Here Comes the Sun (3 page)

He nodded, side-stepped into the puddle (which divided on either side of his foot) and walked on, leaving Jane standing in exactly the right spot to receive the full force of the spray when a 42A bus went neatly through the puddle a few moments later.

 

Staff was reading a letter.

It wasn't easy going, because the script - and, indeed, the language - it was written in had died out centuries before; but he could understand that. The writer of the
letter probably hadn't found the need to put pen to paper for a very long time.

 

Dear Sir
, it said, translated:

 

Staff sighed, and put the letter face down on his desk.

They ought to do something about it.

Too right, he said to himself, and they will, just as soon as they find out who they are. And normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. And, naturally, we apologise for any inconvenience in the meantime.

‘Hell,' he said aloud.

‘Sorry, wrong floor,' said a voice from the other side of the desk. He looked up and saw Ganger, DA, sitting in the visitor's chair, smiling and looking far more comfortable than he would have imagined possible.

‘It's a knack,' Ganger replied. ‘You just have to wriggle about until you find a part of the seat that fits.'

That
's what he does, Staff realised; he replies before you speak. Bloody irritating, of course, but certainly conducive to efficiency. Like a fax machine or something.

‘And?' he said.

‘Yes,' Ganger replied, and pulled a sad face. It looked hopelessly incongruous. Ganger's face was pretty exclusively smile-shaped. ‘The problem is, how?'

‘Exactly.'

‘Well,' Ganger said, leaning back and folding his arms behind his head, ‘there you have it. In a nutshell.'

Staff capitulated. ‘All right,' he said. ‘Can we go back over that and fill in the blanks, please?'

The sad face melted into the usual grin, like grilled cheese. ‘You were thinking, Shit, there's another irreplaceable employee gone and handed in his notice, and what the hell are we going to do now? I replied, “Yes”, because I'm buggered if I can think of anything either. But the fact remains that he's got to be replaced, because otherwise it's going to be all jam for the electric torch manufacturers but no fun for everybody else, plus you'll have to pay the man in the moon double time and a half. The problem is, how do you fill a vacancy like that from the load of rubbish you've got available?'

‘Exactly.'

‘And there you have it,' Ganger said, smirking, ‘in a nutshell.'

‘It's very impressive, the way you do that.'

‘Flashy,' Ganger replied. ‘Telepathy is like television or tele-anything. Looks good, but doesn't actually help very much in the final analysis. Not,' he added quickly, ‘that it really is telepathy; more a sort of partial insight. It comes in useful in our work.'

‘Ah yes,' said Staff, leaning forward slightly. ‘I meant to ask you about that.'

Ganger hitched up one corner of his mouth into yet another isotope of his perpetual smile. ‘You're quite right,' he said. ‘Up to a point.'

Staff growled at him. He laughed.

‘It's all right,' he said, ‘I'm on secondment. That means I have to play fair. That means you can trust me. Okay?'

‘Perhaps.'

Ganger stood up and walked to the window. ‘Good view you get from here,' he said.

‘All the kingdoms of the earth,' replied Staff absently. ‘Look, who exactly are your lot?'

Ganger continued to look out of the window. ‘Simple,' he replied. ‘We're them rather than us, but we're on your side really. Is that enough?'

‘No.'

‘Okay.We're a department, same as all the other departments, but we're pretty well autonomous within the quite strict confines of our brief. And the head of our department gets abjured a lot at christenings.'

Staff nodded. ‘And all his works?'

‘Right on,' Ganger replied. ‘Also his pomps, not that he's got any really. Not in the last five years, at any rate.'

‘Five years?' Staff raised an eyebrow. ‘What's so special about . . . ?'

‘We got put out to tender,' Ganger replied. ‘We were the guinea-pig, you see. Five years ago, we were the most hopelessly inefficient department in the whole set up . . .'

‘Surely not?'

The back of Ganger's head nodded. ‘Straight up. Hopelessly overstaffed, but undermanned at the same time. Work backing up, souls not getting processed, furnaces still powered by expensive, ozone-unfriendly sulphur, and worst of all, costing an absolute fortune. Really, the whole system was on the point of collapse. In fact, there were those who reckoned it had collapsed years before, only in the nature of things nobody had noticed.'

Staff picked up a pencil and started to fidget with it nervously. ‘Nobody told me,' he said.

‘Didn't they?' Ganger leaned on the window-sill and swayed slightly. ‘I'm not in the least surprised. Not something they'd want you to find out about, really. Anyway, they reckoned that since nothing they could do could possibly make things worse, they'd try an experiment and put the whole operation in the hands of outside contractors. My lot got the contract, and since then . . . Well, you can judge for yourself.'

There was a silence, during which you could have counted up to seven comfortably, and ten if you gabbled a bit. ‘Then you're not . . . ?'

‘Qualified?' Ganger laughed. ‘Oh yes, we're all qualified. I'm not a mortal, if that's what you're thinking.'

‘But if you're not a mortal, then you must be . . .' Staff 's voice trickled away, like the last drops of water from a turned-off hose. The back of Ganger's head shook.

‘Not necessarily,' he replied. ‘Common misconception, that. Most of us are left over from the previous systems, but . . .'

‘Previous systems?'

‘Ancestor worship,' Ganger explained. ‘Classical mythology. Odin and Thor. There's one chap works in Accounts who used to be Osiris, or is it Anubis? Odd sort of bloke, but in his line of work it's actually an advantage to have the head of a jackal. Me, though, I'm from Philosophy.'

‘Philosophy?'

‘Absolutely,' replied Ganger, with a hint of pride in his voice. ‘Personification of an abstract concept. I'm a child of late nineteenth-century German neo-nihilism. One of Nietzsche's gentlemen, you might almost say.' He laughed briefly at his own joke. ‘Sorry, I'm drifting away from the point rather, aren't I? What I was going to say is that in our department, we do have a few members of staff who were originally mortals.'

Staff tried to find an appropriate word, or at least a noise, but there wasn't one. Instead, the room was filled with the noise of a jaw dropping.

‘I have that effect on people sometimes,' Ganger agreed. ‘I startled the wits out of a girl in the street earlier on. I want to talk to you about her later, actually.'

‘You use
mortals
? On
official business
?'

‘Ex-mortals,' Ganger replied gently. ‘There are limits, naturally. But within those limits . . .'

‘You can't,' said Staff, controlling his anger with difficulty. ‘It's unheard of. It's against the rules. It's . . . it's . . .'

‘Evil?' Ganger chuckled. ‘Well, it would be, wouldn't it?'

‘Will you kindly stop reading my mind?' Staff shouted. ‘It's bad enough my having to live in it without strangers poking their dirty great snouts in there as well.' He pulled himself together. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘But please, just for the time being, could you possibly?'

There was a pause. ‘Could I possibly what?' Ganger said.

‘Thank you,' said Staff. ‘Could you possibly just wait for me to say what I'm thinking, rather than going and looking for yourself? For one thing, it's bad form. You know, like reading the end of a book before you get to it. And it puts me at a disadvantage.'

‘Not really,' Ganger replied. ‘I can only read what's there, can't I? And anyway, it's not telepathy, it's just . . .'

‘Insight, I know, you said.'

‘Now you're at it.'

‘Oh shut up.' Staff reached for the pencil again and started to chew it. ‘These mortals,' he said tentatively.

‘Ex-mortals.'

‘Ex-mortals, then.' Staff felt his teeth meet around the graphite core. ‘I suppose they're all, you know, in menial capacities. Hewers of wood, drawers of water, that sort of thing.'

Ganger shook his head. ‘Not really,' he said. ‘Upper executive, lower administrative grade, mostly. None in the upper grades of admin, but that's because they're relatively new and it all takes time. Dead men's shoes, you know, that sort of thing.'

For some reason, the phrase made Staff shudder a little,
in context. ‘But that's really . . .' He diluted the thought rapidly, just in case someone was peeking. ‘Not really on, you know. I mean, mortals . . .'

‘It's never been tried here, you mean.' Ganger turned away from the window, and Staff noticed, in the brief fraction of a second it took him before he could cauterise that part of his brain temporarily, that he looked a bit different. ‘I know, it's hard to accept. But we're doing it, and it seems to be working. That's the joy of effectively running our own ship. If we do something outrageous, then who cares? It's just us, going to the devil in our own way. So to speak,' he added deliberately. ‘And if it works . . .'

 

 

 

 

B
etween the acting of a dreadful thing and its first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma or a hideous dream. The genius and the mortal instruments are then in council, and the state of man suffers the nature of an insurrection.

‘Oh hell, why not?' said Jane suddenly, aloud, and crossed the road into the shop.

‘Two cream doughnuts, please,' she said to the girl. ‘No, make that three. The fresh cream, not the artificial.'

Eyes like molybdenum steel augers bored into her soul as she fumbled in her purse for a pound coin, trying her inadequate best to look like someone who is buying cakes for three people, not just one.

‘And a penny change,' said the girl. ‘Thank you.'

Well, Jane thought, as she walked on down the street, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Eat a doughnut, girl, said the Father of Lies, you won't know yourself afterwards. Whereas in fact, her better part of reason told her, the only perceptible change will be round the back of her buttocks. Girls who eat three cream doughnuts have only themselves to blame if they end up looking like hovercraft.

‘Never mind,' Jane said firmly. A man in a fawn overcoat gave her a look and quickened his pace slightly. Never mind, she repeated
sotto voce
, at least it isn't chocolate. When you start mainlining chocolate in the middle of the day, it's time to give up and die.

She found a bench in the park, sat down and looked at the paper bag on her knee. Cream had saturated it in patches, making the paper transparent, and she shuddered slightly. Had a tramp been passing just then, he would most certainly have been the recipient of unexpected charity; but there was nobody, except a couple of gluesniffers under a plane tree on the other side of the Oriental pond, and the distant prospect of a jogger. She was going to have to eat them herself.

The first one wasn't too bad, although she was painfully aware that the cream had got out and was roaming around her face like a Dark Age horde. The second one wasn't too bad until about halfway through; and she abhorred waste, and you look such a fool walking around with one and a half cream doughnuts in a paper bag. So she finished it, sent her tongue snowploughing through the sweet slush on her upper lip, and closed the bag firmly. She felt slightly sick.

‘It's a symptom, you know,' said a voice beside her.

She jumped. It was bad enough being addressed by a strange man in a park; the fact that it was the same strange man who frightened her half to death the previous day by reading her mind and then walking away dry-foot through a huge puddle only served to add inches to her take-off.

‘Eating,' the man went on, smiling. ‘Atavism, pure and simple. The hunter-gatherer inside us all reckons that if you've got something to eat, then that's all that matters, and so at the first sign of trouble we reach for food. It's all stress related, of course; and the things we eat make
the stress worse. For a purely instinctive reaction, it's pretty counter-productive, wouldn't you say?'

‘Go away,' Jane replied.

‘You've got cream on your nose.'

‘I'll call a policeman.'

The man smiled. ‘For all you know,' he said, ‘I am a policeman.'

‘Then I'll call another policeman. Go on, get lost.'

The man crossed his legs and folded his hands round the junction of his knees. ‘Another slice of atavism,' he said, ‘though marginally more sensible. What a mess humanity is.'

He vanished.

In the ensuing cloud of mental static, Jane became aware that she had somehow managed to sit on the third cream doughnut. It's odd, the way you notice things like that.