“Fowin can do all that?”
“Any Kiint can do that. Too many of them have conformist thought routines if you ask me. At least the Agarn Kiint make an effort to push the envelope. Not that it’s helped them with the Sleeping God.”
“What’s that?” Jay asked eagerly.
Tracy gave her a solemn smile. “Something an old race left behind a very long time ago. It’s created quite a dilemma for this civilization of so-called philosophy gurus. Not that there’s anything they can do to affect the situation. I think that’s what upset them the most. They’ve been the undisputed masters of this section of the universe for so long, finding something infinitely superior to themselves is rather shocking. Perhaps that’s why Fowin was so accommodating today.” She stopped as Galic appeared at the foot of the veranda’s steps.
“You did it,” he said.
“Certainly did.” Tracy grinned back.
He came up and sat in the deckchair beside her. Before long, other retired observers had dropped by to discuss the new colony. They had an enthusiasm Jay hadn’t seen in them before, making them younger. Not once that whole evening did they discuss the past.
After dark, the party moved into Tracy’s lounge and started calling up star charts and planetary surveys. Arguments about the merits of possible locations raged good-naturedly. Most wanted to see the colony in the same galaxy as the Confederation, even if it had to be on the other side of the core.
Some time around midnight, Tracy realized Jay had fallen asleep on the settee. Galic picked her up and carried her into her bedroom. She never woke as he covered her with a blanket and put Prince Dell on the pillow beside her. He tiptoed out and closed the door before returning to the debate.
Louise had fled for half a mile down the Holloway Road. It was narrow at the top end, the pavements lined by tall brick buildings with crumbling windowsills and gutters. Their ground floors were small shops and cafes whose drab and grimy fronts were firmly shuttered. Her footsteps rattled off the stern walls, an auditory beacon signalling to everyone where she was.
Further down, the road began to widen out. The buildings along this section were better maintained, with clean bricks, glossy paintwork, and more prosperous businesses. Narrow side roads branched off every hundred yards or so, consisting of attractive, compact terrace houses converted into flats. Silver birches and cherry trees in their front gardens overhung the pavements, to give them the semblance of a quiet rural town.
The slope began to flatten out, revealing at least a mile of straight deserted road ahead of her. The larger commercial premises had taken over on either side, their hologram adverts swirling over the broad pavements, forming a skittering iridescent rainbow. Traffic control informationals hung in the air above road lanes at the main junctions, flashing their colour sequences down onto the empty carbon-concrete.
Louise slowed to a halt, panting heavily from the exertion. She couldn’t see anything move behind her, but it was so dark behind her she’d hardly see any pursuers until they were almost on top of her. Travelling on under the illumination of the holograms would be a mistake.
Tollington Way was fifty yards ahead of her, a side road leading into the backstreet maze that proliferated behind every major London thoroughfare. Holding her sides against the ache of breathing, Louise jogged for a hundred yards down it, then stopped and hunched down in the deep shadows of a doorway.
Her soaking leggings were chafing her thighs, the T-shirt was disgustingly cold and clammy, and her feet felt as though they were shrivelling up. She was shuddering all over now from the cold. High above, small green lights flashed on the dome’s geodesic structure.
“Now what?” she gasped up at it. Charlie would be watching her through the sensors, seeing her infrared image constricted into a small ball. She datavised a general net access request. There was no response.
Escape and hide, Charlie had told her. Easy to say. But where? No one was going to open their door to a stranger on this night. She’d probably be shot just for knocking and asking.
A cat yowled and jumped off a nearby wall to run along the street. Louise was rolling to the ground and bringing the anti-memory weapon smoothly to bear before the noise had even registered properly. The cat, a furry tabby, loped past, giving her a disdainful look.
She let out a brief sob as her muscles went limp. The weapons control program was still in primary mode. She took it off line as she climbed painfully to her feet, swatting dirt from her knees and the front of her waistcoat.
The cat was still visible, silhouetted against the hologram haze curtaining the end of Tollington Way, its tail swishing about arrogantly. It was obvious she was still too close to Holloway Road; her pursuers would come down it, searching every side road. Fletcher said they could sense people without even having to see them.
Louise accessed the map of central London she’d stored in a neural nanonics memory cell, and began to walk away from the light. The anti-memory weapon was slipped back into her waistcoat pocket. She couldn’t work out which was the better way of avoiding search parties; staying in one place (assuming she could find a disused room or warehouse) or constantly moving round. The odds were uncomputable, principally because she didn’t know what she was facing. An organized systematic hunt, or a couple of possessed ambling round in a disinterested fashion.
Studying the map was almost meaningless, it didn’t relate to anything. Without any goal, any destination, one street was the same as any other. Its only use was in preventing her from crossing any of the main roads.
Maybe I should just find somewhere to hide. That’s what Charlie suggested.
On an impulse she called up the Ritz’s address. The map had to switch magnification factors the hotel was so far away from her.
That was out, then. Pity, no one would think to hunt for her there.
“Andy,” she whispered in shock. The one person she knew in London. And who would never turn her away.
She retrieved his eddress and ran it through the London directory she’d loaded along with all the other junk data recommended as essential personal survival tools for the arcology. Some people didn’t include their physical address with their net code. But Andy had. He lived in Islington, somewhere on Halton Road. A tiny blue star burned on the map.
Two miles away.
“Sweet Jesus, please let him be there.”
They chained Fletcher to the altar with manacles that had an electric current running through them, nullifying his energistic power. They ripped his clothes off, and cut obscene runes into his flesh. They shaved him. They burned a pile of Bibles and prayer books at his feet, and used the ash to smear a pentagon around his body. They hung an inverted cross above his skull, dangling by a rope that was fraying and rotting.
Ghosts slithered past, offering their desolate expressions in sympathy.
“Sorry,” was their only whisper. “So sorry.” Past heroes, humbled and degraded by their emasculation. The possessed spat at them, jeering them out of the way.
St Paul’s was illuminated with the mealy light from smoking iron braziers and racks of candles, leaving the vaulting ceiling invisible. Its new incense was the smell of sweaty bodies and fried burgerbap onions. Prayers had been supplanted by rock music coming from a ghetto blaster, with the sounds of copulation heard between tracks. With his head forced back awkwardly against the stone, Fletcher could see several young possessed scrambling monkey-fashion over the stained glass windows, painting them over with sticky black fluid. A dark shape moved into his limited field of view.