by Tom Holt
‘I got it,’ replied the Emperor’s sister. ‘Just give me a moment, will you? We got no help again today.’
The County Palatine clicked his teeth. ‘You want to get shot of that kid,’ he said, ‘she’s no good to you.’
Rosa gave him a withering look, the sort of look that scours roses of greenfly and lifts impacted grease off the inside of neglected ovens. ‘You know how hard it is to get help - even crummy help - this time of the year? You don’t. You let me run my business, okay?’
She scuttled off under a ziggurat of dirty plates. The Electors sighed.
‘She works too hard,’ opined the Lord Treasurer.
‘It’s a shame,’ agreed the Count of the Stables. ‘We should find her a reliable waitress.’
The Count of the Saxon Shore grunted. ‘Anything that’d improve the service round here would be fine by me. You can get peptic ulcers waiting too long between courses.’
A match flared at the end of an eight-inch cigar. ‘You’ve gotta look after your health in this life,’ commented the Lord High Cardinal, ‘because if you don’t, nobody else will.’ He burped smoke, like a dragon with carburettor trouble, while the other Electors exchanged surreptitious glances. They had an uneasy feeling that the Lord High Cardinal had just made a pronouncement ex cathedra; in which case, somebody really ought to write it down. ‘Anyway,’ he continued briskly, ‘to business.’
The Electors stifled a selection of sighs and yawns. A working lunch, in their view, was a truly wonderful idea, but not nearly as truly wonderful as a plain ordinary lunch, hold the work. Still, they had a Duty.
‘Well,’ said the Lord Treasurer, ‘I did the books last night, and they’re looking pretty healthy. We got,’ he reached in his coat pocket for his spectacles and yesterday night’s wine list, ‘we got income, seventeen point four four six four four million kreuzers, expenditure seventeen point four four six three nine million kreuzers, capital reserves nil, income transferred to capital account nil, fixed assets nil, short term liabilities nil, written down balance fifty kreuzers, transferred to cash account fifty kreuzers. Okay?’
The County Palatine frowned. ‘What does that mean, Tony?’ he asked.
‘It means,’ replied the Treasurer with a grin, ‘today we can afford to leave a tip.’
The Electors nodded their approval, and the Lord High Cardinal cleared his throat.
‘Policy review time next, folks,’ he said. ‘Anybody got anything to say about our policy?’
‘I think our policy is just great, Rocky. What do you say, Tony?’
‘Yeah, it’s a great policy, Rocky. Where’s that damn broad with the goddamn sweet?’
‘Okay.’ The Lord High Cardinal pencilled a little tick on the back of the menu. ‘Now then, what’s next? Oh, nuts, I forgot the minutes of the last meeting. Anybody take any minutes last meeting?’
‘Nah.’
‘Okay then, approved as drawn.’ The Lord High Cardinal raised his eyebrows and scratched them with the end of his pencil. ‘That just leaves Any Other Business, guys,’ he said. ‘Hold on, though,’ he added, as Rosa approached with a tray, ‘here it comes now.’
When they had finished Any Other Business, and the Count of the Saxon Shore had had Extra Any Other Business with a side order of whipped cream, they sat for a while thinking and breathing heavily, until the arrival of the coffee recalled them to the next item on the agenda.
‘Date of next meeting,’ said the Lord High Cardinal. ‘Thursday all right with you guys?’ The Electors nodded. ‘Okay, Thursday at twelve fifteen. Meeting closed. Hey, Rosa, where’s the toothpicks? I got a big fat lump of veal gristle lodged behind my bridgework. You want me to choke to death here?’
Coffee was traditionally taken in silence, or at least without articulate speech, to give the Electors an opportunity to ruminate on the decisions they had just taken and if necessary review them or supplement them with a brandy or a small shot of grappa. It was, above all, a moment of tranquillity, essential in the headlong life of a monumentally important officer of state. Sometimes, however, something happened to spoil it; for example, the proprietor’s sister tripping over her feet and depositing a plateful of tagliatelli verdi in the lap of the Count of the Saxon Shore.
‘Yow,’ howled the Count. ‘You damn crazy bitch, that’s hot!’
‘Sorry,’ said Rosa, perfunctorily. She leaned over and scooped the tagliatelli back out of the Count’s lap on to the plate with a fork. ‘You should count yourself lucky it was only a melted butter and cheese sauce. Bechamel sauce on a nice light suit like that, you’d be in real trouble.’
The Lord High Cardinal raised a caterpillar-like eyebrow. ‘That’s not like you, Rosa,’ he said. ‘You got something worrying you?’
Rosa sighed. ‘That waitress,’ she said. ‘That so-called waitress. She only calls and says she’s handing in her notice. On account of she’s getting married and moving to Seattle. Some people just don’t care.’
She bustled away to get a hot cloth.The Electors looked at each other.
‘I move,’ said the County Palatine, ‘we find Rosa a new waitress. Seconded?’
‘Seconded,’ replied the Count of the Saxon Shore, grimly. ‘As soon as possible. Wearing food isn’t me, you know?’
‘Right.’ The County Palatine frowned. ‘Anybody know of anybody?’ he enquired. ‘Gotta be somebody good, mind. You know, reliable, honest, intelligent, hard-working, efficient. Sure-footed,’ he added. ‘Good sense of balance, all that kind of thing.’
There was silence, during which the sun broke through the thick mantle of cloud that had masked it for a week or so now, flashed momentarily and then ducked away out of sight once again. A brief flare of dazzle on the outside of the window seemed to inspire the Lord High Cardinal, for he suddenly clapped his hands together and rubbed them warmly.
‘Boys,’ he said, ‘I know just the person.’
George sat down at the controls, fastened the safety harness and switched on the intercom. There was the usual crackle.
‘Helios One to Control Centre, come in please, over,’ he said, but without conviction. Old dog, screamed every fibre of his being, new tricks.
‘Control Centre to Helios One, you are cleared, repeat cleared for commencement of preliminary take-off procedure in fifteen, one-five, minutes, over.’
George growled. He didn’t like talking to a computer; it made you feel odd, it was like talking to yourself. Makes you go blind, talking to yourself, so his mother had told him. He blinked.
Not, he had to admit, that a lot of it was not an improvement. It worked, for a start. When you wanted it to turn left, you just wiggled the stick; you didn’t have to lean right over and lean your back against the side of the cockpit. In fact, you didn’t even have to wiggle the stick; something called an autopilot would do it for you. I wonder, George muttered resentfully to himself, how much he’s getting a week. Probably non-union, too.
‘Helios One to Control Centre,’ he intoned. ‘Commencing pre-take-off checklist programme, over.’ He said it with roughly the same degree of expression and involvement as a forcibly converted Aztec saying the Mass in Latin, and without very much more idea what it was supposed to mean. It was all very well, sure; instead of having some brainless erk of a trainee standing out on the tarmac hauling on the propellor to get the thing fired up, all you needed to do was press a button. Provided, of course, you could remember which button. There were rather a lot of them, and they were all exactly the same shade of red.
Ah well. If things got tricky he could always ask the autopilot.
Instinctively he felt behind his seat for his thermos, and then remembered that in the shiny new design there were no convenient little ledges and nooks for secreting personal belongings in. Instead, there was a beverage control monitoring system, which unerringly threw a cup of warm, brown water all over him as he was coming into the bumpy stretch above 10.45 a.m. Time I retired, he said to himself. If only they’d let me, he added.
&n
bsp; ‘Control Centre to Helios One, scheduled take-off time minus fourteen, one-four, minutes, over.’
If only, George continued to muse, the Boy hadn’t gone off like that. He had talent for this job, the Boy had. Wonder where he was now? There’d been a rumour going about the Social Club that he’d packed in the Service altogether and gone off doing some job or other among the mortals. Still, they tended to say that about anybody who went missing for more than a week these days. Perhaps the Boy was going to be seconded back, now that they’d gone and bought this new model. A natural, that lad; fly anything, given time and provided nobody minded what he collided with while he was practising.
As take-off approached (what was wrong with calling it Dawn, by the way? Dawn had class; but you’d feel a bit of a Charlie talking about rosy-fingered take-off or the take-off coming up like thunder) something small but hard, like the ball in a pinball machine, started to roll about inside George’s head; and maybe it was the faint jolt as the giant machine lifted smoothly into the air that finally gave it the impetus to roll into place. Anyway, roll it did. Clunk.
There was something very wrong with this machine, and nobody had realised. What the hell was it?
George flipped the intercom back to transmit.
‘Helios One to Control Centre. Am cruising at five hundred thousand, five-oh-oh-thousand metres and climbing, all systems functional, over.’
He replaced the microphone thing, looked around to make sure nobody could see him, and switched off the autopilot.
‘No hard feelings, chum,’ he explained. ‘You’re doing a lovely job, but you know how it is. Always was a rotten passenger, me.’
He took hold of the stick and instinctively moved it to the right position. At once he became aware of a minute difference in the feel of the thing. The pinball rolled round in its hole and settled again, and in the back of George’s mind, some coloured lights lit up and shouted ‘Replay!’
Slower. Ever since he’d switched it on to manual, it’d slowed down.
George glanced out of the side of the cockpit at the ground. Centuries of practice flying the old sun on manual had enabled him to gauge the airspeed simply by watching the ground, while his brain made a series of subconscious, lightning-quick calculations. He knew he was flying at the right speed, just by the way the shadows of the trees below him shortened and lengthened again as he passed over. And yet just now he’d slowed down. It’s impossible to confuse deceleration with any other experience in the world; like mashed swede, there’s absolutely nothing you can mistake it for. Which meant . . .
‘Bugger me,’ George said; and, in spite of himself, he chuckled. It only went to show, you do no good by fiddling with things just for the sake of it.
It explained everything; the wilting crops, the freakish behaviour of the tides, the fact that the Pole Star was halfway up the back of Cassiopeia’s Chair, the friction burns down the left-hand side of the Kalahari Desert, the way his wife always seemed surprised when he got in from work these days.
The daft sods had made the damn thing go too fast.
TWELVE
The alarm-clock buzzed. Jane made a squeaking noise, rubbed her eyes and extended an arm with the general idea of getting hold of whatever was making that horrible noise and throttling it. Then her memory fired up, and she groaned.
It was morning, and she had to get up and go to work. Oh damn . . .
She brushed her teeth like a well-brought-up robot, combed her hair and looked at herself in the mirror.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m Jane. I help run the Universe.’
It didn’t sound any better this morning than it had yesterday. She shrugged, blew her nose and went to see whether the ironing-fairy had broken in during the night and made a start on the blouse dump.
It hadn’t. Bother.
Hanging at the back of the wardrobe and looking as if it had been dead for some considerable time, she found the old blue blouse with the Princess Diana collar that her mother had given her for Christmas, back in the days when you could buy a whole roast ox, watch the bear-baiting and still have change out of a half-groat.
On the other hand, she said to herself, it’s the only clean blouse I’ve got.
She put it on, together with a few other jumble-sale rejects which she found hidden in corners, and stumped through into the kitchen to make herself a slice of toast and a cup of tea. The floor crackled underfoot as she walked.
‘Yes, all right,’ she said aloud, ‘I’ll clean you tonight if you’ll just shut up.’
Don’t suppose I will, though, she said to herself, as she stood waiting for the kettle. I’ll be too tired. And anyway, people who run universes should have their housework done for them, surely. I mean, it doesn’t say and on the eighth day, He changed the bed, cleaned the oven and did the hoovering, does it?
That’s probably because He was a He.
Smoke curled out from under the grill and she sighed. Speciality of the house, she muttered to herself, Toast à la Pucelle. She grabbed a knife and started to scrape, until she was left with a large pile of black dust and about four square inches of toast.
Job satisfaction, she said to herself, that’s what I’ve got. You know, the lovely feeling that I’m making the world a better place. Really making the world a better place. Or will be.
Staff had explained all that to her. Yes, she’d ironed out all the problems of human personal relationships at a stroke, but of course it wasn’t as simple as that. A built-in fail-safe in the programme slowed the process down so that the customers wouldn’t notice anything different. Wouldn’t do for the customers to notice anything, they’d get restive, start believing in things, bad for morale. This way, she reflected bitterly, they’ll be happy ever after without realising it, and so they’ll go on being miserable, the same as before.
‘Yes,’ she said to the kettle, ‘but I did manage to get them to replace the sun, remember. I mean . . .’
The kettle looked at her without saying anything. It didn’t need to. She looked away and tried to crush rock-hard butter on to the porcelain-fragile toast without smashing it in the process.
There was nothing to show for it. The less there was to show for it the better, and so far she had a hundred per cent success rate.
‘The hell with this,’ she snarled at the kitchen clock. ‘If I had any brains, I’d go back to working at Burridge’s. At least I was sure of getting away at five-thirty.’
The clock ticked. A fat lot of help you are, she thought. Still, I have to talk to you, because if I start talking to myself, it’ll mean I’m going mad.
She dumped the last few shards of toast in the bin and made a mental note to try and buy a sandwich at the station. The station . . . Well, it was a different sort of commuting; bus to Waterloo, train to Salisbury, change for Amesbury, bus to Stonehenge, bodily translation from there direct to the office. Unless there was a go-slow or track repairs, of course, in which case she’d be diverted to the Cloud of Unknowing and have to try and find a taxi.
‘And you can shut up as well,’ she snapped at the eggtimer.
At the back of her mind, in among the almost-forgotten birthdays and rotting scraps of Maths O-level, a small and badly underpaid member of staff coughed nervously and suggested that something was probably fundamentally wrong with the whole set-up. Either you work on earth, it said, and you get all this hassle, but at least you stay a human being doing sort of human things, plus the ironing; or you work in the Empyrean and don’t have to be bothered with matters corporeal. And while we’re on the subject, it added, looking nervously over its shoulder, I don’t know about you but I think there’s something extremely fishy about this whole work thing, and it really doesn’t add up at all, because . . .
It would have enlarged on this theme if something large, panther-shaped and blatantly alien hadn’t jumped out of the shadows on the edge of the subconscious and bitten its head off. The small knot of thoughts which had gathered to listen to it quickly melted away. A few fr
actions of a second later, strange shapes in black overalls came and cleared away the mess.
Leave the washing-up till I get home, said Jane to herself. Gosh, must rush. Don’t want to be late for work.
‘You’ll like the work here,’ Staff had said. ‘Relaxing. No pressure or hassle or anything like that, just straightforward clerical and administration.You probably need a rest after all that, um, recently.’
The phone rang again. Jane stuck her tongue out at it, and then picked up the receiver.
‘This is Phil from Audit,’ it said nastily. ‘Look, aren’t those 1998 projections down yet? You promised we’d have them a fortnight ago and we’re completely stuffed without them.’
Jane sighed and went into Ansafone mode. ‘My name’s Jane,’ she said, ‘I’ve only been in this office a week and I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m supposed to be doing or what’s going on. If you would care to explain exactly what it is that you want me to do, I’ll get on to it as soon as I possibly can. Thank you.’ Then, out of what could be described as sheer devilment were it not for the risk of causing confusion in the present context, she made a beep noise, and waited.
There was, as usual, a disconcerted pause of about three-quarters of a second. ‘Look,’ said the voice, ‘it’s just not good enough. Unless I get those breakdowns on my desk by half past four this afternoon, there’s going to be ructions, okay?’
The line went dead. Jane shrugged, replaced the receiver and turned her attention back to the bulging tray of papers in front of her. They were all sorts of different colours, and they were covered in print, typewriting and office-person’s handwriting (which is cursive, semi-legible and entirely uniform in every office in the whole of Creation) in a wide assortment of scripts and alphabets; all of which, curiously enough, Jane found that she could read without difficulty. The only problem was that none of them carried any sort of clue on the face of them as to what they were or what had to be done with them; apart, of course, from the ones with URGENT (or even occasionally URGENT!!!) stamped on them in red. Clearly, she was meant to worry like hell about those.
