Here Comes the Sun (24 page)

On the doormat there were three envelopes. Staff picked them up, poured himself a stiff shot of distilled water, and sat down in the one chair that space permitted in his living-room.

The first letter was junk mail from the United Perpetual Bank, offering him a discount on eternal life insurance and a credit card supposedly accepted by five million religions cosmos-wide. For an extra sixty thousand kreuzers a month, the United Perpetual people would be delighted to allow him to participate in their Special Select Reserve pension fund, which was guaranteed tax free owing to its registered office being situated in the Eye of the Beholder. If his application form was received within seven days, they'd even give him a free radio alarm clock.

The second letter was from the compilers of a publication called
Truly Important People of Yesterday
, and he
was warmly invited to complete the enclosed personal biographical questionnaire in order that his biography could be included in the next edition, along with 190 million other truly important people who the publishers reckoned were good for the two thousand kreuzers they were charging per copy. He binned that one, too.

The third one he had saved until last, because it looked important. For a start, the address was hand-written, and his name was spelt right. He slipped his finger under the flap and pulled, and a moment later Ganger jumped out, landed heavily on all fours on the carpet and sat up, massaging his neck.

‘Before you say anything,' he said, ‘no, I don't think I'm getting paranoid about making sure we aren't seen together. Maybe I'm a touch overcautious, but there's no point in taking silly risks.'

Staff frowned. Entrusting oneself to the local postal system, which had the tendency to send all letters to a distant galaxy on principle, seemed to him to be the silliest risk going.

‘Now you're here,' he said, ‘can we get on with it? Only I've got a lot of ironing to catch up on, and . . .'

Ganger stared at him incredulously. ‘Ironing?'

Staff flushed. ‘Yes,' he snapped, ‘ironing. And there's the kitchen floor to wash.'

From where he was sitting, Ganger could see the kitchen, and it struck him that it was so small that you could clean it very quickly just by spilling your drink. He confined himself to raising an eyebrow.

‘Okay,' he said. ‘I'll cut away to the main frame, shall I? It's vitally important to the entire future of the cosmos that we go for a pizza.'

Staff blinked. ‘I see,' he said. ‘Vitally important.'

‘Vitally.'

‘Who's paying?'

‘I am.'

A smile like - well, in the circumstances,
not
like the sun emerging from behind a cloud; like something equally life-enhancing but without the overtones - flicked across Staff 's face and earthed itself in his collar.

‘Done with you,' he said.

 

 

 

 

‘L
ook,' said Bjorn, stopping suddenly and placing a shovelsized arm on his guide's sleeve, ‘where is this?' There was a faint crackle and Bjorn hastily removed his hand. It was tingling painfully.

The guide pointed down the tunnel. ‘Look,' he replied.

For the record, the guide was a small, hunched entity entirely wrapped up in what looked like an oversized monk's habit. In fact the costume was so voluminous that Bjorn had to take his own word for it that there was anyone in there at all.

‘Where?' he said.

‘There,' the guide replied. ‘My name's Tzzx, by the way.'

‘Sorry?'

‘Tzzx.'

‘I thought that's what you said.'

Bjorn's eye followed the line of the pointing sleeve and lit upon a sign nailed to the wall. By the dim ambient light - it gave Bjorn a really nasty shock when he realised that it was coming from inside Tzzx's cowl - he could just about read what it said.

It said:

It also said:

and
and something else in cyrillic lettering, and something else in Chinese, neither of which Bjorn could read. To make matters worse, it said them all at the same time.

‘Um,' Bjorn said. Tzzx chuckled, and a few blue sparks floated out from under his robe.

‘I know,' he replied, and Bjorn noticed that he didn't so much speak as crackle. ‘Confusing, isn't it? And now we'd better be getting on, or we won't miss the train.'

‘Do we want to miss the train?' Bjorn enquired.

‘Well,' Tzzx replied, ‘since it'll be coming down this tunnel at approximately fifty-five miles an hour, I think it'd be sensible.'

Tzzx scuttled away up the tunnel, moving amazingly quickly, and Bjorn followed him. For someone who was completely swathed in ill-fitting brown sackcloth and had no perceptible legs, Tzzx had a fair turn of speed; and the way he managed to avoid treading on his own hem was little short of miraculous.

‘We're in the subway,' Tzzx was saying. ‘I thought it'd be quicker than walking.'

‘We are walking,' Bjorn pointed out. ‘Running, even.'

‘Yes,' replied Tzzx, and Bjorn noticed that the gap between them was widening, even though he had broken
into a jog, ‘but we're walking in the subway. Makes a difference, you see.'

‘Does it?'

‘Naturally. Ah, here we are.'

The ceiling lifted and the walls became wider apart. On the left-hand side, Bjorn could see a platform, about two feet higher than the floor of the tunnel. It looked remarkably like a platform in a station on the Paris Metro.

‘If you like,' Tzzx called out, ‘we can take a train the rest of the way.'

Bjorn clambered up on to the platform and sat down beside the cowled figure on a bench. It took him several minutes to catch his breath.

‘I bet you don't know how the subway works,' Tzzx said.

‘You like betting on certainties, I can tell.'

Tzzx laughed again. Funny sound, Bjorn thought; like the noise you get when you accidentally put something metal in a microwave and switch on.

‘The subway,' Tzzx said, ‘is an urban short-haul passenger transport network, designed to take the load off congested surface routes in peak time.'

‘Really,' Bjorn replied. ‘You amaze me.'

A fat green spark floated out from under the cowl, drifted in the air for a few seconds, and vanished. ‘All right,' said Tzzx, ‘if you don't want to know . . .'

‘Sorry,' Bjorn said. ‘But I knew all that bit already. I've been on subways hundreds of times. But not this one.'

‘There's only one,' Tzzx replied. ‘Ah, here's the train.'

Sure enough, a tube train pulled into the station and opened its doors. Bjorn frowned. It was unmistakably a tube train. In fact, that was what was getting to him: it was the most quintessential tube train he'd ever seen.

‘Come on,' Tzzx said. They climbed in and sat down. The compartment was empty, apart from a half-empty
carton of pasteurised milk, which got up in a marked manner and moved right down to the other end.

‘Milk doesn't like me,' sighed Tzzx. ‘It thinks I turn it sour.'

‘How do you mean, there's only one?' Bjorn said. As he spoke, he realised what his subconscious had been driving at. The compartment they were sitting in was every underground railway carriage he'd ever been in: in New York, Paris, Moscow, London, anywhere. All at the same time.

‘Exactly that,' Tzzx replied. ‘There is only one network. They just call it different things in different places.'

‘Um.'

The train rattled away out of the station and into a dark tunnel. Bjorn surreptitiously fingered his penknife in his trouser pocket and tried to locate the two-handed claymore attachment by touch.

‘It's a whole different dimension down here,' Tzzx went on. ‘It really amazes me how few people notice. You'd have thought it'd have been obvious.'

‘Should it?' No, that was the little plastic magnifying glass you couldn't actually see through. That's the scissors which will just about cut sellotape three times out of seven. And - ouch - that's the nail file.

‘Think about it,' Tzzx replied. ‘Name me a subway station.'

Bjorn considered. ‘Oxford Circus.'

The cowl nodded. ‘A classic example,' Tzzx said, shooing away a small steel bolt which had unscrewed itself from somewhere and was now buzzing round his head like a lovesick moth. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that by the time you've gone down the escalator and trudged along all those miles of corridor to get on to the right platform for the Central Line, you've really walked a damn sight further than the actual distance between Oxford
Circus and Bond Street. And it still takes three minutes to get from Oxford Circus station to Bond Street station in the train once you get on it. True or false?'

Bjorn thought hard. ‘Um,' he said.

‘It's because of the dimensional shift, you see,' Tzzx explained. ‘In this dimension, all the destinations are exactly the same distance from each other, and you travel—' He hesitated, crackled like a car radio under a power cable, and continued: ‘Well, it's like at right angles to sideways, I guess. Or, more accurately, at an angle of 450 degrees to the vertical.'

Bjorn relaxed. When you are trapped in a strange dimension with a weird shapeless stranger in a cowl who gibbers to you about mathematics, there's nothing like finding a ten-inch length of copper piping filled with lead at the bottom of your knapsack. Bjorn wasn't a hundred per cent certain where it had come from, but he was very glad it was there. He wrapped a hand round it gratefully.

‘Okay,' he said. ‘Suppose you're right, how come you don't get on the train at Les Invalides and find the next stop's Tottenham Court Road?'

Under the cowl, a blue light glowed smugly. ‘Easy,' said Tzzx. ‘Nothing ever exists in just one dimension. When you get on the train, usually you're also in the dimension of Time, and a whole lot of other ones which we needn't bother with right now. They restrain you from getting outside the matrix. It's like a sort of seat-belt or something. '

In the sorting-office of his mind, Bjorn picked out the word in Tzzx's last statement that had triggered off the alarm system in his pineal gland. It was ‘usually'.

‘Right now, though,' Tzzx went on, ‘we're sort of free-floating outside all the regular dimensions. If you're interested, the three we're in are Metro, Fear and
Bureaucracy. And if you hit me with that copper pipe, it'll be the worse for you.'

Bjorn tightened his knuckles around the pipe. There are times when it's appropriate to believe what you're told, and times when you hit people.

‘You sure Dop sent you?' he asked.

‘Ah.' Tzzx threw back his cowl and - this is a very approximate and inaccurate description of a profoundly complex operation - rolled up his sleeves. There was nothing to be seen but a fountain of blue and red sparks. ‘I was having you on there, I'm afraid.'

Bjorn nodded, raised the pipe above his head and lashed out at the centre of the cloud of sparks with all his strength. There was a loud bang; then it started to rain molten copper.

‘I was telling the truth about trying to hit me, though,' said a voice in the centre of Bjorn's brain. Then there was nothing except the rush of a few million particles being dragged apart and sucked away into an infinite vacuum.

Of the many results of this, the least significant was that an old lady living in a converted railway carriage somewhere in Nebraska received an electricity bill for eight million, three hundred thousand and thirty-six dollars, fifteen cents; which puzzled her. As she explained to her nephew, it wasn't the size of the bill so much as the fact that she'd only just paid the last one.

 

The forecourt of the offices of the Department of Time is about the only place in the entire Administration complex where you can ever have a hope of parking, and even then, you have to know the ropes.

What you do is this. Before you leave to go there, you phone Gerald, the doorman, and ask him to preserve a place for you. It's vitally important that you get the verb right. If in doubt, spell it for him; because if he just
re
serves you a place, then by the time you get to park, your vehicle will long since have fallen apart under the normal pressures of entropy.
Pre
serving is different; it involves using the Department's special relationship with time to backdate your reservation a couple of centuries or so. One final word of advice; it's well worth slipping Gerald a minimum of fifteen kreuzers once you've parked, unless you want to come back from your meeting to find that your vehicle has been valet-parked a couple of centuries away, probably in a stable and boxed in by ox-carts.

‘Thanks, Gerald,' Ganger therefore said, and there was a clink of money changing hands. ‘And do you think you could get us a taxi?'

‘No sweat, boss,' Gerald replied, and winked. ‘When were you wanting it for?'

(Please note Gerald's extremely careful choice of verb tense; it doesn't do to be grammatically imprecise around Gerald. The senior executive officer who once told him ‘Call me any time you're ready' was forced to retire early with critical tinnitus, because Gerald is ready pretty well all of the time, and has been most of his life . . .)

‘In about half an hour's time,' Ganger replied. ‘In the future,' he added quickly. ‘Okay?'

In fact, there are a great many things about the Department of Time which require extreme caution until you're used to how they work. You need a postgraduate degree in temporal theory just to walk through the revolving door if you want to come out in the same century you entered. This explains why Ganger and Staff went in via the coal shute.