Grailblazers (14 page)

‘There are also,' said the spokeswraith, ‘spiders.'

There was a soft thunk as the overseer's jaw dropped on to the studded collar round his neck. ‘What was that?' he gasped.

‘And snakes.'

‘And mosquitoes.'

‘And,' added the spokeswraith meaningfully, ‘it's not as if it's exactly got vacant possession, you know. The whole place is absolutely crawling with ...'

With a massive effort, the overseer hoisted his jaw back into place. ‘Yes?'

‘You know,' replied the smoke-cloud diffidently. ‘Things. It's really creepy out there, you know?'

‘They go around singing all the time,' ventured a voice from the last bench but one. ‘It's enough to give you the willies.'

‘Bloody unsocial hours, too,' added a scratching, grinding sound from somewhere near the middle of the ship. ‘Dream-time-and-a-half, that sort of thing.'

‘Let's get this straight,' said the overseer, with an ever so slightly unbalanced lilt in his voice. ‘All you ghouls and ghosts and things that go bump in the night are refusing to get off the ship because you think the place is
haunted?'

‘Yes.'

‘Be reasonable,' added the scratching sound - a fever-wraith from the Plumstead Marshes - ‘they're natives, they're used to living here, we're not. They'd have us for breakfast. If you turn us off the ship, it'd be mass murder. Exorcism. Whatever.'

The overseer lowered his head, stuck his hands in his pockets - where, inevitably, he found a small piece of string, a half-eaten apple and two small bronze coins of purely nominal value - and thought about it for a while; then he retired into the helmsman's cabin and banged his head against the ship's wheel for a while. Oddly enough, it helped, because when he emerged he knew exactly what he was going to do.

And it worked. It was, of course, bitterly unfair on the indigenous paranormals; and it has to go down as one of the biggest stains on the superhuman rights record of the English nation. Now, however, it's far too late to do anything about it, because within five years of the arrival of the deported spirits from Albion, the native deities had been completely wiped out, leaving the entire continent empty to receive the newcomers. In due course, they settled in, adapted themselves to their new environment and evolved an entirely original lifestyle of their own which bore no resemblance whatsoever to the culture they had left behind them, and which survived for seven hundred years before being completely destroyed by the coming of the First Fleet.

Which, so the aborigines say, served the buggers bloody well right.

 

‘Tho what did they actually do to the native thpiritth?' the Timekeeper demanded. Lamorak winced. He hated this part of the story. It was, he had always felt, enough to make one ashamed of being Albionese.

‘They methylated them,' he replied quietly. ‘Well, it's been really nice meeting you,' he said, ‘and I look forward very much to having met you before, but unless we make a start immediately we're going to be very, very late. Ciao.' He picked up his rucksack, slung it on his back and advanced purposefully towards the unicorn.

‘That'th horrible,' said the Timekeeper, and shuddered. ‘But it thtill doethn't ecthplain about the apron and the unicorn.'

‘Very true,' replied Lamorak over his shoulder. ‘Right then, Per, you grab hold of the rope while I push.'

‘The apron,' said Pertelope, ‘was a talisman belonging to one of the deported spirits. It has magical powers of its own. We managed to track it down, through newspaper reports of unexplained happenings which could only have been caused by the apron, and it turns out to be owned by a maiden of unspotted virtue living in Sydney. Hence the unicorn.'

‘I thee,' murmured the Timekeeper. ‘At leatht I think I thee. What thort of unecthplained happeningth?'

Lamorak smiled unpleasantly. ‘It's kind of hard to explain,' he said.

The Timekeeper was not amused. ‘Try me,' she said.

‘Football results,' said Pertelope. ‘The apron plays merry hell with the results of Australian Rules football matches. All we had to do once we knew that was to plot all the results on a big graph and wait until a significant mutation in the sine curve became apparent.'

‘And?'

‘Paramatta Under-Twelves 22, Sydney 0,' Lamorak growled. ‘Which was as good as putting up a big neon sign saying OVER HERE.' He paused and scowled. ‘I can explain the mathematics of it in very great detail if you want me to,' he added.

‘No thankth,' said the Timekeeper, and Lamorak noticed that her eyes looked as if someone had accidentally slapped three coats of weatherproof varnish over them. ‘Actually,' she went on, ‘it'th time I wath getting along, tho ...'

‘Of course. We quite understand. Right, Per, when I say heave ... Per? What the hell are you staring at?'

Pertelope was standing bolt upright, his face contorted into an expression of terminal sheepishness. He swallowed once or twice, raised his left arm and waggled his fingers.

‘Smile, Lammo,' he hissed out of the side of his mouth. ‘I think we're on television.'

 

 

Faster than the speed of light is very fast. And, it goes without saying, dark.

‘Ouch.'

‘Sorry.'

‘That was my foot.'

‘Yes, all right, I said I'm sorry.'

‘Well, mind where you're going next time.'

Sleek, streamlined, virtually frictionless and as devoid of light as six feet up a drainpipe, the mighty starcruiser pounced like a giant cat across the vastness of space. Far below - so far that distance became just another deceptive illusion - the earth spun on its languorous axis, while Time found itself dragged inexorably up the down escalator.

‘For crying out loud, George, watch what you're doing with that bloody kettle.'

‘Sorry.'

‘You'd have thought the dozy cow would've been back by now. I'm
starving.'

‘So are the rest of us, Simon. The difference is,
we
don't make such a great big performance out of it.'

‘Oh yes? And who asked for your opinion, Priscilla?'

‘I'm not Priscilla, I'm Annabel.'

‘And I'm Priscilla. You just put your teacup down on my head.'

‘God, sorry, Priscilla.'

‘I'm not Priscilla, I'm George.'

Aboard the starship
Timekeeper,
there are three levels of Time: earth time; relative time; and the time they'd all been cooped up on this small, cramped and above all dark spaceship. The third variety had the weirdest properties of all. It seemed to last for ever.

‘Look, this is hopeless. I'm going out for a pizza. Anybody else fancy coming?'

‘Listen, George ...'

‘Trevor. I'm George.'

‘Listen, Trevor, you just can't do that. This is a scientific experiment, right? We're playing sillybuggers with the fabric of causality as it is; I mean, God only knows what damage we're doing just by being here. If you suddenly touch down in the middle of the twentieth century and start stuffing yourself with a deep-pan quattro stagione, there's no limit to what could happen. So just sit down and shut up, okay?'

There was complete silence.

‘I said
okay,
Trevor?'

‘I'm not Trevor, I'm Nick.'

‘Where's Trevor, then?'

‘How the hell am I supposed to know that, Louise? There's no light in here.'

‘Actually, I'm not Louise, I'm Angela. Who the hell is Louise, anyway?'

Meanwhile, the second escape capsule roared away across the indescribable magnitude of Nothing, piloted by a ninety-seven-year-old child, straight as an arrow towards where he remembered the best pizza restaurant in the world used to be. The problem was that it wasn't open yet; it wouldn't be open for seventy years.

 

 

There was complete silence, except for the unicorn. It raised its head, saw the maiden of unspotted virtue, blushed, and said ‘G'day' awkwardly, and started chewing the cud ferociously.

Then, very slowly, Lamorak reached out for Pertelope's pack, took out the sponge bag and found the oil of cloves; then he drank it, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and smiled.

‘Hello there,' he said.

‘Actually, Lammo,' Pertelope hissed, ‘you're not supposed to drink it, you're supposed to—'

‘Shut up, Per, I know what I'm doing.' Lamorak stood up, brushed dust off his trouser-knees and walked up to the maiden of unspotted virtue.

‘Swap,' he said. ‘My unicorn for your apron. How about it?'

The maiden of unspotted virtue stared at him. ‘Have you gone out of your tiny mind?' she said.

Lamorak raised an eyebrow. ‘I'm sorry,' he said, ‘I don't quite follow. Straight swap. You get your award for best nature programme, I get the apron, everybody's happy. Where's the problem in that?'

There are many cold places on earth, but few of them are as cold as two feet away from the maiden's eyes. ‘Listen, whoever you are,' she said. ‘I'm trying to make a serious film here. If I go home and tell my producer I've got ten minutes' footage of live unicorns in the can, I'm going to spend the rest of my career filming the weather forecast. Now will you please both go away? You're frightening the kangaroos.'

For perhaps the first time ever, Lamorak was at a slight loss for words. After considerable effort, he managed to say, ‘But it's a
unicorn.'
The maiden of unspotted virtue sighed.

‘Buster,' she said, ‘I don't care if it's a performing woolly mammoth. I have my credibility as a serious wildlife presenter to think of. Understood?'

‘But it's a—'

‘Quite.' The maiden pursed her lips. ‘That's fine. You take it along to the satellite boys, they'll probably give it its own chat show. Meanwhile, some of us have work to do, so if you wouldn't mind ...'

Lamorak said nothing. Even if he could have found any words appropriate for the situation, he'd have had difficulty saying them with his lower jaw hanging loose like a second-hand drawbridge. He shook his head in disbelief, turned away and sat down under a rock.

‘Excuse me,' Pertelope said.

‘Well?'

‘I think,' Pertelope said, ‘there may have been a slight misunderstanding here. You do have the apron, don't you?'

‘What apron?'

‘Ah. So you're not a maiden of unspotted virtue?'

A moment or so later, Pertelope picked himself up off the ground, rubbed his jaw and joined his colleague under the rock.

‘Something must have gone wrong,' he said.

Lamorak nodded. ‘Wrong bloody maiden,' he replied. ‘I mean, how the devil was I supposed to know there were two of ...?' He broke off. A horrible thought had just occurred to him.

‘Oh
shit
,' he said. ‘Of course. Why didn't I realise?'

Pertelope looked up at him. ‘What do you mean?'

‘The football results. We must have misinterpreted them. Here, hand me your rucksack, quick.'

Pertelope did as he was told; and, while the maiden of unspotted virtue and her camera crew raced off into the distance, with a doomed kangaroo a mere ten yards in front of them, he thumbed through the Sports section of
What's
On In
Sydney.

‘Per,' he said at last, closing the book, ‘you might have told me that Lightning Darren O'Shea had signed for the Paramatta Under-Twelves.'

Pertelope registered dismay. ‘Oh drat,' he said. ‘Yes, that does put rather a different complexion on it, I suppose. What do we do now?'

The Timekeeper leant over the rock and cleared her throat. ‘We could eat,' she suggested.

‘Not peaches, please,' Lamorak sighed. ‘Not right now, I couldn't face it.'

The Timekeeper grinned. ‘All right,' she said, ‘how doeth thcallop chowder, chicken with bathil and oregano and apricotth in brandy thtrike you?' By way of explanation, she opened her shopping bag and produced three large tins. ‘I'll just thet up the tholarpowered microwathe and we're in buthineth.'

Lamorak smiled wryly. ‘Why not?' he replied. ‘And afterwards, could you give us a lift in this spaceship of yours? Otherwise it's going to be a long walk.'

‘Thure thing.' The Timekeeper took a small tin cube from her pocket, pressed a knob on the back, and held it at arm's length. It grew into a microwave oven.

‘Only don't tell anyone you'the theen one of thethe, becauthe they haven't been invented yet,' she added. ‘You could thet off a complete Dark Age with one of thethe thingth.'

‘No problem,' Lamorak replied. ‘You keep stumm about the unicorn, we'll forget about the technology.'

The Timekeeper laughed and set to work with a tin-opener. It was some time since she'd used it last, and she nearly burnt a hole the size of a large geological fault in the landscape before she got the atomiser beam properly adjusted, but there was no harm done.

‘That still doesn't explain things, Lammo,' Pertelope was saying, and his voice sounded remarkably like the buzzing of a fly against a windscreen.

Lamorak shook his head and said, ‘Not now, Per. Later, perhaps.'

Pertelope scowled at him. ‘But Lammo,' he said, ‘it doesn't matter about Lightning Darren O'Shea, because it says here his brother Norman is now playing for the Melbourne Werewolves, and that means the x-coefficient no longer reciprocates the reflected tangent of pi—'