And how many refugees will other realms accept, Tom wondered, before they close their borders?

  Then lev-bikes swooped over the crowd, strong hands reached down to Tom and Jissie, swung them up. They coasted over a myriad heads -upturned faces following their progress with fatalistic jealousy - before alighting on the wharf’s edge, in a clear area where platoons of Halberdiers with interlocking mag-shields held back the jostling mob.

  Elva was not among the bike riders, but just then her voice called out from inside a small vessel floating at the wharf’s edge. Tom helped Jissie climb down, then flicked off his cloak and vaulted down in one easy motion.

  Nausea hit him as his feet touched the deck inside the cabin, and he stumbled as kaleidoscope images flashed through his mind. Then he was on his knees, vision clearing. Jissie was nervously scanning the vessel’s interior just as the hatch solidified shut overhead.

  There was no sign of Elva.

  ‘Elva ... ?’

  Then her disembodied voice said: ‘Sorry, my love. I’m a little delayed. What you once called “salting the ground”, as I recall.’

  ‘You recall everything perfectly.’

  ‘So I do, darling. So I do.’

  Tom sat back on the soft flooring, leaned against a bulkhead, and tried not to vomit as the vessel lurched into motion.

  ‘What’s your ... situation?’ he managed to say.

  ‘We made contact with the Third Battalion.’ The comm hissed. ’There’s a Jack down and—’

  Silence, save for an internal thumping of the vessel’s systems.

  ‘Elva!’

  Tom coughed.

  ‘—little delayed. Tom? Are you all right?’

  The visions were closing in again.

  Dead man’s hand, severed and lifeless amid broken furniture and licking flames.

  Tom blinked. There was a drop of fluid on the back of his hand, electric blue and glowing ...

  ‘No.’

  ... which sank away, absorbed into his skin. It left him wondering if there had been anything there besides an artefact of blurred vision and sickness.

  Then a vertiginous shift took hold of Tom and black-and-bronze figures rear their talon-hooked wings whose leading edges carry rows of targeting eyes, and tear liquid bodies asunder with a swipe. They leap aside as more of their kind materialize in the Dark Fire where black flames spread wide and—

  Tom squeezed his eyes shut.

  ‘Jissie? Look after him until—’

  Shift, and the screams of children as the Absorbed men with scarlet scarves at their throats move in unnatural synchrony, bringing their grasers to bear.

  ‘Yes, ma’am. I’ll do everything I—’

  Then the shards of scenes which surrounded Tom became a blizzard of impressions born of Chaos, fragments of a world under siege, spinning round him like a pack of ravening beasts whose maws were open to devour his sanity while the fetid stench of rotting corpses rose from their throats and overwhelmed him.

  When Tom’s head cleared, some hours later, the sickness was gone as if it had never clutched his body. Tom felt weak but clean, and he smiled as Jissie fetched him a squeeze-bulb filled with indigoberry daistral.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’m feeling much better.’

  ‘That’s good, my ...’ Jissie, kneeling in front of him, looked down at the deck. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Hey’ Tom, still clutching his drink, raised her chin with his forefinger. ‘Call me Tom, all right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Tom let that slide. Instead, he squeezed hot daistral into his mouth where it exploded with sweetness and warmth. It slipped down inside, silk-soft and spreading energy.

  ‘Good. Ah ... Where are we?’

  Jissie gestured towards a small display. They were alone in the humming vessel, which was guided by its onboard AI.

  ‘Close to where my Lady bade the machine go. They’ll have a, um’ - Jissie glanced at Tom - ‘an autodoc all ready for you. She said.’

  ‘That’s good,’ muttered Tom. ‘But I’m all better now.’

  Tricons shifted in the holo. They were travelling along a submerged tributary of the Hypotubule Way, just passing through another realm’s border. Sensors indicated neither scanfields nor weaponry to delay their progress.

  Tom put aside the empty squeeze-bulb, and lay back against the curved bulkhead. It felt warm, hard against his shoulder blades. His eyelids drooped, opened.

  ‘Sir? Tom...?’

  ‘I’m just tired, but I won’t sleep just yet.’ Tom reached inside his tunic, pulled out the stallion talisman. ‘Are you interested in historical stories?’

  Outside the vessel, black waters which rarely experienced visible light slipped past soundlessly, without revealing the tiny fragile forms that lived and fought and died inside its fluid, nurturing, yet treacherous medium.

  ~ * ~

  33

  TERRA AD 2166

  <>

  [9]

  Blinding sunlight sparkled from the great glass spheres, the long walkways which angled into the sea or carried holidaymakers between the restaurants and the sightseeing-globes high above the warm, dancing, lapis-lazuli waves.

  There was an official name but no-one used it. Gerbil Heaven stretched out across the sea, enabling pastel-dressed tourists to spend time in its submarine restaurants and gift shops, while allowing a few precocious schoolchildren access to study centres where grinning researchers carried out real marine biology.

  ‘Last time I was beneath the sea,’ murmured Dirk, ‘it was black and choppy and I thought I was going to die.’

  ‘This was with McLean?’ said Kian; and, unspoken: Along with Orla? Smuggling matter-compilers?

  ‘Right.’

  With Deirdre, they rode a spherical lift to a high bubble-shaped restaurant where, she assured them, they could take lunch while watching the dolphins play below.

  ‘You’re the expert.’ Kian looked at Dirk. ‘She’s been here at least, well, once before.’

  ‘Hey ... I thought about coming back here at Christmas.’

  ‘But you didn’t’

  ‘It was shut.’ Deirdre looked from one twin to the other. ‘Is it true that people can’t tell you apart?’

  ‘Well of—’

  ‘—course they—’

  ‘—can’t’

  Deirdre stepped right back, staring hard. ‘Thicker neck, heavy shoulders ... Narrower features, lean ...’

  The twins looked at each other.

  ‘You look like a wrestler,’ Deirdre told Dirk. ‘And you, Kian, are a long-distance runner. Easy.’

  For once, the brothers could find nothing to say.

  ‘Come on, guys.’ The lift-sphere stopped, and Deirdre waved the doors open. ‘Stop worrying about your spaceships, and let’s all go eat some smelly fish.’

  An hour later, they were drinking lattes, slumped back in their chairs around the detritus of lunch, happy with the buzz of their own conversation and ignoring the families surrounding them.

  ‘—learned more about the exercises in this weird old book,’ Dirk was saying, ‘called Zen and the Art of Programming by this Buchanan guy. Old website-derived thing that foresaw the merge between evolving software and formal specifications. Grainy bitmaps. Weird stuff about self-defence as a branch of physics, and Lord knows what.’

  ‘And your buddy Rajesh taught you these baithaks and dands? Combat conditioning?’

  ‘Yeah, and some takedowns you’ll really like. There’s a pickup where—’

  Deirdre shook her head. ‘Am I going to enjoy this bit?’

  ‘Never mind. Anyway, the original site was described as “the mingled thoughts of Borges, Pirsig, and Dijkstra, as produced by the bastard intellectual love-child of Feynman and Bruce Lee.” That’s verbatim, pretty much.’

  Deirdre laughed, and Dirk looked at Kian.

  Not many people would have caught those old references.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ said Dirk.

  ‘Yeah. Pity,’ said Kian.

  ‘What?’ Deirdre looked from one to the other. ‘What?’

  That was the moment a strange woman approached their table, pulled out an unused chair without asking and sat down.

  Her suit was pale-grey and elegantly cut, her coiffed blonde hair was short, and though she looked eighteen at first glance, it was obvious from her calm self-possession that she was actually much older.

  ‘My name is Zoë, and I’m a friend of Ro’s. I need to talk to you. All three of you.’

  She was also the person who had been watching them back in the shuttle port’s Arrivals lounge.

  ‘What,’ said Deirdre, ‘do you want to talk about?’

  ‘Well ... Did you know some people still hold to the idea of parallel universes? Every time an electron has a choice of two ways to travel, there are two entire universes, as if our own wasn’t unimaginably vast already.’

  ‘That’s nonsense.’ Deirdre’s voice was flat, unfriendly. ‘And why are you talking physics to complete strangers?’

  Neither Dirk nor Kian responded. There had to be a second level to this conversation. And there was one kind of entity which seemed to exist in many superimposed states - maybe overlapping realities - at any instant in time.

  The Zajinets.

  ‘Time is weird, too. Two centuries of looking,’ said Zoë, ‘and there’s only one low-level process that appears to know the difference between past and future: neutral kaon-antikaon decay. Otherwise, there’s no telling past from future in any fundamental equation.’

  ‘If they’re neutral,’ began Deirdre, ‘how can there be an anti—?’

  ‘It’s the strangeness number—’

  ‘—not the charge—’

  ‘—that’s opposite.’

  ‘Decoherence,’ said Zoë. ‘Definite past to fuzzy present to unknown future ... Are the concepts meaningless? It’s probably one of those unanswerable questions, like whether everything has to proceed from a first cause, prima causa, like that.’ Zoë stood up, pushed her chair back. ‘A thousand years from now, scientists and philosophers still won’t have a clue, y’know?’

  Zoë’s attention rested on Deirdre just for a moment; then Zoë turned and walked away with a side-to-side sway that captured three intent gazes until she entered a lift-sphere and transparent doors slid shut and she dropped from sight.

  ‘What the bastard hell,’ said Deirdre slowly, ‘was that all about?’

  Kian turned to Dirk.

  ‘They can’t be watching now, otherwise—’

  ‘—she wouldn’t have talked to us, right.’

  ‘What? D’you two have any idea what she was talking about?’

  The twins looked at each other. The woman, Zoë, had been using oblique and surreal language because she was almost certain that they were not currently under surveillance, but not entirely sure. However, the twins had the advantage of nameless preternatural senses which could detect sensor devices trained upon them. Right now, they felt nothing.

  ‘She was talking about quantum weirdness, and how particles behave differently depending—’

  ‘—on how you observe them. It was a hint that we should behave differently, ourselves. Not too clear a hint, obviously.’

  Deirdre leaned forward on the table. ‘Are you two trying to tell me something? Or just playing games?’

  ‘She’s UNSA Intelligence and we’re in danger from Zajinets and we’re under—’

  ‘—surveillance. You as well. That’s what she was telling us.’

  With a long sigh, Deirdre closed her eyes, opened them, then gave a tiny smile.

  ‘You’re forgetting the most important part.’

  Kian and Dirk simultaneously raised their right eyebrows, in a synchronized gesture which would have scared most people witless. Deirdre was unmoved.

  ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that young, or not-so-young, Zoë just fancies the pants off me. Or didn’t you notice?’

  ‘Urn...’

  ‘Er...’

  Dirk coughed. ‘Excuse me? Could we—’

  ‘—have the check, please?’

  Particles under observation might or might not behave differently than they would otherwise, but people under surveillance are certainly constrained.

  That night, they sat cross-legged in a circle on the rug in Deirdre’s candle-lit room, taking it in turns to sip from the fat bottle of Drambuie which Dirk had brought from Aberdeen. Their conversation remained subdued and morose, encouraging them to drink.

  ‘Uch ...’ Deirdre shivered at the sweet/sharp taste, and passed the bottle to Kian. He drank, grimaced - ‘Likewise’ - and handed it on to Dirk.

  Outside, small lights twinkled in a broad tree, unmoving in the breeze-less California night.

  ‘Come on,’ said Deirdre. ‘We should all get some sleep, ready for our trip to Arizona. All right?’

  ‘Our trip.’ Dirk nodded, as if he had expected this all along.

  ‘Naturally,’ said Kian. ‘We’re hardly going to go to DistribOne—’

  ‘—without our best pal, are we?’

  ‘Come on, boys. Scat. I want sleep.’

  The twins hauled themselves to their feet, Dirk snagging the bottle as he did so.

  ‘ ‘Night, dear.’

  ‘ ‘Night, dear.’

  ‘Goodnight, boys.’

  <>

  ~ * ~

  34

  NULAPEIRON AD 3426

  The vessel surfaced in a wide oval lake in the Umbral Caverns of Realm Rinsenberger. On the brass-coloured dock, green-uniformed Dragoons helped Tom from the subaquargos, while Jissie clambered out by herself and skipped ahead.

  Though the atmosphere was warm and humid, the Dragoons betrayed no signs of discomfort, even in their dress uniforms with heavy polished helmets. The officer bowed and introduced himself as Lieutenant Hixent. Then the whole platoon wheeled, forming an escort.

  After they had walked only a few metres, the platoon halted, and it took Tom a second to realize that he and Jissie and Lieutenant Hixent were standing on a wide silvery disk, one of many inset in the brass wharf. The disk detached itself and rose into the air, carrying all three of them aloft.

  ‘A moment, my Lord ...’ Lieutenant Hixent made a gesture, assuming control. ‘OK. Now, we have an arachnargos waiting for you.’

  Tom looked down at Jissie. Her eyes, widened, took in everything.

  ‘We should move quickly,’ Tom said. ‘If that’s possible.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’ Lieutenant Hixent caused the disk to slide through the air, while the escort marched below to a jogging cadence, matching the lev-disk’s speed. ‘Would you and your daughter care for refreshments, or should we get you straight aboard?’

  Jissie flinched then reddened.

  ‘We’ll eat on board,’ said Tom, ‘if that’s all right. My compliments to Lords Draxon and Traquinal, but I should not stay to make their acquaintance. My presence here is a liability.’

  ‘Sir.’

  They wheeled into an airy, cathedral-high hall, filled with high arches and intricate friezes and centuries-old mosaics. At the hall’s centre, a functional-looking arachnargos was poised: long and low, its upper carapace a dark, shining green, its lower thorax pale-grey speckled with brown. The tendrils were hunched and angular, ready to thrust into motion.

  ‘It’s the fastest we have, my Lord.’

  ‘My thanks, Lieutenant. My profound thanks.’

  It was only as tendrils were lifting Tom and Jissie aboard that Tom saw relief soften Lieutenant Hixent’s square features. And Tom wondered whether it was a spirit of solidarity or a desire to remove a prime target from a fearful realm which motivated the Dragoons’ assistance.

  Five hours later, after a journey which Tom spent worrying about Elva while Jissie stood in the control cabin watching the pilots, they reached the border with Valkeu Demesne, another realm which Tom had never visited. No longer ruled by the eponymous Count Valkeu, it had become a demesne whose reputation was for innovative technical products produced by an isolationist culture which grew increasingly ... strange.