Feersum Endjinn

1

She was a closed codex within a vast dark library whose floor was a valley, whose walls were cliffs, whose alcoves were hanging valleys; she was an ancient book, rich of smell, gravid with collected knowledge, huge and heavy with ink-thick illuminated pages and a cover of embossed leather, chased with metal and fitted with a lock for which only she possessed the key.

She was a virgin wise too long now on her wedding night, wined, dined, coddled, sozzled, wished well by family and friends still revelling in distant loudness in the halls below, swept up by her handsome new husband and left to change from wedding gown to nightgown and slip into the huge wide warmed welcoming bed.

She was the only speaker in a tribe of the dumb, walking amongst them, tall and silent while they touched her and beseeched her with their sad eyes and their deferent, hesitant hands and their flowing, pleading signs to talk for them, sing for them, be their voice.

She was the captain of a ship sunk by enemy action, alone still conscious in the lifeboat while her crew died slowly around her, moaning quietly through salt-crusted lips or raving as they twitched and spasmed in the bilges. She saw another ship and knew she could signal it, but it was an enemy vessel and only her pride made her hesitate.

She was a mother watching her child suffering and dying because she was of a faith inimical to medicine. Doctors, nurses and friends all pleaded with her to allow her child to live by merely saying a word or making a gesture, the syringe there ready in the surgeon's hand.

She was a protester who'd had proved to her that her fellow dissidents had betrayed her, deserted her, lied to her. It was known beyond doubt that she was guilty; all that was required was that she acknowledge her guilt; no names were needed, nobody else had to be implicated; she merely had to accept her responsibility. She had been foolish and she owed society that. Regretfully, they showed her the instruments of torture within the place of torment.

/She allowed the book to be opened, its every word translated into a language only she knew. When it was slammed shut again, she smiled to herself.

/She fed her new husband yet more wine as she slowly undressed him, and when he had to relieve himself locked him in the latrine, donned his clothes and escaped the room on a rope made from the bed sheets, spilled wine like a proud deflowerer's trophy stain, flourished to the night.

/She sang to the tribe with her dance and her own gestures, more beautiful than speech or song, so silencing their signs.

/She signalled the ship and when she saw it turn set the lifeboat towards it, slipping into the water to swim away while her comrades were rescued.

/She would still say nothing, but took the syringe herself, went to apply it to the child's arm, looked into its blank and empty eyes, then squirted the fluid over its skin before quickly sucking air into the instrument and turning and plunging it into the horrified surgeon's chest.

/By the rack within the gory chamber she broke down and wept, squatting on her haunches, hiding her face and sobbing. When the torturer bent pityingly to hold her, she looked up with a tear-streaked face and bit his throat out.

'Fuck! Fuck! I can't let go! I can't get out! I can't let go!' the man screamed, his voice hoarse. 'She won't let me go!'

He sat up in the couch and pulled at his collar, his face reddening as he struggled with something at his throat that nobody else could see. The nurse tapped at her keyboard and a tiny light flickered on the head-net the man wore like a thin hat over his shaved scalp. He swayed from the waist, his hands fell from his throat, his eyelids drooped and he lay back again.

The woman waved one hand and the window into the room blanked out. 'Thank you,' she muttered to the nurse. She turned to the tall, broad-shouldered man at her side and motioned with her head. They stepped into the corridor out­side.

'Do you realise what she did?' she asked him. 'She put a mimetic virus into his head. Could be months before we get him back. If we get him back.'

'Evolution,' Lunce said, shrugging.

'Don't give me that shit, the guy was one of our best.'

'Well, he wasn't best enough, was he?'

'Oh, well put. But the point is, word's got out now and nobody else will touch her.'

'I'd touch her,' Lunce told her, and made a show of cracking his fingers.

'Yeah, I bet you would.'

He shrugged again. 'I mean it. Wake her up and really torture her.'

The woman sighed and shook her head. 'You really have no idea, do you?'

'So you keep telling me. I just think we're all missing something really obvious here. Maybe a bit of real physical… pressure might actually produce some results.'

'Lunce, we have the Consistory member with special respon­sibility for Security Oncaterius breathing down our necks on this; if you're tired of your work, why don't you suggest that to him? But if you do, just remember it's nothing to do with me.' She looked him up and down. 'In fact, as I haven't particularly enjoyed working with you, maybe it's not such a bad idea.'

'We haven't tried what I'm suggesting,' he pointed out. 'We have tried what you suggested and it's failed.'

The woman dismissed this with a wave of her hand. 'Well, we'll keep her in solitary for now and see if that gets any results.'

Lunce just took a deep breath and snorted.

'Come on,' the woman said. 'Let's get something to eat. I have to think what we're going to tell Oncaterius.'

Asura was left in a cell. She thought of it as a mirror cell because when she lay down on the bed and put her head on the thin pillow there was a cell in there too; that was the only place they would let her go to in her sleep.

So she was in two cells. It was a little like being in the tower in the first of the dreams she could remember, but less interesting. There was a tap for water and another tap which dispensed a sort of soup. Between the two taps was a cup chained to the wall. Also in the cell was a toilet and a bed platform and a chair platform, all parts of the wall. There was no window and no view, though there was a locked, tight-fitting door.

She slept a great deal ignoring the pretend, dead-end cell they offered her. Instead, when she dreamt, she recalled what had happened to her so far.

She remembered the view of the great castle, the journey on the airship, the train and car journey before that, the dream in the night at the big house, the things that Pieter Velteseri had asked her about, her walk through the garden from the vault and the strange dreams she had had before she'd awoken.

And it was as though there was something beyond those dreams too, something she knew was there but knew nothing else about save that it existed. The knowledge tickled her mind when she thought back to the time — instant or aeon — in the Velteseri family vault. There was something there, she knew there was, but like a dim light just sensed with the corner of the eye which disappeared when looked at directly, she could not inspect it more closely; the very act of attempting to do so had the effect of extinguishing it completely for as long as she tried.

She reviewed all that had happened to her in the short life she could remember. She wondered if there had been a degree of choice in the fact she had awoken in the Velteseri vault; most of the clan had been away and Pieter might have been chosen as somebody likely to help. She thought she had been right to trust him, and thought that the dreams she had had during the night she had spent at the house had been genuine dreams; something that had put her here had contacted her and told her what her purpose was.

She supposed she had been kidnapped by somebody who was not really Cousin Ucubulaire. These people must have recognised her name, or found out about her in some other way, and not wanted her to do whatever it was she was supposed to do here (assuming she actually had been taken to the big castle she had seen). Perhaps travelling under the name Asura had been a mistake.

And yet as soon as she'd heard Pieter Velteseri utter the word she'd known that was her name. There had been no feeling of warning, no niggling sensation that she might be doing something dangerous; instead she had recognised her true title and claimed it.

She thought about this. She had the impression that somebody or something had gone to great trouble to get her here. How silly not to realise that her name itself might bring her into danger.

But she was here (again, assuming) and she did not feel she had anywhere else she had to go. She was where she wanted to be. So perhaps she had been meant to be found by Lunce and the lady who'd called herself Ucubulaire, or by people like them. That made a kind of sense. They had her, but they had not succeeded in finding out anything she didn't want them to know…

She decided she would wait.

She waited.

2

Gadfium felt she was an insect crawling across the floor of a dank cellar. Everywhere she looked there was garbage, show­ing up grey and ghostly in the not-quite totally dark space around her.

The whole first-level room was one gigantic rubbish tip filled with the debris of millennia. From pipes, ducts and chutes high on the walls and ceiling a constant rain of refuse, tailings, junk and trash pattered down. She picked her way across a heap of what looked like doll-size plastic sanitary ware, her feet sinking and sliding through the mound of miniature baths and bidets in a slough of breaking and crackling.

– Are you sure this is going to throw people off our trail?

– Positive. Bear right here. Not too far. That's it.

Gadfium walked on, avoiding a pile of rotting babil fruit husks. She heard a series of crunches and crashes somewhere to her left, where she would have been walking if her crypt self hadn't told her to bear right. She looked around the hills of rubbish.

– I'm sure we could recycle more.

– I suppose it will be re-used, eventually. Or would have been, but for the Encroachment.

A bright stream of yellow fire burst silently from a distant wall and fell slowly in a livid arc towards the raised floor of the lumber room, its colour changing as it fell from yellow to orange to red. A sizzling sound came from that direction, and then a distant roaring noise as whatever it was hit the surface.

– That's pretty.

– Furnace smelt-slag.

– Thought it might be something like that. How are your researches going? Have you discovered anything else interest­ing?

– Goscil was the Security agent.

– Really? I always assumed it was Rasfline. Gadfium shook her head. You just never knew. — What else? she asked.

– I still don't know who betrayed the group, but they've all been taken into custody except Clispeir.

'Clispeir? Gadfium said out loud, and stopped.

– Please don't stop here, there's a hopper full of reject cerametal vehicle parts due to land where you're standing in about a minute.

Gadfium started walking again. — You don't think it was Clispeir, do you?

– I don't know. She is due for some leave in two days; perhaps they are waiting for her to come to them. The observatory at the Plain of Sliding Stones is still cut off from normal communication so she would not have been able to find out about the others.

– If it was her, could the message we received from the fast-tower have been a Security trick, simply made up?

– Possibly, though I doubt it.

Gadfium walked on for a while across the flat bed of some long-dried tailings. Whistling noises from above and behind terminated in distant thumps which shook the dusty surface.

– Some Palace gossip, her crypt self told her. Our lot and the Chapel may be about to come to some sort of agreement.

– This is sudden.

– Apparently the Army had some supposedly war-winning scheme that didn't work. Now we have no choice but to reach terms… Ah.

– What?

– Security. They think they have the asura.

'What?' Gadfium said, and stopped again, feeling herself fill with despair.

– Keep going. They could be wrong.

– But… so soon! Is everything hopeless?

-… No. However, I may have a change of plan for us.

– What exactly is this plan, anyway? I'm grateful to you for getting me out of the Palace, but I would like to know where you're taking me, apart from into outlaw territory.

– Well, onward and upward from there, but first, I think now, deeper.

'Deeper?'

– Deeper.

The neatly folded uniform appeared to have been washed but not repaired. There were still a few rips and tears in it. On top of the pile of clothing lay a pair of Army-issue boots, a belt and some complicated webbing, a mask and forage cap. The collection was held easily in one huge white furred paw; black claws extended a little on either side, bracketing the pathetic heap of effects.

The chimeric polar bear sat at one end of the long table in the committee chamber. The Palace civil servant officially in charge of the meeting sat at the other end, on a seat in front of an empty throne. Adijine had decided to stay away when he'd discovered what had arrived earlier in the diplomatic bag. The Consistorians all seemed to have found urgent appointments elsewhere as well, though like the King most of them were probably watching the events through others' eyes, as the Chapel representatives would know.

The head of the Engineers' delegation set the pile of clothing down on the table top. Adijine, sulking alone in bed, stared through the civil servant's eyes, then switched to an overhead camera.

Looking carefully, the King could see little round holes in the grey uniform material and matching craters on the well-worn boots where acid had eaten away. He tried to feel some shock of recognition on seeing the Army-issue gear, but he hadn't been paying that much attention when he'd been in the head of — he had to search for the name — Private Uris Tenblen.

One of the boots toppled and fell over, lying on the polished surface.

'Your plan,' the ambassadorial emissary rumbled, setting the boot upright again with one massive paw, 'fell through.'

He looked round the others in his team, receiving smiles and quiet chuckles. The Palace team sat silently, though some moved uncomfortably and a deal of close table-surface inspection ensued.

'We have,' the polar bear emissary said, obviously relishing each loudly spoken word, 'taken other precautions as well, but we shall be keeping a very careful and continuous watch on the ceiling above Chapel City, and not only have powerful sensors trained on the relevant area, but various missiles as well…"

Adijine swore. He'd half hoped the Chapel traitors would misinterpret the body which had fallen into their midst — maybe, he'd thought, they would assume the man had fallen from a hang-glider, or some apparatus that could climb along under a ceiling. But it looked like they'd guessed correctly.

'And I must say,' the polar bear said, drawing itself up in its seat and sounding appropriately sententious, 'even though we thought ourselves by now inured to the thoroughly reckless nature of our opponents, we have been profoundly shocked and disappointed to discover the completely irresponsible and utterly senseless depths — or should I say heights?' — the ambassadorial emissary showed his teeth and glanced round his appropriately appreciative team —'to which our previously at least ostensibly esteemed adversaries have been prepared to stoop to in their understandably increasingly desperate attempts to secure victory in this outrageously prosecuted, thoroughly unfortunate and — on our part — wholly unprovoked dispute.'

Adijine cut out there. That hairy white bastard was going to milk the situation for all it was worth, and doubtless at inordinate length.

He checked the representation of his private secretary's suite. There were calls waiting. He selected that of the Consistorian with special responsibility for Security.

Gadfium negotiated the lumber room. A flight of rungs set into the wall led her to a door and a lift shaft with spiral stairs running round it. The elevator appeared from above, stopped and opened its doors. Gadfium ducked under the stairs' safety rail and into the lift. She'd been hoping her other self had been kidding about going deeper but when the lift moved it was downwards, dropping her below ground level, deeper into the earth beneath the fastness.

– I'd better warn you there might be unexpected things ahead here.

– Such as?

– Well, people whose presence I can't warn you about.

– You mean outlaws.

– That's a little pejorative.

– We'll see.

– No, let's hope we don't see.

– You're right. Let's hope we don't.

– I'm going to put the lights out.

– Oh? Gadfium said as the elevator went dark.

– Help your eyes adjust.

'Oh, and I've always loved the dark,' Gadfium whispered to herself.

– I know. Sorry.

The elevator slowed and stopped, the doors opened and Gadfium got out into a darkness that was only just short of absolute. She could hear running water in the distance. Her feet splashed when she walked cautiously forward, arms in front of her, into what looked like a broad tunnel.

– Should be left here. Whoa. Stop. Feel forward with your right foot.

– It's a hole. Thanks.

– Look left? Yes; two steps left then walk on.

– Wait a minute; are there any cameras here?

– Not down here.

– So you're looking through my eyes-

– And I'm running an image enhancement program on what you're seeing. That's why I can see better than you can out of your own eyes.

Gadfium shook her head. — Anything I can do to help, apart from not keep my eyes open?

– Just keep looking all about, especially at the floor. Ah; here's a door. Turn right. Two steps. Right hand; feel?

– Got it.

– Careful; it's a vertical shaft. There's a ladder. Go down. And pace yourself; it's quite a way.

Gadfium groaned.

The city within the fourth-floor Chapel was formed in the shape of a magnificent chandelier which had been detached and lowered from the ceiling in the centre of the apse, above what would have been the chancel in a genuine chapel. It sat on a sheer-sided, three-hundred-metre-tall plateau which took the place of an altar, and rose in concentric circles of glowing, gleaming spires to the sharp pinnacle of the central tower. Formed from a metal framework wrapped with square kilometres of glass cladding interspersed with sheets of various highly polished stones, it looked out over the extravagantly decorated, elaborately columned length of the forest-floored Chapel and had been the monarch's traditional high-season residence for generations.

Uris Tenblen had fallen, still screaming hoarsely, onto the steep side of a tall spire in the second circle of the city, bounced once, hit a sheer wall opposite the spire, rebounded again and plummeted, still hardly slowed, into a flower bed on a stone-flagged courtyard. He had left a shallow elliptical crater in the earth and scattered blossoms like soft shrapnel as he'd bounced a third time and finally come to a halt crashing into a group of tables outside a cafe.

Most of Tenblen's precipitous descent and each successive part of its termination had been captured by an automatic camera on a seventh-level tower.

By the time a medic had arrived Tenblen had been quite irretrievably dead for some minutes, but the glancing nature of his first two contacts with the tower and then the wall, along with the comparative softness of his third impact in the flower bed, meant that there had been time for the alerted rebel Cryptographers to target and interrogate the dying man's bio ware. The Army, as a matter of course, retro-fitted devices to its soldiers' implants to prevent this sort of thing, but — as was not unknown when an individual sustained a series of individually non-fatal impacts — these had been slow to react, and the rebel army had been furnished with recordings of what at first appeared to be merely the nightmares of a dying man but which were later realised to be accurate if still horrific records of reality. They were also, collectively, war intelligence of the first order.

Deep beneath the fastness ground level, in a tiny alcove off a larger alcove off a great arched tunnel off an even more enormous tunnel, Gadfium — exhausted after her escape and the various ensuing traverses and descents — slept.

When she awoke it was to her own voice crackling in her head and breaking up.

— kup, will you? — thing — gon! — fium! —

She opened her eyes. A blast of fetid breath rolled over her. She looked along the dust-dry floor and in the grey almost-light saw what looked like two hairy tree trunks with something resembling a furred snake dangling between them.

She looked up slowly. The tree trunks were joined at the top; a bulging hairy cliff continued up to a tusked, seemingly eyeless head which was broader than her whole body. On top of the domed head was another head, pale and hairless and half human, staring down at her. Weaving above and to either side of it was yet another head, with tiny staring eyes and a thick, curved beak, balanced on a long, scaly, snake-like neck.

A series of snorts and deep, chest-shaking breaths drew her attention to the fact that the enormous creature in front of her was only one of many, standing in a rough semi-circle around the alcove she had taken shelter in. One of the animals stamped a foot. She felt the ground shake.

Gadfium stared. She waited to faint but it would not happen.

Adijine walked to the window of his private office, shaking his head. 'You mean we might have to give those bastard Engineers in the Chapel what they want?'

'We don't appear to have very much choice,' Oncaterius said, crossing his legs and brushing one careful hand over his knee to free his robe of creases. 'It would seem the war is becoming recognised as unwinnable even by those who were originally most in favour of it.'

Adijine wrinkled his nose at this but did not rise to the bait.

'Time draws on,' Oncaterius said evenly. 'The Encroachment draws closer, and perhaps therefore so should we to our, ah, Engineer cousins in the Chapel. We require the access they claim to have to —'

'Yes, claim,' the King said, staring out of the window and down into the depths of the Great Hall; rivers, roads and rail tracks threaded the landscape below in ascending orders of directness.

'Well, let's say, appear to possess,' Oncaterius continued, unruffled. 'They would appear not to possess our access to the necessary systems within the Cryptosphere, therefore an accom­modation would appear to make sense for all concerned.'

'An accommodation in which those bastards get to call far too many fucking shots,' Adijine spat.

'I believe Your Majesty knows my opinions on the wisdom of having antagonised the clan Engineers in the first place.'

'Yes,' the King said, rolling his eyes and then turning round. 'I think you've made them clear on more occasions than I care to remember, except when it might have made a difference, right at the start.'

Adijine stood behind the imposingly heavy and ornate swivel chair on the far side of his even more imposingly heavy and ornate desk.

Oncaterius looked wounded. 'If I may say so, Your Majesty does me a disservice. I'm sure the records will show my voice was one of those raised in —'

'Oh, never mind,' the King said, turning the chair round and sitting heavily in its enveloping frame. 'If we have to compromise we have to. We can thrash it out at the Consistory meeting this evening, assuming the Chapel delegation have come up with their answer by then.' The King smiled ruefully, shaking his head once. 'At least we won't be making any concessions to some cross-clan posse of concerned scientists and mathematicians.'

Oncaterius smiled coldly. 'I accept Your Majesty's thanks on behalf of the Security service.'

Adijine narrowed his eyes. 'Is Gadfium still free?'

Oncaterius sighed. 'For now. She's an old lady scientist who got lucky, not a —'

'Couldn't we have tried to capture her? What was the point of trying to kill her?'

'On the confirmation of the existence of the conspiracy,' Oncaterius said, sounding a little as though he was reciting, 'and having received permission to proceed with its amelioration, it was she who happened to be in the position to do the most immediate damage. Rapid action was called for. Our operative took appropriate steps, considering the urgent nature of the circumstances. And I am sure Your Majesty understands that it is usually considered a great deal more straightforward to kill somebody than it is to capture them.' Oncaterius favoured the King with a thin smile. 'Given that our agent's attempt merely to murder Chief Scientist Gadfium resulted in three deaths it is perhaps just as well we did not endeavour to effect her capture.'

'Given the level of competence your people brought to the operation, I'm sure you're right,' the King said, taking some pleasure in the facial flinch this produced on the other man. 'Now, was there anything else?'

'Your Majesty has been informed of the capture of an asura?'

'Held for questioning,' Adijine said, waving one hand. 'Any progress?'

'We are being gentle. However, I think I may attempt to question her myself,' Oncaterius said smoothly.

'What about the child, the Teller who was under suspicion of crypt-hacking or whatever? Didn't he get away too?'

Oncaterius smiled. 'Dealt with.'

3

Sessine stood on the sloped desert sands, looking towards the tall grey tower at the end of the peninsula, cut off from the sands by a high black wall. Within, gardens formed a green triangle at the tower's base. Beyond and to either side, the sea rolled in, waves like creased bronze where they reflected the light of the network of red-orange burning in the sky. He looked away for a moment, trying to cancel the display in the heavens, but it refused to disappear.

The cliffs behind him were rosy with the same light, the sand beneath his soles strewn with shadows like wavelets. The air smelled of salt.

He felt something he had not felt for a long time, and it took a while before he admitted to himself that it was fear. He shrugged, hoisted his pack over his shoulder and continued on towards the distant tower, leaving a deep, scuffed trail of footprints behind him in the talc-fine sand. A vague, gauzy cloud of accompanying dust hung in the air.

It was the ten thousand, two hundred and seventh day of his time in the crypt. He had been here for almost twenty-eight years. Outside, in the other world, a little more than a day had passed.

The wall was obsidian; pitted in places, still highly polished in others. It met the sands and plunged into them like a black knife a kilometre long and fifty metres high at least. He stood in the silence, staring up at the almost featureless cliff, then trod down to the nearest shore. The wall extended a hundred metres or so out to sea. He turned on his heel and set off for the other end.

It was the same. He squatted by the shore and tested the water as a wave broke and rolled, pushing foam up the slope of sand. It was warm. He'd have to swim. He'd thought he might.

He started to undress.

He had not ever paid very much attention to his geographical position in the crypt, though it did roughly correspond to hardware in the base-level world. He supposed he must have wandered over much of South and North America before he had encountered the tonsured woman with her elaborately coded message; that had been, as nearly as he could make out, in a position which equated to somewhere in the North American Midwest; Iowa or Nebraska, he thought. His path since then had led him through Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Britain, Europe and Asia Minor to Arabia.

The sea crossings had been the most dangerous parts of his journey; whether they were effected by the likeness of a bridge or a tunnel, they represented choke points for travellers, and such a focusing of potential prey had in most cases produced a predatory exaggeration of the level's ecological balance. He had had to use the sword a few times, and — on occasion — opponents had attempted to best him through other levels of the crypt, imagining him into situations within which they thought he could more easily be defeated and absorbed.

He found, however, that he had little difficulty in assuming control in such situations. Much appeared to depend on one's wit; a general flexibility and quickness of mind plus an extensive and catholic knowledge-base — as long as these attributes were combined with a generous dash of ruthlessness — were all that one really needed to operate successfully within such imagined realities.

He had walked over broad bridges and within great tunnels hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres long, travelling within the spaces afforded by the slow sweeps of the writhing data highways, in something like a trance sometimes when the pace was forced and he could not afford to sleep, imagining himself to be a molecule of water trapped within the fold of some Archimedean Screw, a wave carried upon some articulation of light within a subsea cable, a fleck of sand-dust borne on the dark gurglings of a submerged water course veined beneath the baking desert.

He swam round the wall, at first attempting to keep his pack balanced on his head, then, when the waves became too rough, resorting to pushing it before him.

The waves mounted, the wind increased, and he realised that he was being blown away from the shore and the wall. He swam on as best he could but after swallowing water and being continually overwhelmed he was finally forced to surrender his heavy, waterlogged pack and all it contained to the sea; it sank quickly. He struck out with all his remaining strength for the just-glimpsed beach beyond the surf-skirted blackness of the wall.

Only his dreams had disturbed him on his journey to this place, still nagging at him with their images of slow eclipses and the death of stars all glimpsed above impressions of battle.

As he'd neared what he still only guessed and hoped was his goal, the dreams had begun to change, and instead of pan-historical images of the Encroachment, he had started to experience what appeared to be presentiments of its effects.

He'd seen the night sky, utterly black but for a twice-dimmed moon. He'd seen a cloudless day that was nevertheless dim, and a sun shining within that faded clarity that was high and full and yet dull orange, not fiery yellow-white; a sun it was possible to gaze at comfortably with the naked eye.

In his dreams he'd seen the weather change and the plants die, and later the people.

By virtue of its location Serehfa did not have a four-season year, alternating between seasons of dry and wet heat whose external effects were moderated by the construction's altitude as well as the carefully altered geography of its surroundings, but he remembered the spring and later the summer coming to Seattle and to Kuybyshev in the year that he had left base-reality behind, and in his dreams that summer did not last as long as the one before, and winter came earlier. The pattern was repeated more intensely in the southern hemisphere.

The following winter lasted throughout the spring before finally delivering a summer hardly warmer than the autumn it quickly lapsed into, and after that there was nothing but winter; winter with the dim face of the sun high in the sky, or a winter set within a winter when the sun dipped nearer the horizon.

The pack ice grew continually, permafrost buckled the ground and thrust blisters of ice through what had been temperate soils, the currents of the air and of the sea changed as lakes and rivers froze and the hearts of the continents and the upper levels of the oceans cooled.

Plants died back, creating new deserts where vegetation used to copious heat and light had withered and plants better suited to the colder conditions had not yet had time to colonise, while those plants themselves succumbed to the sudden, smothering weight of the advancing snow and ice.

Animals of all descriptions found themselves being concen­trated in a smaller and smaller band around the waist of the world, raising the contest to survive to new levels of ferocity, while even in the comparative warmth of the oceans life became gradually less abundant as the white shutters of freezing sea irised, slowly closed over the brash-ice waves, and the trickling streams of sunlight energising the top of the food chain were reduced almost to nothing.

As though in mocking compensation for the shaded sun, great storms of light played about the heavens at night, flickering like aurorae, cold and vast, inhuman and numbing.

Still in those dreams he saw people crouched round fires, struggling through snow drifts with packs and possessions, taking refuge in mines and tunnels as the snow piled and the glaciers advanced and the icebergs crunched aground off equatorial shores and the pack ice spread from either pole like crystals in some drying solution.

No spears of fire or engines of more sophisticated energies lifted exiles into space, but for all the corpses abandoned at roadsides, for all the men, women and children left to die or freezing together in cars, carriages, houses, villages, towns and cities, still people persevered; retreating, stocking up, burrowing down, sealing up.

The fastness that had been Serehfa fell slowly, surrendering to aggregated megatonnes of ice until only the fast-tower itself remained, a listing cenotaph to human hubris. Then the glaciers swept down from the mountains to north and south and scoured even that from the surface of the world; the fast-tower's only memorial was a brief volcanic eruption wrenched from the earth by the thermonuclear-level energies its final fall created.

And so humanity left the surface of the world to the ice, wind and snow, and sheltered, reduced and impoverished, within the stony depths of the planet's skin, finally coming to resemble nothing more than parasites in the cooling pelt of some huge dying animal.

With it it took all its knowledge of the universe and all the memories of its achievements and all the coded information defining the animals and plants that had survived the vicissitudes of time and evolution and — especially — the pressure of the human species' own until then remorseless rise.

Those buried citadels became whole small worlds of refugee communities and spawned still smaller worlds as new machines took over the job of maintaining the levels of the crypt, until gradually more and more of what was in any sense humanity came to reside not simply in the created world of its tunnels, caverns and shafts but within those worlds in the generated realities produced by its computers.

Then the sun began to swell. The Earth shucked off its mummifying cocoon of ice, passed quickly through a feverish spring full of flood and storm, then wrapped itself in deeper and deeper cloud and more torrential rain. The atmosphere thickened and the heat and pressure built up while lightning played across the boiling clouds; the oceans shrank; the swollen bulk of the invisible sun poured energy into the deepening cauldron of gases around the planet, transforming it into a vast caustic foundry of chemical reactions and precipitating a welter of corrosive agents to pour upon the razed, enfumed surface of the Earth.

Earth turned into what Venus had once been, Venus began to resemble Mercury and Mercury ruptured, flowed and disin­tegrated to become a ring of molten slag spiralling in through the livid darkness towards the surface of the sun.

Still, what was left of humanity persisted, retreating further from the open oven of the surface until it became trapped between it and the heat of the planet's own molten sub-surface. It was then that the species finally gave up the struggle to remain in macrohuman form, pulling back fully into a virtual environment and resorted to storing its ancient biochemical inheritance as information only, in the hope that one day such fragile concoctions of water and minerals could exist again upon the face of the Earth.

Its time from then was long as people reckoned it from that point, short as they would have before. The sun's photosphere continued to expand until it swallowed Venus, and Earth did not survive much longer; the last humans on Earth perished together in a crumbling machine core as its cooling circuits failed, the half-finished life-boat spaceship they had been attempting to construct already melted to a hollow husk beside them.

… He suffered with each child abandoned to the snow; with every old man or woman left — too exhausted to shiver any more — under piles of ice-hard rags; with all the people swept away by the howling, fire-storm winds; with each consciousness extinguished — its ordered information reduced to random meaninglessness — by the increasing heat.

And he woke from such dreams sometimes wondering whether all that he was being shown could possibly be true, and on other occasions so convinced that it had been real that he would have faithfully believed what he had seen was the inescapable future, rather than some mere possibility, projection or warning.

He crawled ashore at dusk, collapsing onto the golden slope of the beach, the perfumes of the lush gardens beyond washing over his naked skin while his body shook and trembled with the after-effects of exertion.

He stared ahead, panting, while the surf washed at his feet, then rose unsteadily and staggered up the smooth stretch of beach towards a low white stone wall separating the strand from the gardens. Steps led up. He stood, then sat, shivering a little on the stone parapet, just looking.

Brightly coloured birds flitted through moss-hung trees, fountains played tinkling on shaded pools, paths meandered between plump lawns, and gaudy banks and beds of flowers offered up their bells and mouths to a lazy buzz of late-gathering insects.

The grey tower towards the apex of the gardens looked dark and deserted against the deep bruised hues of the sky.

He got his breath back and when he started to shiver again stood up and walked smartly towards the tower.

He walked out from under the sheltering trees.

The tower's dark grey surface had the rough-smooth texture of eggshell. It stood on a plinth of veined porphyry surrounded by a shallow moat where lilies floated and over which bowed an ornamental bridge of red-painted wood.

As he watched, something caught the faint light in the sky at the top of the tower and flashed, and floating down towards him there came an angel.

He laughed out loud.

4

I get tired screemin. Evin moar I get tired ov gettin bashed on thi hed wif thi mask whot has cum off ma faice; itz stil atatched 2 thi air tank on my bak & itz slipt roun bhind ma nek & is goan fump fump fump on thi bak ov my bonce.

I feel bhind me & tare it away.

Ma eers r goan pop pop pop. Thi air iz blastin roun me so hard therz harly eny poynt in me screemin nway. Its olmost totily dark; Ive got a sorta gray sensation ov thi wols rushin past aroun me, & if I twist roun I can luke up & c a vaig impreshin ov a tiny patch ov dark gray on thi blakniss.

Downwirds, thers jus blakniss.

I try 2 kript but I cant; doan no if itz coz Im movin 2 fass or coz thi shaft is sheeldid or coz Im 2 terrifyd 2 consintrate proprly. I start screemin agen, then stop, gulpin 4 bref.

Id ½ shat my pants by now but itz been so long sins I 8 I cant.

Thi air is coald & am shiverin but its not freezin. I setil in2 a sorta floppi X-shape aftir a while, like Ive scene skydivirs do; I drift 2wards 1 wol, then manoovir myself away agen. I ½ 2 keep swaloin 2 keep my eers from burstin. I try 2 fink how far up I woz & how long itz goan 2 taik me 2 fol 2 thi botim, if its thi botim thats goan 2 brake ma fol. I reelize that ther mite b sumthin btween me & thi botim & I cude hit @ eny momint & I start screemin agen.

I stop aftir a while. Teers get whipt off ma faice but itz not me cryin itz juss thi feercniss ov thi wind tearin @ ma Is.

Ive nevir dyed b4. I doan no whot itz like. Ive herd from uthir peepil & Ive bin in thi minds ov bags whot ½ dyed & got ther impreshins but thay say itz difrint 4 evrybodi & I doan no whot itil b like 4 me & I woz hoapin not 2 find out 4 a while yet thanx very mutch but thare we go.

I start wunderin if thayl resusitate me @ oll. O fuk; whot if Im in sutch big trubil thayl juss looz my ident from thi kript? Whot if thay catch ma dyin fots & then juss interogate me, or doan bothir sayvin me @ oll?

I feel like am goan 2 b sik.

Thi roarin aroun me goze on forevir. My Is r dry & soar. My eers hurt 2.

O fuk I doan wan 2 dy.

I cant bleev how long this is takin. I feel like Im in kript-time. It okurs 2 me mayb I am, mayb I kriptid without noin about it. But I cant b. Im obveyisly not. I'm heer, follin down this shaft, damit. I try kriptin agen.

It wurx. Im on thi sekind basemint levil, praktikly @ c levil.

How mutch furthir down can this bleedin shaft go?

/I port acros in2 thi kript; @ leest I can avoid thi momint ov impact. My implants will pool me bak when I dy, so ther woant b 2 ov me, but @ leest… wait a bleedin minit.

Accordin 2 thi loakil hardware Im stil on thi saim levil. Thi kript finks Im staishinry. Wots goan on heer?

I dubil chek, trebil chek, kwadroopil chek. Yep; thi kriptosfeer finks Ive stopt.

I giv a sorta mentil gulp, then port bak acros 2 my bod.

/Thi air iz stil screemin up roun me. Itz stil totily blak but wif thi thermil bit ov my vizhin I can stil make out thi wols 2 ither side. Shurenuf, they do luke a bit difrint; no impreshin ov them hurtlin past no moar. I stare down.

I doan c nuthin but blakniss but now I fink about it thi sound is diffrint sumhow; evin moar ov a roar.

Then suddenli thers lites evriwhare, blindin me.

I cloas my Is. I fink; blimey, I nevir felt a fing. Thass me ded & this is thi long tunnil wif thi lite @ thi end whot evribody getz 2 c & I muss ½ hit thi botim & not evin felt it.

Xsept thi roarins stil thare & thi wind is stil pushin in2 ma face. I opin my Is agen.

Im stairin strate down @ a sorta a hexagonil grid ov wires or metil or sumfin, & beyond thi grid, a few metirs furvir down, thers ol these big propelir fings, 7 ov them, ol whirlin away & roarin & sendin thi air screemin up past me.

I luke 2 thi side.

Thers a doar in thi wol levil wif me & a cupil ov big black meen lookin birdz wif skaley nex perchd thare, lookin @ me, beedy-Id, ther fevirs rufflin in thi draft.

I cant fink whot else 2 do. So I wave 2 them.

That woz how we used 2 reech our hoam, 1 ov thi birdz tells me.

Am wokin along a brod britely lit tunnil. Thi 2 lammergeiers r keepin pace wif me by sorta ½ hoverin in thi air 1 on ither side ov me, ther wings goan whuf whuf, whuf whuf. I didn evin no they cude do this.

Am wokin kinda funy coz I think I did crap my pants juss a litil, but they doan seem 2 nods, or thayr 2 pol­ite.

U meen u got blastid up thare by thoaz fans? I say, suriptishisly poolin @ thi sect ov ma pants.

Krect, sez thi bird (½n 2 shout abuv thi noise ov its wings goan whuf whuf).

So whyd u leev? I shout. & who woz that up thare pooshd me down?

We left bcoz it woz no longir safe, & we wer needid down heer, yelz thi bird. As 2 who pooshd u in2 thi shaft, I imajin it woz probly a state employee.

Whot, a Security geezir or sumfing? But — ?

Pleez; I cant tel u eny moar. Our comandir may b abil 2 ansir eny uthir qwestions u ½. Luke; wude u mind runnin?

Runnin? I sez, Why, is ther sumbidy aftir us? I glans bhind expectin 2 c Security peepil pursooin us but thers juss thi long brite tunil stretchin way in2 thi distins.

No, shouts thi bird, itz juss this pace is very tyrin 4 us.

Sorry, I sez, & braik in2 a run. Dozent do my chafed bum no gude but it keeps thi 2 lammergeiers happy, beetin alongside.

& so that woz how I arrivd @ thi lammergeiers HQ; brefliss, on thi dubil & wif my pants spottid wif kak.

Thi hed lammergeier iz a feerce big bugir ov a burd; tolir than me when heez perchd & wings longir than Im tol. He iznt no ole gie neevir, heez in hiz prime wif sleek blak & wite fevvirs, steely lookin talins, a naykid nek that lukes oild & brite, & jet-blak Is. I doan no if heez got a naim; we ½nt bin propirly introdoosed.

Heez sittin on a perch, Im sat on thi floar. Thi room iz funnil shaped & thi brod sirkulir roof has a imidje ov a blu sky wif litil flufy clouds in it. Thers anuthir ½ dozen or so uthir lammergeiers perchd aroun thi room 2.

U ½ been a propir pest 2 sertin peepil, mastir Bascule, thi big bird sez, stairin @ me & rokin from side 2 side & sorta stampin itz feet on thi perch. A moast persistent pest.

Thang u very mutch, I sez.

That woz not a complimint! thi bird screetchiz, flapin.

I sit bak, blinkin (my Is r stil a bit soar aftir ol that wind roarin past me when I fel). Whot do u meen? I ask.

Itz qwite possibil that we ½ givin away our noo posishin heer by turnin on thi lift fans so we cude save yoor miserabil hide! thi bird shouts.

Wel, sory Im shure, but I woz toald u mite ½ sum informayshin about thi whareabouts ov a frend ov mine.

What? thi hed bird sez, soundin puzzld. Who?

Itz a ant. Hir name is Ergates.

Thi bird starez @ me. Yoor lookin 4 a ant? he sqwaks, & sounz increduliss.

A ver speshil ant. (I naro my Is.) Whot woz taikin by a lammergeier.

Thi bird shaiks itz hed. Wel, it woznt dun by 1 ov us, it sez, shakin its fevirs.

O yeh? I sez.

We r chimerix, mastir Bascule. This… ant muss ½ bin taikin by a wild lammergeier.

& whare r they then? I ask. (Dam, fot I woz on thi rite trak @ last!)

Ded, thi hed bird sez.

I blink my Is. Ded?

Thi state had them kild during yesterday evening when it reelized we opoasd it; moast ov them wer mobbed by chimeric crows & brot down. We bleev we wer thi reel targets. 2 ov us wer cot & distructid. Ol thi wild lammergeiers r ded.

O, I sed. O deer, I thot.

Hmm, I sed, I doan supoase u no if eny ov them sed anythin about-?

Wait a minit, thi bird sez, waivin 1 wing @ me. It cloases its Is 4 a momint. It opinz them agen.

It lukes stedily @ me 4 a momint, then sorta ½ shaiks its hed. Wel, mastir Bascule, it sez. As I sed, u ½ been nuthing if not persistint. & u ½ not been fritind 2 risk yoor life. It stamps its feet agen. Ther is sumthin u mite do.

Do 4 what, 4 who?

I cant tel u 2 mutch, yung sir; itz best 4 u if u doant no 2 mutch, beleev me; but ther r sum very importint things happening rite now, things whitch affect — & whitch wil affect — ol ov us. Thi state — thi peepil who ½ atakd owr frends thi sloths & ½ tried 2 kil u — r tryin 2 prevent sumthing happening. Wil u giv us yoor help in making it happin?

Whot happenin? I ask, suspishiss. They say thers a emisiry from thi kaotic bits ov thi kript aroun, wantin 2 infect thi uppir layers.

Thi big bird shayks its wings impayshintly. Thi emisiry, it sez, is kold an asoora & it is from 1 ov thi few parts ov thi kript whitch haz not bin tutched by thi kaos. It carrys within it thi meens ov our salvayshin, but its mishin is in jeperdy; the state oposes it 2 bcoz thi fulfilment ov its mishin wude — conseevibly — meen thi end ov thi presint power structyoor. Ov coarse thi state has used thi bogey ov thi kaos 2 atemt 2 turn uthirs agenst thi asoora & those who wude aid it. Thi fact remanes it iz our only hoap. If it duz not sukseed we r ol lost.

I shift my bum a bit. I reely shude ½ askd 2 cleen up a bit b4 ol this. Not that a playce whare lammergeiers r iz likely 2 b big on washrooms, judjin from thi state ov sum ov thi floars Ive seen aroun her. Im finkin fru whot thi hed geezirs juss toal me. It mite b tru, but I ver mutch dout am been toald thi hoal trufe heer.

& whot am I suposed 2 do? I ask.

Thi hed bird lukes distinkly uncumfortabil, & flaps itz wings a bit. Itz danegeris, it sez.

Id kinda gessd that, I sez urbainly, feelin pritti groan-up, thangu ver mutch. Whot did u ½ in mind? I ask.

Thi lammergeier fixiz me wif its ice-blak Is. Goan bak up thi fass-towr, it sez. Only hi-er this time. (It stamps its feet, 1 aftir anuthir, & thi uthir burdz do thi saim thing.) Mutch hi-er.

I sit bak. Frotes gon a bit dry.

U got a toilit I cude yooz? I ask.

Lukes like thi hoal bleedin fass-towrs juss pakd wif shafts. Weer heer @ thi foot ov anuthir 1. Itz biggir than thi 1 I fel down; a lot bigir. This is thi 1 in thi centir ov thi towr & it muss b eesily ½ a kilometir acres. Very faynt lite filtirs down from… blimey, I doan no; helluva far up, thas 4 shure.

We r heer curtisy ov thi war, thi hed bird telz me. Both sides think thi uthir controlz this space.

O reely.

Yes; thi fact they may b about 2 reech an acomadayshin shortly is anuthir reezin 4 ther bein a degree ov urjinsy about thi presint sityooayshin.

Thi hed bird is perchd wif his ½ dozen pals on whot lukes like a peece ov crumpild, soot-blakind missile rekidje neer thi centir ov thi shaft base. Uthir lammergeiers r flittin about thi place fru thi shados. Thi rok floar ov thi shaft lukes like it used 2 b smooth but itz ol chipt & skard now & literd wif bits ov broakin mashines. Thers a dubil set ov rales leedin in from thi side ov thi shaft whitch is whare we came from; thers a big cavern thare whot lukes like a mooseum ov rokit flite or sumfing; fool ov big sheds & misteeryus bits ov eqwuipmint & rustin missiles & big sferikil tanx & telescopes & radar dishis & deflatid silvir baloons like discardid bolgounz.

I luke strate up. Didn no u cude get vertigo lukin up.

This iz thi mane shaft, thi hed bird sez, & poziz. 1nce it led 2 thi stars.

I luke up agen & I can bleev it. My hed spins @ thi thot &

I olmost fol ovir.

Thi top ov thi fass-towr has bin inaxessibil 4 as long as enybodi or anything can remember, thi lammergeier telz me. Meny atemts ½ bin made, moastly in secrit, 2 reetch its hites. Ol ½ fay led, as far as we no. It lifts up 1 foot & lukes down @ thi bit ov missile itz perchd on. U c sum ov thi rekidje around u.

Uh-huh, I sez. Sumfin up thare keeps shootin them down, yeh?

No; but ther apeers 2 b an armurd conical base 2 thi towrs upir reetches @ about 20 kilometirs whitch nobody has bin abil 2 penitrate.

I luke roun @ ol thi missile rekidje. Thi offorities doan yoozhily let airplanes operate wifin thi cassil 4 feer ov a crash weekinin thi struktyir, let aloan missiles. U cant help wunderin whot sorta damidje has bin dun up thare by ol this rekd hardware.

So? I sez.

We ½ a final vacyoom baloon, thi lammergeier sez.

A whot?

A vacyoom baloon, it repeets. Teknikly, a very strong impermeebil membrane encloasin a hi vacyoom & fitid wif a harnis.

A harnis, I sed.

+, we ½ sum hi-altitood breevin eqwipmint.

U ½, ½ u? I sez. (& am finkin, 0-0…)

Yes, mastir Bascule. We r askin u 2 take thi baloon up as far as u can & then clime sum way beyond thi levil thi baloon attanes.

Iz that posibil? How far up we tokin?

It is sertinly posibil, tho not without risk. Thi altitood is aproximitly 20 kilometirs.

Haz enybudy els bin up that hi?

They ½

They get bak down agen?

Yes, thi lammergeier sez, stampin from side 2 side agen & flappin its wings out a bit. Sevril mishins ½ ataned sutch hites in thi past.

Whot am I suposed 2 do up thare?

U wil b givin a pakidje 2 tak wif u. Ol u ½ 2 do is diliver it.

Whare? Who 2?

U wil c when u get thare. I cant tel u eny moar.

If this is so urjint, how cum u gies cant do it? I ask, lukin roun @ thi othir birdz.

1 ov our numbir tryd, thi hed bird sez. We beleev he is ded. Anuthir woz about 2 mount a sekind atempt juss b4 u apperd but we wer not veri hoapful ov suxess. Thi problem is that we canot fly 2 a ½ ov thi altitood reqwired, & 1ce thi baloon wil rise no moar simply woking up steps apeers 2 b thi best meens ov gainin hite. We r not bilt for wokin. U r.

I fink about ol this.

It is a simpl task in a sens, thi hed lammergeier sez, but without it thi asooras mishin wil shurely fale. Howevir, this is a danejiris undertaikin. If u lak thi curidje 2 taik it on then b shure that moast hoomins wood feel thi saim way. Probly thi sensibil fing 2 do is 2 turn it doun. U r bairly an adolesint, aftir ol.

Thi hed bird lowirs his nek a litil & lukes roun @ his 2 neereist pals.

We ask 2 mutch, he sez, soundin sorofool. Cum — & he starts 2 opin his wings as if 2 fly away.

I swolo hard.

Il do it, I sez.