by Tom Holt
‘Why not?’
‘Because they wouldn’t have agreed,’ Ganger said. ‘Plus, they’d have guessed what we were up to.’
‘They’re the wet leaves we were talking about just now, I take it?’
‘Some of them,’ replied Staff, nodding. ‘So what we were doing, being absolutely frank and open about the whole thing, was sending you in without any backup or support whatsoever, with the express purpose of getting up the noses of some of the most important people in the whole Administration. We knew they wouldn’t let you do anything really useful; in fact, we’re absolutely amazed how much you have managed to get done. No, the whole point of the exercise was to get them well and truly annoyed and angry; and then, with any luck, they’ll make mistakes, and we’ll have ’em.’
Jane sat for a moment. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘But why didn’t you tell me all that in the first place?’
‘Because you’d have refused,’ Ganger replied. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Jane thoughtfully. ‘Probably not, actually. But I wouldn’t have done it so well. I’d have been all furtive and apologetic about it, I expect, because I’d have known I was up to something sneaky.’
‘Sneaky?’
Jane nodded her head. ‘Sneaky in a good cause,’ she said, ‘but definitely sneaky. As it is, I’ve charged along thinking I had right on my side and it’s them who’re being difficult and obstructive. Yes, I get the idea now.’
‘Good,’ Ganger said, cheerfully. ‘This coffee, by the way, tastes as if it’s spent the last year in a gearbox.’
‘It certainly explains,’ Jane continued, ‘why you two have been taking such a keen interest in everything I’ve been doing.’
‘You noticed that, then?’ Staff enquired.
‘Yes,’ Jane said. ‘I thought it was odd at the time, two highranking officials personally supervising just one trainee. You said it was because I was a guinea-pig . . .’
‘Not so much a guinea-pig,’ Ganger said, half to himself, ‘more one of those white rabbits you get in research . . .’ Staff kicked him under the table.
‘Anyway,’ Staff said, ‘we’ve come clean, so what about it? Are you still going to carry on?’
Jane scratched the tip of her nose with her plastic straw. ‘Oh, I don’t see why not,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if I’ve got anything better to do.’ Suddenly she stood up. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘I think this whole thing is probably a bad dream I’ve been having, and unless I wake up pretty soon I’m going to miss my bus. What the hell do you two think you’ve been playing at, anyway?’
Staff was about to say something, but Ganger shushed him. Other diners turned their heads and looked at them.
‘First of all,’ Jane continued, gathering momentum but not appearing to dissipate any energy in the process. ‘This weirdo here comes and tells me he’s a . . .’
‘Not that word, please,’ Ganger said softly.
‘. . . And that he wants me to come and work for him, and until I agree he’s going to camp out permanently in my ear. Then,’ she said, turning to Staff, who instinctively moved a little further behind his coffee-cup, ‘you turn up and tell me that unless I pack in my job with Burridge’s and come and work for you instead, the world’s going to end. And somehow,’ she added, with feeling, ‘you convince me - probably because of a couple of conveniently timed natural disasters - and so that’s what I do. And first I rescue a major city from a flood, and then I help you cover up the fact that you’re so damned laid back that anybody can just walk in to your premises and help themselves to the major star of their choice, and I somehow start believing, Yes, maybe this is for real after all. And then . . .’ She paused, scrabbling around for words in the same way a motorist at a toll booth searches for an elusive coin. ‘And then, just when I’m beginning to be able to look at myself in the mirror every morning without wanting to burst out laughing, you tell me that what I’m really doing is helping you two with some weird boardroom coup or other. Well,’ she said, ‘you can take your job and you can stuff it, because . . .’ She stopped dead. ‘My God,’ she whispered, ‘I’ve been wanting to say that to somebody all my life, and now I actually have. Whee!’ She pulled herself together, straightened her back and picked up her handbag. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’m through. I’d give you a month’s notice, but after a week in the Department of Time I shudder to think what you’d do with it. Goodbye.’
She turned her head towards the door and started to walk towards it.
Bearing in mind the way the cosmos is run, and who runs it, credit has to be given for the fact that she got over halfway before the ground suddenly opened and swallowed her up.
SEVENTEEN
Bjorn carefully took the basin off the fire and tested the water with his finger. Then he took off his boots and put his feet in it.
He’d been a long way: up as far as the first range of picturesque blue hills to the east and halfway to the shadowy forest-clad slopes in the west, and still without finding so much as a kebab house, let alone the Kentucky Fried Chicken of his dreams. Shadowy forests and verdant meadows, yes; food, no. He poked his little fire with a stick and cast a furtive glance over his shoulder at a shyly grazing fawn.
This place, he said to himself, is the absolute pits.
Above him the sun shone, casting long, sharp-edged shadows on the bowling-green grass of the river valley. He lay on his back and stuck his tongue out at it.
Years ago, he remembered, I worked for those bastards. Best years of my eternal bloody life I gave them, lugging great heavy boxes about mostly. It wasn’t fun, exactly, but at least a bloke could go down the Social Club with his mates, play a few frames of pool, have a couple of pints and a bag of chips afterwards, throw up over a parked car or two and trip over a dustbin before going home. At least there were pavements, and gutters, and the water came out of taps instead of lying around in river-beds where leaves and stuff can fall in it.
And then, he recalled, still years ago, I was working on the sun; nothing exciting, just cleaning it off at the end of the day, hosing it down, scraping the squashed flies off the windshield. And something went wrong or some daft bugger made a really big cock-up, and everybody reckoned I knew what it was, because I was in the sheds working when it happened, whatever it was. So they said, anyway. News to me, but still, they said that whatever it was had to be hushed up and I’d have to go, and I could either start a new life somewhere else, somewhere idyllic, or else . . . well, I can’t remember what, I think it was just Or Else.
Bastards . . .
The fawn was looking up at him out of great round black eyes. He relaxed and smiled.
‘Here, baby,’ he chirrupped. ‘Whooza preddy liddle deer, den?’ With some of those wild leeks from under the trees over there and maybe some watercress, he whispered to himself, you could do worse.
And then the fawn pricked up its ears, swivelled its head, and darted away. A forlorn attempt to hit it with a rock at twenty yards failed. Bjorn sat down again and started to massage the soles of his feet.
And then looked up. There was a girl standing over him: a tall girl, with long, straight hair, a sort of chestnut brown, and light blue eyes and a kind of mischievous-angel half-smile on her slightly parted lips. And, more to the point, knockers like footballs. Bjorn opened his eyes wide and let his jaw drop.
‘Um,’ he said, but it came out as a real thoroughbred mumble. ‘Sorry, was that your, um, deer?’
The girl brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and knelt down beside him on the grass. She was wearing a simple peasant blouse, the sort that they don’t even bother putting the price on in Printemps, and in her right hand she held a basket of strawberries.
‘Na searan thu chulain-bach ma?’2 she said. Bjorn had a couple of goes at swallowing his Adam’s apple and grinned stupidly.
‘Er, yeah,’ he said. ‘Right. Um.’
The girl laughed; and her laughter was like the soft splashing of a mountain tarn; or alternatively, ice-col
d lager hitting the bottom of the glass. Bjorn blinked and instinctively started to pull on his boots.
‘Be curailin suine pel-riath mo,’3 said the girl, and it occurred to Bjorn, apropos of nothing much, that her eyes were like . . . well, they were like . . . well, they were pretty neat eyes, you know?
‘Hi,’ he croaked. ‘I’m Bjorn. Yup. Right.’
The girl laughed again, and this time, hell, you could almost taste the hops. Then she took a strawberry from the basket and popped it into his mouth before he could close it.
‘Er, right,’ he said. ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot.’
The girl leaned forward and kissed the top of his head, and it seemed to Bjorn that the smell of her hair was like the first cigarette after a twelve-hour night shift in the explosives store. Then she giggled, stood up and walked away.
About five minutes later, Bjorn stopped staring at where she’d been, and spat out the strawberry. His left leg had gone to sleep and something small and hairy was running about inside his boot. In the shade of a thicket of wild laurels, two shy, velvet-antlered fawns were laughing themselves sick.
Jane opened her eyes.
And a fat lot of good it did, too. In order for your eyes to be of any use, it helps if you’re not in a windowless cavern hundreds of feet below ground, with the lights off.
‘Hello,’ said a voice above her.
She tried to move, but that was a wash-out too. Somebody or something had done a pretty neat job of tying her to what her intuition told her was a railway sleeper. A long way over her head, more or less where her instincts suggested the voice was coming from, she became aware of a low crunching noise, like a steamroller creeping slowly up a gravel path.
‘Hello?’ she whispered.
‘Oh good, you’re awake,’ replied the darkness.The voice was masculine, probably, but beyond that it was monumentally nondescript. It had no accent, gave no indication of age; and if it happened to be speaking in English, Jane felt, that was probably due to some fiendishly advanced simultaneous-translation system. ‘My name is,’ and it said something Jane didn’t grasp, but which sounded very like Eyesee. Couldn’t be that, of course. Stood to reason.
‘What am I doing here?’ Jane enquired.
‘I don’t know,’ Eyesee replied, ‘I can’t see in this light. Don’t you think it’s terribly dark in here?’
‘Yes,’ Jane replied, trying to ignore the creeping sensation she was experiencing, which felt rather the way she imagined it would feel if you had someone cleaning the marrow out of your bones with a pipe cleaner.
‘Shall we have the lights on, then?’
‘Yes, please.’
Well, we all say silly things sometimes, and she wasn’t to know. So, when the lights suddenly came on and she started to scream uncontrollably, there was a small part of her brain that was able to say, ‘Wasn’t my fault,’ and mean it.
‘Gosh,’ said Eyesee, ‘is there anything the matter?’
By way of reply, Jane screamed some more; a lot more, in fact. Even when the lights went out again, she carried on whimpering and gibbering for nearly two minutes, which is a long time.
‘Better now?’
‘Nnnnnn.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Mmmmmmmm.’
‘I hope I didn’t startle you,’ said Eyesee. ‘Perhaps I should have mentioned that some people find my appearance distressing. Me for one,’ he added.
Jane subsided into a series of short, mucous gasps. The voice waited for a while, and then cleared its throat softly.
‘It scares the living daylights out of me sometimes,’ Eyesee said. ‘Depending on what frame of mind I’m in. By the way,’ he went on, ‘my name. Actually my full name is Executive Officer i/c Reprogramming and Mental Aberration Adjustment. My friends call me Eyesee for short. Or rather, they would if I had any.’ He paused. ‘I don’t, though,’ he added. ‘I think my appearance is against me, you see.’
‘Mmmmmm.’
There was a sigh. ‘Before that,’ Eyesee went on, ‘I was called Retribution, and I didn’t mind that, because then I could be Rhett for short, like Rhett Butler. But the chaps Upstairs thought Retribution was a bit downbeat, so they changed it. These days they like to stress the positive aspects of the work we do here. Uphill job, mind.’
Jane sat frozen. She was aware of the inordinate length of time it was taking the big blob of sweat to reach the end of her nose, and it dawned on her, or at least upon a part of her mind that was playing roughly the same role in this episode that the orchestra played in the sinking of the Titanic, that Fear is another dimension.
‘Anyway,’ Eyesee went on, ‘I don’t mind what I’m called these days, now that I’ve had a chance to get used to it. It’s pretty apt, really, because people see retribution the way they want to see it, so I look different to everyone. Horrible, of course, but different. So I think Eyesee is a pretty good name, don’t you think?’ The voice paused. ‘Because it’s up to your eye to see me the way you think I ought to be, okay? How did I come across to you, by the way?’
Jane swallowed hard, and discovered that someone had laid a thick concrete path right down her throat. ‘You were very big,’ she said. ‘Huge. And slimy. And you had little strips of flesh still stuck to your bones. And there were these maggots . . .’
‘Ah.’ There was, far away in the darkness, a faint sniff. ‘Seems like you didn’t catch me at my best.’
‘Um.’
‘Maggots, did you say?’
‘Mm.’
‘What a perfectly horrid idea,’ said the voice. ‘I must say, you’ve got a rather nasty imagination there. Perhaps you ought to see somebody about it.’
There was a long silence.
‘Well,’ said Eyesee, ‘this is all very well but it’s not getting us very far. Look, would you mind awfully if I just had a little light? I promise to keep out of your field of vision. Only, well, the truth is I get sort of nervous in the dark. It’s probably because I’m afraid that I’m out there somewhere. Maggots,’ he repeated with distaste. ‘Whatever next!’
‘Go ahead,’ Jane quavered. ‘I’ll shut my eyes.’
There was a click, and then a faint glow began to permeate the darkness, like ink soaking into blotting-paper. ‘People find that closing your eyes doesn’t actually help,’ Eyesee remarked. ‘Tell you what, I’ll hide behind the flywheel. You won’t be able to see me then.’
Slowly and deliberately, Jane counted up to ten. ‘Ready?’ she called out.
‘Ready.’
She opened her eyes. To her overwhelming relief all she could see was an enormous machine. It wasn’t anything identifiable like a printing press or a hydraulic ram; imagine a top film designer had been told to design a machine for a horror-film set - that’s what it was like. A really top designer.
‘Where am I?’ she whispered.
‘Do you know,’ said Eyesee’s voice from behind the machine, ‘it’s amazing how many people say that. And before I started working here I thought it was only in books. You’re in Justice.’
Jane’s eyes widened, until her memory told her to pack it in. ‘Department of Justice?’ she said.
‘Got it in one. This is the engine room, as you’ll probably have gathered already. What you’re looking at right now are the actual Mills of the Gods.’
‘That grind slow but exceeding small, you mean?’
‘That’s them,’ Eyesee replied. ‘Actually,’ he added, ‘they don’t, not just at the moment. Right now, they grind large and exceeding lumpy. In fact, ninety-five per cent of the time they don’t grind at all.’
‘Um,’ Jane replied. ‘What am I doing . . . ?’
‘Partly,’ Eyesee went on, ‘because the nut on the drive shaft connecting the flywheel to the cams has stripped its thread, and would you believe, you can’t get them in that size any more because these days they’re all metric. Partly because even if they were in full working order they can’t afford to run them for more than an hour a day because of the price
of coal. Partly . . . well, mainly actually, because there’s really no call for them these days.’
‘Right,’ said Jane. ‘Look, why am I tied to this lump of wood, and what am I doing . . . ?’
‘In theory,’ Eyesee went on, and Jane began to wonder whether the maggots were really the least bearable thing about him, ‘they don’t need them any more because of me. De-automation, they call it. All the rage. Who needs machines when you can have people, they say. They don’t give a damn for the effect it’s going to have on the lives of hundreds of thousands of ordinary . . .’
Jane coughed sharply. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. The sound of her words faded away.
‘What they say is,’ Eyesee droned on, ‘who needs Justice anyway? Outmoded concept, superhumanity has moved on since those dark and far-off days, that sort of thing. The idea is that they’re phasing Justice out and replacing it with Retribution. Sorry, with Reprogramming and Mental Aberration Adjustment. That’s me,’ he added bitterly. ‘And Rehabilitation, of course. He’s about here somewhere.’
Jane swallowed. ‘He is?’
‘Unfortunately,’ Eyesee sighed. ‘Nasty piece of work. He makes me look like Tyrone Power, by the way.’
‘Ah.’
‘The idea being,’ said Eyesee unpleasantly, ‘that Retribution may be nasty but at least it’s likely to be pretty exciting, whereas Rehabilitation is just incredibly pointless and boring. They’re right about that, at any rate.’
Jane digested that statement for a moment. ‘Are there any more of you?’ she asked tentatively.
‘Not full-time, no,’ Eyesee replied. ‘There’s Government, of course, but she only comes in two mornings a week. Which is just as well if you ask me, because there’s only two cups in the kitchen and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s having my morning coffee out of a mug.’
‘Government?’
‘It’s got Snoopy on it, as well,’ Eyesee went on. ‘I’ll swear it curdles the milk. Oh, yes, Government.You know, in a democracy people usually get the kind of government they deserve.’
