The Holy Machine

6

There were stars. They weren’t like the stars of ordinary reality: they were multicoloured, they stretched back in three dimensions, and they were moving, around, above and between one another.

There was a warm smell of a summer night, a hint of lilac. Celestial music came faintly from far away and then broke out into a bold fanfare as huge coloured 3D letters burst like fireworks across the firmament.

‘Yes, welcome to SenSpace, George!’ said an intimate, female voice in my ear, ‘It’s been a long time. Are you travelling alone, or do you have companions I need to link you up with?’

‘One companion, Ruth Simling,’ I said, reluctantly adding her SenSpace alias: ‘Little Rose.’

‘Ah yes,’ said SenSpace fondly, ‘dear Little Rose! I’ll link you up immediately.’

Ruth appeared beside me, as our hitherto parallel SenSpace universes were merged into one. Or rather, Little Rose appeared, a small, mousily pretty young girl in a party dress, still recognizable as my mother, but some ten years younger than myself.

I looked away. We were standing on a high platform, the swirling stars above and around us. Beneath a vast patchwork landscape was laid out, teeming with detail and activity, which seemed to stretch away for hundreds of kilometres in every direction.

You could have studied it for hours just as it was, but what made it even more absorbing was the fact that whatever patch you looked at would immediately grow, as if a powerful pair of binoculars had been put in front of your eyes.

Here were children playing on a sandy beach for example, splashing among white surf and breakers of perfect translucent green. The longer I looked at it the closer they became. I could hear their voices and the sound of the surf. I could hear the flapping sound from a small boat with red sails. I could feel the sand. I could hear one little girl whisper to her brother they were going to build the biggest sandcastle ever seen. ‘That will teach John,’ she said, ‘That will teach him!…’

I looked away. The seaside at once shrunk again to a tiny blue and yellow patch far off on the surface of the seething quilt of the SenSpace world.

My eye fell on a forest. The green was very bright, like coloured glass. There was a dragon with fiery nostrils waiting in a cave. Knights were riding towards it through the emerald trees. Their silvery armour glinted, their shields were bright. You could see every single leaf on every twig.

Here was a city. The towers were ten times higher than Illyria’s. Open trains full of laughing people whizzed between them on precarious monorail bridges. Little coloured biplanes swooped and dived among them. I could see the smiling faces of the pilots as they raced one another round the towers. I saw a red plane crash through a bridge and into the side of a building with a big explosion. But then the plane was gone, the bridge was whole again and trains of happy people were whizzing across it once more.

‘There’s something I’d like to show you George,’ said Ruth beside me in her Little Rose voice.

She reached out and took my hand (I mean my SenSpace hand: back in the real world, in our apartment in Faraday District, she and I were at opposite sides of the room), and I followed where she led.

We came to a little cove, where olive groves came down almost to the edge of the sea. The sea was blue and so clear that shoals of fishes seemed to be flying rather than swimming over the smooth white stones on the bottom, and a rowing boat at anchor appeared suspended in space over its own shadow.

Cicadas and crickets kept up their incessant throbbing among the olive trees and pines.

The air was heavy with the aromatic resins of wild herbs baking in the sun. There were goat bells in the distance. A small bird with a scrap of wool in its beak, crossed the sea to a little rocky islet fifty metres off the coast, on which grew a single small pine.

At the top of a little rocky cliff, were the ruins of a Byzantine shrine…

‘But this is Aghios Constantinos!’ I exclaimed.

Little Rose looked up at me smiling and nodding.

‘It’s even better under the moon!’ she said, and the daylight began at once to fade…

‘But it’s a real place, Ruth!’ I said. (The daylight hesitated, unsure whether to proceed, and the sun stopped its descent towards the sea.) ‘We used to go there. We had picnics. I found a tortoise once.’

‘There are tortoises here too,’ she said, ‘Look!’

‘But you can still go to Constantinos and see real tortoises, Ruth!’

Little Rose frowned. ‘I’ll never go back there. Not after what happened.’

Ten years previously a Swiss Illyrian had been kidnapped and murdered by Greek terrorists on that same stretch of coast, close to the border. Our visits had stopped from that date on.

‘Look!’ said Little Rose, ‘A tortoise, see, right down by your feet!’