“There are two types of people in this world,” Pete volunteers helpfully, “those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else.” He sips his wine thoughtfully. “But the first kind don’t put it that way. They usually think in terms of the saved and the damned, with themselves sitting pretty in the lifeboat.” He manages to simultaneously look pained and resigned. “Sometimes they find their way out of the maze. But not very often.”
“Huh. Speaking of which, I’ve been getting an earful at the office lately,” I say. Mo glances at me sharply as I continue. “One of my colleagues keeps banging on about some televangelist or other who’s been running a mission. You’d think he farts rainbows the way Jim talks about him. The, uh, Golden Promise Ministries? Do you know anything about them?” Mo’s eyes narrow to a flinty stare, but she holds her peace. Pete nods thoughtfully.
“Golden Promise? The big tent revival meetings in Docklands?” I nod. “Pastor thingummy, um, Schiller—he’s one of the bigger American Midwestern TV Charlies”—he glances at Sandy apologetically—“but there’s something not quite right about him. Did I tell you about Dorothy”—Sandy nods—“one of my parishioners? Special needs, learning disability. And no, we’ve got two or three Dorothys, I’m not telling you which one it is. Anyway, she went along and found it very disturbing. Well, not at first, but he’s actively recruiting. And trying to get people to go along to a series of church meetings his people are running in South London. They’re clearly Presbyterians who are hot on fundamentals theology, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Stuff that smells a bit cultish, frankly. They’ve got the usual unhealthy obsession with homosexuality and so on; but what upset Dorothy was that they were trying to fix her up with a husband. Trying to get her to join a Christian dating ring. Which might be fine if they’d bothered to ask, but Dorothy has—let’s just say she has issues. They were quite pushy, and really freaked the poor girl out.”
Mo nods slowly. Looking at me, she asks Pete out of one corner of her mouth, “Are they by any chance a quiverfull ministry?”
Pete’s lips thin. “Yes.”
The word “quiverfull” sets my alarm bells ringing, and clearly upsets Mo. It goes back to Psalm 127, which refers to having many children as having a full quiver. They’re arrows for the Lord, and a number of evangelical churches have adopted the theory that you can never have too much ammunition. The Brotherhood of the Black Pharaoh has a history of using such churches as cover for their cells. They have other uses for children, as recruits and—let’s not go there over dinner.
“You disapprove?” I ask.
Pete sniffs. “I’m in the business of providing spiritual and pastoral care for my parishioners,” he points out. “Pressuring a confused and vulnerable young woman into an arranged marriage in order to turn her into a baby factory is not how you look after her spiritual needs—” He stops, revealing a momentary flash of anger. “Sorry. Not your problem.” He pauses. “I probably said too much there,” he adds.
“It will go no further,” Mo assures him.
“Absolutely.”
Sandy, who has been holding her breath without me being consciously aware of it, exhales loudly enough that I nearly jump. I notice that her wineglass is empty. I pick up the bottle. “Can I offer you a refill?” I ask, a little white lie because now I think about it she didn’t ask for one in the first place—
“No thanks.” Her cheeks dimple. “I’m avoiding alcohol for the next few months.”
Mo catches the dropped penny first: “Congratulations! How long—”
“It’s been nearly ten weeks. We’re not out of the first trimester yet, I wasn’t going to announce it for a little longer.”
Opposite me, Pete’s expression has switched from muted disapproval to the smug anticipation of fatherhood-to-be.
“Congratulations to the two of you,” I say slowly. “Well, good luck with that.” I lower the wine bottle and pick up my glass. “Here’s to sleepless nights ahead, huh?”
Mo raises her glass, too, keeping her expression under rigid control. But I can see right through it; right to the core of delight for their joy, and suppressed envy for Sandy’s condition, and above all else, horror at the fate they’ve unwittingly condemned themselves to.
LATE THAT NIGHT, AS WE LIE IN BED, I FEEL MO’S SHOULDERS shake. I slide an arm around her, try to provide comfort. She’s crying, silently and piteously to break a man’s heart; and the worst part is that I can’t do anything about the cause of her grief.
We’re not going to have children.
For months now, and for decades to come, we’ve been living on borrowed time. I can feel it in the prickling in my fingers and toes, in the strange shapes and warped dead languages of my dreams. We’re living through the end times, but not in any Biblical sense—the religions of the book have got their eschatology laughably wrong.
Outside the edge of our conscious perceptions, the walls between the worlds are thinning. Things that listen to thoughts and attend are gathering, shadows and fragments of cognition and computation. The Laundry has a code name for this phenomenon: CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Magic is a branch of applied mathematics: solve theorems, invoke actions, actions occur. Program computers to do ditto, actions occur faster and more reliably. So far so good, this is what I do for a living. But consciousness is also a computational process. Human minds are conscious, there are too damn many of us in too small a volume of space on this planet right now, and we’re damaging the computational ultrastructure of reality. Too much of our kind of magic going on makes magic easier to perform—for a while, until space itself rips open and the nightmares come out to play.
But that’s not why we aren’t going to start a family. Abstract principles aren’t sufficient. No, it’s a lot simpler: we know the sort of thing that’s likely to happen during CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, and we’re not selfish enough—or evil enough—to condemn a child of ours to die that way.
There’s going to be an epidemic of dementia—not mad cow disease, new variant CJD, but something our house doctors call Krantzberg syndrome: if a sorcerer unintentionally thinks the wrong thoughts, performs magic by mind, the listeners and feeders and actors they invoke from the quantum foam take tiny bites out of their brains. Dream the wrong dreams, and you can wake up with a palsy or an aneurysm.
There will be amazement and miracles, too. Magic wands stuffed with silicon chips that work wonders. Twisted biological creations that obey our directives. Ordinary people discovering they have the power to summon demons and angels and warp reality to their will. Somnolent sentient species rising from the deeps to take an interest in the suddenly interesting land-dwelling aboriginals. Alien emissaries, and powers beyond our comprehension like the Sleeper in the Pyramid—
—Monstrous conquerors no bullet or atom bomb can kill—
—And their willing servants.
No, this isn’t a sensible decade to start a family. Especially not for the likes of Mo and me, insiders and experts with a ringside seat at the circus of horrors.
WEDNESDAY MORNING DAWNS, GRAY AND MOIST. I YAWN, ROLL out of bed, and stumble downstairs to the kitchen to switch on the kettle. I glance at the clock: it’s a quarter to seven. I shiver, the skin on the soles of my feet sticking to the cold linoleum. We talked, for a bit, when the tears dried, then I slept fitfully. No dreams of the plateau and the pyramid, which is a small blessing. But today is a workday, and I’ve got at least one meeting booked in the office. I reach for my phone, which is still sitting on the kitchen table where I left it last night—