by Tom Holt
Gabe didn’t look happy. “But?”
“Those humans,” Kevin said. “They needed me. They were relying on me. They were practically, like, disciples.”
“Stay out of the family business, son,” Raffa said grimly. “You know what the old man said over and over again. You’re just not cut out for it.”
“Yeah? Says who?” Kevin pulled himself up short, appalled at what he’d allowed himself to say, even more appalled by the fact that he’d felt the need to say it. “I can’t just walk out on them,” he said quietly. “Think about it, fellas. That’s not what Jay would’ve done, is it?”
“Sure.” Gabe was looking at him particularly solemnly. “And I guess you remember what happened to him, don’t you?”
“Yes. Well, then.”
“The difference being,” Gabe said, “that Jay was in sure and certain hope of the resurrection, so when push came to shove it really didn’t matter a damn, did it? He knew it was just a matter of three days putting his feet up down at Nick’s place, chilling out, drinking iced tea, watching a few old movies, then back to work and no harm done. But in your case, if they string you up …” He paused. “Different rules now, Kevin. And we’re not in charge any more. Sure, Snib Venturi might be nice as a token of respect to your old man—professional courtesy. But then again, he might not, and in that case, there’s not thing one we could do about it.” He fixed Kevin with his bright golden eyes. “You want to take that chance, Kevin? For them? For humans?”
“Besides.” Uncle Raffa was doing his still, small voice of calm. Bad angel, good angel. “What’s all this about anyhow? It’s not like those two want to do anything worthwhile. Quite the reverse. They want to get in contact with him. That lowlife. What good could possibly come of that, boy? So you see, it’s not like Jay at all, so don’t you go getting any ideas. You’d just be helping two troublemakers make trouble. Is that what you want to do? Is that worth pissing off the Venturis for? I don’t think so.”
Kevin had never heard one of his uncles swear before. “I guess not,” he said.
“Good boy. So that’s an end of it, right? You won’t be helping those no-goods any more.”
“No, Uncle.”
Gabe smiled and ruffled Kevin’s hair, which burst into flames. The two uncles burst out laughing, quenched it and grew the sizzled hair back. “It’s weird to think you’re human now,” Raffa said. “It only seems yesterday you and me and Mikey were up there repainting the firmament.”
Which was actually a pretty tactless thing to say, given on that occasion Kevin had proved he couldn’t be trusted with even the simplest of tasks (and that, oh best beloved, is why your solar system now has only eight planets). Gabe hadn’t meant it that way, of course. Hadn’t he? Get real. Of course he had. “You remember that, huh?”
“What? You bet. How we all laughed. It’s gonna take some getting used to, Kevin, you being technically, well, you know. But it was your choice and we respect you for it, don’t we, Raffa?”
“Sure, Gabe. We respect you like anything.”
The big grin didn’t change, but the eyes suddenly went quite cold. “Just don’t go doing any more dumb stuff, all right? Properly speaking, Raffa and me, we’re retired now. It’s time for us to fold our wings, put our feet up, take it easy. Which we can’t do if we’re forever having to chase after you cleaning up little messes. You copy that?”
“Yes, Uncle. I get that loud and clear.”
“Of course you do.” The eyes were warm again, and full of tenderness. “Right, so where do you want to be dropped off? Any place you want to go, kid—the world is your oyster.”
“I take it you mean any place except London, England?”
“You don’t want to go there, trust me.” Gabe spread his hands cheerfully. “Crummy place. Rains all the time, the prices are a rip-off and the food is terrible.”
“All right. Where would you recommend?”
“Goa,” Gabe said firmly. “Long, golden beaches, hot sun, pleasant people and the most amazing fish. You’ll love it. Nothing to do all day but soak up the rays and stuff your face.”
“And there’s a varied and exciting cultural life,” Raffa added. “So they tell me.”
“Yeah, all that stuff too. And the chicks—”
Raffa dug him in the ribs with his elbow. He blinked. “If you’re into birdwatching, that is. They got brown shrikes there like you wouldn’t believe.”
Kevin kept his eyebrow unraised with an effort. In some of the older copies of the office manual in Dad’s library there had been a bit about the nephelim, offspring of mortal women and angels, which didn’t seem to appear in the more recent editions, and which had always puzzled him, till now. True, there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, or even a brown shrike, but Gabe had never struck him as a keen ornithologist. Even so. There’s something profoundly upsetting about finding out that people you’ve looked up to all your life may not be as perfect as you once thought.
“And Blyth’s warbler,” Raffa said, “you can’t spit anywhere on Goa without a Blyth’s warbler getting its head wet. Kind of an earthly Paradise.”
Paradise, with his uncles standing guard out front with flaming swords. Kevin smiled slowly. “You think so?”
Gabe nodded. “Sure, kid,” he said. “God’s own country. Just stay well clear of the fruit trees.”
26
What, apart from that, is the one thing everybody knows about the North Pole? That it’s magnetic, of course. A compass needle will always point to it, no matter where you are. That’s science, a fact, and not to be argued with. Why it should be so …
They’ll tell you that it’s because the North Pole is where the Earth’s magnetic field points vertically down, and you accept that either because you can’t be bothered to try and understand it, or because you genuinely believe that the Earth is a giant magnet, presumably anchored through all eternity to the invisible door of an enormous celestial fridge. Not so long ago they’d have told you a different story. There’s a huge deposit of iron deep in the heart of some subglacial polar mountain, they’d have assured you on a stack of Bibles, and you’d most likely have fallen for that one too. It’s people like you who make it easy for them to get away with telling us what they want us to believe.
Actually, the old version is a whole lot nearer to the truth than the new one, because there genuinely is a substantial quantity of iron stockpiled in echoing caverns deep under the ice, just off to one side of Pole Central. A lot of it is obsolete now, of course, though it could probably still give you a nasty nip, and its curators keep it polished and sharpened mostly from force of habit. It doesn’t cause the magnetism, needless to say. In fact, the magnetism is a damn nuisance, because whenever he moves about in the adjoining chambers of the complex, everything in the stockpile wants to come too, which can be more than a little disconcerting for anyone working maintenance at the time.
Not that he gives a damn, or if he does (and of course he does; they’re his people and he looks out for them) he takes pains to make sure they don’t know it, because that’s all part of his style, the image, the way he wants to be perceived. It’s a good style for someone in his position. Old Blood-and-Guts, they call him. You’d better watch out, don’t you dare cross him or get in his way or you’ll get trodden on, and they admire him for it, because when every man’s hand, angel’s wing and demon’s claw is against you, what you want most from your leader is invincibility combined with granite toughness. So, if you’re pulling a double shift painting cosmolene on the throwing axes and the Old Bugger takes his morning trip to the john two minutes early, you don’t resent the fact that the entire inventory flies up out of the racks and embeds itself in the wall while you’re still working on it, even if it means you come off shift with rather less fingers than you’re used to. Instead, you feel kind of proud that you follow a guy who’s so hard and mean, iron longs to be near him.
For the same set of reasons, all the fittings in the executive
bathroom are brass. Image is important, but it’s good to be practical.
The magnetism thing causes problems in other areas too, for example when guests visit the complex. This doesn’t happen often, but from time to time it’s unavoidable. For example when Aiko Kawaguchiya succeeded her father as head of Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits and demanded a personal one-to-one meeting to renegotiate all the licensing agreements for KIC’s various computerised toy brands, one thing that somehow didn’t get mentioned during the preliminary discussions was that Aiko had a steel pin in her leg because of a teenage cycling accident. The subsequent meeting was not a success, even though it was obvious that Aiko felt a strong, in fact an overpowering attraction to her new business partner. Likewise, the CEO of Guangdong Amalgamated Plastics was left tongue-tied and speechless for the duration of his visit simply because nobody thought to tell his hosts in advance about the wires in his dental plate.
The minor irritations are worth putting up with, however, when you consider the benefits, particularly in the area of perimeter security. Thus, when a sleek mile-wide silver saucer crash-landed among the ice floes and gouged a thirty-mile crevasse before coming gently to rest at precisely magnetic north, there was a contingent of suitably armed elves waiting to meet it.
A hatch popped and a being crawled out down the gleaming ramp. It was so profoundly cocooned in its environment suit that its shape was anyone’s guess, but it had three pairs of gloves and six pairs of boots, and one goldfish-bowl helmet at one end and a slightly smaller one at the other.
It raised its front head and cleared its throat. “One small step for a Gryzon,” it said, “a giant leap for—Hello, who are you?”
The elves looked at each other.
“We come in peace,” said the Gryzon. “Take me to your—No, please be careful with that, I need it to breathe with.”
The elves picked the alien up by its hands and feet and carried it down some steps in the ice, while others slammed the ramp shut and nailed it down with six-inch nails.
“Our long-range scans,” said the Gryzon, as its helmeted heads went bump-bump-bump down the ice-walled corridor, “said this planet was uninhabited. Do you folks live here or are you just visiting?”
“Shut up,” said an elf. “Talking food gives me gas.”
They emerged into a high-vaulted chamber hewn out of the permafrost. The pillars that supported the cathedral-high roof were shaped like pairs of rearing reindeer locked in combat, and boughs of holly hung from the architraves. In niches in the walls stood row upon row of shrunken heads, all crowned with floppy red hats. “I’d really like to talk to your head of state or foreign minister,” squeaked the alien. “Or if they’re busy, the secretary of state for agriculture will do fine.”
A vast door at the end of the chamber swung open. It was made of three layers of material: steel and diamond with a dark-matter core, laminated in a herringbone pattern and clinched together with nails as thick as a man’s leg. An even bigger, higher, gloomier chamber lay beyond it, in which the only light came from a single arrow slit a thousand feet up. In the darkness it glared like a searchlight, and it illuminated a monstrous throne made of reindeer bones heated and twisted together like wicker. A pale fire danced all around it, flashing and sparkling red, green, silver and gold in long strings that trailed across the floor and ran up the nearby pillars like scintillating ivy. If the alien had been able to get at its scanning device, it would have read the effect as anomalous electromagnetic discharges somehow related to the massive EM field that had literally pulled the Gryzon scoutship down from the sky. Behind the throne stood an ancient fir tree, from whose branches dangled what the alien recognised as super-enlarged isostreptic clusters, each tennis ball-sized particle glittering with silvery strepterons and snow-white metaquarks—enough energy, the alien calculated, to build a small sun or blow apart a very big one. That would account for the enormous build-up of ice on the outside at any rate, a simple refrigeration effect. What the alien couldn’t begin to account for was the fact that the throne was occupied by something or someone who appeared to be alive instead of shrivelled to a crisp by so much unfiltered mythopoeic radiation.
Not just alive but bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and full of beans, a large, stout humanoid biped in loose-fitting red robes, its two arms resting on the splayed antlers that formed the armrests of the throne. It peered down at the alien through two small half-moon lenses supported by a wire frame and growled, “Now what?”
“Caught this one, boss, snooping around the north fence. It talks.”
The Red Lord narrowed its eyes, and the alien felt a slight pricking sensation, as though it was being subjected to a high-resonance bleptyon scan. “Of course it talks, you halfwit. It’s a Gryzon from Sigma Eridani Two. Highly advanced culture. Split the atom around about the time our lot realised that fire is hot. Let it go and bring it a nice cup of tea.”
The Gryzon blinked. “You know about us?”
The Red Lord shrugged. “I’ve been around,” he said. “You’re a bit off the beaten track though, aren’t you? What brings you out this far? Let me guess. You put the postcode for Sirius into your satnav and this is where it brought you.”
The Gryzon shook its heads. “We’re explorers,” it said. “We seek a new home for our people.”
“Is that right?”
Synchronised nod. “Millennia of war with our neighbours the Eee have left our planet barely habitable. Our scans suggested this world would be suitable.”
“Mphm. And is it?”
“Geologically and ecologically speaking, it’s just right. Of course, it also reads as uninhabited.”
The Red Lord clicked his tongue. “I’d get a new scanner if I were you.”
“It didn’t register mammalian bipeds as sentient life,” the Gryzon explained. “Back home, mammals are—”
The Red Lord smiled. “I know,” he said. “Where you come from, you can buy little aerosols of mammal spray for keeping the little buggers off your roses. That’s not the case here.” He paused, then added, “But I don’t suppose that’d bother your superiors very much.”
The Gryzon made a complicated no-not-really gesture. “Our situation is desperate,” it said. “Unless we can relocate immediately, we face extinction. Compared with that, wildlife conservation isn’t an immediate priority.”
The Red Lord steepled his fingers. “And of course your long struggle with the Eee has left you with overwhelmingly superior military technology and a huge fleet of warships. You think the indigenous life forms on this planet would be a pushover.”
The alien hesitated, then nodded. “Of course, if it was up to me …”
“Quite,” the Red Lord said. “But it isn’t, is it? It’s up to your superiors, who have their species to save and elections to win. I do understand.” He reached under the throne and picked a long parcel off the floor. It was wrapped in red and silver paper decorated with jolly robins. He slit the paper with his fingernail and drew out a long zigzaggy thing.
“Got your scanner handy?”
“Yes.”
“Scan that.”
The device whirred, bleeped hysterically and blew a fuse. The insides of the Gryzon’s helmets misted up.
“It’s called a thunderbolt,” the Red Lord said. “Let me point out that I’m a simple reindeer farmer, one of millions scattered across the planet, and we all have these. We use them for controlling agricultural pests—you know, bugs and creepy-crawlies. Of course, they’re nothing like the kilotonnage of the big ones the military use.”
“Um.”
The Red Lord put the thunderbolt back under his chair. “You might care to mention that to your superiors,” he said. “Quite possibly it could help them to make an informed decision.”
“I’ll do that,” the Gryzon squeaked.
“Good lad. You might also suggest that they take a look at the third planet of 61 Cygni. I think you’ll find it’s much more suitable, and it really is uninhabited, not so much as an amo
eba lurking in a rock pool anywhere. Ah, here’s Grusmazhg with your tea. One magnesium chunk or two?”
A little later, when the elves had used their sleigh to pull the saucer out of the ice and the Gryzons had blasted off back to their distant home, the Red Lord leaned back in his throne, closed his eyes and breathed a long sigh of relief. A close call. He knew all about the Gryzons and their antisocial habits. Of course, he said to himself, it’s not my job; properly speaking, I should’ve left it to … well, nowadays it’d be the Venturi, who’d have fought like tigers to protect their investment: injunctions and lawyers and space battles and huge clouds of mangled bits of starship orbiting the Earth like Saturn’s rings, to achieve what I managed with a simple bluff. Or indeed a simple lie, which I couldn’t have told if I was the official god around here, because gods don’t, do they? Just as well I’m not the official god, then. Oh yes. Amen to that.
The Red Lord closed his eyes, letting his head slide forward on his chest, trying to clear the clutter out of his mind, trying to think. There had been times recently when he’d been sorely tempted to pack it all in, make some sort of a deal with the old fool and the young halfwit, retire, maybe even allow himself to dissolve back into the elements from which he’d been formed so very long ago. But then there was the change of management, and he didn’t trust Snib Venturi as far as he could sneeze him out of one nostril, and also That Time of Year was coming up fast, and now this. There were times when he asked himself why he bothered with it all. He could ask questions like that, since he’d never pretended to be omniscient or even particularly clever; not clever, just a bit stubborn and very, very, very strong. And the answers he’d come up with over the years still rang as true as they always had: because it annoys Them—the bosses du jour, the Management—and for the Hell of it. And, of course, because sooner or later it was unavoidable that They would find him and come after him with lots and lots of celestial policemen, and he’d be intrigued to find out just how bloody a nose he could give them before They inevitably won. Meanwhile, just call it force of habit for want of a better phrase. And because The Government doesn’t want me to is the best reason for doing anything, after all.