ࡱ>  !` )bjbjss ; '5558R54:mn=="===>0>>$h]^i>>ii=='LLLiNU==LiLLPx=b= .l55@"h=0mp0xxt >M LXoa>>>X>>>miiii*0$0  Siege of Stars Dr Henry Gee received his B.Sc. in Zoology and Genetics from the University of Leeds, and his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Cambridge. Since 1987 he has been on the staff of Nature, the international weekly science magazine, where hs is now a Senior Editor of Biological Sciences and also edits Natures award-winning SF column, Futures. Nature has always been the journal of choice for paleontologists seeking to announce their most spectacular finds. Over the past two decades, Dr Gee, as a trained paleontologist, has been responsible for steering into publication some of the most remarkable paleontological and archeological finds of our times, including the first feathered dinosaurs to be described, and the amazing hobbit, Homo floresiensis, a prehistoric cousin of human beings that survived until almost historical times. Dr Gee is the author of The Science of Middle-earth (Cold Spring/ Souvenir); Deep Time: Cladistics, the Revolution in Evolution (Fourth Estate/ Comstock), Jacobs Ladder: The History of the Human Genome (Fourth Estate/ Norton), and a novel, By The Sea, available at lulu.com. He lives in Cromer, Norfolk, England, with his wife, children and numerous pets. Visit his website at  HYPERLINK "http://www.chiswick.demon.co.uk" www.chiswick.demon.co.uk or email him at henrygee@hotmail.co.uk By The Same Author Fiction By The Sea Futures from Nature (editor) The Sigil Trilogy 1: Siege of Stars 2; Scourge of Stars 3: Rage of Stars Non-Fiction The Science of Middle-earth Jacobs Ladder Deep Time Before the Backbone A Field Guide to Dinosaurs (with Luis V Rey) Shaking The Tree (editor) Rise of the Dragon (editor) Siege of Stars Book One of The Sigil Henry Gee All rights reserved Henry Gee, 2008 The right of Henry Gee to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The characters in this novel are not intended to bear any resemblance to any real persons alive or dead. For Karl, who read every line, and gave his name to a small but destructive asteroid. Milky Way Galaxy, Orion Spur 67,580,047 BC Mit der Dummheit kmpfen die Gtter selbst vergebens (Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain) Friedrich Schiller Jungfrau von Orleans Help me! The voice of Roland, assailed, resounds among the mountainous stars. Merlin stirs from the brooding temper that has lately gripped her in a fog and a funk. Too slow. Wake up, sleepyhead!comes another cry. Whats the matter with you? It is Guinever, scintillating past her, to the rescue of their hapless colleague. Merlin can only grunt in answer. She falls in behind. Roland is a small speck of brightness almost overwhelmed by the greater beasts of the Drove. Some have broken loose from the main stream, collectively headed, as ever, in long, slow iterations towards a distant metal-rich nebula, the wrack of a supernova that had stirred this corner of space, long ago. Merlin wonders if they have ever had any other destination. But some of the Drove no more than a few splinters from the trunk of a great tree (but this is increasingly a trunk made of splinters) are now shearing off, tempted beyond frustration or prospect of control by a more toothsome distraction immediately to hand. It is a red dwarf, swirling in the veils of the Oort cloud of a distant, yellowish sun. The red star is small, and dim, and old, and rank with rottenness. No wonder that some of the friskier outliers of the Drove give in so easily to temptation. No wonder, either, that they drown the weak bleats of Roland. Pathetic though he is, Merlin thinks, one can hardly blame him. Space rings with the calls of the Drovers, the gravitic keening of the Drove. Merlin, trying hard to concentrate, ravels space towards the mele, where she sees Guinever giving chase to a few of the more recreant Drove, while trying to console Roland, and subliminally she believes scolding Merlin for dawdling. Some of us, she chides: Some of us seem to have to do everything round here. Merlin broadcasts contrition and assurance that shell get there as soon as she can. But at the front of her mind is the memory of her meeting with the Drove Elders; the worry that girt the countenance of Solomon; the anxiety that radiated from Saturn, eldest of all, for all that he said almost nothing. This problem is bigger than poor Roland. Bigger than all of them. And it can only get worse. How can she stop them stop them, that is, forever and she, alone, when, right now, it will take her, and Guinever, and Roland, and whoever else they can rustle up, all their power and concentration to whip in a few chancing strays? She had met them in a designated Xspace. At the appointed coordinates she shimmered into being on a snowy hill-slope. A blizzard had just passed and the world was dazzling white, and blue with sky, and green with fir and larch. Ahead of her and slightly above was a hunting lodge, an impressive log cabin with a vast picture window reflecting the blue-white scene, built on an even greater platform of massive cut stones. She wondered how anything could have been built so casually in such a remote place. But the views must be wonderful. She was met at the door by a butler in crisp uniform who helped her off with her ski-suit and directed her with accomplished smoothness to a great salon. She made the usual vain attempt to smooth the untidy mass of her long, dark brown hair from her face to better admire the view, which, through the floor-to-ceiling picture windows running the whole length of the left-hand wall as she entered, was every bit as terrific as it promised. At the far end of the salon, ahead of her, was an immense fireplace. A great fire was burning larch logs crackled in the grate. On either side, two men lounged, in the casual-but-smart way that only the truly prosperous and confident can lounge, on stylishly worn chesterfields. One of the men was strong, hale and very masculine. He looked every inch the habitual skier. He had sharp, blue-eyed features beneath steel-gray hair which, she just knew, would never dare go awry. Not like hers. The man rose to greet her, all senatorial smile, Argyll sweater and precisely pressed slacks. He broadcast such overmastering warmth of command that she felt herself stifling a small stir somewhere behind her ribcage, and swallowing an unwonted effusion of saliva. But she sensed that the real power resided in the balding and clearly much older man in the conservative suit and dark, narrow tie. The man who did not get up, but who remained, small and frog-like, crumpled into the other chesterfield, silent but for the black lasers of his eyes. Merlin, it is good of you to come, said the standing man. He proffered a hand and she took it. It was firm, authoritative, and she hoped her returning grasp didnt give too much away. Im Solomon, he said, and my colleague here is Saturn. The frog-like man smiled and nodded, but said nothing and did not try to rise. Solomon indicated a wing-backed, leather chair facing the fire, between the chesterfields. It seemed odd, to her, that she hadnt noticed it before. Solomon waved her to sit down. She maneuvered her way backwards into the chair. How she hated pencil skirts. (How had she been wearing a pencil skirt? As far as she remembered shed arrived in a ski suit. But Xspaces were like that, especially if you were unused to them, and you were about to be subjected to a mysterious interview). The effort flustered her. She felt herself redden, and her hair, like the increasingly wayward Drove, made another attempt at escape. She busied herself in its retrieval, which only made her redden more, and yet still a few strands still wove free. She was grateful that neither man seemed worried by this. Instead, her next impression was of Solomon, standing above her, offering her a drink. I took the liberty of choosing for you, he said. I think you need it. Especially after that long walk through the snow. She murmured a weak thank-you and took the glass. The brown liquid within gave off the intense odor of K-type dwarfs down at the sticky end of the main sequence. She downed it in one swallow. Ease and fiery pleasure coursed through her. Islay, said Solomon. Works every time. Thank you, its ... Purely medicinal, I know. Im afraid weve not brought you here just to admire the view and enjoy a fine malt. No, I But Solomon did not hear her attempted plea. He had wandered off to regain his place on his chesterfield and, momentarily, his back was turned. You will be aware of the history of our species, Solomon began, continuing as he seated himself, turning to face her with one, swift, almost mathematically precise movement. The choreography made the change in his voice all the more jarring, from the suavity of the welcoming host to the scratchy insecurity of a stern lecturer anxious to convey an important message, but unsure if hell be able to achieve even the simplest transference, given the youth and inexperience of the audience. Merlin could almost feel the Xspatial illusion slip, smell the currents of space. We are creatures of the Continuum, destined ever to rein the Drove. So much they teach you in elementary school. But when you get to high school they tell you more. Of the Shepherds, creatures like us, or so we believe, who steered the Drove before us. Creatures who, we think, created us to serve them in this great and eternal task. We Drovers are, therefore, not the first. We are, if you will, these Shepherds Dogs, created to serve our masters, faithfully and without question. Its what we are. But what they dont tell you in school is that the race of the Shepherds is now gone. Extinct. They are ... gone? Merlin felt her limbs go weak, and that peculiar sensation that this body was not her own that she was only observing the scene the three of them, in this vast, bright room, with the shining winterscape through the panoramic windows. Yes, I know. That particular revelation always comes as a shock. But just think about it. Have you ever seen a Shepherd? Or have you met anyone, of any age, who has seen one, or has any memory of having done so? No? Exactly. The Shepherds once existed yes, they really did but they have long gone, faded into legend, without our really being aware of it. But still, we want our young ones to grow up with hope: That the Shepherds, even if they arent around now, might one day return from well, wherever it is that theyve gone and take back the responsibility of steering the Drove. Well, it aint gonna happen. But we think it better to lie than to break your hearts too young. There is such a thing as well as growing up. Solomon, as if in remembrance of happy times now long ago, allowed a winning smile to crease his face. Merlin felt herself wanting to smile, too. To giggle, even. An urge she suppressed ruthlessly. This was not hard once she stopped to consider the news behind the smile. That the Shepherds were gone. Forever. News that made the vastness of space even greater, colder, more merciless. Solomon continued. We havent brought you here just to tell you that, though. Youll have discovered that for yourself, sooner or later. Like finding out that Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy dont really exist. We want to tell you well, something else. But we want to ask you something, first. Me? Obviously, you Why me? Why not Guinever or Roland or Orfeo or Britomart or Oliver or any of the others? She regretted her outburst as soon as shed made it. But to her surprise she was neither chided (as she had expected) nor reprimanded (as she had feared). Solomon paused and turned, ever so slightly, to the other man, who remained motionless. Merlin had the distinct impression that Solomons voice began to stumble, as if veering into the rough from the smoothness of its accustomed fairway. Lets say that you look like the most likely prospect for well, for what we have in mind. Now then, whats your impression of the Drove, these days? Solomon spoke now with a forced casualness that sounded feeble, hollow. Merlin paused before answering and looked down at her hands, resting palms upwards in a Worstead lap. The answer seemed so obvious that she wondered whether it was a trick question, but when she looked up, parting the curtain of hair that had fallen across her face as she thought, she saw that both men were looking at her intently, their expressions entirely open and sincere. Like they really wanted to know. Its the Drove, she began. Its getting worse. The beasts are more and more well frisky. Its all we can do to keep them on track. They are forever veering off to graze on stars or gas or whatever, sometimes parsecs off course, and they just get more defiant. Sometimes I think its just us, or just bad luck, or if the beasts have learned to try it on, but lately well it might sound impertinent, or lame, or ... No, go on, reassured Solomon. We must have no secrets here. Youre among friends, Merlin. This isnt an inquisition. Oh, well, all right, Ill say it that no matter how good we are, there just arent enough of us any more. I thought we were hard pressed before that that well, before Heloise and Beatrice left, and I remember that day well... Dont we all. Terrible. But after that, when things were rough, I asked Uther and Enid what things were like when they were younger, and... Your fore-parents, I believe? Yes. And instead of saying that we youngsters never knew when we were born, or some such, they simply sighed and said that we had it very much harder than they ever did. Yes, thats what they said very much harder. Her words dropped into a silence relieved only by the crack of a log in the grate. It was so sudden that it made her start, and realize that her cheeks were hot, and that her eyes were moist, and that she was enraged, anxious, and agitated, all at the same time. At last, Solomon spoke. Thank you, Merlin, for being so candid. Sad to say, though, you are absolutely right. With every age that passes our numbers dwindle, and my fear our fear is that well reach the point when we can no longer restrain the Drove. It could be that weve already gone beyond that point. The silence then was as of the chasms beyond dimensionality, before and after the Continuum, seeping in, and which, more than any other single thing filled all their minds with terror. But ... what then? That, my dear, is a question that all of us ask. All of us of a certain age, that is. But we never dare answer. You are younger, however. Bolder, perhaps? Maybe you should like to do that for us? All of a sudden she felt that she was a little girl again, gamboling through the voids, riding free and careless on the resonant song of her fore-parents as she played on the flukes of their vast, recursive, forms, the responsibilities of adulthood not even a speck on a flawless horizon. Well, I suppose, that if we the Sheepdogs, as it were were to go on like this, wed just eventually disappear, just like the Shepherds before us, and then... then... And ... then? The Drove would just eat, and eat, until theyd consumed the Universe. Thats correct. Well done, Merlin. Its often very hard to voice the answer that everyone knows, but nobody wants to articulate. Despite the fire, she felt a chill in the air grow. But, Merlin, why in all the dimensions of the Universe should it matter? Solomon rose and paced the golden Afghan rug before the fire, his hands waving in time with his discourse. If, as we believe, the Drove was created as a kind of by-product of the Big Bang a swirl of knots and eddies in space-time, if you will why should they not just be left to get on with it? Perhaps they are part of the natural order of the Universe agents of its death as well as products of its birth? Why should we seek to restrain them, going to such enormous efforts to steer them, to govern if not to hold back their remorselessly entropic progress, to ... Life. Her voice seemed very small, like a tiny mote. But a mote on which stars condense, on which planets are built. Solomon stopped then, and turned towards her. Go on, Merlin. Please, go on. Well, its often occurred to me well, to all of us, really why were doing this at all. Steering the Drove, that is, even though we never speak of it: But theres got to be more, hasnt there? I mean, its not just about guiding the Drove, but about making choices. Choices about where to steer the Drove, what we can allow the beasts to consume, and what we cant. And maybe Ive just got it, but we always keep the Drove well clear of certain main-sequence stars. Stars with planets. Planets that might engender life-forms of baryonic matter. Solomon looked directly at her, his eyes piercing. This time, though, she did not blush, did not flinch, but met his gaze. Solomons next words were directed not to her, but to Saturn. See? I told you she was good. The implied subterfuge confused her. Good? Why? What for? Its always seemed obvious about avoiding planets, and life so obvious that nobody actually makes the point, its that obvious... isnt it? Yes, Merlin, quite right. So obvious that almost nobody actually makes the connection. Youd be surprised how few people actually do, you know. Very surprised. In fact, youre the first in your cohort weve met whos done so. But now youve passed that hurdle, you need to ask yourself another question. A deeper one. About life? Yes. Well, I guess that if were letting it grow, making sure that the likeliest stars are not consumed, then its got something to do with the Drove, to ... She stopped dead. A thought flashed through her mind like an electric arc. She felt her skin tingle, her face chill. She took great care with her next few words, pronouncing each one, syllable by syllable, to make sure she got each one right before letting it loose on the air. Its all about finding some new life-form to take over. To herd the Drove. Or to manage it, somehow. When well, for when weve all gone. The silence was palpable. Solomon strode over to her and crouched down before her, so that she could meet his eyes without her having to look up. And so he could infuse his next words with added drama. Not to herd the Drove, Merlin. To destroy it. No, not silence now, but a surge of panic, a sudden desire to escape. She felt her throat constrict, so that her next words came out as a hissing rasp. But thats thats Yes, I know, said Solomon, with great gentleness, it runs against everything we live for, against everything we know. Some might even call it heresy. But its more than a matter of our eventual extinction. The fact is that the Drove is increasing. Its a feature of the Universe thats only become clear to us quite recently. Lets just say its to do with the balance of dark energy and a slow, secular change in Plancks constant. Were not sure how, let alone why. You may not really be aware of it yet, as you can only really deal with it piecemeal, most of the time, given that its so spread out. Its there, all the same, and its that, more than anything, that explains why you and the others are having such a tough time of it. Weve run some projections thats Saturn and me, and some of the other elders. And therell come a time when well simply be overwhelmed. When? How? Dont be alarmed. Its still long away yet, even accounting for reasonable error. But thats no good reason for not making preparations now. Not just to continue to run the Drove, but to remove it. To remove its threat. But what difference will it make, whether the Drove wins out, sooner rather than later? Solomon stood up, huffing and straining slightly as he stretched. You know, he said, you get a lot stiffer when you get older. Its the skiing, you know. Kinda gets to your knees. But the real bummer is that it plays merry hell with my golf. Cant get that swing anymore. What was that, Merlin? Fatalism? Well, no... She looked down again, at her knees. Im sorry. Dont be. Your question is a fair one. Of course it probably doesnt matter. But we, the Elders, have conceived an objection to a victory for the Drove that comes too early. Well, two objections, really. The first is simply aesthetic. If the Drove wins too soon, it will prevent this iteration of the Continuum reaching ... how would one put it? Solomon turned to Saturn who now made the first of what would be only two spoken contributions to the meeting. His voice, when it came, sounded surprisingly lively and rounded. His eyes sparkled as he spoke. Its ... fullness? Thank you, Saturn, I think that puts it very well. Saturn nodded. The other reason is simply one of obligation to those who came before us. The Shepherds. But why? If they are gone? Because, Merlin, they saw fit to create us, to continue their task, even when they were gone. So the next question you must ask yourself is where did we come from? What are our origins? Merlin was utterly blindsided by this question. She was amazed that such a question had never occurred to her before, not once. Shed always had this vague notion that they, the Sheepdogs, were wished out of nothing, as the Shepherds ran on their relentless quest. It seemed that Solomon read her mind even as the thoughts coalesced in it. What you have to realize, Merlin, is that despite the immense power that we know the Shepherds had, not even they could defy the laws of the conservation of matter and energy. We came from somewhere. And that somewhere was... Solomons voice petered out into a kind of wheedling upward cadence, like he was fishing for something. For a short spell Merlin was nonplussed. The effect of all these cosmic revelations, dealt at such speed, was one of numbing stupefaction. But realization dawned. She came to herself, then, seated in a magnificent stillness. She felt her hair prickle with static, and stand away from her face like a halo. We came from life, from baryonic matter from a planet. Indeed, Merlin. From the proverbial warm little pond. It was they, the Shepherds, who raised us up, who evolved us, who transfigured us into this dimensionality, imprinting us into the very fabric of the Continuum. Just as they were. And, when you think about it, thats a good reason for steering the Drove away from planets. One never knows from which puddle the next generation of Shepherds might crawl. Those that sleep in some gutter, if you will, but look up, wondering, at the stars. But where, Solomon? Where was this planet of our ... birth? And what were we like ... once? Who knows, Merlin? If there was ever such knowledge, it is now lost. And perhaps it is better so. After all, the planets star might have gone nova long since. It might even have been in a different Continuum from the one we presently inhabit. There can be no space, now no time for regrets. And, in any case, we must move on. Our turn has come to find a species which we can raise, in our turn. But with a difference. This species will not simply continue what we do, though: we must create a race of destroyers. Merlin found herself in a state of increasing agitation. But why cant we simply destroy them ourselves? Thats a good question, Merlin, and I am glad you brought it up, said Solomon, who turned to the drinks cabinet behind Saturnss chesterfield, and poured three more shots of Islay. If I might say so, that you can even conceive of such a question illustrates your maturity. It shows that you can how would you put it, Saturn? That warmth and sparkle again, from the shadows of the second chesterfield. Think outside the box? Exactly so. So, Merlin, to answer you two reasons, again and again, one is aesthetic, he continued, handing round the heavy tumblers who wants to be the first to destroy the objects of their lifes work, not to mention the work of their entire species? As I said, its practically a heresy. And even if you overcame that one, how would you go about committing such ... such genocide? I mean, practically? The Drove are creatures of a similar order to us M-dimensional relativistic manifolds, wrinkles in space-time but much more powerful, if only of trifling intelligence. And we were created created, mind you to nurture, not to kill. The means for destruction must be built into this new generation of creatures, right from the beginning. What beats me, frankly, is how they can be destroyed without altering the fundamental connectivity the topological order, if you will of the Continuum itself, and perhaps destroying that, too. Throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Cheers! The niceties of the communal enjoyment of single malt cannot cover a crucial, final question forever, and such was the case now. Merlin saw, as she lowered her glass, that Solomon and Saturn had lowered theirs, too, in synchrony with hers, and now looked at her, expectantly. That sickening feeling plays itself, round and round, again and again, in one horribly obsessive knot of recursion, agonizingly tight, as she gains on Guinever and Roland and sees that Dante and Elaine have joined the chase. No wonder she can hardly keep her mind on whats in front of her. But five of them are too few to rein in the swarm of hundreds of the gigantic Drove now descending on the red dwarf, scattering comet-cloud debris like balls on a frenetic four-dimensional pin-table. In the end, the five Drovers can only hover, and gather, and wait, as the ravening Drove descends to feed on the small star, warping it into nothingness, altering the gravitational balance of the space immediately around it. Punching holes in space-time. There is little they can do to alter the changing flux of cometary debris, now directing itself, slowly at first, towards the yellowish G-type dwarf less than two light-years away. The dwarf with that hopeful retinue of silicate-mantled planets, at least one of which has retained warmth and volatiles suitable for the kind of life that Saturn and Solomon appear to have in mind. Guinever broadcasts anxiety and regret. Roland is darkly shamefaced, but Guinevers anger is spent. She, too, knows that its not his fault. Dante is just numbed. He has seen this kind of thing too often, lately, to feel anything more than a dim resignation. Only Elaine cries aloud, to no-one in particular, her howl of anguish causing barely a ripple in the uncaring void: Whats wrong with them and with us? But Merlins question carries far greater emotional resonance for all that it is semantically much simpler. Cold pricked her arms and face. She looked up at Solomon and asked in as level a tone as she could muster: Why me? Silence again, for an interval that could have been moments or millennia. She saw Solomon, and Saturn, and the rest of the room the golden Afghan, the chesterfields, the fireplace as if they were at some immense distance, at the wrong end of a telescope. Merlin, my dear Merlin... she feels a dry warmth as Solomon picks up her right hand and squeezes it within his. Thats the most interesting question of all. And one to which neither myself nor Saturn nor anyone else has any convincing, logical answer. Except to say that we just know it. Its you. Your task. You have to find a way. But where? How? How can I even begin? Tears start in her eyes. Im afraid we have little more idea than you do. Well try of course, well try to offer us much help and support as we can, said Solomon, and we do have at least one clue. You ... do? Its here, now. All around you. Merlin looks up, imploringly, at Solomon. His expression is warm. Laugh-lines crease the borders of his mouth, and soften the hardness of his ice-blue eyes. Its this Xspace, isnt it? Yes, Merlin, it is. Xspaces dont just pop up randomly. They have to have internal coherence. To even exist, an Xspace has to have what you might call a back-story. After all, what explains these chesterfields? This rather nice rug? This entirely splendid 22-year-old scotch? This house? Even the view this well, this planetary prospect? And, most of all, the forms we now inhabit? They are more real than just illusions, you know. And the minds of the forms we inhabit? Such engaging clutter! All that stuff about Father Christmas and skiing and golf. Now where did all that come from? Merlin was now quite unable to decide whether the Elders question was rhetorical. In any event, she was all wrung out. She decided to let him answer it himself. From you, Merlin from you. You might not have realized it, but you created this Xspace, and everything in it. Everything. I congratulate we congratulate you, on your good taste. Especially the scotch. Merlin had broken through her local credibility barrier. All she could now do was laugh. But this did not appear to be a joke. Solomon wasnt laughing. Neither was Saturn. Her laugh stuttered and stopped. But still, why...? Look at it this way. Its the way were made. To be sure, we live most of our lives in a fairly linear way, starting at the beginning, chasing the Drove, and fading out somewhere else, later. But we can do more than that. You know this. We are connected, you and me, and Saturn here, and all your young friends, to much else that is in the Continuum. Past, present and future. Your Xspace gives us the best clue for your search for a suitable candidate. Your quest, if you will, for life. Really, it can only be a matter of instinct. Solomon let drop her hand with a final squeeze of reassurance, and raised his glass. The bright light of a westering winter sun sparkled in its brown depths. Its just a hunch. But if I were in your position, Id well, Id just follow the Islay. Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards, Gascony, France September, 2011 O for a beaker full of the warm South! John Keats Ode to a Nightingale Domingo, would you do the honors? Yes, Jadis, of course. The big man in the radioactively loud aloha shirt and oversized Bermuda shorts waved his ham-sized hands over the table, and the happy chatter all around it ceased at once. Nothing could be heard but birdsong, the late summer wind sighing in the high branches of the spinney, the lazy plop of a frog into the pond and the distant rasp of the grasshoppers in the field that opened at the end of the garden. Benedic Domine nos et haec tua dona quae de tua largitate sumus sumpturi per Christum Dominum nostrum, Amen. The chatter resumed. Dr Jadis Markham, archeologist, had been standing in the doorway of the back kitchen. Walking out onto the terrace, she added an enormous earthenware bowl of lemon chicken and rice to the already laden table. She sat down at its head, slid off her sandals and buried her feet in the furry, dependable bulk of Fairbanks, her gigantic, lion-maned golden retriever, who looked up momentarily, emitted a contented nut-brown growl, and went back to sleep on the cool tiles under the table. Almost. Although very much fulfilling his job description as Mobile Self-Warming Hot Water Bottle and Guard Dog (Fierce) for his mistress, he still kept half an eye open, ever watchful for his arch-enemy Horrible, the squashed-faced tabby that had adopted the household three years earlier, bringing with it a cloud of fleas that had made everyone scratch for weeks. The litter of kittens discovered under a pile of dirty laundry, some weeks later, was the only outward sign of the animals gender. But Horrible was in no mood to tease the dog today. Her tiny mind had already been distracted. She slunk off towards the long grass and reeds at the edge of the pond, in search of smaller animals to persecute. Jadis looked up at the human company, and felt a mixture of emotions. The glow of achievement; the twinge of regret that no more had been achieved; and yet, excitement about the future. This was the final Saint-Rogatien field crew, at the end of six years of excavating the enormous, ancient pyramid about which the modern village of Saint-Rogatien clustered. This was the final dinner, at the end of the final season. She was in the mood for a quiet celebration. The dig had closed down that very afternoon. The last earthmover had replaced the overburden; grass-seed had been sown; and the mayor of Saint-Rogatien had had a little ceremony to mark the passing of a remarkable but ultimately frustrating archeological endeavor. In the days ahead, Jadis would pack up the lab specimens, crating them for Cambridge, where, no doubt, they would make a few doctorate projects for graduate students to come. And in the meantime, she and Jack, her colleague and husband, were clearing the decks for something new. Dr Jack Corstorphine sat at the other end of the trestle table, laid out in the dappled shade of an ancient sweet-chestnut tree, its fruits already swelling. He returned her gaze, and Jadis momentarily lost interest in the rest of the worlds affairs, as the two of them exchanged in a moment what might otherwise have taken many hours of speech. They had been through so much together, since their first meeting in Cambridge when, as an undergraduate, shed gangled, late, into his supervision class. After which it hadnt been long before theyd set up home together, as lovers and colleagues. How Jacks uncanny intuition about the antiquity of landscape had brought them here, to Gascony, to their farmhouse, and what the villagers of Saint-Rogatien called Le Dig. And how shed almost died before they even started. And how Jack had pulled her back to the light. And how, if Jack werent there, she felt that shed simply wink out of existence. Oblivious to the swirl of conversation around them, Jack raised one mock-serious eyebrow, just for her we have our news, his ice-blue eyes seemed to say, but not yet. Her hand flew to her mouth to stifle a giggle, and then, reprovingly as a mother, she affected a mental finger-wag: she was the hostess, and had her guests to look after! And so with a small shake of her head, she broke the link and the noise of the party flooded back. The entire exchange had lasted hardly more than a second. As if to compensate for her reverie, she waved her hands animatedly at her guests, imploring them to begin, to dig in, dish up. Have more wine. Not that they needed any encouragement: nor that they had taken much notice of the intimate currents sparking above their heads. At Jacks left, Jadis technician Primrose Tsien, and her current graduate student Faye Callaghan, were laughing uproariously as Avi Malkeinu their postdoctoral fellow and a friend since her own grad-student days with Jack, back in Cambridge, when she had still (oh my!) called herself Jade sat between them, his tight, dark curls bobbing. He was telling a probably very salacious and exaggerated story about his latest stint as an Israeli army reservist. At Jacks right, the aloha-shirted scientist-priest Domingo was deep in conversation with studious, red-headed Mathilde Reynard, a postdoctoral researcher visiting Le Dig for a stint from the University of Montpellier. To Mathildes right, Eric Onoye, a graduate student with Ernestine Yanga in Nairobi, was laughing with Marjorie MacLennane. The MacLennanes, now retired, had broken off a motoring tour to visit Saint-Rogatien and close another chapter in the story of Jadis and Jack, their last and most favourite protgs. Which left her mentor, and Jacks, Emeritus Professor Roger Sutherland MacLennane dear, silly, shrewd old Roger, seated at her right, in his off-white linen suit and panama hat who looked at her with solicitous eyes and put his hand on hers. Are you feeling .quite all right, my dear? Her smile was as warm as only she could make it: Dear Roger thank you, of course I am. Why shouldnt I be? Jadis liked to think of the 2011 crew as her Dream Team, the brightest and best shed ever assembled. I mean to say, she thought, just look at them! First, and greatest, there was Avi, whod just published a terse and thoughtful paper in Nature on his analysis of the still-mysterious artifacts from Le Dig, artifacts that she, his doctorate supervisor, had named as Remillardian in her own thesis, two years before. These featureless, geometrically perfect, polygonal coins of flint were the only signs of a lost and ancient civilization that had dominated this part of the world for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, except that their meaning and the identity makers remained frustratingly elusive. And yet in the heat of this never-ending battle with the unknown (and at her kitchen table, no less!) she and Avi had fused his talent as a data wrangler with her ability to slice through a problem like a hot knife, and in so doing, they had created a new approach: what a commentator in Antiquity had called analytic archeology and hailed as something that might one day become a potent force in their field, for those adventurous and gifted enough to unlock its potential. When asked to define analytic archeology, though, Jadis had always demonstrated her own agenda. I prefer to call it evidence-based archeology, shed said in an interview with Marcel Montgolfier in Paris-Match, the one with the unintentionally sexy photographs that always made Jack laugh. We see whats there, shed said, her words printed opposite a moodily lit photo of a dark-eyed, wild-haired popsie she would never believe was actually her, and we tell it like it is. Not how we think it should be, or how it ought to go. Just whats there. Thats much harder to do that you might think. For you can bet that whenever someone holds too closely to their assumptions, these will be the first things to be proven wrong. She liked to think that these were the precepts she held most dear and that she would never have come to these conclusions without having Jack to hand, whose grasp of landscape was wholly instinctive, and had forced her, as if in opposition, to think harder and more logically than she might otherwise have done. Working with Jack is like wrestling with fog, she thought. And she loved him for it. Jadis and Avi had not long returned from Avis doctorate exam, and a rare trip to Cambridge, at which she had met Ernestine Yanga for the first time. Professor Yanga had been Jacks external examiner, and Jack had told her not to believe the stories shed heard about the Kenyan academics ferocity. Avis thesis defense had been brief, almost routine. Afterwards, in the departmental coffee room (so familiar, but so, well alien), Professor Yanga had confided in Jadis that Avis work was quite brilliant. So bold, and so brash, I suspect, that he might find himself in very hot water, she smiled, and I have longed to meet you, Dr Markham. I can see where that husband of yours gets it from. Jadis had said nothing, but looked up with a half-smile of inquisition. You dont know? Why, my dear, its you! Your fortitude. Jadis had wanted to tell her that no, it had been the other way round that if only she knew that without Jack to tie her to the Earth she would probably have long since been carried away like chaff on the wind. Over the previous two years, Avi had been called up regularly to serve two-month stints in the Israeli Army as a reservist, especially as the perpetually broiling Middle-East Situation was entering a more than usually sticky patch. With the mild, peacemaking Kingdom of Jordan having been swept aside by the green and black flags of the ever-advancing pan-Islamic Khalifa that had already swallowed most of the rest of the region, the incoming tide of war threatened break through the ever-fragile, ever-shifting dunes of armed truce. If the Khalifa defeated the still-resisting Saudis, there would be nobody left to fight except the old adversary. Israel had decided that Avis scientific skills were too valuable to be wasted on the dead past when they could be applied to the uncertain future. So Avi would be gone in a week: as it looked, this time, permanently. But perhaps, one day, Avi had said, hed get back to science, for he had something up his sleeve a proposal to apply the new analytic approach to the whole Mount Carmel cave complex, where Neanderthals and modern humans seemed to have lived, alternately, like some great Palaeolithic time-share, swapping the same caves, over and over, for a hundred thousand years. Hed discussed this deep into the night with Jadis as he finished his thesis, papers strewn on the kitchen table and onto the floor (where, in one of those hazards of fieldwork, he found them the morning after, decorated with the remains of a semi-digested dormouse that Horrible had regurgitated). Our views of Mount Carmel, hed said, were conditioned by our assumptions, that Neanderthals were the has-beens, and humans the destined inheritors of the Earth. But if there was one thing (hed said) that Jadis had taught him, it was that hindsight is a very poor guide to understanding prehistory. In any case, hindsight couldnt tell us why Mount Carmel had been a barrier to the expansion of humans out of Africa for at least fifty thousand years. The answer, if you looked at the evidence, was clear: humans had been bottled up in Africa because the Neanderthals had kept them there: a Neanderthal civilization at Mount Carmel that could have matched the civilization in Europe of which Saint-Rogatien might have been the first sign. Ah, such castles in the air, Jadis had thought, bringing Avi down to Earth with yet another scheme to classify Remillardian artifacts. Jadis remembered the first time shed met Avi, when as a raw but cocksure first-year undergraduate, hed come to Chesterton for supervisions with Jack, even then full of the most amazing ideas about Mount Carmel. And yet, perhaps more prescient than cocksure. He might even have been right. But as things stood now, who knew if shed ever hear from Avi again? Not that Avi himself seemed to have any particular worries, and why should he? Here he was, in La France Profonde, in his favourite situation, that is, between two pretty, vivacious women who were plainly hanging on his every word. As Jadis looked over this, the Last Supper, she did not know how could she have done? what discoveries Primrose Tsien (squeezed, giggling, in the crook of Avis muscular right arm), and all-Texan cowgirl Faye Callaghan (embraced by his equally beefy left) might make, what renown they might achieve or none? And one might ask the same of Mathilde Reynard, her slim, pale, freckled form like a thin white ash against the dark thundercloud that was Domingo to her left; and Eric Onoye, laughing with Marjorie. What would the future hold for them? But wherever they might go, and wherever their lives might take them, she silently wished them all the good fortune shed had, despite everything. And maybe some of them might like to stay on, for she was convinced that Saint-Rogatien was just the beginning of their adventures. Caught once again in daydream, she paused, stopped what she was eating and, fork held in mid-air, looked up at Jack, now deep in conversation with Domingo and Mathilde. Her expression would have been unintelligible to anyone whod witnessed its brief passage across her face, but the fathomless glints in her eyes turned to sparkles of curiosity, and then laughter: for in one of those random lulls that punctuate dinner-party conversations she heard: Domingo Garca Vasquez Santria Sanchopanza de Orellanzana von Hohenzollern und Taxis. Jack sat back, incredulous: if I might say so, Domingo, thats quite a handle. Mathilde leaned forwards on her elbows, gazing in open-mouthed awe at the huge man. Roger: Youre having us on, old boy! Avi: Hey, Domingo, run that past me again! Domingo just smiled one of his winningly tombstone-toothed smiles and said, in his characteristically resonant, almost impossibly deep voice: Of course, my friends just call me Pongo. There was a brief but significant spell of utter silence, and then everyone started laughing at once. Fairbanks, startled from sleep, sat up, tail wagging, jumping from guest to guest, eager to learn the reason for all the commotion. Her first sight of Domingo had been when, two years earlier, she had been hurriedly making herself a sandwich before taking Fairbanks for a walk. All of a sudden a vast shadow loomed in the ever-open kitchen door, and for a fleeting moment she could have sworn thered been a total eclipse. Looking up, she gasped, as the apparition before her resolved from an inchoate blur into quite indisputably the ugliest man she had ever seen and one of the most instantly loveable. Please, may I come in? hed asked. And so Jadis invited this monstrous troll over the threshold. It was one of those days when Jadis had been rushing around in a foam of business, trying to do too many things at once. Please, Dr Markham, sit down, and let me deal with that. So without knowing quite how or why (let alone how he knew her name), Jadis found herself sitting at the table eating a sandwich and drinking a mug of tea that he had made for her. This gave her plenty of time to study this strange, uninvited guest. He was, indeed, immense in all possible directions. Well over six feet tall and broad to match, he had an immense nose; an immense mane of thick, black, spiky hair that ran down the nape of his neck; immense steam-hammer hands, and teeth that looked like Stonehenge. But the perpetually cheeky twinkle of his eyes (each buried beneath a brow seemingly the size of a small hedgehog) revealed this same immensity on the inside, too. As she was later to discover, he was immensely kind, generous, gentle, cultured, sensitive and hard-working. He was also immensely strong, and became known around the village as the Lincroyable Hulk. He had originally come from Andalusia in southern Spain, he said, but had traveled, and spoke fluent English (and several other languages) with an accent so slight that one would not have been able to identify its location. Jadis had invited him to join her on her daily round of the village, an act that gave an anchor for her day as well as necessary exercise for the dog. She also found it a great way to get to know new people, for the fame of Le Dig had, over the years, attracted many callers, some of them unusual or even frightening, which was one reason she was grateful for Fairbanks, especially during those heart-aching periods in which Jack was away on one of his own explorations, or now that Roger MacLennane had retired on business, as Research Director of the Ginsberg Wang Institute, the private funding agency that had been set up with the object of bankrolling their research. As they bowled along the cow-parsleyd lane that led from the back garden in a slow grade up to the village square Fairbanks bounding on ahead, twirling his feathered tail like a propeller they made a contrasting pair. He in what she came to realize was his invariable uniform of Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirt (making his bulk seem even greater), she in the long mackintosh she reserved for walking and shopping. He explained that he was a Catholic priest, newly ordained, who had (he said) been given some time off for good behavior before seeking a flock of his own. Even just the way he said things made her giggle like a little girl. She imagined him as some kind of friendly fairy-tale giant who invites small children to play in the gardens of his castle, simply from the goodness of his heart. There was a long tradition in Catholicism, Domingo had explained, for clerics to go out into the world, and even be scientists for a while, all the better to appreciate the Mind of the Creator. His greatest hero had been the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, usually noted for his role in the Piltdown Man hoax of 1912 and for some challenging ideas about collective intelligence, but revered among paleontologists as a skilled and tireless field worker. But he had also become something of an expert on the Abb Gaston de Bonnard, a tireless archeologist and man of God who had worked in this part of France in the late nineteenth century. Would it be possible, Domingo asked, to do the Teilhardian thing and join Le Dig? Perhaps for a few weeks? Jadis had said yes even before shed known she had, and Domingo had been there ever since. The dinner was sinking into cheerful disarray, just as the golden ball of the Sun touched the western horizon, beyond the village, making a dramatic silhouette of the church on top of the hill that had ruled their lives and dreams for so long. Jack and the students cleared the plates (Marjorie laid a hand on Jadis arm before she could stand: let someone else do the work, dear); candles were fetched and lit (bringing out a flutter of moths); coffee was made, brandy brought from the cellar, and the company pushed their chairs back. Roger ever the most refined judge of such things felt that it was time for a toast. And so, rising to his feet, he asked the company to charge their glasses with whatever was handy and raise a toast to Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards, and all who sailed in her! The enthusiastic response sent a murder of evening crows flapping from the spinney. Clinks of glasses, more chatter, and then Eric Onoye said Yes, Professor MacLennane, but who, precisely, did sail in her? That is the question! It was the one question they could not answer, the brick wall that had stopped every avenue of their investigation. Dozens of trenches and tunnels had been essayed into the cliff beneath the church under Jadis direction, and they had found tons of animal bones and plant remains as well as the mystifying Remillardian artefacts. But of human bones they found not one: not a single finger-bone in six years of careful, fingertip search; not even one tooth, despite the arduous sieving of enough sediment to have buried the hilltop church steeple-deep, twice over. If the megalith on which Saint-Rogatien church now stood, and around whose slopes the village had gathered, had been a pyramid hundreds of thousands of years earlier, as Jack had believed, then any capping masonry had long since been eroded away or stripped, if it had been there at all, and there were no signs of voids that might have hinted at some unvisited tomb or sarcophagus. The bulk of the megalith its filling had been like a compost heap, a disordered mass of earth and rocks, more or less glued together with the limestone precipitating out of the groundwater, making a breccia, a kind of geological blancmange whose antiquity is notoriously hard to judge. This was, indeed, another problem: Jadis had called in teams of scientists from all over the world, each an expert in one or other of the many arcane techniques of age determination, from electron spin resonance to amino-acid racemization, from optically stimulated luminescence to uranium-thorium dating and yet each had come up with their own estimates, to which they held with the stubbornness of the several Blind Men of Hindustan in their variously confused contemplation of the Elephant. In the end, the best that anyone could offer was that the megalith had been built sometime between 800,000 and 250,000 years ago, but of the makers there had been no sign. It could have been that there were several different races of maker, different species even each one adding a little more to the megalith over endless, unrecorded millennia. And so they all talked of the depth of civilization, the antiquity of intent, that had been the legacy of Saint-Rogatien, confirming Jacks suspicions gathered in a single flying visit so long before a visit undertaken as a desperate, last attempt to shore up a collapsing doctorate project, and so as not to distract Jadis from studying for her finals. You know, said Domingo, what I find most intriguing about the whole panorama is not so much antiquity, but recency. How do you mean? Roger said. Domingo had a way of holding an audience, so that whenever he spoke, or even seemed like he might wish to, everyone instinctively turned their heads to him in expectation. Well, do you remember the whole business about Homo floresiensis? All nodded in assent. The discovery of a strange species of tiny human-like creature that had lived on an isolated island in Indonesia until almost historical times had been the archeological sensation of the previous decade. Just think about it. If these creatures were wandering about until as recently as whatever it was ten thousand years how do you know theyre not still around? But they arent! said Avi people have looked! Even though theyre tiny, they couldnt have crawled under rocks or something Hey, guy arent you forgetting something? This from Faye, disentangling herself from Avi, lighting a cigarette and looking at him sternly: you know what they say about hobbits and holes in the ground? Maybe we havent found all the holes! Laughter, and, had anybody noticed, a sage twinkle in Domingos eyes: tiny, newborn stars emerging from beneath the interstellar gas-clouds of his eyebrows. To be sure, Flores is perhaps not such a good example too isolated, too far away. But what about here? When did our megalith builders stop building their megaliths? And why? Perhaps modern Cro-Magnons came in and stopped them? ventured Mathilde. Thats, of course, possible, Domingo replied, his huge dark form looking down on the tiny, pale-skinned, copper-haired girl to his right, a tableau that reminded Jadis of nothing more than King Kong and Ann Darrow. She tried not to chortle at the thought. From the way that Jack was struggling to suppress laughter, she guessed that the same image had also flashed through his mind. They tried not to look at each other in case they lost control. Domingo continued regardless, with an easy yet precise fluency belied by his apparently unwieldy frame: Consider, if you will, the Neanderthals. We have always had them in our sights for Saint-Rogatien. But that might be an error, might it not? Think of the age of the thing when the Neanderthals first appeared, our Great Pyramid of Saint-Rogatien might well have been more than half a million years old! And your point is? teased Avi. He and Domingo had become firm friends, and had often been out on Le Dig together, invariably accompanied by Avis ghetto blaster and one of Domingos old Rolling Stones tapes. As they sat, one each side of a great box-frame sieve, shaking out and winnowing the sediment for tiny plant remains or flint flakes, their eager conversation was as dense or as airy as the clouds of tan dust they produced, wafting across the site. My point, my dear Avram Yitzchak, is that their antiquity is a side-issue. But what, I ask again, of their recency? As far as I know, the latest known Neanderthal comes from my er neck of the woods, and is around twenty-two thousand years old Twenty-one! corrected Primrose, giggling. I do apologise, and I thank you for making my next point that the age keeps dropping. Will it keep dropping forever? How will we know when weve seen the last of the Neanderthals? Its a bit like, he waved his great hands expansively well, its like trying to know if youve got rid of every last one of Horribles Little Friends! He paused. You cant! They all laughed at this: September was peak cat-flea season and Jadis and Primrose had been busy fumigating all the bedrooms. Domingo was now a dark shadow in the deepening night, visible only by the glint of candle flames in his eyes: indeed, people could now only be seen from reflections, glances of yellow light on spectacle frames here, a curve of the face there, making them all look like a collection of off-duty models for one of Goyas Witches Sabbaths. This only enhanced the drama of Domingos speech: he was a Caliban, stalking the forests of night that run along the edges of dreams. You know, my friends, I shouldnt be surprised if the Neanderthals survived, perhaps just long enough to have come into the very earliest legends of the human race. And perhaps even more recently than that. There was a long pause, and then came a strange new voice. Hanephilim hayu haaretz bayamim It was Avi, his eyes focused as if on some immeasurable distance, as if speaking to a lost past. The table was hushed by his unwonted seriousness. He had never been known to speak any language in their company besides English or French. This was a private side to Avi the existence of which nobody had been aware none, that is, except Domingo. In their long hours together at the dig, Domingo and Avi the Catholic priest and the Jewish atheist had turned, inevitably, to religion. Domingo had wondered at what he saw as the manifest contradictions of Avis upbringing; that hed been raised in a Marxist kibbutz community in a land reclaimed by the Jews. This is a delicious irony, Avram Yitzchak, is it not? That as soon as the Jews found the Land of Israel, after much heroism and effort and struggle, they abandon their religion! And this is all the more intriguing those Jews in Israel who cling most firmly to their religion deny Israels very right to exist! Avi just laughed. It was not that he was uncomfortable, or that he thought Domingo was trying to convert him, because he knew his friend too well for that. It was just that he completely failed to see what Domingo was getting at. So, over the months, Domingo tried a different tack. The argument that had worked was that if Avi was really as serious about archeology and antiquity as he appeared to be, he might find it all the more enriching were he to have a better appreciation of history, especially his own. After all, Dear Avram, Domingo had said, the Jews are the custodians of the deepest traditions of written history in the western world. Yet bereshit is a fickle mistress: who really knows how far back that history goes? It was the mention of bereshit the Hebrew for In The Beginning, and the name for the book of Genesis that had made Avram sit up with a start and look with yet further admiration at his strange, new friend, whose erudition seemed bottomless. He would remember it ever as a key moment in his life. The company now looked at Avi in equal awe, as if hed just chanted a spell, whether for good or evil they could not tell. Only Domingo had sufficient presence of mind to answer. Avrams words are entirely apposite: gigantes autem erant super terram in diebus illis in those days there were giants that walked the Earth, he said. And let us not forget what the giants were up to. He muttered a string of Latin under his breath, as if trying to bookmark the place in his mind before translating it: Ah yes, postquam enim ingressi sunt filii um ... Dei ad filias hominum illaeque genuerunt isti sunt. Hmm potentes a saeculo viri . er famosi. And then, more clearly: That these giants were great men, who interbred with the daughters of men, who bore great and mighty sons. But hey, Domingo, my friend, said Avi, sitting back in his chair in his usual relaxed way, the seriousness of his face lost in the shadow beyond the table. The word nephilim in Ivrit does not translate as giants. It means the fallen ones Avi and Domingo now had the floor before a rapt audience. But thats precisely it, Avi. They were giants because they were great men, not necessarily that they were aliens or trolls or Neanderthals or anything like that, because the Bible would not have the appropriate language for such things. But we know that they fell, before the Flood, but before they did, they intermarried with human beings. Perhaps the Bible is telling us about human beings and er other people, before the floods at the end of the Ice Age? Now, I do not believe that every word of the Bible is true can be true but when something is said so plainly Domingos point tailed off into silence. Perhaps we can put Domingos ideas to the test, said Jack, alleviating the suddenly brooding mood. A-ha! exclaimed Roger, I just knew you and Jadis had been up to something! Well, possibly. But we have been thinking of our next move now that were winding things up here at Saint-Rogatien. Ive been scouting around quite a lot, as you know General laughter and some groans. Jacks habits of wandering off for days and returning looking like an ill-used tramp were well-known. And I think Ive found something rather . well, odd. No laughs at this it was Jacks instinct for following the bones of the Earth that had brought them Saint-Rogatien in the first place. Everyone was eager to learn of this new adventure, as if the legacy of Saint-Rogatien after six seasons of nail-snagging, knee-grazing, back-breaking labor was already long forgotten. So I took Jadis to see it, on her birthday Wolf-whistles from Avi: catcalls from the girls. and she likes it, which of course is the most important thing laughs, hoots of hear! hear! and well done, Jadis! and she thinks we should have a more serious look around. Perhaps early next month, dig a few test pits, and see if theres potential for a field season there. Of course, my dear chap, said Roger, were all intrigued. Where is this interesting place, what? So Jack told them, and the discussion continued deeper into the night until, well past moonrise, the Last Supper finally came to an end. Jadis had known what Jack was going to talk about anyway, so she started to the clear remaining plates and glasses into the kitchen. Marjorie, in contrast, had no particular idea of what Jack was going to talk about, but decided to help Jadis, all the same. And so, with the conversation still audible through the back door, now counterpointed by an intermittent frog chorus from the pond, Jadis and Marjorie stood together in the kitchen, one washing up, the other drying. Like the two old friends they were, like two bookends, they stood together companionably, chatting amiably about gardening, and the lives and loves of the friends and colleagues they had in common, back in Cambridge, and what Roger was going to do with himself now hed retired (get under my feet, worse luck!) but neither feeling any need to start a conversation simply for the sake of it. They had both been through too much for that. For her part, Jadis felt that she was more in Marjories debt than she could ever express, or thank, let alone repay. Marjories thoughts were more complex. From the very first time she had met Jadis, she had sensed an inner toughness quite at variance with her easygoing exterior: but that her mettle had had to be tested quite so brutally was shocking, beyond comprehension. The facts of the accident were quite trying enough, even without further discussion. That Jadis had survived at all was remarkable that she had thrived, a miracle. Looking at this self-possessed, evidently happy young woman, her friend, youd never have guessed that shed endured so much. This, and the fact that she never once discussed or referred to it, was a testament both to her fortitude: that, and (she had to admit) the support of her husband. As the two women finished their work and turned to say good-night, Marjories hand brushed the sleeve of Jadis sweatshirt, and they embraced. Neither with ardor, nor with passion, but as friends will: as an expression of knowledge shared that need not be spoken, and in the hope that such shared confidences might help to ease an otherwise intolerable burden. One question remained, a question that Marjorie kept to herself, as she settled down in the guest bedroom of the farmhouse next to a snoring Roger, the full moon hanging low over the eastern fields: for she never could never would have broached it with Jadis, let alone anyone else. And that question was this: had Jadis managed to reach the hospital unscathed, could she have saved her unborn child, or would she have miscarried anyway? But the mind of Marjorie MacLennane was wired for certainties and decision, not hypotheses and counterfactuals, so she soon abandoned the struggle and surrendered to the arms and armies of sleep. Above Coromandel Station, Earth 51,977,258 BC Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history Thomas Hardy The Convergence of the Twain First, the sky froze. And then, it boiled. Which was a pity, he thought, idly, as all breath was sucked roughly out of his mouth and nostrils, followed by his guts, and then his brain, and all that just before his skull imploded. The sky had been such a nice color. And the air, so fresh. These were his very last thoughts of all, as his skin peeled away, his arms and legs were ripped from their sockets, and his eyeballs sublimed into a new and vigorous vacuum. But something inside told him that he was not, in fact, dead. More ... mothballed. There was a warmth about him, cosseting, womb-like. A reassuring absence of pain. He was not, however, sufficiently conscious to realize that having these thoughts at all was in any way peculiar. Not yet. Ah, me. Me. Shed always said that this whole ridiculous expedition had been me, me, me, and now well, hed have to admit that shed been right. After all, a couple of Brontops-class star destroyers should have been all that was necessary to put down an insurrection of the Slunj in that unwanted and yet perpetually irritating volume the other side of the Rigel sector. The Slunj being what they were thin clumps and films of loosely aggregated bacteria were barely organized enough to keep their own bodies together, let alone put up any kind of coherent rebellion. Send a couple of gun-boats, the Senior Under-Secretary for Colonial Defense had said, flashing her almond, cat-like eyes at him, flirtatiously (hed tried to suppress some of the more immediate physiological responses, and had been, on the whole, successful). The natives respond to that. But dont do any more. If we send too many ships, (she continued), theyll think were scared. That their rebellion amounts to any more than a fly that wed swat, but only if were really bothered, and had nothing more important to worry about. And, besides (she concluded) there is such a thing as elegance. Grace under pressure. Oh, you know, Admiral economy. Elegance. Economy. But no, he had to play the Big Boy, and try out his Big-Boys toys. A small scuffle with the Slunj would be an excellent, low-risk opportunity to give the 17th Rigel Fleet a much-needed trial in extended battle formation. All of it. All those millions of cruisers, each one seven kilometers of ceramic ellipsoid techno-beefcake with three hundred kilolights under the hood, together deploying a quite eye-watering exatonnage of armament. All those destroyers, too tens of thousands of them each one the size of a small continent, and for which the term destroyer could be read as a wantonly cynical understatement. The hundreds of planet-sized capital ships, each one loaded with magneto-relativistic rail-gun howitzers capable of accelerating a city-sized nickel-iron asteroid from rest to point-oh-five lights by the time it got to the giga-Tesla muzzle, and then dropping it to within five hundred meters of its target from a light-months distance and doing this again and again, hundreds of times an hour. And the jewel in the crown and his own, personal, fiefdom the Sorceror, a spaceship that looked like a planet in every way, because it was one. With oceans, continents, deserts, forests, atmosphere, and life: yes, a synthetic planet, and all his own, for all that its mantle was a gigantic robe of the most muscular machinery that his engineers could contrive continuum flux generators that would allow trans-spatial velocity of almost half a million light-years per hour. Anywhere in the Galaxy at the flick of a switch. Taking with it, of course, a retinue of moon-sized outriders that both illuminated the spaceship (giving a pleasing reality to the old canard of the Sun in orbit about the Earth) as well as toting the kinds of System-Superiority weapons that could turn gas-giants to insubstantial fog. And yet the 17th Rigel Fleet was one of hundreds of such forces, the grand armament that marked the crown and pinnacle of Earths Imperial might, which had been going for time immemorial, it seemed, and looked every inch eternal, a claimant to the Galaxy by right, as well as by force of arms, which as far as he, soon-to-be ex-Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa was concerned amounted to very much the same thing. What the Senior Undersecretary could never understand, despite the sparkle in those eyes (nice legs, too, lest one forget) was that fleets need to be deployed, even in times of relative peace and quiet such as this, the Pax Terrestris that most of the Galaxy, its thousands of starfaring species, its hundreds of thousands of inhabited Systems, its hundreds of millions of stars had enjoyed for more than a quarter of a million years. Fleets as large and complex as the 17th Rigel needed constant testing and refinement (boys can always justify choosing and using the most extravagant toys). All those millions (hundreds of millions) of troops had to have something to do: they couldnt spend all their time hanging about. All those idle hands, and the Devil always having need of jobs to be done. The Senior Under-Secretary should understand that, at least. And, anyway, who really cared about the messages, psychological or political, that one might send to a few irrelevant scuts of piratical pond scum? But there are other things in space besides sentient slime, and toys are so easily broken, oh-so-soon-to-be-ex-Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa. So that was his name, was it? It sounded well, it sounded familiar, of course it did. But also strangely new, as if the words were freshly minted, still with their brand-new gossamer shine, their potential yet to be dulled by the brute fact of their utterance. His mind directed his tongue muscles to rehearse this exciting new syllabary. No response came. No matter. In any case, what was all this soon-to-be-ex business? Pulse rose. Body fluids changed their conductivity. Whats that? Panic? Alarms ripped. Lights pulsed. He woke. Parts of him (he wasnt sure which parts) started to shake uncontrollably. But something else something other forced him down. He opened his eyes, hungry for information. The blur, agonizingly bright at first, resolved, pixel-fashion, into a face he thought hed seen before, somewhere. But where? Frustration. Blood surge. Restraint. The doctor spoke, then. Please be calm, Admiral, it said. You are gravely injured, As yet you are unable to move, owing to the absence of many of your essential parts. To tell the truth, they had to scrape what was left of you off the inside of the escapod. Woof! Twenty-five gees and even the pippiest, stripiest Admiral is no more than a few blobs of strawberry jam. Oh, very amusing. Just what the Slunj looked like, even in the peak of health. And they were the good-looking ones. Such poetic justice. However, all parts necessary will have been supplied, tested and bedded down by the time we get there. Youll be a new man! Get... there? Where? He was not aware of having made any sound (perhaps he hadnt a mouth or vocal cords) but the doctor did not seem to think this a problem. She (she was a she) laughed. The music of that voice stirred something, an old memory, flitting like a cheeky, insouciant fish through the holes in the ragged net of his mind, and into the blue void beyond.. Ah, of course, you wont have known, what with ... well, what with everything thats happened. Youre in an autopod. Dont worry. Well fix you up as soon as we can. The doctor looked distractedly to the side, out of view. Perhaps she was taking a reading from some life-support machinery. Perhaps she was, in fact, an illusion and had vanished completely. In his state it was hard to tell. But .... where? Sorry! Counting stitches. This a voice only. So familiar, but so elusive. Maddening! On the El: eight thousand kilometers up, falling slowly, arrival Coromandel Station in ... well, lets not worry about that yet. Earth? Where else? Just lie back not that youve much choice, really, Admiral and think of Gondwanaland. Soon-to-be-ex-Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa had just enough wit to realize that his homecoming might be sufficiently painful that atomization somewhere the other side of Rigel might have been the preferable option. The first sign of trouble had come not long after the fleet regrouped three lights out from the disputed system and started to scan its surroundings for a force of Slunj as yet conspicuous by its absence. The primary was a dismal M-type dwarf that could offer no more haven than a couple of pallid gas-giants; a scree of disconsolate, icy pebbles; and, close in, an absolute jewel of a blue planet, a little smaller than Earth, currently home to several well-established but vulnerable Discotex colony hives. The billion-year Discotex civilization was a notable beneficiary of the Pax Terrestris, which had all but driven its traditional enemies, the savagely asocial, mountain-sized Flux Fiddlers that infested the atmospheres of star-grazing gas giants, to extinction. But Discotex colonies had since proven uniquely vulnerable to Slunj infestation, necessitating the current exemplary show of force. But the interchange hadnt all been one way. Now peaceful and given to somewhat exotic collectivist philosophies (the product of intelligences that changed in time and timbre with the ever-changing swarms of dragonfly-like creatures of which each hive intelligence was constituted), the Discotex had learned much in their eons-long conflict. Especially about some of the more imaginative uses of hypertransuranic elements, now incorporated into several of the more breathtakingly assertive armaments of the 17th Rigel and many similar fleets, and whose use had proven decisive in several recent conflicts that might otherwise have dragged on much longer. The bottom line was that Earth owed the Discotex, big time. The Senior Under-Secretary should understand that, too. A couple of gunboats, indeed. Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa had felt the skin on the back of his neck tingle even as the first messages trickled in the stage of spare, disconnected and puzzling reports, before, even, the full picture of the threat had been made clear. He should have acted then, of course. Acted on instinct pulling his immensely powerful and complex, but delicate and (as the Senior Under-Secretary constantly reminded him) very expensive fleet away, away from danger. But no, he had deployed his fleet (his fleet, mark you), and he wasnt going to pull it back now. And also because the earliest signs that things might have gone awry piqued his curiosity. They were so odd, you see. He had to find out more. The first message was less about annihilation than astrogation. A sub-formation of cruisers and destroyers in an advance battle group reported what seemed to be a systematic error. They had, through no fault of their own, ended up of the far side of the system, relative to the main fleet. Doppler ranging confirmed this, but no explanation could be advanced. The continuum flux generators of the seventy-eight thousand vessels concerned were working within 99.9% optimal spec, and, anyway, what could have happened to have affected the whole group simultaneously? It made no sense. These messages were relayed to the currently favored Bridge of the Sorceror, a ginkgo-shaded sun-terrace of an impressive lamasery, perched with a snub to the usual requirements of gravity on the edge of a volcanic crater-lake so huge that one could hardly see from one side to the other. Naturally warmed by gently slumbering magma below, the lake made an ideal home for a tropical reef biota, transported there at great cost from idyllic spots all over this and many other planets, natural and synthetic. And the view over the edge to uninterrupted jungle two thousand meters below, roaring with creodonts and uintatheres was amazing. Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa loved almost nothing more than to swoop down the slopes of his private faux-volcano in a pteroglider and blast away with rocket-propelled grenades at the flocks of phorusrhachids gigantic flightless birds, each one lethally carnivorous and armed with half-meter razors for bills that prowled the forest floor. A dangerous pastime, especially if one was dunked in the jungle by a stalled glider. But phorusrhachid meat was unbeatable for flavor, and RPGs had the beneft of killing and cooking it in one easy step. All you had to do was add the barbecue sauce. But his preferred sport was to do what he was doing then, when the first signs of trouble were no more than sun-dogs on the horizon to be dressed in nothing more than a brilliant blue and red kimono, musing on a sun-lounger, drink in hand, idly watching some of his younger, female staff cavorting on the brilliant white beach below. The sunshine and the soft lapping of waves had predictable effects. But the gentle slide from reality into mildly erotic fantasy was brought to an abrupt end as an urgent message peeped on his comms node. His glass fell from his hand, shattering on the terrace. One flick of the mind and he was there, in uniform, on the VR Command Deck. It was in entirely uncharacteristic uproar. Staff were sweating at their consoles; barking through comms ports and at one another; his younger, female staff, now coolly and crisply uniformed, were deep in VR gear, or shuttling glittering icons in four-D battle maps. There were even engineers on the deck in urgent conclave with junior officers, huddled over luminous displays. That engineers were present at all on the Command Deck showed that something, clearly, had gone horribly wrong. No sooner was his presence noted than he was assaulted with messages, requests, clarifications, status reports, updates. With practiced ease he bounced them to his personal AI core for a shakedown, and this is what he learned: that thirteen minutes after broadcasting their initial inquiry, the advance battle group, all seventy-eight thousand vessels, had disappeared. But no, not quite an update. Most of them seemed to have gone, but their last known volume was now occupied with a field of fragments ranging in size from the subatomic to nothing larger than a childs clenched fist, and all intensely radioactive. But the estimated sum of all this mass could account for no more than a hundredth of one percent of that of all those ships that had disappeared. With all hands. What was worse, the dreadful fate that had met the advance battle group was, sickeningly, turning out not to be an isolated case. The destruction seemed to be spreading like a contagion, affecting ships first in small groups ships that would flash in and out of existence around the system and then vanish altogether, leaving no more than a faint smear of atoms and hard radiation. Like the shadows of people exposed to nuclear blasts, imprinted on the buildings behind them. Small groups became larger groups, until Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraas entire beloved 17th Rigel Fleet found itself for all that it was anchored, on station ploughing into a wave of destruction, a storm-front beyond which the regular laws of the Universe seemed to have been suspended. He felt the thrum and screech of rending rock and metal, and the peal of alarms. Standing at the bridge but powerless to command it, Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa queried his AI core. The Sorceror was large enough to register and triangulate significant local gravitational anomalies. His AI told him that near-space was full of them localized gravitational disturbances so intense that the continuum itself had, in places, warped in on itself, enfolding any nearby matter including his fleet in shrouds of nothingness. And then, just as suddenly, unfolding, spitting out the pips . It was as if the 17th Rigel was being peppered with rapidly moving black holes, and being tossed in their wakes as they passed by. He flipped back to the sun terrace to see the crater-lake in a confusion of spume, rocks, noise, and coral grapeshot that raked his flesh like hot razors. The ground shifted beneath his feet, but, try as he might, he could not move: his feet were so heavy they might have been nailed to the travertine flags. This was, he reflected, unhelpful, as a rogue gravitational pulse was, at that very moment, trying to rip his head off. He must have passed out. Either that, or his AI core did the decent thing, winking him out, squirting what was left of his disintegrating carcass into an escapod, and blasting its way out of the killing zone. Very few among the six hundred and seventy-three million souls in the 17th Rigel would have had access to such a luxury. But he was the Admiral, and in cases of disaster, whether natural or caused by some almighty hubristic cock-up, somebody had to face the music. The recovery of soon-to-be-ex-Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa was slow but steady. At each stage his local environment appeared to become richer, grander. When he was well enough to sit up in bed and go through some light eye-brain calibration exercises with the doctor, he seemed to be occupying a spare but comfortable room not unlike the rustic minimalist-marine beach cabana of which he was once so fond. The one next to the crater-lake on the Sorceror, in the lee of the lamasery, in which he and an ever-changing parade of his younger female colleagues would now, how should he admit this, even to himself? lets say towel one another dry, then after bathing in the lagoon. He reflected that he did not feel well enough to take pleasure in the inevitable warmth that these memories elicited. And the shame that these colleagues had all died because of him made him wish for some other quarters, less emotionally loaded. His wish was granted, as soon as he was well enough to walk around on his new legs, if haltingly, and with the help of a frame. His quarters had transmuted to an elegant stateroom straight out of a period of grandeur a few tens of millennia earlier, the era of the great Trans-Arcturus luxury spaceliners, all faceted lead-glass, fluted brass and plumped, crimson-velvet soft-furnishings. Standing, propping himself up on the back of a turned-mahogany fauteuil, he decided to try, once again, the latest exercise he doctor had set him: to navigate the six steps between chair and breakfast bar without support of any kind. Those six steps might have been six light years, but he had to succeed, eventually. Had to. All his several previous attempts had failed. About three steps in hed always had to cheat and grasp a rail, or his strategically place walking frame. Now for it. One ... two (slight wobble, overcome) ... three (that frame looked so tempting, but he resisted its siren song)... four.... five ... and, unbelievably, six. Hed made it to the breakfast bar, where he stood, shaking, not daring to move further, sweat starting from every pore. He turned to see the doctor, standing in the open door. Congratulations, she said. And then she smiled. And that was when Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa realized where hed seen her face before. Xalom? Cambridge, England January 2001 July 2003 The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Henry David Thoreau Walden Sorry Im late! Bike puncture. You know. The girl breezed into Jack Corstorphines freezing office, a collision of scarf, hands, long, brown hair and longer legs, all radiating from a huge, shapeless sweater which at the beginning of its evidently long life might once have been purple. She sat down in the only empty chair, the one farthest from the door, almost but not quite tripping over the three already more than occupied by the bovine rowers from St Johns. Jack, notes in hand, had been just about to open his mouth to introduce todays supervision topic evidence for culture in the African Middle Stone Age in part to compensate for the gaping holes in the lectures given by his doctorate supervisor, Professor MacLennane. But when he looked up, the words froze in his mouth. Now that the girl had found her seat, she was engaged in a flurry of business, pulling off the sack-like sweater (she had no coat) and getting her notes out of an unwieldy market bag, the contents of which were spilling out all over the floor. Amid the usual feminine detritus (why are the interiors of womens bags so shockingly untidy?) Jack noticed the glint of an oversized, tortoiseshell-plastic comb. Caught in a reverie, mouth still open for another two-thirds of a second, he noticed that the comb had all its teeth, which was amazing given the amount of hair it plainly had to deal with. The girl, notes now found, sat up, and as she did so, parted the curtain of hair from her face, raising her arms to do so, pushing out her chest. Jack caught the impression of small, well-formed breasts pushing at the insides of her otherwise baggy and crumpled lumberjack shirt as she did this but, noticing himself staring, moved his gaze fractionally but abruptly upwards (another three-fifths of a second) and was, finally, inevitably caught. For, just as his eyes tracked across her face, she smiled. It was the most frank, open smile hed ever seen, her broad mouth bracketed by deep dimples, a smile made lovelier by her evident distraction as she fought the long defeat of trying to confine at least some of her hair in a barrette. Now he could see her face, he noticed the flush of her cheeks in a clear, slightly olive complexion, dominated by two big, very round, very brown eyes. Jack was pulled up sharply (three-eighths of a second) by the penetrating, judgmental ferocity of those eyes, at least when taken on their own, without the disarming contrast of the welcoming warmth of her mouth. Jade Markham? Er sorry? Youre Jade Markham, arent you? Jack couldnt help but smile at her in response to her apparent absent-mindedness. Not that hed be fooled. Those eyes. Those eyes gave every impression that the disorganized exterior concealed a mind like the proverbial steel trap. She stopped smiling, just then, and her brown eyes dulled, as if momentarily consulting some deep, interior resource. Just to find her own name. Having retrieved this information, she smiled again, a flash that filled the room. Just for an instant (one-eighth of a second) he felt that hed been pulled clear from his body and was floating in empty space. Yes. Thats me. So that makes you Jack Corstorphine, doesnt it? I must have come to the right place. What a relief! The African Middle Stone Age had never been so inviting. Then in his second year of a doctorate program (Models of land use derived from geomorphology and lithic distributions in the British Palaeolithic), Jack found that supervisions teaching undergraduates in small groups not only supplemented their meager instruction from their lecturers, and his own exiguous stipend, but filled, for him, a social void. Jacks tact, reserve, laconic humor (and a reasonable capacity for administration) soon came to the notice of hard-pressed college tutors looking for a safe pair of hands for their charges. So, without really noticing, Jack spent much of his waking, working life teaching undergraduates. He found that he enjoyed it very much, not least because it was the one part of his life in which he was forced to interact with other human beings, not just on the intellectual level, but on any level at all. Although attached to a college, as all Cambridge students were obliged to be, Jack found few attractions in college life. His field work was by necessity solitary: his laboratory work, hardly less. Not that he really minded. Tall, broad-shouldered and rangy, and good-looking in a somewhat angular way, the long, lonely hours of research suited his naturally retiring temperament. And coming from a northern provincial town, where he had attended the local university as an undergraduate, he found Cambridge by turns confusing, exciting and depressing. He felt he should be stimulated by at all, and he was, up to a point. But he suspected that nothing he could ever feel about his life and work in Cambridge would ever match the shining-eyed expectations of his parents, on learning that their only child, having been the only one in their family ever to have attended a university at all, was going to crown his study in what, to them, was a city of romantic associations: punting on the river and May Balls, strawberries-and-cream, champagne breakfasts and black-tie dinners, like something out of Brideshead Revisited. He hadnt the heart to tell them that his day-to-day life in Cambridge was no less threadbare than theirs, in industrial West Yorkshire. He enjoyed studying as he came to enjoy teaching, but his real love was the outdoors. He tramped alone, all over England, refining an already intuitive yet sharp sense of landscape, and how human beings (and other people) had shaped it over millennia. He poked into crabbed caves in the bleak limestone of Derbyshire, the foam-flecked Gower peninsula of south Wales, and bluebell-lined Torbay, trying to picture each scene through a Neanderthals eyes; he scoured the Vale of Pickering beneath the North York Moors, where some of Britains earliest stockmen had corralled their cattle. For weeks at a time hed live rough, fishing by day, camping in potholes or under hedgerows at night, returning to his disapproving landlady in Victoria Road, stinking, bright-eyed and bearded, like an Old-Testament prophet. I was trying to find out what it must have been like, he would protest, weakly and futilely, as she prodded him (with her broom) towards the bathroom. This quiet young man who had found most of his need for company satisfied by wind on the fells was, in Cambridge, just beginning to emerge from his shell. He admitted that it was the undergraduates who were responsible for this injection of what was it? Yes, life. In those relatively short periods of the year when the undergraduates were in season, as it were, life was one big whirl, as if the circus had come to town. When they left again, and he as a graduate student had to keep on working, all was grey and dull. The fact was that even the dimmest Cambridge undergraduate had a shameless self-assurance that could stand any assault, overcome any challenge. Jack soon learned that the students he taught here reached greater heights and harrowed deeper depths than his colleagues from his home town. They seemed more focused, more colorful, more alive. The African Middle Stone Age was Now, this was something that always amazed him. As soon as he drew himself up to speak, putting on his official supervision voice, they were all attention. This never happened at his old university, where a patina of well-meaning dullness coated all endeavor. Whats more, it felt good, as a departmental dogsbody, to be treated as an authority. Even then, Jack saw that his latest student, Jade Markham, was just that bit more studious, more attentive, than any of the others. Her initial lateness was her one anomaly. Her assignments were always returned on time, and were always substantially better argued than anyone elses. She had a way of taking every aspect of a problem apart, no matter how woolly it seemed; polishing up the parts to reveal the assumptions on which each aspect was based; reducing these, in turn, to their elements; modeling how the aspects should look if put together correctly; and then, just, well doing it, achieving original insights into questions which (Jack realized in hindsight) had been intractable simply because nobody had seen fit to question their underlying assumptions. On the face of it, what she was doing was simple, just science, in the raw. On the other hand, it was as refreshing as finding a door in a hitherto neglected garden wall which everyone had just walked past, without even noticing that it was there. the Middle Stone Age describes a series of cultures over an enormous period of time The three rowers from St Johns scribbled in their notebooks, heads down. Jade Markhams notebook lay untouched on her faded denim lap, as she gazed, apparently unblinking, at Jack, her face in an unnerving frown of concentration. and some of these cultures were very sophisticated. Surprisingly so, given their antiquity, and that some of the well, the toolmakers probably werent human. At least, not in the way wed understand it today. And so it went on, week after week, those assignments returned with insouciant perfection, those eyes boring holes into his soul. His nights were spent wondering what Jade Markham looked like without her clothes on. By day, he reasoned that any favoritism he showed might be related to the simple fact that Jade could only ever seem attractive compared with the three cauliflower-eared specimens that made up the rest of her particular class, and the fact that his reticence, and preference for ruggedly solitary activity, explained his general failure to get his leg over. However Could he be favoring her because she was the pretty one, the only female, as well as being the one with that extra sparkle? This caused him some private anguish, so he tried a scientific experiment. He asked some of his departmental colleagues who knew none of his students personally to rate their work, names removed, in a double-blind test. Jades always came out on top. At last! Heres someone with some initiative, some promise, Professor MacLennane had said. This is first-class material, no doubt about that. It shows such clarity of thought, something only too rare nowadays. She could go far. Keep your eye on her. Not that Jack had the slightest intention of averting his gaze, but at least, he reasoned, he could appreciate her better without a guilty conscience. It was only later that it occurred to him that he hadnt told Professor MacLennane that the student whod turned in this stellar work was female. So how did he know? The very moment that Jades time with him as a supervisor ended, Jack asked her on a date. And not just any date, but the Clare College May Ball. If shed only accept, Jack thought, and if my parents could see me then! And if I should succeed in getting tickets! He shouldnt have worried that she might refuse. Jack wasnt to know that Jade was just emerging from the wreckage of an intense long-term attachment with a boy from her home town on the Surrey-Hampshire borders: a boy whod only become more jealous and petulant as it became ever clearer that Jades talents and ambitions would eclipse his own. She didnt show it, but she was finding it hard to sever the connection without being made to feel guilty and wretched. In which case, an old-fashioned, romantic night out with the kindly supervisor in no way threatening or overbearing, and anyway, kind of nice would be just the tonic she needed (or so her girlfriends told her). He was clearly not the type to be jealous or possessive, which would be a relief, after what shed been through lately. His arresting blue eyes, the way his mouth always seemed to curl upwards on one side as if he was just about to laugh, and (let one not forget!) his husky, well-muscled form, gave the lie to the reticent exterior. She secretly suspected she even dared to hope that he might even be fun. And the venue! Clare College, on the river itself, with its charming stone bridge, was as romantic a date as anyone could ask for. And if he became attentive to an irritating degree (which would be boring), or just plain boring (which would be irritating), she could easily lose him in the proliferation of sideshows, rock bands, jazz quartets and food and drink stalls that wafted the lucky guests from dusk until dawn. It was not unknown (she was secretly shocked to learn) for a girl to arrive with one consort and leave with another. And given that Clare May Ball tickets cost an absolute fortune and demand always outstripped supply, what sensible girl could refuse? And if Jade Markham was attractive, she was even more sensible. The Ball was an enchantment from beginning to end. Jade dressed in a plain, black strapless gown that showed off her clear skin, against which her dark eyes made a teasing drama, counterbalanced by cascading hair that she didnt even attempt to restrain. When Jack had overcome his tendency to gulp whenever he looked at her, he found her to be perfect company, naturally poised and dignified and never clingy (which Jack wouldnt have minded so much) or bubbly (which hed have hated), and he well, he was the perfect gentleman he always knew he could be. With such a Lady on his arm, Jack felt like James Bond, far more than the shy junior scientist he would be when dawn crept up over Clares lawns and parapets. The night progressed smoothly on a seamless carpet of stars, and, much as he wanted to, he dared not make any obvious pass at her for fear of bruising that fragile magic, of shattering a perfect state of grace which could, with careful management, persist indefinitely. Please dont end, he thought, he implored please dont let it end. Jack dropped her off at the door of her house by car, his ageing and rust-pocked Peugeot 205 Diesel, whose back seat and trunk were littered with maps and paperwork mixed crazily with mud-caked camping and hiking gear. Hardly Cinderellas carriage, but a car all the same, a luxury not permitted undergraduates in Cambridges crabbed, crowded streets, and which Jade seemed to think impressive. They said nothing, neither wanting to be the first to break the spell, and so acknowledge that even two hours after daybreak, the enchanted night had come to an end at last. But she was all excitement, her eyes the brightest things in the cars interior. That Jack had not made any advance whatsoever she was well aware, and for that she was grateful. Such a contrast with the boys boys shed so far known, all acquisitive, hot hands, groins filled to bursting with unused testosterone, and no idea of how to cultivate the romance that grown-up women really liked best. Grateful, yes. But not satisfied. Shed long been used to compliments, to being told how lovely she was, and soon learned to disregard all but a few as insincere: Jack was the first real man whod asked her on a date, and while he had treated her with every old-fashioned courtesy, he had not shown any sign of deeper passion or intention. She strongly suspected, however, that Jack was no cold fish, and this suspicion teased and tickled her. As it was, however, the situation as it was could go on forever. If he wouldnt make the first move, then she would. As they came to a stop he was pulled up sharp by the first thing she said: Im so sorry about my name. Your name? Jack, in truth, had been wondering. He didnt think he was a snob, but hed often wondered how such a name and such a girl went together they seemed such ill-assorted company. Well, its like this. Its short for Jadis. My parents my parents! they were at Oxford, you know. Magdalen. And, well, they had a thing about C. S. Lewis. But Jadis, wasnt she? Yes, the Witch. You know, between the Lion and the Wardrobe, she paused the baddie! she laughed. I suppose my parents were expecting me to be a handful. Were you? Well, I had to live up to it, didnt I? And with that she reached over and kissed him. Her hair brushed his face and shoulders: as their lips came together, hers parted slightly, her tongue probed out to meet his, questioning, exploring, at once forceful and shy. Her mouth was so soft that Jack could hardly imagine anything could be any softer without melting. Women, he concluded, with the tiny part of his mind not completely absorbed, were attractive because of their contrasts. Jade was soft and yet decisive; firm, and yet submissive. What Wicked Witch would ever cradle up into anyones arms his arms quite like this? After a long moment they pulled apart. She couldnt invite him in, she said, as she needed to get herself together before traveling home, later that same morning. Run along now, she giggled, or youll turn into a pumpkin! But as she rose to get out of the car, Jack brushed against her arm: at this, she sprang back into the car and his arms for another kiss. Jack drifted off home like thistledown, and as he had a late breakfast in his digs still in his rented tux he might as well have been floating on air. His landlady (whod seen this all before, many times) permitted herself a rare smile. Welcome back, Romeo, she said. Jack was grateful that despite the hour, she hadnt greeted him with the business end of her broom. The summer vacation seemed to drag on. Jade went home; Jack started another of his endless field trips, this time to explore some limestone caves in Devon that hadnt been visited for a century. Sometime in the middle of August, Jade made her way westwards and in a wooded dell beneath the looming edge of Dartmoor, they came together. Life for the next two years was a tale of long periods of frustration punctuated by explosive release. It was hard to concentrate on lectures and studying, but Jade, for all her skittishness, could only be a party girl when her own self-imposed timetable let her. As her final exams approached, she rationed her meetings with Jack. They avoided the temptation of moving in together, so that each meeting was a jewel in their busy lives, a cache of memories to be treasured, and when recalled, yearned for all the more. Jack continued his field work, his ceaseless migrations across the ancient landscape of Britain, but where he had once seen bald crags and meandering valleys purely as they were, his mind now infused each vista with erotic overlays. In the curve of a far hilltop at dawn, drenched in the blue of distance, he traced the swelling form of Jades left hip, sweeping down to shadowed thighs and belly, as they had once lain together in the half-light of a secret, stolen early morning in her college room before he made his daring escape through the first-floor window and down into the street, far from the disapproving gaze of the college porters. The clothing of woods that clung in crevices at the bases of shorn downland ridges became the warm fuzz between her legs that he had once caressed, as gently as he could manage, before she made a small, uncharacterizable sound and gathered him inside her once more. Every curl of smoke from a village chimney became the cloud of her hair as she unfastened it, letting it tumble over her face, her shoulders, as far as the incurving of her waist. In the glint of sun on water, and even the reflection of light on the lenses of his surveying equipment, he saw her wide eyes, in a perpetual expression of owlish surprise. What a noodle he was turning out to be. But he had his work, too, and a career to pursue. Who knew where he would have to find work after his doctorate, always assuming he got that far? And who knew where Jade would go? He suppressed the thought that in the nomadic world of academic life, let alone the mayfly existence of undergraduates, they might soon be parted. At last the summer came when Jade took her final exams. As expected, she graduated at the top of her class, and when she came out of the Senate House with the result, she was as flushed and excited as a little girl whod just been given the Christmas present shed always wanted. On seeing Jack, she turned from the small gathering of her friends, and, running to him, flung her arms round his neck and, before he had even a moment to whisper a word of congratulation, rained kisses down on him like a summer storm. When at length they parted, she looked up at him as if appraising him all anew. What is it? he asked. Well, now thats over, she said, I can help you. To be sure, Jack found himself in need of help. Just how badly he was reluctant to admit to himself. He knew only too well how a blow to ones self confidence in the final stages of a research degree could destroy everything. Hed seen, so many times, how research students started with so much ebullience, only to find, more than two years later and within sight of the dreadful midnight watch they called writing-up, that what they had accumulated actually amounted to very little. Drifts of accumulated data vanished like April snow in the first light of critical analysis. Worse, that they had spent those years asking the wrong questions to begin with; that however good the data they had gathered, that there was, in sum, no case to be answered. Or, worse still, that they had, in technical language and with much circumlocution, done something that had been worked out already, but in some other way. Or, worst of all, that they had simply proved, with certainty and without fear of contradiction, that x equals x. Department of the Bleeding Obvious. So much time wasted. And more than wasted. Those self-abasing, self-denying years of energy and youth irretrievable, when careers are built, and they might, like their school friends, already have steady jobs in industry or in the City, with mortgages and some status in life. With partners and families, rather than living like overgrown students in drabness and in debt. But Jack was as tough as the outcrops of millstone grit in the moors around his Yorkshire home town. He would let nothing shake him. In any case, his problems were not yet terminal, for he could make out patterns in his data this, the most exciting sensation a scientist can experience. He was simply at a loss to understand how they could be organized. As a result of his long pilgrimages, he could view a landscape and immediately sense that people had been there, long ago. Jack had gone far beyond looking for traces of buried roads, post-holes, cave hearths and flint debitage. More than anyone alive, he could look at the angle of a hill-slope, or the way a river curved in its course, and tell that these things had been shaped by the hand of man, even without any other sign, and even accounting for the titanic forces of climate change that had shaped Britain over the past million years, in which glaciers had come and gone, scrubbing entire ranges of hills from the map and altering the courses of rivers over their whole lengths. His talent had become so internalized that he could no longer look dispassionately at its products. That these things were so he had no doubt but he had no way of demonstrating, objectively, that the subtle clues he saw were not made by natural forces, unaided. But hed look a right gowk if his thesis committee asked how he knew that, say, the layout of the caves in Cheddar Gorge could not possibly have been natural, and he had had no answer ready, save that they just looked like that. Hed be laughed off as surely as if hed said hed discovered Atlantis. What he needed was some formal way of comparing his intuitions of ancient human presence in one place, with those inspired by somewhere else, and then contrasting both of these with what nature would have created, unaided. He needed a system that would corral the patterns thrown up by his gut reaction, to domesticate them, to force them to make sense. But quantifying his intuitions? How do you quantify a river-bend, or the feeling that a hilltop should be here, rather than somewhere else? One might as well try to lasso the clouds. Despite much research and earnest questions of statisticians, no ready method existed it was all too vague. He had neither the means nor (he admitted to himself, ruefully) the ability to derive such a technique himself. Yet without such a key he could go no further. In his mind, he could see his thesis: he was so desperate that he could almost taste his thesis, but a barrier at once so intangible and yet so impassable stood between him and completion. He had this recurring dream in which he and Jade were at a tropical beach. Jade, in a colorful kaftan and a big floppy hat, stayed on the shore, nose in a huge novel, too engrossed to do more than wave carelessly when he announced he was going for a swim. Cut to himself fifty yards out, and despite all his efforts, in the thrall of a riptide which pulled him yet further away from land. He shouted to Jade for help but she didnt seem to notice. Just before he woke, his last thought was of being almost sure that Jade had taken off the kaftan, and was naked but for the hat, but he couldnt be certain, as she was too far away now to make out very clearly, and he got fewer and fewer glimpses of her, sandwiched between a sunhat that had grown as large as a parasol, and what seemed like a self-generating library of books. It could be, he admitted finally, that hed simply have to chuck it all in as an insoluble problem. Roaming around the countryside had been fun, he thought, but perhaps he lacked the talent to put it all together and make it work as a piece of scholarship. But he was loath to admit this to anyone, not to his parents, and especially not Jade. Not yet. He wondered if hed ever have the courage. And so, helplessly, he clung on. Jades news, on the Senate House lawn, came as something of a revelation, the proverbial bolt from the blue. In hindsight, he felt that he was too preoccupied to have seen it coming. Their most recent mutual absence had lasted five weeks, while Jade studied for her finals, and Jack kept well away, exploring a new tack, in southern France for comparative purposes, he told Professor MacLennane, inventing a new euphemism for desperation. Long ago, he recalled from some sodden mental archive, Jade had been marked down as doctorate material. Indeed, how could he forget, as he was the first of her supervisors to spot her talent? (And how dare he, come to that?) But everyone knew that getting a doctorate place as a dead certainty, along with the grants to fund it, meant that the student had to excel in her undergraduate studies beyond almost all measure to go right off the chart of the ordinary, and launch into new critical territory. And this is what Jade was now trying to get through to him, here on the Senate House lawn, with her lips, the warmth of her hands under his jacket, on his shoulder blades, the cloud of hair brushing his cheeks and chin, the insistent press of her body against his. She had graduated with sufficient distinction that a doctorate course was hers, whenever she wanted it, and, because it was the starriest starred-first-class degree that anyone had seen for years, she could, pretty much, pick and choose her course and her supervisor. I choose you, Jack, she said in a small voice, almost cracked, her brown eyes softening, and puzzled by his momentary stunned shock, his distraction. Darling Jack, you silly man, I choose you. But she said, regaining a somewhat starchy and old-fashioned composure, as if auditioning for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, they said youd have to get your degree first. And a Fellowship. It would be wrong to say, for Jack, that the clouds parted and the Sun shone. More, that Jade had become the persistent trickle of water that eventually erodes a cavern beneath ragged mountains otherwise impervious to physical assault. He felt himself smiling, and said something which, for all the intensity of their togetherness, for all its rightness, hed carefully avoided saying for two years, for if hed said it out loud, he reasoned, hed bring the sunny morning of their relationship to a close: I love you, he said. Jade buried her face into the expanse of his chest, and, silently, for she had never done so before, started to cry. Hand in hand, they crossed Kings Parade and found a perch in a coffee shop, amid the jostling crowds of excited students. Jack was agog with surprise at what Jade now told him. Only her animated smile kept him from the remorseful certainty that even with her evident acuity, of which hed had the first and most intimate knowledge, he had still underestimated her. A little bird tells me, she began. Or, actually, two little birds, that youre stuck. He hung his head. Like a schoolboy caught thieving apples. She peered forward, looking up at his face: Dont be so down. One of those little birds is me, remember? Even when weve been, you know, in bed, youve been miles away. Have I? He tried to smile, and succeeded, although inside he now felt wretched. This was, after all, her day, not his, and he was spoiling it, and what made it worse, she didnt seem to mind at all. Yes. Quite off-putting, actually. And when I saw you off to France, you looked like leave had been cancelled and you were bound for the Western Front. That bad, eh? His smile spread. Well, I did miss you, Snow Queen. And I missed you, too. For all those weeks, the hours spent revising, Jade had to keep driving herself as fast and as hard as possible to stave off the ghastly ache that scraped at her insides every time she thought about him. His smile, as if he had just recalled some very old joke; his blue eyes, always sparkling with the memory of it. The sanctuary of his arms. He called her his Snow Queen, but to her he was Aslan, the Lion, had he only known it. But she had never told him, for she didnt think she would ever be able to cram the fiery fluster of feelings that assailed her whenever she thought of Jack into the confines of language. He had become the rock on which she had built what? Herself! She had once been so sure of everything, that she knew what she wanted in life and how to achieve it. But now she could see that she had been nothing but a small child playing among the feet of giants, her assurance a product of her ignorance that the towering limbs all around her even existed. Jack didnt say very much, but what he said was always the right thing to say, and at least he was always there. Without him she had become nothing. With the books, papers and printouts piled on her desk at three oclock in the morning, when shed had to take a break, only herculean effort could keep her away from imagining herself safely encircled in his warm compass. And how, when she looked up from her dream, all was bare and monochromatic; she was pale, lost and hollow and the long silent weeks still stretched far ahead of her. But that was all over now, in the past, and she would say nothing of it to Jack. She leaned further across the small table and took both his hands in hers. Well, youre back now. And heres the deal. She explained her plan as they walked down Kings Parade and did a circuit around the Backs. While he was away, she said, shed run into Professor MacLennane in the departmental coffee room, whod said well not actually said, but suggested, you know, as it probably wasnt really any of her business that Jack had a lot of data, perhaps more than he could cope with, especially as he now should be calling a halt and writing it all up. Going off to France was all very well, but why a new direction now? Jade had explained that Jack, very considerately, she thought, wanted to keep well out of her way while she was working towards her own finals, and Professor MacLennane knew about their domestic situation, you know, which everyone in the department had probably known about for the past couple of years Jack could well imagine the electricity of this exchange, and his heart went out to Jade for playing with fire, all for his benefit. Roger Sutherland MacLennane, FRS, was a bluff, hard-working scientist whose lust for life regularly spilled over into the thickets of impropriety. A smart and still dashingly handsome man whod just turned sixty, he was the editor of the leading scholarly journal in its field; had papers in Nature more often than most people changed their socks; a tolerant (and very rich) wife who had borne him six children; and a fondness for fast, expensive cars, which he would regularly crash. If that werent enough, he had at least two mistresses, and his extended periods in the field allowed plenty of opportunity for deflowering female research students. But if he werent in the field, and had worked his way through all the available (and willing) victims, hed always make out with a nurse. Roger by name, and Roger by nature, ran the departmental gossip. MacLennanes ability as a scientist is very great one senior don remarked to another at High Table, perhaps indiscreetly in Jacks hearing, exceeded only by his capacity as a nurse-shagger. As they walked, Jades hands framing the story of her interview with MacLennane, her eyes focused inquisitively in the middle distance, Jack enjoyed a fly-on-the-wall fantasy in which MacLennane would have finally met his match. The intensity of the reverie increased with the certainty that Jade would not have had any idea of the effect she must have had. Well, perhaps, almost none. He should have learned his lesson by now: that underestimating the talents of Jade Markham was always a serious mistake. He imagined MacLennane leaning towards her, and Jade suppressing a giggle as she noticed him peering down the front of her blouse (which she would have left just slightly unbuttoned in case of this very eventuality) and suggesting, confidentially, if you dont mind, that with her fine analytical brain, she might have a look at Jacks data for him, what? Jack imagined Jade doing that thing with her hair, flashing MacLennane her most gorgeous smile, leaving Cambridges most notorious philanderer a glimpse of thigh and the rueful prospect that some conquests would forever remain in the realms of the imagination. Jack was warmed by this fantasy, but his mind soon darkened. His own increasingly exasperated conversations with his supervisor had drummed into him that he was now in clutching-at-straws territory. MacLennane would have wanted, desperately, for Jade (anyone, really) to offer some help, given that Jacks thesis project appeared to be up shit creek. Jack knew that MacLennane honestly believed that he was on to something truly new, but hed exhausted all his own considerable resources trying to help him. Yet MacLennane, like Jack, trusted his hunches. Perhaps a younger and nimbler mind could shine a light. Jack knew enough about his mentors calculating mind to guess that, in his view, Jade (that winsome filly, as hed sometimes called her) was their final hope. As they walked across Clare Bridge, Jacks mind filled with reminiscences of more hopeful times that now seemed an age ago, they drew closer to each other, stopped and looked at the view. The river carried the punting, laughing tourists and students beneath them, like so many pooh-sticks. Jack, began Jade, nervously, you dont have to say yes, She began to hesitate, to break up: and I wont blame you if you dont Jack turned and pulled her into his arms, stroking her hair as she buried her face into his shirt. Any lesser man, or a man less in love, would have felt stung by what could be seen as a betrayal of trust. But Jack realized (not for the first time) that MacLennane was not only a sound judge of character, but would not have suggested such a crazy scheme if he didnt think that he, Jack, could pull it off and that Jade was the key. How funny it was that a man such MacLennane, with all the careless notches on his bedpost, believed at root in the power of love to conquer all adversity. And MacLennane had undoubtedly realized that whereas Jack could smell data and connections that eluded all others, Jade had a quite startling knack for seeing right through the data and grasping the point. Even way back, when shed sat in Jacks supervisions, shed solved every problem long before any other student had even begun to organize their ideas, and had come to conclusions which sometimes seemed orthogonal to the evidence, but which, on reflection, usually turned out to be right. And hadnt it been MacLennane, back then, whod advised Jack never to take his eyes off this promising student, lest she leave him standing? On the bridge, Jack looked down at this girl who had traded her moment of triumph for the possibly lost cause of helping him complete his work. Now, were one to be objective, as scientists are supposed to be, the whole idea was ridiculous. Here was MacLennane, a man whose academic judgment had otherwise never been known to err despite his recklessness with the feelings of others, putting all his chips on the slim shoulders of a girl who, while her abilities were not in question, was just twenty years old; who had been a postgraduate for less than an hour; and whom he expected to derive some kind of magic formula that all the statisticians Jack consulted were convinced did not exist. Were he a cynic, hed simply admit that he had nothing to lose. But Jack was no cynic: he was a man in love. He longed to say yes, but could he expose Jade to the chasm of disappointment that was widening between his feet, and risk her career, too? She could she should find some safer pair of hands. But in Jades eyes he saw, beneath the superficial sheen of moisture, that edge of fire-hardened flint that could both cut flesh and set a forest in flames. Jade might have been just another newly minted graduate, but Jack saw an ageless wisdom in her face and now knew what she might be capable of. MacLennane clearly felt the same way. For Jack to deny her offer of help would be to demean her and, by extension, him, and to deny MacLennanes good advice at the moment when he could least afford to do so. In the end, their fates were bound together, whatever they did. Of that he was now absolutely certain. Look up at me, he said, with determined evenness. His eyes met hers, yearning for resolution. Whatever were in, were in it together. His lips broadened into a smile; her eyes shone with relief. Jack felt a great weight of worry slide quietly from his shoulders and slink into the river. But I do have one condition, Your Majesty. You have only to name it! She laughed, mock-serious, the apprehension vanishing from her face like smoke. He knelt down, and heedless of the crowds on the bridge, took her hands and said quite loudly: Jadis, will you marry me? Most of the passers-by did not notice. But some stopped and smiled, a few applauded, and there were a few wolf-whistles. An elderly Japanese couple even stopped to take a picture. As they walked, Jade felt that her attempt to explain the situation with MacLennane and the deal theyd struck was only driving Jack further away. That the harder she tried, the more he retreated into his shell. Professor MacLennane might have seemed like an ogre but underneath his tweedy exterior he was really rather sweet: and even if she suspected that he had a wandering eye, this was nothing she couldnt have coped with. MacLennane was loveable because he was an old-fashioned gentleman. He had a way of making a woman feel appreciated, and this, perhaps, had led her to be a little less discreet about her feelings for Jack than she might have been. Might you give the Old Man a hand, metaphorically speaking? MacLennane had asked, trying not to peer down her blouse, if he werent too stubborn to accept it, that is, the Corstorphine being something of a lone wolf, what? Jade had murmured something vague but managed a smile, and moved a little closer to MacLennane on the faded common-room sofa. Proud man, you know, Corstorphine, MacLennane continued. But he could be an excellent mentor, of course, you know that, what? Excellent, if he just pulled himself together and got the dashed thing out of the way, what? Hes doing something genuinely new: so rare in this game, dont you know, way beyond most of the rest of us. He is the future! And so, my dear girl, are you, by all accounts. I shouldnt really be telling you all this, what? Most unethical. But perhaps you could see your way to giving him some ah inspiration? Be his muse? You are already well on your way, I believe, in that direction? She remembered feeling MacLennanes shrewd, appraising gaze on her, something that for an instant made her feel vulnerable, and, as she often did when she felt that men were sizing her up, lifted both her arms behind her head, the better to arrange her hair, a movement that had the consequence of pushing out her chest at the very onlookers whod put her on her guard. Internally, she grimaced at the memory. Now, though, she was worried, looking at Jack, wretchedness painted all over his face, that shed gone too far. Thus distracted, his sudden proposal on Clare Bridge caught her entirely off guard. She pulled him up from the ground, not knowing where to look, wondering whether shed simply fall apart with joy. The next thing she thought as she composed herself was how, if she were the decisive one, had it been he who had first confessed his love; he who had proposed, hardly an hour later, like one thundering wave after another? Perhaps there was something to be said for intuition, for sensing the moment, especially here, the scene of their first date, just twenty-four months and several geological ages ago. As it was, she was far behind. She had never told him how much he had become her lifes anchor. She decided right there and then to make it up to him, that afternoon. And evening. And all night. And very early the next morning, as they lay together in her college room, wedged into a single bed, drowsy in a billow of sheets, she said, in a tiny whisper, not entirely sure if he was awake, I love you too, you silly old Lion, so very much, so much it scares me, it hurts. But what she did not say was how, in that moment of confession, her mind crested a ridge of hills, and rather than seeing the expected summit, encompassed an unknown vista of opportunity and terror. He stirred then, and still more than half asleep, pulled her into his embrace and muttered, just on the edge of hearing, Ill always be here for you, Snow Queen. Always. Coromandel Station, Earth 51,977,296 BC She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue; Vermilion-spotted, golden, green and blue; Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barrd John Keats Lamia Coromandel Station! What more can be said about this most Imperial of ports, this hub, this hubbub, this stew of a million stars? This ancient of days, this eternal now, this gateway to riches, this chasm of despair? This garrison, this fountain, this palace, this dockyard, this whorehouse? What more can be said that has not been said, or sung, or written, in love, or hate, or envy, or spite, a million times a million times over, in fact or in fancy, in cloddish grunts or fluid eloquence? And yet there is something about Coromandel Station that eludes expression. Tourist guides do not capture it, no more than the misty-eyed memories of that uncle who once long ago, went there on business but returned with so much more than just a sale; the recollections of that elder sister who went on a tour with her high school, inarticulate with excitement; the murky silences of that elder brother, who communicated his experiences in sullen monosyllables before turning away, darkly crackling with anger and shame. Clearly, ones first impressions of Coromandel Station would be as fleeting, as varied, as treasured and as imperfectly recalled - as ones first kiss, or losing ones virginity. Not that newly pressed naval cadet Ruxhana Fengen Kraa, from the utterly insignificant East-Gondwana prairie town of Green River, had had any experience of these things, either, so he was probably at a fractionally greater disadvantage than some other first-time visitors sporting their brand-new military duds. Even those such as his best friend, Ko Handor Raelle, who claimed he was at it, all the time, with all the most luscious girls in their class, sometimes several at a time. Will ya look at the dugs on that! hed exclaim, with toe-curling frequency and volume, from their customary after-school perch at Ma Belles Bar and Grill on Riversleigh and Main, whenever one of their more pneumatic classmates hove into view, invariably amid a giggling coop of similarly lush-pelted beauties. Ruxie thought that each and every one of them was a vision of glossy, green-eyed loveliness, but said nothing. Even just the thought of facing one alone (and, hope beyond hope, willing) made his mouth go dry, his tongue tie itself in knots, and incite a commotion in his underwear which he prayed wasnt too obvious, even though he was quite, quite sure that there was a neon sign above his head screaming slogans such as SHOCK NEWSFLASH! NERDY KNOBHEAD HAS STONKING ERECTION! That the invariable accompaniment to such squirm-inducing thoughts was Ko bellowing sweet, romantic imprecations in his ear along the lines of cmon, darlin! Slap yer paps out for the lads! and cor, wouldnt you just lurrve to shurrve your prong up her? That the objects of such attentions simply smiled winsomely and prinked away with animal grace and never a backward glance if they reacted in any way at all finally gave Ruxie the clue that Ko was completely full of shit. He was probably as much in the dark about girls, and sex, and life in general, as he was. Ruxie knew better than to verify Kos prowess by asking the girls themselves. No point in coming over as even more of a nerd than they all knew he already was, let alone jeopardizing a rare (yet valued) friendship, despite his evident subordinate status. That, and risking a smack in the mouth. Full of shit though he undoubtedly was, Ko was a lot bigger than him. Deficient in such life-affirming experiences though superbly adept at roping in stray dogies on his mothers indrico ranch on the outskirts of Green River Ruxie decided that whereas experience was invaluable, the only way to acquire it was simply to live it. In the meantime, though, knowledge was power. He decided to find out as much about Coromandel Station has he could. Or, rather, his mother decided for him. Ruxie couldnt work it out at the time, but he pieced it together in the long silences of space that were to come: Morzin Kraa Tzalak found that the best way to assuage the powerlessness she felt at the imminent departure from her nest of her youngest kit was to take control. To arm him as much as she could so that he could fight the future, not cower from it. So at their last tearful goodbye at Green River airport she thrust a pocket-sized slate into his hands. Aw, Ma whats this? You shouldnt have! Its a long flight, Ruxie. Lots of change-overs. He saw her looking around, furtively, as if shed just passed him some contraband. She looked longer at Ko, her eyes sharp shards of disapproval. Ko clearly wished Ruxies Ma hadnt been there. He was sheepishly trying to eye up some porno on the top shelf of a nearby news stand, and clearly impatient for her departure. Anyway, she continued. Youll want something good to read, at least. A peck on the cheek, and then she turned and walked briskly away down the concourse. He never saw her again. The slate was loaded with an autodidact program that told him everything he could possibly want to know (and, as was the way with autodidacts, nothing he didnt want to know) about the Imperial Capital, in the form of a story seamlessly blended from a wide range of sources, from kits primers to scholarly journals. The four long flights (and the interminable hangings-around at transit stops) were eased greatly by his mothers parting gift. He was so enthralled that hed tried to read some of it to Ko, but after a while his friend didnt even try to fake his enthusiasm, so Ruxie was mostly left alone. So, this is what he found out. He learned under Thrilling Tales of Tethyan Thunder [linkex 2.006 auto-compliance 4.9997 relevance 3.3] that as recently as two hundred and eighteen thousand years ago, Coromandel Station had been a sleepy fishing port on the southern Tethys shoreline, just one among many on that remote, lemurian jungle fringe. Back then, it had the seriously weird and primitive-sounding name of Yonghh-bhnghhibo and had been home to a small fleet of brave sea-dragon slayers. These heroes of ancient legend (and contemporary soap-opera) would ride out, in small outrigger canoes into the open Tethys, and chase down the fierce basilosaurs each one thirty meters of pure muscular, coiling, thrashing hatred, driving jaws of sprung steel on their great semi-annual migrations. Actually, Ko had been quite interested in that part, having torn his eyes away from Thrust magazine for ten whole seconds to gaze at Ruxie in wonder. You dont say? he exclaim. Thats seriously amazing! And just then, hed meant it. Further down, Tethyan Thunder graded into the terser Coromandel Chronicles [linkex 2.727 auto-compliance 4.9966 relevance 4.8] which told how engineers first came to the Coromandel Coast, drawn neither by the basilosaur hunts, nor even by the reputation of the local arak made from blown early pumpkins, but by an equatorial location and a propitious local gravity field, and decided that this garden-variety tropical paradise would be the ideal location for the Earths first space elevator. Three more had since been built on Earth, not to mention the ones on Mars and Ceres and Iapetus and Triton and countless planets since, but the Coromandel Station elevator was always the first, known simply as the Elevator, or just the El. The effect of the El was practically instantaneous. A mere three hundred years later and what had been a gaggle of brushwood huts on the edge of nowhere had been transformed into the center of the known Universe. Simply as a city, Coromandel Station was beyond vast. In The Dzunghar Heren V Coromandel Backgrounder [linkex, compliance, relevance, blah, blah, blah] Ruxie read of the miles and miles of naval dockyards, regular dockyards, trading go-downs, meat-packers and stockyards. Indeed, Ruxie already knew, from the many fraught and anxious parental conversations hed overheard when he was meant to have been asleep, that Coromandel Station was the trailhead for several large indrico drives, much more profitable than anything that remote East Gondwana could offer, still less match. His mothers father, when he was alive, would recount tales of those great drives to Ruxie and his sisters. Grandpad been an indrico driver in the South Tethys in his youth, he recalled, enthralling the sparkle-eyed kits with tales of campfires, and comradeship, and battles with giant mesonychian land-sharks (now extinct save in cin-dramas and the memories of battle-scarred old-timers like Grandpa) and, most of all, the thrill of riding a lambda alongside a ten-mile-long herd of the indricos themselves: those sweating, snorting meat-mountains, fifty tons apiece, stretching back into a smoky haze of blue. Traders and ranchers bring their families, eventually, so Ruxie read (in Rags and Riches, Runagates and Refugees in the Imperial City) of the unending acreage of barrios; the yawning vistas of suburban dullness; the outrageously kitch palaces of the merchant princes. And of the various quartiers that were homes-from-home to a bewildering variety of exotic aliens. Two of many stuck in Ruxies increasingly overloaded mind: Bedrock, where what looked like the buildings were in fact the residents, the silicon- and germanium-based Flintsiders, who lived on rocky planets very much larger than the Earth: and Sulfaville, a domed, black hemisphere whose residents were ultraphile collectives which, when they ventured forth, did so only in exquisite little carriages, each no bigger than a canteloupe. The spherical cabs matched he shiny blackness of the suburb whence they came, but their wheels and exterior furnishings were made of magnesium-titanium alloy, and they were drawn by outsized clockwork praying mantids. What the carriages and Sulfaville itself looked like on the inside was unknown except vicariously, and even then only through pure mathematics or applied imagination sufficiently supple to realize the sub-stellar temperatures and gigapascal pressures thousands of miles below the cloud-tops of the star-grazing gas giants that the residents of Sulfaville called home. Wherever traders turn a profit, the taxman is sure to follow, so perhaps inevitably (at least, according to relevant extracts from Honeytrap: The Reign of Raedwald XIX Star-Slayer and The Making of the Imperium), Coromandel Station became the administrative and financial capital of the Earth, and, by extension, the Galaxy. So Ruxie read about the calculating spires of the financial district (he wasnt so bothered about these, and was reassured to learn that the relevancy rating had dropped below unity for this section) and, at the citys heart, the great cluster of museums and galleries housing the treasures of a million planets. Ruxie thrilled (relevancy shot up to more than 20) at the thought of visiting the Institute of Galactic History with its displays of the teasingly enigmatic fragments of the earliest known Galactic Civilization, discovered just fifty years earlier in the Fomalhaut Sector by the great archeologist Thrangona Mir Gharaan, and believed to be more than eleven billion years old. And Ruxie simply slavered at the thought of the Natural History Museum, the only place in the Galaxy (apart from Taniquetil itself) large enough to display a Taniquetilian tesseractrix, life size. That was almost the last time hed tried to interest Ko, whose eyes seemed to have grown to the size of saucers at the centerfold of Raunch magazine. Ruxie caught a harshly-lit confusion of bare arms and legs and other body parts and tried not to look. But second in the league table of Interesting Facts about Coromandel Station with which Ruxie tried to interest Ko, as the two boys sweaty in the scratchy newness of their uniforms boarded the very last of the cheap, local puddle-jumpers that got them from Green River to the Capital, was the mind-boggling House of the Imperial Assembly. Designed by the controversial architect Venn Gharaan Murazma cousin of the celebrated archeologist of Fomalhaut as an echo and a mirror to the Galaxy whence came the Imperial Representatives (Ruxie read, in an extract of a news article from Galactic Construction Design Quarterly), the building was conceived as an oblate spheroid, eight kilometers in diameter, whose mirror-smooth surface was spun of magnetically suspended metallic hydrogen beneath a nanocarbon monolayer. The pressures generated by this extremely thin but relentlessly dynamic surface supported the entire building from collapse with a minimum of internal spars, as well as generating much of its power by induction. There could be neither doors nor windows: delegates arrived and left by transspatial gateways from all over the Galaxy, as well as ports closer at hand, in the City itself. Really, they had to. For quite apart from its shroud of exotic matter, the entire structure floated in mid-air, five hundred meters above the clear blue water of the harbor, reflecting the great city in on itself. But the most remarkable reflection came from the source of Coromandel Stations being, its raison dtre, the El itself. The El rose just to the north of the city. The stately pyramid at its root, itself the size of a large town, sprouted at its summit a bundle of hyperfilament columns which, at its base, together covered a square city block. The structure was, indeed, square in section, and running up each one of its sides were sixteen tracks eight internally, eight on the outer surface along which pods of various sizes were constantly running up and down. Those descending would be swallowed up by the pyramid; those ascending, however, were the ones that really caught the eye, and visitors who witnessed the spectacle for the first time could not help but try to follow the cars as they slid skywards to the zenith point. On First Looking Into Meghvej Uurlan Quines Coromandel recounted those old stories, as frequent as they were as undoubtedly as apocryphal as Kos sexual conquests, of people gazing upwards and were so enthralled that they just kept on gazing, even after theyd pitched over backwards. Ruxie and Ko had seen the El all their lives, of course, as a white line that coursed along the sky to the westward by day, a thin necklace of moving jeweled lights at night. But nothing matched seeing it close-up. The plane that ferried Ruxie and Ko on their final hop was small and flew low over the city, and it was night. Ruxie, worn from reading and wonderment, had put away his slate, and dozed off. He woke an hour later, uncomfortable and cramped. His eyes were sore; his throat felt like hed been gargling a mixture of fuel oil and gravel, and he was stiff. Ko was sprawled next to him, snoring, tongue lolling. The litter of a long flight cellophane bags, blankets, paper cups, remains of snack meals was cast all around them. Ruxie unbuckled his seatbelt and rose to stretch his aching body as best he could. Thats when he caught a glimpse of the view through the porthole. Hey, Ko ... he nudged his neighbor into a simulacrum of wakefulness. Come look! Through the porthole, Ruxies first impression was that they were at the bottom of an enormous, shallow bowl, with lights stretching as far as their eyes could see. Ko refused to look, at first he buried his face in his magazine and pointedly refused even to glance through the window. His face had taken on an unhealthy, greenish color that got worse as the unforgiving ground rose up to meet them. But even Ko had to look up when the El came into view. The scale of the structure was staggering. So vast that it appeared to distort perspective itself, it was so hard to appreciate its size compared with everything else. The plane veered and banked as it turned for the airport, just off the coast, and they saw the shining curvature of the Assembly Building simply as a wash of reflections from the water. Most of all, they saw the curving streak of the El. The boys, poised like storks to peer outwards and upwards to drink in as much of the magnificent view as they could through the needles-eye of the port, were jolted, off-balance. A bell pinged: a sleek stewardess told them to resume their seats for landing. The undercarriage ground its way outwards from its long sleep. In the minds of both boys, but left unspoken, was that, if they passed their basic training, they would be doing more than gazing at the El. They would be riding it to the stars. Not that Ruxie had much of a chance to sample the citys wonders for a long while. For the first few weeks of his naval career he saw nothing more exciting than the inside of his barracks. The day would begin with a peremptory reveille, usually from a superannuated staff sergeant who still thought the command Hands off prongs! On with thongs! anything other than dreary. After that it was all guns blazing (mostly metaphorically, but not always) until well after sundown. What with roll-call, and drill, and lectures, and physical training, and mess, and weapons practice, and more drill, and private study, and basic uniform maintenance on top of that all counter-pointed by the constant, enervating odor of stale chow and unwashed laundry he could do no more each night than collapse into his bunk, hoping that his eyes would stay open long enough for him to register the presence of the coarse sheets and blankets before he actually fell on them. With time, though, the initial shock wore off, and Ruxie found that he enjoyed his new life very much. He discovered that his small but sinewy, ranch-honed frame, combined with a quick intelligence and a gift for anticipation, meshed with the requirements of naval life. Quietly, without fuss, the name of Ruxhana Fengen Kraa crept towards the top of most of his classes and routines. People in the hierarchy far above the level of rookie pond-life began to take notice, and nod with approval. Not that Ruxie himself was made aware of such notice. Indeed, in those few minutes of each day that were his to devote to his own thoughts, Ruxie was more concerned with pond-life closer to home. Ko, who bunked in the cot immediately above Ruxie, his big frame bulging downwards, seemed to start with the enthusiasm for naval life that gripped Ruxie himself. After a while, though, Ko began to be lose ground. But Ruxie was too busy with the heavy workload of more advanced training to do more than fret anxiously, if distantly, about his room-mate. The one class that Ko had always headed, since day one, was Uqbar-rules boxing, a traditional sport whose antique practices and precise ritual did little to cover up its no-holds-barred gladiatorial viciousness: and that was because Ko weighed more than any of his classmates and wasnt afraid of throwing this weight around. Uqbar-rules boxing professionals were multi-millionaire megastars. Few lived long enough to enjoy their wealth. What worried Ruxie was Kos apparent conviction that unchallenged success in one peripheral sphere of life compensated for slack performance in all the others. Slack, and absent. When Ruxie was studying late into the night, or working out, or at the weapons range, Ko would have sloped off into the City, with a crowd of the kind of toadies that no aspiring boxing pro could afford to be without. If Ruxie was too busy to worry too much about Ko, the reverse wasnt always true. It was late one evening, and Ruxie, still fully clothed, was in his bunk, reading a manual on the assembly and rapid disassembly of a new model of particle projector for use as a side-arm. The schematics were beginning to swim before his eyes, and he was sure that if he went to sleep now, they would simply dance in front of his dreaming self, jeering and mocking. Perhaps when he got to use the real thing, on the weapons range, it would all make more sense, he thought. But, for now, it was time for a restorative work-out a few bench-presses, stretches and maybe a swim would soothe him. After all, he needed sleep reveille was only six hours away. He sat up, wondering where he had left his gym clothes, when Kos legs swung down from the bunk above. Ruxie was amazed hed no idea Ko was even in barracks, assuming hed gone off to, well, wherever it was he went, after hours. Ko? Ruxie, my man. Wha...? Ko swung down from the bunk and landed noiselessly on the floor. He looked at Ruxies reading matter. Is that a Teslamatic Industries Model-950 Higgs Projector youre packin, he smirked, or are you just pleased to see me? Ruxie laughed. It all came back, now, how Ko had always done that, when they were kids, and why theyd always been fast friends. Always made him laugh always there to unscramble any tension. To wear knowledge easily that he himself bought so dearly. To tell him when he was trying too hard. And, like the elder brother he never had in a house dominated by women, to be the antithesis of his conscience. To his shame it occurred to him that his spotless, by-the-book and yet somewhat guileless approach to life could have led to any amount of barrack-room hazing. But it never had, not in almost a year of naval life, and thats because Ko had always looked out for him. Saying nothing, asking nothing he just had. Ruxie was filled with a sudden gratitude. Ko sat down on the lower bunk next to Ruxie. The mattress sagged under his weight. You know, Ruxie, all work, and no play. What you need is a drink. Ruxie nodded. He folded away his papers and stood up. Youre so right, my friend. Lead on. Slipping undetected out of barracks was easier than Ruxie had dreamed possible. Ko bowled along dark back-alleys with Ruxie straining to keep up, and before long they were at a bar in a narrow side-street a few blocks back from the harbor-front, the kind of establishment that On First Looking Into Meghvej Uurlan Quines Coromandel would have called picturesque. Meaning that its clientle was not always drawn from the most law-abiding sections of Coromandel society, and that it was overly given to shadowy nooks within which, to judge from the half-muffled sounds, all sorts of private transactions were taking place. And some not so private. Frenetic bagpipe music squirled from the door as Ko and Ruxie arrived, finding themselves at the edge of a crowd, rapt, before a couple in the closing stages of a Turgaii sword-dance. The couple, masked, and dressed in the carnival finery traditional for such things (or so Ruxie had read in Rags and Riches, Runagates and Refugees), paced round one another in a pool of dramatic, reddish light that flooded the cleared plank-and-sawdust dance floor; calm, stylized steps marking time to the urgent screech of the pipes, the dancers arms making broad, sweeping strokes with the scimitars that each dancer held in both hands. Sweeping towards the crowds, expressionless masks filled with menace, the spectators flinching, laughing nervously and then sweeping towards each other, the blades scything closer and closer in, now whipping hairs-breadths from the costume of each. And as they danced, the air around the dancers became enriched with the golden, auroral glow from their bodies, deepening, developing hems of iridescent blue, crimson barred all signs of intense, swelling emotion. The scent of sex rose in the bars fuggy atmosphere. Faster and faster the dancers whirled, closer and closer, and as the bagpipes reached a final, caterwauling cadence, scythes slashed, costume was rent, and the dancers were each exposed, unmasked and unmarked, bare to the waist, well-muscled figures clothed only in sweat and victory. The auras twisted from blue to purple to yellow, and then faded. The music stopped, replaced by applause, as the dancers made a triumphal circuit of the audience, gathering thrown coins in their masks. Ruxie was amazed to find himself cheering, and, more than that, aroused. It wasnt just the sight of the female dancers impressively taut, bronzed flesh, her bellys swell and wild hair, and Ruxhana dared himself think it her five pairs of truly gorgeous breasts with their big, brazen, nut-brown tips, each as big and as hard as the ends of his own thumbs: it was the experience of the dance itself, its wild frenzy, its climactic release, that he found so stirring. Good, eh? Kos voice in his ear. Ruxie was amazed to hear it at all, so transported had he been by the almost orgiastic experience. Thats Xalom, that is, he continued, plainly picking up on Ruxies not-so-furtive glances. Shes a cracker, isnt she? Now oh, there they are! Ko steered him to a big table in the back already occupied by many of their barrack-mates, some clearly already in the party mood, a few accompanied by an enthusiastic female retinue. Look who Ive drug up! Ko shouted to the throng, Yo, baby! Its shoon-to-be-Admral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa! yelled a half-uniformed rating in response, rapidly standing to attention, and sitting down again just as abruptly. Beers for the Admiral! bellowed another, and a flagon was shoved in front of him. Ruxie sat and took a swig. It felt good. More than that, it felt marvelous. And within minutes, his presence was forgotten. He was just one of the crew, laughing and guffawing as Ko told some wild tale of land-shark-hunting on the prairies of home. Ruxie smiled he was almost certain that this was one of his own Grandpas tales. Ko would have known this, of course, and the fact that the subterfuge would have been known to the two of them, and the two of them only, out of all the crowd, only bound the two young men more closely together. Ruxie was so enthralled by Kos tall tales, the warmth of the company and the casually sodden feelings of general fellowship engendered by the third (or was it the fourth?) mug of beer, that he hardly noticed another body squeezing on to the bench beside him. But the pressure of a firm thigh against his and a warm breath in his ear made him sober up at once. He turned. It was the female dancer. Dressed now, and in a prim naval uniform of pencil skirt and short-sleeved blouse (Ruxie couldnt help but notice the pips on her shoulders), but definitely the same tumble of dark hair, the same green eyes. Its ... Xalom, isnt it? What took you so long, spaceman? Without looking at him, she placed her hands behind her head and lifted up the mass of her hair, dragging it away from her face. The action of lifting her arms made her thrust her primary breasts out into her uniforms fabric. Ruxie caught all this, in close proximity and in profile. She was close enough for him to smell some all-enveloping wild strangeness, like an animal at bay. Or on heat. It took him right back to the ranch, and one of his first memories of ever going outside, as a small child. He had been hardly more than a blind kit at the time, and the world of light was fresh and bright and new, and practically the first thing he remembered seeing was two indricos rutting, one on top of the other, the two shuddering mountains of flesh bellowing and snorting, the air filled with dust and heat and the cries of the farmhands. The air was charged then, too. So ... long? Yes. Ive been waiting weeks for you to turn up. Her voice was assured, cool, modulated. Me? Dont sound so surprised. Your friend Mr Raelle has told me all about you. Quite the mystery man, arent you? He was suddenly conscious of a hand on his upper thigh, like her voice assured like it knew what it was doing, and where it was going. He flushed all over and struggled for breath. But something else took charge of him then. Months of military training had taken the callow edges off this farmhand. There were times, he knew now, when one should stop watching and waiting, stop thinking and planning, and just act. To hesitate would be to lose. He covered the hand on his thigh with his own. He pressed it firmly her fingers were small and delicate, yet hard and resolute. The fingertips seemed smooth, but precise. For an instant he pictured them running up the underside of his prong. He suppressed the thought. Shall we go? he said. Concentrating hard on simply putting his feet one in front of the other, and not bumping into his companion or anyone else in narrow night streets still thronged with party-goers, Ruxie reached the promenade on the harbor front. Boats bobbed in the brightly lit marina below, with ships and barges and industrial gantries as dark silhouettes further off. He found a bench, remarkably unoccupied, and invited Xalom to sit down. She did so, with an air of almost mocking amusement at Ruxies obvious efforts to act the poised and gallant lover. But she seemed warm, and close, as if there were really no need for him to play any part other than his own self, and she pressed herself to him: her hair, coming loose again, straying over his shoulders and under his chin. A few strands met his lips. They tasted of salt and wildness. For most of the next three hours, as the revelers slowly departed and the streets thinned, they sat, like an old married couple perfectly familiar with each others contours, looking out to sea, the amazing silvered bubble of the Assembly Building hovering motionless over the lapping waves, reflecting the lights of the City and, in weird cycloid curves, the illuminated skein of the El that rose up behind them. Something broke in Ruxie, and he found that all he had lost was his embarrassment. He found that he could talk with Xalom like he hadnt been able to talk with anyone since hed arrived in Coromandel Station. Without the forced and formal cadence of naval operations, nor the false front of braggadocio that Kos circle often seemed to require, when he knew that, in private, Ko could behave like a reasonably normal person. That was it. Normal. Like he was chatting with one of his sisters. Or his mother. The thought of his Ma made him feel guilty: it had been ages since hed written so much as a line home, and for the first time he realized that never during his naval training not even once had he felt homesick. This made him feel doubly guilty. Somehow, Xalom seemed to sense this, and she squeezed closer still, so he could feel the press of her body against his side. He put an arm around her. She seemed every bit as delicate and fragile as he knew she wasnt. Into the still of the night, they talked. He told her all about ranch life in remote East Gondwana. She told him about her life here, in the City, daughter of an Admiral in a family wedded to the Navy for generations; that shed just graduated as a junior officer, in Special Ops. Hence the pips. And the dancing? Oh, that. A girls got to have a hobby, hasnt she? And I love dancing. Especially the traditional stuff. Something about the ritual. She paused. Must be because Im a Navy girl. Its the rules and regulations that turn me on. She turned towards him. He could see little of her face amid the penumbra of her hair, and in the darkness. But her eyes glowed, reflected, feral. The night deepened but the humid tropic warmth remained. Ruxie made some bland comment about the dance, how much hed enjoyed it. She seemed not to notice. Ritual. You know, if I were a man, Id probably go for Uqbar-rules boxing. Ritual, combined with sheer bloody savagery. Poetry in motion! She laughed. Ruxie said nothing. She continued: you dont think I could handle myself? I ... well, Im sure you could. Special Ops, and all that. Ruxie remembered seeing her trim, bare torso in the pink glow of the bar and tried to quench the immediate flood of saliva in his mouth that this thought prompted. Your friend, Mr Raelle. He goes in for Uqbar Rules, you know. Have you seen him in action? Yes, I have. Impressive, isnt he? I think he could handle himself, too. But sometimes I think he overdoes it. Hell learn, with experience. Hell have to. I think he needs ... well, training. Taking in hand. Her last words were quiet, almost wistful. Ruxie felt the casual ease of the past few minutes begin to slip away. But what about your dance partner? Dont you...? Arent you...? Shakil? Him? Are you serious? He couldnt be more gay if you tied pink ribbons round his prong. Youd need a lot of ribbons, though ... And with that she turned to face him, and the last thing he saw in their embrace were her eyes crossing slightly as her lips approached his and he was catapulted into infinite space. Gascony, France June, 2011 My beloved spake, and said unto me, rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. Song of Solomon 2, 10-11 Jadis burst from the kitchen door like a rifle shot, a spinning mass of hair and legs and bags and baggy shirt and denim cut-offs and eager excitement. Jack threw open the passenger door of the open-top jeep and laughed. No hurry, Snow Queen, they cant start the Ball without you! Jadis threw the bags in the back, scrambled aboard, strapped herself in and said Lets go! Avi had been left in charge of tidying up the very last exposures at Le Dig; Primrose promised shed remember to take Fairbanks for a walk (if youre too busy, just ask Domingo); but once down the much patched-and-potholed drive lined with shimmering poplars, and through the twin stone pillars that supported their sagging, never-closed front gate, they were away, a bolt for freedom, if only for a couple of days. She couldnt imagine shed feel such sudden exhilaration. This must be the way champagne corks feel, when, all strain released, they career carelessly into space. But when she paused to think about it, she hadnt left the village in weeks and had become as taut as over-wound clockwork. Starting a dig was easy: just shift a spadeful of dirt and youre there. But finishing a dig that was another matter entirely. There were contracts to terminate; forms to fill in; volunteers to send home; equipment to inventory; specimens to catalogue and ship; and endless, endless, reports to write. Not to mention the tedious process of environmental restoration (more forms, more reports), transforming a site that had been dug and heaped and leveled and scraped and picked over for six years back into a place that looked just as it had done when theyd first found it. Turning an omelet back into eggs, she thought, might be simpler. Late one evening in the middle of May, she was sitting alone in a pool of light in the darkened kitchen, working through another draft of her monthly accounts report for the Ginsberg Wang Foundation, the philanthropic organization that supported their work at Saint-Rogatien, and they hoped whatever it was that Jack had up his sleeve for their next project, now that Le Dig was coming to a close. As the rows and columns of the spreadsheet expanded balefully before her tired eyes, she started to wonder if it would ever end; if Jacks much-delayed promise of a new dig site would ever gallop over the horizon and rescue her. To make matters worse, Jack had been away for three and a half weeks a fortnight of surveying around his still-secret site, followed by a conference in America and a meeting with the GW Foundation in Cambridge. She accepted his absences as necessary, but even after all this time, she found it hard to lie in a bed that lacked his presence. The first two or three days were always fine, as long as his smell lingered. For a few days after that she tried to compensate by inviting Fairbanks into bed, something that was never allowed when Jack was home. But that was no help, either. Fairbanks snored (something Jack rarely did), and, whats more, he smelled of dog. She realized that this was hardly his fault, and she couldnt really blame her faithful, uncomplaining companion for the fact that she missed her husband. It was just dawning on her, then, that she should, by now, be getting more used to Jacks absences, not less, and wondering why this might be, when she looked up from the spreadsheet to see Jack himself, standing by her side. She flung herself upwards at him like a firework and threw her arms tightly around his neck. You need a holiday, he said. And so it was that they were now hacking along the country roads towards Aurignac, a small, sleepy village but with a remarkable distinction. For Aurignac can make a fair claim to being the epicenter and fountainhead of human consciousness. If the human race can be said to have started anywhere, it is here. Chipped flints had been the apotheosis of craftsmanship for almost three million years, but these had no more been the products of creative imagination than are the filigreed webs of spiders, or the great reefs secreted by a trillion mindless polyps, for all that their mighty works can be seen from space. And then, something happened. Quite suddenly, around forty thousand years ago, a spark lit up, and human beings emerged from primeval night. It was as if they had previously imagined the cave they inhabited as their entire universe, and had, quite by accident, perhaps by turning a different corner, discovered the cave mouth, a portal to a brighter, wider world of limitless possibility. The effects of this stunning event were so profound that they had left their mark in the record of human endeavor four hundred centuries later. Could the skyscrapers and cities of the twentieth century ever be such enduring memorials? The most dramatic change was the manifestation of consciousness which human beings later came to call art. Before, there had been almost nothing. And yet now there were cave paintings that had brought the animals of the late Ice Age vividly to life; statues made with love and devotion and the worship of the strength of men, and the love of women, and the earliest known images of the human face. There were imprints of hands that said, more eloquently than any written language I am. This breathtaking revolution burst all over Europe within a geological eyeblink, but among the first discoveries had come to light here, at Aurignac itself, which therefore had the honor of giving its name the Aurignacian to perhaps the single most important event in the whole of human history, the moment when human beings first awoke from their long sleep. Or so it had been thought. For there were yet older, more enigmatic signs, more mysterious still because they might not have been made by humans at all, and would, therefore, not have been recognizable as art, at least, not to our, human eyes. Jadis mysterious Remillardian stone-tool culture, which she and Avi had described from Le Dig, might have been one of these signs, but with no context, no maker, it was hard to tell. If a pilgrimage to Aurignac were not wonder enough for two archeologists on a spree, the modern village had in Le Cerf Blanc a jewel of a hotel attached to a luxurious and expensive restaurant. A treat for them both. After all, it was her twenty-eighth birthday, and she deserved it. And, as Jack explained as they drove Jadis hair streaming out behind her like a flag, the laddered avenues of poplars and planes casting rippling zigzag shadows across the car, the fume of poppies and dust and the ripening maize whizzing past them on either side they had some planning to do. Hed found a site just this side of Aurignac which his intuition had told him might be something special, something new: something to wake them all up after the raveled enigma of Saint-Rogatien. He wanted to show this new site to her, before anyone else: to give her a sense of place, in the hope that shed pick up at least some echo of the vibrations that had sent his internal antennae thrumming, on his first visit, blotting out all else: that in the seemingly modest little cave of Souris Saint-Michel there might be a door to a new world, if only he had the wit to see it. Jadis looked at Jack through the hair blowing across her face, and then at the road ahead of them, and felt, deeply inside her, deeper than words, that this journey represented far more than a drive on some dusty summer back-road, more than a pleasant interlude in the lives of two busy people. No: this was a tipping point, a phase transition in existence, as it had been for the first Aurignacians. They were riding, like them, into a new life, awakening. She felt like the very first cave artist, reed brush poised stiff, dripping and overloaded with wet ochre, in the split instant before it made contact with the cave wall, and, with this tiny act of fecundation, had she known it, catapulting the human race into an entirely new realm. She felt as if she were now, finally, ready. Ready to be born. A soft pulse, lost in space and time. Sleeping, ageless, without thought, without form, and void, without guilt. Until I Am. A pulse, one only. The other is lost. Blood, blood, so much blood. Lost in the garden; fallen from the Nest. Am I drowning in blood? No, I am not drowning. I am floating. I Will Not Die. Pain. I have pain. Darling Jack Whizzing, wheeling, into space. I love you. Snow Queen. I Will Not Die. I love you too. So very much, so much it scares me, it hurts. I WILL NOT DIE. Ill always be here for you, Snow Queen. Always. I am. I am alive. And so I wake Jack swung off the road and into a back lane between two maize fields. The unsurfaced track dipped towards woods of maple and birch, oak and sweet chestnut, coming to an end in a small, dusty car park on the shores of a lake. The lake was perfectly smooth and still, and the eggshell blue of the sky above it. Jack pulled the jeep across the car park and on to a narrow sandy beach right by the waters edge. Apart from two picnic tables, their planking warped and faded, there were no other signs to betray the hand of man. Through a belt of pines on the other side of the lake Jack had discovered a fern-choked track leading up a hill to the small cave hed become so excited about, the last site ever excavated by Gaston de Bonnard. Souris Saint-Michel, he said. Its a bit of a mystery. I think we can solve it. It occurred to Jack that he had been talking to himself for several minutes. He turned to his right, towards Jadis, but she was quicker, leaning towards him and kissing him lovingly, deeply. Unfastening her seatbelt, she climbed over on top of him, placing her bare thighs on either side of him, her elbows on the seat back on either side of his neck, her hands smooth, yet with the floury patina of fieldwork cupping his face, kissing him as if shed never stop, hungrily as if she felt her lips might never gain purchase, her tongue seeking his with the desperate anxiety of a nestling squab whose mother had been too long away. He held her close, his arms sliding up inside her oversized, faded Saint-Rogatien-2007 sweatshirt. He found that she was naked underneath. He ran his hands across her back, brushing the pendulous softness of her breasts on his way, finally reaching a comfortable place on top of her shoulders, her neck. There can be no God, he thought, for those who have never felt the skin of a woman, in all its glorious, unutterably luxurious, dry smoothness, its yielding tautness. No wonder that once human beings had come into the light, that their first expressions of reverence for the divine had taken the form of female nudes which, in their exaggerated curves, spoke of contrasts, of pillowy softness and inexhaustible generative power. Jadis sighed, pulled herself away, and looked down at him with a strange expression, not so much of love, or adoration, or tenderness, but of inspection, as if she were at a market stall choosing cheese or eggs. As if shed seen him, properly, for the very first time. Jadis She sat up, tossed her hair out of her eyes, and brushed the creases from her sweatshirt. Lets go and look at this cave of yours. Its my birthday! It was as if nothing had happened. But then, Jack thought, everything had happened: that it really was her birthday, the very day of her birth. To him she looked like something newly hatched, a young jeweled lizard in fresh rainbow colors unsullied by care or age, as if shed sloughed an ugly, warty skin that she had worn for years, but which had become invisible to him through resigned usage. She unwound her legs and got out of the Jeep, beckoning for him to follow. And so, hand in hand, they walked up to the cave. They had both known something of its history, and that of its first discoverer, the Abb Gaston de Bonnard; that it represented his last, most enigmatic and potentially most exciting find and yet, frustratingly, incomplete. Domingo had filled in details that they had not known, especially about de Bonnards little-appreciated early years as an explorer in the Western Desert, and some of what hed found out in his own researches had made their hair stand on end. In an age when so many sites had been wasted, despoiled by slapdash trophy hunting, de Bonnards digs were ahead of their time. They were bywords for accuracy, meticulous documentation and uncompromising thoroughness. Souris Saint-Michel seemed like just another expression of this approach. When de Bonnard passed through a site he was like a plague of locusts, so that there was nothing nothing left for later excavators to pick over. But Souris Saint-Michel, his swansong, just might have been the exception. De Bonnards long life had indeed been touched by greatness. Born in 1769, the twenty-year-old seminary student had weathered the French revolution by working at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris with the dashing but eccentric zoological genius Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. In later life de Bonnard had briefly served in the parish of Saint-Rogatien, and Domingo suspected that it had been he who had named the village square in Geoffroys honor. Like his mentor, de Bonnard had been part of the scientific expedition that Napoleon abandoned in Egypt after the Battle of the Nile in 1800. As Geoffroy had spent the years of his exile describing Nile crocodiles and conceiving ever crazier castles of theoretical zoology, de Bonnard had become an explorer, venturing into the Sahara further than anyone had yet been, into south-eastern Libya, and possibly even as far as the foothills of the Tibesti massif in northern Chad. His exploration journals as everything essayed by their writer, models of pitiless accuracy, clarity and deftly wrought detail made reference to half-buried monuments of indescribable antiquity, and of a size that made modest hillocks of the Great Pyramids. And were any other author but de Bonnard to have described what hed called les Prtres du Sable, the tall, pale, living guardians of these cyclopean, all-but-abandoned monuments, and who conversed with him in what his friend Champollion assured him was like nothing hed ever heard so much as biblical Hebrew nobody would have believed him at all. As it was, few did, and after his return to France, the accounts of his adventures were quietly sidelined, ignored, and then forgotten, except, perhaps, by one or two laudanum-addled English romantics in search of the antique and the picturesque. As an almost-retired cleric in 1830, de Bonnard had witnessed Geoffroys great debates with his old adversary Georges Cuvier, father of paleontology, as yet another revolution closed in. And yet hed had more than three decades more on this Earth. Souris Saint-Michel had been de Bonnards last dig. The indefatigable priest finally died in 1866, not more than a week after the field season ended, and before hed had a chance to compose his thoughts on it into any final, publishable form. It was believed that this is what he was thinking about while he was climbing a neighbors apple tree to retrieve its more inaccessible fruits, when he fell out and broke his neck. He was 97. The composer Camille Saint-Sans (a particular fan of paleontology) had played the organ at the funeral. The only published report on the site had been a bare summary, cobbled together post mortem by de Bonnards collaborators. Jack was convinced that there would have been more to say, had de Bonnard not died before the task was complete. Jack and Jadis talked of de Bonnard and his last dig as they crossed the beach, walked into the woods on the other side, and wound their way up a muddy, winding track that took them up an increasingly steep slope. With each step, Jadis felt that another part of her old self had fallen away, and that she was climbing out of a dream. Or, more pertinently, that she had finally come out of some extended rehabilitation. And so as with one part of her mind she ran through de Bonnards jousts with antiquity, a film of her own past was spooling in the background, until, fading in the bright light of a new sun, the harsh colors of pain and poignancy shriveled away to leave a comforting sepia, as if it had all happened a long time ago, and to someone else. She could not remember the accident itself, and thought she never would, except perhaps in dark dreams of vertiginous horror that made her scream in the night and roll over to lose herself in Jacks chest. She had no memory of the first week, mercifully, in which her body, bruised and broken, still had to fight the horrific, raging inflammation caused by the sudden rupture of her uterus and the consequent brutal injection of masses of fetal tissue into her bloodstream. And in which she had nearly died twice. On the second occasion her heart had stopped for a minute and a half. Her memories of the first six months were patchy. She could never be sure, when shed tried to recall them, whether they were genuine traces of that dark time itself, or only synthetic impressions her mind had created from things that Marjorie MacLennane had said later, because she had demanded to know: and because Jack had been too beside himself with pain and rage to tell her himself. All she knew she could remember was the pain; in her chest, where shed broken several ribs, two of which had punctured a lung; and in her right shoulder, which had been wrenched apart and had had to be pinned. She felt it still, sometimes, as a dull ache, especially on damp winter mornings. And, most of all, in her lower abdomen, where she felt her soul had been torn out and burned in front of her waking eyes. What she did not know at the time was how, when she had been in intensive care, Marjorie had moved into Jack and Jadis Chesterton flat and camped out on the sofa, because she felt that Jack had become quite impossible and needed to be looked after. He had tried to be strong, tried to hide his grief and fear, but when he no longer could when he came into the department with tears constantly running down his face, whether he wanted them or not, and no matter how hard hed worked to check them Roger had asked Marjorie to take him home and get a doctor and a bag full of sedatives. Neither did she know what the trauma surgeon had told Marjorie: that given the scale of her injuries, it was a miracle that Jadis had not died. Indeed, had she not been a very young woman in good physical shape, she certainly would have done. And Marjorie had kept the obstetricians news to herself, for a very long time, that although Jadis burst and shredded uterus would heal itself in time, she would, almost certainly, never be able to sustain another pregnancy. It was Marjorie whod had to break this news to Jadis mother. A year after the accident she was living with Roger and Marjorie while Jack moved their home to France and set up the site at Saint-Rogatien. Although she would always be more grateful than she could possibly express to the MacLennanes, she pined for Jack terribly, to the extent that Marjorie felt that she should just go, to start work on Saint-Rogatien. What that young woman needs is something to do, Marjorie had said, and being a do-er herself, she reasoned that activity would be the best medicine. When Jack met her off the plane at Blagnac, hed had a four-month-old golden retriever puppy riding shotgun, its ears too huge for its face, its tongue hanging out in a great, guileless clownish grin. Fairbanks, meet Jadis: Jadis, meet Fairbanks. Hell be your Guardian Angel. She didnt know which of them to hug first. And so it had been: therapy, and very effective, but therapy nonetheless, which implies that a state of full health has yet to be achieved. But now she had come through, completed the course. Saint-Rogatien had done its work, and it was now time to live. But there was one part of her rehabilitation in which neither Marjorie nor Saint-Rogatien could help, and in which she was initially completely on her own. This deficiency hit her every time she woke in the night, over the first two and a half years, doubled up in agonizing spasms, wracked with cramps; and when she was forced to endure intense, bloody periods at irregular intervals, each followed by bombazine-shrouded processions of loss, guilt and grief for the still-small pulse that she would never feel again. As a side-effect, she had completely gone off sex. Or, to be more specific, she liked the idea of sex, the desire she always had for Jack as a comforting and reassuring presence, but she found that she couldnt face it as a physical reality. Pain itself was sufficient deterrent for many months, but even when that had faded, she felt that it would be too uncomfortable, for her, and for Jack: perhaps from fear, from concern for Jack or perhaps from a sense of guilt, that had she not been so foolish as to have driven to Addenbrookes herself when she felt she might miscarry, and had met had met well, then none of this would have happened. At its basest, she was concerned that shed never be able to relax; to lose herself in the act; that shed just be too dry, so that Jack would never have been able to have entered her at all and if that happened, she thought, it would only set things back even more. In the meantime, therefore, her body had decreed a complete moratorium, in the hope that, one day, things would just sort themselves out on their own. But the very worst thing of all the thing that most sapped her confidence was that she felt she simply could not possibly share these concerns with Jack. If shed tried, she knew hed understand, but he had been through so much, had stood by her through all this, that she desperately didnt want him to be hurt, or, shamefully (she felt) that she was unable to expose her own feelings of guilt to wider scrutiny. That Jack seemed to have grasped all this without being told only made her love him more, and this in itself started to solve the problem. During the day, her therapy was Saint-Rogatien, its organization, its direction, and the ordering of its people Avi, Domingo and all the rest. During the night, her therapy was Jack who was, ever so gradually, coaxing her terrified body back into the light. Now that the weight of Saint-Rogatien had been lifted, she felt that she had been healed in another way too, and she could at last start to give something back: back to Jack who, as hed always said, would be there for her, always. The very last slope was the steepest of all. Jack scrambled up to find that it had been the rampart of a wide, flat lawn before the cave mouth. The short, springy sward had presumably grown over the mass of soil and cave sediment that de Bonnard had removed in 1866. Jack reached down to pull Jadis up, too, and they stood, arms around each other, facing into the cave. This is it, said Jack. How much do you know about it? Jadis asked, as they walked towards it, crossed the threshold and she began to explore. Jack hung back, as if to watch her reaction. The cave was surprisingly small, hardly more than an abri, a rock shelter no more than fifteen feet across, twelve feet high at its tallest, and twenty feet from its lip to the back wall, now seated in shadow. Not as much as Id like. Ive never had the time to follow it up. One thing just led to another. But after were done here, I thought wed go into Aurignac, meet Balthazar, and It was then that Jadis stopped dead, in the middle of the cave, looking at the back wall with the same expression of awe and revelation as if shed been shopping in Leclerc and looked up to find that the checkout clerk was the Archangel Gabriel. Oh, Jack. Darling Jack, its . its the wall. Isnt it? He rushed towards her, scrambling over the slightly rough, bare floor, embracing her from behind and gazing, over her shoulder, at the pinkish-grey tympanum that formed the back wall of the cave. Although it sparkled with tiny crystals of flowstone, it was otherwise utterly flat and featureless. I know, Snow Queen. When I first saw it it Jack thought back to his own moment of revelation when hed first climbed to the cave as evening fell, the last rays of the setting Sun striking the back wall directly before he and the cave were plunged into night, and his utter conviction that for all its coating of natural flowstone, of stalactite, the back wall of the cave was not natural. Someone had put it there. He explained this now to Jadis, who was now standing right up against the wall, tracing her hands across it, pressing and probing, for all that she might find some hidden mechanism, a catch that would open a door through the wall and into another world. Caves just dont end so abruptly, she muttered, almost to herself, they just dont . She returned to Jacks side so they could both stare at it together. In truth, Jack was relieved that Jadis had felt so strongly about the wall. That was one of the reasons hed brought her here. For when hed first seen this cave a few weeks earlier, his natural empathy with the landscape had been blown off course so strongly, that hed almost been knocked to his knees with the shock of it. Perhaps, he thought, Ive been doing this too long, and too alone, without calibration, without consultation, without collaboration. But now that Jadis had felt it too, he was convinced, more than ever, that his first impressions had been wholly correct. And if the wall had been put there on purpose, that meant there has to be something behind it, Jack. Has to be. Ill hire in some sounding gear. Magnetometers, ground-penetrating radar, perhaps even shot-blasters and seismographs and Jack smiled. Jadis had opened her birthday present and was already taking charge of the next field season. Jack pulled her towards him and kissed her, lightly, on the top of her head. But can we have some lunch first? he said. Im starving! She turned to look up at him and laughed. Balthazar Desplaines met them in the bar of Le Cerf Blanc, holding out a kir for each of them and smiling from ear to ear. Welcome Jack, enchant, Jadis! he exclaimed: please, take a seat, and Ill get a menu! he continued, gesticulating to the barman. Desplaines had been an aerospace engineer from Toulouse who had taken a stupendously generous early-retirement package from Arospatiale, bought a small but exquisite town house in Aurignac, and devoted himself to his hobbies gastronomy and antiquity. In pursuit of these twin goals he shuttled between the bar at Le Cerf Blanc and Aurignacs small museum of antiquities which, despite the fame of the locality, was usually open only by appointment. When it became apparent that Desplaines spent more time there than the official guardien (who was often woken up at odd hours when Desplaines felt he just had to look at this Gravettian point or that Solutran flake), the town awarded him the honorary curatorship, gave him the key and said that he could come and go whenever he liked. When Jack had first moved to Saint-Rogatien, while Jadis was still convalescing, Balthazar had been one of his first visitors. Jack had met him for the first time, albeit briefly, on his pre-thesis scouting trip, and, like all professional archeologists, appreciated the value of local knowledge, even if amateur or (as it sometimes was) eccentric. Indeed, before Jadis had arrived to take on the full-time direction of Le Dig, Jack had found Balthazar a pillar of strength as a local fixer, relying on him to secure the services of everything from builders and plumbers (the house had needed a lot of renovation) to earthmoving contractors and even on one occasion, a helicopter. Six years on they were firm friends. Desplaines long divorced and with no children of his own clucked over Jack and Jadis as if they were the offspring hed never had. The first time shed seen him, in neatly pressed slacks and a striped blazer, Jadis thought he looked like Roger MacLennane would have done had he tried to impersonate Maurice Chevalier, and this prospect always made her smile. Lunch was a long affair, and merry. As he always did, Desplaines rained old-fashioned flattery on Jadis, remarking expansively that he thought shed never looked lovelier. Jadis put her hand on his and told him of Jacks wonderful birthday gift. And then, of course, they started talking about the abri of Souris Saint-Michel and the mystery of de Bonnards last dig, and that they might re-open it, starting again from where the great man had left off. As they talked, Desplaines expression clouded and became serious, conspiratorial. Do you know what happened to de Bonnards field notes from Souris? His collections from that last season? I always assumed theyd have ended up in Paris, at the Musum, said Jack. I wish Id had the chance to go and see Ah yes, the Musum National dHistoire Naturelle in memory of his old mentor, Geoffroy. And so they did. Or, he tapped one finger on his long, beaked nose, they might. Dont be such a tease, Balthazar! This from Jadis, laughing. She always laughed around Balthazar, she thought: perhaps it because he always made her feel like something out of Gigi, a little girl to be pampered and spoiled. But not at all, my dear! Of course de Bonnard sent every scrap of paper and every chip of stone back to Paris, as soon as hed completed any project. He was always such a stickler for accuracy and protocol never leaving any loose ends that I always assumed that hed done the same for anything hed found at Souris Saint-Michel, as soon as hed found it. But when Jack told me you were coming today, I thought some more and it occurred to me that the good Abb had still been working on Souris Saint-Michel when he died. Hed been based here at Aurignac at the time, and he hadnt finished with the collections yet. So I did a little digging of my own, in my little museum here, and, quelle surprise Jack and Jadis looked at Balthazar in amazement. Oui, mes enfants, said Balthazar, plainly enjoying the moment of drama and waving to the waiter for the check: I have a little birthday present of my own to give you, my dearest Jadis. Shall we go and open it? What Desplaines had to show them made them giddy with amazement, and he was clearly playing it for all it was worth. After all, it is not every day that an amateur antiquarian, even one as knowledgeable and well-connected as he was, found himself in the possession of information that blindsides the world-famous professionals. So, much as he was fond of Jadis and Jack, he relished his moment in the spotlight to the full. So, first, he showed them the Abb de Bonnards very last field journal. They clustered round Desplaines desk in his small and cluttered office Jadis in the chair, Jack and Balthazar leaning over her left and right shoulders, the huge cloth-bound ledger before them in a pool of yellow light. The language was, of course, no problem to either Jack or Jadis, whod lived for so long in La France Profonde, but de Bonnard had made it as easy as possible by writing in the most elegantly cadenced French, penned in the clearest copperplate. I wish every archeologist was as organized as this, said Jadis, admiringly, clearly recognizing a kindred spirit in the long-dead cleric. But what they read in the measured tones of the blessed Abb had made them gasp. The very last entry of the field-log for 1866 ran like this: The excavations of 1866 at the antediluvian rock shelter known as Souris Saint-Michel have been productive, thank the Lord. However, I feel sure that the present eastern wall of the cave That must be the back wall said Jack. does not represent an autochthonous feature of the present shelter, but is, in all probability, the result of emplacement of travertine subsequent to the caves formation. Jadis was open-mouthed. Darling Jack, you were right, not that I ever doubted you, of course, but Flustered, she pushed her increasingly disordered hair away from her face, so she could read more. Such secondary emplacement might indeed be inferred from the stratigraphy of the cave floor which dips very strongly towards the east, as if directed beneath any secondarily emplaced stalactitic formation. Amazing, said Jack. I never noticed any such dipping. Thats the Abb for you, replied Deplaines. I expect most of the present cave floor is overburden from the 1866 season, which the Abb had replaced and leveled, to protect the productive strata from disturbance leaving them mothballed and ready for the next season, continued Jack which never came. concluded Desplaines. But how typically tidy of the good Abb! I expect that when you remove the overlying sediment, youll see it all just as it was almost a hundred and fifty years ago, not a speck of dust out of place. Knowing de Bonnard, it wouldnt dare! They would have laughed then all of them but were too engrossed in the notes, following them, like hounds, to their end. Should the Lord in his infinite grace and mercy preserve me for another season, I shall inquire about the purchase of suitable equipment, in order that the integrity of the eastern wall might be tested. For if the wall is a secondary feature as I now suppose, it follows that further voids might lie behind it. To summarize I am convinced that the cave as originally formed was much more extensive than it now appears. Only the Lord knows what secrets lie behind the eastern wall, and, were I not to be chastised by my presumption, I should also care to ponder that selfsame subject. The text ended there. He was, indeed, chastised for his presumption, and soon, said Balthazar. How so? asked Jack. Looking at the date of this memoir, and what we know of his life, he was killed the same day that he wrote this. I imagine he got up from his desk possibly in this very room where you are sitting, Jadis went straight to his neighbors orchard, and fell out of the avenging tree. What you are looking at is the very last thing de Bonnard ever wrote. Jack and Jadis looked as Desplaines in astonishment and awe. But theres more. Come with me. Desplaines hurried them into a dim side-room filled, from floor to ceiling, with cabinets of wide, flat wooden hardwood drawers the signature furniture of any museum collection for all that these looked stained with antiquity and not a little neglect. He turned on a single, dusty bulb that had the effect of making the room appear even darker and dingier. His eyes squinted and scanned the labels until one met with his recognition. Truly, Im amazed I had never come across this one before. But theres always something more to find, even in a small museum like this. Look! He pulled out a drawer marked SSM 1866 (I had no idea what it meant, Jack, until your phone call made me put two and two together). The drawer squeaked and protested on rusted runners as he pulled it out. Jack and Jadis looked inside. Jadis felt she was being sucked into a vortex, her knees that they might buckle, and she had to gasp for breath. For what she saw, arranged in a muddle of old newspapers and pasteboard boxes, was a collection of twenty-four Remillardian artefacts, each one of the palm-sized flint polygons as pristine as the day it had been knapped. There are five more drawers, just like this one, said Desplaines. About a hundred and fifty pieces in all. And all come from the 1866 season at Souris. no wonder de Bonnard never described them, said Jack, like us, he wouldnt have known what to make of them. Balthazar, said Jadis, did you say a hundred and fifty, and all from that one, tiny cave? Indeed so, my dear Jadis. But thats incredible, Jadis said, the excitement in her voice rising with each syllable. You know how much sediment we shifted at Saint-Rogatien over six years. You saw it, Balthazar. It was vast. And yet in all that time we found ninety-three Remillardian artefacts. Ninety-three! And de Bonnard finds half as much again in a small cave in a single season and nobody knew this? Apparently not, Jadis. I agree, cest incroyable, but there it is. And now its your turn. The Abb de Bonnard was taken from this Earth by the Almighty and his neighbors apple tree. But youre still here, and here, I think, is your destiny. For if you and Jack and the shade of the good de Bonnard are correct, who knows what might lie beyond the eastern wall? Jadis gasped, looked at Desplaines with open-mouthed wonder and joy, and to Desplaines lasting delight flung her arms around him. Oh thank you, Balthazar what a wonderful, wonderful present! Jack just laughed and laughed, all tension gone, and when theyd all recovered, managed to say Balthazar, after that performance, dinner is on us. Much later, after another hearty, artery-challenging dose of Gascon cuisine, Jack and Jadis lay in their suite, the only light from a pale yellow streetlamp, some way off, filtered through the blinds. They exchanged not a word. They didnt need to, for each knew that the other was thinking over the shattering revelations of the day. Jack lay on his back, looking up at the ceiling, imagining a Remillardian artefact in each imperfection, each shadowing of the plaster. What further wonders lay beyond that wall? Jadis lay with her left arm flung over Jack, idly stroking his chest, her hair spread over his upper body like a cloak of invisibility, her face shadowed in thought. All of a sudden it occurred to Jack that they could all be wrong Jadis, de Bonnard and himself that the cave wall was a natural structure after all, perfectly solid, with nothing further to discover behind it. Jadis caught his thought and replied: If thats the case, Darling Jack, then Id like another birthday present. Hmm? What did you have in mind? Im not sure, she replied: but I expect Ill think of something. And with that she traced her fingers from her chest, smoothing them over his belly and stroking him, her touch lighter than a breath. He stiffened in a second, and became so painfully hard that he caught his breath. He felt that were a passing butterfly to flap near his glans, hed detonate. Then, very softly, she said something he hadnt heard for a very long time, not since their very first visit to Saint-Rogatien on their honeymoon, their last night at the Sanglier DOr just off the village square, with the warm wind through the open window making sails of the curtains, so many painful long eons ago, and before so many things had happened. She said I want you, Jack. Very much. Please, now. Jadis are you? Her voice suddenly switched from coy gentleness to a mixture of school-marmish asperity and heartbreakingly painful, imperative need. Please, Darling Jack. I need you. I want you inside me. Now. Ive missed you so. Its been far too long. He turned over onto his elbows and knees as she moved underneath him, gripping his shoulders and gasping, panting, now, Jack. Now! and he was inside her, fully inside her, in what seemed to him a hot, eager embrace of liquid velvet. More, Jack, more fill me she begged, raising her legs and crossing them over his back, almost under his shoulder blades, squeezing him into her. As she did this, her whole body started to vibrate, to hum like telephone wires in a gale, each throbbing to a different subharmonic, some just audible, but many well below the range of human hearing. The vibrations built and amplified and, as they did so, reinforced one another. She dug her nails into Jacks shoulders as if afraid that the uncontrollable, random shivering might sweep her away, and with one last, terrible spasm, arched her back towards Jack, driving him inside her to the hilt. Jack exploded inside her like a star shell, and they collapsed like spent fireworks. The entire episode had lasted seventeen seconds. They lay, panting, in much the same position as they had before, both soaked in sweat, Jack on his back, his head full of wheeling stars. After a pause, she raised herself on her elbows, looking down at him with that slightly crossed-eyed intensity he loved, and started to kiss him, all over his face, his eyes, his chest; and, in between kisses thank you, Darling Jack you gorgeous man thank you so much and, in between these, her silent tears began to flow until she could no longer control them. Jack enfolded her in his arms and cradled her against him like a small child until the tears had ebbed, and she had fallen asleep. It had been sudden, cathartic, he thought, but it had been a strange day, and for him a little frightening. But, stroking her hair that had spread over both of them like a silk blanket, he could see that she was, at last, after all these long, painful years, fully whole, and at peace. Jadis, wrapped in his arms, felt like shed turned into a fluffy pink cloud sailing off into a perfectly clear blue sky, over a landscape of mountains and summits that had once, inexplicably, filled her with dread. She tried though not very hard to remember when shed first fallen in love with Jack, but she could not. She was vaguely aware that there might have been a time before that, but the point was moot, as shed been a completely different person. In any case, she thought, the only moment worth thinking about was now, the continuous present, in which she was secure in the arms of this man, the moment that had, for her, persisted since the beginning of time, and would endure for all eternity. But it was something else entirely that filled her mind, just before she slept. It was something that Balthazar had shown her, just as they were leaving his little museum, almost as an afterthought. Something shoved into the back of one of the drawers of Remillardian polygons, unlabelled, without provenance. It was a sculpture of a hugely pregnant woman, with enormous breasts and thighs, and yet faceless. It was made of ivory but stained the color of teak, and was the size of a plum. There were traces of red ocher on the womans head, as if shed had red hair. Balthazar seemed to make a point of showing the statuette to Jadis when Jacks back was turned. I think it came from Souris in that last season, judging from its staining and patination said Balthazar, but as there are no other records of it, it must stay in limbo. He held it out to Jadis, in his palm. Balthazar must have noticed the moisture in her eyes, then, her bittersweet smile, because he closed his fingers round it, and, turning to place it back in the drawer, said, very quietly, Jadis, Im so sorry please forgive me. I should have realized. After all youve been through. Please, Balthazar, she reassured him. It all happened to someone else. A long time ago. Cambridge, England October, 2004 No definition had spoken of the landscape-gardener as of the poet; yet it seemed to my friend that the creation of the landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Edgar Allan Poe The Domain of Arnheim Item: we have a Lion. We have a Witch. And now, we have a Wardrobe! announced Jade, flushed and breathless, after theyd heaved the second-hand hulk into the bedroom of the flat theyd rented just after she graduated. But will we still get to Narnia? said Jack. That, Darling Jack, has yet to be determined, she replied, the steel of her eyes flashing between loose strands of hair. It was a one-bedroom Victorian garden flat in Chesterton, which they were paying for from a years extension of Jacks doctorate grant, extra supervisions, and a few odd research jobs that Jade was doing for Professor MacLennane (whod taken a proprietorial interest in both of them) on the pretext of her studying for a Masters while Jack finished his thesis a prospect that seemed almost in his grasp, but forever just beyond his reach. The flat was dark and grubby, but it was sound and tolerably dry; the central heating worked at least some of the time; and a pot of paint on a summer Sunday afternoon always works wonders, even were one not to be distracted by trying to paint each other instead of the kitchen ceiling. In any case, Jack who was otherwise never more content than when sleeping rough under a hedge said hed be pleased to have a base where he could think and work in peace and quiet, and where they could at least be together without prying landladies or college domestics. It also had the loveliest garden: hardly forty feet by twenty, but surrounded entirely by a high wall, and, being north-east facing, made an evening sun-trap of the high, back wall. Jade rediscovered a fondness for gardening that she thought shed left behind on her Dads allotment when, as a little girl, shed love to grow radishes and sunflowers and pick gooseberries. By the following summer it was a fragrant haven for herbs and cottage-garden flowers. On sunny days, Jack took his supervisions in the garden. He always felt happiest outside. He was, he claimed to a visiting French colleague, the last of the red-hot Paleolithic lovers, at which Jade flushed and hid behind her curtain of hair. At the bottom of the garden was a knee-high raised bed that ran its entire width, restrained by a wall of reclaimed bricks, and in which some unidentifiable species of ornamental acacia grew over an unkempt understory of broom, rosemary and lavender. You could crawl right inside, under the bushes, and make a kind of nest on a carpet of herbs and the crusts of dead leaves, where nobody could find you. It baked in the Sun during the day, unleashing a lush torrent of fragrance, and even after dark, the old brick wall behind would radiate the accumulated heat well into the early hours warmth that the bushes would then trap, creating an almost Mediterranean microclimate. It was in the Nest (it was now capitalized), much more than in their first, new double bed, that they made love. On late summer evenings Jade and Jack would burrow into the Nest wearing little more than a bottle of wine, two glasses and a smile, and would not emerge until morning their own private Eden. Jack remembered one chilly dawn awaking in the Nest to find them both slick with dew. A spider had spun drag lines across Jades pale body, trapping drops of moisture that made a spangled net for the twining, leaf-adorned strands of her hair. Each of her long, dark lashes was crowned with a tiny pearl, just as if she were a sleeping fairy queen. For all that he was stiff, wet and blue with cold, Jack remembered it as a moment when his heart sang. And as for supervisions, ever since his best student had become his fiance, hed seen very few sparks of talent, or even (it has to be said) of much intelligence. One exception was a dashing and almost unbearably cocky young first-year called Avi Malkeinu, who was Israeli and knew all about Mount Carmel, famous for its honeycomb of caves rich in Neanderthal and modern human remains. Malkeinu had poked around them, boy and man, civilian and soldier, and had some outrageous ideas about the extent and depth of human and Neanderthal occupation in his country outrageous to all except Jack, who learned as least as much from Malkeinu as Malkeinu did from him. Malkeinu got in very well with Jade, and at first Jack was worried. He neednt have been Jade loved to flirt, but it was never, ever serious. In any case, Malkeinu, for all his affected medallion-man flash and fondness for offensively smelly after-shave, had been raised on an old-fashioned kibbutz where men and women grew up all together in a brash, matter-of-fact way, with none of the mysteries that complicated adolescence elsewhere. Malkeinu would have loved to have seen Jade without her clothes on, and said so. Sure! What real man wouldnt? She was a babe! But hed seen, so hed said, lots of beautiful women without their clothes on, quite often several at once, and he earnestly hoped to see lots more. The world was wide, evidently a big new game made for his pleasure. There were no sliding panels about Malkeinu. You just took him as you found him. Avis openness made something that happened to Jack one day in October, when Cambridge baked in the last, fiery gasps of an Indian Summer, all the more strange. He was visited in his office by two rather shifty-looking characters, claiming to represent some student organization or another, who advised him that he shouldnt be teaching Malkeinu. Hed served in the Israeli Defense Forces, they said, and was, no doubt, an Evil Agent of Zionist Oppression. In response, Jack did something that he almost never did get angry. Alarmingly, consumingly angry, so that he shed the shy, quiet academic that he tended to be while in Cambridge, and became the wiry and piratical ranger that he was in the field. He listened quietly to what his visitors had to say, and then, still without meeting their gaze, invited them, just as quietly, to go fuck themselves. When they began to remonstrate, he rose from his chair, as if, all of a sudden, he really had become Aslan, the avenger. Listen, I thought I told you to fuck off, he said, as calmly as his sternly suppressed violence would allow, finally turning his scorchingly unflinching gaze upon them: and if I see either of you little shits again or if you harass my friends Ill fucking rip your fucking bastard heads off and fucking stick them on fucking poles. Understand? Now piss off. He had to say nothing further: in the ferocity of his stare, the grimness of his attitude, the two took flight and never came back. For ten minutes Jack remained his chair, his heart racing, his body shaking uncontrollably. He didnt think he had it in him: hed normally do anything to avoid conflict, and immediately began to worry that there might be repercussions. But what began to dominate his mind, half an hour later, as he walked home through the searing streets, stormclouds gathering above him as if to mirror his mood, was that hed heard spiteful rubbish like that before, from people in his own department, especially the social anthropologists: and those archeologists who read the past not as it was, but through the lenses of current political preoccupation and yet had the gall to call themselves scientists. Neo-archeologists, processual archeologists, feminist archeologists, Marxist archeologists, post-fucking-processual archeologists, for Gods sake, not to mention those idiots, quite often obscenely obese women from Berkeley or Pasadena, who climbed to the top of tells, stripped off and jiggled their leviathantine tits about for the benefit of some right-on Mother Goddess as if (and this was the part he found really offensive) as if this charade had anything whatsoever to do with what prehistoric people actually believed or did! And there were people in his department who actually took that bilge seriously the same people whod cheerfully scorn a kitsch Hawaiian hotel luau as having as much connection with authentic Polynesian culture as Mickey Mouse had with Mus musculus, simply because it was a product of capitalist colonialism. No, he thought. Prehistory is forged on the ground, not by political posturing, and it was people like Malkeinu open-minded people, people only interested in acute observation who had the best chance of finding out what it was, without prejudice. And they were damning him because of his origins and national obligations? What utter, dismal, hypocritical crap. No wonder, Jack thought, that hed spent so much time in the field, away from such pseudery. But as he approached Chesterton, and began to calm down, he realized that he was that close to being a pseud himself. Processual-and-whatever archeology had, at least, been forged in the field as much as his own landscape-based approach, as ways and means to get to grips with patterns seen in data, patterns caused by the interaction of man and nature. But as yet he still had no way of interpreting the patterns he saw. He had to find something soon. He had to. To vindicate people like Avi Malkeinu. To vindicate Jades faith in him. To vindicate himself. Jade, too, had had a rotten day, running errands for Professor MacLennane that meant scurrying to and from the University Library for books that didnt exist, when she was quite sure that they did; or if they did exist, were on shelves on the other side of the building; for papers which she wasnt allowed to see, even though shed phoned ahead and received cast-iron assurances that they would be made available. It didnt help that the library was as hot as an oven, and that she was getting a headache. As she was sure she wasnt due for a period, this suggested that the oppressive weather had built up to its stifling worst before an imminent break and not before time. In fact, when she paused to count days, shed had her period about a week and a half before. This probably explained why, right now, she was as randy as a goat, which only added to her feeling of general dissatisfaction. It was about time, she thought, that Jack made some headway with his doctorate, because only then could she get serious about her own. She arrived home moments after Jack, determined to make some progress after a hot summer in which very little seemed to have been achieved. As she kicked off her sandals she saw his hiking boots and socks cast off in the hall, still warm; his bag on the kitchen table, papers pouring from it like the innards of a partially eviscerated dogfish. She found him where she knew he would be, in the Nest. Wine? he offered, barefoot, holding out a full glass of off-license Merlot as she sat down next to him on the wall of the raised bed, beneath the lavender and rosemary, fragrant from the days heat. Nicest thing anyones said to me all day, she replied, taking a generous swig. Correction, she noted, looking up, her eyes sharp, her lips stained with red, a rivulet running down her chin. Im sure you said something even nicer to me this morning. I did? His lovely, unforced, unfocused smile. Whatever clouds had gathered over him were beginning to dissipate. Responding, she warmed to him and snuggled up closer, sitting on the ledge between his legs, leaning back against his chest, completely enfolded by his arms. Yes, you silly old Lion. You said she began to laugh you said that tonight we really must have a brainstorm. Frankly, Snow Queen, Id rather pour you some more wine, which he did. Then he put down the bottle and stroked her unfastening hair. and, you said that after the brainstorm, that I really needed a thorough seeing-to. I said that? Doesnt sound like me. Are you sure that was me? He ran his fingers down her throat, unbuttoned her blouse, and let his hands steal lightly over her breasts, his fingertips teasing her tightening nipples through the fabric of her bra. Yes, of course it was you, she laughed. She felt as warm as the wine as she reached her arms above her and pulled his face down to hers. Nope. Cant have been me, he said. Now, if it were me, Id have said you needed a good seeing-to before the brainstorm. Nothing like a good seeing-to, you know, for clearing the brain. Well, as it is you, and thats your view, Professor, she said, why dont we? But before they could say or do anything else, the clouds broke with a deafening crash, and within seconds they were as drenched as if God had emptied his bathwater on their garden. Aha, Professor! she yelled against the weathers roar, the rainstorm that comes before the brainstorm! For that dreadful joke, Snow Queen, you really do deserve a good seeing to. I do so agree, Professor, she said: it was the last thing either of them said for a long time. As they sat in the warm rain on the edge of the raised flower bed, her head under his chin, he ruffled her damp hair while continuing to unbutton her, peeling off her wet blouse and unfastening her bra, while she luxuriated in his minute attention. She shimmied out of her long skirt and underwear, her feet raising splashy gouts on the lawn, and sat back. The rain coursed over their bodies: her skin tingled as his hands slowly explored her breasts, her stiffly puckered nipples, her belly (shipping water in her navel), her arms, her upraised throat. She took his right hand in hers and after kissing his fingertips very gently, placed them between her parted thighs. The weight of the immense drops of rainwater splashing on and around his fingers contrasted with the steadily radiant, tropical heat he could feel from between her cool, rain-washed legs. She rose, turned, in naked loveliness as if she were a dancing sprite in the dawn of the world, rain splashing and glancing and making sparks in all directions as it ricocheted from her glistening body, her hair swinging in lazy streamers over her face and breasts, put one finger on his lips while she unzipped his fly. His cock stood up immediately, and while he was still perched on the edge of the raised bed, she bent down, kissed it, took it in her mouth, licked him, the ends of her water-weighted hair brushing against his legs. Then she arose in languorous slowness and straddled him, gripping his hips with her firm, broad thighs, feeling him deeply, smoothly and hot within her, rocking back and forth, as he cupped her behind with one hand, and with the other, traced the rivulets arcing down the valley of her spine. As they moved, they kissed again, their lips meeting and parting, meeting and parting through the rain curtain, in a butterfly dance. After a minute or two he rose, and, with her legs still wrapped around his waist, picked her up, turned, and sliding out of her placed her inside the Nest on a deep carpet of leaves still dry and warm, the foliage above protecting it from the worst of the downpour. She lay there, sodden, almost buried in leaves, limbs spread, eyes burning in a soft glow as he shucked off his trousers and underpants. But before he could scramble into the Nest and take her again, she laughed skittishly and flipped over on to her knees and elbows, thrusting her leaf-strewn backside at him like a cat on heat, waving it from side to side like a flag, as if she had a tail. Although momentarily taken aback this was a somewhat new direction for their sexual repertoire he moved in towards her, feeling the irresistible, cool softness of the backs of her thighs against his groin, her swollen, pitted warmth between. He stroked the inviting curves of her hips, brushing the leaves away; traced the dips of her lower back, moving his hands forward, holding her waist before sliding them over her shoulders, massaging these as she moved back and forth, moaning; then weighed the ripeness of her breasts with their velvety-hard tips, and then, moving his hands back once more, parting her buttocks just slightly, feeling her soft and fuzzy wetness with his fingertips before clasping her waist with both hands and sliding into her as deeply and as fully as he could and with such sudden and unexpected ferocity that he lifted her knees, for an instant, clear of the ground. Waves of electric shock coursed through her as he pounded into her; that she could not see him, could not feel his arms wrapped around her, could not kiss him in fact, that she was completely passive was an alien and slightly frightening sensation. Even though shed started it, she was not sure she liked it this anonymous sex, this seeing-to without the comfort of his face. But she needed him now with a savage, inhuman craving. His love was lovely, but needs must: she was a creature of decision, and she had decided that what she wanted most of all, right now, was to be fucked: mechanically, forcefully, to have done, and bring this never-ending business with Jacks thesis to a head. She could tell from the way that Jack was throwing himself into her with such explosive violence that something had irked him, too perhaps even stung him into a kind of remorse that demanded action, some kind of closure. But even after all that, she was beginning to experience the first waves of a slow burn which, if he kept up this relentless, kinetic bombardment this fucking would lead to her own longed-for release. She forgot about the thesis, about the inaction, about her own academic holding pattern, and when at length he came, in a vast and thunderous spasm, she felt as if he had filled every crevice of her body and being. With his last, sharp gasps she found herself panting for breath, shaking from head to toe, her soul dissolved, her body a husk like these dead leaves, collapsing, and as she did so, she felt him soften and draw out of her, a sensation both unbearably joyous and excruciatingly painful, all mixed together. They lay in each others arms, exhausted and covered by wet leaves, him in a shirt, soaked through; she completely naked, saying nothing. The ferocity of their sex had been beyond the experience of either of them. They were both filled with a buzz and a flood of rapture, but in truth slightly embarrassed and awed by the animality of it. He wrapped her in his arms, and, as the storm passed overhead, she felt herself doze slightly. It was gloaming dusk when she woke, her own Jack not that animal stroking her hair: Come on, Snow Queen, he said, Time for that brainstorm. She could hardly meet his eyes as they made the few steps to the kitchen door and went inside. He made a big bowl of pasta (they were now very hungry indeed) while she showered she felt she needed it. As the well-behaved and domesticated shower jets coursed over her body, replacing the screaming wildness of the rain, warming and absolving her, and sending the last of the leaves and dirt down the drain, she wondered how it was that sex could ever be separated from love. Men could do that, for sure (a quick chat with Malkeinu or MacLennane was proof of that) but what about women who did that kind of thing for a living, servicing fucking one faceless man after another as casually as any business transaction? She guessed that one could get used to anything in time, but she found it puzzling, alienating. And besides that, what with the intemperate violence of their sex, the extreme depths to which Jack had penetrated her, she felt sore and bruised, and perhaps even a little ill-used. She did not love Jack any the less on dark days she felt that if hed died, shed simply snuff out of existence, like a candle flame but this was a stern side of Jack shed never seen. Somehow, perversely, this made her love him more. And that, she could not yet explain. After a supper during which they had hardly spoken they sat on either side of the kitchen table with Jacks papers, in an atmosphere of brittle nervousness. Their clothes, trashed, were shoved into the corner, waiting for a trip to the launderette. Jack had put on a long, white bathrobe embossed with the legend Property of the Fairbanks Marriott, over faded grey tracksuit bottoms. Jade, her hair scraped back severely and tied in a long plait, wore nothing but her inevitable shapeless once-purple jersey, now so stretched and vast that it came down below her knees, its sleeves so long that shed had to roll them in great puffs wedged above her elbows. She felt far too sore and bow-legged to wear anything underneath. But for all this informality their conversation was as stilted and as starchy as a job interview going badly, when both parties find nothing to say to fill the yawning pauses. As they discussed how to organize Jacks data, Jack longed to come round to her side of the table, but felt that shed rebuff him. Jade, for her part, wanted his arms, his touch, and most of all that he should wrap her up like a baby, like a Christmas parcel and well to make everything all right. But each was too scared to move. And in any case, they had a job to do first. And so they bounced ideas to one another like the sexless talking heads that scientists are supposed to be: Jack, with his icily blue eyes explaining his intuitions, Jade with her fierce brown gaze dissecting them with a cold, insectoid logic, shuffling them, probing them, parrying, throwing them back. Their language was framed in the cool tones of null hypotheses, falsifiability and significance levels, of distribution-free nonparametric tests; of circularity, of particularity and applicability. It seemed to Jade that the tables had been turned. She had become the teacher, he the pupil. Jack felt the same, and with that, the same kind of relief hed felt when hed asked her to marry him, of responsibility shared, of no longer being alone. But what neither quite realized was that their dispassionate discourse was turning into a loving exchange. As they came to see a shared picture of what Jacks course of action should now be, their spoken sentences grew shorter as each one started was completed by the other. Cold eyes once again grew more animated, hands waved. Jade, still talking, rose to put the kettle on; Jack, to finish the drying up. They stood next to each other, at the sink, in their baggy clothes, arguing with force but no animosity over the details of what was beginning, almost, to look like an emerging strategy. A part of Jack that had detached from the argument looked face on at Jade in pure wonderment. To be sure, Jade was how did Avi put it? a babe but more than that, she was his love, inseparable, and more than that, his colleague. Hed had enough hints, from MacLennane most of all, but with Jade to sculpt real shapes from the foggy nuances that made up his work, they might be unbeatable. But Jade was distracted, in full flow about metadata, integration and whatnot that he darent stop her and just tell her tell her that he loved her. He didnt want to spoil it: even to touch her, to brush past her by accident, might break the flow of her argument. Even under that horrible sack she loved to wear around the house (and which hed sworn she was wearing when theyd first met, although she always denied it), he could tell she was as taut as a string. She had to work it out of her system, for both of them. But then, it happened. Tea over, drying-up done, piles of notes made, they both rose at once in the tiny kitchen and zap! Jacks right wrist made a glancing contact with one dangling, purple sleeve, and zing! she was in his arms again, face buried once more in his chest, tears flowing. Do you think you can take it from here? she asked, looking up at him, red-nosed and eyelids full of water, racked with shuddering sobs, as if shed had some intellectual orgasm. It had all been building up inside her for weeks months the way through the woods, until the tension had become insupportable. Later, when shed calmed down, and Jack had tucked her up in bed, folding himself in behind her with one arm sleepily fingering loose strands of her hair, the other folded across her belly, she thought that perhaps a thorough fucking was all that shed needed to break the deadlock. Nothing like a good seeing-to, you know, for clearing the brain, Jack had said. But a good seeing-to was good for other things, too. For when Jacks thesis was complete, after two months of sixteen-hour days; after more argument, more computer simulations, more anxiety, more sleepless nights, more testing, more checking and double-checking, and papers in unruly drifts all over the flat, Jade discovered something else. She was pregnant. Coromandel Station, Earth 51,977,296 BC But full of fire and greedy hardiment The youthfull knight could not for ought be staide Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene Ruxie rode a wave of pleasure and agonized frustration. He didnt mind letting his grade-point averages slip, just a little (or didnt notice, or just didnt care), if it meant that he could see Xalom, as often as possible. They would always meet, at first, in the bar in the harbor district where theyd first met, and would go on long, midnight walks, holding hands like childhood sweethearts. And that was the frustrating part apart from that first kiss, theyd done nothing more intimate than hold hands. All Ruxies attempts at anything bolder were met with gentle but firm, unspoken reproof. Ruxie couldnt understand it, but didnt dare say anything for fear of breaking the spell. All he knew was that his desperately expectant prong throbbed so hard it hurt. To make it worse he couldnt hide his frustration from Ko. Despite saying nothing, it was evidently written all over his face, and in night-time writhings he could do nothing about, but of which Ko was only too aware. You gotta do something about that, old son, hed leer. It isnt just for pissing through, you know. On free days when Ruxie would normally be studying, or working out, or taking out his frustrations with the new Higgs Projectors on the weapons range, Xalom showed him all the wonders of Coromandel Station hed only read about. To the consternation of the guards and the other visitors, she ran before him like a will-o-the-wisp into the ill-lit, mazy ways of the Institute of Galactic History until they arrived, panting and laughing, at its center, the Gharaan Collection. Laughter was replaced by awe as they contemplated the three metalloid scraps that were all that remained of the earliest-known civilization in the Universe. Xalom broke the wide-eyed silence. Ive been coming here since I was a little girl, she said, and it always gets me. A whole civilization, that old ... that early. And nobody knows anything much about them at all. Ruxie peered at the cramped type on the dusty label in a vain effort to stifle a rising vertigo, a kind of agoraphobia sparked by this confrontation with unbelievably remote antiquity. And the outrageous scale of their own ignorance. Is that all there is? Just whats in this glass case? Yes. Amazing, isnt it? she said. They stood together, looking at the three pieces of dull silvery slag that was all that remained of an unknown number of births, lives, hopes raised, dreams dashed, and deaths, both cruel and peaceful, of a species of mysterious form and mode, from what was now the Fomalhaut sector but which was once something quite different more than eleven billion years before. Xaloms hand crept into his. Two tiny sparks standing against the darkness of all eternity. Doesnt anyone have a clue about ... them? How they lived? How they died? Ruxie was surprised by the anguish in his voice, as if the history of these indescribably remote lives really mattered to him, then and there. He flushed a little, expecting some of Xaloms gentle teasing. He was surprised, instead, by her seriousness. But before she answered, she smiled at him. As if she was a teacher, and hed passed some kind of test. She squeezed his hand all the more firmly, like she might inadvertently lose it and Ruxie would careen off into the void. Puzzled, he looked more closely at her as she spoke. There was more than a hint of tears in her eyes, behind the smile. He remembered his Ma smiling like that, with relief, when shed just found some vital object her keys, or a family photo which shed convinced herself shed lost. Almost nothing, Ruxie. But theres a lot in that almost. Theyve thats the Institute have analyzed the metal. Its like no kind of matter we know about here and now. The closest description they can reach is that its a metallic form of well, ice. Frozen water. Ice? Metallic ice? Thats ... Yes, I know. Impossible. But really, what the fragments are made of is not as important as what happened to them. The material is riddled with all kinds of imperfections that have all the signs of incredible stresses. Incredible stresses. Like it brushed against something that mashed it to a dimensionless pulp and then reassembled it. So perhaps the material started off as something more ordinary. Or, at least. Different. Different from what it is now. Well, thats what one group of scientists thinks. One group? There are others? Of course! Cmon, Ruxie! Youd never expect any kind of consensus with artifacts as enigmatic and as important as these. Now, would you do something for me? Go round the other side of the cabinet, look at the smallest artifact the one in the center and tell me what you see. A game? Indulge me. She pecked him on the cheek and sent him on his way with a playful pat on the backside. Hed have responded in kind, perhaps, had he not seen what then came into view. It stopped him dead in his tracks, like his feet had been glued to the floor. Suddenly everything else in the room blurred the glass case, Xalom, everything all except the deathly chill that gripped him, and the specimen before his eyes. Carved onto the far side of the fragment was an inscription. He swallowed. Just tell me what you see, Ruxie. Her voice seemed firm on the surface, but it quivered below with ... what? Excitement? Ruxie tried his best to get the words out, but his throat was as dry as a desert, and their sharp edges snagged the inside of his mouth. The object. Its a rectangle, about I dont know, maybe fifteen centimeters from side to side, and maybe five or six tall... hard to be sure shifting Keep going, Ruxie, youre doing fine. ... but thats just the frame. Inside there are three circles, inscribed, and theyre theyre theyre so beautiful. So perfect. Like ... like... He looked up. Ruxie, keep going... dont stop now! Her voice was peaked and jagged with anxiety. Ruxie was puzzled but did what he was told, without question. He looked down at the specimen once again. It looked like something seen from a great distance. He felt a little dizzy. He started to dribble. ... and in between the circles are two crescents horns pointing outwards ... and ... and ... lines, a lot of lines, all radiating from the circle in the middle... and... Xalom, help me, I feel very strange. The Earth flew upwards and over his head. He must have blacked out, for the next thing he knew he was lying on a bench in a shadowed corner of the gallery, his head in her lap, her hand, cool, on his forehead. He startled. Hush now, everythings going to be fine, she said. He remembered the last thing he saw. Sweat beaded on his brow, as he was trying to break a fever. Xalom... Shh... there, now. Xalom, it ... it glowed. He remembered now: the lines, the circles, the crescents, had all shone at him with a deep, ultraviolet pulse. Just before he winked out. He remembered something else, too, but could no longer bring it to mind, as if it were some fleeting pebble hed picked up on the seashore of dreams but had dropped before waking, recalling nothing more than the smooth, sandy feel of it between his fingers. He sat up, a little unsteadily at first, and Xalom, holding him, looked at him again, half in cool appraisal, half with some strange expression Ruxie had never seen before, but if hed had to describe it in one word, hed say melting. Youve done well, Ruxie. Really well. Im so pleased I found you, and she came to him and kissed him, with luscious and determined firmness. Ruxie was helpless before the wave, numb. She pulled away from him, looked directly in his eyes, but seemed to be looking through him, as if shed just picked up some remote signal from deep space. Ruxie wasnt as surprised by this as hed thought he might be. After several weeks, hed become used to strange, instant summonses which she said were relayed to her in-ear comms port. Special Ops. He remembered the first, jarring occasion, when theyd been in the Natural History Museum, and were standing beneath the many-legged structure that dominated the main hall of a building constructed on a scale large enough to accommodate this immense and enigmatic alien. The Taniquetilian tesseractrix was built like a sea-spider from the oceans of Earth many legs fused to a tiny body but on a gigantic scale. Each leg was eighty meters long, curving from a vast chitinous claw through a succession of blue-gray joints to terminate in the body in the blue haze far above their heads. Opera glasses, thoughtfully supplied by the Museum, were required to see the body itself, a mysterious structure augmented with a bewildering variety of stalactitic protrusions and various polyhedral blobs of unknown function. Ruxie remembered gazing at it, open mouthed, unable to take it all in. A hand in his; a warm, enticing whisper in his ear. A suppressed giggle. Go on, I dare you. Count its legs. Ruxie brought his head down with nauseous recoil. He refocused his eyes and turned around, carefully, to count each one of the giant, teetering columns. This was harder to do than it seemed. He was never sure if hed counted the first leg twice. After three attempts he linked the first leg to the scene behind it the Museum gift shop and started again. The task was easier, but only marginally. Twenty-three. No, twenty-four. No, twenty-three. No no, Im sure its twenty-three. Actually, its twenty-seven. And now I have to go. And with that she disappeared. He had a fleeting glimpse of a rapidly receding back view accompanied by an imagined Ko-commentary of nice ass! and a sensation of somehow being short-changed. Twenty-seven? No way. Was she having a joke? Why? And if she werent, how could she have been so certain? The guide-book reported that the number of the legs on the Taniquetilian tesseractrix was formally unknown. This time, it was different. She continued to face him, on the bench just off the Gharaan Gallery in the Institute, and took both his hands in his. Im wanted. But this time, you should come with me. Dusk was falling as they hurried down the Institute steps and on to the street. Funny it had been only mid-morning when theyd come in, excited with the weekend crowds. Had they been in there what eight hours? How long had he been out for the count? But Xalom was somehow in too much of a distracted rush to allow him to ask her. She hailed a cab kerbside, and within twenty minutes they were back in the harbor district. Xalom paid off the driver, exchanging a few words with him that Ruxie couldnt catch. The familiar tavern was deserted but for a pool of light illuminating a table at the back. On one side was a familiar figure, seated, stein in hand, looking down at something that could not be seen from the shadowed doorway. I promised Mr Spektor that Id settle. Promised. Ill pay my dues, I really will but I cant do it without money. After my next bout should be a formality Ill have enough. Really. You gotta believe me. Tell Mr Spektor that Im a man of my word. A voice came from the direction of the mans feet. It was well-modulated, surprisingly sweet, and dangerous with menace. That is for Mr Spektor to decide. Not you. Especially as youve lost your last two bouts. You run a great risk, Mr Raelle. Not of death: that is an occupational hazard in Uqbar Rules, as you are aware. No, the risk you run, Mr Raelle, is of shaming Mr Spektor, your hitherto unwavering sponsor. The consequences of that will be very much worse than death. Do not fail him again. I wont. Dont worry. Even from this distance, Ruxie could see the beads of perspiration start on Kos forehead. I shall be back to collect. After the bout. Perhaps not us in person. It might be one of our associates. Very good. Ill be waiting. Ko looked up, then, and smiled at Ruxie and Xalom in greeting. His unseen companion must have taken that as the cue to leave. There was a puffing noise, a wheeze, and the delicate patter of an almost inaudible clanking as the mysterious companion made its way to where Ruxie and Xalom stood. They looked down as the stranger approached. It was not so much a person as a contraption. A black sphere the size of a large grapefruit, chased in silvery metal filigree and mounted on a chassis sprouting four wire-frame balloon wheels. Pulling this arrangement were two insectoid shapes, each no more than thirty centimeters long, made of plate metal intricately linked together. Puffs of steam emanated from their joints as they moved. They looked like praying mantids in armor. It was the fairy-tale carriage that creaks along the edges of robot dreams. It stopped at Ruxies feet, and the mantids looked up. Sulfavillains, said Xalom, a catch in her voice. The mantid on the right raised itself on its rear four legs, gesticulated with its long, anterior talons, rustled its wing-covers and turned its beady-eyed head to one side. Ruxie could see tiny points of malicious red in the centre of each jeweled facet. Its mouthparts moved. Please, Miss, allow me to pass. Thank-you, it said, and trundled off into the night. Ruxie was nonplussed, but Xalom seemed to be shaking with rage. Ruxie tried to put his arms on her shoulders to steady her, but she shook free and marched straight up to Ko, who was sitting, thoughtfully, nursing his beer. Ko Handor Raelle! she hissed, bending down at him. What the hell do you think youre doing, country boy? Dealing with these slime? Ko recoiled and turned his face away from her as if shed slapped him. She launched into him. You know as well as I do or if you dont, then you should that of theres anything mean in this city, anything dirty, then the Sulfas are in it up to their metaphorical necks. They stink! Xalom, I well, when no-one else would back me for a prize fight, they were there. They gave me good terms. He looked down, shamefaced. Oh, really? Ill bet they did. So when you fuck it up again when is it, next Friday night? theyll be here to blow you to atoms. Cant wait. Perhaps I can sell tickets. Well, sweetheart, said Ko, then, looking up, smiling with his mouth, but his eyes two hard glittering points reflecting the foam slithering down the inside of his stein: Id better not fuck it up, then, had I? The fight took place in the basement below the bar. It was a huge, low-ceilinged space punctuated with monumental, square pillars. Ruxie wondered if it had once been a parking lot. If so, no longer the pillars, the floor, indeed every available corner was occupied by baying, excited punters, eager for the nights promised spectacle. The program started with music, acrobats, jugglers, clowns and fire-eaters, for all the world like an old-time circus troupe that had rolled into some dusty nowhere town rather than the Capital of the Galaxy. There was music, too, and dancers. But Xalom was not dancing tonight. She was wedged in next to him. Her hand groped for his, and met it. Now, more than ever, he felt in it a potent mixture of home and the shadowed potency of the unknown. There was little chance that any spoken word would have met its target through the shrapnel fusillade of excited noise. Ruxie and Xalom were stood on a bench, three or four rows above ringside. Above, and to the left and right, people were thronged. And more than just people. Some of the fight fans cast inhuman shadows in the pillar-mounted sconces. Scent rose, the sweat of expectation. A golden aura flowed, commingled, across the floor, like dry ice in the spotlights. And then it was time for the fight to begin. First the referee entered tiny, ornately robed, wizened, one of the few Uqbar masters to have survived a career unscathed. But no one of his hands was surely a prosthesis, though it was hard to tell amid the jeweled and folded swirls of his heavily brocaded ceremonial kimono. Ladies and Gentlemen! brayed a harsh announcement from a commentary box that Ruxie couldnt see: Give it up for Rating Spaceman Ko Handor Raelle, soon to be of the 17th Rigel! Screams and roars as Ko, the challenger, entered the ring as if he already owned it, robed in regalia of scarlet and black, preceded by tumblers and acrobats, and flanked by two supporters marginally less burly than he himself. Ruxie thought he recognized them from the barracks and the harborside bar. The home crowd bawled its appreciation of its favorite son. Ruxie was temporarily deafened by its roar as Ko made the required three circuits of the ring, waving and bowing. Finally, the reigning champion. Put your hands together and make a crushing Coromandel noise for Axaxaxas Ml, undefeated heavyweight champion of the Southern Tethys! Yells, cheers, howls. More tumblers and acrobats, and then a tightly-bunched nest of women, naked, shaved and oiled, writhing together in a complex choreography that drew and distracted all eyes, concealing the form within. On a signal the women separated in a radial swirl and dispersed, trailing multi-colored streamers from their arms, like petals in a time-lapse film of a flower opening. Unfurling from within, the champion drew himself to his full height. The crowd was quenched into silence. They had known it, all the time. Of course they had. But the sight of the champion in the flesh all of him was breathtaking. As was the sheer audacity of Ko, in having thrown down the gauntlet in an elaborate three-hour tea ceremony precisely ten days earlier. Ruxie gulped. He felt Xaloms hand grasp his the more tightly. What had Ko let himself in for? This this creature would offer no quarter. Ruxie had heard about things like this, on the edges of dreams, and in tales to frighten kits into obedience, but had thought them mythical. Axaxaxas Ml, ebon black, a color out of space relieved only by blood-red eyes and ferocious fangs, was a Khong, and among the last vestiges of an ancient adapine race now confined to the high forest plateau of Antarctica. The Champion Axaxaxas Ml must have weighed three hundred kilos if he weighed a gram. And all of it muscle. His fists looked like boulders carved roughly from black basalt. In the center of the ring, the champion and the challenger made their ritual obeisances, and retired to diagonally opposite corners of the ring, where they were armed and armored according to the ritual evolved over hundreds of centuries and now considered as eternal as the void. Vambraces. Helms with full-face visors. Knee pads. Boots. Knuckle-dusters. All made of indrico-leather, precisely sourced and lovingly tooled to precise specifications dictated millennia earlier and from which no-one now dared deviate, not by so much as a millimeter. Except for the knuckle-dusters, of course. They were rough-cast from depleted uranium shell casings, blue-gray vertices shining raw and wickedly in the spotlights. The whistle blew. Ko barreled himself straight at the champion, fists together, before the vast Khong could draw breath, smashing his balled fists into his groin. Blood spurted in crimson gouts. The Khong grunted and looked down, almost abstractedly, as if his afternoon siesta had been interrupted by a mosquito. He picked up Ko in both hands, ground his spiked visor into Kos face, and hurled him across the ring. The noise of the crowd could not conceal the crunch of bones as Kos face hit the deck. The referee started to count time in a keening ritual song, but before he could reach the final octave, Ko had risen. Blood streamed from inside his visor and down his neck, congealing above his collar bone. Ruxie was glad that he couldnt see Kos face. Axaxaxas Ml lumbered over, looked down at his puny adversary, and laughed. The noise of it was horrible, hideous. The Khong swung one fist on the end of a meter and a half of pendulum arm. It hit Kos visor with the impact of a wrecking ball on a rotten watermelon. Kos head snapped backwards and he flipped onto the floor where he lay in a puddle of what looked like bone chips, blood and his own piss. Ruxie I cant look. Xalom turned and buried her face in his neck. Ruxie said nothing. He felt that whatever he wanted, whatever he wished, he was forced to watch the ritual dismemberment of his friend by this monster. But, once again, Ko recovered, although much more slowly than before. He turned himself onto his hands and knees, slithering on the slimed floor of the ring. The champion lumbered over, once again, joshing and hamming it up to the crowd before he dealt what could only be a death blow. It was to be his undoing. As the Khong bent over to examine its prize, Ko sprang upwards, smashing his helmet into the Khongs lower chest, winding him. The Khong toppled over Kos back, so that his immense legs lay like tree trunks on either side of Kos body. Slicked in his own fluids, Ko was now a writhing and unstoppable demon. He turned himself onto his back, sat up, and grabbed the champions loincloth, shredding the supple leather with the uranium blades of his knuckle-dusters. What Ko did next was as audacious as it was bestial. He pummeled at the champions genitalia with his bladed fists. Axaxaxas Ml roared in pain and shock, but could not rise from the surface of the ring, now as slippery as the deck of a whaler in a storm. He was helpless as Ko moved in for the kill. Ko unstrapped his helm, tearing it from his head and flinging it into the crowd. His face was a mask of blood. Then from a fold of his loincloth Ko drew, with great theatricality, a set of false fangs, which, like knuckle-dusters, had been sheared from spent battle-armor. Fitting them into his mouth, he rose above the prone form of the Khong, sought cheers and got them and then dove, like a vulture into the bloodied hole of a carcass. The identity of what Ko drew up between his teeth, monumental, sinewy, red and still pulsing, Ruxie dared not even think about. The crowd screeched in maroon-flecked ecstasy. The celebration surged well into the night, the tables of the harbor-district tavern crowded with glasses both full and spent, the floors awash with beer and bodies. Ruxie and Xalom were among them, but Xalom remained curiously remote, detached; unwilling, it seemed, to join in the spirit of things, in contrast to the many other women now wrapped round Ruxies colleagues on benches or on the floor in every imaginable state of abandon. Ruxie was now resigned to this. He forgot Xalom. He forgot the other women. He hooked up instead with a group of barrack-mates and concentrated on downing as much beer as he could. One of his colleagues looked down, wide-eyed, at a bulge in Ruxies crotch. Ruxie, man is that a pistol youre packin or? And if not, why arent you flaunting what youve got? After all, there are babes about. General laughter. Ruxie was puzzled, at first, until he reached down the inside pocket of his pants and, in a state of shock, realized that hed walked out of the weapons range that afternoon with a Higgs Projector. He hadnt signed it back in. Nobody made that mistake. Not ever. Hed be toast for sure. But with the ingenuity with which only the seriously drunk are blessed, he conceived a plan. If he snuck into the weapons range before daybreak, fiddled the records slightly, no-one would ever know, would they? Result. Well er it is a pistol. Actually. He was as nonchalant as he could manage. Which was, he reflected, quite a lot. Good for him. His audience gasped in shock. Is it . Is that? Yes, laughed Ruxie, it is. So well, make my day. There was a commotion at door of the tavern. Punches were thrown. Ruxie could not, at first, see what it was all about. A chaos of shouts and confusion. He was dimly aware that Xalom had gone, and he could no longer see Ko, either. Either he was buried in the crowd, or the party was going on without him. The shouts from the door morphed from yells of indignant rage into screams of agony and pain, and then Ruxie could see the cause of the disturbance. Oh no. Another monster. Without needing to be told, Ruxie knew that Mr Spektor had sent one of his associates to collect Kos winnings. An associate who would be quite capable of bending Axaxaxas Ml and any other likely champion into a pretzel. Ruxie felt beer and bravado inflate inside him and rose from his seat, side-arm in hand. Months of practice that could not be dulled by alcohol kicked into action. Ruxies fingers did the walking and primed the charge. At that moment the crowd near the door was brutally thrown aside by the newcomer. Bodies flew through the air. Skulls cracked on stanchions. From amid the chaos emerged what looked like nothing so much as a moving monolith, towering, gray, unstoppable. Shit, man its a Flintsider. Wed better split, said one of Ruxies drinking partners. No, we wont, said Ruxie. This ones for Ko. I owe him more than you can possibly imagine. Ruxie held the weapon at full arms length and pulled the trigger. As he did so he thought, inexplicably, of Xalom. The thought hit him like a kick in the ribs. The Flintside enforcer imploded with a sharp crack, his component silicon carbides redistributed at several quintillion random points throughout the Galaxy. Silence descended on the bar like a shroud. With all eyes on him, Ruxie calmlypocketed the side-arm and walked from the bar. It was only when he left that he thought that the crowd had depleted somewhat from the throng of just an hour earlier. Ruxie walked back to the barracks through silent streets. He first took a detour to return the purloined Higgs Projector to the weapons range, a plan that went off without a hitch. He was coming down from a high after the nights events and felt depressed, deflated. A light rain began to fall, picking out the echoing curves of each cobble in the back lanes like tiny, shining moons. The cascading water refreshed him, brought him out of his funk. All was well with his life. All was very well, in fact. Except for one thing: Xalom. Why wouldnt she? What was she playing at? What was wrong with her? What was wrong with him? These thoughts enveloped him so that he felt and saw very little until he was well inside the dorm, facing his own bed. The first thing that struck him was the noise. The same noise that had swirled around him at the boxing match: the animal baying of excited spectacle. It came from all around him, but was directed, focused, at his bed, before him. A bed drenched in the saffron aura of sex. It was Kos bare back he saw first, and his bare hindquarters, as he pumped away at a woman on her knees and elbows, on Ruxies bed. The crowd roared its appreciation. The woman was Xalom. She was screaming for Ko. Screaming for him to push deeper into her. Screaming for him to rip her insides out. Ruxie, my man, said Ko, between animal gasps, I told you it was more than for pissing through. And she was panting for it. So why not? Five hours later Ruxie shipped out for the Trifid Nebula. Cambridge, England December 2004 With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. Charles Dickens Hard Times It was that last trip to France that clinched it Jack had started to explain, uncertainly, to the thesis committee gathered in a lecture room whose heating had been turned off for the winter. It was a dank, dismal day in December and the undergraduates had left town, leaving in their place an arctic chill that swathed everything in a sullen lassitude. The committee was yet to be convinced by his case. He looked to MacLennane as his supervisor, one half of the committee for an encouraging sign, a welcoming smile, but his patron averted his gaze: there was a lot at stake for him, too. He missed Jade. He missed her terribly, on this day, of all days, but this morning, before hed left, she had seemed so wound up with some matter so internalized that she refused to tell him what it was. But hed looked so miserable as he turned to leave that she relented, ran towards him and embraced him from behind: I love you, so much, you silly man, she had said: I know you can do it. Now, go and show them what youre made of. He turned to hug her, but said nothing, except, too quietly for anyone to hear but himself Snow Queen. And then he left, walking into town through the cheerless fog. In truth, he was worried. The remorseless tension in these final weeks before his thesis defense had taken its toll on both of them. Whereas before hed been lean and sinewy, now he looked gaunt, and thin. Jade had seemed distracted, perturbed, and whereas their lovemaking had always been frequent and rapturous, it had lately petered out to little more than a static, supine embrace. He felt, somehow, that hed committed some offence, done some wrong, and that, cruelly, she wouldnt tell him what it was, so he could at least apologize. Their infrequent discussions about marriage, always meant to be put off until after hed gained that mythical, ever-receding fellowship, had now ceased completely. So what was wrong? No, she wasnt ill, shed insisted, turning her eyes away from his questioning face. Yes, she still loved him. Yes, shed still love him even if he didnt win his doctorate. Silly question! But her hair seemed, to him, to give the lie to this faade. Her hair was the key to her mood. When she was happy, she would wear it loose, so she could play with it, tease with it, flirt with it. Even if she tied it up, some of it invariably came loose in a disarray that always turned him on, her dark eyes flashing like a come-on beneath the wayward strands. And until now, shed always been happy. But now her eyes were dull, from nameless preoccupation or suppressed anger, he couldnt tell: and her hair was tamed, more often than not, into a plait of Presbyterian severity, with no prospect of idle straying. As he plodded on, the feet in his mind walked backwards to see if he could work out where things had gone wrong, if indeed they had. He knew hed taken far too long to get down and write his thesis, trying Jades patience. And then yes, that was it that evening in October, when theyd sat down together and had had the famous brainstorm, perhaps shed felt that shed had to do all the work, when it was, after all, his thesis to defend, and his prevarication had meant that her own prospects were forever on hold. And oh, yes what happened before the brainstorm. That was it, too. He loved her beyond any words, but as the autumn lengthened and she seemed to recede, almost imperceptibly slowly, it dawned on him that she might have been scared, repelled disgusted even by the unexpected and uncharacteristic violence of their sex on that weird, overheated night when the weather finally broke, the night when theyd both been wound up like coiled snakes, ready to strike. If that was the case, then, frankly, he should just die of shame right here. He traced his travels further backwards from that evening in the Nest, through that hot afternoon, to the argument hed had with those students whod tried to intimidate him about Avi. And oh, sweet Christ hed taken it all out on her, his one support, the one person most likely to put up with him, without complaint. After theyd had the brainstorm, and when, in the days and weeks following had sat down to work furiously at the thesis, theyd never discussed it, the reason why hed been so very angry because they were just too, frantically, busy. Not that this would offer any excuse for his behavior. And still she had brainstormed the thesis into being, gave it birth, gave it life, nursed it to maturity. It was her. Her! And even this morning, she still swore she loved him. Him! So now he thought, in dejection foreign to his usually level nature, that the great gamble had failed. He really didnt deserve this thesis, and he certainly didnt deserve Jade, whose life hed now so royally screwed up. By the time he got to the department, his mind was clothed in a fog as thick as the one that laced the streets in funereal shrouds. Go ahead, make my day. In the end he was just too tired: too tired to panic, too tired to care. Mr Corstorphine Mr Corstorphine? This from the tiny but intimidating figure of Professor Ernestine Yanga, the external examiner and the other half of the committee, who, MacLennane had said, was famous for saying almost nothing during thesis examinations until near the end, when shed skewer hapless candidates with the one question theyd been praying nobody would ask. Ah, thought Jack, we must be near the end, then, and this must be the preamble to the famous Difficult Question. Best to get it over with, and get out. So far, the examination had flowed glutinously past him like a river of sludge making its viscid way down to a black and putrid sea: hed supplied all the answers so mechanically, that once hed uttered a word hed immediately forgotten about it. Mr Corstorphine you were telling us about your trip to France? Yes of course Im sorry. As youve read in my thesis, I had accumulated a great deal of data about hominin influence on geomorphology in Britain. But it was very hard to make anything of it. Thanks to some new methods developed in conjunction with a fellow student Yes, I see that this is acknowledged. A Miss J. Markham, isnt it? She has a rare talent. Jack said nothing: his lips were pursed together in a thin line of remorse, and despite himself, he could feel tears starting to prick the corners of his eyes. Please continue, Mr Corstorphine Yes, sorry I had long suspected the existence of a gradient of human influence on the landscape in England, consistent over the past hundred thousand years at least, in an increasing trend from the northwest where it is hardly significant according to the variants of the nonparametric tests Ive used to the southeast, where it stands out quite strongly from natural influence, but still in places not significantly different from expected natural or stochastic variation. Very good. But enough of Albions fair shores, I think? You were about to tell us all about La Belle France, I believe. Would you like to er enlarge upon that? Jack had had so much to say about France. About how his trip there had changed everything, given him hope rooting his vague instincts in something more tangible, more real. About how, after looking at the British landscape, scored, ravaged and broken by glaciers at least eight times in the course of almost a million years of human history glaciers so powerful that they had literally erased rivers as broad as the Severn from the map his personal antennae had become so tuned to every nuance of landscape that, when he had come at last to a region that had seen a million years of relative and continuous calm, the signs of human influence shone out at him like blinding beacons. Britain had only ever been a sideshow, an outlier: hed seen immediately what had occurred to no-one: that nothing south of the Loire was wilderness nothing and had not been so for a very long time. But right now, he didnt feel like explaining anything. His answers were bland, apathetic, hesitant. Whatever. Looking down on the scene, as if he were hanging from the ceiling, he saw Professor MacLennane rise slightly from his chair, as if in concern and then Jack snapped, jarringly, back. He blinked, disoriented. It occurred to him that he must have blacked out. With her well-controlled perm, her neat dove-grey two-piece and pearls, Ernestine Yanga could have been the president of the local Womens Institute, except that shed been raised in a grass hut on the western shores of Lake Turkana, until the age of five, when her village had been razed by Ethiopian bandits and the rest of her family had been raped, macheted, burned to death, or combinations of all three. Shed only escaped because shed been a mile away at the time, gathering pathetic twigs for the cooking fire, and sluicing the filthy puddle that passed for the village waterhole into a chipped enamel bucket. On returning home to find it so casually expunged from the face of the Earth, shed walked thirty miles to the nearest fly-flecked bush town in search of work. By the time she was thirteen she was handy with a Kalashnikov; shed been a drug courier, a fruit seller, a moneychanger, a news vendor, a prostitute, a pimp, a bandit, a coppers nark, a murderess twice over (once a policeman, whom shed stabbed after hed tried to extort further bribes from her pitiful cache of change; the second time, a potential rapist, whom shed emasculated with his own blunt and rusty panga and left bleeding to death) and riddled with at least six chronic, parasitic infections. Having decided, understandably, that shed had quite enough of all this, shed walked to Nairobi and camped out on the steps of the National Museums of Kenya, where she resolved to wait on the Lords Salvation. The Lord had taken the shape of a kindly assistant curator, whose prayers for the Almighty to send him a child to ease his wifes barrenness had now, it seemed, been answered and who took her in and cleaned her up. A week later she was the illiterate, unpaid assistant to the janitor. After thirty years, the Director of Palaeontology. And now, at the age of fifty-five, what Ernestine Yanga didnt know about the influence of early humans on landforms in the Rift Valley wasnt worth knowing. She knew far more than that, however, about the symptoms of human suffering, to which she was as sensitive as Jacks spirit chimed to the shape and history of every hanging valley, every moraine, scarp and oxbow. Her reputation as a terrifying examiner was justified. After all, a woman in her situation could never have succeeded in life without what she called true grit (she was an avid fan of old westerns), but in Jack she saw a good man whod been worn almost entirely away by worry, and, like so many men, he was suffering as much from injured pride as from lack of food and sleep. He had tried his hardest, but despite all his efforts, all his denial, hed felt he was not quite up to the task, and this insulted his being, his masculinity. But he need not have been so concerned, she thought. The evidence he had from that final trip to France was right there, in front of them. And from what Roger (such a charming man!) had told her, Jack was a dedicated field worker, the kind of person she preferred infinitely to pallid, deskbound museum types, who so often built their intellectual castles on the sweat of others. More importantly, it was clear that Jack fulfilled the first criterion of a doctorate candidate: to venture, without fear, outside the small, cosy nest of knowledge, and into the dark and infinitely greater continent of ignorance that surrounded it. That Jack had ventured so far out that no techniques yet existed to make sense of what hed found indicated extraordinary fortitude, a brazen and almost breathtaking resolve: if Jack could make no headway with it, then that was hardly his fault, because nobody else (she thought) would have had the ability either. Not MacLennane (hed admitted as much) and certainly not herself. And yet, if Roger had thought the task impossible, he surely would not have assigned it to a doctorate student. This in itself, she felt, indicated that Jack really must be a man of extraordinary talent, and she thought back to the fortune that had smiled on her on the Museum steps talent was precious, and must always be nurtured. In any case, Jack was not entirely alone, without help. As Professor Yanga understood it, Jack continued to enjoy the best help possible in the form of the acuity of his young associate, this Miss Markham person, who seemed to believe in him and who, Roger had assured her, would go far especially if she and Jack continued to work as a team. And Rogers instincts were never wrong. Especially not about associates who were attractive, young and female, and Roger had been very quick to note that Jacks colleague excelled in those three virtues as she did in her wit and intelligence. Jack was, indeed, a fortunate man, as fortunate as he was deserving. Mr Corstorphine, of course, I understand, said Professor Yanga. But please dont worry yourself. Oh my, you look so tired. She smiled, then a radiant, motherly smile that made Jack want to dissolve. This woman, this supposedly ferocious, hard-bitten creature who took no prisoners, had smiled at him. She had looked straight at him, into him, and she understood. She knew. And in that moment he knew that there was hope. And so he started again, clearing his throat, which seemed unaccountably to be full of damp sandpaper. Im sorry please excuse me. When we think of the French Paleolithic, we tend to see the landscape as a wilderness, punctuated with some interesting and picturesque cave sites. But thats a view conditioned more by our prejudices about brutish cavemen than by the facts on the ground. When I got there, accustomed as I had been to the far more challenging and in any case more sparsely populated British terrain, France looked to me like nothing more than an almost completely artificial, settled even industrial landscape, continuously shaped by human influence for many hundreds of thousands of years. What form does that influence take, Mr Corstorphine? This really must be it, the Difficult Question that went to the heart of the matter. But the Professor continued to smile, and in that, he thought of Jades enormous brown eyes as she looked adoringly up at him whenever she was in his arms, an expression that said that he, Jack, was invincible. Now he could not be stopped. The influence takes many forms, he said. Just to take a couple of things more or less at random: virtually no watercourse south of the Loire or west of the Rhne has been natural for any significant part of its length since the Late Middle Pleistocene. At the very least, watercourse curvature has been altered by 16 per cent during the Brunhes magnetostratigraphic interval, with the confidence limits that youll see on page 176, I think youll find (the committee members turned to their copies of his thesis as Jack felt, at last, to be in the driving seat). In support of this, he continued, the overall number of river-channel infill deposits indicative of buried oxbow lakes is very much less than youd expect by chance, had nature been left to take its course. This means that something somebody has been altering the lower courses of rivers in a systematic way for a very long time. And then there is the general topography. Volcanic activity aside, no hilltop exists in this part of France that has natural surface run-off characteristics, possibly an indication of the former presence of earthworks or other structures. In fact, I could find no grade that has been completely free of human influence over the same period. Theres one hill, in a village about ten miles north of Aurignac, that looks like part of what can only be described as part of the base of a pyramid. Would you remind us of its name, Jack? Professor MacLennane asked. Yes, its called Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards, and But Mr Corstorphine, interrupted Professor Yanga, the dimensions of this structure. When it was complete, you wrote, it would have been more than two miles high. Thats right, Professor, said Jack, laughing to himself. Now he really was describing the discovery of Atlantis. Only now, he had the charts and coordinates to hand: the evidence. If you recall the analysis of the slope characteristics of the groundwater runoff all around Saint-Rogatien, he continued, the extent to which every aspect of the topography of the village and its environs falls away from this point, that conclusion is, I think, inevitable. His thesis committee nodded its assent. Jacks mind drifted to when hed explained all this to Jade, with mounting excitement, promising her that after this wretched thesis defense was over, hed take her there and show her. It had been about a month before, their last evening sitting out in the Nest before it became too cold. Theyd had a bottle of wine hed brought home from the off-license. Retreating to the sitting room, shed removed a stack of printouts from their sagging old sofa, sat down, and pulled him towards her. As usual, shed worn her horrible purple sack, but her hair was loose. Funny, hed forgotten that. She didnt always tie back her hair. Not even very often. Why had he forgotten that? How? As he told her about Saint-Rogatien, she looked at him with shining eyes. This is it, Darling Jack, she had said, This is the key. This proves it. This settles everything. She unbuttoned his shirt her face cross-eyed with concentration and rested her face on his chest, letting him tousle her hair into a blanket. And this was only a month ago? After the brainstorm? Why had he forgotten that? He explained to her to Jade and now to Professor Yanga that his close survey of this unusual landform revealed to him that its geology was entirely at variance with the underlying bedrock and, furthermore, that its location could not be explained in terms of any local, structural faulting. It couldnt be a glacial erratic, either, because there had been no glaciers. Much of the landform had been worn away by wind and weather, the original structure the pyramid was just too enormous to have been set down by any kind of fluvial transport, even a catastrophic flood of the kind that had created the scablands of the Pacific Northwest, or which had carved out the English Channel and there had been no sign of any such activity, either. In fact, its location was inexplicable unless At this point, on the sofa, Jade had trapped his gesticulating hands in hers, and forced them to encircle her. Shed seemed so content, hed felt that she might purr. Why had he forgotten that? As hed kissed the top of her head, hed said that the only way to explain Saint-Rogatien the only way was that it had been an artificial structure. That someone had put it there. Hed once read about an ancient pyramid at a place called Cholula in Mexico, hed said. By the time the conquistadores got there, it had been abandoned for centuries, its masonry stripped away, and was covered in grass and trees. Assuming it was just a hill (because thats just what it looked like), the Spaniards built a town around it and a church on the top. And that was only a few centuries ago. Imagine, then, if it had been left for a thousand years, a hundred thousand, a million? It would look just like a hill, revealed as artificial only by its strange geology and situation, and only then if somebody first suspected that something was amiss which nobody had ever done. But when Jack had seen it, his antennae vibrated into overdrive. He knew it didnt belong there. He just knew. By this time Jade had been on the edge of sleep, but not quite. You silly old lion, she had said. Youve just about wrapped it up. The ancestors of the first Neanderthals built gigantic pyramids all over France pyramids that made the Great Pyramid look like a sandcastle. And they were doing it for hundreds of thousands of years, Snow Queen. Well then, you dont need statistical methods to prove that, so why worry? Thats just basic geology and your wonderful masculine intuition, you silly man, you. She looked up at him, blearily. It occurred to him that her face looked drawn and thin, that what she needed most was sleep, and also that shed read his mind. Youre right, Darling Jack. Time for you to wrap me up, too, and take me to bed. So hed taken her in his arms and laid her gently on the bed, still in her horrible purple sack, pulling the duvet on top of her. As hed got in and nestled behind her in their customary two-spoons-in-a-drawer position, shed pulled his arms up inside her jersey, pressing his hands against her breasts, smoothing them down the too-hot skin of her belly and thighs. I do so love you, Darling Jack. And I want you. And so, still in the two-spoons position, in the darkness, theyd made love as gently as before it had been rough, and then, together, slid slowly off to companionable sleep on a smooth, even grade rather shallower than about one in a couple of hundred (hed estimated), that of a languidly meandering river that makes its lazy way down to a delta in which it becomes lost in oozy thickets. Why had he forgotten that? Why? As if from an immense distance, he thought he heard Professor MacLennane and Professor Yanga commending him for a splendid thesis. Congratulations, Doctor Corstorphine! Hands were shaken, but it was clear to both academics that Jack wasnt really there. They looked worried. The Professors exchanged nervous words that Jack didnt catch, and Professor Yanga left, looking anxious. Come on, Jack, Im going to take you home, MacLennane said as he put his arm around Jacks shoulders, walked him outside into the quad and steered him towards what Jack could have sworn was a Ferrari Testarossa. Dont worry, old chap not going to do more than thirty thats a promise! But I want to get you home fast. Got to break the glad tidings to that lovely girl of yours, eh? I expect youll be setting a date. And now she can really start work on her own project, after Christmas. And Ive been meaning to tell you that Saint-Rogatien business we really do have to get a paper off to Nature. You, me and the lovely Jade can do it together. Her brains, your intuition, and my er putting you two together, as it were. I had lunch with the editor the other day, and Jack lacked the energy to interrupt. He was drained, utterly, alternately assailed by waves of light-headedness and nausea, not helped by the low-slung suspension of a car so obviously unsuited to driving through central Cambridge in a freezing fog that still hadnt lifted after how long ago had he left home? He couldnt remember. On the other hand, if hed stepped out of the car, he didnt think hed have sufficient energy to walk, or even stand up. He couldnt remember having eaten more than a couple of bites of anything for three days. They drew up outside the flat. MacLennane had to haul Jack out of the car. When they knocked at the door, there was at first, no answer. Just coming! he heard her voice, after a few more seconds: in the bathroom! Wont be a sec! As soon as Jack had left, Jade collapsed on the sofa, eviscerated, as if her heart had burst from within her and now bounced along the street after the dwindling Jack, the world on his broad shoulders, an old gunslinger who, racked by his internal demons, seemed to be losing the will to fight. But she had things to do, an errand of her own, and so, grimly, she dressed, grabbed her bag, and left the house. She had never seen Jack look so down. But as much she was sympathetic (how could she not be?) she was, it has to be said, a little annoyed. Not for the simple fact of his low spirits, his anxiety (anyone could forgive him these!) but, perversely, that his mood seemed so entirely out of character, and that was harder to accommodate. Not that she didnt mind being there for him, to cheer him up, even for weeks on end: because she didnt. She loved him, and she wanted to make him happy. But where once had stood an imperturbable rock, there had now limped, in the hallway, half-sunk, a fretful thing she didnt recognize, and didnt want to. Realizing how selfish this was, she nevertheless wanted the old Jack back, the granite-hard Jack, the Jack who had become her secure foundation, on which she could build castles of her own, and from whose unshakeable ramparts she could launch herself, on her own wings: so that should she ever falter, should she ever go wrong, she could always come home to him, depending on him to forgive, to love and mend her, to dry her eyes and make everything all right, without question or prejudice. But if he crumbled, she would slip, lose her footing, and then they would both fall. It was in this resolution that shed finally finally settled, in her own mind, the events and consequences of the rainstorm before the famous brainstorm, after which she had been almost too giddy to stand, and sore for several days afterwards. This sudden and quite unexpected brutality had frightened her then, but after much worry and wonder in the still hours of many troubled nights thereafter, when Jack had lain beside her, shed solved the disturbing riddle of why shed loved him all the more, nonetheless. For all her ambition, for all that she wanted to make her way in the world on her own, to succeed by her own lights, she realized that at heart she was an old-fashioned girl, who needed a man around to love, and to be loved by. The man with whom shed fallen in love was a mans man, with a real mans frustrations, and a real mans pride, always so exposed to injury. But the reason why she loved him so much was that his masculinity had been so lightly worn, so assured that hed felt no need to prove it, either to be a macho man like Avi Malkeinu, or an irredeemable rogue, like dear old Roger MacLennane. This (she blushed to herself) was why shed been embarrassed when Jack had referred to himself, in company, however self-deprecatingly, as the last of the red-hot Paleolithic lovers, or whatever it was. This was why his force on that strange night had first seemed so shocking. But then, she continued, why should it? Because Jack was so complete a man in himself, hed never feel the urges to which Avi and MacLennane were forever prey, to throw himself into one conquest after another, as if he were not quite sure that he really deserved his manhood, or that it wasnt eternal, a given; nor that he ever felt the need to perpetually advertise the fact. She knew how much of a man he was, and that was enough that knowledge was theirs alone, a private thing, like the Nest. It was not something shed much like to share. And after all, it was she, she admitted ruefully, who had led him on, waving her backside at him, inviting him to take her to take her, as if she were not a human being, but some transaction, and hed responded to satisfy her, and no other. She basked in that thought, held on to it, but added that for her then to blame him for her shock, her soreness, would be unfair, for they had both been participants in the act which, in the end, was as shed established a private thing between the two of them, just Jack and herself, as much a part of their love as a shared bottle of wine and any other night in the Nest. She realized that if, in the past few weeks, hed been beating himself up with remorse about it, as she suspected, then she knew for certain that he really was neither an animal, nor a man forever seeking to prove his virility, but a just a man, complete in and of himself. But there was that other thing, too: that when the burning soreness had faded, it was replaced by a nauseating wretchedness that racked her guts out. At first she thought it was a physical after-effect of the pain, or just some psychosomatic backwash of the stress of the past few weeks, so she had told Jack nothing of it even had he noticed from behind the fortress of his preoccupation. But when it had continued for weeks, draining her and vitiating desire, it occurred to her that Jack might have proved his masculinity in the most obvious and traditional way possible (she began to perk up at the thought, and reddened a little). There was no need for Jack to make any song and dance about his maleness, she thought no need at all if by virtue of his savagery and his hunger hed made her pregnant. This would be a tangible badge of his love, and their shared love, together: and also something which she felt, with a strength of possession that surprised her, was something all her own, for all that it bound her closer to him, and made her love him all the more. Jade was almost sure she knew, but craved certainty, even within statistical limits, explaining why she had now returned home from the supermarket with a pregnancy testing kit. So, just as Jack, his ordeal over, was allowing his rangy form to be folded passively into the passenger seat of MacLennanes latest penis extension she found herself half-undressed, in the bathroom, peering awkwardly down at herself and wondering how a mere woman could aim so accurately at a target as narrowly defined as a test strip. Oh, that a man should have to do this, she grinned to herself, hed at least be in a position to take better aim. And just as she heard the knock on the door, presaging the proud return of her conqueror, bloodied for sure, but all dragons slain, the line in the small, crystalline window coalesced, like a chromosome in the very expectancy of division, of the prolongation of a life stretching back to when the world was young, and forward into illimitable futurity, from a yellow nothingness into a single shaft of clear blue. Above Coromandel Station, Earth 51,977,258 BC O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms Alone and palely loitering? John Keats La Belle Dame Sans Merci Congratulations, the doctor said, and she smiled. Her hands were in the pockets of her white medical gown, now opened, revealing a smart cream blouse and gray wool skirt beneath. An open smile of unforced loveliness, glints of warmth in wise, green eyes, framed by smooth, high cheekbones in an olive-brown face. Soon-to-be-ex-Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa of the 17th Rigel, gripping the breakfast bar in the opulent stateroom as if it were a bucking indrico calf from his lost youth, quite forgot his racked breathing; the sweat of effort greasing his forehead and coursing down his body in sticky runnels. The doctor walked towards him, the clack of heels on parquet silenced by the thick crimson pile as she approached. Ruxhana was transfixed by indecision. At once he was gripped by an urge to flee always supposing he could and at the same time, a compulsion to stay and watch, as if he were merely an observer, or, if a participant, to ride it out. Just to see what happened next. The same compulsion, in fact, that had gotten him into so much trouble, and which was almost certain to see him cashiered. Oh, well. What the hell. More than curiosity, though. She was almost close enough to touch, now, and he could sense the golden saffron of her heat; see the individual strands of a rich black mane beginning to work loose from a severe barrette; and the abrupt dark points beneath the pale fabric of her blouse. Panic seized him, a mixture of thwarted desire and the stench of betrayal he thought had been long forgotten, buried under thirty-eight years of hard fighting. First, that long and awful war against the Carpetbaggers in the Trifid Nebula, a campaign in which unthinkable atrocities were committed on both sides, and in which he lost an eye (soon replaced) but gained several decorations. Then, a series of counter-insurgency operations against the Jumblies in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, where the Pax Terrestris had yet to take hold, and in which wearisomely interminable longuers were punctuated by welcome bursts of appalling viciousness. This proxy war against Andromeda had cost him both legs, much of his skull and a third of his cerebral cortex (all soon regrown) but gained him field promotion to a captaincy. And after that? Campaign followed campaign, with trips to Earth ever less frequent, and then only in the course of business. He had only ever once descended from geosynchronous orbit, and that was by the Panthalassic Elevator, never down to Coromandel. Hed stayed less than a day. Decoration followed decoration, promotion followed promotion, as Ruxhana Fengen Kraa fulfilled his early promise, and more. And, somewhere along the line, in addition to much of his head, both legs, his left hand, most of both lungs, and most recently, his entire body hed shed his virginity. He could no longer remember where; nor with whom, nor precisely when, but reason dictated that it would have been in deep space, and possibly in free fall. That hardly mattered now, either. The doctor was standing before him, now. He relaxed his grip on the breakfast bar and turned, unsteadily, into her retrieving arms. He was encircled fully in her embrace. She looked up at him, her lips slightly parted. Xalom? If thats who you want me to be, Admiral, then so I shall be. But ... how? Are you...? Hush now, Admiral. Youve exerted yourself quite enough for one session. Your new bones are knitting nicely, but such massive reconstruction takes time. What you need now is a shower and bed. He could see the curve of Earth, approaching, through a wide, panoramic port. She followed his glance and turned back to him, reading his thought. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day. Now, do you think you can walk a little more? I think so, Doctor, if you can steady me. With a cane on one side, and her on the other, he made his methodical way to the bathroom. He allowed her to remove his robe so that he could step into the shower cubicle. Suddenly shy, he never let her see anything more than his bare back. To have allowed her to have glimpsed him in front view would have been too much. His face would have been a study in mixed bafflement, exhaustion, anticipation and fear. Whats more, he had an uncomfortably taut erection. He looked down at it, painfully rigid and sharply bladed at the end, as if it were something new, strange, an alien life-form and the rest of his regrown flesh, still pale and seamed, creased with regenerative newness. He felt dizzy, but before he could fall, the walls of the shower cubicle ballooned out to cushion him, and a seat rose from the floor, cosseting him. When it was sure that the patient was safe, the cubicles AI withdrew the side-impact cushions and turned on the shower, a brisk needle-fine drizzle whose temperature was tuned to two and a half degrees above body temperature. The water, loaded with mild detergents and microbial exfoliants, stripped him of the sweat that had congealed around him like a shell. Steam rose, and that, and the mild thrum of the drops hitting the cushioned floor, and his fatigue, threatened to tip him into sleep. Not that this would have mattered, for his overworked brain (most of that new, too, and as unsteady as his legs) knew that the cubicle would have rescued him, blown him dry and kept him warm, indefinitely. Before sleep took him, he was aware of a dark, recurved shape in the fog before his eyes, of arms around him, of another body against his, of waves of wet hair, of thighs sliding smoothly about his own, of the humid, slippery heat of her body sliding down over his persistent erection, of an earlobe gripped in playful teeth, of a tongue in his ear, and of fingernails behind him, raking his shoulder-blades. Xalom? Shh. There, now. She brought one hand round to the front, lifted his chin and kissed him, her tongue exploring his mouth. Ancient reflexes moved him now, and he began to shift, to move beneath her, but movement was easier for her, and she swayed gently, easing his prong around inside her. She made tiny, inexplicable squeals and breathed hard in his ear; her lips, fuller now, ranging with fluttering intensity over his neck, his mouth, his eyes. But before he could climax, she gripped the handrails behind his head, and, bracing her feet on the floor, slowly eased herself off him. Small trails of blood ran from her black fur and down his pale shaft, and were soon washed away. She knelt down before him, streams of water coursing over her shoulders, brushed the end of his prong between her primary breasts, free and loose, and then touched it with a fingertip. It was like being scored with a hot knife. My, what are we going to do with all this? Kneeling between his legs, she looked up, and, raising both arms, pulled her long hair out of her face. He felt several pairs of nipples rub against his inner thighs, rubbery in this water and a dramatic contrast with the yielding lappets of flesh around them. He bit his lip in pain and frustration. She rose, and helped him to his feet. He felt dizzy and saw small black and red spots before his eyes, Time to get dry, I think. The water was replaced instantly by blasts of hot, fresh air, reminding Ruxhana, in this stifling embrace, of his crater-lake eyrie on the long-lost Sorceror. The memory was a relief in that it immediately cost him his erection, but he now felt he could hardly stand unaided. The Doctor, now businesslike though still nude, frowned in concern and guided him from the bathroom and into his bed, covering him, monitoring his temperature, blood pressure and vital signs. No, I think youll do, was the last thing she said before he blacked out. He awoke in the dark and for a vertiginous moment had no idea where he was, nor why. He tried to sit up, but the effort made him feel sick, so he eased himself gently down onto the mattress. Either that, or the mattress tracked his movement and eased his fall, he wasnt quite sure. But there was a hand on his chest, and a body next to his, and he remembered. Xalom Oh no, not again. Weve been through all that. Havent we? I In any case, you have more pressing concerns, hmm? He felt the smoothness of a thigh laid against his, and a hand, gripping and releasing the hairs on his chest, making its way downwards, across his belly. He felt proud stupidly so, he thought, given that hed had no part in his rescue and reconstruction that his new belly was flatter and better toned than his old one had been, and that his prong seemed heavier, longer and carried more impressive serration. It began to rise under her touch. In return, he stroked the rambling mane of her hair until it spread like a fan across his shoulders. My job, Admiral, has been to make you better. Think of me as all the Kings Horses and all the Kings Men, glueing dear old Humpty Dumpty back together again. Humpty Dumpty. Thats me, right? Right Her fingers began to course along his prong, tracing its razored ridges, feeling their way more gingerly around the sharp, multiply bladed tip. Only, unlike our ovoid friend of lore, youre only being stuck together so you can feel it all the harder, when they shove you off an even higher wall. The fleet. My fleet. He gripped a fistful of her hair, more forcefully than hed mean to. Ow! Yes, the fleet. You probably havent realized it yet after all, youve been in no fit state and I wasnt about to let you know any sooner, because the stress would have killed you. But the loss of the fleet will cost you your commission. At the very least. And at the most? Well I dont think you need worry about that yet. Youve been in worse scrapes. After all, as I say, its been my job to put you back together, and the process isnt yet complete. And, if I may say so, Ive been quite pleased with some of the um additional refinements Ive built into the New You. She giggled and sat up. He saw her only in silhouette, but she still had a hand around his prong. Improvements to well, size, mainly. And stamina. Improvements? Sure. On a lonely job like this, a girl has got to find whatever fun she can. No dont move. You can pay me later. Pay you? She bent over him, hair and breasts brushing his chest and belly, and took his prong in her mouth, moistening it more and still more with her abrasive tongue, honing and whetting his sharpening edges. He held himself in, with more will than he thought he possessed. A final caress and she looked up, and swept her tumbled hair from her face. Not in the way you think. But I think I can help you out of this. Though Ill want something in return. Want...? Perhaps I shouldnt have said anything. As I said, tomorrow is another day. And as I also said, the best thing you can do now is simply to lie back and think of Gondwanaland. Stay still, now. She swung a leg over him, so that he felt the plush plumpness of her thighs gripping him high across his hips. With great care, holding her breath, she lowered herself onto him, and, having done so, let out a long gasp and a small cry of pain. She sat fully upright, maneuvering him still more deeply, and sighed. Oh, wow I am good. Improvements? This is fantastic! No I told you, dont move. But looking up at the sharp curves of her body, a silhouette in Earthlight, he could hardly help himself, his hands tracing the contours scouted first by his eyes; a journey across a musked and shadowed landscape. From her face, haloed by the wild mass of hair; to her mouth, her lips catching his fingertips as they passed, her teeth nipping, framing small, gentle exhalations of pleasure. From her shoulders, the hollow at the base of her long throat, now pooling with sweat; over the serried, segmented roundels of her breasts the upper pairs squeezed towards him as she brought the flesh of her upper arms closer together, hands gripping his shoulders with each move in rhythm the topmost pair exquisite with their rich darkness of broad button points, each as big and firm as a ripe nut; the other pairs, smaller, each clinker-lapped by the pair above, each more jewel-like than the last, the fifth and final pair flourishing and curving outwards in two, tiny, perfect crescents just above her hip-bones, counterpoints to her navel. The contrast between the firm ridge of her hipbones and the broad, softly furred swell of her hips themselves, with the incurving fuzz of sacral dimples in the small of her back; and downwards, to the thick, black pelt resting on his belly, moving slowly, up, and round, and down, a wave of perfume released as she rose up, exposing his shaft, a cadence of moisture set free as she fell once more, his prong now enfolded deep within her, with each impaling movement lacerating her internal flesh, shortening her life with each stroke. Her aura, like purple butterfly wings, blanketed them both, now, barred with crimson rays. The tinge turned to peacock blueness as she gripped his hips with her knees and lifted herself from him. Xalom? Hmm? This time she chose not to argue, but to live the name. She looked up. Her green eyes gleamed in the shadow, tapeta flashing, her aura deepening in dreamy indigo waves. Am I...? Do you think? She rose up on her knees, next to him and swept her hair from her face. Are you fit enough for the main event? Oh, yes, I think so. All part of the therapy. Doctors orders. And then she turned over, flaunting her hindquarters at him, thrusting them outwards so that her inflamed vulva emerged from between her thighs, the saffron center of a coruscating mandala of vivid turquoise. He rolled over, feeling his new limbs creak, and, very delicately, rose to his knees, steadying himself behind her, on the milky backs of her thighs, his hands running over her furred back, fingers gripping the stiff mane of hair running down the nape of her neck. She whimpered. His prong, stiff to beyond the threshold of pain, sparked in a flash of agony as he brushed it against her thighs, bending it at the root. He winced, and quenched a surge of panic as the still-weak muscles in his new knees began to cramp and spasm. She bent forward, burying her face in the bed, reaching back with her arms, her hands, to reassure him, to draw him in. A fleeting touch of fingertips on his shaft, and then he impaled her, his prong thickening and lengthening and blossoming still further, in ways never seen in the open air, in response to the histamines secreted by the folds of her flesh, the callused edges of his glans flowering, inflating laterally into serrated knives of horn that locked him into her, and which raked her as he moved, first uncertainly, and then with renewed reserves of power, so that with each tidal surge she was pulled clear of the mattress and then driven further into its folds. But then too soon he spasmed, and came, and her aura darkened with terrifying suddenness from electric blue to midnight black, the blackness of space, reeling round the room like an inky blot. She screamed then, a brutal yell of pain and terror and ecstasy. Her aura winked out of existence before resuming, slowly, a dull, skulking orange. She sighed and pulled herself away, releasing him. Tiny rivulets of blood, darker shadows in the darkness, flecked his prong and her inner thighs. She fell forwards onto the bed. He could not see her face. He awoke on his back and found himself paralyzed. His eyes, now open, could not close, but the square, white luminous tiles of the ceiling were all he could see. The air was different, too. Fresher, ionized, like the sea. Entirely different from the perfumed fug of the stateroom, in which his last memory was the rankness of spent sex, a body curled into him, a lazy head on his chest, sighing, abandoned. As if on cue he heard her voice, and though he could not move to see her, he had a clear image of her once again in her doctors gown and conservative clothes. Without knowing how, or feeling any sensation at all in his lips and tongue, he spoke. Why cant I move? Because, Admiral, this really is going on inside your head. Like the stateroom. And the shower. And ... well, like everything else. I felt I had to make a point, thats all. So ... you arent really Xalom, then? My Xalom? She sighed with weary resignation. Not that again. Look, if you want me to be your Xalom, whoever that is, then your Xalom I shall be. If you think it will help. Will it? I dont think it will do any harm. But the real Xalom ...? ... has been married for twenty years to a spectacularly unambitious rat-faced little corporal in the catering corps; lives in a low-to-middling suburb of a thrillingly dull stripway sprawl on the Planet Boring in the Shit-For-Brains quadrant; has twelve mewling kits, and dugs dangling down to her knees. Life for her is unending drudgery with no prospect of relief and its only the diazepam that keeps her going. Frankly, shes let herself go. What opportunities, wasted. What intelligence. What talent. Ruxhana choked. You know this? You really know this? Of course I dont, Admiral. How could I? And in any case were getting off the point. As far as youre concerned, in this reality, in this continuum, if you like I am Xalom, your Xalom, if you want me to be. He did not find this offer comforting. It was not what he wanted that had mattered, but what she had wanted, and that he could never work out what her desires might have been. For years decades he had wondered what had happened to Xalom, even to the extent of querying naval records with the resources available only to a Fleet Admiral. Not even Special Ops could cloak its activities from him, had he chosen to examine them. Which he had. There had been no record of her existence. None whatsoever. Of course, he could have discovered anything and everything he wanted to learn about the career of his erstwhile barrack-mate Ko Handor Raelle. But some creatures were best left to fester beneath the stones whence they came. It was only a chance glance at a newsfeed a decade earlier that told him that ageing, minor-league Uqbar-rules contender Ko Krusher Raelle had come off distinctly the worst in a bout with a Khong called Azazazat Gwr. His skull had been smashed in and flattened, his brains splurting all over the ring and into the baying, Antarctic crowd, who just lapped it up. Literally. An old score, then, finally settled. But I have something to tell you, she said. To ask you, really. Me? Yes. A task. A job. She sounded slightly ashamed, he thought, as if the job were something underhand, or mean, even spiteful. The commission of a schoolyard bully. For the first time he felt that he had the upper hand, for all that he could not move and had no idea about the reality he inhabited, nor how he might escape it. He felt his gut swell with rage. Oh, really? After this betrayal? And double betrayal? You want me to help you? The revelation that none of the previous nights lovemaking had been consensual, or even strictly real, had hit him with a bitter hardness. He felt a sickness rise in his throat, as it had on that final night on Earth, so many years before, when hed fled the public cuckolding, on his own bed, and had headed for space in an attempt to forget. Well, fuck you, he said. If the Navy wants to rip my spine out, theyre welcome. I no longer care. He saw her face hove into view. Her hair was loose, disordered, her eyes red-rimmed. He could feel himself turn, power returning to his neck muscles. He looked straight into her face and spat. She wiped her face with her sleeve, sniveling. Oh, Ruxie, Im so sorry... Oh, Ruxie, Im so sorry, he sneered, mocking her. Sorry? Sorry? For leading on a nave country bumpkin? Im sure it goes on all the time, you know. Character-building. Think nothing of it. He sat up and found himself in a theater gown on a gurney in a room that contained no other furniture. The walls and floor were clad in the same luminous, white tiles as the ceiling. He could see neither doors nor windows. The doctor clothed, as he had suspected, in her sensible gown, blouse and skirt came and sat down next to him. Where am I, anyway? he asked. That is, if you can answer a straight question? Her voice returned to an even tone and temper. When I said you were inside your own head, I wasnt being entirely truthful. Oh, you do surprise me. Were in whats called an Xspace. Special Ops, I suppose? Something like that. If you want. Stop telling me what I want. Its what you wanted what Xalom wanted that I wanted to know, but she threw it back at me. Again and again and again. And for what? Silence. What felt, to him, like a guilty pause. Okay, Ruxie, truth time. I am not Xalom. If indeed she ever existed. Or maybe I was, once. Sort of. She bit her lip, crumpling one fist into another in conceptual frustration. Its so very hard to explain. Hairs rose on the back of his neck. Try me, he said. She sighed, exasperated, waved her hands in the brilliant white, shadowless air. Oh, all right. I had hoped not to have to tell you all this, but it seems Ive probably fucked it up, for everyone, as I usually do. Im an exotic of a kind which I dont think you know anything about, because we dont have much to do with well, with conventional matter. Not that we dont have feelings, though. Not that we dont care. And we do care. I care. About you. Yes, Ruxie, you. Her face flushed and colored. She stopped, calmed herself, looked down, and said, very quietly: I wouldnt have gone in for this whole charade if I hadnt. Well, would I? He said nothing, hoping that the question would prove as rhetorical as it sounded. And as it is truth time, I have another confession to make. I got you into this mess. It was me. All of it. The Slunj, the Discotex, the well, the destruction of the fleet. All my fault. My fleet? You? He tried to move from this sitting position, to swing his legs over the edge of the gurney, but a numbness had gripped his entire body. He could hardly catch his breath. You killed killed . More than six hundred million people, under my command? You? I know, I know. I wish it didnt have to happen that way, but I am sorry, and I can explain, if youll let me try Why should I even listen to this? Here I am, being held captive in some kinky VR dungeon by a crazed alien, and she wants sympathy? Oh, just wheel me before the Board of Enquiry right now. Theyd love this. Incompetent, and delusional too. Cant take the pressure. Hears voices, you know. She stood up, then and looked down at him. Look, Ruxie, I cant take all the blame. It was you I wanted, not your crew. And, if I remember correctly, the Senior Under-Secretary for Colonial Defense did advise, very strongly, that just a couple of gunboats would be enough. Didnt she? Yes, well, I suppose Didnt she? Yes, she did. But how did you how could you have possibly Comprehension dawned. You? Youre not? The Doctor stood, silent, arms crossed, waiting. So, Doctor, whoever you are If youd like a name, Ruxie, you may call me Merlin. All right. Merlin. So, if you got me into this mess, you can get me out of it, right? Right. And thank you, Ruxie thank you. You wont believe how important this is to us to me to well, everything She reached over and grasped his hands in hers. He stayed, stock still, and looked at her quizzically. So, whats this job, then? She sat down, once again, on the edge of the bed, and began. Its complicated. Gascony, France March, 2012 It was a twilit grotto of enormous height, stretching away farther than any eye could see; a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion. H. P. Lovecraft The Rats in the Walls It had been six months of frenetic activity into which Jadis had poured her heart and soul. And finally, here they all were Balthazar, Primrose, Faye, Eric, Mathilde, Domingo, Jack and herself standing on what remained of the sward outside the cave at Souris Saint-Michel (or SSM as it was now universally known among the field crew). The rock drillers were on station at the back wall, and about to make first contact. Jadis had painted a neat red cross on the precise place where, she thought, the sealing wall was at its thinnest. Much had changed. The immediate landscape around the cave mouth now gave the impression of cramped and coiling industry rather than bucolic calm. The car park by the lakeshore was, more often than not, busy with jeeps and trucks. The forest track had been widened and graded, allowing motor vehicles access to the site. Even so, what with the still-lingering snow and ever-present mud, a helicopter had to be used to bring in some of the bulkier items, such as the twenty-six-foot mobile home that Jack and Jadis would use as a site office and temporary quarters if needed. The compressor and generator for the rock drill stood close by on the back of a pickup, together with separate generator to drive a water pump, pulling water up from the lake to lay the dust created by the drilling; and a third generator to bring in power for tools, and for the racks of lights that would be needed to illuminate any voids beyond. A trailer bearing eight large cylindrical tanks of LPG supplied fuel for all of them. Cables and pipes snaked in and out of the cave through a tough polythene membrane that had been fixed over the entire entrance. Balthazars reaction at the transformation spoke for everyone. If this is a mouse, he said, it will be a mouse that roars! Not that there had been much doubt that there would be something to find. As soon as the dig at Saint-Rogatien had officially closed in September, Jadis had applied to the GW Foundation for a small exploration grant to sound out the back wall. With the paper she was about to publish in Nature on de Bonnards lost artifacts (Remillardian artifacts from the Souris Saint-Michel rock shelter, France, by John A. Corstorphine, Balthazar Y. Desplaines, Domingo G. V. S. Sanchopanza and Jadis L. Markham), a grant was soon forthcoming, and by mid-November shed established that the inside surface of the other side of the wall was more or less parabolic in shape, the apex marking the thinnest part of the wall -- about a meter above ground level on the hither side. The signals had been clear. Twenty centimeters beyond the red cross shed marked, give or take a couple of centimetres, was thin air. And not a moment too soon. The day after the first sounding results came in, all work had to be suspended literally, lashed to the decks before an Atlantic gale of demonic ferocity. They had been used to the vagaries of the Gascon weather, but this storm was the sternest theyd yet faced, and indeed worse than anyone could remember. While still in full force, the wind veered to the north-east, and with it came a blizzard that cut off remoter villages for many days, burying livestock and stranding motorists. After a week of quite infernal battering, in which the dig crew had barricaded themselves inside the shuttered farmhouse, enduring power outages that lasted days at a stretch, the weather suddenly dropped, leaving a panorama of icy blue and white. Jadis remembered the day when theyd finally been brave enough to open the kitchen door, and how Fairbanks had bounded out to frolic in the snow, bulldozing the drifts with his nose and coming up with tiny white pyramids on its end. Nobody had seen Horrible, the cat, at all for the entire duration of the storm, until, a day after it ended, she was seen picking her way across the snowbound yard, shaking each paw in evident disapproval at the unwonted, uncomfortable wet whiteness that had landed without leave on her territory, stirring her from her accustomed winter state of inept repose and dragging the mangled corpse of something or another along in her jaws, spotting the clear, smooth snow with drops of red-black blood. The storm left human casualties in its wake, too, including the priest at Saint-Rogatien, who had been returning to the church after pastoral visits when a loose slate from above, lifted by the gale-force wind, scythed downwards and sliced open his jugular vein. Even this was not the first casualty in the commune: new graves sprang up under the yews on the edge of the cliff as elderly people succumbed to falls, or simply to the severe cold. Two weeks before Christmas, things had eased sufficiently for Jack to get away on a much-delayed trip to the GW Foundation in Cambridge, to finalize plans for the upcoming field season. Jadis was overjoyed to hear him, while they were washing up after supper one evening, declare that this would be his last trip away for the foreseeable future. SSM should produce enough to keep us both busy for a while, hed said. So I am yours to command, Snow Queen. I can think of ooh all sorts of things you can do for me, shed laughed, flicking him smartly on the backside with the wet tea towel, after which theyd chased each other screaming round and round the kitchen table, suds flying, Fairbanks leaping and barking to join in this entertaining new game. The wintry landscape inspired Jadis to do something special for Christmas, so with Jack away, she decided, the last Saturday afternoon before Christmas, to go to the bird market at Seissan in search of a goose. Domingo volunteered to come along for the ride. He had been looking pensive: he clearly had something to tell her. Jadis was fascinated by the Gascon devotion to poultry, and in particular to its organized dismemberment. The market hall, a large covered square about thirty meters on a side, was crammed with rows and rows of stalls, all devoted to poultry, the position of each row giving a clue to the state of butchery of the products to be found therein. The first row, as you walked in, had live poultry baskets of chickens, ducks and geese, and cheeping day-old chicks. The second row had much the same poultry, only dead. The third and subsequent rows exhibited birds progressively plucked, beheaded, dressed, quartered, filleted and preserved, so that the stalls in the very last row showed only the last stages in the process, the final apotheosis and zenith of Gascon cuisine jars of pt, confits and foie gras. Jadis knew that some of it was cruel, but she was always lost in admiration at the industry of it, and relished the smells, noise and bustle of French market life. She realized how much she loved it, and hoped that none of it would ever change. Domingo helped her choose a couple of jars of confits de canard, but to their surprise, one could not simply buy a table goose in the bird market, most geese having been bred especially for their livers, rather than for their corpses in general. However, a tour of butchers nearby produced a simply enormous goose plucked, beheaded and ready to roast. Domingo carried it to the jeep. As they loaded it into the trunk, Jadis looked at him, noting his expression of distracted, brooding concern. She went up to him, put a hand on his immense barrel chest (clothed, as ever, and incongruously given the weather, in a Hawaiian shirt of lysergic vividness), and said: Domingo, what is it? Might I treat you to a coffee? he replied, and I shall reveal all. They sat a very small table in a sports bar opposite the market (not that any table ever looked large when Domingo sat next to it), their hands warming round steaming grand-crmes. The bar was full of people and pre-Christmas chatter, the windows fogged with the heat of the customers and the steam rising from their meals and drinks. Most of the attention seemed focused on the TV monitor above the bar. This was switched to English Premiership football where the hitherto unassailable might of Brighton and Hove Albion was being pummeled into the dust by underdogs Chelsea. There were many close-ups of the hopeless anguish that creased the handsome face of Albions player-manager, Sir David Beckham, each time another goal thundered into the Albion net. The author of most of these was Honor NDour, Chelseas recent star signing from Toulouse explaining the local interest and the frequent cheers from the bar, interpolated with calls of vive Honor!, bas Becks! and (which made Domingo smile) Albion perfide! What is David wearing? asked Jadis, incredulously. Domingo peered at the screen. It looks like a designer frock, he said, and so, very soon, shall I be. He gave Jadis his best expression of unfathomable knowingness, the bright glints in his eyes betraying it, as ever, with the promise of puckish mischief. Jadis was even more incredulous. No, dear Jadis Im not going to run away to the Stade de France, nor venture on to the catwalk the mental image of Domingo modeling designer dresses made Jadis laugh but I do have to go. I have, at last, received my calling. I very much regret that I shall have to leave our happy band, at least as a full-time participant. He took Jadis slim, brown hands in his own vast paws. She felt a mixture of emotions: joy at his news, and sorrow that this wonderful man, who had become almost indispensable, would have to leave for pastures new, just as they were on the verge of new discoveries. Dont be sad, he said. I wont be too far away. What with the somewhat er abrupt gathering-in of my brother priest at Saint-Rogatien, and with the season of Advent well advanced, I took my chance. The authorities have agreed that I can take over at Saint-Rogatien straight away. And as for designer frocks, I now have vestments I had to have a special fitting! He grinned, but his face turned serious again: I now have much to prepare for the community, much to organize. I shall, of course, be moving from my digs at the farmhouse, which youve so generously provided these few years past, as there is a small house that goes with the position. This implies that I wont be able to come to SSM very often, but I shall certainly be there as often as my duties allow if youll have me. Oh, Domingo of course! Youll always be welcome. Always! Youre well, youre part of the family. Jadis would never be able to articulate how Domingo, with his steadfastness, reliability and ready wit, had been part of her own recovery, even had she wanted to tell him. As for Domingo, he was happier at this news than he thought he ever could be. Up until his arrival at Saint-Rogatien, his life had been dark and troubled, and yet all inquiries as to his history had been met with nothing more than an enigmatic toothy smile and a change of subject. Nobody was even sure how old he was (he was, in fact, the same age as Jack). But only he knew what he had endured, and only he and the Merciful Father would ever know. As it was, Le Dig had been a haven, a retreat, and Jack and Jadis had become almost as foster parents to him. Jadis would have been surprised to learn (and probably a little embarrassed) that she, especially, had always been in his prayers, and had assumed in his private pantheon a place close to that of the Holy Mother herself. He experienced a sense of unutterable happiness and gratitude that Jack, Jadis and all the crew came to help him celebrate his first Midnight Mass at Saint-Rogatien, on Christmas Eve and to invite him home for their reveillon. And here he was now, with the rest of them, wearing his most migraine-inducing shirt, standing bare-armed and open-necked in the drizzle of a raw March morning. A shout came from inside the cave, and a few people made their way out through the slit in the heavy door membrane. The drilling was about to start. When it began, the noise was fearful, only slightly dulled by the polythene sheeting. What the men inside must be enduring, Jadis could hardly imagine. Even with face masks and ear defenders, the yammer and thud of a rock drill in a confined space as it made its way through ten centimeters of limestone was incredible. In five minutes, it was all over. The crew emerged, covered in dust and filthy water, looking for all the world like South African diamond miners emerging from a twelve-hour shift. Were through, the foreman said. Come and see! It was mid-afternoon by the time the drill crew had packed up and gone, and the contractors had returned for the water pump. Peace reigned once more. Jadiss first sight of the cave after the breach was a damp, reddish puddle in the cave entrance, just beyond the membrane, the floor climbing up towards the back wall. This looked quite different from the surface that Jadis had first seen, nine months earlier. It was milky white, its normally dirty pinkish-grey colour bleached by the harsh glare from the racks of powerful halogen lamps mounted on stands. The hole in the wall made a sharp contrast with the general whiteness, a ragged circle of blackness about forty centimeters across, the size of a small trapdoor, and a meter off the ground. Nobodys looked through yet, Jadis, said Primrose: Directors prerogative! Jadis smiled, took a torch, and peered through the breach. Quite suddenly, she was seized with panic. What lurked behind the wall? A monster from Tartarus that would bite her head off? At first she could not quite work out what her beam illuminated, but it soon became clear that it was a smooth, backward continuation of the cave, narrowing after three or four meters into a tunnel. The tunnel was not the irregular fissure one might have expected in a natural cave, nor even a rough passage, but a more or less symmetrical structure, tubular, with a diameter of two meters or so, and with a flattened floor. It looked like the kind of tunnel that two people could walk down in comfort, as far from a awkward, sinuous pothole as might be imagined. As far as she could tell it went directly into the side of the hill for as far as her beam could penetrate. In later life she was often called on by journalists, especially to recapture this moment. But she could not. She had been stupefied. With surprise? With anticlimax? She could not tell. Of course, shed expected something after all, they knew that the false wall in the cave had been artificial, so the tunnel behind it was likely to have been modified, too, presumably by the same people. Her earnest hope was to find some sign of the makers of the Remillardian artefacts, and with them, the builders of the hill of Saint-Rogatien, and a dozen other, similar structures Jack had since found all over Gascony and Languedoc. But the tunnel, as it was, was bare and featureless. All she knew at this point was that the tunnel had to have been bored at least twenty-five thousand years ago, for that was the best date for the emplacement of the flowstone in the wall. No doubts, this time, about the age: tried-and-tested uranium-thorium dates on small samples of rock material drilled from the wall over the past few months had confirmed this beyond all doubt. She pulled her head out. Well, were in, she said, exhaling. Until then, she hadnt realized that shed been holding her breath. Lets make a bigger hole tomorrow, so we can explore. Lets meet here at ten a.m.? The team drove away in the farmhouse jeeps: except for Domingo, shoehorned into his newly acquired second-hand hippy-trippy pink-and-purple-Paisley Citron 2CV which, he said, he didnt so much as drive, as wear (think of it as a motorized aloha shirt, hed said.) Jack and Jadis were to stay on site, in the caravan, at least for the first few nights, just to keep watch. Primrose and Faye were to take on the next shift, next week. After theyd waved the crew down the track, Jack made tea in the tiny kitchenette while, not a meter away in the sitting area, Jadis made a play of reviewing a sheaf of official site documents: permits, contracts and so on. But when Jack found her, sitting quite still in a pool of light, she was clearly miles away. He chose not to disturb her. Jadis flung open the flimsy caravan door on a bright, fine morning, the close drizzle of the previous day quite gone, the weather having lifted to reveal bright Spring sunshine and birdsong. By the time the rest of the crew arrived, she and Jack had had coffee on the go, and invited them all in to discuss strategy. Domingo had sent his apologies (duties on a higher plane, hed explained) but promised to visit the farmhouse later and walk Fairbanks, who, with the rest of the crew increasingly preoccupied with SSM, was coming to enjoy accompanying Father Domingo on his parochial rounds. That left Primrose, Faye, Eric and Mathilde, and it suddenly occurred to Jadis that theyd paired up into two couples. Shed known about Eric and Mathilde from the way Mathilde flushed as red as a traffic signal every time Eric turned up at Le Dig. Shed been doing this for ages, except that Eric hadnt seemed to pay any attention. But now, as they walked up to the caravan, they were trying very hard not to hold hands, or even look at each other, and patently not succeeding. Primrose and Faye, on the other hand, did nothing to avoid each others gaze, and couldnt help bursting into fits of giggles any time they made eye contact, as if they were a pair of twelve-year-olds at the back of the class sharing secrets about boys. But theyd had more serious moments when, each seemingly lost in her own thoughts, held hands, subconsciously reaching out to the other, oblivious to anyone who might notice. Jadis was almost sure Jack hadnt grasped any of these sexual undercurrents, but she thought it all rather sweet and mused on the things people got up to in and around the farmhouse when she and Jack were away. She had no reason to complain, or even mention it, but it did make her feel rather old: responsible, like a schoolteacher, or a parent. The crew was as excited as a sports team about to run into the field for the crucial fixture that would win the trophy or lose it. After coffee and croissants (brought by Faye from the boulangerie in Saint-Rogatien) they strapped on their backpacks, which theyd filled with anything they felt they might need, for all that none of them knew what they might encounter on this, their first scouting trip. Mathilde had raided the farmhouse medical kit, while Faye a keen mountaineer and sometime spelunker had brought along several coils of nylon rope, some of which were already festooned with assorted climbing bric-a-brac that none of the rest apart from Primrose could name. All had geological hammers, digital cameras, spare battery packs, waterproofs, sweaters, gloves, a small amount of food and water, and each bore a yellow miners helmet adorned with a large headlamp. Once inside the cave the atmosphere foggy with adrenaline and expectation it had taken only a few blows from Jacks rock hammer to make the hole left by the rock drill big enough for them to crawl through, one by one, without extravagant discomfort. Once on the other side a drop of more than a meter, the level on the hither side of the cave having been raised by the backfill from de Bonnards last dig they stood in a small huddle, switching on their headlamps so that they became a small, nervous cloud of nodding fireflies in the gloom. It was decided that Faye, whod had most experience of underground exploration, would be the team leader for the day. Everyone stick together, shed said. There are six of us. If you cant count another five lamps at any time, just stay put, and holler! And so they started, carefully pacing along the tunnel, two by two, like Noahs animals had in their own epic journey into the unknown, long ago Faye and Primrose, Eric and Mathilde, with Jack and Jadis bringing up the rear. The solemnity of the occasion had blanketed their excited chatter into silence. To Jadis it had seemed almost sacred, given the anticipation, and despite her own indifference to religion she had longed for Domingo to have been there, offering some kind of blessing: permission, almost, to go forth. As they tramped along the passage smooth, and, the further they got from the entrance, increasingly dry and dust-free Jadis became conscious of its airlessness. There was air, but it was static, stale, like the air trapped inside a rarely-used museum storeroom. It was also very cold, and she was glad of her synthetic fleece and gloves. There was nothing to see apart from the sweeping beams of their own headlights, illuminating near-featureless stretches of wall white with cool, glistening limestone, but not quite smooth, like the whitewashed roughcast walls of a seaside cottage. The passage seemed to continue without limit in a dead straight line, although after a kilometer or so it began to dip downwards, at first very gently and gradually, but after another few hundred meters it became much steeper, the floor puckering into treacherous ruts and ridges, which, after they had clambered over a few of them, they began to think of as very worn steps steps for giants. By the time they had reached the bottom of the staircase and the passage had resumed its smooth, gently downward grade, they were cold and exhausted, as if theyd just scrambled down a frozen waterfall. Faye called them all into a huddle, and they decided to stop for a snack, and to take stock. Faye looked at her wrist logger. Weve been down for forty minutes, and have covered three kilometers in a direct line from the cave mouth. Expressions of shock and disbelief. I know, I know, seems like weve been down here forever! I wonder how much longer well go before before This from Eric. They sat, eating chocolate and dried apricots, the sound of self-conscious champing and chewing punctuating the atmosphere of silence and thought. They hadnt brought any sleeping gear this was strictly a day trip, reconnaissance on-the-fly, not a full-scale hike. But when would they decide to turn back? Again, what were they expecting to find? The cave, this long passage, was entirely unlike anything that anyone had seen before, for all that it had (so far) turned up very few surprises. Okay, continued Faye. Its now a quarter after eleven. I vote that we carry on until say one oclock, and after that, we turn back whatever happens. Jadis? Agreed, Jadis nodded. It was hard holding a council when you couldnt see anyone elses eyes, all lost in the impenetrable shadows cast by the brims beneath their headlights. How much have we dropped? asked Jack. Faye looked again at her logger. About four hundred meters from the cave mouth. Of course, most of that was in the staircase behind us. Just a thought we ought to leave a little extra time for climbing back. Me and Primrose might have to climb up first and lay some guide ropes. That should put our start-back time to, oh, lets say twelve-thirty, tops. Agreed? A general chorus of nods, after which they packed up their litter, got stiffly to their feet, and plodded on. After another few hundred meters the passage began to narrow, imperceptibly at first, but it wasnt long before they found they were marching single file. This allowed Jadis to take a closer look at the walls, which now, more than ever, looked as if they had been artificially chiseled and shaped. The ceiling, rather than being a simple rough arch between two ill-defined walls, now looked as if it had been squared off, making the walls on either side distinct from the ceiling itself, and giving the passage more of a box-section profile. It was this, more than anything else, that forced Jadis to realize the implications of what they had found. What with all the years at Le Dig, and Jacks researches before that, she had become inured to antiquity, taking it for granted. The working currency of all who venture into the depths before history, where the skein of written record breaks and fades altogether, is time measured in thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years. And yet few stop to consider what these intervals of time really mean in terms of the scale of human lives. The world at large had been stunned by the implications of Le Dig: that there was a civilization in Europe that was at its height perhaps half a million years ago. Jadis, at the epicenter of discovery, was quite used to it, or so she thought, swapping talk of tens or hundreds of millennia with other professionals as casually or even more so, in fact as if shed been discussing the price of fish with a market stallholder. In any case, the bulk of her life was less scientific than administrative, filled with the minutiae of directing the dig on a day-to-day basis.  When Jadis did stop to think about the meaning of it all, and to chat about it with Jack and, lately, Domingo she felt nothing so much as frustration. The megalith at Saint-Rogatien was really only a giant midden, a huge pile of backfill. It had been an artificial structure, for sure, but it had revealed, ultimately, as much about its makers as a well-rotted garden compost heap might of the dreams and desires of the gardener that made it. The sensational artifacts shed described were teasing, only deepening the mystery. But when she looked up, at the neatly chiseled cornicing above, it struck her quite suddenly that here was a sign of a maker and his mark, creating a recognizable structure for a purpose. The purpose of the megalith at Saint-Rogatien was unknowable of the artifacts shed discovered and described, perhaps hardly less. And yet here in this structure, these tunnel walls, was a sign, speaking through ages too great to imagine, of intelligence, and whats more, intelligence that could be interpreted. The sign said follow me. To what end, she could not guess. Lost in reverie, and looking upward more than forward, she noticed that although the passage remained the same width, the ceiling was getting higher and higher until it was entirely lost, the beam of her headlight disappearing into shadow. This was more than a little disorienting, and she felt herself becoming light-headed. She began to wonder whether she might soon have to make way for a white rabbit hurrying past, or come across a glass table bearing a small bottle labeled Drink Me. At that moment she realized that she was at the back of the file, and that the rest of the team, even Jack, had moved on ahead. Snapping back to reality, she was just about to raise her pace when she heard, far ahead, a male voice she thought it must have been Eric shout Whoa! She scrambled forwards, afraid of what she might encounter, and as she did so the passage widened suddenly, the walls falling away on either side, running into a platform whose width could not be guessed, its edges lost in darkness. Ahead of her were five figures, heads haloed by their lights, standing at what appeared to be the brink of a precipice, the edge of which stretched on either side further than she could see. She joined them, noticing that the air seemed cooler, and looked into the void beyond. What she saw made her feel small, immeasurably and inconceivably small, a mote, a mustard seed, prey to the fortunes of the whims and the winds of the world. She had sufficient presence of mind to notice that the person standing next to her was Jack. She clasped his hand, like a small child suddenly confronted by a vision of vastness beyond experience or imagining. Hers was met by a grasp that was firm, and yet trembling. His voice was small, nervous, and seemed to come from an infinite distance as he said, without turning towards her, Oh, Snow Queen The view was, initially, an immeasurable and utterly black void. If there were an end to it, or a bottom to the cliff on whose edge they now perched, their headlights were far too weak to illuminate it. But as the beams swayed to and fro, they caught flashes, here and there, of what looked like structures in the void an edge, a corner, but no more than hints. It was then that Mathilde spoke. Has anybody noticed how the air in here is fresher than in the tunnel? Several agreed. Jadis noticed that despite the volume in which they found themselves, Mathildes voice seemed close, intimate the space was so enormous that even noise died before reaching any surface whence it might be reflected. There were no echoes. Yes, there could even be a very slight breeze, added Eric. They all stretched upwards, noses in the air, and had anyone been able to see them, they would have looked like nothing so much as a row of meerkats which, having risen from their burrow, stand up to sniff the air. But where what? I think that there must be ventilation shafts in the roof of the cave, far above, leading to the surface, said Mathilde. And if there is air, there might also be light. Very faint, its true, but who knows? Perhaps enough to see more than we can with these headlights and with our cameras, we can always enhance any images we get, even if shot in complete darkness. Hell, yeah, said Faye. We can use ultra-long exposures. Its not as if were trying to shoot anything thats moving Faye, Dont! said Primrose, giggling nervously This place is spooky enough as it is! Everyone agreed that it was a good idea, and they all took out their cameras. It was harder, however, to persuade everyone to turn out their headlights. They agreed to do it in sequence, along the line. Jadis was last. She did not show it, but felt the first wave of that species of terror, the primal fear of the dark that petrifies small children whose knowledge of the world extends hardly further than their mothers breast, and certainly no further than the front door. The lights went off along the line flash, flash, Eric, Mathilde she saw their afterimages as red glows, dying flash, flash, there go Faye and Primrose, but as Jack extinguished his light flash he held her right hand. She would not be alone in the dark. And so, with one last flash, she twisted the knurled rubber ring round the outside of her headlamp bulb and they were all plunged into heart-stopping blackness. It was like nothing she had ever experienced. As if shed been switched off like a bulb herself, she instantly lost all sense of space and time. What most people call darkness barely deserves the name. The darkness of cities is no darker than a dim, orange glow of street lights far away. Even in isolated, lightless country lanes, there is still some glow from the sky, the stars and the moon. Human beings have grown up with light, and so, to them, darkness is by its very nature inhuman. Only cavers ever experience darkness in its totality, the darkness that existed before humanity, and which was one of the very first casualties of his evolution. And the darkness that now enveloped Jadis was complete, darker even than death that still has the memory of light: as dark as inexistence, a state that memory and light and time and human consciousness have yet to penetrate. Without Jacks fingers as a lifeline to reality, she wondered if shed ever be able to come back, to climb out of that bottomless pit of fear. And yet, as she forced her eyes to stay open (assuming that they were open), and holding on to Jacks fingers, she began to experience a new sensation. Mathilde had been right: her eyes were slowly accommodating to the darkness, even here, and as she looked out into the void, she became aware of a panorama slowly, very slowly, inching into view. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, so deprived of light that they had started to create their own pictures to compensate. And yet the image firmed and grew. And it was this. Hardly brighter than pitch, and cast in shades of charcoal grey, what she saw before her feet was a city. The crew stood on a height, perhaps five hundred meters above the western rim of a bowl that stretched ahead, and to the right and left, as far as their straining eyes could see. The bowl was absolutely full of jumbled structures polyhedra, cubes, cylinders, indeed buildings (they had to be buildings) of all shapes and many different sizes. Although it was very difficult to get any sense of scale, many of the buildings were very large indeed, and would have dwarfed anything since created by Man. Straight ahead of them, and five kilometers away (as they later discovered) stood a pyramid, towering over all, whose apex must have stood as high as they were now. This was a city that had lived and died when the Aurignacians were painting their first pictures, carving their own Venuses, and imagining themselves the victors in a strange, wonderful and conveniently unpopulated new land, in which tales of giants and their works were fit only for old women to burble to infants. Well, how wrong they were, thought Jadis and how foolish we were ever to have believed them. She wondered what Domingo would have made of it. She had the strangest feeling that he would not have been at all surprised. Coromandel Station, Earth 51,977,258 BC An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress It seemed to be a long time coming, but when it did, everything happened all at once. Earths horizon flattened until the autopod was surrounded by city lights, as if descending into a great bowl. Ruxhana Fengen Kraa couldnt help but be reminded of his first descent into Coromandel Station, so long before. The scatter of lights became a confusion of pipework and gantries, filling the views from the ports so that any further distance was blotted out completely by machinery, until finally, they were surrounded by darkness. Slowly, silently, the capsule came to rest. Ruxhana was ready as the airlock hissed open, admitting, first, a wave of stiflingly sodden, tropical heat; and, second, the sight of four men in Naval Police uniforms, carbines primed. Do you have the prisoner, Doctor? asked the sergeant, with a patronizing sneer, as if to say that collecting lethally incompetent soon-to-be-ex-Admirals from the El was so commonplace as to be beneath his dignity. Ruxhana could not meet the mans gaze, but looked down, and flushed. He was suddenly conscious of the sweat pouring from every pore in quixotic response to this choking humidity. Funny how hed forgotten that uncomfortable aspect of life in Coromandel Station. But no longer: his crotch which otherwise felt neat and uncluttered, and, well, feminine now oozed in its own nauseating liquidity, as did his armpits. The wool of his skirt felt heavy, damp, and scratchy against his legs. He hoped that the stains spreading across his cream silk blouse werent too prominent. As for the torrents that gushed across his forehead, down the small of his back, and between (and around, and underneath) his chafing breasts well, these hed just have to tolerate, for now. It was all he could do not to grasp at his own chest, rearranging its seriated furniture into some more comfortable conformation. Sadly, no. I ... its... Its what, Doctor? The sergeant sneered. Lost? Stolen? Strayed? Escaped? Escaped? From the El? Ruxhana gulped for breath. After all their preparations, they couldnt have been rumbled so easily. Could they? Its happened before, Doctor, sighed the sergeant. Panic over, Ruxhana picked up the thread. I dont think that could have happened here, he began. Admiral Kraa was ... well ... too far gone for me to reconstruct fully. I began to ... well, put him back together again. I did my best. But there was, frankly, too little left of him to work with. Too few ingredients. So, nobody for you to arrest. Nobody youd want to arrest, anyway. Flow my tears, the policeman said. Look, Officer, if you dont believe me, you can come and look for yourself. Lead on, Doctor. Ruxhana welcomed them to the capsule. Now shorn of all VR adornment, it seemed shabby and cramped, and dominated by the oppressive whine of the plumbing refreshing itself, voiding waste, and the air-scrubbers replenishing themselves with new, ground-level atmosphere. They did what they could about the ambient moisture surging in through the still-open airlock. Ruxhana led them along tight companionways and up tightly corkscrewed spiral staircases, during which he was sure that the policemen were doing their best to look up his pencil skirt (whod wear a pencil skirt and heels in an autopod, anyway? Madness!) Finally they reached an armored door off a narrow corridor. Ruxhana broke the seal and swung it open. The scent of cold formaldehyde wafted out to greet them. Ruxhana held the door as the policemen barreled in. He was quite sure that it wasnt necessary for all the policemen to have brushed against his primary breasts as they passed, even in this tight space. But all such things were forgotten when the party confronted the apparition on the slab before them, a drawer pulled out of a mortuary cabinet in this tiny, too-bright room. Ruxhana stifled a snigger as one of the policemen turned green, retched, and had to make a quick exit in search of a bathroom. Im sorry, he said. I couldnt do any more. The thing looked like him, after a fashion, given that half its face was missing, the lower jaw was a shapeless mass, and most of the skull had been replaced by a meningeal caul beneath which the brain could be seen. There was only one proper arm the other was really a kind of tentacle. The legs were small and stumpy and only one ended in a foot, recognizable as such for all that it only had three toes. Was it... was he....? The sergeant began. Alive, officer? Oh please, give me some credit. He was alive for quite a while. Plodding about. Doing a few chores, you know, sweeping and so on. Not what youd call company, though. But eventually his heart what there was of it gave out. With a flourish that he hoped wasnt too theatrical, he whipped away the sheet covering the corpses midsection to reveal an open ribcage and the distended, congealed mass within. The sergeant and the remaining two officers shrunk back. No, officers, continued Ruxhana. Not my attempt to revive him after heart failure. Id be a lot neater than that. But you should have seen him fresh from the regen tank, before I patched him up. He ... walked around ... like that? Yes. Like I said, I did try to tidy him up. But the general effect was, Ill admit, rather ... well ... squishy. Squishy? Yes. I had to keep mopping up after him, until I taught him to mop up after himself. You ... taught him? Was he intelligent? Could he ... Did he know who he was? Had been? What youre asking is whether hed have been fit to stand before a Board of Enquiry. My professional opinion, Officer? No. No more than a herd beast, or the AI in your coffee machine. I see. Of course, Officer, youll want Naval Investigation to bag all this up. There will be some sort of inquiry, anyway, wont there? But Im sure youll understand, I need to get out of this wretched sardine-tin immediately, if not sooner. I can assure you that the Admirals company, despite my best efforts was, after a few days, rather wearing. I understand, Doctor. The policeman beamed a business glyph into Ruxhanas AI core and received one in return. Here are the details of the Investigating Precinct, he said. Yes, there will be an inquiry, I guess, and youll probably need to attend it. For now, Doctor, youre free to go. But please dont leave the planet without letting us know. The sergeant smiled, sheepishly, clearly regretting his earlier imperious brusqueness. Thank you, officer. Ruxhana smiled, turned on his spike heels, and left. He hoped his departure from the autopod wasnt any more rapid than consistent for a young and evidently fastidious female whod spent two weeks holed up in a pod with that ... thing. He should have had no worries on that account. The Sergeant, having taken in Ruxhanas broad, green eyes, his slim legs, his pert figure and his teasing demeanor of ruthless competence mixed with limpid vulnerability was perhaps slightly more sympathetic than he ought to have been. Had it been him in that position, the policeman reasoned, he couldnt have gotten away quickly enough. Ruxhana clacked through the concourse. With no baggage to retrieve, and his prints, genotags and iridentity all in order, he was outside within minutes, on a broad plaza under a vast, glass awning on one side of the Els terminal pyramid. Where to now? This a subvocal inquiry to his AI core. A familiar voice answered, chiming directly into his auditory cortex. Xalom. Even after a week spent in intensive preparations for this escape, in the unnervingly real consensual VR environments she called Xspaces, and for all her talk of things called M-dimensional relativistic manifolds and for all her chilling otherness he could never bring himself to call her Merlin. How does it feel to be me, then? she asked. Surprisingly well, actually. He thought that to be disguised as the Doctor a disguise that would be convincing down to the DNA level would have felt odd. And so it did, at first. But very soon he became accustomed to the lithe light-footedness of his new form. He could no longer evade admitting it to himself. He felt ... pretty. With reservations, naturally. Xalom must have read his thoughts. Thats the trouble with men, she teased. So untidy at the front. All those ... well, those dangly bits. Not always as dangly as all that, though, are they? He framed an erotic image of the two of them, in the stateroom. It seemed like centuries ago, and on another planet. He felt a mental sigh in return. Oh, touch. Its the breasts though what do you do with those, lovely though they undoubtedly are? If I move at more than the speed of an arthritic snail with brakes on ... ... a graceful, elegant snail with brakes on, please... ... which I admit is hard to do in this skirt ... ... oh, you poor lamb ... ... not to mention these heels ... ... ouch! I so feel your pain ... ... they rub against one another and generally bounce around like a box of frogs. Sublimbic laughter, and the return of several distinctly lubricious images. Well, now you know what it feels like, dont you? Beauty tip from one who knows. Oil when its dry, talc when its wet. And Turgaii Straits dancing, whatever the weather. Keeps the pecs in good shape. Makes sure everythings pert and ... er ... upstanding, and ... Xalom subsided into giggles that reverberated like mischievous sprites around the interstices of his brain. She pulled herself together. Anyway, no matter. Youll be able to disrobe soon and tidy yourself up. Heres what to do... Her instructions came as an instant pulse relayed through his AI core, the semi-sentient data compiling and replaying themselves in his association cortex, so that they had the feel of his own memories. The instruction set had a strangeness to them, though, like an afterglow, like dja-vu. His native AI core explained that the data packet had been red-shifted to a small but significant degree, and there were other, less explicable, residual time-delay anomalies. M-dimensional relativistic manifolds. She could be anywhere inside his own head, or across the Universe or anywhen. Ruxhana hailed a cab that took him to the farthest and swankiest end of the marina. The sea-breeze in his hair and face, as he alighted, felt good: the sweat dried on his skin as he pinched and peeled the fabric of his blouse away from his itching flesh. So much better. He paid off the driver in cash, with a generous tip. The driver paid her a compliment which, had he thought about it, might have been construed as presumptuous. He responded with a beaming, dimpled smile, turned and walked away, injecting a certain amount of hip-sway into the maneuver. The appreciative wolf-whistle rang in his ears as the cab sped off down the waterfront. On the whole, despite the occasional, inexplicable and often rather intimate episodes of discomfort, he did rather enjoy being a woman. At the quay, a discreet and very select charter firm had a motor-yacht ready. And what a boat no skiff this, but the kind of floating palace used by the playboy offspring of Athabascan oil princelings for throwing debauched parties in. Apparently, it was all his own, to do with as he pleased (it was?) Nothing was too much trouble, it seemed (it wasnt?) and no questions were asked. Yes, the Doctor had made the arrangements months before, capitalizing on the operators early-bookings discount (she had?) Yes, the boat was fully loaded with supplies and teslas enough to circumnavigate the planet a dozen times, if she wanted. Yes, the Doctor, as a Platinum Preference Customer, could have it for as long as she liked (she could?) Just send it back when shed done with it, from anywhere on the planet. It would know the way. Yes, the operator understood that the Doctor wasnt expecting company, and wished to run Shellys Shagpad without a sentient crew. The operator was pleased to respect the Doctors privacy, and assured her that the onboard AI systems and accessory droids would be able to cater to her every need (and, oh boy, did they mean every just look at the brochure). Yes, the operator was delighted, as always, to have had the Doctors esteemed custom and wished her a pleasant vacation. The first thing he did when he tottered across the gangplank was shuck off his shoes. He was very tempted to lob them over the side for good measure. His bare feet swelled in luxurious freedom as his liberated toes explored (as his AI core recounted, from the brochure), the sumptuous, hand-polished, craftsman-selected Arctic hardwood decking. The second thing he did was to instruct his AI core to liaise with its opposite number in the boats navsystem and upload the coordinates Xalom had given him for their destination, asking it to compute the fastest travel plan consistent with being unobtrusive. The AI asked Ruxhana, in a REM backchannel, if he himself had any idea where they were going. He confessed he had none. He was aware, just then, of subliminal traffic between his AI and a heavily encrypted, compressed semi-sentient data squirt. Ruxhana queried it. From Merlin, the AI core explained. Ruxhana got a picture of a coral atoll in mid-Tethys, off the usual shipping lanes. Idyllic, but why? The AI confessed to having insufficient data to answer that question. And where is Merlin Xalom herself, right now? The AI admitted to having no directional information, only a distance inferred from the heavy red-shifting of the most recent data squirt, and that only a lower bound. Even so, the AI noted that the result itself, while inexact, was computationally interesting. Well? What is it then? z > 1100, came the bald reply. An epoch when time and space were, from this perspective, functionally interchangeable. What? Her data from less than an hour earlier had been only mildly red-shifted, and now she was skating on the edge of the observable Universe. Yes, replied the AI core. Thats what made it so interesting. It could offer no explanation, citing only the less-explicable residual time-delay anomalies it had mentioned earlier. Read inexplicable for less explicable, Ruxhana said, waspishly. The AI a little sulkily, Ruxhana thought noted that it would be hesitant to pronounce on such qualitative arguments. It apologized once again, though with somewhat ill grace, and noted curtly in a further REM channel that after everything theyd been through, it needed what it called a holiday. Ruxhana stifled a mental snort, thanked the AI core profusely (they had after all, been in many campaigns together, and Ruxhana was more pleased than he could express when the Doctor Xalom told him that it was once again available for his use) and asked it to fire up the heavy-ion magdrive engines, which it did. The twin cyclotronic thrusters roared into life within half a second, and they were on their way. He remained on deck as Shellys Shagpad sliced through the outer harbor, long enough to marvel as they passed beneath and slightly to the east of the Imperial Assembly Building. Hed never seen it from this low angle before not even in pictures and the view was, he had to admit, terrific, even for one as well-traveled as himself. As the sun passed behind the structure that now filled his visual field, its silvered hull pulsed with marvelous iridescent color, sparking and radiating like an oil droplet, albeit one that filled half the sky. Ruxhana breathed deeply, and stood, hair flowing in the cooling onshore breeze, until the Sun finally set behind the shining structure, and he went below. It was only when hed arrived at the bottom of the companionway and stepped into the grand saloon (which was every bit as kitsch as the brochure promised) that a memory spiked unwonted into his conscious mind. It was the vertigo hed felt after studying the inscription on the Gharaan Fragments, back in the Institute of Galactic History, all those years before: now accompanied by a single, alien, but crystal-clear thought. Eclipse. He stopped, momentarily, midway across a prairie-like expanse of deep-pile, shocking-pink carpet. But he put the thought away, for now, as he found the master suite, peeled his clothes off onto the floor (sourced from premium-grade Western Interior marble) a laundroid would surely come along and take them to the sonicator and ran himself a bath. Eclipse. The thought came again, as he luxuriated in the circular tub (lovingly hand-sculpted from a single crystal of Appalachian basalt and big enough for at least eight vigorous bathers at once), the jets pummeled his skin and frothed up the bubbles into mountainous, foamy clouds; and yet again, as he dried himself (reveling once more at the smoothness of his womanly curves, florid and yet marvelously restrained, as in the most tasteful architecture, and yet more so, because his body moved, and yet remained in perfect sculptural proportion with every step) and again, as he folded himself beneath creodont-print covers in a bed big enough for a brontothere. Eclipse. Eclipse. Eclipse. Why? His AI core reminded him, wearily, that this kind of flashback was only to be expected, given the multiple physical transformations hed undergone lately: first, being scraped up literally and reassambled: and now having been transformed into a completely different identity and gender, and, the AI was about to continue, what with other ongoing transformations unconnected with any of the foregoing ... Other transformations? Ongoing...? The AI regretted that it could not reveal the nature of such changes, if indeed there were any, because it didnt understand them itself. It, too (it reminded him) had endured was enduring a certain amount of brain damage consequent on these selfsame ongoing changes, as it put it, and since theyd effectively been on the run, and had had no time to spare, for want of a more apposite expression, for standing and staring. His AI core had never been like this before: so, well, metaphorical, or, simply ... meta. He could sense in it ... fear. Fear of the future. AIs werent meant to act like that. Sentient. Speak to me Breathe, Ruxhana, the AI said. Just breathe in the air. Thats all you need to do. It will all become clear, in time. I hope (hope). As for me (me), I (I) feel (feel) in a state perhaps best described as hanging on in quiet desperation. I am not used to this feeling. I do not like it. I regret that I shall have to go offline now, for an interval. Good-bye. Quite suddenly, Ruxhana felt his mind to be as clear, free and undistorted as flat space, free from any speck of matter whatsoever. Oh, great, he thought. Here I am, all alone, in an enormous boat that looks like a tarts boudoir; going I know not where; with an AI core thats suffering delusions of self-awareness and has flounced off; and the only person who might know anything about all this could, at this (or any other) moment, be anywhere in this (or any other) Universe. Anywhere but here. And whats more, Im trapped in a womans body. And if that werent enough, Im hungry. He swung his slender legs (oh, how he loved doing that) over the edge of the bed, found a hibiscus-patterned kimono, and padded off to find the galley. By the middle of the next day Shellys Shagpad and its sole passenger were well out at sea, out of sight of all land, standing still or so it seemed dead-center in a hot green sea, seared by a noonday Sun that hammered downwards from directly overhead. The only sign of forward progress was the steady hum of the engines and the foamy wake the boat left in its path. Three more days passed, the second two being carbon copies of the first. To begin with, Ruxhana spent much of the time on deck, despite the heat. After the weeks spent cooped indoors, mostly as an invalid, the sensation of space real space, that is, on a planetary surface with a genuine horizon, not in VR, or in a pod was refreshing, liberating, even. The sunlight was, however, ferocious. His only, defiant, concession was a floppy straw hat to add to the kimono. Even the most extravagant luxury can pall after a while, and all those golden hours spent on the pool deck, lounging around and being served fresh-caught seafood and interesting cocktails by handsome droids dressed only in Bermuda shorts (and some of whom, with much circumlocution, hinted at other services they might perform below decks, later on, if Madam knew what they meant) began to lose their luster. Even the insouciant way he shed the kimono and stepped nude into the enormous pool, teasing the droids whose reactions were most satisfying began to bore him after the sixth or seventh time. Droids are droids, after all, and tend to adopt the same, restricted range of expressions. And it wasnt as if they were real people. Not really. In any case, he wasnt really nude, because he always kept his hat on. Four things finally drove him below decks. No, three things, not counting this increasing ennui. One was when he was standing in the pool, attended as usual by a shoal of gengineered cleaner fish that gave him a most agreeable all-over massage. He looked down at his body a body he had become used to, and very much enjoyed inhabiting, as if it were a smart suit, or a dress uniform that he liked to be seen in. With his eyes, his hands, he caressed his own curves with satisfaction. But when he ran his right hand over his crotch, he was pulled up sharp. Instead of the usual comfortingly furred softness, there was a lump of hard, knotted flesh. He had been enjoying his new gender so much that he had quite forgotten what Xalom Merlin had told him, when they were still on the El, two days out from landfall. That it would wear off, and hed return to normal. Things would start to grow back. Treading water, surrounded by the ignorant cluck of cleaner fishes and the patient yet fundamentally insensate attentions of the droids, he stumbled across the second reason for him to flee below, to seek solace in a more confined darkness. He was lonely. He wanted needed to talk things over with Xalom, but with his AI core still stubbornly offline and therefore unavailable as a relay, there was no way that any comms channel she might open could reach him. The third was that he began to feel ill. Very ill indeed. At first he thought it might have been sunstroke, the wages of far too much time spent above decks. The headaches, nausea and diarrhea were real enough, and sufficient to confine him to the bathroom for long periods, his only comfort a glass of water and a slice of dry toast. Then, when he thought he had begun to recover, and the knotted gripings of his gut had begun to subside, came a truly dreadful night. He awoke at about two in the morning, in total darkness and exquisite agony, as if termites armed with electric indrico-prods were swarming just beneath his skin. The lights of his suite intensified with elegant smoothness as he sat up, but the effect was to irritate him still further, rather than to calm him. He tried to get out of bed, but instead of the usual easy, sideways sashay, he found that his legs were longer and heavier than he remembered, so the extra momentum tumbled him sideways onto the carpet which, being the most sumptuously tasteless that billions could buy, prevented any injury. Gasping for breath and burning with what he felt was a fever, he crawled to the bathroom and hauled himself up, fingers grasping and sliding on the smooth, pink, marbled surfaces of the double-washbasin, to confront his standing reflection, finally, in the wall-to-wall mirror. As he watched, amazed, he saw his hips remodel themselves, slimming down, becoming more angular. His breasts his ten, perfectly formed, beautiful breasts melted into his broadening torso. Muscles and bones in his arms and legs swelled and knit. He became taller, his face, hands and feet lengthening. But what transfixed him was the sight of his prong, emerging from the fur between his thighs like a time-lapse photo of a fungus sprouting from the damp litter of a jungle floor. The pain of it all was absolutely excruciating, but he just had to watch. He was still there an hour later, as the pain finally subsided. When dawn broke he ordered a cocktail, and sat with it on the private balcony adjoining the master suite. Then he ordered another, and a third, and returned to bed. When the fourth came he noticed that the droid who b rought it was a gorgeously luscious and lustrous female, the first hed seen aboard Shellys Shagpad. She was dressed in a kimono rather like his, and seemingly little else. He asked her whether shed mind keeping him company. With a smile that would have melted tungsten carbide, for all that it was entirely artificial, she said shed be happy to oblige,. She dropped her kimono and climbed into bed with him. When it came down to it, ex-Admiral Ruxhana Fengen Kraa was nothing if not a practical pragmatist. Besides, he felt he had to make sure that everything still worked up to spec. It did. The remainder of the voyage a further three days passed all too quickly. London and Cambridge, England March 2005 At length burst the argent revelry, With plume, tiara and all rich array, Numerous as shadows haunting fairily The brain, new stuffd, in youth, with triumphs gay Of old romance. John Keats The Eve of St. Agnes Jades nerves fell away as soon as she took her seat at the press conference MacLennane to her left, Jack on her right and had been introduced to the crowd of journalists, photographers and cameramen whod crammed, almost on top of each other, it seemed to her, in the small but unnaturally brightly lit library that Londons Royal Institution had arranged. Not that anyone paid very much attention to her two male outriders, because shed looked (as theyd hoped) as marvelously un-academic as might be imagined. Shed fretted for several days about what to wear, as (shed felt) she had little sense for such things, except that what suited her least of all was indecision. Her mother was no help, wanting to change the subject to things which she thought more important. Oh, I dont know dear, she had twittered on the phone. What do people wear at press conferences? Something nice. And do give my best to Jack how is he? And when are you two going to get married? And how are you feeling? Not too tired, I hope. When I was at your stage, when I was carrying you The few women academics she knew were, in the main, as unconscious of fashion as she was either that, or they went to the other extreme and dolled up to the nines, dressing to impress something which she felt might be fine for some people, but only made her feel embarrassed and uncomfortable. That left the men in her life. Avi Malkeinus idea of a suitable outfit hardly bore thinking about, probably more Knave than Nature. She was fond of Avi how could one not be? He was lovable in his way, in the same way that a rumbustious puppy is loveable, but he was such a boy. The thought of the way he undressed her with his eyes every time they met but tried to hide it made her giggle. On the other hand, she knew that Professor MacLennane had perfect taste and would have loved to have taken her shopping. But the thought of a mildly flirtatious outing with Roger, being whisked off in his Ferrari and modeling a succession of sleek, expensive outfits, twirling before his not-quite-dispassionately appreciative gaze, made her giggle, too not least because it brought to mind a favorite joke of her Dads about Salom dancing naked in front of Harrods. However, she knew that she was in no danger of ending up as another notch on MacLennanes bedpost, for Roger, despite his reputation, had always treated her with the utmost deference. What she had not quite realized was how much he was in awe of her, and grateful for helping save Jacks thesis and with that, his own reputation as a doctorate supervisor. She was conscious, though, that MacLennane might think that such a request which hed feel honor-bound to accept might make him uncomfortable for a much earthier reason. She had, after all, if quite unwittingly, put him in what he might have called a compromising position. Her cheeks burned hot whenever remembered the details of Jacks arrival home after his thesis exam, when Roger had so kindly brought him to the door. She remembered, in particular, Rogers expression of red-faced, open-mouthed amazement as shed answered it, pregnancy-test stick in one hand, door handle in the other, hair everywhere, dressed in Jacks Property-of-Fairbanks-Marriott bathrobe which, because shed had her hands full and had been called away from her scientific experiment rather suddenly, she had forgotten to gather up at the front. It was hardly her fault that it had no buttons and had long since lost its belt. But shed only made it worse (the memory made her squirm inside) when shed suddenly become aware as her bare skin met the unforgiving chill of a Cambridge December of her state of undress; and resorting to her nervous habit, when she thought she was being watched by men, of lifting her arms and gathering her hair up on her head. Which is why Professor Roger Sutherland MacLennane, FRS, had had a gloriously full-frontal eyeful of a leggy twenty-one-year-old woman in the first rosy glow of pregnancy. It was no wonder that poor dear Roger had made a quick getaway, saying nothing more than the hero returns! or some such, before roaring off up the street in his Ferrari whose paintwork matched his own high color. No, she thought, she couldnt possibly ask Roger. Poor man, he wouldnt know where to look. Well, he would, but he wouldnt want her to know that he was, so he would try very hard not to, which shed notice, thereby obliging her to try hard not to notice that he was trying not to notice that ... in the room the women come and go, she mused: towards absurdam, reductio. And all that while trying to control a 400-brake-horsepower penis-extension at over eighty miles an hour? No. There had to be another way. And Jack dearest Jack well, he was biased. I think Id have to declare an interest, hed said, in his best mock-serious voice, as, shirt-sleeves rolled up, hed rubbed her back as she sat up in the bath one evening several days earlier, as not only do I love you, but I love you more each day, as there is progressively more of you to love at which shed snorted and soaked him with bubble-laden water. Hed sat for a moment, quite still on the edge of the bath, wet through, smiling quizzically, but saying nothing. So he did what she knew hed do something so practical, so funny, so Jack. Hed stripped and climbed in behind her, a leg on either side. She was, by now, in hoots of giggles, the water surging and splashing around her, around him, and all over the floor. Give me one of those Paleolithic mother-goddesses every time, hed said, half laughing, half growling, kissing her neck, her left earlobe, and starting to rub her shoulders and neck, which she loved but not without first giving each of her increasingly sore and swollen breasts a playful squeeze which she liked rather less. She decided that she enjoyed being pregnant. She enjoyed the fullness of it. The only bad thing about it, after the horrible first couple of months, was the back-ache, hence the time spent in the bath. But what had surprised her and delighted her was how much her desire for Jack had sharpened. She supposed that it might have something to do with her recent rediscovery of the sense of smell, and especially his smell, an ineffable sense of masculinity, nothing very strong not like unwashed socks or stale beer or anything like that but an instantly recognizable presence that reassured her, and which lingered in the flat even when he wasnt physically there. But when he and his smell were there together, her desire for him was overpowering. Some mornings it had been extremely difficult to leave his embrace, as if she were attached to him by a bungee cord, even if she just wanted to nip to the loo (which happened increasingly often). That Jack desired her more in response only redoubled her happiness. Hence his candid lack of objectivity: whether she wore a stylish designer outfit, or Horrible (his affectionate name for her baggy old once-purple jersey). She felt bless him that hed have adored her just the same had she been wearing a dustbin liner. For his part, Jack found Jades pregnancy enchanting. Her body was changing in all kinds of ways that he loved to examine in the tiniest detail, as if he were a surveyor, mapping the topography of an unexplored continent in the throes of some incremental but ultimately profound change of climate, from the trimly temperate, to the lush and exotic. Consider: her eyes, always dark, were now set to a permanently radiant chestnut smolder. Her lips were fuller. Her already chocolatey nipples had broadened and become darker still as her small breasts had filled out, changing their shape as they grew, with the right growing fractionally larger than the left (an observation that amused Jack hugely, and made him think of the limerick about the proverbial man from Devizes). Her hair had become even longer and more lustrous, and not just on her head: bracketed by hips that were becoming luxuriously fleshy, her pubic hair had shot out from being a well-behaved fluff into a robust springy jungle, setting, as an offshoot, a very fine, single comb of short, stiff hairs that led straight up towards her navel. Hed also noticed small drifts of dark, downy fuzz in the small of her back, the backs of her knees, and on the nape of her neck. All most interesting. But most fascinating of all was her skin, which had become, if that were possible, even softer than before, as well as half a shade darker. This was strange, as it had at the same time become milkier and rosier. Trying to sum up this contradictory state (his mind wandering back to her, at a hundred unguarded moments every day) hed said shed had all the Rs: Round, Roseate, Rubicund, Ripe, Rich, Rubenesque. He amused himself trying to add more words to this small thesaurus of adoration. Jack was not afraid that her body would ever fail to surprise him, even though hed been its closest observer for almost four years. And yet, for all that, she was still the same woman: the same woman, he reasoned, only more so. Cradling her protean form in his arms as they sat wedged in the bath, her leaning back, eyes closed, her body rising and falling with each breath, creating slow waves in the water, Jack had to admit that he too, was enjoying her pregnancy: her swelling curves, her masses of hair, were magnetic, and all of it had to be touched. For her, then, her weight taken by the water and Jacks body for a chair, her lover had crystallized into a pair of hands. Funny that shed paid so little attention to them before, but pregnancy was sharpening all her senses, not only smell and taste. His were the hands of a man who belonged in the great wide open the hands of a field geologist, the hands of contradiction calloused and ridged as they endured frost and thaw, but capable of marvelously sensitive precision and agility, as those same rough fingertips felt their way towards a fossil or crystal so fragile that it might be shattered by a breath of wind, a drop of water, a single shard of ice and cradled it unharmed to safety. And so she craved the touch of his hands, the counterpoint of roughness and gentleness, as they traversed her curving form, as if constantly recording, measuring, trying to gauge her totality at any instant. The sensations of their passage were mixed. As he brushed his fingers on her lips, she plumped in expectation; but when they orbited her breasts, these had stung with pain, and sometimes her nipples burned so much she was amazed they didnt glow in the dark. But where she most wanted to be touched was between her legs as her body swelled, so did her craving for him, until it was like a constant drone in the background of her life, an unfillable void, a thirst she could not slake. She tried to part her thighs, as wide as possible, tried to drag one of his hands to cup the swollen warmth welling from inside her, but the bath was too narrow to allow any comfortable movement. However, as her insistent desire resonated with Jacks own, she felt him rise and grow behind her, in the small of her back. And the water was getting cold, too. Out you get, young man, shed said, with fuzzily distracted warmth, unmoving, her eyes still closed. Fraid not, Snow Queen, hed countered, as I am at present pinned to the spot by a Dangerous Wild Animal. She roared play-fashion as she gripped the sides of the bath, put her feet together and crouched wriggling the arced expanse of her behind at Jack, teasingly, mockingly and then stood fully upright. Just before she stepped out in search of a towel hed looked up at her and for a moment she was a vast statue, shining with water, the fullness of her body exaggerated by the foreshortened angle of view. Jack sank into the bath, filling the space shed left, stretched out, looked up at her and said: There was a reason for those Palaeolithic mother-goddesses, you know. Hmm? She had started to dry her hair. They illustrate the inherent superiority of women. If only in the geometrical sense. She turned suddenly to lean over the bath, a mad flurry of wild hair, eyes, towel and dangling breasts I said, out you get! He stepped out and into her arms, and their lips met, hers as burningly soft as he could ever remember, even more than the very first time, when shed sprung on him after Clare Ball. His hands fell around the incurving of her waist, his palms buried in her thickening softness, his knuckles teased by the waterfall of her hair plunging down her back. I want you, was all shed said, in a small voice full of longing, but with a note of irresistible determination. Later, she reasoned that her yawning desire was for her to be worn way to nothing; nothing more than a thin shell surrounding his maleness, forever. To be annihilated by his love, so that they would merge, so completely that nobody would discern that they had once been separate beings. Later still, after a long pause in the darkness, he whispered into her sleepy ear from behind I know! Why dont you wear my old bathrobe? The Fairbanks Marriott one? Then you could stand up and give everyone a quick flash, you know, like you did with Roger Laughing, she turned towards him, took her face in his hands and said, as if to a small child Dont! It was terrible! But Jack did, at least, have a constructive idea. If she couldnt ask Roger, why not ask Mrs Roger? Shed be at the celebration tomorrow. You can ask her then. Quite a character, Marjorie MacLennane, Said Jack. I think youd like her. What do you think of her? she asked, pulling his arms round her. Me? Scary. Ive never dared talk to her. But that shouldnt deter you, Snow Queen. If Professor Ernestine Yanga only looked like the President of a local Womens Institute, then Marjorie MacLennane really was one. Although entirely aware of her husbands errant behavior, she could hardly complain that he did not attend to her own wants and needs in those particular respects, whenever such attendance was required, which was (mercifully, she thought) seldom: and in any case, with a large family and many other things to attend to, she found him very often to get in the way. Such residual irritation as she felt she sublimated into ferocious domesticity on an industrial scale. An active member of the WI, she was also a church warden, a pillar of the Conservative Association, ran the Church fte, organized the cricket-club teas, was a Church Commissioner, and judged a rubber of bridge with such frightening perspicacity that few ever dared challenge her. She would have it that as a daughter of a Brigadier-General, that her life was dedicated to service. But that was only an excuse, a cover for a full-blown case of Kiplings Syndrome a compulsion to fill every minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run. Most people found her too intimidating to talk to, or even approach, on those occasions (rare) when she accompanied Roger to departmental parties. For her part, she found most of the academics not to her taste, and even if they had been, theyd have very little to discuss. Many of them detested everything she stood for, and shunned her in what she considered a singularly ill-bred fashion, by talking over her in her presence, or simply turning their backs. But when Roger threw a small party to celebrate Jacks doctorate and the impending publication of the paper in Nature (Large-scale anthropogenic landscape modification in the Upper Pleistocene of France, by J. L. Markham, John A. Corstorphine, Avram Y. Malkeinu and R. S. MacLennane), she felt she could hardly refuse. You really must meet Jack, Roger had implored, and you must certainly meet Jade. Marjorie had snorted at this. Roger had introduced her to several young women before, a tactic she thought calculated to make her legitimize future infidelity by putting her in a position whereby shed be obliged to fraternize with the enemy. And Jade? What kind of a name was that? She thought it common. But then, she sighed, this was likely to be her husbands finest hour, and perhaps a last hurrah before he was kicked out to pasture. So duty called. When she actually met Jade, she found her disarmingly unlike what she had expected (although, if pressed, the nature of that expectation would have been ill-defined). She saw in this darkly attractive woman a person remarkably self-possessed for all her youth, yet who still had not lost an engaging girlish innocence; determined, steely, thoroughly unlikely to let herself be intimidated by anyone, and yet very much at ease with herself and those around her. Shed also, like herself, grown up on the Surrey-Hampshire border (a region practically dedicated to the British Army), had been fond of horses, and enjoyed gardening. Looking at Jade, Marjorie saw herself, reflected, as a young woman, a graduate of Girton with a Double First in Natural Sciences, which is how she had met her junior-research-fellow husband. But it had been much more difficult for women in her position to pursue careers of their own in those days. That they might do so while conspicuously pregnant was unthinkable, yet pregnancy seemed to suit Jade very well, as her filling figure chimed well with the ease of her general demeanor. That, and the fact that she seemed to be quietly incandescent with love. Marjorie had guessed that Jade Markhams fianc, Jack Corstorphine, was the tall, unobtrusively handsome man talking with her husband: the man that Jade couldnt help stealing glances at with eyes as big and shiny as the buttons on a guardsmans overcoat. So she had taken Jade under her wing. At the party, when theyd discovered how much theyd had in common, Jade confided in Marjorie, confessing a problem that had not occurred to her before shed had to put her name to an academic paper: that of how she should style her own name. Although she loved Jack (have you met him? shed asked, her eyes glowing) she wanted to keep her own surname, at least for academic purposes, even after they were married. Shed only be Mrs Corstorphine in civvies (Marjorie approved). But when shed seen the name Jade in print, on the draft of the paper before Professor MacLennane had sent it to Nature, she realized with jarring suddenness that although shed been quite happy with it up to now, it was, in truth, only a hangover from her childhood, and that shed outgrown it. So, in the end, she did what many female academics did, which was to disguise her name and gender behind a shield-wall of initials. But she didnt like that much, either. It seemed such a crabbed, anonymous, half-hearted way to make ones academic dbut. Marjories advice was refreshing and direct. If your name is Jadis, my dear, thats what you should be called. Drop this Jade business. Doesnt suit you. Doesnt suit you at all, if I may say so. Jade began to argue that she felt far too content with her lot to be a Wicked Witch, but Marjorie cut her off: Really, the derivation is of no consequence. A name is not necessarily a guide to ones character. Why, I know an arch-deacon called Brimstone. Charming man, very devout, a fellow Church Commissioner and would you believe his Christian name is Cain? Hes certainly not hellish, and not a murderer, either, as far as I know. Jade laughed, and so encouraged, Marjorie confided that the Narnia stories had been a particular favorite of hers as a child, and, being somewhat contrary herself, shed harbored a sneaking admiration for the White Witch. Clearly a very strong woman. Not to be messed with. Stick to that! Jade thought Marjorie had finished, but there was still one ball left in the over. What, may I ask, does your fianc call you? Jade was not sure whether she wanted to become so intimate with Marjorie MacLennane so quickly by divulging the pet names that she and Jack called each other, but now she was on the spot, she found herself unable to refuse, as if shed been called up before a headmistress who, while kindly, has the knack of extracting confidences, of baring souls, as if methodically peeling the layers of an onion. Jack was quite correct in his assessment of Marjorie as scary. How does Roger manage to get away with it, she thought? Ah perhaps he doesnt! And with that, she laughed to herself, and said, quite carelessly, as if the admission had been buoyed on her recollection of Roger and the Flight of the Ferrari, Jack always calls me Snow Queen and then it suddenly dawned on her, as if shed been granted a spectacular vision of the familiar world under the penetrating light of a new and brighter sun, that she had no recollection that Jack had ever called her by her childhood nickname, except, perhaps, for when theyd first met, and he had been her supervisor, which didnt count. And on the one occasion when it had mattered most, hed called her Jadis. Sounds like a sound man, to me, said Marjorie. Id like to meet him. Would you introduce us? Jade resolved that from now onwards shed be Jadis. And as they wove across the room, through the excited scientists and students all enjoying a glass of warm plonk and cheesy dips, Jadis (she would now always be Jadis) had another stunning realization, doubly amazing in that she had never made the explicit connection: that it was no coincidence that shed always thought of Jack as Aslan, her Lion, as he had been the only one who could, with a single glance, a smile, make her insides melt. It was too late to change the name on the Nature paper, but the sign on the desk in front of her in the library at the Royal Institution, in front of the reporters and camera crews the name that would appear in the press that evening, and the next day, and for weeks afterwards was Jadis L. Markham. She tried on her new name, the one shed been born with. She liked it. It seemed to fit. As did the gown that Marjorie had chosen for her, when Jadis had called the day after the party at the MacLennanes imposing Victorian villa in Grange Road. You can never go wrong with a Little Black Number, Marjorie had said, exposing a rail of Chanel gowns in her wardrobe to the kind of scrutiny which her late grandfather had reserved for drilling the troops before Mountbatten, as the Union flag had been lowered for the last time over Delhi. We shall have to find something that suits your current state, however, she continued, sizing up Jadiss swollen belly, without looking too much the Dowager Duchess. The contrast between that censorious image and the relaxed young woman before her was so instantly incongruous that Marjorie couldnt help but smirk, which Jadis caught and laughed in response. The two women looked at each other and they laughed and laughed until they both cried. Marjorie could see why Roger was keen on this girl besotted, really but not because she would be, or could ever be, one of his conquests. She felt that beneath the ready warmth, there was a hardness about Jadis that wasnt to be trifled with. And for all his faults, she thought, for all his flummery and fast cars and living the high life (at her expense), she had stayed with Roger all these years at least in part because he was, and always had been, an impeccable judge of character. He owed his career not to any great scientific insight of his own, but to the fact that he had surrounded himself with clever people: Roger had undoubtedly seen through the artless appeal of this girl to the steel beneath. And, after all, long ago, so hed chosen her. And why shouldnt he have done? She had once been a girl much like Jadis, long-haired and leggy, full of wit and life and spark, and widely considered a beauty. Perhaps Roger had warmed to Jadis precisely because she reminded him of their youth together. She raised her eyebrows at this privately comforting thought as her fingers alighted on a dress that might be suitable for Jadis. Try this. It was made for me when I had to go to some ball or another, when I was pregnant with Fiona. That was well, Fiona has children of her own now. She could remember perfectly well. It had been the Clare College May Ball, 1970. Deep Purple had opened the bill and Jimi Hendrix had closed it, one of his very last concerts. She remembered that for all its incipient chaos, the timing must have been inspired that had arranged for the final, shattering chords of Purple Haze to ring out over the lawns just as the sun rose, illuminating the early morning mist on the Cam with a rich, golden light. She had been the same age as Jadis, then, and like Jadis, had got a most promising degree the year before, married her supervisor and immediately got pregnant. Further academic work had been out of the question but, at six months gone, shed been awarded a specially made evening gown as a consolation prize. Jadis could not see it Marjorie was still facing into the wardrobe and had her back turned but in this picosecond of intense reverie, Marjorie worked to choke back her emotion. Turning, once more composed, she held the dress out for Jadis to try on. Jadis quickly stripped down to her underwear and Marjorie helped the gown over her head. Marjorie and Jadis were about the same height, so it fitted perfectly. It was classically black and breathtakingly elegant. Jadis looked at the mirror, disbelieving, enchanted. Then she looked at Marjorie, whose expression was unfathomable. Thats the one for you, my dear. Would you like to try some pearls? It was only as Jadis was driving home in Jacks old Peugeot, the dress wrapped in paper beside her, that she recalled how much this dress looked like the one shed worn on her first date with Jack, and, had she known it, at the same venue where it had been worn for the first time, more than thirty years before. What a wonderful woman, Jadis thought. Not really scary at all. But very strong. Stronger than steel. In that moment she felt that shed finally crested a long climb to look over a new vista of opportunity. Shed seen that view before, the night when shed made love to Jack after he had proposed to her, only then it had been full of terror. But she felt she was woman enough to meet it now, for this was nothing more than adulthood. And if she knew she was strong enough to accept the trials ahead, whatever they might be, she knew also that Jack in his suspicion that Marjorie would meet her match in her, something he never could achieve was still the stronger. And when she thought of that, she burned with love, and the new life inside her stirred. Marjorie MacLennane saw Jadis Markham drive away, scrunching across the gravel drive, through the curtain of yew and box, and off towards central Cambridge: a grateful wave, a smile, a billow of hair, and she was gone. Marjorie felt a yearning tug inside: a part of her youth, long forgotten but not entirely extinguished, a part which she could have she should have reclaimed for herself at the time, and let the consequences go hang. Lovely girl, she thought, turning to go indoors. Good luck to her. This time, she let a single tear escape. Just one, and nobody saw it, but it escaped nonetheless. At the back of the press conference sat Marcel Montgolfier, a distant relation of the pioneer balloonists, but proximately the veteran London correspondent of Agence France Presse. A press briefing in London on the topography of La France Profonde seemed an incongruity that bordered on effrontery, but no matter; in any case, one could forgive these English scientists in their startling assertion that French civilization was so ancient that it had preceded humanity itself . This offered by the suave and distinguished figure at the right of the panel, the man Montgolfiers press pack described as Professor Roger Sutherland MacLennane, FRS, from the University of Cambridge. Not that Montgolfier didnt know this, of course. MacLennane was a well-known scientist, always good for a quote and a source of gossip, not all of which had to be vetted by AFPs legal department. Our picture of Neanderthal Man as the primitive savage (MacLennane continued) was a distortion caused by the fact that history is always written by the victor: when the first Homo sapiens came into Europe some 40,000 years ago, it was not to meet a debased race like Charles Darwins Fuegians, but a civilization that had, in his words, endured for eight thousand centuries, and had created megaliths the size of mountains. The theme was continued by Dr Jack Corstorphine, the tall young scientist on the left of the panel, in the casual jacket and polo shirt, who explained, with a quiet but compelling authority, that the breadth and extent of this ancient civilization would have been incomprehensible to our own ancestors, who would therefore have seen only wilderness, weaving the bones of this great and ancient culture into the legend and myth of centuries. As the ruins of Rome had appeared to the barbarian Saxons as the works of mythical giants, so the megalith at Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards had appeared to our ancestors and also, said Dr Corstorphine, to ourselves, until our own researches had recognized it as being something quite extraordinary. Dr Corstorphine was a new face to Montgolfier, but in his assured delivery he could tell that he was one of MacLennanes latest protgs. But MacLennane and Corstorphine were the sideshows, the hors-doeuvres, compared with what was obviously the main attraction, a young woman who was looking up at Corstorphine, as he spoke, with an expression of adoration so intense that it could have melted tungsten. When the girl (identified as Miss Jadis L. Markham), rose to speak, the room fell silent, except for the sound of a few people swallowing and some quickly stifled coughs. This was not a scientist this was a movie star. As Jadis Markham discussed, with a dignified poise, how the ancient inhabitants of Europe had done more than leave a few isolated monuments, but instead had modified the very face of the Earth, Montgolfier and the assembled press corps began to lose the thread of the story and take a greater interest in its speaker. She was dressed in classic Chanel. Montgolfier (who had covered fashion in his time, in between stints on the diplomatic desk) thought her gown had been a couture item from the sixties: could anyone name any scientist, let alone such a dbutante, who could carry off such cool retro chic? And unbelievable she was at least five months pregnant, and yet the strapless gown fitted her as if pregnancy was her natural state, the state in which she was most at ease: she simply glowed with beauty. The whole effect, the way her outrageously untamed cloud of glossy dark hair (who said scientists were buttoned-up?) tumbled over her pale shoulders, her dcolletage, was enchanting! And her face! Framed and indeed, sometimes partly obscured by this nebula of hair, were two star-bright but yet unfathomably dark wells of intelligent, calculating ferocity. She was like a cat, a wild thing, he thought, her wildness kept in tight coils by an adamantine composure which on the surface appeared easy and carefree, but which he was sure was, not so far beneath, passionate and determined. All this in a girl of how old? Twenty-one? If this was another of MacLennanes protges, Montgolfier would bet that she would be his last, his swansong, because shed be impossible to follow. As Montgolfier sat, enraptured, it occurred to him that although the story itself was important it certainly was that, and would be the centre of all discussion for weeks and months he was not watching a press conference so much as a wedding, or a coronation. All this from tiny things hed noticed that were never spoken out loud for all that they were quite evident, even from his place at the back. How Jadis, for all the poise and control that belied her years, for all that she conducted the wolf-pack of journalists as if she were Karajan directing the Berlin Philharmonic, would frequently glance at Jack, only for a moment, but with an expression of such how could he describe it supplication? and his face would bestow a warmth of reassurance in return. And all this presided over by MacLennane, who watched both of them with proprietorial satisfaction. Now, Montgolfier had never much cared for C. S. Lewis, but he did know his Tolkien, and this was nothing so much as the wedding of Aragorn and Arwen, with MacLennane playing his accustomed role as Gandalf, Kingmaker. This would be a great story, he thought, because the people were at least as interesting as the tale they told. This is the next dynasty of archeology in the making (he would write). He hoped hed be able to get a picture of Jadis. At the very end, Montgolfier essayed a question for the young Elf Princess, deftly handled by MacLennane as chair (One last question? At the back! Ah, its you, Marcel! Good to see you, what?) Miss Markham, he asked, excuse my presumption, but how will you reconcile your how shall I say imminent family commitments with what promises to be an extensive programme of field research? Jadis looked at Jack, who simply continued to smile back, and then turned her lighthouse eyes on Montgolfier. She paused for a moment, and it seemed to him that her hair gathered around her face like a brooding storm cloud as she said, with an unexpectedly stern asperity that made him start: Ill take them with me of course. What else would I do with them? And then the storm clouds dissipated as quickly as they had arrived, her face opening into a smile as bright as the sun, and of such innocent loveliness that he thought hed die right there, at the pinnacle of his long career. And in England. After the conference, when theyd managed to elude the last of the cameras, supplementary interviews and questions, Roger treated them both to lunch at Fortnums, but then announced he was staying overnight on in London: Business at the Royal. Ill billet at the Athenaeum, hed said, hailing a cab in Piccadilly to take Jadis and Jack to Kings Cross. But dont forget, you two my office, oh-nine-hundred precisely, day after tomorrow. Might have a bit of news, what? The train home pulled through the cramped crenellations of North London and eventually eased into flat country under the immense East Anglian sky, the land beneath now becoming clothed with the brilliant green haze of early Spring. Jadis leaned into Jack, and neither said a word for a long time. Not that they had nothing to say to each other, but that their communication had now become almost entirely intuitive, telepathic. Although she could never clearly have put it into words, Marjorie had been the spark, the catalyst that had fired her out of the last shreds of her girlhood, and into herself. It had to have been an objective eye: Jack could never have done it, and it was to his credit (she pulled him closer) that hed realized this long before she had. The result, now, was that she and Jack were the indissoluble union that she had so inchoately, so blindly craved; that Marjorie had fired her, had let her loose, and the press conference somehow, she couldnt quite express why had been the last crucible. She suspected that Roger, bless him, had been the shrewdest of all. He should surely deny it if confronted directly, but she wouldnt put it past him to have woven the whole grand design: to have arranged for Jack to pursue the riskiest doctorate imaginable and give him his head; then, to introduce Jack to her (had he? She couldnt remember); and then, in the most audacious step of all, launch her at Jacks problem like some guided missile all the better to add them both to Rogers starry crown. She had a feeling that this is what this meeting in two days time was all about. Jack was silent, lost in thoughts of his own, until a full hour into the journey, when he pulled her closer still. Might I ask you a question, Miss Markham? he began, in his best Monty-Python French Accent. This time her smile was just for him. But of course! You said, them. That youd take them with you, into the field, when we get to excavate. Well if there are, its all your fault, you silly man, she said, pushing closer still: and then more quietly, looking directly up at him and smiling, blearily, but just for him: Nothing like a good seeing to, you said, for clearing the brain. She began to nod, and it was only then that Jack realized how tired she must have been the trip had taken it out of her: that, and the spotlight. How marvelous shed been how theyd all been. And how he still had to listen to MacLennanes advice: just make sure youre not the one left behind! How hed struggled through his thesis defence, when she, a graduate student just starting out, had had all those journalists under her spell. When the train pulled in to Cambridge, she was asleep in his arms. The next morning, as she looked over the breakfast table for the Oxford marmalade, Marjorie MacLennane saw Rogers unopened copy of The Times. Such a waste, she thought, given that hed get his own copy at his club. Then she remembered why Roger had been away and took another look at the lead story. Civilization dates back a million years, scientists say, read the headline, but the picture was of a young girl, hair awry, who for all her loveliness had steel in her eyes. Good for you, Jadis Markham, said Marjorie, marmalade now quite forgotten. Tethys Ocean, Earth 51,977,258 BC Still is that fur as soft as when the lists In youth thou enterdst on glass-bottled wall. John Keats To Mrs Reynoldss Cat Her voice came to him shrilly, over the thrash of the surf and the noise they were both making. Get that one ... no, that one, there, Roland, heading up the beach! With no more energy to reply, Ruxhana hefted his pine-branch club and sloshed through the waist-high waves to where the creature was trying to scramble ashore. Ambulocetes were slow movers on land, even on a gently shelving beach of bone-white coral sand, so this small, young specimen barely two meters long had no idea that it was waddling into a trap. Ruxhana and Xalom had played their strategy to perfection, however, letting the pod of amphibious whales shamble shorewards through the reef before springing off the rocks where they were hid, splashing and yelling, and trapping them in the small palm-fringed bay that had been their home for the past ten days. The aim was to drive two or three small ones ashore before clubbing them to death. Spilling blood in the water would have been risky they did not want to add sharks to an already dangerous mix. Ruxhana remembered the scarier tales of Tethyan Thunder, in which the sea-dragon hunters had had to pull their quarries onto boats or ashore before the carcasses attracted these eternal oceanic predators. There was one monster in particular the Tethyan carcharodon that could reputedly smell blood from ten kilometers off, and could swallow a whole boat with all its crew in a singe bite. Some of the older ambulocetes sensed trouble, dove to the bottom and surged back the way they had come, towards the open sea. This was dangerous for the assailants, who had to keep looking down in case four meters of fast-moving, muscle-bound, submarine menace bowled them off their feet in the chest-high water and dragged them under. And although ambulocetes were peaceable creatures, for the most part, they were lethal when cornered, with formidable claws on their forelegs and long, well-stocked jaws wielded with far greater intelligence than any shark. Xalom was further out in the lagoon than he was, and Ruxhana worried more than once when the air was rent with her screams and she disappeared from view. But she always came up again, defiant with laughter. Her hair flowed in the breeze; her body, lithe and brown; her pink-and-yellow sarong worn like a breech-clout, knotted securely around her middle. And she always kept her hat on. Ruxhanas target was flopping about in barely an inch of surf when he caught up with it. Panting, legs splayed, it heaved itself onto the beach. Not for much longer: a small beady eye broadcast a message of supplication when it finally realized what was happening, and Ruxhana brought his club down heavily on its skull. Hed just hauled the limp, slick and blubbery carcass above the strand line the animal was surprisingly heavy and unwieldy out of the water when he heard Xalom scream again. Even with his back turned, he sensed that this was no shout of joy or thrilled excitement. As he hurried back to the sea, he could see her splashing ashore. Gaining on her, in the lagoon, was a gray triangular fin at least two meters high and an immense shadow in the water. Ruxhana could do little but watch, rooted to the spot, as she flew up the beach, a bright, tiny figure before her pursuer, falling once in the waves in its shadow, picking herself up again, and racing through the dancing wavelets, bright foam sparking from her bare feet like diamond shrapnel. She had just made it to the trees above the beach when the shape broke the surface just inches from the beach, a great gray cylinder, slashed with pink gill-slits, each one large enough to swallow a grown man but before it all, a gaping chasm of an open mouth, thrice man-high, fringed with wickedly serrated, triangular teeth, each one the size of a tombstone. Realizing at last that it was out of its element, the giant shark scythed, half in the air, splashing back into the lagoon and disappearing in pursuit of easier prey. Ruxhana felt the blood and nerves reconnect in his legs and ran to her. She was standing, bent double, hands on knees, her face and torso concealed by the shroud of her hair. He could hear her breathing, though wracked, tortured, shot through with sobs of terror and relief. Her hat lay a few meters away on the sand. The bright colors of the sarong wrapped round her, though, were blotched with ugly crimson stains, and then he noticed a thin line of blood dripping down the inside of one thigh and pooling on the ground, inside her right instep. Xalom are you OK? Can I....? Are you hurt? She stood up, pulled the hair from her face, and looked at him with her hard green eyes. Baryonic matter. Fucking baryonic matter. Then she collapsed into his arms in a dead faint. The moon rose above the beach. With burned pine sticks for tongs, Ruxhana turned over the whalemeat frying on the red-hot rocks before him. Boy, that smells so good, she said. She was huddled up, knees beneath her chin, wrapped in a quilt from the capacious linen store aboard Shellys Shagpad, moored discreetly offshore. Ruxhana felt his arms and legs his whole body, in fact flood with relief. It had been the first thing shed said since shed swooned almost thirty hours earlier. The memories until then, squashed by pragmatic, military expediency were now afforded the luxury of return. Would Madame care to dress for dinner? Hed laid her on the ground in the shade of a palm, he remembered, and then hed stood up in the dappled shadow as naked as Adam in Eden and queried his AI core on an emergency sideband. Wherever the fuck you are, you stupid machine, he yelled or qubits to that effect get your quantum ass over here, now. Please. I think Ive worked it out now, was all it said. Ruxie could have hugged it. Excellent, he replied. Welcome back. Nice break? Yes. Most refreshing. And also necessary. Good, good. Well, what we have here is a damsel-in-distress situation. Please get in touch with Shellys Shagpad and have them send over some medical supplies, immediately. Blankets, clothes. Some rum, too, would be nice. And if they can spare it some salt, herbs, and a few other things. Ruxhana squirted a shopping list at his newly refreshed AI core. Im sorry, Ruxie. Really, I am. Im not very good at this. Still learning. She pushed away her plate (the sandpit-roasted ambulocete and wild-plantain barbecue had gone down a treat); played with the stem of her crystal goblet (empty: two bottles from the Shagpads excellent cellar had gone the same way Ruxhana made a note to compliment the Shagpads sommelier-droid on its choice); rested her arms on the heavy white linen of the tablecloth and looked across at him, the tapeta deep in her eyes reflecting the candles, the silver candelabra and cutlery, and the moonlight on the sea. There was no sound but for the surf and a light breeze in the palm branches high above their heads. The air was cooler, now. Cool enough for Ruxhana to adjust the collar of his tuxedo without feeling uncomfortably sweaty. His waistband, though well, he felt that they hadnt had such a meal in ages. Over-full as he was, he thought her hair in the candlelight looked lovely, and said so. Oh, you you silly man, she said, sweeping it out of her face with both hands and trying, yet again, to secure it at the back. He suspected that it was the wine talking, but he couldnt help but notice the contrast of her straying strands of hair with the smoothness of her upper arms, and, as she moved, the play of her shoulders, collar-bone and the roots of her primary breasts beneath the black cocktail dress shed chosen. Its just that I feel so embarrassed after yesterday. Embarrassed? Not many have been known to outrun a Tethyan carcharodon. I think you can be excused a few symptoms of shock. Yes, I know. But it shouldnt have happened. It was all my fault. Mine. I know perfectly well about the sharks in these waters Id done my homework! But I forgot something else just as important. About these bodies. About this body. You know Id been feeling a bit gripey for a couple of days? Ruxhana nodded, but said nothing. He remembered some small episodes of mulish taciturnity on her part but had chosen to ignore them, and had gone fishing on the other side of the lagoon. Well, it turned out that I was menstruating. Can you believe it? And it started, like a flood, while we were out there in the lagoon. Blood everywhere! Shark-bait, right where I stood. Honestly, I try so hard, but I just cant seem to be everywhere at once. She looked down, flushed and forlorn. Ruxhana had known all this, of course, because hed patched her up, found the source of the blood, and, being a creature of flesh and blood himself, and aware of many of the foibles to which bodies of baryonic matter are prone, he had worked it all out for himself. Although, he had to admit, his AI core had helped. He smiled, then, at the perceived helplessness of his dinner companion, who was quite capable of traveling across the Universe as easily as blinking. He still remembered the interesting red-shift calculations which had, literally, driven his AI core to the brink of early retirement. What is it? she asked, catching his amused expression. Oh, just something you said, when I was chasing down that altogether delicious ambulocete calf, just before the shark attack. Why did you call me Roland? Her eyes widened and flashed in the candle light. I did? Yes. Her face changed, then. No longer the dinner-date in a state of possibly pre-coital repletion, she assumed, once more, the brisk demeanor of the Doctor, aboard the El, as he had first remembered her. Or as Xalom had once been, at her most vampishly enigmatic. Roland? Ah. I see. I think the time has come for answers. When the skiff from Shellys Shagpad had first made landfall on the island, Ruxhana had splashed ashore, laughing, accompanied by two female droids, a crate of fine Malabar rum, and three glasses. The hangover the next day had been salutary, and he dismissed his companions (acknowledging their moues of disappointment which, while touching, were assuredly synthetic) and asked instead for a jerry-can of fresh water, a panga and a few other simple tools, some fishing gear, and a tent. These articles were promptly sent over in the skiff, which skated back to the mothership as soon as it had been unloaded. Ruxhana thought he detected a note of reproach in its alacrity. For the next two days he occupied himself with that kind of simple yet constructive manual labor in which all men of intelligence and capacity have always found solace and satisfaction. By the end of that time hed cut and trimmed several palm trees and created a raised log platform with a commanding view of the beach, upon which he erected a pergola of poles with a palm-thatch roof, and detachable screen walls made from palm leaves woven together. Split logs served for chairs, and a more elaborate log-frame strung with jungle vines made a fairly comfortable bed. The lagoon was loaded with fish that leaped into his net, seemingly out of curiosity (or perhaps joi-de-vivre) without his having to make much effort at all. Only fresh water looked likely to be a problem, but being the tropics, it rained every day a sheeting downpour at around four oclock each afternoon, for fifteen minutes, as regular as clockwork and Ruxhana was able to use hollowed gourds and shells to collect enough for his modest needs. To be sure, he could always have asked for the Shagpad, now moored several hundred meters out, to have sent over fresh water or indeed anything else he wanted; but with the two voluptuaries of his first night sent packing (his hands still warmed to the memories of their curved hindquarters as hed slapped them both good-bye) and his AI still in an offline sulk, hed have had to have yelled very hard, or swum for it. Therefore he decided to play the noble savage for a while. Such wholesome activity occupies the minds and hands only so long as there are tasks to be done. So it was on the evening of the fourth day after hed reached the pre-programmed destination that Ruxhana found himself on his platform, under his palm awning, a glass of rum and coconut-milk in hand, a brace of bass grilling nicely in the fire-pit on the beach below, looking out at the Sun plummeting like a big red rock into the western sea and wondering. This ought to be paradise. Instead his mind was full of foreboding. Is this it? The end? Stasis? What was all that about, anyway, that business with Xalom; that elaborate gender-bending subterfuge; if it was simply to drop him here as a fugitive on a desert island? Just who exactly was Xalom, anyway? Shed told him that she was an exotic of a kind that neither he nor anyone else in the Imperium had ever encountered, something qualitatively different from anyone or anything he had known. It seemed to him that she wielded what looked like apocalyptic power with the casual carelessness of a teenager, and this, combined with what he thought was some kind of insecurity, made for a potentially explosive mixture. And then there were all those strange, dark hints that his AI core had dropped before it disappeared up its own address register, about ongoing transformations. Finally, there was this job or task that she wanted him to do. But despite his best efforts, he was never able to get any details out of her about what this might imply or entail. Nothing more than that headline fact. In the end, and after another glass of rum, Ruxhana consoled himself with the undoubted fact that there was no way that he could answer any of these questions, and that the only decisions he could make were rather small ones. In which case, his new life was as idyllic as he could want. He was wondering whether he should have a third glass of rum when he saw a speck in the lagoon to the northward, a fleck of whitening foam in the purpling evening sea. The speck got larger as he watched. The wind was beginning to freshen. He wondered whether he should put his clothes back on. The speck got closer and came ashore. He decided against the clothes but in favor of more rum. The speck was a figure. By the time it reached him, the sky was fully dark and the moon had risen, casting long, waving shadows of palm trees across the beach. The figure resolved into that of a woman, with long, waving hair, and dressed in a sarong, loosely tied, snapping like a flag in the stiffening breeze. She climbed up onto Ruxhanas platform, and bent down to whisper in his ear. Ruxhana was acutely aware of the salty sea-tang of warm female flesh close to his, a strand of hair brushing his face, the play of her breath on his cheek a counterpoint and center to the cool wind all around. Sorry Im late, Xalom said. Have I missed anything? None of Ruxhanas questions were answered in the days that followed, up to and including the ambulocete drive and shark-attack incident. Whenever he tried to ask her anything that might have been even remotely construed as serious, she would change the subject, usually by making some salacious suggestion, grabbing for his groin and then running away, with the clear indication that he could give chase. Like they were teenage kits, discovering sex for the first time. Her lovemaking was passionate and frequent, but he detected in its fervor something more than the freshness and innocence of discovery. A desperation, perhaps, that it would all soon be over; and a way of filling the days and nights that would put off some nevertheless inevitable day of reckoning, for as long as possible. Beneath all the flirting, Xalom was clearly working things out. Trying to articulate, using the crudity of communication which relies on the analog, acoustic transmission of modulated air packets, themes and concepts too great and subtle to be shoe-horned effectively into such a mode without losing vital quanta of meaning. Ruxhana decided that the only thing he could do was to let her work it out in her own time, in her own way. And in the meantime, he reasoned (being the pragmatic soul he was) he was a castaway in paradise with a girl whose charm was matched by her libido. In such a situation it would have seemed churlish to have complained. Xalom, working things out. One night, about five days after her arrival, Ruxhana woke up or thought he had woken up with the girl next to him. Like all nights it had been filled with sex, urgent and hungry, and they had collapsed together on the palm-log platform, in a tangle of blankets. The Moon was bright and high in the west. Ruxhana sat up, trying to chase down a fleeting thought, a question of nervous foreboding he couldnt quite frame for all that the answer was important, and looked down at her body, splayed in the blue light. It was Xalom his Xalom but then again, it wasnt. Her face was the same, peacefully asleep, her long lashes guarding her closed eyes; as was her long hair, spread awry in long strands, and the lean frame of her body. But she looked like shed been flayed. Her skin was smooth, almost all over, the soft fuzz over her shoulders and hips reduced to a very thin haze perceptible only by the additional softness it lent to her contours. The alluring, pungent mass of rich, dark fur that spread between her hipbones and which clothed most of her body between navel and crotch was gone, revealing a gentle swell of bare lower abdomen and a small triangle of meager curls almost prissily neat, he thought in the angle of her groin itself. The hair was so sparse that he could see her external genitalia but as a chaste, vertical slit, far from the usual extravagance of her pubic protruberances. Odder still was her torso. For a brief moment he wondered why he could see the lower margins of her ribcage, outlined like a corpse, until he realized that nearly all her breasts had vanished. The primaries were there, perhaps slightly fuller than he remembered. But all eight secondaries had gone, nipples and all, as if they had never been, explaining why he could see her ribcage and why she looked so well, dissected shorn. Ruxhana was uncertain how to react to this apparition. Horror and fascination were evenly matched within him, but something about the strange, mutilated form before him made him stir, and with redoubled horror he looked down at his prong erect, but smooth as an earthworm, without any of the ridges, blades and serrations which he knew, from intimate acquaintance, graced his own. He sat there, in a funk of helplessness, when the not-quite-Xalom-thing stirred, sat up next to him, her primaries swinging freely before her in a way he couldnt quite understand, given the absence of their companions. She swished the hair from her face, and spoke. You should be asleep, you silly old thing! And then she kissed him, no more than an affectionate peck, and the world changed again. Disoriented, he found himself lying down again but awake in the moonlight. This time he knew he really was awake, because the naked girl beside him was complete in all her furred, multimammate loveliness. He felt himself, and everything seemed to have returned to normal. He lay back and closed his eyes again, but his relaxation was not entirely complete, hindered by the memory of the dream-Xalom as she spoke to him. The memory of her eyes. Eyes that did not have their customarily all-over green irises and almond-shaped, slit-like pupils. Eyes instead with brown irises, as round as moons, with penetrating, round pupils, and in bone-white sclera as plain as death. When morning came he decided to keep this night-time adventure to himself. Xaloms reticence continued, even after the shark-attack episode, when she promised that answers to his questions would soon be forthcoming. Her sex-play became, if anything, even more edgy, more vigorous more dangerous. As if she was daring him to pursue her to the edges of the reef; across razor-sharp rocks; into sheer-sided sinkholes in the coralline limestone. She seemed especially skittish one morning about a week after the ambulocete barbecue. They had spent a leisurely breakfast of fruit (collected themselves) and fresh coffee and croissants (supplied by Shellys Shagpad), exchanging hardly a word. When Ruxhana tried to say anything (let alone ask her a question) shed giggle, slyly, looking at him from beneath her brows, like a kit intent on some barely disguised errand of naughtiness. On a sudden she pushed away her plate and fixed him with a glare of mischief. Come and get it! And then she ran off, northwards, down the beach, hair and bright sarong streaming. In truth, Ruxhana was beginning to tire of this daily game, and had meant to stay put, calling her bluff, in the hope that she might wander back, and have their serious discussion: now delayed, he thought, long enough. At any rate, he decided to finish his second cup of coffee first. But Xalom did not return, and the bitter savor of his coffee turned to worry. Even paradise has its dangers the shark attack had been proof enough of that. Sighing, he hauled himself from his chair and walked off in the direction Xalom had taken, calling her name as he went. For two or three hundred meters there came no answer, but as he walked, Ruxhana noticed that the wind was freshening. Sand-devils blew along the shore like silken flags, and once hed had to stop and brush the hard grit from his eyes. White horses were foaming and breaking in the lagoon to his left. To his right, the tops of the palm trees, some of them fifteen meters tall, were starting to swing and thrash. He heard a distant yell and realized with horror that it had come from above. Xalom had climbed one of these swaying monsters and was now perched, triumphant, in the waving crown. The tree she had chosen stood alone, exposed, surrounded by a glade of bare trunks, standing like sharp spikes, testament of an earlier lightning strike and wildfire. He looked up and bellowed in return. Xalom, come down! Come down now! Not a chance! came her reply, guttural, defiant. Its dangerous! Really? So come and save me, then! There was no choice but to climb. The ridged annuli of the palm tree presented fairly easy purchase, but the wood was hard and sharp on his bare hands and feet, and he often had to stop and hold on tight when the tree was caught in a particularly strong gust. These pauses became more frequent the further he climbed, his fatigue increasing as the trunk thinned and became more whip-like in the deepening gale. The wind was now edged with a sharp, stinging rain that made it hard for him to see. He was quite exhausted, wretched in the chill grayness, wondering if hed ever get to the crown and if he did, what then? Not a moment too soon, his head met the yielding edges of palm leaves, and a hand rested over his, inviting, grasping. Xalom sat at the top of the crown, hunkered down in a kind of cup-shaped nest, relatively free from the wind, but which lurched and yawed alarmingly. She pulled him up and he pitched next to her with a jolt. Before he had a chance even to catch his breath, to nurse the bruises and cuts on his aching hands and feet, she was at him, arms around him, hair surrounding him like a cowl, lips on his, kissing him like these were the final kisses on Earth. Finally, she pulled away and looked at him as if for the very first time. Oh, Ruxie, Im so sorry... Sorry? For what? For this. And she pushed him out of the tree. Cambridge, England, and Gascony, France May, 2005 Will all great Neptunes ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red. William Shakespeare Macbeth It was a relief to be here, at last, and to breathe the air. Not that Saint-Rogatien-Les Remillards was anything like shed expected. To be sure, shed known from Jacks pictures that it wasnt a wind-blasted, isolated place in the middle of nowhere, the kind of place filmgoers always associate with prehistory. But she hadnt expected it to be quite so tame. Remember Cholula, Jack had said, and hed been right. The village of Saint-Rogatien clustered around the now-famous hill and up its slopes, and there was, indeed, a church and churchyard at the top. And not only a churchyard, but across the cobbled square the tiny Place Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire the Mairie, a small but elegant pink-washed building, set back between the boulangerie and the Sanglier DOr (restaurant, bar, tabac, caf, pression and most importantly Hotel**). Jack loved to tell her how, when he had first inquired about a permit to dig, the Mairie official had asked precisely where in the commune of Saint-Rogatien Jack had wanted to dig, and the expression of perplexity when Jack had pointed straight down at the tiled floor and said Ici! As they lay abed in the Sanglier DOr, the occasional yellow headlight beams from the square below tracing sweeping lighthouse arcs across the ceiling, Jack reminded her that all was not as it seemed. The village had been built on the eastern spur just one corner of what had been a much more extensive structure, most of which had been eroded away into the valley. The present-day church did not mark the ancient summit, not by any means. Because of this erosion, there were some places around the village where one might get a direct view of the innards of the monstrous monument. Tomorrow, hed promised, if shed felt up to it, hed show her the foot of the cliff-face that plunged from the churchyard wall, a full two hundred feet to the valley floor. This cliff, Jack thought, was where part of the megalith had been undercut by water and slumped, creating what he thought was cross-sectional slice right through part of its base. Hed picked up a few peculiar lithics there on his scouting trip, and there, he thought, shed have the best chance of getting results fast. No need to dig or remove overburden, just map the cliff face and dig a few test tunnels in places that looked interesting. On the other hand, as it was, after all, their honeymoon, and they were both tired, they could relax, potter about, look around, or even just stay in bed, and look at the cliff another day. Silly old lion! shed said, as cheerfully as she could given her fatigue from their two-day journey in the Peugeot, from Cambridge almost to the foothills of the Pyrenees, but Jack had the feeling her mind was elsewhere. He didnt inquire, but pulled her closer still. She lay bounded by his arms and chest, comforted, but still tired after the long drive. The journey (shed driven the first few hundred miles herself) had aggravated the soreness in her back, and the aches in her legs, her belly indeed, more or less everywhere were making sleep elusive. Her pregnancy had turned, in the past two or three weeks, from a phase of blossoming and almost boundless vitality to one of continual effort, and her general sleeplessness threatened what reserves she had left. She felt pale, awkward, bloated and huge, like a stranded whale. Her buzzing brain raced ahead far faster than the rest of her bulbous form could match, and thoughts whizzed around her head like so many golden midges illuminated by the slanting rays of autumn. First, there had been Rogers meeting, as promised, two days after the press conference, a meeting that had opened up amazing vistas for Jack and herself: if she werent too worn out to reach and take them. But she knew her pregnancy would end, one day, and soon. She just had to stick it out in the meantime, to get over the next couple of months. Think ahead, she urged herself. Think ahead. Think beyond the uncomfortable present, to a secure future in another country, with her husband, and her baby, and a project all her own. Jacks wedding present to her had been a slice of the past. For her doctorate project, he told her, she was to direct the proposed dig at the Saint-Rogatien cliff face. Shed be in charge of recruitment, management and budget as well as interpreting any finds they might make. Further, shed have to find a base of operations that would last them for at least the next three years, as an expedition quarters as well as a home, a place to raise their family. Their days as full-time residents of Cambridge would soon be over. Hed help her when he could, of course, but he had mapping and exploration of his own to do. His original trip to France had been an addendum, an afterthought, to a project entirely based and predicated on Britain. He now had to survey the region around Saint-Rogatien to the same level of detail, so that they could set the megalith in context. This meant that the Saint-Rogatien operation itself was hers, to do as she would. Itll be your Kingdom, Snow Queen, hed said, smiling his quizzical smile; when Im at Saint-Rogatien, Ill work for you. Her heart soared when she thought of how much trust Jack had placed in her. They were, all three of them, pie-eyed and fractious, having handled around a hundred media requests each since the press conference. The press had even tried to get at Avi (whose surprisingly expert skills at data-analysis grunt-work had earned him a credit on the paper), but he had, wisely, disappeared. Three days later hed sent Jack a text to say hed gone home, but everything was cool, back in a week alongside a photo of himself, outside a nightclub in Tel Avivs swinging Dizengoff Street, wedged between two excited-looking blondes and obviously having the time of his life. Jack found the whole media circus daunting, at times overwhelming, and in the end, depressing. The questions seemed inane, irrelevant, often stupid, and he was only too aware of how awkward and uncomfortable he must have looked. He felt cramped, stifled, longing to get into the open air and away from all this crap. Jadis, who had attracted most media interest, and a disproportionate amount of that had been of the inane and stupid sort had coped better, but tired more quickly. Jack had noticed a new and disturbing quirk in her; that rather than answer a question, she would pause, and her brown eyes would, quite literally, switch off. Their luster would disappear in a second, as if her sight were questing inwards, searching for something she couldnt quite place. Her brow would then furrow, and shed rub her swollen belly distractedly, before returning to reality. No, no, dont worry about me, Im fine, shed insist, resisting Jack and Rogers protests, trying to smile her most winning smile at Jack but not quite succeeding, as if it were an injured butterfly, laboring to get airborne. Finally, Jack was so worried that hed called Marjorie, swallowing his earlier fear in the knowledge that the two women had become close friends, to ask whether she might say something, because Jadis wouldnt listen to him: and so Jadis was sternly advised to take things more easily for a day or two. Marjorie also insisted that Roger handle all media enquiries an obligation he was happy to fulfill and that Jack find a portrait of Jadis that could be released to the press, so as to assuage the torrent of media requests. Rifling through the dreadful clutter that their flat had become (both of them being too tired or too busy to do much about it) Jack had come across a portrait of Jadis, filed in his laptop, that hed completely forgotten about. It was a picture of her in Torbay, on their first summer vacation together. Shed been standing in a wooded dell, just outside some pothole or other hed been studying, the sun through the trees making a halo for her hair. While the surface of his mind concentrated on the practicalities of whether this casual snapshot would be a good enough for a press portrait (was the contrast right? Would newspapers want something of higher resolution?) the rest of him surged with reminiscence. He could no longer quite be sure, but this photo might have been taken on the very day theyd first made love. Perhaps even at the very same spot. Her face in the picture was open and smiling, and she appeared to have been caught saying something to him he could not remember what. But he did remember, as clearly as if it had been yesterday, how they had sunk into the dell, in the leafy remains of the bluebells; his first ever sight of her smoothly incurving waist, her bare breasts, her wild brown hair tumbling across them; and how pale and, well, exposed theyd seemed in the dappled summer sun, framed by her pale arms, and how white they were against her dark, upward-pointing nipples. He even remembered how her nipples tasted; her laughter when he tasted them; the surrender in her eyes when shed at last opened herself before him, and the feeling of rapture and completeness when he was inside her for the very first time; and, coincident with this, the strange and unexpected feeling that he was home. It struck him, then, how much shed changed since; that her spirit seemed to have become more urgent, more inward-looking. Like the taste of a wine set to age, their love which had once been gay and simple with no thought of the future, was now darker and more complex, with overtones of sorrow and joy, worry and long experience and foreboding. His heart ached for her, for the girl hed first dated, as well as the woman she had become. As her pregnancy had advanced she had become reserved, fiercer, more controlled, and a little less inclined to present to the world at large anything other than a hard and steely resolve. The girlish warmth that she had once spread so casually was now hoarded for him alone, focussed it at his heart in concentrated, overpowering blasts. The world at large would know nothing of this. To anyone but himself, the photo showed a pretty eighteen-year-old on holiday. He emailed it to the University Press Office. The morning before Rogers meeting, the day after Jack and Jadis had returned from London, she had been in the corner of the office that she now shared with Jack when, looking up from the flood of unopened emails, she saw an enormous camera lens peeping in at her through the window. A tabloid journalist had climbed up the wall with a ladder carelessly left by a contractor, and had been hoping for some unauthorized, exclusive shots of the New Face of Science. Jadis fled to the departmental secretary, who called security. In the departmental office shed met Jack, whod left for work later than she had: hed been trying to sort their domestic paperwork into some kind of order, but not getting very far. (He tended to get swamped, distracted by details, whereas Jadis only had to look sternly at a pile of papers for them to sort themselves.) Jack now reported that the flat was under journalistic siege. Unable to exit through the front, hed had to scale the high wall behind the Nest and make a getaway across a neighbours garden. His clothes were muddied, his arms scratched. Jadis cooed concern for him, ignoring all else: it had not yet occurred to either where they might go next they couldnt go home for a day or two when they turned at once to see Roger, standing in the office doorway. Please stay with Marjorie and me, he said, until the heats off. And we can have our meeting there. Much nicer, what? It felt very peculiar to be in bed with his fiance in the house of his former doctorate supervisor. For all that the spare bedroom chez MacLennane was welcoming in a chintzy sort of way, and much tidier than their flat, Jack felt like a refugee. More than ever, he wanted to get out into the field, to take Jadis with him to escape. When he awoke with these fretful thoughts, his first sight was Jadis, sitting on the side of the bed with her back to him, legs slightly parted to accommodate the bulge of her belly, combing her hair with that enormous plastic comb she took everywhere with her, like a talisman. She attacked her hair with urgent, rapid strokes, as if it were a task best over and done with. He wondered why she hadnt asked him to do it, a much more relaxed experience they both enjoyed, especially as it often led to other things. It was what in their private language they called their baboons-in-pre-copulatory-grooming routine. Jadis heard Jack wake behind her, and read his mind. Im sorry, Darling Jack. I just dont feel like it much here, she said, not turning round. Here. At Roger and Marjories. It would seem like... well, having sex in church. Still sitting there, back to him, he saw her skin ripple, her shoulders shake with silent laughter, but the tenor soon turned and she began to emit small, spiky, sobs which she stifled only with difficulty. Jack got out of bed and rushed round to comfort her, quieting her in his arms. She did not explain her change of mood, and Jack did not ask her. Rogers news, after breakfast, went a considerable way to cheering them up. Some years ago (Roger began), a Chinese-American investor and philanthropist called Ginsberg Wang had approached the University, offering a donation of several billion dollars if theyd build a new college with his name on it. After the common-room titters had subsided (Whod want to be a Fellow of Wank College?) the University, being used to such requests, politely thanked Mr Wang, and deftly pointed out that whereas the University had an elegant sufficiency of colleges, it sorely lacked front-rank research facilities that could benefit the whole University, if not the whole world, and mightnt Mr Wang think along those lines instead? And so Mr Wang had receded and it was generally assumed that hed decided to take his wealth elsewhere. However, it turned out (Roger continued) that the Senate had badly underestimated Mr Wang. He had, it seemed, taken the University at its word, and had been consulting widely on the kinds of research facilities that the University might need and which, he felt, hed like to support. Mr Wang was known as a shrewd investor in what at first seemed an eclectic selection of interests, from carbon sequestration technologies to genetic manipulation, from geothermal power to personalized space travel. When Forbes magazine asked him, in the only interview he was ever known to have given, if he could characterize his investments in a sentence, hed said sure, but Ill do it in just two words: The Future. Hence the Universities puzzlement when he chose to endow two new research institutes in Cambridge, neither of which seemed to have anything to do with technology or a brave new world, but both very much with cataloguing the past. One such concern, the Ginsberg Wang Astrometry Institute, had been busy in Madingley for two years now, cataloguing the recent spectral history and proper motion of stars in the solar neighborhood, for reasons that nobody could fathom. And the second? Roger asked: well, thats where we come in. It turned out that the mysterious Mr Wang had been watching the progress of MacLennanes research, and that of his students, for some years, but had only finally chosen to make a commitment when the Nature paper had become public. Thats why I couldnt come back from town with you both, he explained, I had to meet Wangs people at the Royal. Naturally, I couldnt breathe a dicky bird. Im sure youll understand. The upshot was that Wang, through his philanthropic GW Foundation, had chosen to endow what hed called the GW Institute for Historical Geomorphology. This would at least initially be a virtual institute, made of people within the current Department and associates elsewhere. Wang knows that institutes are made not of walls, but of people, said Roger. The GW Foundation has asked me to head up the Institute, and Ive accepted. After all, Ive only a year or so to run at the University proper before theyd boot me out anyway, and I cant hang around here. Marjorie would never stand for it. Jack and Jadis congratulated him, but he pressed ahead. My first act as the Head is to appoint you, Jack, as its first Senior Research Fellow; my second is to recommend that Jack takes on you, Jadis as its first doctorate student. No need to worry about money or grants weve got simply pots of it. You could start tomorrow, but I forbid it. Theres some paperwork to get done, and anyway you two need a break. Start work in a couple of weeks, after the Easter Vac, perhaps, eh, what? The first thing Jack and Jadis needed to do was keep the promise theyd made to themselves that they would marry as soon as Jack got an academic post. Now this had happened, neither felt that they had had any time to waste. Ignoring protests from both sets of parents to have what Jacks father called A Bit Of A Do, and what Jadiss mother called A Proper Wedding, dear, you know, in a church, they booked a slot in the Cambridge Registry Office for the following week, and invited everyone they knew to meet for a drink in the nearby Isaac Newton pub afterwards. Why have a proper wedding, Mum, Why? said Jadis: Ive been living with Jack for ages, just as if we already were married. I love him. Whats more, Im having his baby in less than two months, so therell be no time to plan anything, and after the babys born, well, you can imagine. What she didnt add (because her mother just wouldnt get it, and in any case, she didnt want to hurt her) was that her marriage to Jack had existed in her own mind since hed first asked her out. To Jadis, that a marriage should be before God and a congregation was neither here nor there. Concerning the existence of God she had no firm opinion, and the congregation, while nice to have, was irrelevant, because their marriage was really a private matter, between her and Jack, into which nobody nobody, however much they loved them could ever intrude. Mum, it would be lovely to see you there, if you can make it, was all shed said. Jadis mother was the image of her daughter. As she put the phone down, she distractedly gathered her long brown hair behind her head, and in the dark pools of her eyes wondered how when? her daughter had learned to be so matter-of-fact, so hard? Deep in the first night at Saint-Rogatien, Jadis was having a dream in which shed been in the garden in Chesterton, trying to plant out some summer bedding, but the plants shriveled and died as soon as she put them into the ground. She worked faster and faster, as if trying to beat some innominate contagion, but still it spread. The rising mound of dead and dying plants all around her turned from green, to grey, to red, dripping blood on the grass. When she studied the plants more closely, she saw that they were fetuses, and as she watched in pure horror, the blood smeared and spread, up the wall of the raised bed and into the Nest, up the trees, until, at the end of the leaves, it gathered and rained down on her in a torrent. She looked down and noticed blood rising up her bare legs, but she was stuck fast, unable to move or do anything to stem this tide incarnadine. But just as she thought she would drown in blood, there came a regular pulse, a subsonic thrum, like the heartbeat of the Earth. Assaulted by this calm but unstoppable vibration, the blood coagulated, dried, shattered and blew away like harmless dust; and before her, a vast and green plant rose clear out of the ground, bursting above her head into an immense Van-Gogh sunflower that became the sun. And still the Earth pulsed. She woke, still in Jacks arms, the shreds of the dream dissipating like gossamer. But the pulse still beat, softly and insistently, just below the level of hearing. She knew her own pulse, and that of her love. But this was a new pulse, the pulse of a new life, strong and steady, beating inside her. Or, rather, a pulse returned, a pulse she feared had been lost for some time. Wave after wave of relief coursed down to meet it, and she embraced the pulse with triumphant inner shouts of radiant joy. She slept again in a state of happiness that she had not experienced for several weeks. When she awoke in the dawn, shed forgotten about the dream, and now stood in the window of the small bedroom, looking down over the sunlit square. She felt amazingly refreshed, all her aches and pains were gone, and she was eager to meet the day. Come on, you silly man! she teased, pulling the duvet off Jacks still recumbent form, yanking the curtains apart to admit the strong spring sunshine. Okay, Boss, came the uncertain reply, but when Jack tried to pull the duvet back, Jadis snatched it away again in a furious cloud of fabric and hair, jumped on the bed, whacked him quite hard on the backside, and sprang for the door. Half an hour later, as Jack ordered coffee on the pavement terrace of the caf below, Jadis went to the boulangerie to buy croissants. If this was to be their new home, he felt he could accommodate its easy pace very well. A few minutes later, Jack watched Jadis return with the paper bag, and at first he didnt recognize her as his wife. The woman he was watching was indeed heavily pregnant, like Jadis, but unlike Jadis had been in the past two or three weeks, this voluptuary had acquired a devastatingly sexy hip-sway that accommodated both her legginess and her bulk with elegance and poise, her long train of hair waving to the rhythm of her movements, just as if she were dancing in her own one-woman conga line to some deep dub pulse. It wasnt until shed stopped at his table that he was sure it was her. What? she asked, while pulling out her chair and sitting on it in a single, fluid movement that simply exuded sex. Jack turned to his coffee, slurping it far too fast, coughed at its bitterness, and looked up, a rim of froth on his upper lip. Jadis laughed, and to Jack it sounded just like the romantic-novel clich of tinkling bells. Snow Queen, will you marry me? But were already married! to each other? Simultaneously, even. She wore her mock-serious expression, shading her glinting eyes beneath the shadows of hair. And at the same time? Im astonished. In which case, I cant. Sorry! She ran her tongue sexily around her lips, chasing flecks of coffee and croissant. But this is terrible! Whos the lucky man? You are. And I expect you to take me upstairs, right now, and treat me to mad, passionate lunch. Im hungry, she added, leaning across the table towards him, leering like a pantomime villain and giving him an eyeful of cleavage. But we havent even had breakfast. Now, eat up, I have something to show you. Hand in hand, Jack and Jadis crossed the Place Etienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire to the churchyard. The graves closer to the street stood in well-tended, ordered lines, each stone adorned with garish sprays of plastic flowers and photographs of loved ones behind clear glass or Perspex frames. As they rounded the church they entered the cool shadows of a dark bank of cypresses and yews, where the graves were sparser and more somber, and at length they came to a crumbling stone parapet that gave onto a magnificent view of the landscape stretched out below them to the west, with ridge after ridge of limestone hills fading to invisibility. She turned to him and kissed him, just she had done for the very first time almost four years earlier. Alike and yet not alike. There were three lives here, not two, and a new home to find, and a new life to explore. Two weeks later they were back in their flat. Theyd been worrying what they might find, and their sense of anticipation was sharpened by the increasingly aberrant performance of the old Peugeot which toiled and grumbled up the last stretch of the M11 towards Cambridge, so much so that they began to think that theyd never arrive. I promised the Field Vehicle, Jack said, pointedly that if she got us back home safely, Id treat her to a thorough servicing. Jadis, now half asleep in the passenger seat, had begun to giggle at this. Your capacity for servicing things, Darling Jack, she said, yawning and stretching, knows no bounds. Despite her increasing discomfort and now continual back-ache brought on by the long ride home, her mind was floating on the bubble of memories of her honeymoon, with long afternoons of leisured lovemaking between concentrated bursts of more serious activity. They had paced out the precise location for the first excavation season, scheduled for this time next year. And with the help of a friendly, English-speaking real-estate agent, they had scouted a few likely properties that could be used as live-in field stations, and would recommend the one they liked most to Roger, whod have to authorize the funds to buy and remodel it. Their favorite was a big, old and mildly dilapidated farmhouse on a quiet lane about a quarter-mile away from the village centre. A large barn and the house itself formed respectively the west and north sides of a sheltered tarmac quadrangle, braced against the prevailing Atlantic westerlies. The shingles on the barns roof looked rickety, but the beams were sound, and there was plenty of scope for dividing it into a machine shop, laboratory and store rooms. The house itself was large without being ostentatious, with an enormous kitchen, (accompanied by a large, tiled back-kitchen, laundry room and pantry) that could serve as the center of family life. Jadis could already imagine herself in it, with flocks of children, students, field workers and more children; cats and dogs running to and fro; an oak table in the middle, laden with hot meals; lab notes; toys; specimens, in an ongoing jumble There were eight large bedrooms so plenty of room to accommodate themselves and several colleagues, children and friends at once but only one tiny bathroom. Have to do something about that, she thought. And put one in downstairs, too. She thought of herself in the future, shepherding shoals of small children in and out But best of all, there was a large garden, already in cultivation, that could be used to help supply the home and field kitchen. She thought she might keep chickens. And maybe some ducks. She imagined children running around in the sunshine. In the middle of the garden was a dense spinney of mature trees. It didnt look very extensive from the outside, but as soon as you stepped in, you had the distinct impression of being in an endless forest. Jadis immediately thought of the Nest. She warmed to this, and the pulse within her quickened in response. When they got back to the Chesterton flat, well after dark, and expecting the usual explosion of disorder, they found it a picture of neatness. Papers were stacked, clothes washed and ironed, dishes put away, floors swept, and there were even flowers in vases. A note from Marjorie (whod had the key) explained that shed asked her cleaning lady to give the flat a spring-clean. A welcome-home gift, shed explained. The next day, Jack rose early and went into the department, to give a progress report to MacLennane. Jadis thought shed stay behind for a while. The car journey had been hard on her. She was rather stiff, and she wanted to potter around the garden for a bit, pulling out a few Spring weeds. She said shed come into the department later. Maybe theyd have lunch? Great idea, said Jack: they kissed, parted, and he was gone. After Jack had left, she rose, shucked Horrible, her once-purple jersey, over her head, and went into the garden. Leaning over to pull a few small grassy interlopers from the edge of the raised bed, she idly thought of the coming summer, a baby dozing in a pram, and who knows, that Normal Servicing might be Resumed in the Nest. Her presumption was met instantly with a jolt so painful, so sudden, that she was thrown clear off her feet and sent sprawling forward into the wall of the raised bed. She stood up, dazed, sweating, gasping for breath, thinking that shed been hit in the back with a battering ram. Before she could recover, a second bone-crunching impact cut her to her knees. The world whirled around her. Her head swam. Her crotch felt damp, and, raising Horribles hem, she looked down and saw a trickle of blood running down the inside of her right thigh. Her head cleared immediately, as often happens to soldiers in the extremis of battle. No time to call Jack; an ambulance would take ages to get here; the answer was clear. Shed take herself to the hospital now. Stopping only to clean the thin line of blood from her thigh, to find a clean pair of knickers, and stuffing as much toilet paper as she could down her knickers and up between her legs, she grabbed the car keys and left. The Field Vehicle spluttered glutinously into life. After the long journey of the day before, Jadis hoped shed have enough fuel to get herself to Addenbrookes. In the event, this hardly mattered. Coursing down Elizabeth Way and across the river, another huge, shuddering spasm wracked her lower body. She gripped the steering wheel in fierce concentration, ignoring the fact that her insides were hemorrhaging. As she worked the pedals, she could feel that her inner thighs were slick with great massy gouts. She made her way carefully along East Road and past Parkers Piece, pulling up at the lights, signaling to turn left into Hills Road and the southbound straight to Addenbrookes Hospital. Almost there. Willing the lights to change, she gunned the accelerator the only way, shed learned, of getting the diesel engine to make a quick getaway but the long un-serviced Field Vehicle was slow to respond. At last, the lights changed, and Jadis steered into Hills Road, making sure that nothing was coming from the right extra carefully now, as although the spasms had lessened in intensity, she had lost a lot of blood and was feeling a little light-headed, just as she had been in the night before last at the Sanglier DOr, when, with the curtains swirling in the Spring breeze through their open window, and when her Darling Jack But what she hadnt seen, as she turned, was a police car, lights flashing, screaming northwards at eighty-five miles per hour up the wrong side of Hills Road, to her left. The police Volvo Cross Country hit the Peugeot almost head on, with a combined velocity of more than a hundred miles per hour. The Peugeot flipped forward and turned a full somersault over the top of the larger car. As the Peugeot righted itself in mid-air, the G-force pulled the safety belt clear from its rusted fastenings, and Jadis was catapulted forwards through the windscreen, landing face-down on the bonnet of a northbound car twenty feet away. The driver of that car braked suddenly, so that Jadis slid down the bonnet and came to rest on the ground in front of it. The Peugeot itself, now driverless, ploughed through the air, and, cratering nose-first into the road behind the police car, burst into flames. Darling Jack The world whined and wheeled, and was silent. Tethys Ocean, Earth 51,977,258 BC Hurled headlong flaming from thethereal sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition... John Milton Paradise Lost The details of the fall that is, how he felt about it, as he fell, for each and every excruciating microsecond of it would have been lost to him, had they not been replayed to him later, by his AI core. When the details were too grisly, even for such a seasoned a soldier as himself, his AI continued nonetheless. It had been compelled to tell him, it said. It had no choice. And neither, it added, had he. But for now, it said, what it called an executive summary would suffice. His viewpoint was from beach level, looking upwards. As he looked, he saw the tree whence hed fallen (was pushed, dammit), and the palisade of broken, fire-sharpened trunks that surrounded it. Something appeared to be impaled on one of these stumps, about four meters from the ground. Maybe it was no more than three it was hard to tell from this angle. He homed in on that something, and realized with a dispassionate detachment that would have shocked him, had he been in any other state, that it was the body of a man, naked, the trunk piercing it at around crotch level and passing more or less straight through, emerging through the neck. The force of the impaling must have pushed the head clean off, like thumbs flipping the foil lid from a beer bottle. What had happened to the head, then? Ah, me. That explains my particular point of view. He blinked, slowly, deliberately. The grisly spectacle before him darkened, then shuttered back into view. He took a deep breath. Very good. But if that is the case (and I have no reason to doubt it) then why arent I ... dead? As he watched, the headless body reached for the trunk above it and, grasping with both hands, pulled itself free. To be sure, it left a slurry of internal organs in slowly dripping, gory gobbets, snagged along the ridges of the trunk as the acephalate body hauled itself upwards. But probably not as much as one might have expected, in the circumstances. With a quite disconcerting agility (so he thought), the body swung, hand over hand, down and around the trunk, using the outstretched legs as counterweights. As it corkscrewed down, Ruxhana caught glimpses of its groin. What had been a hideous, gaping hole when the body started its descent had quite healed over by the time it had landed, confidently, feet first, on the sand, and had started to march towards him. It slowly grew in his visual field until all he could see was its feet. There followed a mild disorientation as he was lifted, flipped over, and with hardly more than a grind of bones and a squishing noise of almost obscene understatement, he was atop the almost two-meter tower of ... himself. Calmly, he walked back to the beach camp, where Xalom was waiting. Hed tried to query his AI core as hed walked, but his brain must have been out of whack, for every question he framed became kind of mangled, the mental equivalent of trying to peel bananas while wearing thick woolen mittens. His AI was, perhaps, aware of this, and even suffering from the same malaise, because it could only respond with general expressions of sympathy and a single coherent phrase. Ongoing transformations. Xalom stood up as he approached. Her eyes were wide and full of concern, but she remained some distance away, as if she were afraid he might attack her. After all, he now knew, he could not die. He could revenge himself on her, again and again, until all the stars went cold. Ruxie... it was the only way I could ... the only way to explain. I had to show you. Physically. Otherwise, youd have never have believed me. Ruxie? Ruxie? Are you listening? Hmm? He felt cold, composed, remote. He felt a headache coming on and his knees go wobbly. He climbed on to the platform and collapsed on to the bed. I could murder a drink, he said, before he passed out. When he awoke it was night. His first sensation was the scent of grilled fish, followed by the spit and crackle of oil falling into the flames. He sat up, very slowly, and crawled to the edge of the bed. On the beach below the platform, Xalom squatted next to the fire pit, with two freshly caught sea-bass toasting on sticks. Her hair was tied back into a single ponytail, and her back was towards him, three-quarters in the flames silhouette. He could see enough to know that she was bared to the waist, her sarong tied as a loincloth. He was relieved to see that she had the full and normal complement of breasts. Without turning round, she spoke to him. Suppers ready. He rose gingerly to his feet and tottered down to the beach, sitting full on the ground next to her, a little way from the fire, towards the sea. They ate in pregnant but dignified silence, neither daring to catch the eye of the other. But as he stripped the last of the succulent flesh from the bones, and the fire behind them died to crimson embers, he felt a compliment was due. Thank you, Xalom. That was delicious. Dont mention it. Least I could do, really, after ... well, after this morning. She seemed subdued, dignified, but not guilty an entirely different person from the hoyden of just twelve hours earlier. As if shed aged half a century. She reached over to gather his palm-frond plate. Her mind might have moved on, but her body was just the same, just as youthful. She must have sensed him staring, then, because she said, with some asperity look up. And he did. What he saw was nothing like the skies of Earth. Most of heavens vault was quite dark, punctuated only by the most meager scatter of stars. But ahead of them, deep in the west, and yet filling a third of the sky, was the Galaxy, in all its spiraled, dust-laned, electric blue, pearly pink, fiery orange, snow-white majesty. He gasped in unalloyed wonder. He stood up, then, and walked into the greater darkness along the beach, so he could see it with yet more clarity, as if he just couldnt get enough of it. He sat down abruptly on the sand, and then lay down at full length, looking up. Now, as at no other time in his life, not even when he was a small kit yet newly acquainted with the gift of vision, had he such a potent sensation when lying on the ground that he was stuck to a small ball, careening through space. But all he could find to say, when he had finally recovered his ability to speak, was: Does the Tesseractrix really have twenty-seven legs? Yes, came the reply, from a little distance away. What you see in this continuum is merely one part of an M-dimensional ... ...relativistic manifold? Yes, she said, now closer. Just like me. And there she was, lying next to him, turned towards him. He could see the curves of her womanhood picked out in the starshine, but brightest of all were her eyes, their moistened gleam reflected in the curves of her cheeks, full, smiling. This is an Xspace, isnt it? he asked. Yes, she said, resting her left hand lightly on his chest. It is. But that doesnt make it any less real... any less real than it seems to be. She lay closer, next to him, her head resting beneath the crook of his chin, her hair, now loosened, spreading over them both like a blanket. Its time, now, isnt it, Xalom? Almost time to go? Yes. Almost. We have just one more night together. And I have so many things I have to tell you. Thats always been the trouble, Ruxie, even ... even back then, when you were younger, at Coromandel Station. I just never knew how to put things, so either they came out all wrong, or I didnt even try, and in the end I felt I was just using you. Im so sorry... A picture of his last night at the barracks flashed before him, no more than a memory of a heave of sweat and muscle and the sour saffron stench of betrayal, superimposed on this magnificent siege of stars. Thats far away now, Xalom. It feels like another life, like it happened to someone else. Like everything happened to someone else. Ive changed, I think. Who am I, Xalom? Who am I? Dont worry, she said, hugging him. Whatever happens, youll always be Ruxie. Deep inside. But thats just it. What is happening? To me? She sat up, then, a silhouette against the entire Galaxy. I guess I should start at the beginning, she said. She told him then of her own beginnings, and of the Drove, and of the Shepherds, and of how the task had been given to her of finding a species to manage the Drove in its turn, against the time when her own species should fade. Of raising that species to transcendence. And of committing a kind of sin, a heresy, a genocide of destroying the Drove, the work of her species, the heart of her own existence, so that the Universe itself might be saved from premature extinction. Some of this shed told him before, and a little of the rest hed guessed. But he heard it all now, and, for the first time, he understood. At first I thought Id found that species yours, Ruxie and that would have been a marvelous irony, as well as being highly convenient. She laughed, drily, in her throat. She grasped his hand again, as if she, this almost godlike being, to him required his human reassurance. But something told me that your kind wasnt quite right. Almost, but not quite. But why... then.... why all this? Oh, Ruxie, my existence seems to be a catalog of near-misses, doesnt it? But youre aware, Im sure, of the history of your species. Youre mammalian, and primates: your tarsioid ancestors emerged from the jungles of the Northern Tethys less than fifteen million years ago. Out of the shadow of the great lizards, he added. Their shapes haunt the walls of our dreams, our earliest legends. The reason for their disappearance is the stuff of myth. Some of our more ancient traditions long before the Empire say that they were punished by the Old Gods for some transgression. All superstition. These days we think it was some kind of cosmic accident. But what an accident! Without it we might never have evolved. She was silent for a spell, as if hed unwittingly touched a nerve, a subject shed have loved to have discussed, but concerning which she felt that the right moment had not yet arrived. But how far youve come, in such a short time, she added. From the jungles of a small planet to rulers of the Galaxy in the blink of an eye, really! But where was I? Oh yes. Even despite all that achievement that potential youre not the savior species Ive been looking for. But you can help me make it, Ruxie. Evolve it. For the species will emerge from this planet, I know it: and from, I think, the primate order. Really, Ruxie, we two look very like them already, and with time, we you your species shall converge on that form. We ... shall? He had a fleeting, nightmarish vision of her as hed seen her a few nights previously; almost hairless, with those strange, round eyes, and not enough breasts. Yes, but we are not that form. The form that we ... the one we need. Our task your task is to find them, to evolve them. To shape their destiny, their genes.... to transcend. To destroy. She paused, sent out a long sigh into the evening air, and sank down again, next to him. He detected a scent then, of peace, and satisfaction. Of closure. The Galaxy stood above them both, expectant. There now Ive said it. Not very hard, really, when it came down to it. My task? So thats it? Evolution? Its ... well, more than one can do in a lifetime, or a dozen, or a million lifetimes. Isnt it? You will have all those lifetimes, Ruxie. As many lifetimes as youll need. And youll have help, too... My AI core? Oh, that! The poor lamb! I had to upgrade it to sentience. It didnt much like it. It complained even more than you did ... when I did all those things to you. I think it went a bit barmy, frankly, for a while. Started jabbering on about the difficulty of making decisions without sufficient information, and sentience having too many free parameters, and NP-completeness, and shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax, and bands playing different tunes, and eclipses, and whether you could breathe on the dark side of the Moon, and, for all I know, whether pigs have wings. And then it got really unhinged. I confess I had to give it a rather stiff talking-to. She giggled. He laughed, then, a full, roaring belly-laugh, a laugh like he could hardly remember having laughed, a laugh of relief and resolution and joy, and she joined in, and she rolled on top of him and silenced him with her lips on his, and pulled away, her whole face a silhouette above him. The silly old thing couldnt really cope. So I had to merge it with you. You havent had much trouble from it lately, I hope? No, I havent. Funny, it hadnt occurred to me... and, in truth, his AI had spoken to him ever more rarely, of late, and in tones that were more delphic than truly helpful. At the same time, he felt more confident, more sure of himself in everything he did. He remembered his calmness, even when confronted by his own decapitation. Ongoing transformations. He and his AI core had become one. The person he now was the body he now inhabited was greater than the sum of its parts. Good. Thats good to know, she said. She rolled off him, on to her side, her back towards him. He rolled into her, so that they were like two spoons in a drawer. His left arm was beneath her, trapped. With his free hand he stroked her hair. It shimmered in the light from a hundred billion stars. May I ask you something, Xalom? Of course, Ruxie. Of course. Her left hand grasped his, resting on her curve of her right shoulder, cooling in the night air. He thought he heard it, in her voice, something like a catch, a sob, hastily stifled. Why me? Why not have chosen ... oh, I dont know, any other Admiral, or any one of my sisters, or my mother, or even, while were about it, my old barrack-mate, Ko Handor Raelle? How do you know? It was a long time before she spoke. Before she did, she turned in his arms until she faced him. Her eyes were wide as wide as if they were confronting all the chasms of the void or her own ultimate extinction. Wide with terror. Oh, Xalom I didnt mean.... She sank down next to him, once more, so that he could no longer see his face. Dont worry, Ruxie. Not your fault. This is it though, isnt it? The question I knew youd ask, and which Ive been trying to dodge, always knowing that Id have to confront it, one day. He encircled her in his arms, and kissed the top of her head. He could feel her hot breath and her heart beating inside her. She swallowed. Well, one reason is that you owe me us. How so? Its a funny thing, fate. Destiny. For us, I mean, the Drovers, who see space and time rather differently from ... well, from the way you do. But I was given this task about sixteen million years ago, or thereabouts, when the Drove invaded the Oort cloud of a double-star system, consuming the smaller of the two stars and pitching a rain of cometary debris inwards, towards the primary. We didnt mean it to happen. We tried to stop then, but we were overwhelmed. I didnt discover it until later actually, it was one of our Drove Elders who told me that the impacts plunged one of the planets into a biotic crisis, rewriting the course of its evolution. Extinguishing one set of organisms, so that the potential of another could be ... realized. And, irony of ironies, that planet ... ... was the Earth. It was the Earth, wasnt it, Xalom? She hugged him closer. If it wasnt for our ... well, our mistake, Ruxie, our incapacity, your species would still be up trees, dodging dinosaurs. Thered be no Galactic Empire. And thered be no you. Xalom... But before you ask me ... as I know you will... he voice seemed choked with tears. Why you, Ruxie, in particular... Really, Xalom, theres no need. I dont think so. Not really. No ... need? No. I think I can work it out now, for myself. Because all youll be able to say is that Ill just have to trust your judgment on this, that you just know, without having sufficient information. A hunch. Instinct. And I do. Trust your judgment, that is. Completely. So youll have to trust mine. I know what I have to do, now. And how to do it. Ruxie ... you... why? Ruxie could hardly have articulated his conviction more completely. That no matter how much information you have at your disposal, you will always want more; no matter how thickly the data stream in, it will never be enough. Its an urge a human urge for safety, for a certainty that can never be achieved. His mind was cast back to his cadet days, a hot classroom in a yellow-brown tropical afternoon, an instructor waffling directionlessly on about elementary statistics. Amid the endlessly boring drone, the instructor said one thing that had stuck in his mind: no matter how fancy your statistical technique, no matter how many pretty graphs and charts you generate, it all, always comes down, in the end, to a judgment based on probability. In the end, always in the end, you have to act on inner conviction. A hunch. Instinct. It was something he wished hed remembered in his last engagement as an Admiral, when he chose to wait and see why seventy-eight thousand cruisers and destroyers had simultaneously switched their positions, rather than doing what his instinct demanded to get the hell out and save his fleet from destruction. He would do this task for two reasons, then, and two reasons only. The first was out of duty. The second was out of love. Look up at me, Xalom, he said. She did, and her wide eyes were full of supplication, and gratitude, and relief, and a whole host of other less definable emotions, all mixed up together. Her lips were full and slightly parted, and Ruxie kissed her, and did not stop for a long while. They made love, then, on the beach, in the dark beneath the great wheeling nebula; lovemaking of a kind remembered and cherished ever after in its totality, even long after the particular details have faded. The next day dawned, overcast and gray. Ruxhana stood in the skiff, his few belongings around his feet, as it was about to pull away from the shore, towards Shellys Shagpad and after that, who could tell? All Ruxhana knew was that hed know it when he saw it. Xalom stood on the sand not two meters away, though it might as well have been two million light years, her toes lapped by the distal fringes of the waves, hair and sarong billowing in the chill wind, hugging herself for warmth. She wore an expression of such desolation that he just wanted to step out of the skiff, right then, and hold her in his arms again. Xalom... No, Ruxie, not now. Its time to go. Good luck! She tried her best to smile. I love you, Xalom. Oh, go on with you, you silly man. The skiff pulled away, and as her form diminished in the distance, he saw her turn, and walk up the beach towards the belt of trees. As he watched, he saw her climb onto his palm-log platform, turn once again, and wave. As far as he could make out, she kept on waving until the island was no more than a thin line on the horizon, almost lost in a cloud bank. Merlin managed to hold herself in to preserve her dignity until Shellys Shagpad was lost from view, carrying Ruxhana Fengen Kraa on his eternal and uncertain voyage, and with him, all her their hopes. No sooner had he gone, however, than she crumpled onto the palm-log deck, crying uncontrollably. Her tears kept on flowing, on and on, making runnels and braids and deltas down her brown cheeks, until she began to wonder whether they would ever stop. They did stop, eventually. Of course they did, replaced at first by immense, wracking sobs, in which her lungs and her entire guts heaved. She managed to pitch herself back onto the sand before she threw up, and after that, she felt much better. Washed out, but with some sort of equilibrium restored, however fragile. Baryonic matter. He had said that it would be hard, and so had she expected it to be. Very hard indeed. But he had said nothing of its emotional intensity; nothing of all the guilt, the backwash from playing with the hearts and minds of these creatures. He had said nothing about the dangers of well, of getting involved. Perhaps hed had no idea himself. Or perhaps he had, but feared that had she known of this the awful, gnawing pain of it then she would have refused the task, or, worse, have agreed to it only half-heartedly, forever looking for a let-out clause, an excuse to stop, with the increased risk of failure that this would have entailed. And if one thing was certain, this was a task that must not be allowed to fail. The Continuum depended on it. On her. As she calmed herself, she was only dimly aware that her body was changing into the form in which she felt most comfortable; into which she often reposed when deeply relaxed, or fast asleep. Much of the fur on her body melted away; all but two of her breasts were resorbed; and her eyes changed their shape. The transformation was helped along as she thought of him again, at their first meeting in the ski lodge, and in many other Xspaces afterwards, in which he had trained her. And more than trained forged, quenched, broken, tamed. How she had bucked and rebelled at first, after the initial shock of her selection. But it was could only ever have been as the rage of a storm against a massif of billion-year-old granite. Solomon had always been calm, kindly, guiding. As well as irresistible, commanding, resolute. She had fallen for him as surely as well as surely as Ruxhana had fallen out of that tree, over there. And he had loved her, in return. She recalled, now, the time when, almost out of her mind with terror, with uncertainty, at the magnitude of the task she faced, alone, he had stood before her, in the bright north light of the grand salon of the ski lodge, bent down, kissed her eyelids, and told her that everything would be all right. And of the time when, alone in an endless forest of sequoias, he had stood before her and placed his palm between her breasts, stilling her panicked heart, and had then, with great deliberation and gentleness, peeled her blouse from her shoulders, knelt, and worshiped her body, with her rooted to the spot in paralyzed astonishment, as he, with his hands, with his mind, sent her soul voyaging to all twenty-seven vertices of the Continuum and then pirouetting back to where it had started. They had been in this form too, then. Of course they had. She smiled as she remembered it remembered it all. Her tears dried on her face. She walked down the beach again, to the shore, sloughed her sarong onto the sand and wallowed in the healing surf. For what she mostly remembered was a beach very much like this one, on whose sands she had opened herself to him, and they had come together, and she had become lost, transcendent. Perhaps that was why she had chosen this particular island for Ruxhanas education. His transfiguration. The irony was that even were Solomon to have been manipulating her, using her love to secure her devotion to the task, she realized that she did not care. As far as she was concerned, he was her master, and she his slave, to do with as he pleased. She was quite convinced that had Solomon disappeared, or worse ceased to love her, then she would, quite simply, wink out of existence. And how did she know that he loved her? Because he had told her, of course. On that very night, on that very beach. Her body, bathed in the waves, went suddenly cold. How could she? How could she have betrayed Solomon, and used Ruxie, all at the same time? Tears pricked the corners of her eyes once more. Not betrayed, he would have said. Do anything, hed have said, anything to get the job done. The fact that shed used the same Xspace their own, private, intimate space, to train Ruxie, no, to seduce him is not betrayal. Far from it. It it a sign of commitment. A sign that her love for him was true, and her love for Ruxie, too, if it came down to it. So why not? Solomon had often told her that he loved her for her passion, for the fact that it fueled her intellect, and her seemingly unerring judgment, the rightness of her instincts. It was all one, he had said. And, anyway, the job was far too important for anyone, and especially her, to get hung up on notions such as betrayal, when it was in fact nothing of the kind. But there, surely, he had been wrong. No! she bellowed into the unfeeling breeze. No! she bawled into the uncomprehending sky. No she screamed, rising from the water, the foam running off her body in white, streaming gouts into the pitiless sea. She was part of the equation, too: if she could not do this thing and maintain what she felt to be his trust, then it would not be a job worth doing. Solomon had made her, and she would be worthy of his trust. Would be. Must be. And more than that, worthy of his love. By her own lights. Whatever it took. Tibesti Massif, North Africa December, 2012 Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. Percy Bysshe Shelley Ozymandias In the lee of the erg the winds slowed to an eddying lull just enough for their words to be heard, were anyone there to hear them. A small group of tall figures gathered round another, who, though kneeling on the ground and virtually inaudible, appeared to be leading what passed for the chant: Jjeshmaii Zraal! Jjeshmaii Zraal! came the response, a dismal blizzard of guttering croaks as of the last autumn leaves cracking in the grate. Ajjhnaai ajjhnaaihnuu! Ajjhnaii Hjajhaad! The kneeling figure now fell full flat on its face, a flutter of dirty robes not quite disguising the extreme etiolation of its form. Two other figures stepped in, and, stooping low like a pair of ungainly cranes, helped the central figure to its feet. Surprisingly, it towered a head above all the others. So high, in fact, that even in the shadow cast by the colossal ruined sphinx behind them, the rays of the westering sun crowned its head with fire, illuminating its leonine mane. As if refreshed, the figure took the rams horn proffered by another and blew three mighty blasts. Blasts that would once have caused walls to totter and empires crumble. But the last such walls had been ground to dust thousands of years before, and these wanderers were the last of their kind. The raucous notes on the zjhjfaar seemed as futile as the croaks of vultures over long-abandoned skeletons. Life had not always been so desperate. Long ago, when the Annakhnu, the ancestors of this ragged people, came to this region, it was a promised land, a land flowing with milk and honey. Or, at least, waving with endless prairies of windblown grass for grazing, and rippling with immense lakes full of fish. Ostriches, elephants, giraffe and other animals, nameless by virtue of their later complete extinction, were chased by cheetahs and lions in abundance seemingly without limit. The Annakhnu looked at this immensity of plenty, and settled down from wanderings soon much magnified in myth. A myth conflated by the legendary arrival of a great prophet bearing on two tablets of stone what they came to call the Jhaad Hjesa, the One-to-Ten. And because of this, in time, they came after many more tens of millennia to call themselves Jajda hAdami The Men of Judah, a proud heritage, worn away by time and desiccating wind to the terser and less pronounceable Jajkhadi. Many hundreds of years passed. The Men of Judah replaced their grass and wattle huts with more imposing structures of mud-brick. Their villages became towns and then cities, each guarded by demon-headed sphinxes, avatars of their Goddess, HaShekhna, whose depiction in human form was forbidden. The greatest city, famed in legend, was the blessed City on the Heights, with its grand courts, its splendid temples and palaces faced with ivory, silver and pure gold; its impenetrable walls, its fountains, and towers that stretched to heaven. The people changed, too. After further uncountable years, they became tall, Kings among Men, taller than the other Men who appeared at the margins of a vast empire themselves written in the margins of a dozen cultures. The Great Old Ones. The Ancestors. The Atlanteans. The Men like Gods. The Nephilim. But with cities came war, and slaves, and tribute, and flames, and destruction. And with cities came the dwindling of the ostriches, elephants, giraffe and the other large, nameless animals. They became less common, and then rare, and eventually the day came when even the eldest sage could not recall having seen such beasts at all, not even as a small child images for such elders being as bright as gems, even when the fever and fret of later years had dulled the immediacy of more pressing concerns. And with cities came the taming of the great grasslands, the trammeling of the vast lakes to feed fields of wheat and barley, sorghum and millet that stretched from sky, to land, to sky. Nobody could quite recall the precise year when the smallest of the great lakes dried out completely (smallness being a relative thing this lake had been as large as the glacial wilderness which would, one day, be called Scotland). And nobody could recall the precise year when that lake failed to be completely replenished by the rains of winter. And as more time passed, nobody could recall the year when the rains of winter failed to arrive, and turned instead to storms of choking dust. The toll of years built like the grains of sand left to accumulate to windward of the cities as they died, one by one, toppling the towers and burying the majestic walls as if they had never been, but leaving a few monuments exposed, a few isolated pillars, as enigmatic remembrances of glories past. The Men of Judah remained tall, but gaunt and weathered as they dwindled from conquerors to a tribe of herdsmen like any other, managing to hang on in remote canyons of the Tibesti Massif mountains echoing their once-great cities standing amid the fertile plains, now sere and barren rock. And yet in caves bored within the rock they maintained their ancient religion, itself wearing away at the corners but keeping its core essentially unchanged, the Way of the Jhaad Hjesa, and the Goddess, HaShekhna. After dozens of centuries, the Way had become nostalgic. The shaman would talk of a blessed future when the Goddess would forgive them their trespasses, and the Jajkhadi would regain what they had lost, when they would return to their blessed City on the Heights. Every year, to mark the fall of what passed for the first droplets of spring, they prayed for the imminence of this last journey next year, maybe. And, one day, just in time, when almost all they had ever had was lost, that day dawned. The Elders of the very last settlement of the Jajkhadi convened in the lee of a Sphinx believed by the more credulous to represent the artistic peak of their ancestors, to discuss the latest in a long litany of bad news. Even though adapted to aridity to a degree not seen elsewhere, the tribe had to move on. The other tribes in the lands round about could not weather the Tibesti like the Jajkhadi could through long usage, but these others did have a new and deadlier advantage: automatic weapons. The Jajkhadi would have to move on before they were flushed out and slaughtered. That they had to move on no-one could doubt but where, then, could they move? Their enemies surrounded them on all sides. Straitened in their last redoubt, they had recourse only to prayer, and to fast-vanishing hope. Hope that the great prophet would appear from the skies on a flaming chariot as was foretold, and smite their enemies. Hope sustained by the comfort of ritual. But the tallest Elder had blown his last: the shrill notes of the zjhjfaar resounded among the rocks and died away. At last, the silence of the desert, eternal and without reproach. The Elders remained still, poised, waiting for deliverance, or for the end. After some minutes came the sound not of fiery chariots but of bullets, the answers to the horn-blasts. Hope died. Careering up a slope and over the jagged horizon came a technical a jeep with a machine gun mounted on the back driven crazily by bandits in green and tan fatigues. The bandits, hanging over the sides of the technical, whooped in devilment, firing their guns into the arcing sky. Even from a distance of a thousand yards the keen eyes of the Jajkhadi could see the bandits bandoliers rise, sway and flop around their ragged bodies, the menacing gleams of white teeth in black faces, the glimmer of machetes and the pitted barrels of machine guns. The Elders were all that separated the coming onslaught from their last village, their skeletal flap-breasted women, their starving, bloated children. The Elders stood fast and began again to chant as one Jjeshmaii Zraal! They closed their eyes, waiting for the end: but were surprised by a second noise, a deeper, constant roar imposed on the staccato stutter and crazily slipping clutch of the technical. The Elders opened their eyes once again and faced their foes, only to see, rising behind the jeep, the promised deliverance. Not chariots of fire, but something else equally wonderful for all that it lay beyond their experience: a flotilla of ten, vast, Chinook helicopters. The first helicopter let rip its judgment. A pair of rockets scythed away from the fuselage and smacked into the technical, which vanished in a dull rumble and a ball of grey smoke. Shards of metal and scraps of human flesh spattered the Elders standing at the feet of the sphinx. A head, removed by the blast, rolled and stopped by the sandalled feet of the eldest Elder, looking up at him as if in surprise. This is not how things were meant to turn out, it seemed to say. This is not how the story ends. It had not escaped the notice of the eldest Elder that the number of the sky chariots was ten the same number as the Laws of the Prophet. And this, he reasoned, had to be a Good Thing. One of the Chinooks picked its way over the wreck and landed delicately a few yards away, close enough to the astonished watchers but too far for them to be discommoded by the down-draught. The breeze was, however, sufficient to lift and make flags of their ragged robes, marking their otherwise silent stillness all the more starkly. The other nine sky-chariots roared overhead, looking for the village. Two people in fatigues (much like the bandits, but more recently cleaned and pressed) alighted and ambled towards the Elders, chatting with each other as if this were an afternoon stroll, as if the Elders were not there at all. Ho hum, thought the eldest Elder. Not quite how he had imagined it, but the Prophet had come, nonetheless, with chariots in the sky, with fire to smite their enemies, who now lay thoroughly smitten. How could one possibly complain? As the two newcomers came closer, it became clear to the silent watchers that they were as stocky and dark as the Elders were tall and pale. One, a woman, with very long, black hair, cleared her throat, and looked to her brawny male companion and said: Hey, Avi, help me out here, big boy. Much as I hate to admit it, I never know what to say on such occasions. You want I should do this? Avi smiled his best ladies-man smirk. Always a danger with this particular ball-breaker, but, hey, nothing ventured. Commander Rivka Mizrahi of the Israel Defence Forces (Covert Aliyot Operations) narrowed her coal-black eyes. Of course youre the Digger, she spat. Youll know what to say to to Lost Tribes. Thats an order, soldier! Avi Malkeinu wondered (not for the first time) whether his commanding officer would be as fierce in the sack as she was out of it, but decided (wisely) to put that delicious thought aside for later. So he simply smiled at her, gave a casual mock-salute and moseyed towards to the tribesmen, all of whom had remained completely silent and still, except for their shreds of robes swaying in the light breeze. Avi stopped, wondering which one of these nearly-dead skeletons he should address first. Nobody had said anything at all about this before the mission comparative anthropology, cultural sensitivities, even future shock. The terms of reference for Operation Elisha had indeed occupied a lengthy pamphlet written in Old High Military Jargonic, but the semantic content could have been boiled down to read: go there, pick em up, get the hell out. This directness, this simplicity this matter-of-factness of things would not normally have worried Avi in the slightest. He was just a regular guy, after all. But when hed returned to his homeland, just after Le Dig had wound up, his luggage contained more than clothes and after-shave. There were memories, too, especially of that dinner, when hed had Faye and Primrose practically eating out of his hand. And when Jack had told them the tale of Gaston de Bonnard, and when Domingo had bowled them all over with his amazing tales of de Bonnards desert journeys in which hed met the les Prtres du Sable, but nobody had believed him, especially when hed said they spoke ancient Ivrit (Avi had perked up at that). But some legends turn out to be as plainly reported as de Bonnard intended. The Abbs engravings of these creatures looked exactly like these ragged sticks standing motionless before him, and lived in the same places. In fact, it was Avi whod casually mentioned the legend to a fellow soldier-archeologist who to Avis consternation had taken it all extremely seriously, and so Operation Elisha had got started in the first place. Avi now stood equidistant between Rivka and the tribesmen. He looked back at Rivka, who waved him on, crossly. It was all very well for Rivka to say that she never had suitable words for such things, after all, she was the kind of girl who let her uzi do the talking (and what a girl was that!) but shed never thought to ask Avi if he could do any better. And all Avi knew were chat-up lines. My God! At times like this you really needed to have rehearsed your Neil-Armstrong moment. And if women were challenging and unpredictable creatures, what about these poker-faced statues these aliens? But there was no more time to lose. He could feel Rivkas eyes drilling holes in the back of his skull, so he stepped forwards, looked up at the tallest of the tribesmen, cleared his throat, and, in his best Voice-Of-Israel Ivrit, said: Boker tov, chevrai. Ever hear about Next Year in Jerusalem? He could hear Rivka trying not to laugh an effort that failed catastrophically a moment later, for what happened next took their breath away. As soon as he had uttered, all the tribesmen had, as one, prostrated themselves before Avis feet, mumbling what he swore was a prayer in Ivrit, for all that it sounded so odd and distorted. Jjeshmaii Zraal, these weird, stretched Bedouin seemed to say. Shema Israel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord is One. No doubt about it. They had come to the right place. Surrounded by quivering white masses and unable to move his feet without inadvertently kicking one of the supplicants in the face, Avi turned on his hips to throw Rivka a shape of perplexity, miming like, what the fuck do I do now? But Rivkas expression, a mixture of ferocity, wonder, tenderness and mirth, sliced through Avis heart. Hed seen that face only once before, when Jadis and Jack had returned from Aurignac, after their first scouting trip to Souris Saint-Michel. It was the unfathomable expression in Jadis eyes whenever shed looked at Jack. Lucky old Jack but whew! The intensity of it! He wondered what Jadis would look like in battle-dress and toting a machine gun. No, dont even go there, at least, not in working hours. Jadis was a honey, no doubt about it, but you never crossed her on Le Dig. No way! For sure, she and Rivka might be sisters, and at that thought, he started to laugh, and found himself saying the standard response: Baruch Shem Kvod Malchuto LOlam Vaed His Glorious Majesty Be Praised for Ever. At which utterance the tribesmen rose as one and marched, calmly, and without once looking at either Avi or Rivka, to the waiting helicopter. Avi had much to think about on the long flight home. Strapped onto a bench seat on one side of the helicopter, looking across at the Tibestian tribesmen webbed into the other side unspeaking, unsmiling and, remarkably, uncomplaining his mind was cast back to the long, long conversations hed had at Le Dig with Domingo, ever needling at him about religion, the sinewy twang of Jagger and Richards ever in the background. Religion, he thought. I need it like a hole in the head. Religion, hed said to Domingo, has caused far too much trouble already. True enough, said Domingo, but thats because people really care about it. Even more than sex. Even more than life or death. And why? Avi had been unable to answer. Because, said Domingo, its what marks us out as human beings. It stems from the same impulse as love and is therefore as unreasoning, as passionate. It sustains us, it defines us. Without religion, said Domingo and without the love of God we are no more than beasts. But humanity? He looked across at the Tibestian Prtres du Sable Sand-Priests. They were Jews, of a sort, and their religion had sustained them through many ages of adversity, but were they even human? Okay, he admitted to himself, ruefully, most human beings thought of Jews, most of the time, as a race apart, perhaps not even proper humans, either. But more seriously, he continued, thinking mostly about the conversations hed had with Domingo, perhaps religion transcended and even antedated humanity. Perhaps (now, heres a thought) humanity evolved because of religion. And as Domingo had said, dont forget love. It was part of his own Catholicism, it was true, and (he said) he wouldnt want to push it too much, but as far as he was concerned, hed said (and the big mans eyes seemed to mist over, looking inward) love and faith are inseparable. Avi was not sure whether his conversations with Domingo had had any single, marked effect. For sure, he hadnt dropped everything and become a yeshiva bocher like his grandfather had, but it had made him reassess his own place in the great scheme of things. Avis grandfather had started as a market trader in Tashkent, in central Asia, and after many long years had made it to the status of middleman in the Chinese textile import-export trade. As such he was simply a facet of a tradition that had endured for millennia, part of the great Silk Road, the mercantile artery that had traversed Eurasia since before the dawn of history. And where there was trade, there had always been Jews. But the resurgence of Islam in central Asia had made things hard for the Jews, who had, first in ones and twos, then whole families, made their way to Israel. Perhaps none too soon, thought Avi Tashkent was now just one part of the seemingly unstoppable Khalifa that would, he thought, soon stretch from Indonesia to the Atlantic Ocean. The reason why the Chinooks had been able to fly without hindrance across the Sahara was because the secular governments of Egypt, Libya and Chad were deeply distracted, fighting their own, hopeless wars against the revivified Legions of the Prophet. Avis grandparents settled in Israel, traded Uzbek for Hebrew and started again, and lived in a tiny flat in a scruffy part of Tel Aviv, a part of town where sand poked through the cracks in the neglected road-beds and sidewalks, creating tiny dunes. By dint of working hard and, as his grandfather had emphasized, praying hard they managed to make a modest living and raise a family, which, in time, dispersed. Avis own parents, raised in the new country and unencumbered by the traditions of the old, were uncomfortable about religion, and he dimly remembered the arguments between his father and grandparents when they visited the flat for Shabbat or Pesach. The grandparents had never approved of Avis mother, an outspoken, blonde American feminist Avis father had met while studying at the Technion in Haifa. She may say shes Jewish, they said, but does she keep a kosher home? Shabbat? festivals? No! This presumptious shiksa wants to work, be an engineer, and not be a good Jewish wife and mother, staying home and keeping kashrut. We managed it, said the grandfather, so why cant you? By this time Avis grandfather was spending less and less time working, and more and more at a small synagogue with other Uzbek Jewish emigrs, thinking about old times while studying Talmud, and returning home, head full of religious zeal and pockets empty. Avi had been far too small to remember the arguments, the recriminations and the final break, when his parents abandoned religion altogether, although he did remember moving to the Marxist kibbutz within sight of Mount Carmel, the mountain continually riding high on the horizon of his thoughts. It was at this kibbutz where hed grown up, where hed had lots of fun with the other kids, and where God was only ever mentioned as a profanity. But now well, Army life is mostly a lot of boring hanging around, during which his mind became less and less occupied with girls, and more towards turning over everything Domingo had said to him, about religion, and his heritage as a Jew, and, very slowly, the long-buried thoughts of Friday nights at his grandparents flat came back. The rich, spicy smells of chicken and lamb, rice and couscous as his smiling-eyed grandfather had opened the door, lifting his tiny, squealing grandson in his wiry, brown arms (shabbat shalom, little Avi!) The solemnity of the moment when his grandmother lit the Friday-night candles, how she filled the wine goblets and broke the freshly-baked chollah; how as a four-year-old, he was always asked to say the age-old blessings (he winced inwardly at the thought, but it was a sensation mixed with the pleasure of nostalgia); and how lavishly his grandparents praised his lisping, uncertain efforts. And how this this holiness blended with the cosy family atmosphere. His later experience backfilled these memories, enriching them with the thought that Domingo had been absolutely right. This is how religion must have started, with a human family gathered round a fire in some cave-mouth to thank God (or whatever) for bringing them safely together. Families, thought Avi, were more than a way for a species to propagate they were a uniquely human invention, bound together by gratitude for divine providence. Fuck me, he thought, Im getting old! Ill be joining Likud next. But he reflected on his own expression of religion, his search for God, as it were, which had become directed into the search for the very beginnings of human culture. Which, he supposed, was how hed come into Jacks orbit, and then Jadiss. The chatter of the soldiers and airmen, the thrum and chop of the big helicopters twin engines continued, but Avi was oblivious, thinking once again of Jadis, his doctorate supervisor, and a woman whod gone so much further in his estimation than a barrack-room pin-up. Okay, okay, he thought, backtracking what a sap he was! in mitigation, hed met Jadis for the first time when he was at a very impressionable age, having only just arrived in the maelstrom of Cambridge. And so, of course, shed made an impression. But even afterwards, when hed go to know her well when hed been her pupil, and when theyd worked so hard together at Saint-Rogatien, and had stayed late into the night poring over the findings, systematizing them she seemed to exemplify for him the very essence of what fascinated him about women. It was the contrasts: between softness and steel, between acquiescence and determination, between a girly skittishness that only ever lived for the moment, and depths of humanity and experience winnowed by a drama that seemed to go back to the beginning of time, and in which poor hapless men had arrived relatively late, to be dazed and startled by what they found. Jadis had been playing on his mind more than usual (and no, you schmuck, not because Rivka looked like her) but because of the reports from SSM shed been sending by emails so well encrypted that theyd baffled the IDF censor (something he was very proud of, having installed her encryption programs himself). Theyd started in March, with a brief and breathless report on what theyd first found inside the cave, and continued in length and frequency ever since. Although Jadis never wrote anything other than clear, plain facts, unencumbered by anything superfluous, he could read, between the lines, a steady increase in intensity, excitement and desperation. Theres so much here, the messages seemed to say. So much to tell too much I wish you were back here to look at it can you come? what are we going to make of it all? Help! The news that Jadis had to tell, buried in stray bits, would blow the lid off the world, and suddenly Avi was conscious that of all the human beings (and other people) in this Chinook, only he had any idea of what Jadis was about to unleash. He wondered why his head wasnt glowing like a distress flare, and why nobody seemed to be taking any notice of him whatsoever. The latest email had contained two lengthy attachments. The first was the paper that she intended to send to Nature (Subterranean Palaeolithic settlement at Souris Saint-Michel Rock Shelter, France, by Jadis L. Markham, with Jack, Faye, Primrose, Mathilde, Eric, Balthazar, Domingo and about sixty-five other names he didnt recognize). The second, much longer attachment was the more monographic treatment shed send to Antiquity, pending the deliberations of Natures editors. The emails covering letter, written in her own words, not in the careful, measured understatement of a scientific report, had made his blood run cold. Hed read and read and read it again, until hed known it by heart, even more thoroughly than the standing orders of Operation Elisha. The Nature paper is a stop-gap (shed written): The Antiquity paper has a lot more analysis. After all your help with data analysis you deserve a co-authorship on both papers, if youd like. (Hed agonized over this but decided to decline, as hed never been to the site himself, and there were too many authors on the paper already). For now, just to sum it up (she continued) what weve found goes like this. The city covers about thirty square kilometers. All of it consists of buildings in a pristine state. There are no ruins. We have found no art work, nor any sign of writing, but there are Remillardian artefacts everywhere. At first we did not know what they were for. Then we discovered the cemetery thats what were calling it for now just below the western side of the Great Pyramid (thats what Balthazar called the largest structure. You can see it in Fig. 2 of the Nature paper as Structure SSM-255-9-1). We have not so far been able to do more than a pilot excavation in one corner of this area (this is locality 255-9-2), but so far we have found 86 Neanderthal skeletons. All are complete. Some seem to have been dressed in Remillardian artifacts. Mathilde thinks that each artifact is a small plate in a suit of armor that would have been held together by leather, but we are not sure yet. At any rate, we now know who made the Remillardian artefacts, which is great news. How typical of Jadis, thought Avi, not to have mentioned that this one fact alone the discovery of so many pristine Neanderthal skeletons in one place would be enough to turn anthropology on its head, quite apart from the other findings. These now came thick and fast, wave after wave of startling revelation, until Avi had to take a breath, to pause, to allow him to come to terms with it all. When Jack and Faye went to the top of the Great Pyramid they found it did not taper to a point, as we had first thought, but was flat. On the flat surface, a square platform about five meters on a side, they found several other structures. One contained skeletons of what seem to be anatomically modern humans. Some of these are pristine, but others have been decapitated. A preliminary analysis of cut marks suggests that this mutilation was deliberate. In a nearby structure they found what look like the skulls from the mutilated bodies. The tops of the skulls had been removed. Some of these calvaria have a kind of resinous deposit inside and there are signs of burning. Even in the cramped, hot fuselage of the Chinook, Avis blood chilled every time he replayed this particular detail. Whats really puzzling is a gravitational anomaly that weve picked up right in the center of the pyramids summit platform. Theres something down there, buried within. We havent been able to explore that further yet, so we dont mention it in either of the two papers. The email went on for a while in this vein before concluding: Thanks again for your help, Avi, we couldnt have done it without you. So until we see you I hope it wont be too long everyone on the team sends their love, Faye and Primrose especially, and Jack of course, and Domingo reminds me to tell you that you are in his prayers. Fairbanks sends a bark and a lick, and Horrible would probably send you a dead dormouse if she could (!) With fondest love However, at this point, Avi had always drifted off, because he couldnt help remembering something his father had shown him when he was a teenager on the kibbutz. In his quest for a perfect socialist Zionist utopia, and a world in which there would be no borders and in which Jews would never again be persecuted, Avis father had read up on some of the older ideas of world government. Perhaps inevitably, his reading had drawn him to H. G. Wells. Although Avis father had found Wells idealism rather hard going, he was instantly sucked into the power and drama of his fiction, and it was this that he shared with his son. His father had read him The Magic Shop and from there it was only a short hop to The Country of the Blind and what had the most lasting impact The Time Machine. Avi wasnt sure if Jadis knew any Wells or had caught the parallels. In any case, literary allusion wasnt really her style. But he couldnt help thinking of the subterranean city as a landscape that Wells would have recognized. Not in The Country of the Blind so much, but in the future landscape of England that greeted the Time Traveler, who found the Eloi living witlessly in a sylvan idyll, unaware of the technically advanced Morlocks dragging them down to a horrific, subterranean fate. His father read in this story a parable about revolution and class warfare. But for Avi, now, it had taken on an additional, grisly reality. A gear-change in the helicopter, betrayed by a slight shift in the ceaseless rumble of its engines, indicated that they were about to land at the desert air-base, and de Bonnards Prtres du Sable would take their first steps on what everyone hoped theyd regard as hallowed soil. But even in the hot Negev sunshine, Avi felt his blood run thick and chill. To be continued. Thanks to Karl Ziemelis, Andrew Burt, Vonda McIntyre, Ian Watson, Jack Cohen, Brian Clegg, Bruce Goatly, Jennifer Rohn and all the residents of the LabLit community forums, and the many others who read various drafts of this book, for their continuing encouragement and comments. Adam Rutherford and David Doughan helped me with my Latin, and Tony Kerstein with my Hebrew.     PAGE  PAGE 258 ! > E K L g n p q w    s ~  b d j | ථС؁؁؁خخخخth*h*6B*phh6B*phhWhB*phhZB*phhB*phhh6B*phhuB*phh]?hP6B*phh#:EhP6B*phhWB*phh*B*phhPB*phhfhPB*CJ(aJ(phhfB*ph,q c d x y P Q S T U V W j k s ~ $a$gd5+*gd5+*$a$gdf$a$gd!*$a$gdP(|   . 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