Here Comes the Sun (34 page)

‘Changing?' Jane raised an eyebrow. ‘You mean back into an adult? I don't think it's as easy as that. I'm coming to the conclusion that this whole thing is somehow linked up with the interpretation of empiric sense-evidence through a number of different logical systems, which means that . . .'

‘No,' Bjorn insisted, ‘I mean change like in, you know, nappies.'

Jane's face relaxed. ‘Oh, I see,' she said. ‘Right, you carry on, and I'll see if I can find out where these signs are supposed to be leading.'

Bjorn shook his head vigorously, like a dog drying itself. ‘No,' he repeated. ‘Like, I don't know how. Where all the bits and ends and pins are meant to go.'

Jane shrugged. ‘Me neither,' she replied.

‘But . . .' Bjorn managed to say, despite the fact that his lower jaw was doing its best to fall off his face. ‘But you're a, um, female. You know about these things.'

‘Uh-uh,' Jane replied firmly. ‘Sorry, can't help you there, I'm afraid. All I know about babies is that you're not supposed to put them in washing machines. Makes the colours run, presumably.' She turned away pointedly and stared at the signs on the wall, until Bjorn gave up trying to outstare her and slowly unslung the knapsack from his back. His face was the colour of bolognese sauce as he grabbed hold of a pin at random and pulled. To judge by his expression, he was expecting an explosion on the count of five.

‘And anyway,' Jane added, ‘it's not a baby, it's a hostage, and traditionally it's the man's job to stay home and look after the hostages.' She looked round and then quickly
looked away again. Bjorn gritted his teeth and tried to tell himself that what he was holding was in fact a crankshaft case, and what was running down inside his sleeve was in fact gearbox oil. It helped, slightly.

The bang they then heard was the front of the building being demolished.

Jane and Bjorn looked at each other.

‘I think I know where it is we're going,' Jane said.

‘Yeah?'

‘Away,' said Jane firmly. ‘Come on.'

In a belated attempt to appear inconspicuous they walked quickly rather than ran towards the nearest exit. A man in uniform tried to stop them, and then recoiled like a salted slug when Bjorn put a wet nappy in his outstretched hand. He made no further attempt to impede their progress.

They were in the baggage hall.

‘Wrong way,' Bjorn muttered. ‘We should have gone left back there by the . . .'

Jane shook her head. ‘This'll do,' she said. ‘If there's someone chasing us, we'd better hide until they've gone. If we just mingle in with the crowd here, maybe they won't see us. Anyway, they'll have assumed we've made a run for the planes.'

Trying to look tired and bored, they wandered down towards the carousel, Jane making little cooing noises to the hostage as they went. The hostage started yelling.

‘That's fine,' Jane whispered. ‘People naturally tend to avoid yelling children in airports, I've always found. It's good cover.'

‘Great,' Bjorn snarled. There was about a mile of wet cloth wrapped soggily around his wrist, and a safety-pin had worked its way inside the sleeve of his shirt.

They made their way down through the crowd - and there was something odd about the people comprised in
the crowd, but it doesn't do to stare - towards the baggage carousels, where they mingled.

‘Here,' Bjorn whispered. ‘There's something odd about . . .'

‘Yes,' Jane hissed. ‘I know. What do you expect me to do about it?'

Bjorn shrugged. Although he wasn't usually given to ruminating on the nature of the universe, he had long ago come up with a reason why female logic is different from male logic. It was complicated, internally coherent and had a lot to do with the fact that women, being on average the shorter sex, spend a lot of their time nearer the ground and are thus likelier to have their brains interfered with by geothermic radiation. He considered explaining it to Jane but decided not to.

‘Excuse me,' Jane said, elbowing a bystander out of the way. ‘Thank you.'

The funny thing about the other passengers was - well, it was hard to explain it exactly, but . . . no, the hell with it, there's no point lying when the only person you're going to deceive is yourself. Bjorn grasped the mental nettle, and then his dazed mind looked round frantically for a mental dock leaf.

They were transparent.

No, not quite; you could see through them, but only at certain angles. It was as if someone had cut out life-size pictures of people and then pasted them to life-size tailors' dummies made of ice. Or glass. You couldn't get paste to stick to ice, because it would melt or slide off or . . . Bjorn caught his train of thought by the scruff of its neck and whisked it back to the matter in hand. If you looked at these people at certain angles, they weren't there.

Fine, Bjorn thought. So what? I'm no bigot. I can handle black, white, brown or yellow, so I can handle transparent as well. No problem.

Not surprisingly, Jane had been working on the same problem, and the answer she'd come up with wasn't a million miles away from the truth.

(. . .The truth being that the other people in the baggage hall were there all right, but not one hundred per cent. One of the disadvantages of long-distance travel which has never properly been sorted out is the unfortunate truth that whenever a living creature goes an appreciable distance from home and is parted from his possessions, a portion of his soul stays with them until the eventual reunion. And when part of a man's soul is being hauled around on fork-lift trucks on to a conveyer belt after several hours crammed into the hold of an aircraft, it's only to be expected that there will be physical side-effects. Normally, of course, nobody ever notices, because everyone in a baggage hall is in the same situation, except for the porters, who are used to it. Since Jane and Bjorn had no luggage, they were able to see things as they really were, usually through the ribcages of the people standing next to them.)

‘These people aren't all here,' she whispered. ‘Don't worry about it.'

‘I wasn't,' Bjorn replied. And then he stared.

Sailing up towards him was a large cardboard suitcase, a scuffed imitation leather hold-all and a canvas kitbag, none of which he'd seen for well over a thousand years, since the baggage handlers aboard the
Argo
had sent them to the Garden of the Hesperides by mistake.

‘Um,' he said. ‘Excuse me.' He leaned forward and grabbed the handles, which crumbled into dust in his hands. A thousand years is a long time to go round and round in circles.

‘What are you . . . ?' Jane screeched, as Bjorn leaped up on to the carousel and kicked the cases to the floor. He
staggered, righted himself, and then collapsed backwards on to the toes of a small, elderly-looking man who was sitting on a very ancient suitcase indeed.

‘Sorry, mate,' he mumbled.

‘That's all right, Bjorn,' replied the elderly man. ‘Could happen to anyone.'

To his great surprise, Bjorn managed to say something. It sounded like ‘Ggnnk.'

 

The General walked up and down the improvised line, inspecting his troops.

‘Right,' he said. ‘This is the big one. What is it?'

‘The big one, chief,' said those few spectral warriors who were directly in his line of sight. The rest of them shuddered. Looking back, they were thinking, it hadn't been so bad being dragons' teeth. Hot, maybe, and smelly from time to time, and perhaps if you were really unlucky you'd get filled, but at least you knew where you were coming from.

‘And you're utterly fearless spectral warriors, what are you?'

‘Terrified.'

‘WHO SAID THAT?'

There was a squeak from the end of the line; then a flash of blue light; then a tiny puff of smoke, and then there was an empty black robe lying on the ground. It was neatly folded, and had its canteen, mess tin and water bottle lying on top of it. Habits get deeply engrained when you're in the Army.

‘Now then,' said the General. ‘What are you?'

‘Utterly fearless spectral warriors, chief,' quavered the line as one shit-scared spectral warrior.

The General paused and looked up and down the line slowly. ‘Good,' he said. ‘So let's get to it.'

‘Long time no see, Bjorn,' the elderly man continued.

‘How're you doing, anyway?'

‘Yeah,' Bjorn mumbled. ‘Hey . . .'

The old man frowned slightly, although it was hard to tell; his face seemed to have set rock hard, like araldite, as if it had been marinaded and case-hardened in boredom. He spoke in a relentless dead monotone, like somebody's cousin showing you holiday snaps. ‘Aren't you going to introduce me to your friend?' he said.

Bjorn swallowed hard. ‘Jane, this is Ulysses. Ulysses, Jane,' he said. ‘Ulysses and me go way back,' he added, trying to avoid Jane's eyes. ‘Haven't seen you since . . .'

Jane looked again. The sack-shaped thing the man was wearing, the droopy leather hat, the sandals . . . ‘Excuse me,' she said, ‘but are you . . .'

Ulysses nodded. ‘You heard about me, then?' he said. ‘Shocking, isn't it?'

Jane rewound her memory quickly; fairy-stories, a film with Kirk Douglas, something they'd made her read at school. In any case, shocking wasn't the word she'd have chosen herself. ‘Oh yes?' she ventured.

‘If it goes on much longer,' Ulysses droned on, ‘I'm going to complain about it. It shouldn't be allowed, really it shouldn't.'

‘Um.'

‘I mean,' Ulysses said, scratching his nose with his little finger, ‘there I was, Trojan War over, all set to go home, got my return ticket and everything. Only Penelope - that's my wife, Penelope - she said, “You be sure and bring me back some of that purple wool they got over there.” Very keen on embroidery, my wife. With her, it's nothing but embroider, embroider, embroider, all the time. Anyway, I remembered to get the wool, and I packed it in my small suitcase, and then when I got off the plane I came down here to collect it . . .'

Jane tried to cover her ears, but found it impossible to do this without moving her hands, and her hands wouldn't move.

‘The big suitcase came through all right, but God only knows where the little one's got to. I think they may have lost it, you know.'

‘Two thousand years,' Bjorn hissed in her ear. She nodded and smiled brightly.

‘Very possibly,' she said. ‘Maybe it got sent on somewhere else.'

Ulysses nodded. ‘Maybe,' he said. ‘I think I'll just wait a little bit longer, though, just in case. She won't half play me up if I go home without that wool, you know.'

There was a long silence, during which Jane and Bjorn tried walking backwards, a few millimetres at a time. This silence was broken by a number of sounds.

There was a yell from Ulysses as he caught sight of a small, battered leather suitcase on the belt and threw himself on to it.

There was a similar shout of triumph as a man in a long raincoat pounced on a bundle wrapped in newspaper, which happened to contain the Maltese Falcon.

There was a deafening bang as the stun-grenades thrown by the spectral warriors (or, in one unfortunate case, not thrown by a spectral warrior) exploded.

There was a shrill scream from the hostage, who had woken up and wanted his teddy.

There was a confused whooshing noise as Bjorn hurled Jane, his long-lost baggage and himself on to the conveyer, which whisked them round for a few feet before thrusting them both under the little rubber flaps that separate the world of light and life from the black void where the luggage comes from and, ultimately, goes back to.

And then there was silence.

It didn't last. When the smoke cleared, there was
coughing and swearing and whimpering (from the spectral warriors) and shouting (from the General), while the tannoy announced the arrival of Flight TR8765 from Atlantis, and part of the ceiling collapsed on to the carousel.

When it came round for the second time, most of the debris had little stickers on it.

 

‘Where
are
we?'

‘Hey, this is great, you know? All these years I've been wishing I knew where this lot'd got to, and now . . .'

‘It's okay,' Jane said. ‘I think I know where we are.'

As if in answer, the lights came on.

Or at least the conveyer belt brought them out into the light. They looked up, and saw the baggage handlers.

It wasn't a pretty sight. Take a line through what ordinary baggage handlers are like (which is bad enough) and then imagine what they'd look like in industrial-grade heavy-duty distorting mirrors.

‘It's okay,' Jane said, extending her legs and stepping lightly off the carousel. ‘It's all okay. Relatively speaking, of course.'

‘Is it?' Bjorn looked at her and so failed to notice the overhead derrick. ‘Ouch,' he added.

‘Stop fooling about and follow me,' Jane replied. She walked rapidly away, leaving Bjorn in the position inherited by all males at airports of running after a female while holding more luggage than he could cope with.

‘Look,' he grunted, ‘slow down a minute and explain. What's come over you all of a . . . ? And you can shut up, an' all,' he added, as the hostage wailed at him and tried to poke its wee fist through his head.

‘It's very simple,' Jane replied. ‘Gosh, if I'd realised it before, we could have been out of here an hour ago. Come on. I never knew anyone who dawdled so much.'

She had marched up to the nearest wall, and now stood facing it. She put her hands on her hips, smiled, and said ‘Open.'