by Tom Holt
‘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?’
EIGHTEEN
Meanwhile, 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:
Congratulations!You are now the owner of a new Terra 57636. If properly looked after, it will give you many years of reliable and pleasurable service.
Although the Terra 57636 has been hand crafted using only the finest quality materials, in order to get the very best in performance and reliability from your machine, you should observe the following basic rules:
Ensure that all surfaces are clean and free from excess oil. Do not remove the trees, as this interferes with the supply of oxygen to the intake manifolds.
Try to avoid discharging toxic waste into the oceans.This can upset the ecological balance and lead to excessive wear on the icecaps.
Nuclear weapons should not be used in the Terra 57636. It has not been proofed to withstand the pressures likely to be generated by nuclear explosions. The manufacturers cannot be held responsible in the event of accident or damage resulting from non-observance of this warning, which will also invalidate the guarantee
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.
Smiling, the minor but ambitious young official relaxed back into his seat, looked up at the endless blue ceiling above him and began to dream.
All right, right now he was doing a job that was little better than Executive Grade 2 status, but that wasn’t going to last for ever. It wasn’t as if they could just take a trainee, however talented, and plonk him straight down in a fifth-floor office; there were motions to be gone through, knees to be browned. Just as soon as you proved to them that you could do all this noddy stuff with one hand tied behind your back, they’d have you out of it and sitting behind a desk in no time flat. That would mean Clerical status; and once you’d got that, you were halfway there. Anyone with an ounce of go in him could whizz up the Clerical ladder like a rat up a drain with the bailiffs on its tail; and then you’d be in Admin. No more dealing with actual things, no more flying suns or grading snowflakes or lugging about tectonic plates. In Admin, they only dealt with the really important, totally nebulous things - five-year plans, forecasts, projections, economic models, cost-effectiveness ratios, overall strategies. There would be committees, sub-committees, quasi-autonomous review panels, watchdog commissions, one-man working parties. You would have absolute control, and maybe even a chair that swivels.
And then would come the real quantum leap; first to departmental status, before soaring upwards to the Empyrean heights of supervisory management; to permanent chairmanship of a committee so vast and so indefinable that the whole curved universe itself would be only part of its jurisdiction. As yet, nothing so mindbendingly huge existed anywhere in the cosmos, apart from in the minor but ambitious official’s imagination; but if it ever came to pass, it would have to have a name that was abstract to the point of stretching the parameters of applied metaphysics.
Finance and something. Finance and Ultimate Purposes.
Something like that.
The minor but ambitious official smiled. He and the world were young, talented and going places together. He and the world were like that.
Oh.
Oh shit!
Actually, that too was way ahead in the future, but as we’ve already seen, the minor but ambitious official is way ahead of his time.
A long way below, but still rather closer than it ought to be, the surface of the sea boiled. Huge banks of water-vapour drifted up into the sky, bumped jarringly into temperature shifts, liquefied and fell back. Out of the water, jagged points of rock poked nervous and embarrassed fingertips, like guests who have turned up far too early for the birthday party of somebody they scarcely know. And deep down, in the very dregs of the ocean, something that had no business moving, moved.
It wasn’t quite the way it’s depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. There’s no inter-digital fireworks, no snap and crackle of white fire. There should have been, of course; and speeches, and a tape to cut, and a special presentation pair of silver shears, and a band. But there wasn’t.
This is the way the world begins; not with a zap but a cock-up.
With a frenzied jerk on the joystick, the minor but ambitious official hauled the Sun back up to its proper place in the sky, and sagged forward against the straps of the safety harness. In his mind’s eye, he saw two visions:
. . . The first, of the world as it should have been - the calm, dignified procession of perfectly formed organic pioneers rising serenely from the depths of the ocean to colonise the purpose-built land-masses, to evolve in a purposeful way into demi-gods, to begin the long but completely orthodox march towards reunion with their Creator, to the moment when they turn their smug faces to the sun and see only their own reflection . . .
The second, of the world as it was going to be - nasty green slimy things slopping up on to premature beaches, twitching apologies for mandibles in the germ-ridden air; slowly squeezing themselves into all manner of outlandish shapes - ammonites, dinosaurs, mammoths, monkeys, things even more obscenely ludicrous than monkeys; things that would slip out of control and start smashing the place up, building motorways, exterminating whales, waging wars, wearing fluorescent green beachwear . . .
Very carefully, the minor but ambitious official looked all around him, and then down at the seas below.
Maybe nobody would notice.
Not yet, anyway. And by the time they did, who could possibly tell whose fault it had been? He fixed his eyes on the western horizon, steadied his grip on the joystick, and began to whistle aggressively.
Some time later, he made a faultless landing back at the hangar, cut the motors, and climbed rather unsteadily out of the cockpit. As he walked the long, long way across the hangar to the big double doors, nobody came running up, nobody called his name; there were no thick-set men in raincoats, no soldiers, nothing - just the erk with the broom and his headphones, prodding half-heartedly at the first few molecules of dust as they drifted through the still-pure air. He closed his mind to the problem, and gradually the problem began to disintegrate. Fragment of the imagination, trick of the light, nothing moved at all. Pretty good job, young ‘un. Thanks, sir, glad you liked it.
‘Bit low there, weren’t you?’
The minor but ambitious official spun on his heel and stared. For his part, the erk with the broom made a more than usually half-hearted stab at an atom of grime, and scratched his ear where the headphones chafed the lobe.
‘Sorry?’
‘I said, bit low there this morning. Could’ve been an accident, going as low as that. You know, could’ve set something off before its time.’ The erk raised his head and grinned. ‘You want to be more careful,’ he added.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ replied the official, apparently through a mouthful of cotton wool. ‘I kept at exactly the right height all the way.’
‘That’s all right, then,’ replied the erk, widening his grin. ‘Must’ve been imagining things.’
‘Well, don’t do it again,’ the official snapped. ‘And get on with your work. This place is an absolute tip.’
But the grin only became wider, and the official turned away and nearly ran for the doors. As he retreated, he may or may not have heard somebody muttering something like, Calls himself a high-flyer, big joke. Low-flyer’d be nearer the mark . . . He grabbed the door, hauled it open, and slammed it.
And it came to pass exactly as the minor but ambitious young official had foreseen. He got his promotion, the world got mankind, and nobody said
anything. True, there were a few heads shaken at hyper-departmental level, and there was a full internal inquiry. And then nothing.
Nothing, except a face burned deep in the official’s mental retina, a grin, the memory of a tiny movement in the depths of the sea. Meanwhile, two careers developed: one dizzily ascending, one sort of slithering along the bottom. Maybe, said the official to himself a hundred times a day, he’s forgotten all about it. A brain like that needs all its capacity just to make sure the beer ends up in the mouth and not down the front of the shirt. If he was going to say something, he’d have said it by now. And then the grin would float by like a stray patch of anti-matter, and whisper, Don’t kid yourself. He hasn’t forgotten.
As an interesting footnote to all this, it’s worth recording that the evolutionary development of the human waste disposal system was the result of the young official’s subconscious desire to have something appropriate to mutter under his breath every time he thought of it.
‘Oh,’ Bjorn said.
‘Exactly,’ Ganger interrupted. ‘That’s why, as soon as he was appointed chairman of the Finance and General Purposes committee, the first thing he did was have you spirited away to an idyll and kitted out with a brand-new identity. It was a good try, but doomed to failure from the start.’
‘Oh,’ Bjorn repeated. He was thinking, Stuff me, what a lot of long words this jerk knows. ‘Come to think of it, I remember something like what you just said. But I never thought . . .’
From the floor there was a howl that set all the atoms in the cosmos on edge. Ganger stared.
‘You mean you hadn’t . . . I mean, it didn’t occur to you . . .’
‘Nah,’ Bjorn replied. ‘Course, now you tell me, it all sort of makes sense. Yeah, you’ve got a point there.’ He leaned down and put his lips close to Finance and General Purposes’ ear. ‘Bastard!’ he shouted.
‘Well,’ said Ganger quickly, ‘anyway, that’s beside the point. Now we all know, and that’s what really matters, isn’t it? In case you’re wondering how I found out . . .’
