Five to Twelve (8 page)

Poor, proud little dom. Magnificent of body but small of spirit. No talent for dying. Only a certain, comfortable
talent for living. He tried to smile, but there was a smile already frozen on his face.

The stars briefly extinguished themselves—a first and dreadful warning. He groped through the darkness that was now darker than night for the jet control. He found it, but he couldn’t hold it. He could only tap it feebly. It was enough.

He began to fall back through the sky, the rush of air cutting his face and body as if he were falling into a fountain of knives. At seven thousand feet his voice returned and he could scream, creating a high column of sound that rode wildly down the night.

It was a scream of pain and pleasure. For the pain gave pleasure as feeling tore back into his body, the unendurable agony of resurrection.

He passed the five thousand level, where Juno cruised frantically, waiting for him. Searching the sky, she saw his downward track against the Milky Way and jetted towards him, switching her headlight on and signalling frantically.

He didn’t notice her. He was hypnotized now by the fiery circle of Stonehenge rushing up through the cosmos as if eager to touch him. How delightful to dive clean into that tiny central point that was the bonfire and send a shower of sparks and scattered life force over all the guests who were celebrating idiocy in the age of idiocy.

But at one thousand feet he decided to forego the pleasure. There was yet, perhaps, some living to be done. There was yet, perhaps, some purpose to be found—even if only a more artistic way of dying.

He hit the control once more and retro-jetted at full thrust. The roar of air about him became no more than a loud rushing, the rushing became a whisper so that he could hear again the complaining whistle of the jets. He had been
falling at such a speed that full retro-thrust only saved him by a hundred feet from hurtling through the transparent tepee and hitting one of the megaliths. He bounced up again like a cork, remembering Juno.

They rendezvoused at three thousand feet, two dull green glow-worms who recognized each other in a way that neither could understand.

Dion stabilized. Juno jetted close.

“Psycho!” she sobbed. “Deadhead! Fool!”

“Medieval fool,” he conceded. “The joke is on both of us. They call it life.”

“Oh, Dion, you hazy crazy word juggler! Why did you do it? I nearly died for you.”

He laughed. “I nearly died for myself… It’s a very cold champagne that God serves on the ceiling, shrivel-womb. You should try it some time. There comes an interesting moment when the stars go dark.”

“I’ll never jet with you again.”

Dion was enjoying himself. “You will. Where I lead, you’ll do your tiny dom-best to follow. And each time you fail, you will get a little nearer to understanding the difference between men and women. Message ends.”

Juno was silent for a moment or two. Then she said: “Let’s touch down at Reception. They must have radar-tracked you. They’ll wonder what kind of oddball bounces against the sky.”

“Let them wonder,” he retorted equably. “And if anyone should ask, say: ‘Dion Quern, master of nothing, has briefly surveyed his kingdom… Have you ever tasted your own frozen blood?’”

“My dear one,” said Juno helplessly. “Sometimes, I even think I understand.”

Dion looked below him, at the hectic, illuminated circle
round Stonehenge and then at the sea of darkness that covered the featureless plain.

“Reception can wait,” he said. “There will be time enough to entertain Victoria of England with the social inanities of our age. But for five minutes, wench, you can lie with your legs open behind a thorn hedge like any honest slut would have done in the last two millennia. Then you, too, can taste the taste of frozen blood.”

Juno, glancing towards Stonehenge, saw the royal standard break in a spotlight glare. She opened her mouth, but no sound came. Dom and harlot, Dion was pleased to note, were at war with each other. The victory was a foregone conclusion.

Silently, almost submissively, Juno jetted down into the darkness.

T
HE
Hallowe’en party which had threatened to hit an all-time nadir in the international social limbo had, in fact, turned out to be quite memorable. Victoria the Second delicately adjusted the bandage on her head as she sipped her iced Polish white spirit and surveyed the general wreckage with some satisfaction.

Great flaps of metal foil, torn from the megaliths, rustled complainingly in the light breeze. Strips of transpex drifted through the air like half-materialized ghosts. A couple of dead white cocks glared malevolently at each other on the now frosty ground; and somewhere in the outer darkness a few traumatized sports and wounded Peace Officers were drinking and singing themselves into oblivion. The Russian ambassador had retreated into hysterics, the European Proconsul had been carried off and doubtless raped by the pirates, the prime minister had a broken arm and a laser burn on her breast, and Victoria herself had been hit by a falling broomstick… Yes, it had been a memorable occasion.

Victoria had not yet received the casualty list; but there could hardly have been more than a dozen absolute deaths and perhaps four or five temporary deaths. The surgeons were already at work in the resuscitation unit; so it should not be long before a few lucky Peace Officers and less lucky pirates received the resurrection and the life.

At one stage it had seemed a cast titanium certainty that
the party would never jet. The professional witches hired for the occasion had produced nothing more shattering than the ritual defloration of an infra virgin by six Happyland-inspired warlock zombies, a group hypnosis that was less spectacular than the cabaret at the old Cafe Royal, the sacrifice of a goat and two cocks, and a ninety foot tri-di projection of Lucifer taking dreary liberties with an old-fashioned nun.

The beer was good. So were the black sausages, the ox blood cocktails, the corps de ballet and the gladiators who had been bribed to fight to a temporary death. But, somehow, the whole thing had begun to fade.

Until, at midnight, when the programmed thunder and lightning had finished, the pirates came jetting down from the black sky with laser guns in their hands and sportive dreams of destruction in their retarded I.Q.’s.

Victoria was delighted by the diversion. Left to her own devices, she would have knighted every single one of them. However, the conventions had to be observed—particularly when four of the intruders swooped on the European Proconsul, scooped her up in a large fishing net just as she was sampling the barbecued black cat, and zoomed up into the night sky again for a destination unknown.

It had been quite an amusing sight. The pirates had kept perfect formation, the net had been cast expertly; and, before she realized what was happening, Josephine found herself swinging crazily at five hundred feet, her life depending on the formation jetting of the four grade one aspirants who each held a corner of the net.

Since the abduction clearly came under the heading of diplomatic incidents, Victoria was reluctantly compelled to do something about it. In response to her signal, the sovereign’s escort—which on this occasion happened to be
a squadron of life Guards—got itself airborne and in hot pursuit.

But by that time, the pirates had mounted the second phase of their attack. Their laser beams cut the high transparent tepee into a mad carnival of whipping strips of trans-pex. At least a couple of the pirates, caught in the contorting tentacles of plastic, were snatched out of the sky and dashed to destruction against the ancient columns of stone.

By that time, even the Peace Corps had realized that this was not just another of Victoria’s surprise diversions. One by one, the Peace Officers who had come as guests sped to the Reception area, snatched their jet packs and duty accoutrements and became airborne.

At first, the attack on Victoria’s Hallowe’en party looked as if it might have been the impractical joke of a few itinerant sports. But clearly it wasn’t. As more than fifty of them jetted down in disciplined formation, it became evident that the whole thing had been planned very carefully.

Juno was one of the first Peace Officers to get herself into the air. Dion watched her go with irritating bewilderment. One impulse goaded him to follow her, to see that she came to no harm. Another impulse held him back, persuading him to let the dom stew in her own crisis. Besides, these boyos from the fourth dimension were hotting up what had been a very cold piece of social discomfort.

By the time he had disposed of the second impulse, Juno had already departed and there were other things to think about. Particularly when a surprisingly small Guards officer fell out of the sky and inconsiderately died almost at his very feet.

She had such a young face—probably she was no more than thirty-five or forty. With multiple fractures in legs,
arms and pelvis, she lay on the ground, a tiny extinguished glow-worm.

Dion cradled her head in his arms. She was hurt in too many places to feel pain. But an intense weariness came over her childlike features.

She uttered only six words before she died.

“Love me,” she said. “Love me! Love me!”

Then the body became slack and she was just another dead dom.

He picked her up, oblivious of the general pandemonium, and carried her out of the circle of light, away from the grotesque null-comedies that were being played around the megaliths of Stonehenge, to a quiet grassy hollow where there was nothing but frost and stars.

He laid her down very gently and straightened the shattered limbs. Then he sat there silently for a while, remembering the taste of frozen blood, thinking how easy it was to stifle the thin warm worm of life.

Presently, he kissed her already cold forehead and was guiltily pleased to find that he had bathed it in tears.

He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. There was only the disquieting notion that, dom though she was, she never had been an enemy. She had been nothing more than a sad little machine.

But even machines are beautiful. And she had been a very beautiful machine.

He loved her. It was easy to love someone you had never known. Someone with whom you would never make love. Someone whom you could never hate, despise or grow tired of. It was easy—and heartbreaking.

By the time he got back to the floodlit group of stones, the attack was over, the wounded and the temporarily dead were being treated, and the absolute dead had been removed.
Victoria looked very regal—and pleased with herself—in the bandage that covered her broomstick bruise.

There was no sign of Juno. Dion inspected the party debris, then worked his way through the casualty treatment area and the resuscitation unit that had obviously jetted down only a short time before.

Still no sign of Juno.

Not that he was disturbed, of course. By this time, no doubt, like many other Peace Officers who were now jetting back in ones and twos, she had abandoned pursuit of the stragglers and was returning to Stonehenge.

On the other hand, she might have collected a laser burn for her trouble and homed on the nearest domdoc for a shot or two before returning to get a full fix. Not that he cared… Much…

Nevertheless, by the time another dozen Peace Officers had touched down, he found himself walking to Reception to collect his jet pack.

He had Reception put out a call for Juno while he was switching gas tanks. Then, when there was no response, he lifted. Looking for her would be about as easy as looking for a black beetle in the Channel Tunnel. But, Stopes, it was better than fabricating zero.

Besides, the party was over. And all the remaining marionettes were drunk, dead, wounded or very tired. Apart from the fracas, it hadn’t been much of a party.

It hadn’t even been much of anything at all, he reflected as he soared above the megaliths and switched his headlight on to full power. The best happenings had happened before the event. He remembered vividly his few frozen minutes on the ceiling when the stars danced and then went dark. He remembered also Juno’s oddly submissive reactions afterwards.

He savoured the recollections. Then he thrust forward at full power and swept away from Stonehenge, rising slowly in ever-increasing spirals. The night—what was left of it—was still crystal clear. The stars were now dancing a saraband.

D
ION
had lost all sense of time. He might have been in the air minutes, hours or since the beginning of the world—if, in fact, there ever had been any world. If it had all not been some grotty fragment of a figment, some loose connection in the solitary nocturnal hysteria of a landlocked, airborne flying fish.

He tried to remember what he was supposed to be doing. Assuming always that there was something he was supposed to be doing. Which was a big assumption…

He tried to send himself a message. Finally, he made it. He spoke very quietly and distinctly to his brain; and his brain patiently unscrambled the message, considered it for a while, then reluctantly relayed it to the eye muscles.

Dion looked at his wrist altimeter. It was a monumental achievement. The wrist altimeter said six thousand feet.

He was cold and he was short of air, and the combination—after his previous experience—was worse than drinking surgical spirit.

There was some further debate with his brain. The discussion was a shade metaphysical; but both parties were fairly reasonable. In the end, they decided to issue a joint communiqué. It was directed to Dion’s semi-frozen hands.

They were rebellious. But, eventually, they acquiesced. Fingers closed stiffly on the jet control. Dion drifted obliquely and crazily down to seven hundred feet.

And recovered his wits.

It took time, but he recovered his wits. And while he was recovering them he jetted gently along on a collision course with destiny.

God, or whatever blank-faced computer runs the fancy fading programme of the cosmos, must have displayed a great sense of humour and/or a total disregard for the laws of probability. Or maybe He/She/It was simply intrigued by Dion Quern.