Only Forward

‘The weather: tomorrow will be a bright day, with light rain between 9.00 and 10.05 a.m.

‘That’s it from us: we’ll leave you with more footage of Gerald the talking duck. Goodnight.’

Half an hour later I was sitting nonchalantly in a cafe about a mile away, drinking a rather nice cup of coffee, smoking a relaxed cigarette and reading the paper. Stable scientists had run yet more tests, I read, and were now sadly confident that it would be at least three hundred years before it was safe to go out. That story was on page six. Good news about the economy was on the cover, sports on pages two and three, and some duck that could talk took up most of four. Sooner or later I was going to have to get on with the job, but for the time being I felt I deserved a coffee. It was now twelve o’clock, after all, and I hadn’t had one since leaving the apartment. I was in, I was alive, and everything was going according to plan.

Okay, I admit I was kind of lucky in the tunnel. Three guys with machine guns would have been more of a handful. The plan, if you’re interested, was to throw the Flu Bomb so that it broke the light as it detonated, and then run and jump.

Would have been a bit touch and go, I admit, but there you are. What can I say? I had a lucky break for once: do you begrudge me that? Well, shut up then.

There were only three people in the backstreet into which I emerged from the tunnel, an old man with a dog and a young housewife pushing a baby in a pram. At first they did look mildly surprised to see me, but I had a plan.

‘Well,’ I said, dusting off my hands, ‘you don’t need to worry about that any more!’

They had no idea what I was talking about, of course, but it sounded reassuring so they forgot about the whole thing and went about their business. I strode confidently up the street, head held high, quietly content that everything was so nice in here when there was only a radioactive wasteland outside. I turned the corner into a busy shopping street and slowed my pace to an apparent dawdle, looking in the windows and taking in the scenery. I say ‘apparent’ because, though I took care to look like just one of the strolling masses out on a Saturday afternoon, I was actually making sure that I got some distance between the wall and myself.

Stable was actually rather nice, I decided. The ceiling of the Neighbourhood was so high that there was enough atmosphere and haze to partially obscure the fact that it was there at all. The wide streets had trees dotted along either side, and every now and then there was a little park. No one was using a portable phone or trying to one-up other people on their knowledge of staff motivation theory; they weren’t using a prostitute or casually disposing of a body. They were just lolling about on the grass or walking their dogs.

The goods in the shop windows were all very old-fashioned, but nicely designed: the whole place was like a time capsule, a living museum of life. There are older places in The City, but none where life is still lived the way it was. You can see fragments, but not the whole picture, and it made me feel very nostalgic. Zany five-wheeled cars pulled slowly through the crowded streets, and the phone kiosks clearly weren’t built to allow you to see who you were talking to.

I hadn’t realised how weird being in Stable would actually feel. This was all they knew. As far as they were concerned, this was how things were. They still had neighbourhoods with a small n, and little houses with driveways and gardens; they still had two-dimensional televisions; they still lived together as families and knew where their grandparents lived. These people didn’t know about the planets, and they didn’t know about the stars: they knew about their jobs, their friends, their lives.

It wasn’t perfect, as two men arguing over a parking space showed, but as neither of them had a gun, it could have been a lot worse. The streets weren’t artificially pristine, as they were in Colour, or knee-deep in everything from rubbish to corpses the way they were in Red: they were just streets. There were no alternatives here, no wildly different ways of being. Everything was just the way it was, and that was the only way it could be. This was their home.

No one gave me a second glance, which was as expected but still reassuring. The police obviously couldn’t announce that they were looking for an intruder from the outside, but they could splatter my face across the televisions and newspapers by claiming me guilty of some heinous crime designed to stir the blood of the Stablents.

To do that, however, they would have to know who I was. The only people on the outside who knew I might be in here were the Centre, and Ji and Snedd. The Stable Authorities would be unaware of the existence of the latter, and the former would deny knowledge of my existence to the death if they were ever asked. The guards in the tunnel would have seen nothing more than that I was a man, possibly wearing a suit. The only other people who could possibly blow the whistle on me were the gang inside Stable who were holding Alkland: but as they were intruders too, their options were limited even if they had known who I was. All in all, things were looking pretty tight.

So far.

Accepting a refill from the smiling waitress, I ran over my as yet embryonic plans for the next bit. Clearly the first priority was finding out where they were holding Alkland. Then I had to stake out the gang, and decide how the hell I was going to get him away from them with us both still in one piece. Then, I had to somehow find a way of getting us out of the Neighbourhood, again, still in one piece.

Christ.

I decided to concentrate initially on the first problem, because until I’d solved it I couldn’t deal with the other even more depressingly difficult problems.

That’s the way I work, you see. Doing what I do, there’s no point trying to come up with some kind of unified, start to finish, A-Z plan before you begin. It isn’t possible because you don’t have the information, because you don’t have the time, and in my case, because I simply can’t be bothered.

I pulled out the map of the Neighbourhood I’d bought earlier, and opened it over the table. This was all I was going to know until I found Alkland, and seeing the interlocking grid of streets and neighbourhoods laid out in front of me helped to concentrate my mind a little. I had no contacts, no angle, and my vidiphone was turned off because I couldn’t risk its transmissions being detected: there was only me and these streets, streets which I didn’t know. And somewhere in there, Alkland.

There were two main lines of thought I could follow. A gang of outsiders were not going to be able to just melt into the background. They wouldn’t have the history, the jobs, the houses. Therefore they were going to have to be holed up somewhere: in a run-down area where people came and went, or in a hotel, somewhere where itinerants were to be expected. The alternative was to assume that the gang were actually from Stable itself, which a) struck me as extremely unlikely, and b) would take me back to square one, because they could be hiding out anywhere. The first task in front of me was therefore actually relatively simple, and one I’d done countless times before, albeit in easier circumstances. It was working out where you’d hide in a Neighbourhood.

Within a couple of minutes I’d narrowed it down to only two areas, which cheered me up a bit. I wasn’t going to have to slog my way through every street in the Neighbourhood. Given that Stable was closed to the outside world, they didn’t have quite the call for hotels that parts of other Neighbourhoods did: what hotels there were seemed to be concentrated in one area on the North side, called Play. I got the impression from the blurb on the map that, in the absence of there being anywhere else to go, they’d turned a quarter of a square mile into a sort of low-key resort, the place to stay when you had a holiday. It didn’t look very spectacular from the photos: a stretch of artificial beach by a river, mainly, but I guess that if there was no alternative, then it was the best there was. The other area that looked promising was a small enclave in the centre of the Neighbourhood, a few blocks either side of the railway line. Something about its position, the way it backed onto warehouses and railway depots, told me that if there was anywhere in Stable where derelicts went to do their thing, this was where it would be.

Quickly finishing up my coffee, I set off in the afternoon sun. It was artificial, of course, but still rather nice. It took me about half an hour to walk to the run-down area of the Neighbourhood, and as soon as I realised that I’d found it, I began to strongly suspect that this wasn’t where they’d be.

It was too anaemic, somehow, too thin. I’m a bit of a connoisseur of disaster areas in Neighbourhoods, and I can tell what they’re like immediately. This was not a place where you’d stash guns or run a drug-peddling concern. It was too clean, too flat. I can’t describe exactly what was missing, a sense of fear, or possibility, or something. There were a few derelicts around, sure, and it wouldn’t be my first choice of a place to hang out, but it was a nothing. It had no atmosphere, no sense of inwardness or community. Somewhere had to be not quite as nice as everywhere else, and this happened to be it. That was all.

Of course to a really clever gang, that might be just what they were looking for, a nowhere land that no one really cared about. Not nice enough to want to live in, but not bad enough to keep bugging the council about. I dutifully trudged through a couple of hours’ worth of abandoned buildings, and asked questions of a few tramps, but each one just confirmed my suspicions.

There were no gangs here. According to the derelicts, there were no gangs at all. The derelicts were like derelicts everywhere, but quieter. They were the logical extension of something I’d begun to notice about Stablents in general: they seemed to be a pretty placid people. It took me quite a while to get them to understand what I was talking about: organised crime clearly wasn’t a problem in Stable. They all pulled together.

By five I’d had enough. They weren’t here. I hadn’t checked every building, and of course it was possible that they’d keep on the move in the day, but I knew in my bones that this was not the right place. That left about five hotels on the other side of town. Finding Alkland was going to be easier than I’d thought.

If there’s anything I really hate, it’s things going better than expected. It’s a sure sign that something really very unpleasant is slouching over the horizon in my direction.

That’s not pessimism. That’s the way it works. Things turning out well fills me with nameless dread, and I was beginning to hope I’d run into a few problems sooner rather than later.

Dressing for dinner consisted of standing in a dark corner of a park on the outskirts of Play and waving the CloazValet™ over myself. Poking about in disused buildings had rendered my suit and coat a little dusty for civilised company, and if you’re effectively on the run it never does any harm to change your look every so often. The CloazValet™ was evidently in minimalist mood: it changed everything I had on to jet black, with the exception of two small squares, one on each kneecap, which it coloured magenta.

The plan was straightforward. Go to each of the five hotels in turn, and hang out. I’d seen enough of Stablents during the day to get a sense of what they were like, and thought I could probably spot an outsider like myself fairly quickly. It was unlikely they’d be marching up and down the place, waving Crunt Launchers around and staring uncomprehendingly at menus, and it was more unlikely still that Alkland himself would be out and about. But if I had no luck with the laid-back approach, all I had to do was case the hotels a little harder. Believe me, this is a walk compared with some searches I’ve done. I once had to find a particular rat (the rodent) in Red Neighbourhood. Not only did I find him, but I got him and his lover (also a rodent) on a thru-mono back to Sniff Neighbourhood in under twenty-four hours. First-class seats, smoking section. All true, apart from the last bit.

The plan also catered for my own personal needs in a rather lovely way. I was hungry, and intended to hang out in the first hotel in a restaurant-orientated fashion. I left the park and headed up the promenade.

Play was kind of weird, I found. Not weird weird, but weird, well, quiet. I guess when I think of resorts I think of the upmarket end of LongMall and the whole of Yo! Neighbourhood, which are geared to providing visitors with a full-on pleasure explosion. ‘Jesus,’ people tend to feel when they’ve spent a day or two in those places, ‘that’s enough fun. More than enough. Let me out.’

Play had the hotels, it had the beach, and it had a fun fair. That was it, and in the gathering darkness it had a forlorn air, like a Neighbourhood on the coast out of season. The street overlooking the beach was almost deserted, with just a few couples wandering slowly up and down, up and down.

I spent a couple of minutes leaning on a rail looking down at the river. Probably it had originally been natural, but over the years the banks had been remodelled with little twists and turns which were too attractive to be pure geography. Little jetties poked out into the leisurely water, and there were a few small beach huts dotted across the sandy areas. I could probably have stayed there quite a while, listening to the gurgling, but I had only four hours before eleven, so I reluctantly turned away.

The first hotel on the strip was a hunk of faded deco grandeur called the Powers. I geared myself up a bit, recapping the standard stuff about Stable being a super place to be and ad-libbing a few new thoughts about it being great to be on holiday, and walked in.

The lobby was deserted. I went up to the porter’s desk, pinged the huge bell, and planned out most of the rest of my life, in some detail, before a small and shrivelled man creaked out of a back room. I established from him where the restaurant was and headed for it. This was also deserted, but looked a fairly flash sort of place, so I shouldered my misgivings and helped myself to a table, there being no one around.

No one continued to be around for quite a while. After about fifteen minutes a slim girl dressed entirely in black wandered by the table, apparently by accident, and on seeing I had a menu in my hands obviously decided to take my order for the hell of it.

Feeling chipper despite the desolate quiet, I asked her what she would recommend. She shrugged. I waited, but that was it, so I went back to the menu and selected a main course at random. She didn’t take out a pad or anything else to write this down on, and I was beginning to wonder if she really was just some passing art student, and was losing interest in the game, when she asked if I wanted anything to drink. I told her I did, and described it in some detail. She didn’t write that down either. She just left.

I finished planning out the rest of my life. I toyed with several alternative careers, imagined what the person I could be happy with for ever would be like, decided where we’d live and for how long, what colour we’d have the walls in each room of the apartment and the probable careers of our children. Then I picked another career, and a different type of person, and planned out the whole of my life that way too.

Then I thought of all the people I knew and planned their lives out for them, in even greater detail. I had a solid crack at predicting the fur colour of Spangle’s great-great-grandchildren, taking into account fifteen different possible mating permutations. I went to the toilet twice, smoked most of a packet of cigarettes and fashioned a really quite realistic bird out of my paper napkin.

Then finally, like some optical illusion, the art student reappeared. I found myself frankly incredulous that she didn’t now have grey hair and walk with a stoop, and decided it must be her great-granddaughter bringing my order, concluding an ancient and mystic hereditary task passed down the family line. She swayed over to the table and plonked a glass of something that clearly wasn’t what I’d ordered in front of me, followed by a plate. Then she disappeared again.

I stared at the plate for a very long time after she’d left, trying to work out what the appropriate response to it was. Dark brown triangles of substance lay on the plate, partially overlapping each other, with a few strands of green substance spread over them in a net-like way. There was also a small pool of something else. Everything put together would have a combined volume, I estimated, of a little over a cubic inch.

I leant over my plate again and stared quite closely at the stuff on it. It could have been whale brain, it could have been modelling clay: without recourse to the techniques of forensic science I simply couldn’t tell. The overall effect was so entirely dissimilar to anything I had ever thought of as food that for a time I felt compelled to consider other possibilities; that it was the art student’s current collage project perhaps, or a stylised plan of a proposed shopping centre seen from the air, placed in front of me as a discussion point while I waited yet longer for the actual food. In the end I decided to try eating it: I couldn’t really afford to waste any more time. I cut off a mouthful of the triangular stuff, and dipped it in the pool of whatever the hell it was. After one chew all my previous confusion disappeared.

It was definitely a model of a shopping centre.

Pushing the plate tiredly away from me I took a sip of my drink. I don’t know what it was, but it had alcohol in it, so I decided I’d finish it with another cigarette before pushing on to the next hotel along.

When I looked up I immediately noticed that someone else had entered the restaurant and was sitting about six tables away, gazing benignly at the menu. For a long time I just stared at him, my cigarette burning closer and closer to my fingers.

It was Alkland.

Let me explain what I mean about the rough beast of unpleasantness I mentioned earlier, the one for ever slouching towards my life to be born.

There is a little god somewhere whose sole function is to make sure that there’s a lot of grief in my life. The rough beast doesn’t just visit me occasionally: there’s a regular fucking bus route. Most of the reason for this is that I end up with the jobs that no one else could handle, but part of it is this little bastard god who sits there keeping a steady eye on the grief meter, giving the lever a jog every now and then. What’s happened, I suspect, is that someone on the other side of the universe has made a pact with the guys in charge, selling his soul for a grief-free life. The grief has to be used up somehow, otherwise it would just pile up and make the place look untidy. So they give it to me.

And what is really weird is that it always comes in equal-sized packets. Some jobs are a bastard from minute one, continue to be a bastard throughout, and finish in a bastard way too. Others, however, start off alarmingly smoothly, full of unlikely coincidences and strange good fortune, and those are the ones that I really hate. Because it means that they’re saving all the trouble for later, that all the dangerous, strange and unpleasant grief that I know I have coming to me has coalesced in a pulsating mountain somewhere further along the line, and is sitting there waiting for me to run into it.

My cigarette eventually burnt my fingers and I stubbed it out. There was simply no question that it was Alkland who was sitting not five yards away from me. I didn’t have to consult the cube in my pocket to be sure of that. Sitting there, taking his time over the menu, he was like an advert for how lifelike cube images were. He looked a little tired, and his suit was rather crumpled, but otherwise he was exactly as I had expected.

I picked my knife and fork back up and moved the crud on my plate around a bit, covertly glancing across the room. The Actioneer, was, I suspected, a little tenser than he looked, but all in all he was doing quite a good job of it. No one else had entered the restaurant with him: evidently his captors were confident that he wouldn’t make a break for it. After all, where could he go?

After a few minutes he looked at his watch with a frown, irritated as only an Actioneer can be at being kept waiting. Then he went back to the menu, doubtless thinking up ways in which it could be improved and made more efficient. I was surprised, actually, at how well-adapted he seemed, how blended in. He almost looked as if he was on holiday, which, for someone who was being forcibly kept from doing billions of things, showed fairly high reserves of resignation. When the art student eventually appeared and wandered within shouting distance of his table, he looked up and smiled vaguely.

‘Hello, my dear: how are you this evening?’

‘Fine thank you, Mr Alkland, and you?’

‘Oh, fine, fine. Relaxing nicely, thank you. So. Is there anything worth eating on this badly-designed menu this evening?’

‘No, not really. The chef said he thought the Chicken a‘ la Turk with strawberry yoghurt and braised sunflower seeds probably wouldn’t do anyone any actual harm, but he didn’t seem too confident.’

I was gobsmacked, I really was. I’d done my very best to be charming to the art student, which was probably more charming than you’d expect, and hadn’t got a single word out of her. It just went to show what looking like a harmless professor does for you. I haven’t described what I look like, have I? Remind me later and I will: it’s not that bad, but it’s kind of uncompromising. Every face says something: the deal with mine is that though you might not like what it’s saying you have to admire the strength of its convictions.

‘What does it look like?’ Alkland asked doubtfully. The waitress thought for a moment.

‘Strange.’

‘I can’t say I’m surprised. Well, I suppose I’ll have to risk it.’

‘Anything to drink, sir?’

‘A glass of wine would be rather nice. Any idea how long it’ll be? To the nearest day?’

‘Well, he’s already cooked one thing this evening, so he’ll probably be a bit tired, but I’ll try and hurry it up for you, sir.’

‘Thank you, my dear,’ Alkland beamed endearingly, handing her his menu and settling back down to gaze benignly round the room.

I flagged her down as she passed, and asked for the check, lighting a cigarette and settling down for a long wait. She was back before I’d finished it, however, with both my check and a salad for Alkland, for God’s sake. He hadn’t even ordered one and there he was eating something within minutes. Obviously some people have got it and some people haven’t.

I paid up and went straight to the lobby, where a uniformed flunky was now standing, trying to look busy. Maybe this was the off season, or perhaps this was the least favoured of Play’s hotels. It was certainly a good choice for a gang to hole up in. Passing myself off as ‘one of his party’ I asked which room Alkland had, and the flunky was glad to help. He told me twice, it was such a novelty to have something to do, and when I asked him where the bar was he practically carried me there.

For the next two hours I sat unobtrusively in the bar, flicking through magazines and keeping an eye out. I’d decided to wait until after shutdown before I did anything, and the bar was conveniently placed for making sure nobody I was interested in left the hotel without my knowing. A few couples were dotted around the bar and a handful passed through on their way somewhere else, but no one who didn’t look like they were Stable born and bred. Either the gang were lying low in their rooms, or were out and about in Stable. I considered asking the lobby flunky for a list of registered guests, on the off-chance that I might recognise any of the names, but decided that it would look too suspicious. Just before ten o’clock Alkland passed by the door, heading towards the stairs up to the rooms, but I didn’t follow him. I knew where he was going.