A Blink of the Screen (8 page)

¹
Author’s note: Should have said comrade, shouldn’t I?

AND MIND THE MONOLITHS

B
ATH AND
W
EST
E
VENING
C
HRONICLE
,
1
A
PRIL 1978

Around the time this was written an Iron Age village was being reconstructed somewhere near Farnham in Dorset; I had contacts in the area, which wasn’t too far away from where I lived. People had been brought in to this new prehistoric settlement and were filmed going through the working day of Iron Age man, but rumours began that locals nearby were going in during the hours of darkness to flog fags and (if I remember correctly) soft lavatory paper to the ancient and rather desperate inmates. In no way can I vouch for the truth of this, but there seemed to be a vogue for this sort of thing and so, for a jobbing journalist, looking outwards through the pigeons, that was enough of a spark to start a fire. Wind yourself up to a sort of English music hall humour and away, boys and girls, you go
.

You can’t miss us, down here at the HTV Paleolithic Village. Well, you can, if you’re not careful. What you do is, you come up
past
the Yorkshire Television reconstructed hill-fort, turn left at the LWT Bronze Age encampment, go straight on past Southern TV’s Beaker Folk village, and we’re next door to the field where some poor bleeders are being paid by Granada to try to build Stonehenge.

It’s not a bad life, all things considered. There’s only me and Sid here now, ever since Ron and Amanda were lured off to Border Television’s Dark Age Settlement by the promise of not having to sleep in the same hut as the goats. Also old Tom Bowler left us last week: he said he didn’t mind being Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, except that when the original Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, wanted to get his head down after a hard day’s flintknapping he, Wuluk, Chief of the Saucer Folk, didn’t have a ruddy great 250 horsepower diesel generator roaring away outside his sodding sod hut hut. Or a bank of arclights in his bedroom.

I can’t say I mind that. What keeps me awake are the thuds and abruptly cut-off screams from next door every time a monolith falls over.

Still it’s not too bad. I can put a pretty good edge on a flint, even if I say it myself, and next week it’s our turn to go hunting. There’s been a bit of a stink over this hunting business ever since the Granada lot came back with a side of best beef and three chickens with their giblets in a plastic bag. I thought that was a bit odd, and I said as much to Sid.

Mind you, Sid’s an old hand at this business. He did a year on the Sussex University Ancient Farm, then he wangled a place on the Radio Three Celtic Living Experiment, and then he did nine months being paid to reconstruct Silbury Hill. He can knock out a copper bracelet quick as a wink, can Sid, and when it comes to hunting, he just nips over to the nearest farm and pinches a cow.

The TV types have never rumbled him; we hardly see them now, what with there being no bathrooms in the Paleolithic and the
midden
right outside the hut and everything – they just stay on the main road and use a long lens.

Where I disagree with Sid, though, is over this flogging of fags to the other villages. I looked at his straw mattress the other day and it’s stuffed with Benson and Hedges, toothpaste, shampoos, and rolls of soft toilet paper. I don’t think it’s in the spirit of the thing, but Sid said trading was very important in the olden days, and anyway, he can get a quid for a roll of Andrex down at the Bronze Lake Village.

What? Oh, that was just that lot next door again. They’ve found 27 different ways Stonehenge couldn’t possibly have been built. No, I shouldn’t go and look, if I was you. They’ve already lost fifteen villagers, three cameramen, and the
Blue Peter
outside broadcast unit.

That site over there? The empty one with the pond? Oh, that’s the Irish Television’s Jurassic Experiment. Yes, I know it’s pretty difficult to find actors 30 foot tall with scaly skins – I suppose they’ll have to, you know, rig up some sort of pantomime horses, only dinosaurs, if you see what I mean. They
had
to go back to the Jurassic, all the other periods have already been pinched by other companies—

My word! That was a heavy one! Nearly brought the hut down!

It was a whole trilithon went over that time. Oh – it’s okay, all it got was a sociologist. Last winter, when we couldn’t go hunting, a whole research team from Keele University disappeared in very mysterious circumstances, nudge nudge, so take my tip and refuse any sausages you get offered by the Bronze Age lot.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just got to do a bit of pottery …

NOTE:
This was followed by a photograph of an ancient-style tent village with arrows and the following captions:

‘Anyone see what I did with my library book?’

‘Gosh, rat soup, my favourite.’

‘Of course the goat is angry. You’re sitting in her seat.’

‘Hey, I’ve invented a druid-yourself kit.’

‘Only another five months, three weeks, four days to go.’

‘After you with the midden.’

‘What I miss most is
Points West
.’

THE HIGH MEGGAS

1986

The short story evolved into
The Long Earth. The High Meggas
was rather a doodle at first, something to do after I had sent
The Colour of Magic
to my then publishers, Colin Smythe. I could visualize it minutely and wanted to begin with a series of short stories. I was still playing with the ideas when
The Colour of Magic
was published and inexplicably became very popular, far more successful than any of my previous books
.

And in those circumstances, what is a humble jobbing author supposed to do? The basis of
The Light Fantastic
was already dancing in my mind and gathering momentum and so with some reluctance I put
The High Meggas,
which I had previously thought would one day make the foundation to a great series, under wraps until it was unearthed a few years ago over quail’s eggs at a literary dinner attended by Ralph Vicinanza, my American agent, and Rob Wilkins. My enthusiasm was rekindled and after discussing the ideas with Steve Baxter, who I have always considered to be the UK’s finest writer of hard SF, a new journey began
.

Frankly I’m glad we did it this way; besides it was a lot more fun
.

They said that Daniel Boone would pull up and move on if he could see the smoke from another man’s fire. Compared with Larry Linsay, Boone was pathologically gregarious. There was someone else on this world.
His
world. It was like finding a fingernail in your soup. It irked. It made the small hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

Linsay had rigged an array of antennae in the pines at the top of the rise. In the virgin wavebands of this world the tiny blip of an arrival was crystal clear; it stood out on the miniature displays like an Everest among the background molehills. Only one type of person would come up this far into the high meggas. The gumment. In Linsay’s vocabulary the word was as pregnant with meaning as some of the old Chinese words that expressed a whole stream of thought. It meant regulations, and taxes, and questions, and interference. Other people. It had to be the gumment because it took money to get into the high meggas, and generally it was the sort of money that only the gumment could muster. Besides, people didn’t like it this far out, where the tuning had to be so fine and it took several weeks of real-time travel to get to the next human being. People didn’t like being that far from people. But there were other reasons. Things started to be
different
in the high meggas.

There was another blip.
Two
people. Linsay began to feel crowded.

They had to be from Forward Base. Linsay was annoyed – he went to Forward Base, they didn’t come to him. Hard to think of any reason that would bring them up here. He imagined them looking around in astonishment, unable to find him. The third rule of survival up here was: keep away from your point of arrival.

He took a bearing to make sure, picked up the rifle that leaned against his chart table, and set off through the scrub. Any watcher
would
have noticed how Linsay kept to shaded areas, broke cover only when he had to and broke cover fast. But there wasn’t any watcher. If there had been, Linsay would be creeping up behind him.

People got the wrong idea about Robinson Crusoe. The popular image was of a jolly but determined man, heavily into goatskin underwear and manumission. But someone at Forward Base had loaned Linsay an old, battered copy of the book. Robinson Crusoe was on his island for over twenty-six years, Linsay learned, and had spent most of the time building stockades. Linsay approved of this: the man obviously had his head screwed on right.

It was late summer here in what was approximately southern France, although the Fist had made such a mess of the coastline that it was barely recognizable. Here there were no longer just the spatter craters that had been such a feature a few tens of Earths back. Up here the Fist had raked across Europe and western Asia, sending major fragments barrelling towards the very core in tongues of plasma. There must have been several years of winter before the atmosphere dropped most of the dust. When it cleared, the seasons were all wrong. The colander that was Europe was slightly nearer the new Equator, the Earth had developed a wobble, and the ice caps were spreading fast.

Mankind, however, was learning about Agriculture at the time and failed to notice. A pack of rantelopes watched Linsay cautiously. He didn’t hunt on this Earth – it was easy enough to hop back one for that – but all the same they weren’t entirely at ease. The winter following the Fist hadn’t wiped out all the primates, and some baboons in these parts were mean hunters.

The bull baboon he’d christened Big Yin watched him from his perch on a rock. Linsay waved at him cheerfully. Big Yin had seen the rifle. He didn’t wave back.

The man was crawling cautiously behind the inadequate cover of an outcrop of fused glass. He moved very much like a man who’d got his ideas about stealth from watching adventure films. He was holding a small handgun. It didn’t look as though it had much stopping power, but Linsay didn’t approve.

He let off a shot that nicked the rock a few feet from the man’s head.

‘Throw the gun this way,’ he suggested.

He watched shock, panic and resignation chase one another across the man’s face, as it scanned the thicket of anonymous bushes that had just spoken.

‘The gun,’ he repeated. He could make out the detail of the man’s belt. Gumment issue, of course, but light duty. That meant he could only have come up from Forward Base.

‘Okay, bush,’ said the man. He tossed the gun in Linsay’s general direction and slowly moved his hands …

A sliver of rock nicked his ear as another round hit the glassy boulder beside him.

‘The belt, too,’ said the bush.

‘You’re Larry Linsay,’ said the man. ‘They said you were stone paranoid – no offence, you understand.’

‘None taken. Move those hands real careful now.’

The hands moved real careful. ‘You don’t know me, I guess we never met. I’m Joshua Valienté. Security man. From Forward Base, you know?’

He flinched as Linsay appeared only a few feet away. Approaching someone by movin’ up towards them through an adjacent world was an old trick, but it never failed to disconcert.

Valienté found himself looking up into a pair of grey-blue eyes that were entirely without mercy. This bastard’d really shoot, he told himself. Don’t even look at your own gun. He’d really shoot you, up
here
where no one else will ever come. He wouldn’t even have to bury the body.

‘Prove it,’ said Linsay.

Valienté shrugged what he hoped was an unaggressive shrug. ‘I can’t.’

‘All good security men carry little plastic cards,’ said Linsay. ‘They have little pictures of themselves in case they forget what they look like.’