The Hums of Ceres Wunderkind

Health Update

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 15:20:38 GMT

There's nothing so tedious as hearing old people whingeing about their ailments, so feel free to skip this.

Basically I'm better but not yet completely well. The wound is still oozing a little and it still niffs a bit although it does seem to be healing slowly . I'm still tiring very easily too.

But - FW and I managed a trip to Caversham Heights on Thursday to present Non Combatants and Others and by taking the small PA system instead of the big one I was able to rig and take down the show single-handed. Because Minor wouldn't help, now would he?

Oh well - another weeks of daily appointments at the surgery for changes of dressings coming up.

Guardians of Glory, Part Fourteen

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:10:44 GMT

It's been a while, I know.

Flight

'A revival? A successful one? After all this time?'

'Yes, Ilse.'

'Wholly successful?'

'Yes indeed.'

Ilse turned from the screen and looked out of her cabin's porthole at the sea and sky marching past in a procession of white, green and blue.

'But I should warn you...'

'Yes, 'Down?'

'There have been one or two... complications.'

Ilse sighed and looked forward into the screen where the 'Down's avatar sat facing her. 'Go on. Tell me.'

The show-off doctor dangled under his whiffy chums the aeroforms for at least half an hour. I think I was meant to be impressed and so I was. A bit, anyway. But that whole being-impressed thing was over and done with after the first five minutes of watching him float around and after that it became rather dull for me. I'm sure he was having a foy of a time.

But eventually it must have palled for him as well because he and his tame balloons floated back over the land and settled to the ground. The doctor unwrapped the streamers from his arms and waved goodbye to the 'forms. They did something complicated involving streamer-twirling in response and, caught by a sudden gust of wind, flew away.

'Was that fun, Doctor Powell?' I asked as we followed the track that led down to the access road.

'Fun isn't quite the right word, Jonathan.'

'What is, then?'

'Fulfilment. Communion. Peace. Something like that. I feel more complete.'

He was talking like a Cultist. Had he simply exchanged 'Down-worship, such as Captain Probert practised, for a different and weirder travesty of faith? I was bored and irritated by the silly look on his face so I thought I'd play him along for a while.

'Do tell me more, Doc.'

He stopped and turned to face me. His eyes were vivid green under dark brows. Funny, I had hardly noticed them before today. He exuded a strange intensity. 'Is that what you want?'

'Sure. Go on. I've never heard of anyone hitching a lift from the 'forms before.'

'Except for you. When you landed.'

I had forgotten about that. Supposedly, the 'forms had caught me in a net and saved me from plunging into the foy-infested sea, not that I'd actually seen it happen, being too busy shitting myself at the time.

'Yes. Sure.'

'You've no idea, have you?'

'I can guess. It must be a bit like reef-gliding or hanging off the side of a Board ship. Isn't it?'

'Oh yes. It's like that, I suppose. But that's not what I meant.'

'What did you mean, then?'

'I meant,' and those eyes flashed with irritation, 'that you have no idea of the cost.'

'Cost? Don't be daft! I'm a Monitor. You're a Monitor. We don't have to pay for stuff.'

'I don't mean money. Tokens don't come into it. I mean the true cost. I'll show you, if you really want to know. It is a heavy price, and terrible to pay.'

'Go on, then.'

'Don't say I didn't warn you.'

And he showed me the true cost.

With a soft whinny of delight, Mariannie skidded to a halt at the foot of the dunes where Der-der waited for her. The pandas embraced as I had seen them do when they parted, but this time with joy instead of sorrow. They clung to one another, white on black, black on white and, I am sure, spoke of their mutual love. I watched, half awestruck, half jealous. They had something I had not.

And it was wonderful.

'Sad, isn't it?' you said.

'Sad?' What in the world could you mean?

'Yes, sad. They're so ill-matched. We can't possibly let them breed, and as for full incorporation...' Your voice tailed off. 'It's out of the question. Completely impossible.'

I looked at you. 'Sorry?'

'You don't understand yet? But you will, Monty, you will. I can see you're nearly as advanced as Mariannie has suggested. Only a little further and you'll truly be one of us. As much as you ever can be, of course.'

You still spoke in mysteries, but I reflected that I had learned a great deal in the two nights and three days since I had left the compound. No doubt there was still more that I had yet to discover. You reached down and put a hand on the bristly fur behind my ears. 'Not long now.'

The two pandas padded slowly across the beach towards us. You advanced to meet them. 'See!' cried Mariannie. 'You cannot deny us now.'

Your reply was too soft for me to hear. Mariannie's was not. 'How dare you! How dare you call him a failure!'

'But he is,' you said. 'Look at him. Look with open eyes and you will see it.'

'I tell you again; I have done as you asked. I have brought him,' she meant me, 'to you. I have trained him. I have uplifted him, as you required. He is close - very close. You can finish what I have started.

'And now, in return, I want my payment. I deserve it. It is my right.'

You sighed. 'I cannot give you what you ask. Look at Der-der. Really look at him. Do you see any hope? Don't you think that, if he could be saved, he would have recovered by now? How long did it take with Montague? Two days? And how long have you and Der-der known each other?'

'Thousands of years, of course. Why do you ask?'

'And here, on Gold?'

Mariannie's reply was muffled by the fur that puffed out around Der-der's neck. You heard her all the same.

'Two years. Longer than that. You have been trying to bring him back for over two years now and you have failed. Let go, Mariannie. Let go.'

'I will not!' The panda left her mate and approached you. 'I will make you!' She came closer still and reared up on her hind legs, as I had shown her on the grassy plain behind the dunes. 'Take us to the Mansion now. Incorporate us! Or I will kill you.' Her claws slid out, lethally sharp.

Dismayed, I withdrew behind the table.

You reached to your belt and drew out a shining metal thing. 'Step back!' you said. 'Or I swear I will shoot you.' You pointed to the sky. A vivid lance of fire flew from your hand, crackling and scalding the air as it passed.

Mariannie fell onto her forepaws.

'Coward!' she spat. You lowered the weapon so that it was pointing directly at her face.

'I have told you to go. Now go! And take the empty cripple with you. There is no hope for him, and if you carry on in this manner you too will be condemned.'

'What is happening?' I asked in an unsteady voice.

'Silence!'

And now memory becomes deceptive and unreliable. I cannot easily piece together the correct sequence of events in my mind. I know that Mariannie turned. I recall that your hand twitched threateningly. I saw how her shoulders slumped. I do not remember if she said anything. And I was not Der-der, so I do not know what he saw and I cannot begin to imagine how he interpreted it. Except for this; that he saw his mate treated cruelly and menaced with a deadly weapon. And I know that he was loyal and brave and strong. And so his ruined mind saw a threat to the one he loved the most in all the world, and so he reacted in the only way he could.

With a wild cry Der-der lowered his head and charged straight at you. His right forepaw reached out to rip your face. And so, I suppose, in your turn you did the only thing you could. You pulled the trigger of your weapon and its sharp beam raged forth and ripped Der-der's head from his body in one short stroke, so fast he had no time to scream. The dying panda crashed into the Show's forward landing strut, shaking the whole craft. His head rolled a short distance from the table and spilled its contents onto the virgin sands. The stench of cooked flesh and burned hair was foul, abominable, and I retched black bile, bitter and burning in my throat. I had never seen anything so terrible and the horror it engendered in me was like a monster, a physical thing, looming up in front of me and blinding me with fear.

I looked up, blinking back the darkness that had invaded my sight. You stood, dazed, by the table, a few feet from me. The muzzle of your gun glowed a dim orange. Ten yards away, Mariannie was frozen in shock and unable to move. I vomited again as Der-der's body twitched and his contracting lungs groaned and sighed. Blood pumped onto the ground, the flow dwindling even as I watched. We did nothing, any of us, for many, many heartbeats. Then Mariannie shook her shoulders and slowly walked towards us. You raised the gun again.

'Do not be afraid,' she said, almost inaudibly. 'I will not harm you. There is no need to murder me as well.' She lowered her face to Der-der's and nuzzled it for a few moments. She may have said goodbye to him. And then with a shake of her head she turned and faced south towards the invisible sea. The Blessèd sun was now only a finger's width above the hills and the panda's shadow streamed across the ground to her left. She walked away from us.

'Wait!' you called out. 'Wait! Come back! We must talk.' But I could tell that we had come to a place outside speech and so, I think, could you, for you fell silent. Mariannie broke first into a trot and then a full run. She sped away from us as quickly as she had run to greet Der-der only ten minutes before. And when she reached the end of the shore she did not stop, or hesitate, or turn and look back, but with a great heave of her powerful back legs she threw herself into the air and leapt over the edge of the land and soared headlong into the gulf beyond and plummeted to the sea, many hundreds of feet below. The rays of the Blessèd sun caught her in her flight, dyeing her coat in patches of funeral red and black. And then, soundlessly, she was gone, and all that remained of her were footprints buried in the sands of the last hanging shore of Gold.

Idiot Killed The Video Card

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:28:08 GMT

Silly sod me. Changing the heatsink paste was only going to work if the heatsink was in contact with the graphics chip. It wasn't. Result - one fried card (but why didn't it simply shut down, like Intel CPUs do?)

Now running (limping) on a 10 year old Voodoo 3 which, fortunately, is a reasonably adequate 2D card.

So Why Didn't They?

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:01:02 GMT

Torchwoody Spoilery?

Put Captain Jack's bits in separate bags?

And what would have happened if they had?

And did they recover all his bits anyway?

Details, Rusty, details!

Tutting and head shaking

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:40:57 GMT

Just back from seeing the practise nurse who isn't too happy with the state of my post-op wound. She's put a drain in and made daily appointments for the rest of the week.

This shouldn't be happening, should it? The double-dose antibiotics should have killed the infection by now...

Never a War - a new Tale of Glory

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:03:19 GMT

Here's another of the short stories I'm writing in parallel with Guardians of Glory.

I don't know about you, but I'm a sucker for what-happened-next stories. When we last saw Johanna Chen, the protagonist of A Child of Glory, she had just left the school at Stilt Town with her tail between her legs. Her school had been dismantled and she had been ejected from Stilt Town because she had not taken the trouble to find out what her students really needed to learn.

But what happened next to Johanna? Here's part one of the answer to that question:

On Pier #3

They were a sharp lot, these Precipice kids. Sharp as knives, thought Johanna Chen, looking down from her teacher's dais at three rows of upturned faces. They had sussed her right away:

'You're from Maybe, ain't you Miss?'

'Yes, I am.'

'What're you doing here, then?'

'I've come here to work.'

'What for? You don't have to work, do you?'

Three different children. Three different questions, but the same question lying behind them.

Brooks of Sheffield, thought Johanna, recalling a millennia-dead author and a novel set in a long-departed England. That's what Mister Murdstone had called his stepson David Copperfield. Brooks had made knives in an industrial city called Sheffield. Perhaps these children would enjoy the works of Charles Dickens one day.

But first; first she had to gain their trust, and she would only be able to do that by being totally honest about herself. So:

'I don't have to work to earn my living, no.'

'She's got thousands of Tokens.'

'Millions!'

'Billions!'

'Trillions!'

'Eh, Miss? Buy us a drink, Miss?'

‘Some other time, Jeff.' The boy blinked. Miss Chen of Maybe knew his name? Johanna continued. 'But I have to work all the same.'

'What, for fun?'

'Not for fun. Because I need to.'

'No you don't.'

Mary Saunders, narrow-faced and pigtail-tied, two rows back, in a clean but patched fibre dress:

'My dom needs to work. Our Jamie needs to work. Our mim needs to work. I should be working too, not sitting here doing nothing, shouldn't I?'

You're only sixteen. That was eight in Earth years. Children of eight worked in Victorian novels. But why should they have to work here on Glory? To feed themselves, of course. You don't work, you don't eat - that was the rule, wasn't it? Unless, of course, you were the granddaughter of ex-Governor Chen of the land of Edge, largest and most prosperous of the habitations of refugee humanity.

Johanna fixed the girl with an unnervingly direct gaze. 'You are going to work, Mary. I'm going to work you. I'm going to make you work so hard you'll wish you were back treading washing in May's Laundry. You are most certainly not going to be doing nothing.'

It was a sore temptation; to humiliate the girl, make an example of her, show her up in front of the other kids. But there was a better way…

'Come up here, please, Mary. I've got a job for you. You're going to be the class leader today.' The children tittered as Mary slowly stood up and walked to the front of the class. Johanna clicked a cupboard open. 'There are thirty slates in there, one for each of you. I know you're a careful girl, Mary, and you won't drop them. Give one to each of your friends and take one for yourself. Then go back to your table. I'll help.'

Together Johanna and Mary handed out the slates.

After class was over for the day, Johanna sat on the end of Pier #3 and let her legs dangle into the abyss. To left and right the winding wheels hummed and spun, raising full cages of shift-end miners or lowering fresh crews for the next turn. Gaunt-faced men wearing padded overalls stood in line, holding their lamps, piece-boxes and masks, ready for twelve more hours of hard physical work.

A whoosh of lines and a metallic crunch of safety locks and another batch of exhausted labourers ducked under the cage gate and shuffled stoop-backed out of the elevator and down the pier walkway to the lamp rooms and shower baths of the cliff-head sheds. Some of them looked curiously at Johanna. It was not uncommon for a woman to wait for her man at the winding head, especially a young woman who was courting her beau, but Johanna, for all her brown boots, serge leggings, grey quilted jacket and tightly-bound headscarf, did not look like a woman of the mining towns of northern Edge.

This was not the only pier on the coast. It was not even the only pier in the town of Precipice. They jutted out, over the cliffs at fifty-yard intervals, cantilevered on wooden struts and suspended from steel cables. Each carried a full complement of winches and cages. Teams of miners were sent down from the surface, parallel to the cliff-face until they reached the gallery end platform which corresponded to the mineral they were digging. Bauxite, iron, silver, gold, lead, titanium; each had its own stratum, its level at which it could be extracted. Some cages descended a mere hundred yards along funicular tracks, others plunged thousands of feet through free space to where the very deepest, most precious metals were found. When they were not carrying men, the elevators hoisted materials from the loading platforms to the freight head. As Johanna sat and watched a narrow-gauge train rattled its way to the end of the pier, ready to have its freight hoppers filled with ore.

All was noise and business. The banging of wagons against the buffers, the crash of emptying scoops, the tramp of men's boots, the screech of fast-running cable drums, the hoarse shouts of foremen giving orders. At this altitude the air was a good deal cooler than it was downslope to the south, but the Blessèd sun shone brighter through the thinner atmosphere, despite the fumes, so that the people of northern Edge walked muffled against both the cold and the light.

High overhead the wind-turbines swooshed rhythmically, incessantly. Edge was permitted no fusors and hydropower was not available on the northern coast, so the only available sources of the electricity that was needed to run the lifts, railways and refineries and warm the people's homes were the winds and, of course, the tides. Below lay the void; the sea invisible beyond it, hidden by veils of grey-brown sky.

Johanna often came here to sit and let the day's events settle in her mind. It would have been so easy to have made her home further south, among the villas and chalets of the tree belt. Her old school chum Bella-Louise Morgan had offered her the loan of a deluxe hunting box not far from the tourist town of Knot Likely. 'All you could possibly need, dear! Even (she whispered it) a private screen. You could have that nice airman of yours over whenever he was off duty. It's only two and a half hours from Maybe. Perfect, darling.' But Johanna had learned a hard lesson when she was younger and she had turned her friend's offer down with grateful thanks. If she was going to work in Precipice, she would live in Precipice.

Snow was beginning to fall as she stood up, wind-chilled, and walked between banks of heaped ground-ice down the gravel road to her lodgings. The Blessèd sun was setting to her left and the street lights were flickering on, highlighting the fine dry flakes scurrying and darting through the air. It was going to be another bleak, blustery night.

'Good morning, class.'

'Good morning, Miss Chen.'

'Jack. Stand up, please.'

'Miss?' The boy rose apprehensively to his feet. Had he done something wrong already?

'You'll be Monitor today.' The class giggled, as it always did when Johanna used that term for the class leader. How could they have known that once upon a time on Earth the senior children in schools were known as Monitors, and that they were expected to take some of the load off their class teacher by helping the younger or slower students? All these children knew was that a Monitor was an impossibly grand and superior person who lived in one of the best houses in town and was consulted on all matters by the Council. And, of course, that he or she spoke directly to the 'Down, the Saviour and Guardian of Humanity, who should be praised and reverenced.

Johanna might become a Monitor herself one day if she caught the 'Down's attention - in the right way, of course. Meanwhile Jack, promoted to a brief status, smiled with relief and came up to the front, ready to help.

What did the children of Precipice need to learn from Johanna Chen today? In their first week together, she had gathered them round her and shown them her picture-book How We Came To Glory, but she had not made the same mistake she had made two years previously in Stilt Town. She had let her pupils marvel at the vivid colours of its illustrations and its dramatic story of loss, danger, survival and redemption and left it at that. She did take the time to wonder if they felt - as she did - that the last page with its montage of a happy citizenry living healthy, fulfilled, and - by implication - equally well rewarded lives on Glory struck an odd chord. On Glory - on Edge, at any rate - people were generally not equal. In that way at least, humanity had brought the old ways of Earth to their new home.

Perhaps the differences between rich and poor were less marked on other lands, but here on Edge, the workshop and powerhouse of Glory, there were masters and servants, employers and employees. Here there were order and structure, hierarchies and the strict rule of law. Johanna had studied law on Horn and she knew how partially it could be applied, and how the flow of that partiality usually ran.

Today, therefore, they would work on their arithmetic. None of her students would ever be shorted at the pay window or double-charged by the tallyman. Not if Johanna could help it.

But as she led her class through their exercises that day Johanna could not help but notice that they were not giving her all their attention. There was something else - an undercurrent, a rumour - distracting them from their work. It was affecting the whole class, from boisterous Lily to studious Ramón, and it revealed itself in sideways glances, half-heard whispers and delayed answers.

Johanna did not blame either the children or herself for the slow progress of the lesson. Instead she let it run its natural course, making sure that all the examples on the children's worksheets were completed, helping the less able students with the harder problems and giving the brighter ones some reading to do in the meantime.

And then, with the slates put away and the mainboard erased and the last report filed and locked, Johanna sat on the edge of her desk and began to talk to her class. Now; gently, letting the children speak freely and guiding, not forcing, the discussion, she would find out exactly what was going on.

Not Nurse Ratchett

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:23:38 GMT

Down to the GP's surgery this morning to see the practice nurse, who turned out to be quite a jolly sort. She squeezed and pushed and got some more muck out and gave me some dressings, swabs and saline to see me over the weekend.

I'll see her again Monday teatime.

Yuk!

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:28:22 GMT

I said the other day that my post-op recovery was going rather slowly. Last night I found out why.

The main wound - just above my tummy button - had become infected and the abscess burst just as I was throwing away some kitchen waste. "That bin smells bad," I thought, but it wasn't the bin, it was me. Pus was literally spurting out of the wound. The immediate effect, apart from smelling like something dead, was that the pain lessened quite significantly, which was very welcome.

Back over to the Royal Berks, then, to see the out of hours GP. He took one look at the mess - I was on my second shirt of the evening and using tissues to staunch the flow - and prescribed a double dose of Flucloxacillin and regular hot compresses.

I'm quite relieved, actually. Now I know there's nothing more serious in there, like a torn muscle, I'm less concerned. Antibiotics will deal with the infection and, so long as nothing else happens, my recovery should be back on course.

Out and about

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:24:28 GMT

I finally got out of the house today. Once in the morning, taking FW to Hurst for her singing lesson and again this afternoon for a little light shopping.

Shagged out now, so I'm lying supine on the bed upstairs. I'm also working on another short story about life on Glory, provisionally entitled Never a War. It's another Johanna Chen tale. Let's hope she's learned her lesson!

Not According To Plan

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:49:53 GMT

Not my plan, anyway. Recovery post lap choly is meant to be reasonably quick but here I am, a week later, still running on painkillers and finding it hard to get comfortable. Fortunately I can sleep if I lie flat on my back. The trouble is that things are only improving very slowly. Right now I'd settle for the return of my gallbladder, thanks all the same...

Another good show

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:30:21 GMT

We gave Our Grandmothers' War to the Bucks FHS in Bourne End last night. The hall was unatmospheric to say the least (they often are) but the audience was attentive and very appreciative, which is always nice.

As a bonus, they served Rebellion in the bar. The Rebellion brewery is only five miles down the road in Marlow Bottom - http://www.rebellionbeer.co.uk. It was established quite recently - 1993 - and they really knows what they're doing. Their IPA was a pleasure to drink.

Next stop Basingstoke, for a Non-Combatants and Others.

Guardians of Glory, Part Thirteen

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:40:59 GMT

Mariannie and Monty reach the end of their journey and Jonathan has a revelation.

Fliers

'Look!'

'Look where?'

'Over there.' Cameron Powell took hold of my left arm and wrenched it over to the right. 'There. Where you're pointing. See?'

'Ouch! Yes, all right. You can let go of me now. I can see them.'

Aeroforms. I might have guessed. The good doctor was going to tell me all about his precious aeroforms, as if I cared.

'Doctor, do I really look like some who gives a...'

'Shut up, Jonathan. This is interesting.'

Sure it was.

The slope had come to an end. It had run out of steam, as it were, and become a flat grassy plain, interrupted by woods and cultivated land. Mariannie and I followed a staggered course, working our way around the perimeters of the forests and farms. We spoke little; and what we did say was direct and to the point. It was clear that the panda saw me as a burden, a duty to be done. But there were so many questions in my mind…

It was still a puzzle, why she had left her mate to help me. There seemed to be no reason why she should have agreed to take me on. She didn't particularly like me and she had left her beloved Der-der all by himself in helpless isolation thousands of feet up the peak from which we had descended. She would have a long and wearisome climb when she returned to him. I could think of no justification for her apparent altruism.

And there was another question. Where were we going? There would surely be a time when Mariannie would announce that we had arrived at our destination and that her task was complete. But I had no conception of where this destination might be, or what I would do once I reached it.

In the meantime we followed the Blessèd sun southwards, ever southwards, and I continued to drink in the beauty of the greater world. For it was beautiful - far more lovely than I had dreamed it could be when I was living under your wardenship in the compound. My heart was lifted by the sheer physical exuberance of our surroundings; the air was richer and more full of life than it had been further up the mountain, the sky brighter and more blue. The ground was soft under my paws, not rocky or hard, and despite the way it slowed me down and blocked my forward vision, I loved the tall grass with its cool scented pollen drifting in the gentle breeze. Because of this obstructing grass, I had to follow Mariannie's lead and accept on trust that she knew where she was taking me. We were still tracking the river, but keeping a fair distance from its bank because the ground became increasingly marshy as you approached it. The river was slowing down and spreading out, like a man approaching his middle years.

From time to time a cloud crossed the sky in front of the Blessèd sun and robbed the air of its radiance, but these interruptions were short and, in the brief respite they gave us from the heat, welcome. Mariannie must have been suffering dreadfully from the lack of shelter. Her fun was thick and shaggy and better suited to the cooler airs of the mist-drenched slopes far above us, while mine was short and bristly. There was more of wolf than bear about me, that much was obvious. Wolf and bear - yes, but what else?

Every fifteen minutes or so Mariannie stopped and held a forepaw up for silence while she listened carefully. What she was listening for I could not say and I could hardly ask her; not while she needed me to be quiet. I supposed she was trying to detect the sounds of men out looking for us. There were man-made sounds all around us already, of course. The farms we skirted were being worked by machinery - some manned, some robotic - but those sounds did not seem to worry her. Each time the Blessèd sun was dimmed she looked upwards in alarm, expecting, no doubt, to see an aircraft overhead, but there were none, merely wisps of cirro-cumulus. She must have heard something else, concealed in the soughing of the grass, because she never looked satisfied but continued our hike with a sad shake of her head, giving off an increasing sense of unease that I could not help picking up myself.

So our journey continued, in a jumble of intense pleasure and nervous uncertainty.

'Aeroforms! Is that all you wanted me to look at?'

'They are special aeroforms, Jonathan. Unusual. Come; look and learn.'

Doctor Powell took a small instrument from his jacket pocket. It resembled a whistle, made of glass and alloy. He held it up to his mouth and blew - three short notes, intensely sweet.

We were standing at the tip of a steep promontory on the northern coast of the land of Falls. A mild air was blowing across the land and a cluster of five 'forms was moving with it. I hadn't forgotten the doctor's assertion that aeroforms had held the net that caught me as I fell from orbit, but neither had I given it much credence. There was something about Doctor Cameron Powell that made him difficult for me to trust - or to distinguish between truth and invention in the accounts he gave and the claims he made. The way he looked, or didn't look at you when he spoke. An allusiveness in his speech; nothing was clear or direct or what it seemed at first. The fact that it always seemed to be my turn to buy the drinks. So I'd been charitable and assumed that his apparent untruths were actually metaphors or maybes or perhapses. I mustn't exaggerate this, though. A lot of the time he said what he meant, simply and straightforwardly. But not all the time, and that was the problem. I could never tell when he was kidding me.

I had let him take me up the coast from the shipyard of Lodge-in-the-Falls, where the El Dorado was being transfreighted, for this day trip because... because it was something different, a break from the routine of shipboard life. I seemed to have been spending all my time locked into routines while I was on observing duty at Sally's North Pole. It had been irksome to find that the freedom I'd thought I'd enjoy on Glory was, so far, non-existent. The Board's timetables were far too rigid and inflexible for me in my present state of mind. But I wasn't quite ready yet to adjust to complete self-determination, it seemed. If Doctor Powell hadn't accompanied me on the previous night's excursion into the more extreme entertainments the airman's quarter of Lodge had to offer, I'd probably have woken up in a cell, Monitor and Guardian or not, so when he proposed a trip up the coast I agreed readily enough. It'd keep me out of further trouble, if nothing else, and would be a way of repaying him for his intervention with the Governor.

'Nice whistle,' I said. The doctor removed the instrument from his lips. 'Can I have a go?'

'No,' was the curt reply. 'Now watch!'

He pointed to the clutch of aeroforms. I didn't notice what was going on at first, but then it registered. They had been moving with the wind, across my line of sight but now, although the pressure of the air on my face had not altered, they had changed direction and were sailing slowly, but determinedly, towards the doctor and me. He had called them and they had answered.

I had never heard of an aeroform that could propel itself. Cameron Powell was right - they were unusual. I stood and watched as the group came closer. Soon they were directly overhead, fifty feet or so above us.

'If you wouldn't mind…' The doctor pointed to the left. 'Twenty yards or so will do.' I walked over the soft, springy grass of the headland. The water was far below us on an ebbing tide and the sound of the waves had been receding steadily while Cameron Powell and I had been standing looking out to sea.

'That's fine. Now wait.' My companion held up his arms. He looked like a priest caught in the act of invocation. Above us the aeroforms began to descend and I caught the sharp reek of their venting methane. Slowly, slowly they fell until they were only twenty feet above ground level. Their streamers surrounded Cameron Powell, veiling him in a multicoloured curtain of translucent material. The doctor lowered his arms until they formed a crucifix. His palms faced upwards. And to my amazement the aeroforms' streamers wrapped themselves around his arms, one by one, until they were completely clothed in red green and blue, intertwined in chromatic spirals.

'Stay here. I'll be back soon.' There was a soft sigh of inflating gas and Doctor Powell's feet lifted from the greensward; first a few inches, then a few feet and then suddenly so far above my head that I had to crane my neck backwards to see him.

'Won't be long,' came a cry from the heavens. I sat, dazed with wonder, on the turf. I had witnessed an ascension.

You would have been impressed by the way I adapted myself. I worked out - eventually - that I would make much better progress across the water-meadows adjoining the river if I raised myself up onto my hind legs. With less effort than I expected I became upright. Suddenly my eye-level was above the tops of the grass-stems and I could see for miles rather than a foot or two. 'Mariannie, look!' I cried out. 'Can you do this?'

'No. And stop showing off. Who's in charge here?'

'You are. But I'm not showing off, I'm finding our way. You tell me where we're going and I'll lead us there.'

The panda put a paw up to her ear. Then she lifted herself up, trying to copy me, I suppose. For a few seconds she teetered there, but fell back to earth with a heavy thump.

'Damn. All right, Montague Mutt, I suppose we'll have to do what you suggest. Tell me what you can see.'

I looked around. 'The river's about a hundred yards to the left of us. There's grass to the front of us and to the right. Then some stumpy hills and then nothing.'

'Nothing?'

'That's right. The hills are blocking the view. Wait a mo.' I turned around, nearly falling over. Behind us the mountain rose, up and up and up, rocky and forested and steep. I might have caught a glimpse of the Mansion and the compound but it was hard to tell through the haze. It was quiet; no sign of men at all, except for a hint of smoke behind the trees to our right.

'So, where now?'

'We'll keep on following the river. You can get down now if you like.'

I was feeling somewhat unstable, so I fell forward onto my front paws, shook my head and waited for Mariannie to start again. We kept on with our former track, except that now whenever we stopped I rose up and took a look around. Every time the view was the same, except that the hills in front of us grew a little nearer each time and, once or twice I thought I saw a disturbance in the savannah behind us - an irregular oscillation of grass stems - but when I looked again it had stopped. A pocket of swirling breeze; that was all it was. Nothing human.

Eventually, after an afternoon made up of quarter-hour walks and two-minute observations we reached the first rise of the hills. At the same time the character of the ground changed, becoming loose and granular, and the grass turned stiffer and sparser. The river to our left was now flowing through an impassable swamp, busy with flies and marsh-reeds, and there was a new, sharper smell in the air, carried by a light wind blowing straight in our faces. We climbed the two-hundred-foot incline of the hill, relieved to give our powerful rear legs a chance to work as they were intended. And at the top... everything changed.

The hill - it was a sand dune, of course - fell away steeply and turned into a beach. But not a beach as I had known them, with gentle waves lapping across rippled sands, or boisterous rollers charging over shingle and rocks. This beach went forward four hundred yards and then simply ceased; dropping away into abrupt, final nothingness. The sea itself only became visible an uncountable number of miles in the distance. From my left came the far-off sound of falling water. I turned and looked. The river was suffering the same fate as the beach, cast into oblivion. It had carved a horseshoe shape into the land as it fell so that I could see the foaming glitter of its fall, a mile or more away. Flying spray cast a rainbow over the near side, refracted through the mists that hung over all, blurring the sky.

These things were strange and extraordinary, but I hardly noticed them. There was something resting on the shore that was much more mysterious. A giant butterfly made of white metal, standing high on stork-like legs linked to saucer-shaped pads, stood on the sand. Four ovoid pods, open at their narrow ends, were fixed to the upper surface of each wing and, where a real insect's head would have been, flashed windows of transparent crystal. A fin rose up from the tail end of its body and on the side was painted the number 2. I looked and marvelled and tried to find some place in my memory where such a sight might once have been cached. Tried, and failed, despite a nagging insistence that meaning - vital meaning - must be linked to it. The wall still stood.

But even this alien craft was not the strangest sight on this strange shore. For somebody had set out a table and two chairs in the shelter of one of the butterfly's wings and in one of the chairs was sitting… I don't have to say, do I? You raised your arm and waved to me.

'Monty! You made it! Well done! Terrific - come on down and join us!'

I looked at Mariannie. 'Did you know about this?'

'What do you think?'

What did I think, indeed? It was bloody obvious what I thought. 'You've betrayed me, then.'

'I've brought you where you need to be. Monty, don't you realise what's been happening? Look around you. What do you see? What is this place called? You know, don't you?'

The words came unbidden to my mind. The Hanging Coasts of Gold. One of the natural wonders of Glory, to be compared with the ice-caverns of the Floating Pole, or the Spine and Shore of Edge or the Ringlands of the Archipelago of Grain. The tide was out now. When it came in, the rising sea would swallow up the waterfall and wash gently across the sands of the treacherous suspended beach.

'Yes,' I said with a sigh of resignation. 'I know.'

'Then let's go.'

I followed the panda as she made her ungainly way down the scarp side of the dune, not looking back. It was only a short walk across the beach, but difficult for me as my undersized paws sank deep into the loose-packed sand. They were wolf-paws, not designed to support the weight of my bear-body. At least, not in this gravity... Mariannie reached you first and I caught up with her a minute later. By the time I reached the shade of the butterfly-wing, you and she were deep in an intense conversation.

'Wait,' you told me, and to Mariannie you said, 'No, that's not possible.'

'But you promised,' said the panda, and for the first time her voice lacked the confidence and certainty that had coloured her speech with me. 'Please...'

'You know what can and what cannot be done,' you replied.

'But I have fulfilled my part of our bargain. I have brought him to you and see! He is nearly ready.'

'You have done well, I agree.'

'Excuse me,' I said, 'but would someone tell me what the hell's going on?'

'Wait.'

The Blessèd sun was not far from setting now. It was low in the sky to our left, casting lengthening shadows across the strand. I looked up at the orange-lit nose of the vessel, twenty feet above us. There it was, its name, the letters star-burned but still clear, the single word Show. Of course; what else would it be?

So much was becoming clear to me now, so quickly. 'No,' I said. 'I have waited long enough.'

'So have I,' said Mariannie.

'Then wait no longer. Look behind you...' You pointed back towards the dunes. I didn't see at first, what you were pointing at, but Mariannie did. With a soft, yearning cry she turned and ran - faster than I would have believed possible - to where her faithful Der-der stood, with his head tilted to one side and a joyful smile on his face.

"Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful."

Sat, 23 May 2009 10:36:42 GMT

Fifty-four years. It's been that long since Waiting for Godot first opened in London. About time FW and I saw it, then :)

It just so happens that we have bound sets of Plays and Players magazine for the nineteen-fifties here at Schloß Wunderkind so I've been able to go back and check the original reviews. And it's kind of weird. Godot gets very little editorial coverage - twenty lines of dismissive copy under the New Plays header and most of what you find is a half-page ad inserted by the management of the Criterion Theatre full of counteracting positive reviews. Then, once the run is over, there's a full page article by Peter Bull, who played Pozzo, which is jocular about the difficulties of being in a controversial production. That's all I can find for late '55-early '56. So, in one sector of the theatrical press at least, Godot wasn't much of a revolution. They probably expected it to be no more than a seven-day wonder.

Except, of course, that it's lasted rather longer than that. Now it's been absorbed into the scenery, in the same way that, for example, the music of Igor Stravinsky has been. Once there were riots, now school orchestras play Le Sacre de Printemps and amateur companies go to Samuel French for their copies of Godot. It's still not easy to do well with either, but it is at least possible.

Something else has changed. When you look at nineteen-fifties responses to the play, they've centred on meaning and significance and symbolism. In the programme notes for the present production, the talk is all about relationships. How very twenty-first century! It's as if we've finally come to realise that we can do nothing to change anything on the wider scale, that questions of why and how are all so adolescent and that all that really matters is how we get on with each other as individuals. So Didi and Gogo are an old married couple, according to Patrick Stewart, and something has gone "terribly wrong" between Lucky and Pozzo.

Is this maturity, or cynicism? Have we finally grown up, or has all drama been reduced to soap opera? I'm not sure.

Anyway, on to the present production which we saw at the gorgeously gold-leafed Royal Haymarket Theatre just down the road from Piccadilly Circus. It was sold out, of course, to a very enthusiastic audience of Woopsies. We weren't the youngest people there, but we weren't far off it.

It was clear from the outset that the approach to the play was going to be essentially light-hearted. Almost every line was greeted with laughter, especially those from Ian McKellen's wonderfully put-upon Gogo, who stood or sat all shrunk in on himself, being classically passive-aggressive while Patrick Stewart's Didi strode around the stage trying, and not really succeeding, to dominate him.

Simon Callow's Pozzo was very loud and red-faced and Ronald Pickup’s Lucky was very downcast – they came over as a vastly exaggerated version of Vladimir and Estragon.

Technically, everything is fine. The set is a post-industrial wasteland, or maybe a bombsite, so old that the Tree has grown through the paving stones that surround it. Performances are confident. The programme is excellent, especially when compared with the usual West End tat.

And so – who’s epic and who fails? Well, nobody fails. They’re all far too good for that to happen. But to my mind, McKellen and Pickup inhabit their roles in a way that Stewart and Callow don’t quite manage. Ronald Pickup, especially, is completely absorbed in Lucky’s subjugation and McKellen, while still being himself, becomes his part in very much the same way that Alec Guinness used to. On the other hand, I could have wished for a little less Brian Blessed from Simon Callow and not quite so much dilithium from Patrick Stewart. It would be unfair to Stewart to leave it there, though – he achieves one of this production’s rare moments of stillness and contemplation near the end. For a moment it actually becomes quite thoughtful. A few more moments like that would have been good.

Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

Sun, 17 May 2009 18:52:29 GMT

I feel quite proud of myself for being able to type that. Anyway - I finally have a date for my gallstones operation. It's June 18th [this year :)]

And not a moment too soon, if you don't mind my saying it. Here it is (not for the squeamish)

Guardians of Glory, Part Twelve

Sun, 17 May 2009 17:44:06 GMT

No, I haven't abandoned it!

Downhill

All that day we scrambled down the stream-path that led from the heights of Gold. It was now two nights since I had left my home in the compound and I was beginning to realise, if not yet fully understand, the significance of my freedom. Nobody would bring me food and water any more, nobody check my pulse and temperature, nobody clean out my room. I was in charge of myself now. All the same, I was still very far from complete independence. Without Mariannie's guidance I would by now be wandering aimlessly in the woods. I would have been retaken and be once more in your custody if it had not been for her help.

I thought more about the subject of independence as I followed the panda's shuffling frame down the hillside, through clean air and vivid patches of mottled shade. I was no longer part of an institution - the Regeneration Facility, I remembered it was called - and I had absented myself from your research programme, but I was still no more self-motivated than I had been before. In that respect I had merely exchanged one boss for another.

But the open air - so devil-may-care in its intimacy with my skin and fur, scented with pollen and the perfume of flowers and something else I couldn't identify - made the blood surge through my veins and lifted my emotions to the point where nothing could worry me; not even the shadow of my imprisonment. I would have sung, had my throat only been equipped for singing.

The heat of the Blessèd sun became intolerable around midday and Mariannie and I took shelter under a grove of ash trees and lay there panting with our tongues hanging out.

We didn't talk much. I was, I must confess, somewhat in awe of Mariannie. She was so in control; of me, of the situation, of Der-der. I wondered about him as we lay among the fly-buzzing undergrowth and waited for the temperature to fall to the point where we could continue our journey. What was he? Outwardly, he and Mariannie were identical except for their gender. They were giant pandas, with black sticking-up ears, patches around their eyes and an air of amiable composure. I almost said idiocy, but that was certainly not true of Mariannie whose eyes glowed with shrewd intelligence. Der-der was different; he was little more than an animal, or so it seemed. Why was Mariannie looking after him? What advantage was she gaining from their lop-sided relationship? There was so much I still didn't understand. The heat and my tiredness made it hard to think coherently.

After an hour or so it became possible to move on once more. Gradually the slope became less steep and the stream grew broader, shallower and less deeply dug into the hillside. Walking became easier too, and we made greater speed, hindered only by the vegetation which grew ever thicker and more green. The grass sparkled, the Blessèd sun arced over the heavens to our left and we forged our way downwards and onwards, wading through the tributaries which joined the main stream every mile or so and keeping out of sight of the buildings which were becoming increasingly frequent as we went on.

That night, as we lay comfortably couched under the worlds and the stars, our stomachs comfortably full of fruit and nuts from a nearby orchard, I felt an urge come upon me that I had never experienced before or else had forgotten. Mariannie was dozing next to me, sharing our mutual warmth, so it was a simple matter to reach over to her, extend my claws, and scratch her deeply behind the ears.

Her reaction was so fast it took me completely unawares. She swung her right forepaw around like a club and stuck me squarely across the muzzle, jerking my head back and nearly wrenching it from my shoulders. I fell hard against a tree. It felt as if I had been lifted bodily and thrown into the air.

'Try that again, you bastard, and I'll rip your guts out!' The panda put her forepaws on my shoulders and pushed me hard against the ground, crushing me under the weight of her body. I looked up at her with dazed eyes.

'Don't you... I mean, I thought perhaps...'

'Shut. Up.'

'But listen... I'm part bear. I'm sure we'd be good together. You know, compatible.'

Marianne glared down at me. 'Get this, pooch. Listen up, doggie. Understand. You lay another paw on me and I will kill you. I'm not interested. End of.'

'You mean it's Der-der. I'm not Der-der and it's him you want.'

The panda ignored me.

'Is it because he...?' I stopped talking just in time. Mariannie raised her paws and turned her head so that I could not see her face. I wriggled out from underneath her, gasping for breath. The panda spoke into the night.

'You know nothing. Nothing about me, nothing about Der-der, nothing about this land, nothing about the world or the stars or the Blessèd sun. You are ignorant. I knew that when I took you on. You are not the first of your kind that I have met. But I did not think you were stupid as well as ignorant.'

'I'm not stupid.'

'No? Then prove it. Look around you. Pay attention to what you see and hear. Keep them in mind. Try to comprehend them, if you can. Work things out in your head.'

'I am remembering things. I'm sure I know more than I did when I left the compound. But you're right. There's still a lot I don't understand.'

'Then concentrate some more. Make an effort. Do you think I'm on this trip for the good of my health? Or because I like you? Now, I'm going for a walk. I want to be left alone. You stay here, little puppy-dog and don't try to follow me. And if you ever try another stunt like that...'

'Yes, Mariannie. I'm sorry. I won't.'

'Then perhaps you've learned something after all. Maybe there's hope for you yet.'

The panda shuffled off towards a nearby copse, leaving me alone and unable to sleep. Thoughts spun around in my head; of humiliation and shame, of course, but also... questions. Who was I? Why was I here? What was I doing? What would become of me?

There were no answers - none that came close to satisfying me or giving me peace. On and on they churned, and even as I tried to calm myself and tell myself there was no point in fretting - that in the end I would find out all I needed to know - I could get no rest beyond a few minutes of dream-haunted sleep.

The Blessèd sun rose and I rose with it. Mariannie had returned at some point and lay gently snoring a few yards away.

It was the beginning of the last day.

Oucho

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:51:38 GMT

Sunday night I had a particularly nasty gallstone attack. It started at 19:00 and when I crawled into bed at 04:30 the following morning it was still going on. I had practically nothing to eat yesterday and feel OK now, but rather sleep-deprived.

I'm quite looking forward to this being dealt with. Although being in hospital was better than I'd expected I don't want to have another stay just yet.

On the good news front, my ADSL connection is steadily rising in speed. It doubled overnight :)

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:25:59 GMT

Still in the Royal Berks. To be honest I feel rather a fraud as everyone else here seems to be much sicker than me.

I'm treating this experience as a dress rehearsal for being old. Anyone of my age has watched his or her parents grow old. We know what happens - what Wilfred Owen, admittedly writing in another context - called the 'slow drawing down of blinds'. Boomers like me; we thought we'd stay young and healthy for ever...

And we thought we'd gently slow down and we'd never have to hurt. The truth turns out to be slightly different :)

In the jug

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 20:02:17 GMT

Hi, and greetings from the Royal Berks Hospital, Loddon Ward, where I'm presently residing. It's down to a complication with my gallstones, which have become a lot more troublesome over the past few days. Turns out I now have pancreatitis. Fun, eh?

So I'm being kept in for a day or two (and being starved) to give the various digestive organs a rest. Fortunately there's internet here, else I'd be going round the bend already (and I've only been here a few hours).

DaveD; if you're reading this, happy birthday for tomorrow. There's a little something in the post :)

I'll have more to say later about the fuckwit GP I spoke to earlier today. For now: If a doctor doesn't listen, he's not worth talking to.

It's obvious!

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:05:46 GMT

So why didn't I notice it before? The three main supernatural characters in the very enjoyable Being Human are all cast against type. Annie the ghost is fleshy and solid, Goerge the werewolf is pale and interesting and Mitchell the vampire is hairy and bearded. However, the others of their kind do conform - pale Gilbert the 80s ghost, George's werewolf friend and the other vampires of Bristol look the (traditional) part.

Isn't that clever! And which came first - the supernaturals' desire to become human or their adoption of unexpected appearances?

The Guiding Star

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:20:22 GMT

Here's the story I promised you.

Welcome back to the Ringland of Leaven and a sequel to Pirates of the Archipelago / Tides of Glory.

Annie McLuskie's story continues...

The Guiding Star

Sometimes I climb the Greater Fang, sometimes the Lesser.

The Greater Fang is taller than its neighbour by two hundred feet of sheer rock face, and that hard-won increase in height gains you no more than a mile or two’s greater distance of vision. It hardly seems worth the effort. And yet, that extra mile... it might make all the difference one day.

- 0 -

She was supposed to be half mine but it never worked out that way in reality. They were... wedded, you might say. Bonded for life, or so it seemed. Yes, I could have insisted on fair shares - stood up for what was mine - but when it came to it... how could I? How could I come between them; they who shared such devotion?

But the day she set out on her great voyage, Annie took me to one side for a moment, held both my hands in hers and looked straight into my eyes. We were standing by the chamber of Number Four Lock, on the northern face of the Ring of Leaven. Her eyes were brown and deep, her mop of black curly hair was tied back with a red bandanna worn slantwise across her forehead.

‘Emmy?’

‘Yes?’

‘You will look after her while I’m away, won’t you?’

I misunderstood at first. ‘Of course I will. You know that. I’ll be there every night, making sure she eats properly. I won’t let her worry about you.’

Annie laughed. ‘You great silly! You didn’t think I meant Mum, did you?’

‘Who else?’

Three aeroforms hovered overhead, dipping their streamers into the water nearby. They were feeding on the algae that bloomed near the lock. From time to time they came between us and the light of the Blessèd sun, filtering it blue or green or orange. Annie laughed again. She was always laughing in those days - she was so excited, so looking forward to her great adventure. And then, swift as a backing wind, she was serious once more.

‘I know you’ll take care of Mum. I trust you. She trusts you. She’ll be all right, though. She’s strong - you know that.’

I knew that. Of course I did. But I saw what Annie, busy Annie with a thousand and one last-minute preparations on her mind, might not have seen. I saw the fear that Mum tried her best to conceal. Tried her best, and nearly always succeeded.

‘But I didn’t mean Mum. I meant Albatross.’

Ah. I should have known.

‘I’ve left a list of jobs that need doing.’

‘Thank you.’

‘But look - you can sail her too if you like. I won’t mind, honest.’

‘Honest?’

‘Really and truly. She needs to be sailed. Leave her alone and she’ll mope. Probably start leaking. You’ve got to swear you’ll take her out as often as she wants. Will you do that for me, baby bro? Promise?’

I made a solemn promise, and Annie gave me a kiss on the cheek to seal it. There never was a girl like Annie.

- 0 -

I think we knew it was real the second time she came back from Edge. Before then; yes, we’d heard her talking about the great sea journeys she was going to make when she was older and we kids had had a good laugh about it. “Foy-bait” we called her, and “Mad Annie”. At least, that’s the sort of talk I joined in with when I was hanging out with the other lads. To her face I was more polite. I didn’t want a slap, did I? We thought she had some kind of weird hang-up over Dad; that she wanted to sail on the open sea just because he couldn’t, being dead and all. We never thought that anything would come of it. There was a place waiting for her in the packing shed when she finished school, standing next to Mum. Or, seeing as she was really not at all bad-looking, perhaps working in Porth Leaven as a tourist guide or a hotel receptionist. That might sound a bit of a let-down to you, especially if you’d known her when she was in her thirties and still growing. She’d been so bright and carefree then. Couldn’t she have studied to become a Monitor, or something in the government of the Archipelago? Had she no ambition? Was she too dim for anything more demanding than manual work? No, of course she wasn’t, but the truth was that she simply didn’t care. Sailing was her true love, and everything else had to take second place.

- 0 -

She’d made this posh friend, sailing. His name was Roy and his Mum and Dad owned miles of farmland in Middle Edge. They were absolutely rolling in it and Mister Awdry, Roy’s Dad, was a big noise in the Council. So it was no big surprise when one day the Monitor sent a boy down to fetch Annie out of school and she came back from his house to say she’d got an invitation to go and see her rich chum, fare paid. The Monitor had printed out the ticket for her, and when I looked at it that night - she showed it to me before she let Mum see it and that made me feel really good - I saw the name Awdry on the top. It was a first class ticket, open return, and when Annie showed it to Mum… well, there were shenanigans. We couldn’t possibly accept it, it was too expensive, Edge was on the far side of Glory, the ship might crash or be lost forever, anything could happen. It was all too much, and quite impossible.

But she went, of course, waving goodbye from the LAV Good Humor’s landing ramp with an enormous smile on her face. She was away for a whole Hally-cycle. It was the talk of the village, especially after she made us a video call. We had to traipse up the hill to the Monitor’s house to take it. Providence only knows what it cost; we talked real-time for nearly half an hour. On the way home, Mum turned to me and asked me what I thought. I said I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen Annie so happy. Mum shook her head sadly.

After she’d gone missing following the Regatta and been rescued and nearly died in hospital Mum had forbidden Annie to sail Albatross. It’d been a punishment for going off without telling anyone, but also Mum’s last attempt at convincing my sister that there was more to life than sailing. But when she returned from Edge the first thing Annie did was to take her boat out into the bay and past Junction Point, and to sail her halfway round the Peak before coming back home. Mum didn’t stop her, and after that she never tried again. She knew it wouldn’t do any good.

- 0 -

Years passed, the worlds dipped and swooped over us in the sky, the Blessèd sun rose and set. Annie left school and started a boat hire business - McLuskie’s Pirate Adventures. A few years later I left too and travelled to the School on Horn to take a short engineering course. When I returned to the Peak after a couple of years for a job servicing ships in Porth Leaven aerodrome, Annie’s enterprise was flourishing. Mum was just the same - a little greyer, a little more tired.

It was the year after that that Annie made her second trip to Edge. I know for a fact that she paid her own way that time. She went third class, for a start, and worked her passage by giving talks on the history - the short, sad history - of seafaring on Glory. Her business carried on while she was away, run by me - when I could spare the time from refitting engines, tautening braces and building up Rays - and by her old friends from schooldays, Sluts and Roger.

When Annie returned it was on a cargo ship, laden with preformed aluminium struts, girders and spars. She brought Roy, her Wedgie friend, together with a sheaf of blueprints six inches thick. Roy had changed since the last time I’d seen him, standing awkwardly by Annie’s bedside in Porth Leaven hospital. He had grown tall and strong-looking; confident and handsome too, despite his pale, easily-burned skin and floppy ginger hair. I looked at him with a brother’s eye. Were Roy and Annie just childhood friends or was there more to it than that? Pangs of loss stabbed me and I wondered how Dad would have felt.

Whether or not they were lovers it soon became clear they were close business associates; and it was no insignificant business either. Within a day they had rented Coyne’s boatyard for an indefinite period and taken on all their staff. The metal from the ship was taken there and laid out on the workshop floor, which was cleared of its work in progress. Twelve half-finished boats were taken out and parked on the ground nearby, or sold on to other boatbuilding concerns. There was something big afoot and the Peak was alive with speculation, from the bars of Porth Leaven to the upland forests and plantations.

I tackled Annie about it. She was hard to find at first, she was so busy, but in the end I claimed family rights and hauled her off to the Black Pig Hotel for a pint and a substantial helping of fish pie. She was still as skinny at forty-six as she had been when she was in her mid-twenties.

‘You need feeding up,’ I told her.

‘Yes Mum,’ she replied and stuck her tongue out at me. I asked her what she was up to, although I knew, I knew.

‘I’m building a ship. Isn’t it obvious?’

‘You mean a sailing ship, don’t you? To sail on the ocean.’

‘Of course.’

The fear that I had seen in Mum’s face so many times clenched my heart.

‘But...’ You’ll be killed. First Dad, now you.

‘No Emmy, I won’t.’ She took my hand. ‘This is going to be the best ship that ever sailed the seas of Glory. I’ll show you.’

And after we’d had a few more pints she took me over to Coyne’s and unrolled the plans and let me look at the details of her new ship’s construction. I cast an engineer’s eye over them. They were good, I could tell. She was well thought out, sound, conservatively designed with broad tolerances and a strong, resilient structure.

‘Who’s paying for this? Not you. It’s Roy isn’t it, with his Wedgie Tokens?’

‘That’s right.’

‘But why would he do that? Why would the Wedgies give you all that money?’ Did you sell yourself to him? The thought came unbidden, unwelcome.

‘It’s purely business, Emmy.’

‘Meaning?’

‘They’re fed up with the Board’s monopoly on transportation. They pay a fortune in shipping charges to the Board, don’t you know? Much more than we do. They only want a fair share of the rewards for their work. Why should they have to give their money, that they’ve worked hard for, to the Board, sitting on their fat arses in the Joyeuse, doing nothing?’

That’s not how it works. There’s a balance, a covenant. Why do you think we don’t have wars here on Glory, they way they used to on Earth? You’re talking like a Wedgie. I thought these thoughts, but didn’t voice them. Edgeois money was paying for Annie’s ship. She would hardly change her mind about taking it, not now.

- 0 -

The ship grew in Coyne’s shed; grew faster than I could have imagined. After a week her skeleton had been bolted together and was standing, braced on wooden supports, in the middle of an organized jumble of tool stands, ladders and workbenches. It looked like the skeleton of an animal lying on its back with its ribs sticking up into the air, glinting bright silver under the working lights. I looked in whenever I could spare time from my work at the aerodrome and followed its progress.

Within two weeks the frame was finished. The ship was going to be two hundred feet long, schooner-rigged with an auxiliary motor, cell-powered and charged by an ingenious system involving reversing the propeller. Meanwhile, up the Peak, pine trees were being felled to provide the cladding for the hull. I protested that the timber would be unseasoned, but Annie assured me that wasn’t a problem; that green wood would be easier to steam-form over the metal framework. The hull would be force-dried later in situ before being plastic-coated inside and out to waterproof it. I shook my head at this, and so did some of Coyne’s more experienced craftsmen, but apparently this technique was widely used on Edge.

I asked Annie what her ship was going to be named. She was already being called McLuskie’s Folly among the boatmen of the Archipelago. Somewhat nervously I told Annie this.

‘Yes, I know. I don’t mind - they’ll see I’m right in the end.’

‘Do you have a name in mind?’

‘I’m not sure. She could be Alastair McLuskie or Cressida. I wondered if I shouldn’t call her Deepdiver. Or Sir Patrick Spens.

‘You could name her after Dad or his boat if you wanted but I’m not sure what Mum would think. Why Deepdiver? That doesn’t sound like a good name for a ship. Inauspicious, to put it mildly.’

‘It’s the name of a friend of mine. But no, I’m not sure. And Sir Patrick Spens wouldn’t be a very lucky name either.’

And not long afterwards Annie announced that the ship would be called Guiding Star and when I asked her why she simply pointed upwards and I understood.

- 0 -

The Guiding Star was launched three months after Annie’s return from Edge. Half the Archipelago turned out to see this extraordinary event, the first launching of an ocean-going ship for four hundred years. Mum was persuaded, much against her wishes, to crack a bottle of the best Bright champagne across her bows, the crew hammered the chocks away, and the Guiding Star slid gracefully down the slipway into the water of the Inner Sea, just as the ‘Down flashed into brilliance overhead, illuminated by the beacon on Leaven Peak. Fitting-out took another three months but suddenly, with no more than a year having passed since she’d returned from Edge, everything was finished and Annie was standing at the helm of her new vessel, on a fine sunny morning, ready for her first voyage. The Guiding Star’s hull was painted royal blue; her white mono sails dazzled overhead, her well-scrubbed decks gleamed silver-grey in the light of the Blessèd sun. In the binnacle in front of the wheel was a small box of electronics - Dad’s geolocator - and at the head of the mainmast fluttered a black flag emblazoned with the skull and crossbones. She was ready for her first voyage.

With a fair wind blowing from the East, the Guiding Star heeled gently to starboard and slowly, carefully, made her way through a flotilla of small boats through the harbour gates into the Inner Sea. People stood on the breakwater, the beach, the cliffs and even the hills above Porth Leaven to watch and remember what they saw. Despite having worked with the greatest airships of the Board’s flight - and they are the most beautiful creations of humanity on Glory - I had never seen anything so wonderful, so exciting, so heart-lifting, in all my life. But as the crowed cheered and waved their hats in the air, and I stood next to Mum, holding her tightly, still there was that underlying fear haunting us.

Where had the Guiding Star’s crew come from? Who would be so mad as to sign up on a ship whose avowed purpose was to cross the oceans of Glory - those oceans that had never been sailed with impunity, which seethed with hostile life? Anyone who had taken a trip on a Board ship had looked down and seen the foys, the gigantic creatures who owned the seas, who were so jealous of their domain that they crushed the life from any human who dared enter it. A ship of fools she was called, and anyone who even suggested that it would be a good idea to sail aboard her was derided as a suicidal madman. Until someone decided to ask the ‘Down.

A petition was sent up to the Monitor of Porth Leaven, signed by a thousand citizens of the Peak, demanding that the ‘Down condemn the Guiding Star, her captain and her builders as reckless, exploitative profiteers who held the lives of their hapless crew cheaper than dirt. Wild speculators, pirates, typical Wedgies in other words. Hundreds waited outside the Monitor’s house while the petition was presented to the ‘Down.

Time passed, the crowd grew uneasy. What was taking so long? Wasn’t the answer obvious? The whole rash enterprise should be banned and the Wedgies sent home. And then the Monitor appeared at the door of his house, carrying a printout slip which he pinned to the notice board outside.

‘Tell us what it says!’ shouted an angry man at the front.

The Monitor, who had been going back indoors, stopped and turned. Everyone who was there saw his expression.

‘It says that the Guiding Star is a well-found ship and that her captain is an experienced, responsible and suitable person to command her.’

‘But what about the foys?’

‘The foys present no danger. The ‘Down states this twice. There is no danger to the Guiding Star from the foys.’

‘No danger?’ Who could believe that?

‘The ‘Down will watch over the Guiding Star. No harm will come to her. That is all. Now, go home!’

And that first day, as Annie’s ship with her hand-picked crew made her shake-down cruise around the Peak of Leaven and among the smaller islands that dotted the waters next to it, we who were left on shore could only watch and think that, however well the Guiding Star fared in the shelter of the tideless Inner Sea, it would be another matter completely when she passed through one of the Ring’s sea-locks and ventured out onto the hostile wastes of Glory’s boundless oceans.

- 0 -

Only two weeks later, with her rigging fettled and her engine tuned, the Guiding Star motored her way out of Number Four lock on a rising tide and set an eastward course over the open sea for the land of Dix. There was intense interest in her maiden voyage throughout Glory. A top-line Board ship, the LAV Calippo, hovered overhead, watching closely. She ran a real-time video link up to the ‘Down and from there pictures of Annie’s vessel were beamed to every Monitor’s screen all over the world. People huddled around those screens, eager to see history being made with expectation so passionate, so strained it was nearly unbearable… and worse for me and Mum, and for everyone with a loved one on board. I had twisted the arm of the aerodrome’s master and appropriated a skiff - a maintenance blimp - with Mum and myself on board. I hadn’t earned my airman’s ticket yet, but this was a special day and the usual rules did not apply.

Dix was ten miles east of Leaven and the wind was in the north-west. The Guiding Star made good speed once she hoisted her sails and furled her propeller - a good eight knots according to the skiff’s groundspeed indicator. I was flying at three hundred feet or so, keeping fifty yards to port of the ship so as not to get in the way of the Calippo’s cameras.

The crossing was expected to take around two hours in total, including docking and undocking. For the first hour everything seemed to go smoothly. It was a fair morning with a scattering of clouds at five thousand feet. They cast moving shadows on the water around the Guiding Star, dark green on pale turquoise. Mum was standing next to me, gripping the rails of the gondola’s gunwale and staring intently downwards. From time to time I put my arm around her shoulder and reassured her. It was going very well, the crew were at their stations, the ship was riding steadily, her sails were comfortably full, Annie had everything under control. All the same, I was glad to have the piloting of the skiff to keep my mind occupied.

An hour and a half, and the Guiding Star was less than two miles from Dix Haven. She would reach the sea-gate with time to spare before the tide fell too far for her to gain entrance to the harbour. The water splashed foam around her bows, her wake trailed behind her like spilled milk on a pathway. Cloud-shapes and ship-shadows were her travelling companions. All was well. And then... it all fell apart. Suddenly there were more shadows in the water, shadows that moved of their own accord, shadows with intentions. Mum moaned aloud. She knew more than anyone what this meant.

The foys were coming. She was only a mile and a half from safety, but already the Guiding Star was doomed. There was no time to spare. My duty was clear. Even though the ship were lost, her crew might still be saved. There were two spare places in the skiff. Between us, my blimp and the Calippo could hoist the seamen to safety, but I had to act now. I revved my engine and vented my Ray-tanks. We lost height rapidly, descending nearly to sea level and covered the distance between ourselves and the ship in less than a minute. I keyed the skiff’s hailer.

‘Annie! Abandon ship! The foys are coming!’

(All over Glory the Calippo’s video feed showed my mercy dash to the waiting audience, clustered around their Monitors’ screens. A sigh rose from every corner of the world.)

Annie cupped her hands and shouted up to me. ‘Hold off, Emmy! Wait.’

‘You can’t wait! There’s no time! Save yourselves!’ The Calippo’s giant hull was nearly overhead. I would take two men off the ship, and the Board vessel would rescue the rest. But Annie... Annie was the captain. She would be last off...

And then, shockingly quickly, there was no time left. With a terrific roar the sea ahead of the Guiding Star split open and the head of a great foy lifted itself out of the water, dwarfing the ship. The foy opened its fifty-foot mouth and called out; an immense, booming, rattling cry. We have heard it, haven’t we, every one of us, that cry, echoing across the late-night oceans when the world is quiet, but never so close, never so loud as I heard it that day.

Annie brought her ship to a halt. She turned to the crew. ‘Everybody stand to!’ she ordered, and every men and women on board stopped what he or she was doing and looked up at their captain, awaiting her next command. Annie had trained her people well. She faced forward and took Dad’s locator from its place in the ship’s binnacle. She held it up like a talisman.

‘Do you know me?’ she cried out at the top of her voice. ‘I am Captain Annie McLuskie.’

We watched, heart-stopped. Was she going to try to talk to a foy? The creature shook its head and sea-water flew in all directions.

‘Annie!’ I cried again, but she raised her hand for silence. I had never seen her so stern, so fixed in her purpose.

‘I am Captain Annalisa McLuskie of the Guiding Star and this is my ship and these people are my crew. I have the right of safe passage over all the seas of Glory, by a sacred compact made between me, the sailing ship Whistledown and the foy Deepdiver Thrarn of the Gulf of Basrum. You may not prevent me from passing. Move aside, and remind your comrades of our agreement.’

Annie stopped speaking. She stood resolutely still on the bridge of her ship, with the locator held high. The foy lifted its head further. My heart squeezed tight in my chest. I could see what it meant to do. It would come crashing down on the Guiding Star like a falling tree, snapping her masts and smashing her hull to smithereens; picking off her crew one by one as they struggled in the water. I had to do something, anything to help. I steered as close as I dared to the ship. Overhead, the Calippo loomed ever larger as she shunted lift and descended, her turbines droning a funeral dirge in mourning for her sister of the seas.

(The world held its breath, dismayed, paralysed with fear. The privileged few with screen access leaned forward involuntarily, the multitudes listening to speakers outside stood silently waiting for the inevitable. Mothers held their children close and buried their small faces in their breasts so they would not be able to see or hear the horrible thing that was about to happen.)

And then… and then the foy dipped its head. It gave one last tremendous bellow and turned. Turned away from the ship and her indomitable captain. Swam off and dived, taking its companions with it. Left the way clear for the Guiding Star to finish her passage to Dix Haven, to a safe harbour and the glorious end of a prosperous maiden voyage.

(A great hush descended over the world. Something so utterly momentous had occurred that, for a while, nobody comprehended it. The silence hung in the air, between the ocean and the stars, like something holy. And then, after measureless time, the world exhaled, and started to breathe, to live once more.)

We heard the sound of cheering from the shores of Dix; faint, but perfectly, beautifully clear. Mum threw her arms around me and soaked my jerkin with her tears; tears which fell across all the lands of Glory.

‘You see?’ said the ‘Down, on every open channel in the spectrum. ‘I told you it would be all right!’

- 0 -

The Guiding Star continued her journey the following day and for the next month she sailed the length of the Archipelago, rounding the tiny land of Un two weeks later.

‘I’ve never been so shit-scared in all my life,’ said Annie when we met up a week after her triumphant return to Leaven. ‘Never. I mean, the ‘Down was backing me up, but I still didn’t know for sure that my meeting with Deep hadn’t been just a dream, and a pretty mad one at that.’

The whole world knew by now that Annie had been granted the freedom of the seas by the foys, although she had only told a few of us how that had come about.

‘What I’m hoping is that one day, when they see how little harm one sailing ship causes them, they’ll let more of us out onto their oceans. We’ll become a true seafaring people at last!’

I gazed into my sister’s face with open love and admiration, but I felt the pain of our impending separation in my soul. We could never be simply brother and sister again.

- 0 -

Annie had turned into a hero. Glory had taken her to its heart; as if the world had only been waiting to be reminded how much it needed heroes. There had been nobody like her since the desperate days that had followed the Landing. Her achievement was a token of how settled, how safe and dull and ordinary the world had become, and as each day passed I watched her become less a person and more a symbol; the abstract embodiment of the hopes of the peoples of Glory. Annie, only Annie, was the bold pirate captain who had faced down the foys and brought her ship safely home. Annie, with her wonderful ship, was the future, the guiding star. And as she got progressively more involved in plans to build a bigger, faster vessel I felt her slipping ever further away from me. She was so busy, so famous, so in demand; and I was just Emmy, her lesser-known brother.

She had become a character in a story; but it was her story, not mine.

The Guiding Star was refitted and improved following her tour of the Archipelago. She was the prototype for what might one day be a fleet of merchant ships sailing newly established sea-routes between the lands of Glory. These ships would be owned and operated by Edgeois concerns, and I was not the only person who wondered what would happen if the land of Edge became as dominant in trade as it already was in the production of raw materials and foodstuffs. What would become of the Board ships if their cargo business was taken from them?

The world was changing fast; it had changed more in one short year than in all the centuries that had passed since humanity had become established on Glory.

- 0 -

Annie’s second expedition was to be a try-out for voyages to come. The Guiding Star was loaded with fifty barrels of nut-oil, to be shipped to Falls for processing into plastics. This would be a major adventure. Falls is two thousand miles north-east of the Archipelago and the Guiding Star was expected to take between two and three weeks to make the trip. She was provisioned with enough food and water to last twice that time.

I sailed with Annie to Number Four lock to wish her bon voyage, and it was there that she gave Albatross into my care and there that she blessed our farewell with a kiss. I stood on top of the lock gates and watched as the ship was warped through on a falling tide. She proceeded a mile out to sea under electric power and then, clear of land, hoisted sail and set off with her pirate flag fluttering valiantly at the masthead.

I have not seen her since.

The ‘Down followed the Guiding Star for the first few days of her passage, but there were several days of fog, rain and storm and communication was cut off. This was expected, predictable. Glory’s seas are not always blue, her winds not always moderate. Many a Board ship has been lost under similar circumstances. But when Annie’s ship had not been heard from for a day, then three days, then a week and then a fortnight it became agonisingly clear that something had gone terribly wrong. But nobody knew anything, or if they did they didn’t tell me.

After three weeks I went to the Monitor’s house and demanded to speak to the ‘Down. Perhaps she knew what had happened. Had the ship’s hull failed or her flammable cargo blown up? The Monitor shook his head sadly and left me at the door while he went inside to find out if I could have an audience. He reappeared and crooked his finger. ‘Come in, young McLuskie,’ he said.

So I followed him into his house and entered his study, where I had never been before, and accessed his private screen. I spoke to the ‘Down, one to one, as a Monitor does. And I was expecting an explanation, or a data list, or some last pictures of my sister’s ship as seen from orbit but, apart from a few functional hellos and goodbyes, the ‘Down would only say these three words:

‘I am ashamed.’

‘Ashamed of what?’ I asked, but the ‘Down would speak to me no more, and I had to break contact with no firm knowledge, no satisfaction, no finality. I did not tell Mum - brave, brittle Mum - about my interview. Her heart was quite broken enough already.

And so… Nobody will tell me that the Guiding Star is lost, only that she is “missing”. No wreckage has been washed up, no last messages recorded by the ‘Down or her comsats. There is hope, but it is a bitter, negative hope and gives no comfort. I carry on my daily work, as I must, and sit with my mother in our little house in the village of Parrolindon for long, empty silent evenings. The friends and relatives of the fourteen missing members of Annie’s crew do not blame her openly for their loss, but I feel their silent accusations all the same and I do not seek their company. Instead, when I can, I take a skiff or, if there is time, Albatross, and I cross the water to the Ring and there I climb the Greater or the Lesser Fang and look out to sea.

I watch for a sail and a black-and-white flag, a brown face and a broad smile, a ship and her captain; because I must. The Guiding Star is not wrecked, so she must be afloat. Annie is not dead, so she must be alive. She is not here, so she must be on her way.

There never was a girl like Annie, and when she returns - as I know she will - I will be the first to see her. That is why, whenever I can, I climb the Greater Fang and not the Lesser.

Well there's a thing

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 23:45:08 GMT

It turns out that the shared house in Being Human is on the same street in Bristol that my parents were living in when I was born. Perhaps I'm really part-vampire, part-werewolf and part-ghost.

Early Doors

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:36:22 GMT

Why, oh why, is the BBC continuing to treat this lovely gem of a comedy so badly? It's being shoved around the schedules (on BBC4, which is digital-only) in such a way you never know when it's coming back. It deserves much better exposure than this.

Bah!

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:56:55 GMT

Effin' gallstones struck this morning at 9 just as I was about to take FW out for her singing lesson and they didn't calm down until past 6.

That's a long time for an attack to last and an unusual time of day as well. The funny thing is that for several weeks I was free of problems. At the time I put that improvement down to diet management but now I'm not so sure. Perhaps I was just lucky.

Still... Bah!

Booky-Wooky

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:10:40 GMT

Snitched from swanofkennet

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Copy into a new note Put an X next to the ones you've read. Include the number you have read in the title and post to your journal.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible – X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - X
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell - X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - X
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X
29 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll – X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - X
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood- X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - X
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - X
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - X
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt - X
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - X
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - X
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo.

I make that - er - does countie thing that would be easy in vi(1). Ah - 48!

Guardians of Glory, Part Eleven

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:53:24 GMT

Ilse and Montague wake to face a new day. Jonathan has a chat with the doctor.

Morning

'I suppose I'm going to have to help you.'

'I would owe you a great debt of gratitude.'

Mariannie snorted. 'That, and one Token, will buy you a cup of coffee in Phyle.' I shook my head, confused. I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about and she knew it. She also knew I would never admit to my ignorance, and she knew I knew that, as did I.

For a moment I envied Der-der his simplicity.

'It started,' said Doctor Powell, 'when I woke up one morning on this ship to find I was the only person aboard. I had been cast adrift; me and the El Dorado. I know now that I wasn't expected to be on the ship. It was believed that the vessel was completely unmanned and a there was a lot of discussion about me when my… inconvenient existence became apparent. It was a toss-up whether I was going to be allowed to live or die.'

'A discussion? Who was involved?'

'That will become clear, I think, as I go along.'

Ilse Hight, that most self-possessed and self-contained of persons, slept soundly in her stateroom on board the LAV Hundreds and Thousands.

'Der-der, darling, listen to me carefully. I'm going to have to go away for a few days; I'm going with Montague to help him find his way to safety. He's rather lost, you see.

'You must stay here and look after yourself. You can do that, can't you? Look, there's plenty of bamboo for you to eat. If it gets cold you can bed down in the moss in the forest.

'Is that alright, love?'

Der-der lifted his head to Mariannie's face. I saw no exchange, and nobody spoke - nothing that I could hear - but an understanding must have passed between them.

'I'll be back soon. Before you know it, I promise.'

The pandas embraced; black fur on white, white fur on black. Seeing their intimacy I was briefly swamped by a feeling of terrible loss. Their loss, for their parting, but also mine, for I had never known such closeness myself - not on this side of the wall of memory. I was desolated by my sorrow and turned away from the pair, trying to grant them the privacy they deserved. They held one another for several long minutes. I stood at the edge of the grove, staring south while the newly risen Blessèd sun poked through the trees to my right.

I had spent the previous night alone, but safe in the knowledge that the pandas were not far off and that Mariannie would come to my aid or, at any rate, alert me if danger came close. Nothing had happened, though, and I had slept well, despite the cold and my unfamiliar situation. Slept well; and it was Mariannie who had woken me with a nudge of her nose against my side, not the light of dawn.

'Wake up! Providence, but you're helpless! Suppose I were a predator? Or a human? You'd be dead now, or caught.'

'Sorry.'

'You wouldn't have time to be sorry. Come on now. Look! There's lots of yummy bamboo to eat!'

And so I had sat next to Mariannie and Der-der and done my best to chew the green stalks to a digestible pulp and suck water out of their hollow interiors.

'We pandas eat a lot of this stuff and we have to stop regularly to graze. I hope you don't mind that.'

'I suppose not.'

'I suppose not! He doesn't suppose! Well, you're just going to have to put up with it. You don't like it, you carry on by yourself.'

'No, no, that's fine, honestly. I'll stick with you. But is this… bamboo all you can eat? Does it grow everywhere? Will you be able to find it where we're going?'

'No, probably not, but we'll eat anything if we must. We're quite partial to a little meat from time to time.'

'Ah. I'll bear that in mind.'

'So are you saying the El Dorado was guided all the time you were with her? Not drifting, as you'd thought?'

'More or less. While I was awake the 'Down let the ship go where she willed. But while I slept, she adjusted the El Dorado's course.'

'Why did she care whether you knew or not? I mean; the 'Down does pretty much as she wants. If she thought she needed to intervene, she would. You know that.'

'Yes, Monitor. Oh, and by the way, you do know about the Captain, don't you?'

'I saw him make the Gesture, yes.'

'Good. Then you'll have the good sense to keep any criticisms you may have of the 'Down and her funny ways to yourself; or in the right company, won't you?'

'I have my rights as a Monitor, you know.'

'I know that. You know that. The Board knows that. But the captain's in absolute charge here. He's an airman; and airmen do what they have to do right here and now to preserve their ships and their crews. They tend to act in their immediate interests first and worry about the long-term consequences later. You might win an appeal against the captain if he decided to brig you; but that'd be in a year's time. You don't really want that to happen, do you?'

'He couldn't do that! The 'Down'd stop him.'

'Only if she knew about it.'

'Ah. Alright. So he's a raving Cultist and I'd better humour him. But all I can say is this - if he were in regular communication with the 'Down, like me; if he had Monitor-level experience of the 'Down and her idiosyncrasies he'd be less inclined to regard her as some kind of super-being. She may be bright, she may be powerful; but she has her little foibles, just like you and me. You have to get pretty near to her to discover that.'

I leaned closer to the doctor. 'She may be the Guardian of humanity; but she's not the only one. I'm a Guardian too. Every Monitor is. You 're a Guardian. Every doctor is. Every ship's captain is, for all that. We have to work together for Glory's sake, and making a god out of one of us - because that's all she is, really, just one of us - is doing nobody any favours.'

'All the same, Jonathan…'

'All the same, I'll be tactful.'

'Thank you.'

'So go on. The 'Down guided the El Dorado without you knowing about it and eventually she hit a land. Was this land the Tracy Island you mentioned earlier?'

'Yes; and you'd better keep your voice down when you say that name in public.'

Was there anything I could say without causing trouble? I looked up. The bar was nearly deserted and hardly public. Never mind - I wouldn't argue the point. 'I hear you, doctor. Now; another drink?'

'Morning Ilse.'

'Morning 'Down.'

Mariannie blew Der-der one last kiss. She looked at me with regret haunting her eyes. 'Come on then, Monty.'

We headed directly downhill. The panda led the way and I followed, picking my way carefully.

'You'll have to go faster than that.'

'Yes, sorry. I'm not used to this. It feels like my rear end wants to run past my front paws, if you see what I mean.'

'It's just the same for me.' That was true - Marianne's powerful-looking hindquarters were built for pushing, just as mine were. Going downhill felt all wrong. 'You have to take short steps and let your back legs drag a little. Watch me and you'll be alright.'

So I watched her and I did my best and slowly we descended the slope. The stream I had crossed the night of my escape had cut a gully into the side of the hill and our path drifted across towards it as time passed until we found ourselves climbing down into it and scrambling over the boulders its grinding flow had exposed. I worried that we were exposed too. There was no cover apart from the occasional tree growing slantwise out of the side of the rift the rushing water had etched out of the land and the Blessèd sun shone more and more directly into our eyes as it approached its highest point. Not only were the heat and glare becoming uncomfortable, but the feeling that we were being watched - examined as you examine me under the lasers in the Mansion's laboratories - was gradually overpowering me. But there was water - as much as we could drink - and as much shade as we needed, bearing in mind that progress was what mattered most, not comfort.

At no time did I wonder how it was I knew about the movement of the Blessèd sun through the heavens or the way running water eroded the landscape. Nor did it surprise me when I realised that I knew - as I had always known - that I was treading the soil, drinking the water and eating the plant life of the land of Gold.

‘After the ship struck the land and I wasn’t killed by the impact the question of what to do with me still remained. The arguments carried on while I did my best to make a home on the land and, even after the El Dorado was freed and taken off to be refurbished and repaired, I was still there, scraping along. If it hadn’t been for something that happened I might have just faded away – starved to death.’

‘That would have been a cruel way to end.’

‘But a passive one. I mean, nobody would have killed me, not as such. No gun to my head, no poison in my food, you know? But instead, I had an encounter with an aeroform – or a pair of aeroforms, actually, and that changed everything.’

‘You called me away from my work, put me on this ship and cited immediate danger. I think you ought to tell me what that immediate danger was.’

Monitor Hight had had twenty-five hours – a full day on Glory – to become angry with the ‘Down.

‘So tell me. What’s going on?’