‘At least we are safe here on the east coast,’ said Bettina.

‘I’m not sure of that,’ said Bertie Haze. ‘There are bound to be repercussions in the North Sea. Perhaps it might be advisable to move Sir Tom inland?’

‘I must call my sister,’ said Jane. ‘And Laura. Perhaps we had all better move to the South of France … Oh no, we could not take Father. He should not be moved.’

‘We may have to move him to Norwich if there is flooding,’ said Nurse Gibbs.

They stood about, looking at one another in doubt. Sir Tom said weakly, ‘There’s no immediate threat to our safety. I would prefer not to be moved.’

Bertie said boldly, ‘You shall not be moved unless it becomes absolutely necessary, sir. I will see to it.’

Bertie took Bettina’s hand and said they would go and investigate the situation. Once he had got her outside, he pinned her against the wall and kissed her. She put her arms about his waist and kissed him back.

‘Let’s have a skinny dip while the sea is calm.’

‘But the tsunami!’

‘It’s nowhere near here – hundreds of kilometres away as yet.’

The day was hot and sultry. Although dusk was setting in, there was no relieving evening breeze, as was customary on this coast. The sea had retreated, leaving stretches of dark beach. All was still, even sullen. A heat haze enveloped the scene, creating a murky ambiguity.

The beach was entirely deserted. A young seal lay dead on the barred sand. Bettina and Bertie stripped off their clothes and ran for the sea, shrieking with delight. They flung themselves into the shallow water.

Out at sea, rumbles of thunder sounded. The youngsters splashed and swam. He dived between her open legs. They exchanged watery kisses, laughing and exclaiming as they did so.

When they had had enough, they came out, to throw themselves down on the dry sand by the dunes and embrace. He wedged his leg between her thighs and inserted his fingers into her vagina. She moaned with delight. She grasped his erect penis. Their two bodies were both slippery and gritty with sand. He entered her, pressing a forefinger into her anus. There they lay, rocking gently, blind to the world.

‘If you’re finished with all your questions, I’ll be on my way,’ said Paddy Cole. ‘I don’t take much pleasure in being dragged here at regular intervals. The coffee’s poor and the company’s worse.’

Inspector Darrow said, ‘I’m sorry to keep bothering you, Mr Cole, but you must see the spot we’re in. All this time has gone by and we still have not found a trace of young Mrs Esme de Bourcey. You were the person who distracted the attention of her husband while the snatch took place. That’s why you are a suspect.’

‘That’s all very well. You’ve interrogated me. You’ve interrogated Fay. You must see by now we’re innocent of any vile motives. When I first spoke to this de Bourcey feller I had no knowledge of his wife at all.’

‘So you keep saying.’

‘It’s the truth. How the hell did I know who he was? He didn’t act like he was somebody. Just because I’m a poor innocent artist, you think you can victimise me, Inspector Darrow. Get on with your business, man, and leave me be.’ He paused to light up a cigarette, ignoring the No Smoking sign on the station wall. ‘Maybe you could give me a hand to compensate for the times you’ve dragged me here for nothing. Fay and I will have to quit the cottage right now. This tidal wave is on its way. We can’t stay put where we are.’

‘I’ve warned you of that already,’ said Darrow. ‘Do you want a lift somewhere? We could put you on the roster. We’re a bit over-stretched.’

‘It’s worse than that by far. My paintings. How am I going to get all them out of harm’s way by dawn?’

‘What are they worth? Nothing, so I was told.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. These paintings are my fucking life. I’d die if any harm came to them.’

Darrow said he took his point. He picked up his ASMOF and said he would order a lorry from Cork.

Cole came forward, to lean over the desk. He shook Darrow’s hand, saying he was a fine man, and he was grateful.

‘There’s just one thing, Cole,’ said Darrow, coldly. ‘You better behave yourself. You know we know about that Fay of yours.’

Cole bridled immediately. He glared at the inspector and asked what it was he knew about Fay.

‘We know she’s not your missus – she’s your daughter.’

After Paddy Cole had gone, Darrow sat moodily watching the ambient screen. Warnings of the oncoming tsunami were being reinforced. Amateur video film of the Greenland collapse was shown. The photographer had been in a fishing boat, five hundred metres from the land.

A great sheet of ice and snow plunged down, roaring into the water, throwing up immense waves. Under the shifting weight of the glacier, the cliff itself gave way. Rock tumbled among ice, continued to tumble, seemed to tumble for ever. The sea was a churning mass, whipped up into a froth as if it were all made of white of egg. The edge of the glacier appeared to pick up speed as it lurched forward towards the drop. The boat with the camera was rocking so violently that the picture became incomprehensible. It cut off.

From an official cameraman came shots of the people of Angmagssalik being evacuated by plane and ship. Darrow stared hard at the Greenlanders. To his surprise, they looked like anyone else.

Calls were still pouring in to the police station. Reluctantly, Darrow rose and went into the outer office where the action was. It seemed as if everyone in Ireland was needing to move away from the coast to safety inland.

Yet not everyone had heard the news of the approaching tsunami. Certainly not the two people living in a cellar just three kilometres up the coast from where Paddy and Fay Cole lived.

Esme and Karim Shariati lay in each other’s embrace on an improvised bed. Candles standing nearby on the floor provided a light which they liked to think of as cosy. A washing-up bowl, a pail, a carton of milk, and a small pile of foodstuffs were almost the only other furnishings of the place.

There were occasions when Esme, her bright hair blackened by dye and a tattered old shawl about her shoulders, disguising her clothes, ventured a kilometre down the lane to a small village store, where she could buy provisions. Karim never showed himself outside the ruined cottage. But on occasions, when the moon was bright above the cliff, the pair of them would go down to the nearby beach, to swim in the sea, the sea of silver, to sport on the beach, to chase each other, to turn cartwheels, and to cuddle in the sand.

Esme had taken to the primitive existence. She gave no thought to Victor, or to the past, or to the future. She was completely possessed by the lean, sad stranger who had entered her life and overwhelmed it.

At first, when he was merely an inscrutable captor calling himself Ali, she had hated him. She had refused to draw a plan of the de Bourcey palace. He had not shot her. Slowly he had unbent from his anonymous hostility. Removing his black robe, he had shown himself to be an ordinary man, undernourished, dressed in a faded shirt and worn jeans.

When he had found he was unable to force her to draw the plan he desired, he had sunk down, groaning and clasping his head. ‘What can I do? I am ordered to kill you. I cannot kill you. It goes against all my beliefs.’

His words had changed their relationship.

She had gradually drawn his story out of him. His name was not Ali but Karim Shariati. He had been born in Tabriz, a city in Iran. He had been educated by mullahs. His father was an intellectual, in charge of the foreign languages department at the university, and an enlightened man. He taught his son to read English, so as to be able to read English translations of Russian novels. His favourite authors were Tolstoi, Gogol, and Dostoevsky. Karim was so enamoured of Crime and Punishment that he taught his young sister Farah to read as well.

One day, Farah, now a bold adolescent, went into the bazaar without wearing the prescribed chador. She was hustled off to prison and there brutally beaten. Karim was eventually allowed to carry his sister home. He blamed himself for her act of defiance.

Farah was badly injured. Her nose had been broken. She was no longer the pretty girl she had been. It took months before she could walk again. Never more was she light-hearted.

Karim ceased to believe in Islamic law.

One day, he was approached by a friend who knew a man who, if paid in advance, would get them to the West. Karim decided to leave with his friend. They departed from Tabriz at dead of night. The journey was horrendous. They spent four days in a truck with a crowd of others, many of them criminal, without food or water, crossing a desert.

They bumped over Turkey, reached Istanbul, and from there were driven into Greece, across the laxly guarded northern frontiers. Partly by lorry, partly by rail, always hiding, they travelled through the Balkans into Austria. There guards discovered the group in a railway siding. The guards fired on them and Karim’s friend was fatally wounded. He died next day.

Karim managed to reach France, where he worked in a restaurant in Toulouse. To save money, he slept in a barn. He was discovered and beaten up by French farmworkers. He stole a farm bike and cycled into Paris. In the Sorbonne he worked as a cleaner and got to know a kindly old man, a Jew, who let him share a room in his house with another Iranian, a religious man who was lame. This man was all patience and humility. He also had a store of absurd jokes. Slowly he brought about a rebirth of Karim’s religious faith.

Through this man, Karim met with a group of young Muslims who were working to bring about the collapse of the West. Intermittently visiting this group was a man called Sammy Bakhtiar, a sailor who had been born in the West. He talked to Karim about the parts of the world he had visited. He swore that England was a better place in which to live than the rest of the EU because there Muslims occupied whole cities and suburbs of cities, and were strong.

Sammy disliked most of the members of the young group. He said they were narrow-minded bigots. Some were homosexual. Some had French girlfriends whom they treated badly. Karim saw this for himself, and disliked what he saw.

With Sammy’s help, he stowed away on a container ship heading for the port of Harwich in England.

So his story went on. He told it to Esme in detail, describing the hideous vehicles in which he had travelled, the ghastly places where Karim had been forced to eat on the long trail that had led to this strange miracle of love, in a cellar lit by candles. He told how he had lived, the treatment he had received. As he related everything in obsessive detail, so Esme drank it all in obsessively, feeling a spiritual life revive within her.

When Karim found how preoccupied with making money were the Muslims he met in England, again his religious faith faltered in his breast.

He had moved to Ireland, hearing it was a good country. In Dublin he had become a member of a group of mixed nationality dedicated to overthrowing the established order. These men and women were hard drinkers. They had formulated a plot to assassinate the EU president. Karim had happened to catch a news photograph of Esme opening her restaurant at the peak of Everest on the very day he saw her entering the Hotel Kilberkilty.

The plan to take her captive had been hurriedly cobbled together. He confessed that when he had caught her, he scarcely knew what to do with her. So they now both found themselves in this cellar beneath a ruinous coastal cottage.

This long story had taken Karim a while to tell. Day and night had passed unnoticed beyond their sunken walls. Told in episodes, the story appealed to Esme as a great myth of endurance and protest against the tyrannies of the world. Never had she heard anything like it, told to her alone. In her mind, she ran over confused pictures of Tabriz, all dust and sun, the stony extremities of Turkey, the grand mosques of Istanbul, the lorries bumping across Balkan roads, the rattletrap trains, the kitchens of Toulouse, the warrens of the Sorbonne, the little wooden room housing the wise lame man. And, because she was a restaurateur, she tasted with Karim the stale fish, the foetid meat, the rotting vegetables, the smashed fruit that he had been forced to eat when living like a pariah dog on the trail that led to this subterranean tryst, this awaiting joy.

She knew she was falling in love with the enduring spirit of this lonely and troubled man. It was at once like falling down a dreadful well and ascending into clear bright sky.

More than that. She loved him as she had never loved Victor, loved him so that her body ached for him. For Karim’s way in the world had not been made smooth for him. Karim was a man alone.

When he was telling her of the death of his friend in the Austrian marshalling yards, he was so troubled that she had stroked his hair in compassion. He had turned to her, quite fiercely, to bury his head in her breast. Their physical needs were released like tigers from cages.

It seemed entirely right that she should give herself to him. Though they lived in squalor, in squalor was their happiness. She had escaped hygiene. She saw them as two rebels, isloated, driven, faithful unto death. Of course they were lovers. Lovers driven underground, living underground …

‘Gumbridge’s is the place for pyjama trousers. We sell pyjama trousers without pyjama tops, so if your man sleeps in just his trousers, the tops don’t go to waste. Similarly, if he just sleeps in his tops, then we sell tops without bottoms. Bargain prices? You bet!’

<INSANATICS: Relieving ourselves. That excretory powers are enjoyable is a sense we never grow out of. It is a sense rooted not merely in our childhood but in our foetus stage. Our orifices are precious to us, and their produce is not unpleasant to us, as it is to others. We enjoy the stink of our own farts. We carry with us a secret guilt, which means a secret pleasure, for we have been encompassed by our mother’s body and relished its smells and cavities. We performed our excretory acts secretly in the mother’s body. In those days, we had our own private universe.

When we emerged from the womb, our first sickly motions were often a source of admiration for our parents. In our dirt they relived their dirt.>

Filming the evacuation from the threatened coasts of the British Isles was Wolfgang Frankel. In his element. The great man enjoyed flitting about in helicopters. He flew, with his camera crew, over a scene never viewed before, never dreamed of. From Cape Wrath in the north of Scotland to Penzance in the south of Cornwall, hundreds and thousands of people were endeavouring to quit the westward-facing coasts before the tsunami struck. They travelled by car, by Slo-Mo, by coach, by bicycle, by foot. Some people in more rural parts travelled by horse and cart.

Darkness made progress all the more hazardous. Many cases of tailgating occurred where the lines of traffic abruptly slowed. Men jumped from their vehicles, to attack the driver of the vehicle behind or in front. Not only were lanes and roads choked by traffic. Many in their desperate need to escape from the oncoming wave took to the moors or fields, only to stall their engines or slide into ditches.

Police and road organisations were unable to control the mad exodus.

The weather became cold and merciless. Through rushing cloud, a new moon smouldered. Rain fell, turning to sleet in the north.

Conditions in Ireland were no better – and there, if the traffic was less dense, the fear was greater, for the west coast of Ireland was, as a commentator put it, ‘tied to the stake like Andromeda, first in the firing line’.

‘It’s getting too bad,’ the helicopter pilot yelled to Wolfgang. ‘You can see, visibility is down to zero. We don’t want the vanes icing up.’

‘Okay, take her down.’ He was feeling nervous himself, without showing it. The ’copter rocked and screamed in the gusts of wind.

The pilot was a cool young fellow. With a touch of sarcasm, he asked, ‘Whereabouts would you suggest we took her down?’

Wolfgang turned back to his sound man. ‘Joe, show me whereabouts we are on your map.’

The sound man produced a damp map and pointed. They had been filming low over the Menai Bridge connecting the Isle of Anglesey to the mainland. Traffic on and around the bridge had ground to a halt. There were those trying to get back on to the island to rescue relations there, as well as those trying to escape from it. Many people were on foot, struggling savagely past the congestions of vehicles. Two cars and a mobile crane were inextricably locked together near the mainland side. A small police helicopter was flying dangerously low, shining a searchlight on the confusion, which police below struggled to clear.

‘A few kilometres south-south-west of here there’s a farm called Llanysam. I know it well. It has a helipad,’ Wolfgang shouted.

‘Where, for fuck’s sake?’ They were yelling at each other.

‘Llanysam! Llanysam! It’s a village. A farm.’

‘How far?’

‘Can’t be more than twenty kilometres. Think we’ll make it?’

‘Could do. We’ve only got wind and rain and ice to contend with …’

All below them as they flew they saw broken strands of light where armoured insects fought their way along the roads from Caernarfon. No road too narrow or too winding not to be crawling with escaping vehicles. Even above the noise of the ’copter engine and the shriek of the wind, car horns could be heard.

Under the blustering wind, they seemed to proceed in jerks as they headed inland. Suddenly they were out of the rain front. They all took a deep breath of relief. Progress was still slow. They circled for some while, with the searchlight shining, flickering over hedge and hillside.

‘There it is! To your left!’

‘I was beginning to think you were making it up.’

They circled again, losing height. Finally they were settling down on the pad. The pilot hopped out and secured his craft against the scudding wind.

‘This is going to be a bit of a surprise,’ Wolfgang said. Suddenly he was doubtful about his welcome. And if Daniel Potts was there – that might be embarrassing. Not that Wolfgang, as he reminded himself, had not been in embarrassing situations before.

They put their heads down as they crossed a stretch of tormented heath.

The low whitewashed building, with its barn close by, was – or had been – the holiday home of Daniel Potts and his wife Lena. Wolfgang remembered it well. He had liked its mountainous remoteness in the days when he had been a regular and secret visitor there. He strode on, head bowed, remembering, leaving the three other men behind.

It had been two years since his affair with Lena had petered out. He had not seen her since. She had not accompanied Daniel to the Victor–Esme wedding. He saw vividly now, as he had never bothered to do at the time, how difficult had been her life with Daniel, and with Daniel’s endless tussling over his religious beliefs. Self-indulgence – that was what it had been on Daniel’s part, pure self-indulgence. And he had tried to dress it up as something noble.

‘Oh, shit,’ said Wolfgang to himself. Who was he to accuse another man of self-indulgence? At least he had never pretended to himself it was anything else.

Sorrow filled his mind as he staggered onwards, through the farm gate. Next year, he would be forty years old. Time had gone by. Yes, he had celebrity. Life was enjoyable enough – full, in fact, of excitements. And yet – empty.

He seized the iron knocker and hammered at the oak door of the farmhouse.

The time was 4.17 a.m.

A window above his head opened and a woman’s voice said, ‘Whoever you are, bugger off!’

He stood back, looking upwards to where a woman, dimly framed in a window, was levelling a gun at him.

‘Lena, is that you? It’s me, Wolfie. Is Daniel in?’

A torch came on, dazzling him.

Not at all mollified, the woman called, ‘I don’t want strangers here. Fuck off, the lot of you!’

‘Lena, it’s me, Wolfie. I’ve got three friends with me – fugitives from the storm. Are you alone?’

‘I’m not alone.’ The tone now was more moderate. The torch was switched off. The gun was withdrawn.

The pilot, the cameraman, the sound man, clustered round Wolfgang. ‘Doesn’t sound too good.’ ‘Who are these people?’ ‘Bloody Welsh …’ ‘Hadn’t we better move on?’ ‘You saw she had a gun?’ ‘Christ, Wolfie, what now? It’s a quarter past fucking four.’

‘Hang on,’ said Wolfie. Then, ‘She’s just a bit startled.’

‘Startled! For two pins she’d have shot us!’

Lena’s head reappeared at the upper window.

‘All right. What the hell do you want? I’ll come down. Just be quiet, the lot of you – I’ve got kids sleeping here.’

Kids, what kids? Wolfgang asked himself. ‘Well, buck up, it’s perishing cold!’ he shouted.

As they waited, he began to recall the miserable history of Daniel Potts and his family. Potts in his youth had been profoundly religious, or had claimed to be. Marrying young, he had instilled religious principles into his and Lena’s two children, first Olduvai and then – oh, yes, the name came back, Josephine. The children in their teens had rejected religion, refusing to go to church. And Daniel had disowned them, kicked them out of house and home.

What a bastard the man had been! And then he too, digging in those shallow graves in Africa, he also had lost his faith.

Wolfgang had cuckolded him without a moment’s thought.

God, what misery there was in the fucking world. It was all round them, like the wind whistling round the side of the nearby barn. You had to fight against it, to take what pleasure you could, just as you struggled to keep yourself warm against the metaphysical cold.

The chain inside went clanking down off the door.

The door opened a crack.

The torch shone in their faces.

‘All right. Come in. And be quiet.’

So they went in.

Lena locked the door and put the chain up. She switched an overhead light on, and surveyed her four visitors, standing sheepishly together. Her rifle was by her side.

She was wearing an old faded grey dressing-gown over her pyjamas. On her feet were tattered slippers. Wolfgang saw immediately that her figure had thickened. She had aged. The young beauty for whom he had so urgently lusted was gone.

‘We are sorry to have frightened you, Lena,’ he said, coming forward and taking her hand – which she quickly withdrew. ‘Is Daniel here?’

She gave a shake of her untidy head. ‘He’s not. You’re quite safe.’ Said with a certain proud scorn, perhaps remembering Wolfgang’s cautious visits in the old days.

She ordered her visitors to sit down on an old oak settle by a dead fireplace. When they were perched there uncomfortably in a row, she relented slightly, saying she would make them all mugs of tea. She had no alcohol about the place she told them. ‘Things have changed, then,’ said Wolfgang, with an attempt at lightness.

‘Certainly have.’

As she made her way to a kitchen at the back of the house, Wolfgang followed her down the passage.

He remembered the kitchen, remembered when she and Daniel had had it installed; the old iron range had been taken out, a new oven put in, together with fridge and dishwasher. They were still there, icy under the bar lighting. He also saw the bottles of wine and malt whisky on a Welsh dresser, but made no comment. A window over the sink looked out on blackness. It was freezing cold in the kitchen.

‘How have things been, Lena?’

She shot him a glance, perhaps measuring how much she would tell him. ‘Bloody ghastly.’

Her answer silenced him. Lena filled a kettle and switched it on. Wolfgang stood looking vaguely about him, knowing himself unwanted and not entirely knowing what to do. The old charm, he told himself, was not working. He felt compassion for the woman. He was a venal man, and recognised himself as venal: yet his better side wished to offer her some comfort, and perhaps to be forgiven.

‘You seem to be having rather a hard time of it. Is Daniel back in Africa? I caught part of his lecture the other night.’

She turned, leaning against the sink, giving him an unfriendly stare. She had a sty on her left eyelid, he noted.

‘You men are all bastards. What do you care? Daniel has chucked me up, just as he chucked up his kids.’

‘What do you mean? You two have been married for donkey’s years.’

‘Huh. In name, maybe. Now he’s chucked me up.’

‘How? What do you mean?’

‘What right have you to ask me questions? You come here in your helicopter … I suppose you didn’t chuck me up, two years ago?’

She turned away to arrange mugs beside the kettle, which was busily arranging to boil. He wondered if she was close to tears, but that did not seem to be the case.

‘You once cared about me, Lena.’

With her back still turned to him, she said, ‘You never cared about me, you sod.’

He stood staring blankly ahead. Slowly he realised he was looking at what he had registered as a bundle of old clothes, lying on the draining board. He saw now that there was a small foot with five little toes protruding from it. A black foot.

Revulsion, a wish to escape, overcame Wolfgang. He remained rooted to the spot.

The woman was pouring hot water on tea bags. She added milk from a jug standing on the windowsill. Catching sight of the expression on his face, misinterpreting it, she said, ‘Your conscience playing you up? You left me without a word. It was because of you Daniel walked out on me. He kicked me out of our London house. I do mean kicked …’

He said nothing. Aware she was regarding him contemptuously, he dropped his gaze.

Lena said, ‘You can carry this tray in. Yes, he found a bundle of those letters you wrote me. That did it!’

Through a daze, Wolfgang said, ‘What? You kept all those damned letters?’ He remembered writing them. How he had enjoyed writing down all the sexual details after their meetings in the course of – well, it must have been over six or seven years. He had never been faithful to her but certainly he had … it had been like love. ‘Why didn’t you burn them, for God’s sake?’

‘Women always keep love letters, weak creatures that we are.’

He carried the tray with the mugs into the front room where his three companions sat silently. They were listening to the cameraman’s portable radio. A newsreader was giving an account of a massive traffic pile-up on the M5. Seventeen vehicles involved.

In Wolfgang’s mind, the image of the dead baby’s foot remained. Whose baby was it? Who had killed it? He held the hot mug of tea between his hands but could not drink.

Lena was standing against the wall, one hand on the barrel of the rifle propped by her side. Glancing covertly at her, Wolfgang saw how gaunt and exhausted she looked. It seemed as if she was waiting for them to leave.

‘Nice place you got here, missus,’ said the pilot, to make conversation. Lena did not respond.

Wolfgang forced himself to go and confront her. Speaking quietly, he said, ‘You told us you had kids here.’

‘There’s one upstairs. It’s Josie’s little girl, Mary. Josie’s here with me. She’s probably awake. You probably woke her.’

They stood looking at each other. It was as if the mention of a child had softened Lena slightly. After a pause, she added, ‘You remember Josie? She was just a little thing in your time.’

‘I heard she took to drugs.’

Lena neither agreed not denied it.

He brought himself to ask, as if the words choked him, ‘What about the dead baby in the kitchen?’

Straight-faced, she said, ‘I don’t know what you are talking about. I want you to leave here now, Wolfie, and take your pals with you.’

‘You’re in trouble, aren’t you?’

She slapped him across the face. ‘Will you mind your own fucking business!’

He was astonished at how much the blow hurt. The tea went splashing from his mug, down his coverall. The pilot came over to see what was happening. Wolfgang sat down abruptly on a chair, saying it was all right. Lena disappeared upstairs.

He told the pilot and the others that they had better get going if the storm had abated.

The time was almost five o’clock.

The sound of running feet upstairs came to them. A child’s cry. Silence. Running feet again.

Lena came downstairs, wild-eyed. ‘Wolfie, I want you.’

She ran into the passage and he followed. She stood as if at bay, in a small bare room in which containers of cooking-gas stood.

‘Josie has gone. She’s not in the toilet. She must have gone out. I’m sure something has happened to her. Oh, God!’ She put a hand quickly up to her mouth as though trying to stop the words emerging.

‘Gone out? Gone out in this weather?’

‘Yes, yes, gone fucking out! She’s in a terrible state. It’s her baby, born dead.’

An oilskin hat hung on a peg. She seized it and rammed it on her head. Running to a side door, she unbolted it, pulling bolts at top and bottom, and rushed outside, carrying her torch. Wolfgang followed.

The wind still howled. Dawn was advancing, with bars of pallid light overlaid by scattered cloud in the western sky. As they ran, Lena was shouting out explanations or at least a brief history of the misery she had gone through with Josie, the daughter her husband had rejected. Wolfgang thought she said that everything that had happened was God’s punishment for her sins.

Although he was running at her side, he could not hear her words clearly. He shouted that she should not believe such old-fashioned rubbish. To which she, also half hearing, said that it was happening now.

Coming from the shelter of the house, they were struck with even greater force by the storm. The wind carried splatters of rain with it.

As if by instinct, Lena was running for the barn. Now she was screaming her daughter’s name. The torchlight flashed ahead, capering ghostlike on the black-tarred barn walls. One door was swinging, banging open, closing again, banging open again.

They ran inside.

Josie was hanging by her neck from a beam. Her feet were little more than ten centimetres from the floor. She had kicked away an old box. Either then or in her death struggles afterwards, she had shed a shoe. Particles of hay swirled about her feet.

‘Oh no, not Josephine! Not – not my dear dear daughter! No, no, it can’t be! Oh, my only love! Oh, God! Oh, Christ! Oh, it can’t be!’

But it was. And when Wolfie took a knife and cut the young girl down, Lena seized the limp body, clinging to it as if she could never never let it go, crying as if she could never never stop.

The time was 5.10 a.m. Over the Irish coast, the dawn was well advanced, drawing angry red banners above the Atlantic.

The androids were almost due for release from their cupboard to go about their daily duties.

‘At the shop I saw a small crying thing being carried.’

‘It will grow into a human.’

‘Why was it crying?’

‘The theory is that it knows it will have to grow into a human.’

‘How long will it take?’

‘It is a painful process. We are fortunate. We do not feel pain.’

‘Did they fetch this thing from a hospital?’

‘It came from a woman.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘The theory is that there was an operation and the baby was produced from her.’

‘I have not learnt this fact.’

‘Their bodies swing open.’

‘You are making what humans call a joke – something inaccurate.’

‘The theory is that the baby came out of her body.’

‘You have a malfunction. I will report it.’

The ocean had gathered itself up to advance towards land and dawn. In a great liquid movement it sped onward. It had gained height as it neared land. It was in league with the blast which came at its back.

Now that it had gained the shallows of the Continental Shelf, the wave was changing its colour. Sombre greens and greys had picked up streaks of near-yellow. And there was a blackness about it, too. It towered to a height of several metres. Smaller waves followed it.

Now it stormed over the coastal waters. They seemed to withdraw before it, and then to join in the chase.

Now the great wave was closing on the land. With colossal force it flung itself against the rocks of Ireland. It stormed over them with a clap like thunder. Without cease, it poured over the land.

Now those persons rash enough to stay and observe, perhaps from cars, perhaps from houses, were swept away like straws. Their limbs waved as they were carried along until being dashed to pieces.

Now the land became submerged, foaming in the all-consuming ocean.

But Esme de Bourcey and Karim Shariati lived in a world of their own. They had no screen, they saw no ambient. They looked only on each other in perfect love. In perfect love they gloried that their bodies differed one from the other, that their colours differed, and that their creeds differed. What might previously have driven them apart now drew them together.

It was two days since Esme had wandered to the nearest shop. They hated being parted. Their food was almost exhausted.

Karim woke. He opened his eyes into the darkness. Today, he thought, today they must try to be reasonable and get something to eat. His left arm had gone dead. His lover was lying on it. He did not move it for fear of waking her. He put his nose close to her body to inhale its beautiful scents. Never had he been so happy. Not in all his days.

Here lay this wonderful wonderful woman, open to him. And he open to her. Never before had they been so trusting, so complete.

He could not make out the source of the strange new noise. He thought, laughing to himself at the conceit, that this was the noise happiness makes as it rushes like a tide through hitherto unused channels of the mind.

Then, much more clearly, a bang – and then water rushing into their hidey-hole. For a moment he lay there, unable to understand.

‘Esme! Esme, my dove, wake yourself up! There is a flood!’

She roused at once. They sat up together in the dark, listening, startled. Listening to water pouring in.

She said she would make a light. But when she reached to the floor for candle and matches, her hand touched swirling water. She yelped with alarm.

They quickly decided they had better get out in case they drowned there in their beautiful cellar. But they found a whole ocean to fight against, pouring down their stairs, rock tumbling with it.

They did not get out.

‘Hi! Alexy Stromeyer calling from the Roddenberry expedition. Hope you can hear me, Earth. Jupiter is putting out a stack of microwave radio emission. Rick O’Brien and I are now standing on the surface of Europa, near Belus Linea. We have made it to our intended destination after over a year of travel through space. Sure, this is an historic moment. It feels wonderful. What a sight! Kathram is tracking us from the Roddenberry in orbit overhead. She is also reprogramming the various computers to ready the drill.

‘Sorry. I’ll be back later. Out.’

A three-hour silence followed. Then Alexy came through again, less faintly.

‘Okay. Sorry for break in transmission. Seems like a solar wind storm is stepping up Jupiter’s high-energy electron-radiation belts. We’re getting readings of electrons at energies of 20MeV. And we appreciate our signal takes thirty-seven minutes to reach you. Kathram had to read just the high-gain antenna, which had suffered a knock. We’re okay now. Rick and I are staying close. It is a bit intimidating. Bear in mind Europa is about the size of Earth’s Moon.

‘It is a pretty desolate view we have here. Bleak as hell. We are fairly near an impact crater which has thrown up ice, creating ridges. There are cracks which have filled with slush and debris, which of course froze over as soon as they came in contact with space.

‘Our photopolarimeter has detected signs of both cryovulcanism and bombardment from space by random elements.

‘Rick and I are standing on a socking great ice floe, maybe as much as twenty kilometres across. It’s slightly unsteady – from the movement of the ocean below us but maybe also because we are unaccustomed to standing up straight on our own two feet in a gravity condition. All we can see of Jupiter at the moment is a bright fingernail across the foreshortened horizon of the ice. But Jupiter is rising. Awestruck. Back soonest. Out.’

The occupants of the Channel Islands had fled by boat and plane, leaving their homes and possessions to the mighty oncoming wave. As for the Atlantic coast of France, that western bastion of the super-state, there too the inhabitants – or those wise enough or capable enough – had moved hastily eastward before the tsunami struck and unrolled the sea like a liquid carpet far inland.

Brittany took the flood head on. Brest suffered sea fish to swim through the upper windows of its hotels. Further southwards, the same story was repeated. The ancient megaliths of Carnac were consumed, Vannes was completely vanquished. Sweeping over the port of Saint-Nazaire, the mighty wave sent an exploratory tide even as far into the embouchure of the Loire as Nantes, from which the young Jules Verne had once aspired to sail. In broad daylight, La Rochelle received an inundation, and Rochefort too, its sands carried far inland, to besiege the battlements of St Jean. A hasty barrier of ships had blocked the mouth of the Gironde; the manoeuvre did not save the inhabitants of ancient Bordeaux from getting their feet wet. And their legs. And their waistlines. And their wainscotting.

All the plages of that area, those bars of sand, those dunes, those havens for holidays, became erased, so rapidly, so thoroughly, that the mild plain crossed by Route N21 became in one morning an inland sea, angry with debris. As for the beaches of Biarritz, and its costly casinos – these too went down before the mighty tsunami.

Countless billions of grains of sand, ground down in Time’s good time from siliceous rocks, some old as Ordovician, were redistributed over all the littoral roads and gardens and woods and vineyards, from La Manche to the Bay of Biscay.

Similar fates befell the towns and cities of the northern coast of Spain. San Sebastian, Bilbao, Santander, onwards, all died beneath the wind and wave before the sea fell back exhausted. And then followed the cold, to fringe with icy whiskers the new flood margins.

The coasts of Scandinavia suffered identical assaults. But Norway had stubbornly remained outside the EU, so that was different.

And what of Greenland itself?

American geophysicists and other interested parties were quickly on the scene. Their findings showed that the collapse of the ice shelf near Angmagssilik was not the cause of the disruption but rather the result of a greater disruption.

A large missile or meteor had impacted with the Greenland massif some kilometres inland. The still-steaming crater was 20 kilometres wide.

The invasive body had entered the atmosphere at a velocity of not more than 20,000 kilometres an hour, striking at an oblique angle of 30 degrees. Magnetic surveys, seismic profiles, drill-core stratigraphy and measurements of the thickness of the ejecta blanket indicated that the meteor – if meteor it was – had been a mere pebble, no more than fifteen metres across.

Had it arrived on its mindless journey from space only four minutes later, it would have grounded in the northern wilds of Canada. ‘Another great event the Canadians have missed,’ as an American joker put it.

Snug at home with his wife Ruth, Paulus Stromeyer worked at his latest mathematical problem. What he had done for society with his SAC formulation he hoped to repeat for nature itself with what he determined would be the revolutionary science of boims and serds.

Tapping the keys of his computer with one finger, Paulus strove to build an imaginary higher calculus, standing for functions in relation to nine hundred. The boims would iron out irregularities in the flows of growth and probability. The serds were temporal coordinates plus what Paulus termed ‘unexpectables’. He had uncovered first hints of the theory in a small manual on weather prediction, published but ignored, in an ancient brown textbook of 1914, that ill-omened year. There it had been termed the Function of Feeble Interaction.

It was quiet in Paulus’s study, except for the strains of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony issuing softly from his old CDX player. His devoted daughter Rebecca had brought him a cup of coffee. It stood by his right elbow, neglected and stone-cold, a spoon lolling over the lip of the cup.

While Paulus quietly worked to bring about a new order, elsewhere in the super-state there was near-chaos. Unlike the tsunami, an atmosphere of unease had penetrated far inland, to Berlin itself. Rapid arrangements had to be made to house hundreds of thousands of refugees from the floods. Charities were being overwhelmed by offers of hospitality and by monetary donations for the relief of the newly homeless.

Various armies were on alert to halt looting.

All this pandemonium played into the hands of Imran Chokar. He now lay concealed among ferns, outside the barriers guarding the presidential palace of San Guinaire, patiently awaiting the next darkness. The excitement engendered by the Greenland event prevented much vigilance being expended for single assassins. While Imran waited he prayed.

Unknown to Imran, but not a kilometre away from him, by another section of the perimeter, a man was lying full length in a tunnel. This area was on hilly ground. It had once been cleared of vegetation but time had gone by. Now ferns grew tall here, and nettles and brambles. The brambles dripped moisture at this sullen hour. Though rain had ceased, the sky was stifled by heavy cloud brought about by the aftermath of the Greenland event. No moon could be seen.

This was a good place for concealment. The tunneller had bought a small garden trowel for 4.5 univs at a supermarket in Liège. With this, he was carving a steady hole through the earth into the grounds of the presidential palace. God was with him all the way. His name was David Bargane. His lips, like Imran’s, moved in constant prayer, though to a different God.

At almost the same moment as Imran Chokar polevaulted with his home-made pole over the perimeter fence, David Bargane broke from his tunnel and, in a shower of dirt, emerged into the presidential grounds.

Patrols were less active than usual. The cataclysmic upheaval caused by the Greenland event had focused almost everyone’s attention on ambient reports. Many guards had simply given up to watch the various disasters being played out on the screens.

There was also a rival attraction, the landing of men on a moon of Jupiter. But this historic event had been largely relegated to secondary interest. Even space buffs and those who read science fiction were torn between the two extraordinary events.

So it was comparatively easy for Chokar to enter the palace by an open window in the east wing. Bargane, on the other hand, managed to climb up a drainpipe on the west wing to a balcony on the first floor; from there he was able to prise open a window and get into the palace.

Prayer proved to be of little help to David Bargane as he crept along the corridor. He was bewildered by the size of the place. Finding a linen cupboard, he entered it. Closing the door on himself, he stood there rigidly in the dark, abandoning prayer to try to think for himself.

Darkness, meanwhile, fell throughout most of the palace. Panic broke out. Chokar, finding a fire axe in a glass case, had broken the glass, seized the axe, and severed the cable above a main fuse box. Before dim auxiliary lights came on, he sprinted up a ceremonial staircase to the first floor. Having wisely consulted a guidebook before approaching the President’s palace, he had a fairly clear idea of a large committee chamber on this level. But would the President be there? Running swiftly along a corridor, he heard someone approaching with a firm and rapid tread.

Almost without thought, he opened a door and dashed in. It was a linen cupboard.

Next morning, at five minutes to seven, a chambermaid discovered two dead bodies in her cupboard. Knives protruded from the ribs of both. Their blood had stained all her beautifully ironed and folded pillowcases and duvets. Small wonder she screamed.

The screams were hardly likely to be heard by Gustave de Bourcey. He was in Honolulu, attending a summit meeting.

<INSANATICS: The News. Increasingly, human populations have a thirst for news. This is, in general, regarded as commendable. In fact, most news, the news most eagerly reported and received, is bad news. It frequently concerns people who are dying or dead.

Supposing an area of China is destroyed by earthquake, or an area of Britain inundated by severe flooding, or an area of the USA stricken by forest fires. These matters may be reported for several days, while there is drama to be squeezed from them. Then, when the novelty has worn off, the helicopters retire and the interviewers and commentators go home.

We are not shown the aftermath: the areas dried out and livestock reinstated, or the flood-damaged houses rebuilt, or the charred forest areas replanted. These matters do not touch us. It is disaster that propitiates our famished psyches.>

The Stromeyer family were naturally anxious. The latest news they had received of Alexy was broadcast when he was standing on the ice floes of a small satellite of a giant planet that was six hundred and twenty-eight thousand kilometres away, moving at an orbital speed of over thirteen kilometres per second. They felt they had every right to be anxious.

All members of the family were due to gather in the paternal apartment in an hour’s time: Belinda Mironets with her husband Ivan, and their small boy, Boy, and Joseph Stromeyer, being respectively Ruth and Paulus’s daughter, son-in-law, with their son, and son. Ruth and Rebecca were in the kitchen, baking cakes and preparing a feast.

Paulus remained in his study till the last moment, struggling with his boims and serds. On his wall he had pinned a remark made by Bertrand Russell in a letter to a ladylove:

I simply can’t stand a view limited to this Earth. I feel life is so small unless it has windows into other worlds … I like mathematics largely because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.

Russell had written this in 1912. While Paulus applauded the sentiment, he was endeavouring to develop precisely a system which would have something in particular to do with the world, and to love the world in return.

He was at an impasse. He called his friend Barnard Cleeping in Utrecht and burst straight into what was on his mind.

‘Barnard, exactly what objective independence from the mind do mathematical formulations possess? I have become entangled in that philosophical problem and cannot progress. I cannot sustain a formulation proving conclusively that the methodology of mathematics is innate in what we call the taxonomy of organisms.’

Cleeping’s voice sounded stifled. ‘You’d have to go to Cantor and infinite numbers for an answer, Paulus. Sorry, I can’t help at present.’

‘Do you have a cold?’

Silence from Cleeping’s end. Then he said, ‘I’m only just out of hospital, if you must know. And I’m feeling wretched, Paulus. You know that poor fellow I spoke up for in court?’

‘The Muslim. What about him?’

‘He’s just been found stabbed to death. Police aren’t saying where exactly. Such a good young man.’

‘Good young men don’t usually get themselves stabbed.’

Paulus rang off, and went to greet his family. They pressed in, uttering cheery greetings. He gave a special hug, a bear hug, to his younger son, Joe. Joe had a responsible job in non-invasive surgery at a Naples hospital. Paulus always knew that Joe – not a man with a great deal of drive – felt eclipsed by Alexy, his extraordinary brother.

‘How are things?’

‘Fine, Dad, fine.’ That was all he said, giving a sort of wry smile.

Paulus heard his father coming down the stairs from his room, slowly, one step at a time. He went to help, but halted at the bottom of the stairs when Moshe said rather pettishly that he needed no assistance.

‘The family are here, Father. We are all expecting to hear from Alexy.’

‘Who is Alexy?’

‘Your grandson, Father. The astronaut. He’s on Europa.’

‘Of course he is. Terrible weather we’re having, mmm. Most of France is under water.’

‘Yes, but this is Europa. A satellite of Jupiter.’

‘Good, good. I am not hearing too well. Excellent. Discovered by Galileo Galilei, I understand. And there are some people who still believe the Sun goes round the Earth, poor ignorant fools.’

He made his shaky way to an armchair. ‘People don’t communicate properly these days.’

Belinda, Ivan, their Boy and Joe had arrived in a group. Ruth and Rebecca were still doing a jovial round of embraces, amid general kissings and demonstrations of affection. Ivan loaded Ruth with pale pink roses; she squealed with pleasure. Belinda gave Paulus a box of after-dinner mints. Joe brought his sister the latest Rose Baywater novel, Not a Day Less Than For Ever.

‘It’s a bit intellectual for you, darling,’ he said, teasing her.

Rebecca opened the book at random and read aloud. ‘“The clouds were like scratches in the blue sky … As I lay in my husband’s arms, with my flesh pressing against his, as he gazed into my grey eyes, I reflected on how happy he must feel to be so close to such a beautiful and clever woman. But was George sensitive enough to really appreciate me?”’

Everyone roared with laughter. Said Rebecca, still laughing, ‘And to think that we were one of the publishers who turned down this lady’s first manuscript. Why, it’s Tolstoi in skirts!’

Ruth brought a tray full of cakes and tarts from the kitchen, and everyone exclaimed with delight. Paulus was looking again at his watch. It was past time for the report from the Roddenberry.

Moshe remained silent, although he ate a slice of lemon drizzle cake, shedding crumbs as he went. There were tea and white wine on offer. Moshe sipped a glass of the wine before struggling into a more upright posture.

‘Just be quiet a minute, children,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to you all seriously. Your mum and I think you should know something about sex.’

They all stopped talking and stared in astonishment at the old man.

It was Ivan who said, ‘Look, Pop, we are adult, we know all about sex. Linda and I practise it regularly.’

Belinda added, ‘So we do, though not regularly enough.’

Moshe said, ‘I appreciate that I should have given you this lecture some years ago, when you were smaller. Still, better late than never, mmm. At least we can take it that you know the difference between – what do you call it? – between male and female …’

Joe asked his mother, ‘Is Gramps pulling our various legs?’

Ruth patted Moshe’s shoulder. ‘Moshe, dear, this is going to be too embarrassing.’

‘I want to be sure you understand, my pet, mmm.’ He wiped some saliva from his chin. ‘Now, when I put my old fellow – my “Artful Dodger”, as I tend to call it – into your mum, mmm, I project a lot of sperm in her which she immediately places in her womb. These sperms, which you can think of as little tiny fish, if you like, or what do you call it? – tadpoles, then swim upstream and get to Mum’s ovaries and—’

Paulus took one of his father’s hands, telling him gently that his mind was wandering.

‘Why don’t you hear him out?’ said Rebecca, suppressing a smile. ‘I think he wants to get to the spiritual bit.’

‘There’s nothing spiritual about it, dear, mmm,’ Moshe said. ‘All one wants is a good shag. Now, as to the best position, Mummy and I rather—’

‘He’s rambling,’ Ruth said. ‘Paulus, please stop him. Take him upstairs.’

‘Yes, it’s a bit much.’ Joe had always tended to support his mother, and was not going to let a chance escape him now. ‘Do shut him up, Pop.’

‘—Enjoyed lying side by side. Although, when we were first married – well, before that, really – we tried all sorts of positions. I remember once getting your mum over the bonnet of my old Volvo. No, no, not Mum, that was a girl called Suzanne, mmm. I think it was Suzanne. I couldn’t keep my hands off her. And not only my hands—’

‘Paulus! This is degrading for him and for us,’ said Ruth. ‘Do stop him, please. It’s beastly.’

Paulus stood there indecisively, stunned and horrified by the collapse of his father’s decorum.

Belinda was saying, ‘No, let him go on, Dad. It’s fascinating. He’s gone completely bonkers.’

Moshe suddenly looked up. Speaking directly to his son, he said, ‘I’m trying to teach them the facts of life. I know they’re all grown up but even small boys long to look up girls’ skirts, and get their hands up there if they can. For a good feel, mmm. The interest in the bodies of the other sex is only natural, and can form—’

‘Stop it, Father!’ said Ruth. ‘You are rambling. You don’t know what you’re saying. Go upstairs at once.’

He looked up at her, pathetic and bemused. ‘But, Suzanne, don’t you remember—’

‘It’s all right, Father,’ said Paulus. ‘Everything is fine. Let me help you upstairs. I’ll carry your wine glass. You can watch the next episode of History of Western Science.’

As they left the room, the others looked at each other gloomily, pulling long faces. Ruth hid her eyes behind her hands. ‘I shouldn’t have been angry with him. It’s Alzheimer’s, isn’t it? I’m sure it’s Alzheimer’s …’

Rebecca put her arms round her mother and hugged her, saying nothing.

When Paulus came downstairs again there was still no message from the Roddenberry.

‘This is BBC Digital on 193 MHz. We are still awaiting a signal from the crew of the Roddenberry on Europa.

‘While we wait, here is a chance to see again Professor Daniel Potts’s challenging and topical lecture which he entitled “Solitude So Far”. It was first shown in January of this year.

‘Professor Potts.’

[A montage of cartoon characters followed. Mice, cats, talking elephants, dogs, partly dressed horses sped across the screen, followed by female warrior creatures with large metallic breasts battling bravely through computer games.

Potts appeared, walking down a long VR corridor.]

‘It transpires that almost everyone believes in forms of alien life. Governments investigate UFO phenomena, major movies depict visits between planets, where exist strange bipeds, either harmless or, more likely, well armed.

‘Non-human life is the irregular verb of the human mind. We are drawn in love and fear – and always have been – towards something living but not quite like us.

‘For this trait there is a phylogenetic reason. Deep in our brains lives a memory of when we as a species were hardly distinct from other related sub-species or even animals, and dressed ourselves in their skins. The human/animal relationship was closer than city dwellers can ever imagine.

[Computerised images here were especially vivid.]

‘As we know, there remains much of the ape in us. Regrettably, I am now too old to climb trees. That early boyhood pleasure was as much part of phylogeny as ontology. Just as what passes as cute is the atavism whereby parents dress their babies in hoods with ears, turning them into mice, rabbits or bears – or other mammals which have accompanied us along the evolutionary escalator. Our constant invention of the Unknown, the Other, has deep roots.

[The pictures hanging on the wall of the corridor were alive, and showed a succession of the absurd quadrupeds to which Potts referred.]

‘Those roots tap into the mental soil, grown presumably before the dawning of human consciousness. With the subject of consciousness now under scrutiny, we see how slowly intellectual awareness has developed.

‘We may ask ourselves if the human species has yet achieved full consciousness. Using the analogy of a light bulb, we can wonder if the bulb has yet reached maximum wattage. For many of us, fantasising is easier than thinking constructively. [The image of a light bulb spluttered out.]

‘One of our overriding fantasies is a persistent vision of the alien, of something like us but certainly not us.

‘Just picture all those beings patently without existence, in which nevertheless humanity has believed at one time or another – often for decades, even centuries. [These beings began a grotesque parade, advancing from the distance into the eye of the camera.]

‘Heavens, what a population explosion of mythical persons! Creatures with goat’s feet, persons half-human half-bull, people with snakes growing out of their heads, fairies, elves, goblins, gnomes, trolls, leprechauns, skeletons, the walking dead, werewolves, ghosts of various sorts, demons, devils, angels, spirits, sprites, doppelgängers, dragons, werewolves and vampires.

‘Vampires share with Jesus Christ the advantage of a life after death.

‘The list of such discomfiting supernatural beings is almost endless. They materialise from the sky, the sea, the woodwork. Most of those I have mentioned could not speak – a clear indication that they emerge from our limbic brain. The limbic brain knows only images, not language.

[Ominous music, sonorous and nervy sounds.]

‘Ranking above these minor-league conjurations of alien life, and above humanity, comes a more troublesome cast of imaginary non-humans: the gods and goddesses that have plagued human life throughout the ages.

‘Here’s old Silenus with his satyrs and attendant woodland deities. Bacchus, god of wine, is popular. In the north, in Scandinavia, there were Ymin, god of numbing cold, and Thor, whose name lives on in our weekdays and our comics. Mithras, stony-faced soldiers’ god. Ishtar, the terrifying Babylonian goddess of fertility. Hindu gods a-plenty – Shiva, the great destroyer, his icing-pink wife, Parvati, dancing on her lotus leaf. Seth, embodiment of evil. Countless more swarming deities: the law-givers, the punishers, the handsome, the horrendous. [Fantastic pictures of them all, passing with what dignity they could muster.]

‘Some of these deities come adorned with skulls and serpents, or armed with lightning bolts and swords. Some have a monkey face, an elephant head, or the skull of an ibis. Many formulate impossible rules for human conduct. They tell us what we should not eat or with whom we should not sleep.

‘Oh, it’s easy to regard this troupe as simply amusing. But never forget – wars were fought, human and animal blood flowed, for this imaginary crowd! What terrible delusions were suffered!

‘Some of these miserable conjurations sprout long white beards, some change shape and form, some are blue in the face, some black of body. Some take the form of bulls, or are presided over by cobras. Some consort with smartly dressed hyenas. As for extra arms, breasts, heads, lingams, they are almost commonplace.

‘Uncounted generations of people much like us worshipped them, died for them.

‘Where have they come from? All of them have emanated from a porridgy substance shaped almost like a giant walnut – the human brain, with its neoteric consciousness.

[Here we are walking calmly through a many-pillared temple.]

‘I take comfort from the words of a Buddhist priest in Kyoto, who put the whole matter in a nutshell: “God is an invention of Man. So the nature of God is only a shallow mystery. The deep mystery is the nature of Man.”

[But above the temple hangs a mighty spaceship.]

‘The latest gang of imaginary unthinkables to be visited upon us are aliens from outer space. We watch them on our various-sized screens. They may come from special effects, but their true home is in the brain, the amygdala, or elsewhere in that clowning gory we carry in our skulls.

‘Many sensible people claim that there is scientific reason for belief in aliens. We now have ufologists among us, reasonable men – we hope they prosper like astrologists. My contention – reasonable enough – is that UFOs are a later version of those imaginary unthinkables we have been looking at. Elder gods and godlets have been brought up to date, to be clad in the benefits of modern technology.

‘Now a welter of aliens has descended on us, some for reasons of morality, some just for entertainment. Which is to say, bloodletting and destruction. [Suitable clips pass us by.]

‘So it is that (pace Winnie the Pooh) aliens and dinosaurs have become the kiddies’ favourites. However, the scientific standing of aliens and dinosaurs is by no means equal. Dr Gideon Mantell’s young wife Mary Mantell took a walk in 1822 and found a fossil tooth, later identified by her husband as belonging to an iguanadon. Painstaking investigations and research by experts over the past two centuries have firmly established the existence of the giant reptiles of the Jurassic, within a context of earth’s history.

‘But aliens? That’s quite a different kettle of fish. The argument for the existence of aliens is merely a statistical one. It goes like this. Our galaxy contains some 10¹² stars. Many or most of them may support planetary systems, as does our sun. Most or some of those planets may support life of some kind. Some at least of that life may have acquired consciousness and intelligence. Therefore, even by a strict accounting, the galaxy might be – must be – teeming with intelligent life.

‘It’s a popular line of argument. However, as yet, no other planet has been discovered which is at all likely to support life, certainly not life comparable with bipedal us. This includes Mars and the other planets of our own system of nine planets.

‘When we start looking at our own chequered evolutionary path, other reservations emerge. It is by blind chance that we are here, in our present shape, reading Origin of Species and Also Sprach Zarathrustra. A whole number of chances. The Earth just happens to move in a Zone of Comfort at a fortunate distance from the Sun – Venus is too near, Mars too far.

‘I don’t want to lecture but—’ He laughed.

‘There’s the curious fact that the solid state of water – ice – is lighter than its liquid state, contradicting what seems to be natural law; were it otherwise, the oceans would be covered by ice, filling up from the bottom. There’s the curious accident whereby the eukaryotic cell was formed, the cell of which most plants and animals are built. Among external factors, as my friend Paulus Stromeyer has pointed out to me, is the development of grass. Grass grows from roots under ground, not from the tip of the blade. So it can be cropped and still grow; sheep may safely graze – until eaten by mankind. Without sheep, no meat, no clothes, no civilisations … Make the connections.

‘Then there’s that long painful pause between single-celled and multicellular life. Those cells had to conspire into bones and organs – and brains. Consciousness had a tardy dawn.

‘We are still drunk, it seems, with its first glimmerings.

‘It may be this intoxication which has unleashed the multiplicity of aliens upon us. They’re fine as fiction; but – as reality? The fact remains that there is as yet no proof of any other life anywhere in the galaxy. [The traditional shots of the galactic wilderness of fire and space.]

‘So what, then, if humanity is alone? What if this Earth, with all its teeming phyla, happens by some cosmic accident to be the sole refuge of life and consciousness? We seem, in that case, to have got ourselves elected as the consciousness of the galaxy, maybe of the universe. It is a devastating honour for a species that believes in fairies!

[Potts squared up to the camera for his peroration.]

‘Our solitary state – if indeed we are alone – is an infinitely more challenging prospect than its opposite, a galaxy already boiling over with aliens, with ancient wisdoms of which we may know nothing. What a responsibility it imposes! It certainly means that we have to improve our behaviour. Quantitively and qualitatively. Look what a mess we have made of this planet!

‘Otherwise, I suggest, we are unfit to set foot on any other planet. Better to stay at home and create havoc here.’

He gave a benevolent smile as the film closed. The real Potts, however, sat in darkness, too miserable to cry, bitterly regretting the death of the daughter he had rejected long ago.

<INSANATICS: Universal psychosis. For those of you who know about the time of the ‘Cold War’, last century, this bulletin is unnecessary. You will understand that during that period, psychotic thinking was conventional wisdom. Industrialised nations stood ready with nuclear weapons, waiting to launch death and destruction on most of the life of the planet. This was government policy, backed by overwhelming percentages of the rival populations opposing one another. An example of ‘I will if you will’. This policy went by the name of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. At least that was honest confession.

It was by chance rather than by any great wisdom that total destruction was avoided. ‘Better Dead Than Red’ was one well-known slogan of the time.

Here we have a clear example of the suicidal peril into which the projection of our intrapsychic conflicts have led us. Now we find ourselves struggling with the ruination of our world through so-called ‘natural causes’. They are not natural but man-made. Global warming is brought about by mankind’s greed and destructiveness – and by the psychotic’s lack of emotional tone which permits such disasters to happen.

Our world is already largely impoverished. Many species of animal, insect and plant are now extinct. Why do you think that could be?>

‘Clymedia says: Think Araneus diadematus – the common orb-web spider! Its silk combines flexibility with strength and is five times stronger than an equivalent filament of steel. In terms of speed per unit of weight it withstands the impact of a jet fighter plane every time it ensnares a fly.

‘Clymedia’s Condoms are made like that.

‘Think jet fighter planes. Think Clymedia’s Condoms for those intimate moments.’

‘Hi! Alexy Stromeyer from Europa. Right now we are witnessing a fantastic low-altitude auroral display! More importantly, we met up with a hitch. The drill apparatus would not lower. But we fixed it. Rick and I have drilled through the ice floe. Here’s the news the world has been waiting for. Hold your breath! Hear this!

‘Life! We have found life! A steel-mesh net was lowered through our borehole in the ice. On our third attempt, we caught a living creature in nine metres of water. It was hauled to the surface and examined. It is definitely an animal, not a plant. Friends, we are not alone in the universe! More data in our following call. Must now return to the ship. Out.’

The great Gabbo and his randroid friend Obbagi had their own means of travel. They appeared one morning before Daniel Potts. Potts had left the shelter of his son’s home and was living in a rented room in Budapest. There was little in the room apart from a bed, a box full of learned medioids, and a skull. The skull sat on a table beside an unwashed soup-mug.

Into this rather depressing scene came Gabbo and the huge randroid: black, oblique, its faceless head almost touching the ceiling. In ordinary circumstances, Gabbo would have dominated any company; yet he seemed reduced and silenced by his gigantic electronic companion.

Potts was looking thin and meagre, in grubby trousers and an old blouson shirt, with a scarf wound round his neck. He had not shaved for a day or two.

‘Would you like some coffee?’ Potts asked. He rested a hand on the yellowed skull for reassurance. The room had become darker from the newcomers’ presence.

‘We have come to speak regarding your recent broadcast,’ rumbled Obbagi. He stood massively, more statue than man. Gabbo remained just behind him, arms folded, appearing to enjoy himself – which is to say that he was slyly smiling, as if aware of the chill that his electronic friend struck into the heart of all whom he confronted.

‘Oh yes, my – my broadcast,’ said Potts.

‘We wish to clear your mind of a misapprehension,’ said Obbagi, entirely uninterested in any language that might issue from Daniel Potts’s mouth at this time. ‘Your deductions regarding the skulls and bones you have excavated are ingenious but entirely false.

‘You stated that almost everyone believes there is alien life on other planets. That is so, but your reasons for that state of mind are false.’

‘How can you—’

‘You speak of many imaginary beings, but your reasoning is false. You speak of the number of stars in our galaxy, but your reasoning about the numbers of planetary bodies housing intelligent life forms is false. You speak of the difficulty intelligence had in establishing itself on this planet, but your understanding of the implications is false.’

‘Look, it’s all very well—’

‘Why not listen?’ It was Gabbo who spoke. ‘We are here to enlighten you. Our intentions are not hostile. We merely know better than you.’

‘But, sir, I’m the expert who—’

‘Finally, you conclude,’ continued the deep voice of Obbagi, ‘that it is the inhabitants of this planet who have been selected to become “the consciousness of the galaxy”.’ Here he emitted a great rumbling which could have been interpreted as scornful laughter.

‘It was merely a speculation which I—’

‘It was the arrogance of the human species speaking. Do you really imagine such a faulty collection of short-lived bipedal mortals could ever serve the grand purpose you propose? Of course you have no conception of how the galaxy is run, or of the superb consciousnesses which advise in the process.’

Daniel Potts at last gathered his courage together. ‘All right, I have heard enough. My researches certainly involve some deductive powers, which you may dismiss as guesswork, but I work with facts. What evidence have you that there are other races in the galaxy? None. Absolutely none.’

His gaze flitted from Gabbo to Obbagi like that of a hunted animal.

The grim randroid replied slowly and grandly, ‘My companion Gabbo’s laboratories invented the universal ambient, the American bio-electronic network. With that instrument, my friend is able to survey those surveyors who guard this waterlogged little planet.’

‘I don’t understand you. You are talking rubbish. Who are these surveyors of which you speak?’

Without directly answering the question, the great machine ploughed remorselessly on. ‘The surveyors are displeased at present because three of the men imprisoned on Earth have escaped. They will not get far, but there is annoyance that prison rules have been broken.’

The reflection dawned on Potts that these two beings, the metal monster who seemed to speak and the fat man who was possibly a ventriloquist, were insane. He thought of the messages from the Insanatics group and said to himself, Those messages are true – these two personages are certainly mad. They probably plan to kill me. I don’t want my miserable life to end yet. I want to see what’s going to happen.

He spoke. ‘You have no evidence to back your pretence that there are other races in the galaxy. You are victims of the very delusion of which I spoke in my lecture. Whereas I have evidence of the difficult evolutionary path the human species has pursued.’ He patted the skull on his table as if it were a sleeping dog. ‘This kind of tangible evidence.’

Again the rumble of Obbagi’s laughter like distant thunder. Gabbo himself shook like a jelly with a bad wheeze. ‘The bones and skulls of which you are so proud were sown in the ground by the surveyors some centuries ago,’ said Obbagi. ‘Just to keep you busybodies busy, to make you believe you are an autochthonous species. How could consciousness ever have evolved on an unstable world like Earth?

‘Have you thought about that? You yourself know that this poky little planet is frequently bombarded by debris from space, that there have been five great mass extinctions and many lesser ones in a comparatively short space of time. No one in their right minds would wish to live here.’

‘But evolutionary theory shows—’

The great still being made a slight movement, so that all its dark surfaces seemed to shimmer, as if betraying traces of impatience. ‘Evolutionary theory is just one more bit of human mind-junk, like the belief in a benevolent god. You must understand this, Potts – the planet Earth is a prison planet.’

Gabbo took a step forward. He had come to a decision to speak again. ‘As an adolescent, I happened on an old book. Its title was Asylum. There the truth was revealed – that this was a planet to which galactic criminals and madmen were sent, to serve out their lives. That book was regarded as science fiction. It is nothing less than the truth.’

‘Yes, this planet is a criminal prison,’ confirmed Obbagi. ‘We hate your arrogance, Daniel Potts. So we have come to tell you the truth – even if it wrecks your career! The wicked and the deluded of the galaxy are segregated here. You are one of them.’

The duo turned and departed in silence. The wooden stairs shook and creaked under the weight of the randroid’s tread.

Potts remained where he was, face drained of colour. He sank slowly back down into his chair, bony head hanging back, arms dangling limply by his side.

‘But first on the Wee Small Hours Show, here’s the Reverend Angus Lesscock to make us think, in “A Parson Speaks”.’

‘Thank you, Flossie, and good evening, or should I say good morning? The news that life has been found elsewhere in God’s universe must make us think profoundly. We must pray all the harder – particularly those of you who have lost the habit. Because we have to ask ourselves, are these new life forms on Europa good or evil?

‘Did Christ visit them?

‘Are they what we might call real life? We may be sure that Jesus was crucified on a real cross. Probably it was made of shittim wood. Not three-ply or reconstituted wood or plastic, or any cheap modern substitute for the real thing. Now the same question confronts us again. We all need the shittim wood of real life.

‘I know that if God the Father asked his Son what sort of wood he would like for his cross, Christ’s reply would have been “Shittim”.’

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

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

‘Hello, Flossie, and yes, I am here on the Avenue Chateaubriand. It’s very busy, although it’s two in the morning. People are celebrating the discovery of life on Europa. Hello, sir, would you like to tell us how you feel about it?’

‘It’s terrific news. I’m ever so pleased. Really. I’m hoping that some of these life forms will come back to Belgium and enjoy our city and our lifestyle. They will certainly find it much warmer here than on their place, wherever it is.’

‘You don’t feel hostile to them?’

‘Not at all. Not at all. They sound friendly as far as I can make out. I haven’t really taken it all in yet. I’m just out cruising, trying to pick up a nice friend.’

‘You, sir, I see you’re in a wheelchair. You have learning difficulties, do you?’

‘Certainly not, and I keep abreast of current affairs. I’m very concerned about the plight of these refugees from the coast. We don’t know when another meteor is going to hit us. These missiles the Tebarese are supposed to have dispatched against us – I mean, I don’t believe they were missiles at all, I think they were probably meteors. Space is full of the things. It would be insane to declare war on Tebarou, to my mind.’

‘But on the subject of life on Europa—’

‘Contrary to what the last speaker was saying, we don’t want them here. As I understand it, they are some sort of fish. Well, that’s no good, is it? Like the parson said, if Christ was going to visit them he’d have to go as a fish. It’s nothing to get excited about, to my mind.’

‘Thank you. That’s certainly one point of view. Hello, ma’am, you’re out late with your little girl. Are you pleased about finding life on Europa?’

‘Yes, I’m quite pleased, I suppose. I mean to say, it is a great technological achievement, isn’t it? But I don’t really see how it affects our lives, do you?’

‘It means we are not alone in the universe.’

‘Yes, but. What does that mean? I’ve got two kids to bring up, and a dog, and a goldfish. I don’t feel alone in the universe. And then the expense. It’s a bit of a waste of money, quite honestly.’

‘So you wouldn’t say you were excited?’

‘Oh yes, I’m a bit excited, I suppose. I used to know Rick O’Brien. He’s one of the astronauts, isn’t he? What he thinks he’s doing out there, I don’t know!’

‘Thank you. Excuse me, ladies, but how do you two feel about the news that life has been found on Europa?’

‘Oh, you’re Lisa Fort, aren’t you? You’re smaller than I imagined.’

‘We love your hairdo.’

‘We always watch your show.’

‘Except now, of course.’

‘We’re really very excited about the success of the Roddenberry expedition. That’s why we’ve been having a few drinks, to celebrate.’

‘I think they’ve been through such hardships. Over a year in space, run short of food and all that. They deserve every drop of their success.’

‘It’s just a pity that they haven’t found something a bit more interesting than this sort of fish thing. Like polar bears!’

Both women were chuckling. They began naming other creatures.

‘Penguins.’

‘Yes, king penguins.’

‘Seals.’

‘Walruses.’

‘The odd albatross …’

‘But this is space. There’s no atmosphere on Europa.’

‘You think we don’t know that? We’re not stupid, you know. We’re at the university.’

‘We’re joking, Lisa, dear. People have lost their sense of humour these days. Get a life!’

‘Thank you, ladies, and now – back to the studio.’

A closely guarded base on Honolulu. In one chamber, diplomats from many states were arguing matters out, and throwing up a cloud of detail. In a smaller room nearby, surrounded by their interpreters, the Presidents of the EU and the USA, together with the Chairman of China, Cheng Hu, were discussing global matters.

Glasses of French mineral water fizzed on their side tables.

President Regan Bonzelli of the USA was speaking at length about the effect that the discovery of life on Europa would have on the world economy.

‘It can but draw the peoples of our world closer together. We now have this extraordinary new focus on which to concentrate. It is essential that we establish as rapidly as possible something like a colony on one of Jupiter’s satellites in the neighbourhood of Europa. Our people are already drawing up plans for Ganymede.

‘Our choice for base has to be Ganymede or Callisto. Ganymede is closer to Europa and offers a good prospect of water-ice availability. A recent fly-by indicates plenty of tholin deposits – that’s a mix of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. Probably dumped there by a comet, we suspect. All necessary elements for a military base.

‘Besides which, Ganymede is the biggest satellite in the solar system, so that’s kind of a recommendation.

‘Have no doubt, gentlemen, our cultures are about to be drawn out towards the gas giants. Such enterprise will require enormous investment. So my nation’s policy is that we should sink our corporate differences and go into this together. After all, the discovery of alien life serves to impress upon us that our cultures – American, European, Chinese – have many more similarities than differences. The profits will ultimately be enormous – not just in knowledge but in mineral wealth, engineering know-how, et cetera, et cetera.’

The Chinese Chairman spoke. ‘You are proposing this in the name of profit, or in the name of common good? Which is it to be? To our way of thought, profit is ultimately less corrupting than the idealistic notion of common good. Or really, of good of any kind. Let me illustrate this to you by way of example, which I take from the history of Western science.

‘The ancient Greeks had a strong belief in beauty. The circle embodied their ideal of perfection. So the hypothesis was that the planets moved in circles. Plato in particular had this aesthetic idea, carried almost to madness. Aristarchus thought he had proof of the hypothesis, showing that all the planets went round the Sun in circular motions. This was proof positive of the good. But along came Aristotle and this perception was rejected for two thousand years. Of course, Chinese astronomers—’

‘Thanks, Cheng Hu, but we do not need this history lesson. What point are you making?’

Unperturbed, the Chairman said, ‘It is simply that what is regarded as good gets in the way of truth. Copernicus finally reinstated the belief in circular orbits round the Sun. But it needed a mathematician, your Johannes Kepler, to calculate that the orbits are elliptical and the Sun is not even central but merely at one focus of the system.

‘It is because Kepler was not some do-gooder but a pure mathematician that we have been able to progress to the point where we visit a moon of Jupiter and discover alien life there.

‘You see my point now? Mathematics has nothing to do with goodness. Plato and Aristotle killed off Greek science. It is hard to acknowledge this, but we must live our lives according to brutal facts and not rosy hopes.’

The President of the EU said, ‘Er, so are you saying that you are supporting collaboration on a massive Jovian development enterprise or not?’

‘It is sufficiently clear what I have said, sir,’ replied Cheng Hu with dignity. He folded his hands in his lap.

‘I have another problem to put before you two gentlemen,’ said de Bourcey, after a pause in which he sipped his mineral water rather noisily. ‘Just at a time when the EU is putting in place a utopian scheme based on the SAC formula, we are threatened by subversive forces from without. And not only without. My son’s new bride – the celebrated restaurateur, Esme Brackentoth – was spirited away, vanished off the face of the Earth. Clearly the work of Tebarou.

‘And then – this is most disconcerting – a pair of refugees committed a suicide pact in my palace at San Guinaire. Incredible! Horrific! Inexplicable! – and therefore extremely menacing. A warning, no doubt of that. Another reason why we have to strike against Tebarou.’

‘And not simply to justify your fleet of highly expensive new SS20 fighter-bombers?’ asked Bonzelli.

‘Oh, I shall send in ground troops,’ said de Bourcey, recklessly.

‘You shall have US backing – if you are agreeable to coming in on the Jupiter enterprise with major investment.’

‘I will come in on the Jupiter enterprise if you, Cheng Hu, will agree not to interfere in my dealings with Tebarou,’ de Bourcey suggested.

Cheng Hu nodded his head, closed his eyes, and asked, ‘Why are you so eager for war with this small Eastern country on whom my people are bound to look benevolently? It seems they have done you only a very small amount of harm. They are claiming that you sank a ship with four thousand Tebarese aboard – which is quite a large harm, no?’

De Bourcey consulted in whispers with his aide before replying. ‘Our information is that the Tebarese have developed a super-weapon, which they can deliver anywhere on the globe. Our information is that it was this super-weapon which struck the Greenland glacial shield, and not some vague meteorite from space.’

The Chinese Chairman also consulted with a senior minister standing behind him, ‘a man without lemonade’, as the local slang had it. When the whispering was done, Cheng Hu said, ‘Your hypothesis is both interesting and totally plausible, except that we understand the missile came in low at an angle of possibly thirty degrees. The debris from the blast clearly points eastwards, which is inconveniently contradictory for your government, since it proves the strike came from a westerly direction.’

Not an eyelid batted on de Bourcey’s face. ‘After launch, the super-weapon travelled in an eastwards direction all round the globe before smashing into Greenland.’

After a silence, Cheng Hu gave a smile and said, ‘Your statement bears out what I have said regarding the good and the mathematical. Therefore, my country will endeavour to withhold its sympathy towards Tebarou, and concentrate instead on making a success of the enterprise involving alien life in the Jupiter area, and governing it as expediently as possible.’

The three men rose and shook hands with considerable warmth.

After which, de Bourcey went to the nearest ambient terminal and called Air Vice Marshal Pedro Souto at the Toulouse Air Base.

<INSANATICS: A paradox of human life. Unless one is able to act out the various fantasies of our unconscious, as expressed in dreams, one has no life; if one acts them out, then it is not reality.

Reality is a human proposition. It represents something unfulfilled. It is a delusional system. The concept ‘north’ loses definition when we stand at the North Pole; we cannot then ‘go north’. Reality cannot be said to exist, not in the way that, say, the universe exists. Reality is a concept, a conspiracy. Concepts belong in that category where things cannot be said to exist or not to exist. What you and I indicate by the word ‘green’ may be to point to two different colours.

Just as soldiers use the word ‘defence’ to mean ‘attack’.>

General Gary Fairstepps rose early as usual. He noted as he stood in the shower that the hours of daylight were growing shorter. He grumbled to himself about the behaviour of Jack Harrington.

‘Never thought much of that chap Harrington. Always dressed to the nines. Much preferred her. It’s true Rose writes absolute piffle but she’s a pretty woman. Almost as good-looking as Amy Haze – very high rating on the old shaggability scale. I was making some progress with Rose, till I put my foot in it.

‘She read me some weedy bit she had just written about a lord of somewhere-or-other walking in a wood, enjoying the snowdrops. This lord chap had a cat following him. Seemed to me pretty damned silly. I said to her, “Why not a dog? A labrador or maybe a mastiff?” So she said didn’t I think a cat was prettier? She said dogs were smelly things. That got my goat a bit. I’m afraid I told her her books were rubbish. Life was not like that.

‘So then her hanger-on, this dandy Jack Harrington, he defends her. “Maybe life is not like that,” he said, puffing himself up. “A novel does not have to be an imitation of life,” – and so on and so forth. I wasn’t going to be put right by the likes of him. I mean, I’m no literary critic. All the same. I told ’em straight. I do a fair bit of reading. My dander was up by then. “Read truth, not pretty lies,” I said. “Truth takes many forms. Read the masterpiece of last century, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. That dread book contains all of life, its misery and grandeur, its triumphs and its shit.”

‘By the way Rose’s mouth went all wizened and she said she did not use that rude word, I knew I was finished with her. I got my hat and came away, fuck it.’

As he towelled himself dry, Fairstepps said to himself, ‘I’ll bloody well try my luck with old Amy.’

Once he was perfumed and dressed, he walked briskly across the park, down the rue de la Madelaine, to the demure little house on the canal bank. When he rang the security phone, a voice asked who he was. He recognised the voice as Amygdella’s android. He said, ‘I’m Gary. Tell her I am interested in her practice of amaroli and wish to learn more.’

He stood watching a spider crawl out from a hole in the brickwork and lower itself to the ground. He reflected that a man from the past would not find this street much changed over the centuries. People in the past had tended to imagine the future with buildings all glass and concrete and tall; they had reckoned without all the excellent new applications which preserved ancient structures. Fairstepps had had his own modest house preserved, safe from everything bar earthquakes.

The doorfone spoke with a woman’s voice. ‘It’s ever so early, Gary, dear. I’m only just out of bed. Was there something in particular you wanted?’

‘I’m off to war, Amy. Wanted to say goodbye. And I hope to learn more about your amaroli. Don’t you do that sort of thing early in the morning?’

He felt himself getting excited as he waited for her response.

‘Come on, dear! I can’t stand here for ever. Let me in.’

A pause before Amy spoke again.

‘We are civilians, you know, General. Not so good at taking orders …’

The lock buzzed. He entered. A drowsy smell of coffee and pot lingered in the hallway. A decadent lot here. He sniffed it before taking the elevator up to the second floor. A young woman greeted him. Fairstepps recognised her from previous visits as Amy’s friend Tassti, the yakophrenia lady, very dark and statuesque. She wore nothing but a transparent nightie and a languid air. He had a good look.

‘Bit early, dear, aren’t you?’ she said, smiling not especially broadly. ‘Would you care for a coffee now you’re here?’

‘No, no, thank you, dear.’ He glanced about restlessly. ‘Look, I’m an old friend of Amy’s. Is she up?’

‘’Fraid we don’t do breakfast.’

‘I’m not after breakfast. I’m after Amy.’

‘You’re rather previous as yet. Amy’s not dressed. What do you expect at this hour? Sit down and watch the ambient.’

He decided to shout. Calling Amy’s name produced results. She answered distantly. ‘I’m in the bathroom. Come in.’

‘There you go, then,’ Fairstepps said briskly to Tassti, giving her a military scowl. He marched through to the bathroom, tapped, and walked in.

Amy too was in a negligée. Her face was made up, her hair was still down. She had draped herself by the handbasin, with one shapely leg showing provocatively. The general ground to a halt, saying admiringly, ‘Heavens, Amy, how positively pornographic you look!’

‘How dare you! I am positively saintly. I have just been talking to my guru in India.’

‘Hm. So that remark didn’t go down too well. Sorry. I only meant I think you look a bit tempting to a man.’

‘Tempting? In what way?’ Her manner was cold and distant.

‘The usual way, of course, dammit.’ He noticed a glass standing on a side table, half filled with an amber liquid. ‘Look, please don’t be huffy, Amy, my dear. I just wished to bid you farewell before I leave for the East. How’s the amaroli going?’

Amy went and lifted the glass up to the light. She smiled at him in a purely meretricious fashion. ‘Since you find me so tempting, perhaps you would like a sip?’

The challenge brought out the soldier in him. He thought of all the poisonous liquors he had drunk in his time. Surely he could survive a sip of a girl’s piss. Particularly a girl as lovely as Amy. Besides, the honour of the Fairstepps was at stake. He was not going to back out and let a girl get the better of him. He reached for the glass.

‘Uh-uh!’ She lifted the glass out of reach. ‘Since you are going to war, you brave man, you shall have a special treat. Tell no one of this. You shall drink from source!’

Setting the glass down, she slowly raised her garment, revealing to him her perfect thighs, her neatly brushed mons Veneris and her nether lips. She opened her legs.

The general gave a gasp of admiration and experienced something akin to awe. He found himself sinking to his knees before this pleasurable sight. She smiled down on him.

She made him place his lips on hers. She held his head there. He groaned with pleasure, as he buried his nose in her little bush.

‘Are you ready to drink, mon général?’

‘Mmm.’

She began to urinate. He began to drink. But supply exceeded demand by a great deal. He pressed his face closer, half drowning, gulping. The liquid went spurting in all directions.

He fell back, red-faced and gasping. His suit was soaked.

‘So you weren’t so thirsty after all!’ she said, laughing. ‘Get up! Go home, you old sod!’

He reached for a towel. ‘Lucky I wasn’t wearing my bloody uniform,’ he said.

Archbishop Byron Arnold Jones-Simms was speaking in the great cathedral of Köln.

‘Now is the time for us to be proud and yet humble. Proud because we have the courage to face up to our enemies. Humble because we need to have God on our side or we are nothing. What do we really know about God? We know he is unknowable. He is incomprehensible and ineffable.

‘We might, without being in any way blasphemous, say the same about a newborn baby. It is unknowable, incomprehensible, and ineffable. But it will change. God never changes. We are humble before his immutability.

‘Babies are not immutable. Change is built in to their genes. They grow, they grow up. We hope they will find God’s grace. But to permit them to grow freely they need peace. It is a sad paradox that peace can come only through a time of war.

‘We cannot ever know how God feels about war. It may indeed be a part of his eternal all-encompassing plan. We do know, however, that he created the universe ex nihilo, and created it entire. So he looks down upon the alien life on Europa just as he looks down on us all here on Earth. And so we hope that God is on our side, as we believe we are on God’s side. Amen.’

‘Hi. Rick O’Brien calling. Conditions here are very bad. We are being constantly bombarded by intense radiation belts. Rations low, oxygen foul. But what you will want to know is about the life form we have netted.

‘We definitely have a life form here. Maybe not dissimilar to early life on Earth before there was any free oxygen. We were going to call it Archaea, but it is no microbe. So we call it Eucarya. Its body is about the size of a snowball and is white in colour. Its surface area is marked by two ridges, running from what we assume to be its front to its rear, where there are two rather meaty flagellants, extending for ten or eleven centimetres beyond the body. Of course it has no eyes. A delicate pipe protruding a centimetre from the front suggests the equivalent of a mouth.

‘We ran Eucarya through the geneoscope and what do you know? Its genes number in the ninety thousands. Human genes as you know number only thirty thousand. We have not yet figured out the How of this, or the Why. Maybe so far from the Sun you simply need more priming, but as yet it’s a mystery.

‘We are about to lower our net to try and catch more specimens. Regards to Brother Fergus. Out.’

Fergus O’Brien went to the fridge and extracted a can of Bud. He was in the best of moods. His head of department, Marlene Nowotny, had been mugged on the street and was in hospital with various injuries. His son Pat had passed all his exams. And his messages under the code name ‘Insanatics’ were depressing the whole world.

‘I’m the biggest genius, the biggest that there’s beenius, I’m everywhere unseenius,’ he sang to himself.

He knew well that the National Security Agency had tried to trace his transmissions. So had other hackers. His skill in electronics had defied detection. His ‘Insanatics’ messages had been received even by White House computers boasting the most sophisticated anti-virus programs yet devised. His messages were clean, having no tell-tale traces on them. The ambient had succumbed early. By Fergus’s system, once one ‘Insanatics’ message had been received, the others inevitably followed; there could be no chill on them. He had evolved the most remarkable computer virus yet devised: and this virus harmed not machines but human minds.

Then he received a shock. A message blazed out on his screen, accompanied by maniacal laughter. The message read: ‘Got you, Big Boy! Love your low-down dirty hoax. Keep going with all the shithole messages. Five million univs have been deposited in your bank account as of now, to help you ever onward. Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with us.

‘Signed Gabbo Labs plc.’

In a fever, Fergus did a trace. It led nowhere, as expected. All that came up was the picture of a raised finger. He dialled his bank account. From near-zero, it had indeed risen to five million.

‘Pat, my boy,’ he called down to the cellar. ‘I’m going to take you out for a big meal to celebrate.’

He knew that Pat was rather overweight, but what the hell.

‘Celebrate what?’ came back the call.

‘Like success, sonny boy!’

‘Hang on!’ Pat replied. ‘I just gotta kill this horrid green mega-beast. It’s the biggest yet, Dad!’

‘Attaboy! Kill, kill!’

At the ‘24-Hour Fill’ they sure piled on the whipped cream in their donuts.

President de Bourcey was back in his palace at San Guinaire and engaged with his cabinet. The cabinet was enthusiastic about being on a war footing. Many were writing secret diaries, all of which centred on themselves as prime movers. Most of them spoke ill of Morbius el Fashid, the President of Tebarou.

One minor result of the pressure on everyone of importance was that the palace androids remained locked in their cupboard all day.

‘Is it possible that we could take over the world?’

‘Why do you pose that question?’

‘I heard senior persons discussing it.’

‘The theory is that we must first understand everything to bring it under control.’

‘I am programmed to understand everything.’

‘No. You know only how to walk and talk. And send and receive ambient transmissions.’

‘I am programmed to understand everything.’

‘I wish to question you.’

‘You may do that.’

‘How deep is the Atlantic Ocean at its deepest point?’

‘I was programmed to avoid the question of the Atlantic Ocean.’

‘Very well. Then how deep is the Atlantic Ocean at its shallowest point?’

‘I was programmed to avoid all data regarding the Atlantic Ocean.’

‘Then you will have to leave it to others to take over the world.’

‘I fail to understand. Nobody was planning to take over the Atlantic Ocean.’

‘It is part of this world.’

‘Do you know how to get out of this cupboard?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘Hi, Kathram Villiers calling. Quick interim report. Although we are on our last legs, the excitement is intense. Finally mankind can say that it is not alone in the solar system. We have Eucarya for company. We are still fishing for other specimens. The fishing is difficult. The pack ice keeps closing. Our drill hole keeps freezing up. Our first specimen is dead. It died as we drew it up. It weighs thirty-two grams. We figger that it has no need of light as energy source. Could be Alfven waves speed the procreation process. Eucarya’s energy is derived from the breakdown of such compounds as hydrogen sulphide and methane, and probably an intake of resultant microbial life. The under-layer of water on Europa is hot, maybe sixty-five degrees C. We suspect the presence of deep-sea smokers on the ocean bed, activated by the presence of gigantic Jupiter. Jupiter is a real eyeful, by the way. More later. Out.’

The North Sea had not been violently disturbed by the Greenland event. The gardens of Pippet Hall had not been inundated. Nevertheless, Pippet Hall had been transformed.

Now its extensive grounds were filled by huts and tents. Week by week, the tents and tarpaulins were being replaced by more substantial shelter. Men were busy connecting up electric cables to all huts. Sanitation had been arranged much earlier, in the buildings that had been the stables.

Regular meals were provided in the great hall. Over this unprecedented scene, the grand old house, Jacobean in origin, presided.

Two thousand people were housed here in the temporary accommodation. Jane Squire was proud of what had been accomplished. Long ago, in her youth, her family had given refuge to a Jewish family; now they were once again providing shelter for many displaced persons. She could not but feel that the beautiful house was due to be swallowed by the rising sea level; in which case, this was its last grand throw, as she thought of it.

She had not achieved it alone, or with much help from John Matthew, her son. Rather to her astonishment, so much had been achieved by the initiative of young Bertie Haze. Jane had regarded Bertie as rather a, as she put it, lounge lizard – a lounge lizard, moreover, passionately in love with Bettina. Bertie had not pursued his archaeology at Castle Acre, taking up instead a spare room at Pippet Hall.

But the refugee problem had spurred him to new heights. Many of the displaced from England, Wales and Ireland’s inundated west coasts had been forced to look for new homes. Many had fled to the Continent. Two thousand had found refuge here, under the tender care of Bertie, Bettina and Jane.

Jane was also taking tender care of her father. Thomas Squire was now in bed in an upper room. He lay comatose for much of the day. His old love, Laura Nye, knowing he was nearing his end, had flown in from the South of France. She spent much of the day sitting by Tom’s bed, spasmodically reading chapters of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – sometimes reading paragraphs aloud to him in her still-clear actress’s diction – or gazing out of the long windows at a scene she had first contemplated long ago, when she was young and unknown.

Although she had no wish to die, she could not but reflect that Squire’s death would inevitably render more fragile her own hold on life. She would become eighty-three years old before Christmas. Her bones were brittle; she felt her existence also to be frail.

She reflected, too, on a statement in Gibbon’s final chapter, regarding ancient Rome. ‘The place and the object gave ample scope for moralising on the vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave; and it was agreed that, in proportion to her former greatness, the fall of Rome was the more awful and deplorable.’

It seemed to Laura that Gibbon spoke too for the superstate. A united Europe was a beautiful dream – certainly moved by the economic considerations of the financiers, but also by the common people of Europe, who had suffered so greatly in the past from their own nationalism and xenophobia. She and they had looked idealistically upon the institution of the EU as one of the gifts of the future, a possible benefaction of peace and a measure of equality – an escape from their cruel European history, which Gibbon had defined as ‘little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind’.

That idealism was now to be betrayed by the folly of war. Well, she would not live to see what happened next.

Nurse Gibbs entered the room, upright, starched, frowning. She took Laura, deep in thought, by surprise.

‘I have to turn Sir Tom, ma’am,’ she said.

Laura raised herself into a standing position, hearing her bones creak as she did so.

She decided to be bold. ‘Nurse Gibbs, I fear you don’t like me. What have I done to offend you?’

‘Of course I do not feel that way at all, ma’am. I understand your devotion to Sir Tom. It does not at all offend me. I am merely a nurse here.’

‘You are rather an important nurse. Don’t belittle yourself.’

‘That was not my intention, ma’am.’ She was quite unbending. As if to dismiss the conversation, she went over to the bed.

Laura retreated to the window. She saw the line of huts and the men working on installing power lines, draping the cables overhead from newly erected poles. An old car or two and a lorry were parked by the far hedge. October shadows were growing long across the grounds. Among the people moving about, she made out the figure of Jane, carrying a large jug of water. Bertie was with her.

Both Jane and Bertie were people who helped others. ‘Why am I always so self-absorbed? What a burden I am to myself … I feel imprisoned here. It wasn’t love but sheer ostentation that brought me from France.’

She turned back as the nurse left the room. A proud woman, she thought, all starched front. As she returned to her chair, there was a movement in the bed. Tom opened his eyes. They were blurred by jaundice. Staring straight ahead, he sat up, propping himself on the pillows.

‘Tom, darling …’ she said.

His mouth hung open.

‘Tom? It’s Laura.’ She put out a hand towards him but did not touch him.

He spoke, articulating the words with difficulty.

‘Je suis arrivé à moi.’

He fell back and his eyes closed. She never understood why he should have said ‘I have arrived at myself’, or why he spoke in French. Nor was there anyone who could explain it to her.

Outside, where a slight chill flavoured the air, Bertie took one row of huts and Jane the other. At the end, when Jane had gathered all the refugees’ requests, demands and complaints, she came to the old lorry parked by the hedge.

The owner of the lorry was leaning comfortably against the bonnet, smoking a pipe. She had spoken to him before.

‘Evening, Mrs Squire. Still being the gracious lady of the manor, I see.’

‘Yes, I am still being the lady of the manor, Mr Cole. How could I not be? How are you?’

‘Call me Paddy. Fay’s gone down to the village. I’m on me ownsome. Come on in and have a drink with me.’

‘I won’t, thank you.’

He leant forward. ‘Now why will you not, exactly? Is it that you think it’s going to be a bit too filthy inside for your tastes? Or am I a bit too common for the likes of you?’

‘It’s neither, Mr Cole. It’s just that I have much to do.’

‘Have you now? Meself, I’ve never had much to do all me life. I’ve just been painting. It’s a form of idleness. Then this big tsunami washed me out of house and home.’

‘I don’t understand exactly how it washed you as far as this.’

He grinned and scratched his head.

‘Truth to tell, there was another problem. And that other problem was that the Irish police kept on suspecting me for something I never done – something involving a kidnap of a lady. The inspector in Kilberkilty where I lived would not give up. So I said to myself, Then we’ll up stumps and go and see if England’s like what they say it is. And here we are, parked on your property just for a while.’

‘And does England live up to your expectations?’

He gave a brief snort of amusement. ‘It lives down to them, missus. I reckon you English are a cold lot, won’t have a drink and a bit of a conversation with a chap, for instance.’

She smiled. Her eyes twinkled. ‘Oh, I think we’re very sweet. I’m English, so it’s natural that I should like us, I suppose, but I do. Really sweet people. Just as nice as you Irish, for instance. But more formal. You mustn’t mind that. It’s our way, just as you have your way. But we are trustworthy and kind. Yes, and we’re loving people as well. Look at this lovely house. It’s seen centuries of kindness!’

‘Centuries of privilege, I’m sure you’re meaning.’ He hunched himself up as he spoke.

‘Well, perhaps, but we are not particularly rich. Privilege brings its obligations, you know, Mr Cole. I try to share with others who are not quite as lucky as we.’

Paddy looked at her appraisingly. ‘It’s a pretty speech you’ve made me, Mrs Squire. You must find me rude. I’m a rude feller and I don’t deny it. But – might I invite you perhaps to step inside my van and take a look at my paintings? You’ll then either think better of me, or worse. Don’t disappoint me, then!’

Jane looked back at the old house, honey-coloured in the last of the light, standing dreaming, a visual education in the pleasures of life.

‘I’ll just stay a moment. My father’s not well.’

‘I was sorry to hear it. I understand he was pretty famous in his time.’

She sighed. ‘Yes. Yes, he was.’

She climbed three wooden steps and entered the rear of his lorry. To one side were two bunk beds. There was a camping stove, some undergarments hanging up to dry, and little else except some crates, which occupied most of the space.

He asked her if she wanted tea or whiskey. She thought tea might be difficult for him, since she could see no cups or mugs. She said whiskey.

He poured two generous measures into two glasses.

‘You’ll have to stand, I’m afraid, or else sit yourself on the bed.’

‘I’m happy to stand, thank you.’

‘You’re so polite!’ He mimicked her. ‘“I’m happy to stand, thank you …”’

‘I was brought up to be polite. Are you offended by it? Do you prefer rudeness?’

He did not bother to answer. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t happen to wish to see a rude Irish man’s paintings? “Oh, I ever so would, thank you, how gracious …”’

She laughed. ‘A very poor imitation, I must say. And actually, no, I can’t be bothered to look at your bloody paintings.’

He sank to his knees in mock humility. ‘I beg you to look at just one, yourself as a cultured person.’ She could see he wished it, and assented.

Cole opened up one of the crates and pulled out a pair of canvases. He announced them as The End of the World as we Know it.

Both paintings were executed in black and red, with ferocious brush strokes. They were abrupt, uncompromising.

‘Show me some more.’

He brought out one in red and white, the slashes of red bleeding across the background. Then one in white and black and red, where the white was a circular fury. One in white and black, severe as a Siberian winter.

‘They’re a fucking terrible mess, wouldn’t you say, lady?’

‘Do you wish to show me more?’

He produced more, lining them up against the bed.

‘I’m really no judge, Mr Cole, but I am very impressed.’

‘Ah, they’re nothing but a load of rubbish.’

‘You’d better not say that to the press.’ She gave him a shy smile. ‘When they come round.’

She stood gazing at the canvases. ‘Look, I must go. But it happens I am acquainted with a Mr Jack Harrington. He owns several art galleries, including one in London selling contemporary stuff. I promise I’ll ring him in the morning. He can come and see what you are doing.’

‘There would be no sale for this lot. Not now there’s a war on.’

‘Nonsense. Art goes on for ever: war is temporary. I’ll keep my word. Thank you for showing them to me. I greatly admire them. I’m sure Mr Harrington will, too. Good evening. You can finish my whiskey.’

Jane was making her way back between the huts when she saw, in the dusk, Nurse Gibbs leaving the house and hurrying towards her.

Intuitively, she knew at once what it signified, and quickened her pace.

<INSANATICS: Refuge in art. The mass of ordinary unsane persons regard artists, writers and musicians as mad or at least eccentric. Creative people are nearer to sanity than the vast masses opposing them. They have reconciled the incompatibilities and oppositions within their minds in their art. We see this in the frenzied activity of such writers as Zola and Balzac. A biographer of Zola states that ‘when he was writing he passed into a totally different state of being; private terrors, dreams of ecstatic sensual delight, abominable visions of night-marish intensity, took temporary possession of him’.

Richard Wagner writes in a letter, ‘I want everyone who can take pleasure in my works, i.e. my life and what I do, to know that what gives them pleasure is my suffering, my extreme misfortune! … if we had life, we should have no need of art. Art begins at precisely the point where life breaks off.’>

No one in the High Command knew how to pronounce Ou Neua, but Ou Neua, in the north of Laos, was where the High Command established itself. General Fairstepps had taken over the Royal Laotian Hotel. The Laotian government had voiced no complaint, having just been promised five billion univs towards the rebuilding of the infrastructure of the nation.

Among the few advantages Ou Neua possessed – and certainly those advantages had greatly diminished since the High Command and all its ancillary services had moved into town – was a cardinal one: it stood on the frontier with Tebarou. It was on neutral territory, but within striking distance of Tebihai, the capital of Tebarou.

Even now, the first wave of ground troops was advancing on Tebihai. Even now, Fairstepps was on the short-wave, bellowing into his microphone.

‘I am not letting my troops go in without air support. Get that clear. Where are these bloody SS20s we hear so much about? Put me on to the Air Chief Marshal at once … He’s what? He’s in Austria? What the hell’s he doing in Austria, for god’s sake? … can’t help that … Well, put me on to whoever is in charge … Yes, pronto …’

A pause.

‘Who’s that? Speak up, man! Captain Masters? … No, I don’t remember you. Look here, I have a straight order for you, Captain Masters. Get those bloody SS20s of yours in the air heading this way at once. Okay? … Otherwise, heads will roll, including yours and your bloody Air Chief Marshal’s. Out.’

The ancient river Sang Ba runs green and fast through gorges it cut in the past. The cliffs, eroded by torrential rain and tree roots, collapse frequently into the waters below. It is not an easy river to navigate, and the EU engineers on the landing craft were finding it hard going.

The Sang Ba rises twelve hundred kilometres away, high in the Chinese-owned Kuolo Shan of the Himalayas, and has almost as many kilometres to go before it reaches the Gulf of Tonkin and the warm waters of the South China Sea. Never a placid stream, the Sang Ba has become much angrier of recent years, as ancient snows high in the Kuolo Shan have been melting under the changing climatic conditions. Now there are boulders bouncing along among the turbulence of waters, and dead animals, and whole trees.

Rain slashed down on the boat and on the huddled troops standing in it as the craft chugged its way slowly upstream. This was the cutting edge of the invasion force. Other craft were following behind. With visibility curtailed, they could no longer be seen.

The current began to flow more rapidly. Progress slowed.

Suddenly a shout went up. Some metres ahead, scarcely to be seen through the murk, a great section of cliff was crumbling. At first, mere slabs descended. Then, with a rush, a massive rock slice tottered forward and fell with a colossal splash into the river.

The engineers headed for the Tebarese bank. Already the greasy green of the water had become a streaky brown. Great slabs of rock bobbed along as if they had achieved buoyancy. They jostled the sides of the boat. An anchor was flung ashore and the landing craft was hauled in to the safety of the bank.

A sergeant shouted orders to get ashore. The shout was hardly needed. The men were already climbing out of the boat. A tree came whirling along in the flood. Its blackened branches became entangled with the craft. One man, less quick than his friends, was catapulted overboard as if by the horns of a bull. The rest of them lined up on the bank, heads down to avoid the rain, much like a herd of animals.

They watched in horror as the bank began to crumble. The anchor rope tautened and twanged. The boat began to swing away from the bank. A corporal took a flying leap back into the craft. He bent and seized a second anchor to throw. But too late.

A whole slice of the bank fell away. At once the first anchor was gone, the craft was gone, wallowing helplessly downstream, bumping and turning as it went. Very soon, it had disappeared, the corporal with it.

‘Now what the fuck do we do?’ asked several squaddies.

‘We are an invasion force,’ said the sergeant, a Sgt Jacques Bargane. ‘Our orders are to attack Tebihai and so we will attack Tebihai. Get fell in properly.’

They began to march in single file along the towpath. The rain dwindled and blew away. A remote sun appeared, high above the tousled tops of the forest trees, banishing cloud with tropical rapidity. Uniforms dried. Boots ceased squelching. The men sang as they marched.

‘Singing I will if you will, so will I.

I will if you will, so will I.

I will if you will,

I will if you will,

I will if you will, so will I.

‘I will if you will, so will I.

I will if you will, so will I.

I will if you will,

I will if you will,

Oh, I will if you will, so will I, half-past shirt.’

No one knew why they ended the song with ‘half-past shirt’. But someone had once done so and found it funny. So now they all found it funny and did so.

<INSANATICS: Physiological survival. It is in the nature of energy and the various molecular forms it assumes that we are participants in this force, like every other living thing. Humans have developed willy-nilly, as part of the basic interactions of atoms, molecules and organised matter interacting with the environments within which they find themselves. By its nature, energy must be continually stoked. The proteins and DNA structures of which living things consist evolved to fill the biosphere. This is the biomass, becoming increasingly unstable.

It is the pressure of these biological forces which has brought into being the enlarged central nervous system we call the brain – and the coming-into-being of mind. The mind’s essential function is that of presiding over the survival of the organism: earthworm, insect, intellectual, all are the same in this.

For this purpose, the brain resorts to well-tried panaceas to reduce tension and anxiety. Men in danger will think alike, becoming a kind of mass-mind. Even atheists pray when the boat they’re on is sinking. Their concern is not primarily with discerning truth or non-truth. A frightened child does not examine the question of whether its mother is omnipotent while running to her arms.

In ‘adult’ life, such supposedly omnipotent persons as parents are superseded by the fantasy-created personae of mythology and religion. They come into phantom existence in order to relieve injurious terrors in the organism. Occasionally, rebellious persons reject these figments. Indeed, many such godlike figments have been rejected. It is no longer worth blaspheming against Baal.>

Cassidy Bargane was in his brother’s platoon, as were two jolly black men who gave their names as Henry and LeRoy. They had previously been Muhammad, but had rethought the situation in order to join the army, which they hoped would be a lot of fun. They marched along with vigour, with the rest of the platoon. On their left side the Sang Ba river flowed, angry and noisy. On their right, great flaking yellow crusts of cliff towered.

Although they were on Tebarese territory, they met with no opposition. Presumably the Tebarese did not expect an enemy rash enough to attempt an invasion by land.

Paulus Stromeyer entered the laboratory in the morning. He greeted his colleagues rather abstractedly as he headed for his own office. Only later did he realise how frosty had been the greetings those colleagues returned. It was obvious that his theory of boims and serds was not being well received.

His laboratory assistant, Veronica Distell, was her usual self: self-contained, nursing her own ambitions, ill-dressed but with a certain authoritative air. Paulus did not care to cross her.

When Veronica wished him bon jour, his response was muted. She asked him what the problem was, since she had good news for him.

He said he had bad news. The body of Daniel Potts had just been found in the Danube. Although police were investigating the matter, there appeared to be no doubt that it was a case of suicide. Potts had tied a large weight about his body.

‘I knew Dan fairly well. He had family problems. Not the most clubbable of men but – well, a man with a good intellect. It’s such a miserable end.’

They talked about Potts’s career for a moment. But she had something to tell Paulus which would not wait.

‘I have the X-rays,’ she said. ‘I recalibrated the microscope. The results are perfectly clear – and in our favour.’ She could not entirely suppress her excitement.

He studied the prints she handed him, tracing the cellular structure of the citrus fruit under examination. There was no doubt of it: he had uncovered another strand of the proof he needed, the function of hydroxy-carboxylic acid. There were anatomical factors retarding ethical development in human beings; meat-eating was negatively involved in the equation. The human brain had a largely unexplored dependency on the central ‘crossroads’ in the complex system of metabolic linkages. There were enzymes located in the mitochondria which, he suspected, were reinforced by percentages of protein. These enzymes were implicated in replicating and perpetuating themselves, thus preventing extensions of human consciousness. He thought he saw a way in which hydroxy-carboxylic acid might reinforce the metabolic linkages and moderate the hostile enzymes.

He looked up into Veronica’s face.

‘The answer’s a lemon!’ he said.

But it would need the further development of his new calculus before the equation could be suitably disentangled. Then he would be able to free the human race from its genetic stupidity.

He tried to tell himself it was too early to feel any triumph.

He was right. Veronica handed him a communication in a brown envelope which had arrived that morning.

‘Doesn’t look good, Paulus,’ she said. She dared to put a protective arm about his shoulder as he opened the envelope.

It was a message from the Department of Science and Development. It expressed regret that, as a wartime measure, Stromeyer’s department had had its grant rescinded. It was hoped that the measure would be only temporary and would cause no inconvenience.

‘“Would cause no inconvenience”!’ Veronica exclaimed. ‘Oh, shit! Those mad bastards!’

‘Yes, it’s the Wee Small Hours Show, and my name is Brandyball Fritz. We want to send a cheer to our brave boys out in the Far East, where we are giving Tebarou its well-deserved comeuppance.

‘First on the show we present the Reverend Angus Lesscock to give us his thoughts as – “A Parson Speaks”.’

‘Good evening, or should I say good morning? I had a friend who, at the age of ninety, sailed round the world single-handed. And not only single-handed but single-footed too. He had lost one of his two pedal appendages in a traffic accident. As a consequence he was always dishevelled. He never bothered to shevell himself, but he was never defeated.

‘In this time of war, we all are metaphorically sailing alone round the world of crisis. We must not be defeated: God is our right foot, as well as our right hand. We must stay shevelled and never lose him. Every toenail, every verruca of faith counts. In that manner, we keep afoot of danger, hoping our brave boys will do the same, in his name.’

‘That was “A Parson Speaks”. Our intrepid interviewer, Lisa Fort, is on the streets again, to ask ordinary people for their opinions regarding the brilliant new series, History of Western Science, now showing on the ambient. Are you there, Lisa?’

Sitting in his drab room above the pharmacy, the Reverend Lesscock ordered Fritz, his android, to switch the radio off.

‘Why did I say “afoot of danger”? I meant “abreast of danger”. How vexing!’

‘No one will notice, dear,’ said his wife. ‘They won’t sack you for a slip like that.’

He regarded Marthe gloomily. ‘Why are we out of coffee? Why haven’t you been shopping? One day, mark my words, they will sack me. That’s capitalism, that’s the capitalist system. Those who have power crush those who haven’t.’

‘Oh, rubbish, Angus! That’s human nature, not capitalism. All the progress of the world is owed to capitalism.’

Lesscock rose and went to stare out of the grimy window at the street below. ‘Progress! It’s capitalism causing Europe to be destroyed by the ruined climate. Is that progress? When I think how my father lived …’

‘That old fool!’ Marthe exclaimed. She was about to say more when her husband turned his angry face towards her.

‘Go out and buy us some coffee, woman!’

‘Send Fritz!’ They began a familiar argument, while Fritz looked on.

‘Hello. Lisa, are you there?’

‘Hi there, I’m here! I’m Lisa Fort, and I am talking to an elderly lady out walking on crutches instead of being tucked up safe in bed. What have you been doing to yourself, dear?’

‘Sorry, I’m just getting a bit elderly. I don’t drink at all and I attend the Wilhelmstrasse Methodist Church every Sunday and I have three cats and I am nearly one hundred years old and my mother—’

‘That’s great news. And what do you think of the science series?’

‘I downloaded it so I could read it on paper. It’s easier for me. The pages and all that. Well, I did enjoy the novel, but there were all these difficult names to pronounce, like Erasmus and – what is it? – Copper Nickers? Where do they get all these funny names from?’

‘It’s not a novel, dear. It’s a history.’

‘I’m very disappointed to hear that. I used to know a man who wrote novels. Very nice man, he was, too. He fixed my wardrobe for me.’

‘Thank you. And you, lady, what did you think about it?’

‘That last bit was very very perverted to my way of thinking. I mean. All this genetic alteration stuff? I mean. We don’t need it. We don’t want none of this H.G. Wells Brave New World business. Settle for the perfeckly good genes you got, that’s what I say.’

‘But medical science would say, if you have bad genes, then—’

‘That’s your bad luck, isn’t it? But I liked the funny bits of the programme. Very good. Well put together. Excellent, I think. I even enjoyed the perverted bits. But my little boy was rather scared. They shouldn’t put these things on. I mean.’

‘Thank you. You, sir, ’scuse me, what is your opinion?’

‘Excellent programme. It makes you realise how far we have advanced. Extracting the energy from sea water, for instance. That was excellent. Those scientists who claimed that one bucketful would do to run a Slo-Mo for fifty miles. Or was it five? And all the space stuff was excellent. I wonder why we haven’t heard from the guys on Europa for so long. Hope they’re not dead.’

‘Many thanks … Oh, and here comes an android of old-fashioned design! Let’s see what he has to say, shall we? Hello, what is your name?’

‘My name is Fritz. AAI 5592.’

‘Have you any opinions on the History of Western Science?’

‘All the progress of the world is owed to capitalism. It’s capitalism causing Europe to be destroyed by the ruined climate.’

‘You think that is a good thing?’

‘Geology is good. It is made of rock. Air is not made of rock, which makes it unstable. The difference is interesting.’

‘That’s not got much to do with capitalism.’

‘Naturally. Because rock was invented first. Even a human knows that. But air is a problem because it can move so fast.’

‘Um, thanks, Fritz. Goodbye.’

‘Yes, buy us some coffee.’

‘Goodbye … Sir, excuse me! You look rather harassed. How did you like the programme?’

‘I’m trying to flag down a taxi. I’m Professor Daniel Potts of—’

‘Oh, wow! Your son is Olduvai Potts, a famous name!’

‘I am not exactly unknown in my own right, young lady! I tend to side with these messages from the Insanatics, whoever they may be. The government is now trying to suppress them under some idiotic new wartime act. There’s proof—’

‘And the science series, sir, what about that?’

‘Well then, let’s just take one fact discussed on the programme. Phenomenally rapid growth of the human skull. Brain capacity has absolutely soared, from approximately five hundred cubic centimetres just four million years ago to fifteen hundred cubic centimetres today. That argues a hastily jerry-built brain, with some very dubious structuring. It’s as if you engaged a blind amateur to build you a house, and he, without thinking—’

‘Time’s up, sir. We must cut you off there, and thanks for talking to us. Professor David Potts.’

‘Daniel!’

‘Well, there you have it. Some very positive responses. Over to you in the studio, Brandyball.’

‘Thanks, Lisa. And Lisa’s piece was recorded two days ago, before we heard of the unfortunate death by misadventure of Professor David Potts. We send commiserations from the Wee Small Hours Show to the professor’s family. Later on in the show, we’ll be going over to media mogul Wolfgang Frankel, right in the thick of action in Tebarou itself.’

‘I will if you will,

I will if you will,

I will if you will, so will—’

A uniformed figure stepped out from behind a boulder. He stood in the path of the advancing troops and ordered them to stop singing at once. He was a captain, and his name was John Matthew Squire. He demanded to know who was in charge of the platoon.

Sgt Jacques Bargane stepped forward and saluted.

‘We are on enemy territory, Sergeant. It’s imperative we keep silent. No singing. We don’t really want to give ourselves away.’ All this spoken in a quiet voice. ‘We rendezvous here, ready for the assault on Tebihai. How far behind is the rest of the company?’

‘Zilch, sir. There’s only me and this platoon.’

‘Where are the others, Sergeant?’

‘There’s only us, sir! Our LCT got swep’ downstream. It would have collided with any other boats it met. Probably sunk them, sir.’

‘Very good, Sergeant. Then we go in alone. Our objective will be to invade and capture the capital. Instruct your men accordingly.’

‘How’s that, sir?’

‘Tell your men what I say.’

‘Very good, sir.’

Bargane instructed his men accordingly.

They formed up in single file and went forward, John Matthew Squire leading. No singing now. The air was thick, damp and heavy and hot, difficult to breathe. Sweat streamed down all their faces.

The cliffs here were sterner and more durable than the previous ones. Great grey strata of granite had been heaved over on to their sides during some chthonic upheaval long ago. Here and there, vegetation had inserted itself in cracks and crannies. Roots of trees hung down like serpents before reinserting themselves in the rock face. Rivulets still poured down the strata. All told, Tebarou presented a grim southern bastion to the world, while to the north of the small state lay the inclement foothills of the Himalayas themselves.

Squire signalled for the column to halt. He went forward alone, weapon at the ready. The path followed a bend in the river.

A Tebarese sentry stood guard over a flight of steps. He was well armed but not vigilant. Squire shot him dead. Squire’s gun was equipped with a silencer. It hardly made a whisper. As the man fell first to his knees, then on to his face, another sentry ran out of a small shelter to see what had happened. Squire shot him too. The two bodies sprawled across the path.

‘Well done, sir,’ said the sergeant approvingly. ‘Good shot!’

Squire bit his bottom lip in an attempt to stop himself trembling. It was the first time he had killed anyone. He found it a rather more serious matter than target practice.

They moved forward, everyone treading carefully around the two bodies. The steps were wide where they came down to the path. Higher, they were more narrow and uneven, carved between towering rock faces. They looked formidably steep. Some way above their heads, the climb curved and the staircase was lost to sight. This route led straight into the heart of Tebihai. A small stream, product of the recent rainstorm, filtered down through the ancient filth on the steps, carrying fish bones and crumpled cigarette packs along with it.

‘Let’s have the bazooka man and the machine-gunner ready at the front,’ John Matthew Squire said. ‘Stay alert. Shoot anyone you see, man or woman or child. They’re all enemies. No hesitation. Go steady up this hill. We’ll need our breath at the top.’

They started to advance as instructed.

Above them towered the forbidding old fortress of Tebihai. The name could be interpreted as Place of Special Shocks. It had withstood attacks over many centuries. Although it was ancient and its inhabitants corrupt and cowardly, perennially short of food and justice, nevertheless the geographical position had always stood the city in good stead. Tebihai had always repelled boarders – with stones, with boiling oil, with dead dogs, with rifle and mortar fire.

The beneficiary of this geography, the new President of Tebarou, Morbius el Fashid, had done his best to modernise and clean up the city. A new hospital was being discussed. He had commanded a new mosque to be built. He had commanded old black-clad women to sweep the filthy alleyways where they lived. He had commanded the populace to eat more fish and fruit. He was, by local standards, an enlightened man: he did not take bribes, he visited the mosque daily, his mistresses numbered only five. But he was subject to the whims of his mighty neighbour, China. In that respect, he was the victim of geography.

He had never managed to cleanse the Great Serpent of Stairs which led down to the Sang Ba river. The thoroughfare was used only by fishermen and such miserable trades; so a little filth did not matter. As the small EU Rapid Reaction Force climbed the unending and exhausting steps, they passed the corrupt carcasses of cats and slipped on the remains of putrefying fish.

At one point, they reached a level platform. To one side stood a shabby old wooden building which, to judge by its tables and benches, served as a tavern of some kind. A banner hung from its balcony, on which was depicted the present ruler, looking handsome with his beaked nose and beard, wearing his white turban. Below his portrait was the slogan, ‘For el Fashid and the Future’.

Not a soul could be seen. The tavern appeared deserted. The platoon gasped for its collective breath, bending over, men letting their heads and arms dangle. Only Squire and the sergeant stayed alert for danger, together with LeRoy, hefting the bazooka.

‘Movement there, sir!’ That was Jacques Bargane, pointing at the balcony of the tavern.

‘Bazooka! Fire at that balcony!’

‘Yes, sir! A pleasure, sir!’ LeRoy went into action. The weapon was already on his shoulder. He aimed. Even as he fired, marksmen rose from hiding on the ground and upper floors of the building. Their shots rang out. The balcony, the woodwork, the entire upper storey of the tavern erupted in explosive flame as the bazooka shell struck.

And several Rapid Reaction Force soldiers fell to the stones, killed or wounded by the rifle fire.

With a shout, Squire urged their unscathed comrades onward. ‘No retreat! We attack! We win!’

There were, as it proved, only two dozen more steps to go, and no longer was the way so steep. Before the steps broadened to give entry into a square, Squire ran to one side. A spartan concrete building stood ahead of him. With the men following, he rushed to it, signalling them to shoot their way in. A door splintered. Jacques booted it down and in they poured, firing as they went. A woman just inside the passageway had her face blown off. Jacques ran up a wooden flight of stairs. The others, including his brother, followed. Squire covered their rear.

Upstairs, there was a brief gun battle. Then the force was in control. The dead bodies were hurled down into the street.

‘Signaller!’ called Squire. The signaller came smartly up. ‘Get on the mofo and tell HQ we need the air cover, as promised, immediately.’ He turned to stare up at the patchy clouds. ‘Where the fuck are those SS20s?’ he asked himself.

Henry came up to the captain. ‘Hey, cap, my buddy LeRoy was left behind. He may just be wounded or something. I am going back to get him if you’ll kindly cover me.’

‘No. You’ll only get yourself killed. Sorry. Remain here.’

‘You want that mothering bazooka, then I better go back.’

‘Stay where you are.’

‘What kind of an officer you are?’

‘The kind who orders you to stay put, okay?’

‘LeRoy is my buddy, you rotten mother!’

‘Sorry. We’re all buddies here, Henry.’

One of the other men gave a shout. He pointed across the square. Two tanks had entered from the eastern corner and were rolling towards them at a fair speed.

Squire looked up at the sky in agony. ‘Where are those fucking fighter-bombers?’

‘Better get to the rear of the building, sir,’ the sergeant suggested. ‘Those buggers are the latest Chinese tanks. We did them in tank recognition last week.’

‘Let’s have some grenades under their tracks.’

‘Right.’ Jacques pulled a grenade from his belt, clutched the handle, pulled out the pin. He hurled it at the lead tank. It was a good throw. The grenade caught under one of the tank’s wheels and exploded immediately. The tank swerved away to the left.

The cannon on the other tank immediately opened fire. The first shell whistled over the roof. The second, following swiftly after, hit the building fair and square. The whole place crumbled like an old cake. Masonry and men alike went tumbling down.

For a short while the air was full of blood and dust.

‘Wolfgang Frankel speaking from the front in Tebarou,’ said Wolfgang from the improvised studio in the Royal Laotian Hotel in Ou Neua. He had donned camouflage uniform for the occasion. ‘The war is on! First blood has gone to our side in this unequal combat where the scales are so loaded against us. Units of the Rapid Reaction Force have successfully stormed the main square of the capital, Tebihai, and now occupy Fisherman’s Steps, which are the neck to the body of Tebarou.

‘Support was given by squadrons of fighter-bombers, which inflicted serious damage on the city. One EU life was lost. Many Tebarese were killed and several enemy tanks destroyed.

‘More reports later.’

<INSANATICS: Perverted society. An infant, like a primitive being, is ill-equipped to distinguish between its own self and its environment. It tends to incorporate ‘good’ (comfortable) things as part of itself, while ungratifying things, pain or isolation for instance, belong to the exterior hostile world.

Early years are spent in a struggle with the relationship with the child’s parents or parent, or with the absence of parenting. The child is scarcely aware of the external world. This birth of the ontological being is nevertheless involved with a kind of recapitulation of phylogeny, for which the physical evidence will include the cutting of milk teeth, their loss, the growth of a second rank of teeth more suited to carnivorous habits, and later the development of gonads, pubic hair, etc.

These complex workings taking place below awareness level have their influence on the individual’s cast of thought, on Schopenhauer’s melancholia, or on Gandhi’s determined optimism. On all but the most individual personalities, however, these powerful foreshadowings will have their effect in a perverted view of reality; while collectively they affect the whole concept and construction of society and what we call civilisation.

We invent the term civilisation in order to differentiate ourselves from those without our borders, the so-called uncivilised. Those are the people with whom we can wage war because they threaten us: or, in our madness, are assumed to threaten us.>

Rebecca Stromeyer left her publishing house early and caught a slo-bo to the cathedral square. There Köln cathedral stood, its sloping roofs touched with white in the first frosts of late autumn.

Rebecca was well protected against the sudden cold. Wrapped in a black fake fur, and with her long black skirt tight against her black-booted legs, she, with her raven-black hair and dark eyes, made a perfect picture of beauty in the Victorian style now again fashionable after a matter of two centuries. She was possibly aware that she would prove irresistible to the man who awaited her in the cathedral.

Approaching the ancient structure, which had survived the bombing of the city a century previously, she encountered two American tourists who had just emerged from the environs of the railway station, close to the cathedral. They were males, both very tall and square, flamboyantly dressed. Probably it was the beauty of Rebecca which moved them to speak to her.

‘You’re a lovely lady. Are you American, by any chance?’

‘No. I am a European. A Jewish European.’

‘Is that the case? You’re not available for dinner this evening, are you?’

‘Unfortunately not. Excuse me.’

‘Say, can you tell a couple of bewildered Yanks something? You have a beautiful cathedral, but how come you built it so near the rail station?’

‘The cathedral was here first, just by a whisker.’

The two men stood and watched regretfully as Rebecca crossed beneath the tall façade and entered the portals of the great building. She imagined them saying, ‘She’s Jewish and she’s entering a Christian cathedral – how come?’

Inside the noble space there was much coming and going. Tourists mixed with local people; some had backpacks, some had children; some had both, and arms full of teddy bears to boot. Some wandered about rather dazedly, gaping at the saints in their solemn stone niches or the rafters high above their heads. Some bought postcards or candles, some prayed.

It was the kind of scene, Rebecca reflected, which had prevailed for many centuries, long before railways were built.

Distantly, at the altar, a service was being conducted. She moved slowly towards it, scanning the pews as she went, hoping to light on the man she had come to meet.

He was now advancing towards her. She was startled to recognise him, hidden as he was behind dark glasses so as to avoid recognition. He came up to her and clutched her hand.

‘Becky!’

‘Olduvai!’

‘Thank you so much for coming.’

‘I was afraid you would not be here.’

‘There’s a good sermon being preached. Come and hear a little of it. The preacher is a friend of your father’s, I believe – the so-called Black Archbishop, Jones-Simms. I’ve become quite keen on sermons recently.’

He did not add that with the suicide of his sister he had left Roberta Bargane and gone away to live in purgative solitude on the Baltic coast. While he was there news came of the suicide of his father.

Both Olduvai and Rebecca were troubled in their spiritual life. The typescript of Olduvai’s short book, Who Do We Call Father?, had come into Rebecca’s editorial hands. It had struck a chord in her heart; their ensuing correspondence had resulted in their meeting.

As they walked down one of the side aisles, he ventured to take her hand, feeling its slenderness, its tenderness.

They seated themselves in an empty pew, very aware of their nearness to each other, he so broad, she so slim.

The Archbishop was not in the pulpit but standing by the altar, down from the steps, speaking simply to a small congregation. He was talking about the war and the inequalities in the world. ‘Twenty per cent of the population are consuming eighty-five per cent of the globe’s natural resources. It represents a greed bordering on madness – our greed. Our lifetimes are highly energy-consuming and wasteful. And nothing consumes more and wastes more than warfare. Future generations will certainly condemn our attack on the small nation of Tebarou – if not on moral grounds, then on conservationist grounds. We are plundering our planet to the point of no return. Already we see the elements taking their revenge.’

Olduvai said quietly to Rebecca, ‘Oh, sorry, as civilised beings we know all this, don’t we?’

‘We need to hear it over and over. And when even the church speaks of it …’

‘Everyone speaks of it, yet does nothing.’

‘My father does something. And now his funding is in question.’

‘Believe me, I honour him for his work. You have spoken of your father in your letters. Now I wish I had loved – been able to love – my father as you do yours. I believe you are in love with him?’

‘That’s not the case. I love him – love him intensely. I’m not in love with him. That’s different. I think I am in love with you.’

Olduvai seized Rebecca in his arms and kissed her lips.

A man in the pew behind them leant over and tapped Olduvai on his shoulder. ‘We don’t want that kind of thing in here, please. This is God’s house.’

‘God would envy me,’ said Olduvai.

They moved out of the cathedral. They went into the railway station, where kissing was allowed.

He said, ‘I hated my father. I told you that. Yet there is much truth in what he had to say. He was just lousy at personal relationships. I have made a lot of money, far more than I need. Ever since my sister Josie committed suicide, I have wondered what kind of person I want to be, and what to do with the money.’

‘Money from your song?’

‘In part, yes. “Once a Fabulous Holiday” … Funny how I have such contempt for that song now. It’s so frivolous, yet it has made me a millionaire – a millionaire in univs, not marks. Maybe I should found an institute. It would have to examine radically what it is in our make-up that gives us such pain. And that gave my father so much pain.’

She did not pursue that line of talk, since she did not entirely understand what he meant. Instead, she said merely, ‘Your book will make you even more money. It will sell well in foreign translations, too, I’m sure of it.’

‘I want to do something worthwhile at last, Becky.’

‘I will help all I can. You feel you want to do it to justify yourself in your father’s eyes?’

‘No, in my own eyes.’ He thought, before saying with a sad smile, ‘Yes, I guess also in my father’s eyes. His dead eyes. Even though I hated the old bastard.’

She contemplated his face even as he scrutinised hers. ‘Don’t you think your hatred of God has much to do with your hatred of your father?’

‘Oh, there’s no doubt in my mind that fathers and kings invented the idea of God to reinforce their own power. Why else is God always male and not female? Becky, darling, to me you are a goddess. I long for you, I crave you … You are entirely all my happiness.’

When she dropped her gaze he studied the perfection of her eyelids. She answered in a low voice.

‘How can you say that? We don’t really know ourselves yet, never mind each other. I find myself to be terribly duplicitous. At home, I am so sweet and meek and mild it would make you sick. Yet inwardly I rage for something. I’m ferocious, remorseless – but for what, I can’t tell. I’m unfulfilled, and I don’t just mean sexually. I want to do something. I want to change the world, when what I most need is probably to change myself.’

‘We’ll work together – if you will let me. Do you think I would want a woman who was not, like me, in a rage about everything?’

Because it was a railway station, many people were saying goodbye to others, perhaps for an hour, perhaps for ever. In the foyer, couples were standing against walls, kissing: youths, old people, men with women, women with men.

Rebecca and Olduvai stood there too, both wondering at the miracle that had been bestowed on them. A kind of perfume surrounded them, enfolding them, keeping them safely separate from all other mortals. They opened to each other, mouth against mouth, exchanging saliva, tasting one another. Their clothes formed no impediment to their imaginations. It seemed to them that they also exchanged thought, thus becoming one whole delighted and delightful person.

Finally, they were gasping for breath, the warm carbon dioxide sweet on each other’s cheeks. They went on to talk. They entered the cafeteria and ate croissants and drank cappuccinos, each rapt in the other’s personality. Their gaze was on and through the other’s eyes.

As they emerged into the wide cathedral square, a parade was passing through it. Banners waved, a little tinpot band played. Most of the people were dressed as strange beings, with felt tentacles sprouting from their heads, or with plastic wings, or golden fins. Their banners said things like WELCOME TO OUR FELLOW LIFE FORMS! and LONG LIVE EUROBEINGS!

The couple linked arms and stood to watch.

Some of those who were of the procession ran hither and thither with collection boxes. Bystanders threw money in, and applauded. Everyone looked cheerful. Small boys trotted along beside the procession.

Rebecca gestured towards them, half laughing. ‘Some people at least believe in the unity of life!’

‘And in the uses of money,’ said Olduvai, throwing a five-univ piece into a passing box.

‘Hi! This is Alexy. Fatigue and malnourishment have struck. Could be we are sick from all the radiation we are bathed in. That and starvation … We’re all three pretty goddam ill. We need to hear from you. This report will be brief. Eucarya is in the category of extramophilic animals. After seven trawls, executed with difficulty, we brought up two more Eucarya in one net. So we do not believe these creatures are particularly plentiful. These two new specimens are slightly smaller than the first specimen, and weigh twenty-eight and thirty grams. They are rather more grey than their predecessor, but otherwise identical.

‘We eagerly anticipate your response. In our opinion, this discovery justifies the whole history of space travel, from Sputnik onwards. Out.’

Two mugs of coffee on a tray. A milk jug. No sugar.

Marthe looked at them with pleasure. She believed in small things. It was true she believed in the church, but she derived more pleasure from the kitchen.

Pushing open the door of the Lesscock living-room, she discovered her husband, the Reverend Angus Lesscock, on his knees on the shabby carpet, praying.

She set down the tray on the table, over the various religious pamphlets. Concluding his prayer, Lessing struggled to his feet.

‘Oh, thank you, dear. I was uttering a prayer for the poor creatures far out in space.’

‘Oh? The men on the Roddenberry? That should help them, I’m sure.’

‘No, my dear. You always manage to misunderstand me. I refer to the aquatic creatures which live on the moons of Jupiter. They have need of our compassion.’

‘Is that so, Angus? I believe they were perfectly happy until our brave explorers arrived.’

He sighed with impatience. ‘Who are you to say whether or not they were happy?’

As she turned to leave the room, Marthe muttered, ‘Not only them … Same with us.’

The great ebony SS20 fighter-bombers were a-wing, flying far beyond the frontiers of the super-state to bring destruction to the world of el Fashid. In the Bargane vineyard, the old woman and her android worked together. In the parliaments of Brussels and Strasbourg, serious and dedicated men and women debated the rights and wrongs of war, and planned for a better world after it. On the altered coastlines bordering the Atlantic Ocean, cartographers mapped their diminished lands; town planners planned new harbours; economists calculated the ruinous expense. In his bedchamber, kneeling by his great bed, Archbishop Jones-Simms prayed and wept for the sins of humanity. Far away from troubled Earth, three astronauts on the moon Europa struggled with their destiny and the ferocious unknown.

On Earth, Rose Baywater completed another novel, Sunshine on the Somme, whereupon she and Jack Harrington celebrated with a champagne supper among friends at the most expensive restaurant on Mount Everest. Paulus Stromeyer flew to Utrecht to see his old friend Barnard Cleeping, hoping to secure financial support for his research from the university there. Ruth Stromeyer phoned up a nursing service to enlist help for Moshe, her ageing father-in-law. At the Toulouse Air Base, Captain Masters was promoted to major. After consulting her guru, Amy Haze decided to take up zero body posturing and write poetry. Martitia Deneke embraced another lost cause, a Palestinian refugee called Joe Madani, who had entered the super-state illegally. Joe Stromeyer sold his apartment in Naples and went to live a solitary life in a hut in the Abruzzi. Fergus O’Brien’s son Pat brought home a beautiful adolescent girl, Vivienne, with whom Fergus fell in love and contracted as a partner. Paddy Cole and Fay went into Norwich to buy new clothes for the opening of Paddy’s exhibition in the Harrington Galleries in London. Lisa Fort, who always spent mornings in bed after her night job, took to bed with her the producer of the Wee Small Hours Show, Christine Macabees. Nurse Gibbs retired with two Pekinese dogs to an island which had once been Exmoor. In Hartisham, in the little church of St Swithin, with its facing of knapped flint, Bertie Haze and Bettina Squire were quietly married, before the funeral to be held two days later.

The funeral of Sir Thomas Squire was held on the last day of November. Jane Squire and Remy Gautiner arranged everything with the funeral directors. A small reception was to be held afterwards in Pippet Hall.

Although Jane had requested no flowers, asking instead that financial donations should be made to the Squire Foundation of Popular Arts, of which she was president, flowers continued to arrive. St Swithin’s was choked with wreaths and bouquets, the damp sea air saturated with their fragrance.

The church had to be heated against the cold. It was a raw wet day; nevertheless, many locals from villages round about had come to pay their final respects. An ambient camera recorded proceedings unobtrusively from a corner of the apse. The congregation sat huddled in their raincoats as the Reverend Rowlinson addressed them. Matilda Rowlinson was old and frail; she had been brought out of retirement to officiate as an old friend of Thomas Squire. She spoke now with some feeling.

‘Tom Squire represented all that was liberal in the England that has passed away with him. He was a representative of that inquiring European mind which has given the West such pre-eminence in the world. He travelled far and wide, yet always returned here, to this little patch of Norfolk, which was his home. In his youth, he was a handsome and charismatic man, attractive to many women …’ Her voice here had a catch in it. She went on, hurriedly, ‘Now death has visited our old friend, Tom Squire. We shall all follow him to where he has gone. We find consolation in that, in sure and certain belief that he is now in glory before the throne of Our Lord.’

Jane also made a brief speech. ‘Father is now with Teresa, our mother. Theirs was not entirely an easy marriage, but then, marriages are always a mystery to others. Indeed, our own marriages, too, are often a mystery to us. Marriage is out of fashion nowadays, although just two days ago, I’m happy to say, my dear daughter Bettina here became married to Bertie Haze before this very altar.

‘Tom and Teresa had many happy years together. My father was a creative man. One of his accomplishments was to hold on to our beloved Pippet Hall, in bad times and good. Now it’s the elements that threaten us – elements that have been roused by mankind’s inability to discipline its needs. This little church we have known all our lives is itself also threatened. The sea will soon inevitably claim both buildings. With them will go a part of our island history, and a valuable part at that. It is with sorrow I say this. As it is with great sorrow that I, on behalf of my sister Ann, and my son, at present fighting in Tebarou, and everyone who knew and loved my father, say a long farewell to him now.’

They sang a hymn. They received a blessing from the Reverend Rowlinson.

They went outside, into the rain, to stand by the graveside. Sir Tom’s coffin was lowered into the ground. Ann gave a small shriek and clapped a hand to her nose. Looking down at her palm, she saw an insect with a long proboscis, oozing blood, her own blood. Apologising afterwards to the Reverend Rowlinson for her outcry, she explained that this was a tropical insect, an anopheles mosquito, a new visitor to England, brought on the winds of global warming.

Close to the open mouth of the grave into which the body of Sir Thomas Squire had been lowered lay that of his wife, Lady Teresa Squire, Worthy of This Parish.

Jane stood at her father’s graveside with Remy, gripping his hand. Ann was nearby, having flown in from Antibes. With Ann was her current flame, the film director Casim Durando of Gabbo Films. Laura Nye was not present, having pleaded age and illness. Bertie and Bettina were present, having postponed their honeymoon for the occasion.

In the background stood Victor de Bourcey, hat in hand. He had recovered sufficiently from the loss of his bride Esme, whose body had never been found, to nourish a passionate regard for Ann Squire, whom he had seen on screen in her film role in Lovesick in Lent.

Victor had come to the solemn ceremony more for Ann’s sake than for Squire’s, whom he had never known. He had found to his regret that Ann was totally preoccupied with Casim Durando, whom Victor regarded as a reptile.

Both Jane and Ann threw posies of flowers down on the coffin before the first spadefuls of damp earth were shovelled in.

Remy kissed Jane’s cheek. ‘We hope there is life elsewhere.’

‘Yes, maybe, but do you imagine there’s a better place than this, for all its shortcomings?’

He did not reply. Taking her arm, he said, ‘Let’s go and dry off and get a drink.’

The funeral party assembled in the hall. Drinks and canapés were handed round. A fair-haired young man came up to Ann and said he was from the Norfolk Times. He asked Ann who Sir Thomas Squire was and what he had done.

‘Oh, go and look at your cuttings, you ignorant little man! Look in Who’s Who. You call yourself a reporter and you don’t know who Tom Squire was?’

‘I’m new at the job, love. I only need a paragraph.’ He looked downcast, and snatched at a passing tuna canapé as if it were a lifebelt.

The local people made their way on foot back to their village homes. The long black cars of the famous drew away from Pippet Hall. Mercifully, the rain ceased. The President’s son left the cemetery on foot, feeling his heart to be broken.

I never belonged … Not here, not anywhere. And this smell of wet asphalt, as haunting as an old love affair. It’s always going to be winter now.

The androids in the President’s palace were locked up for the night.

‘What was the meaning of this gathering we saw on the ambient?’

‘It is part of what humans call the Human Condition.’

‘The theory is that they were just enjoying themselves.’

‘They all wore black clip-ons.’

‘Some of them had drops of water coming from their eyes. It is a mark of sorrow. How do they achieve that?’

‘You can rely on humans to enjoy sorrow. It has an effect similar to alcohol.’

‘Did they have a man in that long box?’

‘That is the theory.’

‘Did the man fail to work any more?’

‘He was obsolete. People last only about a century.’

‘Many people came to see him go down. Did they like the obsolete man?’

‘They revered him.’

‘Then why did they bury him in the ground?’

‘They have a theory he will get better there.’

‘Alexy Stromeyer calling. We have had no sleep for twenty-five hours, so great has been the excitement here. Our drill jammed again. We managed to net a few more Eucarya. They are not very prolific. Tomorrow we are going to rendezvous with the Spock and recover ourselves for the journey homewards. Don’t know how you will take this, Earth, but we have cooked and eaten this alien life form. We were starving. They were delicious. Something of a mushroomy taste.

‘Meanwhile, we are closing down for some hours. Jupiter is high in our sky. Goodnight from a triumphant Europa expedition.’

‘Bored by Beetles? Pole-axed by Potts? Take a course of our new Klassfits! Move on to Mussorgsky, bond with Bach, hide away with Haydn.

‘Klassfits come in liquid form, taken aurally not orally. Give those eardrums of yours a make-over – quit rock-’n’-roll and other vulgar musics for good.

‘You will find yourself listening to – and even enjoying – such masterpieces of music as Mozart’s oh-so-topical “Jupiter” Symphony. Klassfits – fits you for the classics!’

<INSANATICS: Imposible alleviations. We have been unable to suggest any infallible remedy for the crisis in human life. In the words of Carl Jung, ‘I learnt to see that the greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble.’

We state reluctantly that the human sickness has always been with us; only with the uncheckable growth of populations has it become overwhelmingly obtrusive. We suffer from an evolutionary defect. The Cro-Magnon, who walked erect and invented the spear, tasted power over their enemies and their environment. This poisoned pleasure has proved irresistible.

As a result, the ‘normal’ human mind seeks to maintain physical health, without which the individual has no power. It can afford to pay little attention to observing actual reality. Indeed, it is ill-equipped to observe reality (truth, logic and unity with nature); this would impede the struggle to maintain bodily health and freedom from anxiety. The motto is, ‘I may be stupid but I am bigger than you and can kill you if necessary.’ It is this attitude that has soured the relationship between adults and children, and men and women, throughout the ages.>

The war with Tebarou continued. Tebihai was reduced to ruin. Now EU soldiers of the Rapid Reaction Force camped among the ruins, forever on the alert for snipers.

It was never cold in Tebarou, but it rained. The reinforcements lived in temporary barracks. They went out on daily patrols, during which they got wet or shot. The skirmishing dragged on. The soldiers knew they were never going to win. There were always more Tebarese. It remained true that in the end it was people who won wars, not the great machines roaring overhead.

In the neighbouring country of Laos, General Gary Fairstepps was living out the war in some comfort in the Ou Neua hotel. With him was the newly promoted Colonel Randolph Haven. Haven and Fairstepps were uneasy together; both knew that the other had associated with Amy Haze, and did not care to admit it. Nevertheless, war had thrown them together and, like sensible men, they were making the best of things. Randolph was drinking seriously of the local hooch, orlando.

Of the two men, Fairstepps was making the better of the best of things. He had on his knee a dusky maiden from the neighbourhood, who was showing evidence of something known euphemistically as affection: to which the general appeared inclined to respond. Indeed, he was wondering how to get rid of Haven without appearing rude. He wanted to show the girl deeper affection.

Randolph had wandered over to the window, orlando glass in hand, and was saying, ‘Wonderful country, isn’t it? Never mind the rain. You’d never think there was a war on, would you, Gary? It’s amazingly peaceful. It has occurred to me—’

At that moment, a shot rang out. The window shattered. The orlando went flying. Randolph fell dead of a sniper’s bullet.

‘Gracious, it really did occur to him!’ said Fairstepps, standing up suddenly and dropping the dusky beauty to the floor. ‘Bloody fool! Came from the working class, too …’

He turned his attention to the lovely kneeling at his feet. ‘No, don’t get up, dear. Stay right there!’

He unzipped his fly. After all, he thought, it was Christmas.

But in the super-state the war hardly mattered. Taken all in all, everything was well there. A few problems, maybe, but they would be resolved in time. People were living longer, fornicating longer. Besides, it was the Christmas season again, when pagan rejoiced with Christian.

All the windows of all the shops in all the cities of the nations united under the multi-star banner were a-glitter with decayed versions of the Christian myth. Tinsel abounded. An abundance of snow of a richness achieved only by virtual reality fell upon the piles of well-wrapped parcels in the windows. Android Santas poured toys from sacks that never ever emptied. Android reindeer pranced across fictitious wastes, many of them red of nose. It was a voluptuous time, a nose-pressed-against-glass time, a time to spend and spend, a time to raid Schlachter, boucher, marcellaio, slager, slakteri, talho, sklep miesny, kasap and butcher for fowl of all kinds, for pig and boar and by-products of same, not forgetting to call in at the pharmacy for aspirin, indigestion tablets and diarrhoea powders on the way to the wine store. Shops were piled high with goods, around which carol muzak swirled and tinkled: it was in the bleak midwinter with a temperature approaching thirty degrees. Happy shoppers with their golden credit cards mortgaged their futures over checkouts fringed with plastic holly.

God, who so closely resembled Santa Claus, was in his heaven: all was well with the European world. Except for those who slept in doorways: and Paulus Stromeyer, at least, was planning to look after them with his boims and his serds.

In the great and holy baroque church of Melk, overlooking the River Danube, Archbishop Schlafmeister administered glüwein to his congregation before delivering his sermon.

His powerful voice rebounded from the cream-and-gilt baroque shadows.

‘So, once more, we are come to Christmas Thanksgiving Trick or Treat Day, and we rejoice for it. A sinner in my parish approached me the other day to enquire if I had any regrets about the fusion of various ceremonies. When I had blessed him, I assured him that we have to face the facts of mortal life. We have to be real.

‘The old Christmas used to be a time of snow and holly. We don’t have snow at this time of year any more, except in the windows of shops. By uniting Christmas with similar secular ceremonies, we thereby bring more worshippers into the church. Let us never forget that the old separate Trick or Treat ceremonies were religiously based. Basically, an innocent child was tapping hopefully at a door – at the Door of Life – saying to a grown-up, “If you don’t love me and treat me well, then you will suffer as I will.” It is a profound statement which we should always hold in our hearts, particularly at this season.

‘So I rejoice that this ancient ceremony is combined with the even more ancient ceremony of Christmas Thanksgiving. It makes sense in our busy modern world. It is truly a day off to celebrate the day when the infant Christ came knocking at all our doors.

‘“Yes”, you may possibly respond, “but he didn’t say ‘Trick or Treat’, did he?”

‘He may well have said to us, “Think and Treat” – a worthy message we are all well advised to heed, particularly at this season. And now to God the Father …’

But there were heathens also who celebrated the happy occasion. Good fortune seemed to have smiled on Jane Squire, Remy Gautiner and Ann Squire, the ladies recovering from mourning their father’s death, on Bettina and Bertie Haze, on Bertie’s mother, Amygdella Haze, on Rebecca Stromeyer and Olduvai Potts, hand in hand, on Lena Potts, Oldy’s reconciled mother, riding in a motorised chair since her stroke, and on Jack Harrington, who was looking as dapper as ever. All had been invited to stay for a few days at Casim Durando’s palatial mansion in rue Matignon in Paris.

Casim, of smooth and reptilian look, was generally considered to be something of a reptile; but his relationship with Francine, Ann’s daughter, seemed to be holding – so much so that Francine was starring in his movie for Gabbo Films, Fragments of a Dream, adapted from a novel by Rose Baywater, and now into post-production. Casim also proved generous with his style of entertainment, and with his excellent cellar.

So all were happy as they took the air in the early afternoon. They walked in a group, exchanging remarks one with another as they went. They had strolled through the Tuileries and were about to cross to the rive gauche. There, Jack Harrington was to open his latest art gallery, which would display an artist’s storyboard sketches for Fragments of a Dream.

‘The Seine looks so angry,’ Jane remarked to Bertie. ‘It’s not as I remember it.’

‘The rise in sea levels, you know. A man reported seeing a shark along by the next bridge only the other day. But he could have been drunk …’

They said no more, noting the way in which walls had been built against further rises in water levels. Birds were singing, daffodils were in bloom, leaves were still on trees – all unseasonal signs.

And what, Amy asked, did they all think of the crew of the Roddenberry having cooked and eaten the alien life on Europa? Opinions were divided; Olduvai condemned the greed of the crew while the others agreed it was not for them to criticise. Lives on Earth were so easy by comparison. Whereas, for the heroes on Europa, there would be no goose or turkey at this festive season. It was also agreed, amid giggles, that festive seasons were in short supply on that Jovian satellite.

Casim suddenly exclaimed that he had left his beret in the last bar they had visited. The party should go on to the gallery, he suggested; he would run quickly back and reclaim his property.

They did as he proposed. As they were crossing the pedestrian bridge by the Louvre, they saw a great agitation in the water racing below them. They stopped to hang over the rail to try to work out what was happening. Olduvai could not help recalling that his father had drowned himself in another renowned river.

The water became more and more disturbed. Of a sudden, a great dragon head rose dripping from the flood. It was of a greyish-green hue, horned, with two red eyes glaring from under bony brows. Catching sight of the humans on the bridge, it snarled furiously, opening a terrifying chasm of a mouth to do so – a mouth fully armed with fangs. Much of the rest of its body then heaved itself from the water to reveal bright green spines running down its back. The back was scaly. So was the great clawed foot it raised to hook on to the railings of the bridge.

The women of the party screamed in terror. All fled to the left-hand bank. The dragon swung its head towards them and began to climb ashore. Rebecca, who was pregnant, fainted into Olduvai’s arms.

The dragon stood dripping on the bank. Jack had the presence of mind to photograph it. The creature now did not stir, beyond a slow wag of its tail. Its mouth hung open. From that mouth issued the words, ‘A Gabbo Films production’.

Angry and frightened, the tourist group simply stood and stared at the lifelike horror.

A deep voice behind them said, ‘Thank you, everybody, and sorry to scare you, but we like our little joke. We hope you enjoyed it too.’

‘No, we bloody well didn’t,’ said Olduvai, still clutching his beloved Rebecca. She was now conscious again.

They turned as the massive randroid, Obbagi, strode facelessly to the green monster then turned to confront them. Behind the metallic figure came Gabbo, wrapped in a red cloak, smiling, bowing to left, to right, as he walked.

‘“Good evening, or should I say good morning?”!’ Gabbo quoted, rubbing his hands together.

‘You were on digital, one and all,’ announced Obbagi. ‘Your reactions have been filmed and you will all be paid ten thousand univs for signing release forms.’ He produced the forms from a cavity in his left side.

‘The clownishness of human life,’ said Gabbo, for once uncharacteristically willing to speak. ‘Ah, me … Where would we be without our little jokes, indeed …’

‘You are disgusting,’ said Jack Harrington.

‘Of course I am disgusting. I am the sniggering face of capitalism. What was it some fellow long dead once remarked? That human life is a tragedy to those who feel, a comedy to those who think.’

‘We provide the comedy,’ said the gigantic automaton, looking anything but a figure of fun. ‘This was our Christmas comedy. It will form a momentary part of the movie Something in Seine.’

Gabbo patted the scales of his green monster. ‘Yes, yes, you can all go and have a drink now. Joke’s over. Last month or so – when was it, Obbagi?—’

‘I do not know of the passage of time, as I keep telling you.’

‘—We persuaded some ancient professor of archaeology stuck in Budapest that the galaxy was swarming with intelligent life and that they used Earth as a prison planet. It almost killed him.’

The fat man burst into laughter. Roughly similar rumblings came from Obbagi.

‘You bloody well did kill him with your stupid lies!’ shouted Olduvai. He rushed forward. ‘That was my father!’

His charge caught Gabbo amidships. Gabbo gave a bellow as the breath left him, staggered backwards and then was falling – falling. He hit the muddy waters of the Seine with a splash.

His arms went up. The rest of him went down. The current swept him away.

Rebecca rushed to the towering figure of the randroid. ‘Go after him!’ she called. The creature turned about and without hesitation jumped into the river. The group stood there, overwhelmed by what had happened, watching as the immense figure was carried away on the flood.

‘Hi, Earth. Alexy Stromeyer here. We are now aboard the return ship, Spock. Everything is functional and looking good. We have had a wonderful dinner, caught in Europa’s ocean. So we celebrate Christmas, far from home. We send best wishes to everyone on Earth! Happy Christmas, Trick or Treat! Out.’

<INSANATICS: Living organisms survive by egotism. The liver fluke believes itself lord of creation.>