Kill The Monster, Chapter 19

XVII. WEST OF JAVA

The motorcade was making good time. All nonessential traffic had been removed from the road, and plain clothes Committee units had scouted out the route several days in advance. There were three decoy cars behind, four in front, and an inch of whisker-crystal-reinforced steel between him and the outside world. The Pastoral car's windows were purely cosmetic, reflective smoked glass panes mounted on steel. The car, a Hirondelle Carroccio Ghibellino, was driven by TV camera, and if the driver was dead, could continue under its own guidance indefinitely. Inside the car, facing and flanking him, were three people, all of whom would die to protect him, each regularly reassessed for loyalty by lie detector.

Adam Hamed's son had never learned the truth behind his father's death. To Abel, Sean was god incarnate on Earth; Abel would have slit his own throat if Sean were thirsty. Abel stood at the apex of a pyramid of Committee weapons, security, surveillance, unarmed combat and physical training instructors who nowadays started inculcating ability to kill and removing any scruples thereto attached when their subject was still of school age. Somewhere in the heaven of good, good men, Abel Hamed's shade was watching his son's woefully misguided life and weeping. The mongoloid boy Sean had saved from Heaven, meanwhile, had grown into a mongoloid man named Giustiniano. Giustiniano had seen Heaven, and was eager to get back to it by receiving into his unworthy body any bullets meant for God's pastor. His placement in Sean's entourage had been as much a matter of PR as increased security, though he had the strength of a shaved bear in a sharp suit.

Finally, Stephanie, twenty years old and an inch taller than Sean, sat between Mickey and Abel, disassembling an electronic pistol. With the pistol, she was capable of hitting the bull of an Olympic standard target from ten metres, ten times out of ten. Looking up, she saw Sean's eyes on her and blushed like a sunset.

The motorcade included motorcycle outriders, light tanks, heavy APC's; it included specially heavy guinea-pig cars designed to set off antivehicular mines, specialist vehicles such as self-propelled anti-aircraft cannon, gamma source and dimensional translation sensor cars. Finally, it had to contain the command and control trucks necessary to hold all its other components together. It was over three kilometres long, and as it crossed this area of the peninsula, was like a steel blade sliding through the land. Nothing north of the motorcade came south, and vice versa. No aircraft flew. No radio traffic travelled.

The peninsula had changed since he'd last been here. The inhabitants had changed the name of their largest city to Lambton, the most common English-language name for small towns nowadays. In the world stakes, it was only narrowly beaten into third place behind Gao Cheng and Santo Cordero. In the same way, every other city in the Middle East between Pella and Bucephala had taken the name of Alexander.

The motorcade had passed the Lambton turnoff some miles back; now they were approaching signs for Michaelport, Langdon and St. Adam. The last name was something of a presumption; Adam Hamed was as yet only beatified. However, the necessary miracles to allow him to attain sainthood should, he was confident, exist in history by the end of the year. The Committee's rewriter's were very thorough, and had the help of time machines.

The peninsula possessed a fully serviceable airport, at the unfortunately-named town of St. Samantha, which was reputed to be considering a second change of name. The Pastor's wife's name and face were disappearing from buildings and monuments worldwide at a frenetic pace, to be replaced by the stock Church figures usually reserved for replacing former High Primates fallen from favour. With the reign of terror as it was, there were, he knew, factories in every nation devoted to producing such emergency statuary. George and Jehosaphat were favourites, along with La Santísima Muerte - figures about whom so little was known that they were considered safe bets for any Way House wall.

The motorcade speeded up, the spaces between its constituent cars increasing, as it frequently did on a purely random basis to frustrate time-delayed land mines. However, all these elaborate and multilayered safeguards failed to address one important fact.

The man who was going to try to kill the Pastor was sitting smiling at him from the opposite seat.

"Can we go to see our old house near Madron?"

Sean shook his head. "No, and it's not called Madron any more. It's called New Nazareth. And you wouldn't like the house; they've turned it into a shrine. There's a statue of me that weeps blood." He smirked with satisfaction. "My blood."

"Produced from cloned stem cells", said Mickey.

"Pre-turannonovirus", nodded Sean. "We stole a sample of my bone marrow from the hospital where I was treated for a broken femur back in 1980. Then we copied it onto sheets, hooked it up to a generator, ran a saline drip through it and hey presto, gallons of Count Dracula's ruin. In December of last year, vice-postulators arrived from the Vatican to check the authenticity of the miracle. While they were checking, they connected a dimensional translator and a hundred-litre tank to the statue and pumped enough type O up- and down-time to keep me bleeding periodically for the next millennium."

Mickey shook his head. "You are a very bad man, father." If the bodyguards on either side of Mickey and Sean thought likewise, they did not betray the fact.

"Ain't I a shtinker?" Sean settled back in his seat with satisfaction. "Well, this is a first for both of us. The first time you get to see how old and ugly I get -"

" - already done that, thanks -"

"- and the first time I get to be on the front foot. I always hate meeting me. I always have the answers to everything. Well, today I'll have the answers." He stabbed a hand down on the external screen control, cycling through front, rear and side views. "Where are your, ah, friends?"

"Relax. Five cars back. They're both so dumb they still think they're back in 2007, though I think they've figured out by now that this isn't Vegas."

Outside on the monitors, the sky was variegated, casting counterpane shadows on an intensively cultivated landscape. Ruined farmhouses stood on every hillcrest, the debris of an agricultural industry in which the size of the average farm had doubled in the last five years. The fields the motorcade was passing through were a blaze of royal purple, winter-blooming opium poppies, the products of global warming combined with genetic engineering. The climate of the peninsula was now ideal for growing field after field of Papaver Somniferum, the Poppy of the Dream-Bringers, for the medical industry, safe in the knowledge that no-one would creep into the fields, liquidize kompott from the flowers, and inject the resultant green chlorophyllous gunk directly into their veins.

"I don't know why you're bothered, pops. I could have a cheap whore sitting here on my lap stark naked playing with my wang and turannone would make it right for all the world."

"It wouldn't make it right for me. There are many High Primates asking questions about why the Pastor's son isn't married."

"They all want me to marry their living dead daughters." He cackled. "Can you imagine? 'I've been saving myself for you and Jesus, Michael; and God the Father can fuck me in the mouth with his rod and staff, and the Holy Spirit can be, well, gosh, everywhere -"

"Enough." Sean was attempting to be stern and patriarchal, but was aware that his lower lip was wobbling. "It doesn't have to be a High Primate. It could be a nova femina. I could Advance anyone."

"I'm just not ready for wedded bliss yet, dad."

Sean tried not to look at the row of empty bottles on Mickey's side of the compartment. "It might make you happier."

"What, like you and mom?"

Sean chewed down his anger before it escaped into speech. "That's different."

"Because you knew you were going to fail in advance, so you arranged to? You didn't fight your fate that hard." Mickey popped another bottle out of the cooler. "Face it, dad, you and mom were types apart. You should lighten up, play the field a bit more. If you think I'll mind, you're wronger than two popes fucking. I worry more about your mental health. I know for a fact you've not been with a woman since mom defected. The Committee told me."

Sean tried to internalize his bogglement, but failed. "The Committee told you that?"

"Of course. They worry about you. Specifically about the fact you have no clear successor. And even if they decide to make the Pastorate hereditary, if something happens to me, what happens then?"

"I'm not a Roman emperor, Mickey. My successor could be anybody."

Mickey nodded vigorously in a way that meant he wasn't agreeing. "Oh, no, you're not a Roman emperor, no. Roman emperors didn't have absolute control over every man jack from Novaya Zemlya to Queen Maud Land, did they? You're a thermonuclear emperor, dad. Whoever takes over from you could burn the world. Don't you think the Committee has a right to be just a little concerned?"

"I don't see why you're worried. If I haven't made my mind up, like you say, the decision could be to keep it in the family. Don't you want to be Pastor?"

Mickey avoided his gaze and looked out of the screen which was pretending to be the window.

"I'm not sure".

Then, his eyes found something worth looking at among the speeding gorse.

"Hey!" He bounced up and down on the seat excitedly. "Tin mines!"

***

The motorcade had stopped. It had stopped - all thirty-seven cars and twenty motorcycle outriders of it - because the leader's son had wanted to look down a mineshaft.

"We haven't really got time for this. The C3 centre is being set up in St. Adam right now. I'd like us to look it over before we make our appointment."

"It's St. Ives, and we can make our appointment any time we damn well wish. Just alter the t coordinate." Mickey stood on the edge of nothingness, on the wrong side of a rusted iron rail. "How far do you think it goes down?"

"About ten metres, sir", said a Committee man with a handy laser rangefinder. "It's probably been filled in."

"Could you posibly move away from the edge, sir?" said another. "We haven't checked this location out in any more detail than a brief airborne drone pass, it's just outside the Required Safe Envelope -"

"Rats", said Mickey. "Some of 'em can be hundreds of feet deep, and I have to pick one that's been filled in."

The motorcade had veered off the Waycaster-to-Penleo freeway and dissipated in a tangle of country lanes which had promised to lead to the pit head building the Pastor's son had spotted and insisted on visiting. The building was the height of a church tower - a huge empty space that had once held a steam engine bigger than the houses of the men who'd tended it, dragging tin silicates up out of the dark grasp of Dis Pater into the light. When the tower had been built, many men hereabouts had spoken a different language. Where had the last native Cornish speaker died? 1880? 1890?

"They'veall been filled in", said Sean. "You were a kid. I lied to you."

Mickey turned with a face of genuine alarm. "You lied? Why would you lie about that?"

"Kids fall in mineshafts if they don't watch their step. There were dozens near the house, not all of them marked. I told you there were hundred foot deep ones because kids are more impressed by a hundred feet than thirty. Though thirty'll still kill them."

One of the escort pilots was hoving discreetly in the distance, trying not to disturb the leader's conversation with the noise of his rotors. Troops were fanningout into the heather. If anything up here moved, had human body temperature, or was carrying anything ferrous, it would show up on a sniper scope. If it exhibited all three properties, it risked being shot dead without any sort of challenge; the Committee troops' weapons would open fire automatically if set to automatic target acquisition mode. ATAM did away with the problems faced by armies filled with young conscripts who couldn't bring themselves to pull the trigger in their first real firefight. The Chinese had nothing like ATAM; they were still using image intensifiers. Nor did they have the SLEASM ekranoplan missile, the JSCM-15 Rukh stealth cruise, or the M17 Seraph urban reconnaissance drone.

But they did have a whole lot of men with guns.

The pretext for the war was going to be Mongolia, which was successfully remote, and to which access by news crews was sufficiently controllable. Mongolia had been a Book Church state for the last five years, but had nevertheless stubbornly retained a large Chinese-built air and AFV force, much of which, owing to the requirement for parts from China, was now obsolete. What was not widely known was that the Chinese weapons had been retained deliberately, and that a wing of Shenyang JF-17's was being painted with PRC red stars and equipped with counterfeit IFF transponders in a set of aviation sheds in the amusingly-named town of Mörön, not two hundred kilometres from the Xinjiang-Uighur border, at that very moment.

The nerve gas attack on Ulan Bator would be carried out by Russian combat pilots of Manchurian extraction, whose burned bodies would appear Chinese to anyone without access to the Russian military DNA database. The pilots were religious fanatics who had been promised heaven; such men were easy to find nowadays. As an added precaution, their families had been carefully taken into protective state custody. God could not always be relied on as an ally. The bombers themselves each contained one carefully-placed Mongol anti-aircraft shell taped inside the wings, primed to explode after a set time delay. The 'planes "had been shot down by heroic Mongolian anti-aircraft gunners". The crews believed they were going to bail out over the Gobi. Hitler had, Sean was assured, apparently used a similar pretext in 1939 to invade Poland. The plan had a viable historical track record.

Sean had been amazed at the blend of inventiveness and immorality displayed by the plan's originators. After all, it did not have to be this subtle. The Church of today was a juggernaut poised to roll all non-godfearing nations flat beneath it. Sean could simply have proclaimed that the God had come to him in a dream and told that the Chinese were all demons in human form; he would have had the voices of many imprisoned dissident Fa Lun Gong practitioners to add to his own. The Church tank crews would have rolled across the borders into Inner Mongolia singing the Happy Yellow Man Death Song.

In an age where senior Church officials were beginning to openly discuss their turannone levels over golf and cocktails, there was no longer any such thing as a damaging headline.

So why amI even bothering to manufacture excuses to invade? Easy. I'm trying to fool nobody as much as my own bloody self. I even had the Chinese ambassador in last week for peace negotiations. And if his government has Sam over there in Beijing he knows damn well the war starts today at 2:30 pm, and there's nothing either of us can do about it. So why did he even bother to turn up?

Simple. He wanted to prove to himself that he's a good man, that he'd tried his very best to stop history happen. God knows I've tried too. I've put a pistol in my mouth a thousand times and pulled the trigger and nothing's ever happened. It's become a regular event at parties.

"This should be nothing", said one of the Committee men, trying to reason Mickey away from the edge, "compared to the caves you've been in in Borneo, sir."

Mickey smiled and nodded. "Snail Shell, yes." He looked up at Sean. "Climbed the whole of the damn thing freestyle. A mile beneath the surface of the Earth. Fell and broke my leg at one point, had to drag myself up a sump back to my pack using just arm strength. Search teams were looking for me for a week. And yet you never looked worried on the TV, dad, though you did fly down to Mulu to direct the search. Why was that, I wonder?"

Sean looked away uncomfortably. "I didn't want you to suffer."

"Yes, but you weren't worried I'd be killed, were you? Why was that, I wonder? You know what the newspapers call me, don't you, Dad?"

Sean knew, but was reluctant to admit it. "The Indestructible Man."

"I've swum with Great Whites in a feeding frenzy." Mickey pulled up one arm of his sweater to expose a circular rash like a henna tattoo. "That was one that caressed me gently with his teeth and didn't like the taste. The doctors said it might be the turannone in the blood. They've started putting turannone in shark repellent now because of me, d'you know that?" He held up a hand, the little finger of which was missing to the first joint. "I lost this snowboarding in the Transantarctics, d'ya remember Dad, do ya? Do ya? We deliberately triggered an avalanche using satchel charges. Used parachutes attached to the boards to ride the bow wave. The three guys with me died. Buried under half a mountain apiece. When the Committee dug me out I'd only lost half a little finger to frostbite. They weren't like me, you see. They figured they could hang with me, but they really couldn't. They were capable of dying."

Mickey leaned back on the iron rail, which squealed under his weight. At least he was leaning away from the edge.

"I'm like you, Dad, aren't I? The present knows you're still alive in the future, so it won't let you die. But you've never told me what I'm like in the future. You must know, but you've never said. Why is that? Do I disappoint you, Dad? After all, I'm twenty-two, and still drinking and whoring like there's no tomorrow. But you, you're the big monastic I Am. I swear to God you'd vanish in a puff of pure self-righteousness if you caught yourself getting a hard-on looking at a lady. You didn't use to be like this, Dad. For a guy who reckons he doesn't believe the bullshit he pushes, you sure are a holy man and a half."

Sean's fists were grinding tight shut. He forced them to uncoil, forced himself to breathe out, made himself relax.

You need him. Hit the little bastard with unpleasant information rather than your fist.

"What would you say if I told you I arranged for you to have two Las Vegas hookers in the third car back?"

Mickey was genuinely put off balance. For a moment, Sean was worried he'd lose grip of the railing. "What?"

Sean smiled. "I instructed your usual fixers to source them from the C20. I have a little skit I need to play out to myself. I need them as scenery." Oh, and by the way, I'm going to kill both of them. The fourth car back contained more Committee executioners than an old Lang family photo.

Mickey smaned. "I've seen who become, Dad. In only ten years' time. You use hookers as more than scenery. Believe me." He coiled his fists around the rust on the rail, risking hepatitis. "Frankly, I prefer you as the lush you're going to become. You're far more fun that way." He looked down into the pit shaft. "Wonder what's down there? Old shopping trolleys? Dead and buried miners? Jilted lovers?"

"Come back over the rail, Mickey. This is kindergarten melodrama. You couldn't kill yourself by jumping in there even if you tried."

Mickey looked up. "Are you sure? What if the me who tries to kill you is just a clone or a lookalike, or someone who's had careful plastic surgery?"

Sean could feel the world falling in on him. "It was you."

Mickey laughed bitterly. "You've so much faith in me, Dad. So you're certain that if I jump in here, I can't kill myself. Because you're certain that, in the future, I'm going to try to cap my own father." He leaned forward over the drop, swinging his arms like a diver. "Let's see, shall we?"

He jumped, head first, into the black. Sean made it over the rail just as Abel tumbled over it, grabbing for Mickey's disappearing foot. The rail's supports in the wall gave way with a clang. Sean heard Abel grunt behind him like a man punched in the stomach. But Sean himself felt nothing but air rushing past; he had gone over the edge and was falling headlong into blackness.

The fall cannot kill me the fall cannot kill me the fall cannot kill me the fall cannot -

A weird coruscating shape billowed into being on his retina, as if he were diving through a pool of rainbows, and was gone.

Thoughtfully, he closed his arms and legs like a swimmer.

Can we reach escape velocity in a thirty-foot shaft?

He realized suddenly that, if he had been falling long enough for thoughts, rather than fragments of his own shattered skull, to run through his head, he could not be in a shaft a mere ten metres deep.

The after-image: am I, in fact, unconscious? Am I really seeing stars due to being banged on the head?

The fall cannot kill me, but it can really mess me up.

Then he hit something that he was entirely certain killed him.

***

Please God, let me be dead. I don't pray for much. I don't even believe in you, so I've got a clean favour sheet. I'm the one lost sheep who's been a bit more prodigal than the others. Take me back to the fold and slit my throat for Jesus.

His ribs were crushed, and for the second time this year, he was rising in an inky black fluid. The breath had been knocked out of him; he couldn't breathe in. The total lack of air in his lungs was stopping him from rising fast enough. He would drown. He would die. He panicked, and began flailing his arms, realizing almost immediately that, no matter how hard he floundered, it would be useless if he'd picked the wrong direction to swim up in.

Somebody knew which way was up. A hand took hold of the scruff of his neck and hauled him upward into light. He felt rough plastic, the gunwale of a boat, over which he was being dragged with the roughness of keelhaulers. A last stale wheeze of air flew out of his lungs.

"D'you think anyone noticed?"

"Unless they spotted the Gate. And we cut the walls of the shaft to hide it."

"They'll look for it. Get their clothes off quickly, get them onto the clone bodies." Hands began pulling him about in the water - he assumed it was water - unfastening his belt buckle, pulling his jacket over his head. Camouflage patterning crawled across the cuffs that clothed the hands holding him; crawled visibly, as light-sensitive liquid crystals changed colour to mask movement. American-made battledress, the dernier cri for today's fashion-conscious infantryman.

"That won't stop them for long. They'll link a Gate into the shaft out of Committee headquarters, see our Gate opening, and start turning over every stone in Time till they find us."

"That's a whole lot of stones."

"Which is what the leader needed to even think of planning this operation. But it worked. So let's not let her down. Put a spike in the Good Shepherd here, get hold of a blood sample to infect the clone."

His head kept going underwater. No-one seemed to care.

"Hey! Hold his goddamned head up! You said he'd be well-treated!"

This new voice was Mickey's.

"That was what we said. This is what we're doing." Something struck him round the side of the head, unbelievably hard. He saw stars. Someone took his head by the hair and pushed it back underwater. When he came back up again, he heard the sounds of a scuffle.

"- AARH do that again, you little bastard, and I'll skin you with a flint. Hold him, don't let him do that again. Let him do that again, and you'll rue the day -"

He heard Mickey's voice laughing. Someone hit Mickey - in the stomach, by the whoosh of escaping breath. He tried to claw his way back up the side of the boat. Somebody pushed him under the water again. He saw shapes moving above the surface - lurching back and forth, fighting. He could hear a vibration in the water around him that could only be a motor, and his legs were moving in a current that could only have been produced by motion. Abruptly, his legs touched what felt like a rough, angled bed of gravel. The boat had been driven out of the deep water to the shoreline.

Mickey was still struggling when he broke surface again. The camouflage was sufficiently good for it to look as if Mickey's body was being tossed back and forth by landscape.

Something snapped around his arms, locking them together behind him, also securing them to something else, something substantial that didn't shift a millimetre in the process. Someone hauled his face up out of the water a final time. Out of the surf, he realized.

I've just been cuffed to something, and I'm still not above the high tide line.

"- think we should kill him now."

You can't kill me now -

"- we can't kill him yet. We need a blood sample. Leave him lying for a moment, deal with the heir apparent -"

He realized he could also see real stars. Different stars, huge numbers of them, patterned into a single spangled constellation that arced over the sky.

Jesus Christ, this is the first time I've ever really seen the Milky Way.

Unfamiliar constellations meant little, of course - he'd never been very good at astronomy, and had spent most of his life in the Northern Hemisphere. He might just be in Australia. The tide, he remembered, rose very high in Australia, very quickly.

The water had been warm. That meant the tropics, anywhere south of Spain at this time of year nowadays. The air felt close, as if a storm was building.

At this time of year. Listen to yourself.

You're not on the same continent, probably not even in the same century. The people who brought you here are not going to agonize about the risks of translating time and space simultaneously. I mightnot even be on Earth. What sort of animals did Wilson say used to live up in Tucana? Monster water snakes a hundred feet long? He eyed the lapping waves uncertainly.

Something up above was eclipsing the light from some of the stars. Something huge and over-arching, encompassing the sky. Something that rested on three slender legs, supporting a heavy central body big as a building, almost directly above him, as if he'd just fallen out of it -

A dimensional transmitter. They'd set it up to snatch him out of the Twenty-First Century, just at the moment he was about to hit rock bottom.

He heard Sean being dragged away over what sounded like a coarse shingle beach, and was alone, though unable to move away from whatever it was he was secured to. He realized that he could smell sulphur.

Okay. Assuming that the Resistance are behind this, they don't have access to unlimited energy. Committee reports say they're limited to jumping a century or so at most. So - assuming I'm still on Earth - I'm somewhere volcanic, by the sea, in the Southern Hemisphere, in the tropics or on the equator. I'm also a century or so in the past. I can see the bloody Magellanic Clouds. That isn't going to happen in the Twenty-First Century.

Does knowing all this help me? I do not believe so.

He heard a human voice gasp for air, surprisingly close by, though he could see nothing in the blackness. Then the ground rumbled beneath him like a massage bed, and he saw ripples of planktonic phosphorescence propagating across the water surface toward him. Ripples a mile wide. Up above him - hundreds of metres above him - he could see a dim, infernal redness faint against the blackness of the sky.

Okay, so now I'm cuffed below the high tide line, to a volcano.

And oh sweet God, I know where I am.

Where would they best make their hideout but somewhere that would be easily erased by history? No archaeologist would find a trace of it. Or if they did, they'd find it a thousand miles away, blown to buggery.

"Holiness?" The voice was faint, but recognizable.

"Abel?"

"I fell behind you, Holiness. I had to wait till they'd gone before I could surface."

Jesus, what is this man, half seal? "I'm over here. They've chained me up to something."

"I believe so, Holiness. It appears to be a bomb."

How can he see in the dark like that? Did they teach him that at Committee school too? Sean remembered suddenly that Adam Hamed had been a sniper in the Pakistani army before his calling to helotone. The son of such a man might be able to see clearly even in starlight. "What kind of bomb?"

"The only bomb worth building that is this large would be thermonuclear, Holiness. They probably don't have access to the newest and best explosives, or it would be far smaller. It probably still needs a fission charge to set off its fusion reaction."

So they're going to be the root cause behind one of the biggest explosions in history. Is all history like that? All the disasters, all the Seven Plagues of Egypt, all the seemingly pointless things that happen, all just the visible ripples of a war being waged under the surface of Time? Do I do all of it? Eden? Armageddon? Ragnarök?

Am I God?

I guess I can be if I want to be.

Abel was dealing with the bindings round his wrists. "Just cable ties. Cheap and easy. That's it, Your Holiness."

Circulation returned to his hands as he massaged them. "Go sound the alarm, Abel."

"Holiness?"

"You know as well as I do that they can't kill me, Abel. But they can torture my son. To get him back we will need help. Go forth, sound the alarm. Let the Committee know when and where we are. And don't take any unnecessary risks. I've lost one good Hamed already, I've no desire to lose another."

"Pastor?"

"Yes, Abel?"

"Did you kill my father?"

Ulp. You ask me that now? But of course, what other time would he ask it at? Forcing that question out must have been like gripping a red hot iron bar in his bare hand and squeezing.

Okay. Get your story straight. "It was an accident, Abel. He was too good a man. He wasn't supposed to be there. But he wouldn't leave his post."

Abel absorbed this. "And what was supposed to happen? Were you aware of it?"

"I knew Pastor Lang and Pastor Lamb were going to be assassinated, yes. And I know I couldn't prevent it. So I ordered the security staff away. To save their lives."

"I love you, Pastor."

Sean was waiting for Abel to kill him, but no attempt at deicide materialized. Gingerly, he rose to his feet, took hold of Abel, and placed his hand on the younger man's head in a posture of benediction.

"I love you too, Abel. As my own son. Which is why I'm going on to take back Mickey on my own." He struck out across the shingle, dripping salt water.

Abel followed him, protesting in a shrill whisper. "But Pastor, the danger -"

"The worst thing they can do to me, Abel, is kill you." He reconsidered this bold statement. "Or torture me, I suppose; or torture my son. You will stay behind and raise the alarm. But I would appreciate it if you would give me your gun now."

Abel fought his own arm muscles, watching his hand, willing it not to reach into his chest holster and bring out the weapon. It was a Church military weapon. It would still fire, even after having been dropped down a mineshaft back in time 137 years onto an empty volcano.

"I'm going to need a plan, Abel. You're smarter than me, or you wouldn't be my lead security consultant."

"I am your security consultant because my father was your security consultant, Pastor."

"Yes. Yes. That as well." He was splashing through the shallows now, trying not to make noise on a shoreline that clicked and rattled at his every step. What he had taken for a beach was a steep slope of lava cinders. The support tripod holding up the Gate was standing with two feet in the shallows, one foot on dry land. Those parts of the land that were not dry above the waterline were steaming.

He passed a mobile generator on his left, a fuel pipe leaving it, trailing off into the dark. Here was the power source for the Gate - not a particularly powerful one. He might, however, have passed through two or three relay Gates on his drop down the mine.

"Can you sabotage that?" he said over his shoulder into the dark.

"I can try, Pastor." He heard a scurry of feet moving leftwards.

Behind him, he heard a hiss, and the rocks were bathed in rainbows. This lit up two men in battledress, frighteningly close, their camouflage suits unable to copy iridescence. There could be an army concealed among the rocks, and he would have no idea until he fell over a sleeping sentry. Luckily, the two men had appeared too engrossed in a task they were carrying out to take any notice of him, but he would have to be more careful.

The two men had been carrying what had looked like a dead naked body. However, he'd recognized the face; it made regular appearances in his bathroom mirror. The clone body. Probably not dead. Possibly just drugged. Maybe brain-dead its entire life. And all they have to do is make it into me by adding one final jolt of turannone taken from my bloodstream. All they need to do is drop the body through their Gate into the shaft, accelerate it through several relays, it hits pit bottom, gets splattered so badly it's unrecognizable...everyone assumes I'm dead, because the Committee searches the mine with microscopes and swabs and finds my DNA everywhere. Because one of the clone bodies is a clone of me. And the other one - there have to be two, of course - is Mickey.

Unless, of course, they just cut out the middle man and drop Mickey back down the shaft alive. They seem to be less friendly with him than he anticipated.

A voice yelled urgently from the dark behind him: "HE'S NOT BY THE DEVICE ANY MORE."

How did he get behind me? It's so dark, and the ground's rumbling like a drumskin, I suppose he could have walked straight past me -

"YOU FUCKING IDIOT, I TOLD YOU TO TIE HIM." This voice came from up ahead.

"I DID. HE'S GOT FREE SOMEHOW."

Sean continued to steal towards the owner of the second voice, listening to its ongoing conversation on the subject of himself.

"JESUS. YOU WANT SOMETHING DONE, YOU DO IT YOURSELF." Too late, he saw a moving mass of camouflage step out of a jumble of tufa.

"AHA! THERE YOU ARE." A gun blazed in the dark. Sean felt as if he'd been gut punched. He knew, with some shocked indignance, that this actually meant he had been gutshot.

"You shot him." That was Mickey's voice, sounding almost as surprised as Sean had been. "That won't kill him", added Mickey uncertainly.

"That remains to be seen", said the gunman cheerily. "But it'll certainly slow him down." Sean felt the gun slide silently out of his hand, saw a dark shape slink away from him behind rocks. Abel needed no technological gimmicks to be stealthy.

Meanwhile, the gunman was advancing on him, weapon held at high port.

"BUT IF I TRAIN IT ON HIS HEAD", bellowed the voice, as if lecturing a classroom, "SEE HOW USELESS IT BECOMES." The gun clicked repeatedly in his hand. "THE MAN CANNOT BE KILLED." The gunman's class began to materialize out of the clinker on all sides. One of the last to arrive was pushing a naked figure with its hands tied behind its back. Mickey.

He looked up at the man who had shot him. A volcanic bomb arced up into the sky high above, dimming the stars, illuminating the lower slopes of an immense volcano. It lit up the gunman's face like a star shell.

"My god", laughed the gunman. "It's like looking in some horrid drunk mirror."

Me? Here?

"Still", continued the gunman, as the rock fragment hissed into the sea a mile away, "I suppose every man gets to look more like his father as he gets older."

"You've become a better shot", croaked Sean from his knees in the ash.

"I've had many years of practice. That's my first shot at you that's hit its mark in over twenty years. I've tried shooting you, blowing you up, flying aircraft into you, and detonating nuclear devices deep underneath the landmass you're sitting on. Eventually it became more of a hobby than a serious occupation; slapstick assassination. I only succeeded in shooting you just now because I deliberately shot to wound. You will, regrettably, survive this."

Sean had difficulty believing this, hunching himself up around the godawful pain of the injury. But if you can still feel pain, it's good. There's no nerve damage. "Why don't you try to kill me after 2035?"

The gunman grinned. His smile was the only part of him that reflected light, like a Cheshire cat just before vanishing. "Because after, oh, 2027 or so, it's too late. You achieve godhead."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean you become the divine figure you've always wanted to be. I know I can't kill you, father."

Someone in the encircling crowd of freedom fighters lit a cigarette. Mickey's face came into view in stereo. One face, scared, young, unblemished. One face, scarred, self-assured, tired of life.

And incredibly, impossibly old.

"Did I do that to you?"

"Time did this to me. I ran away and hid in time, remember? Reprogrammed one of our very first dimensional translators. I have ridden into China at the head of Mongol hordes through forests of spitted heads. I have presided over quaestiones that sent hundreds of learned men to the stake. I have whispered in the Yellow Emperor's ear that those who can read and write plot constantly against him. I have stood round Nazi bonfires singing the Horst Wessel Lied - a title that works in English as well as German, by the way - as copies of Das Kapital and the Torah blaze and crackle merrily. I have also written flatulent thundering tracts condemning the use of research conducted by Nazis to send men to the Moon. I formulated every single one of the arguments used by the Papacy to refute a heliocentric universe. Been there. Burned that."

"So you've been busy, then."

The older version of Mickey cackled like a hyaena on nitrous oxide. "You could say that, Pops."

"Seems a bit strange, being addresed as Pops by a man so obviously older than me."

"You're Not The Boss Of Me Now. And furthermore, I would submit that You Are Not So Big."

"What did I do to make you want to kill me?"

Old Mickey feigned cluelessness. "What, you mean apart from the wiping out one quarter of the world's population, enslaving the Earth, wiping out every Hindu and homosexual on the planet, destroying the ozone layer, starting World War Three, and having my mother put in solitary? Offhand, I can't think of anything." He thought a moment longer. "Unless it's assuming I've got to assassinate you just because causality tells me so. But that's your stock in trade, isn't it, father?"

"You know full well", gasped Sean, hugging his injury preciously, "that everything we have seen happen in the future will happen, regardless of what we do to try to change it."

"Yes, I do." Old Mickey squinted up the barrel of his own gun and pulled the trigger. "Damn. Nothing today. Yes, pater dear, I'm afraid you've convinced me on that one. I can't kill you, because you're Still Alive In Thirty-Five. However, I have an answer. Two answers, actually." He paced back and forth, hands behind his back. "The first is, how do you know you're still alive in thirty-five? All you have is the word of one horrible old sot who told you he was still alive. And you haven't even had your 2030 appointment yet. I've read your precious notebook, father, many times, when you've failed to lock it away before going to bed. How do you think I've known your movements so well throughout all these years I've been fruitlessly trying to kill you? But you still haven't figured out why I hate you, father. It's because of what you've done. But it's also because of what I am."

Sean felt pins and needles pricking his extremities. He felt cold. "You're a hindu?"

This time it was little Mickey who answered. "I'm a homosexual, father. Your goddamned pogroms wiped out everyone I cared about." He twisted the knife a little further. "Every man, that is."

Sean nodded. "Yes. Yes, of course. I'd, uh, hoped you'd grow out of it." It was becoming hard to stop himself from vomiting from the pain. And it is becoming difficult to see how I am going to get out of this one. The hopelessness of his situation fascinated him.

"You thought I'd grow out of it?" Little Mickey had taken over the tirade.

"I've known plenty of young men who have. Besides, you're not at risk. You're my son. You know nothing bad would ever happen to you."

Despite the fact that he was the man with the gun, Old Mickey's eyes were streaming with tears. "Oh, sure, I'm the Pastor's son. I'm safe from harm. But no-one else around me is. It's like having the touch of death. Do you know how many men I've slept with only to find out they've disappeared immediately afterward?"

Sean nodded. "Fifteen at the last count. Not counting Primate Piasecki's son. He was disappeared by his own father."

"Why did you have to do it, Dad?"

"Because I knew it happened. So it had to happen. I did what I could. I started the rehabilitation programme -"

"Dad, the rehab programme involves electrocution, genetic surgery and lobotomy. The inmates are treated like laboratory animals."

"They're still alive. We might even cure them." Sean was pretty sure, even as this came out of his mouth, that it had been The Wrong Thing To Say; however, he was in too much pain to be sensitive now. "In any case, all this outraged gay rights stuff is just posturing. You never knew the Committee were responsible for disappearing your little friends till six weeks ago, but I know for a fact that you've been a member of the Resistance for at least a year now."

This engaged Old Mickey's interest. He looked up in bafflement. "Oh? And how is that?"

"When I was taken by the Chinese a year ago, their ask-you-questions-and-hurt-you guy said they had a close to one hundred per cent match source of blood for transfusion to keep me alive. You don't get that sort of match with anything other than a blood relative; and your mother's not a blood relative. The only surviving blood relative I have, in fact, is standing here talking to me right now."

"That's where you're wrong, sonny boy."

The voice was as unexpected as Elvis dressed as Santa bursting out of the fireplace on Easter Sunday. He gaped; he gawped; he boggled. His jaw dropped enough to allow him to eat meals bigger than his head.

She had been behind him all the time, sitting on a rock, swathed in liquid crystal camouflage. She still had her hair in a businesslike bun.

"...mum?"

"You've been making a devil of a mess of things, young man."

She was wearing the same purloined battledress as the rest of them. My mother, the soldier. But she wasn't wearing any weapons.

"Is Dad here too?" He looked from man to man. Grins opened in the dark. Evidently his idiocy was amusing.

"You really have no idea how this is possible, do you? Think back. You found my dead body in the porch at High Acres. How old did it look to you?" She looked put out. "I was sixty-five at the time."

Realization dawned. "It...looked older."

She nodded. "I have no idea how much older. They won't tell me. I was surprised when they turned up, I can tell you! Sam and Mickey and a whole load of men with guns. They told me I had to come with them, that London was going to blow up. I saw the heat flash on the horizon. Saw the shock wave fetch a bird straight out of the air. I was told you'd survive, but that I wouldn't if I didn't go with them. I went with them."

Sean nodded. "It was a lie, of course."

"Yes, but only in the sense that they knew I was going to go with them anyway." Lilianne One smiled a spirit-level-straight row of entirely false teeth. "Causality and all that. Mickey looked so old! I thought he was you at first. One day, I will die, and then the Resistance will take my body back to Surrey and leave it in the porch for you to find it." She pursed her lips. "I must say, I wasn't overly pleased to find out you hadn't even found time for my funeral."

That hurt more than the bullet. "I was busy, mum."

"I dare say. Avenging your father's death by joining the ones who killed him." Lilianne One nodded to a pair of Resistance men who moved in on Sean with a gleaming gun-like device. He heard a hiss, felt a sharp pain in his shoulder, and then felt no pain any longer. The world began to flex and buckle. Nearby voices sounded as if speaking many rooms away.

"You shot him and let him go this long without an analgesic?"

"It's only pain. He ought to know what it feels like."

"He does. Believe me. He's your father, Mickey. He could have killed you a hundred times over by now."

"Yeah. The bastard."

I know how he feels.

He looked up at the ring of faces.

"God does not kill Satan", he announced. "Instead, he allows Satan to live eternally while watching all his designs come to nothing. Watching all his legions, all his demonic comrades, fall in battle. That is why Satan hates God." He looked Old Mickey straight in the eye.

Old Mickey nodded. "That's about the long and the short of it."

Sean swallowed. He still felt incapable of rising. He licked his lips nervously.

"Is Sam here?"

Lilianne One smiled. "She certainly is. She's most anxious to meet you."

"That's good", he said. "We haven't got much time before the Committee find this place and execute you all."

Lilianne One frowned crossly. "Now you're being ridiculous, Sean."

"No, I'm serious." For god's sake, why is it so difficult to explain things to your parents? "I'm still alive in '35, I'm busy being master of the world right now, you'll have to come back and kill me later."

"NOBODY", said Lilianne One with a firmness rocks would bounce off, "IS GOING TO KILL ANYBODY." She looked round at the circle of Resistance men, who looked almost ready to hide their sidearms behind their backs.

Sean suddenly realized an inevitable, unpalatable truth.

"You're in charge", he said. "You're the leader of the Resistance."

It fit, like a manky angular jigsaw puzzle piece he had never expected to slide perfectly into place to complete the picture.

Lilianne One nodded. "It took a little while. But Mickey and Sam really aren't cut out for being cruel to their paterfamilias on a large scale, despite all their bravado. I, on the other hand, have spanked your backside and refused you presents at Christmas for decades." The circle of Resistance men smaned.

"They're all high", said Sean. "To stop me being able to give them orders."

Lilianne One nodded. "It's our only defence. We control the production and supply of dangerous drugs throughout time, in fact. From Homer's lotophagi through the soma of the Rig Veda to the Golden Triangle, we have addicted billions. We use the trade both to supply ourselves with the good stuff, the pure elixir of independent thought, and to support our cause by selling off the leavings.

Sean nodded. His head weighed more than a world. "And you're the good guys."

"No." Lilianne One's face was quite serious. "Like you, we're just guys. We have a purpose. And we realize we can't kill you. But Mickey here -" she nodded at both Mickeys - "has a twofold plan to put to you. Firstly, even though we still can't kill you, as you seem to have something you're scheduled to do in the future, we can put you out of the picture." She nodded to a Resistance man, who threw something into the ash by Sean's fingers, making him sneeze.

The something seemed to weigh quite a few kilos, and to be contained in a canvas backpack.

"All you need to survive", she said. "We'll treat your injury as best we can. There's food in there, and medicines, and your ten favourite books. You remember that exercise book you filled up one Christmas, when it was too rainy to go out? We made lists."

He couldn't believe this. "Mum, I was ten. One of those books was Fantastic Mr. Fox."

"And a very good book it is too. I see myself as Fantastic Mrs. Fox, and yourself as the evil farmer Boggis."

He slid his hands over the canvas straps. "What am I supposed to do with this?"

Fantastic Mrs. Fox looked down at him severely. "Survive. We'll leave here via the Gate. You'll leave a few minutes beforehand. The fusion charge that's set to blow a hole in this section of the outer caldera will also, briefly, put an unimaginable electric potential through a superconductive cable with one end at Ground Zero. That cable will feed power back through our Gate into our Gate half an hour earlier."

"That fusion device also lets in the outside sea and acquaints it with the magma downstairs, producing a steam explosion heard in Alice Springs, am I right?" said Sean. "This is Krakatoa, 1883, and I claim my one million dollars."

"Well done! It was in your Look And Learn Book Of The World when you were six, I remember. You would keep pestering us to turn back to the illustrations of small woodland animals being hurled through the jungle."

"Don't patronize me, mother. I'm tyrant of the world."

"And I've been supporting an international, interstellar and intertemporal world resistance army with none of the fancy advantages you've had, my lad. There's been no magic notebook for me. And this is the 535 A.D. eruption of Krakatoa, not the 1883. The lesser-known 535 eruption blew apart a substantial caldera and belched out sufficient gas and ash to change global climate, cause massive disruption of nomadic herding cultures in central Asia, and very possibly bring down the Roman Empire. Going back to the blast, it will provide a temporary boost that will allow us to throw you far further in space/time. It's a one-time-only trip, and as we've also reprogrammed the navigation unit, this will take you on a random walk through time spread across two hundred million years. Same physical coordinates, fixed on the centre of the Kaapvaal Craton in what is now South Africa. Those rocks haven't changed for around 3 billion years. You should end up somewhere in the Drakensberg. The Dragon Mountains. That might be quite apt. You're likely to see dinosaurs."

"Only from a long way off and receding at great speed."

She looked almost disappointed. "You always liked dinosaurs when you were a boy."

"Mother, dinosaurs are house-sized eating machines that will rend my flesh. And how are you going to reconcile exiling me with the fact that I'm demonstrably still dictating in 2035?"

"You only ever call me mother when you're cross." She nodded to yet another minion. "Flare."

A man scurried forward, pulled a stick from his belt, snapped the end off it, and stuck it down into the ash. Light seared his eyes, too bright to look at.

The camouflage patterns on the battledresses of the Resistance men - men and women, he reminded himself - broke into pixellated static, confused by the flickering of the magnesium flame.

Lilianne One directed Sean's gaze across the circle, at the face of the man directly opposite him.

"My god", said Sean. "It's like looking in some horrible sober mirror."

He heard a soft rhythmic scamper of feet moving away down the ash slope. Abel, taking advantage of the fact that the enemy were blinded by the light.

"Great, isn't he?" Lilianne One almost squirmed in satisfaction. "His name's John Pastore. His parents are Anne Lily and Alwyn Fabio Pastore of Sutton in Surrey. His father was a marine engineer with Vickers, his mother a medical secretary. After a brief stint in the Royal Engineers, he went to work building temporary housing for the UN in underprivileged areas of Africa. While there, he got religion and joined the Church of the Book, which resulted in his speedy divorce by his wife Amanda. He has one son, called Richard, though he to call him Dickie. You ought to recognize him; he's a straight clone of you, produced from genetic material left in Sam after your last night together, which I believe for you would be last year - so sad. His family, in fact, have been clones of ours going back ten generations."

Sad eyes stared at Sean across the circle.

"What's it like", said Sean, "to think your whole life has been your own creation, just to find it's all been put together by others to make you an accurate copy of someone else?"

The other man pursed his lips and tilted his head this way and that in thought, a mannerism Sean recognized from the mirror. "Pretty harsh." He brightened. "But I get to be World Dictator."

"He is me", said Sean, impressed.

"No-one will know the difference", beamed Lilianne One. "And he is a clean-living, genuinely godfearing man, a man who can honestly tell himself he has never ordered the liquidation of another, a leader who is not desensitized to violence. The greater part of our team here - the solid lower echelons of the Resistance who are not trusted with secrets of this sort - will act as a rearguard to allow our escape, and will die in droves to prevent Committee troops from recapturing this man, who we'll have tortured lightly in advance to make things more realistic. They will not question his authority as their Pastor. Why should they? He'll be a Level Thirty-Three by then."

"Why wasn't I told this?" Old Mickey's voice cut in to the conversation suddenly.

Lilianne One's demeanour was that of a she-wolf disturbed while eating. "It wasn't necessary for you to know it, Mickey dear."

Old Mickey's face twisted. "But he'll have absolute power! And he's a genetic copy of him!" He stabbed a finger at Sean.

"A copy by nature", said Lilianne One. "Not nurture."

"You just said yourself that you brought him up in as close a way to Dad as possible", complained Old Mickey. "Do you expect him to suddenly start behaving differently to him once he gets hold of power?"

"It's a valid point", said Sean.

"I am forced to concur", said Pastore.

"You keep quiet, John Pastore. You'll be absolute monarch of all you survey and like it. Mickey dear, I apologize for not letting you know the plan, but you've all known and accepted for a long time that the strategies of the central leadership need to be very tightly controlled. This course of action puts us on track for achievement of our revolutionary goal of the re-establishment of democracy."

"What?" said Sean. "For a happy fluffy world where everyone's wishes are fulfilled and everyone has a nice house and votes for a government that always does their bidding? Where everyone has enough to eat, everyone can drive around in as big a car as they like, own all the guns that they like, and trade internationally on the free market?"

Lilianne Agnello's face shook with artfully internalized anger. How dare he talk to me like this. He's only a little boy. "Now you're being obtuse, Sean."

His voice was coming out as a croak now. He was bleeding out the water he needed for saliva. "No I'm not. It never existed, mother. The democratic age you people talk about was one where armed gangs ran riot in the streets. Where big American and European corporations held entire Third World nations in debt they'd never escape. Where the poor were free to breed as much as they pleased, even when they couldn't afford to feed their children. Where the icecaps were already melting because three hundred million fat Americans couldn't be bothered to go downtown to the shops on foot instead of in an SUV the size of Rhode Island. Where the only people who lived in nice houses and were happy and fulfilled live in Surrey, frankly, mother. Sure, democracy presided over a period of unrestrained growth in the body politic. But growth isn't always good, mum. Not when it's cancerous and kills the organism. The Earth has a finite quantity of resources, and democracy and the free market gives men unrestricted free rein to use up all those resources in minimum time and end up sitting in their Canyoneros starving in the middle of a dustbowl. If that's your democratic golden age, give me dictatorship any day." He was surprised at his own venom.

"That's the sort of man you're putting into power", said Old Mickey. "I hope you're pleased with yourself, grandmother."

Lilianne One lookd up with eyes the colour and emotional content of steel. "You would prefer someone different, perhaps?"

Old Mickey stalked off muttering among the rocks, his camouflage rapidly rendering him invisible. Lilianne One's attention turned to Sean again.

"We will, of course, have to take a little of your blood for this to happen. I know you've made a few alterations to the Level Thirty-Three turannonogenic complex since the last time we tapped you, but I'm sure he can take it -"

Sean sighed, shrugged, and extended an arm. "Take. Drink. This is my blood."

"After Abel sends out his Mayday, of course, we'll have only a little while left before Committee troops zero in on our location -"

He looked up dumbfounded. She looked back severely.

"I'm your mother, Sean. You have very few secrets from me. And remember that we have time machines too. We've had this patch of space-time checked and rechecked. The Committee arrive in five hours' time, just after we leave, just after you leave. Our sacrificial lambs die to the last man. You end up somewhere in time. And the Committee take Mr. Pastore away on a stretcher and clothe him in Imperial purple. We smuggle coded instructions to him for the next five years. He orders Earth's overcrowded masses out into space to ease the load on the ecosystem. He excises Leviticus from the Bible. He has all the world's nuclear weapons translated out into space so that each one eclipses a star in Ursa Minor, and has some of them detonated periodically every New Year's Eve - the constellation of the Ploughshare. And most significantly, he withdraws from public view, abdicating responsibility to a popularly elected council of ministers. We win, Sean." Lilianne One's sincerity was almost painful. "And by we, I mean you as well as us. You never really wanted to be Pastor Lamb. You get to spend the rest of your days marooned in time in a nice grass hut in the world's dawn - or a coniferous hut if you end up anywhere before the Palaeocene, of course. And by the way", she said, "Sam wants to go with you."

He felt like Atlas, as if someone Herculean had taken the weight of the sky from his shoulders. The burden of so many decisions, of so many lives, so many individual hopes and dreams mercilessly crushed by the grinding wheel of history. Passed on to a new man, a fresh man, a man who'd never yet had to get his hands dirty.

Fucking GET IN.

He looked over at Pastore.

"Do you feel like Hercules?" he said.

Pastore thought about this with a puzzled face.

"You mean to steal Hippolyta's girdle, borrow Hell's watchdog, or fight the hydra?"

"Give him another ten cc's", said Lilianne One. "We need him quiet for field surgery."

An injector hissed into Sean's shoulder one more time.

"The hydra", said Sean, who could see the hydra, "is the many-headed monster, is the people. No matter ho many heads you lop off, two more will take their place. And even when all their other necks are severed, the people have one final head, and he cannot be killed. Furthermore, Jesus wants me for a beam in your eye..."

The light drained out of the world, and was replaced by fantastic otherworldly lights behind his eyes, which entertained him until somebody tapped him on the shoulder and said -