Here Comes the Sun

by Tom Holt

  Actually, two things. True, one of them is indeed blood. This was the other one.

  ‘Just out of interest,’ Jane remarked, ‘why have you got a baby strapped to your back?’

  ‘That’s not a baby, that’s the hostage,’ Bjorn said. Once he’d said it, of course, it occurred to him that you don’t say words like hostage in airports, even airports that probably only exist in the vague and unfrequented dimensions under the stairs of the human brain. By then, of course, it was too late.

  ‘I see,’ Jane said, and nodded. ‘He’s turned into a baby.’ She continued looking at Bjorn - just over his shoulders, to be precise - but her next words were addressed vertically. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s fine. Don’t mind me; after all, it’s your continuum, you do whatever you like.’ She shuddered. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘you agreed that we seem to be in an airport?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ Bjorn confirmed. He was trying to stuff a very, very disreputable handkerchief up the back of his shirt.

  ‘Well, why not?’ Jane replied, smiling brightly. ‘Where better than an airport, if we want to go somewhere? I mean, we don’t have any passports or tickets or anything like that, let alone any money, and . . .’ She stopped herself, and then started again. ‘That’s not going to be a problem, though, is it?’ she said. ‘Now then, where was it we wanted to go?’

  ‘Um,’ said Bjorn.

  ‘It’s very logical,’ Jane went on, sorting through her pockets with a sort of manic confidence. ‘We wanted to go somewhere. Therefore we are in an airport. I think we can put that down to good old-fashioned cause and effect, somehow.’ She paused, and considered briefly. ‘In the old days,’ she added, ‘I think there was a lot of tedious mucking about with genies and lamps and three wishes, but I suppose they rationalised all that. Ah, here we are.’

  She held out two passports, and two tickets.

  Although she wasn’t in the least surprised at the way they’d materialised, she was intrigued to notice that they were return tickets. One was marked THERE, the other BACK.

  ‘Oh come on,’ she exclaimed testily. ‘Either the whole free will thing was a gag or it wasn’t. You can’t have it both ways.’

  A nun looked at her.

  ‘You keep out of it,’ she snapped.

  Jane and Bjorn Blyblollolob, passgers on Bee Dubbyu Ay fly nummer Squirch Frow Squirch to Somewhere Else, pliz proceed immidyatly to gate nummer miaow, passgers Jane and Bjorn Blyblollolop, fankyow.

  Jane winced. Then she looked directly upwards once more.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And about time, too.’

  ‘THIS WAY!’

  ‘Actually, chief, that way’s a . . .’

  Splash.

  Staff stopped running and collapsed against a door. It swung open, and he fell through.

  It is important to remember that all offices are one office, all corridors are one corridor, and all fire extinguishers, wherever consciously situated, end up directly on a level with the kneecaps of stumbling people. Staff swore.

  He was in his own office,

  ‘Now hold on,’ he panted to nobody in particular. ‘If we’re going to play silly beggars with each other, we might as well do it properly.’

  The light switched on, apparently of its own accord. There was suddenly a cup of tea on the desk. Staff knew without tasting it that there were two sugars.

  He realised that he hadn’t had the faintest idea who he was talking to, but whoever it was had listened. It was terrifying.

  ‘Ganger,’ he whispered. ‘Can you hear me?’

  There was silence, internal as well as external. He shook his head frantically, but nothing rattled about in it. He even tried blowing his nose, but no dice.

  ‘Um, can you hear me?’ he said. ‘How about one . . .’ He looked about frantically, and saw the cup of tea. ‘One digestive biscuit for yes, two for no.’ Two digestive biscuits slid out of the air and into the saucer. They seemed to be grinning.

  ‘I see,’ Staff muttered, his teeth set. ‘It’s going to be one of those days, isn’t it?’

  (. . . And outside, in the world, a split pin in the gravity induction drive mysteriously floated out and fell on the floor with an unheeded tinkle. It caused a very localised problem; the world was unaffected except for a square mile of Amazonian rain forest, where the trees were suddenly sucked down into the ground.)

  Staff walked deliberately round to his chair, sat down and put his feet up in one of the drawers. He reached out for the tea and biscuits.They moved, gently but firmly, six inches to the right.

  ‘I suppose telling me who you are would be out of the question,’ he said.

  Two digestive biscuits, travelling like the razor-sharp throwing-discs of the Japanese Ninja, scythed through the hair on the top of his head and embedded themselves in the wall. He glowered at them.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said firmly. ‘I can wait.’

  The universe - or at least the part of it filling Staff’s office; the relevant part - held its breath. There was a puzzled silence. Staff folded his arms, leaned his head back and gazed at the ceiling.

  Time, of course, is tricky stuff, and it would be fatuous to say ‘half an hour passed,’ or ‘an hour ticked by,’ under the circumstances. Better to say, ‘some time passed,’ and leave it at that.

  Staff sat still, saying nothing, surrounded by nebulous bafflement. After a while, the ceiling began to flicker, and suddenly was covered with a profoundly weird version of Michelangelo’s vision of creation. But Staff just closed his eyes.

  Some time passed . . .

  NINETEEN

  A brief note on the culture, lifestyle and overall world view of spectral warriors.

  Spectral warriors only know one joke. It goes like this:

  Q: How many spectral warriors does it take to change a light-bulb?

  A: One, and a stepladder. At a pinch, of course, he could stand on a chair.

  Like all crack military units, they have marching-songs, the best-loved of which goes:

  Underneath the lamp-light, by the barrack gate.

  Darling, I remember the way you’d always gone by the time I got there.

  Spectral warriors come into being when freeze-dried dragons’ teeth are sown on the ground, and cease to exist when an enemy kills them, or (more usually) when they transgress their own Byzantine disciplinary regulations. Being composed entirely of spirit and ether, they do not require food and drink, or at least, they never get any. Very few of them survive long enough to find out whether or not it actually matters.

  It would be wrong to say that spectral warriors are afraid of nothing: they’re afraid of an enormous variety of things, and their anxiety is usually thoroughly justified. The only thing they aren’t scared of is the enemy, because anything their opponents can do to them is going to be playtime compared to what’s waiting for them when they get back to camp. This is, of course, intentional.

  Platoon 384657J, Blue Company (known in the service as the Whimpering Eagles) burst through the plate-glass windows at a fast trot, fanned out and assumed the legendary Reverse Tortoise formation, a manoeuvre designed to enable the front-line troops simultaneously to envelop the enemy and get as far away from the commanding officer as possible. Then they took cover, deploying in the specially developed triplex enfilade pattern unique to the unit. Then they stood up and looked sheepish.

  The lance-corporal turned to face the crowd of staring holidaymakers, and cleared his throat self-consciously.

  ‘Wrong airport,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  The entire section then withdrew, putting into practice the time-honoured embarrassed slouch.

  The general drew a deep breath, as if to shout, but the words came out at an unexpectedly gentle muzzle velocity. It was like being cooed at by a man-eating dove.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘This way, I think.’

  ‘We haven’t got time,’ Jane hissed. ‘Come on.’

  Bjorn looked round, stupefied. He’d never seen so many c
ans of lager in his entire life. It was, he decided, either a vision of paradise or a challenge. He wanted it to be a challenge.

  ‘Um, yuh,’ he said. ‘Just let me, uh, choose a six-pack, and I’ll be right with you.’

  He turned back, and gawped.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d been in a Duty Free, of course, but it was the first time he’d ever been in a perfect one. The thing which made it different from all the rest was the way it had nothing but beer. Lots of beer. There were cans as far as the eye could see; in fact, if he’d thought about it, he’d have realised that so much specific gravity in one place at one time was a direct contravention of the laws of physics.

  ‘Stone me,’ he whispered. ‘They’ve even got Rottweiler Nine-X.’ His hand reached out instinctively, like a seedling reaching for the sun - and with about as much chance of making contact, because Jane had caught hold of his ear and was pulling.

  ‘For pity’s sake,’ she was saying, ‘you may be a moron, but I’d have thought even you could recognise an obvious trap when you saw . . .’ She stopped dead, her mouth hanging open, and her fingers slowly relaxed their grip.

  Odd, Bjorn thought, I didn’t notice there was a perfume counter. In fact, there wasn’t one when I came in, just sixty thousand cans of Budweiser. He tried to interest Jane in this fact, but he was wasting his time.

  ‘Please yourself, then,’ he said. ‘I’ll just go back and have another look at the . . .’

  The beer had gone. It had been replaced by a million bottles of scent. Either the shelf-stackers had access to some fairly advanced technology, or something peculiar was going on.

  Behind his back, the hostage started to cry.

  ‘Hey!’ Bjorn protested. ‘That’s not fair. I was just going to . . .’ He hesitated, while the world flickered. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Right, that’s more like it. Thanks.’

  For her part, Jane was standing looking at the bottle of Chanel she’d just decided to buy and was trying to figure out why the label now read Jackal Extra Lite, Original Gravity 1034°-1038°.

  Bjorn scratched his head. ‘You know what,’ he said slowly. ‘I bet if you opened one of these cans there wouldn’t be any beer in there anyway.’

  Jane looked at him absently. ‘Sorry?’ she said.

  ‘I think,’ Bjorn replied, ‘that all this is a thing. You know. Illustration. Illusion. Figment of the whatsisname, imagination.’

  ‘I know,’ Jane said. ‘And it was so cheap, too.’

  They looked at each other.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ Jane said. ‘I wish we knew where we were.’

  Bjorn shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It’s where we’re going that matters.’

  That sounded terribly impressive, and Jane nodded. ‘Well said,’ she answered. ‘And where’s that?’

  Bjorn looked around. The Duty Free had vanished, and had been replaced by one of those little stalls that sell impractical pink socks. An electric trolley lumbered past and vanished into a gap between two delaminating dimensions.

  ‘Dunno,’ he said.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  The security officer looked round, and then looked up. About a foot above his head he could make out two tiny points of red light, like . . . Well, if he was a rabbit standing in the middle of a five-lane freeway, and if articulated lorries had red headlights, that’s what they’d have looked like, only less, well, cosy.

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ said a voice from a long way away, ‘but could you possibly tell me the name of this delightfully appointed airport?’

  The security guard licked his tongue round the inside of his parched mouth, and told him. The lights flickered for a moment as the black column they were attached to nodded. ‘Thank you,’ it said. ‘Very much obliged to you.’ Then it turned, inserted what would have been fingers if it had had hands into the black hole where its mouth would have been had it been fitted with one, and whistled.

  The front of the entrance hall blew out in a confetti-storm of shattered glass, and the floor shook with the almost subterranean thumps of exploding stun-grenades. Disconcerting shapes, like clouds of black nothing, swung in on ropes, tried unsuccessfully to stop, and crashed into electronic departure boards with pyrotechnic results. There was a really revolting sort of burning smell - not exactly indescribable, because language is capable of an infinity of subtle modulations, but describing it with any accuracy would be a pretty antisocial thing to do. An abandoned luggage trolley quietly folded its wheels inwards and tried to crawl backwards into the wall.

  Last of all, the general strode in. He stepped over the dazed body of the security guard, marched over to one slumped heap of smouldering black cloth, and prodded it with the toe of his jackboot.

  ‘Idiots,’ he said.

  The remaining black shapes - still plenty of them - gathered reluctantly around him, as he studied the check-in area thoughtfully.

  After a long time, the general turned due east, wiped melted soldier off the sole of his boot, and pointed.

  ‘They went thataway,’ he said.

  Bjorn shuddered. The damp patch was expanding with all the speed of the First Mongol Empire, and was threatening to annex his sleeves.

  ‘Er,’ he said, before the embarrassment caught up with him and clogged up his vocal cords. He blushed.

  ‘What?’ Jane said, without turning her head. She was trying to follow the arrows that pointed the way to passport control, and was wondering whether it was the third or the fourth time they’d passed that photograph booth in the corner there.

  ‘Um,’ Bjorn mumbled, ‘I think the, er, hostage needs changing. You know, like now, maybe. Sort of thing.’

  ‘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.