Here Comes the Sun (6 page)

‘Oi,' he said, ‘you down there. What the fuck am I meant to be doing up here, anyway?'

It had been very slightly easier once he'd worked out how to operate the joystick; although that was a case in point. You'd think that if you pushed it back it would make the thing go upwards. It didn't, though. Remarkable how quickly an ice-cap will melt if you do low swoops over it.

‘Is there anybody down there, for shit's sake?'

He gave up. On the left-hand side of the console there were some buttons he hadn't pressed yet. He pressed them. They didn't seem to make any difference.

There had to be some way to make this thing fly steady. If he could get down lower, perhaps somebody on the ground would know what to do, and they could shout up at him and tell him. He noticed a lever with a red knob on it, and pulled. That certainly made a difference.

‘Help!' he screamed.

About five minutes later, once he'd got used to flying along upside down, he managed to grab hold of the lever again and tried to pull it back. It wouldn't budge. It was stuck.

At least, he said to himself, I can't see what's going on on the ground. I don't think I'd want to know, somehow.

Instinct told him that since he couldn't see where he was going, the sensible thing would be to try and go higher, because the higher up you went, the fewer things there were that you could possibly bump into. The odd
star, perhaps; maybe a comet or two. Not the ground. He wrestled with the joystick, but now that was jammed too. He had a notion that he was going into a spin, zooming downwards. If the great burning disc he was attempting to manipulate hit the ground, the chances were that it would probably perform a massive leg-break and whizz out into the back end of the universe for six byes.

Not my fault, he muttered, as he strained against the stick. Not my fault, not
my
fault, not my
fault
. . .

 

Jane woke up and sat bolt upright in bed. Something was wrong.

It was, she realised, the dawn. It was doing something it shouldn't be doing. It was flashing on and off.

With her head still full of damp, heavy sleep, she stumbled out of bed, clumped to the window and hauled on the curtains. Dear God, she thought, I'm right.

The sun, riding high - very high - in the morning heavens was flicking on and off like a huge, blazing indicator. Blinding flashes of light, then sudden darkness, twenty times a second. All the signs were that planet Earth was approaching a junction and preparing to turn left.

Perhaps, Jane said to herself as she struggled into a pullover, it's an eclipse. Lots of eclipses. Perhaps they're using up an enormous backlog of eclipses before they pass their best-before date.

She stopped and thought for a moment. There was, she realised, something else.

Very slowly, she turned round and looked for her watch. It was difficult going, because the stroboscopic effect of the flashing sun made it impossible to focus or judge distances. Eventually, though, she found it and peered at the dial. It was half-past eleven. At night. She'd only gone to bed an hour ago. What the hell were they doing having dawn?

Perhaps, she thought, there'll be an announcement in a moment. There is no cause for alarm, it's only a drill. We're having a dawn-practice and we forgot to tell you. Sorry about that.

Then she twigged. The sun was going the wrong way. Instead of East-West, it was going West-East. She could tell this because, in addition to flickering away like very old film footage, it was going at one hell of a lick.

Jane stood there, one small mortal trying to make sense of the Universe. All things considered, it was a pretty ambitious undertaking, and nobody could have blamed her if she'd not even tried. Aristotle had tried, after all, and Thomas Aquinas, and Descartes, and Einstein, and a lot of others too, all of them better qualified and probably far better paid than she was. The combined results of their researches, one had to admit, had not been impressive. Nobody could possibly have reproached Jane if she had failed. But she didn't; in fact, although she wasn't really conscious of it, she hit the nail on the head dead centre and with considerable force.

‘Oh dear,' she said. ‘Somebody's made a banjax.'

As if to congratulate her on the accuracy of her summary, the moon rose from behind a clump of very frightened-looking clouds, zoomed across the sky, stopped just underneath the sun and hovered there. On the perfectly blank silver sphere of its face, Jane was sure she could make out an expression, and it reminded her of her geography teacher at school. Jane frowned.

‘Honestly!' she said.

Then she drew the curtains tightly and went back to bed.

 

Wayne, trainee technical assistant (second grade), opened his eyes and looked up.

Not that it was up, strictly speaking, because he was
still flying along in a dead spin, upside down, straight towards the centre of the earth. As far as he was concerned, however, it was up. They call it relativity, and up to a point it works.

‘Ger,' he said.

Directly above, or perhaps below, his head, he could see the moon. What was more, he could see the man in the moon. And the man in the moon wasn't pleased, apparently.

To be precise, he was standing up in his cockpit waving his fists in the air and shouting. He was too far away for Wayne to be able to hear him, let alone read his lips, but he had a pretty shrewd idea of the general gist of what was being said.

‘Not my fault,' he yelled. ‘Not my
fault
!'

What the hell, the man couldn't hear him anyway. Wayne shrugged, relaxed his shoulders, and leaned back in the seat. Any minute now, he reckoned, he'd collide with the earth and none of it would matter very much anyway.

As he slid back in the seat, it so happened that his elbow banged against the control panel, and something got switched on.

‘. . . THE BUGGERY DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING, YOU DOZY YOUNG BUGGER, PULL THE BLOODY STICK BACK AND OPEN YOUR SODDING FLAPS!'

Ah, said Wayne to himself, that must have been the radio. Now perhaps we're getting somewhere.

‘Here,' he shouted. ‘Can you hear me?'

The voice from the radio, which he assumed was that of the man in the moon, didn't answer his question in so many words, but the impression he got was that yes, they had established radio contact. He took a deep breath.

‘Here,' he said. ‘How do you fly this poxy thing?'

There was a moment of stunned silence.

‘You mean you don't
know
?'

Wayne scowled. ‘Course I don't bloody know.You think if I knew I'd be flying it upside down straight at the bloody ground?'

The moon wobbled on its course. ‘Didn't anyone, like,
tell
you before they let you take her up?'

‘No,' Wayne replied. ‘Look . . .'

‘All right,' said the man in the moon, quickly, ‘keep your head, there's nothing to it really. You see that stick thing in front of you?'

Wayne looked down. ‘Yup,' he said. ‘I tried that.'

‘Shut up and listen. That's your joystick, right? Now to the left of the joystick there's some levers. That's your flaps. Now, ease the stick back with your right hand, lift the flaps with your left. Easy does it. I said easy! Gently!'

Amazingly, Wayne could feel the sun responding; levelling out, slowing down. He gripped the stick hard. The voice over the radio sounded quiet and reassuring with just a soupçon of blind terror.

‘Now then,' said the voice, ‘just by your left foot there's a pedal. That's the brake. You got that?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Gently mind, that's it. Not too hard, mind, or you'll stall her. Now then, ease forward on the stick, that's it, lovely job, and open the throttle just a crack . . .'

‘Which one's the throttle?'

‘Right foot. No, no, that's the clutch,
that
's it. Just a crack, mind, or first thing you know you'll be up the back of the Crab Nebula. Come on now, son, just a little bit more, you've got it. Now hold it like that.'

‘Like this?'

‘NO!'

There was radio silence for a moment as sun and moon took evasive action. By rights, the violent jinking of the moon should have whipped up a tsunami that would have
gone over North America like a carpet-sweeper and given Japan a spring-clean it would never have forgotten. As it happened, however, they were hopelessly under-manned at Tides, owing to the secondment of key personnel to other departments, and everything stayed exactly as it was.

‘USE YOUR BLOODY STICK!'

‘Like that?'

‘Yes. More so. Put your back into it.'

‘Like this?'

‘Yes.'

The sun seemed to hover for a moment; then it seemed to drop like a stone, just for a fraction of a second; then it caught itself, wobbled heart-stoppingly, and pulled away, flying straight and level. The moon closed in and followed it cautiously.

‘Nice work,' said the man in the moon, with a trace of admiration cutting the fear and the relief. ‘Just one more thing.'

‘Yes?'

‘Switch the bloody flasher off, will you? You're giving me a headache.'

Wayne crunched his eyebrows together. ‘Flasher?' he said. ‘What's that?'

‘The flasher. The emergency warning lights. You've been flashing on and off, didn't you . . . ? By your left hand, it's a little blue button with an arrow on it . . . That's it. You're doing just fine.'

In the cockpit of the moon, George let out a long sigh and wiped half a pint of sweat off the bald dome of his head with the back of his hand. Bloody short retirement it had turned out to be, after all. Still, he said to himself, the lad looks like he's got the hang of it, amazingly quickly as well; a natural, obviously. Just as well, too.

‘Right,' he said. ‘All we've got to do now is to turn it round.'

 

 

 

 

H
igh above the peaks of the Blue Mountains, the sun, under escort, completed its banking manoeuvre, straightened out, and began to head East. On the ground, all the villagers except one threw their hats in the air and cheered.

‘Well, well,' said old Ari, the blacksmith. ‘It's not every day you see something like that.'

The other villagers were silent for a while. Even by their standards of simple-hearted straightforwardness, old Ari did come out with some pretty asinine comments from time to time. Still, he made a cracking good horseshoe, so nobody really minded.

‘There's something to tell the grandchildren about, eh, Bjorn?' remarked Gustav, lowering the shard of smoked glass through which he had prudently watched the whole thing. ‘Remarkable.'

Bjorn said nothing. He was fitting a new handle to his axe, having broken the old one when he lost his temper earlier on. Bjorn got through more axe handles than the rest of the community put together.

‘I never cease to wonder,' Gustav went on, knocking
out his simple corn-cob pipe on the sole of his boot and stuffing tobacco into the bowl, ‘at the infinite variety of Providence and her astounding . . .'

‘I don't,' said Bjorn. ‘If you've got nothing better to do than stand there yakking, you could pass me that rasp. Poxy bloody cross-grained stuff, hickory.'

Gustav passed him the rasp. ‘I mean,' he went on, ‘sixtyseven years I've been alive, and I've never seen the like. Never in all my born . . .'

‘I have.'

Gustav's merry, weather-beaten old face contracted into an unaccustomed frown. ‘You have?' he asked.

‘Oh yes. More times than you've had hot dinners. Give me the wedge. No, not that one, the small one.'

‘That's very remarkable, neighbour Bjorn,' said Gustav, with a voice entirely devoid of disbelief. ‘I haven't, and I'm much older than you.'

Bjorn stood up and banged the axe head three times on the ground to seat it in the handle. At the third blow, a long crack appeared in the handle. He swore, broke the handle over his knee, and reached for the auger.

‘You should be more careful,' Gustav said. ‘You could hurt your knee, doing something like that.' Bjorn laughed unpleasantly.

‘Fat chance.'

This was, Gustav couldn't help feeling, a typical sort of conversation with young Bjorn. Strange, he looked a pleasant enough sort of fellow. Perhaps he had had an unhappy life before he came to the village.

‘Are you sure you've seen things like . . . ?' Gustav pointed at the sun. Bjorn nodded.

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘I used to work for them, didn't I?'

 

Jane looked suddenly round, the toothbrush still in her mouth.

‘Look . . .' she started to say. The man made an apologetic gesture.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘I didn't realise. I can come back later if . . .'

Jane looked at him.Yes, there was something about him that told her that he was another one of Them. What was it, now?

‘You're a different one, aren't you?' she said. ‘I mean, you're not the same one who came before, are you? Or are you him with a different body on?'

‘No,' the man replied, ‘I'm a different one. My name is Staff.'

‘Staff?'

The man shrugged slightly. ‘It's not my actual name,' he said, ‘but it's what everybody's called me for longer than I can remember. It's short for Chief of Staff.'

‘Ah.' Jane extracted the toothbrush and laid it down on the soap-dish. ‘I wish you lot wouldn't keep creeping up on me like this.'