While she slept in his arms, Harry sat and made plans. They weren't much, just something to do. They kept him from thinking too deeply about his and Penny's imminent departure, its possible perils. About its inevitability.
For it was inevitable - as was the drone of the helicopter whose searchlights came sweeping along the beach from the east. Harry had thought they'd be safe here for ... oh, a long time. But as he reached out and touched the minds of the people in the droning dragonfly airplane he saw that he'd been wrong. They were espers.
The Branch,' he said, perhaps bitterly, waking Penny up and forming Möbius equations in his mind.
'What, even here?' she mumbled, as he shifted her across the continent to a clothing store in Sydney.
'Even here... there... yes,' he said. 'Indeed, anywhere. Their locators will find me no matter where I go; they'll alert their contacts worldwide; espers and bounty hunters will track and trap and eventually burn us. We can't fight a whole world. And even if I could, I don't want to. Because to fight is to surrender - to the thing inside me. And I'd prefer to be just me. For as long as possible, anyway. But tonight we'll lead them all a dance, right? For tomorrow we die.'
'Die?'
'We'll be dead to this world, anyway,' he said.
They chose expensive clothes willynilly, and an expensive leather suitcase in which to pack them. Then, as the store's alarms began to clamour, they moved on.
It had been 9:00 p.m. local time when they left the beach; it was 11:30 in the store they robbed; moving east they got dressed on another beach (Long Beach) at 5 a.m. in the first light of dawn, and started a champagne breakfast in New York a little after 8 a.m. - and all in the space of thirty or so minutes!
Penny ate her steak barbecued, medium rare; Harry's was so rare it dripped blood, just the way he'd ordered it. They drank three bottles of champagne. When presented with the bill the Necroscope laughed, snatched Penny into his lap, tilted his chair over backwards... and the pair of them out of this world into the Möbius Continuum.
Minutes later (at 10:30 p.m. local time) and some three and a half thousand miles north of where they'd started out, they robbed the innermost security vaults of the Bank of Hong Kong; and by midnight they'd lost a million Hong Kong Dollars on the gaming tables in Macau. A few minutes later (at 6:30 in the evening, local), still ordering and drinking champagne, Harry bundled an entirely tipsy Penny into a hotel bed in Nicosia, and left her there to sleep it off. She dripped pearls and diamonds and her skin smelled of a fine haze of alcohol. Most women (were they truthful) would give an entire world for the things she had seen and done and experienced in the last half-day of her life on Earth. So had Penny given a world. That's why Harry had arranged and executed it.
Their binge had taken a little over three hours: the locators at E-Branch HQ in London - and others in Moscow - were quite dizzy. But the Necroscope knew that Penny was as yet too weak a source for them to track as a single entity. On her own, they probably wouldn't be able to find her. Even if they could, he doubted if they'd have a man in Cyprus. She'd be safe there. For a little while, anyway.
And now it was time he made their Starside reservations...
Part Four
1
Faéthor - Zek – Perchorsk
In the Möbius Continuum, Harry opened a future-time door and went looking for Faéthor Ferenczy. Faéthor was long dead and gone, and had been incorporeal - which is to say bodiless - for a very long time. So long that by now he was probably mindless, too. But there were things of great importance which the Necroscope wanted to ask him. About Harry's 'disease' and how he'd come by it; maybe even about how he could cure it, though that possibility seemed almost as remote as Faéthor himself.
Möbius time was awesome as ever. Before launching himself down the ever-expanding time-stream, Harry paused, framed in the doorway, and looked out on humanity as few flesh-and-blood men had ever seen it -and then only on his authority. He saw it as blue light -the near-neon blue of all human life - rushing out and away with an interminable sigh, an orchestrated angelic Ahhhhhhhhh, into forever and ever. But the sigh was all in his mind (indeed he knew that it was his mind sighing), for time is quite silent. Which was just as well. For if all the sound in all the years of all the LIFE he witnessed had been present, then it would have been an utterly unbearable cacophony.
He stood or floated in the metaphysical doorway and gazed on all those lines of blue light streaming out and away - the myriad life-lines of the human race - and thought: It's like a blue star gone nova, and these are its atoms fleeing for their lives! And he knew that indeed every dazzling line was a life, which he could trace from birth to death across the tractless heavens of Möbius time: for even now his own life-line unwound out of him, like a thread unwinding from a bobbin, to cross the threshold and shoot away into the future. But where the rest were pure blue, his own thread carried a strong crimson taint.
As for Faéthor's line: if it existed at all, it would be pure (impure?) scarlet. But it didn't, for Faéthor's life was over. No life now for that ancient, once-undead thing, but true death, where he sped on and on beyond the bounds of being ... all thanks, or whatever, to Harry Keogh. Bodiless, yes, the old vampire, but still the Necroscope knew how to track him. For in the Möbius Continuum thoughts have weight and, like time itself, go on for ever.
Faéthor, Harry called out, sending a probe lancing ahead as he launched himself down the time-stream, I'd like to pay you a visit. If you're in the mood for it.
Oh? The answer came back at once, and then, astonishingly, a chuckle; one of Faéthor's most dark, most devious chuckles. A meeting of two old friends, eh? And is it visiting day? Well, and why not? But truth to tell, I've been expecting you.
You have? Harry caught up with Faéthor's spirit: with the memory, the mind which was all that remained of him.
Oh, yes! For who else would know the answer if not me, eh?
The answer? But Harry knew well enough what he meant. The answer - the solution - to his problem, assuming such a solution existed.
Come, come! Faéthor tut-tutted. Am I naive? Call me what you will, Harry, but never that! And now he gave a deadspeak nod and looked the Necroscope over. Well, well! But, you know, you never fail to amaze me? I mean, so many talents! And now this faster-than-life travel! Why, look-you've even outstripped yourself!
Even as Faéthor spoke, Harry's life-line gave a wriggle, a shudder, and split down the middle. Half of the line bent back a little on itself and shot off at right-angles to the Necroscope's line of travel, shortly to disappear in a brilliant burst of red and blue fire. But the other half, like a comet with Harry himself for its nucleus, sped on as before and kept pace with Faéthor.
Harry had been expecting some such. The phenomenon he'd just witnessed (which in fact had been his departure point for Starside) was in the probable future. But this was Möbius time, which is to say speculative time, and nothing was for certain. It was the reason why reading the future was so very hit and miss. For if in the real world anything contrary should happen to him between now and then, his departure simply wouldn't happen. Or possibly not. In other words - and despite the fact that he'd seen it - it was only something which might happen.
But probably, said Faéthor. And again he chuckled. So... they're driving you out, eh? No, Harry shrugged, I'm going of my own free will. Because if you stay they'll hunt you down and destroy you.