by Tom Holt
‘Come in.’
Rather to Staff ’s surprise, the door opened easily. He blinked.
It wasn’t quite the way he’d expected it to be. For one thing, it was clean. Cleaner, in fact, than the rest of the building. It was newly decorated. In one corner there was a highly advanced fax machine, flickering quietly, bringing up its lunch, while in the other stood a computer terminal which looked like the sort of thing George Lucas would have dreamed up if possessed by devils. There was also, Staff noticed, a substantial potted plant. Real, not plastic.
‘It’s because we’re separately funded,’ said a voice behind him. ‘The benefits of decentralisation and all that. You’re Chief of Staff, aren’t you?’
The figure standing behind him was almost as disconcerting as the environment. It looked young, vibrant, full of energy. More amazing still, it looked like it was capable of enjoying itself.
‘You’re . . .’ Staff said. The figure grinned.
‘My name’s Ganger. We haven’t actually met, but it’s my job to know things.’
By way of a disorienting remark, said Staff’s soul to any part of his brain that happened to be listening, that’s got to be in the running with Are you sure you’re feeling all right? and Excuse me, there’s a bomb inside this banana. Throwing people off balance was probably part of the job, too. Staff forced himself to relax.
‘Sorry to barge in like this,’ he said, ‘but have you got a moment?’
Ganger nodded. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Carol, I’ll be engaged in the back office. Anyone calls, take a message.’
Staff’s head swivelled like a windmill and he caught sight of a blonde head between two earphones. Laid-back nonchalance is all very well but there are limits.
‘You don’t mean to say,’ he whispered, ‘you’ve actually got a secretary?’
‘Two,’ Ganger replied, and Staff gave up the struggle. This was the sort of man who had a My-other-car’s-a-Porsche sticker in the back window of his Maserati. ‘Come with me. Coffee?’
Staff made a little noise without opening his lips. ‘I suppose your secretary will bring it through to us?’
Ganger raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, yes,’ he said.
‘One of your two secretaries?’
‘That’s it. If that’s all right with you, that is.’
‘That’s fine,’ said Staff. ‘I think I’ve come to the right place.’
It seemed like a very long walk through to the back office, until Staff realised that it was the effort of walking through the carpet. You could easily lose a Mayan city in the pile and never know it.
‘So what can we do for you?’ Ganger said, waving his arm at a chair. Staff looked at him carefully. Perhaps it was an invitation to sit on it, but it seemed unlikely. It had the appearance of the sort of thing you pay money just to look at.
‘Sit down,’ said Ganger, ‘please. We don’t stand on ceremony here.’
Maybe not, but you sure as hell sit on luxury. Staff sat back, panicked for a moment until he got his bearings again, and cleared his mind.
‘Actually,’ he began to say, ‘all it was . . .’
His lips froze. Ganger followed his line of sight and raised an eyebrow.
‘It’s a photocopier,’ he said. ‘You know, you put pieces of paper in one end . . .’
‘I’m sorry,’ Staff muttered. ‘Like I was saying, I’m in a bit of a quandary, and I thought, you know, a fresh angle on the problem . . .’
Ganger nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Do you advertise or do you go to an agency? Good question.’
‘Look . . .’ Staff tried to sit up, but the chair wouldn’t let him. He struggled. Self-esteem wasn’t the most significant part of his personality, but he was damned if he was going to end his career by slipping down the back of a chair.
‘How do I know all this?’ Ganger said. ‘Simple. It’s my job.’ He paused, then smiled gently. ‘Try straightening your back,’ he said. ‘It’ll push you forward out of the cushion.’
Staff did so, then he scowled. ‘You’re a . . .’
‘No, I’m not, actually,’ Ganger replied. ‘It’s possible to read mortal minds, of course, but not ours. Jamming devices, you know. Really, it’s just intuition and psychology.’
‘Oh.’
‘And microphones too, of course.’
‘Ah.’
The door opened, and a female person brought in a tray with two cups of coffee. With saucers. Saucers that matched. I’d honestly believe I’d died and gone to heaven, thought Staff . . .
‘Only that’s not possible in the circumstances,’ Ganger said, and laughed politely. ‘Thank you, I’m flattered. All it takes really is good taste and careful management.’
‘And separate funding.’
‘That helps, certainly.’ Ganger looked at him over his cup. ‘My money’s on an agency.’
‘Really?’
Ganger nodded. ‘Every time,’ he said. ‘Saves time, and in the long run money. Neither of which, if I’m right, you’ve got a great deal of.’
Staff tried unsuccessfully to balance his saucer on his knee, but the chair seemed to be breathing. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘And what do I tell the rest of the committee?’
Ganger looked surprised: probably a whole new experience . . .
‘Not at all,’ he said abruptly. ‘Things surprise me all the time. Who gives a toss what the committee thinks? Anyway,’ he added, ‘if you’re at all bothered about it, don’t tell them.’
‘But I’ve got to tell . . .’
‘Why?’
Staff was shocked; it was like being asked to justify breathing. Then the penny dropped. Different rules . . .
‘You tell me,’ he said.
TWO
Jane was not a naturally discontented person; or at least, that was what she’d always led herself to believe. It was just that there were certain things that she found hard to put up with. These things tended to change their shape depending on circumstances, just as clouds can sometimes be great fluffy dragons and sometimes wisps of low-quality cotton wool; sometimes it would be the plight of famine victims, sometimes it was the incredibly feckless way the stationery supplies were managed at work, and sometimes - quite often, and in point of fact, right now - it was the punctuality of the 42A bus that really managed to get to her. If there was a common factor, it was probably sloppiness.
The weather could do with sorting, too.
The British Nation, she said to herself, and its unique relationship with water: we either sail over it or stand under it. It took the Chinese, though, to invent the umbrella.
Since the 42A had patently been ambushed by the Hole in the Wall Gang, set on fire and abandoned somewhere further up the line, she decided to walk the mile from the office to the station. She splashed resolutely up the road, trying to avoid the larger puddles and speculating as to whether ditching fins and growing legs had been the evolutionary breakthrough everyone reckoned it was. She was coming to the conclusion that the really smart move would have been wings and floats, like the Spruce Goose, when she bumped into a fellow-pedestrian and nearly knocked him over into a puddle the size of Lake Van.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
The man, who was so sharply dressed you could have used him for open-heart surgery and, despite the lack of hat or umbrella, as dry as a bone, smiled at her.
‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘But you’re wrong about the wings, you know.’
Jane’s jaw flopped down like undercarriage. ‘What?’ she said.
‘Wings,’ the man replied, still smiling. ‘If the ancestors of mankind had grown wings, they wouldn’t have needed to develop manual dexterity and the use of tools. That way, their brains wouldn’t have adapted and become what they eventually did become. Result, you wouldn’t be a human, just a big pink bird, and the chimpanzees would be feeding you breadcrumbs in Trafalgar Square. Think about it.’
He nodded, side-stepped into the puddle (which divided on either side of his foot) and walked on,
leaving Jane standing in exactly the right spot to receive the full force of the spray when a 42A bus went neatly through the puddle a few moments later.
Staff was reading a letter.
It wasn’t easy going, because the script - and, indeed, the language - it was written in had died out centuries before; but he could understand that. The writer of the letter probably hadn’t found the need to put pen to paper for a very long time.
Dear Sir, it said, translated:
I have to inform you that I resign.You probably don’t remember me though I saw you once at one of those receptions over the top of someone’s head, you were shaking hands a lot and opening something. I’ve been raising the Sun for 777 years, 7 months and a week Thursday, but this is too much and I’ve had enough. It’s a scandal, that’s what it is, and they ought to do something about it. I have the honour to remain, etc.
Staff sighed, and put the letter face down on his desk.
They ought to do something about it.
Too right, he said to himself, and they will, just as soon as they find out who they are. And normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. And, naturally, we apologise for any inconvenience in the meantime.
‘Hell,’ he said aloud.
‘Sorry, wrong floor,’ said a voice from the other side of the desk. He looked up and saw Ganger, DA, sitting in the visitor’s chair, smiling and looking far more comfortable than he would have imagined possible.
‘It’s a knack,’ Ganger replied. ‘You just have to wriggle about until you find a part of the seat that fits.’
That’s what he does, Staff realised; he replies before you speak. Bloody irritating, of course, but certainly conducive to efficiency. Like a fax machine or something.
‘And?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Ganger replied, and pulled a sad face. It looked hopelessly incongruous. Ganger’s face was pretty exclusively smile-shaped. ‘The problem is, how?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Well,’ Ganger said, leaning back and folding his arms behind his head, ‘there you have it. In a nutshell.’
Staff capitulated. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Can we go back over that and fill in the blanks, please?’
The sad face melted into the usual grin, like grilled cheese. ‘You were thinking, Shit, there’s another irreplaceable employee gone and handed in his notice, and what the hell are we going to do now? I replied, “Yes”, because I’m buggered if I can think of anything either. But the fact remains that he’s got to be replaced, because otherwise it’s going to be all jam for the electric torch manufacturers but no fun for everybody else, plus you’ll have to pay the man in the moon double time and a half. The problem is, how do you fill a vacancy like that from the load of rubbish you’ve got available?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And there you have it,’ Ganger said, smirking, ‘in a nutshell.’
‘It’s very impressive, the way you do that.’
‘Flashy,’ Ganger replied. ‘Telepathy is like television or tele-anything. Looks good, but doesn’t actually help very much in the final analysis. Not,’ he added quickly, ‘that it really is telepathy; more a sort of partial insight. It comes in useful in our work.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Staff, leaning forward slightly. ‘I meant to ask you about that.’
Ganger hitched up one corner of his mouth into yet another isotope of his perpetual smile. ‘You’re quite right,’ he said. ‘Up to a point.’
Staff growled at him. He laughed.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘I’m on secondment. That means I have to play fair. That means you can trust me. Okay?’
‘Perhaps.’
Ganger stood up and walked to the window. ‘Good view you get from here,’ he said.
‘All the kingdoms of the earth,’ replied Staff absently. ‘Look, who exactly are your lot?’
Ganger continued to look out of the window. ‘Simple,’ he replied. ‘We’re them rather than us, but we’re on your side really. Is that enough?’
‘No.’
‘Okay.We’re a department, same as all the other departments, but we’re pretty well autonomous within the quite strict confines of our brief. And the head of our department gets abjured a lot at christenings.’
Staff nodded. ‘And all his works?’
‘Right on,’ Ganger replied. ‘Also his pomps, not that he’s got any really. Not in the last five years, at any rate.’
‘Five years?’ Staff raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s so special about . . . ?’
‘We got put out to tender,’ Ganger replied. ‘We were the guinea-pig, you see. Five years ago, we were the most hopelessly inefficient department in the whole set up . . .’
‘Surely not?’
The back of Ganger’s head nodded. ‘Straight up. Hopelessly overstaffed, but undermanned at the same time. Work backing up, souls not getting processed, furnaces still powered by expensive, ozone-unfriendly sulphur, and worst of all, costing an absolute fortune. Really, the whole system was on the point of collapse. In fact, there were those who reckoned it had collapsed years before, only in the nature of things nobody had noticed.’
Staff picked up a pencil and started to fidget with it nervously. ‘Nobody told me,’ he said.
‘Didn’t they?’ Ganger leaned on the window-sill and swayed slightly. ‘I’m not in the least surprised. Not something they’d want you to find out about, really. Anyway, they reckoned that since nothing they could do could possibly make things worse, they’d try an experiment and put the whole operation in the hands of outside contractors. My lot got the contract, and since then . . . Well, you can judge for yourself.’
There was a silence, during which you could have counted up to seven comfortably, and ten if you gabbled a bit. ‘Then you’re not . . . ?’
‘Qualified?’ Ganger laughed. ‘Oh yes, we’re all qualified. I’m not a mortal, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘But if you’re not a mortal, then you must be . . .’ Staff ’s voice trickled away, like the last drops of water from a turned-off hose. The back of Ganger’s head shook.
‘Not necessarily,’ he replied. ‘Common misconception, that. Most of us are left over from the previous systems, but . . .’
‘Previous systems?’
‘Ancestor worship,’ Ganger explained. ‘Classical mythology. Odin and Thor. There’s one chap works in Accounts who used to be Osiris, or is it Anubis? Odd sort of bloke, but in his line of work it’s actually an advantage to have the head of a jackal. Me, though, I’m from Philosophy.’
‘Philosophy?’
‘Absolutely,’ replied Ganger, with a hint of pride in his voice. ‘Personification of an abstract concept. I’m a child of late nineteenth-century German neo-nihilism. One of Nietzsche’s gentlemen, you might almost say.’ He laughed briefly at his own joke. ‘Sorry, I’m drifting away from the point rather, aren’t I? What I was going to say is that in our department, we do have a few members of staff who were originally mortals.’
Staff tried to find an appropriate word, or at least a noise, but there wasn’t one. Instead, the room was filled with the noise of a jaw dropping.
‘I have that effect on people sometimes,’ Ganger agreed. ‘I startled the wits out of a girl in the street earlier on. I want to talk to you about her later, actually.’
‘You use mortals? On official business?’
‘Ex-mortals,’ Ganger replied gently. ‘There are limits, naturally. But within those limits . . .’
‘You can’t,’ said Staff, controlling his anger with difficulty. ‘It’s unheard of. It’s against the rules. It’s . . . it’s . . .’
‘Evil?’ Ganger chuckled. ‘Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?’
‘Will you kindly stop reading my mind?’ Staff shouted. ‘It’s bad enough my having to live in it without strangers poking their dirty great snouts in there as well.’ He pulled himself together. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But please, just for the time being, could you possibly?’
There was a pause. ‘Could I possibly what?’ Ganger said.
‘Thank you,’ said Staff. ‘Could you possibly just wait for me to say what I’m thinking, rather than going and looking for yourself? For one thing, it’s bad form. You know, like reading the end of a book before you get to it. And it puts me at a disadvantage.’
‘Not really,’ Ganger replied. ‘I can only read what’s there, can’t I? And anyway, it’s not telepathy, it’s just . . .’
‘Insight, I know, you said.’
‘Now you’re at it.’
‘Oh shut up.’ Staff reached for the pencil again and started to chew it. ‘These mortals,’ he said tentatively.
‘Ex-mortals.’
‘Ex-mortals, then.’ Staff felt his teeth meet around the graphite core. ‘I suppose they’re all, you know, in menial capacities. Hewers of wood, drawers of water, that sort of thing.’
Ganger shook his head. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Upper executive, lower administrative grade, mostly. None in the upper grades of admin, but that’s because they’re relatively new and it all takes time. Dead men’s shoes, you know, that sort of thing.’
For some reason, the phrase made Staff shudder a little, in context. ‘But that’s really . . .’ He diluted the thought rapidly, just in case someone was peeking. ‘Not really on, you know. I mean, mortals . . .’
‘It’s never been tried here, you mean.’ Ganger turned away from the window, and Staff noticed, in the brief fraction of a second it took him before he could cauterise that part of his brain temporarily, that he looked a bit different. ‘I know, it’s hard to accept. But we’re doing it, and it seems to be working. That’s the joy of effectively running our own ship. If we do something outrageous, then who cares? It’s just us, going to the devil in our own way. So to speak,’ he added deliberately. ‘And if it works . . .’
THREE
Between the acting of a dreadful thing and its first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma or a hideous dream. The genius and the mortal instruments are then in council, and the state of man suffers the nature of an insurrection.