The Triple Goddess (134 page)

Then the tracking station jumped to life, beeping and flashing.

So fierce was Rupert Vignoles 0281V’s devotion to Lassie that, so as not to miss the faintest whimper of the receiver, Vignoles moved a camp bed into the garden shed, where he spent his evenings and cooked his meal on a paraffin stove, and stayed up later than he should. He hung a sign on the door forbidding entrance to unauthorized persons—by which he meant his mother—and disclaiming responsibility for the electrocution of anyone who was reckless enough to trespass on his domain; by which he also meant his mother, whom he loved only second to his dog.

When the satellite’s solar-powered batteries began to fail after relaying the first fuzzy images of the meteorites on the old black-and-white Pye television, 0281V kicked the structure of the tracking assembly and succeeded in altering the satellite’s course so that it was swept along in the meteorites’ slipstream and able to conserve energy. Now that he was generating enough power to transmit pictures and an ever-strengthening signal, Lassie’s “owner” was astounded by the clarity of the photographs that he woofed back to Sidcup, Earth. Vignoles could almost hear him panting.

Lassie was coming home!

But in his excitement 0281V made a mistake. One starry night, stoked with pride and several glasses of his mother’s Stone’s Original Green Ginger Wine (sweet, hint of spice), mixed half and half with the same of Crabbie’s (fruity, herbal), Rupert Vignoles inadvertently broadcast Lassie’s coordinates to the world, using a hard-wired tin cup as a transmitter, when boasting about his pet to a divorced mother of three in Fairbanks, Alaska, who had picked him up on her ham radio and got in touch to say that she had always wanted to visit Sidcup, but could not afford the fare.

At Central’s Department of Human Bondage, a disgruntled Chief Operator Ian “Iron Fist” Glover 7171C was called at one o’clock in the morning from a Murphy bed in his office and the embrace of a male intern, Pecto Mussellini 4013P, to listen to a replay of the transmission; following which Vignoles was traced, by a much larger and much more intelligent but much less winsome satellite than Lassie, to the Sidcup garden shed.

Plucked from the arms of his weeping mother at the shed door—for his parent remained respectful to the last of her son’s stricture regarding his privacy—Vignoles 0281V was taken by State police to the “Bowels”, or Central’s London debriefing centre, formerly the Elephant & Castle tube station. There Ian “Iron Fist” Glover 7171C, in his dressing-gown, extracted a full confession with the aid of a simple but effective invasive contraption that tap-danced on the internal organs while playing Irving Berlin’s
Puttin’ on the Ritz
.

After returning to an empty office, and checking his messages to learn that a miffed Pecto Mussellini 4013P had departed to console himself elsewhere for Ian interruptus, a now unable-to-sleep Chief Operator Glover, having been advised on his mobile that Vignoles was still alive, ordered his gonads connected to enough volts to keep Lassie howling for a century; and sent a communication to another youth, Florian Montacute 9357P, an epicene contrast to Pecto Mussellini whom Glover had encountered while on holiday on Uranus, offering him a job as his new intern.

The following morning the expired Rupert Vignoles 0281V was turned over to the Department of the Environment, where he was shredded, bagged, and tagged for delivery to his mother with Central’s compliments and a suggestion that she recycle the contents as fertilizer on her rose beds.

Now that Central’s machine had taken over from such inspired amateurs as Madame Flahita and Rupert Vignoles, a committee of Central’s most over-qualified science laureates signed a statement attesting to their finding that: “At some supervening point either sooner or later, the impact of so many cluster-condensed masses as are anticipated to make landfall within a given area inside the Earth’s circumference, such area being defined as excluding only that other area that lies outside it, and which shall also enter those areas at present given over to water both saline and fresh, will effectively negate the planet Earth’s viability, along with that of all other environments that the Central State is cognizant of that it either has already, or could now or in the not too distant future, have under its control, in offering the prospect of constituting a reliable ongoing post-calamity-situation domicile for a Human Race that, to all intents and purposes, will no longer be in need of accommodation and means of subsistence for reason that it will no longer exist.”

‘Or, more poetically,’ said Ian “Iron Fist” Glover 7171C to himself, as he wept over two pictures of Pecto Musselini that he carried in his trouser back pockets, of the pair (Ian and Pecto) on the beach at Central’s R&R atoll, Shakei-Tabout...quoting
Cymbeline…
‘Golden lads and girls all must, |As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.’

Ian had further reason for despondency: not only had Pecto advised him by text message that he had accepted another internal job directly underneath Iron Fist’s immediate superior, Bruce Nance 6978B, replacing Pecto’s friend, Cupid Stunt 0291P, who was having sexuality issues; but Florian Montacute 9357P had turned Iron Fist down in favouring a much more senior officer, an A Class, with his favours; and Ian, who instead of feeling like an iron fist in an iron glove was now feeling like a velvet glove without a glove, on account of his having been assigned a distinctly un-golden girl intern from the office pool; which meant that Iron Fist was not going to get his sooty chimney swept for the unforeseeable future, and maybe never would again.

Central, intent upon preventing outbreaks of dole and dissipation, issued an injunction forbidding Dionysian revels and drug-induced comas. People were expected to maintain a Cromwellian sobriety, and, to keep them busy and productive, it was announced that each was to be assigned a role in a massive cooperative effort to find a panacea for oblivion. Everyone was charged with coming up with at least one idea, and entering the details on a form, from the rich retired Central officers who were holed up in their second and third homes on private beach-in-space platforms, to the geriatrics in extraterrestrial colonies where they had been sent to reduce overpopulation.

No one was exempt. Even the convicts and felons on far-off stars, who were digging up rocks containing the minerals of which Earth had been depleted, were roped in, harder than they already were.

Submissions were processed by the Department of Desiderata, which was under the aegis of Inman Tray 9230, newly promoted from B to A because his job was so more important than before, when there was so much less to desiderate. Executive secretary Mercedes Stamp 2020K’s staff, increased from fifty to a thousand, assigned each incoming form a reference number, before passing them to Central’s Chief of Research Ida Checkitt 7012C’s ten thousand-strong Indian subcontinent outsource network, for processing and classification.

Those premises that seemed budding with the most promise were to be dispatched to Inman Tray 9230A’s in-trays, for the Department of Desiderata’s assessment as to whether they might bear fruit.

A weary Ida Checkitt went home every night and informed her partner that, potentially fruitful or not, every grape would be a raisin by the time it got passed up the line, and they would be toast; and Checkitt’s partner, Random Pickett 0548E told Ida that she smelled of curry; and Checkitt told Pickett that she was not surprised, because she spent her whole day talking to members of her work force in Bombay and Calcutta whose numerics, after their names had been subtracted from them because they were so long that they slowed down the computers, ran to fifteen decimal places; and that if she had to expand her outsource network by one more person she was going to have to assign him the sixteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, Π, or π, or pi, being the mathematical symbol denoting the value of the circumference of a circle to its diameter; which, last time Checkitt checked, was approximately 3.141592653589793 and counting….

So far it was a very one-sided Star Wars, and amongst the professionals the scientists, flummoxed, spouted saliva and jargon, and fogged their glasses with frustration. They knew of no material with which they might construct an Achillean shield to ward off the meteorites; no engines or lasers strong enough to repel them; or bombard them like giant kidney stones; no means of setting up a battle amongst them, as Medea did to help Jason, and Athena, Cadmus, by throwing the rock that started a fight to the death amongst the warriors that sprang from sowing the dragon’s teeth; no alternative orbit, or stratospheric zone, out of their path into which Earth might be propelled by jet- or rocket-powered thrusters. There was no known chemical formula produceable in sufficiently concentrated quantity to dissolve them; no known medicine that would quell them; no cryogenic means of freezing them to a standstill.

Every atomic theory of fusion and fission from Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Teller onwards was re-examined, in the hope of coming across something that had been overlooked. Designs for giant interceptors equipped with optical electronics to deliver molecule-busting rays; hydra-headed hydrogen bombs; factory-sized magnetic resonance emitters; search-and-destroy systems capable of pinpointing everything from missiles to the armaments, personnel, pocket handkerchiefs, and inhalers of the smallest terrorist cells; prototypes, and rejected patents; miscellaneous gimmicks, gismos, and gadgets; a suggestion that a thousand-person orchestra try to lull them to sleep with a rendition of Brahms’s Lullaby; another proposing scaring them away by playing the Sex Pistols punk rock at extra mega-volume...none of these or even a combination thereof was considered likely to work against so large and dense an assault, or even feasible to bring to bear.

Though it caused a brief stir at Central, the possibility of cloning a community of Humans—a Masonic handshake by-invitation-only private party community of As, Bs, and Cs—by extracting pluripotent stem cells from their own blastocysts, and shooting them to Never Never Land in capsules, was rejected as impractical on the grounds of impossibility.

Despite an ecstatic moment on the part of estate agents, after it was rumoured that the Red Planet, Mars, might be outside the scope of the onslaught, their hopes for a massive escalation in prices for airquake-proof Martian condominiums, and an increase in lease-to-own purchases, were dashed.

Innumerable individuals professed or confessed or alleged that they had, or thought they had, or thought they had the potential to have, extraordinary powers over natural and unnatural forces, and of divination. Magic and spells were dug out and written and shouted and sung and muttered by all denominations and types of magus and magician—black or white or multi-coloured magic, what did it matter? and those skilled in gramarye: wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, necromancers, shamans, conjurors; enchantresses, pythonesses, fairy godmothers, and those who, like
Macbeth
’s Second Witch, understood that “B
y the pricking of my thumbs, |Something wicked this way comes”;
seers, soothsayers, sibyls, savants, prophets, psychics, mediums, mystics, clairvoyants, and fortune-tellers; druids, and obeah men and women; plus those who claimed to have connections with afreets, marids, jinn, and peris.

It seemed that, come the end of the world, when the cows were in the byre, and the chickens had come home to roost, and all was done and dusted, and cut and dried, and put to bed, for the last time, no normal folk would have been affected.

Units under the direction of Homer Farfrae 2829B took the depositions of the most unlikely sources, with orders to be patient with them, and put up with their outlandish behaviour. Central dispensations and pardons, and permits, for the public sacrificing of goats, chickens, and sheep, even Human beings, were handed out like sweets to children.

Another team was sent to the Duke Humfrey’s Library reading room in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, charged with calling up mediaeval manuals from the stacks, and making a note of ancient medical prescriptive compounds and components, the “
inscriptions” comprising
a basis, or chief ingredient intended to cure,
curare
; an adjuvant to assist its action and make it cure quickly,
cito
; a corrective to prevent or lessen any undesirable effect,
tuto
; a vehicle or excipient to make it suitable for administration, even pleasant,
jucunde
, to the patient—anything and
everything that they might come across that might be cobbled together or doctored or cut-and-pasted or translated or updated into anything resembling relevance to the matter in hand.

Rewards were offered for anything, anything at all, that might prove efficacious in reasoning with, placating, appealing to, or shooing off the great lapidary menace. Advertisements went out for exorcists, practitioners of the occult arts, night-hags, and lamias. Leaflets were circulated at witches’ covens, offering substantial fees for spells, incantations, abracadabras, bewitchments, curses, hexes, runes, hocus-pocuses, mumbo jumbos, and fee faw fums. Voodoo, hoodoo, jadoo…no category was ignored or dismissed.

Diviners, augurers, visionaries, and prognosticators; compilers of almanacs and astrometeorological and astrological forecasts; bibliomancers, or those who foretold the future by interpreting a randomly chosen passage from a book; chiromancers, or palmists; geomancers, or diviners from handfuls of earth; psychomancers and necromancers, or those who conjured or communicated with spirits and the dead; gyromancers, or those who divined by walking around a marked circle until they fell down from dizziness; sortilegers, or those whose predictions came from a card or another item drawn at hazard, or by casting lots; oneiromancers, or the readers of dreams; readers of avian auspices and omens and portents; funfair and boardwalk fortune-tellers—all were courted and encouraged to apply themselves to their specialties with vigour and vim.