Worm Winds of Zanzibar (The Alex Trueman Chronicles Book 2)

by Martin Dukes

  “Garek was messing with my head,” said Alex. “When they were holding me there and checking out my skull.” He described the fairground, the garden and the people in their 1950s-style clothing.

  “He’s good,” said Malcolm with a nod. “But I’m guessing if you’d had a close look, you know, under stuff, behind stuff, you’d have noticed there’s no detail there where there should be. It’d be all up-front like a stage set but nothing behind. If you’d had more than a few words with the people there you’d have seen through it. People are hard to do convincingly, but obviously if you don’t know what to expect you’re going to be taken in. No reflection on you, pal. Any mortal would be taken in.”

  “Huh! They surely got me!” said Alex with a hollow laugh. “That temple place, though, I can’t believe that wasn’t real. It’s got to be. Too real for my liking!” He shuddered. “I honestly thought that was it for me.”

  He stood up at last, rubbing his throat ruefully. “I genuinely thought I’d died.” He glanced down at his black robe. “And look at this. I didn’t even know they’d put it on me.”

  “Yeah, quite a look you’ve got goin’ on there,” said Malcolm with a wry smile.

  “So how did I even get here?” asked Alex, who was beginning to feel a little calmer now, even though the strange realities of Elysium were still hard to accept. “I was about to get my noggin lopped off and then suddenly I’m here.”

  “Yeah, I told you they were hot for you. Sounds like you found your 5D feet just in the nick of time. Nice timing,” said Malcolm with a chuckle. “I’d love to have seen the expression on old Zeke’s face when you t-phased out of there.”

  Alex sighed and spread his hands helplessly. “Too much jargon–way too much! T-phased? What are you even on about?” he demanded. “You’ve hardly said a word I understand up to now.”

  “Welcome to Elysium,” said Malcolm grinning. “’Goes with the territory. I was just the same when I got here. You get used to it.”

  “Explain,” said Alex wearily.

  “Okay, but let’s go get coffee,” said Malcolm, pulling on a dressing gown that was hanging on the back of the door. He glanced at his watch. “Two thirty in the morning. The Brothers keep unsocial hours.”

  He opened the door and led the way downstairs into a kitchen, switching on lights in the conventional manner en-route. The kitchen looked thoroughly convincing, at least to Alex’s eye, although he had a surreptitious look behind the bread bin whilst Malcolm was getting milk out of the fridge and putting the kettle on.

  “C-con,” said Malcolm over his shoulder. “The whole house. You won’t find any flaws. It’s as real as I can make it.”

  “Even down to the dried up baked bean juice on the table?” asked Alex, picking at it with his thumbnail.

  Uh, huh,” said Malcolm putting coffee into two mugs. “That’s what you call attention to detail.” He laughed. “No, actually, just kidding. That’s actual bean juice from actual beans, no construct of any kind about it.”

  He fetched a toaster out of a cupboard and opened the bread bin. There was nothing in it.

  “Here’s an example,” he continued. “Check this out.” An expression of momentary pre-occupation settled in his face and then a slice of brown bread appeared in each hand. Alex, startled, took a step backward.

  “Whoa!” he said.

  “Take a look at them,” said Malcolm handing them over. “One is c-con, the other is i-con. Which is which?”

  Alex examined the two slices. They looked and felt identical. He frowned.

  “Go on,” said Malcolm encouragingly, switching off the kettle. “Use all your senses.”

  Alex sniffed the bread. One of the slices had no smell; he tore it in two, revealing a smooth grey substance that reminded him of what Malcolm had described as D3D. “I-con,” he said. “And I’m not going to check it for taste.” He put the two slices on a plate by the toaster.

  “Good for you,” said Malcolm, setting two steaming mugs on the table. “You’re getting the hang of this. Now what are we going to do about our deluded friend Zeke and his little pals?”

  Alex shrugged. “I guess the ball’s in your court now. How do you even do that–making stuff appear out of thin air?”

  “Tech implanted in here,” said Malcolm, indicating his head vaguely. “Taps into the power of a collapsing supernova. One of the joys of Elysium. Cool, isn’t it?”

  “Damn right it is,” said Alex with feeling. “Can you do cake?”

  “‘Course I can,” said Malcolm pulling up a chair. “But I’m thinking we need to get some friends of mine on board now. This is a really interesting development. You turning up here, I mean. They’ve been working with me on the project.”

  “What project?”

  Malcolm grinned and wagged a finger at Alex.

  “This project.”

  “Oh, great. So now I’m a project.”

  “You are,” said Malcolm. “You’re a really interesting guy. I thought so the moment I came across you back there in Intersticia, munching on biscuits you had no right to be eating and looking kind of gormless. I thought, hmmm, interesting guy, and I was right. Armand and Dave think so too. I’ll give them a call.”

  Malcolm closed his eyes, and his features were visited by an expression suggestive of thought. A fat man materialised next to the fridge.

  “Hey,” he said, raising a hand in greeting to Alex and then to Malcolm. “This him?”

  “Yup,” said Malcolm, getting on with buttering toast. He gestured with a knife. “Alex, meet Dave. Dave meet Alex. Alex just did an involuntary t-phase.”

  “Cool,” said Dave looking impressed. “Neat trick. Neat threads too,” he said with a nod at Alex’s robes. He had long, wavy black hair and his impressive paunch was encased in a Nirvana T-shirt. He was somewhat taller, but dressed otherwise he would have looked remarkably similar to the Grand Vizier. Alex resolved not to mention this point as Dave came across to shake hands with him.

  “So, how did you do this phase thing?” asked Dave. “A lot of guys’d give their right arm to be doin’ that.”

  “He doesn’t know, dumbass,” Malcolm told him. “Like I said, it was involuntary. But that activator band you made me might have had something to do with it.” He turned to Alex, who had his mouth open to speak. “I gather you slipped on the band, Alex. You know, the headband? I hid one in your cell, along with some other stuff I thought you might find useful.”

  Alex nodded, remembering the loose slab in the Sultan’s prison cell. Already it seemed an age, a world away.

  “We didn’t know what they were for,” he said.

  “Really?” Malcolm frowned. “I left instructions. There was a metal cutter and a lock pick, both configured with your own DNA and each with a limited internal power supply.”

  “Right, so that’s what the other stone was,” said Alex thoughtfully. “A lock pick. No wonder Henry couldn’t get it to work. But we never found any instructions. I tried on the band anyway and it sent me completely loopy!” said Alex indignantly. “Thanks for that. What was the point of it, anyway?”

  “We thought there was something unique about the way your brain was put together,” said Dave. “There was a bit in there that seemed to do no obvious job. The purpose of the band was to stimulate it, to wake it up, as it were.”

  “Looks like it did the job,” said Malcolm. “I think we know what it does now.”

  “But hang on a moment,” objected Alex. “How did you know we’d be banged up by the Sultan? How did you know which cell we’d be held in? I thought the whole sector was locked down so’s nobody could interfere, anyway. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Malcolm sighed. “This is going to be hard for you to understand. We couldn’t get in or out during the lockdown, but we could see some of what was going on. Not real clear, but enough to pick up general trends. We reckoned things were going pear-shaped down there for you. We knew the Sultan was going to go off his chump, and we thought there was
a good chance you might get yourself banged up.”

  “Place of safety, you said,” said Alex ruefully. “Ha! I might have been killed straight off. I was lucky to even get as far as a cell.”

  “There was a limit to what we could do,” continued Malcolm apologetically. “We did try. Obviously we couldn’t get in to do anything to help you within the time frame of the lockdown. But there was nothing to stop me from stepping back a couple of decades and planting stuff in those cells before the lockdown began. I did all the cells,” he added with a nod. “Just to be on the safe side, same bag of tricks in each one. I worked real hard for you. I wrote a message on the walls in amongst all the other graffiti. No one else was going to be able to read it, except you.”

  “Very clever,” said Alex. “But unfortunately the Brothers had the same idea, didn’t they? I mean, about getting in to Zanzibar before the lockdown began. Garek was in there waiting for me to turn up. He’d been there years and years.”

  “Yeah,” said Malcolm with a nod. “Yes he did. You’d better fill Dave in on what just happened to you.”

  “Hold it a sec,” said Dave, raising a pudgy hand. “Armand’s on his way. He was just dealing with some guy in C9. I’m guessing Alex isn’t going to want to go through this twice.” He leant his very considerable bulk against Malcolm’s fridge. “Coffee’d be good,” he added.

  Malcolm grunted and put the kettle on again, but there was no other trivial, passing the time of day kind of conversation. Dave fiddled with his single earring and regarded Alex with friendly interest. Malcolm made more toast. Somehow, without Alex noticing, he had changed from boxer shorts and T-shirt into his customary crumpled suit. His unruly hair, standing up at all angles when Alex had first materialised in his bedroom, had been smoothed down and subjected to a little basic discipline, but it looked nevertheless as though it might break out from this confinement at any moment.

  “This is my DA,” said Malcolm with a laugh, when Alex drew attention to his quick change. “That’s my Default Avatar. That’s what I look like unless I decide to look like something else. It’s what I looked like when I first got into Elysium.”

  He began to tell Alex about the large firm of printers he had once worked at, but before he had made much progress, an exceptionally tall black man wearing a neat black suit and a wing-collared shirt arrived in their midst. His features were very fine and very dark, with high cheekbones. His hair was close cropped. A vague whiff of lavender arrived with him, which reminded Alex of old ladies’ handkerchiefs.

  “Armand,” said Malcolm, doing the introductions.

  Armand helped himself to toast without being asked and made a vague gesture with one hand that prompted Malcolm to get leaf tea out of a cupboard. He never took his eyes off Alex, however, while pulling out a chair and sitting at the table opposite him.

  “Delighted to make your acquaintance,” said Armand with a faint French accent. “Perhaps you could tell us what has been, uh, going on. I’m assuming Malcolm is already in the picture.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Malcolm behind him, rinsing out a tea pot. “I’m right in there. You go ahead, Alex.”

  Alex went ahead.

  “Remarkable,” said Armand, leaning back in his chair when Alex had finished. He had listened with the closest attention, occasionally stopping Alex and requiring him to supply more detail, occasionally passing comment to Malcolm or Dave. Now he cocked his head on one side and regarded Alex thoughtfully.

  “You are a very extraordinary person,” he said at last.

  “Er, thanks,” said Alex, blushing a little. “Good of you to say so.”

  “I told you he was,” said Malcolm smugly. “Didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you?”

  “But why?” asked Alex simply. “What’s so special about me? What’s so special about my skull? I still don’t get it.”

  “You can’t see it,” said Armand patiently. “As you were told by another, if your story is to be believed. I can’t see it, either. We don’t have the sensory organs, as your friend Ezekiel pointed out. If archangels can see it, we simply have to accept it. What we can see and what may, perhaps, be connected is your apparent ability to T-phase.” He raised a hand as Alex opened his mouth to ask the inevitable question.

  “I know,” he continued. “More jargon. T-Phasing, or simply phasing, is how we get about. Ezekiel was telling you about the fifth dimension.”

  “You know, that folding paper stuff,” broke in Malcolm. Alex nodded.

  “Indeed. We can travel anywhere in the Universe, or indeed within Elysium, by using that principle. We call it making a T-phase – the T stands for teleportation. It requires sophisticated technology and a great deal of power.”

  “Not for this guy,” said Dave, gesturing with a part-eaten slice of toast. “He just did it.”

  “That’s right,” said Armand, his mouth twitching into a momentary smile. “You just did it, so it seems.” He tapped his head. “We have what you would perhaps describe as circuitry embedded in here. It enables us to connect to the technology I mentioned to you and to the necessary power source.”

  “A supernova, yeah?” suggested Alex. “That’s what everyone says.”

  “Various stellar power sources are employed in various parts of the Universe,” said Armand, accepting a mug of tea from Malcolm. “Essentially, it’s unlimited power. It’s what makes Elysium tick, as it were. But you, Alex, appear to manage without. An extraordinary thing. I have never heard of such a thing, and I have been here a long time.”

  “He’s older than he looks,” explained Dave with a gesture of his mug.

  “What we need you to do is to repeat the accomplishment,” said Armand. “I presume that you are capable of replicating the process. You will need to set in place the exact same mental processes you used before.”

  “But it’s not exactly the same, is it?” observed Malcolm. “Unless we lay him on the table and I get ready to swing a bread knife at his throat, it’s not even going to come close.”

  “If he can do it once, we have to assume he can do it twice,” asserted Armand, without taking his eyes off Alex. “How did it begin?”

  “I guess it began with me picturing Malcolm,” said Alex, casting his mind back. “I really wanted to get to him just then. I really wanted out of there. I mean, like, REALLY,” he added for emphasis. “You know, big sword coming down and all that.” He shuddered once more at the recollection.

  “I’m sure,” said Armand smoothly. “I imagine it must have been… distressing. Picture Malcolm’s bedroom, if you can bear it,” he said. “Let’s see if we can get you there. Come on, take it step by step. Take yourself through the same mental process. We’re in no hurry. Close your eyes, if it helps.”

  Alex set down his mug and closed his eyes. He tried to recreate the mental state he had found himself in during that dreadful moment when the gleaming black sword had risen above him. At first it was impossible. There were too many distractions; Malcolm putting the top back on the coffee jar, closing a cupboard, Dave munching toast.

  “Shush!” said Armand as though sensing these disturbances.

  It was better now. Alex cautiously found his way back into that dark recess of his mind, the hidden place, the cave within himself. With fingertips, he explored the texture of the darkness, reaching, probing. At the same time he envisaged Malcolm’s bedroom, holding the image, making it sharper, more focused. The veil parted with shocking suddenness and a momentary sensation of falling. There was a sickening lurch, a prickle along his spine and a blinding flash. He screwed his eyes up tight, opened them and he was there, in Malcolm’s room, standing by the bed. Malcolm and Armand came thundering up the stairs. Dave materialised next to him, still with a piece of toast in his hand.

  “Dave!” said Malcolm in disgust. “I can’t believe you phased over three metres.”

  “He did,” said Dave, sounding aggrieved and gesturing at Alex.

  “He did indeed,” said Armand grinning broadly. “He did indeed.
That, my friend, is a very special talent.”

  “I told you, didn’t I?” said Malcolm proudly. “Ha!”

  “Does that mean I can go… anywhere?” asked Alex, the implications of this beginning to dawn on him. “What’s going to happen now?” Kelly, Henry and the others came suddenly to the forefront of his mind. “I need to get back to my friends,” he said. “They’re being held prisoner.”

  “I shouldn’t worry about that,” said Dave. “Time operates differently in Elysium. We should be able to drop you back in there any time you like.”

  “Uh, huh,” said Malcolm shaking his head. “The sector’s locked down, remember?”

  “He got himself out of there without tripping any wires,” said Dave. “I’d have picked it up. I’ve been across all their signals. Not a peep out of them.”

  Armand frowned. “From what Alex said it sounds like Garek used a piece of museum vintage technology, something which contemporary sensors aren’t even looking for.”

  “We’ve got to do something about the Brothers,” said Malcolm. “They’ve crossed the line, haven’t they? They’ve been caught poking their nasty little fingers into a lockdown. That ought to count for something. We should get word to Mike, shouldn’t we?” He and Dave looked to Armand, who leaned back in his chair.

  “I agree that Ezekiel is technically guilty of attempted murder,” said Armand. “Although, since the intended victim was a mortal, it’s hardly going to set the courts ablaze.”

  “Oh, thanks,” said Alex indignantly.

  “We need to find out where this temple place is,” continued Armand. “The powers won’t like the sound of secret conspiracies to end the Universe, no matter how misguided these characters are.”

  He leaned forward, tapping a finger on the table top.

  “Do you think you could go there again?”

  “You are joking?” said Alex with a shudder.