'Is that it? You stupid bastard; why the fuck did you let all the guards go, and the-'
'Error of judgement, I suppose, old son,' the wee familiar says, and yawns. He hops onto my shoulder and we both watch the inside of the castle door. The tip of a sword appears through the metal and cuts a circle out of it; it falls to the floor and the big blond bastard steps through. 'Fields,' the familiar says quietly, nodding by my ear. 'That airlock door had monofilament reinforcing; cutting it cold like that would need some pretty neat blade-fields. Quite some weapon the lad's equipped himself with ... though it could be the other round, of course.'
'Where's that wee bastard of a dirk?' I'm shouting now; bloody petrified, ready to shite the bed so I am. The big blond bastard is tramping down the castle hallway, looking dead wary but all determined like, and swinging the sword like he means business. He looks to one side and glowers.
The wee dirk comes at him, but far too slow; almost like it was hesitating. Blondy keeps glowering at it. The dirk stops in mid air, then just falls to the floor and rolls away into a corner. 'Aw naw!' I'm shouting.
'Told you it was a cheap copy; they had to equip it with an IFF circuit. Probably our chum's sword - or that helmet - fed it a fake Friend signal. The real things are free agents, smart enough to make up their own minds ... which is why they're quite useless for the likes of you or me, of course.'
'Stop talkin like a fuckin arms salesman and dae something!' I scream at the wee familiar, but it just shrugs its wee grey shoulders and sighs.
'Too late, old son, I'm afraid.'
'You're afraid!' I yell at it, shouting into its face. 'You're no the one they're waiting fur doon in Hades pal; three hunner years they've had to think up somethin really sore and nasty fur me; three hunner fuckin years!'
'Oh calm down man; can't you face death with some dignity?'
'Bugger dignity! Ah want tae live!'
'Hmm. Good,' the wee familiar says, as the big blond bastard disappears from the screen. There's a banging noise somewhere outside the door of the bedroom, and the floor shakes. 'Aw naw!' I wet the bed; just like that; canny stop myself. 'Mammy, Daddy!'
The door bursts open. The big blond bastard stands there, filling the doorway. He's even bigger than he looked on the screen. Fucking sord must be nearly as long as I am. I cringe doon in the bed, whole body shaking. The warrior has to duck as he comes through the door, to avoid banging the wolf-head helmet on the roof. 'Wh-wh-what's yer problem, big filla?' I says.
'Now problem moy son,' the bloke says, and comes up to the bed. Bloody man-mountain. He raises the sord up over me.
'Aw geese a brek pal, please; ye can have anythin ye -'
Wallip.
Shock like nothing I've ever felt in my life before, like God slappin ye, or a billion volts going through ye. Stars and light and dizzyness. I can see that sword falling towards me, flashing in the light, see the look on the big bastardin warrior's face, and hear a wee noise at my ear; a wee funny noise, like a chuckle; I'd swear ... like a chuckle, honest.
The auld punter in the bed wiz deid; skul split open like a rottin coconut. That wee thing on his shoder vanishit in a puf aw smoake. Ah felt ded dizy an ah saw stars and stuff. Ahd sware the giy in the bed lookd difrent from when ahd cum intae the room; his herr hadnae bean that sorta blond-grey culur, had it?
'Well ... heck and hot-dickety, damn transference worked. How're you feeling, bonehead?' It wiz the helmet tolkin. Ah sat doon on the bed an took it of to look at the woolfs heid. 'Ahm feelin a bit funy,' ah toald it. 'Not yourself,' it sed, an the wee woolfs heid noddit at me, an grind. 'Hardly surprising. You'll come to; my vast intellect has survived the transcription perfectly whole and intact, so I can't imagine that such an enormous library of a mind having been faithfully transmitted there is even the remotest possibility that your pamphlet of a consciousness hasn't come through undamaged. Anyway, back to business; the ship's circuits have finally woken up to the fact that there's an interloper aboard; they won't accept that you're the rightful owner, and I still need a little more time to re-arrange the telepathic circuits in this ridiculous helmet, so let's depart before the ship scuttles itself; that involves a thermo-nuclear explosion as I recall, which I doubt even I or that wonderful sword you're holding can protect you from at quite such close range, so, time to go.'
'Fare enuph pal,' ah sez, an gets up, puttin the helmet bak on. Felt grate apart from ma heid; wiz like ahd had a dream but ahd just woke up, ye ken. Sumthin abowt bein an old man; like the wan in the bed. Nevir mynde. Wurk it oot layter. Bettir get oot the cassil if the woolfs heid sez so. Ah liftit up ma sord an ran fur the ootside door. Nae fukin tresshir agen, but ye canny win them aw. No tae wury; plenty mair cassils an majishins an auld barbareyins an whitevir ...
Whit a life, eh? This is the gemm!
Quaternary
'You know I had that damn record for three years before I realised Fay Fife's name was a pun; you know; 'Where are you from?' "Ah'm fay Fife."' he told Stewart, shaking his head.
'Aye,' Stewart said, 'Ah ken.'
'God I'm so stupid sometimes,' he breathed, gazing sadly at his can of Export.
'Aye,' Steward noded. 'Ah ken,' he said, and rose to turn the album over.
He looked out through the window to the view of the town and the distant bare trees of the Glen. His watch said 2:16. It was getting dark already. He supposed they were near the solstice now. He drank some more.
He'd had five or six cans, and it looked like he'd have to stay over with Stewart, or get a train back to Edinburgh. A train, he thought. He hadn't been on one for years. It would be good to take a train from Dunfermline and go over the old bridge; he could throw out a coin and wish that Gustave would kill himself, or that Andrea would find herself pregnant and want to bring her child up in Scotland, or -
Cut it out, you idiot, he told himself. Stewart sat down again. They had talked about politics. They'd agreed if they were sincere about what they said they believed in they'd be out in Nicaragua, fighting for the Sandinistas. They'd talked about old times, old music, old friends - but never about her. They'd talked about Star Wars - SDI - which Britain had just signed up for. It wasn't that distant a subject for them; they both knew people at the university who were working on optical computer circuits; the Pentagon was interested. They'd talked about the new Koestler chair of parapsychology at the university, and about a programme they'd both seen on television a few weeks earlier, on lucid dreaming; and also about the hypotheses of causative formation (he said sure it was interesting, but he could remember when Von Daniken's theories had been 'interesting').
They'd talked about a story mentioned on television and in the press that week, about an émigré Russian engineer living in France who'd crashed his car in England; a lot of money had been found in the car and he was under suspicion of having committed a crime in France. He had apparently gone into a coma, but the doctors seemed to think he was faking. Devious bastards us engineers, he told Stewart.
They had talked, in fact, about almost everything except what he really wanted to talk about. Stewart had tried to bring the subject up, but each time he had found himself sliding away from it; the programme on lucid dreaming had come up because it was the last thing he had had an argument with Andrea about; the causative formation hypothesis because it was probably the next thing they'd argue about. Stewart hadn't pressed him on the subject of Andrea and Gustave. Maybe he just needed to talk, about anything.