by Tom Holt
The ball race chose that moment to fuse, filling the air with a sparkling cloud of diamond dust. Planet Earth wobbled sharply on its axis.
‘All right,’ hissed the Head Technician, ‘only if this goes wrong, you just remember it was your idea, right? Like, you gave me a direct order and . . .’
‘Shut up,’ the supervisor reiterated, ‘and find me that spanner.’
A few moments later, Planet Earth stopped shuddering and began to spin noiselessly, easily round its axis. It began to slow down . . .
‘Ouch!’ said Jane, aloud.
It hadn’t been her first choice as a flat; it wasn’t really her kind of neighbourhood: it was a fair old hike to the station every morning, the bedroom wall needed papering badly, the doors stuck in winter and there was something of a condensation problem in the kitchen; but hitherto at least, she’d never had any problems with the ceiling being too low. Until now, apparently.
She looked down. Yes, there was the floor, just where she’d left it. There was her furniture. Same old furniture, mostly the unsuitable and heterogeneous offerings of relatives and friends, except that previously it hadn’t shown any signs of wanting to jump off the ground and float about the place like a shoal of dazed tuna. And there was her breakfast - mug of coffee, slice of toast - swimming obligingly towards her through thin air.
She grabbed at the coffee-cup as it floated past, missed the cup but not the handle, and split the coffee. It fell upwards and splashed against the ceiling.
Gingerly, and conscious that there were rather more cobwebs up here than Mrs Beeton would have approved of, Jane raised her left hand above her head and pushed the ceiling away from her. She felt herself bob downwards for a few feet, and then the current, or whatever the hell it was, caught her up again and lifted her slowly upwards. She kicked violently with her feet, but it didn’t help. She hit her head gently on the lampshade, pushed off again, and walked on her hands across to the door frame.
‘Somebody,’ she said to a passing telephone directory, ‘is going to have some explaining to do.’
The directory fluttered its pages and continued to drift upwards, until it was splayed open against the plaster-work. Jane gripped the wooden frame of the door with both hands and tried to haul herself downwards.
‘That’s better,’ she said, as her feet connected with the carpet. She looked down. The fibres were trying their best to stand on end, giving the impression of one very frightened Axminster. Worse still, all the dust she hadn’t got around to hoovering out of it was slowly rising. It got up her nose and she sneezed.
A flower vase drifted past her, upside-down and bobbing about erratically as air escaped out of its inside. This wouldn’t do at all. She managed to propel herself on to the back of the kitchen table, which was passing by slowly and ponderously, a mere foot or so above the ground. As she had hoped, her weight helped to push it down, and she found herself a mere six inches above floor-level. What she needed now, she reckoned, was some sort of punt-pole.
A passing golf umbrella solved that problem, and soon she was punting cautiously across the floor, steering clear of drifting armchairs and trying not to hit the walls too hard, towards the window. She had an idea that things were going to be a bit surreal out there, and it was a pity that her camera was presently nuzzling against the ceiling-rose like a small black remora.
‘Good lord,’ she said.
In a way it was really rather beautiful. Peaceful, certainly. The drivers of the cars had mostly had the sense to switch off their engines and they were now simply drifting aimlessly, a few inches off the ground, while airborne pedestrians hung on to their door handles. A school of red buses sailed gently past the request stop opposite the corner shop, while the newsagent’s stock in trade sailed gracefully, almost majestically, into the air, flapping their leaves like enormous, slow-motion herons. An open umbrella fluttered away past her window on its way to the stars.
‘You see what I mean?’ said a voice above her.
She looked upwards to see Staff flat on his back against the ceiling. She tried not to laugh, but there are limits.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But you look so . . .’
‘I know,’ he replied sadly. ‘You think you’re having problems. Just count yourself lucky you’ve got a corporeal body. You have no idea how difficult it was getting here.’
Jane pushed hard on her umbrella, and the table rose upwards. She was just able to grab hold of Staff’s left foot before it fell floorwards again, and she towed her visitor down with her. As she had expected, he weighed nothing.
A little undignified scrambling enabled Staff to get on the table, and he secured himself to it by wrapping his arms round one of the legs. Even so, the lower half of his body pointed resolutely upwards, with the result that he looked like nothing so much as a large, respectable tadpole.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘Surely now you can’t deny that there’s a problem.’
‘Oh, there’s a problem all right,’ Jane agreed. ‘Like how I’m going to get coffee stains off the ceiling. It’s Artex, you know.’
‘I gathered,’ Staff replied. ‘It’s like sandpaper, that stuff. Oughtn’t to be allowed.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Not your fault. Look,’ he went on, ‘unless we find some way of getting things sorted out, it’s going to get worse. You must see that.’
‘But,’ Jane started to say; then she corrected herself. ‘Are you sure I’d be able to help?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Staff replied, ‘you and others like you, but you first.You see, if you make a go of it, we can recruit others. Management won’t be able to stop us. We’ll be able to fill all the vacant posts, get the plant and machinery properly serviced; that way, we won’t have all our staff and resources tied down coping with emergencies.’ He paused to fence away a teapot that seemed to want to get inside his jacket. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘what do you say? Anything’s got to be better than this.’
Suddenly, the world started to move again. For a split second, Jane felt it distinctly; the violent shock of an incredibly rapid acceleration, rather like the awful feeling you get the first time you’re in an aeroplane taking off. Then she was rather too preoccupied with the spectacle of all her possessions falling to the ground and smashing into tiny pieces to bother with detailed observations of that kind.
‘Right,’ she said and, using her thumb and forefinger, picked a razor-sharp shard of casserole out of her hair. Outside, the air was suddenly full of the sound of many motorists restored to normality and lamenting their lost no-claims bonuses with the help of their horns. The last glossy magazine twirled a few times in the air and flopped to earth like an exhausted pigeon.
‘You’re on,’ she said.
‘Tell me,’ said Gustav tremulously, ‘all about it.’
The fire burnt low, so that the interior of Gustav’s small but cosy cottage became full of deep shadows, each one a curtained doorway into hostile infinity. Using his teeth only, Bjorn removed the crown cap off a bottle of Carlsberg and spat it accurately into the grate.
‘Not a lot to tell, really,’ he said. ‘I applied for the job, got it, tried it, didn’t like it, told them to stuff it, moved on. Simple as that.’
‘Um,’ said Gustav, ‘yes, I suppose it is, really. But tell me,’ he went on, overcoming his feelings of acute apprehension. ‘What was it really like? Being an angel, I mean.’
There was a silence: a huge, heavy, abrasive silence you could have ground corn with. The firelight glinted red on Bjorn’s eyes, making Gustav shrink back into the chimney corner.
‘You ever call me that again,’ Bjorn growled, ‘I’ll pull your lungs out through your nose and make you eat them, okay?’
‘I’m very sorry,’ Gustav squeaked. ‘I’d got the impression . . .’
‘Because,’ Bjorn went on, ‘we don’t like that name, right? It’s a poncey name. Makes you sound like a right fairy, being called that.’ He paused to glower savagely into the fire. ‘Makes
you think of little lacy dolls with wings and Christmas trees shoved up their jacksies. Anybody tries that with me, they’ll get what’s coming to them, understood?’
‘Understood.’
‘Fine.’ Bjorn took a long pull of beer and burped assertively. ‘The lads and me, we used to call ourselves “the Boys from the Blue Stuff ”. Sounds better, you know, meaner. More macho. And we didn’t fart around playing harps, either.’
‘Absolutely not,’ Gustav agreed, nodding furiously. ‘Right on,’ he added.
‘Right on what?’
‘Sorry.’
Bjorn drank some more beer and scratched his ear thoughtfully. ‘I’m not saying we didn’t have a few laughs, mind. I mean, it wasn’t all answering prayers and polishing the sun. Bloody awful job, that was,’ he parenthesised, ‘took all the skin off your knuckles if you weren’t careful.
Bloke I worked with, he got his fingers caught in the works when he was trying to clean them out and nobody noticed. They launched the damn thing same as usual and he was left there, trapped, dangling by his fingers, yelling his head off, but nobody heard. You just imagine that,’ he went on, after a deep shudder that started just below his neck and finally earthed itself out through the soles of his feet. ‘Just imagine it, hanging by your fingers from that bloody great hot thing, miles above the ground, for a whole day. And when he tried to get compensation, what did they say? Should have observed the safety procedure, they said, all his own silly fault, served him right. He went a bit funny in the head after that so they put him on Earthquakes. Nobody notices if you’re a bit funny in the head on Earthquakes.’
‘I see,’ said Gustav. ‘Well . . .’
‘We were always having them,’ Bjorn ground on, staring straight in front of him into the fire. ‘Industrial accidents they called them, only some of them weren’t accidents if you ask me. You can’t tell me a grown man suddenly falling off a perfectly wide, fenced-off catwalk into the works of the grass-growing plant was an accident, or a coincidence. Just so happened he’d found out about the foreman and the cocoa money, that’s all. Of course, they hushed it up. Blamed it all on the frosts, they did.’
Gustav smiled and tried to seep away into the cracks between the stones, but there was too much of him for that. ‘Gosh,’ he said.
‘Right bastards, some of those foremen were, mind,’ Bjorn went on. ‘There was one when I was on Miracles - some years ago, this is, because they’ve closed that department down now. Evil Neville, they used to call him. Short, round bloke, face like a road map. Whenever we were told to turn water into wine, he’d be in there with his mates and a couple of hundred jerrycans, and the poor bloody punters would have to make do with water turned into lager. Couldn’t tell the difference half the time. No wonder the whole department got such a bad name with the high-ups. Talking of which, you got any more?’
He waved the empty bottle, and Gustav, simpering, fetched another. It had cobwebs on it.
‘Cheers,’ Bjorn said. He decapitated it, absent-mindedly swallowed the top, and slurped deeply.
‘It sounds very unpleasant,’ Gustav said.
‘Unpleasant!’ Bjorn sniggered noisily. ‘You’re telling me, sunshine. I could tell you some stories, no worries. What about that time we were working Nights and Norm the Headbanger got completely rat-arsed and left his brother’s old van parked right in the middle of the Great Bear? Or there was that time Mad Trev and me were working on Rivers, and Trev got taken short just before the flooding of the Nile. Those Egyptians sure got a shock that year, I’m telling you.’ He laughed brutally. Gustav closed his eyes and felt sick. He had a little picture of an angel over his bed: his mother had put it there years ago, telling him that it would watch over him while he was asleep. As soon as he was alone in the house again, he told himself, he’d get a shovel and bury it under the oak tree.
‘Not that it was all bad, mind,’ Bjorn was saying. ‘There was guard duty, f’rinstance. I liked that. They gave you this flaming sword and you stood about in front of the gates of Eden, and anybody who was daft enough to try and get in there - shunk!’ He made a sharp, graphically illustrative movement with the bottle, spilling the few remaining suds it contained over the back of his hand. ‘Don’t get up,’ he said. ‘In that cupboard, right?’
He lurched to his feet and went to the cupboard. Gustav shut his eyes.
‘Here,’ he heard Bjorn call out. ‘There’s no more beer left, that’s a bummer. Hold on, though, this’ll do. Cheers.’ Oh wonderful, Gustav thought, he’s found the paint thinners.
‘Help yourself,’ he said, in a small, tinny voice he barely recognised as his own.
‘Anyway,’ Bjorn said, sitting by the fire again and wiping the neck of the bottle. ‘I stuck it as long as I could, but in the end I couldn’t stick it any more.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah.’ Bjorn drew heavily on the bottle, winced and licked his lips. ‘I reckoned it was, well, brutalising me, you know? Like, when I was young they said I was sort of sensitive, you know, feelings and all that. So I reckoned, if I stick this job any longer, what’s going to happen to me? I could end up turning into a really nasty person if I wasn’t careful. So I quit. Probably I was just imagining it,’ he added, ‘but you can’t be too careful, right? I mean, there’s integrity, for one thing.’
‘Er, right.’
‘So,’ Bjorn said. Then he sat silently for a very long eight seconds, glaring viciously into the fire. Just as Gustav was beginning to feel a scream welling up inside the pit of his stomach, Bjorn got up, drained the bottle, and put it down on the table with a bang. ‘You know what,’ he said, ‘it’s done me good, you know, talking about it. I feel -’ he burped savagely ‘- much better now. In fact, we must do this again sometime, right?’
Gustav closed his eyes. On the one hand, his mother had told him never to tell deliberate lies. On the other hand, his mother had told him a lot of stuff about angels that had turned out to be rather wide of the mark.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’d like that.’
‘Yeah.’ Bjorn rose to his feet, groped for his axe, and staggered clumsily to the door.
‘Strewth,’ he said, poking his head out into the cool, sweet, night air and sniffing distastefully. ‘Smells like armpits out here. Cheers, then.’
‘Cheers.’
Gustav closed the door after his guest, bolted it, put the shutters up, and collapsed into his chair, trembling. From the distant village street he could hear the distinctive sound of a man with an axe playing Try-Your-Strength games with the village pump. He winced.
The picture of the angel disappeared from above Gustav’s bed shortly afterwards, and was replaced by a Pirelli calendar.
‘Oh,’ said the charge-hand.
Far below, an enormous brown snake of muddy, foulsmelling water thrust its snout into the gaps between the skyscrapers. Apart from the occasional crash of falling masonry, the great city was quite astoundingly quiet.
‘I thought you meant Memphis, Tennessee,’ the chargehand went on, slightly apprehensively. ‘So there’s another Memphis, is there? That’s confusing.’
‘Isn’t it?’ his superior replied, through tight lips. ‘Sorry, perhaps I should have explained a bit better. I thought it’d be clear, even to a complete idiot, that when I said flood the Nile as far as Memphis, I meant Memphis, Egypt. Obviously, though, I was wrong.’ He pushed his cap on to the back of his head and scratched his bald patch thoughtfully. ‘You know what,’ he added, after a moment. ‘This is going to take a bit of sorting out, this is.’
‘Ah.’
‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘just to take the small details first, there’s your crocodiles, right?’
‘Crocodiles?’
‘Crocodiles.’ He pointed. ‘Must’ve got swept along with the current or something. Look, there’s one now, just crawling up the steps of the Fire Department building.’
‘Oh yes, I can just make it out. Gosh, that’s . . .’
‘And in ten minutes,�
� his superior went on, ‘when we whack all the pumps back into reverse and start draining the water away . . . Well, there’s going to be a lot of them left behind, right?’
‘Um.’
‘But,’ his superior went on, ‘that’s really a minor point, and probably nobody’s going to notice, what with rebuilding the whole goddamn city, and flying in emergency aid, and what not. Still, I just thought I’d mention it. Let you have the fully-rounded picture, so to speak.’
‘Right.’ The charge-hand nodded. ‘Got that.’
‘There’s also,’ his superior went on, his face gradually tightening like an overstretched guitar-string, ‘the fact that the Egyptians are now one river short. They’re not going to be pleased, you know. I get the feeling they’re, you know, attached to it.’
‘Yes?’
His superior nodded. ‘You been working in this department long?’ he asked. The charge-hand did some mental arithmetic.
‘Not very long,’ he said.
‘How long exactly?’
‘Um, eight hours,’ the charge-hand replied. ‘Before that, I was on Truth.’
‘Truth. I see.’ His superior nodded a couple of times, and then a few times more simply out of momentum. ‘Doing what, exactly?’
‘Mumblemumblemumblemumble.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I made the tea,’ the charge-hand replied. ‘And sometimes I went out to the shop to get doughnuts and things. We used to do a lot of just sitting about in Truth, see.’
‘That follows.’
‘It’s the Daughter of Time, you know, Truth,’ the chargehand added, nervously. ‘Not many people know that, but it’s . . .’
‘Right.’ His superior jammed his cap squarely on his head, lifted his sagging shoulders, and scribbled on his clipboard so hard that the point of his pencil snapped. The fragment of graphite flew wide, tumbled down through the firmament, hit the Earth just outside Petrograd, and ended up in the State Geological Museum marked Fragile. ‘I guess we’d better make a start on getting it sorted, then. First, we’ll need a Form KRB1, supported by a blue chit and a Requisition in Form 4.’