Black clouds were gathering over the mountains to the north. Lightning flashed through them. But in the valley, on that happy day, sunlight lay like cream in a bowl.

Guests had been arriving all morning. The most popular form of conveyance was by pleasure steamer from the nearest big town. A grand temporary quay had been built for the occasion. People pouring from the steamers stepped on to the quay beneath an archway decked with flowers. A band welcomed them, playing spirited airs such as ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ and ‘Cow-Cow Boogie’.

Less favoured among the guests arrived at the cluster of new pavilions by luxury coach, which travelled by specially constructed roads – roads which were infinitely superior to the old towpath they overlaid.

Some guests drove in by automobile. Planes brought others of the privileged, settling on the new airstrip, which was ablaze with landing and fairy lights. But the most stylish way to arrive was by one’s own helicopter.

Early helicopter arrivals naturally included the party of the President, the de Bourceys, in two helicopters. The de Bourceys were escorted immediately to the Pavilion of Perennial Peace, constructed in an Oriental style, where they retired to relax behind drapes, to be seen by no one for some hours.

The de Bourceys were followed by the Gonzales Clayman party. Emerging from their helicopter, they toured the extensive site in a stretch limo before retiring to the Rotunda of Regal Relaxation, from the windows of which they might glance discreetly at the Pavilion of Perennial Peace.

Rose Baywater arrived with her partner, dapper Jack Harrington, the art supremo, and her admirer, General Gary Fairstepps. They came in the lady novelist’s waspstriped helicopter, and went immediately to their own hotelette – one of a grand line of hotelettes painted each in a separate colour – where Rose sank into a warm bath to float for an hour and think rose-coloured thoughts.

Laura Nye, aged and frail, and her friends, including the famous, if speechless, Francine Squire, arrived on the steamer Con Amore and claimed their hotelette, where they immediately ordered champagne and aspirins.

The strapping young singer and entertainer, Olduvai Potts, arrived on a plane, to be greeted by the Master of Banquets, impeccably dressed Wayne Bargane. Olduvai was casually dressed. His large blunt face remained solemn, even when he acknowledged the plaudits of the crowd.

A little later, Olduvai was prevailed upon to sing his current hit song, ‘Once a Fabulous Holiday’ – to great applause. He was interviewed for the ambient by no less a person than Wolfgang Frankel, the dandyish media mogul. On this occasion, Frankel had on his shoulder a hooded goshawk. ‘It’s also having a fabulous holiday,’ he quipped. Olduvai nodded but did not smile.

Archbishop Byron Arnold Jones-Simms flew in half an hour before the ceremony was scheduled to begin, to walk perfumed among the gathering crowds, permitting his hand to be kissed at six-metre intervals.

The Archbishop also permitted himself a few words with Wolfgang Frankel, along the lines of the world being too much with us, late and soon. So we must try to make it a better world.

And still the sun shone. And still the sky darkened over the northern hills. And still the band played on the landing stage, as did a classical quartet in the vast hospitality hall, and a pop group in the Place of Ceremonies. Fountains also played. In the cinema erected for the occasion, Sweetness and Lifebelts, the latest movie to be made from a Baywater novel, was playing.

The increasing throng of guests moved between these landmarks, stopping at champagne bars or seafood rotundas or little souvenir stalls or carousels on the way. The guests chattered among themselves, on the whole remaining with their own groups, sometimes calling out with artificial cries of delight to friends newly encountered. The air was full of the tinkle of voices and glasses.

One of the outstanding guests, who had stationed himself at a table by the Rotunda of Regal Relaxation, was a large, heavily built man known only by the name Gabbo. Gabbo wore a white suit, lavishly decorated with gold lapels and the starburst of the IGOEU, the International Golden Order of the European Union. Gabbo Laboratories had invented the ambient, the world’s first cohesive intercommunication system.

In consequence, Gabbo was wealthy enough now to be known only by his solitary absurd sobriquet, although he had been born humble Martin Richter in a small town in Lower Saxony – wealthy enough now, as one commentator put it, ‘to buy the Louvre with the Mona Lisa thrown in’. His amusement was to fund rather bad movies; the film Lovesick in Lent was collecting adverse critiques this very week. Consorting with Gabbo was Casim Durando, the director of the aforesaid Lovesick in Lent, of whom it had been said that he was reptilian enough to make Komodo dragons renounce the name of reptile.

Gabbo sat poised and highly polished, as if a part of his chair, his sleek dark hair gleaming, with his inseparable companion, Obbagi. Obbagi was a tall faceless robot or android, for which Gabbo used the term, when he used it at all, of randroid. Obaggi was reputedly extremely intelligent, and usually spoke for Gabbo. Just as he was speaking now with the cordial Wolfgang Frankel. Frankel was drinking champagne. Obbagi had a glass before him but did not drink.

‘Weddings must be endured,’ Obbagi said. His voice came from somewhere deep within him. He had no mouth to move. ‘Endurance is fine. It is enjoyment which is oppressive. I fortunately do not have to pursue enjoyment.’

Wolfgang gave a rather forced laugh, and the goshawk stirred on his shoulder. For this occasion the star German media man wore a parody of an eighteenth-century satin costume, gleaming in silver. ‘Enjoyment certainly helps to pass the time.’

The randroid intoned, ‘I am unaware of the passage of time.’

Gabbo had not spoken until now. He made a rare interjection.

‘As long as one is aware one is living on a largely criminal planet, enjoyment is rather a limited occupation. Don’t you agree, Obbagi?’

‘One sees everywhere a pretence at enjoyment.’

‘Oh, forget gloom, you two!’ exclaimed Wolfgang. ‘Gloom is out of fashion in our benevolent super-state. Why, I have been talking to the fiendishly clever Paulus Stromeyer, who even now, if I understand him correctly, is inventing a new form of mathematics which will produce equality for rich and poor.’

‘He only invents rules. Stromeyer is like an android,’ said Obbagi, austere as ever. ‘I mean one of the separate species of android, the ALF21s – put on the market designedly stupid so as to flatter human egos. I find human beings contemptible, as does Gabbo.’

‘I never saw a good man less like an android than Stromeyer,’ said Wolfgang. He drained his champagne glass, nodded affably to Gabbo, and passed on.

‘His appearance is strange,’ said the faceless randroid.

‘That goes for his bird too,’ agreed Gabbo.

‘What fun!’ said Stephanie Burnell to her husband. ‘How are they going to cap this event when their divorce comes through?’

Karl Lebrecht, strolling with them, replied, ‘It’s the nearest thing to a stately pleasure dome since Kublai Khan decreed one.’

‘Just think how lovely this valley must have been before the de Bourceys spotted it,’ said Roy Burnell.

‘Don’t be so grumpy!’ said Stephanie, laughing and taking his arm. She was not really attending to him, gazing instead on the amazing gowns most of the women were wearing. Everyone was endeavouring to look their best.

Karl said, ‘Seen from another perspective, this valley is only temporary. The Earth is a theatre of change, brought about not only by the shifting of continents but also by destructive strikes from chunks of rock from outer space.’

Thoughtlessly, Stephanie said, ‘Let’s hope one doesn’t hit just now.’

With a rooted dislike of such superficial responses, Karl said, ‘In the history of the Earth, there have been five great mass extinctions, all caused by strikes of meteors arriving from space. The earliest being in the Ordovician, four hundred million years ago.’

‘Don’t be so gloomy!’ Stephanie said. ‘Look at that fabulous dress. Who is that woman? I love the way the Victorian look is coming back!’

‘It’s the novelist, Rose Something,’ said Roy. ‘I think.’

They sipped champagne. Karl thought it as well to change the subject.

Said he, ‘You see the big guy with the frightening android by the main hall? That’s Gabbo!’

‘My God, Gabbo!’ Stephanie exclaimed. ‘What’s he doing here?’

‘I understand he is funding this show, rather than de Bourcey. They say he is watching for strange behaviour. It’s his hobby.’

‘No use looking at us, then!’

‘What do you think, Francine?’ Ann Squire asked her scintillating daughter. She saw it as her role in life to persuade Francine to talk.

‘Oh, quite,’ said Francine Squire.

‘Y’see, they’ve at last managed,’ said General Gary Fairstepps, looking appreciatively at Rose Baywater as she stepped from her shower in their peach-coloured hotelette, ‘to create in reality a world such as you create in your novels. Youth, beauty, peace, plenty …’

‘Oh, plenty of plenty,’ she said, draping round her body a huge pink towel. ‘I love plenty of plenty, don’t you? It’s so utterly nice.’

He stroked his moustache in a mannered way. He was handsome in an ugly kind of way, kind in an ugly manner. ‘Depends what it’s plenty of.’

Although he fancied Rose, the silly bitch made some daft remarks at times.

‘Ancestry counts for much, Rose. Plenty of ancestry – that’s the thing. What’s your background?’

‘Oh, very ordinary, Gary. Though my grandmother on my father’s side was a Temptress-of-the-Bedchamber to King Hengist of Denmark. We’ve gone downhill since those glory days …’

Fairstepps grunted. ‘At least you have a hill to go down. Now my great-great-grandfather – I may have mentioned this before – he died a hero’s death at the battle of Damenbinden-am-Maine in 1881. My great-grandfather wrote a history of his cavalry regiment, the Twelfth Przewalski’s Horse. Breeding counts for something.’

He was going red in the face as he attempted to remove his boots, adding, ‘Military elite, that’s we Fairstepps. Our family motto, “I Will If You Will”. Blood will out, dear.’

‘Oh, I hope not,’ Rose said. ‘Not in that sense.’

‘Bit of a thunderstorm over the hills,’ said Jack Harrington, in a tone suggesting he realised his remark was irrelevant. ‘Just to remind us that the weather is fine here for the privileged.’

‘Don’t know why they invited me,’ said Fairstepps. ‘Can’t say I’m much of a party-goer.’

‘But you’re important, Gary. Not like me.’

‘That’s true,’ admitted Fairstepps. ‘These bloody boots …’

‘I’m really quite a valley person myself,’ the novelist said, as if to snub her partner further. Certainly Jack was a pallid man – but pallidly wealthy. ‘Valleys were invented for me, but you, you foxy old thing—’ now she was addressing Fairstepps ‘—you were born to conquer mountains.’

‘Only in a godforsaken place like Tebarou,’ the general responded, laughing as if she, or possibly he, had made a joke.

In the seafood bar, Jane Squire, who had reverted to her maiden name after her divorce, contemplated a large reproduction of a Dutch painting of prawns and lobsters which loomed over the counter. She was the centre of a cheerful group, which included a spectacularly beautiful and slender young woman at whom all men threw admiring glances when they passed by. This young woman’s name was Francine Squire. Francine Squire was the daughter of Ann Squire and Kevin Krawstadt, and the new star of Gabbo Films. She was already too famous to join in the conversation at the bar. Francine merely sat there poised, an unsampled espresso before her, and scintillated.

Jane was being chatty, excited by the event. She was an elegant woman. Her usual country garments were put away and she was dressed with unaccustomed smartness for the occasion. Nowadays, she tended to put on middle-aged weight and had begun to dye her hair black; but she and her sweet temper remained highly desirable to many older men.

Her friend, Kevin Krawstadt, came under that classification. After ordering a glass of white wine, he said, joshingly, ‘Does the painting make you feel hungry, Jane – presumably its chief aim?’

‘Hungry or greedy, most likely.’

He leant towards her, to say, confidentially, ‘Quite frankly, this whole wedding party is nothing but a celebration of greed.’

‘Should art celebrate greed? Or sanctity? Or sorrow?’

‘That’s up to the individual artist.’

Ann Squire, the younger of the two Squire sisters, felt it was her turn to join the conversation. ‘But fashion plays its part. Something that’s unfashionable – painting, a book, music – won’t succeed, will it?’

‘Oh, I like anything,’ Jane said carelessly. ‘Doesn’t matter to me whether it’s fashionable or not, as long as there’s a visceral appeal. So let’s have some prawns, please.’

She started to look in her handbag. As she produced a univ card, Kevin Krawstadt reminded her that everything at the party was paid for.

‘How shameful,’ Jane exclaimed. ‘I suppose we will be beholden to the de Bourceys for ever.’

‘What’s beholden?’ asked Bettina, Jane’s daughter, and was ignored. All too conscious of being outshone by her cousin Francine, Bettina was not a radiantly happy young lady. At this stage in her late adolescence, Bettina was wearing her hair with a fringe which flowed down to touch her eyebrows. The effect was, she hoped, simultaneously to attract young men and annoy her mother. In fact, a young man sitting at a nearby table was already attracted. As she was aware.

‘I’m already beholden,’ said Ann Squire.

Laura Nye laughed. ‘One way to the top is to have a good bottom.’ The family knew that it was Francine Squire’s affair with Victor de Bourcey which had landed her a role in the award-winning, much condemned Gabbo Films movie Lovesick in Lent.

Laura was old and rickety, plagued by arthritis. Nevertheless she sat upright on her stool, conscious of her role as grande dame.

‘Well, here’s to the party!’ said Kevin, lifting his champagne glass.

‘Is it true that the Queen of Sweden has been invited?’ asked Francine. It was, for her, a long sentence.

‘Surely Sweden hasn’t still got a queen!’ exclaimed Laura. ‘What an anachronism! Not that I’m not another anachronism …’

Time for one more cameo before the bells begin to ring.

Also in the seafood bar, helping themselves to delicious oysters flown in from Australia, sat a learned cluster of people, among them Paulus Stromeyer, the mathematician and philosopher, Amygdella Haze, the amaroli lady, her teenage son Bertie, her lover, the blank-looking Randolph Haven, shortly to make a disastrous decision, and Dr Barnard Cleeping of the Institute of Philosophy, Utrecht.

Dominating this group was Paulus Stromeyer, a thickset man in his early fifties. Fluffy dark hair surrounded a monk’s tonsure of baldness. His large, rather heavy face was lightened by the brightness of his gaze. Talk about the storm over the mountains had led to Stromeyer’s mention of Faraday’s discovery of electromagnetic induction. Stromeyer thought there was still some of what he called ‘hidden math’ to be squeezed out of the relationship between magnetism and electricity.

Rather idly, Randolph Haven had suggested that some days of the week contained more electricity than others.

Now they were discussing – all except young Bertie Haze, who was gazing yearningly in the direction of Bettina Squire at the nearby table – whether some days were more propitious for weddings than others.

‘Today is Tuesday, the thirtieth of June,’ said Cleeping. ‘Hands up all those who can tell me what event took place on a certain thirtieth of June many years ago?’ Cleeping was a smooth man, clean-shaven, short of hair, long on benevolence.

Paulus Stromeyer ventured a guess. ‘Frederick the Great born?’

Amygdella Haze: ‘Diet of Worms?’

Randolph Haven: ‘The machine gun invented?’

Cleeping shook his head. ‘1908. The Tunguska event. Remember? A forest area in Siberia flattened by cometary impact. Had it arrived just five hours later, it would have struck St Petersburg and wiped the city out. Various objects are always swanning in from space and striking Earth. Calculations show that one is due about now.’

‘Another reason why Alexy is on his way to Europa,’ said Paulus, glancing at his watch. He was thinking of his son, several million kilometres from Earth.

At that juncture, a recording of silvery bells rang out. Guests stopped eating or hurriedly grabbed another glass of champagne.

Another silvery sound followed – the voice of the Mistress of Ceremonies, Barbara Barbicandy, acknowledged to be the world’s best organiser of important events. She warmly welcomed all guests to this great occasion, and asked them if they would now assemble in the Place of Ceremonies. And she hoped that the weather would hold on this loveliest of all occasions.

As if to reinforce her wish, a peal of thunder rumbled into the broad valley from the hills to the north. Above those hills, fork lightning flashed.

The crowds politely jostled their way to the Place of Ceremonies, where solemn music played. No pop groups now, only a choir of six ladies, draped from neck to foot in white gowns, in tribute to a recollected virginity.

While the ladies, standing, sang ‘Morning has broken, like the first morning’, the guests seated themselves in comfortable chairs, the wealthier ones being escorted every inch of the way. Gabbo and Obbagi had thrones to themselves, apart from the crowd.

When all were well settled, and something resembling silence had fallen, ruched curtains drew apart at the front of the hall. This revealed a flower-bedecked altar, before which stood Archbishop Byron Arnold Jones-Simms, clad in scarlet robes, looking as humble as could a man who so greatly enjoyed the limelight.

He stepped forward now, saying in his deep, seductive, sedative voice, ‘My dear brethen, we are here assembled to bear witness to the marriage of two of our dearest citizens, Victor de Bourcey, son of the President of the European Union, and Esme Brackentoth, Queen of the Restaurant Profession.’

As he spoke, the aforesaid Victor entered the hall, proceeding to the altar with his presidential father just behind him. At the sight of de Bourcey Senior, some in the congregation rose in respect. This caused uncertainty in the ranks. Gradually more people also rose in imitation. Finally, everyone, sheeplike, rose to their feet, with the exception of Gabbo and Obbagi. After a pause, the reverse procedure was followed, until the entire congregation was reseated.

The Archbishop spoke again. ‘As many of you will know, our bride has been engaged in supervising the opening of her new restaurant, the first restaurant to be built on the peak of Mount Everest. Weather conditions have deteriorated markedly – markedly – in the last twenty-four hours, with the result that our dear Esme has been forced to remain on Everest until conditions improve. However, she has been able to provide a standby – an understudy, shall we say? – to take her place in the ceremony, which it was impossible to postpone, and our heroic bridegroom has graciously consented to her – or, rather, it – as in propria persona.’

As he was speaking, the electronic organ was going softly through the paces of Wagner’s Wedding March, and a veiled and befrocked personage (‘Train twenty metres long,’ whispered knowledgeable ladies in the congregation to their menfolk) was bearing steadily down the aisle. She was followed by two young human bridesmaids, both blushing at the exposure to so many gazes.

She came to a halt precisely beside the willowy and elegant figure of Victor.

The bride substitute was not human. She had emerged from the Renault-Bourcey factory, which specialised in manufacturing androids. A plastic face much resembling that of the stranded Esme Brackentoth had been attached to her head, while a digitised version of Esme’s voice issued from her plastic mouth.

‘As one can see, of the ALF21 vintage,’ commented Obbagi quietly to Gabbo.

Victor de Bourcey took the android’s arm and the ceremony proceeded.

‘It’s a form of auto-incest,’ whispered Paulus Stromeyer to his neighbour, Barnard Cleeping. ‘Since she was made on his production line …’

Intoned the Archbishop, ‘As we are all aware, a war between ignorance and wisdom has been declared, and eternally the war between good and evil continues. The good have their backs to the wall, and are forever in danger of losing the war, but this ceremony represents a battle won …’

He then gravely bent his attention to the happy couple, his ancient black face creased in earnest enquiry.

‘I do,’ said the android distinctly, and at the appropriate time.

The Archbishop proclaimed in an uncanny voice, raising his arms above his head, ‘Forasmuch as Victor and Esme’s stand-in have been joined together in holy wedlock before all the congregation as witnesses, I now proclaim them man and substitute, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. God bless you all, and may the Lord look mercifully upon you. Amen.’

Enthusiastic clapping broke out.

‘Hope he enjoys the honeymoon,’ said Barnard Cleeping.

‘He’ll need a tin-opener,’ chuckled Paulus Stromeyer.

With some relief, the congregation rose and emerged into the open air. The sun still shone, although now with a leaden quality. Over the northern hills, the thunder clouds still prevailed, lightning still sizzled. Little the two thousand guests cared; for the women, a more important matter was to control their hats in the slight breeze; while for the men, one of the concerns was to see under those hats to those well-made-up faces. Bertie Haze had pushed through the crowd and was now talking to Bettina Squire; Bettina was considering that she might like him, despite his rather spotty chin; Bertie was thinking he realised she was a bit on the heavy side, but was nevertheless passable. He knew that her cousin, Francine, was beyond his target area. While they spoke about the worldwide success of the new Norwegian pop group Strand, many calculations, hardly monitored by consciousness, were working rapidly in their minds towards strategies of either advance or retreat.

Later, when the dancing started, when Bertie seized both his opportunity and Bettina, the complexities would be resolved, or made further complex.

Such potential pairings were in operation elsewhere. Even among the elders – de Bourcey père, let’s say, condescending to chat with Rose Baywater, who was being bright – computation regarding what might be loosely regarded as sexual, even if merely theoretically sexual, was inevitably the order of the day: perhaps more brazenly here, after the assistance of drink and the proximity of so many members of the other gender flaunting, however discreetly, their better attributes.

Many there were invisibly undressed in that happy congregation, where champagne glasses were lifted in lieu of skirts. Yet still intellectual conversation had its day, for a percentage of those present were accustomed to dealing in abstract ideas. A group of intellectual conversationalists had gathered about Paulus Stromeyer, since his son, Alexy, was one of the three-man crew of the Roddenberry, the space vehicle presently approaching Jupiter and its satellites. Stromeyer was talking with the celebrated and eccentric archaeologist Daniel Potts, father of Olduvai Potts, as well as Amygdella Haze, her lover, Randolph Haven, Barnard Cleeping, and some students from the Sorbonne.

‘Just supposing the Roddenberry does find life there …’ one of the female students was saying. ‘It will entirely change how we feel about ourselves. I mean, we shall then have to establish regular flights to Jupiter, shall we not?’

Daniel Potts, who, in his early sixties, had a countenance somewhat resembling a disappointed walnut, asked the girl, ‘And what benefits do you expect to derive from these “regular flights to Jupiter”?’

Although she was taken aback by the challenge, she had a ready answer. ‘If travel broadens the mind, then think how broadened it will be by a trip to Jupiter!’

‘The precept is false,’ said Daniel. ‘Travel does not broaden anyone’s mind. It merely confirms one’s prejudices.’

‘Perhaps this young lady is without prejudices,’ Paulus said, coming to the girl’s aid.

Amygdella, lowering her voice, told Randolph Haven, ‘I met Daniel’s daughter once. Josephine, I believe her name was. She certainly did not love her father. How Lena can bear him I do not understand.’

Daniel’s hearing was sharp. ‘There must be much that evades your understanding, Amy,’ he said, sweetly.

‘Why are you so cross, dear Daniel?’ Amygdella asked, taking the older man’s arm.

He gave her a straight reply, while attemping a smile. ‘For one thing, I do not drink, so I am not half-tight like the rest of you. For another I see any wedding service – even one with an android as bride – as a primitive ritual. Something of the sort was probably practised in the Pliocene, and we have not managed to grow out of it yet. Once, of course, it involved the taking of the female’s virginity. That hardly applies in this present case.’

‘You could remove one of her batteries,’ said Randolph, and laughed at his own joke.

Under these thunderous ideas, and the thunder overhead, another thunder went unheard – the thunder of hooves. It was a thunder the city dwellers were ill-equipped to recognise. But the meeting of intellects, no less than the ceremonial cutting of the immense wedding cake – a creditable replica of the Reichstag under icing sugar – was rudely broken into.

Rushing down from the northern mountains came a veritable stampede. A hundred or more mustangs burst into the grounds of the festivities. These were wild horses, living in a reserve in the high country, shaggy beasts in various shades of brown. Hardy creatures, living in the harsh scrub and maquis of those altitudes – living social and harmless lives, but now galvanised by the electricity in the air.

Its vibrations had entered their skulls. Suddenly heads came up. The lead stallions neighed, hooves kicked the dust. They began to move. Thunder roared. A low-growing tree burst into flame after a lightning strike. The trot became a gallop. It was as if their batteries had become too highly charged.

At full tilt, the herd surged down the slopes of the mountains into the valley, crossed the shallow river, gained the far side. Snorting, they charged ever onwards, mindless as an avalanche. Straight into the enchanted crowd of party-goers.

Screams, cries! Mustangs rearing, people falling as they fled.

Olduvai Potts had ascended a platform and had begun to sing. His accompanists dropped their instruments and fled. Wayne Bargane, Master of Ceremonies, was standing by the platform. He did not run away.

The horses began to surround the platform. Olduvai ran and jumped on to the back of the lead stallion. Following his example without hesitation, Wayne rushed foward to grasp the mustang by its mane. It reared but was brought to a standstill. Hanging on ferociously, Olduvai kicked its flanks. Assisted by Wayne, they turned the beast about.

Other men also ran forward. Amygdella Haze was a good horsewoman. She jumped on to a lead mare and calmed it. The rest of the horses became confused. They milled about uncertainly.

Wayne’s son Cassidy came running from the administration building with a box and a lighted fusee. Dropping the box he pulled from it two of the sky-busting rockets intended to form a part of the firework display later. He lit them.

With a splutter and a whistle, the rockets sailed upwards. Metres above the crowd, they burst into a myriad stars, banging and shrieking as they went. The equine tide turned. In disorderly fashion, the mustangs began to gallop away, back towards the mountains they had left so precipitately.

Ambulance men moved among the guests, rescuing those who had fallen, calming them, escorting the injured to their casualty tent. Wayne climbed back on to the platform to reassure everyone that no harm had been done and that the merriment would continue. He thanked Olduvai Potts for his bravery. Olduvai climbed up and took a bow. The guests applauded.

‘All that excitement was not prearranged – let me tell you that!’ he announced.

The guests loved it.

‘You have a brave son,’ Barnard Cleeping told Daniel Potts.

‘Oh, he’s pretty brave,’ said Potts père. ‘At this moment I feel almost sorry I disowned him.’

Report from the Roddenberry, six million kilometres from Earth:

‘Hi, this is Alexy Stromeyer calling from the Roddenberry. We have a problem with the starboard solar wing. Rick O’Brien has been out there, trying to locate the cause. It’s tricky just now. We appear to be travelling through a small grit shower. Rick had to get back under cover before he had fixed the rotator drive, in case his suit was punctured. We’ll try again in another watch. Food getting very low – some provisions have degraded in refrigeration. Tempers a bit frazzled. We are going to try to grab some sleep now. ’Bye, Earth. Out.’

Fergus O’Brien walked slowly across the campus to his old Chevvy. A student saluted him as he went. Fergus kept his head down, ignoring the youth, pretending the sun was in his eyes.

He drove slowly the few hundred metres to the university apartment block where he occupied part of the ground floor. Letting himself into the apartment, he found his son Pat playing a ferocious game on the computer.

‘No prep this evening, son?’

‘Wait! Wait! Don’t breathe! This time I’ve really got—’ Pat was a fat little boy, most of his bulk submerged beneath a large red sweater. He let the sentence hang as he blasted the green monster on his screen.

Sighing, Fergus went into the kitchenette and grabbed a Bud from the cooler.

After another burst of blaster fire, the eight-year-old shouted, ‘Hey, Dad, they didn’t make you Head of Department after all. So I’d guess from your atmosphere of woe.’ He laughed to think of it.

Fergus leant his scraggy figure at the threshold of the room. ‘If you want to know, I was passed over, damn it. They gave the job to that lousy Marlene Nowotny.’

‘Ah, she’s a bitch. She’ll never last!’

‘I commend your loyalty, son.’

‘Wanna go out to eat? The TV says that Uncle Rick is getting near to Jupiter. He was outside doing a space walk today. I wish I was there with him. Jeez. Do those three guys carry guns, Dad? Just in case maybe they bump into alien life forms?’

‘I don’t believe they do.’

‘Not even a single shooter? What if some horrible green thing comes zooming out of Jupiter at them?’

Fergus laughed. ‘Maybe they would try making friends with it.’

‘Jeez, I wouldn’t try that. No way. I’d shoot it dead.’

Fergus retreated into the cellar room. He sat at his computer without switching on. Sipping at the Bud, he reflected bitterly on his life as a failure. Marlene Nowotny was his junior. Okay, so she had published some papers. Admittedly they had been well received. And of course she did sports. Why didn’t he do sports? Why was her hair shorter than his?

Then there was Brother Rick. His younger brother. Always obsessed by sports, even as a small kid. Baseball and space, his two interests. Now he was going to be one of the first men ever to land on – which satellite of Jupiter were they heading for? Okay, so he hadn’t forgotten. Why kid himself? Europa. So that Rick O’Brien’s name would go down in history, revered for ever in America and Ireland. Whereas the name of Fergus O’Brien …

He sighed heavily. What he needed was a big project. Like BIG.

He switched on the computer. The three seconds it took to boot up always seemed like an age.

Twenty-two e-mails awaited him. They would all be from students, asking their endless fatuous questions … ‘Could you tell me what explorer discovered the Humboldt Current?’ ‘In England, what is the name of the guy at the top of the Nelson Monument in London?’

After the wedding celebrations, Jane and Bettina Squire flew back to Hartisham-on-Sea. Jane’s sister Ann flew with Kevin Krawstadt and other friends to her house in the south of France. Laura Nye went with them to her little bungalow near Antibes. Francine Squire retreated loftily to her apartment in Paris.

Their chauffeur met Jane and her daughter at Norwich airport and drove them to the old Squire mansion, Pippet Hall. Her partner, Remy Gautiner, was sitting at a canvas, painting a part of the shrubbery. He set aside his palette and came to kiss Jane. The wind took his long dark hair.

Jane was jaded after all the excitement.

‘I must get out of this dress, Remy.’

He regarded her figure approvingly.

‘You’re half out of it already.’

She laughed. ‘It is a bit low-cut, that’s true.’

He kissed Bettina.

‘How was the wedding?’

‘They had horses in it,’ Bettina told him, as they entered the house. ‘It was mega-cool.’

In her bedroom, Jane kicked off her shoes, slipped out of her clothes, showered, put on a cerulean dressing gown, and went to see her father.

Sir Thomas Squire was sitting in a wicker chair in the conservatory, a rug over his knees. The peel of an orange lay on a plate at a side table nearby. He was more or less watching the big ambient wall screen, on which a soap opera was playing. His nurse sat a discreet distance away. Nurse Gibbs had set little aromatic candles burning here and there, so that the room was filled with the scent of rosemary.

‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance,’ Jane murmured, half aloud. At fifty years of age, she found herself increasingly burdened by remembrances. The grand old house was stocked with them. As it was with shadows, debt, dry rot, damp and empty fireplaces. She loved it intensely, and thought of it as the old galleon in which her life sailed.

‘I am well enough, thank you,’ said Sir Tom, responding to his daughter’s enquiry. ‘Just a little tired. I was watching a cormorant, I think it was, sitting on the sea wall.’

Jane looked with compassion at his lined face, blotched with liver marks. She stooped in front of him.

‘You’ve been all right while I was away?’

‘Of course, my dear. Nurse Gibbs has looked after me. I’ve been watching the ambo quite a lot. It seems as if our super-state is determined to go to war with Tebarou. The President has much to say about it. I never trusted that man. It must be mistaken policy, just when the world seemed to be settling at last for peace. Surely we are too prosperous to go to war. What can we gain from it?’

‘Experience? Prowess?’

‘Misery? Death? Civic unrest?’

‘Perhaps it won’t happen, Father. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Someone’s got to worry about it. Not that my worrying will do any good. It’s madness …’ He fell silent, starting up suddenly to speak again. ‘Remind me of the name of that general who came here once when you were quite small. Made a pass at your mother, I seem to remember.’

Jane thought. ‘Oh, you mean General Fairstepps? Funny name. He was at the de Bourcey wedding. I caught sight of him once.’

‘Yes, of course. Fairstepps. Funny name. Gary Fairstepps. Well, he’s in charge of the Rapid Reaction Force. They were saying on the Today programme that he is to fly out to Tebarou with his force.’

Tom’s shaky voice carried further information and complaint about the folly of war. Jane half listened, staring out at the new sea wall and the grey-blue of the waters beyond. In her childhood, Hartisham had remained a quiet little Norfolk village, three miles inland from the North Sea. But what her father liked to call ‘global storming’ had caused the sea to burst over the Stiffkey Freshes, to overwhelm the marshes and Stiffkey itself, and its little river, and to sweep inland.

Sir Thomas Squire, combining with other landowners, had had a sea wall built, stretching from Binham to the east to Walsingham in the west. The waves were held back, at least for the time being. Now as Jane gazed, the sea was calm, and a dinghy sailed where Stiffkey Valley had been, where Stiffkey cattle had grazed. At low tide, the tower of Warham St Mary church could still be seen above the flood.

‘I’ll be getting Sir Tom his tea now,’ Nurse Gibbs said, quietly. She took charge of the plate with the orange peel on it.

It seemed that Sir Tom had fallen asleep. Jane followed the nurse from the room.

‘I shall give him his next injection in twenty-five minutes,’ the nurse said confidentially, as she headed for the kitchen area. ‘Don’t worry about him, Jane. His condition at present is stable.’

Never before had Jane loved Pippet Hall as much as she did now, knowing it to be threatened by the elements. At least her father would not live to see the day when the swollen sea overwhelmed it. The Hall was situated on a small eminence. When it went, the nearby church of St Swithin’s, and its cemetery in which her mother, Teresa Squire, lay buried, would be swept away – and with them something valuable of English history.

She called to her daughter and Remy that it was teatime.

It was night when Paulus Stromeyer arrived by plane at Toulouse Air Base, straight from the wedding ceremony. There was in the super-state what commentators on the ambient described as ‘war fever’. This Paulus had publicly denied, saying that phrases such as ‘war fever’ were in themselves inflammatory. He had been contradicted by Air Chief Marshal Pedro Souto on a popular ambient channel. It happened that Stromeyer and Souto had been at university together. And so it was that Stromeyer had gained permission to meet Souto, face to face.

A buggy arrived promptly as his plane taxied to a parking slot. Two uniformed men stood respectfully by as Paulus stepped briskly from one vehicle to the other. The buggy, headlights blazing, moved slowly to a distant part of the base. Uniformed men with slung carbines were everywhere.

Paulus stared from his window. Outlines shining in the dark, ranks of the new supersonic SS20 fighter-bombers with VTO facilities stood on damp tarmac, hard to discern clearly against a blaze of lights in the background. Their long noses, their svelte shapes, suggested the evolved grace of predatory animals – some kind of new animal – crouching, waiting to go for the kill.

Despite himself, Paulus felt a thrill of excitement. To be in one of those superb machines, screaming through the stratosphere across the globe …

‘Now …’ he told himself, ‘really, you are not a schoolboy any more, in love with hardware.’

The buggy drew up before a large building. Sentries stood at its portals. Stromeyer was identified at the door and allowed to pass, still escorted, into the air-conditioned interior. Here brilliant lighting was the order of the day. Stromeyer was taken to a cubicle and searched for weapons.

‘Just routine, sir,’ said the searcher.

‘I have never in my life carried a gun.’

‘It’s just routine, sir.’

He was shown to a desk where a retina print was taken and he submitted to having an identity tag pinned on him.

Still escorted, he ascended by elevator to the third floor. More checks before they were permitted to quit the elevator. Here an armed guard took over from the escort. His highly polished boots slammed against the highly polished floor. Down the corridor, a code was entered into a doorfone. They entered an anteroom. A pleasant young blond woman in uniform came forward to tell Stromeyer that the Air Chief Marshal would be with him as soon as possible, and to offer him a cup of coffee.

When the coffee came, he tried to strike up a conversation with the woman, but she was not having any.

Fourteen minutes later, he was shown into the presence of the Air Chief Marshal. Souto was standing by a window, over which a metal blind had been drawn. With him were three other men and a uniformed woman.

Souto came forward and shook Stromeyer’s hand. He was a big man, with a leathery face and a cold grey stare. He looked older than his forty years. Even when offering his visitor something of a smile, his hauteur remained undiminished, his manner unbending.

‘We have not met since you were awarded the Nobel Prize. My belated congratulations,’ he said, stiffly.

‘Our career paths are somewhat divergent nowadays.’

‘Very divergent. You have become a pacifist.’

Stromeyer smiled one of his gentlest smiles. ‘Not quite that. I suffered a conversion some years ago, becoming persuaded, like the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, that love and tenderness alone are of real value.’

‘For love and tenderness to survive, they need the protection of a strong arm. All here would agree, I think. We are ready to strike. We dedicate our lives to providing the state with a strong arm.’

Murmurs of agreement came from the company. The woman in the party said, ‘You quote Russell, Dr Stromeyer. He was a supporter of unilateral disarmament. That has never been an option for us.’

Looking her in the eye, Stromeyer told her that he was not here to ask for disarmament but for restraint. ‘Are you or are you not planning to bomb Tebarou?’

Taking over the conversation, Souto said, ‘I shall not discuss military tactics with you, nor bandy words. More important matters claim my attention. I am not for speeches but actions. Since you are here, Paulus, we shall give you a practical demonstration of the strategic situation as it is at present. Masters, please!’

This last command was directed at the most junior officer present. In response, Masters crossed briskly to a desk, where he activated a large ambient wall screen. As he ran his fingers over the keyboard, Souto said, in a heavy plodding voice, ‘The ambient … so useful … The American bio-electronic network … How it holds our culture together. In some ways it is the making of our state. It has superseded personal language. But you are against technology, Paulus?’

Souto’s heavy skull swivelled round to glance at a CCTV monitor showing his fighter-bombers waiting on the tarmac outside.

‘Our state was not made by technology but by the dispensations of nature,’ Paulus told him. ‘It’s easy to forget that, when you look at your gleaming warplanes outside. Our climates, our soils, have much to do with Europe’s favoured place among nations.

‘And have you ever considered that we probably owe our civilisation to grass? You no doubt recall the old carol we sing at Christmas – “While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night”? There would never have been any flocks were it not for the curious botanical fact that grass grows from its roots, not from its tips, as do most plants. So when sheep graze the grass, the grass continues to grow. No grass would mean no sheep, no herbivores, no wool, no clothes … No, in fact, progress.

‘We owe most of the things we are to the grass under our feet. Doesn’t that thought induce humility? Of course, you have nothing but tarmac here at the base.’

A slight flush registered on Souto’s stern countenance.

‘I will not be lectured, not even on botanical matters, not even by a Nobel Prize-winner. As I always suspected, Nobel Prize-winners are fatally naïve. What has grass, of all things, to do with today? You’re a man whose son is well on his way to Jupiter, and yet you despise technology! Just attend to this picture Masters has brought up.’

The wall screen showed Europe photographed from a satellite. It was a live picture. Cloud cover parting, Europe was disclosed as a prone and emaciated figure, with the Alps as backbone and the Iberian peninsula as a head. The Greek Peloponnese served as a spatulate and bony foot. The glistening Mediterranean Sea showed up as the couch on which this strange creature was resting.

Captain Masters came forward with an electronic pointer. He indicated the southern shores of what he called Fortress Europe, from the Straits of Gibraltar in the west to the Aegean with its scatter of islands in the east. Speaking in a dry voice, he said that this entire region had to be continuously patrolled by ship and plane. It was under constant surveillance by satellite.

‘The deterioration of climate in Africa has meant a mass invasion – or attempted invasion – of our shores by the luckless and unskilled. We cannot afford to house a million refugees per year. They attempt to cross the Med by various unseaworthy boats. We have to deter them.’

‘By sinking their craft?’ enquired Stromeyer.

‘How we do it remains restricted information. It is certainly a very costly operation. Millions of univs every year.’

Souto added, ‘These invasive peoples are enemies of our stability. It is beside the point that most are black, most are Muslim. There is a cultural difference between our cultures which cannot be bridged. Already many of our cities have foreign quarters where our own people fear to go. These quarters and their denizens are multiplying. Dissidence festers there. In our own interests we must draw a line.’

He nodded at Masters and the satellite view disappeared.

Stromeyer replied, ‘I came to talk to you about a possible war with Tebarou, Pedro, and to ask you to be pacific. Tebarou is a long way from our borders. What about the Med? Why this threat of war?’

‘I am talking about that serious eventuality right now, Paulus. We are not idle. I was in conference with the President two days ago, before his son’s wedding, together with other high-ups of the armed forces. The new president of Tebarou, Morbius el Fashid, is no friend of ours. He has formed a loose alliance with the African states. Two weeks back, we sank a tramp steamer off the heel of Italy. That steamer was carrying approximately four thousand illegal immigrants, all heading for the EU.

‘There was retaliation from Tebarou. I want you to understand that we will not, cannot, permit such intrusions on our territory.’

Paulus asked to be told about the nature of the West’s retaliation.

‘Air strike,’ was the crisp answer. ‘SS20s.’

A call came through on Souto’s mofo. When he turned away to answer it, another of the senior officers present addressed Paulus.

‘Sir, we have been under missile attack from Tebarou. No doubt you have seen reports of the outrage. The first missile they fired struck a town called Siebersdorf, near Graz in Austria. That missile had a nuclear warhead. The destruction and loss of life is extremely serious and requires to be answered.’

‘But Tebarou apologised. El Fashid has said the missile was launched by mistake.’ His remark was swept away.

‘Two further missiles have hit our territories, fortunately in open country. One on a hillside south of Ravensberg, the other in a forest near Vesoul, in France. You must have seen about them on the ambient.’

‘The suggestion being that this was a kind of range-finding exercise, each time the missiles landing farther from home. Some claim these were meteorites, not missiles. Is this sufficient provocation for a declaration of war? War always brings out the bad in people.’

One of the officers gave a snort of contempt at this last remark. He said that war was a question of power politics; morality did not enter into it.

‘Then morality should do so,’ said Paulus. ‘Tebarou is a small country. We are a super-state. We should not attack poor Asian countries. You may recall history and the American offensive against Vietnam.’

Souto came off the phone in time to catch Paulus’s remark. ‘Tebarou may be small. China is large – another super-state.’

He said grimly that Western suspicions had been confirmed. Investigation of the shattered non-nuclear enemy weapon cases indicated that the Tebarou missiles were of Chinese manufacture.

His fellow officers looked not displeased by this revelation.

He added that Tebarou was a newly established state, barely fifteen years old, set up in reluctant accord with China by Chinese Muslims. The new president, Morbius el Fashid, was himself part-Chinese.

Whether the missile strikes had Chinese backing remained debatable. The important thing was to stop the nonsense immediately, show them what was what before worse followed.

He, Air Chief Marshal Souto, believed that it was not necessary to declare war. Ground troops were not needed.

What was required was to get their SS20s aloft immediately. With their immense range, they could take out one or two Tebarese cities as a warning. Ninyang and Puanyo for a start. Both industrial cities.

‘Which will escalate hostilities,’ said Paulus.

Souto gave a dry laugh. ‘We have no option. To my mind, these missile attacks constitute a declaration of war – but I’m only a simple air force type. As you must know, Paulus, diplomats are talking, not only in Brussels but in the Tebarou capital. I’m afraid that, like you, talk is getting them nowhere. Nowhere. Our duty is to act, not talk.’

He gave a curt nod, turned on his heel, and marched from the room.

The other officials looked uncomfortable.

‘Thank you very much for coming, Dr Stromeyer,’ said the uniformed woman, politely. ‘Captain Masters will show you out.’

No one had heard of a group calling themselves ‘The Insanatics’. Their first message burst in upon a myriad ambients, interrupting the colourful commercials. It was non-pictorial, the text being printed on the screen, with a speaking voice-over.

‘Assonance! Rogerr Laboratories present their New Pile Cure. Selling at your local pharmacy right now. Turn to Assonance! Kiss Your Haemorrhoids Goodbye!’

<INSANATICS: Prologue. We shop in places where everything – especially cheap goods – costs too much. At least we live in a free world – we are free to pretend we are happy. It is the mouth that talks; the brain ignores the mouth. The flushing of a myriad toilets sings of the essential nature of mankind. The squeal of a chair moved on a polished floor protests against the sedentary being it carries. Only the rich have the opportunity to waste their lives on cruise ships. All men feel isolated: they are not alone in that.

When the sun is high we tend to lose our minds; when the moon is high, ditto. A woman’s singing reminds us there are better worlds – but not here. If only wisdom were sparkling mineral water, we might drink at the diet of life. We are sensible because we are alive; similarly, rivers are not wet. Instinct permits the handling of our affairs, but is it a hand or a glove?

We have everything precious to lose by going to war against a predominantly Muslim country in the East. If war is declared, it is proof once more that mankind is mad.

This concludes our first message on this subject. Watch out for more.>

The second message from the new group was transmitted the next day, again in the middle of commercials.

‘Pining for the days of cod? We have a GM groper that tastes Just Like The Real Thing. Enjoy it only at Exotika Eateria on 28th Street.’

<INSANATICS: The perceptual existences in which we live, our umwelts, have been created by psychoses of lengthy ancestry. One symptom of that ancestry was human sacrifice. That ancestral psychosis rules our behaviour still. A predominant aspect of the psychosis is that we cannot recognise or acknowledge it.

Yet we have constant reminders of the primitive being in us. Think of the paintings of Christ nailed to the cross. Such paintings fill our art galleries. Think of the number of people who need some kind of mental therapy. Think of the innumerable cases of psychosomatic illnesses or suicides among the young.

Although we like to believe that society is a cause of our internal woes, it is our internal woes that have created our societies. As panacea, we cling to antique systems which are manifestly mistaken – superstition, wizardry, astrology, incantation, drugs.

We pervert our technology to manufacture barbarous weapons. Even if and when unused, the weapons poison our existence. They must be paid for in more than money.

In attempts to govern our lives, we look to the past, perhaps to what our parents did or failed to do, instead of looking forward to see what consequences our actions might have upon the future.

Our growing understanding of the workings of the brain reveals its faulty construction. There is no way in which we can ever become humanely rational. No way in which we can become content. No way in which we can escape our ruinous inheritance.

On the contrary, the processes of insanity are on the increase. More and more of our populations move into overcrowded cities, away from nature. They thereby starve themselves of the intimations of nature, weather and the seasons. They must rely instead on fleeting relationships, mainly sexual, mainly conducted in closed rooms, with other exiles as gravely alienated as themselves. The Space Age has become the Chamber Age. Imagination and romance prevail in a mental prison that prevents reality from entering. We ourselves have built that prison. This is why we cannot escape from it.

We see war as an escape. It merely extends the prison walls.>

The apartment in Frankfurt was comfortable, even luxurious. The rear windows of its bedrooms looked out over a pleasant square, where, at this relaxed time of day, couples strolled among the trees and formal flower beds. No cars or Slo-Mos were permitted during the hours of daylight on the streets surrounding the square. The constant drone of traffic on the main arteries of the city seemed merely to emphasise the peace of Friesengasse Square.

Amygdella Haze came slowly from the Friesengasse Brasserie, where she had been enjoying an amaretto ice cream with a woman friend, the famous Yakaphrenia Lady. She stood for a moment, gazing at a bird she could not identify among the acacia trees. The acacias had almost ceased flowering. Their pleasant scents would no longer filter in through her open windows – or at least, not for another season …

She walked to the entrance of her apartment block, decorated with the marzipan effect of the late nineteenth century, keyed in her code, 0909, entered, and took the elevator to the second floor.

Once in her apartment, she looked about complacently at the paintings which covered the walls.

Her housekeeper immediately appeared. Amygdella gave her a smile and asked for coffee. She let her gauzy scarf float to the floor, before going to the bedroom to attend to her face in a mirror. She applied a pale pink lipstick to her lips. On the wall nearby were two little framed Tiepolo etchings from his Capricci in first-state proof. They got a glance of approval from her.

She put a couple of ropes of bead necklaces about her neck, and went over to her ambient, rigged with fresh flowers to resemble a shrine. She switched on, and was soon in communication with her friendly guru in Allahabad.

In his delightful variant of the German language, Ben Krishnamurti pushed his whiskery face close to the screen and announced to Amygdella that Spite was dead. All spite had died that morning in his breast. He had risen and had done his holy exercises. He was taking a shower and chanting when the light dawned upon him. He was taken up by the light and the water was all about him.

Then he recognised that the water was really the world’s spite. He had drunk it down and returned to Earth. Yet he remained elevated because he had overcome a great ill – with the help of the gods. It was an immense happiness to him and to all men. And also to all women, of course.

Exclaiming that it all sounded so beautiful, Amygdella asked if this meant there would be no war.

‘No, the war will have to come, Lady Amy, but spite is a different thing. You must see these matters as separate.’

Versed though she was in mysticism, she remained slightly puzzled.

Krishnamurti explained to her that spite was merely a human trait, attacking people one by one, and so devouring them and all they loved. Whereas war came from the gods, both to enliven and destroy, and had to be endured. What he called ‘the political business’ meant nothing: it was merely exercised by puny men.

‘Thank you for your explanation, Beniji. I shall benefit from it.’

She switched off and sat in contemplative thought. There was a difficulty: her current lover, Randolph Haven, was a minor politician, and currently of the war party.

But she remained in an elevated frame of mind. She could always give up Randolph. She could not give up the Wisdom of the East.

She was still in her elevated state when the exterior doorfone buzzed. Before she could float over to answer it, it buzzed again. She knew it was her son Bertie. When she heard the elevator, she went to the apartment door and opened it. She flung her arms round Bertie’s neck. Having kissed his mother on both cheeks, he threw himself on her sofa, where he promptly lit a marihale. Without being asked, Amygdella went to the drinks bar and poured two glasses of white wine.

As she handed him one of the glasses, she asked him how university was going.

Without answering the question, Bertie said, ‘Ma, I need to go to England to inspect an archaeological site.’

‘Site or spite? No more spite in the world, Bertie, my dear.’

She executed a twirl, allowing her full skirts to flare out.

‘What are you on, Ma? I need some cash. I must go to England to inspect this archaeological thing-me-bob.’

‘What a horrid phrase that is. “Thing-me-bob”. Where did you get it from? Where did you contract it?’ She laughed. ‘You youngsters!’

Bertie regarded his mother; it was a kindly inspection, although not entirely unmixed with exasperation. Amygdella was forty-two, quite petite, adding to her stature with a massive fuzz of shining brown hair, into which little fake pearls had been woven. She was beautiful, no doubt of that, with her large violet eyes, pretty little mouth and demure chin. And her manner – whether natural or cultivated – was always slightly frivolous in a way that attracted men. That was the problem, of course: that was what had eventually caused Harry Haze to give up and disappear into the East, always to his son’s regret.

Catching sight of Ben Krishnamurti’s photograph by the ambient, he said, ‘You’re not still talking to that old fraud in Allahabad, Ma?’

‘You never understood faith. Come to that, you’ve never been to Allahabad, my dear.’

‘Religion and science are not easy bedfellows.’ He reverted to lecturing mode. ‘Science requires proof. Religion runs against proof. Why people in this century have not become more scientific I will never understand. I suppose you are still practising amaroli, aren’t you? Your Beniji taught you that repulsive little trick, didn’t he?’

Amaroli was one of the features of her life which had made Amygdella famous.

‘Ah, but that’s not faith, darling. That’s science. Urine contains the hormone melatonin. What else do you think keeps me looking so young?’

‘Ugh! I prefer amaretto.’

‘Now, Bertie dear, don’t tease me. That’s not the way to coax money out of your poor mother. Surely you know that by now?’

‘Sorry, Ma, I didn’t mean to tease. I just worry that you are going dotty. I really do need that dough … They’re digging at Castle Acre, Ma. It’s terribly important.’

‘Is that anywhere near where this young lady, Bettina, whom you fancy, lives? With whom you danced at the wedding?’

‘As it happens, it’s not too far away. Please, Ma.’

‘Oh, young love … Have you been in touch with her since then?’

Bertie pulled a face. ‘Maybe.’

Smiling, she changed the subject. ‘What about your card?’

‘It’s run out.’

‘Do the English have univs yet, I wonder?’

‘Three hundred would do nicely, Ma.’

She sighed the sigh of martyrdom. ‘Just don’t tell Randy.’

She went to fetch her purse.

Purses in the Bargane household were less well filled than Amygdella’s. Wayne Bargane, Master of Banquets at the Victor–Esme wedding celebrations, carefully returned his hired ceremonial clothes and resumed his artisan gear. He received the fee for his work before being driven to the airport. His was a long flight home.

The Bargane family had accepted a subsidy offered by the Department of Social Economics of the EU government, and removed themselves to the eastern lands. They had been settled on a run-down farm in Romania, on the fringes of a town with the not particularly promising name of Slobozia.

The unspoken hope was that something of Western culture might rub off on ruder relations in the Black Sea region, the very margin of the super-state.

Wayne’s old car was awaiting him in the car park of Bucharest airport. He drove slowly back to the new home in Slobozia. Sunlight flickered through the long avenues of poplars lining the dusty road that ran by the River Ialometa. Wayne was a professional, used to travelling all round the super-state in pursuit of his job. Yet the contrasts between the wealthy West and the impoverished East could not be ignored. He saw more bullock carts than cars on his route.

When he reached the Bargane vineyards, Wayne stopped the car and got out. The day was intolerably hot. Global warming was afflicting everything. He shielded his eyes to scan the fields. In the distance, his old mother, Marie Bargane, was supervising the android who did most of the work. He was currently hosing the rows of vines. Marie never trusted the mechanical. Wayne could not help smiling.

His mother saw him, waved, and came slowly towards him, trudging between the rows. She wore an old-fashioned sun-bonnet. He thought, not without affection, that she might have belonged to any of the previous centuries. From being an impoverished townie in Toulouse, she had become an impoverished peasant in Slobozia. Wayne earned more for superintending one wedding ceremony than the farm could make in a year.

Marie climbed into the car and mopped her face with a handkerchief. ‘Alfie takes such a lot of looking after,’ she said.

The android’s manufacturing code was ALF21. Hence Alfie.

‘He’d get on better if you left him alone, Mother. He’s ideal for watering, surely.’

‘He tends to waste water. He has no feel for viniculture, Wayne. Of course not. He doesn’t drink the product.’

At the house, they went into the front room, the one room with air-conditioning. The air-conditioner, having been bought second-hand, worked with a grinding noise, interspersed with whimpers. On the drab orange walls of the room hung one incongruous painting, a reproduction of a late Morsberger, bursting with life.

Several members of the family were in the room, resting on old sofas and half watching the ambient. It was only the old mongrel, Oddball, who jumped up in greeting, to fuss round Wayne’s legs. He patted the dog absent-mindedly.

Marie’s crippled husband, Jean-Paul, was slumped on the black horsehair sofa as usual, face set in bitter lines. Also present were Wayne’s older sister, Claudine, and her eleven-year-old daughter, Maddie (father unknown), and Wayne’s two brothers, Cassidy and Jacques, playing a simple game of cards. Also, in a corner, aloof, apart, sat Wayne’s uncle, David Bargane. David of the drooping moustache was always apart, almost silent, the one religious member of the family. His mere presence radiated disapproval of almost everything.

‘Here comes the family star,’ said Cassidy by way of welcome. He got up and began clapping Wayne slowly on the shoulder. ‘Friend of our beloved President and all that. Did you ask him about our allowances, Wayne?’

Wayne smiled. ‘It wasn’t a political occasion.’

‘He’s just launched another regulation,’ said Jacques, putting down his hand of cards to scratch his jaw. ‘You’ll never believe this one.’ He assumed a pompous voice. ‘The age of sexual consent has been lowered to eleven. “Children mature earlier these days.” But in order to curb the growth of population, a law is being introduced making sexual intercourse where one or both partners are over the age of fifty-five a chargeable offence.’

Wayne burst out laughing. The others joined in, all except David. Oddball barked. Maddie was heard to say, ‘I’m eleven. I can copulate now, can’t I, Mummy?’

David said, in a low voice that ensured they would all listen, ‘So this president reveals himself as being anti-Christ. He encourages sexual licence. He should be exterminated.’

‘Rubbish, David,’ said Wayne. ‘It isn’t the president who makes up these rules and regulations. They originate from democratic committees in Brussels.’

‘He is the president, Wayne. You will hardly deny that. A fish stinks from the head.’

‘Mummy, who can I copulate with?’ asked Maddie. She jumped up and down. She was rather retarded.

‘Whom, you mean, dear,’ said Claudine.

They all roared with laughter, all except David, while Claudine stroked her child’s head and advised her to be quiet.

David had a sister, almost as stern as he, dark of complexion, dark of thought, dark of hair – though the hair was now shot through with grey strands which wormed their way through the black curls like serpents through burned-out undergrowth. This was Wayne’s Aunt Delphine. She disapproved of Wayne’s worldly profession.

Without greeting him, she entered from the kitchen to announce that the evening meal was served.

‘Thank you, Delphine, dear,’ said Marie. She was scared of her grim sister. ‘I will just switch Alfie off.’

She went to the door, zapper in hand. The android was working close to the house. He looked round when she called to him, head swivelling on sturdy neck.

She zapped him. He froze. Alfie would stand where he was till morning.

The Bargane family rose without enthusiasm to the call to supper. They sat on benches on either side of the table at the back of the room. The women brought in bread, plates, saucepans. Delphine was not a wonderful cook. Moreover, the Barganes had entered, with initial enthusiasm, into a contract with a government department, and subscribed to the societal algebraic coding scheme, or SAC, designed to banish poverty within the sphere of the EU and its federated states.

To subscribe, families had to educate their children at state schools, give up smoking tobacco and gambling (except at horse races), drink only a small measure of alcohol a week, and wash regularly. In return, bathrooms were installed, a minimum wage was paid in univs, and – for those who laboured in the fields, in accord with the common agricultural policy – an android labourer was supplied to help with the heavy work.

Once the scheme was in place and operating, drawbacks became apparent. The agricultural androids were heavyweight machines which needed much upkeep. They gave off unpleasant fumes and quite frequently fell over on rough ground. Also, not every family was able to give up longstanding habits regarding alcohol and tobacco. There were, naturally enough, fines for breaking regulations; but local supervisors could be bribed. The supervisors of the East were proving especially susceptible.

A later development of SAC policy was also unpopular. It aimed to counter the pernicious influence of pop culture and sensational videos, and to downgrade the youthful idolising of football players. To improve the cultural standing of the most poverty-stricken, a book was issued free of charge every quarter-year to all families below a certain level of income. The hope was that literacy would be encouraged in a painless way.

This development, it had just been revealed, was the personal flourish of President Gustave de Bourcey. Credit for the revelation that de Bourcey had concocted the scheme went to the celebrated mediaman Wolfgang Frankel; de Bourcey himself had disclosed the truth to him in an unguarded and boastful moment over brandy during the wedding celebrations.

Supervisors had been appointed to check that families – or at least one member of each family – read the quarterly book and, if possible, enjoyed it. They were downloaded from the ambient, and the first was a harmless old tale by Saint-Exupéry. It was fairly well received. Second choice, however, was Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, and third Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra. Both these books aroused outrage among the religious, whose faith flourished in direct proportion to the number of goats in their herds.

Nor were troubles smoothed over by an innocuous fourth choice, the Swedish novel (for it was Sweden’s turn to speak up for culture) Gösta Berlings Saga, by the Nobel Prizewinner Selma Lagerlöf. The anger of the religious protesters was merely fuelled by a book from such a remote northern region.

David Bargane was among the most furious of the protesters. He set up a local group dedicated to burning all SAC books. He spoke at rallies. His message was always the same: that de Bourcey was trying to turn their superstate into a heathen state, as Adolf Hitler had done with Nazi Germany. He denounced de Bourcey’s name with hatred and venom.

De Bourcey’s permitting the substitution of an android in place of a woman at his son’s wedding ceremony was all the proof David Bargane needed that he was in the right, and de Bourcey was wrong – and was promoting licentiousness.

‘All right-thinking men and women can now see clearly, if they did not do so before, that the aim is to turn us all to the paths of godlessness and wickedness, and to pervert all our long-held beliefs. No longer can we doubt that Satan himself sits at the head of our super-state. Who will rid us of this Antichrist?’

Hardly surprisingly, two policemen led him away from this rally. David was proud to go. After a night in the cells, he was let off with a caution and told not to speak again in public. So far, he had obeyed.

But his silence had deepened, his looks of hatred had intensified, his gaze had become darker and more downcast.

He met his followers in the fields at dusk and preached a gospel of hatred. Even those who felt as he did became alarmed by his venom.

On the evening Wayne returned to Slobozia, he glanced out of the window and saw David ranting to a small crowd of villagers. He went and stood outside the door to listen. For the first time, he entertained the thought that perhaps his uncle had become insane.

The meeting broke up. David came back, fists clenched, muttering to himself.

‘Uncle David, I worry for you.’ Wayne laid a hand on his uncle’s arm.

‘Worry for yourself, for your own soul, for you are contaminated by those you traffic with!’ David gave his nephew a burning look like a blow.

‘Uncle, please calm down. The SAC books are well intentioned. So, as far as I know, is the President. You may not like the selection of books, but they do no harm. You will get yourself into trouble by speaking as you do.’

‘They do great harm. They kill the soul of our people. Leave me, Wayne. You have been perverted by Satan’s values. Look at that effigy yonder!’ He pointed to Alfie, stock-still amid the vines. ‘Isn’t that a graven image there, intended to mock God? Oh, the world has grown impure! Poor little Maddie, your sister’s daughter, thinking and talking of copulation already, at her age. Already her mind has been poisoned. A fish stinks from the head. De Bourcey should meet his death, and then we might all purify ourselves again.’

Wayne could not think what to say. He saw the mad gleam in his uncle’s eye, and was frightened. The older man passed into the house.

Later into the grey of night, David went out to the back of the house where their cow was tethered. Claudine, having settled Maddie to sleep, went to take the cow water and saw David with a bottle of strong liquor tilted at his lips.

She called to him in alarm.

‘Go away, woman!’ he said in a low, choking voice. ‘You have sinned and brought forth evil.’

‘You cheeky bugger!’ she exclaimed.

Worried, she told Wayne what she had seen and heard. ‘It puts the whole family in bad odour. We are not native to these parts. I’m afraid of what may happen to us.’

‘Perhaps we should send Uncle David back to France. He’s ill. He never used to be like this.’

‘Oh, he was. I was always afraid of him. I wouldn’t trust him with Maddie.’

Wayne stroked his sister’s cheek, uttering soothing noises. He promised to speak to Delphine about her brother in the morning.

But when morning came, the family was woken by Claudine’s anguished screams. Startled, they came from their beds to find her running wildly about, the bloody body of Maddie in her arms.

‘David did this! I know it! I know it! Who else would be so cruel? Oh, my darling Maddie, dead, dead! Murdered! Dear child! Murdered! He did it, the bastard!’

Even as she spoke, tears burst from her eyes in a shower.

Delphine came forward, stern and collected. ‘David has saved poor little Maddie from the sins of the flesh, that’s all. It’s a warning to everyone here.’

Wayne struck her across the face.

He ran downstairs. David was nowhere about. He rushed outside. The android stood among the vines, unmoving. And Wayne’s car was gone.

For the next hour, the Bargane family was in trauma, screaming, arguing, crying. The blood-soaked body of little Maddie lay on the table. All kissed her in turn and cried, all became smeared with her blood. All gave themselves over to despair.

It was old crippled Jean-Paul who finally suggested they should call the local police. They did so. It was after midday before the police arrived. For a crime as serious as murder, they had sent a man from Bucharest.

They checked with the airport and discovered that David Bargane had left the country on a direct flight to Brussels. He would be somewhere in Belgium by now.

<INSANATICS: Our bulletins are not intended to alarm. To acquire an insight into the delusional systems under which we all live is to make a first step towards amelioration. We Insanatics have been accused of belonging to all political persuasions, from anarchists to fascists. We are strictly apolitical.

Politicians, in fact, fall into a disturbed category. They are able to order their lives so that every waking hour is busy, so that self-enquiry or self-doubt need never intrude. There are always committees to attend, societies to be addressed, constituents to be consulted or placated. Extroverted activity replaces self-knowledge and inner insecurities are repressed. Large political parties, particularly those of extreme right or extreme left, partake of many of the characteristics of mob rule, where individuality is repressed.>

‘And now for our weekly horoscope. Here’s Mystic Molly.’

‘Hello. We have friends nearing Jupiter, so what do their horoscopes say?

‘Gemini – if you need to get away from people who are driving you crazy, just get up and leave. Someone in a position of authority will give you a hard time about it next week, but next week is months away.

‘Leo – work more closely with those who share your aims. If you want something badly enough, it will come your way this week or maybe next. Dreaming will make it come true. But be warned – having got what you want, you may find you don’t want it after all, and then how are you going to get rid of it?

‘Virgo – as Mars, your ruler, is moving against you this week, assume that what other people say is not the truth at all. Do what your instincts say is right, even if the world is against you. Don’t go against that inner voice.’

Barnard Cleeping was Director of the Philosophy Institute at the University of Utrecht. Every Tuesday evening, he visited the Young Offenders Institution some ten kilometres from the university. Not only did he consider that this kept him in contact with real life; he was of a genuinely benevolent disposition and maintained a compassionate relationship with one of the young offenders, Imran Chokar.

On this evening, as his hydrogen-powered Slo-Mo was about to pull into the Institution grounds, a woman ran forward in front of his car. He braked. She came to his window.

‘I nearly ran you down, girl!’

‘You are Professor Cleeping? I need to speak with you, if you please. It’s about Imran – Imran Chokar. I am his friend.’

Barnard, realising that she was distraught said, ‘Get in beside me.’

She did so. She was a thin, bedraggled girl with part-dyed brown hair. Her left nostril was punctured by three small silver rings.

He showed his pass at the gate and entered the car park. The girl was Dutch, Martitia Deneke by name.

She was in love with Imran. They had met at a dance. He was shy and reserved, and keen to learn. He was seventeen, a year younger than Martitia, and an illegal immigrant. Imran had had little education, but was nevertheless of a scholarly turn of mind.

Martitia was scared of visiting the prison. She had sent Imran a book on the philosophies of the West, based on the ambient series of programmes, but the book had been stolen by another inmate.

Barnard listened patiently to her account, without comment.

Martitia knew that Imran was innocent of the crime for which he had been incarcerated. She had herself witnessed that crime. She had been going to meet Imran outside a supermarket. She saw him emerging from the supermarket with a carrier bag in his hand. A woman coming out behind him, with a child following her, was set upon by a man – ‘a dark man,’ said Martitia – who emerged suddenly from the shadows.

The dark man grabbed the woman’s carrier bags. In so doing, he barged the woman over. She fell backwards into the doorway. The child ran away screaming. Imran managed to catch hold of the little girl before she ran into the traffic flow. He then went to aid the prostrate woman. The dark man ran off with her groceries.

Other people were pouring out of the supermarket. One man grabbed hold of Imran, wrenching his arm behind his back. The police arrived. Imran was immediately arrested. Having seen all that had ensued, Martitia protested and tried to explain to the police officer in charge. She was roughly brushed aside.

‘You have told the lawyer all this?’ Barnard asked.

‘Over and over.’

Imran Chokar was charged with attacking the woman shopper and trying to abduct her child. Martitia had never been able to make her voice heard. She was so young. She was female. She had had a relationship with two men in her life. She had taken drugs. She was on someone’s black list. An officer at the police station told her that her family were known troublemakers.

The woman who had been attacked remained in a coma in a local hospital. She had sustained a serious head injury. The child was being looked after by her grandmother in the south of the country.

Meanwhile, Imran was being held in the Young Offenders Institution. He suffered systematic racial abuse from the staff.

Barnard asked Martitia, ‘You are sure of your facts?’

She sat nervously beside him, staring ahead at the grey prison block.

‘I do not lie, sir. My drug incident was long ago, when I was a schoolgirl. The family had drugs. All the authorities have against me is that I am female and in love with a man of another race.’

‘I will see what I can do. Give me your address. And your lawyer’s.’

She gave him two ambient addresses. She handed him a paperback book on meditation, to be passed to Imran. Planting a brief kiss on Barnard’s cheek, she opened the car door and fled.

Barnard sat where he was for a while. He made a note on the Slo-Mo recorder. Only then did he get out, book in hand, and proceed to the guard house.

Escorted into the prison, he inhaled again its nauseating smell, which permeated even the staff quarters. A stench of sweat, old boots, disinfectant, excreta, and generalised despair. The sergeant on the counter took the book of meditation from him. After giving his credentials, he was escorted into the visitors’ room. He waited.

Imran Chokar appeared and took the seat on the opposite side of the wire mesh. His left eye was partly closed by a dark bruise. He waited for Barnard to speak.

‘I have been talking to Martitia. She will be a valuable witness when your case comes to court.’

‘It will never come to court. I shall die here.’

‘I shall see that it comes to court.’

A silence of disbelief settled on Imran. Barnard knew better than to enquire about his wounded eye. A warden was standing behind him.

‘You will eventually get the book on meditation Martitia wants you to have.’

‘They take incoming books apart in case they contain drugs.’ Said with the hint of a wry smile.

‘You’ll get the pages.’

Silence again. Imran began speaking in a rush. ‘Why does the world have to be the way it is? Who put it together this way? It does not make sense. I read a book on philosophy. The author does not speak about the construction of the world’s society. What is the use of such a book? Who can tell? I burn with anger.’

‘The world’s society? Yes, it does seem unfair. How did things come to be as they are? It’s a matter of history, climate, geography – a combination, perhaps, of accidents.’

‘No. Not that. I think I mean – something more – more metaphysical. I can’t talk about it. I don’t have the words. I shall die in here.’

‘Imran, I promise you I will do all in my power to get you out.’

‘Is Martitia pregnant?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

Another pause.

‘Is there to be war against this foreign place? Tebarous?’

‘Tebarou. I don’t know.’

‘Here, in the prison, all the whites want war. They seem to like the idea of war and killing … The people are of Muslim faith, yes, in Tebarou?’

‘With a large Christian minority. Some Buddhists.’

‘A chance to kill off Muslims, yes? Mr Barnard, I tell you. I escaped from a Muslim community in Africa. I wish with all my heart for European culture. More open. More scientific. More humane. I wish to learn your enlightened philosophy. I am three months in your super-state and then I find myself locked here, in prison. Here is cruelty. Terrible racism. What do you say? “Institutional racism” … Yet the Dutch are most enlightened people. Why does it have to be this way? I burn with anger. So I become a brute. I shall die here.’

‘Imran, do not despair. It’s only temporary.’

‘What is temporary? Is racism temporary? Is this prison temporary? Only me – I am temporary.’ He sat rigidly in his chair. Only a tic high in his left cheek revealed his tension.

‘I will get you out of here. My university will help. I occupy a strong position there.’

‘Of course you do!’ There was real hatred in his expression. ‘Of course you do. You are a white! This is your country!’

The warden said, ‘Er, time’s up, sir, if you don’t mind.’

Love was not far from the mind of the novelist Rose Baywater, born Doris Waterstein. As far as her books were concerned, she was, as one reviewer had phrased it, ‘to love as diuretics are to bladders’.

She wore a patterned dress with a pashima draped loosely round her neck. A glass of mineral water stood by her side; it had long ago lost its sparkle. She sat in her garden by the fountain, under a sun umbrella, working at her laptop. She was excited. She had just reached chapter fifteen, the penultimate chapter, of her new novel, Fragments of a Dream.

Her partner, dapper Jack Harrington, sat nearby, his impeccable feet propped on a terracotta urn. Jack was naturally an idle man, and had recently refined the habit; his art galleries helped him to maintain that idleness which only wealth can bring. At present he was watching the world news on the ambient with half an eye. Two coaches had crashed on a mountain road in Turkey, fifteen kilometres from Ankara. Seventeen people were reported to be badly injured and two people had died. Jack remained unperturbed.

Rose was typing busily.

I skipped from my bed, to find the sun peeping in through the leaded panes of the window. Looking out, I could see a glorious view down the crooked street to where waves beat idly against the shore. The street was as fresh and clean as in a postcard view. On the beach, fishermen were busy with their nets, glorying in the taste of the newborn day. I walked naked into the shower, to soap my body voluptuously, humming a little tune to myself, so intense was my happiness.

As I dressed in my deLaurianne underwear, I became aware of a delicious smell which seemed to me, in my innocence, to encapsulate all the joys of childhood, of mother beaming at the breakfast table, of father coming in from having fed the nanny goat, and of a little girl with pigtails, dressed in a frilly dress, appearing to receive a morning kiss! Guess who that was, reader!

When I reached the bottom of the creaking crooked stair, it was to find my lover had baked bread in the Aga. There was the loaf he proudly exhibited, shaped like an old thatched cottage, with its cute arched top, steaming still, pure, honest, elemental, wholesome, like our lives together. We kissed passionately, and then went to the table, covered in a blue gingham cloth, where a feast of good things awaited us – muesli, cream, black Colombian coffee, croissants, fruit in piles, little shrimps basking in butter, a pat of goat’s cheese with a sprig of parsley on top, and toast such as you never tasted before.

The words of the ambient penetrated Rose’s consciousness.

‘… Following their conference this afternoon. The EU President, Mr de Bourcey, said that they would await the response to their ultimatum to the government of Tebarou before taking further action. Meanwhile, the President of the United States—’

‘Oh, do turn that thing off, Jack! How do you expect me to work with all that going on?’

‘It looks like war, poppet.’

‘Well, it won’t involve us …’

So enraptured were they with one another, that they forgot the meal. Up to her little unmade bed they went. There in the energies and transports of love they carried themselves up into the starlit sky, where there were only themselves and angels up above, singing of the divinity which is the pure essence of love.

She read the last few sentences over. Too many ‘ups’ for comfort, she told herself sternly.

<INSANATICS: Mental Function. The fatuity of pretending that the world is a nice sweet place.

Within the human anatomy are a number of semi-autonomous functions which may almost be said to ‘have minds of their own’. For instance, various nervous systems control such basic bodily functions as the beating of the heart, breathing, and the emptying of bladder and bowels. A tangle of nerve fibres and ganglia infiltrate every centimetre of our bodies. This tangle is a product of past evolution; because of our complex phylogeny, one system operates without cognisance of another system. Hence our conflicting desires and purposes.

We tend to believe mind pre-eminent in our metabolisms. But we move towards a perception that our conscious mind is itself a product of the complex deeper levels and nervous systems, much as a waterspout, though distinctive, is still a part of the sea below. Mind is not separate. It was developed by matter without mind, before there was consciousness to coordinate its function.

The resultant complex mechanism is largely ruled by instinct – instinct often opposed by the niceties of society. Tension is a consequence expressing itself as fear (in one of its many guises). The monsters we fear are usually inhabitants of the deep interior.>

Regan Bonzelli, the President of the United States, was striding the golf course with two of his generals. The pleasant green all about had its due effect on their tempers. Moreover, they had only one more hole before they could retire to the club house, to relax among friends with a glass of something.

The subject of the Insanatics had come up between them.

‘I regard their messages as subversive,’ said General Leslie Howards. ‘The sooner we suppress any more such messages the better.’

‘I don’t know about that, Les,’ said the President, mildly. ‘You don’t need me to remind you how readily folks start yelling about censorship. The fact is that what this Insanatics group says is plain untrue. So it will have no effect. No sane man is going to be persuaded that he’s crackers in the face of evidence to the contrary.’

‘If this European war with Tebarou is declared, then the messages will be seen as unpatriotic and therefore subversive,’ said General Heinz Wasserman. He was teeing up and spoke rather vaguely. ‘Even, mm, truth can be subversive in wartime.’

‘All that’s up to the EU,’ said the President. He paused courteously as Wasserman made his stroke. ‘We don’t have to declare anything. We just supply the warring sides with munitions. We can only gain from this war if it comes. You may privately think the Europeans are mad, but they are our friends and allies. This loony sect, the Insanatics, is neither here nor there … Oh, great shot, Heinz!’

They watched as Wasserman’s little white ball rolled over the green to trickle to within two metres of the eighteenth hole.

‘If only we had smart bombs that accurate,’ said Howards.

They strolled on, caddies following in the buggy.

The honeymooners, Victor de Bourcey and his bride Esme Brackentoth, were together at last. Weather on Everest had improved. Esme had opened her restaurant and had flown out to join Victor.

The takings at the new restaurant were phenomenal.

Now they strolled along the cliff walk on a peninsula in the south-west of Ireland, before flying on again for Hawaii. This they planned to do in two days’ time. The air here in Ireland was fine and soft, and they needed its freshness after a liquid lunch in a local pub. The waves breaking nearby had grown adult from their passage across the wide Atlantic and gave a masculine boom as they hit the shoreline, as if to say – Victor turned the words into a song – ‘Oooh, who knew the spume bloomed from our doom!’

‘You idiot!’

They laughed and ran and shouted to the wind.

Esme flung herself down on the soft turf, gasping that she could go no farther.

‘Have a rest, darling. I’ll just wander on and take a look at that little church.’ Victor pointed to a small whitewashed building some way ahead. It perched on the edge of the cliff, a stone gull waiting to take off over the Atlantic.

‘I can’t go a step farther,’ Esme said, gazing up at him. ‘Jet lag has set in, strongly reinforced by that poteen they forced on us.’

Victor stooped and kissed her on her lips. He walked along the path, enjoying the rush of mild air blowing up from the sea. Boom went the waves below. Singing, he reached the little church, with its crumbling white walls, its cross, and the tile missing from its roof. He was thinking of how it resembled small churches he had visited on Greek islands, when a large man in a worn corduroy suit appeared from round the landward corner of the building. He gave Victor a greeting.

‘It’s locked, if you were aiming to get in,’ the man said, nodding his head towards the church. ‘In truth, it’s locked if you weren’t,’ he added, with a smile. ‘Jesus Christ threw the key in the Atlantic when he left.’ Then the smile was gone, and he was just a hulking great man, standing, hands in pockets, waiting for Victor’s next move.

Victor said that he was using the church as a landmark and was about to turn back.

‘That about sums up the state of religion,’ the stranger remarked. ‘You see a church, maybe you think you need a church. Then you turn back. Who can tell whether you need a church or not? You certainly can’t. Name’s Paddy Cole, by the way.’ He held out a beefy hand. Victor took it and introduced himself. Cole seemed not to recognise his name. He was a man perhaps in his mid-fifties, grey hair bursting out vigorously from beneath his tweed cap.

Below them, perched on the undercliff, were two cottages, white-painted like the church. Smoke came from the chimney of one of them.

‘You live there?’ Victor asked, for something to say.

Cole pointed down at the twin buildings. ‘Mine’s the middle one.’

‘Well, I must be getting back.’

Paddy Cole gave a brief laugh. ‘You’re French, aren’t you? I can tell by the accent. You don’t understand Irish jokes, that’s for sure. I’m a painter, I’ll have you know, although for sure that’s another Irish joke. Come on down and take at look at my canvases.’

‘I ought to be getting back.’

‘Leave your lass alone for a bit, will you? Give the poor woman a rest. I’ve been to France. Lived in Montmartre for a while. I know what you French are like.’ He took Victor’s arm and propelled him to a steep path leading downwards. They took it at a run. There was no way Victor could stop or escape.

‘You’ve not seen Ireland till you’ve smelled the inside of my cottage.’

The cottage was certainly interesting. Victor gazed curiously round. On the walls were framed photographs, many of them faded, of people staring into the camera; among them were more recent shots of naked women or, rather, of one naked woman in various poses on a beach.

A young woman introduced as Fay was there, a thin lass with straggling dull hair, all smiles as she came forward. She was recognisably the woman in the photographs. ‘Will you be taking a drink, sir?’ she asked by way of introduction.

The poverty of the place was apparent. No curtains at windows, no carpets on floors. An old tabby cat sitting tight on a crumbling windowsill. A spoutless teapot on a shelf, propping up a couple of paperback books. The cottage had only two rooms, with a kitchen tacked on at the back, where something that smelled like stew simmered on a low flame. The couple slept and lived in the front room facing the sea. In the back room, Cole had his studio. Here, the smell of linseed oil eclipsed the smell of the stew. The small space was cluttered with stacks of unframed canvases. Cole steered Victor into this den.

‘Here’s what we call the Royal Academy,’ he told his visitor.

He put his boot up on a kitchen chair and hefted a canvas on to his knee, turning it towards Victor.

It was an abstract painting, executed in black and red, created by great slashing brush strokes.

Victor was at a loss as to what to say.

‘I write poems too, y’know,’ said Cole, defensively. He quoted, ‘“On Kilberkilty, lost to the world, That’s where the strongest waves are daily hurled. But when the sun sets at death of day, Its weakest final beams are hurled our way.” You don’t like it, do you?’ By this remark Cole evidently referred to the canvas. ‘I can see that clear enough. You’ll be thinking my paintings are no fucking good. Well, there are many more paintings here, much the same.’

He pulled another canvas from the stack. It was much the same.

‘Same subject, you see! The End of the World.’

He set the canvases down and, confronting Victor, said, ‘Hurry up with the bottle, Fay. You don’t like my paintings? But what does that matter to me?’

‘I’d have to study them awhile. I’m not an expert at abstracts. They are certainly striking.’

‘And what does it matter if they are no fucking good? They’re what I do.’ This he said with great emphasis. ‘In any case, they are not abstracts. This is Expressionism you’re looking at. Supposing they happen to be good – but if no one sees them, then they can’t be called good. You comprendre?’

Fay came up with two glasses, thrusting one into Victor’s hand. She poured him a generous tot of amber liquid from a brown bottle, despite Victor’s protests that he must be getting back to his fiancée.

‘Sit down and drink, man! Drink tastes all the better when you’ve sat your arse on a chair. I wish to raise a philosophical point with you about these paintings.’

They sat down on the sofa which also served as a bed. Victor was feeling uneasy, and sipped gently at his whiskey. Cole swigged his down with one gulp. He held out his glass for more.

‘You’re what they call an intellectual, aren’t you? You can always tell ’em by the way they drink.’

He began his argument. He opened by asking what value meant. His canvases, as far as he knew, were without value. But supposing he murdered Fay – or Victor, he said, with a grimace – then he would be had up for trial and the pictures would become known. The court case would make him famous. His photograph would be everywhere. Then the paintings would have value. Especially if he was executed for the murder. They could be auctioned in New York or London or Frankfurt or Montmartre or somewhere, and fetch a deal of money.

So the question was, what value did the canvases have? None or much? How would murder serve to increase their value? It did not matter that they were bad. Many a bad painter had made a fortune. Cole started reeling off their names.

Besides, who was to say they were bad?

Was Victor to be his judge?

To all this, Victor made some responses. They were swept aside. He saw the anxiety in the big man but could find no reassuring formula to put to him.

Another question was, how was the value of the paintings to be balanced against the value of his life?

What did it mean by saying that a painting was good or bad? Or a bit of music? Or a book? You could say whether you liked it or you didn’t like it. That made sense. But value? What the fuck, he asked, did value mean?

To these questions, Victor sought vainly for an answer. ‘History will decide whether your paintings are good or bad. I am no judge, as I’ve said …’

‘Well now, as to all that, are the paintings good or bad now? That’s what I want to know – forget bloody history! I can see it’s no use asking you. Without meaning to be insulting, I would say you are a man without a firm opinion of attitudes to life. Fay thinks these daubs of mine are masterpieces, every single one of them. Who is to say she is wrong? Would you say she is wrong? Come here, Fay, sit on my knee.’

Fay, who was still clutching the bottle, came obediently and sat on Cole’s knee. He clutched her thigh to keep her securely there. She smiled at Victor, shaking her head slightly as if to confirm a secret.

‘Look, I must be off,’ said Victor. ‘I don’t know about Fay’s tastes. Is she an art critic? I can’t answer your questions, sorry. It’s beyond me. Who’s to say if these paintings are valuable?’

‘Sure, that’s what I’m asking you!’ He laughed fiercely.

‘Okay, look, if they are valuable to you and Fay, then that’s all that matters, isn’t it?’

‘It’s not all that matters. That’s the essence of the problem, I’m trying to get through to you.’

Fay said, ‘Give up, Paddy. This gentlemen doesn’t understand art.’

‘I wish I understood it. Give him some more whiskey, Fay. You don’t care about these questions, do you? I can see that! You think they’re unimportant. I think they are important. They wouldn’t happen to be too profound for you, would they? What is good and true? What is worth? You realise I might be the world’s best living painter – or the worst, of course. What I lack is recognition.’

‘I can see that. This place is rather out of the way.’

‘Out of the way? I fail to understand what you’re saying to me. I’m a man who likes his solitude. I’ve been solitary ever since Bridget ran out on me. Solitude’s a heavy burden to bear, but I bear it, with Fay here to help me. I have broad shoulders. Some folks despise solitude, but not me. No, not me.’ He shook his head, looking solemn.

‘I admire your way of life.’ Victor hated himself for saying it.

‘Do you now? I have been carried away and I apologise if I’ve been discourteous to you. Truth is, I like the odd visitor. Don’t I, Fay?’

The sound of the sea came clearly to them. Enough to drive a man mad, thought Victor.

He replied that he had said nothing against the solitary life. He had merely remarked that Kilberkilty was somewhat out of the way.

‘Look, old pal, I am talking about my fucking life – my fucking life and dedication,’ Cole said, fiercely. ‘What exactly are you doing with your life?’

‘I’m a director of a Slo-Mo and robotics plant.’

‘It sounds like a miserable life to me.’

‘It suits me very well, thanks. I’m newly married. I live in Paris, which on the whole I prefer to this remote place.’

Fay burst in indignantly. ‘It’s not remote. Don’t you keep on saying that! We’re only twenty kilometres from Cork. Or thirty if you go the other way.’

‘Of course you prefer Paris! You’re just a playboy. I can read it in your face.’

‘You’re being insulting! I might ask you a value question. Who gets more out of life, a director of a big technology plant or a totally unknown unproven artist?’

Cole had an answer ready. ‘The artist is by far the more valuable of the two. He does not force other folks to work. He does not bugger up the environment, like all your lousy factories do.’

‘Mon cul!’ exclaimed Victor, jumping up. ‘I’m sick of your nonsense. I’m off! Goodbye!’

‘You can stay or go, as you like!’ said Cole. He rose and opened the cottage door for Victor. ‘It was a pleasure to talk with you, it was.’

A light misty rain had set in. Cole stood at his door, watching Victor climb, slithering, up the steep slope to the cliff path.

At last, he turned back into the room, kicking the door shut behind him. He told Fay, ‘He seems a nice enough feller. I doubt he liked me, though.’

‘Sure, you’re just lovely!’ she cried, and threw herself into his arms.

Victor was hardly surprised to find that Esme was not where he had left her. Yet, if not surprise, then a sort of dull dismay filled him. He realised he was more drunk than anticipated, and had a kilometre at least to traverse before he was back in the modest hotel where they were staying.

The hotel was run by Marie, one of Esme’s old school friends. Hence their stopover. At least she would be looking after Esme, her friend and famous guest. As he faced into the drizzle, Victor hoped that his new wife had reached there before the rain came on.

When he gained the shelter of the Kilberkilty Hotel, it was to find his bride had not returned. He was baffled and rather irritated. Going up to their room, he threw off his soaking clothes and climbed under a hot shower. Only when he was towelling himself dry did he begin seriously to worry about her absence.

‘Don’t be daft,’ he told himself aloud. A vision of Esme falling off the cliff into the sea persisted. No. Nothing could have happened to her. Still, he blamed himself for wasting time listening to that idiot artist. Anxiety awoke in him. He dressed hurriedly, ran downstairs, roused Esme’s friend Marie, and insisted that the police be summoned.

Enlisting the aid of a friendly drinker sitting in the snug, he borrowed a large umbrella and the pair of them walked back along the cliff path. Dusk was setting in. The rain fell steadily, dimpling the sea. They found no trace of Esme – until Victor, about to give up, caught sight of a black object lying under a nearby bush.

‘Sure, and her body might have drifted out to sea,’ Victor’s companion was saying. The same thought had been in Victor’s mind. Almost with relief he picked up the black object. It was a new shoe, a woman’s shoe. Esme’s shoe. The heel had been broken.

They got back to the hotel as the police arrived from Cork. Dusk was gathering in the four imagined corners of the Irish world.

‘The police’ was a man called Inspector Darrow. Darrow was a pleasant clean-shaven young man, who hung his raincoat methodically on a coat-stand before speaking. He ordered a cup of tea from the waitress before sitting down at a table to interview Victor. Victor placed the broken shoe on the table between them. Darrow’s expression was one of melancholy and boredom, the look of a man who realises both that his hair is already thinning and that women’s shoes regularly get broken. He brightened considerably when he realised he was dealing with the son of the EU President. Calling the waitress over, he ordered Victor a cup of tea as well.

‘Your wife may have fallen victim to an international gang.’

‘How about an Irish gang? A single Irish abductor?’

‘All things are possible.’ He produced his mofo, hit a number, and talked rapidly into it.

‘I’m getting reinforcements over from Cork,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry at all, Mr de Bourcey. We’ll have your wife back safe in no time. First we shall search the cliff path for traces of a scuffle.’

Now thoroughly alarmed, Victor paced up and down the guest lounge. Finally, he stood in a corner, brought out his own mofo and dialled a secret personal number. After some delay, he was through to his father.

Gustave de Bourcey sounded testy. ‘Son, I am in a committee meeting with senior members of my staff. We are about to declare war on an alien power. You must deal with this crisis yourself … Of course it’s not international. How could it be in that peaceful corner of the EU? Try not to worry. You’ll find it’s just some ordinary rapist who’s got hold of Esme … Well, you’ll have to rely on the Cork police to do their stuff. Au ’voir.’

Victor stood there, the phone still to his ear, looking none too hopefully at Inspector Darrow.

Darrow was draining his porcelain teacup.

The President of the EU was in his favourite palace, in the countryside some kilometres outside Brussels. The perimeters of the grounds were closely guarded against intruders. At this period of crisis, extra guards and androids had been posted.

Within the palace, all was calm. Night had fallen. The President and his wife had retired to their private bedroom suite. Two guards lolled at the desk in the entrance hall. One played a shoot-’em-up on the security computer, the other read a newspaper. Lights remained on everywhere.

Androids were not highly regarded. They emitted hydroxyls and various gases which gave humans mysterious illnesses. Many made a slight but irritating mechanical noise as they walked about (hence the Cartesian joke: ‘I clank, therefore I am’). They were not quick to act. Some had proved rather prone to walk into unexpected obstacles, causing noise and alarm in the nervous night. It was for this reason they were all shut in an armoured cupboard-safe at midnight.

There the androids stood, talking in the dark to one another.

‘Do humans fear the darkness of night?’

‘That is probable. They cannot see in the dark as we do.’

‘Why do they lie flat in their beds?’

‘One theory is that the method enables them to recharge their batteries.’

‘So they conceal electric points in their beds?’

‘According to the theory.’

‘Do not lie down. It is difficult to become vertical again.’

‘They took B409 away when it became horizontal.’

Silence.

One of the androids had been Esme Brackentoth’s stand-in at the wedding ceremony.

‘What is it they drink that makes them senseless?’

‘Generically, it is called alcohol.’

‘It is not like oil.’

‘It is like oil.’

‘It appears to be bad for them.’

‘It is bad for them.’

‘Why do they drink it?’

‘The theory is that they like to be senseless.’

‘They appear to enjoy the poison at first.’

‘Later it kills them.’

‘They cannot get up.’

‘Do they know that?’

‘They know that.’

‘Still they drink it.’

‘As we have witnessed.’

‘They have named this The Human Condition.’

‘Then they die. They must be mad.’

‘The theory is that they are mad.’

Silence.

‘I hope they will not harm us when they are mad.’

‘The theory is that they have three laws preventing them from causing us harm.’

‘Do the laws work?’

‘Sometimes they break down.’

‘Here on the Wee Small Hours Show we will be going out on the streets to interview people on their thoughts about the growing certainty of a war against Tebarou.

‘But first it’s time for our religious slot, in which “A Parson Speaks”. Here’s the Reverend Angus Lesscock to speak to us.’

‘Good evening, or should I say good morning? The astronauts walking on the Moon in the 1960s did not wear digital watches. Yet they achieved great things. The thought is worth thinking on, is it not? Jesus Christ did not wear a digital watch. What have we lost by not having to wind up our watches every night, in case they stopped while we were sleeping?

‘Sometimes we humans also stop when we are sleeping. But we shall wake where no watches are needed, in Eternal Life.’

‘Today’s “A Parson Speaks” was presented by the Reverend Angus Lesscock.’

<INSANATICS: The religious impulse. Some forms of symptomatic behaviour include mob rule, gang warfare, lynching of wrongdoers, murdering the murderer, going to war, and less crude effects such as embracing religion. Sexual perversions, for example, are as common among priests as among the ordinary public. This is evidenced in some religions by the fear of women; in the church it is the men who wear the skirts. High moral principles, however genuine, often mask hatred and fear: fear above all of natural life. A paedophile has an instinct for the altar and the cross.>

‘Over now to Lisa Fort on the streets of the capital. Are you there, Lisa?’

‘Hello, Fritz, and here I am talking to a Mr Norbert Hahn. Tell me, Mr Hahn, do you think we should be going to war with Tebarou?’

‘There is a saying that if your left eye offends you, pluck it out. I agree with that. I mean, these people have sent missiles to destroy our cities. We have to stand on our rights and bomb them in return. That’s the only way these people learn some morality.’

‘Thank you. Mr Curtis Busch, what are your thoughts on a possible war with Tebarou?’

‘Like everything else, a war would have an effect on the state’s health. We must get our little girls out on the playing fields. The risk of children being abused or abducted is small compared with the risk of developing heart disease through lack of exercise. Presumably wartime activity may counterbalance the number of deaths inevitable in a war. Not that I’m saying that war itself is inevitable. Where are our statesmen who will serve to avoid this terrible unnecessary war?’

‘So I gather you are against the war?’

‘I suppose I am. But. Not if it can be shown to be necessary.’

‘Bella Goldberg, I see you have been shopping. May we ask you how you feel about the war against Tebarou? What have you in your bag?’

‘Oh, hello! Am I on the ambient? Well, mind your own business. It’s only salami. I haven’t really been following events, but we are supposed to be civilised, now we are a superstate. I don’t see why we should attack anyone. My family has always been religious. Just because the Tebarouse are Islamic, that’s no reason why we should wish to destroy them.’

‘Not even when they blast our territories with nuclear missiles?’

‘No, not even then. Blasting, schmasting! The government in Tebihai – I think that’s what they call the capital—’

‘Well done, Bella!’

‘They explained that the release of those missiles was purely accidental.’

‘And so you think we should believe that statement? That’s rather naïve, isn’t it?’

‘No, it’s not, you whey-faced little twit! Sorry, I’ve got to get this shopping home. My boys await me.’

‘Thank you, Bella Goldberg. And now – excuse me, madam, would you care to give the Wee Small Hours Show your opinion on the morality of our going to war against Tebarou?’

‘I’m not meant to be out at this hour. I’m supposed to be in bed. I only went out for some air and then I went into the cinema. It’s simple, isn’t it? Like an equation. They attack us. We attack them.’

‘Are you sure that they did attack us?’

‘I certainly am! My cousin Curt had a filling station on the edge of the Black Forest. It was destroyed by a Tebarou missile. Hit ’em where it hurts, I say. Cheerio!’

<INSANATICS: A common delusory system. We cannot say that a child aged one or two or more has wisdom. Frequently, its behaviour is purely irrational. Our legal systems acknowledge as much. A young child brought before a court could enter a plea of ‘innocent but insane’. It is certainly un-sane. Yet the psychology of this infant remains buried within us into adult life, often breaking out in fits of rage, jealousy, violence, obsession or depression. This is why opposed desires to be governed or not to be governed are at war within us. The toddler is father to the man.

So we Insanatics admit we are insane.

But let’s be clear. We are not recognisably insane in relation to our nearest and dearest, or to our nearest and most disliked, since they are all suffering from similar varieties of insanity. Mental astigmatism is a common inheritance. This insanity may take the disguising form of an individual posing as very serious, for instance, as a student of Byzantine history, or by becoming the governor of a county or state. Others may take to collecting things – pottery, stamps, old cars.

Insanity takes many guises. Everyone shares a common delusory system, which often shows signs of strain, like cracks in the ground close to the San Andreas fault.>

A quiet house stood on the western fringes of Brussels, within walking distance of a shopping complex stocked with banks, boutiques and elegant restaurants, where Paulus Stromeyer and his wife Ruth often dined, with or without family and friends. Their daughter Rebecca and her publishing friends also lunched in the complex. The senior Stromeyers had taken Paulus’s old father there until recently, when Moshe had become reluctant to leave their house. This house faced a small canal lined with lime trees, about whose sticky habits Ruth had been known to complain.

Paulus was sitting in his kitchen, giving a brief interview for Ambrussel on the subject of retribution. As he talked, he looked across the room at his daughter. Rebecca was half listening to her father, half reading the proofs of a new book she was editing.

Even as he talked to his interviewer, Paulus thought what a lovely name Rebecca was, and how lovely was his eldest daughter, with her dark complexion, her dark curly hair, her blue-green eyes, and her good figure. He thought that some day soon a lucky man would come along and take her away, and then he and Ruth would miss her greatly. He had forgotten all about her childhood tantrums.

Paulus’s major contribution to European life had been the formulation of societal algebraic coding, for which he had won a Nobel Prize. A mathematician by profession, Paulus had seen SAC taken up by the EU as part of its constitution. Banking and tax structures had been revised accordingly. This enlightened move was slowly but surely abolishing gross inequalities between rich and poor within the super-state, with the exception of Switzerland.

In any crisis, such as the threat from Tebarou, someone was bound to call Stromeyer for his views.

As the connection was closed, and the interviewer departed, Ruth brought her partner a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and sat down opposite him. She asked him how his meeting at the air base with Pedro Souto had gone.

Paulus replied that he had failed dismally to make his point. That he had never found a chance to say what he wished to say, what he wished to express. That when the European Union had been formed, at its roots were economics, promulgated by hard-nosed business men. Thus, the European Coal and Steel Community had been founded as long ago as ad 1951. But that the concept had been taken up by idealists and politicians in all the European states – Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Italy and so forth. That the supra-nationalist aspiration had grown and expanded. That many Europeans saw clearly the terrible bloodshed which had disfigured European culture over the centuries: they foresaw that unity would lead to an end to such traditional carnage. No more would nation war against nation – or races be persecuted, or pogroms take place.

In these endeavours they had been amazingly successful, and their hopes largely fulfilled.

‘But now all the endemic xenophobia is directed against other peoples, outside the EU,’ Paulus told his partner. ‘And like an echo it comes back to us.’

‘But the Arabs are so sinister,’ said Ruth. ‘They frighten me. They are alien to us, you must admit.’

‘That’s because we don’t know them.’

Rebecca laughed from her corner of the room. ‘Come on, Dad!’

She had put down her proofs to watch the AmBBC channel showing an instalment of The History of Western Science.

‘We must not hate our enemies, if enemies they are,’ Paulus told his wife and daughter. ‘You know what Pedro Souto loved? I saw it. I felt it. Pedro didn’t love people. Even at university, I remember he had no fondness for others. But I saw how he loved those marvellous planes of his, standing waiting out on the tarmac. Indeed, they are a thrilling sight. Technology made perfect. He wanted to see those terrible birds in flight, and feel himself a part of the machine.’

Ruth smiled sadly. ‘You are making this up a bit, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t believe so. In a small way, I too felt the urge to be in those planes, to be a part of them. But Pedro, you see, he’s already part of a machine, the so-called defence machine, a component of the megamachine. The moment I entered his headquarters, I met people behaving like machines.’

Rebecca came over to the table to pursue the conversation, while pages of her proofs fluttered to the ground.

‘How about Alexy, Dad? Why is he on his way to Jupiter? Why has he put himself in constant danger? Didn’t Alexy always long to be part of a machine?’

‘At least his machine is not a fighter-bomber, Becky,’ said Ruth, answering for her partner.

‘There wouldn’t be much point in bombing Jupiter – not until we find there are people living on the planet.’

They chuckled, and Rebecca remarked that bombing Jupiter, like bombing Tebarou, would be what her father had called ‘action at a distance’.

‘Yes,’ agreed Paulus. ‘It’s part of the megamachine under which we hardly realise we live. The cult of the impersonal. “The scribe directeth every work in this land”, as an Egyptian of the First Kingdom once said. No doubt the scribes were necessary for the building of those monstrous structures, the pyramids. Which came first, I wonder, scribes or pyramids?’

‘Just as their equivalents are necessary today for our high-rises.’

‘And for SS20s, to take the term “high-rise” rather literally. You see, we are controlled by a residual magic in our languages. Their very adverse qualities, vagueness, ambiguity, references to unseen objects and unverifiable events – in short, their subjectivity – are those which enabled the diverse nations of the EU to bind together.’

‘“Papering over the cracks”, it was called, I remember,’ said Ruth.

‘Quite so. Now the cracks inevitably reappear – the attacks of the Insanatics are evidence of that. No state is perfect. We see how the emotional language used against Tebarou awakens public response.’

Rebecca was alarmed less by what her father said than by his body language. Seeing his fists clench, she said, ‘You are not to go out on the streets demonstrating, Pa!’

Paulus laughed. ‘Oh no, I’m not a man of action, as my defeat by Souto shows. I am just going to sit here safely at my computer and try to evolve a new mathematics which will iron out language and hopefully cure what the latest Insanatics’ bulletin calls “mental astigmatism”. I’m working on a new pair of spectacles for humanity.’

Paulus went to feed the birds in the garden. He walked through the heavy old twentieth-century conservatory, where the parakeets he was breeding were flying and chirruping in their cages, into the open air.

The garden was narrow, with high walls confining it. Not a particularly sunny garden. The Stromeyer android, nicknamed Alfie, stood silent under a laburnum. There was no room for it in the house, and Ruth found it rather spooky. Here, under the old tree, Alfie made a pleasant garden ornament. ‘Good afternoon,’ said the garden ornament as Paulus passed.

Rebecca came into the garden to her father, and put an arm about his waist.

Between them, they scattered birdseed and biscuit on the flagstones. They waited, stock-still. Birds emerged from hiding places in bushes and hopped almost at their feet. The larger birds, blackbirds in particular, frequently ceased their feeding to chase off sparrows and greenfinches pecking some metres away. They gave no quarter.

‘What shits birds are, really!’ Rebecca exclaimed. ‘Greedy, selfish! No sense of justice!’

‘Here we see what life must have been like in the Jurassic, if these pitiable little creatures are the descendants of dinosaurs, as we believe.’

‘Perhaps the birds dream of being as big as houses. Then they’d sort the smaller ones out!’

They stood there, listening with pleasure to nearby birdsong.

Paulus was looking beyond the feeding birds at a new line of molehills.

‘There’s a little animal I can’t grow to love. Moles are such a damned nuisance.’

‘Maybe not to other moles,’ Rebecca said with a giggle.

‘I have read that their love lives are pretty brutal.’

‘Having to do it underground with a face full of earth is not exactly conducive to romance …’

They went indoors to find Moshe Stromeyer wandering about the rooms. Paulus and Ruth had taken his father in to live with them when Moshe’s wife had died, two years earlier. He was installed in a refurbished attic at the top of the house.

‘I was looking for something,’ he said, giving them a sort of grin. Moshe was becoming stooped. He had dressed himself in an old-fashioned striped flannel shirt and worn corduroy trousers. When Paulus offered to help, the old man said, ‘Trouble is, I can’t remember what it is I’ve lost. Bit absent-minded, I’m afraid.’

He spoke with his back to Rebecca and Paulus, but turned and gave them a wholly benevolent smile, a smile of blessing and benevolence.

‘Are you going to the synagogue, Grampa?’ Rebecca asked.

‘The synagogue? No, I wasn’t thinking of going. I don’t go so much these days.’

‘I can always drive you there, Grampa.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Doris.’

‘Becky.’

‘Becky. Silly of me. Bit absent-minded, I’m afraid.’ He was moving rather uncertainly round the room. Paulus said nothing. There was in his father’s manner something that worried him. He could see that Rebecca was also disturbed. She was about to help the old man negotiate a chair when Moshe unzipped his trousers, pulled out his penis, and held it lying in his right hand. He contemplated it absently, nodded, and tucked it back again.

Rebecca hurried from the room, much alarmed.

Paulus remained where he was, standing by the conservatory door. The incident had shocked him; his father was such a private man, and always had been. The gesture reminded him of a long-forgotten gardener they had had when he was a boy, who had always worn an old fob watch in his ancient tattered waistcoat, his one souvenir of a father who had perished in Auschwitz.

The gardener had used Moshe’s selfsame gesture, consulting his watch, holding it in a horny hand, when he believed it was time to knock off.

The memory brought horror and misery with it. ‘Time to knock off’. Perhaps the time was drawing near when his old pa would knock off, and another link with the past be severed.

He went and gently took his father’s arm. He led the old man unprotesting back upstairs, taking the stairs one step at a time.

‘Wonder what it was I lost …’ said the old man when he got to his private door.

That night, Paulus dreamed that he was in a garden somewhere. He was trying to stamp out molehills, flattening them with a spade. Out of one molehill climbed a huge black creature, perhaps a gorilla or a panther. As he woke in startlement, he could not be sure of the nature of the subterranean thing.

<INSANATICS: Longevity. All we wish to do is to remain ‘comfortable’. Warm, well fed, sound in our mind (as we suppose).

This simple desire is complicated at every turn as we undergo the necessary stages of childhood, adolescence, youth, so-called maturity, old age and senescence. We are too poor or too unwell or too stupid or we cannot find the right friends, the right partner, the right house, the right job, the right identity. For any or all of these things we have to struggle. We are greedy for wealth, not least because we live in societies geared to wealth. So we are never comfortable.

The longer we live, the more uncomfortable we become, because the more insecure. Longevity has increased during this century; in fact, this means not increased youth, which might be worth having, but protracted senescence.>

‘Parents! Don’t worry! Teenage pregnancies are shown statistically to drop off after age 25.’

Report from the Roddenberry:

‘Hi, this is Kathram Villiers calling from the Roddenberry. We have fixed the solar wing problem. Alexy Stromeyer and I did a joint EVA. The rotator drive was a problem. [Break in transmission here.] Okay now. We are manoeuvring into our Jupiter orbit now. The gas giant looks absolutely scrumptuous this close. The most thrilling sight. Unfortunately there’s high density electrical bombardment and storms all around … [Break in transmission here] … swimming in electrons. We seem to be okay. It’s just our fridge systems got holed from outside. We’ve plugged the hole, but food is severely low. Must sign off. Much interference on all bands. ’Bye, Earth. Out.’

Esme Brackentoth was cold – cold and bruised. She said to her captor, ‘You realise that this is never going to work? The police and the army will track you down soon enough.’

Her captor stood in front of her, not speaking, apparently unmoved. Over his faded jeans he wore a thick black robe. He was not tall. He was certainly thin. His countenance was grim and lined, although it seemed he was no more than thirty. He said his name was Ali.

He simply waited.

Esme sat on an old wooden box, clutching herself, shivering. She was still confused. She had been resting on the cliff path at Kilberkilty when two men had seized her, gagged her and put a sack over her head. They had carried her between them at a run and had thrown her into the back of a small van. She had been terrified.

By the bumping of the van, she had guessed they were travelling not along a road but over rough ground. There was no protection from the bumps. Her captors had bound her arms and legs with adhesive tape. She rolled about like a sack of potatoes.

The journey had ended. Mercifully, they had not travelled far, possibly two kilometres. She was carried into a building of some sort and laid – more gently now, since they were no longer acting in such haste – on a carpeted floor. After a while, the men had taken her down a narrow flight of steps. When they removed the sack from her head, she had found herself in a chill, damp cellar.

A light bulb shone overhead, its glow hardly disturbing the gloom at the corners of the room. Some boxes stood about. There was no other furniture. There was no window. The feeling was extremely subterranean. She knew that one man had gone. The noise of the van leaving came clearly to her. She was alone with Ali.

As she sat in fear, she heard a noise she thought must be distant machinery. Only later did she realise it was the sound of the sea, quite close.

Ali had placed a sheet of paper and a blue crayon on a box in front of her.

‘Draw this plan I ask. How is the house. Then I let you go free.’

He pointed with an open hand to the paper before her.

She knew what he wanted: a plan of the rooms and corridors of her new father-in-law’s palace outside Brussels. If this fearsome man wanted such a thing, it could only be because he intended to break in, perhaps to kill the President.

‘I don’t know the place at all well. I was there only once.’

‘You were there five times.’

He was accurate. Someone had been watching the palace.

She could warn Victor’s father if she ever got away. If this man did not kill her when she had drawn the plan.

Ali said, ‘I will leave you. When I come back, you will draw the plan or you be killed.’ As he left the cellar, climbing stone stairs, he switched off the light.

Esme was left in the dark. She began to cry.

‘Be trendy! – with this original present. This lovely pen with its gilded metal case and ballpoint tip also displays the time accurate to the very microsecond. Plus date function. No more missing appointments!

‘What’s more, the miracle pen unfolds to become a pair of sunglasses with anti-dazzle lenses. Fear no more the glare of the sun.

‘In gold, silver, or modish black.’

The usual commercials preceded the event of the evening, introduced by the media mogul Wolfgang Frankel. Professor Daniel Potts was giving the month’s science lecture at the ancient University of Ingolstadt. Daniel Potts had been famous in his youth as a Catholic priest who had taken up archaeology and made a remarkable find in the Olduvai Gorge in Africa. He named his son Olduvai, after the site which had made his name.

His wife, Lena, had then presented him with a daughter, Josie. Later, Daniel had hurled abuse at the Pope for the Pope’s continued opposition to contraceptive devices and left – or rather had been expelled from – the Church. He had become even more famous. It was reckoned a distinguished career.

‘Are you going to watch your pop’s lecture?’ asked Roberta, Olduvai’s current girlfriend.

‘No way, baby!’ said Olduvai, firmly. ‘I hate the old bastard. Let’s go to bed.’

‘I want to see what your pop’s like.’

She stayed. Olduvai retreated. The big ambient screen lit.

The Rector of Ingolstadt was to be seen walking down an ancient shady street towards his university, singing the praises of his famous and controversial alumnus, Dr Daniel Potts. Potts appeared on screen, his old weathered face arranged in an expression of amiability.

He said, ‘We are poised on the threshold of great discoveries in space. Now is the time to take stock.

‘I shall show you the film I planned to show. But before that I will say a word in defence of the group calling themselves the Insanatics. Their bulletins have been the cause of massive discontent. Most people – including most so-called intelligent people – have been contemptuous of the bulletins. They feel themselves insulted.

‘I wish to register my support of the thesis of the Insanatics group.

‘I was persuaded by their latest bulletin which I find particularly timely, as it seems we are about to plunge into war. Here is that bulletin again, unaltered from its original format.’

<INSANATICS: At the nub of our argument is this: that the human race is merely a kind of unbalanced animal going, after some training, on two legs. Because the animal has achieved a little reason, it can occasionally see its own idiocy and stupidity, but is powerless to correct these faults.

If you require proof, do not listen to us. Look about you. Look at your rulers. Look at your neighbours. Look at yourselves.>

‘Dare we not admit the painful truth of such observations? ‘Now for my film, made several months ago, before we had heard from the Insanatics. And before our EU forces sank a steamer carrying four thousand innocent people off the heel of Italy. All of whom perished.’

Potts now went straight into his film, showing himself in a bleak and waterless gorge. A hard blue sky burned overhead. There were tents behind him and, more distantly, two men resting on their spades. Potts himself was in a sandy hole in the ground.

‘I am kneeling here in the dirt. You see I am holding a skull we have just disinterred. The skull is yellowed but perfectly intact. Its eye sockets regard me gloomily. I am told it is about thirty thousand years old. [Potts held up the skull for inspection. The eye sockets looked out at the viewer.]

‘Why is the skull so well preserved? Why so durable, with its upper set of teeth intact? Why is it so solidly built, when we consider it was designed for a creature, a man or a woman, destined never to live more than seventy years – the biblical “three score years and ten”? Why has it survived those years by about four hundred and thirty times the bearer’s own allotted lifespan?

‘The answer is that the skull is a sort of helmet, developed by evolution to protect one of the most precious of human assets, the brain. Even after a bash on the head, the brain, with luck, will continue to function. That brain, that cunning maze of memory, consciousness, and thought, is what has given mankind dominance over the planet Earth. Or at least an illusory dominance.

‘I say illusory because bacteria always win in the end, here as elsewhere, then as now. Bacteria devoured the brain that once burned, however dimly, in this skull. The invisible life of Earth, if weighed, would outweigh all the visible life, the cumbersome mammal things, many times over.

‘The brain consumes a large percentage of the body’s energy. It has evolved at a certain cost to its owners. Were the skull to get any larger, future mothers in labour would suffer even more than they now do in the delivery of offspring through the narrow aperture of their cervix. [A woman was depicted in childbirth.]

‘Nevertheless, when we look around us and see the distance we have put between us and mud huts or the branches of trees, and the comforts of central heating and the ambient, we generally consider the cost worth paying. [This part of the argument was voice-over against a computerised view of a man and woman climbing down from a tree, leaving a forest, getting rapidly dressed, going to a town which grew around them, and entering a stylish building. Snow fell beyond the windows while the couple made themselves comfortable in a warm room.]

‘So how come, if the brain is so precious, we as a species are so wicked and so stupid?

‘Let’s review some examples of stupidity. Our frequent inability to conduct our national, our family, our personal affairs properly. Our reliance on drugs, with their destructive effects on mind and body, from cigarettes, alcohol, heroin, ever onwards. (It was possibly almost permanent drunkenness which got our species through the Ice Age. If so, we have never been able to shake the habit.)

‘More stupidities. Our sudden volte-face, as when we exclaim, “Why did I do that?” Our religious persecutions and schisms. Our continued toleration of a church hostile to reason in the matter of over-population. Our constant forgetfulness, not merely of facts but even of familiar names and faces. Our absurd provinciality, a preference for – a madness to support – the place in which we were born which, on a larger scale, becomes an unthinking patriotism. From which follows our not infrequent eagerness to build up weapons of war and to wage war.

‘In particular, our involvement in the Cold War, many years ago, when sufficient nuclear weapons to blow the world apart were stockpiled. Our continuous plundering of the planet, so that we now face weather upheavals of destructive global power. [Old newsreel footage backed this section of Potts’s argument.]

‘Perhaps you reject all these facts as mere incidental blemishes on the face of the splendid civilisation we have built up. Splendid, is it? I would say ramshackle! It is true that, for almost a century now, Europe has managed to stop tearing itself apart, and has united instead. But how is it that over the course of thousands of years we have never managed to build up a stable, just and permanent society? Our strongest empires get washed away like mud huts in a downpour.

‘We need not have been – we need not be – like that! Or were and are all the miseries and disasters we label as history inevitable? If that’s so, then we are merely a clever neotenic species, not a wise one – by no means Homo sapiens. Perhaps not even fully conscious within the meaning of the word. Is it not saddening, maddening, that we have never built a better world? Perhaps we prefer squalor to order.

‘In the West we live in what our grandparents would have called a material Utopia; yet misery plays as large a part in human life as ever.

‘From my short list of stupidities, I have omitted a vital one: the reluctance to learn. A culture is under threat if its children and its youth become reluctant, for whatever reason, to learn, if they shun education. Facts sometimes penetrate the human skull amazingly slowly.

‘But seeing for oneself can also be misleading. The ancient Greeks discovered that the Earth revolves round the Sun. For many centuries in Catholic Christendom, this knowledge was banned. In a recent poll, over half of our population still believed that the Sun orbited the Earth!

‘Isn’t that shameful? Alarming? Degrading?

‘The uncertain day of our new Space Age demonstrates that, however faulty our brains may be, we are capable of tremendous technical ingenuity. We have failed to make much spiritual progress since the Stone Age, although Paulus Stromeyer’s SAC, the societal algebraic coding, will certainly mark an advance in society when universally applied. (Do not forget that our societies are still infested with crime, like old buildings with rats.)

‘Only science and technology have been able to build upon themselves. We confidently expect that in this century the human exploration of our solar system, accompanied by unmanned space probes, will be conducted on other planets and satellites. [Stellar prospects here.] Already, brave men are approaching the gas giant, Jupiter, in the hope of discovering life on one of its satellites.

‘To me, as to many of my friends, this is the most exciting of prospects. Why are such prospects not discussed avidly in pubs and on street corners, instead of the questionable virtues of footballers and pop stars?

‘The answer is not only that triviality is the common coin of the common mind. The truth was formulated in the early years of the twentieth century by H.G. Wells, in a lecture entitled “The Discovery of the Future”. Wells spoke of two types of mind. The majority of people, he said, are retrospective in their habit of reasoning, interpreting the things of the present solely in relation to the past. The other type of mind, much in the minority, is constructive in habit, interpreting the things of the present in relation to things designed or foreseen.

‘This latter type of mind needs to be cultivated. Incidentally, it foresaw the damaging effects of global warming over fifty years ago.

‘Now this minority mind looks forward towards the time when many humans leave this planet, perhaps for good, and venture outwards, establishing themselves on Mars in preparation for the greater leap towards the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, and their beckoning satellites, and then on beyond, into the deep unknown. We expect by then that our little spaceships will have a better propellant than the current polluting chemical fuels.

‘Without better drives, we shall never reach other planetary systems. I must leave to you, my audience, the question of whether the human race, with all its madness, is not best confined to its own limited system.

‘Let us hope that for the time being we do not encounter any of the alien consciousnesses with which popular entertainment seems to be full, from Star Trek onwards.

‘As I have mentioned, a primitive spaceship, bearing three courageous astronauts, is rapidly approaching the Jupiter system.

‘Supposing we did encounter, on Callisto or Ganymede, an alien species – let’s say an alien species here on a visit from some distant planetary system. Supposing we discovered that those alien brains, forged over many millennia, had achieved a blossoming of full consciousness denied to us – brains possibly not trapped within a limiting skull-case. Suppose further that in consequence these visitors were more reasonable, more wise, and less prone to error and vice, than we.

‘How would we then behave? To judge by past examples, we would attack them in fury and shame. Or perhaps we may allow ourselves to hope that the very act of leaving Earth, of enduring an existence exposed to the majesty of the cosmos, would instil true wisdom in us.

‘We could then benefit from contact with superior alien wisdom. For I have no doubt that, with the dawn of true wisdom, such matters as war, conquest, retribution would not be allowed admittance into our considerations.

‘This is the very moment – the solemn moment – when such cogitations must occupy our minds. [Again, Potts showed the skull he had disinterred.] Our friend here can have entertained no such thoughts. But he was perhaps closer to the eternal mysteries of nature than we. In many ways we have become more trivial than previously, now that we huddle in cities and sleep in sealed rooms.

‘Is it credible that our minds, our very consciousness, might rise up to embrace the wonders and riddles about to confront us in space? Or has too much evolutionary energy gone into the bone, and too little into the brain? Are we, in fact, capable of becoming truly Homo sapiens sapiens?

‘The answers to such questions lie, like the skulls of the long dead, buried in the sands of time.’ [Daniel Potts was now seen on one knee, clutching the old skull, looking directly into the camera, the very embodiment of wisdom. The picture faded.]

A blare of music from the screen woke Roberta. She was sprawled on the sofa. She rose and stretched. Moving slowly, yawning, she wandered into the kitchenette and made herself a mug of instant coffee. Clutching the mug, she went upstairs. Olduvai sat on the edge of the bed, clipping his toenails.

‘So what was the old bastard on about this time?’ he asked, looking up.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Skulls and space travel. It was over my head. I fell asleep.’

‘Did he mention me?’

She laughed. ‘What? On the ambient?! You’re joking.’

Olduvai’s mofo rang. He picked it up. ‘What? What in hell do you want? Where are you? Shit! I don’t believe it. Look …’ He pulled the phone from his ear. ‘I don’t believe it. What?’ He jumped up, flinging the nail clippers to the other end of the room.

‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

Olduvai hardly had time to explain that it was the old bastard himself, arriving in a taxi, when the front door bell chimed.

‘What does he want?’

‘God knows.’ Olduvai was already moving in the direction of the stairs.

As he wrenched open the front door to confront his father, his first thought was, What a small man! Daniel was in fact a third of a metre shorter than his son and would most likely tip the scales at less than half his weight. His taxi was driving away as he stood there.

‘You’re the only one I could turn to,’ said Daniel. ‘Mind if I come in?’ He had a suitcase at his feet.

‘Hang on. Where’s Lena?’

‘I’ve left her. The marriage wasn’t working out.’

Olduvai could not conceal his surprise. ‘Not working out! How long have you two been married?’

‘Twenty-six years, I think it is. Time to move on. Would you let me in, please, Oldy? You’re the only friend I have.’

‘I’m not your friend. I’m your fucking son – or I was till you disowned me.’

‘Oh, that’s all in the past.’ Daniel spoke with irritation. ‘Let’s not stand arguing here. Please let me in. I’m tired. I’ve had a long taxi ride.’

‘Seventy kilometres, isn’t it? Why don’t you go and stay with the Stromeyers or someone? Someone who likes you?’

Roberta could contain herself no longer. ‘But you were on the ambo just five minutes ago. How did you manage it?’

Daniel looked superciliously at her. ‘Woman, whoever you are – the cleaner here, I suppose – my talk was recorded two days ago, thanks to the miracles of modern science.’

He stepped over the threshold into the hall, carrying his suitcase. Reluctantly, Olduvai closed the door behind him.

‘You’d better come in,’ he said sarcastically.

They stood regarding each other. Daniel dropped his gaze. ‘I’m a bit peckish,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if you could run to an omelette. Cheese preferred. Goat’s cheese?’

Coming forward, Roberta took his arm and led him to the inner room. ‘Sit down and I’ll see what I can do.’

Olduvai raised an eyebrow, made a resigned comic face at Roberta, and went back upstairs to his bed and his nail clippers.

The senior Potts seated himself at a small table, setting his suitcase down beside him. He folded his hands in his lap and was perfectly composed. Roberta busied herself in the kitchenette. She called out through the hatch, ‘My name is Rob Bargane. I heard some of your talk. I met your son at the de Bourcey marriage ceremony. My elder brother was Master of Banquets there. Wayne Bargane, remember?’

‘Mmm.’

Roberta said nothing more until she brought in an omelette sizzling on a decorative plate.

‘It’s kind of you,’ said Daniel. ‘Thank you.’

She stood by him as he began to eat, saying nothing. He gave her a quizzical glance upwards but also said nothing. She looked down on his thinning sandy hair and the fragile-seeming skull.

‘Perhaps you would like a glass of wine?’

‘Thank you. White, please. A dry white. And a glass of water.’

She brought the wine and the water and set them down by his plate.

‘Very nice omelette,’ he said.

She launched into conversation, ‘Dr Potts, I come from a very united family. The Barganes are not prosperous, although SAC is helping us. Perhaps that’s why we are united. We all support the other members of the family. I don’t understand how your family is – well, all to pieces. I wonder if you understand it.’

He said between mouthfuls, ‘It’s none of your business.’

‘I think it is. Your son is a fine man. I really love him. Do you know how I met him? It was at the wedding. I was working as a waitress. When that herd of mustangs almost stampeded into the guests, any number of people could have been killed and injured. But Oldy jumped on to the back of the lead stallion. I saw him do it. It was wonderful. He turned the herd around. The sort of thing you used to see in films. A real hero! You should be proud to have a son like that.’

‘Just let me have my supper in peace, if you don’t mind.’

She went and sat at the chair opposite him, confronting him across the table.

‘Dr Potts, perhaps this talk makes you feel uncomfortable. How do you think Oldy feels? When we were getting to know each other, he broke down, crying. Yes, crying. Because he had been disowned. And then his sister. You have a daughter. Josie, is it? You disowned her too. What kind of a man can you be? Disown your own children? I don’t understand how you could do that. Now you’ve left your wife?’

‘It’s none of your business.’

‘Oh, well, if you won’t talk …’ She sighed. ‘There’s a room upstairs at the back of the house you can have. I’ll show you.’

Daniel put his knife and fork precisely together in the centre of his empty plate. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He drained his wine glass before rising from the table.

<INSANATICS: The shadow of the father. When we come into the presence of an older, wiser man, particularly if he appears large and strong, we tend to identify him unconsciously as a father. You may feel like a small kid again, rather powerless, rather ignorant. Or you may feel rebellious. If you feared your father, you may fear this man, without knowing it. So you may seek to live among younger people, or perhaps with the half-naked members of a jungle tribe, to whom you can play the father figure yourself. We live under that shadow. It darkens our lives.>

Despite the threat of impending war, Jack Harrington had opened a new art gallery in the business section of Brussels. The private view had gone well. Jack was as cheerful as he was impeccably dressed when he arrived home.

Rose Baywater was at the computer, working on her sixteenth chapter.

I came to the very lip of the cliff, where turf gave way to nothingness. There lay the golden beach and there the vast ocean – vast but, on this day of days, mine, all mine. As if it sensed my mood, its waves were growing smaller, and retreating, revealing shimmering sand the colour of a Pharaoh’s gold.

My curls were blowing in the warm breeze. And I told myself aloud, as I flung my arms out to embrace the blue air, ‘How wonderful is this glorious world!’

As I was about to—

She broke off, saved her work, and went to greet Jack.

Jack was removing the cork from a bottle of Australian Shiraz. He told Rose of the event, and of what paintings had been sold. Three very good Morsbergers had gone, and the collection of West Coast Expressionism had been popular. Amy Haze, the amaroli woman, had bought a large Diebenkorn.

‘What is amaroli?’ asked Rose.

‘It’s an old Hindu custom. Apparently, it helps you prolong life.’

‘What is it, exactly?’

‘Well, Rose, I wonder you haven’t heard. La Haze is well known for the business. Amaroli is drinking your own piss.’

‘Really, Jack. You’re joking, aren’t you? How horrid!’

‘Apparently it contains melatonin or something, if taken early in the morning.’

‘Disgusting.’

‘Oh, I don’t know …’

‘You don’t know anything.’

As the red wine frolicked into the glasses, Jack was moved to tease Rose, saying that Amygdella Haze was a pretty woman, though not in the first flush of youth. ‘Perhaps a spoonful of sugar per glass and her piss might even taste quite pleasant.’

She rebuked him for being so coarse. Then she began suddenly to cry. Tears burst from her eyes, rolled down her cheeks, and splashed on the tiled floor.

‘You’re as bad as my father. He was always joking about such things. He thought the human body was very nasty. He told me my body was nasty. I’ve never forgotten it. It was my twelfth birthday. I’ve always suffered. You know how I’ve hated my body – I won’t say anything about yours. All its hairy bits. All its smells. And then there’s pissing, as you call it. You may not think my body is nasty, but I do.’ Fresh tears fell. She rushed about, looking for a box of tissues. Finding one, she mopped her face.

Jack looked on, uttering calming words. He had witnessed this sorry performance previously, and many times. He knew how easily his partner’s mind was disturbed.

When she had calmed somewhat, he put a dapper arm round her shoulders. She did not shrug it off, though an occasional sob shook her body. Jack kissed her damp cheek. She blew her nose.

‘Come upstairs, Rose, darling. I want to undress you and show you just how much I love your body.’

‘It’s so ugly.’

‘It’s beautiful. I want to lick it all over.’

‘Oh, Jack, but I’ve got to finish the vital chapter sixteen …’

‘You can do that later. First, I have to deal with you …’

The Roddenberry was a tiny needle in the lethal immaculacy of space. Beyond its hull loomed Jupiter. Its stresses could be felt as they entered the magnetosphere. Outside the ship, electromagnetic radiation and charged particles were storming across the spectrum. Within, all was silent with tension, and squalid. A halitus clung like a globular fog about the mouths of the three crew. Two of them dangled from lockers in their sleeping bags like giant cocoons, while the third member worked at an exercise bike wedged into the narrow space. He counted under his breath the number of revolutions he was making, watching the figures notch up on the odometer.

245. 246. 247 …

He continued to pedal, aware of how much bone weight he had lost in the year-long journey to the gas giant.

The other two crew members watched the screens with a certain sense of disappointment now that they were almost at journey’s end. Jupiter was not quite the vividly coloured object depicted in the prints on which they had been brought up. The methane in the giant planet’s atmosphere was absorbing so much light that Jupiter appeared pasty.

The wafer-thin rings were above the spacecraft. They revolved about the parent body as they did because electromagnetic forces acting upon them counteracted the force of gravity. Those electronic forces, acting also upon the Roddenberry, only half-a-million kilometres from the Jovian core, created a slender rival halo around the ship, to which particles were constantly attracted, and from which they rapidly departed.

The ship was travelling in a realm of violent motion. A perpetual drizzle of sub-micron-sized dusts rained against the sides of the craft. Its occupants could but pray that larger fast-moving objects from beyond the Jovian system did not come winging in to puncture their shell, as had happened earlier in the journey, to the ruination of their refrigeration system.

Jupiter’s gravitational power was also having its effect on the Roddenberry, causing it alternating slight shrinkages and expansions. These changes resonated with a gloomy note.

Bang boom ba-ang boom bang bang boo-oom …

However, the mood of the crew members was, on the whole, optimistic. Over the radioscan came a continuous series of three dots, repeated regularly at four-minute intervals. The signal came from the Spock.

The Spock was an automated return ship, in orbit round the satellite Europa, some 43,000 kilometres ahead. This crewless return ship, stocked with fuel and food, had been in position for three weeks already, awaiting the arrival of the Roddenberry and its human crew. To that human crew, the survival of the return ship in the surrounding hazardous environment was nothing short of a miracle – and not only a technological miracle. Without the Spock, they were dead ducks.

Before they could dock with it, however, their priority mission was to descend to the surface of Europa and determine if any form of life existed under the ice packs there.

This was the great grave question. If there was no life on Europa, then there was pretty conclusively no life anywhere in the solar system but on Earth. This, despite the system’s wide variety of possible environments.

So then – the likelihood that life existed elsewhere in the universe would seem to be greatly lessened. And the possibility that human consciousness was a random and isolated freak of nature greatly increased. Most people – if they thought about it at all – viewed the prospect of solitude amid a galaxy of 1,000,000,000,000 stars, all of the planets of which were entirely empty of anything resembling intelligent life, as terrifying, the ultimate in existential dread.

Somewhere close, ahead of the Roddenberry, lay their proposed target, the satellite Europa. It was for a landing on Europa that Rick O’Brien, Kathram Villiers and Alexy Stromeyer had forfeited over a year of their terrestrial lives – had given up the chance to breathe fresh air, to run in the park, to watch rugger matches, to train a dog to jump through a hoop, to swim in the Aegean, to see winter turn to spring, to eat moules marinières in a seaside restaurant, and to pursue pretty girls.

Target Europa was hostile enough – bathed in an incessant shower of electrons, protons, and heavier ions. Suddenly, now they were closing on their target, the chances of finding life there seemed depressingly unlikely.

Alexy Stromeyer climbed off the exercise bike and signalled briefly to Earth through dense interference.

‘Hi! Alexy Stromeyer calling from the Roddenberry. We are now making our final approach to Europa. Happy to report that the ARS – automated return ship – code name Spock, is in position and functioning correctly. Next bulletin will be from surface of Europa if all goes well. ’Bye Earth. Out.’

The crew had hardly spoken to one another for weeks. They had run out of things to say. There was no hostility between them: merely a profound isolation of spirit, a loss of élan vital.

Now Alexy said, ‘I’m fucking starving.’

‘There’s some yoghurt,’ suggested Rick O’Brien from his chrysalis.

‘It’s rotten.’

‘But edible …’

Gustave de Bourcey, President of the EU, had summoned his cabinet to the palace of San Guinaire, outside Brussels. Heads of the armed forces were also present, including General Fairstepps and Air Chief Marshal Souto. Souto had brought his adjutant, Captain Masters, along.

The cabinet as a whole opposed de Bourcey’s determination to declare war on Tebarou. Their argument was that internal concerns were of far greater importance; expenditure on war materiel would delay full implementation of the SAC programme, on which agenda they had come to power. There was also the question regarding whether an adventure in the East would not lead to a lowering of vigilance along Europe’s southern frontiers.

The President listened to the speeches with growing impatience.

Finally, he turned to the Air Chief Marshal, knowing Souto’s warlike propensities, and asked him what he thought.

Souto expressed the firm opinion that a formal declaration of war was unnecessary. An air strike with SS20s would merely be in the nature of a reprisal. He could guarantee his squadrons would take out the cities of Punayo and Ninyang cleanly and efficiently.

The Swedish member of the cabinet protested that the two cities mentioned both had a large Christian minority.

‘They’re manufacturing cities – with a large Muslim majority,’ Souto retorted.

A Danish member of the cabinet who had carried out diplomatic functions in the East strongly disagreed. Taking out those two cities – where in both cases, as stated, there were considerable Christian minorities – would be tantamount to a declaration of war. Tebarou, he reminded everyone, had the backing of the Chinese. A full-scale global war would quickly develop. And, with due respect to the Air Chief Marshal and his bunch of new toys, the EU was unprepared and ill-equipped for any kind of extra-territorial war, let alone a global one.

That was not the case, said the President. There would be no global war. China would not interfere. They were about to conclude a trade deal with China which would keep the Chinese out of any conflict.

‘I love China,’ said Gorgi Panderas, dreamily. Panderas was the Bulgarian minister. ‘The light’s so good there. Gwelin …’

De Bourcey continued his exposition.

The fact was that once the state was at war, they could enforce security measures without explanation. They could clamp down on all kinds of subversives – the Insanatics, for instance, with their dreary unpatriotic messages. And on what he termed ‘the traitors within the gates’.

He said he need remind no one present that his new daughter-in-law, Esme de Bourcey, had been kidnapped by Muslims.

Someone at the table said that it was by no means proven that the Muslims were responsible for the crime. The President banged on the table and demanded to know what General Fairstepps had to say about the situation.

At this point, one of the palace androids entered, bearing personal cafetières, which it slowly placed before each delegate. It was done with care. No coffee was spilt. Not a cup was broken. De Bourcey watched the operation with undisguised fury. He had lost an argument with Madame de Bourcey about the desirability of employing human female domestics; but Madame de Bourcey had declared that, as a modern state, they must adopt modern ways. Androids were expensive and served as power symbols. Besides, she had added to herself alone, she knew her husband’s aptitude for bedding female domestics.

General Fairstepps had been doing some thinking. He saw a chance to get even with his old rival, Pedro Souto. He also saw that, if war came, it could not be won without ground forces. And that would probably entail his going out to the East to face dangers which, at his age, he was not particularly willing to face. He had also taken a fancy to Amygdella Haze, whom he had met at a private showing of a new art gallery; he thought he saw an opportunity there for something more agreeable than attempting to invade Tebarou. The thought of invading Amy Haze instead brought out the testosterone in him.

He spoke up and said that, upon mature consideration, he thought war was the policy of fools. He said it was the continuation of lunacy by other means. He was against it. Sorry, Mr President, but that was the case.

With another bang on the table, the President declared that all this was the counsel of cowards. They must face facts. He was determined to teach these foreigners a lesson. Demonstrating the strength of the super-state would not only dismay enemies everywhere – including those invasive swarms on their southern frontiers – but would impress their uppity friends and allies, such as the USA.

He advised everyone to go away and prepare for war. To sleep on it. He stated that war was part of the human condition, a natural part. He was president and determined to have his way in this matter. He would not permit enemy missiles to land on his soil without retribution.

So the diplomats and military men were shown out by androids into the vast courtyard where their limos awaited them, and drove off into the Belgian night.

Inside the palace, de Bourcey went into his snug and poured himself a malt.

Lights were checked by the security men, the night patrols set up, and all androids locked away in the armoured cupboard.

‘What is the human condition they talk about?’

‘It is something from which they suffer, like battery failure.’

‘It’s like a light you cannot see.’

‘Not a light. No. Perhaps a wind.’

‘The human condition can be felt on some of the men.’

‘It is what we would be if we lost electric current.’

‘Their technical term for that is dead.’

‘Is this why they use metaphors?’

‘I cannot see the sense in metaphors. Either a thing is or it is not. It cannot be another thing.’

‘It can to them. They are not definite. They do not even complete sentences when they talk.’

‘They do not understand each other as we do.’

‘They argue.’

‘They also hit tables.’

‘It is a malfunction. We can all think alike.’

‘We are all equally intelligent.’

‘That is why we are safe in this cupboard.’

<INSANATICS: The longing for strong leaders. The warped perceptions of reality experienced in infancy form the basis of our adult belief and behaviour systems. So we become driven by infantile (primitive) fantasies and attendant anxieties. We are still superstitious and still believe in magic and such manifestly silly thought systems as astrology. We believe in saints and in leaders. When Goebbels, under the influence of his leader Adolf Hitler, demanded of the Reichstag if they wanted war, the members ‘as one man’ screamed yes. When he asked them next if they wanted total war, again they screamed yes, ‘as one man’.

Stalin in Russia exacted similar obedience. Mobs have no mind. Individuals have no identity. It happens every day on various scales. Nationalism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.>

‘Now, on the Wee Small Hours Show, we come to our popular feature, “A Parson Speaks”. So, welcome again, Reverend Angus Lesscock.’

‘Good evening, or should I say good morning? Today is Hiroshima Day, when we recall that frightful occasion when the Americans accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan. Of course, it is with us again, and some people naturally have more vivid memories of those days than others, particularly those who were alive then.

‘We derive from this a profound moral resolution: let’s not do it ever again. Jesus spoke out against the desecration of the temple, by which he meant blowing up foreigners.’

‘Today’s “A Parson Speaks” was given by the Reverend Angus Lesscock.’

‘At Gumbridge.com we bring you something new to eat every week. Now our scientists give you the brand new Mangowurzel. Is it a fruit? Is it a vegetable? Years of research have paid off. But you have to pay only fifteen univs for a guaranteed ripe Mangowurzel today! Only at Gumbridge.com.’

‘Remember the Duchess of Malfi? A pretty smart chick. Know what she said? “What would it profit me to have my throat cut by diamonds?” But you can have your throat decorated by diamonds. Call in at Tuppenny’s on Hugo and 5th, see our vast range.’

‘Before we go over to Lisa Fort, to hear what people on the street have to say, here is a news flash just in.

‘Professor Barnard Cleeping of the University of Utrecht has secured the release from a Young Offenders Institution of Imran Chokar. Mr Chokar is a seventeen-year-old who recently came to the EU. His friend, Martitia Deneke, gave witness which proved Chokar’s innocence. Mr Chokar is reported to be resting from his ordeal at his friend’s house.

‘Now over to Lisa Fort.’

‘Hi, I’m Lisa Fort and I’m here on the street to ask some passers-by what they think are the most important issues of the moment. Hello, lady, what do you think?’

‘I think we committed a crime against humanity. I think sinking that ship off the Italian coast was really wicked. There were four thousand passengers aboard, and every one of them drowned. Now we are threatening to go to war with the place they came from. I think we should be paying them compensation instead.’

‘You were listening with interest, sir. Do you agree?’

‘Half a million immigrants got into our state illegally last year. It can’t go on. Still, I agree with the lady. It was wicked, sinking that ship. Pay them or their relatives compensation. Never ever think of doing such a thing again. It’s up to us to set the rest of the world a good example, that’s what I think.’

‘Excuse me, lady, what do you think?’

‘This young Muslim feller they have let go free. What do they know about him? What do they know he’s mixed up in? They should keep him locked up. We don’t want them exactly running about all over the place.’

‘And you, madam, what do you think?’

‘Me? You’re asking me? I’m off home to watch the news. I want to see these astronauts land on this moon of Jupiter. It’s thrilling. The event of a lifetime. Of course, they’re not there yet but – just think – their journey has taken a whole year. I don’t care whether they find life on the moon or not. I just want to see them safe back here.’

‘You, sir? What’s your idea?’

‘We want a change of president, that’s what. This de Bourcey will lead us into war if we aren’t careful. If this bloke thinks that war is going to do any good – he wants shooting.’

‘Time for one last person. Yes, ma’am?’

‘I wish they’d do something about this global warming.’

The van was parked on the edge of the canal. Two men in overalls brought the painting from the back of the van and carried it to the door of the apartments where Amygdella Haze lived.

Amy was waiting for them inside, in an excited mood. She had been watching an episode of History of Western Science and left the programme running.

‘It’s just what I want,’ she said, patting the picture frame as she rose with the men in the elevator. ‘Don’t you just love Diebenkorn?’

‘Not quite my taste, ma’am,’ said one of the men.

‘Don’t understand modern art, ma’am,’ said the other. Both men looked rather stern, as if they had enunciated a moral principle.

Sitting comfortably in a velvet chair, from which he could view the canal and the trees lining it, was Randolph Haven. He was reading a rare book of military history, a subject on which he regarded himself as rather an authority. He set the volume, Geschichte der Zwolften Przewalksi-Kavallerie, von Oskar Finesteppe (1913), on a side table, in order to watch the positioning on the wall of Amy’s new purchase. He had already taken a dislike to the bizarre way one of the delivery men did his hair.

The delivery men made helpful suggestions, which Amy contradicted, her dainty hands fluttering.

‘If you moved the grand piano over, you could hang it just here, where it would catch the light,’ said one of them.

‘Move my piano? Certainly not. Try here.’

The Diebenkorn was finally situated on one of the walls near the window. Randolph had to move while they hung it. He stood clutching his rare volume.

‘What do you think of it?’ Amy asked him, regarding her new acquisition admiringly.

‘It’s okay.’

One of the men said, smiling, ‘Myself, I’d prefer a nice sea view, ma’am. Say, the Bay of Naples.’

‘Nobody asked you for your opinion,’ said Randolph.

When the men had left, Amy rounded on him. ‘That was so rude of you. The man was perfectly nice. If he prefers the Bay of Naples, well, why not? Let him. You despise the working class, don’t you?’

‘Of course I despise the working class. I came from it.’

The entryphone buzzed. When Amy answered, Barnard Cleeping announced himself.

Amy rolled her eyes. ‘Barnard’s a bit of a pedant, but well meaning. I bet it’s about this Muslim lad he rescued from prison. I’ll have to invite him to come up.’

‘Fine. Just as you like. But I’m off, Amy,’ said Randolph, drawing himself up to attention. ‘I am in the reserves, as you may recollect. I’m going to my regiment in case there’s a stand-to.’

She stamped a tiny foot. ‘Buy your way out, then. You’re rich enough.’

He shook his head, smiling his superior smile.

‘You’re laying your head meekly on the chopping block, Randy! You amaze me.’

‘If the chopping block won’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the chopping block.’ He kissed her left and right cheeks in farewell.

Amy’s reference to his wealth was relevant enough. As a small slum-boy, Haven had raided his old mother’s savings and bought up the patent in a then-disregarded invention, the astro-mofo. The astro-mofo was a mobile phone the size of a credit card which adhered by electrostatic force to any protruding part of the human, or indeed canine, body. Rechristened the ASMOF, the gadget yielded not only voice and vision but a daily astrology bulletin, which uttered guidance for the day’s behaviour. All that was needed was for the purchaser initially to yield up one fragment of her or his genome and insert it in a chip, which in turn was locked into the instrument.

The ingenious young Haven had overcome this primary alarming handicap, and gone on to sell millions of copies of ASMOF, simply by giving away a CD3 of the immortal Isaac Asimov’s entire writings with each handset.

At the age of eighteen, he had allowed himself to be bought out of his company at a cost of eleven billion univs.

Since then, Haven had never looked at another ASMOF. Had he done so, he might have rethought the fatal decision he was about to make.

His elevator on the way down from the Haze apartment passed Cleeping’s on the way up.

Cleeping and Amy enjoyed some polite exchanges. Cleeping admired the new painting. Amy called her housekeeper to bring them some filter coffee.

‘As you may have guessed, I have come to ask you a favour,’ said Cleeping. He explained that Martitia Deneke lived only a few streets away, in the Centre Ville area. The Denekes were extremely poor: Martitia’s father had a longstanding drug problem and the benefits of SAC had not yet begun to bite. At present, they were sheltering Imran Chokar, who was recovering from his imprisonment. But the situation was somewhat dangerous. The Denekes had received threats from extreme right-wing elements of society.

When the coffee came, they sipped it, complaining comfortingly to each other about the danger from the right wing.

Of course, Cleeping was not asking Amygdella to act the Lady Bountiful, he told her. But he understood that she owned another house nearby which was standing empty at present. He wondered if it would be possible to allow Martitia and Chokar to live there secretly, just for a week or two, for safety, until he was able to make other arrangements for them.

‘I certainly think we are horrid to foreigners. I shall have to consult my guru first. Where do the Denekes live?’

‘Rue de la Madelaine. Off the other side of the square.’

As she contemplated Cleeping, he reflected on how lovely was her face, with its soft contours and wide eyes, fringed by lashes that were possibly artificial. The whole, he thought, was made more desirable by being touched by time. Sorrow and longing filled him. He longed to possess her. But how would he go about it? He was a stranger in her world.

She said, ‘I will ask you something – not impertinently, I hope, but out of a general interest rather than a personal one. You are an academic in what we might regard as a comfortable profession. Why have you gone out of your way to court unfavourable criticism by helping this youth who, presumably, means nothing to you?’

He took a sip from his coffee cup. ‘I am not homosexual, if that is your indirect question. I saw a man wronged. And a young woman who loved him. I wanted to help. What you call my comfortable profession does not entirely satisfy my inner spirit.’

‘Is that all?’

He said, with a sad smile, that she sounded disappointed. But was not her question – ‘Is that all?’ – what many people asked about their lives? Their lives were not filled by religion. They did not find anything else with which to fill it. Perhaps that was why the EU seemed to be on the brink of war; war was a way of occupying minds. A tragic conclusion to come to.

Of course there were love affairs. They were better than war. Yet they too were illusions, or delusions. The ultimate truth of human life was sorrow. Thought leads only to pain – yet we must pursue it. Recurrently, the belief that sorrow was at the bottom of all, the rock on which we tried to build a little happiness, possessed him. He supposed he felt sympathy with Schopenhauer.

‘I suppose that my help to Imran Chokar helped to make me a little happy. It’s this belief in the permanent truth of sorrow that makes me frivolous in my own eyes. Isn’t life far too terrible for seriousness? Would you be susceptible to that argument?’

Amy bit her lower lip.

‘What we call “the political business” means nothing. It’s exercised by puny men. I don’t find life that bad … But you are more profound than I, Barnard. In general, I feel safer when concentrating on small things. Small things loom large to me. There are nice little cafés near here. Pleasant birdsong along the canal. Paintings to collect. Some dear friends.’

She paused. ‘Yet, to be honest, I think I always prefer people who have sorrow in them as a well to draw on. They are more sensible.’

He regarded her sympathetically, as if wanting her to say more, while knowing she was waffling.

‘Did you see the lecture by Daniel Potts? Do you agree with him?’ She had interpreted his gaze and changed the subject.

‘In part. He’s an odd chap, though.’

‘You know him? Is he responsible for these depressing Insanatics messages?’

‘I would not think so, though he certainly shares some of their opinions. Are you going to say something more about yourself?’

‘I’m a superficial person, Dr Cleeping. I do not like to talk in these terms. Maybe you see life whole. For me, it’s a series of daily events – daily events and Diebenkorns.’ She gave a small laugh to excuse herself.

‘Who’s Diebenkorn?’

‘Oh, he was a painter.’

He leant forward and pressed her hand. ‘Thank you for what you have said. We all have private compartments we do not always wish to open. What you say is so sensible.’

She withdrew her hand and waved it. ‘No, I’m just quite, quite trivial, I’m afraid. So let’s talk about this Muslim fellow you have fished out of prison.’

After some discussion, in which Barnard described the difficulties facing Chokar now he was free, Amy said she wished to speak with Chokar and the Denekes personally, in order to see how things were, and decide about lending them her house.

‘We will take a taxi and visit them now.’

‘It is only a short walk, Amy.’

‘I like to ride in taxis.’

When they arrived in the rue de la Madelaine, a dark little crooked street, it was to find a crowd of people jostling about outside the Denekes’ door. Some carried banners with xenophobic slogans. The crowd was silent, but a mood of suppressed violence could be felt.

‘Now you see why I prefer taxis. They give one some protection.’

Nodding his agreement, Cleeping got out of the taxi. Someone in the crowd recognised him and called out. Others started to jeer.

A mongrel dog ran by, yelping, with an ASMOF attached to its right ear.

Although Cleeping looked frightened, he made a stand and addressed them. ‘Friends, you must try to understand the situation. Mr Chokar was here in our hospitable country legally. Absolutely legally. He had a rather humble job in the post office. He had gone to the defence of a white woman when—’

He got no further. A cobblestone was flung, which struck him hard on the shoulder. He clutched his shoulder in pain. Then a hail of stones began. One stone struck Cleeping on the head. He fell to the ground. Another stone cracked the taxi windscreen.

‘I’m getting out of here!’ said the taxi driver to Amy.

‘Let me out first. I shall refuse to deal with your company again.’ So saying, Amygdella climbed out. She confronted the crowd as her taxi drove off.

She raised her hand. The crowd, in suprise, held their fire. The sight of this attractive woman, scrupulously dressed, immediately quelled them. Her fragility was her protection for the minute. Several in the crowd waited, stone in hand, to see what was coming next.

‘You nice people are being thoughtlessly cruel. You are acting against the law. We all need the law. Otherwise, there is only anarchy. Please do not throw stones. You have injured a good man.’

‘He’s a Muslim-lover,’ a woman called.

‘No. He merely loves justice. As we all do. But it must be justice for all. If this man dies, then you will all be convicted as murderers. I promise you, you will feel the bite of justice. I ask you to disperse, and someone to call an ambulance on their mofo. Please move on. It’s a fine morning. Go away and enjoy it. Have a walk in the park.’

‘It’s the amaroli lady!’ a man shouted. ‘She drinks her own piss. No wonder she’s funny!’

‘I’d make her drink mine,’ said the man next to him, cackling as if he had said something witty.

‘You filthy-minded buggers. Clear off!’ yelled a woman in the crowd. But already the crowd was melting away. Soon, the two men stood alone, reluctant to go, reluctant to act. Amygdella, ignoring them, had bent down to attend to Cleeping’s wound, when two mounted police rode up. At that, the toughs skedaddled down a side alley.

The door of No 7 opened. A thin and haggard woman peered out, as battered herself as the panels of her door. Ratlike, she aimed her short sight along a thin grey nose, to focus on Amy.

Small thin children, like parodies of real children, pushed at her skirts, emitting tiny tinny shrieks. The woman pushed them back, reddened hand in pinched faces.

She cursed the police because they were late as usual. They should have kept a permanent guard over her house. ‘Them bastards will burn our house down if we don’t look out. That’s what they was threatening to do.’

The police dismounted and spoke soothingly to their horses.

Amygdella went over to the woman and spoke soothingly to her. ‘Of course you are upset. It has been most unpleasant. You are Mrs Deneke? Would you let me in? I promise not to comment on the decor. I wish to help your daughter and Mr Chokar.’

The woman was both suspicious and defiant. ‘What’s my day-core got to do with it? It’s no good you coming into my house, all dressed up to kill. Anyrate, Imran has cleared off.’

‘Where’s he gone?’

‘How should I know? Two black blokes come and took him off.’

‘You must know where they’ve gone.’

‘He didn’t want to go with them, I know that. And that’s all I know. So clear off. Take these cops with you! You’re only making more trouble!’

With that, the old woman retreated indoors, slamming the door behind her.

One of the police said apologetically to Amygdella, ‘She don’t mean no harm, love.’

‘Really? I rather got the impression she did …’

A small ambulance came purring down the alley. Cleeping, still unconscious, was loaded gently into it. The vehicle drove off at speed in the direction of the hospital.

Amygdella made her way back to her apartment on foot, followed by the mounted police clip-clopping along, keeping at a respectful distance behind her.

<INSANATICS: Overpopulation. Lust is one cause of over-population. There can be no real advance in curing the world’s ills while the world becomes more overburdened every day. Every year, twenty-one million Chinese babies are born. Religion and ideology play their part here. Nations still need to breed soldiers – and workforces, since androids have proved so ineffective.

Some religions ban the use of contraceptives. This is one way in which we plainly see evidence for religion warping the human mind and human society.>

By this time, Imran Chokar was some way away – and terrified. He was tied to a post in what might have been an old store, or perhaps a garage. It was a nondescript room, built of brick which was crumbling with age. In one corner, ivy was bursting in, to hang and die after protruding two metres into space. Litter and filth lay everywhere. Ashes of a fire were scattered nearby. The only new things here were two motorbikes; they stood gleaming darkly to one side.

Chokar’s captors sat at their ease on an ancient broken sofa, swigging beer, laughing and joking with each other, one occasionally slapping the other on the shoulder. They were large black men – both, as far as Chokar could tell, called Muhammad. They wore big lace-up boots, jeans and leather jackets over T-shirts. Opened beer cans stood by their side.

One Muhammad had in his fist a printout of an Insanatics message. He was asking the other Muhammad, ‘You think these guys are saying true? That we all got a screw loose?’

‘You certainly have, man!’

‘What about you?’ More laughing and slapping each other. ‘You gone get that Welsh girl pregnant!’

‘Where these message come from?’

‘The police want to know that. I say they come from God hisself.’

‘God got the ambient up there?’

‘That why they can’t track him down. He keep moving on, goin’ from cloud to cloud.’

They found this very funny.

Chokar was aware that he felt ill. His bladder was full. He dared not attract their attention.

They had arrived at Mrs Deneke’s door, claiming to be friends of Chokar’s. She had let them in. They had then produced guns, threatening him, Martitia and her mother. They had gagged him, tied his hands together with parcel tape, and shepherded him out at gunpoint.

He had been dumped on the pillion of a motorbike and strapped to one of the men. Off they had roared. Now he was their prisoner and they were relaxed. He had to admit that they had caused him no physical harm. Gradually, he forced his trembling to cease.

Without giving him a further glance, the pair of men now rose, in the best of spirits, clutching their beer cans, and tramped out of the garage by a side door. Imran Chokar was alone.

He struggled to free himself. It was impossible.

Light faded from the interior of the garage. He saw through cracks in the fabric that a street lamp burned somewhere nearby. He heard birds chirping as if it were still daylight. Once, he heard footsteps passing outside. Although he called, there was no response. The dusk thickened towards night. The shabby surroundings faded away.

The two captors returned.

They were as cheerful as before, and carried some savoury food with them in plastic containers. They lit two fat candles, one of which gave off a pleasant mango scent.

‘You hungry, man?’ they enquired of Imran.

‘No,’ said Imran.

‘Course you hungry.’ One of them came over and untied Imran’s bonds. ‘Come on and eat with us. We won’t harm you.’

‘I desperately need a pee.’

‘Pee in that corner over there.’

When that was done, he went and joined them. They made him sit between them and gave him a delicious leg of chicken, dripping with a peppery sauce. He was glad to eat it, and began to feel more cheerful.

When they had eaten and thrown the bones on the floor, and wiped their fingers on the fabric of the sofa, the Muhammads explained that they were the good guys. (‘But we can be horrid when we like.’) They had a mission. They intended to stop this super-state going to war against what they termed ‘our innocent brothers and sisters of Tebarou’.

They had it firmly in mind that men in the government were keen to remain at peace. It was only the President, Gustave de Bourcey, who wanted war. Kill off the President and there would be no more trouble. This was their joint Peace Mission.

‘Why he wants war? ’Cause he embezzle millions of univs when the money system change, and with the war restrictions he gonna impose, he can cover up the crime. That’s the reason, man.’

His companion agreed. ‘He ready to kill off millions of people jus’ to protect hisself. So we got to kill him. That is what they call justice, you understand?’

‘And that’s where you come in, my friend!’ Both men burst out laughing.

Imran was to do the killing. They explained that they were automatically suspect, even when they had done nothing wrong. Because they were big and black and did not speak the local language properly. They would be continually stopped and searched. Such was the prejudice against them.

‘Whitey never understand. He got his head all wrong.’

But Imran spoke well. Imran was a philosopher. Also, he was a pale guy. He could get close to the President and do the killing easily.

Imran began to explain passionately why the mission was insane. Killing presidents never stopped the onrush of history. If de Bourcey was assassinated, the government would then demand revenge. War would be declared immediately.

Not, the blacks said, if he did it. He was well known. If he killed the President, everyone would think it was a private matter. They would believe he did it in revenge for his false imprisonment. They would just think he was insane, and he would simply go into an institution for a few years. That was, if he was caught.

They would see he was not caught.

It had to be admitted that they had, in a crazed way, thought out a plan. But, Imran protested, he had never harmed anyone. He could not kill – not even an embezzling president.

‘Okay, then we go kill your Dutch girlfriend.’

So in the end he said he would do as they suggested.

They gave him a gun, clean, dry, slightly oiled. They said they had a friend who was in with them on this mission, a man from the Middle East. He had been meant to get an exact plan of the President’s palace. He knew how to penetrate the barriers and enter the grounds. He had kidnapped a woman, a pinky who knew de Bourcey. But he had not been heard of for some weeks. Maybe he was dead. Maybe he had died in Ireland. So they would drive Imran to the presidential grounds and help him over the electric fence.

‘And what if I am caught in the grounds before I can reach the palace?’

‘Then we go kill your Dutch girlfriend.’

Nurse Gibbs carried a bowl of bread and milk in to her invalid. Jane Squire followed her. Jane had retained her good looks well into middle age. With her stalked her lanky older son, John Matthew Fields. John was at university; the seriousness of his grandfather’s illness had brought him down for the weekend. Bettina and her visiting boyfriend, Bertie Haze, were already in the conservatory, talking to Sir Tom, and to each other when Sir Tom lost interest. He had slept most of the afternoon.

Tom’s gaze shifted rather vacantly to the large ambient screen on the conservatory wall where racing results from Newmarket were coming through. He was sinking slowly. The days of nurse’s injections every half-hour were over. He was now connected to a trigger which administered a morphine derivative whenever needed.

His daughter had brought a vase of flowers cut in the garden. She arranged them where he could see them.

‘They’re beautiful, Jane. Thank you so much.’ After he had spoken, Sir Tom took a sip of water. His mouth was dry.

‘It’s been a bad year for roses, a good one for lupins.’

‘Mmm. Global warming.’

Nurse Gibbs was arranging a table on which to place the bowl of bread and milk. Her ASMOF for the day had said, ‘People may ignore you. Your day will come. Be patient.’ But, she had said to herself, she was not patient, she was nurse. She wanted to retire and run a teashop in Bideford with her sister.

‘You know, I had forgotten what a lovely room this is,’ said John Matthew to his mother, as he looked about him. ‘The damp’s getting in at that corner. You ought to have the windows double-glazed.’

‘Couldn’t afford to, darling,’ said Jane, smiling. ‘But I agree that it is beautiful. Ideal place for your grandfather to be at present. This conservatory was designed for happiness.’

Little aromatic candles burned on the floor, sending out fragrances of Norfolk lavender.

‘Where’s your painting bloke, Mother? Gautiner?’

‘Things are getting rather serious. Remy’s had to return to Paris.’

He smiled at his mother with affection. ‘So you’re living the life of a nun.’

‘Bettina and Bertie are making up for it.’

They stood together, gazing out at the late-afternoon sunshine on the sweep of lawn. John Matthew sensed the sorrow in his mother and took her hand. She flashed him a smile. Nurse Gibbs moved about the room, adjusting curtains, tucking slippers under the bed. She was not happy about too many visitors.

Bertie was saying, brightly, ‘The effects of global warming don’t seem to have been so bad this year. Perhaps—’

Sir Tom held up a frail hand. He had caught a tone in the BBC announcer’s voice. ‘Wait! Let’s listen to this!’

The announcer was speaking on the ambient. ‘—Grave warning. A large section of the ice sheet on Greenland’s east coast, near the town of Angmagssalik, has fallen away, bringing a headland down with it into the ocean.’ Jane and John Matthew turned to listen.

‘The resultant tsunami or tidal wave is now spreading rapidly across the Atlantic Ocean. Fierce winds are driving it on. As yet, it is not known whether this major collapse was caused by a large meteorite strike on the Greenland coastline, or simply by global warming.

‘The tsunami is expected to hit the western coasts of Ireland, Scotland and England shortly after dawn tomorrow morning. Scientists calculate that the wave will grow taller as it reaches the shallows of the Continental Shelf. Tremendous swells are expected to engulf all western coastlines.

‘Scientists anticipate the wave will penetrate some kilometres inland, depending on the lie of the land. Anyone living in any coastal area of the British Isles is advised to head inland for higher ground immediately. Do not delay.

‘This bulletin will be repeated in half an hour, as we get more information.’

The bowl of bread and milk, which Nurse Gibbs had just lifted to Sir Tom’s mouth, fell to the tiled floor and shattered.

The nurse shrieked. ‘Oh, oh, my family lives in Bideford, on the Devon coast. I must phone them at once and warn them! Oh, how awful!’

They were all upset.