 
Rocket Fuel

by Andrew McEwan

*

Copyright 2012 Andrew McEwan

Smashwords Edition

*

Cover design by Andrew McEwan

*

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

***

I come from a land in the sun-bright deep,

Where golden gardens grow,

Where the wind from the north, becalmed in sleep,

Their conch shells never blow.

Moore

1st Part: MOTHERTUG

Their faces were not all alike,

nor yet unalike, but such as those

of sisters ought to be.

Ovid

One - The Happy Monkey

Okay, wind up the elastic band, we are GO...

Morgan pressed the button and the light winked off. He spun in his chair before the glitzy console, whistling, tuneless, the tight air squeezing his sound, killing it.

Frozen Hound peered over his shoulder and yawned. Morgan stroked the dog's wet nose.

The minutes sidled past.

Fourteen. Fifteen, and the light came back on. Morgan, known as Lumping Jack, frowned.

'Something not right,' he said.

The dog paced in circles, tail between legs.

The console died, echoing the engines, the ship's drive not only cut but paralysed.

The Happy Monkey, Morgan's guppy, wound down its vacuous spiral to rest...

'Permission to come aboard.'

'Permission denied.'

'I have a warrant for the arrest of Dr Henry Grey.'

'On what charge?'

Pause. Then, 'Murder.'

Lumping Jack and Frozen Hound shared a bowl of cheese-flavour crackers...

The brand was one with which she was familiar.

'They're really pushing this stuff,' she commented to nobody in particular. 'Cheese-flavour Yum-Yums, bacon-flavour Yum-Yums, banana-flavour Yum-Yums - really, Morgan and his dog have a terrible diet.'

'Really...' said Sally.

'Yeah,' Kate replied, nudging her sister. 'I thought you were asleep. Did I wake you? I'm sorry; I was reading.'

'I can see.'

'I don't know why I bother. It's all Byron's fault, he got me hooked.'

'Kate.'

'What?'

Sally turned, over. 'Shut up.'

They faced each other across the dark expanse of a fibrous carpet, its tangled pile like charred grass. Morgan smiled his jolly smile and folded his arms, rested his weight on one hip, said, 'Please, no autographs.'

Kate Droover fell asleep. When she woke, groggy, the comic's lurid colours over her face, Sally was gone, vanished. The dim cabin closed about the emptiness, disguising it, but Kate knew in her heart that Sal was in trouble.

She swung her legs from under the covers and dropped lightly to the metal deck, its warmth - faintly pulsating - comforting beneath her as yet drowsy toes.

'Sally?' She keyed the door. Nothing happened. 'What the...'

Everything was quiet; too quiet.

Pause. Then, 'Murder.'

Lumping Jack cursed. Frozen Hound switched herself off. One of the dog's ears stood erect and Morgan blew in it, folding the extraordinary animal in on itself, hiding it in a space that was no space, a universe inside out...

There was an explosion. Screaming in her brain was a host of squabbling bats, feral creatures with one eye. The cabin door slid open, the air-pressure keeping it shut expended in a single languid kiss.

Kate shook her head in an effort to clear it and ran into the black corridor, its walls undetectable, its floor slick with condensation.

Someone caught her arm and yanked her through a jagged rent, the cooling teeth of which tore the skin of her upper arm and shoulder.

'Slow down!' came the order.

'What's going on?'

'Quiet...listen.'

Kate freed her arm and stood. After a moment she thought to hear dripping - water or blood. 'What is it? Sal? Monica?' She fumbled in the uncompromising dark but was alone.

The dripping stopped. As if a tap had been more firmly closed, she told herself, and shivered.

Two - The Friendly Mould

War raged about the star Horus, its six worlds and thirteen moons. The forces of Topica and Upfront fought over the planet Bid-2., its mineral resources for past centuries the focus of countless disputes, with each side accusing the other of abusing agreed quotas and violating land rights.

The contest was bitter, more so as the opposing planets drew ever closer in their mutual orbits through the firmament. A peace delegation from Earth had been annihilated. Daily the worlds grew in one another's skies, bleeding across green and yellow horizons. And daily the cost in lives and hardware was beamed into Byron's living-room.

He waited for the knock on the door that never came...

'I can still fly,' he protested bitterly. 'They had no right to discharge me.'

'They had no choice you mean,' answered Sally.

Byron cracked his knuckles and switched the screen off. 'Whose side are you on?'

'The Topican's,' Sally told him. 'I'm a spy...'

'No,' said Byron; 'you're too ugly. Spies are beautiful and dangerous.'

'You don't think I'm dangerous?' She rose from the couch and walked into the kitchen, acting the ruffled tigress.

He rolled a cigarette. 'No,' he replied. 'But your sister, she has all the qualifications.'

Sal returned with a glass of milk and a doughnut. 'You wish she was here instead of me.'

He couldn't refute the statement. Brooding, he sighed. The cigarette smoke soothed him, quietened his nerves; but the restlessness was still there, the urge to be flying.

'Don't look so worried,' Sally said. 'Sis and the captain want to be underway as much as anyone.'

'To Earth and Sol system,' whispered Byron, who had never been farther down the arm than Fortuna. 'Is it really as paradoxical as they say?'

'Earth? Nah, not like it was years ago, more...What's the word? Cultivated.'

'Cultivated?' It was a new one on Byron. He'd met Sally Droover the previous day on a hilltop on the outskirts of town; she was taking in the sunset, pale and smooth in the waning light. They got to talking about places, his homeworld of Upfront so close to destruction, hers of Luna, Earth's grey satellite, and he'd felt it then, what she called mothertug, a strange, almost overpowering desire to set foot on the world of origin, the blue-green planet from which the threads of life extended, its gravity of the heart and mind an unquenchable attraction, a thirst exacerbated by the fact all non-military traffic would soon stop around the vicinity of Horus, the golden sun that was for many years his guiding star.

'Yes,' said Sal, munching. 'Not nearly so raw as Upfront or Grandee or Deathspoint - but kind of boring; the parts I've seen anyway...'

Which amounted to nothing.

And they were stuck without a trained engineer, albeit one with a record.

Byron Friendly would never fly again in this sector, that was definite. So what did he have to lose? Zero, and they were sure to take him as every available engineer of even middling ability had been drafted.

But not Byron. Byron had survived the unsurvivable, lived to tell the tale, too often; those who flew with him were luckless and, rumour had it, regarded as expendable.

Sal was right, they had no choice but to discharge him. Still, he should never have floored that controller.

*

'What do you think of him?'

'I don't know, he puzzles me.'

'In what way?' Captain Jones leant on the bar, face alert to every movement in the room, its tables and chairs, pillars and shadows fixed in their pattern, each subtle change noted, each citizen and soldier marked.

'It's difficult to say,' admitted Kate. 'I like him; he's good, we know that much. But...'

'You can't forget Ernie,' Amy finished.

Kate nodded.

'Me neither. But Ernie's dead, gone, and we need an engineer, unless you're planning to spend the rest of your life on this precarious edge, eh? Halfway between somewhere and nowhere!'

Kate sipped her drink. 'You've made your decision,' she said.

'Right,' confirmed the captain, adding, 'I may be the majority shareholder in our little outfit - and a drunken whore to boot - but I still like to discuss these changes in...' She paused, tensed.

'Amy?'

'Sorry, Droover, touch of nerves.'

'You drink too much.'

'Right again...' A man with brown skin and yellow hair watched them from the far side of the scantly peopled, grotesquely furnished restaurant. 'No manners.'

'Who?'

'Guy in the corner there.'

'Security?'

'Yeah, they have those eyes.' She waved obliquely.

Kate laughed, smothering it. 'We leave in six hours,' she reminded; 'don't go getting us arrested.'

'No chance,' Amy rejoined. 'What for, flirting?'

'You know what I mean.'

Captain Jones shrugged. 'Okay, okay...I'll curb my less demure instincts; you just buy the drinks.'

And so it went.

Kate stood alone in the dark street, shades like gravel shards, icy charcoal about her. In the distance she could make out the faint umbral glow of Upfront's main spaceport, its screened image mellow and illusive, her sight subtly nudged aside. The stars, close-nit, glimmered overhead, providing the colourless illumination.

She heard sweetened breath in her ear, the captain.

'I hate to squat in strange alleys...' confessed Amy Jones, tugging Droover's padded sleeve. 'Come on.'

'Sure you can walk?'

'I was born walking; besides, it's late, we don't want to miss our slot.'

'And Friendly?' said Kate, guiding her companion like on so many occasions: a little guilty, a little sick...

'Who?'

'The engineer!'

'Oh, I took care of that hours ago.'

'You called Sal from the bar?' questioned Droover, navigator to pilot.

Captain Jones kicked a stone, chased it. Grinning, she glanced over her shoulder at Kate. 'Race you!'

And was gone.

Kate broke into a run, following the hollow footfalls that echoed in the street, the buildings either side leaning as if poised; preparing, given sufficient encouragement, to fall like oddly pigmented waves onto the road, washing her away.

The spaceport loomed ahead beyond a fence of brittle trees and harsh, netted wire. Eerily quiet, the wells and bunkers filled the ground for several kilometres square. Kate reached an IN ramp and jogged the descending pathway, eager to board the ship, its familiar sanctuary and contented faces. The sky lit up briefly, a ball of lightning closely attended by a weight of exhausted thunder as booster rockets lifted a guppy clear of the planetary surface, thence toward some orbiting engine.

She smiled a half smile, felt the thrill of near departure, wondered at the course her life, the lives of the crew might take from here, Rigmarole. It was months since she'd seen Earth, breathed its neutral (reconstituted) air and returned its harmless (stagnant) gaze, and like a favourite lover she longed once more to array her limbs across its naked contours.

'Slow as ever, Droover...' drawled the captain from a hidden doorway.

'I never could keep up with you,' she came back; 'not in anything.'

Together they rode an elevator. Kate stuffed her hands in her pockets and Amy drummed her fingers on her brow - on, off, on, off, on...

'We got lucky,' Sally told her sister some time later, prior to launch.

'How's that?' Kate concentrated on her maps, the traceries in her skull like a firework display. 'I wish Frank and Monica would slow it down once in a while,' she commented.

'Our new engineer,' said Sal. 'You know. He's a funny colour, but I like him.'

'What?' She blinked.

'I said he's a funny colour. Don't you agree?'

'He's native Upfront,' Kate returned.

'Yes! And if he's at all like Ern...' Sal shrugged and wandered from the narrow space.

If he's at all like Ern, mouthed Kate, aligning neat rows of neat figures, shuffling their order, filing the rote, feeling the old man's loss, the possible gain. If he's at all like Ern, we'd better watch out.

Ernie was crazy. Ernie sang. Ernie, on four of the last five loops, had nearly wiped their slate.

She belled the captain.

'Jones.'

'Droover K. Listen, what does Byron Friendly know of Ernie's bubbles?'

'Nothing; they died with him, that's finished.'

'You're sure?' Kate had other ideas, thought there was more to his fantasies than a lifelong addiction to squeaky, ten-a-penny pheromones.

'Ain't I always?' replied the captain, feigning disinterest, a sure a sign as any that she was concerned. But they had to leave Upfront, and in a hurry.

'Fine,' the navigator concurred, satisfied Amy had taken stock of the situation. Didn't she always? Okay. Still, it intrigued her, what the engineer would find...

'Straight, Droover K?'

Kate pursed her lips. 'Fine,' she said again.

'Okay...'

Fine, she repeated, a third time, to herself...really.

And to Sally, 'Yeah,' dissolving sugar in coffee, 'he does sort of grow on you.

Three - Carbon Crazies

Spritzer Rich was the diarist among the crew. He wrote nothing down, but stored visual and audio material in his head. He'd collect data from the central computer into which every member of their little family was at some time plugged: Captain Jones through her pilot's station, Luke Farouke during his regular trysts with comp's menu-memory...

He kept a separate channel for movies. His favourite at present was The Great Escape, with Steve McQueen, and he'd fashioned himself a baseball glove out of copper sheeting, the ball steel and lethal.

He alone knew the truth about Ernie; and he was silent, keeping a resentful distance, a repairman's aloofness between Rich and Jones, Spritzer and the Droover sisters, Abdul, Frank Marsh and Monica Hat, this new engineer, who he secretly envied.

'Pitcher,' he said. 'The engine should belong to you. Ernie knew his business, but you could make her interiors dance, her bubbles into more than spectres, insubstantial girls whose hearts are as bloodless as their eyes; you could assemble a cornucopia of things...'

Things like - he laughed.

Things were secret...

'Kinema.'

Frank and Monica liked to swop bio-chips. On Upfront they'd escaped the confines of the ship and walked beyond the fences, giving themselves over to an unfamiliar nature.

Cut off from everything but each other they strolled for hours beneath the green-tinged sky and yellow-flecked leaves of tall bushes and stunted trees, the latter heavy with exotic fruit, shrouded in colourful, noisome insects.

For now the pressure of co-ordinating the dimensionless void was lifted. There was neither input nor Droover, output nor Droover's backhanded remarks.

They enjoyed teasing her, but enough...

'Is enough,' closed Rich. 'One day, I know, you two are going to surprise me; but until then,' he shook his empty hands, 'I'll put my money on Abdul.'

The little thief.

Luke Farouke spent his vacant moments polishing his crime skills, liberating items of dubious value, replacing them with miniature treasures: an ivory brooch for a cheap watch, a pot of Roman ancestry for one massed out of donkey faeces - but the man was a true artist, a genius.

*

Lumping Jack prowled the night streets like a wraith, his veneer of darkness compelling the eye to look askance as he burgled the record's office of Interplanetary Spacelines. The supernational had a contract he was interested in; a lot of money - he conjectured - was involved.

Naturally, he got what he wanted.

Twenty minutes later Morgan was back on board his guppy, mind and fingers prying into the procreative wellspring of graphic information. What he had gleaned from a hapless nightwatchman; the stuff that made worlds pause; a mad scientist's ciphered elucidations, no less than Dr Grey's confidential papers, his instructions as to the handling and transportation of certain valuable cargoes...

But what?

It was worth his while, he decided, to find out.

*

'Corpses.'

Spritzer, snatching the revolving steel ball, congratulated himself. He had to admire Ernie, his use of fact, turning it inside out, hawking it as fiction, and in such a format, a comic-strip that by now had so many lookalikes and facsimiles, imitations and blatant rip-offs, the truth, the compact warning of the originals was forever swamped. Buried like Ern: in life an engineer of opposing forces, in death a force without substance or identity; a bubble popped...

If only they knew, he thought. There was Ern, dropping his pills, and why? He was slave to the engine much as the engine was slave to retrograde, its bizarre fuel, the splicer of time and space.

The twisted runt had a Messiah complex, a megalomaniacal desire to wrest mankind from its entropic fate - all through the medium of an irregular, pictorial rag.

Why indeed...it was more than syphilis contorting his brain, the insanity of Ernie stretched to points achievable solely within the thraldom to which he had given his every breath, his final act.

'Rich.'

'What is it?'

'Nothing, I...'

'Captain?' He let the ball drop. It struck the gantry and rolled, nudged the toe of his boot.

'You were giving me a lot of static just then.'

He smirked. 'It's fixed,' he said.

You can rely on the pitcher, for now.

'Thanks.'

If only they knew the intricacies and understood the effort, showed - were it possible - the appreciation he deserved, and recognized their peril, he might yet come down on their side. But that wouldn't happen, he would be forced to kill again. A pain struck him, as it often did, across the bridge of his twice broken nose.

If only they knew the truth, and listened to Dr Grey.

'Henry, they bleed blood and sweat sweat, but unlike you and me - and Ernie - they don't know shit.'

Round and round the stars they go, looping the loop, matching beginnings and endings, starting where they left off, never questioning, never realizing, as, like carbon atoms, they cycle and recycle the same old (new) routes, propelled by a desire to trade and be traded, a need to explore come what may, a gravity of lungs and muscles upon them, the beguiling siren's call, of nature's prey, and predator...

He wanted the engine, Ernie's legacy. He wanted -

Spritzer laughed.

Four \- Mucho Tomcat

'"Yes," replied the alien; "but can you eat it?"'

Kate's face was blank.

'You don't get it,' said Byron, feeling foolish. He shook his head.

'You lost me,' Kate told him, 'I'm sorry.' She felt strangely numb, as if the stars around her were not screened away but impossibly close, touching... 'Look!' she declared. 'You can see the engine.'

Byron followed her gaze. Glimmering dully, silver-grey against light-pricked black, was the misshaped powerhouse of the Mucho Tomcat, the giant engine that was the smaller craft's means of crossing interstellar space.

'Nice,' said Friendly, who had never handled anything half as large. 'I like...'

Kate folded her arms and smiled. 'Ernie was proud of her; too proud maybe.'

'What do you mean?'

She shrugged. 'He died,' she said quietly.

Byron sensed some mystery. 'How exactly? Your sister was pretty evasive.'

'Sal's upset; we all are,' Kate explained. 'But it'll work out.'

He was none the wiser. The ship closed under the illusion of acceleration. Minutes would see him inside the greater body. Its structured interiors already occupied his thinking. The woman next to him, tall and silent, vanished from his mind and took with her the fragile thread of his inquisition.

He stepped through the double lock and paused. A draught of warm air brought the smell of ripened death: fetid meat and stale wine, a feast of unmasked gods. He turned left down a passage whose blistered walls were greasy, pocked.

He thought to hear a sound behind him.

The sticky odour faded, dragged behind filters. He halted, wishing the stench had lingered, as his first duty was to locate and expel his predecessor's blighted carcass...

Five - In Place Of Manna

What's happened?

She dreamed and she dreamt; then the clock woke her, blowing in her ear, turning her outside in...

Kate sat up. The sudden light flooded her mind with barbaric colours, warring reds and greens, embattled pinks and blues, screaming orange. She squinted through their stirred haze at the picture window, its vision of a golden strand, gentle waves and gentler sky, a lone palm.

And swallowed.

It was the morning after, the night before a giddy mass of lopsided images: Byron swinging from a stair-rail, Byron with his face painted, Byron caged...

'What's happened, Kate?' she asked herself. She reached over to the wall console and punched the INFO key. The tiny screen lit with figures, unfamiliar symbols that marched right to left, assembled from miniature yellow squares.

She scratched her head. 'I must be regressing...' Maybe she'd go back to sleep; but it didn't seem such a great idea. 'Come on brain- function!' The symbols resolved into recognizable letters and numbers. 'Better. Now...'

Earth orbit.

Her mouth tasted foul. Cigarettes, she remembered.

'I don't smoke cigarettes,' Kate told the screen.

'Droover K?'

'Yeah...who is it?'

Silence.

The window flickered and died.

Byron's rollies, bushy strands of tobacco, gaudy papers, and an oily taste on the tip of the tongue, the lips unsweetened, his, Friendly's soggy kisses all down her spine.

'Oh.'

She dialled the captain. Nothing.

'Am I the only one awake?' There was a robe on the deck, a paperback novel. She picked both up.

'Sal's.' She put the robe on, flitted through the novel's printed pages. 'Why am I talking to myself? Kate? Hm?'

She dropped the book onto her sister's bunk, , its shifting cover a melange of eyes peering at her.

Tossing her unruly fringe out of her face Droover padded along the corridor and rapped on the captain's door. Nothing. 'Amy? Hey, speak to me.' Another voice, she thought, I need to hear another voice, one to reassure me. 'Amy!' The door was unlocked and slid easily open. A film of blackness engulfed her senses, beyond its receding tide the smell of vomit. 'You had a party and didn't invite me...' rambled Kate. 'Where are you?'

Some other world, the captain's dead lips told her.

'Oh,' she said again.

'Have you seen her?' asked Kate, hugging the robe tightly, a desire in her bones.

'Who? Sally? She's out cold, won't come round for hours.' The skinny cook looked apologetic. 'You want something to eat?' he offered.

She said yes. 'I'm starving. Are there sausages?'

Abdul brightened, relieved perhaps that his preoccupation was not wholly out of place in the circumstances. 'Six kinds,' he boasted.

'And hot coffee?'

'As much as you can handle.'

'Okay!' Kate too was cheered, the business of eating a welcome distraction. She needed time to adjust, take it all in. They, the crew, were in trouble.

She followed fleet-footed Abdul down to the galley. 'Down,' he would often say, 'so all the delicious smells drift up.' And Kate had to agree.

There was a lethargy about her limbs as she descended. The cluttered galley shone, alive with brass and chrome.

Luke Farouke (Amy had dubbed him Abdul, although she couldn't remember why) pulled a chair out for her, grinning like a poacher with a deer in his sights.

'Did you see her, before we flew?'

'Captain Jones? No, I thought she was with you and Sal.'

Kate shook her head, rested it in her hands. 'I lost Sal,' she said; 'somewhere. I'm not sure; but Amy wasn't with us, at least not for long. I don't know, my mind's full of blanks.'

'Then you must have spent some time with her,' Abdul speculated, 'eh? Drinking her whisky?'

She grimaced. 'Where's those sausages?'

'Two minutes.' He stepped across the kitchen threshold - an invisible line all save himself were forbidden to break - and poured her coffee. 'Drink. This's my special memory-restorer blend. You'll see.'

She took his advice, heaving lungfuls of sausage odour, and saw on the table before her a thimble. 'What's this?'

'Present,' Abdul said from behind a curtain of steam. 'A little something I picked up in Kopa.'

'It's pretty. ..'

'It has special powers.'

'Really?' Kate placed the steel thimble on her middle finger. 'What can it do?'

'When the moon is right,' the cook revealed, 'it can turn you into a panther.'

She giggled, felt the tears loosen, the tears she would have to cry for Amy Jones, their erstwhile captain.

But not now. 'Real panthers are extinct, like all the big cats; there're only reconstructions.'

'Ah,' whispered Abdul, delivering a feast of meat and curly onion strips, 'that's what you think. But the real cats, the genuine articles, are making a comeback.'

'You're talking nonsense.' She ate, uncaring.

He sat at the table. 'There,' he gestured; 'you're eating like one already!'

'A panther?'

'Of course.' His posture relaxed, exhausted. 'You don't need a fork, Droover, just an appetite.'

She glanced at the metal object on her finger. 'When were we ever in Kopa?'

'Kate can't remember?' Abdul stood, fussing. 'A while ago. I couldn't tell you the exact date. It was Ernie's idea we go there, to see the geysers.'

'Geysers on Iglan?' Chewing.

'Sure - and Kopa offered the best price for cane sugar.'

Kate was baffled. Wasn't Iglan uninhabitable? Radioactive? A pink-people bond-prison?

She finished her sausages. 'One thing at a time,' she said. 'Pink-people?'

'What?' Abdul sat once more.

'More coffee please...'

The smiling man filled her cup.

She drank...

'Droover K?'

'Yeah...who is it?'

'The pink-people are innately radioactive; they glow, and have sweet tooths.'

'And the geysers?'

'A side-show.'

She peered at the empty plate. 'We can never shake hands then, Abdul...'

But she was alone, and shivering.

'Where is everyone?' Sal wanted to know.

'This is it,' Frank told her. 'Spritzer's locked himself in the machine-room and the radio's down between here and Byron Friendly. We'll have to wait till he surfaces.'

Sally slumped in a couch, grim. 'Wonderful. So, Monica, you're the medical among us. What killed the captain?'

Monica Hat looked about her at the expectant faces. Frank's hand touched hers. 'I don't know,' she mumbled.

'Don't know?' The co-pilot was angry.

'Right,' she said louder. 'It's beyond my experience; we'll have to go Earthside for an expert opinion.'

'That's your diagnosis?' Sal inquired sarcastically.

Monica exhaled. 'Yes...'

'And Ernie? The same for him?'

'We've got to find his body first,' Frank interjected.

'Yeah,' said Abdul; 'but that's Friendly's job.' He bit hairy fingers unconsciously, as if lubricating them. 'Won't Spritzer fix the radio link, Frank?'

The bigger man rolled his shoulders. 'Maybe.' He stared at his feet, the suddenly odd-looking shoes upon them.

'Maybe not,' finished Abdul. He smiled ruefully. Spritzer Rich was always doing his best to trip somebody up. 'Anyway,' he continued, 'isn't there a more immediate problem? Sal, you should know...'

She agreed. 'Kate's volunteered to make the trip to Radio,' she said. 'As acting captain I have to stay with the ship until all the legal ramifications are worked out.'

'Shouldn't that be automatic?' queried Frank. 'I mean, didn't Amy make the necessary arrangements?'

Kate leapt from her seat, the movement her first, and quick as a frightened bird. 'Are you kidding! Amy Jones never arranged anything over and above the next port of call, the next bar, the next drink.' She paced before them. 'Ring-pull Jones they called her on Sarpendon; rainwater, Captain Rainwater she was on Luna!'

The others were quiet.

Then, 'We loved her too, Kate,' said Monica.

'Right, we're of one mind. Sis here pays a visit to the Licencing Bureau; the rest of us wait for her call and manoeuvre the ship as and when we have to. In the meantime,' she paused, 'I suggest we start thinking about a cargo.'

'And Amy Jones?' asked Frank.

'Is dead,' said Abdul. 'She can wait, Ernie too. What matters now is the future, our future, and just what the hell we're going to do if the powers-that-be discontinue our franchise.'

'Point taken,' Frank conceded. 'All the cargoes between here and Endsix'd be worthless if we lost the fuel-rights to shift them.' And now his hands appeared swollen, like they'd been injected with water.

And, thought Kate Droover, no one really knows what's going on. It's all mixed up...

Her skin tingled. The flesh at least recalled - but was there more than kisses?

'Byron,' she said to the console, its flat screen. 'Byron, it's me, Kate. Switch your set on.' A stupid thing to say.

The miniature yellow squares paraded.

Byron swinging from a stair-rail, Byron with his face painted, Byron caged...read the words.

The digits she ignored.

*

The engineer chewed his lip, teased the fibres apart, set the instrument on the deck. It was too much like hard work; a labour of love, this or any engine. A man could get attached, literally, to the job. The engine fed him, he breathed its air and rolled its cigarettes. It was beautiful. He could appreciate Ernie's art, sense his presence. Byron may have failed as yet to locate his forerunner's corporeal self, but his spiritual anima was all around.

He whistled, something he hadn't done in years, and it felt a vital part of him.

Ernie must've been a whistler, he supposed. It was natural, Byron's inheritance.

He replaced the instrument and clicked the panel shut. A row of red lights advanced along a horizontal scale. They reminded him of Droover, her tidy vertebrae.

*

Kate stood a moment before the aft lock, wondering how deep Friendly could be, then made her way up to the bridge where Sal sat waiting in the pilot's chair surrounded by a vague corona of lights.

'I've contacted the Bureau,' her sister informed her, 'and appraised them of our situation, so they're expecting you.'

'Good.' Kate stuck her hands in her pockets. 'Has Spritzer fettled the link to the engine?'

'No; he's keeping a low profile. You know what he's like.'

Kate nodded. 'So Byron's still in the dark...'

Sally rose and approached her younger sibling. 'You've fallen for his alien charms, haven't you?' she jibed, half teasing, half bitter.

'Oh,' answered Kate, looking askance; 'he's okay.'

'Ha!'

'What? I'm in...' Droover felt abandoned to the darkness, its slight chill. 'What's the problem?'

'Kate?' The voice was Monica's.

'Who else? Move it!' She banged her fist on the shapeless computer.

'Sorry...lost the key.'

There was a click and the lights came on, exploded inside the cockpit. She listened to the clamps disengage and tried to imagine herself falling. On the computer screen a red dot separated from a green line. The power-unit's torque jammed in, startling her.

'All yours,' said Monica.

Droover punched the code for Luna and relaxed. The grey world of her birth blossomed like a concrete flower before her eyes, overlaid with a plethora of useless maps and data she failed to clear. Like insects, metallic flys, she thought. She hated riding the cramped emergency vessel; it reminded her of an elevator, one in which a bunch of amateur cartographers had set up camp. The environment was oppressive. She closed her eyes and tried not to breathe in time with the broken heater.

'Fucking Spritzer,' she said. Soon it was damp and warm. Too warm, hot...

And Luna was twenty minutes off. She drained the stale water as it was offered and let the vessel land itself.

Luna terminal was quiet. Kate checked the bus schedule, saw she had an hour, and cursed her sister for not better judging the stopover. But at least it gave her time to freshen up; even get mildly intoxicated.

No! What was she thinking?

'I'm adopting Amy's vacant persona,' she muttered, those about her disinterested. Their faces were unfriendly, sated. Their smiles mentioned no worries.

Droover grimaced, feeling like a fight...

'Droover K?'

'Yeah...who is it?'

'Me. '

She smiled, noticing the steel thimble on her middle finger, pressed into her left palm.

The bus rumbled. The sun outside its window glittered. On the blue-green ocean below floated Radio City, its family of islands stretched out beyond: lush, barren, tortured, exotic...a total of nine.

Kate rubbed her eyes and took in the scene once again. A warning light came on above her.

The bus dived in a broad curve, braked smoothly and coasted into the white and purple depot. Outside the window now were eager vendors, coiled steam from food-stalls, the noise of many feet and the hum of luggage.

She disembarked amid the clamour, walking briskly to the nearest escalator, ignoring the news-touts and shoe-shines, those characters that - like most people - would spend their free hours laid out on some beach, real or imaginary. The social system of the city rankled her as it always had. There was no room here for the unknown, risk or adventure. Radio City was precise in its functioning, overly perfect. For souls such as Kate Droover's there was only one choice: space - and quick.

But still she missed Earth. Its ruined continents possessed a degree of scope.

Taking a street at random she meandered, oblivious to the crystal-cut and animate walls around her, the individual and corporate vanities which adhered to every surface, fixed or movable, overlapping like posters and bills, shop-signs and logos...an identity multifarious, that of themselves, a deliberate confusion. The city, she knew, could adopt any guise; trouble was, most of them were pretty...

And then there was the absence of traffic.

She thought of the ancient, tumbled metropolises squatting like parked, rusted spacecraft on the forgotten land, their deserted conurbations once thronged, bursting, streets packed with stinking cars, buildings choked with bodies doing real work, not the ersatz variety so popular among the sanitized dwellers of this tame jungle. There was no raw excitement here, no fires or robberies; there were only reconstructions, illusory dramas acted out in illusory bars and cafes. Radio City was a dream city; happy and careful and even-tempered, a city lacking stealth and bite, a homologous joke.

People were gunned down around her, but she was left standing, unappreciative of this thematic culture...

'Are you lost?' inquired a policeman, brass buttons shining, helmet pushed back over red hair.

'Is that possible?' she came back, testy.

He (It?) appeared surprised; a novelty, and his to profit by. 'If one tries,' he answered smartly, the accent Irish. 'May I be your guide?'

He had in tow a wheel, a kind of spectral rickshaw. Droover considered the speed it would lend her and agreed.

'Where to, then?' the policeman asked, seating himself one side of the magnetic apparition.

'Central 68,' she said, and, imitating his action, they were moving.

The Licencing Bureau occupied the thirtieth floor of an oval structure that reminded Droover of an antique mirror. Its facade borrowed shape and colour from the dissimilar edifices surrounding it, lower conglomerates in whose formless laps it reclined, as if on show. And as an administrative centre it was. But shapes could be misleading. The thirtieth floor, for instance, was down; like most of Radio it displaced languid ocean.

Kate entered the lobby and paused. Beneath her, visible through the glass floor, milled hundreds of buffalo. A square section lifted and she stepped within its fancy, arms folded as the seamless, image-thick box was lowered.

'What floor please?'

She told it.

A wind ruffled the animals' matted hides and dusty clouds grew like mushrooms at their feet, but Kate could, neither smell nor feel the commotion.

A door opened, a window in the dry, grassy landscape that offered a view as if back through time, for beyond stood rows of metal desks and busy appendages, the clatter of mechanical, oily typewriters spilling past the unglazed frame.

Droover, frowning, paced along the manifested aisle toward the heavy, carved and hinged panels at its farther end.

Every face in the room was a girl's...some glanced up; some to one side; others giggled.

Puzzled, and not a little annoyed, she knocked on the imposing entrance and waited. The gouged reliefs bored into her skull a full minute (she counted) and then swung away, admitting her. The office held a large wooden desk, a high-backed leather chair that rocked, its occupant facing a blank screen. The desk was swathed in coloured paper, sheets toppling floorward, that surface blue-veined like roof and walls, a cheeselike marble on which Kate Droover walked: up to the desk, her rubber soles squeaking. ..

Among the discarded sheets were sowed numerous freshly-sharpened pencils varying in thickness and length.

'I believe I'm expected,' Kate said brusquely. 'I represent the merchantman Mucho Tomcat.'

The chair turned, the man in it short and amused. 'In this life,' he told her, 'you believe what you can.'

She avoided his eyes.

'So Jones finally had one too many, eh?' he went on. 'That's difficult to credit!' He stood and came round the front of the desk, leant back on it. 'Anyway, fate dealt her a bum hand; but that's over. It's time to start again if you don't want to see the entire venture go under. But there're a few minor details to be cleared up first.' Reaching behind him he grabbed a pencil from amid the variehued litter and spun it in his fingers, all the while smiling at Kate, who was static, patient, thinking of the crew, her duty to them.

A tense silence lingered...

'Yes?' she said finally. 'What minor details?'

The man's smile broadened. He raised the pencil to her throat and dragged its blunt end slowly downward till it met the zipper of her blouse, whiting her skin. There it halted. He pushed from the desk. She remained passive. The pencil moved once more, counted down the plastic teeth, descended, their clicking like that of the typewriters dimly echoing through the heavy doors, far and near and measured.

His smile, she decided, was sickening.

The pencil passed below her breasts, exposing them, and lodged in her navel, where he gave it a twist. Then his greedy mouth was on her, nipping at flesh.

Six - The Engine

The SS Usufruct drifted ever closer, its darkened mass that of a warship, its silence foreboding. Sally Droover watched the craft's progress from the bridge, mouth dry and eyes strained to pick out the merest detail, while on the Tomcat's screens the unfamiliar beast provoked a riot of colour, an expansive contrast of visuals. In no way was it trying to disguise itself. Neither did she intend to stand in its way; but still there was no coherent message.

What did the warship intend? she wondered. Its present course would bring the two vessels nose to nose in minutes.

And then?

'Droover S?'

The voice snatched her attention. '...Here,' she replied, pushing the button hesitantly. 'Friendly, is that you?'

'Right.'

'Spritzer untangled the link,' she said, more for her own benefit than the engineer's. 'How's tricks?'

'Fine. Listen - ' But he was cut off.

Sal jumped from her seat, furious. The screens around her had come alive with pictures, the face they portrayed composed of tubes and plastic.

'YOU WILL REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE,' the exaggerated tones of a man ordered. 'WE WILL COME ABOARD.'

Sal leaned over the fascia, tapped a screen. All channels were open, she saw, the masked features broadcast throughout the ship, its internal communications subjugated. 'Says who?' The co-pilot was in no mood to be pushed around.

The warship took its time replying; time which brought it within seconds of its stated aim: the shudder of docking, the merchantman trapped...

'RESEARCH SECTION FIVE,' the face said eventually.

Byron scratched his head. The repairman had told him about Captain Jones, although he'd offered little by way of detail, more interested in what Friendly thought of Ernie's 'projects and idiosyncrasies,' as Rich put it.

The engineer didn't know what he meant. Puzzled, he made some excuse and buzzed the bridge, just as a shadow fell across his bed...

Wait a minute. Think, he told himself. One dead engineer; one dead captain. It made - like Rich - no sense. The engine, its complex of walkways and galleries, inspection tunnels and freefall zones, fuel-tanks and converters hung in the void like an armoured maze around him, only it possessed direction, while among the crew there appeared to linger a malady of derangement. And now this further mystery, the Usufruct, she and the Tomcat kissing, exchanging any number of possible viruses, from common colds to pneumonia-like suspicions...

Think back to Upfront and your first encounter with Sal, the glint in her eye when she heard you were a flyer, the almost inescapable outcome, there, on that sunlit hillside, and later, in the house, waiting for the knock on the door...yeah, waiting, he repeated absently, scanning the hidden countenance of the intruder, the white and purple plastic of his suit as the ship tracked him through the main bow-lock and onward, to his rear a quartet of similarly attired colleagues, each burdened with guns and unrecognizable equipment.

To what end?

'MAKE IT QUICK,' their leader instructed. He faced the screen, the distant lens, adding, 'I REPEAT: YOU WILL REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE. ANY ATTEMPT TO INTERFERE IN THE RESEARCH SECTION'S LEGAL UNDERTAKINGS WILL BE MET WITH FORCE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.'

Byron scratched his head...

They took Amy's body away. They explained nothing, refused all pleas, simply bullied their way in and left with the captain in a bag, together with samples of her clothing.

'You're to stay in-system,' Sally was instructed. 'You may be subject to quarantine.'

May? 'What the hell for?' she demanded. 'What killed her? Tell us that much.'

The mask regarded her silently. Then, 'We don't know; we do what we're told,' it said.

The threat was obvious; the lie also. 'And if we leave, say for Proxima?'

'You'll be destroyed.'

'Just like that?' Come on, she thought, give me some information, some idea, some...

'Nobody is to come or go aboard this ship until further notice. Failure to comply will result in immediate arrest. You are not to relate any details to any party outside of this ship and/or a proven representative of Research Section Five. We'll be keeping an eye on you - understood?'

Sally blew on her fingernails.

The man behind the mask straightened.

'Tell the bastard to fuck off,' advised the engineer, the warship's grip relaxed.

She burst out laughing.

He said, 'You, the crew of this pile of junk may live to regret that.'

May? She stood with her hands on her hips. 'Goodbye.'

*

Sixty hours, the readout told him. That translated to six in decontamination.

No wonder engineers were a lonely breed. It was hardly worth it; but if he didn't surface now, at least for a while, then the wait would get longer.

He fell asleep. In his dreams a shadow spread across his bed, its substance tangible, heavy, like a blanket. Beneath, swaddled in imagery, parted from consciousness, Byron fought against a wind, the blustery air tearing out of a cataract, the rent in the ground impossibly dark, sucking on his limbs, dragging the blood from his veins as it forced him back, away from the abyssal opening. Somehow, he knew, he had to reach it, had to climb down inside, had to - what? Secrets denied him. His one hope lay in struggle, the matching of human strength and human fear, a contest he was ill-prepared for.

But on waking, getting to his feet, he was sure the answer lay within reach.

He'd slept two hours. Minutes wasted. Minutes more he would need to spend ridding his body of harmful compounds, dismantling those toxins likely to infect others (he himself was all but immune) while smoking cigarettes and reading comics, a ready supply of which - most in mint condition - occupied many a shelf and airtight container.

And he could be pretty sure they weren't going anywhere, not for a while...

The engine was idle.

*

Kate acted. The apology on her lips was for Sal and Amy and the crew, not for the short man whose blood dripped now to the stone floor, whose eyes turned inside his head, and whose legs collapsed below him like the kicked-away legs of a chair, the pencil he'd tormented her with, its sharpened end rammed forcibly up his nose, the right nostril, into his brain...

She zipped her blouse and took a step back from the desk, letting him slump onto it, slip as the sheets of paper, clatter, soft and hard, to the blue-veined marble.

It seemed to take so long.

The typewriters could still be heard, their sound, the hands behind it reminding her of where she was, what she had done, the importance of making a speedy exit.

But how? There was, as far as Kate knew, only the one way out, and that the way she'd come in.

Could she risk it? The sooner she was seen to leave the sooner her crime would be discovered.

Did she have any choice? No, unless...

A second, hidden door.

She found it easily, a section of wall falling outward at her touch, beyond the gaudily-lit maelstrom of the undercity, its sea-encased totality busy with life and living, colours thick and melded, not infrequently astir.

Droover stopped a vacant wheel and sped off through the turgid air, forgetting the office and its blank screen, wooden desk and leather chair, revelling in the outlandish, actual solidity of this other world.

It was behind her, the murder. Ahead was another thing, a new beginning. The wheel wandered at her instigation, transparent, globular and comfortable, a cousin to the one that had brought her to 68. Kate relaxed. Kate dozed, and on a whim directed the vehicle toward Bench 1.

She would, Kate decided, do a little island-hopping.

*

He was lucky unlucky, they said, the crewmen, the flyers like himself. He was Byron Friendly, and jinxed.

But he shouldn't have floored that controller...

All the same, there was no future in war, he was well out of it. So what bugged him?

Byron, he thought, it's mothertug again. Unlike before though, the attraction for Earth, the pull of Sol, this feeling was for Upfront, his home, his planet, his people and their insecurity. That's what affected him.

'It isn't fair,' he said.

It never is. ..

The engine was idle, but it wouldn't remain so. He recalled a time when he was forced to crash-land a reconnaissance craft on Bid-2's largest moon because of a retro failure that would have corkscrewed them into oblivion had he not taken manual control, wrestling the ship a full twenty minutes, its captain raving as they spiralled, threatening him with disciplinary action unless he unfroze the pilot's instruments and displays, the whole of which reported there to be no problem expect maybe in Friendly's head...

Had he flipped? Did he imagine it?

Byron was the only survivor. His mind played tricks on him, then and since. There wasn't enough left of the reconnaissance craft to prove the case one way or another. So they'd stretchered him out, given him a medal.

Still, there were doubts...

He shaved.

The engine roared, that of his heart and lungs. The clock sounded the hours, those to come, and go.

He cut himself; healed...

He waited.

Seven - The Heat Extractor

The engineer smoked, burnt neat holes in the comic with his cigarette...

Lumping Jack paced, hands behind back.

They faced each other across the dark expanse of a fibrous carpet, its tangled pile like charred grass. Morgan smiled his jolly smile and folded his arms, rested his weight on one hip, said, 'Please, no autographs.'

Nobody laughed.

*

Frank was sweating, despite the fact he'd dropped the cabin's temperature by fifteen degrees. It was still too hot, wouldn't go any lower. He needed cooling, wished he were ice, not steam, not boiling. He stood on tiptoe, the metal deck burning the soles of his feet. Water dripped from his fingertips, hissed as it exploded into gas.

He wiped the mirror in the adjacent stall and saw his face to be pink, the skin taut, his teeth large, nostrils flared, eyes like pool balls...

He had to get out.

Now. Do it, Franky, press the button, step inside, close the door, seal it; nothing could be simpler, I've rigged the outer lock, jumped its failsafe, there's no problem, just raise your hand, that's right, easy, yeah, you got it.

Okay. That wasn't so bad, was it?

'What the...' Sal stared unbelievingly at the computer screen, the flashing red light it displayed.

Elsewhere in the ship a copper baseball glove rasped closed about a screwdriver.

'Man overboard,' the pitcher said.

Eight - Last Of The Earth Men

Ernie put pen to paper, the numbness in his wrist irritating, and wrote...

Last Of The Earth Men - issue 58.

(Spot-beam to Uncle Stylo, friend and illustrator: GO!)

In front of the Hightop building, Mugio, on the Spanish mainland, the harbour thick with water-borne traffic, the Atlantic grey and restful.

'So do we go in?' Morgan asked his dog.

She padded up the steps. 'Why not? They can only kill you - besides...'

'What?' he blurted, striding after, the darkened lobby deep and blind.

But Frozen Hound didn't answer.

Nine - Triple Zero

Abdul climbed to the observation deck. He could see Earth's daylit crescent, Luna's steely globe. And fastened to the transparency's outer surface was the Research Section's ugly surveillance module, the malformed unit's invisible ears clued into each level of the ship's communications, life-support and utility systems. It stuck to the cornea-shaped window like some monstrous leech; silently watching, a spy in their camp.

And it, they know, he thought, know everything...

It frightened him.

Heart pounding the cook quickly descended to the bridge where he'd left Sally Droover, quiet and numbed at her pilot's station, the screen still flashing red.

He touched her shoulder and she turned. 'What?'

'Come on.' Abdul took her hand and led the way back to his cabin...the lights out, undressing.

'Luke...' She moved against him, trembling.

'Ssh - it's okay, Sal; we have to be close, talk, you and me, we have to make a decision.' He held her.

'Kate hasn't called,' she said. 'I think something's happened to her.'

Abdul considered what he already knew. 'Maybe she has,' he said, 'and they blocked it.'

The co-pilot's eyes gleamed. 'You mean the warship?'

'Right.'

'I thought of that,' she said. Then, 'They could easily have picked her up on Luna, or after, at the Bureau.'

'Right again.'

They fell slowly to the bed, taking comfort in one another's proximity, warmth.

After a moment Sal continued, her mouth a damp presence abutting his cheek, whispering, 'It'd make sense for them to grab Kate as soon as possible, and return her here, maybe, if they're serious about quarantining us...'

He agreed. 'You any idea why?'

'No. But if it killed the captain...' She paused suddenly, hands either side of his thin face.

'And Frank,' said Abdul, putting it into words. 'And Ernie; perhaps you or me next, or Monica.'

She froze. 'Spritzer.' The name spilt like dust from her dry tongue, its throaty kennel instantly starved of moisture.

Abdul rolled on top of her. 'Go on,' he encouraged, prompting, troubled, his own suspicions close, he thought, to hers.

'Have you seen him since Upfront?'

'No. You?'

'No.' She bit her lip. The shadow-thick look she gave him was earnest. 'He's responsible, isn't he, Luke?'

'I think so.'

'But why? How?'

'Who knows?' Research Section Five, he answered himself. 'He watches us, or did,' Abdul said quietly; 'just as they watch us now.'

'Yeah, Amy said something about it once. She seemed to believe he needed it; that it was harmless.'

He grinned, head shaking. 'I can imagine - Jones always had an answer for everything. As long as he did his job, eh? But it's strange, casting your mind back days, weeks; no time at all really, yet so far away...'

'Don't,' said Sally.

'What?' He laughed softly, moving her hair.

'Begin reminiscing, it's morbid.'

'Sorry, Sal. We're not finished - sure. Only where do we go from here?'

She kissed him.

'Are you serious?'

'Isn't that why you dragged me in here?'

Abdul shrugged. 'Yes; but not the main reason.'

'I'll bet.'

'Okay,' he murmured, half submerged in pillow. 'There's no way we can leave the ship, that's for certain, and neither can we move Tomcat any significant distance.'

'So?' She felt sleepy, oddly rational: the medicine had worked, strengthened her defences.

Abdul pondered a while.

Sally said, 'We can leave the ship.'

'Huh?'

'We can leave the ship,' she repeated, 'and take the engine.'

'Are you crazy?' He was intrigued, hopeful. 'How?'

'It's possible. If Friendly's half the engineer I think he is we could fly out of here without the help of the main computer.'

He liked the brightness, the optimism in her muffled voice, its girlish, confident enthusiasm. 'Isn't that dangerous, flying blind?'

'Very. But rather a gamble, Luke, a chance of survival, against certain death.'

'Our repairman?'

'Yeah...'

'You're convinced then?'

'That the threat is physical? I am.'

Sally clambered over him and switched on the lights. She was smiling, but underneath, hardly visible in the glare of yellow luminescence and white skin, lay coiled a potent fear, one he comprehended.

'Let's go for a walk,' she said, winking.

The two of them pulled on clothes.

*

Byron sighed dramatically as the last digit vanished from the timer. 000 it read.

Decontamination always left him irritable and thirsty. He was eager to assuage the latter; the former would, he reckoned, take care of itself.

His comic discarded the engineer stalked a passage, climbed a ladder, entered a large space. It was empty, to the eye. To the touch it contained charged particles and the smell distended, warped and pungent atoms.

He walked through it, whistling. On the farther side connected ducts and channels, three possible avenues. He took the centre, ascending its subtle curve, stroking its walls, passing, as had other feet before...

The lock was a welcome sight. To his rear the engine seemed too quiet, its previous occupier - as yet undiscovered - still hesitant, extant and reserving judgement, a vague shape, a cloy static, not entirely prepared to hand over the reins...

And it was massive, his knowledge stretching to perhaps a tenth of it, the maze which housed him, gave him air. He felt he owed Ernie something and that one day he might be called upon to pay.

Byron, key the lock, see some genuine faces.

He did. They belonged to Monica Hat and the repairman, who waved.

She grabbed his sleeve, pressed a finger to his opening lips, its opposite to her own. His brow knitted.

'We lost Frank,' she said flatly, blunt nail slipping from his chin. 'Come on, Luke's waiting.'

Byron followed her to the lounge, its disarray reflecting that prevalent among the crew. He kept quiet, sensing the renewed mystery, a tangle of threads.

Sitting, drawing, was Luke the cook; called Abdul, he remembered, although not why.

Lucky unlucky, Byron said to himself, his mind fuzzy, rough at the edges, discomforted by the change of environment. And there were harsher crossings ahead.

Abdul folded, then handed him a piece of paper.

It was a crude plan of the ship, the main decks and bulkheads outlined, the engine a shaded mass below and to one side, like a dog with a fly on its nose. Byron studied the diagram, hunted for clues, not glancing up, knowing they were under observation from the Research Section - but not why...

Abdul, Sally, each was confused, as was Friendly. On the diagram were three circles in a box representing the lounge; in the machine-room a single triangle. He took a pencil and drew a fourth circle next to the triangle, placing a question-mark inside it, seeing how the strong light obliterated the fine lead traces.

Sally reached for the paper.

'And Kate?' queried the engineer, tired of games.

'Ah, she's fine,' the co-pilot informed him. She crumpled the drawing. 'Did you manage to find Ernie?'

He shook his head. The other two exchanged meaningful looks, a mutual shrug.

Abdul stood. 'We've a plan,' he said airily. 'Interested?'

Byron settled back in his couch. 'What can I say?'

'Anything you like,' Sal said.

'Yeah?'

'Whatever you want, Byron,' she added. 'You're among friends here.'

The cook smirked. 'Mostly,' he corrected.

The engineer decided he'd go along. After all, what choice did he have? He appeared to have provided them with the desired information, the whereabouts of Monica, but he still didn't understand their intentions; or for that matter, how much they were prepared to disclose: in front of the viewers... 'Did you ever play charades?' Sally asked him.

Byron pulled the makings from his breast pocket and began to roll a cigarette.

'This way.'

'Is that thing loaded?'

'Of course not!'

They followed Sal to a little-used compartment high and to the rear of the ship. Byron suspected that, on board the warship or elsewhere, there'd be gathered a team of eminent scientists scratching their heads and mumbling incoherently as they tried to decipher the apparently pointless actions of this clowning threesome. Or maybe it was what they expected, he amended, the first in a long chain of symptoms, the effect of an alien or mutant virus.

'Are you sure it's his birthday?' inquired Abdul.

'Positive,' replied Sally.

The cook looked guilty. 'I ought to've baked him a cake.'

Byron thumbed out the lights.

From the floor climbed dust-laden beams of gold.

All was quiet.

Through the grating the machine-room sparkled like a jewelled cave, its assorted contents poised, colourful ogres and flashing gnomes, richly-dressed imps and sprites. Moving between them, swathed in a pale robe, a ghostly mantle, danced the surviving co-ordinator, the tuneless notes she expressed rising out of the tightly gathered crowd, its silence unmusical, its presence manifold. There was a spell upon her, a weightless chain, one that allowed her to float. The machines seemed numberless, like each grew from and was part of its neighbour.

Byron rubbed his eyes.

'No Spritzer,' said Abdul.

Sal flicked his chest with the back of her hand, admonishing his blindness and impatience. The dance ended, Monica froze, and a clanking shape rose amid the lugubrious creatures, cloaked in copper and enamel, tossing a polished ball...

There was a hissing noise, that of angry breath. The metal skull turned upward. 'You're fools if you think you can escape,' a mouth said. 'You're infected, all of you. Look at Monica and see.' His voice was amplified, distorted by the visor, but it was the repairman's.

The lights came back on inside the compartment.

'Come down, why don't you,' intoned Rich. 'We can be together, eh, like in the old days?'

Sal frowned. Not in the least concerned, thought Byron. She pushed aside some empty containers and levered open a hatch, dropping to the room below without so much as a glance at the two men.

'Did you alter the code on the engine lock?' questioned Abdul, straightening.

Friendly mumbled that he hadn't. Perplexed, he remained in the cramped space as the cook left via the door.

Was he deserting us? he asked himself. A shot sounded from below. He turned quickly, fell to his knees and peered through the hatch.

Spritzer lay dead, sprawled like some fallen bird. Monica was nowhere to be seen.

'What happened?' All the colours bled into Byron's mind. He squinted against the glare.

'I shot him,' said Sally.

'I thought you said it wasn't loaded?'

'It wasn't.' She stared down at the metallic corpse.

'What?'

'It wasn't,' she repeated, louder. 'I don't know; he jumped, I fired, that's all...' She placed the gun aside. It appeared, to melt into the ethereal machinery.

Byron swung his legs round and lowered himself. Immediately the illusion lifted, and what had been a fabulous cave became a steel-lined workshop, perfectly ordinary.

The bird was a man again, shrouded in copper solely from the right wrist to the tips of the fingers...

'There's no blood,' Sally piped, cheery. 'Not a drop – but he's dead, I killed him.'

Byron searched for a pulse. Nothing. She was right, he was dead. He reached for the gun; it was missing.

'Let's get out of here,' he said.

So they unbolted the door and walked slowly to the aft lock, where Abdul caught up with them.

'Just a few essentials,' the cook said, pushing past, entering the chamber.

Byron noted that these included a wooden totem.

'I couldn't be sure you'd make it,' explained Abdul, hurrying them forward.

The engineer ignored him, sealed the entrance. Shyly, he keyed the inner lock, wishing he had thought to change the code, wondering at his own, mixed emotions, the dislike he was feeling for those who were close to him. He was jealous; this was his place, the engine, his private enclosure. Ernie would never have let them in here. And they looked excited, like children at Christmas, eager to get their presents, greedy for what items of worth and beauty were theirs to hold. He swallowed, perturbed. The door edged open and a cool draught licked about his hand, drinking his sweat, binding his arm to the interior: a long wet tongue of probability, remote as only the near, yet predictable can be...

Then it was later. He remembered something. 'What happened to Monica?'

Sal licked her lips, regarded him strangely. 'Didn't you...' she began, eyes piercing. 'Monica disappeared,' she said.

Ten - When The Elevator Breaks Down

She sat on the beach and watched the waves roll in, with them the tide. The sky was blue and void of cloud and the yellow sun climbed high, brushing Kate's hair and warming her skin, next to adjust the shadow about her. She felt content, happy even, unable to say why. The birds called to her and she listened to their voices, recognizing some, and only moved when the water cooled her toes.

Bench 1 was made up of three adjacent islands (1, 2 and 3) linked by esoteric bridges, floral promenades to the uninitiated. A few people wandered through the lush undergrowth, plucking white and purple blossoms, while others swam in the tepid ocean, one with the fish and oysters, their bobbing faces lost in spray.

Droover rested by a stubby tree. Its leaf fronds glimmered, translucent and green, rainbow-hued above her. She was a new person this morning, not recalling the night before, oblivious to its passage. She thought back to the Mucho Tomcat, her crew and engine, and it was as if they belonged in a different life, another world. She'd parted from them...how long ago? Kate had lost all track of time. She scratched her nose, pursed her lips and made hollows in the sand, quickening her pace as the sea washed in, chasing her...

She suspected a man followed, but then forgot as, delicately, the day wore thin.

Evening found her beneath a large umbrella, sipping an iced drink. She had no money, she reflected. Everything on the Bench, though, was free.

'May I join you?'

Droover said nothing. He smiled and sat opposite her, a string, a key dangling from his wrist.

'I know,' he stated, pre-empting the expected question, 'there are no locks on the island. So why am I carrying a key? Truth is,' he went on, toying with the object, 'a man gave it to me; said it'd bring me luck. Do you believe in luck? Eh...'

'If you imagine it will open my heart or my legs,' Kate told him automatically, 'then you're very much mistaken.' She was suddenly cold, a little shocked by what she'd said, surprised that she'd said anything.

The man retreated imperceptibly; his smile hardened. Droover used the extended moment to relocate her composure. She nearly apologized, trouncing the impulse under a boot of disgust.

A waiter brought him a drink. He swirled the liquid in its tall glass. 'My name's Mordy.'

'Droover...'

'Would you like to spend the night with me, Droover?'

This time she didn't hesitate. 'Yes.'

Sex was fluid, long, abstract and pleasing.

'What's that on your finger?' Mordy asked at some point.

She'd drawn a map of her pleasure on his skin. 'Magic.'

He laughed. She bit him.

Hours sailed past. Light filtered into the room, piecing together furniture and contours, the ceiling's inward-facing steps rising to a convex window.

Mordy sighed, as yet asleep, and Kate traced with her eyes the pattern of marks and bruises on his body. There was a definite picture, she was convinced, but an image incomplete and therefore unreadable.

'Droover k?'

'Yeah...who is it?'

She got out of bed and took a shower.

Retracing her steps she saw Mordy was gone.

She shivered, and woke up on the beach, the water about her toes sending tiny shocks through her body...

*

'Spots on the tongue, Luke?'

'Yeeah...' What he could see didn't make him feel good.

'I should be so lucky,' said Sally. 'My hair's falling out; look.' Tens of fine strand wrapped her fingers.

He closed his mouth.

She touched his shoulder. 'Don't worry about it. Get some sleep. You'll need it.'

'Isn't Friendly back yet?' he asked, not for the first time, switching the mirror off.

'Nah – '

Abdul caught her as she dropped.

'No one said it was going to be easy,' the co-pilot complained later. 'If you'd let us help...'

He was shaking his head. 'You don't appreciate the problems,' Byron explained; 'there are things to do and things not to do, things to touch and things not to touch, places to go and places not to go, places you...'

'All right!' she interposed. 'I think we get the picture. But there has to be something, yes? We can't just sit here, totally useless.'

He inhaled deeply. 'Okay.'

'What? Tell us.'

'There's a leak in one of the auxiliary tanks, you can climb in and fix it.'

'Not me,' said Abdul. 'I get suit-sick.'

Sal gave him a dirty look. 'Suit-sick?' she said testily.

The cook nodded vigorously, held his head and grimaced.

'Well?' Friendly goaded. 'You want to or not?'

Sally folded her arms. 'You're on,' she said, and began to strip, tossing her clothes at Abdul...

*

She stood on the bridge between islands 1 and 2, the sky laced with purple and indigo, the filigreed woodwork of the arching structure like a bone coat-hanger, hollow, embellished around her. The air was sweet, tanged with the scents of apricot and banana.

She searched for the moon, rubbed the steel thimble against her palm. It was obscured by cloud.

A panther, she mused. When the moon was right. When there was a moon.

She continued across the bridge. Spherical bodies protruded, bulged from the forest-floor like fungi, lights within, shades of red and amber, blue and coral, swirling. Kate Droover stepped over the smallest, feeling her skin tingle, reminded of Mordy, real or not, his gentle fingers as they slid up her thigh and dipped inside her. She smiled; a larger globe oscillated, black and white and gold. It beckoned her, she thought. She approached carefully. There was no one, no person to be seen. Touching the pulsing surface brought a second recollection, that of death, how it had felt to kill: easy.

She pressed too hard and the bubble burst, knocking her cold and dizzy, sprawled on the damp earth like a hunted animal, its flank bloodied, an arrow projecting, the shaft long, flighted with green feathers.

Kate dragged herself from the spot as if dreaming.

And maybe she was.

'A friend.'

She got out of bed and took a shower.

Retracing her steps she saw Mordy was sitting up, examining the bite marks across his stomach. He glanced at her, dripping wet, wrapped in a bulky towel, and said, 'What did I do that you liked so much, Droover?'

She spun around.

They breakfasted on fruit and goat's milk.

Mordy was quiet, brooding, his earlier good-humour vanished with the stars, outshone by a nearer reality, that of parting; a farewell in his eyes, their shimmer diluted.

'I know it sounds oldfashioned,' he said eventually, 'but I'd really like to see you again.'

'You will.'

He looked surprised. 'How? When? I don't know anything about you. Where do you come from? How long are you staying?'

'I have no past,' she said abruptly. 'Just a present, maybe a future.'

Mordy was incredulous. 'You know how old I am? Twenty-six! I design interiors, which I loathe. There's nothing I'd like more than simply to pack up, go away, forget my life - become like you, Droover. A person without a past...'

She swallowed, danced in her chair. 'What's stopping you?'

'You can't be serious; I've commitments.'

'Break them.'

He leaned forward and stroked her elbow. 'And wait for you to throw me away?'

Kate was puzzled. 'You wish to hang on to something,' she told him. 'You can't. Not me, anyway. I don't belong.'

'Right,' he said; 'you're elemental, a wraith, a succubus I happened upon in the night.'

She liked that. 'Give me the key,' she said.

Mordy looped the string from his wrist to hers. Right to left, the metal object passed over a bridge of flesh.

'Now you have two.' He indicated the thimble, in hue the key's twin, shining dimly.

'Let's go back to bed,' suggested Droover.

He wiped his mouth. 'Did I tell you about this machine I have that can make love thirty different ways? True, it's programmed in the styles - all copy-righted of course - of famous twentieth century women. There's...'

'Mordy.'

'What?'

'Shut up.'

She crossed the final bridge, that spanning the ocean-filled divide between islands 2 and 3, and halted outside an irregular glass building, its low roof curved like a wave, the sea made concrete, spangled, a crystal pile.

Music throbbed from deep. A seamless panel slid aside, giving her access to the lurking, miscellaneous entertainments.

*

The suit was too big, its oxygen tainted. The faceplate was spotted with oily dust. It had proved impossible to remove, stained her fingers. And all the while Byron Friendly stood and smiled, when he wasn't frowning.

As for Luke...forget him, she thought, the conniving bastard, hyped up and moaning, clutching his toys.

A jet of hot gas struck her arm, sent her spinning, tangling her line. Sally cursed, rebounded off an unseen obstruction into the floating debris that had assembled behind her, now encompassing, a multicoloured, sticky residue she'd disturbed on entering this freefall hell.

'Droover S?'

'Yeah...who is it?'

'The engineer.'

She checked, double-checked, but the channel wasn't open.

'Oh, shit.'

'Sal?'

'Yes!' She jerked violently.

'Use the sealant-gun to locate the puncture, like I showed you,' came Byron's voice.

Angry, she closed the channel again. Then, shakily, the suit's illumination embroiling her in ragged shadow, Sally manoeuvred toward the small hole in the tank's flexible casing. It pulsed at intervals, and she had to be careful to avoid being hit by a second blast of gas.

It salved her ego to have found the leak without resorting to the bulky instrument attached to her shoulders. She tugged once on the line, waited, and bobbed at the reply.

According to Byron the radio was unreliable in the presence of so much retrograde - or the memory of it.

The thought was eerie.

The co-pilot mated the sealant-gun's nozzle with the roughly circular opening.

Her suit's lights dimmed. The faceplate seemed murkier than ever. She switched the radio on. 'Friendly.'

'Here. What's the delay?'

'Nothing, I...'

The gun went off prematurely.

Embedded in darkness, immobile - the glow before her eyes was illusory. She imagined it, didn't she? Sal was stuck, that was real. A coil of tubing floated through her field of vision: so the darkness, the tangible black, had its imperfections, like a clear, empty night of stars.

There was a buzzing in her ear. It sounded bad. She had to move, but found it impossible, that and the situation, the two one...

The tube was her air supply. What was left in the suit? What reserve?

At least she didn't panic; panic was useless.

The auxiliary fuel tank was two hundred metres in radius, she recalled. Sally Droover was glued to its inner wall like some insect on fly-paper.

I wonder if I mended the leak? she mused, drifting, out of body, out of.. .

Hey, a face.

'Hello,' she said. Her voice echoed, trapped in the deflating helmet.

The face revolved, a construction of grime and spongy sediment the likeness of Ernie.

*

She hadn't cared for the planetarium; it made her homesick, filled her with the urge to run.

Mothertug...

But that was past, Kate reminded herself. That was gone, a different life, another world, planets and stars, moons and space - contorted space, flat, folded, corners all the same -which no longer occupied her sky.

She ordered another drink and watched a series of shows, a noisy assemblage of horrendous acts and obscure passages. And what it lacked in content it lacked in every other department as well. Or so Kate imagined. There were people around her (too many, too close) who appeared to be enjoying themselves. Their expressions, however, lacked truthfulness.

Am I like them? she asked herself. Is this what lies ahead, crouched in hiding ready to swallow me?

She slammed her glass down on the garish bar. Nobody looked her way.

The key dangling from her wrist shone red and blue, then red and green. Kate flicked it, tasted it, tasted the thimble that had fixed itself to her middle finger; tasted acid, a bitter flavour, sore on the tongue.

Droover spat, a brief globe of luxuriant hues...

She got up and walked, dodging, avoiding contact with those she newly despised. She'd been deluding herself, she realized, fleeing the wrong places, running nowhere. It had to stop; she was bound by friendship if nothing else, and that was something she could not so easily shake. Changed she may be, but the past, all of it, good and bad, left its mark, as had she on the once smooth skin of Mordy.

It brought an old saw to mind...

'When the elevator breaks down,' Kate recited, jogging, 'take the stairs.'

Eleven - Uncle Stylo At Elbow Canyon

Byron heard the wind, and, sheathed in his pressurized suit, made ready to fight it.

The radio was useless. He tumbled headlong into the tank and looked around. There was a snowstorm, he fancied, whipping at his armour, flailing him with arrows. The sealant-gun hovered like a speared fish on a long thread of exoplastic, its dead eye the colour of iron. It was obvious what had happened. He set off for the tank's farther side.

Sal lay immersed, motionless, a corpse weighted into some river bottom. He tapped her visor.

She would hate him for this - but she was alive.

Balding, frustrated, but alive.

Abdul drank all the water he could find. When there was no more to be had he followed the damp footprints on the deck, their owner's toes sharply defined, a comic-book trail leading he didn't know where...but expected to discover...

Sometime.

'I told him not to move!' raved the engineer. 'The fool!'

Sally flopped down on the bed among her clothes. 'He can't have gone far,' she reasoned. 'He'll come back.'

'Far enough,' said Friendly.

Casually, she dressed.

'You don't care?' he quizzed.

She shrugged. 'He's not helpless. He can look out for himself.'

Byron rubbed his eyes. 'How did I get into this?'

'Fate,' she replied.

'What?'

'Oh, relax, Byron. There's much to do if we're to fly this thing. ..'

He nodded, dragged his shoes out from under the table, its top laden with instruments, a terminal, gauges. 'You think it'll work okay?'

'Sure; have faith.'

'In you or me?' he said icily.

She stood next to him, said, 'The engine.'

*

They handed her a thick coat as she stepped ashore. The soft crunch of snow juddered under her boots. This was Bench 2. A mountain reached upward before her, the gradient approaching its misty summit gradually increasing, framed in an illusion of vermilion sky.

There were sleds and reindeer. The animals' breath steamed like her own in the cold air. Nevertheless, Droover thought them constructs.

She climbed into a sled and was driven ever faster toward a wall of fir trees, their fine branches heavy with white flakes and decorated in multihued coronae of broken light. The crude vehicle bounced, the team before it numbering four, hooves and runners cutting the unblemished snow. The trees, when she came among them, proved a blur...

Kate sat alone.

It wasn't so cold that she couldn't smile, but her teeth hurt if she kept it up for long. And then the sled arrived at a clearing, the forest quiet and dense all round. A lone figure appeared, wading, stooped with age or tiredness as it, a man, greeted the reindeer each by name.

Kate watched him curiously. He avoided her gaze and clambered onto the empty platform at the front of the sled, where he found and gently whipped the loose reins.

She was thrown back in her seat, laughing.

The scenery confused her again.

Emerging from a high mountain pass, the sun at its zenith and the clouds dissolving, the buffeting of the runners abruptly ceased. The sled was airborne, gliding, its team vanished as if assimilated into the surrounding, ochre rock. Kate leaned over the side, caught a fleeting glimpse of the animals as they retreated through a hazy veil of fresh snow, having propelled the vehicle to the limits of their milieu.

She shucked off the coat as the temperature climbed. A few metres below ranged the red-brown desert. It reminded her of old western movies; she might even be in a wheel-less stagecoach, en route to some jerry-built town.

In the distance the sea was just visible, pushed back by the land's deceit, its cunning.

'Is this still Bench 2?' she asked her squat driver.

His shoulders bunched tighter, but he said nothing.

They descended with the contours, on rails of stone, walls of it rising above them as the air swept past. Kate slumped in the seat and tried not to think. She was hungry, she realized, and far from home.

'Where is home? The ship?' In that case it moved, like she did, was never in the same place twice.

Deepening layers of shade overwhelmed her. The sled skidded to earth, to sand, plumes of orange dust.

The stooped man jumped down and offered his hand. His face was swathed, despite the heat, in a scarf; like the rest of him, still dressed for the cold beyond the mountain.

Droover ignored him. He sidled off, kicking stones. A second figure manifested itself on her blind side. He wore skin and cotton, khaki and white.

'How was the trip?' he inquired.

Did she know him? 'Fine...'

'Ernie's told me all about you,' he went on; 'said you might need some help. Come on.' He walked briskly from the grounded sled, a breeze in his stride, clutching his hat.

Kate stayed where she was.

He returned. 'Something the matter?'

'I...' The breeze stole her voice. It curled from the rocky walls that flanked her, their vertical faces cracked, holed and leaning. She felt ill.

He put a foot on the sled's top step and hauled himself up, sitting opposite her. In his palm rested a pebble, its surface curved, shaped by forgotten currents.

'There's a lot to talk about,' he said. 'I haven't heard from Ern in a while, but I'm aware things are coming to a head. Your presence here's a part of it. The rest...'

'Ernie's dead.'

He tossed the pebble from hand to hand. 'So - I thought that might be it. Anyway, he did all he could.'

'What do you mean?' Kate was mystified. 'How did you know him? Who are you?'

He paused a moment. Then, 'Stylo. Uncle Stylo they call me; and...' he broke off. 'It'd be easier if I showed you.'

Kate agreed. What else could she do? Stylo led the way to a partly concealed entrance, a cave-mouth, lifted a lamp from a peg in the half-light and descended by its muted glow the rough stair that wound to a large room below. It was full of logs, cut and stacked, an axe resting upright against one pile. The smell of wood permeated her senses. He continued downward via a steel ramp. She echoed his footsteps, and entered a series of hewn passages, a variety of other rooms, some with plank or cloth doors, some open, to left and right as they moved deeper into the burrowed stone.

'You're not alone here,' she observed.

'No,' answered Stylo. 'Not in terms of numbers. This is a place of many functions however, where many paths cross, as you'll see later.'

Kate didn't question him further. She got the impression they were leaving the main complex and penetrating a more exclusive retreat, one linked to the surface by unrelated tunnels, its purpose equally removed from that of its neighbours, if not necessarily at odds. But whatever the truth, it couldn't have been very private.

Finally there was a steel hatch, circular and fastened into the surrounding rock.

Stylo pulled it wide and yellow light flooded out...

'What do you think?' he asked - a request, once they were on the inside, behind the steel.

Blast-proof, Droover reckoned, quickly reappraising. 'It's beautiful,' she told him.

He grinned, a sign of approval. 'It serves,' he said, false modesty in his tone.

She was cheered by the inflection. 'Where's the kitchen?'

'There isn't one.'

'No?' Her stomach complained.

'But if you're hungry,' Stylo added, stemming her disappointment with what she imagined a practised flourish, 'I'll pop out and shoot a cow.'

That, she thought, would do nicely.

*

'What do you think they're doing?'

'Who?' Byron quizzed.

Sally groaned, coughed as her throat filled. 'The Research Section,' she clarified hoarsely.

The engineer, grimacing, handed her a lozenge. 'Mot many left,' he mumbled; then louder, 'They're probably waiting to see what lunatic scheme we have in mind. I've taken out all the links, the visuals as well as the sonics. My guess is they'll sit on their hands until they think we're dead, or dying, and then come in and tidy up the pieces.'

'How romantic,' Sal commented, reclining.

'Isn't it.'

'Have we long, Byron, to live?'

'I don't know about you and Abdul,' he admitted, mimicking her facetiousness.

'Hm...I never imagined it would be like this. I wonder what Kate's doing now?'

'Sunning herself on some beach,' he said.

'Nah, that's not her thing at all. Sis is more the rucksack and thermos type.'

'Yeah?' He pushed a button and a light came on.

'Does that mean it works?' asked Sally.

'I'm not sure. That was only a test.'

She clacked the lozenge against her teeth. A few were loose, bleeding. 'What about the ship? How are we going to disengage without tearing a hole in the engine?'

They'd been over this before. 'Explosive bolts, remember?'

'Oh, right...'

Byron concentrated on his wiring, doubting the reliability of hers. Luke Farouke hadn't come back, not yet...

He'd slept.

On waking, blinking through the garish cabin lights, he saw - or was convinced he'd seen - an ostrich. Anyway, it had feathers, was blue, the sighting brief as it sped past the open door; feet like huge, misshaped, forks.

Fantastic.

index i - EUROPA

Ernie put pen to paper, the numbness in his wrist irritating, and wrote...

Uncle Stylo showed her the presses, the bacteria-tanks that produced the newsprint, and the many stages through which the cellular-based scrip went before it finished up in a batch of original comics.

He had a framed cover-page from issue 1.

Kate was astonished.

Morgan did his usual exercises. The bridge of his guppy was choked with pot-plants and cheeses. He had it from a reliable source that pot-plants and cheeses were all the rage on Europa and Sarpendon, that people - starved of vegetable company and deprived of something to put on their crackers - would pay well over the odds for such ordinary items.

This was his chance to break into the big league.

Interplanetary Spacelines, he thought gleefully, he comes Lumping Jack.

He hoped to make enough from the venture to put down a deposit on one of the new retrograde engines just now becoming available to the smaller operator. As it was he and others like him were mostly restricted to in-system business, the routine ferrying of low-profit-margin goods and services, even resorting to the transport of passengers. But not any longer; this was it, the opportunity he'd been waiting for.

Eighty-seven hours it took to make the crossing.

Morgan had heard some weird tales concerning Jupiter's fourth moon and the pivotal station it carried piggyback, but was fully prepared, he believed, for every eventuality.

The Happy Monkey nosed into Sarpendon's topside dock. All that stood between him and his potential customers was six centimetres of amalgamated steel.

And a confiscation order...

'Illegal?'

'Yes; I'm sorry.'

Morgan was speechless.

'All alien species are forbidden within the precincts of the station. Rules.' The man said this last with a shrug. 'Anything you bring from your ship will be seized.'

Nonchalant, Lumping Jack interpreted his attitude; the fucking cunt; everything her owned, possessed or could lay his hands on had gone into getting here, loaded, and for what? Zilch...he was wiped out, washed up, fin.

'Where can I get a job?' he said.

The man changed hats.

Kate Droover punched the correct time-date sequence into the lock and stepped back. The hatch screeched open and the floor raised her out with the morning sun. From this airy vantage it was easy to see how the canyon got its name.

To her left, subtly camouflaged, was a shady awning. She dumped her pile of comics on a stool and sat cross-legged on the cool stone.

It was there to be read, Kate knew, the facts as expounded by Ernie and presented by Uncle Stylo, each separate panel hand-drawn, shades of black, blue, pink, crimson, green, white and purple.

He'd been duped, that much was clear.

Pot-plants and cheeses...

Life for the foreseeable future was recycled and insulated, hermetically sealed and filtered. The job was glider pilot. He was, for the first time in his life, part of a team. They were twelve: himself, a mechanic and ten drillers, swept up in a bizarre half-light, tossed on undetectable winds and immersed in miragelike contours, reflections from the gas giant dominating the Europan sky. It was impossible to think in terms of day and night. The great red spot, God's thumbprint, ornamented the icy surface...almost as often as he did, waist-deep in the frozen illusions, stepping carefully to avoid the ephemeral pits and interstices. Morgan's head floated. This was research at its most basic and raw.

And a synthetic version was still not perfected.

Rocket fuel, the insubstantial element, the complex mutation of achromatic gases, lay in scattered pockets beneath the moon's inhospitable crust.

And it was running out.

Did very strange things, the real stuff.
'How right,' Kate said. She turned the page, relaxed. The sun crept higher...lower.

Higher.

In a brashly illuminated lab on Sarpendon, several kilometres above, Dr Henry Grey heated a syrupy mixture in a test-tube, eyes wide as the unfocussing liquid turned nasty, converting a globe of flesh, glass and air into air alone, neatly severing his arm at the elbow.

You had to laugh - Stylo appeared, wearing his hat.

'What I want to know,' Droover challenged, folding the comic in her lap, 'is how Ernie ever found this out. Really...I mean it can't have happened like this.' She got to her feet, waving the issue she'd been reading.

'Don't be so impatient,' Stylo told her. 'You're fighting it; stop. Let the colours, the pictures absorb you.'

She huffed. 'They scare me.'

He smiled. 'They're meant to. Ernie intended it. All I do is translate his ideas, his beliefs - warnings if you like - into a form accessible to the subconscious.' He stroked a long finger down her nose, lifted her chin. 'Perhaps I shouldn't have let you in on the secret, eh? It would've been easier.'

Kate turned away, wandered to the cliff edge.

'The technophiles in Radio City understand the importance of escapism,' he said. 'But there're different kinds.'

'Now you're getting pretentious,' she accused.

'You'd rather be one of them?'

'No!'

'Then try, learn, let go, think of your sister and Amy Jones, what they've become.'

That hurt her. Kate had yet to accept the captain's death. In her chest stirred a familiar, cold discomfort. 'You're confusing me,' she said, feeling cornered, trapped between the man, his pervasive illustrations, on and off the page, and the vacant drop before her.

She didn't know in which direction to take the next step; either into the melting world, the capricious reality that was the burgeoning legacy of artificial retrograde, or over the safe, reliable edge...

'Why us?' she questioned, suddenly bitter.

'They needed guinea-pigs,' replied Uncle Stylo.

He'd moved closer, Kate felt. 'And Ernie, the captain, they were just casualties, the first of many, perhaps.'

'Right.'

'So where do we go from here?'

'You already know the answer to that.'

Yes, she thought, I do. There is only loneliness, the worst of all fates.

'Hey.' He touched her again, and this time she acknowledged the contact.

'Give me the hat,' she said.

'Droover K?'

'Yeah...who is it?'

'The pink-people are taking over. The moon will be full in a few days. Make the most of it.'

Sound advice...

*

He peered intently at the core sample. It was twenty centimetres long and eight in diametre. Like a cylindrical diamond, it shone, utterly beguiling.

And there was something trapped inside.

Morgan rubbed his eyes. He couldn't directly handle the frosty wonder, but with the help of thick gloves, tongs and a hammer, he could break it open.

'Droover K?'

'Yeah...who is it?'

'Lumping Jack.'

The something was a dog. Frozen Hound, he called it.

She kissed him.

'What was that for?'

'Mothertug...'

2nd Part: STROMA

The isles of Greece! The isles of Greece!

Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

Where grew the arts of love and peace,

Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung!

Byron

Twelve - Pushing: Darkened Jelly

The hat was floppy...

Kate Droover gazed at the stars. It was too dark to read and too important not to. But what she had plenty of - she realized now - was time.

'Technophiles.'

'How's that?'

'You referred to the people of Radio City as technophiles,' she said.

Uncle Stylo shifted next to her, turning warm areas cold and vice-versa. He didn't reply, was being evasive.

'I want to sleep out here,' Kate went on. Then, 'How did Ernie get his material to you?'

Why hadn't she thought of it before?

'Spot-beam.'

'One way or two?'

'I can send a message to the engine, if that's what you mean. But it will take a while.'

She changed her mind - below ground seemed much the safer; although safe from what she couldn't say. It was as if the open sky compressed her, whereas the passage-ridden stone offered protection. It was, she supposed, like being aboard the ship, surrounded by confederates...

Kate's mind drifted back to the Licencing Bureau, its staff and its office.

Why hadn't they come after her?

Perhaps she'd imagined the entire episode, but that didn't seem likely.

And she was meant to have called...

'They'll be worried about me,' she said out loud, jumping up, flustered.

Stylo rose, slower. 'Among other things,' he said ominously.

*

'It's going to be very dark in a minute,' Byron stated. 'And then anything might happen.'

He could hear Sal's irregular breathing.

'Do it!' she retched drily.

There were fireworks.

Rockets...

They were flying. He wasn't sure where, or if they'd make it in one piece, but they had escaped the Research Section, its masked representatives.

Sally leant against a wall. He was right, she couldn't see a thing, only spectres, globs of chimerical light, angry photons clawing at her eyes, wanting in. There was sound, much of it coming from the engineer.

'Well,' he said presently, 'we're not dead. If they fired they missed.'

'And hit the guppy,' she concluded. 'That piece of shit stuck to the ship was probably a bomb.'

'Makes sense.' She could picture him nodding. 'Practical,' he added. 'Multi-functional. Economic.'

'We don't have much fuel, do we?'

'Just enough to stop.'

'Then what?' She thought she knew already.

'We look around, find some.' Simple...

Sally laughed despite the pain. 'Robbers! Your retrograde or your life!'

Friendly Byron came and sat beside her, a more tangible form in the dark, a thicker blackness. 'You know, Sal, I'm starting to like you.'

She pushed from the wall, sagged. 'I feel the same as Kate,' she told him jokingly. 'We're the same size and everything. If you can imagine her with her head shaved...'

'It's like a warm egg.'

'Yes; so watch you don't crack it.'

This time it was Byron who had the milk and doughnuts.

Roman candles...

There was an explosion.

'What's the probability against us hitting something?' the co-pilot asked.

'Not nearly high enough,' he answered. Moving gently he slipped from between her polished thighs.

There was a series of lessening, prismatic waves, a presence.

'What the...'

'Luke?'

The cook uncovered his torch. Naked, skin peeling, mouth hanging open, he stood at the foot of the bed.

'Luke?' Sal repeated, dazzled.

'Sorry to disturb you,' said Abdul. 'But we've visitors.' His voice was lazy, the words sinking to the deck almost as soon as he spoke them.

'Where've you been?' Sally wanted to know. 'Do you feel okay? Tell me...'

'I'm fine,' he lied. 'I'll make it.'

Byron wrestled with his trousers. 'Who are they?' The light crashed around the cabin, stinging his head. 'Get that out of my face!'

The ragged figure stepped outside the room and the blackness swelled once more.

The engine's displacement had drained every ounce of power, as Byron knew it would. He fumbled with batteries for his own torch which he should have checked beforehand, silently furious, puzzled more by Abdul's sudden reappearance than the million-to-one shot collision. Trillion-to-one if it were a ship. He was shaking, actually physically shaking, and it was excitement carousing through his veins. He couldn't believe it. He must have aimed the engine somewhere specific, unconsciously pointed it toward crowded space.

Wasn't that good? They needed fuel, so it made sense. But it hadn't been intentional. Things were occurring the wrong way round. In this instance they were fortunate. Or where they?

'Visitors?' Sally echoed belatedly. 'That's crazy.'

'Not if we swallowed them whole,' he said, enthused. 'Like that whale in the bible...you know.' He finally got the torch to function, its narrow beam mellow.

'Then it's preposterous,' she amended. 'I'm sleepy.'

'No - a blessing! There's been no decompression, so they haven't punctured the hull. What more can you ask?'

But she was snoring.

And Luke Farouke had gone.

So he went to receive their guests - and to see what could be salvaged - alone.

After all, Friendly was used to it.

*

Kate dozed in a hot bath up to her chin. The water cooled and she climbed out reluctantly, towelled dry, and dressed in jeans and t-shirt, borrowed clothing.

The t-shirt had a picture on the front, Earth with a sign hung on a rusty nail, reading: NO VACANCIES, a joke on the depleted population (approx. 0.5 billion) and their jealously-guarded rights of abode - when emigration and planet-hire were the fashion and the obscenely rich did as they pleased in the galaxy. Those who clung on lived mostly in the vast island that was Radio, cosseted in the mid-Atlantic doldrums, encapsulated by image and pretended form, safe in their micro-climates...

She found Stylo at his desk, a pen in his fingers.

'Your friends made the push,' he said; 'somehow.'

'What do you mean, "somehow?"'

He scratched his palm with the nib, marking ting circles. 'I got through to the engine moments before it flew,' he explained. 'The beam was diverted, and I got this back.'

Droover took the slip of paper from him. 'To whom it may concern,' she read. 'We're monitoring.' She turned it over; the reverse blank. 'That's it?'

'Yep,' confirmed Stylo.

'Monitoring what? Me?'

'Go and read your comics,' he told her.

Kate frowned. The bath had refreshed her, but his obliqueness was getting to be infuriating.

*

The air seemed to wobble around the shaft of the torch-beam, rumbling quietly as Byron pressed through it, a resistance that to the engineer was deliberate. Like the dreamt wind gushing from the abyss it attempted to force him back, hold him a bay, keep him at a controllable distance.

But he would have none of it. Byron was the engine, and as the engine he cut the blackness that was space, burrowed like a mole to his prescribed destination. Only a lack of fuel might stop him. Only destruction.

He plunged in regardless...

They were Topicans, he discovered, and their craft bisected four inspection tunnels, six walkways and the auxiliary tank Sal had recently mended. They'd had their throats cut.

It was a time, he reasoned, for woundings.

Cut, cut, cut, cut...one two three four murdered crewmen and a torch-bearing engineer.

Quite a procession. He dumped the bodies in a wheeled receptacle and sent it thuddering to the nearest converter, there to be disposed of, evaporated.

Whistling he next explored the interloper, its belly-hatch scorched and ajar, where possibly it had taken a hit, where definitely its crew had exited.

To find what? Their end.

'Lucky unlucky,' Friendly said. The craft's interior was new and sparkling. 'Anyone home?'

A communications panel fizzled.

War raged about the star Horus, he recalled, its six worlds and thirteen moons, one of which was his home.

'Abdul?'

No reply.

Thirteen - Fast Out, Fast In

He stared disconsolately at the few strands of tobacco in his pouch, the bedraggled papers, and wished he had searched the pockets of the Topican crewman before sending them to a unique cremation.

A light flashed on a console. He examined it closer. It was a distress signal.

'Oh,' said Byron.

Hurriedly, the engineer returned to Sally...

'Go away,' she told him.

He shook her. 'Listen...I've a plan.' Her eyes opened, shot and bleary, but aware.

'I don't want to hear - get me a drink.'

'There's no water, only ice-cream.'

'How?'

'No power, just refrigeration.'

Sal managed to focus her eyes in the torchlight. 'What are  you talking about, Byron?' '

'The - forget it.'

*

Lumping Jack Morgan took off for the weekend in his guppy. It was raining in Sarpendon.

It was feckless, he couldn't afford the fuel, but Frozen Hound wanted to talk...and visit some relatives on Triton...who went a bundle for pot-plants and cheeses.

He knew a shortcut, also.

And what they lacked in money they more than made up for in hospitality: of a variety Morgan hadn't come across before, of knowledge and virtuosity.

The dog, a she, grew in proportion to his newfound adroitness, shedding her rimy fur.

*

The engineer finally got Sal into the suit, her reluctance verbal as well as physical. His plan was simple. Whether or not it would work was open to question.

'Stay close,' he instructed. 'Move when I move, okay?'

The co-pilot scowled, features partly obscured behind the dirty visor. She wondered where Luke was, her sister. Tensed and untensed her depleted muscles in preparation...

Byron extinguished the torch. A deep rumble oscillated through the hull. They were somewhere below the main tank and she felt like Atlas with the world on her shoulders. The noise echoed, died, rose again. The canned air she breathed tasted of garlic and tomatoes. Friendly moved and she responded.

He carried a switch taped to his thumb and tuned to the array of instruments on the cabin table. The confidence he showed in its primitiveness was juvenile, almost ludicrous, yet Sally appreciated the thinking behind its one-off design. He planned to depressurize the engine, give those now arriving, drawn by their comrades signal, an uncomfortable surprise. She just hoped they were few, and careless.

The two of them meandered, followed a grimy walkway, outstretched hands palming the unseen walls. Sal found if she closed her eyes she could imagine the passage a street, houses lining its pleasant bustle, automobiles, women with prams, lamp-posts, kids on bikes leaping over concrete curbs, drains clanking under rubber. Byron was her guide-dog, for she was blind, an old lady whose joints swivelled like ratchets, corroded by time.

She hadn't realized he'd stopped and bumped into him. Opening her eyes Sal discovered varicoloured lights, dancing motes in the blackness.

Byron touched his helmet to hers. 'They're cutting their way in,' he said.

The lights grew in vividness. They lodged behind a duct, its vaguely glinting outline reminiscent of a moonscape, some childhood image just now leaking from Sally's tired brain. Memories flooded back, filled the long-vacated niches of her once innocent mind. She saw Kate flying a helium balloon, their parents' warm faces - for the last time, the short trip across the Mare to end, for Emily and Lloyd, in disaster. She'd laid flowers on their grave, the Sea of Tranquillity a suitable resting place. Her sister had refused to go, refused to believe, refused...

Always looking for a way out, that was Kate. A stealer of birthday cards, party dresses and makeup.

The light fashioned into a square, its own after-impression, blue and purple and green, fading to blood and cobalt, a mass of warped sapphires.

Had he pressed the switch? She couldn't make out his face, see his hands.

She held her breath; nothing was happening. Sally poked him with her foot, enjoying the sensation.

Byron shifted his weight, leaning more heavily against her, forcing her full of pain, squashing, crushing. Then it was as if her mind surfaced, and the world, the limited world, the world of pulsing agony, was dismantled, vomiting chaos.

Heads sailed past, and torsos, limbs, metal appendages and giant, curled fingers, each several metres long, black as the space around them, visible to Sal via their preternatural luminescence. Planets, moons affixed themselves, grew like warts, glowing solely for her benefit, reinvented hues...present in her estranged psyche...cute and pretty, a reality quenched by eerie daylight.

Suns, stars.

'What?'

'I asked how you were feeling,' said Byron, hovering over Sal, smoking.

'Can I go outside?'

He laughed. 'There is no outside.'

'That can't be!' She felt cheated. The blue clouds about the engineer concealed his proximity.

'I'm sorry,' he intoned. 'But I can get you that drink now.'

'I'm not thirsty.' Sal was crying.

Byron looked puzzled. 'I had to carry you, I was worried.'

Sally thought about this a while, then said, 'It matched my eyes.'

His puzzlement magnified.

'The dress,' she said. 'Kate tore it...'

'Yeah?'

'Don't make fun of me!'

'I'm not trying - Do you know where we are?'

She pouted. 'I saw the sun.'

'No, no sun, not in here.' He drew on the cigarette. 'Maybe the lasers. I think one exploded.'

She recalled the street vision, the scenes of domestic life from an earlier century. It had fallen apart, invaded her, and fled. 'It all happened so fast,' she ventured.

He offered her a cup of water. She drank.

'Right,' Byron agreed. 'After I blew the hatches...'

But she wasn't listening. He'd ripped the interior out of the Topican craft, she knew, nearly killed them both, made sure of their latest visitors. And Abdul.

Fast...out and in, and they were flying...where? She dreamed a multitude of answers.

The engineer provided others. 'If you're ever in the market for a second-hand ship, make sure it isn't Topican,' he said eagerly, sucking burnt digits.

'Doesn't their planet have a denser than average atmosphere?' Sal was beginning to comprehend, stuff he took for granted, the surety, for example, that the smaller vessel would spew its guts so dramatically.

'Correct. The ground-pressure on Topica's about a fifth again that of Upfront or Earth.'

'Which contributed to the suction.' She was nodding.

'Aha...' His expression was uneasy, like he didn't wish to complicate things, explain more fully.

'And they employ field-locks?'

'Hm.' He sounded pleased with himself. 'They have their virtues over conventional systems, but...'

The shrug was comical. She giggled.

'It's fortunate for us they disdain engineers,' Byron went on. 'I mean: look at this!'

She glanced around, picked shapes (heads and fingers) from the dim illumination, its source a quartet of yawning panels, frothing wires, metal and optic.

'Everything's automatic,' he said jeeringly, contemptible of what he saw as a lack of human transcendence, the art of man in contrast to the rigidity of machine. 'The air's what was left in our tanks plus whatever I could scavenge, and there's water from a condenser.'

Sally was further appreciative of his forward planning. But how much was chance? she wondered. Raising her legs the co-pilot became conscious for the first time of the lessened gee...

'Where?'

'Fury,' he repeated. 'It's a...orbital station.'

'Belonging to whom?'

'Us, hopefully.'

'You mean Upfront?'

'Yes.'

'Won't they open fire, Byron? Or didn't it occur to you?'

'Of course; but there's an escape-capsule.'

'Built for two...'

'Eh?'

'It's a song,' she said. Couldn't he stop talking? If he was scared, and he ought to be, why didn't he bite his nails like ordinary people?

Her own were stumps. Brittle.

'It's that or suffocate,' he argued. 'We're limping as it is - they'll see that.'

Sal's neck hurt. Whatever, she thought, as long as she didn't have to clamber back inside the buckled suit...

Fast...in and out, and they were flying...where? She dreamed a multitude of answers.

The engineer provided others. 'I've changed my mind, about the Topican spacecraft...' He faded away.

Sally jerked, claustrophobic, sweating, drowning, dazed and giddy in freefall. The world had ceased to mean anything; they, Byron Friendly and herself, were travelling backward toward a halo of orange-green.

The seals on her helmet popped, releasing her.

'How do you feel, Sal?' Byron asked. The halo sprang from his torch, reflected off a low ceiling.

'I.. .' she began.

'You fainted,' he informed her. 'I had to carry you. I was worried.'

'Didn't we?' It was blurred. 'The decompression...'

'Stalled,' he said.

Sal rubbed his brow, a space enlarged, no longer bordered by hair.

Friendly grunted.

Sally mumbled, and he leaned forward to hear. 'I thought we'd got out...I was frightened, and you were...'

He pressed his hand over her dry lips. The expression on his face was one of pity, albeit a pity hardened by circumstance, its weight of sorrow thus diminished.

'You keep slipping away,' Friendly admonished. 'Try and stay awake; at least till I come up with something.'

She was glad his confidence was authentic. She hadn't dreamed that; or her many aches.

But she was losing.

'Fight,' he instructed. 'Don't give in.'

'It's crazy! What's happening?' Her throat was constricted, moistureless, the fallacy of drinking insufficient. She felt close to hysteria.

'They're cutting through one of the lower portside locks,' he said. 'I moved us out of the immediate vicinity. It was getting a little warm.' He rolled a scrawny cigarette, using the last of his tobacco. 'They've rigged some kind of bypass, so I can't blow the hatches. Anyway, it was only one chance in ten.' The grin he wore appeared freakish.

'Better than nothing,' Sal rasped. 'What next?'

'Wait and see.'

'Bastard...'

Byron licked the paper and frowned at its crumpled tube, the ragged ends. 'Maybe I'll quit, like you,' he goaded. 'Eh, Droover, what do you say to that?'

'Okay,' she answered. 'Okay, just keep your noxious emissions to yourself, Byron.'

He laughed self-mockingly at her double meaning and searched his ribbed, encapsulated person for matches. Not finding any made him mad.

And then the engine depressurized...

Sally was back where she'd started, only this time it hurt more.

Byron leaked blood. He was spread out on the floor beside her, stripped and gleaming. There were shiny pins sticking from his chest, upper-arms and thighs. They seemed to be holding him together; but she doubted that was their intended purpose, more likely a coincidence. He looked funny. Her own body was pale, shadowy. It discoloured the white walls with its tawdry echoes. The floor was soft and comfortable. Above, the ceiling was domed, opaque.

Despite the pain Sal felt better than she had for days - if they were days. Like distance within the engine, everything was compressed: days as metres, unguessable.

But she wasn't thirsty anymore. She was alive.

index ii - RETROGRADE PLUS

So Kate ran away again. What else is new?

'Not simply as good as,' they said proudly, 'but a whole nine percent better.'

Not only had Dr Grey achieved the artificial synthesis of retrograde, he'd manufactured retrograde PLUS, actually improved the Europan original.

They were impressed.

There was a snag. '

'We're not entirely sure,' they admitted. 'It would require extensive tests...'

Naturally, they got the go-ahead.

'Naturally,' Droover said. And there it was, proof, in a paper nutshell; illustrated, established fact.

All wonderfully obfuscated...

Lucky for her the sea was nearer than it appeared. She stood on the pebbled strand and gazed at the faint outline of Bench 3, its misty forest shrouded in unfailing rain. Uncle Stylo hadn't tried to stop her, neither had Kate told him she was leaving. Onward and outward, impelled by an invisible force, drawn on the threaded line, its farther end entwining, connecting all those whose lives intersected. hers.

Including Stylo, she thought.

A boat arrived as she knew it must, rising from the waves like a mythological chariot, attracted by her body's glow, a heat not unlike that which powered it.

Kate boarded gingerly, a nervousness of apertures - windows in the cosmic ocean \- and tongues - languages of space and time.

A bird overflew the blue deep, squawking.

Soon her shivering became vague. Like Bench 2 it shrank, then vanished completely as the boat rounded the jungle coast, its trees tall and thick, bedecked in flowers, the perfect, virgin enclave.

Kate readily leapt ashore, one hand pinning down her hat, one hand sweeping a curve through air and bushes.

*

Morgan's contract with the mining company expired after ten shifts, each a hundred Jovian days in length, every third of which he slept. He declined a renewal, had what he wanted: cash for fuel and fuel sufficient to reach Luna where he planned on surprising a certain "reliable source". Lumping Jack didn't want revenge, merely justice. But then something happened that forced a change in his carefully resolved schedule.

Dr Henry Grey absconded...

'Why?' They sat in the cramped lounge of Morgan's guppy.

The elderly scientist waved his stump excitedly. His brow sloped, heavy with meaning. 'The bonding's unstable,' he said. 'The whole twisted concoction's anomalous! But will they listen? No! Almost the entire research staff has been bought-off with promises of lucrative new deals - Deals! I ask you...And the military, the secrecy...' His cracked voice descended to a whisper, losing itself in his beard.

He was mad, Lumping Jack decided. 'And?' His senses glutted themselves on the possibilities...

'I have a mission,' said Grey. 'A conscience.'

'Yes, but what's in it for me?'

The scientist grimaced; he looked uncomfortable. 'I was hoping to appeal to your better instincts,' he confessed. 'Perhaps I was naive, eh, mistaken?' He chewed his lips. 'Ah...' His thin frame melted into the stiff couch.

Frozen Hound manifested.

'Ah,' the doctor repeated.

Morgan shuffled; it was his turn to appear ill at ease. 'Okay, I'll go along,' he said, the dog's breath in his ear.

And a partnership, a fellowship was begun.

*

'So we're prisoners,' Byron said uselessly. 'We tunnelled out of the stockade and came up in the jail. Brilliant!'

*

Mordy blew his nose.

'There's aspirin,' offered Uncle Stylo.

'No, no thanks - they make me sleepy.' He pushed hair from his brow and stared at his father. 'Which way did she go?'

'On to three.'

'And she's still there?'

'That's what I want you to find out.' Stylo put down his pencil and whistled...

Fourteen - The Engineer

It was ironic, thought Byron as he walked handcuffed between two squat ratings, that they should wind up here, on Fury. It was where he'd hoped to escape to had Sal and himself been successful in capturing the Topican craft. The dour faces either side of him registered no humour. He slowed down, wondering what lay at the corridor's farther end. It was his first time actually inside the orbital station, so he didn't know his way round. A chill ran through him as he envisaged a firing-squad. The smooth walls were scarred in places, evidence of the recent fighting, the battle his side, Upfront, had lost.

A door opened and he was pushed into a circular room with a view of the planet, Bid-2. There were three chairs and three men waiting, two naval officers and a civilian.

The ratings left...

'You are Byron Friendly?' asked one officer derisively.

He answered yes, curious.

The civilian folded his arms. He sat in the middle, suggesting prominence.

Officer two said, 'The engine...do you own it?'

He answered no, reticent. What were they getting at?

The civilian slapped his knees impatiently and got up. 'Some of our men have disappeared,' he said flatly, ignoring the agitated soldiers. 'I...' He smiled. 'I want you to tell me why.' The threat was clean and obvious, forcing Byron to likewise disregard the flanking uniforms and their stifled annoyance as he smiled a smile of his own.

'You what?' quizzed Sally, freshly animated.

'I agreed,' said the engineer. 'What choice was there? You're being looked after, I'm a POW.' He dressed in the clothes the guards had given him. 'This way I can be of some use, perhaps learn something. Besides,' he baited, a familiar game between them.

She sighed. 'Yes?'

Friendly kissed her. 'Abdul stole my lighter,' he said. 'He left this in its place.'

Sal took the tortoiseshell comb. 'I suppose when my hair grows back...' Her voice was wistful.

'That's right,' Byron congratulated; 'think positively.'

He got a kiss in return.

'Thanks.' Then the ratings came for him...

The engine's bleak silhouette carved a huge lump out of the grey planet's mountainous surface, the infertile setting for a prolific conflict. Fury orbited, the station a monument to past successes of diplomacy and co-operation, its terminal a joint venture seized firstly by Upfront, retaken by Topica.

Shining yellow about the powerhouse were a host of vessels, greedy birds inspecting some leviathan's carcass. But the colossus was far from dead, or benign.

Byron was ushered into a tight-packed transport. He felt his brain was squeezed. The surly men about him were silent. The craft nudged from Fury and flipped over, booster rockets jolting it toward the now invisible flock. He sat doubled up in a webbed couch, trying not to moan. The pressure in the station had been to him standard; but soon that too would change. He wished he was back there, with Sally, peering through windows, slowly rotting...

Soon his arm was yanked. A face hovered and hands levered him from his captivity. A series of faintly buzzing fields snapped around him. It was like being repeatedly sawn in half, walking from one world to another, via the locks.

What was it with Topica that it had to be different?

Finally, lungs aching, Byron emerged into darkness. It took his eyes a few moments to adjust. A match ignited, flared, and he was offered a cigarette.

'You must want to win my confidence,' he said lamely.

The man, a second civilian, replied, 'If you like.' His manner was relaxed.

Byron inhaled. 'Well?'

'There is a mystery,' the man said, smoking. 'One of our people wandered off and some others went after him. None have returned.'

The engineer said nothing, waiting. The black was disrupted by glowing orange, marking their faces.

'You'll understand our position concerning Earth,' the civilian went on. 'Relations between Terra and ourselves have come under a degree of strain lately; so when this appeared, swallowing a scout ship...'

'You panicked,' blurted Friendly. 'You're paranoid.'

'And your life is no longer your own. Be warned, lest it end!'

'Nah, not while you need me.'

The man seemed to hesitate. Byron glanced around, but could spot no clues to his whereabouts in the near total dark. Were they alone? The smell...

'That remains to be proven. For now I suggest you do your best to alleviate a troublesome situation.'

Byron flicked his cigarette away. Mentally he examined the cards he had to play, the bluffs he might chance, the obvious stakes. A light came on; they were in a storeroom, although he failed to place it within the engine. Cans of paint lined the shelves. He reasoned them to be near the lower portside lock the Topicans had cut through. 'Okay,' he said. 'Who and how many? I have a vested interest, right? So you can question me later.' He reached for the door handle, the man's cagey expression unmoved by his words, all the proof he required to be confident of at least a temporary advantage.

He was brought up short. Cans of paint? Shelved?

'My name is Beman,' the man informed.

'Yeah...'

*

'Droover K?'

'Yeah...who is it?'

'When the moon is full. That's the time the pink-people come out to play.'

She crouched, wary, sprang over a mossy log and sprinted for the large, bushy tree. It heaved with creatures, ants and spiders that ranged in size from dust motes to fists. The arachnids were her favourite, the boxy orange ones, like soft-skinned crabs, their number limitless.

She tried to visualize the machine that produced them. Or did they rain from the sky? Earlier Kate had been caught in a shower of green lizards...

She poked a spider with her thimble, and it jumped. Her hat fell off and she bent to retrieve it, spying midst the tangled forest-floor a wristwatch-cum-radio. Droover slipped the metal bracelet over her right hand.

'Stylo?'

'Here, Mordy. Anything?'

'I just stepped off the boat and already there are contrary signals. I think I'm picking up underground activity; at least that's how it sounds.'

'Impossible,' his father said, 'there's been no construction at sub-sealevel in the area. Most likely it's your equipment. Run a test program, see what that comes up with.'

Mordy frowned. 'I did... it shows...'

'Go on.'

'Tectonics,' he reported.

'On a bench?' The disembodied voice was incredulous. 'You've got to be kidding...'

I know, he told himself, these are spurious, floating atolls, islands without foundation.

'Run it a - ' But Mordy had closed the channel. Next he unhooked his pack and threw it in the ocean.

The bite-marks across his stomach writhed, contracted.

The doctor and Lumping Jack left Sarpendon. Morgan wasn't at all convinced by Henry's story, but he'd go along for now, the dog's liking for the old man persuasive.

He set a course for Luna, then altered it.

'They'd expect you to head there,' Frozen Hound explained, a rare sentence. 'Henry has a logical mind. Do something erratic, that way, when they find him missing, we'll be more difficult to trace.'

'The dark side?'

'No, too risky; make it Earth.'

*

'Droover S?'

'Yeah...who is it?'

'The engineer.'

'Ernie, get out of my brain.' Sally was engaged in some private thinking. The walls looked more cheerful, she noted, and the food was good.

But she hated not to be working.

It was plain there had been no depressurization; the engine, its internal conglomerates and networks were intact, displayed no obvious stresses or fractures. He toyed with the idea that it had somehow mended itself: a frenetic team of conscientious dwarfs armed with repair-gear and blow-torches, a multitude of active fingers superintended by the dead engineer.

It had its appeal, and brought to mind the still unsolved problem of Ern. Not for the first time Byron was struck by the fact neither Sal nor Kate, or for that matter Captain Jones, had ever offered any explanation as to what befell his artful predecessor. What, if anything, had caused his demise? It was a puzzle he might never solve.

Beman was ready.

'Just you and me?' asked Byron, accepting the challenge. He liked the Topican, admired his departmental stubbornness. The pair of them would get on fine, as long as they had to.

He wondered if his own needs would be met before those of his adversary.

'Our man followed the main service conduit to its branching,' Beman said, pointing. 'That's the last he was seen. A group of four, including a naval officer, went in search. They were in radio contact until...'

He seemed reluctant to say it. Friendly acknowledged and led the way. There were stencilled numbers lining the conduit, or tunnel as Byron would term it; also coded lettering. It was like a sewer, only dry, silent, the fitful illumination as yet victim to the engineer's prior tampering.

At the nexus they turned north north-west. Like mad sailors, thought Byron, always thinking the direction they'd come from was south, forever ever seeking cooler, windy climes...

The tunnel narrowed and soon they had to crawl on their bellies, mimicking rats.

He had no fixed goal in mind: if people wanted to disappear, that was their business.

They climbed over a converter-housing and down its greasy side. The air was stagnant. Beman sniffed it, said, 'You mustn't come here too often.'

'No,' said Byron, pausing as the man used his inhaler, its contents protection - in theory - against the unwindings and complications that were retrograde...

Together they swung open a large circular hatch and entered a chamber where no light penetrated.

Sal was woken by a wailing klaxon. The floor on which she'd slept vibrated intermittently, shuddering its message of violence through her languid body. She stood, dizzy, and tried the door. It was locked. Pressing her ear to the white surface she could hear sounds of running, many boots tapping, part of a combat symphony. Upfront, she reckoned, was attacking the station. The four walls emitted noise and a bluish liquid. There was a stench of disinfectant.

The square to her left erupted, gushing stained water, wispy smoke. Sal barely had time to shield her face. She was thrown to the floor. Scrambling clear of the wreckage she discovered two ringed fingers, a hand, a wrist, but no more. The room next to hers was gutted, as if a bomb (Yes?) had gone off, perhaps killing its planter.

Gladly, the co-pilot availed herself of the exit. Through the dust figures shifted. A woman yelled, bloodily, and the flimsy ceiling was torn back to reveal the artificial sky with its grid of pylons and net of fine silver bridges. Sally pushed aside a fallen roof-support, the task made easy by the seeping gravity, and climbed to the subsequent floor, a mostly open area of colourful galleries, more alert than was necessary as the only shapes that moved were those of chairs and paper cups, plates, magazines and ashtrays.

Was the outer skin breached? No, no, couldn't be...

A darkened ship glided overhead, its silence a quality of the hugging void, what few lights it showed flashing red, green, red, blue, red.

Shots were fired, stuttering, ricocheting around the deck like stones rattled in a bucket. Sally fell clumsily, the low gee proving awkward. She yanked open a door and propelled herself into a corridor leading inward, toward the core, and what she hoped was safety.

Beman raised a flaccid arm, let it drop.

'Something hit him hard,' observed Byron, smoking one of the Topican's cigarettes.

'What?' queried the man. 'What hit him Who?' Aggression reshaped his voice.

They squatted on a gantry, oily space beneath their feet. The engineer said, 'I don't know.'

Beman produced a gun.

'You remember the way?' asked Friendly, smiling. 'You still need me I think.'

'There are more ways than one...' He turned suddenly, unnerved by a movement to his rear. 'Hunter!' he shouted. 'Are you there? It's Beman. Hello!'

The only reply he got came from Byron. 'You're imagining things,' the engineer told him. 'It's nothing, a spectre, a ghost. There're hundreds.' He'd slipped quietly off the platform, clambered now below the mesh, Beman frantic, shooting, effecting transient blooms of variegated light.

'Where are you?' demanded the civilian. 'You can't get away; not for long. You hear?'

The air shook...

Beman was folded, caught in the gantry as it scissored. He screamed incoherently, a last defiance, then was quiet, as with a jerk of hydraulics the steel mesh neatly cubed him, mixed his parts with the murdered rating's, Byron's eyes to flicker as together they spun in tens and twenties, spattering him with lukewarm juices.

The shock troops blazed a curtain of fire, blackening walls and blistering flesh.

Upfront had returned with one intention, to seize the orbital station at whatever cost. Sally pitied the occupants while not counting herself among them; they couldn't have had much of an opportunity to strengthen their position.

Her thoughts drifted briefly to Byron, came shrieking back as an explosion rocked the vent in which she'd wisely ensconced her person. Cold air was dragged over her, then to be heated in a squall of boiling thermals farther down the tract. It was dim, no fun at all where she was, but secure enough for the present. At least till the fighting stopped.

She relaxed, breathed steadily, listened to the warped echoes as they stole up from the deep, reverberating through the thin aluminium, dampened by her body and amplified by the invisible juncture that lay a short distance ahead. Maybe, considered Sal, providing a second option...

Slowly, deliberately, she edged forward, halted when her feet lost purchase, hung in the nothingness. Leaning out she touched and identified another five avenues, projections from the sides of a box, her own the sixth, on which she balanced, blind and debating. The gravity hinted there was a down; she ruled it out, up for similar reasons. That meant left, right or straight on. Sal tasted the faint draught, its dying speed, and manoeuvred gingerly eastward.

*

The sun rose. Rainbows shimmered. Kate Droover drank from a stream of liquid silver, dunked her hat for more.

The wrist radio crackled. She didn't answer. Who'd be calling her? She shook her head and hands dry and walked along the bank, leaves and rocks clustered like spectators, an audience of patient stone and temporal foliage. The wilderness seemed to have grown in depth, swollen in detail under the starry aegis of night, as if Uncle Stylo had taken his finest brush and a magnifying glass to its melding borders of green, brown, green, blue, green, yellow, green.

A hairy caterpillar said good morning, how are you today? And Kate, hungry, asked it the way to the nearest cafe.

Just follow the spiders, it informed, track with your eyes their longest threads.

And she did.

What she found surprised her. 'Mordy?' she cried, wiping drops from her nose. 'Hey!'

He wandered over.

She sat down.

He was gone when she looked again...

*

On Earth the threesome sat round an oval table, steaming mugs ringing its varnished (a sheet had covered it) surface. Morgan whisked his cocoa, hating its frothy colour. Dr Grey lifted his mug to his lips and sipped contentedly, while the dog used a straw.

'This is my first visit to Australia,' said Lumping Jack. 'I always thought it was...red, you know, like Mars.' He felt stupid, manipulated. Frozen Hound ignored his silent pleas.

'It's a rare citizen of the planet who ventures far overland these days,' replied the mad scientist. 'Life is too comfortable, eh? We shouldn't lose sight of our heritage,' he added. 'Not the nice bits anyway...' he rambled, far away. Then, 'Listen.'

The dog's ears pricked up.

'What?' said Morgan, suddenly nervous. He pushed back his chair and stood, peered out the grimy window at the twilit soil and hills. His guppy rested nearby, swathed in canvas in hue similar to the blackened earth all around. The ramshackle house never possessed a discernible shadow.

'Nothing,' the doctor said finally, theatrically. 'This is a dead continent, remember?'

Lumping Jack groaned. 'Sure, you told me. And that, over there, was your grandmother's rocking-chair...'

Henry laughed incongruously. His stump flailed the air. 'If the world were to end tomorrow,' he sang, 'it would be like any other day, with broken trees and bony knees, the sun to wither away.'

The dog howled, a sound the outback hadn't heard in decades.

Chorus...

*

Byron felt sick. The drugs they'd pumped him full of on Fury, he now realized, were no substitute for decontamination, the steady purging of malignant chemical traces...only here that process was reversed, like his thinking. Did they appreciate their mistake? he pondered. Maybe it was deliberate, a poison administered, one to erode his immunity. He shrugged mentally, unable to figure it out, and. continued down the ladder. At its base he ducked under a blinking console.

And came up facing Abdul. He toted Beman's pistol, a severe expression on his face.

Neither man moved for some time. Then the cook's lineaments hardened further and he keeled over, shattered like a fragile, porcelain statue.

The engineer toed a few shards; they crumbled. The gun simply vanished.

Like another, he reflected. Like Monica.

From where Friendly stood he could see the co-ordinator, her dance suspended in his mind.

The voices drifted like odours, each different, each with a source. They talked of campaigns, losses, destruction. She was above them, exhausted, bathed in their cigar-smoke and tones of gratuitous promiscuity. She knew she was dying. She poked her aching fingers through the grill and rattled it.

'Help,' she said, Sally Droover, wanting Amy, wanting Kate, wanting... 'Byron - Byron Friendly.'

One of the voices repeated the name.

'I don't believe it,' another said. 'Here?'

They obviously knew him...

'Get her out of there.'

Thank-you.

He tracked the pale figure, followed the chalk-marks roughly scribed on pipework and equipment lockers. Mostly they were arrows, but every so often a circle or square steered his gaze, and the arrowheads evolved into triangles, sharp tadpoles whose tails shortened, then disappeared.

The engineer walked tirelessly, mouth dry, head choked with used imagery. Pictures from an earlier time hung before him like promises, leading him on, an exhibition that drew him deeper into the past, toward his beginning, a bizarre retrospective of recent, muddled events. There was Sally on the hilltop, taking in the sunset. Sally again, joking in his Upfront residence; and her sister Kate, coughing, inhaling, laughing blue smoke, himself with his face painted, swinging from a stair...

Comics. Lumping Jack, Frozen Hound, Dr Henry Grey: Last Of The Earth Men. Before. Lucky unlucky, the knock on the door that never came. And, 'Ernie,' he whispered, unknowing of the action. It straightened his spine. Up ahead the wan figure paused, skin waxy, loose and malformed, as if poured from a height onto shrunken bones, a distorted candle, its wick a plume of black hair. 'We meet at last,' Byron added, grinning, matching his counterpart's twisted demeanour.

'You're welcome,' said the engineer.

Fifteen - Colour Shock

A man called Silver held her hand, warming it, pressed between his own. 'I've news,' he said, 'of a Terran warship...the SS Usufruct?'

Sally Droover moaned, squeezed his fingers. A ghosted outline sailed past her eyes, features plastic.

'They described you as "dangerous,"' Silver said. 'You want to tell me why?'

She stuck her tongue out. It was puffy. 'Those fuckers used us,' she answered. 'Ernie told me, in a dream.'

'Ernie?'

'Our engineer - before Byron. Did you find him?'

'Byron? No, not yet.'

'Neither will they,' Sal said proudly. She felt like a little girl; this was her father who comforted her. He sat by her bed when she was ill, perhaps with mumps or a fever...

Kate would be out shopping with mother. They'd come bursting in waving bags and big, cheery smiles, teasing her, modelling new blouses, shoes, haircuts. She grimaced.

Silver looked worried. 'Something wrong?'

'My sister,' she murmured, picking the tortoiseshell comb off her chest, dragging her thumb down its springy teeth. 'I have to give her this.'

'A present,' he guessed.

'A future,' she corrected.

*

Uncle Stylo exited the narrow canyon, kicking up dust. There was an uneasiness about him, like the world, the false world of the Benches, the accessories to Radio City, its archipelago, was stirring. Roused from some magical sleep, a serpent, its crested tail woven through the tame Atlantic, the pre-industrialized, raw-natured element slowly reasserted itself. Manmade was no longer good enough. Reconstructions, illusions, effigies were being superseded, overtaken by the very forms and processes they themselves had destroyed and replaced. The planet altered, Stylo imagined. Parts of it sank, were cast afresh from the waves, as at first, born of the ocean's depthless womb, thrust up onto the land to struggle, fight, survive or die without intervention, matched and provided for, but in limited, finite numbers. The imitations to dwindle, he saw. And the imitators to fall the long fall...

Into what? Chaos? He glimpse a fresh solidity in the rocks, their redness enhanced with green and blue and yellow. All the colours were here in the stone under his feet. To his practised eye they shone with a reality only touched on before.

A great sadness welled up inside him. Yet, long-buried, the serpent stirred in him too.

And he smiled, pleased. The abandoned kingdoms, the neglected realms, their fabulous gardens had once more opened their gates, set out their random, lavish stalls for business.

Extraordinary, Stylo thought. He turned for home, wanting, needing to capture it, to shape and mould while the newly vibrant hues were still fresh in his mind.

Running, he laughed, and his laughter floated on the wind, carried far and wide, even to the ears of Kate and Mordy, the two as yet struggling apart, soon to match both data and stories, scars and organs...compare the trees of the energized forest to the support-systems and backups prevalent in their lives, the lives of others: branches of wood and metal, roots of tangled history, from seed to corpse; bark and leaves, skin and its sloughing, the passage of fluids, blood, sap and tear-dropped water; thoughts across space, distance no obstacle to their willing hearts, the delay meaningless, time abundant...

Sixteen - The Spider's Tail

Mordy found himself in a clearing, the noon sky cloudless above, the fine, grassy blades soft below. He lay down in the warmth and closed his eyes. He had wandered for hours through the thick, unyielding jungle. It gave the impression of being far larger than possible, stretching farther and deeper than the sea should allow, its twisting vines and creepers wound back on themselves, a net in which all was suspended, that nothing escaped.

He'd lost the wrist-radio. No way of contacting his father without it, he knew, caring little, interested more in locating Droover, the woman, his key on her arm, her thimble's abrasions on his flesh. And his father's hat...

The ocean receded from his thinking much as it did from his inward-coiling path. The water belonged to another plane now, an alternate Earth, a past existence. Mordy felt he might spend the remainder of his living hours beneath the twin canopies of sky and tree.

He slept for a while. When he woke the shadows were all round him, tugging his own. He got to his feet and turned full circle, wondering which unseen track to take. The moon hung gibbous and large, appeared strangely close. He shrugged and continued in the direction he was facing, shaking hands with an outreaching limb, eager not to upset or embarrass his woodland hosts.

He walked into the swelling night. It received him kindly, offered him clues to the whereabouts of his intended. Droover's thread was a filament in the dark, the spun conductor of an eight-legged star.

Mordy grasped its ninth appendage delicately, careful not to break it...

Seventeen - The Occupants

Morgan pressed the button and the light winked off. He spun in his chair before the glitzy console, whistling, tuneless, the tight air squeezing his sound, killing it.

Frozen Hound peered over his shoulder and yawned. Morgan stroked the dog's wet nose.

The minutes sidled past.

Fourteen. Fifteen, and the light came back on. Morgan, known as Lumping Jack, frowned.

'Something not right,' he said.

The dog paced in circles, tail between legs.

The console died, echoing the engines, the ship's drive not only cut but paralysed.

The Happy Monkey, Morgan's guppy, wound down its vacuous spiral to rest...

'Permission to come aboard.'

'Permission denied.'

'I have a warrant for the arrest of Dr Henry Grey.'

'On what charge?'

Pause. Then, 'Murder.'

Lumping Jack glanced at Henry, who scratched his beard, a look of disappointment etched on his face. They wouldn't be making the trip to Radio after all.

'You have five minutes before we force an entry.'

'There is no Dr Grey here,' replied Morgan, buying time. He could feel the inadequacy of the supposition; it trickled down his spine, mimicked the guppy's apprehension.

'One minute,' the voice amended. 'And counting.'

Kate shook her head in an effort to clear it and ran into the black corridor, its walls undetectable, its floor slick with condensation.

Someone caught her arm and yanked her through a jagged rent, the cooling teeth of which tore the skin of her upper arm and shoulder.

'Slow down!' came the order.

'What's going on?'

'Quiet...listen.'

Kate freed her arm and stood. After a moment she thought to hear dripping - water or blood. 'What is it? Stylo? Mordy?' She fumbled in the uncompromising dark but was alone.

The dripping stopped. As if a tap had been more firmly closed, she told herself, and shivered.

Her eyes strained, seeking a focus. In front of her was an opening, its violent nature silhouetted against the backdrop of stars, its position immediately to the left of a just visible fascia, panels and keys, buttons and screens dead. Kate at first imagined herself inside a control-room of sorts, a relic of the island's making. She quickly dismissed the idea, recognizing the jumbled paraphernalia of a bridge - a ship's fractured, rusting skeleton into which she'd...stumbled?

Morgan decided to make a run for it. 'They'll want you alive,' he reasoned.

Henry was silent. There was a fatalistic glint in his eyes, a yearning for simpler days.

Lumping Jack though, was not about to give in. There was too much at stake.

Frozen Hound switched herself off. One of the dog's ears stood erect and Morgan blew in it, folding the extraordinary animal in on itself, hiding it in a space that was no space, a universe that didn't exist...

There was a chance, he knew, of bypassing the stranglehold on the engines.

And that was enough.

*

He'd happened upon the wreck quite accidentally. Blind to his surroundings, Mordy had wandered into a dense aisle of trees, their sweating coolness making the ground slick underfoot, the air tangy. A bird flew out of nowhere, startling him, and then his boot struck metal.

Even in the dark he could see the hull was badly corroded. A faint aura of displacement lingered about the wreck, which had met its end, he supposed, far overhead, crashing to earth, here digging its own crude grave. The forest had since grown around it, concealing the spot.

He wondered at its crew, its pilot. Gingerly he lowered himself inside.

It smelled of other worlds.

He wished it could fly, take him away. He discovered a bent chair and sat in it, picturing its previous occupants, their calculated deaths...

'I know it sounds old-fashioned,' he said eventually, 'but I'd really like to see you again.'

'You will.'

He looked surprised. 'How? When? I don't know anything about you. Where do you come from? How long are you staying?'

'I have no past,' she said abruptly. 'Just a present, maybe a future.'

Mordy was incredulous. 'You know how old I am? Twenty-six! I design interiors, which I loathe. There's nothing I'd like more

than simply to pack up, go away, forget my life - become like you, Droover. A person without a past...'

She swallowed, danced in her chair. 'What's stopping you?'

'You can't be serious; I've commitments.'

'Break them.'

And he did. And there she was.

Eighteen - Jigsaw Moons

The new Sally Droover wasn't taking anything for granted. Her dreams paraded, imagery from a dissolving brain. Really, it flowed out her ears, stained the pillow. But the engineer had returned for her, smirking like a horny leprechaun.

He lifted Sal, threw her over his shoulder and capered along the dim passage. She bobbed erratically, dribbling phlegm, a pain in her stomach. The darkening walls passed on either side, narrowing toward some distant point, shading grey to black to emptiness: the void, less the stars, less the planets and moons and satellites.

To begin with his footfalls were silent, then, as her eyes drifted shut, melting, her ears caught the crunch of dry leaves, the slap of soles on wet pavement, the familiar ring of steel gantries, catwalks, deck shielding. Through the transparencies of her mind Sal descried a hatchway, and beyond it sunlight, greenness, flowers...

It was heaven, Sally reckoned, and she liked it.

It smelled of other worlds.

Luna and Callisto; Thebe, Sinope, lo, Atlas, Janus; Mimas and Phoebe; Miranda, Umbriel, Charon...all of those and others, a regular bouquet.

Pieces of moons assembled in her skull, inverted, blossomed, gave her this vision: of a place within a place, an interior whose global boundaries interconnected, spliced from longing, shaped from a hundred birthday parties...a jigsaw of juxtaposed fantasies.

It contained her, but Sal wasn't satisfied.

Byron put her down gently.

'Where are the angels?' she inquired.

'What do you think I am?'

'Crazy...'

He smiled. 'Now there's gratitude for you.'

She hugged her knees. 'Where are we? I mean, actually.'

'The main fuel-tank.'

'You're lying!'

'Nope.' He rummaged in a baggy pocket for tobacco and papers, the latter red with yellow polka-dots. 'Ernie grows his own,' he explained. 'The paper - like much else - he recycles. Old comics mostly.'

'You're serious.' Sally looked around. Close by bubbled a stream, water running (Do I believe...) uphill.

'It takes some getting used to,' Friendly admitted. He waved his lighter. 'Abdul's dead.'

'Yeah?' The air tasted vaguely of retrograde. 'You mentioned Ernie...'

He nodded. 'He's around somewhere.'

'Living?'

'Of course living.' The cigarette-smoke rose awkwardly, like it were confused, undecided.

'How did I get here?' A rush of questions suddenly crammed her head.

'How does an engine travel between stars?' he replied. 'Ask yourself the answer.'

She laughed.

*

Uncle Stylo stepped out of the elevator and walked past the rows of clattering typewriters, their attendant fingers busy, hammering inky letters onto the page. He pushed through the ornate door and heard it close behind as he approached the bulky desk, the woman sitting on it to glance up from a sheaf of coloured reports.

'They don't make good reading,' she told him.

Stylo unbuttoned his jacket and dropped into the leather seat, dislodging a pencil balanced on one arm.

The woman swivelled.

'What don't you like?' he asked.

She avoided his gaze. 'Mainly,' she hesitated; 'the Research Section's handling of Droover.'

He accepted the implied criticism. 'Kate, right?'

'Right...'

'Mordy's with her.'

'You trust him?'

'He's reliable.' Stylo weighed the statement and found it wanting.

'I'm not sure - everything's so complicated.' She dumped the reports. They splashed over the desk, slid to the marble floor.

A tense silence lingered...

'You worry too much, Amy. The situation's under control.' He stood, stepped round the front of the desk, leant back on it. Reaching behind him he grabbed a pencil from amid the varihued litter and spun it in his fingers, all the while smiling at Amy Jones, who was static, patient, thinking of the crew, her duty to them.

The man's smile broadened. He raised the pencil to her throat and dragged its blunt end slowly downward till it met the zipper of her blouse, whiting her skin. There it halted. He pushed from the desk. She remained passive. The pencil moved once more, counted off the plastic teeth, descended, their clicking like that of the typewriters dimly echoing through the heavy doors, far and near and measured.

His smile, she decided, was sickening.

The pencil passed below her breasts, exposing them, and lodged in her navel, where he gave it a twist. Then his greedy mouth was on her, nipping at flesh.

*

The SS Usufruct drifted ever closer, its darkened mass that of a warship, its silence foreboding. John Silver watched the craft's progress from the station, mouth dry and eyes strained to pick out the merest detail, while on the orbital's screens the unfamiliar beast provoked a riot of colour - an expansive contrast of visuals. In no way was it trying to disguise itself. Neither did he intend to stand in its way; but still there was no coherent message.

'Dangerous,' was all Silver and his colleagues had to go on right now. The warship would be nose to nose with the orbital station in minutes.

And then?

'You're convinced?' Mortimer queried.

Silver licked his lips. 'Yes...it all fits. They wouldn't be out here for anything less.'

'Rocket fuel,' said Mortimer. 'Shit.'

'And there,' Silver concluded, indicating Bid-2, its scarred, mountain-grey surface, 'lies maybe the only source outside of Europa. A million times as much!'

'You think they're sided with Topica?'

'It's probable...'

'But we can't be sure.'

Silver spun around. 'No, but the ball's in their court. We'll see.'

'Yeah - whether or not they blow us apart,' the older man finished.

Time was passed...

'Did they find the girl yet, Mort?'

'No...'

'She couldn't have just vanished.' Silver paced, eyeing the flickering screens. 'Why don't they do something?'

'They're looking. It's okay.'

'Jesus! Not our people...Them,' he pointed. 'Could they have got her out?'

Mortimer was confused. He inhaled deeply. 'No way.'

'But she's gone.'

'Yes...'

'Where, Mort?'

Their expressions locked. 'It's weird,' came the reply, 'but I think Friendly paid us a visit.'

'Byron? Undetected?' Silver liked it. 'Why not? There's more here than retrograde, uh?'

The stakes were high, he told himself, and mounting, literally, the planet over which they hung contributing to the plot, as did the Usufruct...

*

They faced each other across the dark expanse of a fibrous carpet, its tangled pile like charred grass. Morgan smiled his jolly smile and folded his arms, rested his weight on one hip, said, 'Please, no autographs.'

Nobody laughed.

There were six in the room: four with weapons drawn, a fifth whose teeth appeared uneven. Himself.

index iii - THE ECLECTIC CITY

Credo quia absurdum, thought Sally: I believe it because it's impossible. Our forefathers were wise...

Byron strolled toward her, looking concerned.

'Where does the light come from?' she asked, stealing his air for her own words.

'Ah, Droover,' he said, teasing. 'Do you need answers to everything?'

'Just the relevant bits,' Sal came back. 'Well?'

'I haven't a clue,' Friendly admitted. He waved his arms. 'I think it's got something to do with retrograde though.'

'What about Ern, he must know?'

Byron sat down next to her, plucked a blade of grass, chewed it. 'He's disappeared...but that's normal.'

'Normal?'

'Okay - maybe normal's the wrong word.' She was gazing at him with mock severity. 'What can I say?' he pleaded.

Sally rested her head on her knees. The flora around her was pungent, tangible, yet completely lacking shadow; or rather what shadow there existed was diffuse, spread too thinly. Of a sudden she felt as if she'd spent her entire waking life afraid, numb, a frozen bulwark erected against a false ogre, what she understood to be loneliness, and was only now seeing the world - the pristine world - as it really was.

If that made sense. Sal couldn't be sure...

Of what?

'Byron.'

'Yeah?'

'Are we inside or outside?' she wanted to know.

He took his time replying. 'It's a matter of scale,' he said. 'On a planet you can be outside, in open air, but still contained within an atmosphere. The same applies here. If you believe it, then it can grow, be any size, infinite - unlike a planet, which is spherical...' He paused, stumped.

'Go on,' Sal encouraged; 'you're getting there.'

'Right - better to talk in terms of an OUT side and an IN side, hm? You follow?' She nodded. He went on, 'So, this, the inside, one word, can be either OUT or IN, depending on how you perceive it.' He rolled a cigarette.

'Like an alternate reality? Isn't that deluded?'

'Maybe.'

'Which?' Her skin felt strangely tight. Were the shadows, the shade's scattered remnants coalescing?

Maybe.

'Not an alternate reality,' said the engineer. 'A rediscovered one; like an old painting that's hung on the same wall, in the same gritty draught for years, taken down and cleaned, and there beneath the accretions is a whole fresh dimension of forgotten subtleties. What the painter intended, his original ideas, but obscured by repeated abuses and near total inattention. Only the layers of neglect, the alterations and sloppy past repairs, have some relevance too.' The roily was lit, poised between smug lips like a token of expertise. 'They make a picture in their own right.'

'And the delusion, that's real?' Sally pressed.

Byron blew smoke at her. 'Does it matter? Yes? Then it's as real as anything else you'd care to mention.' He seemed rattled, perturbed.

'It's funny,' she said; not, as she'd hoped, surprising him. The smugness was pretend, self-mocking. He'd beaten her to it, asserted his familiarity with the perverse, his ability to cope with its more erratic turns.

She fell onto her shoulder, crushing daisies, and wondered what the punchline was...

*

'"Yes," replied the alien; "but can you eat it?"' Mordy's face was blank.

'You don't get it,' said Kate, feeling foolish. She shook her head.

'You lost me,' Mordy told her, 'I'm sorry.'

*

'Universe B.'

'Eh?'

'Oh, I read it somewhere. I was thinking out loud.'

Byron shifted her weight. He was carrying Sal piggy-back, like Europa did Sarpendon, who, if myths indeed be true, was slain by Patroclus as his father Jove looked on, warned not to intercede lest all the inhabitants of heaven do likewise whenever one of their offspring was threatened.

'How far have we come?'

'Who can say?'

'The sky, Byron, is growing dark.'

Death and Sleep, twin brothers, carried Sarpendon's dishonoured corpse away...

*

Amy responded. She needed him, what he could give. Hers was an addiction only Stylo understood. But she hated him, hated herself as she lay sprawled over his desk, face pressed into a mass of scrunched paper, the sheets she had dropped, their sharp folds like accusations, each biting her sore breasts: teeth like his, as uneven. She cried out, not wanting to, knowing how much he liked to hear her pain, kneading her twisted spine with his palm as she tried, despite herself, to wriggle loose.

Stylo gripped her thigh roughly, forcing it back, the knee to her chin as he entered her...again, this a diluted rape; first of her bruised, vulnerable psyche, second of her physical self, hooked and cheapened by his lust.

But she needed him, what he could give. And take away. And refuse her.

Amy Jones couldn't risk that. She was Stylo's to do with as he wished. He possessed her, kept her soul in his genitalia, a drug, his semen, Amy was dead without.

'How much does Mordy know?' she questioned later, housed in a blue couch, his apartment.

'Enough,' answered Uncle Stylo. He counted the hours to her next fix and plotted its administration.

'But not all...' she said, the strength in her voice that of well-being, present control, the man opposite - contradictorily - in awe of her.

'No, only we know that.'

Amy didn't believe him. Greed had got her where she was, and his greed was greatest.

'I have to go out.'

Stylo shut his eyes. 'Go ahead...'

Into the city.

It altered as she passed through, a shape among shapes, few more permanent, less actual. She went to a cafe whose towering walls swirled moltenly, refreshed herself, a drink of such crispness that it dried her mouth; and across the clockface table a man, tall and angular, his reflection in the watery dial as the minutes seeped away.

He didn't talk, wasn't real. His eyes were windows onto twin kitchens, identical, the menu posted in each.

She'd ordered the drink off his luminous sheriff's badge. It was delivered via his thumb after the glass had grown from the table. There were other places whose taste was less refined. Amy avoided those, they reminded her too much of Stylo.

She left amid a glow of orange light. She toyed with the idea of going up to the surface.

It was the same everywhere, she thought, the same hollow eyes staring out of pallid, unsuspecting faces. No wonder Stylo had been able to channel such power, these expressions, of easy bliss and complex wrappings, wanted nothing of responsibility, were glad, ignorant, happy for him, for any to carry the burden, even if it led to their ultimate extinction. Although that was perhaps their unconscious motive. They were bored.

Amy forgot them, became blind to them as they surely were to her. She climbed into a vacant sedan and pointed it toward Bench 9, the last stepping-stone in a series that crossed from Radio to nowhere... and back.

The city was a thousand cities from a hundred ages. He could program its architecture, arrange the layout of its nebulous streets. It was beyond description. Behind its illusory walls its citizens roused and slept, ate and performed, their lives introspective, shy even; for all the resources that lay at their disposal, they were trapped.

And Stylo was no different. He struggled as they struggled, but inevitably lost. So he organized a fiction, designed a character, implemented a scheme, and watched as it overwhelmed the vague borders of his mind.

He was, at the seat of his awareness, Lumping Jack. He was, in spirit, Research Section Five. He was, for all intents and purposes, Ernie - both writer and illustrator, consumer of fact and producer of that fiction which was killing him. His life and lives, and the explosion in his head, all his own intricately crafted lies.

Was it megalomania? He'd succeeded in transmitting his syphilis onto the engineer, but at a cost. It worked against him now, clouded the waters of his healing well, those same he'd hoped would restore him. But to what? The past, yes, but not his past, his personal, pined for history. It was bigger than that. It was more substantial by the hour. He'd witnessed it himself in the desert. He had used his creation as a kind of whipping-boy, substituted its reality for that of the world's, and now it was using him, Stylo. His arrogance had grown independently. Like Ernie's body, his mind developed tumours, morbid humps typical of his disease.

General Paralysis of the Insane; a slippery slope, his mental deterioration, one he'd thought to escape...

Only it was catching up with him. The madness coiled about his arms and legs, compressed. Yet the grip, he sensed, was his own. It held him together. It slowly destroyed.

Bench 9 undulated, its yellow grasses sighing in the breeze, her every stride bending stalks, trampling ground. The insects roved, ants and butterflies, creatures cased and winged; they occupied each separate strata of air to a height only the birds knew for sure.

At the island's centre was a clump of trees, elms and beeches, a single gnarled oak. They might have stood there since the beginning, but as the soil they owed their being to a comparatively recent ideology. They were inherently false, synthetic in all but facade, ersatz copies of a type, a primary...

Amy was drawn to them. They felt real. She clambered into the oak's spread branches, as high as she dared, the thirst in her loins distracting, and wedged herself in a V of limbs. She had decided. She wouldn't return. Stylo had poisoned her and Amy had taken his poison willingly. She was as guilty. She would die in this tree that was not a tree, away from his double-headed seed. Her first act of bravery in a long time.

And she'd stick with it.

The sun went down, the moon waxed, the sweat of her skin made nonsense of the cold - but she remained.

The captain owed it to her crew...

She was sorry.

*

Ernie put pen to paper, the numbness in his wrist irritating, and wrote...

Last Of The Earth Men - issue 59.

Morgan hit the floor; shots fired inches over his whitened knuckles, his head. The carpet threatened to choke him in its depth.

The succeeding quietness was unnatural.

'It's okay, you can get up now,' said Henry Grey. 'I got all of them.' Casually, he wafted a smoking carbine.

'I thought you were dead,' said Lumping Jack.

The scientist laughed. 'Me too! But I've a few tricks up my sleeve, eh?'

Morgan examined the slumped bodies.

Their skins peeled off. 'What the...'

'Pink-people,' Henry told him. 'I'm afraid I haven't been entirely honest with you,' he added.

Frozen Hound came padding into the room. The dog's nose was troubled by so much death, the smell of killing.

The doctor shouldered his weapon, patted the dog with his one hand. 'Come on, aboard the guppy, I'll explain.'

Lumping Jack Morgan and his curious partner travelled from the Hightop building out into the Spanish midday sun.

Nineteen- Glass Gangsters

John Silver leant against the transparency, eyes surveying the drab planet, the now mated engines. The warship had mounted like some ponderous beetle, next to flood its consort with laser light and personnel, a hunting party Silver registered hypothetically, as there had been no word from the Terrans. He recalled his conversation with Sally, her dream-spawned ramblings. The mystery went deeper it seemed...

There was nothing he or Upfront could do. Earth was too strong; Topica, perhaps, her ally.

'You know the first time I heard of Byron Friendly,' Silver told Mort, 'I was fronting an investigation into the apparent theft, and re-selling...of machine parts; specialist material, you'll appreciate. And this one engineer, Friendly, came up to me brandishing a pair of stolen gyros - cool as you like. I thought he was pushing the stuff; still had the film on them.'

Mortimer laughed.

'Anyway,' Silver continued, 'it turned out he'd found a cache under his bunk, which he shared on rote with three other guys, and decided to turn it in.'

'I've heard this story,' said Mort. 'Didn't he lock someone in a foot-locker?'

'A drugs-cabinet. Yeah, his captain. Man got high on curejuice and confessed everything; had a ruse whereby he took delivery of duplicate parts. Clever.'

'But the legendary Byron scuppered him.'

Silver pushed off the glass. 'The captain, four service vehicles and a brand-new reconnaissance craft to date...'

'And that controller. What was his name? Pearson, or Price, a cousin of Admiral Gregorian.'

'Parker,' John corrected. 'Right.' And that was the end of the road for Byron; or maybe just the end of an episode.

Mortimer flattened his moustache. 'According to the computer,' he said, 'we've lost them.'

'It must have crashed.'

'No, I've checked: frame's sound.'

'So why isn't it registering our guests?' He could see the warship, the engine. 'Mort?'

'Hm? Oh. They dropped out...'

'But they're here.'

'Yes.'

'What are you saying? That I'm hallucinating? That the computer is correct?'

Mortimer came and stood next to him. 'The software could've warped,' he suggested.

'Try again.'

'Okay. The image is caught in the glass, like a photographic plate.'

'It's moving.'

'A screen then.'

'Be serious. You're telling me there're a host of photons trapped in these few millimetres dutifully re-enacting past events?'

'More or less.' Mort looked embarrassed.

'In that case,' announced Silver, 'I'm going out...'

Mortimer grimaced. They both knew what he'd seen, was seeing. As the door closed behind Silver he stalked over to the computer and gave it a kick, cracking a toe.

*

Mordy glided through the early morning mist, skin damp and clothes adhering. Like wallpaper, he thought. The gloom lifted by degrees, so he tripped less often, the weight of a carcass across his shoulders.

He wondered how real meat tasted, raw or cooked.

Droover was waiting when he got back. Her hair shone, a lustre comparable to that of the broad fern-leaves. Like them she had a red flower behind her ear.

'You didn't light a fire,' Mordy said.

'I was thirsty. I went to the stream. There's a waterfall not far from here.'

'Really - what flavour?'

'Strawberry...'

'No chocolate?'

'A choice of seventeen tantalizingly tempting tangs!'

I'll bet...

Something hit him from behind. Mordy fell on his face, the carcass to roll over his head, its own smashed by the crudely improvised shillelagh pushed behind his belt. A split-second glance told him of a stealth projectile, its silent trajectory meant to pass through his neck.

Then he was up and running, Droover close, the two dodging low branches and vaulting obstacles they might previously have given a wide berth.

But not now. They were targeted, and as such deeper instincts held sway...

They moved as blurs, wraiths midst the darkened jungle, its trees providing shade and cover, its mostly hidden life glimpsed at speed from their flashing skulls. Legs working, arms pumping, lungs desperate to breathe on and on, not to slow or cease, never to collapse. Mordy broke from a thicket, bleeding, Droover on his right, to his left a blank wall of steel. It threw him; matt planes of metal, gaudy light and the scuffing of many feet. A fear was born in his chest.

Both crouched, listened, exchanged glances. Droover grabbed his arm and hauled him off, lithe and determined. A projectile cracked above. Leaves and twigs descended. He didn't understand, concentrated on the terrain, its non-stop vegetation, and reached for Droover's thimbled hand...

It cut him.

And she, some slick black notion, had vanished.

Sal peered at Friendly who peered at Sal.

'Did you hear that?' one asked the other. 'Like a scream?'

'Yes...Ernie?'

'Who else? Unless, maybe.' A nose was scratched. The light poured from fewer angles and the scents grew in number along with the spoor of animals.

The timbered scene strobed. Out of the nascent cloud, which gained definition as they stared, dived a chattering, shining bird.

Sally got the impression its copper wings were planished and its talons edged in bone. It reached the nadir of its arc, spun aside, end over end as if struck, glittering coloured spirals off its long tail, taunting her with the associations sight of it conjured in her mind...

'Move,' said Byron, and ran.

The man was dead. The protective clothing he wore had let him down, fatally. Mordy was convinced, he didn't need to turn him over. A mask was a mask, he said to himself, dead or living, its shield remained. Anyway, he recognized the livery as that of the research section. Seemingly out to kill him. But why?

Shaking, he loped away. He rubbed his wrist, wondering at Droover, his radio that she wore, a further, useless ornament. The key he'd given her was the key to his father's strongroom, that squared cavern below a mountain to which he had always been denied access. Amy Jones had duplicated it, passing it to him via a third party, a man whose shiftless eyes spoke of subtler plots than any Mordy could imagine. He'd treated it as a joke, initially, then the Tomcat's captain had arranged a meeting and together they'd hatched a plan to murder Stylo. Only Mordy's courage proved the weakest; he'd leapt at the chance to go after Droover, thus removing himself from her machinations. The woman was crazy. And the man, the third party, haunted his vision like a phantom out of some old movie.

From him there was no escape. He was Mordy's guilt. He was Mordy's secret rendezvous. He was the man without a name; the man who adopted the names of others...

He should have checked to see if the section agent had a usable weapon. That was the kind of luck Mordy needed now.

He continued on foot, losing himself in the increasing hostile, both objective and subjective jungle.

*

Silver commandeered a chassis from a bewildered attendant and steered it for the engine. He had no idea how he was going to get in. Whether it was possible or not though, he would try. It was unlikely, he figured, that every access point was covered by the invading Terrans. At least not on the outside. Once the interior lay open to him he'd start worrying about diplomatic relations, but until then... 'Fuck 'em.'

He breezed against the giant hull and clung. The engine's mass seized the magnetism and the chassis was tight, immovable. He was on his own, literally.

'It's definitely solid,' he reassured himself. 'So what are you waiting for, an invite?' Curious, he tried to thread through a call to Mort. Nothing. He turned his head toward where the orbital station should be. Nothing.

Already suited, he clambered from the tiny chassis and went walkabout on the lumpy metal, ignoring the timer in his helmet as the void, the homeless void, slipped by.

*

She wasn't anywhere; he'd lost her.

In the canopy's blue-green ethereal shade he stooped, picked a stout branch from amid the leaf-litter, and cautiously retraced his too hasty steps. Had she fallen? Byron wondered, passing the wood from hand to hand, familiarizing himself with its weight. Was she able to move at all? Insects buzzed in his ear.

A twig snapped. In front of him a distorted figure looked left and right. The man lacked solidity, as if he were liquid ice, constantly remodelled, smoothed under a gentle flame, edges smudged into the complex framework of trees, their elaborate, varihued subordinates clustered like - machines, he thought, tools and work-benches painted in lurid tones of red, yellow and green, blue, orange and violet, an overdose of verdant, sylvain colour; the impinging sound vaguely crystalline, that of fractured bone and torn cartilage, ruptured blood vessels and damaged skin, the hefty branch he'd wielded sending a tremor up his arms as it, like the figure, had broken...

Byron regarded the corpse, closed his eyes a moment then walked around it to where the sun indicated firmer ground, a steadier landscape.

The air in his lungs tasted sweeter. The wind in his face felt sharper, less ordered. It was like exiting a tunnel...

Sudden.

Twenty - The Hyperboreans

Droover ran with the wind till it ran out. It stopped abruptly, metres short of an ancient tree from whose knotty limbs hung a body, that of Amy Jones, long and dry and twisted. She looked as if she'd been blown here too, caught up in the north wind and battered against the rocks, tossed on potent currents, their stamp yet evident on her pale flesh. Droover dropped slowly to the ground, seized by exhaustion, pleased to rest. She removed a comb of tortoiseshell from a pocket and carefully dragged it through her black hair.

In the past, when they were kids, it had always made her sister mad to see her preen herself like this.

From beyond the tree a man waved. His face was in shade, but she recognized him. He could wait a little longer...

'What do you think of him?'

'I don't know, he puzzles me.'

'In what way?' Captain Jones leant on the bar, face alert to every movement in the room, its tables and chairs, pillars and shadows fixed in their pattern, each subtle change noted, each citizen and soldier marked.

'It's difficult to say,' admitted Kate. 'I like him; he's good, we know that much. But...'

'You can't forget Ernie,' Amy finished.

Kate nodded.

'Me neither. But Ernie's dead, gone, and we need an engineer, unless you're planning to spend the rest of your life on this precarious edge, eh? Halfway between somewhere and nowhere!'

Kate sipped her drink. 'You've made your decision,' she said.

'Right,' confirmed the captain, adding, 'I may be the majority shareholder in our little outfit - and a drunken whore to boot - but I still like to discuss these changes in...' She paused, tensed.

'Amy?'

'Sorry, Droover, touch of nerves.'

'You drink too much.'

'Right again...' A man with brown skin and yellow hair watched them from the far side of the scantly peopled, grotesquely furnished restaurant. 'No manners.'

'Who?'

'Guy in the corner there.'

'Security?'

'Yeah, they have those eyes.' She waved obliquely.

Kate laughed, smothering it. 'We leave in six hours,' she reminded; 'don't go getting us arrested.'

'No chance,' Amy rejoined. 'What for, flirting?'

'You know what I mean.'

Captain Jones shrugged. 'Okay, okay...I'll curb my less demure instincts; you just buy the drinks.'

And so it goes...

Naturally, he got what he wanted.

Twenty minutes later Morgan was back on board his guppy, mind and fingers prying into the procreative wellspring of graphic information. What he had gleaned from a hapless nightwatchman; the stuff that made worlds pause. A mad scientist's ciphered elucidations, no less than Dr Grey's confidential papers, his instructions as to the handling and transportation of certain valuable cargoes...

But what?

'Rich.'

'What is it?'

'Nothing, I...'

'Captain?' He let the ball drop. It struck the gangway and rolled, nudged the toe of his boot.

'You were giving me a lot of static just then.'

He smirked. 'It's fixed,' he said.

You can rely on the pitcher, for now.

'Thanks.'

If only they knew the truth, and listened to Dr Grey. 'Henry, they bleed blood and sweat sweat, but unlike you and me - and Ernie - they don't know shit.'

Round and round the stars they go, looping the loop, matching beginnings and endings, starting where they left off, never questioning, never realizing, as, like carbon atoms, they cycle and recycle the same old (new) routes, propelled by a desire to trade and be traded, a need to explore come what may, a gravity of lungs and muscles upon them, the beguiling siren's call, of nature's prey, and predator...

*

And to Sally, 'Yeah,' dissolving sugar in coffee, 'he does sort of grow on you.'

This is a land of plenty - past the tree, beyond the north wind, in aeternum: forever.

Twenty-one - Exit

The wind ran with Droover...

He opened the way: a slippery handle, but Silver got to grips with it, bathing himself next in light.

He climbed inside and sealed the hatch, progressed to its sister lock. Beyond that stretched an interior he recognized from training films and mock-ups, the engine's supporting lattice of walkways and galleries, inspection tunnels and freefall zones, the connective tissue surrounding the major organs...

Stroma.

The fuel-tanks and converters hung in the void like an armoured maze around, before him.

John Silver ventured deeper. To him, it was a whole new world, a whole new experience. He thought of Mortimer, what his friend might learn from this. He wished he could be here. Silver hated being lonely...

He gagged at a sharp pain in his chest.

'Droover K?'

'Yeah...who is it?'

He took another step.

She kissed him.

Proem - A Kitten

It jumped off the chair and scampered toward the far side of the room. I watched its erratic voyage with a smile. It curved between chair legs and paused to examine an uprooted tuft of carpet, pawing the errant strand like it were special, there just for that purpose, belonging to no other outside realm of weave and colour and pattern, simply a toy placed in the kitten's path, for the kitten. But the young animal soon tired; the fibre proved no substantial challenge. It set away, flicked its tail, eyed those of us in the room, brushed our knees and elbows as it passed, disturbed the pieces on the game-board, their bright milieu laid out on the living-room floor. Stupid of us to be there, the kitten may have thought. But thoughts, the kitten may have amended, are stupid also, not for us cats who're born with smarts; thinking's for people, because they're uncertain how to behave and need to weigh up a situation. The kitten smirked wisely. It washed its tail, its hind legs, its belly, rubbed a forepaw over its cute furry head. The kitten was very neat and precise - in a haphazard sort of way. And then it continued toward the curtain, a peregrination the import of which should not be underestimated. The kitten sprang left, sudden. Sprang right, a reason for each movement or neither; a purpose or not a purpose. Who can tell? It turned around and came charging at the board, knocking cards and counters, mixing tokens, spinning dice, their spots reading differently after the kitten's assault: two and four now when previously they read three and one. Or was it one and three? I shook my head. Monica laughed. Frank plucked the tuft of carpet and tossed it up, but was ignored. The kitten jumped back on the chair, slyly winked. We settled back to the game. Whose turn was it? Kate's? Sal's? Nobody could remember. Then it was at us again, among our fingers and hands, stealing our attention from the confused game, a random hurricane of black fur the eye of which was paired and not quiet, but shiny, like a wet green leaf. I made a grab for its loose neck, just as its mother would - and missed. The kitten leapt. It reached the curtains in two great bounds and was soon frantically climbing, an ascent any bit as meaningful as that of K2 or Everest. At the lofty summit it looked around, regarded us strangely, seeing we'd altered, changed shape, shifted along with the perspective of the room. Its claws drew loops of fabric. Its tongue flew in and out as if sampling the rarefied air, dusty near the ceiling, spider-web height. It winked a second time, this time with excitement, not worldly-wiseness as before. And then its tail whacked the cornice and the kitten came speeding down like some fur-wrapped bobsleigh, a world record in its sights; flat out, braking at the last moment and skidding to a clumsy halt the wrong side of Byron's upended ashtray. The debris obscured part of the board, made areas difficult to negotiate, lettering hard to read, symbols to decipher. But the kitten didn't care. It was away once more, bolting into the kitchen, meowing as it rebounded off the cooker and hit the fridge, skating across the worn lino in every direction expect that which led ultimately to its dish, and food. I was glad it wasn't Christmas; the thought of the kitten scaling the tree was too much. But Christmas wasn't too distant, a month. As it was the uncontrollable creature slept for an hour on a pile of clean washing, dusting the coloured materials with ash and hair. And then it was here, in the wrong place, driving everybody crazy as it made the game impossible to play, stretching each round as the players teased and cooed and tickled and chuckled and spoilt and kissed and picked up and put down quickly, complaining of scratches, talking in silly voices, getting to their feet and walking around, stretching like the kitten and forgetting, in these exasperating minutes, all about the game the rules of which were largely forgotten.

The kitten was more fun, their faces said. It didn't yet have a name, at least not one I'd given it.

It had plenty of its own.

Epilogue - Spoke Lavender

I remember the way Byron felt, Droover thought, his pink tongue and probing brown fingers. I remember life.

Pineapple dreams: they come in rings and segments, sweet, yellow, juicy and full of sunshine...

She stood in the shade of an awning listening to running feet, the captain's, Amy Jones a growing, solidifying mass of moon-grey and cloud-blue. Kate was someway behind her - Kate was here waiting, watching as Captain Jones slowed, folded a slab of gum into her mouth, its constitution a recipe of Stylo's, the poison she required so badly, his seed. All of which Droover knew, the truth an open page, the page from Spritzer's diary, the repairman plugged into a computer aboard Ernie's Engine, dreaming his dreams while mapping the complicated world.

It was a suitable punishment, a newly defined crime.

Kate stepped out into the street. Amy pulled up, face contorted, a fey smile, one shaped - in part - from alcohol.

'Hey...' The captain looked behind her, stood with hands on hips. 'You're in two places at once,' she said.

Kate replied, 'Want to tell me about it?'

The other woman took a pace back...altered, as if through a pall of refractive gases: retrograde. 'I think you know enough,' she commented, adding hesitantly, 'Kate, I'm sorry if I hurt you or anyone; I never wanted that.'

'But?'

'I'm dying.' She laughed, girlish. 'I'd be dead now - maybe I am; but this way I had a chance, you see? A chance to live, a closed loop, like orbiting the same star forever, or spending eternity in no-space. Unaffected, or so I imagined. At peace.'

'Halfway between somewhere and nowhere...'

'Right! It was a mistake. I got scared, that's all.'

Kate approached her, put her arms around Amy and gave her a hug. 'Don't worry,' she said, 'it comes out...' searching for the word, 'it comes out fine.'

In the end.

She talked with Lumping Jack. They had no language in common, no words to write or say. Frozen Hound wagged her tail and mixed up the colours on the page, the page in this latest edition (#60) of Last Of The Earth Men.

There was a storm which passed, a spring storm smelling of new leaves, cherry blossom and daffodils, the wind driving it fresh and enlivened, raised from the mountains and the sea.

She closed her eyes and lay down. Around her the air moved, carrying upon its shoulders the odours of natural inks and earthy dyes, the scents of plant extracts, the indefatigable rhythms of the seasons. She was able after a while to comprehend their various tones and meanings, appreciate the harmony they favoured and the knowledge they sought, was, in just as short a time, communicating to them with a kind of halting emanation of her own.

Morgan gazed at her from his place in the comic, perhaps aware of her as yet rough delivery, the edges that caught and jarred. But he didn't quibble. Why should he? Frozen Hound and Dr Henry Grey were with him, nodding enthusiastically, offering advice, senses fine tuned as the aromatic exchange took on a clearer and more definitive shape.

It sailed on by...

Spoke purple and white. Spoke lavender.

And in the end, when each was - via channel or conduit, tunnel or passage - in touch with the others, it was plain they all had a lot to convey.

And so, relaxed, mouths shut, inhaled.

