Here Comes the Sun (22 page)

‘You forgot to tell me,' the Dream-Master observed, ‘how we're going to deliver the dreams without roundsmen. '

‘Did I?' Jane smiled. ‘By fax, of course. Direct instantaneous transmission, brainwave to brainwave. And all during off-peak hours, too. It'll be cheaper, as well as quicker and more confidential.'

‘I see.' The Dream-Master leaned forward, with the air of someone playing an ace. ‘And what about prodigies?' he demanded sharply.

‘Sorry?'

‘Prodigies,' the Dream-Master repeated. ‘The skies raining blood. Spectral armies fighting in the clouds. Plagues of frogs.'

Jane shook her head. ‘They'll just have to go,' she said. ‘I mean, as information technology, frogs have had their day. So have plagues of anything.' She paused to examine a cracked fingernail, and then continued: ‘You've got to meet the changing needs of the consumer. These days, if
you get a plague of anything, people aren't going to go running to the nearest soothsayer. They'll be too busy organising emergency relief rock concerts.' She made an expressive gesture with her hands. ‘It all comes down,' she said, ‘to cost-effectiveness. Time and motion, if you like. Time, as in not wasting; motion, as in not just going through.'

‘Really.'

‘Anyway,' Jane said, standing up. ‘It'll all be in my report. I expect you'll get your copy in due course.'

The Dream-Master stood up too, and suddenly banged the desk in front of him. ‘And just who do you think you are?' he said.

‘Easy.' Jane gave him a long, hard look. ‘I'm a mortal. Or, if you like to look at it another way, I'm one of the poor bloody customers. The end users. The unfortunate souls who have to use the services all your blasted Departments actually provide. The punters, in other words.'

The Dream-Master grinned. ‘Exactly,' he said.

Jane sat down again, put her head slightly on one side and raised an inquisitive eyebrow. ‘Please go on,' she said.

‘Think about it,' replied the Dream-Master. ‘You've got mortals—' He picked up the stapler from his desk-top, moved it six inches to the left and put it down again firmly. ‘And on the other hand, you've got us.' He lifted his coffee mug and placed it carefully on top of a pile of petty cash vouchers. ‘Understand?'

‘No.'

‘Then I'll explain. Mortals have it easy. They're born, they lounge about for a few years, whingeing, they die. We have to work here. Mortals—' He pushed the stapler off the desk into the wastepaper basket. ‘But we're different. We're for keeps.' He picked up the coffee mug, which a sheet of paper had fastened itself to the bottom
of, and then put it down again. ‘You want to grasp the fact if you're going to work here.'

‘Another thing that's wrong with this Department,' Jane observed after a long pause, ‘is the disgraceful waste of perfectly serviceable office equipment.' She picked the stapler out of the bin, dusted it off and put it back on the desk. ‘I take it you're not really sympathetic to my proposals?'

‘You could say that.'

Jane sighed. ‘And you don't think that anybody else will be, either?'

The Dream-Master nodded. ‘Let me give you a word of advice,' he said. ‘Try and get it into your head that improvements are not necessarily good. In fact,' he added forcefully, ‘usually quite the reverse. Remember that and you won't go far wrong.'

‘Thank you.'

‘I haven't finished yet,' the Dream-Master continued. ‘Once upon a time, long ago, there was another bright spark, just like you. Originally worked in this Department, oddly enough. Thought everything around here needed a good shake-up, reckoned we were all far too set in our ways and a thorough pruning would do us all the world of good. Clear out the vested interests and the restrictive practices, start from scratch. That sort of thing.' He sighed. ‘It all sounded so good that we tried it, just for a while. Biggest mistake we ever made.'

‘Really.'

‘Oh yes.' the Dream-Master lolled back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. ‘The idea was to create a whole new level of staff to take over the running of the world, look after it, repair it, make sure everything was kept clean and tidy and in good running order. And that's what we did. We recruited them, trained them, and handed over the whole shooting-match. They were called,'
the Dream-Master added, almost as an afterthought, ‘the human race.'

‘Um.'

‘Yes,' snapped the Dream-Master, ‘um. Bloody silly idea, wasn't it? And you know what happened to the bright spark who suggested it?'

Feeling like the poor fool who's lent her watch to the conjuror, Jane shook her head. ‘No,' she said. ‘Do tell me.'

A grin like a septic dawn spread over the Dream-Master's face. ‘He got posted,' he said.

‘Posted?'

The Dream-Master picked up the Fragile stamp, pressed it on an ink-pad and brought it down on the desk-top so hard that it snapped in two.

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘Posted.'

Jane considered this for a moment. ‘Wasn't that rather difficult?' she enquired.

‘Nah,' replied the Dream-Master. ‘Once we'd got his head through the flap, the rest just sort of followed.'

 

 

 

 

‘S
od,' said Bjorn. He twisted uncomfortably round, and tried to see what had grabbed hold of his leg. The part of him that still occasionally harboured optimism hoped that it would turn out to be a smiling blonde air hostess.

It was, in fact, a man-trap. Close, but no cigar.

A fairly humane man-trap, it has to be said. The jaws weren't lined with inch-long steel spikes; in fact, they were padded with foam rubber and covered with chamois leather. There was also a notice, probably insisted upon by the Administration's hyper-paranoid legal advisers, engraved in tiny letters on the trap's upper mandible. It read:

Bjorn grunted and tried prising the jaws apart with what was left of his axe. There was, of course, a
man-trap-opening attachment on his Zambian Army Knife, but he'd broken that a day or so ago trying to cut into a pat of hot butter.

Overhead, the beams of many searchlights were producing a complex and geometrically satisfying display which, combined with the blaring of sirens and the thundering noise of many speakers playing back tapes of barking Rottweilers, added up to one of the most original
son et lumière
performances in cosmic history.You had to be there, of course.

Bjorn was, and wished he wasn't. The axe handle, seasoned hickory, groaned accusingly and splintered without shifting the jaws of the trap at all. The torches waving about in the distance wouldn't be in the distance for very much longer. What to do?

‘Gotcha!'

A light shined straight into Bjorn's eyes, and he automatically shied away from it, raising his hands to shield his eyes. He had enough problems as it was, he felt, without having great big blobs of yellow custard cluttering up his retina for the next five minutes.

‘All right, chummy,' said a voice from behind the light source. ‘Throw down the gun. Easy, now.'

Bjorn sighed. It was going to be one of those nights, he could tell.

‘How?' he said. ‘I haven't got one.'

The torch-beam didn't blink exactly; but there was a sort of sympathetic modulation in the flow of photons as its owner registered surprise.

‘But you're a dangerous intruder,' he said.

‘Yeah,' Bjorn replied sourly. ‘Looks like it, doesn't it?'

The torch came closer. ‘So what are you armed with, then?' the trooper enquired curiously. ‘Bombs? Gas grenades? Flamethrower?'

‘No.'

The torch-beam wavered again. ‘Don't believe you,' said the voice behind it. ‘Come on, you've got to be armed with
something
. Nobody breaks into a high-security compound without something.'

Bjorn considered. ‘I've got a bust penknife, a broken axe-handle and a pair of socks,' he said. ‘Now, could you see your way to getting this fucking thing off my leg before it stops my circulation completely, please?'

The trooper hosed Bjorn down with the torch from head to foot, shrugged, and came closer. When he was within arm's length, Bjorn reached out, pulled his feet out from under him, and knocked him silly with the rim of his own steel helmet. Then he grabbed the man's rifle, and used its barrel to force apart the jaws of the trap. It wasn't easy even then; by the time he'd finished, he was holding the only rifle in the cosmos capable of shooting directly behind the person firing it. Essential equipment for self-defence in the corporate jungle.

Pausing only to stuff the socks in the recumbent trooper's mouth and steal his packed lunch, Bjorn jumped to his feet, winced, and ran off into the darkness. Behind him, very close now, he could hear the blood-curdling baying of quadrophonic Dolby hounds, with the occasional crackle.

Something materialised in front of his face and he ran straight into it. If the way he rebounded like a tennis ball and sat down with sparks coming out of his ears was anything to go by, it was quite possibly an electric fence. He forced himself to stop vibrating, picked a handful of spent volts out of his eyebrows and blinked four times. This was heavy stuff. Whatever it was they'd got in that shed, they didn't want anybody else to know about it. Which was odd, considering that it was hoisted up into the sky every morning where everybody on earth could see it.

‘Psst.'

Bjorn lifted his head, spat out an amp and peered into the darkness.

‘Over here.'

‘Why?' Bjorn enquired.

The darkness hesitated. ‘Look,' it hissed, ‘do you want to be rescued or not?'

‘Depends,' Bjorn replied. ‘Who are you?'

‘Dop sent me.'

‘Oh.' Suddenly, a great light dawned in Bjorn's mind; figuratively speaking, of course. Otherwise, light would have seeped out through his ears and given the troopers something to shoot at. ‘Oh, right. Coming.'

‘This way,' hissed the voice. From the way it expressed itself exclusively in whispers and hisses, it was either the tutelary spirit of a cracked gas-main or a chatty snake. But if it was a friend of Dop's, that didn't really matter much.

Dop was the sort of bloke you could really trust.

 

From where Jane was sitting, wearing the great halo of noise and vibration like a hair-dryer, it looked like a giant millipede in dayglo socks. The more you looked at it, the less you actually made out. Everything just seemed to melt into a continuum of twinkling red and white light.

She switched on the intercom. ‘It's very pretty,' she said. ‘What is it?'

The pilot's laugh bounced around inside her headphones. ‘It's the main stretch of the Renaissance bypass, between junctions 16 and 17,' he replied. ‘Want to take a closer look?'

‘Okay,' Jane replied, and the helicopter slowly lost height. As they closed in, the continuum became marginally less continuous. It looked less like a fibre-optic cable with indigestion and more like the pattern of millions of
tiny dots of light, each close behind the other, each moving so slowly that you had to stare quite hard to perceive any motion at all.

‘Fine,' Jane said. ‘It's a traffic jam.'

‘Almost,' the pilot replied, ‘but not quite. Going in closer.'

Lower still, and the millions of tiny dots broke up into vague but distinct shapes, like a newspaper photograph under an extremely powerful magnifying glass. They reminded Jane of something - cars, to be precise, and lorries and motorcycles and vans - but it was only a similarity. They were palpably vehicles, but there the resemblance ended.

‘What are those things?' Jane asked.

‘Lives,' the pilot replied. ‘No, that's not strictly true. If we're going to be all technical and correct, they're presents.'

‘Presents?'

‘That's right. And before you ask where's the wrapping paper and cards, I mean presents as opposed to pasts and futures. Okay?'

Jane frowned. ‘I don't think I . . .'

‘Well you wouldn't, would you?' the pilot replied. ‘I mean, you're down there somewhere. Part of you is, anyway.'

‘Um.'

So low now that each individual thing was plainly distinguishable from the mass, even if it didn't look at all like anything Jane had ever seen before. Try and imagine one of those old Heinkel bubble-cars that's suddenly come to life, and you may be able to creep into the corner of the same frame of reference.

‘See the sign up ahead?' said the pilot. ‘There's a clue for you.'

Jane peered forward. Despite the pitch darkness above
her, she could see reasonably well at ground level, thanks to the lights of the things. There was indeed a sign; very much like a road-sign.

‘I can't quite . . .'

And then she could. It was an awkward moment. It read:

At Jane's request, the helicopter climbed higher, until the continuum reappeared and the individual lights merged once more with the general flow.

‘That's one of the good bits,' the pilot was saying. ‘It's the bit they show in the reports. Further on, where the whole bloody thing's falling to pieces, it's not so pretty.'