Meeting at Infinity
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain's oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language's finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
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On the stroke of twelve o’clock noon-for-doom of this day and no other: begins destiny. Begins death. Tick away time—heartbeat, clocktick, belltoll.
THIS WAY OUT.
These are the words inscribed on the arrow of time like a highway sign. They are not in any known language.
Now the hands of the clocks lie over one another like lovers. Now they are parallel. Yet they have always pointed the same way—the way out. They meet at noon. They meet at infinity.
NOW.
Under this sun a known minimum of a hundred thousand planets whirl and their turning drives the clock of human lives like a gear-train.
At random, on the face of this chaotic clock: Fearmaster of the people called G’kek speaks with those who came last year and gave gifts. The fear he is held to have mastered shakes his voice as a wild beast shakes its unwilling prey.
At random, again: the hunger is seen to burn in the eyes of those who have no purpose now except to stand and wait. If this was real hunger that could devour, they would be eating men.
And once more at random: lava bursts from the coughing throat of a volcano. The phlegm of this orogenous fever is hard pumice in chunks of one to fifteen tons. The sweat is a red-hot river moving at the speed of a running man.
FOR EVERY EVIL UNDER THE SUN
THERE IS A REMEDY OR THERE’S NONE
IF THERE IS ONE TRY AND FIND IT
IF THERE ISN’T NEVER MIND IT
On a hundred thousand worlds there is room for many times a hundred thousand evils. Men have found remedies for rather few.
Here is an evil the remedy for which is not known. Like the erupting roar of vulcanism it shakes the earth. Like hunger it obsesses men. Like the gear-train of the worlds it drives them blindly on.
It begins!
Clockhands unite with the heartfelt insincerity of strangers greeting; they are bars of light on a ground-glass screen set in the wall of the thousand-storey tower called The Market. That tower grows treetrunk-wise from roots in history and technology. Like the time-stick which was the first attempt at a clock it casts a shadow—over a hundred thousand planets circling Sol.
Its roots are thick and succulent. They grow in the best of all soils: fed by death and decay. Wormlike, they have penetrated the hundred million corpses of the White Death.
But the oldest of all the roots, thick with more corpses than the rest together, is as fat and long as humanity’s worldline: the instinct to possess more than another.
Tacket’s Expeditions went out drunk with the exhilaration of discovery and fell one after another into traps. Those that came after, circumspectly and in armour, were the merchant venturers who turned blazed trails into highways. As ever. Had there been refrigerators at the court of Castile, Columbus might not have sailed. The wind that wafted explorers around the world stank of putrefying meat, and they sought spices to disguise its taste.
Markets are the index of their society. Sometimes a society becomes a market. Then the day of the merchant venturer is upon him. He becomes the hero, one hand full of treasure—but the other clasping a sword.
The evil that begins is not the evil of greed. Long ago men decided that was an evil of the second class, one without a remedy.
It has been less than a generation since the White Death. Half the population of the world on which The Market stands remembers its course, like a scythe through grass. Like a house subsiding, the structure of existence has shifted and found new purchase. The subsidence has caused cracks. Most of them have not been filled in. Cold winds breathe inclemently on the skin. Men rail against fate. They curse—among others—Tacket.
But it was not Tacket’s fault. The Market is rooted deep, deep.
The clockhands which are bars of light on a ground-glass screen, set in the wall of the white tower, are diverging again. The decision is made; the die is cast. There has been no pause, hesitation, interruption. Nothing has stopped, not for a single instant.
The Market looms above a city of twelve million inhabitants. Not one of those inhabitants knows of the climax—not even those who, passing and repassing in the streets by the base of the tower, looked up and saw noon-for-doom blaze one hundred-foot clockhand bar vertical on the screen.
Among those who do not know, cite: Kingsley Athlone, vice-sheriff of the Eastern Quarter and self-appointed hunter of a hated man; Manuel Clostrides, High Bailiff of the entire Market complex; Ahmed Lyken, merchant venturer; Luis Nevada, well-ranked but alone and therefore frightened; Curdy Wence, yonderboy; Jockey Hole, rankless, notorious, unaware that he is a most important man …
Cite the population of all the worlds the shadow of The Market falls upon.
There is no stopping it now.
N
ORTH AND SOUTH
, the avenues were called after Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama; east and west, the honors went to Magellan and Columbus. Like the lines drawn for tick-tack-toe, the four avenues defined the basal area of the white tower called The Market.
The avenues seethed with people. Maybe there were fifty thousand people within a quarter-mile of the tower. A few of them moved with purpose. The others just moved.
The avenues each had four central traffic lanes, but they carried very little traffic—use of the roadway, here in the city center, was strictly regulated and something of a privilege. Therefore the big black and white police cruiser was not causing an obstruction as it crawled very slowly past the main entrance of The Market.
In the rear seat sat Kingsley Athlone. He was a solid man approaching middle age, muscular, with the beginnings of a paunch which he carried with dignity. His dark grey uniform fitted him perfectly—fitted not only his body, but the expression on his face and the tone of his voice. As the cruiser passed the entrance of The Market for the second time, he said, “Benny!”
The driver glanced around. He was bigger than Athlone; he had a square red face in which a good-natured mildness fought a perpetual battle with a look of bewilderment. He said, “Yes, boss?”
“See him?” Athlone grunted.
Benny’s eyes switched along the sidewalk, and he slowed the cruiser to less than walking pace. “I see him, Boss.”
“That’s
what a killer looks like, Benny,” said Athlone in a scratchy voice. “Remember that, hey? He doesn’t look like a wild animal, or a savage. He doesn’t have to look like a dreg. He could be anybody, Benny. He looks like you. He looks like me.”
With the inevitability of reflex, Benny objected. He said, “I don’t think he looks like you, boss.”
Athlone scowled. His voice grew almost sweet. “Benny,” he said, “you’re not much better than a moron. Do you know that? One day soon, if you aren’t careful, one bright sunshiny day like this one, you’re going to find yourself back among the dregs.”
Benny didn’t say anything. He knew better. He just pulled the cruiser over against the sidewalk.
Athlone went on watching the killer. Half a frown drew his thick eyebrows together; he was suddenly angry with himself. The killer had status, and it bloomed like a fireball among the streams of men and women thronging the Avenue Columbus. He didn’t need a bodyguard, imported tailoring or a luminous sign above his head to differentiate him from the ruck and rabble. The proof lay in the fact that Benny had spotted him.
And that was what Athlone had meant when he said the killer looked like himself. He had meant that, and hadn’t meant to say it. If he had let the words out within hearing of anyone but Benny, he would have had to take steps to ensure they were never repeated. Fortunately, he was fairly certain that Benny was too blockheaded to read into the phrase the jealousy it betokened.
Nonetheless, the time would surely come—and all the sooner for that slip of the tongue—when Benny would have to go back into the faceless world of the dregs.
Meantime, there was the killer trying to lose himself in
the crowd. He’d been trying for about two months. He had put on a brown coverup like a hundred other brown coverups; he had gotten himself an automat barberclip like a thousand other barberclips. He could
not
imitate the rushing gait of those who moved only to delude themselves that they were busy. He could
not
imitate the purposeless lounging of those deluding themselves that idleness was a worthwhile luxury.
And he could not make the hunger—that hunger which would devour men—burn in his eyes.
Benny had seen (but Benny was probably too stupid to evaluate) such a hunger burning in Athlone’s eyes.
At a carefully judged distance from the entrance of The Market, there was a group of three cultists with a portable altar. One of them was limping, one had his right arm in a sling, one kept shaking his head due to an uncontrollable tic. A fluorescent light burned on the altar, casting a greenish glow over the piles of tracts with titles like
No Truck with Tacket!
and
Whose Fault was the White Death?
An effigy of Tacket, two feet high with nails driven into its face, loomed above the lamp. The cultist who limped was shrieking imprecations in a hysterically high voice, pausing occasionally to wipe his face and pant for breath.
There was a small island of empty pavement around the group; those who were moving moved a little more quickly as they passed the altar, and those who were lounging moved discreetly a few yards further along. Although the cults were losing their influence, they still were able to make a lot of people feel guilty.
The crowd also created a small island of vacancy around Luis Nevada, and it frightened him because he could not blend away from sight as he intended to. Here on the streets fronting The Market he was marked as clearly as though a halo shone sun-bright over him, as though he were a man
with no shadow, as though a hundred people who knew his secret moved among the crowd uttering whispered warnings. There were always a few curious eyes turned on him. There were always men and women who stepped out of his path automatically, giving way to a nonexistent bodyguard. Why? Had Athlone somehow contrived to …
No use. No use. He was a man with a face among the men without faces.
He shot a glance up at the clock on the wall of The Market, and felt his palms sticky with sweat. Noon had come and gone, and he was still in the nightmare. He had lived among dregs for over two months now; he had thought he could come out and be inconspicuous. Instead, he was signposted for what he was, and no matter how good his nerves were, a man could take just so much of this vague, fascinated staring.
Maybe he’d have done better to stick to his original intention, instead of betting so heavily on Erlking’s word—
But in the instant when the idea crossed his mind, he knew he couldn’t have endured that. Essentially the choice was between taking Erlking’s confused, muddy promise—and committing suicide.
When was that bastard Lyken going to come
out?
One thousand stories above the city, Ahmed Lyken sat in a high-backed chair, behind which his six giant bodyguards moved scarcely a muscle, and read his personal doom in the glitter of hard black-irised eyes. He had known it was coming, of course. In ancient times, when an officer was on trial by court-martial, they would lay his sword on the table before calling him back to hear his sentence; if the point was towards him, he had been found guilty, if the hilt was towards him, he had been acquitted.
One could not imagine Manuel Clostrides—high bailiff of The Market—wielding a sword, but nonetheless he had given a similar message.
Once more his eyes roamed the room, noting items that Clostrides had lately been given as presents and had found worthy of display in his huge office. One tall copper vase with strange bronze and green blossoms in it, each flower as big as a man’s head. One ebony statue of a woman giving birth, life-size. One natural rock weighing two hundred pounds: white quartz veined with the raw glitter of gold.
Customarily, before receiving Ahmed Lyken, Clostrides would have placed on display a gift received from him. But today there was nothing.
Lyken’s gaze moved back, unhurriedly, to Clostrides’ round, pale face under its thatch of black hair, to his plain, black clothes relieved only by jeweled status badges on the shoulders, to the great chair in which he sat like a judge. It would have been preferable, Lyken thought, if that pale face had worn a smirk, a sneer, some expression indicating that the man derived personal satisfaction from ruining an individual of power and influence.
He found his voice in the distant caverns of himself and shaped a reply to what Clostrides had said.
“You’re threatening to repossess my franchise. Is that what it comes down to?”
Clostrides leaned back in his chair and shook his head a very little.
“Not threatening, Ahmed.
Intending
to.”
“Because of a fungus growing on a consignment of grain?”
“Because of what that fungus might mean to the public at large. Half the world remembers the White Death, Ahmed.”
“I say to you”—Lyken’s voice was frigid, like icebergs breaking in a gray winter sea—“that this is a trumped-up excuse. That it’s a fiction contrived to excuse robbery.”
Clostrides did not react to the accusation. “Sometimes the public believes a fiction more readily than the truth. If I were alone, Ahmed, I might stretch the regulations—and I’d do so
willingly. But we aren’t in a position to dictate to the world, regardless of what people think.”
“We dictate to hundreds of worlds!”
“We aren’t responsible to the Tacket worlds. We are responsible to our own.”
It was finished, of course; nonetheless, for the sake of appearances, Lyken had to say more. If he was to gain the maximum advantage from the precautions he had taken against this event, he would have to be misleading until the very last moment.
Gruffly, he said, “Go on.”
Clostrides shrugged. “There’s hardly anything else to say. The Directors have met and sealed the order. Your assigned Tacket numbers return to the public domain at midnight. Will you yield to your peers?”
“Of course not.”
“Then we shall have to repossess them by force.”
“You can try, if you like.” Lyken watched the effect of his words on Clostrides. Had they been perhaps a trifle too confident? In case they had, he added swiftly, “Perhaps I would yield the franchise for another of comparable value.”
“Out of the question,” said Clostrides. “The harm that might well have arisen from the affair of this fungus made the Directors consider that idea unfavorably.”
“Then you’re lying,” said Lyken without heat. “I’ll concede that some of our Directors are so timid they could imagine a new White Death in a grain blight! But were you speaking truth, all that would matter would be the closure of my present franchise. That’s not what you want. Who’s after my franchise? Yorell? Or Klein? Or Lanchery? Who?”
“The consensus was,” murmured Clostrides, “that letting in that fungus was the act of another Tacket.”
Somewhere deep within Lyken was a childhood memory, raw and tender, that Tacket’s name could touch. He had
jerked up from his chair and taken a stride forward before he recovered his self-control.
“Who said that vile thing?” he forced between clenched teeth.
“It was said—and that’s enough!” All of a sudden Clostrides’s voice rang like a hammer striking iron. Muscles tensed unexpectedly along his bare forearms. He looked, now, like what he was: a man who spoke as first among equals with the greatest of his age. He too stood up, but smoothly.
“Go!” he said finally, and deliberately turned his back.
Lyken hesitated fractionally. He had been going to allow himself a foretaste of revenge; he had been going to give a glimpse of the hidden power in which he had put his trust. Now savage anger wiped away the petty desire. Let the bastards find out the hard way!
He spun on his heel and stormed from the office; with machine-like precision his giant bodyguards followed.