld to his exposed skin. Once on the other side he shivered like a tuning fork, but quickly brought this under control whilst simultaneously warming to the harmony between galaxies. The revelation burned in his lungs and he imagined for a second he could breathe fire.

His companions appeared tiny.

A cat brushed past his leg and his whereabouts closed about him once more.

If anything it was colder down here. Darker, too. They'd sacrificed the modest comfort of small flames for the yawning bleakness of the void. But in the void Skidmore felt at home. They pushed on the short distance to where a suspended walkway fanned out around the emptiness of a hole in the ground, the vague outlines of pipes beneath.

A second explosion above brought rocks tumbling down, clanging off ductwork that rang hollow.

The pipes must run between tanks, from Grastobol out under the sea, Skidmore thought.

He dug his lighter out as his brand died and managed to illuminate a nearby ladder.

Clambering its length he could barely feel his feet and hands. Ten metres below was a mesh platform where Pollute soon joined him but there was no sign of Sara, who Skidmore was forced to climb back up and fetch, her lungs as her limbs, on the verge of giving out.

Jones was busy searching for an access hatch, shuffling on top of the largest pipe and sliding left and right. He kicked something, a metre-long lever, but only succeeded in injuring his foot.

More rocks fell. It was finale time, the final frames of the movie.

Skidmore joined his friend, Sara borne over his shoulder.

Leaving her with Jones he scampered a short way along the pipe and raised a stone the size of his pelvis, thinking it an egg and that part of him an egg cup. Happy memories of basic tools. He could barely carry it, but having rested a moment swung the stone against the lever, which absorbed its force without so much as a squeak, flipping both stone and man away contemptuously.

But Skidmore wasn't about to be outdone.

The hole in the ground resounded like a striking clock. The lever shifted, and at the next strike capitulated entirely, allowing its assailant to heave open the steel cover and break the hermetic heal on a passage smooth, round and brightly lit.

He dropped through and took hold of Sara, small as a bird and seemingly as fragile.

Pollute came after, dragging the cover closed, gravity and engineering securing the lever back in place.

This was it. No other way out.

The pipe hummed with distant noise. Whatever caused the noise, a sound like steely insects, might reasonably kill them.

Their breaths still streamed, but it was several degrees warmer.

'Come on, keep moving,' said Skidmore, a warm and gentle breeze at their backs that was perhaps as imaginary as the sunlight ahead.

12

Hand luggage.

Two spoons. The simplicity of cheque and balance, in this instance gravity and its source, a star.

He was able to carry it in his pocket, but the wisdom of that, compounded by the unnecessity, made the attaché case indispensable. Skidmore though had removed the cherry from his ear, irritated by Holroyd and his "worst case scenario", the orbital's projected destruction.

All he had to do now was smile and walk out, the station's gyrocompasses spinning up and the majority of those on board ignorant of the strain slowly being increased on deck and bulkhead.

Maintenance crews would be roused from bunks and reassigned by emergency protocols. An increasingly number of red lights would illuminate previously blank fascia.

Spilt coffee. Jammed doors. Rising panic.

Skidmore recalled his time as a crew member, although in truth barely remembered those stolen days. Problems always started small and the crews were equipped to tackle such. But it wouldn't be long before the risk curve ran vertical.

He reckoned twenty minutes.

The cat followed him, keeping a watchful eye. Sometimes he thought it must be invisible to the casual onlooker, a flickering shadow, a spectral light dancing on the edge of vision. To Skidmore it had always loomed large, tail long and fur sleek, grey to blue electric.

If you wished to steal something the easiest way was to walk in and take it.

Trusting Horatio Holroyd was another matter.

'We're soldiers of fortune, you and I. We go where we go and do as we do. There is no other path.'

Skidmore had stared into the void. He hadn't liked what he'd seen there. The path his nemesis spoke of was easy to follow.

His nemesis, he thought, liking that. Simeon Vendy, he smiled and nodded at gatekeepers and shop staff, none of whom suspected he was another creature enitirely.

The benign singularity he toted thus far disturbed only his stomach. In a minute from now a different scenario may begin to unfold. There was of course a best case scenario as well as a worst. Something in the middle then; without too many casualties. Naive to imagine there wouldn't be any, that lives as well as constructs wouldn't crumble.

A taint on his soul that was already tainted.

A collapsed star to collapse a star, the latter of a magnitude sufficient to make practical an engine.

Two years had passed since Aqua Minor. Two years since he'd burned Sara's body on a small moon under the aegis of the MPV's shaky atmospheric parameter. Enough to create a pile of ashes that then might be allowed to drift, much as Skidmore himself, alone and beyond contact, skittering via instruments, experimenting with primordial puddles across the reach. He failed to understand the wound the girl had opened in him. The one in Freda's chest was at least demonstrable, although ultimately as vague, for Skidmore was convinced Freda was nothing more than a sophisticated flesh robot. Perhaps an animus of Yours Truly herself. Whatever the truth, Sara's death, her small frozen body, scarred him in a way nothing else had, or even come close. Pollution Jones was left to his own devices, of which he had few, relying on Skidmore for everything. A necessary friend, he thought, nevertheless one whose loyalties might be divided. And no-one better suited to that than Horatio Holroyd.

His reasons for being back on Pierspont were similarly questionable. Staring at the department store window he saw the large 100 had been replaced by a display of happy families and picnic hampers. History had passed its landmark and moved on, here and elsewhere.

He hefted the brick and salivated.

Hanging about the lake had brought him into contact with a nervous fringe of would-be anarchists and revolutionaries, many of them pale, uncomfortably ensconced in this world's closed peripheries. They knew what he knew, that there were other worlds out there, other peoples, and that the rule of the generals, whilst absolute, was as weak as time.

The underground was faceless and disorganized, largely dismissed by the authorities, who chose to label its threat as insignificant. They'd been spooked by Skidmore's last visit for sure; but that had quickly died down, suppressed and unreported. He made no claim to it now, preferring instead to adopt the persona of a runaway, using what he knew of Pierspont and its surrounds to fabricate a tale of boundaries crossed and the mark of pollution.

A rat amongst mice, he was though dangerous.

The glass almost seemed to hesitate before breaking.

