Here Comes the Sun

by Tom Holt

  They were transparent.

  No, not quite; you could see through them, but only at certain angles. It was as if someone had cut out life-size pictures of people and then pasted them to life-size tailors’ dummies made of ice. Or glass. You couldn’t get paste to stick to ice, because it would melt or slide off or . . . Bjorn caught his train of thought by the scruff of its neck and whisked it back to the matter in hand. If you looked at these people at certain angles, they weren’t there.

  Fine, Bjorn thought. So what? I’m no bigot. I can handle black, white, brown or yellow, so I can handle transparent as well. No problem.

  Not surprisingly, Jane had been working on the same problem, and the answer she’d come up with wasn’t a million miles away from the truth.

  (. . .The truth being that the other people in the baggage hall were there all right, but not one hundred per cent. One of the disadvantages of long-distance travel which has never properly been sorted out is the unfortunate truth that whenever a living creature goes an appreciable distance from home and is parted from his possessions, a portion of his soul stays with them until the eventual reunion. And when part of a man’s soul is being hauled around on fork-lift trucks on to a conveyer belt after several hours crammed into the hold of an aircraft, it’s only to be expected that there will be physical side-effects. Normally, of course, nobody ever notices, because everyone in a baggage hall is in the same situation, except for the porters, who are used to it. Since Jane and Bjorn had no luggage, they were able to see things as they really were, usually through the ribcages of the people standing next to them.)

  ‘These people aren’t all here,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ Bjorn replied. And then he stared.

  Sailing up towards him was a large cardboard suitcase, a scuffed imitation leather hold-all and a canvas kitbag, none of which he’d seen for well over a thousand years, since the baggage handlers aboard the Argo had sent them to the Garden of the Hesperides by mistake.

  ‘Um,’ he said. ‘Excuse me.’ He leaned forward and grabbed the handles, which crumbled into dust in his hands. A thousand years is a long time to go round and round in circles.

  ‘What are you . . . ?’ Jane screeched, as Bjorn leaped up on to the carousel and kicked the cases to the floor. He staggered, righted himself, and then collapsed backwards on to the toes of a small, elderly-looking man who was sitting on a very ancient suitcase indeed.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ he mumbled.

  ‘That’s all right, Bjorn,’ replied the elderly man. ‘Could happen to anyone.’

  To his great surprise, Bjorn managed to say something. It sounded like ‘Ggnnk.’

  The General walked up and down the improvised line, inspecting his troops.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘This is the big one. What is it?’

  ‘The big one, chief,’ said those few spectral warriors who were directly in his line of sight. The rest of them shuddered. Looking back, they were thinking, it hadn’t been so bad being dragons’ teeth. Hot, maybe, and smelly from time to time, and perhaps if you were really unlucky you’d get filled, but at least you knew where you were coming from.

  ‘And you’re utterly fearless spectral warriors, what are you?’

  ‘Terrified.’

  ‘WHO SAID THAT?’

  There was a squeak from the end of the line; then a flash of blue light; then a tiny puff of smoke, and then there was an empty black robe lying on the ground. It was neatly folded, and had its canteen, mess tin and water bottle lying on top of it. Habits get deeply engrained when you’re in the Army.

  ‘Now then,’ said the General. ‘What are you?’

  ‘Utterly fearless spectral warriors, chief,’ quavered the line as one shit-scared spectral warrior.

  The General paused and looked up and down the line slowly. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘So let’s get to it.’

  ‘Long time no see, Bjorn,’ the elderly man continued.

  ‘How’re you doing, anyway?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bjorn mumbled. ‘Hey . . .’

  The old man frowned slightly, although it was hard to tell; his face seemed to have set rock hard, like araldite, as if it had been marinaded and case-hardened in boredom. He spoke in a relentless dead monotone, like somebody’s cousin showing you holiday snaps. ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?’ he said.

  Bjorn swallowed hard. ‘Jane, this is Ulysses. Ulysses, Jane,’ he said. ‘Ulysses and me go way back,’ he added, trying to avoid Jane’s eyes. ‘Haven’t seen you since . . .’

  Jane looked again. The sack-shaped thing the man was wearing, the droopy leather hat, the sandals . . . ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but are you . . .’

  Ulysses nodded. ‘You heard about me, then?’ he said. ‘Shocking, isn’t it?’

  Jane rewound her memory quickly; fairy-stories, a film with Kirk Douglas, something they’d made her read at school. In any case, shocking wasn’t the word she’d have chosen herself. ‘Oh yes?’ she ventured.

  ‘If it goes on much longer,’ Ulysses droned on, ‘I’m going to complain about it. It shouldn’t be allowed, really it shouldn’t.’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘I mean,’ Ulysses said, scratching his nose with his little finger, ‘there I was, Trojan War over, all set to go home, got my return ticket and everything. Only Penelope - that’s my wife, Penelope - she said, “You be sure and bring me back some of that purple wool they got over there.” Very keen on embroidery, my wife. With her, it’s nothing but embroider, embroider, embroider, all the time. Anyway, I remembered to get the wool, and I packed it in my small suitcase, and then when I got off the plane I came down here to collect it . . .’

  Jane tried to cover her ears, but found it impossible to do this without moving her hands, and her hands wouldn’t move.

  ‘The big suitcase came through all right, but God only knows where the little one’s got to. I think they may have lost it, you know.’

  ‘Two thousand years,’ Bjorn hissed in her ear. She nodded and smiled brightly.

  ‘Very possibly,’ she said. ‘Maybe it got sent on somewhere else.’

  Ulysses nodded. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll just wait a little bit longer, though, just in case. She won’t half play me up if I go home without that wool, you know.’

  There was a long silence, during which Jane and Bjorn tried walking backwards, a few millimetres at a time. This silence was broken by a number of sounds.

  There was a yell from Ulysses as he caught sight of a small, battered leather suitcase on the belt and threw himself on to it.

  There was a similar shout of triumph as a man in a long raincoat pounced on a bundle wrapped in newspaper, which happened to contain the Maltese Falcon.

  There was a deafening bang as the stun-grenades thrown by the spectral warriors (or, in one unfortunate case, not thrown by a spectral warrior) exploded.

  There was a shrill scream from the hostage, who had woken up and wanted his teddy.

  There was a confused whooshing noise as Bjorn hurled Jane, his long-lost baggage and himself on to the conveyer, which whisked them round for a few feet before thrusting them both under the little rubber flaps that separate the world of light and life from the black void where the luggage comes from and, ultimately, goes back to.

  And then there was silence.

  It didn’t last. When the smoke cleared, there was coughing and swearing and whimpering (from the spectral warriors) and shouting (from the General), while the tannoy announced the arrival of Flight TR8765 from Atlantis, and part of the ceiling collapsed on to the carousel.

  When it came round for the second time, most of the debris had little stickers on it.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Hey, this is great, you know? All these years I’ve been wishing I knew where this lot’d got to, and now . . .’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Jane said. ‘I think I know where we are.’

  As if in answer, the lights came on.


  Or at least the conveyer belt brought them out into the light. They looked up, and saw the baggage handlers.

  It wasn’t a pretty sight. Take a line through what ordinary baggage handlers are like (which is bad enough) and then imagine what they’d look like in industrial-grade heavy-duty distorting mirrors.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Jane said, extending her legs and stepping lightly off the carousel. ‘It’s all okay. Relatively speaking, of course.’

  ‘Is it?’ Bjorn looked at her and so failed to notice the overhead derrick. ‘Ouch,’ he added.

  ‘Stop fooling about and follow me,’ Jane replied. She walked rapidly away, leaving Bjorn in the position inherited by all males at airports of running after a female while holding more luggage than he could cope with.

  ‘Look,’ he grunted, ‘slow down a minute and explain. What’s come over you all of a . . . ? And you can shut up, an’ all,’ he added, as the hostage wailed at him and tried to poke its wee fist through his head.

  ‘It’s very simple,’ Jane replied. ‘Gosh, if I’d realised it before, we could have been out of here an hour ago. Come on. I never knew anyone who dawdled so much.’

  She had marched up to the nearest wall, and now stood facing it. She put her hands on her hips, smiled, and said ‘Open.’

  It ignored her. She might as well have been talking to a brick wall.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That’s awkward.’

  Bjorn arrived. The suitcases and the hostage’s carrycot (which had materialised somewhere inside the works of the carousel, and had pink ponies on the sides) were only adhering to him through a misunderstanding of the basics of gravity. He sagged, and his burdens flumped to the ground.

  ‘You see,’ Jane went on, ‘I’d thought, you know, we wanted to go somewhere, so suddenly there was an airport. We needed tickets, suddenly we had tickets. We needed luggage, we’ve got luggage. And then all that business with the Duty Free shop; I mean, it was as if someone was reading our minds for what, deep down, we really wanted in a Duty Free shop. So I thought, this is all basically wish fulfilment.’ She frowned at the wall. ‘Only it doesn’t seem to work quite like that. Maybe it’s got to be consistent with the illusion, or something.’

  Bjorn looked over his shoulder. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to hassle you or anything, but there’s . . .’

  Tentatively, Jane prodded the wall with her fingers. ‘If it was wish fulfilment, you see,’ she said, ‘then it’d be easy to work out where we were, we’d still be somewhere inside our own heads. Or somebody’s head. A sort of generalised head; you know, the collective subconscious or the race memory or something. Species memory, probably, only of course, you’re not . . . What are you pulling my arm for?’

  ‘Because,’ Bjorn replied urgently, ‘there’s a platoon of spectral warriors coming through the baggage machine and . . .’

  He was wrong, at that. The baggage machine was spitting out empty black cowls, while the strips of black rubber over the gateway between the two halls were rising and falling in a manner suggestive of chewing teeth.

  ‘Yuk,’ said Jane. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

  ‘Pathetic,’ the General observed.

  There were still quite a few of the spectral warriors; only, like the British at New Orleans, there weren’t quite so many as there had been a while ago. Had the General more experience in commanding spectral forces, he’d have known better than to try and bump them across dimensions. As it was, he was angry.

  The remaining spectral warriors fell into line quickly. The General paced up and down, snarling.

  ‘This time,’ he said, ‘no mistakes, right?’

  ‘Right, chief.’

  ‘No getting blown up. No getting sucked away. No forgetting to jump off the escalators and being dragged screaming down into the works. Got that?’

  ‘Got it, chief.’

  ‘Fine. Now then.’

  There were two gateways.

  One was green, one was red. That was all right. It was what was written over them that worried Jane.

  The green one said SHEEP and the red one said GOATS. There was also a huge needle, with the hindquarters of a camel sticking out of its eye. Two men in Italian suits were standing behind it, pushing, while a third was making frantic efforts with a bar of soap.

  Jane sat down on Bjorn’s suitcase, took off her left shoe and examined a large hole in the sole of her stocking. It shouldn’t be like this, she thought. In fact, if she had her way, pretty soon it wouldn’t be. But they had to get out of here first.

  They became aware of someone standing over them. At first he looked like a spectral warrior, but it was a superficial resemblance only. Same black baggy cowl, absence of face, unpleasant metallic-looking sidearms, but this one had a badge with his name on it.

  His name was George.

  ‘Having trouble, miss?’ asked George.

  Jane looked up. ‘As a matter of fact I am,’ she said. ‘I wonder if you could help me?’

  The black hole that was George’s face flickered into the anti-matter equivalent of a smile. ‘Do my best, miss. That’s what we’re here for, after all,’ he said. ‘Now, what seems to be the trouble?’

  Jane took a deep breath. ‘For starters,’ she said, ‘where are we, what happened to the dimensional shift, who is it chasing us, and how do we get back to the mainstream dimension without going through those gates over there? I take it you do have to be dead to go through there.’

  ‘Quite right, miss,’ George replied. ‘Although dead is as dead does, as I always say. Still, that’s by the by, isn’t it?’

  In the far depths of his hood, something twinkled cheerfully. Jane nodded and smiled encouragingly.

  ‘Well,’ George went on, ‘where you are now, miss, you’re in the main entrance hall of judgement control. That’s where you have to show your credentials to Immigration, to see if you’re going to go first class or economy, smoking or non-smoking. Your baggage will be weighed, and if it’s tried in the balance and found wanting then you get charged excess. And like you said just now, miss, being dead is essential. No exceptions, you see. Rules is rules.’

  Jane nodded. ‘I quite understand,’ she said. ‘So we’re quite a few dimensions away from normality, I take it.’

  ‘Absolutely right, miss,’ George replied. ‘Well spotted, if I may say so. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say you left the mainstream by falling through an artificially created hole in the dimensional shift. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it happened while you were in a restaurant somewhere. Does that sound right to you?’

  By this stage, Bjorn had given up listening. He was going through his kitbag. It was a thousand to one chance that the big jar of Greek olives was still in there, but it was worth a shot.

  ‘I think I was kidnapped out of my own dimension by an official called Finance and General Purposes, to stop me finding out about why he’s trying to sabotage the human race,’ Jane said. ‘Would that account for it, do you think?’

  ‘Oh, I should say so, miss,’ George replied. ‘Happens more often than most people realise, that sort of thing. We get a lot of that down here.’

  Jane nodded. ‘And then,’ she went on, ‘I think he hid me away in the back of his mind - well, in his conscience, actually, which is the nastiest place he could think of. It’s where all the horrible things which he knows deep down inside ought to happen to him are stored. I didn’t like it much in there, to be honest with you.’

  ‘Don’t blame you, miss,’ said George. ‘Dodgy places, consciences. Then what happened?’

  ‘Well,’ Jane said, trying to remember, ‘shortly after that . . .’

  ‘Got them!’ Bjorn shouted. ‘Hey, that’s brilliant!’

  ‘Shortly after that I was rescued, and I’m not quite sure where I was then, but I suppose it must have been in one of the Administration office blocks, because if I’d just escaped from inside this person’s head, it would stand to reason that I’d end up pretty close to where he
was, don’t you think? Or am I way off beam?’

  ‘Sound right to me, miss,’ said George encouragingly. ‘Go on.’

  Jane thought for a moment. ‘That’s where I sort of lost track,’ she said. ‘You see, my . . . this man here, he sort of pulled some dimensions apart and we just sort of fell through, and here we are in an airport sort of thing.’

  ‘A very neat way of putting it, if I may say so, miss.’

  ‘And at first I thought I must be inside my own head this time, or at least sort of, because everything I wanted to happen sort of happened, only not quite, if you see what I mean. And I thought, Yes, because all through my life people have been telling me that where I’ve been going wrong is not really knowing what I actually want.’

  George nodded, or at least the gash in the side of reality which he represented wobbled a bit. ‘Pretty close, miss,’ he said. ‘You’re on the right lines, but not quite there. If I might explain?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘Hey, and my Proud To Be Weird T-shirt. I’ve really missed this, you know?’

  ‘Bjorn,’ Jane said, ‘shut up.’

  TWENTY

  ALL RIGHT, said the wall, YOU WIN. Staff nodded and opened his eyes. I’m listening, he thought. Can we do this the easy way, because I’ve had a hard day, and burning bushes or anything like that really wouldn’t be a good idea.

  . . . And then there was a flash, and a cloud of foulsmelling yellow smoke, and a buzzing sound, like all the flies in all the kitchens of all the transport cafes in the whole world . . .

  ‘Stubborn, aren’t you?’ said a voice from the chair opposite. ‘I expect you’re going to insist on visual interface as well?’

  ‘’Fraid so, yes.’

  ‘More fool you, then.’