Muddle and Win

by John Dickinson

  The distant glow from the city behind them reflected on something ahead. It was a gate, with nine doors made of iron and brass and adamantine rock. It grew as they flew towards it.

  It grew and grew, until it seemed the size of a small mountain and wide enough for an army of giants to march out in line abreast. Muddlespot went from wondering who was going to open it for them to wondering if there was really anyone anywhere who was big enough to open it at all.

  Still it grew, huge, blank, impenetrable, and now Muddlespot saw that the whole adventure was going to end right there. Because, plainly, and whatever the guards and even Corozin might say, that gate just wasn’t going to open for them.

  It didn’t open. It went on growing until the rivets were the size of hillocks and the nearest keyhole was like the mouth of a huge cave, yawning wider and wider as if to swallow them . . .

  And it did. They flew through the keyhole with the guards whooping and cackling like children in a tunnel. Their voices echoed round the iron chamber and struck sparks from the metal. Then they were out into the wild abyss beyond, which was made of heat and cold and wet and dry, and was torn by great winds that tossed their craft to and fro and up and down, until Muddlespot’s eyes bobbled in his head and he began to feel very uncomfortable indeed.

  And on they flew. And on. Until the clouds parted, and they were skimming over the rooftops of Darlington Row.

  ‘Alert!’ cried an angel, high on a crystal tower. A thousand amber eyes opened.

  (That was his watch mate, waking up. Angels are not challenged in the eye department. They can have as many as they need. A watch angel needs quite a lot of them.)

  Together they looked at the scene below. They called the Seraph. In an instant he was with them. All along the watchtowers a shudder ran – the militant rustle of a million soft white feathers. Something was happening.

  Cold-eyed, lean-jawed, the Seraph brooded like a thundercloud. He uttered a single word. ‘Scramble!’

  Golden trumpets blew. Flights of doves exploded from the towers like thistledown in a wind. They banked, one squadron after another, and swooped down upon Earth. Over the air came a message, loud and clear: ‘Enemy craft approaching the Darlington Sector. Intercept and destroy!’

  There it was, a dark and clumsy insect, chugging steadily across the skies to the very heart of the High Security Zone. A sitting target.

  The squadrons banked in pursuit.

  Muddlespot was struggling into a parachute that the guards had passed back to him. It was the act of shrugging the awkward thing onto his shoulders that made him tilt his head back and lift his eyes to the sky – the sky of white, puffy clouds that now, suddenly, seemed to be speckling with little black dots. Little black fast-moving dots.

  He gaped at them for a moment. Then he let out a shriek.

  One of the guards looked up. ‘Doves at six o’clock high!’ he cried. ‘Evasive action!’

  The hell-plane flipped onto its side and dropped like a stone. Pursued by the threatening coos of enraged doves, it zigzagged desperately over the neat front gardens of Darlington Row. The air hissed. Little white missiles showered all around them. Three landed in a row within inches of Muddlespot’s nose, and burned a neat line of holes in the bat skin. The holes smoked at the edges.

  ‘Aaahahaahah!’ cried a guard in terror, as the plane flung itself to the right and the first dove squadron peeled away.

  ‘Five o’clock! Five o’clock!’ cried his fellow.

  ‘And three and seven and eight o’clock!’ screamed Muddlespot, who had taken the time to look around.

  In they came, merciless, swooping out of the sun . . .

  And you can weave and spin, you can dive and climb and do Immelmann turns, but there’s no evading the doves. You can run, but they’re faster than you are. And you can’t hide. They get you whatever you do. They get you every time.

  (Just ask anyone who owns a car.)

  In they came. Again the sky hissed. Little piles of dove poo splattered on the wings. The engine coughed. A sulphurous fume flew back from the cowling and blinded Muddlespot where he sat. The attacking squadron banked away but others were still pursuing. The sky was full of enemies, swift, implacable and armed to the anus.

  ‘Target ahead!’ cried one of the guards.

  Trailing a stream of yellow smoke, the machine shot through an open window. Muddlespot, peering fearfully from his seat, looked out on a landscape of carpet and tablecloth and doorways and cat bowls all reeling backwards beneath him.

  ‘Get ready to jump!’

  Everything was spinning. Now, what was beneath him was an upside-down lamp and shade sprouting from a very upside-down ceiling. And above him, also upside down, drifted the face of Sally Jones, huge, saying something like ‘Let me do that for you.’

  ‘Jump, Muddlespot! Jump!’ screamed a guard as everything righted itself.

  ‘Um – I’ve got this sudden pain!’ wailed Muddlespot.

  ‘Send us a card about it! JUMP!’

  ‘But I don’t want to die!’

  A long, leathery arm reached back from the cockpit and grabbed him by the neck. ‘Sure you do!’ the guard cried. And hurled him out into space.

  Air rushing . . .

  Insides wriggling in terror . . .

  Which way is up?

  A moment ago, that was . . .

  A chaos of light, and of unfamiliar things, spinning before his eyes . . .

  And some of it is getting horribly nearer, horribly quickly . . .

  The air is bellowing in his ears . . .

  WHACK!

  Miraculously, the parachute had opened above him. The canopy billowed into a beautiful, comforting half-sphere, with a pair of jaunty slit eyes and horns blazoned on the middle of it. Somewhere above him the wounded machine flew on, its engine coughing and its smoke-trail thickening. The ground was swaying up to meet him, but no longer rushing as if to crush him to pulp. He had time to look around, to try to understand this place that was to be his field of action, and that he had never seen before.

  The smells hit him immediately. They were strong and unfamiliar. Soap scum, leather, carpet dust and old cat – he knew none of them. He recognized the scent of an oven (there were quite a lot of ovens in Pandemonium), but the sweet, moist overlay was totally new to him. He knew nothing about baking. Ovens were for meat – preferably meat that was still living. Dough was to Muddlespot as sunspots would be to an Amazonian slug. It just did not compute.

  The room itself seemed to him to be a huge, cubical cavern with pale walls and a floor the size of an ocean. Except that he knew it couldn’t really be an ocean, not here. For one thing, it was blue. (There isn’t much blue in Pandemonium, and what there is doesn’t appear in the oceans, which are mostly cooking fat.) There were rectangular shapes on the walls. He did not realize, then, that some of these shapes were pictures and others were windows, or that there was any difference between the two.

  The chaotic profusion of objects bewildered him. The house contained all the furniture and possessions of two working adults and two teenagers, including office papers, newspapers, bills, sports kits, school kits, a cat, a largely forgotten tidying rota and nowhere to put the boots. Stuff was everywhere.

  And it was all huge. It was far larger than he had imagined it would be. When he looked down again he saw that he was about to make his landing on what appeared to be a mountain covered with dark forest. He waggled his arms and legs a bit to see if he could steer, and found he couldn’t.

  He was still clutching his equipment sack. His mind had forgotten all about that in his terror, but his hand hadn’t. Or maybe it had just forgotten to let go. He dropped it now, letting it fall the last few fathoms to the ground, and gathered himself to land as lightly and gracefully as he could in this new world.

  THUMP!

  Winded, groaning, Muddlespot got to his hands and knees. He untangled himself from the strings of his parachute, took the bag off his back and stuffed as much of the canopy
as he could back into it. He limped over to where his kit lay, found various bits that had fallen out of the sack and stuffed them away too. Then he straightened and looked at the forest around him.

  It wasn’t a forest of trees. (There are trees in Pandemonium. They make them of brass.)

  These were a bit like trees, to be sure. They seemed to be about the thickness of slender young saplings. But they had no branches. And after rising several times his height from the ground, they bent over and lay one on top of another, all in one direction as if shaped by some terrific wind.

  With a creeping feeling in his stomach, Muddlespot realized that they were human hairs. And very probably, unless the guards had made some enormous mistake, they were part of Sally Jones. He was standing on her head, and her head was – to him – the size of a mountain.

  Muddlespot was used to being smaller than everything else. But that was because Corozin had chosen that he should be. Corozin could make anything he had power over be any size he liked. If Corozin had chosen that his palace cleaner should be a hundred fathoms tall, then that’s how it would have been. (Muddlespot would have rather liked being the only hundred-fathom-high former wart in existence. It would have made dusting the palace spires so much easier.)

  But here on Earth, Quantity ruled. Quantity said that things like Muddlespot were Ideas. Ideas had to be small. It didn’t matter how big an Idea they were, said Quantity. They could be Freedom or Liberty or World Peace for all Quantity cared. But they still had to fit inside a head without causing too much discomfort to the head’s owner.

  It’s true that some Ideas kicked back against this. They were Really Big Ideas, they said. They knew things about Quantity that made Quantity look like it wore nappies. No way were they going to be told how much space they fitted into. The Theories of Relativity bent space, warped time, predicted black holes and singularities and chucked in a cosmological constant just to show what they thought of Quantity. But all it got them was enough room to make their owner’s hair stand on end.

  So there was Muddlespot, tiny, smaller than a fleck of skin, abandoned in the vast forest that was the scalp of Sally Jones.

  And the light around him grew.

  Someone behind him said ‘Freeze.’

  THE ANGEL TOWERED over him. It might have been carved from bright marble or shining steel. Or very, very hard light. Muddlespot had to squint at it to see.

  It was all straight lines – head, wings, feet. Its dark glasses were rectangles. Its tuxedo was pressed in crisp white lines, its little black bow tie was a cubist’s dream. Even its fiery hair flamed in little zigzags. In its rock-steady hands it gripped a great bassoon, with the mouth pointed right between Muddlespot’s eyes.

  Muddlespot’s hands shot up as high as they could – which was just slightly below the level of his ears.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ said the angel, in tones like bells tuned in C sharp. ‘What have we here?’

  ‘Er . . .’ said Muddlespot. He thought of various possible answers. None of them seemed likely to improve things. ‘Is there time to defect?’

  ‘Nice try, creep,’ said the angel, ‘but I don’t think so.’ It spoke into a mouthpiece. ‘Hello, base? I have the intruder. Shall I purify?’

  ‘Mercy!’ cried Muddlespot, throwing himself forward and grovelling among his scattered kit. ‘I’m too young to die!’

  ‘You have your orders, Blue Two,’ said a voice from midair. ‘Yay, verily.’

  ‘Too bad, creep,’ said the angel, hefting the bassoon. ‘Say your prayers. Oh, I forgot – you people don’t, do you? Just say “Goodbye” then.’

  Muddlespot’s little claw, clutching frantically, closed on the thing he was looking for. ‘Goodbye!’ he squeaked. And he rolled, and threw it at the angel’s feet. SPLOTCH! went the tar bomb in a fountain of black ickiness. The light was smothered at once.

  The angel was blinded, covered head to foot in black goo – and very angry. It wiped its eyes on its sleeve. The bassoon quested from left to right. Just let that little creep show himself and he’d get blasted so hard he’d still be travelling outwards when all the galaxies collided!

  But Muddlespot was gone. All that was left was an abandoned No. 19 portable furnace, a few scattered runes and a frantic scurrying somewhere in the undergrowth.

  ‘Base!’ yelled the angel. ‘I’ve lost him! Request urgent backup!’

  ‘ALERT! ALERT! ALERT!’ sang angel choirs in close polyphony. Rainbow gates clanged open. Steeds of fire trampled. Saints shook their lances and hurried out to battle. The air rang with alarums. ‘ALERT! ALERT! YAY, VERILY ALERT!’

  Fierce-eyed robins established a cordon in the bushes around the Jones household. Shock troops equipped with cymbals, harps, triangles and trumpets moved in behind a creeping barrage laid down by an organ in the old mission hall, while low-hovering afreets and pegasi circled in support.

  But Muddlespot was ahead of them. He was already tumbling into space, hanging by an abseil line from the tip of Sally’s ear. Down, down he went, burning his hands in his hurry, kicking out with his little feet so that he could swing inwards on the return, and release, and fall in a heap in the delicate curled canyons of Sally’s auricle. There he lay breathless, listening to the clamour of the hunt and the growing clatter of feet in corridors nearby.

  Voices called. Wings rushed. Muddlespot cowered in his place as troops of security angels poured past him, hurrying out from their posts in Sally’s brain to scour the slopes of her shoulders for signs of the intruder.

  The sounds faded. He waited. No more came.

  After a long while he picked himself up, gathered his considerably reduced kit sack, and began to softly make his way in the direction from which they had come.

  Upwards.

  Inwards.

  Into the mind of Sally Jones.

  There was a high archway, carried on slender pillars. Beyond was a six-sided chamber. On each side of it was an arch like the first, opening onto long corridors of diminishing perspectives, or onto flights of broad steps leading either up or down. A gallery ran around the chamber, far above Muddlespot’s head. More arches opened from it, one after another. The archways were not round or pointed but parabola, intersecting at the ceiling with an ordered complexity that could only have been conceived by someone who really liked that sort of maths.

  Everything was made of glass, or some transparent crystal. He could see through walls and through floors, to other chambers and corridors far above his head, or many, many levels below his feet. It was dizzying. It made him feel that the floor was about to give way and send him tumbling through layer after layer of thought. Some of the surfaces were plain; others were patterned with complex translucent designs like mosaics of stars or unicorns rising from waves. These broke up the passage of light, discreetly concealing whatever lay beyond them. In a corridor a level below this one was a row of doors. Muddlespot could just make out the lettering on some of them. FRENCH SUBJUNCTIVE, one said. And next to that was DECLENSION OF IRREGULAR FRENCH VERBS.

  The corridor stretched on and on to the left and right. There must have been a thousand doors of it. And beyond it was another, and another, and . . .

  Music seemed to be playing somewhere, but he couldn’t catch what it was or which direction it came from.

  ‘Unusual,’ he murmured to himself.

  He had thought that the mind of a schoolgirl would be a rather small place. He had imagined that there would be bright colours and childish pictures, and lots of things like bowling alleys and swings and slides. He had been rather looking forward to the slides.

  ‘Unusual, unusual,’ echoed the crystal passages, as if they agreed with him and were also a little proud of it. They spread in all directions, intricate and yet ordered. Everything had symmetry. Every feature had its mirror image. There was no dust. There was no movement. There was no sound of voices. There were a million ideas in Sally’s head, but they didn’t go wandering about. They stayed in their rooms until they were wanted. And
when they were wanted, they had to move quickly.

  Feeling very small, Muddlespot climbed a flight of broad stairs to reach another chamber. There was a crystal figure in the middle of it. A graceful torso rose from a block of sculpted ice. The head was a man’s, with a full beard. He was crowned with leaves. Blank-eyed, he gazed along his outstretched, smoothly muscled arm. His index finger pointed to one of the chamber’s six arches. Above the arch was written in words of gold, LOOK FOR THE RIGHT.

  ‘The right,’ grumbled Muddlespot nervously. ‘Yeah, yeah, right.’ But he went the way that he was pointed. It led down another long corridor and past a court where a fountain was playing. He crossed the open space quickly. On the far side was a higher, wider arch and above it, again in gold letters, were the words IT IS BETTER TO GIVE THAN TO RECEIVE.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ muttered Muddlespot.

  And: ‘She can’t be for real!’

  In their niches, statues brooded silently. Their blank eyes looked down on him. Oh yes she can, they seemed to say. Yes she can.

  There was another flight of stairs, as wide as a basketball court and very long. Muddlespot panted up it, hurrying because he knew there couldn’t be much time before the squadrons of angels he had seen leaving earlier gave up their search and returned to their posts. At the top was another arch. Beyond it was a chamber. This was the place.

  The ceiling was set with stars. A pantheon of crystal statues, marked with names such as TRUTH, WISDOM, FAIRNESS and CALM, stood in a semicircle around the centre of the room. And opposite, curving round the far wall, were two huge arched windows. The windows looked out onto the world in which Sally lived. He saw the room that had spun before his eyes during his desperate flight and jump. He saw a formica tabletop, on which were laid textbooks, calculators, neatly ordered pens and a workbook on which Sally’s own hand was writing, in beautiful, round letters, the words Essay on the Fall of Roman Civilization in Britain.