Here Comes the Sun (30 page)

Staff considered this for a moment. ‘If he's a friend of yours,' he observed, ‘then why's he holding you two feet off the ground by your lapels? Does that mean he's really glad to see you or something?'

‘You bastard,' said Bjorn. ‘You slimy, toffee-nosed little git. You went off and left me in that . . .' Bjorn paused and made a thorough search of his vocabulary for the right word; given the size of Bjorn's vocabulary, it was a bit like looking for a combine harvester in a haystack. ‘In that
dump
,' he said decisively. Which only goes to show that you don't need to lug a dictionary round between your ears to be able to come up with the
mot juste
.

‘Oh, come on,' Ganger replied. ‘It wasn't that bad, surely.'

It was the wrong thing to say. Ganger suddenly found himself an inch away from the angriest pair of eyes he'd ever come across.

‘Right, sunshine,' said Bjorn quietly. ‘You can read minds, right?'

‘Up to a point.'

‘Maybe you'd fancy having a quick look round what I've got in mind for you.'

Ganger swallowed hard. ‘I'd rather not,' he replied. ‘You do realise, of course, that physical discomfort has no effect on me whatsoever.'

‘Sure?'

Jane made a tutting noise. ‘Put him down,' she said briskly. ‘If you frighten him he'll probably go and hide in my subconscious, and I've had enough trouble with it over the years as it is. Who are you, anyway?'

Bjorn swung his head round, and blushed. ‘Um,' he stammered. ‘Like, well, my name's sort of Bjorn. That is . . .'

‘Hello, Bjorn. Aren't you forgetting something, by the way?'

Bjorn's eyes filled with panic, as he struggled to identify the social error he'd just committed. Should he have shaken her hand, he wondered, or offered to give up his seat or carry her bag for her? Were you actually supposed
to say your name on a first date? He looked around wildly for a door to open.

‘I think she means about putting me down,' Ganger whispered.

Without moving his head, Bjorn relaxed his fingers slightly. There was a thump, and something down by his feet said ‘Thank you so much.'

‘How do you come into this anyway?' Jane was asking. ‘You don't look like a . . .'

‘He's not,' Ganger broke in. ‘Or at least, he used to be. But he's not any more. Now he's a supergrass.'

Jane was just about to say ‘A
what
?' and Staff was on the point of asking, ‘Look, just what
is
going on here?' and Bjorn was poised to hit somebody, when the heap on the floor groaned and moved slightly.

And looked up. And saw Bjorn. And screamed.

 

Or at least one of him did.

One of the risks inherent in high managerial office, with all the accompanying stress and nervous tension of departmental politics, is that of developing a dual personality. Usually it's regarded as something to be avoided, but it can have its advantages.

To take a good example: it meant that whereas half of Finance and General Purposes' personality was making small squeaking noises and trying to hide itself in the pile of the carpet, the other half was striding angrily down the corridors of the Security barracks, yelling furiously and banging on doors with a riding crop. Where Finance and General Purposes had an advantage over the run-of-the-mill psychotic was being able to provide separate corporeal incarnations for each of his separate personas; or, to put it another way, two bodies to go with his two faces.

The one that went with his half-crazed-Dictator face was very big, dressed in the sort of black leather greatcoat the
SS would have gone in for if they'd had access to top-quality dragon hide, and draped liberally with interesting-looking weapons. You'd need an active, not to say warped, imagination to work out what they were designed to do to you, but any fool could see they were weapons. Fiendish ones, probably.

‘Come on, you goddamn sons of bitches,' he was shouting. ‘Move it!'

He moved the stub of a cigar round in his jaw as he shouted. Somewhere just north of his hip pocket, a particularly abstruse weapon shrugged and metamorphosed smoothly into a pearl-handled revolver.

As his footsteps echoed away down the corridor, two bleary-eyed spectral warriors opened their doors and looked out at each other.

‘Now what?' yawned one of them.

‘You know what?' replied the other. ‘I have this feeling we aren't going to enjoy this.'

His comrade in arms suddenly became aware that he was still wearing his Snoopy T-shirt. He turned hurriedly away and reached for his regulation issue shapeless black cowl, and so failed to notice that his colleague had come to the door still holding the copy of
The Ballet-Goers' Companion
he'd been reading, under the blankets, with a torch.

‘Better get ready,' said the closet balletomane. They both withdrew into their cells.

A few minutes later, they fell in for parade. Something about their leader's manner as he paced up and down inspecting them didn't do much to cheer them up. In this persona, Finance and General Purposes was sometimes known as the Grand Old Man, or Old Ironsides, or simply The General. And a lot of other things, too.

He stopped and pointed with his riding crop, his hand quivering with rage.

‘Oh, shit,' whispered the Snoopy fan to his neighbour. They surreptitiously swivelled their eyes to the left, saw what the matter was, then quietly and sincerely thanked Providence that it wasn't them.

8765B had forgotten to take his face-mask off.

Accordingly, the row consisted of forty-nine billowing black cowls, empty except for a pair of indescribably horrible points of red light, and one pale pink face with spectacles and razor-rash. Forty-nine pairs of indescribably horrible points of red light closed, and the cowls surrounding them winced. A spectral warrior who turns out on parade improperly dressed doesn't get away with just whitewashing stones or cutting the grass with nail-scissors.

‘You,' hissed the General. ‘Fall out.'

The pink face sagged like a deflating balloon and fell down inside the cowl. ‘But . . .' said a tiny voice, from a long way down.

‘I said fall out, soldier. You deaf?'

‘Sir.' There was a sigh of pity and terror - the proportions were approximately those of an extremely dry Martini - as first the cowl and then the rest of the habit slowly crumpled to the ground and lay there in a heap, like a pair of drunken trousers. For spectral warriors, the words of command tend to mean what they say.

The General looked round, and bit into his cigar-butt.

‘Whassa matter?' he snapped. ‘You never seen an immortal soul busted before?'

Complete silence. When, eventually, the late 8765B's collar-pin hit the ground, it sounded like a small explosion.

‘All
right
,' growled the General. ‘Move it.'

There was a crash of boots on the tarmac.

With a grunt of satisfaction, the General gave the signal, and the column moved forwards at a terrified
quick march towards the waiting trucks. Perhaps it would have comforted the spectral warriors to know that, about a quarter of an hour's drive away, exactly the same person as the hundred-per-cent bastard who was staring at them and willing one of them to have forgotten to blanco his bayonet frog was cowering under a chair and making noises like a petrified kitten.

Maybe not.

 

There was a hushed silence. You could almost hear the thought, feel the tension. If there had been a barometer nearby, it would have screamed.

Eventually: ‘Yeah,' said the Count of the Saxon Shore, ‘I'll have the veal as well. So that's three veal, one chicken, one osso bucco, and three bottles of the red.'

The Emperor's sister shook her head. ‘Veal's off, sorry,' she said. ‘I forgot to mention. Goddamn butcher didn't deliver again today.'

The Electors looked at each other for a long time. It was the County Palatine who eventually put it into words.

‘Hey,' he said, ‘what's going on around here?'

 

 

 

 

M
eanwhile, in the interests of clarity and a comprehensible narrative, take the next exit on the left, over the flyover, and back down the Pastbound lane almost as far as you can go . . .

To a time when there was virtually no Time at all, when the world was young and fresh, and still thinking,
Stuff it, it's years yet before I have to start thinking about pension schemes
.

A vibrant new administration has just moved into spanking new purpose-built offices, with state-of-the-art information technology, a highly trained and motivated young staff and an instruction manual. Which reads like this:

 

And so on. Most of the manual is in fact taken up with awful warnings as to what will happen to anybody who infringes the manufacturer's patent or makes unauthorised copies of the software; and a garbled version of this has survived to this day in the form of the Revelation of St John the Divine. The rest of the text was lost many centuries ago.

A minor but ambitious young official has just been appointed deputy head of the Sun Department, a relatively unimportant post, but even high-flyers have to start somewhere. It's his job to ensure that the sun is flown on exactly the right trajectory to ensure that it delivers just the right amount of light and heat to the world busily evolving below. Too little, and Life will be stillborn. Too much, and there's a risk that it'll turn out the wrong way. Strange, warped mutants with malfunctioning components and entirely unsuitable evolutionary matrices will emerge from the bubbling green soup that covers the surface, instead of the superbly constructed designer lifeforms that the manufacturers intended.

Look very closely, and in the corner of the hangar you'll see a scruffy individual in the first ever pair of
worn-out jeans and the primal Def Leppard sweatshirt, loafing aimlessly around with a broom in one hand and a pair of headphones over his ears. It will be many millenia before the Sony Walkman is invented, but he's getting in some early practice. His chances of promotion are slim.

And on the sixth day, the minor but ambitious young official woke up, put on his shiny black leather flying jacket and his goggles, and strolled confidently down towards the hangar. So far, he told himself, he'd done a pretty good job. The Boss himself had said so, and he ought to know. Pretty good job you're doing there, young 'un, he'd said, and you couldn't put it more clearly than that if you tried.

He climbed into the cockpit, checked the rear-view mirror and the oil gauge, and fastened the safety harness. Pretty good job, young 'un. Well, absolutely. Credit where credit's due, and all that.

‘Flaps?' he shouted.

‘You what?'

The official sighed. ‘I said,' he yelled back, ‘flaps.'

‘What about them?'

‘Are they engaged or aren't they? Come on, man, I haven't got all day.'

‘Flaps engaged.'

‘Switches?'

‘Yeah.'

The young official made a despairing gesture. ‘Oh, for crying out loud, are the switches on or off?' he cried. ‘Or do I have to come and check them for myself?'

‘Switches on.'

‘Hoo-bloody-ray. Right then, contact.'

Pause.

‘I said,' growled the young official, ‘contact. But of course nobody is listening. I am talking to myself. Which
is just as well, because it's the only way I'm going to get an intelligent conversation around here. CONTACT!'

‘Yeah, right. Sorry.'

There was a thud; then a roar; then the hangar started to shake, as the huge machine's four enormous compression chambers slowly filled with cold, blue fire. The young official pulled his goggles down over his eyes, put the choke halfway in, and called out, ‘Chocks away!'

And then he was flying. For a few seconds the world seemed far too small to contain such a wild extravagance of movement; then the airbrakes caught and the giant projectile burst through the thin haze of water-vapour that hung over the sparkling new oceans, levelled out and started to fly straight and level.

A pretty good take-off, young 'un, said the minor but ambitious official to himself. Neat work. Nothing to it, really; all you have to do is hang on to this handle thing and it'll fly itself.

He leaned forward in his seat and peered over the side. Far away, he could glimpse through loopholes in the clouds a shining blue horizon, textured by the breeze into a million regular waves. In there somewhere, at this very moment, the atoms were rubbing together in a miraculously improbable way. Life was just around the corner.