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He rose from the cradle, his hand sliding surreptitiously under the bar at the back as he said, ‘Enough for now.’ He crossed the floor and starting climbing back up the ladder. ‘You think about what I’ve said, my young beau,’ he said as his head disappeared. ‘You’ll forgive me for shutting the hatch behind myself. It’s not that I don’t trust you, as I’m certain you realise. But I sleep better with a certain degree of security.’

The hatch shut and Tighe was left alone with his pashe.

Tighe waited a moment and then stood up and went over to the cradle. Groping under the bar at the rear, he found a tiny scratch that tingled a little as he touched it. Was it a switch? He lowered himself gingerly into the cradle, but was not ejected from it.

He felt a glow seep through his face; joy. In this one small thing he had outwitted the Wizard, he had mastered one of the Wizard’s tricks. If in this, then why not in other things too? Perhaps he could learn to fly the device himself – unlock the controls, to use the Wizard’s phrase. Perhaps he could find some way of sealing the Wizard upstairs and then take over the device and fly it back to his village. Take his pashe back home. Surely in the familiar surroundings of the village she would return to her full senses. He looked over to her. She sat, perfectly still, staring into space. ‘Pashe,’ he said, his success with the cradle emboldening him. He didn’t care if the Wizard was eavesdropping: let him eavesdrop! ‘Pashe, I shall take you home. I shall, I promise.’

His pashe said nothing; stared ahead.

Tighe turned all his attention to the screens and the controls. The images on all four screens were now of white rock and bulging shapes. Tighe ran his finger round the rim of the control, looking for a switch such as the one
that had operated the cradle. He pulled a fingertip all the way along the underside of the panel and then repeated the manoeuvre, but found nothing. Finally he started fiddling randomly with the knobs, hoping that by chance he might strike some constellation of positions that unlocked the panel. But nothing happened.

Eventually he gave up and searched instead through the cupboards underneath the panel. There were some circuitboards, apparently discarded, and plastic-laminated sheets of paper. Tighe brought each one out, but it was impossible to decipher the diagrams on them. Then there were various plastic nobbles and stumps, and a long fluffy piece of thread. Tighe experimented with the idea of using it to garrotte the Wizard – to threaten to strangle him, perhaps, force him to fly back to the village – but when Tighe gave it a sharp tug it snapped. Finally, in the far corner of the cupboard, his groping fingers lighted upon what it took to be a piece of fluff. His heart pulsed with excitement. Drawing it out, he could see that it was one of the dandelion-puff devices with which the Wizard had killed the Manmonger. He held it between his fingers, trembling with excitement. He could use it as a weapon against the Wizard! Perhaps hurt him, or even kill him. Threaten him with it, maybe. Excitedly he held one of the tiny strands so that the miniature kernel dangled, and let go. It drifted slowly to the floor. Disappointed, Tighe picked it up again and peered closely at the centre. Was there a switch somewhere about the device?

There was a loud honk from the control panel.

Startled, guilty, Tighe stuffed the dandelion puff into a pocket, and quickly replaced all the rubbish he had pulled out of the cupboard. The floor wobbled and jerked and the control panel honked again. Tighe looked up, alarmed. The picture on the screens had settled: the image was almost pure white.

He could hear the hatch opening behind him, and he pulled the doors of the cupboard shut and scuttled over the floor to where his pashe sat.

The Wizard descended ponderously, grumbling. ‘That wasn’t even an hour. It’s hardly any use sleeping at all if I only get an hour.’ He marched over to his cradle and spoke directly to Tighe – to distract him, Tighe could now see – as his leather fingers fumbled for the switch on the back. ‘At least you’ll not grow bored, I hope, with all this noise and excitement.’ He stopped, stiffened, and turned slowly to face Tighe directly. His brown face was expressionless, impossible to read. ‘You are a
quicker
learner than I have given you credit for, my elegant-fingered handsome one. You have discovered the trick with the cradle, I see.’

Tighe looked up at him. ‘Wizard,’ he said. ‘I have.’

‘I’m impressed. It pleases me, to be honest. Your brain is a valuable thing and I’m glad to see that it’s not a dull one. How many other tricks have you
picked up I wonder? But there’s no point in dwelling on your triumphs, or you’ll grow vain. Do you know what that alarm signifies?’

‘No, Wizard.’

‘It is my Lover. Or one of them.’

‘Your Lover, Wizard.’

‘He is not far. I have a proximity alarm. I don’t believe he knows about it or he would have done something to cancel it. To disguise himself, perhaps. But it is sounding now, so he is somewhere within fifty kilometres.’ The Wizard settled himself easily into his cradle. ‘Still, he is not within visual range, so that’s something.’

‘Is he hunting you, Wizard?’

‘He hunt me? Or I him? Well, no, no, to be truthful. He hunts me more than I hunt him. For the time being, at any rate. At least until the harvest in your sweetly shaped head can be drawn out!’ The Wizard chuckled to himself, a dry, scraping sound. ‘Then perhaps the boot will be on the – on the – my!’ The Wizard sat back. ‘We’re almost there!’

‘Almost there?’

‘At the East Pole, my lovely.’

‘Why is your Lover hunting you, Wizard?’

The Wizard scratched at his ear with a sudden and intimidating ferocity. ‘I don’t often get
itches
,’ he said, ‘in this particular skin. But when I do get them, they take some serious scratching, let me tell you. No, no, I’m not ignoring your question. It’s a good question. I ask it myself sometimes, but with a slightly different inflection. Shall we say that I am too
individual
for his purposes?’

Tighe put his arm around his pashe’s unresisting neck.

‘You could ask him, were you ever to meet him,’ said the Wizard. ‘And I can tell you what he would say. He would say that he made me and therefore I am his. Can you believe it?’

‘Slavery?’ offered Tighe, thinking of the Manmonger.

‘Oh, more intense, more intense. It is true, I suppose, that he made me; but he was in his turn made. These squabbles amongst us are misdirected. We are all Lovers, after all. He and I. I and you.’ The dark face turned to Tighe. ‘We are the same, after all.’

‘Wizard,’ said Tighe, trying hard to control his breathing. ‘Where is my pahe? You must have picked him up when you picked up my pashe, after all.’

‘I do not believe’, said the Wizard, ‘that my Lover will find us just yet. And in half an hour I can position myself over the Pole and we’ll be safer than we were.’

He touched one of the knobs and the craft dropped and turned slowly. For several minutes he stared intently at the screens, shifting the angle and
position of the craft. The whole thing wobbled and jerked; Tighe began to feel sick. Suddenly out of nowhere, his pashe spoke, loudly, ‘Coming to get us, wake up, wake up!’ Her eyes were wide. But when Tighe hugged her and spoke soothing words to her, she calmed down and settled back into her usual placid staring.

‘What will this Lover of yours do, Mister Wizard,’ asked Tighe, ‘should he ever catch up with us?’

‘Oh, he’d be cross,’ said the Wizard. ‘There’s no doubt of that. Cross with me. He’d take you, and probably extract things now without waiting, which – in my opinion – would be a mistake. There are large stakes being played for here! The whole world! He’d be cross and he’d take it out on us. For instance, I don’t believe he’d have a use for your pashe, there – that woman there you’re so fond of. There’s nothing in her to interest him now; he’d discard her. So you should be grateful to me. My Lover and I, we are identical in so many ways; but yet I am superior to him. Kinder, stronger, better. I keep your pashe alive, you notice. You must be grateful; you must be loyal.’

With a sudden, painful intensity of realisation Tighe knew then that the Wizard had killed his pahe. Whatever mysterious use he had for Tighe, or for pashe, had not been the case with pahe and he had disposed of him. Tighe clamped his teeth into the flesh of his inside lower lip to prevent himself from calling out with the shock of the revelation.

The craft slewed and slowly turned. Tighe felt queer inside; sick, lighter. There was a hazy dislocation in his sense of balance, as if he were about to fall over even though he remained upright. He put his hand out to steady himself. Nauseous.

Things seemed to be slowing down. The patterns made by the Wizard’s cloak as he fiddled with the controls fell limply, in slow motion. Everything swam. ‘What’s happening?’ Tighe asked, his own voice warbling with fear.

‘Nearly there,’ said the Wizard. ‘A little more by way of adjustment.’

There was a bang and the whole room shuddered.

‘Fine!’ barked the Wizard, apparently pleased with himself. ‘That’s good. It’s always exciting to come to the East Pole. I always feel so exclusive – so few people have been here.’

He leapt from the cradle and walked over to the stairs. With the ghastly distortions of dream logic he leant back as he approached the stairway, until standing by the stair he was at an angle of twenty degrees. Yet he didn’t fall over. ‘Shall we go out, my sweet one?’ he called over, from this impossible posture.

Tighe stared at him.

‘Come along. We’ll leave your pashe here I think; she’s in no state for explorations. But I have some things stored in the snow out here and I think you’ll be interested. Stand up, boy!’

In a daze, Tighe got to his feet. As he was rising he got the sudden, horrible sense that he was going to fall forwards; he lurched backwards and banged the back of his head against the wall behind him. The Wizard chuckled in his dry way.

‘Take your first steps. This is a strange, rotational gravity situation. The pull shifts from footstep to footstep, but you’ll get used to it. Come upstairs.’

Still leaning back the Wizard faced the stairway and pulled himself upright on it, climbing more slowly than usual up the hatch. Tighe rubbed his eyes. The whole thing was too bizarre. He took one step and his stomach heaved. Another step and the whole room around him seemed to distort, the walls looming in drunkenly. By the time he had walked over to the stairway everything was out of alignment; the stair that had seemed straight from where he had been sitting with his pashe now leant away at an angle of twenty degrees, and curved towards the top. He reached out to grab a rung and missed, clutching at air. A second attempt and he still couldn’t co-ordinate. The third time he held his hands in front of him and waved them upwards until they connected with the metal of the ladder rung. It all seemed so unreal that Tighe half expected his hands to go right through the material of the ladder.

‘At the Poles,’ the Wizard was saying, chattering on with more of his incomprehensible explanations, ‘at the Poles gravity loops round in a circle with a radius of a few kilometres, or less – you
feel
the arc of gravity here, where in the middle of the world it feels like a straight line. It’s a curious sensation, I think you’ll agree.’

Pulling himself on to the ladder felt like hanging upside down, and climbing up was extremely hard. He wasn’t helped by the fact that, every now and again, the craft would lurch a little, as if unsettled.

He made his way up into the upper room. From somewhere (Tighe couldn’t work out exactly where) the Wizard had brought out a body suit. ‘You’ll need to put this on,’ he said. ‘It’s fierce cold out there. Cold enough to freeze you solid.’

Tighe inspected the suit. It was made of a black material and the inside was as soft as finest goat’s fur. He clambered into it, relishing the softness against his skin. It was too large for him, but when he was inside it the Wizard pulled some ruckling threads, which dangled from the belly of the costume, and its legs, arms and torso closed around him.

‘Comfortable?’

‘Very,’ said Tighe, as the Wizard fitted a hood about his head.

‘You’ll need these as well,’ the Wizard said, handing him two gloves. ‘The gloves and the boots have special threads in them, do you see? They’ll enable you to cling to the side of the wall when it’s sheer. Do you see? Do you see?’

Tighe nodded. The hook was shrinking around his head to press tight against his scalp. He felt the ring around his face where the fabric framed his eyes and mouth. ‘What about you, Master Wizard?’ he asked, in Imperial. The Wizard took his arm and stood them both in the middle of the room.

‘Me?’

‘Will you not wear warm clothes, Master?’ The Wizard was dressed in the loosest black shift and leggings. His brown leather skin was bare from halfway down his forearms; his neck and head and his feet were equally naked. Tighe watched and noticed the Wizard touch the floor with one toe; a delicate, ballet-like gesture.

‘No no,’ said the Wizard, as they started to rise. ‘No need, no need. I told you, there’s a microfilament mesh that runs underneath this leather skin of mine. It can heat up to keep me warm, or chill to keep me cool. Necessary,’ he confided, leaning closer to Tighe. ‘There are no sweat glands in this particular skin, you see.’

As they rose, Tighe felt himself overbalancing, and tried to lean forwards, but the Wizard grabbed him. ‘Illusory,’ he said. ‘You’ll fall if you lean too far.’

The roof-hole opened, and a great hissing sound poured in. Tighe looked up, nervous. The sky was full of torn-up fragments of white, buzzing and whirling back and forth.

Then they were on the roof of the Wizard’s craft.

All around was a blurring of blue and white. It was bitterly cold, just as the Wizard had foretold; colder than Tighe had ever encountered before. Tighe’s face juddered with the chill; he felt his sinuses hum. In front of him was what seemed to be an impossibly brief, curving section of wall, with nothing above or below. It was pure white.

A flurry of the white fragments thickened until the whole air was full of them. Then, as abruptly, it cleared and the air was clear. Tighe could see the strange white rock up ahead, marked with thin runnels up and down. But the wall went nowhere; putting his head back he could see clear blue sky above it. The top of the wall!