Myri could make nothing of this last part. ‘Thinking? Thinking about what?’

He bit his lip and shut his eyes for a moment. ‘Listen to this,’ he said.

‘It was the analyser that set my mind going. Almost every other day it breaks down. And the computer, the counters, the repellers, the scanners and the rest of them - they’re always breaking down too, and so are their power supplies. But not the purifier or the fluid-reconstitutor or the fruit and vegetable growers or the heaters or the main power source. Why not?’

.

‘Well, they’re less complicated. How can a fruit grower go wrong? A chemical tank and a water tank is all there is to it. You ask Lia about that.’

‘All right. Try answering this, then. The strange happenings. If they’re illusions, why are they always outside the sphere? Why are there never any inside?’

‘Perhaps there are,’ Myri said.

‘Don’t. I don’t want that. I shouldn’t like that. I want everything in here to be real. Are you real? I must believe you are.’

‘Of course I’m real.’ She was now thoroughly puzzled.

‘And it makes a difference, doesn’t it? It’s very important that you and everything else should be real, everything in the sphere. But tell me: whatever’s arranging these happenings must be pretty powerful if it can fool our instruments and our senses so completely and consistently, and yet it can’t do anything - anything we recognise as strange, that is - inside this puny little steel skin. Why not?’

‘Presumably it has its limitations. We should be pleased.’

‘Yes. All right, next point. You remember the time I tried to sit up in the lounge after midnight and stay awake?’

‘That was silly. Nobody can stay awake after midnight. Standing Orders were quite clear on that point.’

‘Yes, they were, weren’t they?’ Bruno seemed to be trying to grin. ‘Do you remember my telling you how I couldn’t account for being in my own bed as usual when the music woke us - you remember the big music? And

- this is what I’m really after - do you remember how we all agreed at breakfast that life in space must have conditioned us in such a way that falling asleep at a fixed time had become an automatic mechanism? You remember that?’

‘Naturally I do.’

‘Right. Two questions, then. Does that strike you as a likely explanation? That sort of complete self-conditioning in all four of us after ... just a number of months?’

‘Not when you put it like that,’

‘But we all agreed on it, didn’t we? Without hesitation.’

Myri, leaning against a side wall, fidgeted. He was being not pleasant in a new way, one that made her want to stop him talking even while he was thinking at his best. ‘What’s your other question, Bruno?’ Her voice sounded unusual to, her.

‘Ah, you’re feeling it too, are you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I think you will in a minute. Try my other question. The night of the music was a long time ago, soon after we arrived here, but you remember it clearly. So do I. And yet when I try to remember what I was doing only a couple of months earlier, on Earth, finishing up my life there, getting ready for this, it’s just a vague blur. Nothing stands out.’

‘It’s all so remote.’

‘Maybe. But I remember the trip clearly enough, don’t you?’

Myri caught her breath. I feel surprised, she told herself. Or something like that. I feel the way Bruno looked when he left the lunch table. She said nothing.

‘You’re feeling it now all right, aren’t you?’ He was watching her closely with his narrow eyes. ‘Let me try to describe, it. A surprise that goes on and on. Puzzlement. Symptoms of physical exertion or strain. And above all a ... a sort of discomfort, only in the mind. Like having a sharp object pressed against a tender part of your body, except that this is in your mind.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘A difficulty of vocabulary.’

The loudspeaker above the door clicked on and Clovis’s voice said:

‘Attention. Strange happening. Assemble in the lounge at once. Strange happening.’

Myri and Bruno stopped staring at each other and hurried out along the narrow corridor. Clovis and Lia were already in the lounge, looking out of the port.

Apparently only a few feet beyond the steelhard glass, and illuminated from some invisible source, were two floating figures. The detail was excellent, and the four inside the sphere could distinguish without difficulty every fold in the naked skin of the two caricatures of humanity presented, it seemed, for their thorough inspection, a presumption given added weight by the slow rotation of the pair that enabled their every portion to be scrutinised. Except for a scrubby growth at the base of the skull, they were hairless. The limbs were foreshortened, lacking the normal narrowing at the joints, and the bellies protuberant. One had male characteristics, the other female, yet in neither case were these complete. From each open, wet, quivering toothless mouth there came a loud, clearly audible yelling, higher in pitch than any those in the sphere could have produced, and of an unfamiliar emotional range.

‘Well, I wonder how long this will last,’ Clovis said.

‘Is it worth trying the repellers on them?’ Lia asked. ‘What does the radar say? Does it see them?’

‘I’ll go and have a look.’

Bruno turned his back on the port. ‘I don’t like them.’

‘Why not?’Myri saw he was sweating again.

‘They remind me of something.’

‘What?’

‘I’m trying to think.’

But although Bruno went on trying to think for the rest of that day, with such obvious seriousness that even Clovis did his best to help with suggestions, he was no nearer a solution when they parted, as was their habit, at five minutes to midnight. And when, several times in the next couple of days, Myri mentioned the afternoon of the caricatures to him, he showed little interest.

‘Bruno, you are extraordinary,’ she said one evening. ‘What happened to those odd feelings of yours you were so eager to describe to me just before Clovis called us into the lounge?’

He shrugged his narrow shoulders in the almost girlish way he had.

‘Oh, I don’t know what could have got into me,’ he said. ‘I expect I was just angry with the confounded analyser and the way it kept breaking down. It’s been much better recently.’

‘And all that thinking you used to do.’

‘That was a complete waste of time.’

‘Surely not.’

‘Yes, I agree with Clovis, let Base do all the thinking.’

Myri was disappointed. To hear Bruno resigning the task of thought seemed like the end of something. This feeling was powerfully underlined for her when, a little later, the announcement came over the loudspeaker in the lounge. Without any preamble at all, other than the usual click on, a strange voice said: ‘Your attention, please. This is Base calling over your intercom.’

They all looked up in great surprise, especially Clovis, who said quickly to Bruno: ‘Is that possible?’

‘Oh yes, they’ve been experimenting,’ Bruno replied as quickly.

‘It is perhaps ironical,’ the voice went on, ‘that the first transmission we have been able to make to you by the present means is also the last you will receive by any. For some time the maintenance of space stations has been uneconomic, and the decision has just been taken to discontinue them altogether. You will therefore make no further reports of any kind, or rather you may of course continue to do on the understanding that nobody will be listening. In many cases it has fortunately been found possible to arrange for the collection of station staffs and their return to Earth: in others, those involving a journey to the remoter parts of the galaxy, a prohibitive expenditure of time and effort would be entailed. I am sorry to have to tell you that your own station is one of these. Accordingly, you will never be relieved. All of us here are confident that you will respond to this new situation with dignity and resource.

‘Before we sever communication for the last time, I have one more point to make. It involves a revelation which may prove so unwelcome that only with the greatest reluctance can I bring myself to utter it. My colleagues, however, insisted that those in your predicament deserve, in your own interests, to hear the whole truth about it. I must tell you, then, that contrary to your earlier information we have had no reports from any other station whose content resembles in the slightest degree your accounts of the strange happenings you claim to have witnessed. The deception was considered necessary so that your morale might be maintained, but the time for deceptions is over. You are unique, and in the variety of mankind that is no small distinction. Be proud of it. Good-bye for ever.’

They sat without speaking until five minutes to midnight. Try as she would, Myri found it impossible to conceive their future, and the next morning she had no more success. That was as long as any of them had leisure to come to terms with their permanent isolation, for by midday, a quite new phase of strange happenings had begun. Myri and Lia were preparing lunch in the kitchen when Myri, opening the cupboard where the dishes were kept, was confronted by a flattish, reddish creature with many legs and a pair of unequally sized pincers. She gave a gasp, almost a shriek, of astonishment.

‘What is it?’ Lia said, hurrying over, and then in a high voice: ‘Is it alive?’

‘It’s moving. Call the men.’

Until the others came, Myri simply stared. She found her lower lip shaking in a curious way. Inside now, she kept thinking. Not just outside. Inside.

‘Let’s have a look,’ Clovis said. ‘I see. Pass me a knife or something.’

He rapped at the creature, making a dry, bony sound. ‘Well, it works for tactile and aural, as well as visual, anyway. A thorough illusion. If it is one.’

‘It must be,’ Bruno said. ‘Don’t you recognize it?’

‘There is something familiar about it, I suppose.’

‘You suppose? You mean you don’t know a crab when you see one?’

‘Oh, of course,’ Clovis looked slightly sheepish. ‘I remember now. A terrestrial animal, isn’t it? Lives in the water. And so it must be an illusion. Crabs don’t cross space as far as I know, and even if they could they’d have a tough time carving their way through the skin of the sphere.’

His sensible manner and tone helped Myri to get over her astonishment, and it was she who suggested that the crab be disposed of down the waste chute. At lunch, she said: ‘It was a remarkably specific illusion, don’t you think? I wonder how it was projected.’

‘No point in wondering about that,’ Bruno told her. ‘How can we ever know? And what use would the knowledge be to us if we did know?’

‘Knowing the truth has its own value.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

Lia came in with the coffee just then. ‘The crab’s back,’ she said. ‘Or there’s another one there, I can’t tell.’

More crabs, or simulacra thereof, appeared at intervals for the rest of the day, eleven of them in all. It seemed, as Clovis put it, that the illusion-producing technique had its limitations, inasmuch as none of them saw a crab actually materialize: the new arrival would be ‘discovered’ under a bed or behind a bank of apparatus. On the other hand, the depth of illusion produced was very great, as they all agreed when Myri, putting the eighth crab down the chute, was nipped in the finger, suffered pain and exuded a few drops of blood.

‘Another new departure,’ Clovis said. ‘An illusory physical process brought about on the actual person of one of us. They’re improving.’

Next morning there were the insects. Their main apparatus room was found to be infested with what, again on Bruno’s prompting, they recognized as cockroaches. By lunch-time there were moths and flying beetles in all the main rooms, and a number of large flies became noticeable towards the evening. The whole of their attention became concentrated upon avoiding these creatures as far as possible. The day passed without Clovis asking Myri to go with him. This had never happened before.

The following afternoon a fresh problem was raised by Lia’s announcement that the garden now contained no fruits or vegetables none, at any rate, that were accessible to her senses. In this the other three concurred. Clovis put the feelings of all of them when he said: ‘If this is an illusion, it’s as efficient as the reality, because fruits and vegetables you can never find are the same as no fruits and vegetables.’

The evening meal used up all the food they had. Soon after two o’clock in the morning Myri was aroused by Clovis’s voice saying over the loudspeaker: ‘Attention, everyone. Strange happening. Assemble in the lounge immediately.’

She was still on her way when she became aware of a new quality in the background of silence she had grown used to. It was a deeper silence, as if some sound at the very threshold of audibility had ceased. There were unfamiliar vibrations underfoot.

Clovis was standing by the port, gazing through it with interest. ‘Look at this, Myri,’ he said.

At a distance impossible to gauge, an oblong of light had become visible, a degree or so in breadth and perhaps two and a half times as high. The light was of comparable quality to that illuminating the inside of the sphere. Now and then it flickered.

‘What is it?’ Myri asked.

‘I don’t know, it’s only just appeared.’ The floor beneath them shuddered violently. ‘That was what woke me, one of those tremors. Ah, here you are, Bruno. What do you make of it?’

Bruno’s large eyes widened further, but he said nothing. A moment later Lia arrived and joined the silent group by the port. Another vibration shook the sphere. Some vessel in i the kitchen fell to the floor and smashed. Then Myri said: ‘I can see what looks like a flight of steps leading down from the lower edge of the light. Three or four of them, perhaps more.’

She had barely finished speaking when a shadow appeared before them, cast by the rectangle of light on to a surface none of them could identify. The shadow seemed to them of a stupefying vastness, but it was beyond question that of a man. A moment later the man came into view, outlined by the light, and descended the steps. Another moment or two and he was evidently a few feet from the port, looking in on them, their own lights bright on the upper half of him. He was a well-built man wearing a grey uniform jacket and a metal helmet. An object recognizable as a gun of some sort was slung over his shoulder. While he watched them, two other figures, similarly accoutred, came down the steps and joined him. There was a brief interval, then he moved out of view to their right, doing so with the demeanour of one walking on a level surface.

None of the four inside spoke or moved, not even at the sound of heavy bolts being drawn in the section of outer wall directly in front of them, not even when that entire section swung away from them like a door opening outwards and the three men stepped through into the sphere. Two of them had unslung the guns from their shoulders.

Myri remembered an occasion, weeks ago, when she had risen from a stooping position in the kitchen and struck her head violently on the bottom edge of a cupboard door Lia had happened to leave open. The feeling Myri now experienced was similar, except that she had no particular physical sensations. Another memory, a much fainter one, passed across the far background of her mind: somebody had once tried to explain to her the likeness between a certain mental state and the bodily sensation of discomfort, and she had not understood. The memory faded sharply.

The man they had first seen said: ‘All roll up your sleeves.’

Clovis looked at him with less curiosity than he had been showing when Myri first joined him at the port, a few minutes earlier. ‘You’re an illusion,’ he said,

‘No I’m not. Roll up your sleeves, all of you.’

He watched them closely while they obeyed, becoming impatient at the slowness with which they moved. The other man whose gun was unslung, a younger man, said: ‘Don’t be hard on them, Allen. We’ve no idea what they’ve been through.’

‘I’m not taking any chances,’ Allen said. ‘Not after that crowd in the trees. Now this is for your own good,’ he went on, addressing the four.

‘Keep quite still. All right, Douglas.’

The third man came forward, holding what Myri knew to be a hypodermic syringe. He took her firmly by her bare arm and gave her an injection. At once her feelings altered, in the sense that, although there was still discomfort in her mind, neither this nor anything else seemed to matter.

After a time she heard the young man say: ‘You can roll your sleeves down now. You can be quite sure that nothing bad will happen to you.’

‘Come with us,’ Allen said.

Myri and the others followed the three men out of the sphere, across a gritty floor that might have been concrete and up the steps, a distance of perhaps thirty feet. They entered a corridor with artificial lighting and then a room into which the sun was streaming. There were twenty or thirty people in the room, some of them wearing the grey uniform. Now and then the walls shook as the sphere had done, but to the accompaniment of distant explosions. A faint shouting could also be heard from time to time.

Allen’s voice said loudly: ‘Let’s try and get a bit of order going. Douglas, they’ll be wanting you to deal with the people in the tank. They’ve been conditioned to believe they’re congenially aquatic; so you’d better give them a shot that’ll knock them out straight away. Holmes is draining the tank now. Off you go. Now you, James, you watch this lot while I find out some more about them. I wish those psycho chaps would turn up - we’re just working in the dark.’ His voice moved farther away. ‘Sergeant - get these five out of here.’

‘Where to, sir?’

‘I don’t mind where - Just out of here. And watch them.’

‘They’ve all been given shots, sir.’

‘I know, but look at them, they’re not human any more. And it’s no use talking to them, they’ve been deprived of language. That’s how they got the way they are. Now get them out right away.’

Myri looked slowly at the young man who stood near them: James.

‘Where are we?’ she asked.

James hesitated, ‘I was ordered to tell you nothing,’ he said. ‘You’re supposed to wait for the psychological team to get to you and treat you.’

‘Please.’

‘All right. This much can’t hurt you, I suppose. You four and a number of other groups have been the subject of various experiments. This building is part of Special Wefare Research Station No. Four. Or rather it was. The government that set it up no longer exists. It has been removed by the revolutionary army of which I’m a member. We had to shoot our way in here and there’s fighting still going on.’

‘Then we weren’t in space at all.’

‘No.’

‘Why did they make us believe we were?’

‘We don’t know yet.’

‘And how did they do it?’

‘Some new form of deep-level hypnosis, it seems, probably renewed at regular intervals. Plus various apparatus for producing illusions. We’re still working on that. Now, I think that’s enough questions for the moment. The best thing you can do is sit down and rest.’

‘Thank you. What’s hypnosis?’

‘Oh, of course they’d have removed knowledge of that. It’ll all be explained to you later.’

‘James, come and have a look at this, will you?’ Allen’s voice called. ‘I can’t make much of it.’

Myri followed James a little way. Among the clamour of voices, some speaking languages unfamiliar to her, others speaking none, she heard James ask: ‘Is this the right file? Fear Elimination?’

‘Must be,’ Allen answered. ‘Here’s the last entry. Removal of Bruno V

and substitution of Bruno VI accomplished, together with memory-adjustment of other three subjects. Memo to Preparation Centre: avoid repetition of Bruno V personality-type with strong curiosity-drives. Started catching on to the set-up, eh? Wonder what they did with him.’

‘There’s that psycho hospital across the way they’re still investigating; perhaps he’s in there.’

‘With Brunos I to IV, no doubt. Never mind that for the moment. Now. Procedures: penultimate phase. Removal of all ultimate confidence: severance of communication, total denial of prospective change, inculcation of “uniqueness” syndrome, environment shown to be violable, unknowable crisis in prospect (food deprivation). I can understand that last bit. They don’t look starved, though.’

‘Perhaps they’ve only just started them on it.’

‘We’ll get them fed in a minute. Well, all this still beats me, James. Reactions. Little change. Responses poor. Accelerating impoverishment of emotional life and its vocabulary: compare portion of novel written by Myri VII with contributions of predecessors. Prognosis: further affective deterioration: catatonic apathy: failure of experiment. That’s comfort, anyway. But what has all this got to do with fear elimination?’

They stopped talking suddenly and Myri followed the direction of their gaze. A door had been opened and the man called Douglas was supervising the entry of a number of others, each supporting or carrying a human form wrapped in a blanket.

‘This must be the lot from the tank,’ Allen or James said.

Myri watched while those in the blankets were made as comfortable as possible on benches or on the floor. One of them, however, remained totally wrapped in his blanket and was paid no attention.

‘He’s had it, has he?’

‘Shock, I’m afraid.’ Douglas’s voice was unsteady. ‘There was nothing we could do. Perhaps we shouldn’t have -’

Myri stooped and turned back the edge of the blanket. What she saw was much stranger than anything she had experienced in the sphere.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ she asked James.

‘Matter with him? You can die of shock, you know.’

‘I can do what?’

Myri, staring at James, was aware that his face had become distorted by a mixture of expressions. One of them was understanding: all the others were painful to look at. They were renderings of what she herself was feeling. Her vision darkened and she ran from the room, back the way they had come, down the steps, across the floor, back into the sphere.

James was unfamiliar with the arrangement of the rooms there and did not reach her until she had picked up the manuscript of the novel, hugged it to her chest with crossed arms and fallen on to her bed, her knees drawn up as far as they would go, her head lowered as it had been before her birth, an event of which she knew nothing.

She was still in the same position when, days later, somebody sat heavily down beside her. ‘Myri. You must know who this is. Open your eyes, Myri. Come out of there.’

After he had said this, in the same gentle voice, some hundreds of times, she did open her eyes a little. She was in a long, high room, and near her was a fat man with a pale skin. He reminded her of something to do with space and thinking. She screwed her eyes shut.

‘Myri. I know you remember me. Open your eyes again.’

She kept them shut while he went on talking.

‘Open your eyes. Straighten your body.’

She did not move.

‘Straighten your body, Myri. I love you.’

Slowly her feet crept down the bed and her head lifted.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

BRIAN W ALDISS: Manuscript Found

in a Police State

The title to a story is all important, as not only must it encapsulate the intent of the fiction, but it must also capture a reader’s interest. It’s interesting therefore to find how often titles will become standards, almost clichés. The format of the above title, for instance, really owes its origin to the American genius Edgar Allan Poe, who won first-prize in a story contest in 1833 with his short sf-horror tale Ms Found in a Bottle. Ever since that date, that title format has been used by many authors to indicate a story wherein the fate of the narrator is unknown. A few recent examples are Cyril Kornbluth’s Ms Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie , (1957), Hal Draper’s Ms Fnd in a Lbry (1961), Gary Jennings’ Ms Found in an Oxygen Bottle (1973) and Robert Silverberg’s Ms Found in an Abandoned Time Machine (1973). And I very much doubt that will be the last of them.

The following story is a step outside what one might expect from Brian Aldiss - but then Aldiss’s talents are so varied today that perhaps one should expect the unexpected from him. After all, his recent novels Frankenstein Unbound (1974) and The Eighty-Minute Hour (1974) are a far cry from earlier books like Greybeard (1964) and The Dark Light Years (1964). It is of course this versatility that makes Aldiss Britain’s top sf writer.

As stated previously, Aldiss has a knack of appearing in the most unexpected places. Not too long ago, Penthouse carried his article on sex in sf magazine art; The Saturday Book, Harpers Bazaar and Queen and Private Library have also published Aldiss on art in sf. He has had poems published in such unlikely places as The Daily Telegraph Colour Magazine and The Times.

Similarly some of his fiction turns up where one wouldn’t expect it, from Punch and Penthouse to picture post cards! His vignette The Humming Heads appeared in the June 8th 1969 Solstice and The Oh in Jose’ in the March 1966 Cad. Aldiss’s second choice for this book, Manuscript Found in a Police State has appeared only once before, in Winter’s Tales 18 (1972) and for the bulk of the sf reading public this will be its first airing. Aldiss’s comments about his fiction also cover his first choice ‘Old Hundredth’ which was included in Volume one.

‘Immensity is a part of us - the better part, I think, lying remote from the petty transactions of everyday like a moor beyond a mean town. It is something worth striving towards. Science fiction is one of the languages of immensity, although in many stories immensity is dwarfed by tiny ideas or silly psychology. You have to turn to the great grey master of British science fiction, Olaf Stapledon, to be confronted by Immensity, naked and unchained.

‘There’s little I can say about my stories included in the Best of British SF anthologies, except to point out that immensity lurks somewhere in the wings of both of them. Manuscript Found in a Police State incorporates some of the hidden symbols of Edgar Allan Poe; it may one day form the basis of a novel, although its. reprinting here makes that possibility more remote.’

‘When correcting the early drafts of stories, I go through them striking out adjectives. I have to be particularly firm about the word “vast”. Both Old Hundredth and Manuscript Found in a Police State are the sort of story from which a number of “vasts” were probably struck.’

* * * *

MANUSCRIPT FOUND IN A POLICE

STATE Brian W. Aldiss

A trail of prisoners wound slowly upwards along a mountain track until it reached the outer gates of Khernabhar Prison. There it waited in bright sunshine until the gates rolled open. Goaded on by their warders, the prisoners moved into the enclosure beyond.

The gates closed behind the prisoners, and were bolted. They stood in a courtyard formed between wall and cliff, the cliff of the great Mount Khernabhar. Offices stood in the courtyard, stern but dejected, their windows blank and dusty. A trough stood in one corner of the courtyard, against the rock; the prisoners were allowed to go over to it and drink.

Axel Mathers moved over with the other prisoners. He scooped up water and poured the first handful over his face; then he drank. As he sucked the water from his hands, he stared down into the trough, where water ran clear and deep.

The interior of the trough was rough. Pebbles and small plants could be seen, lucid under the water’s disturbed surface. Although sun shone full on the trough, the liquid was brilliantly, cold, cutting at a man’s throat as it went down. It spurted into the trough from a fissure in the rock, spurted out of Khernabhar itself, spurted from the intestines of the great mountain. Because he knew the terrible legends of Khernabhar, Mathers found himself cocking an ear towards the fissure, half-expecting to hear human cries issue from it.

He still could not believe that the sentence of the Dictator Hener’s courts was to be carried out - oh, yes, the others would serve their term, but surely for him some last minute reprieve would come! For him! He found that his every gesture was heavy with deliberation and that everywhere he cast his eye in that dreary courtyard he saw beauty. The very shards of rock tumbled from the mighty, rock-face were miraculously cast and coloured. Everything was rare and beautiful - the dust, even the dust, because it would never be seen again!

He looked in the girl prisoner’s face, reading there the same anxiety to draw in every memory of the world of light. He knew her first name: Joanna. Like him, she was sentenced for crimes against the State. She wore a ragged skirt that stretched down to her ankles, a long-sleeved blouse, and a poncho. Her thin face, her dark hair, were streaked with the dust that had accompanied them from the last ugly village on the plain. Yet she was attractive, the line of her nose, the line between her nose and mouth, the line of her mouth, possessing a mysterious and painful logic which was beyond words. It was easier to look at the trough, the dust, the stones, than at her face.

The party - it comprised twenty-one prisoners - was allowed to sit in the dirt and wait. Every minute spent here in the sunlight was precious. Mathers sat next to the girl while the guards who had made the trek up from the plain argued with the guards of the prison. Poor oafs - each side envied the other its job! The guards from the plain had brought drink to sell to the prison guards; the prison guards complained that the prices were too high. Slowly, cretinously, they bandied their dreary small change of language and a minor language at that, hardly spoken outside the boundaries of the nation, not even universally spoken inside! Yet were the guards not to be envied? Would they not all, over the next years, be allowed their stupidities, their drunks, their randies, even their deaths, under the ever-changing sky?

The bargaining was concluded. Bottles and money changed hands. There was coarse laughter and most of the guards moved towards the guard room. The guards remaining got the party to its feet again and moved it forward. Driven on by their curses, the prisoners pushed through inner gates, the mountainside moving in above them. Mathers looked up — saw a tribe of monkeys away above their heads, free to scamper over the slopes. He saw the shoulder of the mountain swing overhead, saw the sun, saw the sun eclipsed by mountain. He caught, the expression on Joanna’s face. Impulsively, they grasped each other’s hands.

All the prisoners were clasping each other. No longer was there need for the guards to curse them. Shadow had fallen on them: they had no further will to resist. Now they heard the moan and grumble - rock itself, complaining – of Khernabhar Prison!

That voice! It came from ahead, yet from all sides. They were moving in a tunnel now, and so had opportunity to note the sound well, to analyse as the least intelligent among them must have done - how it seemed to comprise many of the noises of the animal kingdom, squeaks, squeals, moans, groans, bellows, chirps. They might have been entering some hideous underground farm in which everything from crickets and birds to sows and bullocks and still mightier animals were confined, yet there was no noise but rock moving on rock. Nothing lay ahead but rock. There was no destiny but rock.

The corridor widened into an underground chamber. No daylight reached this far: the darkness was broken by torchlight and by a long gutter which ran with a tarry substance that burned. This tarry substance dripped into a tank sunk in the floor of the chamber. Guards were dipping wooden brands into the tank.

Now the noise was louder; its full melancholy din beat upon them like the wings of some vast and weary creature in flight - some reptilian prehistoric bird that screamed as it pulled its weight over lands unknown.

With the noise came the odour…and that too seemed to move in from the reptilian distances of buried past-time. It was an ancient and dirty odour, trailing across the back of the throat a flavour of corrupt piscine flesh, yet so great were the other pressures on this doomed gathering, that it moved forward as if merely through a growing twilight.

Now it’s coming - it’s coming! I have no fear. This is not death for me, not death but a new chance. At last, I have this chance to be better - inwardly to be better. Whatever happens, an inner part of me can learn to be better. If I can stand it, for my own good, as well as the good of the revolution...

One of the guards thrust a torch into Mather’s hand and pushed him forward. He noticed the girl took care to remain close to him. She evidently drew some reassurance from him, looking up now and then - but more with an air of appraisal than appeal, he noted. Many things he noted: all were subordinate, mere insignificant details glimpsed under the skirts of his black cloud of awareness.

What did overwhelm his attention was sight of the moving prison itself. The guards were prodding Joanna towards it, holding him back, holding the others back behind, separating them. The visible part of the prison loomed before the girl - they were thrusting her into a cell that had already half-disappeared into squealing, grunting darkness.

It was an open cell with no front wall. A cell, then a thick dividing wall, and then another cell. And then another dividing wall and another cell. Open cells: no doors, no front walls. She was pushed into the first cell and Mathers into the next one. The prisoner behind him was being readied for the following cell.

Clutching his torch, Mathers stood glaring out at his captors, at the dingy and muddled scene - but it was a scene from life, it existed, however precariously, on the fringes of the free world, it lay but a lung’s breath away from open sky and running animals and the elaborate affairs of men. As he stood there, trying to memorise even the coarse faces of the guards, the cell gave a lurch and, with grinding slowness, moved a few inches to his right, reproducing all round him the noise of tortured animals.

To step into the cells, it was necessary to walk across a narrow gap which separated cells from cavern. The cells containing Mathers, the girl, and the next prisoner ground and bumped to one side. A pause, and then they moved again, an inch, half a dozen inches, a few more, stop ... After another pause, this movement was repeated to the accompaniment of more anguished squeals of sandstone on sandstone. Already the cell containing Joanna had disappeared behind a wall of rock and could be seen no more from the underground chamber.

The cells had only another fifteen or so feet to move before Mathers too would find himself cut off from human view. He stood - crouched, rather, staring out, wondering if he should not spring forward and run for corridor and daylight. But the guards stared back, for once looking orderly and efficient, waiting for him to make a reckless move. He observed that further guards were herding the rest of the prisoners into a side-passage perhaps to wait there until the slow progression of cells brought more empty ones into view. So he was cut off from the poor specimens of humanity with whom he had shared many painful days imprisonment in the town on the plains, with whom he had made the ascent to this more dreadful place; although he had no particular friends among them, regret leapt in him as they were driven from sight.

The cells lurched again, roaring cruelly as they moved. Only a few inches, painfully uncertain, but now on his right he saw protruding the edge of the cavern wall that would eventually cover his cell and eclipse him entirely from the outside world. He looked at it, reached out to touch it, saw how the rock had been reinforced with heavy stone blocks, making a pillar. As he touched it, the vibrations and squeals began again and the cells again jolted forward. When the movement and noise died, Mathers heard the man in the cell on his left weeping. He himself knew only paralysis, and could not weep or pray. As for the girl, whose cell had now disappeared into the rock, he heard not a sound from her.

There is still time. Someone will come forward. My friends will have managed to secure a reprieve. The guards will relent. Or I shall wake.... Wake, wake, damn you, out of this nightmare...

Again the lateral movement, the pause, the movement again. He roused partly out of his paralysis to take stock of his cell. It was carved from solid sandstone, even elaborately carved at its outer end, where pillars had been fashioned in the wall-ends between cells, chunky pillars with an archaic motif binding them. The cell held a wooden bed with a mattress on, and no other furniture. At the rear of the cell was a double trough, its two compartments, one below the other, filled with water that trickled in from a groove in the rear wall; the overflow of the water ran down into a hole in the floor evidently intended for sanitary purposes. The side walls, roughly carved from the rock, were covered with the graffiti of past incumbents of the cell.

Sandstone - weathered only by the hands of prisoners, hewn eternities ago.... And, if the rumours are true, a spell of imprisonment here means ten years. Ten years… Oh, Lord, ten years, where is Thy justice?

On one wall was carved the figure of an old stooped man with a long beard, beautifully picked out in an antique mode. Mathers glanced at it in cursory fashion, reflecting that all prisoners would look similarly stooped by the time they emerged into daylight once more. He ran his fingertips despairingly over the surface of the rock, feeling the very, texture of injustice.

God knows, I should not be here - I have done no wrong.... Yet however false my conviction, all men are sinners. I’m guilty of many things. Perhaps we all deserve punishment. ...

As he was setting his torch in a socket in the wall, the slow movement came again; his small world grated forward inch by inch, as if the whole mountain of Khernabhar were in action. The movement spoke of a vast and weary suffering, the last tremors of a dying man: while the negation of movement that followed spoke of death itself.

And now the fourth wall had moved across the front of his cell more than half way. His view of the cavern, the guards, the trough of pitch, was through a gap of less than six feet. He felt his spirit drifting out of him like smoke.

How much time passed, Mathers could not tell. After a long lethargic pause - the short lethargic movement, and a further narrowing of his view of the outer world. He sank down to await the stone eclipse. The vigil was punctuated by a guard coming and throwing him a bundle of food and an unlit torch, and by a struggle between the guards and the captive next door, who tried to break out; he was badly beaten about the head and kicked in the stomach before being dragged back into his cell. Mathers heard him groan occasionally.

Again the shuddering movement, the screams from the rock. Over Mathers, an annihilating numbness.

Why do I feel as I do? Nothing so terrible has even happened to me before, no, nothing ever approaching this. ... It affronts the name of humanity. So why am I possessed by the idea that this pain is something I have suffered before? When, where, could I have suffered anything remotely as terrifying? My dear mother took such tender care of me in childhood that I was never suffered to be shut in a cupboard or chest. Darkness did not scare me. I had no fears - why, then, along with everything else, am I forced to bear this burden of an unmindful familiarity?

Hardly aware that he did so, he wept for his parents, now dead, and for the life they had given him, now to be stolen away. When he looked up, the cells had jarred on again in their journey into the rock, and only the narrowest gap permitted him to look at the world, of the cavern. In anguish and surprise, he jumped up, threw himself at the gap, thrust his arm through, gesturing at the mean company of guards. He called to them, begging for mercy. They looked at each other and grinned almost enough to reveal their teeth.

The grinding began again, and the lurch forward. As the gap narrowed still further, he had to pull back his arm quickly or it would have been wrenched from him at the shoulder between outer wall and cell wall. He stopped his cries and stood quiet as the vibrating movement closed the space inch by inch. When the movement stopped, there was a gap here and there, at no place wider than an inch, to which he could apply his eye and see the guards still there in the cavern, talking among themselves, more casual now he had been carried from their view.

Later, the grinding began again, and this time it carried him and his cell completely into the rock and away from the world of men. Mathers collapsed against one wall, burying his face in his hands.

The revolution must come! Some day soon, it must come! Our country cannot bear this oppression much longer.... Help me to survive till then, oh Lord! The regime must be eradicated to the last man, and this hellish prison destroyed forever.

Sinking into the well of his thoughts, he was a long time in realising that the tempo of movement and stillness had been broken. Now was only stillness. He jumped up in vague alarm, he stood there, he waited. Silence alone greeted him, pressed hard against his ears. The world of men was only a pace or so away - yet already it had sunk below the horizons of his awareness.

Movement had stopped. How long had it continued? Certainly not more than four hours, probably not less than two: for that sound as of animals being slaughtered had commenced only as Mathers and the others were ushered into the tunnel. From the legends he had heard of Khernabhar, he knew what this cessation meant, and his eyes turned instinctively to an object that had come into view on the outer wall, the rock face that cut him off from humanity.

The object consisted of an iron ring from which hung a length of chain. Mathers went over and lifted the heavy links. The boss that held the ring was firmly secured into the rock. He let the chain drop. The links clanked and hung still. He stood there motionless, his gaze locked to the dull length of chain. The horror of his situation was with him like a dark and invisible companion. His journey into the rock had begun.

At some featureless later moment in time, he came to himself again, his brain began to function along more normal channels, prompted by recognition of sound. When he turned his attention to it, a rush of small noise came to him, an underworld of sound that at first brought him only further terror.

Later, as the journey into the sandstone went deeper, after his torches had failed and died and he was alone in the dark of the mountain, he began to identify individual sounds, to force meaning from them, to hammer them into substitutes for those other senses of which he was bereft. Foremost among these were the sounds of water.

Mathers’, water supply in the trough had its own collection of delicate noises. Its drips and splashes were close at hand, and generally as regular as clocks. They were busy and comforting noises, noises whose source he could verify by touch. Frivolous noises.

The, next nearest water noises sprang from the first series. They were deeper in tone, on the whole continuous, and solemn noises. They flowed in particular under the mobile floor of the cells, as if some deep groove ran there to bear the water further yet into the stone heart of Khernabhar. These were lazy noises, which sometimes sounded reassuring, sometimes menacing.

Distant noises came into two categories. Ever-present but intermittent were various drips and plops that stirred Mathers’ imagination when he lay helpless in the dark, listening; by concentrating on these distant sounds, he could imagine that he was not incarcerated in a mountain but stood in one of the rain-forests which covered the northern half of his country. These watery messages gave him illusions of freedom, as did other distant sounds, for they became voices of brooks, waterfalls, and torrents - interior brooks, waterfalls, and torrents, cascading through the entrails of Khernabhar, similar enough acoustically to remind him of waters washing slopes of mountain-jungles which he had explored with his father in his youth.

This last category of water-sound came and faded, and Mathers grew familiar with it only as day succeeded day, and week week, and the cells moved further into the mountain.

With other subterranean noises, he was less comfortable. Along with the prisoners in their cells travelled other living things, mice, spiders, insects, possibly even snakes and bats - but chiefly rats, whose activities roused him from many an uneasy sleep.

Sometimes, patches of strange light would float before his eyes. He imagined himself to be going blind until he discovered that the outer wall was sometimes smeared with phosphorescence and gave off a phantom light. He would stand with his eyes almost touching it, trying to imagine it to be the blessed glare of daylight that bathed them.

By this time, routine - the iron and remorseless routine of Khernabhar

- had gripped him. The one focal point of the day came every morning with a scattered tapping, rapidly growing in volume. Although he was generally prepared for the summons, Mathers would start up and begin to hammer on the wall himself with a piece of rock. This was the signal to begin the day’s haul!

He would then feel in the dark for the chain hanging from the outer wall. The chains punctuated the outer wall. Wherever the cell stopped, somewhere there was a chain to haul on.

The haul began. No movement at first, then a jerky start. Unison was soon achieved. The prisoners heaved on their chains together, unseen and unknown to each other. With squeals of protest rock began to grind over rock…

It was an enormously exhausting, an impossible task. Yet the cells moved. They moved only a few inches before rest was necessary. And then the effort had to be made again. And again. Over and over.

Being a methodical man, Mathers tried to keep track of time by counting. He came to believe that they generally worked for between two-and-a-half to three hours - nearer the latter mostly, but the strain varied according, he presumed, to the roughness of the ground underneath the cells.

The distance they moved was easier to compute, although it too varied. It was about twenty-two or twenty-three feet in one session. There was only one session a day: a morning’s exhausting work.

When he had rested from the haul, Mathers habitually made an exploration of the newly exposed section of outer wall. He ran his fingers over the surface, arms outstretched. It was his way of mapping as best he could the dreadful journey inwards, and he worked his way along from end to end, from bottom to top, with methodical care.

The wall was by no means the smooth surface it had seemed at first casual glance. It had been scarred by numerous parallel lines, graphs of the moving walls incised by small stone outcrops on the latter. There were other lines, too, and arabesques and patterns, carved by prisoners. Sometimes, a fault in the rock had caused part of the wall to crumble. In one place, the wall was extensively faulted, the fault extending over three days travel. Mathers was as excited as if he had discovered a new landscape. He noted that the fault had been carefully patched with stone, with smooth blocks ingeniously inserted into the wall. At the end of the fault, his fingers discovered what he believed to be flints. He pulled them from their ledge and discovered they were regularly shaped; the knowledge, for some reason, made him uneasy.

With the flints, he made sparks, cascading like stars from his fingers. Using straw and shavings from his mattress, he was able to create fire. The straw supply was limited. He rationed himself to a few wisps at a time, and these he lit only when rations arrived, until he could create a better lamp.

Food supplies were irregular. Above the groove from which his water supply trickled was a larger hole, into which a man could insert his head. The hole formed the lower end of a tube boring upward through solid rock. Somewhere distantly up there was a gallery and a nebulous world of men an ear applied to the hole could detect, on occasion, their comings and goings, their voices distorted out of recognition. Every so often, they threw food down the tube - and no doubt down the countless other tubes under their care.

Considering the poverty and discomfort of all other arrangements in Khernabhar, the food was tolerable, though always insufficient. It reflected the ample and various local resources; hard round loaves of coarse oaten bread; various fruits - coconuts, mango, satsumas, the thick-rinded mangosteen - some of which arrived well pulverised; and bundles of rice with shreds of meat in, knotted into fabric squares for their downward journey.

Mathers made it his habit to conserve his tiny fires for meal-times, so that he could eat with a little light and feel he retained at least a shred of old civilized habit.

When I’m out of here, I will rejoin the guerrillas! I will lead a band on to Khernabhar itself. We will burst from its wooded defiles, destroy this vile machine, and release all the prisoners. This evil must be ended for all time. When I’m out of here…

He mused for hours at a time on the prison itself, hoping that he might be led to think of some way of escape. Escape was always in his mind, burning like a will-o’-the-wisp against the night of incarceration. He had to escape or go mad, and every day made the idea of getting free more urgent, because - yes, that was the supreme fiendishness of Khernabhar! they were still - voluntarily, voluntarily - hauling themselves deeper into the great mountain.

Shredding the hempen squares that wrapped his deliveries of rice, soaking them in the oil of the coconut, Mathers made himself candles and lit one with the flints. A tiny flame grew, nickered, fluttered, became oval, and maintained itself. Mathers was kneeling on the floor over it. He sat up and looked about. There was his cell, his home - its walls, its roof, the shadows, banished to corners. How sane, even welcoming, it looked!

He scrambled up with his candle. His determination was to examine minutely the inner walls of his cell but curiosity first deflected him to the water trough. There, holding his candle before him, he stared down and saw his reflection staring up - or not his reflection surely, but that of a savage, a hermit, with ragged beard and ragged eyebrows, with protruding cheekbones, with sunken gleaming eyes and corrugated forehead! With a gasp of surprise, he started back and could not look again.

And how long had he been here? He went over to the record of days he had kept in the dark, a row of scratches scored on the wall with a stone. The scratches were muddled together and numbered thirty-three or thirty-five. So little more than a month had passed since he was exiled from the world of men! Time, down here in this infernal darkness, moved as protestingly as rock itself!

At last, he took his candle up and began a minute inspection of the past as recorded about him. He had, of course, made such an inspection when his torches burned; but his agony of mind then had been such that only general impressions had registered. What he wished to do was to match the information of the rock against the rumours he had heard of Khernabhar and see if they shed some new light on the situation which would give him a key towards escaping.

To his surprise, his memory of the cell walls was largely false. His mood had been such, to begin with, that he had had eyes only for messages carved by recent tenants of the cell - cries of misery, revolutionary slogans, and a proclamation of vivid obscenity. His attention was now directed to marks of past time - in many cases, long past.

By the dim flame, no larger than a human eye, he read the signs: the squinches or blind arches spanning the two inner corners and speaking, in their elaboration, of love rather than intentions of hatred: the sculpturing of the rock which showed no mark of the tools used to shape it; and the additions since, the mute voices of prisoners long dead! And how long dead? The earliest markings were in many cases obliterated by later additions, and the later additions by ones still later. It was noticeable that the most recent additions looked the roughest and least literate. Many of the earlier ones, faint though they were, were perfectly legible and perfectly formed.

Legible - but impossible to understand. For there was a script here that Mathers recognised but could not read. The Old Tongue! Men had written here using the Old Tongue as their natural language! Those prisoners must have died all of two thousand - perhaps as many as four thousand - years ago!

Many of the writings were records of individual lives. Where these were dated, Mathers saw that they went back many centuries. He read them marvelling, thinking how little life and consciousness had changed.

Frequently, the records were broken by the legend; CURSED BE

THE NAME OF KHERN KAHZAA. This past tyrant, Emperor of the Eternal Wheel of Life and Death, had given his name to the mountain. His was the name most frequently invoked, until one got down to the present generation of scribbles, when the name of the hated dictator, Hener, and the beloved revolutionary leader, Reh - particularly the latter - predominated. The last occupant of the cell (so Mathers judged him to be) had scraped the revolutionary name everywhere. REH! REH! And on the rock of the trough was a large VICTORY TO REH!

That must have been carved at least ten years ago. Reh grows old. There are only white hairs in his beard. True, he survives, seems invincible. Yet victory is far from him. No doubt of it, new leaders are needed. Perhaps better leaders, perhaps better slogans. Perhaps better revolutionary material and better thought behind them. Perhaps our people are less than the men our ancestors were .. .

Only in one place had later scribblers been careful not to deface earlier writings. This was centrally, on the leading wall. Here an intricate figure had been engraved. Within a large circle, a double circle, slightly smaller, had been cut. Between these two inner circles were short radial lines, dividing the rim into a number of small partitions; the partitioners were not completed all round the circle. The outer circle was broken in two places. At the centre of the figure were smaller circles, some intersecting, cut to different depths. The whole figure was intersected by a grand line.

Against this design were written various figures and notations in a corrupt version of the Old Tongue, of which Mathers could understand little. But he did understand that he was looking at a representation of the prison of Khernabhar. This was confirmation of the rumours he had heard: that the prison was a great wheel, rotating in the fastnesses of rock, the cells being mere niches on its perimeter.

He could not interpret the measurements on the incised figure, but he had heard that the diameter of the wheel was as much as five miles, and that the array of cells along its perimeter numbered as many as three thousand, although they were not always continuous. The great central axle upon which the wheel revolved notated in the heart of the mountain. To this wheel of cells there was only one entrance, only one exit, as depicted in the design - the exit being sited somewhere on the mountainside before the entrance, so that those going in should not see the pitiful state of those emerging after their long ordeal.

* * * *

That night - but in Khernabhar there was only night - Mathers lay down to sleep with his head full of the image of the great slow-grinding wheel, grinding men’s lives away. The wheel moved every day, had perhaps moved every day since it was carved from the rock, for there were always wrongdoers in the eyes of the state. It could move only in one direction, and therein lay its monstrous paradox: that the captives holed like maggots in their cells were forced to propel themselves into the rock. Only by going deep into the mountain was it possible to re-emerge, only by going deep into the mountain was it possible to complete the revolution that meant freedom, only by going deep into the mountain could hope of survival be nourished.

So the prisoners hauled for almost three hours every day on the chains in the wall beyond the wheel, hauled till their sinews almost tore, to get the wheel through its long and grudging course!

Sandstone grinding past sandstone . . . Ten years to a revolution - I’m sure that’s what I heard at university. Ten years - about ten years, no matter who or what the prisoners are. It might as well be eternity... .How long is ten years?

And what minor paradoxes were involved! This daily collaboration was an unspoken one between rebels and outcasts of society. They were thrust down here precisely because they did not cooperate: and only in their cooperation could they drag their way through miles of rock.

Again: They cooperated even from the beginning, pulling themselves voluntarily from the outer world, when they were fresh and strong and healthy; yet at that period, inevitably, they would pull with less than a whole heart - might, in some cases, refuse to pull at all. Only later, when they could suppose that their call was half-way or more along the circumference of the prison - that, in other words, they were now on their way out - would they pull wholeheartedly; and by then, the evil regimen would have rendered them aged, feeble, and sick, incapable of real effort.

And again: many of the prisoners, because they were the victims of a warlike state, were men of peace. Yet they, as much as the fieriest revolutionary, must have echoed the eternal unspoken wish that dominated Khernabhar: LET THERE ALWAYS BE WAR!

Only when there was war was the supply of prisoners fully equal to the supply of cells. Only then was there full manpower to haul on the chains and drag the wheel round through eternal blackness. Only then was there a chance that the tons of rock might be speeded and long years of imprisonment thereby lessed by a few days or hours.

* * * *

The things that Mathers read in the rock, shocking as they were, brought him a truer realisation of his situation. They and the presence of a little light for a few hours of the day permitted him to consider others beside himself. He thought with some horror of all the other prisoners who sweated and festered in their cells; but a gentler concern filled him when he turned his mind to the two people who had been incarcerated with him. Of the man who had been thrust into the cell behind his, he had heard nothing beyond the groans of the first day. From the girl’s cell - yes, Joanna was her name he had heard some noises, scuffles as if she had been throwing herself against the walls in an hysterical effort to escape, and even perhaps a cry or two.

He set himself to make contact with her, and investigated the walls afresh. The distance between the leading edge of the cell wall and the outer wall - that is, between wheel and solid mountain - was generally no more than an inch: which said a great deal for the superhuman abilities of the architect who had designed Khernabhar! But this distance did vary to some degree, as if the wheel had a slight eccentricity and, when Mathers began his new investigation, it was enlarging to something over two inches. Since the walls between cells were about four feet thick, there was no chance of making contact while circumstances remained as they were.

Yet, even in this static place, circumstances were not unalterable. On the first day of this new investigation, Mathers found part of the outer wall had crumbled. Almost by the roof, there was a fault in the rock, into which he could thrust his hand!

Shaking with excitement, he lit a precious candle and pushed his bed over to the wall. By climbing on the bed, he could look into the hole. The hole was the width of two hands spread wide, irregular inside, going back not much more than arm’s length. And two objects lay inside the hole.

He pulled the objects out. One was a length of roughly carved wood, a cudgel perhaps. The other was a skull.

He sat on the side of his bed, nursing the skull and staring at it with delight. It was the skull, he supposed, of a wild cat, paper-thin but beautifully formed, the lower jaw still intact, the buttresses of the eye-sockets exquisite. He cupped it in his hands as if it were a jewel. The hours passed as his mind travelled all the meanings of the life that, fading at last among the shadows of Khernabhar, had built and utilised this shell.

It was only later, when he had placed the skull carefully in a corner where he would not tread on it, that he turned his mind to the cudgel. It was more mysterious than the skull. He could accept that wild cats might be lured in from the mountainsides to hunt the rats living in the catacombs of the dark, scrambling in during the dry season down a water-hole. But where did the cudgel come from? Who had left it there?

In his solitude, he was making a mystery of nothing. The weapon had probably been tucked into the hole by another prisoner, tucked there and forgotten. What else?

* * * *

Next morning, the signal came, the prisoners - each in the solitude of his cell - began their daily haul on the chains, six inches forward and pause, six inches forward a pause, repeated some forty-four times. And the hole in which the skull and cudgel had been cached slid away and was finally lost to view behind the following cell-wall.

But a new and more extensive fault appeared. This one was less high than the last, and extended raggedly sideways. It had some depth and, examining it closely, Mathers deduced that it had been artificially deepened. Some of the rock glistened; moisture seeped from one of the cracks.

It occurred to Mathers that faults like this might one day appear on a much larger scale. He would then be able to hide himself in the fault. On the following day, when the wheel moved on, he would stay where he was and find himself in the cell of the prisoner following him. But the notion of being walled into a narrow hole, even for no more than a couple of hours, was enough to make him break out in a chilly sweat. Nor did he want to set himself further from Joanna. He would have to wait until a fault appeared large enough for him to squeeze forward between his cell and hers.

As chance would have it, the rock faults now stopped. Although the gap between cell and wall continued slowly to widen, it was still scarcely enough to thrust an emaciated arm through. Day followed day, each swallowed up by silent sandstone.

A plague of rats came upon him. They came swarming down the food chute and milling through his cell. They easily slipped between wall and wheel, and were gone, came back, whisked by, vanished. A day later, he saw his first cat. It was an intimidating beast, mangey, long in the leg, and boardlike in the body, with the expression of ferocity on its face heightened by a rat hanging from its jaws, which it wore like a military moustache. Mathers called a welcome to it. It disappeared with a look of unalterable hatred.

The animals came and went according to their seasons. He began to detect and was presently overpowered by an odour of corruption. A prisoner had died near at hand, to add his peculiar stench to the atmosphere. This prolonged corruption doubtless accounted for the influx of the rats and their enemies. It was dismaying to think of a sightless face a few yards away, staring into the night of Khernabhar and being dismantled as it stared.

He devoted himself the more sedulously to plans to reach the girl. Since chance counted for so much, his plans soon degenerated into dreams of what he and she would do when they were together; in truth, imprisonment might then be tolerable. But he decided that he would be unable to forsake his cell permanently; it would be necessary to return frequently for food - two trying to live on one ration would starve; even love could not gainsay that. How could easy return be made possible? Clearly, only by breaking down a part of the wall between them.

The most vulnerable part of the wall was its outer edge. The chains dangling in the outer wall, by which the wheel was dragged round, were five feet in length. If Mathers could manage to prise a chain, boss and rivets and all, from the wall, then the chain could be used as a crude saw and, with him working at one end and the girl at another, it might be possible to wear a groove in the separating wall deep enough for them to be able to climb through uninterruptedly from one cell to another!

Now every afternoon (to himself, Mathers still used the diurnal terminology of the world outside) was spent with the cudgel, painfully attempting to prise a boss loose from the wall. Day after day, the bosses proved unmoving. The master-architect had had a skill that defied time.

* * * *

Mathers’ most terrifying day in Khernabhar began as wretchedly as any other. He woke from tantalising and instantly forgotten dreams of the world outside and paced round his cell as usual until the tapped summons brought him to his working position. With a rock, he tapped on the outer wall as heartily as anyone. Come on, you lazy swine! Get to those chains! Pull us to freedom! Since about two months had elapsed since his term of punishment began, there might be as many as ninety new captives behind him ... little enough to set beside the three thousand-odd ahead, but at least a beginning.

The creaking, groaning, squealing progress was under way. How hateful the effort! How sickening, how weakening! How ill-matched was the human heart against the burden of night and sandstone! And yet ... with cries of protest, the wheel turned slightly and the cells moved along.

When it was all over, Mathers threw himself on his bed. Exhaustion set in now, and he fell into one of those uneasy states between waking and sleeping which were a feature of his present life. A pair of rats chased themselves across his shoulder and stomach. He jumped up immediately, to sit shivering on the side of the bed.

Was there some faint light or suggestion of it about the cell?

Perhaps deliverance is here! Why not? The revolution has taken place. Reh has been successful! His men are in Khernabhar, slowly blowing the place up and reaching all the prisoners. .. . Or the evil Hener is dead, his henchmen killed, and liberty proclaimed from the palace!

No, I’m just dreaming. But it could perhaps be a narrow shaft through the rock - too narrow even to climb through, let’s say, but wide enough to let down a ray of light directly from the sun at a certain time-of day!

He went to the outer wall. If there was light, it was uncertain, the feeblest glow. If there was light, it came from the direction of Joanna’s cell. He called her name, louder and louder. The glimmer of light died. He pressed against the rock, still calling, and felt it faulted beneath his hands, ragged and recessed.

Although he had made a stern rule with himself to use his limited candles only in afternoon and evening, he decided this new factor warranted an exception to the rule. Kneeling, he struck his flints together, sending the sparks cascading until at last the hemp wick was touched and flickered into light. He cupped it lovingly in his hands until it grew strong. Then he carried it over to inspect the wall.

The fault in the rock was deep, tall, and lengthy; it extended behind the leading wall of his cell towards Joanna’s, beyond the penetrating power of his illumination. It had been neatly patched with stones, beautifully squared cabbies, but they had been prised away and the depth of the hole increased. The hole was deep enough to hold a man!

I could get to her! Now! No need to return here until tomorrow morning, when the action signals start!

To carry the candle on what would probably be a difficult scramble seemed an unnecessary impediment. Mathers set it down on the edge of the cell floor and climbed into the fault.

The rock had broken along its veinings, and the veinings were irregular. There was plenty of room one moment, very little the next. He chose to work his way along with his back to the smooth inter-cell wall and his face to the ragged rock. The fault twisted, and he was forced to push his way forward lying virtually horizontal.

Progress became easier, the gap between wall and rock widened, he regained his feet, shuffled forward, and soon the edge of her cell wall met his knuckles.

He stepped out into her cell. Living darkness, strange smells.

‘Joanna! Joanna!’

She flung herself on him out of the dark, kicking and screaming. Or for an awful moment he thought it was her. Then his hand, fighting to push her face away, met a bristling crop of beard! Almost at once, his hand was bitten. He pulled it back and struck out wildly. Two hands closed around his throat and squeezed!

Electric colours punctured the blackness. Reaching forward, he linked his hands behind his opponent’s skull, at the same time bringing his own skull violently forward. The bearded man fell back cursing unintelligibly and then charged in again. Mathers ducked, falling over with the enemy on top of him. He kicked out wildly and was lucky enough to connect his knee with something vital. As a howl of pain sounded, he staggered and almost fell back into the rock fault.

Before he could pull himself to safety, his assailant was at him again, this time poking a stick at him. It caught Mathers painfully in the ribs before he managed to grasp one end of it.

‘What’s the matter with you? I’m no enemy if you’re an honest man. Where’s the girl, where’s Joanna?’

Savage growls and curses in a strange language were his answer.

The stick was wrenched from his grasp. He scrambled back to his own cell under a fusilade of blows. Never was refuge more welcome, or light more blessed, than his. He lay for a long while on his bed, trembling and gasping, clutching his wounds, and peering in dread at the rock fault.

All that night, he could not sleep for fear of his unknown attacker, for the pain of his wounds, and for wondering what had become of Joanna.

Next morning, he worried about trying to make contact with the prisoner on the other side of him. Perhaps they might form an alliance Mathers suddenly felt the need of company. But, when the cells next moved on, the rock fault would lie, not between his cell and the next prisoner’s, but between the next prisoner’s and the cell following that. There was no way of getting in touch. At least he had the consolation of knowing that the unknown attacker would no longer be able to break in upon him after this morning’s work.

His candle was almost at an end - he had been unwilling to extinguish it - when the working signal came. Never more gladly had Mathers gone over to take his position by the dangling chain.

* * * *

In the brief fight, he had sustained nothing worse than bruises. Even in his weakened condition, it took Mathers only a few days to recover from them. His mental state required longer to stabilise, he was now victim of fears and suppositions that almost took on their own life. Night after night, he woke screaming from dreams in which terrible things with faces all hair and snout and teeth flung themselves at his throat in paroxysms of fury. Sometimes these dream attackers were gigantic, filling the cell; at other times, they were no larger than a finger-nail.

All were equally terrifying.

His hours of candle-light were necessarily rationed but, light or dark, he would crouch with every muscle tense, staring towards those cracks round his walls from which attack might come.

Gradually, however, his fears subsided. The plague of rats also died and, with it, the abominable stench that he imagined helped to distort his senses. The stench of Khernabhar was always permanent and corrosive; it ceased to be intolerable.

What has happened to me all these days? How is it I have been so preoccupied with myself? What about her? What has happened to Joanna? Is she still alive? She can’t be dead, no…

One morning, he was his normal lucid self. The terror of the attack had vanished. He saw clearly, or imagined he saw, what had happened. That vile bearded creature was merely another prisoner, originally three cells ahead of Mathers, who had taken advantage of the rock fault to get back to Joanna’s cell. He could be ousted if Mathers went prepared to fight. As for Joanna, Mathers had no proof that she was not still in her cell. He tried to avoid dwelling on the evils that might have befallen her.

What he needed was a weapon. Then he would be prepared for the next occasion on which it was possible to attack.

There were no metal objects available. But the cudgel was a fine solid affair, and one end could be sharpened into a point by the flints. By the time he had finished with it, it gave him added confidence.

But the grudging stone wheel of Khernabhar obeyed its own laws, turned at its own pace, unfolded its own possibilities when it would. Its rotation on its axis was like the slow turn of the centuries themselves, and its blind unchanging walls offered no chance of escape.

To divert himself, Mathers took to pacing the cell and to reciting such poetry and prose as he could recall at the top of his voice. By some insensible shift of his emotions, one poem in particular became his favourite:

Anna, thy beauty seems to bring

Bewitchment of the world I know,

Spelling a change, till everything

Is pale, impermanent, as though

World were but rares-show.

O’er ravaged lands and prosperous,

Countrysides of sun and shade,

Seascape or moonscape, without fuss

Your dreaming eyes, your lips, have made

Reality to fade.

So now before the bricks of town

Palm trees advance or towers pace,

Wild mountains rise, breakers crash down!

Unchanged alone where phantoms race –

Thy love, thy face!

The Anna in the old poem became Joanna. The bricks of town became the walls of his cell. Then the poem was true, yes, yes, all else faded before the beauty of her face and all the intangible qualities her face stood for. No imprisonment could crush the budding of humanity’s finer qualities. He forgot that the beauty of her face was something far more frail and transient than the beds of rock about him. Mathers was suddenly in love!

Over and over, he tried to trace all his memories of her.

Had I ever set eyes on her before we were assembled for the march up the mountain? Wait, yes, I saw her in the yard of the court on the day we were sentenced! Of course! She was standing in the cart as Hener’s toughs thrust me down the steps! She in sunshine! Had she something round her head? A handkerchief ... Her hands up to her hair?

Why didn’t I pay better attention? The sun was in my eyes.

So many times did he return to the” few fragments of memory he had of her, that they became obliterated. He was left with nothing but a glimpse of her shoulder, the nape of her neck, a curl of hair on it, the sight of an ear-lobe. And that was all of Joanna that remained!

Through the days of progress and stillness through the rock, in which he sought her essence and waited to see her reality, Mathers paced his cell and kept himself exercised. He was at his exercises one day when a fresh aspect of the wheel design on his wall caught his eye. Holding the candle up close, he inspected it minutely.

It became apparent to him - and he wondered how he had failed to observe the fact before - that the design was etched over a much more ancient version of the same plan. What he had previously regarded as construction lines or markings in the rock were parts of a far older drawing, executed in a more fanciful and decorative way. Allegory had been used, and he realised that the old man with the beard, whose lineaments he had admired, was part of this archaic design, and supported the semi-obliterated wheel upon his shoulder.

Accompanying the design were hieroglyphs, faint, indecipherable, and certainly of great antiquity. Mathers, gazing at them, was taken back to a fine winter morning when he was a young man, riding on horseback early through the woods with his father. They cantered through a thicket of holly trees which cut at their legs, up to an eminence on which stood a dozen or so tall spruces, so old that they sprawled at angles, often leaning their trunks against each other for support. The hieroglyphs conjured up the intricate foliage of those spruces, glimpsed in freedom long ago. Mathers and his father rode up to the trees to enjoy the view and let the horses breathe. They jumped down onto the soft ground, peering through the mist across the valley.

‘There’s Khernabhar, the home of the ancient tyrant Khern Kahzaa!’

Mathers Senior said. He pointed to a mountain that, from this distance, hardly looked bigger than others nearer at hand, up whose shaggy slopes the mists were drifting.

Leaning against one of the spruces, Mathers Senior spoke of the Saga of Cunais, which contained word of Khernabhar and its secrets. The Saga was of a great oral tradition, born long before the days even of Khern Kahzaa, before the days of written language; it contained legends that seemingly related to the coming of man on the planet. One legend spoke of a dynasty of terrible kings, father, son, and grandson, who imprisoned a whole nation in a mountainside because they were hairy and possessed six fingers on each hand.

... ther peltts

Like fiber were up ta eye-pits * On befor-heds thankly as arm-pits

Sprooated while each furd’ hand mounted extra fur d’ fingre *

Upon imprisonment, this strange nation was forced to build a great wheel of incarceration inside Khernabhar, to symbolise the eternity for which they would be sealed off from the world. The last king of the dynasty sealed up the entrances to the mountain; but the nation still survived inside and would one day emerge to overthrow the world. So claimed the saga.

‘The Saga of Cunais has been banned from our libraries since Hener came to power,’ said Mathers Senior to his son, looking across the valley.

‘And perhaps before his day, too. Even very ancient and dead things can return to disrupt the present.’

The mist of that distant day faded into grainy sandstone; the sound of his father’s voice changed back into the drip and boom of water; and the knot of trees became merely the hieroglyphs of Mathers’ cell wall.

It’s all older than anyone can guess at ... Reh, do you know of this iniquity? The revolution must come! Or perhaps it has come, and we prisoners are abandoned here. Perhaps the revolution has been betrayed! Then there must be another revolution .. . I must get free!

Mathers stood for a long while, one shoulder against a wall, staring absently ahead, listening to the endless working of water all round. At university, he had joined one of the secret revolutionary societies, where he learned of another version of the story in the Saga of Cnnais. This version also claimed a dynasty of three kings, father, son, and grandson; but it presented the father as an upright and religious man, founder of a Holy Order for which the great subterranean wheel was designed. This saintly ruler intended the cells for monastic cells; and the holy penitents intended to occupy the cells would propel themselves, generation after generation, revolution after revolution, reverently through the deep earth until, at the time of the final Resurrection, they propelled themselves direct into the presence of the Lord Almighty. The son of the pious dynast had been a weak and dissolute man, who allowed construction to go forward without his personal interest. He was murdered by his son, who indeed took personal interest in the vast wheel but subverted its sacred intentions and turned it into combined prison and torture chamber, which usage had been maintained into historical times and ever since. The legend had it that the enslaved wheel-builders turned against this wicked king, and that he was the first to be set to work in his own instrument of terror.

Whatever version of the legend was nearest the facts - and the truth would now almost certainly never be established - this such was evident: however far one might cast one’s mind back into the history of civilisation, the wheel would always be there, turning, groaning, every day on its axis.

As for the possibility that an ancient nation, hairy and six-fingered, had been incarcerated here, that was probably an embroidery. Unless - and an idea so paralysing came to Mathers that he dropped the candle. It rolled on the floor and went out. As he scrabbled for it on the floor, he tried to recall details of the hairy man who had assailed him in Joanna’s cell, trembling to remember how many fingers the creature had on each hand ...

Shakily, he felt for his flints and re-lit his candle, looking round fearfully at the swooping shadows.

* * * *

Careful measurements of the outer wall revealed that the slight eccentricity of orbit was still gradually increasing the gap between wall and cell-end. Mathers was sure that the maximum gap would be small and, once maximum was reached, would dwindle again: so that when the gap was barely wide enough for him to struggle through, he resolved that go he must. He had his cudgel - if he met his old assailant, he would be ready.

As to that old assailant, Mathers had a new theory. It was mere superstition to imagine that any of a prehistoric race mentioned in a long-forgotten saga could survive below ground - wasn’t it? There was a more practical explanation.

The wheel of Khernabhar could not continue without maintenance. He had seen how faults in the rock had been repaired, and rock debris would have to be cleared away. Very well: then, just as there were passages to allow for water and food to enter the cells from above, so there must be ways for humans - guards - to do the same thing. His assailant had probably been such a guard; which might well mean that a passage-way to the world above was near at hand. If he could find Joanna, they could escape by that route and find their way to Reh’s headquarters, there to help fight for the revolution.

In his pockets were flints, a new candle, and some food. He went over to the water trough and took a last drink. He looked round the cell and counted the scratches he had made in the sandstone. His lifetime of imprisonment in the rock had in fact lasted only one hundred and two days so far. Something like one hundred and fifty three prisoners would have been thrown into the cells behind him - and the same number released far ahead of him - several miles and many years ahead of him!

He set his old candle down on the cell floor, since he would be sure to drop it in his struggle to reach the next cell. Taking up the cudgel, he pushed his way into the gap between cell wall and rock face. Thin though he was, there was scarcely room to edge forward but, inch by inch, he did it, cudgel in his leading hand, face forward into the darkness.

In the vacant cell, the candle continued to burn for some while. The marks of ancient occupancy stood on the walls, water continued to drip. Shadows fluttered occasionally against the roof of rock.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

J G BALLARD: Now: Zero

If any author is symbolic of the changing patterns in science fiction in the early 1960s, that author is J. G. Ballard. And, like any true revolutionary, Ballard had his origins firmly in the status quo.

James Graham Ballard was born on November 18th 1930, in

Shanghai, the son of a Scottish doctor living in the American sector. Still in his mid-teens, Ballard was interned in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and was eventually repatriated to England in 1946. He went to Cambridge University to read medicine, and there won the annual short story competition in 1951. Thus fortified, he launched himself into his first mainstream novel. Science fiction was still a few years away. He did some copywriting, and even flew with the RAF.

In the Summer of 1956 Ballard submitted a short story, Escapement, to John Carnell, who accepted it. The story is a new look at time travel, in that the protagonist finds himself out of synch with his surroundings. Ballard then visited Carnell and brought with him a beautiful fantasy, Prima Belladonna, which Carnell also bought. The two stories appeared concurrently in the December 1956 issues of New Worlds and Science Fantasy. Ballard was launched.

He had no trouble producing follow-ups. Every story had its own individual flavour: whether the emphasis of future society and its overpowering effects on man, as in Build-Up (New Worlds, January 1957), or his deft fantasies centred on Vermilion Sands, of which Prima Belladonna was the first.

Before the end of the 1950s it was obvious to everyone, that here was someone who had brought something new and original to sf. Writing in the November 1959 New Worlds, Carnell said:

‘A sure sign of the present health of science fiction is the continued emergence of writers well outside the mainstream tradition, more interested in experimenting with the imaginative and stylistic possibilities offered by the medium than in the conventional story set against an interplanetary or futuristic background. Among these writers is J. G. Ballard ...”

In the early 1960s Ballard utilised his talents in reshaping the catastrophe novel, starting with The Wind From Nowhere (1961), and then The Drowned World (1962) and The Burning World (1964). All showed his emphasis on people rather than events, and all proved highly successful.

His next novel, The Crystal World, grew from a serial, Equinox, published in New Worlds. The important factor though is that the first episode appeared in the first issue to be edited by Michael Moorcock, dated May-June 1964. Nova Publications had finally felt the pinch of the magazines’ declining circulations, and the company folded. Carnell went on to edit his New Writings series, whilst New Worlds was handed to Moorcock, and Science Fantasy to Oxford art-dealer Kyril Bonfiglioli.

That first Moorcock New Worlds also carried an article by Ballard on the controversial William Burroughs. It was evident from the start that under new management New Worlds was already heading into other territory. The so-called ‘new wave’ was born. Ballard’s fiction became more and more fantasy-orientated, bizarre, avant-garde. His stories would range from the highly readable and fascinating Storm Bird, Storm Dreamer (New Worlds, November 1966) to the apparently pointlessly symbolical The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race, reprinted in the first March 1967 New Worlds. I say ‘first’

because there were two issues bearing that date. They were the last paperback format New Worlds. The publishers encountered financial difficulty, but thanks to the efforts of stalwarts like Brian Aldiss, Marghanita Lhaski, J. B. Priestley, Kingsley Amis and the late Kenneth Allsop, New Worlds was reborn in a larger format with the aid of an Arts Council grant. Moorcock now threw all caution to the winds and the Ballardian material came even more bizarre, reaching a peak of irrelevancy with The Generations of America and Princess Margaret’s Facelift. These pieces will be remembered only as experiments in the flexibility of fiction, not for their entertainment value.

The stirrings of experimental Ballard are evident from the early days, and one of the best examples in his short story from the December 1959

Science Fantasy - Now: Zero.

* * * *

NOW: ZERO

J G Ballard

You ask: how did I discover this insane and fantastic power? Like Dr Faust, was it bestowed upon me by the Devil himself, in exchange for the deeds to my soul? Did I, perhaps, acquire it with some strange talismaniac object idol’s eye-piece or monkey’s paw - unearthed in an ancient chest or bequeathed by a dying mariner? Or, again, did I stumble upon it myself while researching into the obscenities of the Eleusian Mysteries and the Black Mass, suddenly perceiving its full horror and magnitude through clouds of sulphurous smoke and incense?

None of these. In fact, the power revealed itself to me quite accidentally, during the commonplaces of the everyday round, appearing unobtrusively at my finger-tips like a talent for embroidery. Indeed, its appearance was so unheralded, so gradual, that at first I failed to recognise it at all.

But again you ask: why should I tell you this, describe the incredible and hitherto unsuspected sources of my power, freely catalogue the names of my victims, the date and exact manner of their quietus? Am I so mad as to be positively eager for justice - arraignment, the black cap, and the hangman leaping onto my shoulders like Quasimodo, ringing the death-bell from my throat?

No, (consummate irony!) it is the strange nature of my power that I have nothing to fear from broadcasting its secret to all who will listen. I am the power’s servant, and in describing it now I still serve it, carrying it faithfully, as you shall see, to its final conclusion.

* * * *

However, to begin.

Rankin, my immediate superior at the Everlasting Insurance company, became the hapless instrument of the fate which was first to reveal power to me.

I loathed Rankin. He was bumptious and assertive, innately vulgar, and owed his position solely to an unpleasant cunning and his persistent refusal to recommend me to the directorate for promotion. He had consolidated his position as department manager by marrying a daughter of one of the directors (a dismal harridan, I may add) and was consequently unassailable. Our relationship was based on mutual contempt, but whereas I was prepared to accept my role, confident that my own qualities would ultimately recommend themselves to the directors, Rankin deliberately took advantage of his seniority, seizing every opportunity to offend and denigrate me.

He would systematically undermine my authority over the secretarial staff, who were tacitly under my control, by appointing others at random to the position. He would give me long-term projects of little significance to work on, so segregating me from the rest of the office. Above all, he sought to antagonise me by his personal mannerisms. He would sing, hum, sit uninvited on my desk as he made small talk with the typists, then call me into his office and keep me waiting pointlessly, at his shoulder as he read silently through an entire file.

Although I controlled myself, my abomination of Rankin grew remorselessly. I would leave the office seething with anger at his viciousness, sit in the train home with my newspaper opened but my eyes blinded by rage. My evenings and weekends would be ruined, wastelands of anger and futile bitterness.

Inevitably, thoughts of revenge grew, particularly as I suspected that Rankin was passing unfavourable reports of my work to the directors. Satisfactory revenge, however, was hard to achieve. Finally I decided upon a course I despised, driven to it by desperation: the anonymous letter - not to the directors, for the source would have been too easily discovered, but to Rankin and his wife.

* * * *

My first letters, the familiar indictments of infidelity, I never posted. They seemed naive, inadequate, too obviously the handiwork of a paranoic with a grudge. I locked them away in a small steel box, later re-drafted them, striking out the staler crudities and trying to substitute something more subtle, a hint of perversion and obscenity, that would plunge deeper barbs of suspicion into the reader’s mind.

It was while composing the letter to Mrs. Rankin, itemising in an old note-book the more despicable of her husband’s qualities, that I discovered the curious relief afforded by the exercise of composition, by the formal statement, in the minatory language of the anonymous letter (which is, certainly, a specialised branch of literature, with its own classical rules and permitted devices) of the viciousness and depravity of the letter’s subject and the terrifying nemesis awaiting him. Of course, this catharsis is familiar to those regularly able to recount unpleasant experiences to priest, friend or wife, but to me, who lived a solitary, friendless life, its discovery was especially poignant.

Over the next few days I made a point each evening on my return home of writing out a short indictment of Rankin’s iniquities, analysing his motives, and even anticipating the slights and abuses of the next day. These I would cast in the form of narrative, allowing myself a fair degree of license, introducing imaginary situations and dialogues that served to highlight Rankin’s atrocious behaviour and my own stoical forbearance.

The compensation was welcome, for simultaneously Rankin’s campaign against me increased. He became openly abusive, criticised my work before junior members of the staff, even threatened to report me to the directors. One afternoon he drove me to such a frenzy that I barely restrained myself from assaulting him. I hurried home, unlocked my writing box and sought relief in my diaries. I wrote page after page, re-enacting in my narrative the day’s events, then reaching forward to our final collision the following morning, culminating in an accident that intervened to save me from dismissal.

My last lines were:

... Shortly after two o’clock the next afternoon, spying from his usual position on the seventh floor stairway for any employees returning late from lunch, Rankin suddenly lost his balance, toppled over the rail and fell to his death in the entrance hall below.

As I wrote this fictitious scene it seemed scant justice, but little did I realise that a weapon of enormous power had been placed gently between my fingers.

* * * *

Coming back to the office after lunch the next day I was surprised to find a small crowd gathered outside the entrance, a police car and ambulance pulled up by the curb. As I pushed forward up the steps several policemen emerged from the building, clearing the way for two orderlies carrying a stretcher across which a sheet had been drawn, revealing the outlines of a human form. The face was concealed, and I gathered from conversation around me that someone had died. Two of the directors appeared, their faces shocked and drawn.

‘Who is it?’ I asked one of the office boys who were hanging around breathlessly.

‘Mr. Rankin,’ he whispered. He pointed up the stairwell. ‘He slipped over the railing on the seventh floor, fell straight down, completely smashed one of those big tiles outside the lift…’

He gabbled on, but I turned away, numbed and shaken by the sheer physical violence that hung in the air. The ambulance drove off, the crowd dispersed, the directors returned, exchanging expressions of grief and astonishment with other members of the staff, the janitors took away their mops and buckets, leaving behind them a damp red patch and the shattered tile.

* * * *

Within an hour I had recovered. Sitting in front of Rankin’s empty office, watching the typists hover helplessly around his desk, apparently unconvinced that their master would never return, my heart began to warm and sing. I became transformed, a load which had threatened to break me had been removed from my back, my mind relaxed, the tensions and bitterness dissipated. Rankin had gone, finally and irrevocably. The era of injustice had ended.

I contributed generously to the memorial fund which made the rounds of the office; I attended the funeral, gloating inwardly as the coffin was bundled into the sod, joining fulsomely in the expressions of regret. I readied myself to occupy Rankin’s desk, my rightful inheritance.

My surprise a few days later can easily be imagined when Carter, a younger man of far less experience and generally accepted as my junior, was promoted to fill Rankin’s place. At first I was merely baffled, quite unable to grasp the tortuous logic that could so offend all laws of precedence and merit. I assumed that Rankin had done his work of denigrating me only too well.

However, I accepted the rebuff, offered Carter my loyalty and assisted his reorganisation of the office.

Superficially these changes were minor. But later I realized that they were far more calculating than at first seemed, and transferred the bulk of power within the office to Carter’s hands, leaving me with the routine work, the files of which never left the department or passed to the directors. I saw too that over the previous year Carter had been carefully familiarising himself with all aspects of my job and was taking credit for work I had done during Rankin’s tenure of office.

Finally I challenged Carter openly, but far from being evasive he simply emphasised my subordinate role. From then on he ignored my attempts at a rapprochement and did all he could to antagonise me.

The final insult came when Jacobson joined the office to fill Carter’s former place and was officially designated Carter’s deputy.

* * * *

That evening I brought down the steel box in which I kept record of Rankin’s persecutions and began to describe all that I was beginning to suffer at the hands of Carter.

During a pause the last entry in the Rankin diary caught my eye:

. .. Rankin suddenly lost his balance, toppled over the rail and fell to his death in the entrance hall below.

The words seemed to be alive, they had strangely vibrant overtones. Not only were they a remarkably accurate forecast of Rankin’s fate, but they had a distinctly magnetic and compulsive power that separated them sharply from the rest of the entries. Somewhere within my mind a voice, vast and sombre, slowly intoned them.

On a sudden impulse I turned the page, found a clean sheet and wrote:

The next afternoon Carter died in a street accident outside the office.

What childish game was I playing? I was forced to smile at myself, as primitive and irrational as a Haitian witch doctor transfixing a clay image of his enemy.

* * * *

I was sitting in the office the following day when the squeal of tyres in the street below riveted me to my chair. Traffic stopped abruptly and there was a sudden hubbub followed by silence. Only Carter’s office overlooked the street; he had gone out half an hour earlier so we pressed past his desk and leaned out through the window.

A car had skidded sharply across the pavement and a group of ten or a dozen men were lifting it carefully back onto the roadway. It was undamaged but what appeared to be oil was leaking sluggishly into the gutter. Then we saw the body of a man outstretched beneath the car, his arms and head twisted awkwardly.

The colour of his suit was oddly familiar.

Two minutes later we knew it was Carter.

That night I destroyed my notebook and all records I had made about Rankin’s behaviour. Was it coincidence, or in some way had I willed his death, and in the same way Carter’s? Impossible - no conceivable connection could exist between the diaries and the two deaths, the pencil marks on the sheets of paper were arbitrary curved lines of graphite, representing ideas which existed only in my mind.

But the solution to my doubts and speculations was too obvious to be avoided.

I locked the door, turned a fresh page of the notebook and cast round for a suitable subject. I picked up my evening paper. A young man had just been reprieved from the death penalty for the murder of an old woman. His face stared from a photograph: coarse, glowering, conscienceless.

I wrote:

Frank Taylor died the next day in Pentonville Prison.

The scandal created by Taylor’s death almost brought about the resignations of both the Home Secretary and the Prison Commissioners. During the next few days violent charges were levelled in all directions by the newspapers, and it finally transpired that Taylor had been brutally beaten to death by his warders. I carefully read the evidence and findings of the tribunal of enquiry when they were published, hoping that they might throw some light on the extraordinary and malevolent agency which linked the statements in my diaries with the inevitable deaths on the subsequent day.

However, as I feared, they suggested nothing. Meanwhile I sat quietly in my office, automatically carrying out my work, obeying Jacobson’s instructions without comment, my mind elsewhere, trying to grasp the identity and import of the power bestowed on me.

Still unconvinced, I decided on a final test, in which I would give precisely detailed instructions, to rule out once and for all any possibility of coincidence.

Conveniently, Jacobson offered himself as my subject. So, the door locked securely behind me, I wrote with trembling fingers, fearful lest the pencil wrench itself from me and plunge into my heart:

Jacobson died at 2.43 p.m. the next day after slashing his wrists with a razor blade in the second cubicle from the left in the men’s washroom on the third floor.

I sealed the notebook into an envelope, locked it into the box and lay awake through a sleepless night, the words echoing in my ears, glowing before my eyes like jewels of Hell.

* * * *

After Jacobson’s death - exactly according to my instructions - the staff of the department were given a week’s holiday (in part to keep them away from curious newspapermen, who were beginning to scent a story, and also because the directors believed that Jacobson had been morbidly influenced by the deaths of Rankin and Carter). During those seven days I chafed impatiently to return to work. My whole attitude to the power had undergone a considerable change. Having to my own satisfaction verified its existence, if not its source, my mind turned again towards the future. Gaining confidence, I realised that if I had been bequeathed the power it was my obligation to restrain any fears and make use of it. I reminded myself that I might be merely the tool of some greater force.

Alternatively, was the diary no more than a mirror which revealed the future, was I in some fantastic way twenty-four hours ahead of time when I described the deaths, simply a recorder of events that had already taken place?

These questions exercised my mind ceaselessly.

On my return to work I found that many members of the staff had resigned, their places being filled only with difficulty, news of the three deaths, particularly Jacobson’s suicide, having reached the newspapers. The directors’ appreciation of those senior members of the staff who remained with the firm I was able to turn to good account in consolidating my position. At last I took over command of the department - but this was no more than my due, and my eyes were now set upon a directorship.

All too literally, I would step into dead men’s shoes.

Briefly, my strategy was to precipitate a crisis in the affairs of the firm which would force the board to appoint new executive directors from the ranks of the department managers. I therefore waited until a week before the next meeting of the board, and then wrote out four slips of paper, one for each of the executive directors. Once a director I should be in a position to propel myself rapidly to the chairmanship of the board, by appointing my own candidates to vacancies as they successively appeared. As chairman I should automatically find a seat on the board of the parent company, there to repeat the process, with whatever variations necessary. As soon as real power came within my orbit my rise to absolute national, and ultimately global, supremacy would be swift and irreversible.

If this seems naively ambitious, remember that I had as yet failed to appreciate the real dimensions and purpose of the power, and still thought in the categories of my own narrow world and background.

A week later, as the sentences on the four directors simultaneously expired, I sat calmly in my office, reflecting upon the brevity of human life, waiting for the inevitable summons to the board. Understandably, the news of their deaths, in a succession of motor-car accidents, brought general consternation upon the office, of which I was able to take advantage by retaining the only cool head.

To my amazement the next day I, with the rest of the staff, received a month’s pay in lieu of notice. Completely flabbergasted - at first I feared that I had been discovered - I protested volubly to the chairman, but was assured that although everything I had done was deeply appreciated, the firm was nonetheless no longer able to support itself as a viable unit and was going into enforced liquidation.

A farce indeed! So a grotesque justice had been done. As I left the office for the last time that morning I realised that in future I must use my power ruthlessly. Hesitation, the exercise of scruple, the calculation of niceties - these merely made me all the more vulnerable to the inconstancies and barbarities of fate. Henceforth I would be brutal, merciless, bold. Also, I must not delay. The power might wane, leave me defenceless, even less fortunately placed than before it revealed itself.

My first task was to establish the power’s limits. During the next week I carried out a series of experiments to assess its capacity, working my way progressively up the scale of assassination.

It happened that my lodgings were positioned some two or three hundred feet below one of the principal airlanes into the city. For years I had suffered the nerve-shattering roar of airliners flying in overhead at two-minute intervals, shaking the walls and ceiling, destroying thought. I took down my notebooks. Here was a convenient opportunity to couple research with redress.

You wonder: did I feel no qualms of conscience for the seventy-five victims who hurtled to their deaths across the evening sky twenty-four hours later, no sympathy for their relatives, no doubts as to the wisdom of wielding my power indiscriminately?

I answer: No! Far from being indiscriminate I was carrying out an experiment vital to the furtherance of my power.

I decided on a bolder course. I had been born in Stretchford, a mean industrial slum that had done its best to cripple my spirit and body. At last it could justify itself by testing the efficacy of the power over a wide area.

In my notebook I wrote the short flat statement:

Every inhabitant of Stretchford died at noon the next day.

Early the following morning I went out and bought a radio, sat by it patiently all day, waiting for the inevitable interruption of the afternoon programmes by the first horrified reports of the vast Midland holocaust.

Nothing, however, was reported! I was astonished, the orientations of my mind disrupted, its very sanity threatened. Had my power dissipated itself, vanishing as quickly and unexpectedly as it had appeared?

Or were the authorities deliberately suppressing all mention of the cataclysm, fearful of national hysteria?

I immediately took the train to Stretchford.

At the station I tactfully made enquiries, was assured that the city was firmly in existence. Were my informants, though, part of the government’s conspiracy of silence, was it aware that a monstrous agency was at work, and was somehow hoping to trap it?

But the city was inviolate, its streets filled with traffic, the smoke of countless factories drifting across the blackened rooftops.

I returned late that evening, only to find my landlady importuning me for my rent. I managed to postpone her demands for a day, promptly unlocked my diary and passed sentence upon her, praying that the power had not entirely deserted me.

The sweet relief I experienced the next morning when she was discovered at the foot of the basement staircase, claimed by a sudden stroke, can well be imagined.

So my power still existed!

* * * *

During the succeeding weeks its principal features disclosed themselves. Firstly, I discovered that it operated only within the bounds of feasibility. Theoretically the simultaneous deaths of the entire population of Stretchford might have been effected by the coincident explosions of several hydrogen bombs, but as this event was itself apparently impossible (hollow, indeed, are the boastings of our militarist leaders) the command was never carried out.

Secondly, the power entirely confined itself to the passage of the sentence of death. I attempted to control or forecast the motions of the stock market, the results of horse races, the behaviour of my employers at my new job - all to no avail.

As for the sources of the power, these never revealed themselves. I could only conclude that I was merely the agent, the willing clerk, of some macabre nemesis struck like an arc between the point of my pencil and the vellum of my diaries.

Sometimes it seemed to me that the brief entries I made were cross-sections through the narrative of some vast book of the dead existing in another dimension, and that as I made them my handwriting overlapped that of a greater scribe’s along the narrow pencilled line where our respective planes of time crossed each other, instantly drawing from the eternal banks of death a final statement of account onto some victim within the tangible world around me.

The diaries I kept securely sealed within a large steel safe and all entries were made with the utmost care and secrecy, to prevent any suspicion linking me with the mounting catalogue of deaths and disasters. The majority of these were effected solely for purposes of experiment and brought me little or no personal gain.

It was therefore all the more surprising when I discovered that the police had begun to keep me under sporadic observation.

I first noticed this when I saw my landlady’s successor in surreptitious conversation with the local constable, pointing up the stairs to my room and making head-tapping motions, presumably to indicate my telepathic and mesmeric talents. Later, a man whom I can now identify as a plainclothes detective stopped me in the street on some flimsy pretext and started a wandering conversation about the weather, obviously designed to elicit information.

No charges were ever laid against me, but subsequently my employers also began to watch me in a curious manner. I therefore assumed that the possession of the power had invested me with a distinct and visible aura, and it was this that stimulated curiosity.

* * * *

As this aura became detectable by greater and greater numbers of people

- it would be noticed in bus queues and cafes - and the first oblique, and for some puzzling reason, amused references to it were made openly by members of the public, I knew that the power’s period of utility was ending. No longer would I be able to exercise it without fear of detection. I should have to destroy the diary, sell the safe which so long had held its secret, probably even refrain from ever thinking about the power lest this alone generate the aura.

To be forced to lose the power, when I was only on the threshold of its potential, seemed a cruel turn of fate. For reasons which still remained closed to me, I had managed to penetrate behind the veil of commonplaces and familiarity which masks the inner world of the timeless and the preternatural. Must the power, and the vision it revealed, be lost forever?

This question ran through my mind as I looked for the last time through my diary. It was almost full now, and I reflected that it formed one of the most extraordinary texts, if unpublished, in the history of literature. Here, indeed, was established the primacy of the pen over the sword!

Savouring this thought, I suddenly had an inspiration of remarkable force and brilliance. I had stumbled upon an ingenious but simple method of preserving the power in its most impersonal and lethal form without having to wield it myself and itemise my victims’ names.

This was my scheme: I would write and have published an apparently fictional story in conventional narrative in which I would describe, with complete frankness, my discovery of the power and its subsequent history. I would detail precisely the names of my victims, the mode of their deaths, the growth of my diary and the succession of experiments I carried out. I would be scrupulously honest, holding nothing back whatsoever. In conclusion I would tell of my decision to abandon the power and publish a full and dispassionate account of all that had happened.

* * * *

Accordingly, after a considerable labour, the story was written and published in a magazine of wide circulation.

You show surprise? I agree; as such I should merely have been signing my own death warrant in indelible ink and delivering myself straight to the gallows. However, I omitted a single feature of the story: its denouement, or surprise ending, the twist in its tail. Like all respectable stories, this one too had its twist, indeed one so violent as to throw the earth itself out of its orbit. This was precisely what it was designed to do.

For the twist in this story was that it contained my last command to the power, my final sentence of death.

Upon whom? Who else, but upon the story’s reader!

Ingenious, certainly, you willingly admit. As long as issues of the magazine remain in circulation (and their proximity to victims of this extraordinary plague guarantees that) the power will continue its task of annihilation. Its author alone will remain unmolested, for no court will hear evidence at second-hand, and who will live to give it at first-hand?

But where, you ask, was the story published, fearful that you may inadvertently buy the magazine and read it.

I answer: Here! It is the story that lies before you now. Savour it well, its finis is your own. As you read these last few lines you will be overwhelmed by horror and revulsion, then by fear and panic. Your heart seizes, its pulse falling ... your mind clouds ... your life ebbs ... you are sinking, within a few seconds you will join eternity ... three ... two ...one ...

Now!

Zero.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

MICHAEL MOORCOCK:

Pale Roses

One of the biggest-selling fantasy authors in Britain today is Michael Moorcock, with his heroic sword-and-sorcery adventures involving the various incarnations of the Eternal Champion - Elric, Erekose, Corum and Dorian Hawkmoon. The Corum and Hawkmoon series in particular are centred upon science fictional ideas, whereas Elric and Erekose originally started their days as straight fantasy. Moorcock has however long since mapped out his Champion Mythos, and written as much into the network as possible - even his science fiction finds its way into the threads. All his books are interlinked in some way, including his mainstream fiction, like the humorous spy novel The Chinese Agent (1970).

Moorcock was born in London on December 18th 1939. He

graduated to sf via the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Naturally this led to him writing for and editing the juvenile comic Tarzan Adventures, to which he had sold his first professional story, Sojan The Swordsman for the June 1957 issue. Before he was twenty he was turning out all manner of thrillers, westerns, air stories, historicals for Fleetway’s publications. Teaming with sf writer Barrington J Bayley, he sold a story to New Worlds, Peace on Earth, which appeared in the December 1959 issue credited to Michael Barrington. His career really got under way as far as fantasy was concerned with the first Elric story, The Dreaming City in the June 1961 Science Fantasy. This and subsequent stories formed his first hardcover book, The Stealer of Souls (1963). Ten years later his books number over forty, and the end is far from sight.

In 1964 Moorcock accepted the editorial position with New Worlds, and instantly began to steer it into new directions, gambling with experiments, and to some extent succeeding. New authors emerged who had an adept capability at instilling sf with fresh ideas - Langdon Jones, Charles Piatt, George Collyn, whilst from America he attracted Thomas Disch, Roger Zelazny and later Norman Spinrad. So was born the notorious

‘new-wave’ of sf, which by and large had a far better effect on the field than readers at the time imagined. For a while science fiction went mad with its new liberation. It was the mid-1960s, with ‘Swinging London’ and England suddenly the centre for art and fashion. ‘Underground’ magazines appeared, and by 1968 New Worlds had itself become something of an underground publication. And Michael Moorcock’s fictional character Jerry Cornelius had become a ‘cult’ figure. The first Cornelius novel, The Final Programme, written in 1964/5 was not published until an American edition came out in 1968. It has subsequently been successfully filmed.

By 1970 the new wave had splashed into a myriad ripples, but it had left behind much in its wash. Many American writers, including those mentioned above and Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg, Barry Malzberg and Samuel Delany had capitalised on the gateway Moorcock and Ballard had opened. Once again, after some sixty years in the sf wilderness, Britain was again dictating the trends. Sf had been revolutionised. True, writers had led their followers down some murky cul-de-sacs, but ultimately they constructed a pathway through from old style to new style. Now, like motorways and railways they exist, compatibly, side by side, each supplying the other with style and themes like some symbiotic service station!

Moorcock quite naturally works on all levels. Despite the intricacy of his fantasy, much of it is little more than standard, swashbuckling adventure. At the other extreme have been works like the Nebula-award winning Behold The Man (1967) and the moralistic Breakfast in the Ruins (1971), or the frightening The Black Corridor (1969) written in collaboration with his wife, Hilary Bailey.

When New Worlds as a magazine died in 1970, Moorcock was able to revive it as a regular paperback series, editing the first six volumes. Hilary Bailey has since taken over that task to enable Moorcock to concentrate more fully on his writing, although he still turns a hand to editing occasionally such as his series of Victorian science fiction which began with Before Armageddon (1975). This aside Moorcock finds time to write screenplays for films, make record albums, and perform occasionally with the rock group Hawkwind.

New Worlds 7 (1974) carried a novelette by Moorcock, Pale Roses, which forms part of his series about the Dancers at the End of Time. (The novels are An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, and The End of All Songs.) It will be best appreciated by readers well acquainted with Moorcock’s fiction, but can still be read as the satirical romp that it is by those not conversant. Note for instance the reference to Eric of Marylebone, a reincarnation of Elric of Melniboné! Moorcock chose Pale Roses as his favourite after much deliberation. He comments:

‘My tendency these days is to move increasingly from fantasy to comedy. Comedy can supply the element which is otherwise supplied by fantastic imagery. I chose Pale Roses as my favourite (at the time I was asked) sf story - I don’t for instance count my Cornelius stories as sf (or my fantasy stories either).’

* * * *

PALE ROSES

A Tale of the Dancers at the End of Time

Michael Moorcock

Short summer-time and then, my heart’s desire.

The winter and the darkness: one by one

The roses fall, the pale roses expire

Beneath the slow decadence of the sun.

Ernest Dowson, Transition

I

In Which Werther Is Inconsolable

‘You can still amuse people, Werther, and that’s the main thing,’ said Mistress Christia, lifting her skirts to reveal her surprise.

It was rare enough for Werther de Goethe to put on an entertainment (though this one was typical - it was called ‘Rain’) and rare, too, for the Everlasting Concubine to think in individual terms to please her lover of the day.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked as he peered into her thighs.

Werther’s voice in reply was faintly, unusually, animated. ‘Yes.’ His pale fingers traced the tattoos which were primarily on the theme of Death and the Maiden but corpses also coupled, skeletons entwined in a variety of extravagant carnal embraces - and at the centre, in bone-white, her pubic hair had been fashioned in the outline of an elegant and somehow quintessentially feminine skull. ‘You alone know me, Mistress Christia.’

She had heard the phrase so often and it always delighted her.

‘Cadaverous Werther!’

He bent to kiss the skull’s somewhat elongated lips.

His rain rushed through dark air, each drop a different gloomy shade of green, purple or red. And it was actually wet so that when it fell upon the small audience (The Duke of Queens, Bishop Castle, My Lady Charlotina, and one or two recently arrived, absolutely bemused, time-travellers from the remote past) it soaked their clothes and made them shiver as they stood on the shelf of glassy rock overlooking Werther’s Romantic Precipice (below, a waterfall foamed through fierce, black rock.)

‘Nature,’ exclaimed Werther. ‘The only verity!’

The Duke of Queens sneezed. He looked about him with a delighted smile, but nobody else had noticed. He coughed to draw their attention, tried to sneeze again, but failed. He looked up into the ghastly sky; fresh waves of black cloud boiled in: there was lightning now, and thunder. The rain became hail. My Lady Charlotina, in a globular dress of pink veined in soft blue, giggled as the little stones fell upon her gilded features with an almost inaudible ringing sound.

But Bishop Castle, in his nodding, crenellated tête (from which he derived the latter half of his name and which was twice his own height) turned away, saturnine and bored, plainly noting a comparison between all this and his own entertainment of the previous year which had also involved rain, but with each drop turning into a perfect manikin as it touched the ground. There was nothing in his temperament to respond to Werther’s rather innocent recreation of a Nature long-since departed from a planet which could be wholly re-modelled at the whim of any one of its inhabitants.

Mistress Christia, ever quick to notice such responses, eager for her present lover not to lose prestige, cried: ‘But there is more, is there not, Werther? A finale?’

‘I had thought to leave it a little longer ...’

‘No! No! Give us your finale now, my dear!’

‘Well, Mistress Christia, if it is for you.’ He turned one of his power rings, disseminating the sky, the lightning, the thunder, replacing them with pearly clouds, radiated with golden light through which silvery rain still fell.

‘And now,’ he murmured, ‘I give you Tranquillity, and in Tranquillity Hope ...’

A further twist of the ring and a rainbow appeared, bridging the chasm, touching the clouds.

Bishop Castle was impressed by what was an example of elegance rather than spectacle, but he could not resist a minor criticism. ‘Is black exactly the shade, do you think? I should have supposed it expressed your Idea, well, perhaps not perfectly ...’

‘It is perfect for me,’ answered Werther a little gracelessly.

‘Of course,’ said Bishop Castle, regretting his impulse. He drew his bushy red brows together and made a great show of studying the rainbow.

‘It stands out so well against the background.’

Emphatically (causing a brief, ironic glint in the eye of the Duke of Queens) Mistress Christia clapped her hands. ‘It is a beautiful rainbow, Werther. I am sure it is much more as they used to look.’

‘It takes a particularly original kind of imagination to invent such simplicity.’ The Duke of Queens, well-known for a penchant in the direction of vulgarity, fell in with her mood.

‘I hope it does more than merely represent.’ Satisfied both with his creation and with their responses, Werther could not resist indulging his nature, allowing a tinge of hurt resentment in his tone.

All were tolerant. All responded, even Bishop Castle. There came a chorus of consolation. Mistress Christia reached out and took his thin, white hand, inadvertently touching a power ring.

The rainbow began to topple. It leaned in the sky for a few seconds while Werther watched; his disbelief gradually turning to miserable reconciliation; then, slowly, it fell, shattering against the top of the cliff, showering them with shards of jet.

Mistress Christia’s tiny hand fled to the rosebud of her mouth; her round, blue eyes expressed horror already becoming laughter (checked when she noted the look in Werther’s dark and tragic orbs). She still gripped his hand; but he slowly withdrew it, kicking moodily at the fragments of the rainbow. The sky was suddenly a clear, soft grey, actually lit, one might have guessed, by the tired rays of the fading star about which the planet continued to circle, and the only clouds were those on Werther’s noble brow. He pulled at the peak of his bottle-green cap, he stroked at his long, auburn hair, as if to comfort himself. He sulked.

‘Perfect!’ praised My Lady Charlotina, refusing to see error.

‘You have the knack of making the most of a single symbol, Werther.’

The Duke of Queens waved a brocaded arm in the general direction of the now disseminated scene, ‘I envy you your talent, my friend.’

‘It takes the product of panting lust, of pulsing sperm and eager ovaries, to offer us such brutal originality!’ said Bishop Castle, in reference to Werther’s birth (he was the product of sexual union, born of a womb, knowing childhood - a rarity, indeed). ‘Bravo!’

‘Ah,’ sighed Werther, ‘how cheerfully you refer to my doom: To be such a creature, when all others came into this world as mature, uncomplicated adults!’

‘There was also Jherek Carnelian,’ said My Lady Charlotina. Her globular dress bounced as she turned to leave.

‘At least he was not born malformed,’ said Werther.

‘It was the work of a moment to re-form you properly, Werther,’ the Duke of Queens reminded him. ‘The six arms (was it?) removed, two perfectly fine ones replacing them. After all, it was an unusual exercise on the part of your mother. She did very well, considering it was her first attempt.’

‘And her last,’ said My Lady Charlotina, managing to have her back to Werther by the time the grin escaped. She snapped her fingers for her air-car. It floated towards her, a great, yellow rocking horse. Its shadow fell across them all.

‘It left a scar,’ said Werther, ‘nonetheless.’

‘It would,’ said Mistress Christia, kissing him upon his black velvet shoulder.

‘A terrible scar.’

‘Indeed!’ said the Duke of Queens in vague affirmation, his attention wandering. ‘Well, thank you for a lovely afternoon, Werther. Come along, you two!’ He signed to the time-travellers who claimed to be from the eighty-third millenium and were dressed in primitive transparent ‘exoskin’

which was not altogether stable and was inclined to writhe and make it seem that they were covered in hundreds of thin, excited snakes. The Duke of Queens had acquired them for his menagerie. Unaware of the difficulties of returning to their own time (temporal travel had, apparently, only just been re-invented in their age) they were inclined to treat the Duke as an eccentric who could be tolerated until it suited them to do otherwise. They smiled condescendingly, winked at each other, and followed him to an air-car in the shape of a cube whose sides were golden mirrors decorated with white and purple flowers. It was for the pleasure of enjoying the pleasure they enjoyed seemingly at his expense, that the Duke of Queens had brought them with him today. Mistress Christia waved, at his car as it disappeared rapidly into the sky.

At last they were all gone, save herself and Werther de Goethe. He had seated himself upon a mossy rock, his shoulders hunched, his features downcast, unable to speak to her when she tried to cheer him.

‘Oh, Werther,’ she cried at last, ‘what would make you happy?’

‘Happy?’ his voice was a hollow echo of her own. ‘Happy?’ He made an awkward, dismissive gesture. ‘There is no such thing as happiness for such as I!’

‘There must be some sort of equivalent, surely?’

‘Death, Mistress Christia, is my only consolation!’