‘Well, die, my dear! I’ll resurrect you in a day or two, and then ...’

‘Though you love me, Mistress Christia - though you know me best you do not understand. I seek the inevitable, the irreconcilable, the unalterable, the inescapable! Our ancestors knew it. They knew Death without Resurrection; they knew what it was to be Slave to the Elements. Incapable of choosing their own destinies, they had no responsibility for choosing their own actions. They were tossed by tides. They were scattered by storms. They were wiped out by wars, decimated by disease, ravaged by radiation, made homeless by holocausts, lashed by lightnings...’

‘You could have lashed yourself a little today, surely?’

‘But it would have been my decision. We have lost what is Random, we have banished the Arbitrary, Mistress Christia. With our power rings and our gene banks we can, if we desire, change the courses of the planets, populate them with any kind of creature we wish, make our old sun burst with fresh energy or fade completely from the firmament. We control All. Nothing controls us!’

‘There are our whims, our fancies. There are our characters, my moody love.’

‘Even those can be altered at will.’

‘Except that it is a rare nature which would wish to change itself. Would you change yours? I, for one, would be disconsolate if, say, you decided to be more like the Duke of Queens or the Iron Orchid.’

‘Nonetheless, it is possible. It would merely be a matter of decision. Nothing is impossible, Mistress Christia. Now do you realise why I should feel unfulfilled?’

‘Not really, dear Werther. You can be anything you wish, after all. I am not, as you know, intelligent - it is not my choice to be - but I wonder if a love of Nature could be, in essence, a grandiose love of oneself - with Nature identified, as it were, with one’s ego?’ She offered this without criticism.

For a moment he showed surprise and seemed to be considering her observation. ‘I suppose it could be. Still, that has little to do with what we were discussing. It’s true that I can be anything - or, indeed, anyone - I wish. That is why I feel unfulfilled!’

‘Aha,’ she said.

‘Oh, how I pine for the pain of the past! Life has no meaning without misery!’

‘A common view, then, I gather. But what sort of suffering would suit you best, dear Werther? Enslavement by Esquimaux?’ She hesitated, her knowledge of the past being patchier than most people’s, ‘The beatings with thorns? The barbed-wire trews? The pits of fire?’

‘No, no - that is primitive. Psychic, it would have to be. Involving - ummorality.’

‘Isn’t that some sort of wall-painting?’

A large tear welled and fell. ‘The world is too tolerant. The world is too kind. They all - you most of all - approve of me! There is nothing I can do which would not amuse you - even if it offended your taste - because there is no danger, nothing at stake. There are no crimes, inflamer of my lust. Oh, if I could only sin!’

Her perfect forehead wrinkled in the prettiest of frowns. She repeated his words to herself. Then she shrugged, embracing him.

‘Tell me what sin is,’ she said.

* * * *

II

In Which Your Auditor Interposes

Our time-travellers, once they have visited the future, are only permitted (owing to the properties of Time itself) brief returns to their present. They can remain for any amount of time in their future, where presumably they can do no real damage to the course of previous events, but to come back at all is difficult; to make a prolonged stay has been proved impossible. Half an hour with a relative or a loved one, a short account to an auditor, such as myself, of life, say, in the seventy-fifth century, a glimpse at an artefact allowed to some interested scientist - these are the best the time-traveller can hope for, once he has made his decision to leap into the mysterious future.

As a consequence our knowledge of the future is sketchy, to say the least: we have no idea of how civilisations will grow up or how they will decline; we do not know why the number of planets in the Solar System seems to vary drastically between, say, half a dozen to almost a hundred; we cannot explain the popularity in a given age for certain fashions striking us as singularly bizarre or perverse: are beliefs which we consider fallacious or superstitious based on an understanding beyond our comprehension?

The stories we hear are often partial, hastily recounted, poorly observed, perhaps misunderstood by the traveller. We cannot question him closely, for he is soon whisked away from us (Time insists upon a certain neatness, to protect her own nature, which is essentially of the practical, ordering sort, and should that nature ever be successfully altered, then we might, in turn, successfully alter the terms of the human condition) and it is almost inevitable that we shall never have another chance of meeting him.

Resultantly, the stories brought to us of the Earth’s future assume the character of legends rather than history and tend, therefore, to capture the imagination of artists, for serious scientists need permanent, verifiable evidence with which to work and precious little of that is permitted them (some refuse to believe in the future, save as an abstraction, some believe firmly that returning time-travellers’ accounts are accounts of dreams and hallucinations and that they have not actually travelled in time at all!). It is left to the Romancers, childish fellows like myself, to make something of these tales. While I should be delighted to assure you that everything I have set down in this story is based closely on the truth, I am bound to admit that while the outline comes from an account given me by one of our greatest and most famous temporal adventuresses, Miss Una Persson, the conversations and many of the descriptions are of my own invention, intended hopefully to add a little colour to what would otherwise be a somewhat spare, a rather dry, recounting of an incident in the life of Werther de Goethe.

That Werther will exist, only a few entrenched sceptics can doubt. We have heard of him from many sources, usually quite as reliable as the admirable Miss Persson, as we have heard of other prominent figures of that Age we choose to call ‘the End of Time’. If it is this Age which fascinates us more than any other, it is probably because it seems to offer a clue to our race’s ultimate destiny.

Moralists make much of this period and show us that on the one hand it describes the pointlessness of human existence or, on the other, the whole point. Romancers are attracted to it for less worthy reasons; they find it colourful, they find its inhabitants glamorous, attractive; their imagination is sparked by the paradoxes, the very ambiguities which exasperated our scientists, by the idea of a people possessing limitless power and using it for nothing but their own amusement, like gods at play. It is pleasure enough for the Romancer to describe a story; to colour it a little, to fill in a few details where they are missing, in the hope that, by entertaining himself, he entertains others.

Of course, the inhabitants at the End of Time are not the creatures of our past legends, not mere representations of our ancestors’ hopes and fears, not mere metaphors, like Siegfried or Zeus or Krishna, and, this could be why they fascinate us so much. Those of us who have studied this Age (as best it can be studied) feel on friendly terms with the Iron Orchid, with the Duke of Queens, with Lord Jagged of Canaria and the rest, and even believe that we can guess something of their inner lives.

Werther de Goethe, suffering from the knowledge of his, by the standards of his own time, unusual entrance into the world, doubtless felt himself apart from his fellows, though there was no objective reason why he should feel it. (I trust the reader will forgive my abandoning any attempt at a clumsy future tense.) In a society where eccentricity is encouraged, where it is celebrated no matter how extreme its realisation, Werther felt, we must assume, uncomfortable: — wishing for peers who would demand some sort of conformity from him. He could not retreat into a repressive past age; it was well-known that it was impossible to remain in the past (the phenomenon had a name at the End of Time: it was called the Morphail Effect), and he had an ordinary awareness of the futility of recreating such an environment for himself - for he would have created it; the responsibility would still ultimately be his own. We can only sympathise with the irreconcilable difficulties of leading the life of a gloomy fatalist when one’s fate is wholly decisively, in one’s own hands!

Like Jherek Carnelian, whose adventures I have recounted elsewhere, he was particularly liked by his fellows for his vast and often naive enthusiasm for whatever he did. Like Jherek, it was possible for Werther to fall completely in love - with Nature, with an Idea, with Woman (or Man, for that matter).

It seemed to the Duke of Queens (from whom we have it on the excellent authority of Miss Persson herself) that one with such a capacity must love themselves enormously and such love is enviable. The Duke, needless to say, spoke without disapproval when he made this observation:

‘To shower such largesse upon the Ego! He kneels before his soul in awe it is a moody king, in constant need of gifts which must always seem rare!’

And what is Sensation, our Moralists might argue, but Seeming Rarity? Last year’s gifts regilded.

It might be true that young Werther (in years no more than half a millenium) loved himself too much and that his tragedy was his inability to differentiate between the self-gratifying sensation of the moment and what we would call a lasting and deeply-felt emotion. We have a fragment of poetry, written, we are assured, by Werther for Mistress Christia:

At these times, I love you most when you are sleeping; Your dreams internal, unrealised to the world at large: And do I hear you weeping?

Most certainly a reflection of Werther’s views, scarcely a description, from all that we know of her, of Mistress Christia’s essential being.

Have we any reason to doubt her own view of herself? Rather, we should doubt Werther’s view of everyone, including himself. Possibly this lack of insight was what made him so thoroughly attractive in his own time - le Grand Naïf.

And, since we have quoted one, it is fair to quote the other, for happily we have another fragment, from the same source, of Mistress Christia’s verse:

To have my body moved by other hands;

Not only those of Man,

But Woman, too!

My Liberty in pawn to those who understand:

That Love, alone, is True.

Surely this displays an irony entirely lacking in Werther’s fragment. Affectation is also here, of course, but affectation of Mistress Christia’s sort so often hides an equivalently sustained degree of self-knowledge. It is sometimes the case in our own age that the greater the extravagant outer show the greater has been the plunge by the showman into the depths of his private conscience: Consequently, the greater the effort to hide the fact, to give the world not what one is, but what it wants. Mistress Christia chose to reflect with consummate artistry the desires of her lover of the day; to fulfil her ambition as subtly as did she, reveals a person of exceptional perspicacity.

I intrude upon the flow of my tale with these various bits of explanation and speculation only, I hope, to offer credibility for what is to follow — to give a hint at a natural reason for Mistress Christia’s peculiar actions and poor Werther’s extravagant response. Some time has passed since we left our lovers. For the moment they have separated. We return to Werther ...

* * * *

III

In Which Werther Finds a Soul Mate

Werther de Goethe’s pile stood on the pinnacle of a black and mile-high crag about which, in the permanent twilight, black vultures swooped and croaked. The rare visitor to Werther’s crag could hear the vulture’s voices as he approached. ‘Never more!’ and ‘Beware the Ides of March!’ and

‘Picking a Chicken With You’ were three of the least cryptic warnings they had been created to caw.

At the top of the tallest of his thin, dark towers, Werther de Goethe sat in his favourite chair of unpolished quartz, in his favourite posture of miserable introspection, wondering why Mistress Christia had decided to pay a call on My Lady Charlotina at Lake Billy the Kid.

‘Why should she wish to stay here, after all?’ He cast a suffering eye upon the sighing sea below. ‘She is a creature of light - she seeks colour, laughter, warmth, no doubt to try to forget some secret sorrow - she needs all the things I cannot give her. Oh, I am a monster of selfishness!’ He allowed himself a small sob. But neither the sob nor the preceding outburst produced the usual satisfaction; self-pity eluded him. He felt adrift, lost, like an explorer without chart or compass in an unfamiliar land. Manfully, he tried again:

‘Mistress Christia! Mistress Christia! Why do you desert me? Without you I am desolate! My pulsatile nerves will sing at your touch only! And yet it must be my doom forever to be betrayed by the very things to which I give my fullest loyalty. Ah, it is hard! It is hard!’

He felt a little better and rose from his chair of unpolished quartz, turning his power ring a fraction so that the wind blew harder through the unglazed windows of the tower and whipped at his hair, blew his cloak about, stung his pale, long face. He raised one jackbooted foot to place it on the low sill and stared through the rain and the wind at the sky like a dreadful, spreading bruise overhead, at the turbulent, howling sea below.

He pursed his lips, twisting his power ring to darken the scene a little more, to bring up the wind’s wail and the ocean’s roar. He was turning back to his previous preoccupation when he perceived that something alien tossed upon the distant waves; an artefact not of his own design, it intruded upon his careful conception. He peered hard at the object, but it was too far away from him to identify it. Another might have shrugged it aside, but he was painstaking, even prissy, in his need for artistic perfection. Was this some vulgar addition to his scene made, perhaps, by the Duke of Queens in a misguided effort to please him?

He took his parachute (chosen as the only means by which he could leave his tower) from the wall and strapped it on, stepping through the window and tugging at the ripcord as he fell into space. Down he plummeted and the scarlet balloon soon filled with gas, the nacelle opening up beneath him, so that by the time he was hovering some feet above the sombre waves, he was lying comfortably on his chest, staring over the rim of his parachute at the trespassing image he had seen from his tower. What he saw was something resembling a great shell, a shallow boat of mother-of-pearl, floating on that dark and heaving sea.

In astonishment he now realised that the boat was occupied by a slight figure, clad in filmy white, whose face was pale and terrified. It could only be one of his friends, altering their appearance for some whimsical adventure. But which? Then he caught, through the rain, a better glimpse and he heard himself saying:

‘A child? A child? Are you a child?’

She could not hear him; perhaps she could not even see him, having eyes only for the watery walls which threatened to engulf her little boat and carry her down to the land of Casey Jones. How could it be a child? He rubbed his eyes. He must be projecting his hopes - but there, that movement, that whimper! It was a child! Without doubt!

He watched, open-mouthed, as she was flung this way and that by the elements - his elements. She was powerless; actually powerless! He relished her terror; he envied her her fear. Where had she come from?

Save for himself and Jherek Carnelian there had not been a child on the planet for thousands upon thousands of years.

He leaned further out, studying her smooth skin, her lovely rounded limbs. Her eyes were tight shut now as the waves crashed upon her fragile craft; her delicate fingers, unstrong, courageous, clung hard to the side! her white dress was wet, outlining her new-formed breasts; water poured from her long, auburn hair. She panted in delicious impotence.

‘It is a child!’ Werther exclaimed. ‘A sweet, frightened child!’

And in his excitement he toppled from his parachute with an astonished yell, and landed with a crash, which winded him, in the sea-shell boat beside the girl. She opened her eyes as he turned his head to apologise. Plainly she had not been aware of his presence overhead. For a moment he could not speak, though his lips moved. But she screamed.

‘My dear ...’ The words were thin and high and they faded into the wind. He struggled to raise himself on his elbows. ‘I apologise ...’

She screamed again. She crept as far away from him as possible. Still she clung to her flimsy boat’s side as the waves played with it: a thoughtless giant with too delicate a toy; inevitably, it must shatter. He waved his hand to indicate his parachute, but it had already been borne away. His cloak was caught by the wind and wrapped itself around his arm; he struggled to free himself and became further entangled; he heard a new scream and then some demoralised whimpering.

‘I will save you!’ he shouted, by way of reassurance, but his voice was muffled even in his own ears. It was answered by a further pathetic shriek. As the cloak was saturated it became increasingly difficult for him to escape its folds. He lost his temper and was deeper enmeshed. He tore at the thing. He freed his head.

‘I am not your enemy, tender one. But your saviour,’ he said. It was obvious that she could not hear him. With an impatient gesture he flung off his cloak at last and twisted a power ring. The volume of noise was immediately reduced. Another twist, and the waves became calmer. She stared at him in wonder.

‘Did you do that?’ she asked.

‘Of course. It is my scene, you see. But how you came to enter it, I do not know!’

‘You are a wizard, then?’ she said.

‘Not at all. I have no interest in sport.’ He clapped his hands and his parachute re-appeared, perhaps a trifle reluctantly as if it had enjoyed its brief independence, and drifted down until it was level with the boat. Werther lightened the sky. He could not bring himself, however, to dismiss the rain, but he let a little sun shine through it.

‘There,’ he said. ‘The storm has passed, eh? Did you like your experience?’

‘It was horrifying! I was so afraid. I thought I would drown.’

‘Yes? And did you like it?’

She was puzzled, unable to answer as he helped her aboard the nacelle and ordered the parachute home.

‘You are a wizard!’ she said. She did not seem disappointed. He did not quiz her as to her meaning. For the moment, if not for always, he was prepared to let her identify him however she wished.

‘You are actually a child?’ he asked hesitantly. ‘I do not mean to be insulting. A time-traveller, perhaps? Or from another planet?’

‘Oh, no. I am an orphan. My father and mother are now dead. I was born on Earth some fourteen years ago.’ She looked in mild dismay over the side of the craft as they were whisked swiftly upward. ‘‘They were time-travellers. We made our home in a forgotten menagerie underground, but it was pleasant. My parents feared recapture, you see. Food still grew in the menagerie. There were books, too, and they taught me to read - and there were other records through which they were able to present me with a reasonable education. I am not illiterate. I know the world. I was taught to fear wizards.’

‘Ah,’ he crooned, ‘the world! But you are not a part of it, just as I am not a part.-’

The parachute reached the window and, at his indication, she stepped gingerly from it to the tower. The parachute folded itself and placed itself upon the wall. Werther said: ‘You will want food, then? I will create whatever you wish!’

‘Fairy food will not fill mortal stomachs, sir,’ she told him.

‘You are beautiful,’ he said. ‘Regard me as your mentor, as your new father. I will teach you what this world is really like. Will you oblige me, at least, by trying the food?’

‘I will.’ She looked about her with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion.

‘You lead a spartan life.’ She noticed a cabinet. ‘Books? You read, then?’

‘In transcription,’ he admitted. ‘I listen. My enthusiasm is for Ivan Turgiditi, who created the Novel of Discomfort and remained its greatest practitioner. In, I believe, the 900th (though they could be spurious, invented, I have heard)

‘Oh, no, no! I have read Turgiditi.’ She blushed. ‘In the original. Wet Socks - four hours of discomfort, every second brought to life, and in less than a thousand pages!’

‘My favourite,’ he told her, his expression softening still more into besotted wonderment. ‘I can scarcely believe - in this Age - one such as you! Innocent of device. Uncorrupted! Pure!’

She frowned. ‘My parents taught me well, sir. I am not…’

‘You cannot know! And dead, you say? Dead! If only I could have witnessed - but no, I am insensitive. Forgive me. I mentioned food.’

‘I am not really hungry.’

‘Later then. That I should have so recently mourned such things as lacking in this world. I was blind. I did not look. Tell me everything. Whose was the menagerie?’

‘It belonged to one of the lords of this planet. My mother was from a period she called the October Century, but recently recovered from a series of interplanetary wars and fresh and optimistic in its rediscoveries of ancestral technologies. She was chosen to be the first into the future. She was captured upon her arrival and imprisoned by a wizard like yourself.’

‘The word means little. But continue.’

‘She said that she used the word because it had meaning for her and she had no other short description. My father came from a time known as the Preliminary Structure, where human kind was rare and machines proliferated. He never mentioned the nature of the transgression he made from the social code of his day, but as a result of it he was banished to this world. He, too, was captured for the same menagerie and there he met my, mother. They lived originally, of course, in separate cages, where their normal environments were recreated for them. But the owner of the menagerie became bored, I think, and abandoned interest in his collection

...’

‘I have often remarked that people who cannot look after their collections have no business keeping them,’ said Werther. ‘Please continue, my dear child.’ He reached out and patted her hand.

‘One day he went away and they never saw him again. It took them some time to realise that he was not returning. Slowly the more delicate creatures, whose environments required special attention, died.’

‘No one came to resurrect them?’

‘No one. Eventually my mother and father were the only ones left. They made what they could of their existence, too wary to enter the outer world in case they should be recaptured, and, to their astonishment, conceived me. They had heard that people from different historical periods could not produce children.’

‘I have heard the same.’

‘Well, then, I was a fluke. They were determined to give me as good an upbringing as they could and to prepare me for the dangers of your world.’

‘Oh, they were right! For one so innocent, there are many dangers. I will protect you, never fear.’

‘You are kind.’ She hesitated. ‘I was not told by my parents that such as you existed.’

‘I am the only one.’

‘I see. My parents died in the course of this past year, first my father, then my mother (of a broken heart, I believe). I buried my mother and at first made an attempt to live the life we had always led, but I felt the lack of company and decided to explore the world, for it seemed to me I, too, could grow old and die before I had experienced anything!’

‘Grow old,’ mouthed Werther rhapsodically, ‘and die!’

‘I set out a month or so ago and was disappointed to discover the absence of ogres, of malevolent creatures of any sort - and the wonders I witnessed, while a trifle bewildering, did not compare with those I had imagined I would find. I had fully expected to be snatched up for a menagerie by now, but nobody has shown interest, even when they have seen me.’

‘Few follow the menagerie fad, at present.’ He nodded. ‘They would not have known you for what you were. Only I could recognise you. Oh, how lucky I am. And how lucky you are, my dear, to have met me when you did. You see, I, too, am a child of the womb. I, too, made my own hard way through the utereal gloom to breathe the air, to find the light of this faded, this senile globe. Of all those you could have met, you have met the only one who understands you, who is likely to share your passions, to relish your education. We are soul mates, child!’

He stood up and put a tender arm about her young shoulders.

‘You have a new mother, a new father now! His name is Werther!’

* * * *

IV

In Which Werther Finds Sin At Last

Her name was Catherine Lily Marguerite Natasha Dolores Beatrice Machineshop-Seven Flambeau Gratitude (the last two names but one being her father’s and her mother’s respectively).

Werther de Goethe continued to talk to her for some hours. Indeed, he became quite carried away as he described all the exciting things they would do, how they would live lives of the purest poetry and simplicity from now on, the quiet and tranquil places they would visit, the manner in which her education would be supplemented, and he was glad to note, he thought, her wariness dissipating, her attitude warming to him.

‘I will devote myself entirely to your happiness,’ he informed her, and then, noticing that she was fast asleep, he smiled tenderly: ‘Poor child. I am a worm of thoughtlessness. She is exhausted.’

He rose from his chair of unpolished quartz and strode to where she lay curled upon the iguana-skin rug; stooping, he placed his hands under her warm-smelling, her yielding body, and somewhat awkwardly lifted her. In her sleep she uttered a tiny moan, her cherry lips parted and her newly budded breasts rose and fell rapidly against his chest once or twice until she sank back into a deeper slumber.

He staggered, panting with the effort, to another part of the tower and then he lowered her with a sigh to the floor. He realised that he had not prepared a proper bedroom for her.

Fingering his chin, he inspected the dank stones, the cold obsidian which had suited his mood so well for so long and now seemed singularly offensive. Then he smiled.

‘She must have beauty,’ he said, ‘and it must be subtle. It must be calm.’

An inspiration, a movement of a power ring, and the walls were covered with thick carpets embroidered with scenes from his own old book of fairy tales. He remembered how he had listened to the book over and over again - his only consolation in the lonely days of his extreme youth.

Here, Man Shelley, a famous harmonican, ventured into Odeon (a version of Hell) in order to be re-united with his favourite three-headed dog Omnibus. The picture showed him with his harmonica (or ‘harp’) playing

‘Blues for a Nightingale’ - a famous lost piece. There, Casablanca Bogard, with his single eye, in the middle of his forehead, wielded his magic spade, Sam, in his epic fight with that ferocious bird, the Malted Falcon, to save his love, the Acrilan Queen, from the power of Big Sleepy (a dwarf who had turned himself into a giant) and Mutinous Caine, who had been cast out of Hollywood (or paradise) for the killing of his sister, the Blue Angel.

Such scenes were surely the very stuff to stir the romantic, delicate imagination of this lovely child, just as his had been stirred when - he felt the frisson -he had been her age. He glowed. His substance was suffused with delicious compassion for them both as he recalled, also, the torments of his own adolescence.

That she should be suffering as he had suffered filled him with the pleasure all must feel when a fellow spirit is recognised, and at the same time he was touched by her plight, determined that she should not know the anguish of his earliest years. Once, long ago, Werther had courted Jherek Carnelian, admiring him for his fortitude, knowing that locked in Jherek’s head were the memories of bewilderment, misery and despair which would echo his own; but Jherek, pampered progeny of that most artificial of all creatures, the Iron Orchid, had been unable to recount any suitable experiences at all, had, whilst cheerfully eager to please Werther, recalled nothing but pleasurable times, had reluctantly admitted, at last, to the possession of the happiest of childhoods. That was when Werther had concluded that Jherek Carnelian had no soul worth speaking of and he had never altered his opinion (now he secretly doubted Jherek’s origins and sometimes believed that Jherek merely pretended to have been a child merely one more of his boring and superficial affectations).

Next, a bed - a soft, downy, bed, spread with sheets of silver silk, with posts of ivory and hangings of precious perspex, antique and yellowed, and on the floor the finely-tanned skins of albino hamsters and marmalade cats.

Werther added gorgeous lavs of intricately patterned red and blue ceramic, their bowls filled with living flowers: with whispering toadflax, dragonsnaps, goldilocks and shanghai lilies, with blooming scarlet margravines (his adopted daughter’s name-flower, as he knew to his pride), with soda-purple poppies and tea-green roses, with iodine and cerise and crimson hanging johnny, with golden cynthia and sky-blue true-lips, calomine and creeping larrikin, until the room was saturated with their intoxicating scents.

Placing a few bunches of hitler’s balls in the corners near the ceiling, a toy fish-tank (capable of firing real fish), which he remembered owning as a boy, under the window, a trunk (it could be opened by pressing the navel) filled with clothes near the bed, a full set of bricks and two bats against the wall close to the doorway, he was able, at last, to view the room with some satisfaction.

Obviously, he told himself, she would make certain changes according to her own tastes. That was why he had shown such restraint. He imagined her naive delight when she wakened in the morning. And he must be sure to produce days and nights of regular duration, because at her age routine was the main thing a child needed. There was nothing like the certainty of a consistently glorious sunrise! This reminded him to make an alteration to a power ring on his left hand, to spread upon the black cushion of the sky crescent moons and stars and starlets in profusion. Bending carefully, he picked up the vibrant youth of her body and lowered her to the bed, drawing the silver sheets up to her vestal chin. Chastely he touched lips to her forehead and crept from the room, fashioning a leafy door behind him, hesitating for a moment, unable to define the mood in which he found himself. A rare smile illumined features set so long in lines of gloom. Returning to his own quarters, he murmured:

‘I believe it is Contentment!’

A month swooned by. Werther lavished every moment of his time upon his new charge. He thought of nothing but her youthful satisfactions. He encouraged her in joy, in idealism, in a love of Nature. Gone were his blizzards, his rocky spires, his bleak wastes and his moody forests, to be replaced with gentle landscapes of green hills and merry, tinkling rivers, sunny glades in copses of poplars, rhododendrons, redwoods, laburnums, banyans and good old amiable oaks. When they went on a picnic large-eyed cows and playful gorillas would come and nibble scraps of food from Catherine Gratitude’s palm. And when it was day, the sun always shone and the sky was always blue, and if there were clouds, they were high, hesitant puffs of whiteness and soon gone.

He found her books so that she might read. There was Turgiditi and Uto, Pett Ridge and Zakka, Pyat Sink - all the ancients. Sometimes he asked her to read to him, for the luxury of dispensing with his usual translators. She had been fascinated by a picture of a typewriter she had seen in a record, so he fashioned an air-car in the likeness of one, and they travelled the world in it, looking at scenes created by Werther’s peers.

‘Oh, Werther,’ she said one day, ‘you are so good to me. Now that I realise the misery which might have been mine (as well as the life I was missing underground) I love you more and more.’

‘And I love you more and more,’ he replied, his head a-swim. And for a moment he felt a pang of guilt at having forgotten Mistress Christia so easily. He had not seen her since Catherine had come to him and he guessed that she was sulking somewhere. He prayed that she would not decide to take vengeance on him.

They went to see Jherek Carnelian’s famous ‘London, 1896’ and Werther manfully hid his displeasure at her admiration for his rival’s buildings of white marble, gold and sparkling quartz. He showed her his own abandoned tomb, which he privately considered in better taste, but it was plain that it did not give her the same satisfaction.

They saw the Duke of Queens’ latest, ‘Ladies and Swans’, but not for long, for Werther considered it unsuitable. Later they paid a visit to Lord Jagged of Canaria’s somewhat abstract ‘War and Peace in Two Dimensions’ and Werther thought it too stark to please the girl, judging the experiment ‘successful’, but Catherine laughed with glee as she touched the living figures and found that somehow it was true - Lord Jagged had given them length and breadth but not a scrap of width - when they turned aside, they disappeared.

* * * *

It was on one of these expeditions, to Bishop Castle’s ‘A Million Angry Wrens’ (an attempt in the recently revised art of Aesthetic Loudness), that they encountered Lord Mongrove, a particular confidante of Werther’s until they had quarrelled over the method of suicide adopted by the natives of Uranus during the period of the Great Sodium Breather. By now they would, if Werther had not found a new obsession, have patched up their differences and Werther felt a pang of guilt for having forgotten the one person on this planet with whom he had, after all, shared something in common.

In his familiar dark green robes, with his leonine head hunched between his massive shoulders, the giant, apparently disdaining an air-carriage, was riding home upon the back of a monstrous snail.

The first thing they saw, from above, was its shining trail over the azure rocks of some abandoned, half-created scene of Argonheart Po’s (who believed that nothing was worth making unless it tasted delicious and could be eaten and digested). It was Catherine who saw the snail itself first and exclaimed at the size of the man who occupied the swaying howdah on its back.

‘He must be ten feet tall, Werther!’

And Werther, knowing whom she meant, made their typewriter descend, crying:

‘Mongrove! My old friend!’

Mongrove, however, was sulking. He had chosen not to forget whatever insult it had been which Werther had levelled at him when they had last met. ‘What? Is it Werther? Bring freshly sharpened dirks for the flesh between my shoulder blades? It is that Cold Betrayer himself, whom I befriended when a bare boy, pretending carelessness, feigning insouciance, as if he cannot remember, with relish, the exact degree of bitterness of the poisoned wine he fed me when we parted. Faster, steed!

Bear me away from Treachery! Let me fly from further Insult! No more shall I suffer at the hands of Calumny!’ And, with his long, jewelled stick, he beat upon the shell of his mollusculoid mount. The beast’s horns waved agitatedly for a moment, but it did not really seem capable of any greater speed. In good-humoured puzzlement, it turned its slimy head towards its master.

‘Forgive me, Mongrove! I take back all I said,’ announced Werther, unable to recall a single sour syllable of the exchange. ‘Tell me why you are abroad. It is rare for you to leave your doomy dome.’

‘I am making my way to the Ball,’ said Lord Mongrove, ‘which is shortly to be held by My Lady Charlotina. Doubtless I have been invited to act as a butt for their malice and their gossip, but I go in good faith.’

‘A Ball? I know nothing of it.’

Mongrove’s countenance brightened a trifle. ‘You have not been invited? Ah!’

‘I wonder ... But, no - My Lady Charlotina shows unsuspected sensitivity. She knows that I now have responsibilities - to my little Ward, here. To Catherine - to my Kate.’

‘The child?’

‘Yes, to my child. I am privileged to be her protector. Fate favours me as her new father. This is she. Is she not lovely? Is she not innocent?’

Lord Mongrove raised his great head and looked at the slender girl beside Werther. He shook his huge head as if in pity for her.

‘Be careful, my dear,’ he said. ‘To be befriended by de Goethe is to be embraced by a viper!’

She did not understand Mongrove; questioningly, she looked up at Werther. ‘What does he mean?’

Werther was shocked. He clapped his hands to her pretty ears.

‘Listen no more! I regret the overture. The movement, Lord Mongrove, shall remain unresolved. Farewell, spurner of good-intent. I had never guessed before the level of your cynicism. Such an accusation!

Goodbye, for ever, most malevolent of mortals, despiser of altruism, hater of love! She shall know me no longer!’

‘You have known yourself not at all,’ snapped Mongrove spitefully, but it was unlikely that Werther, already speeding skyward, heard the remark.

And thus it was with particular and unusual graciousness that Werther greeted My Lady Charlotina when, a little later, they came upon her.

She was wearing the russett ears and eyes of a fox, riding her yellow rocking horse through the patch of orange sky left over from her own turbulent ‘Death of Neptune’. She waved to them. ‘Cock-a-loodle-do!’

‘My dear Lady Charlotina. What a pleasure it is to see you. Your beauty continues to rival Nature’s mightiest miracles.’

It is with such unwonted effusion that one will greet a person, who has not hitherto aroused our feelings, when we are in a position to compare them against another, closer, acquaintance who had momentarily earned our contempt or anger.

She seemed taken aback, but received the compliment equably enough.

‘Dear Werther! And is this that rarity, the girl-child I have heard so much about and whom, in your goodness, you have taken under your wing?

I could not believe it! A child! And how lucky she is to find a father in yourself - of all our number the one best suited to look after her.’

It might also be said that Werther preened himself beneath the golden shower of her benediction, and if he detected no irony in her tone, perhaps it was because he still smarted from Mongrove’s dash of vitriol.

‘I have been chosen, it seems,’ he said modestly, ‘to lead this waif through the traps and illusions of our weary world. The burden I shoulder is not light...’

‘Valiant Werther!’

‘... but it is shouldered willingly. I am devoting my life to her upbringing, to her peace of mind.’ He placed a bloodless hand upon her auburn locks and, winsomely, she shook his other one.

‘You are tranquil, my dear?’ asked Lady Charlotina kindly, arranging her blue skirts over the saddle of her rocking horse. ‘You have no doubts?’

‘At first I had,’ admitted the sweet child, ‘but gradually I learned to trust my new father. Now I would trust him in anything!’

‘Ah,’ sighed My Lady Charlotina, ‘trust!’

‘Trust,’ said Werther. ‘It grows in me, too. You encourage me, charming Charlotina, for a short time ago I believed myself doubted by all.’

‘Is it possible? When you are evidently so reconciled - so - happy!’

‘And I am happy, also, now that I have Werther,’ carolled the commendable Catherine.

‘Exquisite!’ breathed My Lady Charlotina. ‘And you will, of course, both come to my Ball.’

‘I am not sure ...’ began Werther, ‘perhaps Catherine is too young...’

But she raised her tawny hands. ‘It is your duty to come. To show us all that simple hearts are the happiest.’

‘Possibly...’

‘You must. The world must have examples, Werther, if it is to follow your Way.’

Werther lowered his eyes shyly. ‘I am honoured,’ he said. ‘We accept.’

‘Splendid! Then come soon. Come now, if you like. A few

arrangements, and the Ball begins.’

‘Thank you,’ said Werther, ‘but I think it best if we return to my castle for a little while.’ He caressed his ward’s fine, long tresses. ‘For it will be Catherine’s first Ball and she must choose her gown.’

And he beamed down upon his radiant protégée as she clapped her hands in joy.

My Lady Charlotina’s Ball must have been at least a mile in circumference, set against the soft tones of a summer twilight, red-gold and transparent so that, as one approached, the guests who had already arrived could be seen standing upon the inner wall, clad in creations extravagant even at the End of Time.

The Ball itself was inclined to roll a little, but those inside it were undisturbed; their footing was firm, thanks to My Lady Charlotina’s artistry. The Ball was entered by means of a number of sphincterish openings, placed more or less at random in its outer wall. At the very centre of the Ball, on a floating platform, sat an orchestra comprising the choicest musicians, out of a myriad ages and planets, from My Lady’s great menagerie (she specialised, currently, in artists).

When Werther de Goethe, a green-gowned Catherine Gratitude upon his blue velvet arm, arrived, the orchestra was playing some primitive figure of My Lady Charlotina’s own composition. It was called, she claimed as she welcomed them. ‘On the Theme of Childhood’, but doubtless she thought to please them, for Werther believed he had heard it before, under a different title.

Many of the guests had already arrived and were standing in small groups chatting to each other. Werther greeted an old friend Li Pao, of the 27th century, and such a kill-joy that he had never been wanted for a menagerie. While he was forever criticising their behaviour, he never missed a party. Next to him stood the Iron Orchid, mother of Jherek Carnelian, who was not present. In contrast to Li Pao’s faded blue overalls, she wore rags of red, yellow and mauve, thousands of sparkling bracelets, anklets and necklaces, a-head-dress of woven peacock’s wings, slippers which were moles and whose beady eyes looked up from the floor.

‘What do you mean - waste?’ she was saying to Li Pao. ‘What else could we do with the energy of the universe? If our sun burns out, we create another. Doesn’t that make us conservatives? Or is it preservatives?’

‘Good evening, Werther,’ said Li Pao in some relief. He bowed politely to the girl. ‘Good evening, miss.’

‘Miss?’ said the Iron Orchid. ‘What?’

‘Gratitude.’

‘For whom?’

‘This is Catherine Gratitude, my ward,’ said Werther, and the Iron Orchid let forth a peal of luscious laughter.

‘The girl-bride, eh?’

‘Not at all,’ said Werther. ‘How is Jherek?’

‘Lost, I fear, in Time. We have seen nothing of him recently. He still pursues his paramour. Some say you copy him, Werther.’

He knew her bantering tone of old and took the remark in good part.

‘His is a mere affectation,’ he said. ‘Mine is Reality.’

‘You were always one to make that distinction, Werther,’ she said.

‘And I will never understand the difference!’

‘I find your concern for Miss Gratitude’s upbringing most worthy,’ said Li Pao somewhat unctuously. ‘If there is any way I can help. My knowledge of twenties’ politics, for instance, is considered unmatched - particularly, of course, where the 26th and 27th centuries are concerned ...’

‘You are kind,’ said Werther, unsure how to take an offer which seemed to him overeager and not entirely selfless.

Gaf the Horse in Tears, whose clothes were real flame, flickered towards them, the light from his burning, unstable face almost blinding Werther. Catherine Gratitude shrank from him as he reached out a hand to touch her, but her expression changed as she realised that he was not at all hot - rather, there was something almost chilly about the sensation on her shoulder. Werther did his best to smile. ‘Good evening, Gaf.’

‘She is a dream!’ said Gaf. ‘I know it, because only I have such a wonderful imagination. Did I create her, Werther?’

‘You jest.’

‘Ho, ho! Serious old Werther.’ Gaf kissed him, bowed to the child, and moved away, his body erupting in all directions as he laughed the more.

‘Literal, literal Werther!’

‘He is a boor,’ Werther told his charge. ‘Ignore him.’

‘I thought him sweet,’ she said.

‘You have much to learn, my dear.’

The music filled the Ball and some of the guests left the floor to dance, hanging in the air around the orchestra, darting streamers of coloured energy in order to weave complex patterns as they moved.

They are very beautiful,’ said Catherine Gratitude. ‘May we dance soon, Werther?’

‘If you wish. I am not much given to such pastimes as a rule.’

‘But tonight?’

He smiled. ‘I can refuse you nothing, child.’

She hugged his arm and her girlish laughter filled his heart with warmth.

‘Perhaps you should have made yourself a child before, Werther?’

suggested the Duke of Queens, drifting away from the dance and leaving a trail of green fire behind him. He was clad all in soft metal which reflected the colours in the Ball and created other colours in turn. ‘You are a perfect father. Your métier.’

‘It would not have been the same, Duke of Queens.’

‘As you say.’ His darkly handsome face bore its usual expression of benign amusement. ‘I am the Duke of Queens, child. It is an honour.’ He bowed, his metal booming.

‘Your friends are wonderful,’ said Catherine Gratitude. ‘Not at all what I expected.’

‘Be wary of them,’ murmured Werther. ‘They have no conscience.’

‘Conscience? What is that?’

Werther touched a ring and led her up into the air of the Ball. ‘I am your conscience, for the moment, Catherine. You shall learn in time.’

Lord Jagged of Canaria, his face almost hidden by one of his high, quilted collars, floated in their direction.

‘Werther, my boy! This must be your daughter. Oh! Sweeter than honey! Softer than petals! I have heard so much - but the praise was not enough! You must have poetry written about you. Music composed for you. Tales must be spun with you as the heroine.’ And Lord Jagged made a deep and elaborate bow, his long sleeves sweeping the air below his feet. Next, he addressed Werther:

‘Tell me, Werther, have you seen Mistress Christia? Everyone else is here, but not she.’

‘I have looked for the Everlasting Concubine without success.’

Werther told him.

‘She should arrive soon. In a moment My Lady Charlotina announces the beginning of the masquerade - and Mistress Christia loves the masquerade.’

‘I suspect she pines,’ said Werther.

‘Why so?’

‘She loved me, you know.’

‘Aha! Perhaps you are right. But I interrupt your dance. Forgive me.’

And Lord Jagged of Canada floated, stately and beautiful, towards the floor.

‘Mistress Christia?’ said Catherine. ‘Is she your Lost Love?’

‘A wonderful woman,’ said Werther. ‘But my first duty is to you. Regretfully I could not pursue her, as I think she wanted me to do.’

‘Have I come between you?’

‘Of course not. Of course not. That was infatuation - this is a sacred duty.’

And Werther showed her how to dance - how to notice a gap in a pattern which might be filled by the movements from her body. Because it was a special occasion he had given her her very own power ring - only a small one, but she was proud of it, and she gasped so prettily at the colours her train made that Werther’s fears that his gift might corrupt her precious innocence were plainly unfounded. It was then that he realised with a shock how deeply he had fallen in love with her.

At the realisation, he made an excuse, leaving her to dance with first Sweet Orb Mace, feminine tonight, with a latticed face, and then with O’Kala Incarnadine who, with his usual preference for the bodies of beasts, was currently a bear. Although he felt a pang as he watched her stroke O’Kala’s ruddy fur, he could not bring himself just then to interfere. His immediate desire was to leave the Ball, but to do that would be to disappoint his ward, to raise questions he would not wish to answer. After a while he began to feel a certain satisfaction from his suffering and remained, miserably, on the floor while Catherine danced on and on.

And then My Lady Charlotina had stopped the orchestra and stood on the platform calling for their attention.

‘It is time for the masquerade. You all know the theme, I hope.’ She paused, smiling. ‘All, save Werther and Catherine. When the music begins again, please reveal your creations of the evening.’

Werther frowned, wondering her reasons for not revealing the theme of the masquerade to him. She was still smiling at him as she drifted towards him and settled beside him on the floor.

‘You seem sad, Werther. Why so? I thought you at one with yourself at last. Wait. My surprise will flatter you, I’m sure!’

The music began again. The Ball was filled with laughter - and there was the theme of the masquerade!

Werther cried out in anguish. He dashed upward through the gleeful throng, seeing each face as a mockery, trying to reach the side of his girl-child before she could realise the dreadful truth.

‘Catherine! Catherine!’

He flew to her. She was bewildered as he folded her in his arms.

‘Oh, they are monsters of insincerity! Oh, they are grotesque in their aping of all that is simple, all that is pure!’ he cried.

He glared about him at the other guests. My Lady Charlotina had chosen ‘Childhood’ as her general theme. Sweet Orb Mace had changed himself into a gigantic single sperm, his own face still visible at the glistening tail; the Iron Orchid had become a monstrous new-born baby with a red and bawling face which still owed more to Paint than to Nature; the Duke of Queens, true to character, was three-year-old Siamese twins (both the faces were his own, softened’); even Lord Mongrove had deigned to become an egg.

‘What ith it, Werther?’ lisped My Lady Charlotina at his feet, her brown curls bobbing as she waved her lollipop in the general direction of the other guests. ‘Doeth it not pleathe you?’

‘Ugh! This is agony! A parody of everything I hold most perfect!’

‘But, Werther...’

‘What is wrong, dear Werther?’ begged Catherine. ‘It is only a masquerade.’

‘Can you not see? It is you - everything you and I mean - that they mock. No - it is best that you do not see. Come, Catherine. They are insane; they revile all that is sacred!’ And he bore her bodily towards the wall, rushing through the nearest doorway and out into the darkened sky.

* * * *

He left his typewriter behind, so great was his haste to be gone from that terrible scene. He fled with her willy-nilly through the air, through daylight, through pitchy night. He fled until he came to his own tower, flanked now by green lawns and rolling turf, surrounded by song-birds, swamped in sunshine. And he hated it - landscape, larks and light -all were hateful.

He flew through the window and found his room full of comforts - of cushions and carpets and heady perfume -and with a gesture he removed them. Their particles hung gleaming in the sun’s beams for a moment. But the sun, too, was hateful. He blacked it out and night swam into that bare chamber. And all the while, in amazement, Catherine Gratitude looked on, her lips forming the question, but never uttering it. At length, tentatively, she touched his arm.

‘Werther?’

His hands flew to his head. He roared in his mindless pain.

‘Oh, Werther!’

‘Ah! They destroy me! They destroy my ideals!’

He was weeping when he turned to bury his face in her hair.

‘Werther!’ She kissed his cold cheek. She stroked his shaking back. And she led him from the ruins of his room and down the passage to her own apartment.

‘Why should I strive to set up standards,’ he sobbed, ‘when all about me they seek to pull them down. It would be better to be a villain!’

But he was quiescent; he allowed himself to be seated upon her bed; he felt suddenly drained. He sighed. ‘They hate innocence. They would see it gone forever from this globe.’

She gripped his hand. She stroked it. ‘No, Werther. They meant no harm. I saw no harm.’

‘They would corrupt you. I must keep you safe.’

Her lips touched his and his body came alive again. Her fingers touched his skin. He gasped.

‘I must keep you safe.’

In a dream, he took her in his arms. Her lips parted, their tongues met. Her young breasts pressed against him - and for perhaps the first time in his life Werther understood the meaning of physical joy. His blood began to dance to the rhythm of a sprightlier heart. And why should he not take what they would take in his position? He placed a hand upon a pulsing thigh. If cynicism called the tune, then he would show them he could pace as pretty a measure as any. His kisses became passionate, and passionately they were returned.

‘Catherine!’

A motion of a power ring and their clothes were gone, the bed hangings drawn.

And your auditor not being of that modern school which salaciously seeks to share the secrets of others’ passions (secrets familiar, one might add, to the great majority of us) retires from this scene.

But when he woke the next morning and turned on the sun, Werther looked down at the lovely child beside him, her auburn hair spread across the pillows, her little breasts rising and falling in tranquil sleep, and he realised that he had used his reaction to the masquerade to betray his trust. A madness had filled him; he had raised an evil wind and his responsibility had been borne off by it, taking Innocence and Purity, never to return. His lust had lost him everything.

Tears reared in his tormented eyes and ran cold upon his heated cheeks. ‘Mongrove was perceptive indeed,’ he murmured. To be befriended by Werther is to be embraced by a viper. She can never trust me - anyone - again. I have lost my right to offer her protection. I have stolen her childhood.’

And he got up from the bed, from the scene of that most profound of crimes, and he ran from the room and went to sit in his old chair of unpolished quartz, staring listlessly through the window at the paradise he had created outside. It accused him; it reminded him of his high ideals. He was astonished by the consequences of his actions: he had turned his paradise to hell.

A great groan reverberated in his chest. ‘Oh, now I know what sin is!’

he said. ‘And what terrible tribute it exacts from the one who tastes it!’

And he sank almost luxuriously into the deepest gloom he had ever known.

* * * *

V

In Which Werther Finds Redemption Of Sorts

He avoided Catherine Gratitude all that day, even when he heard her calling his name, for if the landscape could fill him with such agony, what would he feel under the startled inquisition of her gaze? He erected himself a heavy dungeon door so that she could not get in, and, as he sat contemplating his poisoned paradise, he saw her once, walking on a hill he had made for her. She seemed unchanged, of course, but he knew in his heart how she must be shivering with the chill of lost innocence. That it should have been himself, of all men, who had introduced her so young to the tainted joys of carnal love! Another deep sigh and he buried his fists savagely into his eyes.

‘Catherine! Catherine! I am a thief, an assassin, a despoiler of souls. The name of Werther de Goethe becomes a synonym for Treachery!’

It was not until the next morning that he thought himself able to admit her to his room, to submit himself to a judgement which he knew would be worse for not being spoken. Even when she did enter, his shifty eye would not focus on her for long. He looked for some outward sign of her experience, somewhat surprised that he could detect none.

He glared at the floor, knowing his words to be inadequate. ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

‘For leaving the Ball, darling Werther! The epilogue was infinitely sweeter.’

‘Don’t!’ He put his hands to his ears. ‘I cannot undo what I have done, my child, but I can try to make amends. Evidently you must not stay here with me. You need suffer nothing further on that score. For myself, I must contemplate an eternity of loneliness. It is the least of the prices I must pay. But Mongrove would be kind to you, I am sure.’ He looked at her. It seemed that she had grown older. Her bloom was fading now that it had been touched by the icy fingers of that most sinister, most insinuating, of libertines, called Death. ‘Oh,’ he sobbed, ‘how haughty was I in my pride!

How I congratulated myself on my high-mindedness. Now I am proved the lowliest of all my kind!’

‘I really cannot follow you, Werther dear,’ she said. ‘Your behaviour is rather odd today, you know. Your words mean very little to me.’

‘Of course they mean little,’ he said. ‘You are unworldly, child. How can you anticipate ... ah, ah ...’ and he hid his face in his hands.

‘Werther, please cheer up. I have heard of le petit mal, but this seems to be going on for a somewhat longer time. I am still puzzled ...’

‘I cannot, as yet,’ he said, speaking with some difficulty through his palms, ‘bring myself to describe in cold words the enormity of the crime I have committed against your spirit - against your childhood. I had known that you would - eventually - wish to experience the joys of true love - but I had hoped to prepare your soul for what was to come - so that when it happened it would be beautiful.’

‘But it was beautiful, Werther.’

He found himself experiencing a highly inappropriate impatience with her failure to understand her doom,

‘It was not the right kind of beauty,’ he explained.

‘There are certain correct kinds for certain times?’ she asked. ‘You are sad because we have offended some social code?’

‘There is no such thing in this world, Catherine - but you, child, could have known a code. Something I never had when I was your age something I wanted for you. One day you will realise what I mean.’ He leaned forward, his voice thrilling, his eye hot and hard, ‘And if you do not hate me now, Catherine, oh, you will hate me then. Yes! You will hate me then.’

Her answering laughter was unaffected, unstrained. ‘This is silly, Werther. I have rarely had a nicer experience.’

He turned aside, raising his hands as if to ward off blows. ‘Your words are darts - each one draws blood in my conscience.’ He sank back into his chair.

Still laughing, she began to stroke his limp hand. He drew it away from her. ‘Ah, see! I have made you lascivious. I have introduced you to the drug called lust!’

‘Well, perhaps to an aspect of it!’

Some change in her tone began to impinge on Werther, though he was still deep-trapped in the glue of his guilt. He raised his head, his expression bemused, refusing to believe the import of her words.

‘A wonderful aspect,’ she said. And she licked his ear.

He shuddered. He frowned. He tried to frame words to ask her a certain question, but he failed.

She licked his cheek and she twined her fingers in his lacklustre hair.

‘And one I should love to experience again, most passionate of anachronisms’. It was as it must have been in those ancient days - when poets ranged the world, stealing what they needed, taking any fair maiden who pleased them, setting fire to the towns of their publishers, laying waste the books of their rivals: ambushing their readers. I am sure you were just as delighted, Werther. Say that you were!’

‘Leave me!’ he gasped. ‘I can bear no more.’

‘If it is what you want.’

‘It is.’

With a wave of her little hand, she tripped from the room.

And Werther brooded upon her shocking words, deciding that he could only have misheard her. In her innocence she had seemed to admit an understanding of certain inconceivable things. What he had half-interpreted as a familiarity with the carnal world was doubtless merely a child’s romantic conceit. How could she have had previous experience of a night such as that which they had shared?

She had been a virgin. Certainly she had been that.

He wished that he did not then feel an ignoble pang of pique at the possibility of another having also known her. Consequently this was immediately followed by a further wave of guilt for entertaining such thoughts and subsequent emotions. A score of conflicting glooms warred in his mind, sent tremors through his body.

‘Why,’ he cried to the sky, ‘was I born! I am unworthy of the gift of life. I accused My Lady Charlotina, Lord Jagged and the Duke of Queens of base emotions, cynical motives, yet none are baser or more cynical than mine! Would I turn my anger against my victim, blame her for my misery, attack a little child because she tempted me? That is what my diseased mind would do. Thus do I seek to excuse myself my crimes. Ah, I am vile!

I’ am vile!’

He considered going to visit Mongrove, for he dearly wished to abase himself before his old friend, to tell Mongrove that the giant’s contempt had been only too well-founded; but he had lost the will to move; a terrible lassitude had fallen upon him. Hating himself, he knew that all must hate him, and while he knew that he had earned every scrap of their hatred, he could not bear to go abroad and run the risk of suffering it.

What would one of his heroes of Romance have done? How would Casablanca Bogard or Eric of Marylebone have exonerated themselves, even supposing they could have committed such an unbelievable deed in the first place?

He knew the answer.

It drummed louder and louder in his ears. It was implacable and grim. But still he hesitated to follow it. Perhaps some other, more original act of contrition would occur to him? He racked his writhing brain. Nothing presented itself as an alternative.

At length he rose from his chair of unpolished quartz. Slowly, his pace measured, he walked towards the window, stripping off his power rings so that they clattered to the flagstones.

He stepped upon the ledge and stood looking down at the rocks a mile below at the base of the tower. Some jolting of a power ring as it fell had caused a wind to spring up and to blow coldly against his naked body.

‘The Wind of Justice,’ he thought.

He ignored his parachute. With one final cry of ‘Catherine! Forgive me!’ and an unvoiced hope that he would be found long after it proved impossible to resurrect him, he flung himself, unsupported, into space.

Down he fell and death leapt to meet him. The breath fled from his lungs, his head began to pound, his sight grew dim, but the spikes of black rock grew larger until he knew that he had struck them, for his body was a-flame, broken in a hundred places, and his sad, muddled, doom-clouded brain was chaff upon the wailing breeze. Its last coherent thought was: Let none say Werther did not pay the price in full. And thus did he end his life with a proud negative.

* * * *

VI

In Which Werther Discovers Consolation

‘Oh, Werther, what an adventure!’

It was Catherine Gratitude looking down on him as he opened his eyes. She clapped her hands. Her blue eyes were full of joy.

Lord Jagged stood back with a smile. ‘Re-born, magnificent Werther, to sorrow afresh!’ he said.

He lay upon a bench of marble in his own tower. Surrounding the bench were My Lady Charlotina, the Duke of Queens, Gaf the Horse in Tears, the Iron Orchid, Li Pao, O’Kala Incarnadine, and many others. They all applauded.

‘A splendid drama!’ said the Duke of Queens.

‘Amongst the best I have witnessed,’ agreed the Iron Orchid (a fine compliment from her).

Werther found himself warming to them as they poured their praise upon him; but then he remembered Catherine Gratitude and what he had meant himself to be to her, what he had actually become, and although he felt much better for having paid his price, he stretched out his hand to her, saying again: ‘Forgive me.’

‘Silly Werther! Forgive such a perfect role? No, no! If anyone needs forgiving, then it is I.’ And Catherine Gratitude touched one of the many power rings now festooning her fingers and returned herself to her original appearance.

‘It is you!’ He could make no other response as he looked upon the Everlasting Concubine. ‘Mistress Christia?’

‘Surely you suspected towards the end?’ she said. ‘Was it not everything you told me you wanted? Was it not a fine “sin”, Werther?’

‘I suffered ...’ he began.

‘Oh, yes! How you suffered! It was unparalleled. It was equal, I am sure, to anything in History. And, Werther, did you not find the “guilt”

particularly exquisite?’

‘You did it for me?’ He was overwhelmed. ‘Because it was what I said I wanted most of all?’

‘He is still a little dull,’ explained Mistress Christia, turning to their friends. ‘I believe that is often the case after a resurrection.’

‘Often,’ intoned Lord Jagged, darting a sympathetic glance at Werther. ‘But it will pass, I hope.’

‘The ending, though it could be anticipated,’ said the Iron Orchid, ‘was absolutely right.’

Mistress Christia put her arms around him and kissed him. ‘They are saying that your performance rivals Jherek Carnelian’s,’ she whispered. He squeezed her hand. What a wonderful woman she was, to be sure, to have added to his experience and to have increased his prestige at the same time.

He sat up. He smiled a trifle bashfully. Again they applauded.

‘I can see that this was where “Rain” was leading,’ said Bishop Castle.

‘It gives the whole thing point, I think.’

‘The exaggerations were just enough to bring out the essential mood without being too prolonged,’ said O’Kala Incarnadine, waving an elegant hoof (he had come as a goat).

‘Well, I had not...’ began Werther, but Mistress Christia put a hand to his lips.

‘You will need a little time to recover,’ she said.

Tactfully, one by one, still expressing their most fulsome congratulations, they departed, until only Werther de Goethe and the Everlasting Concubine were left.

‘I hope you did not mind the deception, Werther,’ she said. ‘I had to make amends for ruining your rainbow and I had been wondering for ages how to please you. My Lady Charlotina helped a little, of course, and Lord Jagged - though neither knew too much of what was going on.’

‘The real performance was yours,’ he said. ‘I was merely your foil.’

‘Nonsense. I gave you the rough material with which to work. And none could have anticipated the wonderful, consummate use to which you put it!’

Gently, he took her hand. ‘It was everything I have ever dreamed of,’

he said. ‘It is true, Mistress Christia, that you alone know me.’

‘You are kind. And now I must leave.’

‘Of course.’ He looked out through his window. The comforting storm raged again. Familiar lightnings flickered; friendly thunder threatened; from below there came the sound of his old consoler the furious sea flinging itself, as always, at the rock’s black fangs. His sigh was contented. He knew that their liaison was ended; neither had the bad taste to prolong it and thus produce what would be, inevitably, an anti-climax, and yet he felt regret, as evidently did she.

‘If death were only permanent,’ he said wistfully, ‘but it cannot be. I thank you again, granter of my deepest desires.’,

‘If death,’ she said, pausing at the window, ‘were permanent, how would we judge our successes and our failures? Sometimes, Werther, I think you ask too much of the world.’ She smiled. ‘But you are satisfied for the moment, my love?’

‘Of course.’

It would have been boorish, he thought, to have claimed anything else.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

KEITH ROBERTS: The Signaller

And so we come up to date. Science fiction in Britain today has at last become accepted by the general readership as a literature worthy of attention rather than something to hide away and read in plain wrappers. To close this anthology I decided to choose a writer who has become particularly accepted by a wide cross-section of the reading public, both in Britain and the United States, plus one who belongs to the new generation of sf writers that first appeared in the 1960s. To my mind the most appropriate author was Keith Roberts, and there could be no. better story than his favourite The Signaller. This episode forms part of his fascinating and perceptive novel of an alternate England, Pavane (1968), and it shows perfectly the range of British sf following in particular the brash satire of Moorcock’s Pale Roses.

Keith John Kingston Roberts was born at Kettering,

Northamptonshire, on September 20th, 1935. He trained as a book illustrator, and later spent some years in an animation studio. Then, after a period in the advertising business, he broke free as a freelance visual ser and copywriter.

In 1964 he sent some stories to John Carnell, but they proved too short for Carnell’s new project - that of New Writings. Roberts was encouraged to write longer stories, and the result was Boulter’s Canaries, his first sale. But his first appearance was in Science Fantasy. What Carnell could not use he passed on to Kyril Bonfiglioli, who found Roberts’s fiction fascinating, in particular his tales about the young witch Anita and her grandmother. As a result the September-October 1964 issue of Science Fantasy carried three stories by Roberts - Escapism (a time travel story) and two Anita adventures. Roberts appeared regularly in Science Fantasy thereafter, including several under the Alistair Bevan alias. His New Writings sales also kept his name in the public eye, particularly Sub-Lim and The Inner Wheel (later reworked into a novel).

In the meantime Roberts was working on a novel set in an alternate England wherein Queen Elizabeth I had been assassinated. The completed work was purchased by Bonfiglioli, and the first episode appeared in the first issue of the new Science Fantasy, retitled Impulse, dated March 1966. That first episode was The Signaller and set perfectly the mood for the rest of the series. It obviously satisfied Keith Roberts. He recalls:

‘I’m difficult to satisfy where my own work’s concerned and usually finish a job feeling I’ve lost out somewhere or other, but The Signaller was one that just flowed. I had the idea on a Friday, and finished the rough draft by Sunday night following; whereas most of my stuff gets four, five or more drafts it went through largely unchanged. It seems to have a good balance between strong personal storyline and technical invention, and I wish to God I could do it again.’

* * * *

THE SIGNALLER

Keith Roberts

One of the most powerful talents to enter the field in the last thirty years, Keith Roberts secured an important place in genre history in 1968 with the publication of his classic novel Pavane, one of the best books of the 1960s, and certainly one of the best Alternate History novels ever written (rivaled only by books such as L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle). Trained as an illustrator—he did work extensively as an illustrator and cover artist in the British SF world of the 1960s—Roberts made his first sale to Science Fantasy in 1964. Later, he would take over the editorship of Science Fantasy, by then called SF

Impulse, as well as providing many of the magazine’s striking covers. But his ca-reer as an editor was short-lived, and most of his subsequent im-pact on the field would be as a writer, including the production of some of the very best short stories of the last three decades. Roberts’s other books include the novels The Chalk Giants, The Furies, The Inner Wheel, Molly Zero, Gráinne, Kiteworld, and The Boat of Fate, one of the finest historical novels of the 1970s. His short work can be found in the collections Machines and Men, The Grain Kings, The Passing of the Dragons, Ladies from Hell, The Lordly Ones, and Winterwood and Other Hauntings. His most recent book is a new collection, Kaeti On Tour.

In “The Signaller”—one of the stories that was later

melded into Pavane— he takes us sideways in time to an alternate England where Queen Elizabeth was cut down by an assassin’s bullet, and England itself fell to the Spanish Armada—a twentieth-century England where the deep shadow of the Church Militant stretches across a still-medieval land of forests and castles and little hud-dled towns; an England where travelers in the bleak winter forests or on the desolate, windswept expanses of the heath must fear wolves and brigands and routiers; and, since the Old Things don’t change even in an Alternate World, an England where it is yet possible to encounter specters of a darker and more ele-mental kind

...

* * * *

On cither side of the knoll the land stretched in long, speckled sweeps, paling in the frost smoke until the outlines of distant hills blended with the curdled milk of the sky. Across the waste a bitter wind moaned, steady and chill, driving before it quick flurries of snow. The snow squalls flickered and vanished like ghosts, the only moving things in a vista of emptiness.

What trees there were grew in clusters, little coppices that leaned with the wind, their twigs meshed together as if for protection, their outlines sculpted into the smooth, blunt shapes of ploughshares. One such copse crowned the summit of the knoll; under the first of its branches, and shel-tered by them from the wind, a boy lay facedown in the snow. He was motionless but not wholly unconscious; from time to time his body quiv-ered with spasms of shock. He was maybe sixteen or seventeen, blond-haired, and dressed from head to feet in a uniform of dark green leather. The uniform was slit in many places; from the shoulders down the back to the waist, across the hips and thighs. Through the rents could be seen the cream-brown of his skin and the brilliant slow twinkling of blood. The leather was soaked with it, and the long hair matted. Beside the boy lay the case of a pair of binoculars, the Zeiss lenses without which no man or apprentice of the Guild of Signallers ever moved, and a dagger. The blade of the weapon was red-stained; its pommel rested a few inches be-yond his outflung right hand. The hand itself was injured, slashed across the backs of the fingers and deeply through the base of the thumb. Round it blood had diffused in a thin pink halo into the snow.

A heavier gust rattled the branches overhead, raised from somewhere a long creak of protest. The boy shivered again and began, with infinite slowness, to move. The outstretched hand crept forward, an inch at a time, to take his weight beneath his chest. The fingers traced an arc in the snow, its ridges red-tipped. He made a noise halfway between a grunt and a moan, levered himself onto his elbows, waited gathering strength. Threshed, half turned over, leaned on the undamaged left hand. He hung his head, eyes closed; his heavy breathing sounded through the copse. Another heave, a convulsive effort, and he was sitting upright, propped against the trunk of a tree. Snow stung his face, bringing back a little more awareness.

He opened his eyes. They were terrified and wild, glazed with pain. He looked up into the tree, swallowed, tried to lick his mouth, turned his head to stare at the empty snow round him. His left hand clutched his stomach; his right was crossed over it, wrist pressing, injured palm held clear of contact. He shut his eyes again briefly; then he made his hand go down, grip, lift the wet leather away from his thigh. He fell back, started to sob harshly at what he had seen. His hand, dropping slack, brushed tree bark. A snag probed the open wound below the thumb; the disgust-ing surge of pain brought him round again.

From where he lay the knife was out of reach. He leaned forward ponderously, wanting not to move, just stay quiet and be dead, quickly. His fingers touched the blade; he worked his way back to the tree, made him-self sit up again. He rested, gasping; then he slipped his left hand under his knee, drew upward till the half-paralysed leg was crooked. Concen-trating, steering the knife with both hands, he placed the tip of its blade against his trews, forced down slowly to the ankle cutting the garment apart. Then round behind his thigh till the piece of leather came clear.

He was very weak now; it seemed he could feel the strength ebbing out of him, faintness flickered in front of his eyes like the movements of a black wing. He pulled the leather toward him, got its edge between his teeth, gripped, and began to cut the material into strips. It was slow, clumsy work; he gashed himself twice, not feeling the extra pain. He fin-ished at last and began to knot the strips round his leg, trying to tighten them enough to close the long wounds in the thigh. The wind howled steadily; there was no other sound but the quick panting of his breath. His face, beaded with sweat, was nearly as white as the sky.

He did all he could for himself, finally. His back was a bright torment, and behind him the bark of the tree was streaked with red, but he couldn’t reach the lacerations there. He made his fingers tie the last of the knots, shuddered at the blood still weeping through the strappings. He dropped the knife and tried to get up.

After minutes of heaving and grunting his legs still refused to take his weight. He reached up painfully, fingers exploring the rough bole of the tree. Two feet above his head they touched the low, snapped-off stump of a branch. The hand was soapy with blood; it slipped, skidded off, groped back. He pulled, feeling the tingling as the gashes in the palm closed and opened. His arms and shoulders were strong, ribboned with muscle from hours spent at the semaphores: he hung tensed for a mo-ment, head thrust back against the trunk, body arced and quivering; then his heel found a purchase in the snow, pushed him upright.

He stood swaying, not noticing the wind, seeing the blackness surge round him and ebb back. His head was pounding now, in time with the pulsing of his blood. He felt fresh warmth trickling on stomach and thighs, and the rise of a deadly sickness. He turned away, head bent, and started to walk, moving with the slow ponderousness of a diver. Six paces off he stopped, still swaying, edged round clumsily. The binocular case lay on the snow where it had fallen. He went back awkwardly, each step requiring now a separate effort of his brain, a bunching of the will to force the body to obey. He knew foggily that he daren’t stoop for the case; if he tried he would fall headlong, and likely never move again. He worked his foot into the loop of the shoulder strap. It was the best he could do; the leather tightened as he moved, riding up round his instep. The case bumped along behind him as he headed down the hill away from the trees.

He could no longer lift his eyes. He saw a circle of snow, six feet or so across, black-fringed at its edges from his impaired vision. The snow moved as he walked, jerking toward him, falling away behind. Across it ran a line of faint impressions, footprints he himself had made. The boy followed them blindly. Some spark buried at the back of his brain kept him moving; the rest of his consciousness was gone now, numbed with shock. He moved draggingly, the leather case jerking and slithering behind his heel. With his left hand he held himself, low down over the groin; his right waved slowly, keeping his precarious balance. He left behind him a thin trail of blood spots; each drop splashed pimpernel-bright against the snow, faded and spread to a wider pink stain before freezing itself into the crystals. The blood marks and the footprints reached back in a ragged line to the copse. In front of him the wind skirled across the land; the snow whipped at his face, clung thinly to his jerkin.

Slowly, with endless pain, the moving speck separated itself from the trees. They loomed behind it, seeming through some trick of the fading light to increase in height as they receded. As the wind chilled the boy the pain ebbed fractionally; he raised his head, saw before him the tower of a semaphore station topping its low cabin. The station stood on a slight eminence of rising ground; his body felt the drag of the slope, reacted with a gale of breathing. He trudged slower. He was crying again now with little whimperings, meaningless animal noises, and a sheen of saliva showed on his chin. When he reached the cabin the copse was still visible behind him, grey against the sky. He leaned against the plank door gulping, seeing faintly the texture of the wood. His hand fumbled for the lanyard of the catch, pulled; the door opened, plunging him forward onto his knees.

After the snow light outside, the interior of the hut was dark. The boy worked his way on all fours across the board floor. There was a cupboard; he searched it blindly, sweeping glasses and cups aside, dimly hearing them shatter. He found what he needed, drew the cork from the bottle with his teeth, slumped against the wall and attempted to drink. The spirit ran down his chin, spilled across chest and belly. Enough went down his throat to wake him momentarily. He coughed and tried to vomit. He pulled himself to his feet, found a knife to replace the one he’d dropped.

A wooden chest by the wall held blankets and bed linen; he pulled a sheet free and haggled it into strips, longer and broader this time, to wrap round his thigh. He couldn’t bring himself to touch the leather tourniquets. The white cloth marked through instantly with blood; the patches elongated, joined and began to glisten. The rest of the sheet he made into a pad to hold against his groin.

The nausea came again; he retched, lost his balance and sprawled on the floor. Above his eye level, his bunk loomed like a haven. If he could just reach it, lie quiet till the sickness went away.... He crossed the cabin somehow, lay across the edge of the bunk, rolled into it. A wave of black-ness lifted to meet him, deep as a sea.

He lay a long time; then the fragment of remaining will reasserted it-self. Reluctantly, he forced open gummy eyelids. It was nearly dark now; the far window of the hut showed in the gloom, a vague rectangle of greyness. In front of it the handles of the semaphore seemed to swim, glint-ing where the light caught the polished smoothness of wood. He stared, realizing his foolishness; then he tried to roll off the bunk. The blankets, glued to his back, prevented him. He tried again, shivering now with the cold. The stove was unlit; the cabin door stood ajar, white crystals fan-ning in across the planking of the floor. Outside, the howling of the wind was relentless. The boy struggled; the efforts woke pain again and the sickness, the thudding and roaring. Images of the semaphore handles dou-bled, sextupled, rolled apart to make a glistening silver sheaf. He panted, tears running into his mouth; then his eyes slid closed. He fell into a noisy void shot with colours, sparks, and gleams and washes of light. He lay-watching the lights, teeth bared, feeling the throb in his back where fresh blood pumped into the bed. After a while, the roaring went away.

* * * *

The child lay couched in long grass, feeling the heat of the sun strike through his jerkin to burn his shoulders. In front of him, at the conical crest of the hill, the magic thing flapped slowly, its wings proud and lazy as those of a bird. Very high it was, on its pole on top of its hill; the faint wooden clattering it made fell remote from the blueness of the summer sky. The movements of the arms had half hypnotized him; he lay nod-ding and blinking, chin propped on his hands, absorbed in his watching. Up and down, up and down, clap… then down again and round, up and back, pausing, gesticulating, never staying wholly still. The semaphore seemed alive, an animate thing perched there talking strange words no-body could understand. Yet words they were, replete with meanings and mysteries like the words in his Modern English Primer. The child’s brain spun. Words made stories; what stories was the tower telling, all alone there on its hill?

Tales of kings and shipwrecks, fights and pursuits, Fairies, buried gold. ... It was talking, he knew that without a doubt; whisper-ing and clacking, giving messages and taking them from the others in the lines, the great lines that stretched across England everywhere you could think, every direction you could see.

He watched the control rods sliding like bright muscles in their oiled guides. From Avebury, where he lived, many other towers were visible; they marched southwards across the Great Plain, climbed the westward heights of the Marlborough Downs. Though those were bigger, huge things staffed by teams of men whose signals might be visible on a clear day for ten miles or more. When they moved it was majestically and slowly, with a thundering from their jointed arms; these others, the little local towers, were friendlier somehow, chatting and pecking away from dawn to sunset.

There were many games the child played by himself in the long hours of summer; stolen hours usually, for there was always work to be found for him. School lessons, home study, chores about the house or down at his brothers’ small-holding on the other side of the village; he must sneak off evenings or in the early dawn, if he wanted to be alone to dream. The stones beckoned him sometimes, the great gambolling diamond-shapes of them circling the little town. The boy would scud along the ditches of what had been an ancient temple, climb the terraced scarps to where the stones danced against the morning sun; or walk the long processional av-enue that stretched eastward across the fields, imagine himself a priest or a god come to do old sacrifice to rain and sun. No one knew who first placed the stones. Some said the Fairies, in the days of their strength; oth-ers the old gods, they whose names it was a sin to whisper. Others said the Devil.

Mother Church winked at the destruction of Satanic relics, and that the villagers knew full well. Father Donovan disapproved, but he could do very little; the people went to it with a will. Their ploughs gnawed the bases of the markers, they broke the megaliths with water and fire and used the bits for patching dry stone walls; they’d been doing it for cen-turies now, and the rings were depleted and showing gaps. But there were many stones; the circles remained, and barrows crowning the windy tops of hills, hows where the old dead lay patient with their broken bones. The child would climb the mounds, and dream of kings in fur and jewels; but always, when he tired, he was drawn back to the semaphores and their mysterious life. He lay quiet, chin sunk on his hands, eyes sleepy, while above him Silbury 973 chipped and clattered on its hill.

The hand, falling on his shoulder, startled him from dreams. He tensed, whipped round and wanted to bolt; but there was nowhere to run. He was caught; he stared up gulping, a chubby little boy, long hair falling across his forehead.

The man was tall, enormously tall it seemed to the child. His face was brown, tanned by sun and wind, and at the corners of his eyes were net-works of wrinkles. The eyes were deep-set and very blue, startling against the colour of the skin; to the boy they seemed to be of exactly the hue one sees at the very top of the sky. His father’s eyes had long since bolted into hiding behind pebble-thick glasses; these eyes were different. They had about them an appearance of power, as if they were used to looking very long distances and seeing clearly things that other men might miss. Their owner was dressed all in green, with the faded shoulder lacings and lanyard of a Serjeant of Signals. At his hip he carried the Zeiss glasses that were the badge of any Signaller; the flap of the case was only half secured and beneath it the boy could see the big eyepieces, the worn brassy sheen of the barrels.

The Guildsman was smiling; his voice when he spoke was drawling and slow. It was the voice of a man who knows about Time, that Time is forever and scurry and bustle can wait. Someone who might know about the old stones in the way the child’s father did not.

“Well,” he said, “I do believe we’ve caught a little spy. Who be you, lad?”

The boy licked his mouth and squeaked, looking hunted. “R-Rafe Bigland, sir…”

“And what be ‘ee doin’?”

Rafe wetted his lips again, looked at the tower, pouted miserably, stared at the grass beside him, looked back to the Signaller and quickly away. “I…I…”

He stopped, unable to explain. On top of the hill the tower creaked and flapped. The Serjeant squatted down, waiting patiently, still with the lit-tle half-smile, eyes twinkling at the boy. The satchel he’d been carrying he’d set on the grass. Rafe knew he’d been to the village to pick up the afternoon meal; one of the old ladies of Avebury was contracted to sup-ply food to the Signallers on duty. There was little he didn’t know about the working of the Silbury station.

The seconds became a minute, and an answer had to be made. Rafe drew himself up a trifle desperately; he heard his own voice speaking as if it was the voice of a stranger, and wondered with a part of his mind at the words that found themselves on his tongue without it seemed the con-scious intervention of thought. “If you please, sir,” he said pipingly, “I was watching the t-tower…”

“Why?”

Again the difficulty. How explain? The mysteries of the Guild were not to be revealed to any casual stranger. The codes of the Signallers and other deeper secrets were handed down, jealously, through the families privi-leged to wear the Green. The Serjeant’s accusation of spying had had some truth to it; it had sounded ominous.

The Guildsman helped him. “Canst thou read the signals, Rafe?”

Rafe shook his head, violently. No commoner could read the towers. No commoner ever would. He felt a trembling start in the pit of his stom-ach, but again his voice used itself without his will. “No, sir,” it said in a firm treble. “But I would fain learn…”

The Serjeant’s eyebrows rose. He sat back on his heels, hands lying easy across his knees, and started to laugh. When he had finished he shook his head. “So you would learn…Aye, and a dozen kings, and many a high-placed gentlemen, would lie easier abed for the reading of the towers.” His face changed itself abruptly into a scowl. “Boy,” he said, “you mock us…”

Rafe could only shake his head again, silently. The Serjeant stared over him into space, still sitting on his heels. Rafe wanted to explain how he had never, in his most secret dreams, ever imagined himself a Signaller; how his tongue had moved of its own, blurting out the impossible and absurd. But he couldn’t speak anymore; before the Green, he was dumb. The pause lengthened while he watched inattentively the lurching progress of a rain beetle through the stems of grass. Then, “Who’s thy father, boy?”

Rafe gulped. There would be a beating, he was sure of that now; and he would be forbidden ever to go near the towers or watch them again. He felt the stinging behind his eyes that meant tears were very close, ready to well and trickle. “Thomas Bigland of Avebury, sir,” he said. “A clerk to Sir William M-Marshall.”

The Serjeant nodded. “And thou wouldst learn the towers? Thou wouldst be a Signaller?”

“Aye, sir…” The tongue was Modern English of course, the language of artisans and tradesmen, not the guttural clacking of the landless churls; Rafe slipped easily into the old-fashioned usage of it the Signallers em-ployed sometimes among themselves.

The Serjeant said abruptly, “Canst thou read in books, Rafe?”

“Aye, sir…” Then falteringly, “If the words be not too long…”

The Guildsman laughed again, and clapped the boy on the back.

“Well, Master Rafe Bigland, thou who would be a Signaller, and can read books if the words be but short, my book learning is slim enough as God He knows; but it may be I can help thee, if thou hast given me no lies. Come.” And he rose and began to walk away toward the tower. Rafe hes-itated, blinked, then roused himself and trotted along behind, head whirling with wonders.

They climbed the path that ran slantingly round the hill. As they moved, the Serjeant talked. Silbury 973 was part of the C class chain that ran from near Londinium, from the great relay station at Pontes, along the line of the road to Aquae Sulis. Its complement…but Rafe knew the complement well enough. Five men including the Serjeant; their cot-tages stood apart from the main village, on a little rise of ground that gave them seclusion. Signallers’ homes were always situated like that, it helped preserve the Guild mysteries. Guildsmen paid no tithes to local demesnes, obeyed none but their own hierarchy; and though in theory they were answerable under common law, in practice they were immune. They gov-erned themselves according to their own high code; and it was a brave man, or a fool, who squared with the richest Guild in England. There had been deadly accuracy in what the Serjeant said; when kings waited on their messages as eagerly as commoners they had little need to fear. The Popes might cavil, jealous of their independence, but Rome herself leaned too heavily on the continent-wide networks of the semaphore tow-ers to do more than adjure and complain. Insofar as such a thing was pos-sible in a hemisphere dominated by the Church Militant, the Guildsmen were free.

Although Rafe had seen the inside of a signal station often enough in dreams he had never physically set foot in one. He stopped short at the wooden step, feeling awe rise in him like a tangible barrier. He caught his breath. He had never been this close to a semaphore tower before; the rush and thudding of the arms, the clatter of dozens of tiny joints, sounded in his eyes like music. From here only the tip of the signal was in sight, looming over the roof of the hut. The varnished wooden spars shone or-ange like the masts of a boat; the semaphore arms rose and dipped, black against the sky. He could see the bolts and loops near their tips where in bad weather or at night when some message of vital importance had to be passed, cressets could be attached to them. He’d seen such fires once, miles out over the Plain, the night the old King died.

The Serjeant opened the door and urged him through it. He stood rooted just beyond the sill. The place had a clean smell that was some-how also masculine, a compound of polishes and oils and the fumes of tobacco; and inside too it had something of the appearance of a ship. The cabin was airy and low, roomier than it had looked from the front of the hill. There was a stove, empty now and gleaming with blacking, its brass-work brightly polished. Inside its mouth a sheet of red crepe paper had been stretched tightly; the doors were parted a little to show the smart-ness. The plank walls were painted a light grey; on the breast that enclosed the chimney of the stove rosters were pinned neatly. In one corner of the room was a group of diplomas, framed and richly coloured; below them an old daguerreotype, badly faded, showing a group of men standing in front of a very tall signal tower. In one corner of the cabin was a bunk, blankets folded into a neat cube at its foot; above it a hand-coloured pinup of a smiling girl wearing a cap of Guild green and very little else. Rafe’s eyes passed over it with the faintly embarrassed indifference of childhood.

In the centre of the room, white-painted and square, was the base of the signal mast; round it a little podium of smooth, scrubbed wood, on which stood two Guildsmen. In their hands were the long levers that worked the semaphore arms overhead; the control rods reached up from them, encased where they passed through the ceiling in white canvas grommets. Skylights, opened to either side, let in the warm July air. The third duty Signaller stood at the eastern window of the cabin, glasses to his eyes, speaking quietly and continuously. “Five…eleven…thirteen… nine…” The operators repeated the combinations, working the big handles, leaning the weight of their bodies against the pull of the signal arms overhead, letting each downward rush of the semaphores help them into position for their next cypher. There was an air of concentration but not of strain; it all seemed very easy and practised. In front of the men, supported by struts from the roof, a telltale repeated the positions of the arms, but the Signallers rarely glanced at it. Years of training had given a fluidness to their movements that made them seem almost like the steps and posturings of a ballet. The bodies swung, checked, moved through their arabesques; the creaking of wood and the faint rumbling of the sig-nals filled the place, as steady and lulling as the drone of bees.

No one paid any attention to Rafe or the Serjeant. The Guildsman began talking again quietly, explaining what was happening. The long message that had been going through now for nearly an hour was a list of current grain and fatstock prices from Londinium. The Guild system was invaluable for regulating the complex economy of the country; farm-ers and merchants, taking the Londinium prices as a yardstick, knew exactly what to pay when buying and selling for themselves. Rafe forgot to be disappointed; his mind heard the words, recording them and storing them away, while his eyes watched the changing patterns made by the Guildsmen, so much a part of the squeaking, clacking machine they con-trolled.

The actual transmitted information, what the Serjeant called the payspeech, occupied only a part of the signalling; a message was often al-most swamped by the codings necessary to secure its distribution. The current figures for instance had to reach certain centres, Aquae Sulis among them, by nightfall. How they arrived, their routing on the way, was very much the concern of the branch Signallers through whose stations the cyphers passed. It took years of experience coupled with a certain de-gree of intuition to route signals in such a way as to avoid lines already congested with information; and of course while a line was in use in one direction, as in the present case with a complex message being moved from east to west, it was very difficult to employ it in reverse. It was in fact pos-sible to pass two messages in different directions at the same time, and it was often done on the A Class towers. When that happened every third cypher of a northbound might be part of another signal moving south; the stations transmitted in bursts, swapping the messages forward and back. But coaxial signalling was detested even by the Guildsmen. The line had to be cleared first, and a suitable code agreed on; two lookouts were employed, chanting their directions alternately to the Signallers, and even in the best-run station total confusion could result from the smallest slip, necessitating reclearing of the route and a fresh start.

With his hands, the Serjeant described the washout signal a fouled-up tower would use; the three horizontal extensions of the semaphores from the sides of their mast. If that happened, he said, chuckling grimly, a head would roll somewhere; for a Class A would be under the command of a Major of Signals at least, a man of twenty or more years experience. He would be expected not to make mistakes, and to see in turn that none were made by his subordinates. Rafe’s head began to whirl again; he looked with fresh respect at the worn green leather of the Serjeant’s uni-form. He was beginning to see now, dimly, just what sort of thing it was to be a Signaller.

The message ended at last, with a great clapping of the semaphore arms. The lookout remained at his post but the operators got down, showing an interest in Rafe for the first time. Away from the semaphore levers they seemed far more normal and unfrightening. Rafe knew them well; Robin Wheeler, who often spoke to him on his way to and from the station, and Bob Camus, who’s split a good many heads in his time at the feastday cudgel playing in the village. They showed him the code books, all the scores of cyphers printed in red on numbered black squares. He stayed to share their meal; his mother would be concerned and his father an-noyed, but home was almost forgotten. Toward evening another message came from the west; they told him it was police business, and sent it wing-ing and clapping on its way. It was dusk when Rafe finally left the sta-tion, head in the clouds, two unbelievable pennies jinking in his pocket. It was only later, in bed and trying to sleep, he realized a long-submerged dream had come true. He did sleep finally, only to dream again of signal towers at night, the cressets on their arms roaring against the blueness of the sky. He never spent the coins.

Once it had become a real possibility, his ambition to be a Signaller grew steadily; he spent all the time he could at the Silbury Station, perched high on its weird prehistoric hill. His absences met with his father’s keenest disapproval. Mr. Bigland’s wage as an estate clerk barely brought in enough to support his brood of seven boys; the family had of necessity to grow most of its own food, and for that every pair of hands that could be mustered was valuable. But nobody guessed the reason for Rafe’s fre-quent disappearances; and for his part he didn’t say a word.

He learned, in illicit hours, the thirty-odd basic positions of the signal arms, and something of the commonest sequences of grouping; after that he could lie out near Silbury Hill and mouth off most of the numbers to himself, though without the codes that informed them he was still dumb. Once Serjeant Gray let him take the observer’s place for a glorious half hour while a message was coming in over the Marlborough Downs. Rafe stood stiffly, hands sweating on the big barrels of the Zeiss glasses, and read off the cyphers as high and clear as he could for the Signallers at his back. The Serjeant checked his reporting unobtrusively from the other end of the hut, but he made no mistakes.

By the time he was ten Rafe had received as much formal education as a child of his class could expect. The great question of a career was raised. The family sat in conclave; father, mother, and the three eldest sons. Rafe was unimpressed; he knew, and had known for weeks, the fate they had selected for him. He was to be apprenticed to one of the four tailors of the village, little bent old men who sat like cross-legged hermits behind bulwarks of cloth bales and stitched their lives away by the light of penny dips. He hardly expected to be consulted on the matter; how-ever he was sent for, formally, and asked what he wished to do. That was the time for the bombshell. “I know exactly what I want to be,” said Rafe firmly. “A Signaller.”

There was a moment of shocked silence; then the laughing started and swelled. The Guilds were closely guarded; Rafe’s father would pay dearly even for his entry into the tailoring trade. As for the Signallers...no Bigland had ever been a Signaller, no Bigland ever would. Why, that…it would raise the family status! The whole village would have to look up to them, with a son wearing the Green. Preposterous…

Rafe sat quietly until they were finished, lips compressed, cheekbones glowing. He’d known it would be like this, he knew just what he had to do. His composure discomfited the family; they quietened down enough to ask him, with mock seriousness, how he intended to set about achiev-ing his ambition. It was time for the second bomb. “By approaching the Guild with regard to a Common Entrance Examination,” he said, mouthing words that had been learned by rote. “Serjeant Gray, of the Silbury Station, will speak for me.”

Into the fresh silence came his father’s embarrassed coughing. Mr. Bigland looked like an old sheep, sitting blinking through his glasses, nibbling at his thin moustache. “Well,” he said. “Well, I don’t know… Well…

”But Rafe had already seen the glint in his eyes at the dizzying prospect of prestige. That a son of his should wear the Green…

Before their minds could change Rafe wrote a formal letter which he delivered in person to the Silbury Station: it asked Serjeant Gray, very correctly, if he would be kind enough to call on Mr. Bigland with a view of discussing his son’s entry to the College of Signals in Londinium.

The Serjeant was as good as his word. He was a widower, and child-less; maybe Rafe made up in part for the son he’d never had, maybe he saw the reflection of his own youthful enthusiasm in the boy. He came the next evening, strolling quietly down the village street to rap at the Biglands’ door; Rafe, watching from his shared bedroom over the porch, grinned at the gaping and craning of the neighbours. The family was all a-flutter; the household budget had been scraped for wine and candles, silverware and fresh linen were laid out in the parlour, everybody was anxious to make the best possible impression. Mr. Bigland of course was only too agreeable; when the Serjeant left, an hour later, he had his signed permission in his belt. Rafe himself saw the signal originated asking Lon-dinium for the necessary entrance papers for the College’s annual ex-amination.

The Guild gave just twelve places per year, and they were keenly contested. In the few weeks at his disposal Rafe was crammed mercilessly; the Serjeant coached him in all aspects of Signalling he might reasonably be expected to know while the village dominie, impressed in spite of him-self, brushed up Rafe’s bookwork, even trying to instill into his aching head the rudiments of Norman French. Rafe won admittance; he had never considered the possibility of failure, mainly because such a thought was unbearable. He sat the examination in Sorviodunum, the nearest re-gional centre to his home; a week later a message came through offering him his place, listing the clothes and books he would need and instruct-ing him to be ready to present himself at the College of Signals in just under a month’s time. When he left for Londinium, well muffled in a new cloak, riding a horse provided by the Guild and with two russet-coated Guild servants in attendance, he was followed by the envy of a whole vil-lage. The arms of the Silbury tower were quiet; but as he passed they flipped quickly to Attention, followed at once by the cyphers for Origi-nation and Immediate Locality. Rafe turned in the saddle, tears stinging his eyes, and watched the letters quickly spelled out in plaintalk. “Good luck…”

After Avebury, Londinium seemed dingy, noisy, and old. The College was housed in an ancient, ramshackle building just inside the City walls; though Londinium had long since overspilled its former limits, sprawl-ing south across the river and north nearly as far as Tyburn Tree. The Guild children were the usual crowd of brawling, snotty-nosed brats that comprised the apprentices of any trade. Hereditary sons of the Green, they looked down on the Common Entrants from the heights of an unbear-able and imaginary eminence; Rafe had a bad time till a series of dormi-tory fights, all more or less bloody; proved to his fellows once and for all that young Bigland at least was better left alone. He settled down as an accepted member of the community.

The Guild, particularly of recent years, had been tending to place more and more value on theoretical knowledge, and the two-year course was intensive. The apprentices had to become adept in Norman French, for their further training would take them inevitably into the houses of the rich. A working knowledge of the other tongues of the land, the Cornish, Gaelic, and Middle English, was also a requisite; no Guildsman ever knew where he would finally be posted. Guild history was taught too, and the elements of mechanics and coding, though most of the practical work in those directions would be done in the field, at the training stations scat-tered along the south and west coasts of England and through the Welsh Marches. The students were even required to have a nodding acquain-tance with thaumaturgy; though Rafe for one was unable to see how the attraction of scraps of paper to a polished stick of amber could ever have an application to Signalling.

He worked well nonetheless, and passed out with a mark high enough to satisfy even his professors. He was posted directly to his training sta-tion, the A Class complex atop Saint Adhelm’s Head in Dorset. To his intense pleasure he was accompanied by the one real friend he had made at College; Josh Cope, a wild, black-haired boy, a Common Entrant and the son of a Durham mining family.

They arrived at Saint Adhelm’s in the time-honored way, thumbing a lift from a road train drawn by a labouring Fowler compound. Rafe never forgot his first sight of the station. It was far bigger than he’d imagined, sprawling across the top of the great blunt promontory. For convenience, stations were rated in accordance with the heaviest towers they carried; but Saint Adhelm’s was a clearing centre for B, C, and D lines as well, and round the huge paired structures of the A-Class towers ranged a cir-cle of smaller semaphores, all twirling and clacking in the sun. Beside them, establishing rigs displayed the codes the towers spoke in a series of bright-coloured circles and rectangles; Rafe, staring, saw one of them ro-tate, displaying to the west a yellow Bend Sinister as the semaphore above it switched in midmessage from plaintalk to the complex Code Twenty-Three. He glanced sidelong at Josh, got from the other lad a jaunty thumbs-up; they swung their satchels onto their shoulders and headed up toward the main gate to report themselves for duty.

For the first few weeks both boys were glad enough of each other’s company. They found the atmosphere of a major field station very different from that of the College; by comparison the latter, noisy and brawling as it had been, came to seem positively monastic. A training in the Guild of Signallers was like a continuous game of ladders and snakes; and Rave and Josh had slid back once more to the bottom of the stack. Their life was a near-endless round of canteen fatigues, of polishing and burnish-ing, scrubbing and holystoning. There were the cabins to clean, gravel padis to weed, what seemed like miles of brass rail to scour till it gleamed. Saint Adhelm’s was a show station, always prone to inspection. Once it suffered a visit from the Grand Master of Signallers himself, and his Lord Lieutenant; the spitting and polishing before that went on for weeks. And there was the maintenance of the towers themselves; the canvas grommets on the great control rods to renew and pipe-clay, the semaphore arms to be painted, their bearings cleaned and packed with grease, spars to be sent down and re-rigged, always in darkness when the day’s signalling was done and generally in the foullest of weathers. The semi-military na-ture of the Guild made necessary sidearms practice and shooting with the longbow and crossbow, obsolescent weapons now but still occasionally employed in the European wars.

The station itself surpassed Rafe’s wildest dreams. Its standing complement, including the dozen or so apprentices always in training, was well over a hundred, of whom some sixty or eighty were always on duty or on call. The big semaphores, the Class A’s, were each worked by teams of a dozen men, six to each great lever, with a Signal Master to control coordination and pass on the cyphers from the observers. With the sta-tion running at near capacity the scene was impressive; the lines of men at the controls, as synchronised as troupes of dancers; the shouts of the Signal Masters, scuffle of feet on the white planking, rumble and creak of the control rods, the high thunder of the signals a hundred feet above the roofs. Though that, according to the embittered Officer in Charge, was not Signalling but “unscientific bloody timber-hauling.” Major Stone had spent most of his working life on the little Glass C’s of the Pennine Chain before an unlooked-for promotion had given him his present po-sition of trust.

The A messages short-hopped from Saint Adhelm’s to Swyre Head and from thence to Gad Cliff, built on the high land overlooking Warbarrow Bay. From there along the coast to Golden Cap, the station poised six hun-dred sheer feet above the fishing village of Lymes, to fling themselves in giant strides into the west, to Somerset and Devon and far-off Cornwall, or northwards again over the heights of the Great Plain en route for Wales. Up there Rafe knew they passed in sight of the old stone rings of Avebury. He often thought with affection of his parents and Serjeant Gray; but he was long past homesickness. His days were too full for that.

Twelve months after their arrival at Saint Adhelm’s, and three years after their induction into the Guild, the apprentices were first allowed to lay hands on the semaphore bars. Josh in fact had found it impossible to wait and had salved his ego some months before by spelling out a frisky message on one of the little local towers in what he hoped was the dead of night. For that fall from grace he had made intimate and painful con-tact with the buckle on the end of a green leather belt, wielded by none other than Major Stone himself. Two burly Corporals of Signals held the miners’ lad down while he threshed and howled; the end result had con-vinced even Josh that on certain points of discipline the Guild stood adamant.

To learn to signal was like yet another beginning. Rafe found rapidly that a semaphore lever was no passive thing to be pulled and hauled at pleasure; with the wind under the great black sails of the arms an opera-tor stood a good chance of being bowled completely off the rostrum by the back-whip of even a thirty-foot unit, while to the teams on the A-Class towers lack of coordination could prove, and had proved in the past, fatal. There was a trick to the thing, only learned after bruising hours of prac-tice; to lean the weight of the body against the levers rather than just using the muscles of back and arms, employ the jounce and swing of the sema-phores to position them automatically for their next cypher. Trying to fight them instead of working with the recoil would reduce a strong man to a sweat-soaked rag within minutes; but a trained Signaller could work half the day and feel very little strain. Rafe approached the task assiduously; six months and one broken collarbone later he felt able to pride himself on mastery of his craft. It was then he first encountered the murderous in-tricacies of coaxial signalling…

After two years on the station the apprentices were finally deemed ready to graduate as full Signallers. Then came the hardest test of all. The site of it, the arena, was a bare hillock of ground some half mile from Saint Adhelm’s Head. Built onto it, and facing each other about forty yards apart, were two Class D towers with their cabins. Josh was to be Rafe’s partner in the test. They were taken to the place in the early morning, and given their problem; to transmit to each other in plaintalk the entire of the Book of Nehemiah in alternate verses, with appropriate Attention, Acknowledgement, and End-of-Message cyphers at the head and tail of each. Several ten-minute breaks were allowed, though they had been warned privately it would be better not to take them; once they left the rostrums they might be unable to force their tired bodies back to the bars.

Round the little hill would be placed observers who would check the work minute by minute for inaccuracies and sloppiness. When the mes-sages were finished to their satisfaction the apprentices might leave, and call themselves Signallers; but not before. Nothing would prevent them deserting their task if they desired before it was done. Nobody would speak a word of blame, and there would be no punishment; but they would leave the Guild the same day, and never return. Some boys, a few, did leave. Others collapsed; for them, there would be another chance.

Rafe neither collapsed nor left, though there were times when he longed to do both. When he started, the sun had barely risen; when he left it was sinking toward the western rim of the horizon. The first two hours, the first three, were nothing; then the pain began. In the shoulders, in the back, in the buttocks and calves. His world narrowed; he saw neither the sun nor the distant sea. There was only the semaphore, the handles of it, the text in front of his eyes, the window. Across the space separating the huts he could see Josh staring as he engaged in his endless, useless task. Rafe came by degrees to hate the towers, the Guild, himself, all he had done, the memory of Silbury and old Serjeant Gray; and to hate Josh most of all, with his stupid white blob of a face, the signals clacking above him like some absurd extension of himself. With fatigue came a trance-like state in which logic was suspended, the reasons for actions lost. There was nothing to do in life, had never been anything to do but stand on the rostrum, work the levers, feel the jounce of the signals, check with the body, feel the jounce…His vision doubled and trebled till the lines of copy in front of him shimmered unreadably; and still the test ground on.

At any time in the afternoon Rafe would have killed his friend had he been able to reach him. But he couldn’t get to him; his feet were rooted to the podium, his hands glued to the levers of the semaphore. The sig-nals grumbled and creaked; his breath sounded in his ears harshly, like an engine. His sight blackened; the text and the opposing semaphore swam in a void. He felt disembodied; he could sense his limbs only as a dim and confused burning. And somehow, agonizingly, the transmission came to an end. He clattered off the last verse of the book, signed End of Message, leaned on the handles while the part of him that could still think realized dully that he could stop. And then, in black rage, he did the thing only one other apprentice had done in the history of the station; flipped the handles to Attention again, spelled out with terrible exactness and let-ter by letter the message “God Save the Queen.” Signed End of Message, got no acknowledgement, swung the levers up and locked them into position for Emergency-Contact Broken. In a signalling chain the alarm would be flashed back to the originating station, further information rerouted and a squad sent to investigate the breakdown.

Rafe stared blankly at the levers. He saw now the puzzling bright streaks on them were his own blood. He forced his raw hands to unclamp themselves, elbowed his way through the door, shoved past the men who had come for him and collapsed twenty yards away on the grass. He was taken back to Saint Adhelm’s in a cart and put to bed. He slept the clock round; when he woke it was with the knowledge that Josh and he now had the right to put aside the cowled russet jerkins of apprentices for the full green of the Guild of Signallers. They drank beer that night, awk-wardly, gripping the tankards in both bandaged paws; and for the sec-ond and last time, the station cart had to be called into service to get them home.

The next part of training was a sheer pleasure. Rafe made his farewells to Josh and went home on a two month leave; at the end of his furlough he was posted to the household of the Fitzgibbons, one of the old fami-lies of the Southwest, to serve twelve months as Signaller-Page. The job was mainly ceremonial, though in times of national crisis it could obvi-ously carry its share of responsibility. Most well-bred families, if they could afford to do so, bought rights from the Guild and erected their own tiny stations somewhere in the grounds of their estate; the little Class-E

tow-ers were even smaller than the Class D’s on which Rafe had graduated.

In places where no signal line ran within easy sighting distance, one or more stations might be erected across the surrounding country and staffed by Journeyman-Signallers without access to coding; but the Fitzgibbons’ great aitch-shaped house lay almost below Swyre Head, in a sloping coombe open to the sea. Rafe, looking down on the roofs of the place the morning he arrived, started to grin. He could see his semaphore perched up among the chimney stacks; above it a bare mile away was the A re-peater, the short-hop tower for his old station of Saint Adhelm’s just over the hill. He touched heels to his horse, pushing it into a canter. He would be signalling direct to the A Class, there was no other outroute; he couldn’t help chuckling at the thought of its Major’s face when asked to hurl to Saint Adhelm’s or Golden Cap requests for butter, six dozen eggs, or the services of a cobbler. He paid his formal respects to the station and rode down into the valley to take up his new duties.

They proved if anything easier than he had anticipated. Fitzgibbon himself moved in high circles at Court and was rarely home, the running of the house being left to his wife and two teenage daughters. As Rafe had expected, most of the messages he was required to pass were of an in-tensely domestic nature. And he enjoyed the privileges of any young Guildsman in his position; he could always be sure of a warm place in the kitchen at nights, the first cut off the roast, the prettiest serving wenches to mend his clothes and trim his hair. There was sea bathing within a stone’s throw, and feast day trips to Durnovaria and Bourne Mouth. Once a little fair established itself in the grounds, an annual oc-currence apparently; and Rafe spent a delicious half hour signalling the A Class for oil for its steam engines, and meat for a dancing bear.

The year passed quickly; in late autumn the boy, promoted now to Signaller-Corporal, was reposted, and another took his place. Rafe rode west, into the hills that crowd the southern corner of Dorset, to take up what would be his first real command.

The station was part of a D-Class chain that wound west over the high ground into Somerset. In winter, with the short days and bad seeing conditions, the towers would be unused; Rafe knew that well enough. He would be totally isolated; winters in the hills could be severe, with snow making travel next to impossible and frosts for weeks on end. He would have little to fear from the routiers, the footpads who legend claimed haunted the West in the cold months; the station lay far from any road and there was nothing in the cabins, save perhaps the Zeiss glasses car-ried by the Signaller, to tempt a desperate man. He would be in more dan-ger from wolves and Fairies, though the former were virtually extinct in the south and he was young enough to laugh at the latter. He took over from the bored Corporal just finishing his term, signalled his arrival back through the chain, and settled down to take stock of things.

By all reports this first winter on a one-man station was a worse trial than the endurance test. For a trial it was, certainly. At some time through the dark months ahead, some hour of the day, a message would come along the dead line, from the west or from the east; and Rafe would have to be there to take it and pass it on. A minute late with his acknowl-edgement and a formal reprimand would be issued from Londinium; that might peg his promotion for years, maybe for good. The standards of the Guild were high, and they were never relaxed; if it was easy for a Major in charge of an A-Class station to fall from grace, how much easier for an unknown and untried Corporal! The duty period of each day was short, a bare six hours, five through the darkest months of December and January; but during that time, except for one short break, Rafe would have to be continually on the alert.

One of his first acts on being left alone was to climb to the diminutive operating gantry. The construction of the station was unusual. To com-pensate for its lack of elevation a catwalk had been built across under the roof; the operating rostrum was located centrally on it, while at each end double-glazed windows commanded views to west and east. Between them, past the handles of the semaphore, a track had been worn half an inch deep in the wooden boards. In the next few months Rafe would wear it deeper, moving from one window to the other checking the arms of the next towers in line. The matchsticks of the semaphores were barely visi-ble; he judged them to be a good two miles distant. He would need all his eyesight, plus the keenness of the Zeiss lenses, to make them out at all on a dull day; but they would have to be watched minute by minute through every duty period because sooner or later one of them would move. He grinned and touched the handles of his own machine. When that happened, his acknowledgement would be clattering before the tower had stopped calling for Attention.

He examined the stations critically through his glasses. In the spring, riding out to take up a new tour, he might meet one of their operators; but not before. In the hours of daylight they as well as he would be tied to their gantries, and on foot in the dark it might be dangerous to try to reach them. Anyway it would not be expected of him; that was an un-written law. In case of need, desperate need, he could call help through the semaphores; but for no other reason. This was the true life of the Guildsman; the bustle of Londinium, the warmth and comfort of the Fitzgibbons’ home, had been episodes only. Here was the end result of it all; the silence, the desolation, the ancient, endless communion of the hills. He had come full circle.

His life settled into a pattern of sleeping and waking and watching. As the days grew shorter the weather worsened; freezing mists swirled round the station, and the first snow fell. For hours on end the towers to east and west were lost in the haze; if a message was to come now, the Sig-nallers would have to light their cressets. Rafe prepared the bundles of faggots anxiously, wiring them into their iron cages, setting them beside the door with the paraffin that would soak them, make them blaze. He became obsessed by the idea that the message had in fact come, and he had missed it in the gloom. In time the fear ebbed. The Guild was hard, but it was fair; no Signaller, in winter of all times, was expected to be a superman. If a Captain rode suddenly to the station demanding why he had not answered this or that he would see the torches and the oil laid and ready and know at least that Rafe had done his best. Nobody came; and when the weather cleared the towers were still stationary.

Each night after the light had gone Rafe tested his signals, swinging the arms to free them from their wind-driven coating of ice; it was good to feel the pull and flap of the thin wings up in the dark. The messages he sent into blackness were fanciful in the extreme; notes to his parents and old Serjeant Gray, lurid suggestions to a little girl in the household of the Fitzgibbons to whom he had taken more than a passing fancy. Twice a week he used the lunchtime break to climb the tower, check the spin-dles in their packings of grease. On one such inspection he was appalled to see a hairline crack in one of the control rods, the first sign that the metal had become fatigued. He replaced the entire section that night, breaking out fresh parts from store, hauling them up and fitting them by the improvised light of a hand lamp. It was an awkward, dangerous job with his fingers freezing and the wind plucking at his back, trying to tug him from his perch onto the roof below. He could have pulled the station out of line in daytime, signalled Repairs and given himself the benefit of light, but pride forbade him. He finished the job two hours before dawn, tested the tower, made his entry in the log and went to sleep, trusting in his Signaller’s sense to wake him at first light. It didn’t let him down.

The long hours of darkness began to pall. Mending and laundering only filled a small proportion of his off-duty time; he read through his stock of books, reread them, put them aside and began devising tasks for himself, checking and rechecking his inventories of food and fuel. In the blackness, with the long crying of the wind over the roof, the stories of Fairies and were-things on the heath didn’t seem quite so fanciful. Diffi-cult now even to imagine summer, the slow clicking of the towers against skies bright blue and burning with light. There were two pistols in the hut; Rafe saw to it their mechanisms were in order, loaded and primed them both. Twice alter that he woke to crashings on the roof, as if some dark thing was scrabbling to get in; but each time it was only the wind in the skylights. He padded them with strips of canvas; then the frost came back, icing them shut, and he wasn’t disturbed again.

He moved a portable stove up onto the observation gallery and discovered the remarkable number of operations that could be carried out with one eye on the windows. The brewing of coffee and tea were easy enough; in time he could even manage the production of hot snacks. His lunch hours he preferred to use for things other than cooking. Above all else he was afraid of inaction making him fat; there was no sign of it hap-pening but he still preferred to take no chances. When snow conditions permitted he would make quick expeditions from the shack into the sur-rounding country. On one of these the hillock with its smoothly shaped crown of trees attracted his eye. He walked toward it jauntily, breath steaming in the air, the glasses as ever bumping his hip. In the copse, his Fate was waiting.

The catamount clung to the bole of a fir, watching the advance of the boy with eyes that were slits of hate in the vicious mask of its face. No one could have read its thoughts. Perhaps it imagined itself about to be attacked; perhaps it was true what they said about such creatures, that the cold of winter sent them mad. There were few of them now in the west; mostly they had retreated to the hills of Wales, the rocky peaks of the far north. The survival of this one was in itself a freak, an anachro-nism.

The tree in which it crouched leaned over the path Rafe must take. He ploughed forward, head bent a little, intent only on picking his way. As he approached the catamount drew back its lips in a huge and silent snarl, showing the wide pink vee of its mouth, the long needle-sharp teeth. The eyes blazed; the ears flattened, making the skull a round, furry ball. Rafe never saw the wildcat, its stripes blending perfectly with the harshness of branches and snow. As he stepped beneath the tree it launched itself onto him, landed across his shoulders like a spitting shawl; his neck and back were flayed before the pain had travelled to his brain.

The shock and the impact sent him staggering. He reeled, yelling; the reaction dislodged the cat but it spun in a flash, tearing upward at his stom-ach. He felt the hot spurting of blood, and the world became a red haze of horror. The air was full of the creature’s screaming. He reached his knife but teeth met in his hand and he dropped it. He grovelled blindly, found the weapon again, slashed out, felt the blade strike home. The cat screeched, writhing on the snow. He forced himself to push his stream-ing knee into the creature’s back, pinning the animal while the knife flailed down, biting into its mad life; until the thing with a final convul-sion burst free, fled limping and splashing blood, died maybe somewhere off in the trees. Then there was the time of blackness, the hideous crawl back to the signal station; and now he lay dying too, unable to reach the semaphore, knowing that finally he had failed. He wheezed hopelessly, settled back farther into the crowding dark.

* * * *

In the blackness were sounds. Homely sounds. A regular scrape-dink, scrape-clink; the morning noise of a rake being drawn across the bars of a grate. Rafe tossed muttering, relaxed in the spreading warmth. There was light now, orange and flickering; he kept his eyes closed, seeing the glow of it against the insides of the lids. Soon his mother would call. It would be time to get up and go to school, or out into the fields.

A tinkling, pleasantly musical, made him turn his head. His body still ached, right down the length of it, but somehow the pain was not quite so intense. He blinked. He’d expected to see his old room in the cottage at Avebury; the curtains stirring in the breeze perhaps, sunshine coming through open windows. It took him a moment to readjust to the signal hut; then memory came back with a rush. He stared; he saw the gantry under the semaphore handles, the rods reaching out through the roof; the whiteness of their grommets, pipe-clayed by himself the day before. The tarpaulin squares had been hooked across the windows, shutting out the night. The door was barred, both lamps were burning; the stove was alight, its doors open and spreading warmth. Above it, pots and pans sim-mered; and bending over them was a girl.

She turned when he moved his head and he looked into deep eyes, black-fringed, with a quick nervousness about them that was somehow like an animal. Her long hair was restrained from falling round her face by a band or ribbon drawn behind the little pointed ears; she wore a rustling dress of an odd light blue, and she was brown. Brown as a nut, though God knew there had been no sun for weeks to tan her like that. Rafe recoiled when she looked at him, and something deep in him twisted and needed to scream. He knew she shouldn’t be here in this wilderness, amber-skinned and with her strange summery dress; that she was one of the Old Ones, the half-believed, the Haunters of the Heath, the posses-sors of men’s souls if Mother Church spoke truth. His lips tried to form the word “Fairy” and could not. Blood-smeared, they barely moved.

His vision was failing again. She walked toward him lightly, swaying, seeming to his dazed mind to shimmer like a flame; some unnatural flame that a breath might extinguish. But there was nothing ethereal about her touch. Her hands were firm and hard; they wiped his mouth, stroked his hot face. Coolness remained after she had gone away and he realized she had laid a damp cloth across his forehead. He tried to cry out to her again; she turned to smile at him, or he thought she smiled, and he realized she was singing. There were no words; the sound made itself in her throat, goldenly, like the song a spinning wheel might hum in the ears of a sleepy child, the words always nearly there ready to well up through the surface of the colour and never coming. He wanted badly to talk now, tell her about the cat and his fear of it and its paws full of glass, but it seemed she knew already the things that were in his mind. When she came back it was with a steaming pan of water that she set on a chair beside the bunk. She stopped the humming, or the singing, then and spoke to him; but the words made no sense, they banged and splat-tered like water falling over rocks. He was afraid again, for that was the talk of the Old Ones; but the defect must have been in his ears because the syllables changed of themselves into the Modern English of the Guild. They were sweet and rushing, filled with a meaning drat was not a mean-ing, hinting at deeper things beneath themselves that his tired mind couldn’t grasp. They talked about the Fate that had waited for him in the wood, fallen on him so suddenly from the tree. “The Norns spin the Fate of a man or of a cat,” sang the voice.

“Sitting beneath Yggdrasil, great World Ash, they work; one Sister to make the yarn, the next to measure, the third to cut it at its end…”and all the time the hands were busy, touching and soothing.

Rafe knew the girl was mad, or possessed. She spoke of Old things, the things banished by Mother Church, pushed out forever into the dark and cold. With a great effort he lifted his hand, held it before her to make the sign of the Cross; but she gripped the wrist, giggling, and forced it down, started to work delicately on the ragged palm, cleaning the blood from round the base of the fingers. She unfastened the belt across his stom-ach, eased the trews apart; cutting the leather, soaking it, pulling it away in little twitches from the deep tears in groin and thighs. “Ah...,” he said, “ah...” She stopped at that, frowning, brought something from the stove, lifted his head gently to let him drink. The liquid soothed, seeming to run from his throat down into body and limbs like a trickling anaesthesia. He relapsed into a warmness shot through with little coloured stabs of pain, heard her crooning again as she dressed his legs. Slid deeper, into sleep.

Day came slowly, faded slower into night that turned to day again, and darkness. He seemed to be apart from Time, lying dozing and waking, feeling the comfort of bandages on his body and fresh linen tucked round him, seeing the handles of the semaphores gleam a hundred miles away, wanting to go to them, not able to move. Sometimes he thought when the girl came to him he pulled her close, pressed his face into the mother-warmth of her thighs while she stroked his hair, and talked, and sang. All the time it seemed, through the sleeping and the waking, the voice went on. Sometimes he knew he heard it with his ears, sometimes in fever dreams the words rang in his mind. They made a mighty saga; such a story as had never been told, never imagined in all the lives of men.

It was the tale of Earth; Earth and a land, the place her folk called Angle-Land. Only once there had been no Angle-Land because there had been no planets, no sun. Nothing had existed but Time; Time, and a void. Only Time was the void, and the void was Time itself. Through it moved colours, twinklings, sudden shafts of light. There were hummings, shout-ings, perhaps, musical tones like the notes of organs that thrummed in his body until it shook with them and became a melting part. Sometimes in the dream he wanted to cry out; but still he couldn’t speak, and the beautiful blasphemy ground on. He saw the brown mists lift back wav-ing and whispering, and through them the shine of water; a harsh sea, cold and limitless, ocean of a new world. But the dream itself was fluid; the images shone and altered, melding each smoothly into each, yielding place majestically, fading into dark. The hills came, rolling, tentative, squirming, pushing up dripping flanks that shuddered, sank back, returned to silt. The silt, the sea bed, enriched itself with a million-year snowstorm of little dying creatures. The piping of the tiny snails as they fell was a part of the chorus and the song, a thin, sweet harmonic.

And already there were Gods; the Old Gods, powerful and vast, look-ing down, watching, stirring with their fingers at the silt, waving the swirling brownness back across the sea. It was all done in a dim light, the cold glow of dawn. The hills shuddered, drew back, thrust up again like golden, humped animals, shaking the water from their sides. The sun stood over them, warming, adding steam to the fogs, making multiple and shimmering reflections dance from the sea. The Gods laughed; and over and again, uncertainly, unsurely, springing from the silt, sinking back to silt again, the hills writhed, shaping the shapeless land. The voice sang, whirring like a wheel; there was no “forward,” no “back”; only a sense of continuity, of massive development, of the huge Everness of Time. The hills fell and rose; leaves brushed away the sun, their reflections waved in water, the trees themselves sank, rolled and heaved, were thrust down to rise once more dripping, grow afresh. The rocks formed, broke, re-formed, became solid, melted again until from the formlessness somehow the land was made; Angle-Land, nameless still, with its long pastures, its fields, and silent hills of grass. Rafe saw the endless herds of animals that crossed it, wheeling under the wheeling sun; and the first shadowy Men. Rage possessed them; they hacked and hewed, rearing their stone circles in the wind and emptiness, finding again the bodies of the Gods in the chalky flanks of downs. Until all ended, the Gods grew tired; and the ice came flailing and crying from the north, the sun sank dying in its blood and there was coldness and blackness and nothingness and winter.

Into the void, He came; only He was not the Christos, the God of Mother Church. He was Balder, Balder the Lovely, Balder the Young. He strode across the land, face burning as the sun, and the Old Ones grov-elled and adored. The wind touched the stone circles, burning them with frost; in the darkness men cried for spring. So he came to the Tree Yggdrasil— What Tree, Rafe’s mind cried despairingly, and the voice checked and laughed and said without anger, “Yggdrasil, great World Ash, whose branches pierce the layers of heaven, whose roots wind through all Hells…”Balder came to the Tree, on which he must the for the sins of Gods and Men; and to the Tree they nailed him, hung him by the palms. And there they came to adore while His blood ran and trickled and gouted bright, while he hung above the Hells of the Trolls and of the Giants of Frost and Fire and Mountain, below the Seven Heavens where Tiw and Thunor and old Wo-Tan trembled in Valhalla at the mightiness of what was done.

And from His blood sprang warmth again and grass and sunlight, the meadow flowers and the calling, mating birds. And the Church came at last, stamping and jingling, out of the east, lifting the brass wedding cakes of her altars while men fought and roiled and made the ground black with their blood, while they raised their cities and their signal towers and their glaring castles. The Old Ones moved back, the Fairies, the Haunters of the Heath, the People of the Stones, taking with them their lovely bleed-ing Lord; and the priests called despairingly to Him, calling Him the Christos, saying he did the on a tree, at the Place Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. Rome’s navies sailed the world; and England woke up, steam jetted in every tiny hamlet, and clattering and noise; while Balder’s blood, still raining down, made afresh each spring. And so after days in the telling, after weeks, the huge legend paused, and turned in on itself, and ended.

* * * *

The stove was out, the hut smelled fresh and cool. Rafe lay quiet, know-ing he had been very ill. The cabin was a place of browns and clean bright blues. Deep brown of woodwork, orange brown of the control handles, creamy brown of planking. The blue came from the sky, shafting in through windows and door, reflecting from the long-dead semaphore in pale spindles of light. And the girl herself was brown and blue; brown of skin, frosted blue of ribbon and dress. She leaned over him smiling, all nervousness gone. “Better” sang the voice. “You‘re better now. You‘re well.”

He sat up. He was very weak. She eased the blankets aside, letting the air tingle like cool water on his skin. He swung his legs down over the edge of the bunk and she helped him stand. He sagged, laughed, stood again swaying, feeling the texture of the hut floor under his feet, looking down at his body, seeing the pink crisscrossing of scars on stomach and thighs, the jaunty penis thrusting from its nest of hair. She found him a tunic, helped him into it laughing at him, twitching and pulling. She fetched him a cloak, fastened it round his neck, knelt to push sandals on his feet. He leaned against the bunk panting a little, feeling stronger. His eye caught the semaphore; she shook her head and teased him, urging him toward the door. “Come” said the voice. “Just for a little while”

She knelt again outside, touched the snow while the wind blustered wetly from the west. Round about, the warming hills were brilliant and still.

“Balder is dead” she sang. “Balder is dead…”And instantly it seemed Rafe could hear the million chuckling voices of the thaw, see the very flow-ers pushing coloured points against the translucency of snow. He looked up at the signals on the tower. They seemed strange to him now, like the winter a thing of the past. Surely they too would melt and run, and leave no trace. They were part of the old life and the old way; for the first time he could turn his back on them without distress. The girl moved from him, low shoes showing her ankles against the snow; and Rafe followed, hesitant at first then more surely, gaining strength with every step. Be-hind him, the signal hut stood forlorn.

* * * *

The two horsemen moved steadily, letting their mounts pick their way. The younger rode a few paces ahead, muffled in his cloak, eyes beneath the brim of his hat watching the horizon. His companion sat his horse quietly, with an easy slouch; he was grizzled and brown-faced, skin tanned by the wind. In front of him, over the pommel of the saddle, was hooked the case of a pair of Zeiss binoculars. On the other side was the holster of a musket; the barrel lay along the neck of the horse, the butt thrust into the air just below the rider’s hand.

Away on the left a little knoll of land lifted its crown of trees into the sky. Ahead, in the swooping bowl of the valley, was the black speck of a signal hut, its tower showing thinly above it. The officer reined in qui-etly, took the glasses from their case and studied the place. Nothing moved, and no smoke came from the chimney. Through the lenses the shuttered windows stared back at him; he saw the black vee of the Sem-aphore arms folded down like the wings of a dead bird. The Corporal waited impatiently, his horse fretting and blowing steam, but the Captain of Signals was not to be hurried. He lowered the glasses finally, and clicked to his mount. The animal moved forward again at a walk, pick-ing its hooves up and setting them down with care.

The snow here was thicker; the valley had trapped it, and the day’s thaw had left the drifts filmed with a brittle skin of ice. The horses floun-dered as they climbed the slope to the hut. At its door the Captain dis-mounted, leaving the reins hanging slack. He walked forward, eyes on the lintel and the boards.

The mark. It was everywhere, over the door, on its frame, stamped along the walls. The circle, with the crab pattern inside it; rebus or pictograph, the only thing the People of the Heath knew, the only message it seemed they had for men. The Captain had seen it before, many times; it had no power left to surprise him. The Corporal had not. The older man heard the sharp intake of breath, the click as a pistol was cocked; saw the quick, instinctive movement of the hand, the gesture that wards off the Evil Eye. He smiled faintly, almost absentmindedly, and pushed at the door. He knew what he would find, and that there was no danger.

The inside of the hut was cool and dark. The Guildsman looked round slowly, hands at his sides, feet apart on the boards. Outside a horse champed, jangling its bit, and snorted into the cold. He saw the glasses on their hook, the swept floor, the polished stove, the fire laid neat and ready on the bars; everywhere, the Fairy mark danced across the wood.

He walked forward and looked down at the thing on the bunk. The blood it had shed had blackened with the frost; the wounds on its stom-ach showed like leaf shaped mouths, the eyes were sunken now and dull; one hand was still extended to the signal levers eight feet above.

Behind him the Corporal spoke harshly, using anger as a bulwark against fear. “The…People that were here. They done this…”

The Captain shook his head. “No,” he said slowly. “‘Twas a wildcat.”

The Corporal said thickly, “They were here though…” The anger surged again as he remembered the unmarked snow. “There weren’t no tracks, sir. How could they come?...”

“How comes the wind?” asked the Captain, half to himself. He looked down again at the corpse in the bunk. He knew a little of the history of this boy, and of his record. The Guild had lost a good man.

How did they come? The People of the Heath…His mind twitched away from using the names the commoners had for them. What did they look like, when they came? What did they talk of, in locked cabins to dying men? Why did they leave their mark…

It seemed the answers shaped themselves in his brain. It was as if they crystallized from the cold, faintly sweet air of the place, blew in with the soughing of the wind. All this would pass, came the thoughts, and vanish like a dream. No more hands would bleed on the signal bars, no more children freeze in their lonely watchings. The Signals would leap continents and seas, winged as thought. All this would pass, for better or for ill…

He shook his head, bearlike, as if to free it from the clinging spell of the place. He knew, with a flash of inner sight, that he would know no more. The People of the Heath, the Old Ones; they moved back, with their magic and their lore. Always back, into the yet remaining dark. Until one day they themselves would vanish away. They who were, and yet were not…

He took the pad from his belt, scribbled, tore off the top sheet.

“Corporal,” he said quietly. “If you please…Route through Golden Gap.”

He walked to the door, stood looking out across the hills at the match-stick of the eastern tower just visible against the sky. In his mind’s eye a map unrolled; he saw the message flashing down the chain, each station picking it up, routing it, clattering it on its way. Down to Golden Gap, where the great signals stood gaunt against the cold crawl of the sea; north up the A line to Aquae Sulis, back again along the Great West Road. Within the hour it would reach its destination at Silbury Hill; and a grave-faced man in green would walk down the village street of Avebury, knock at a door…

The Corporal climbed to the gantry, clipped the message in the rack, eased the handles forward lightly testing against the casing ice. He flexed his shoulders, pulled sharply. The dead tower woke up, arms clacking in the quiet. Attention, Attention. ... Then the signal for Origination, the cypher for the eastern line. The movements dislodged a little cloud of ice crys-tals ; they fell quietly, sparkling against the greyness of the sky.

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EPILOGUE TO VOLUME TWO

It was Pavane that really cemented Keith Robert’s name into the science fiction hierarchy. And although he temporarily vanished from the scene in the late 1960s after Impulse (which he edited for a few issues) ceased in 1967, he has lately returned with a vengeance with a collection of his short stories, Machines and Men (1973), plus a new novel The Chalk Giants (1974), as well as a breathtaking historical novel about the fall of the Roman Empire, The Boat of Fate (1971). Without a doubt Keith Roberts will be one of the new British sf writers to follow in the future.

And what of others? Again, had this anthology been larger I would liked to have squeezed in many other British writers; not only those that made their initial impact under John Carnell, such as Dan Morgan, Don Malcolm or Ed Mackin, but also the new authors who have come to the fore in the 1970s. To close this second volume therefore I would like to look briefly at some of those writers who are currently keeping sf alive in Britain and laying the foundations for the next generation.

Scores of names spring to mind immediately, but it would seem that the current new name leading writer is Christopher Priest. Priest has recently produced some startling novels, starting with Indoctrinaire (1971), followed by Fugue For a Darkening Island which came third in the voting for the John W Campbell Memorial award for best sf novel of 1972, Inverted World (1974), and the recent extravaganza, The Space Machine (1976), set on the Mars of Wells’s War of the Worlds. Like most professional sf writers, Priest firmly has his feet in science fiction fandom, having edited his own fanzines, like Con back in 1964. His first professional sf story in print was The Run in the third issue of Impulse dated May 1966, and he hasn’t looked back since. Ironically back in those fannish days many fans took Chris Priest to task over an article he wrote for the first issue of a fanzine called Fusion. The article was on how to write science fiction, and since Priest had not written any, some fans felt he had no right to give his opinions. I am sure everyone will agree he has sufficient justification to answer them now.

Ian Watson has made a colossal impact with his first novel The Embedding (1973) which is sure to go down in sf history as one of the most impressive first novels ever. Watson first appeared on the sf scene during the last experimental days of New Worlds with three stories beginning with Roof Garden Under Saturn in the November 1969 issue. He still appears in the New Worlds anthologies, and was a regular contributor to Science Fiction Monthly. A second novel, The Jonah Kit, was published in 1975, and his most recent, The Martian Inca, in 1977.

A writer better known in America than Britain is Yorkshireman Brian M

Stableford. He has had over a dozen novels published, starting with Cradle of the Sun (1969), and including the most inventive space opera series to see print, concerning the starship Hooded Swan. Stableford also had his fannish apprenticeship, although he severed all connections when studying at University so that he could also concentrate on writing. He too appeared originally in magazines, starting with a novelette, Beyond Time’s Aegis in the November 1965 Science Fantasy. Written with his friend Craig Mackintosh it appeared under the alias Brian Craig. His first solo sale was the brief The Man Who Came Back (Impulse, October 1966). Recent story sales in America resulted in The Sun’s Tears (Amazing, October 1974) being chosen for one of that country’s annual anthologies of the year’s best sf.

Mark Adlard is unique in that he began writing sf without realising that was what it was, and only looked into the genre after his annoyance with friends calling his stories science fiction. Since then he has become one of Britain’s most stylistic sf writers, as well as an accepted critic and authority on the field. He has had three sf novels published so far, all centred on a massive future city on an Earth where plastic and steel has given way to an all-purpose stahlex. The novels are Interface (1971). Volteface (1972) and Multiface (1975). Adlard writes from experience as he is in real life an executive in the steel industry.

The lack of female writers in this anthology is quite apparent because, alas, on proportion there are few British female sf writers. The leading British female sf writer today is almost certainly Josephine Saxton who first appeared in the November 1965 Science Fantasy with a short puzzler, The Wall. Most of her subsequent sales though have been to the American magazine market, and she has established herself firmly in the sf field with novels like The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith (1969) and Vector For Seven (1970), though has yet to receive just recognition in this country.

Other authors who spring to mind are Michael G Coney, Charles Partington, David I Masson, and M John Harrison, all of whom have started to establish themselves in the last decade and will almost certainly be amongst the names to follow in the ensuing years. But alas, space precludes but a passing mention of them and their colleagues.

With all this talent brimming over the science fiction barrel in Britain it is sad to realise that the majority of them have first to establish themselves in the United States before they can begin to make a name in Britain. This is solely due to the lack of suitable markets for sf in Britain. It is true that at last several paperback publishers are now making science fiction a leading part of their output, especially Futura with its specialist Orbit imprint. But these prefer to publish novels, and whilst that is fine for a seasoned writer, it is no easy thing for an untrained writer to launch himself straight into a novel. Also sf is ideally suited to the short story form and yet there are few outlets for original short fiction in Britain.

At the time I’m writing this, March 1977, there are four markets, only one of which is a magazine. That is Vortex, which first appeared in January 1977 and has yet to establish itself. It sets itself an ambitious target, wishing to publish the whole range of scientific and speculative fiction and fantasy, but only publishes about three new stories a month, say forty a year. The other outlets are all original anthology series. New Writings in SF, edited by Ken Bulmer, New Worlds edited by Hilary Bailey, and the most recent Andromeda from Orbit, edited by Peter Weston. All three appear only twice yearly, and at the very most will not include more than ten stories per volume, which would be sixty in a year. All in all then there is a possible market for about one hundred new stories a year in Britain. Since the bulk of that can easily be absorbed by the regular professionals, what chance do new writers have of making an impact except by sending to America. Since few American magazines are freely distributed in this country it means that only a minimal number of home readers will be able to enjoy the fruits of their country’s bright and imaginative minds. Most will have to wait several years until the stories appear in a British anthology, such as this (take The Teacher for example), or in an author’s collection.

Britain needs more regular sf magazines. During the 1950s when interest in sf was nothing compared to today’s enthusiastic fans, Britain was able to support four leading magazines: New Worlds, Nebula, Science Fantasy, and Authentic, producing about forty issues a year, a market for over two hundred stories annually. They were the magazines that produced today’s Aldiss, Ballard, Shaw, White and Kapp but where will the next generation of sf writers owe their origins?

In this anthology I have traced both the development of science fiction in Britain and the number of talented writers Britain has produced. I hope that in the not too distant future I shall be able to produce a third volume containing the writers omitted from these two books, and I would like to think that by then I would be able to discuss the growth of many new markets for science fiction in Britain. This country desperately needs them.

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