Faust Among Equals (23 page)

‘Marvellous. Help me out of this tree, will you?'

‘Tree?'

‘Yes. This tree here.'

‘The thorn tree, you mean?'

‘That's the one, Links. Try hurrying, will you?'

‘Coming right up, Mr Lundqvist.'

Links Jotapian scrambled to his feet and looked around. Lesson Three had been all about using your initiative and improvising material out of unlikely objects found in the vicinity. He found the page and followed the relevant line with his finger.

Under combat conditions
, he read,
a makeshift ladder may sometimes be improvised out of a broken segment of helicopter rotor blade, using only a Bowie knife and three feet of stout cord. Full instructions are given in Lesson Twelve
. . .

‘Mr Lundqvist?'

‘Yes?'

‘You still there, Mr Lundqvist?'

‘Reckon so, Links.'

‘Do you think I'm ready for Lesson Twelve yet? Only I remember what you said about not taking the lessons out of sequence, because each one led naturally on from the previous, and . . .'

‘Rules were made to be broken, Links. Right, listen carefully.'

Right. Fade out on Lundqvist, cut to . . .

. . . Two seagulls, black drifting shapes against a velvet sky, circling before coming in down on the glide and pitching on the remains of the roof.

‘Anybody home?'

Helen of Troy stopped and looked up. She had been rubbing at the cushions of the Chesterfield, trying to get the blood out with half a lemon steeped in vinegar.

‘Larry?'

‘We're on the roof. Do you need rescuing?'

Helen considered for a moment. ‘Not rescuing, no. I could use a little help in here, though.'

‘Coming in.'

As the seagulls dropped down through the hole in the roof, the Captain of Spectral Warriors woke up. He had been sleeping peacefully ever since Helen had bashed him on the head with a copy of
Mrs Beeton's Everyday Cookery
.

‘All right,' he said, staggering to his feet and levelling the Redhawk. ‘Nobody move or I'll . . .'

The barrel of the gun became suddenly heavy, its weight augmented by a perching seagull. By the time it accidentally went off, it was pointed directly at the Captain's left foot.

‘Oh my God, the
carpet
!' Helen wailed. ‘Look, for pity's sake, just get out of my way before you damage anything else.'

‘But . . .'

‘
Out!
'

The Captain wilted. It wasn't, he decided, one of his good days. Slowly and painfully he hobbled out of the room and through the front door, and was therefore just in time to be directly under the thorn tree when Links Jotapian's makeshift ladder broke.

‘You all right, Mr Lundqvist?'

‘Sure, Links. I think something broke my fall . . .'

(
‘You knew, didn't you, skip? You knew all along, and you pretended
. . .'

‘Keith, will you tell your friend that when I get reincarnated, I'm putting in for a transfer . . .'
)

‘Gee, that was lucky, Mr Lundqvist. I guess I didn't use enough cord where it said bind together tightly with cord, only it didn't say exactly how much cord to use, and . . .'

‘Never mind.' Lundqvist pulled himself to his feet, looked round and saw Helen framed in the doorway. ‘C'mon,' he hissed, ‘let's get out of here before she has the whole goddamn place done out in rose damask.'

 

Two or three hours later, Lucky George came by with the Transit to pick them up.

‘You've been enjoying yourself, haven't you?' he observed.

Helen shrugged.

‘So?' she said. ‘I
like
nice furniture and things, you know that. George, don't you sometimes think it'd be fun if we had a little place of our own that I could do up and make all nice and—'

‘No.'

‘You could have your own little study,' she said wistfully, ‘for all your books and magic stuff and things, and we could—'

‘No.'

‘Oh.' Helen clicked her tongue. ‘Never mind,' she said, ‘it was only a thought.'

‘Good.'

‘Anyway,' she said, producing a lighter and a can of paraffin,

‘I think Lundqvist's gone off the kidnapping idea. Curious,' she went on, splashing paraffin, ‘how anyone could be so
dozy
. . .'

‘You missed a bit.'

‘Did I? Oh yes. I mean, kidnapping
me
. After the last time and all . . .'

George nodded. ‘All brains and no intelligence,' he said. ‘Can I do the setting alight? You know how I love setting light to soft furnishings.'

Helen smiled fondly. ‘Go on, then. Only George, the labels all said
Fire retardant
and
Specially treated for your safety and peace of mind
, do you think they'll . . . ?

George grinned. ‘If I say so,' he replied.

T
he half-life of Time is notoriously long.

Being neck-deep in boiling shit is the mother of invention, as the chronological technicians say, and some of the things they've tried have been quite staggeringly ingenious, if futile. Sealing toxic temporal waste up in lead-lined cylinders and burying it is completely passé now; recently the trend has been towards boiling it, sending it back through hairline dimensional faults in the hope of setting up a Moebius effect, or selling it to the gullible citizens of Plato's Republic in big wooden crates marked ‘Tractor Spares'. These devices have taken small deposits out of circulation; however, in the time it takes to get rid of, say, 4,000 metric tonnes this way, twice as much of the loathsome stuff has built up and is leaking merrily away into the environment, poisoning the fish and causing innocent parties all over the cosmos to seduce their great-grandmothers and be late for their own funerals.

In desperation, some authorities have been illicitly shipping it out into the future, which doesn't help exactly but at least means that it becomes somebody else's problem.

Unless something is done about it pretty soon, the boffins say, the whole unhappy mess is pretty soon going to go critical and start doing horrible things to the nature of reality. Already, they report (from the relative security of their nostalgia-lined bunkers), there are rumours of the spontaneous occurrence of the dreaded isotope Overtime.

The only possible solution is recycling. Maddeningly, however, nobody has the faintest idea how to go about it.

Nobody who's been asked, anyway.

 

One of the few people not worried sick about the problem is Kurt Lundqvist. His own proposal for getting rid of it (loading it into canisters and dropping it from a great height on South-East Asia) having been rejected, he dismissed the matter from his mind and turned his attention to more immediate issues.

Such as nailing Lucky George. Dawn over the outer suburbs of Aspen, Colorado, found him sitting on his porch with the remains of his fifth pint of black coffee and nothing to show for his pains but a pile of screwed up bits of paper.

He'd tried direct attack. He'd tried abduction. Dammit, what else was there?

Like a dog returning to its own vomit, his mind kept coming full circle back to the idea of hostages. Kidnap one of Lucky George's friends, his instincts shouted at him, and you have Lucky George himself, because the man lives and dies by his friends. The true professional prefers to attack the enemy through his strengths rather than his weaknesses - weaknesses are carefully guarded, strengths are taken for granted - and what George really had going for him, a part from a repertoire of largely meretricious magical effects, was a quite depressingly huge network of friends and acquaintances stretching throughout space and time, but centred on the University of Wittenberg, Class of '88.

For the twelfth time that night, Lundqvist picked up that year's UOW Yearbook and flicked through, hoping that a name would catch his eye.

Martin Luther (Theology). HRH Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Philosophy, Politics and Economics). Hieronymus Bosch (Design Studies). Cristoforo Colombo (Geography). Leonardo da Vinci (Business Studies).

The sun rose on the Rocky Mountains; and suddenly Lundqvist had the answer. Simple. Of all the friends of Lucky George, who had ultimately achieved the most?

No contest.

He who achieves the most has the most to lose.

 

Mr Van Appin leant back in his chair and rubbed his chin. Right now, he was beginning to wish he'd never taken Lucky George on as a client in the first place.

Sure, there had been the good times. The patent applications. The intellectual property work. The trial itself, and then the appeal. There had been big money down along the line (it's not every client who pays in genuine functional bottomless purses), not to mention the prestige and the cachet and, of course, the travelling expenses. But you had to take the holistic view; and when the presence of Kurt Lundqvist in one's waiting room at nine o'clock on a Monday morning is taken into account, even a lawyer may be heard to speculate that money isn't everything.

Pure bullshit, of course. It is. But even the Pope has doubts sometimes.

Which reminded him. He flipped the intercom.

‘Sonia,' he said. ‘Ask John Paul if he wouldn't mind coming back at half-past, and show Mr Lundqvist in.'

In Mr Lundqvist came, like Death into the world; sat in the client's chair and put his feet up on the desk.

‘Kurt,' said Van Appin with insincere cheerfulness, ‘always a pleasure, how's business?'

‘Slow,' Lundqvist growled. ‘Listen. I need a lawyer.'

Van Appin quivered slightly. ‘Delighted to help in any way I can,' he said. ‘Matrimonial problems?' he hazarded.

‘No,' Lundqvist replied, ‘I need to borrow a lawyer. Not you, somebody else. You got any?'

Mr Van Appin looked at Lundqvist over his steepled hands. ‘When would you be needing him?' he asked.

‘1492.'

‘I'll see who we've got available.'

He swivelled his chair and tapped a few keys on the keyboard. The screen flickered.

‘Any particular sort of lawyer?'

‘Property lawyer.' Lundqvist laughed, a sound like sandpaper on sharkskin. ‘Little development project I got in mind.'

‘In 1492?'

Lundqvist shrugged. ‘Tax reasons,' he explained.

‘Bit out of your usual line, isn't it?'

‘It pays to diversify.'

‘True.'

Lundqvist leant forward. ‘One other thing,' he said. ‘What we're talking here is utmost good faith stuff. I don't want anyone to know, you got that? Especially any of your other clients.'

‘Hey, Kurt.' Mr Van Appin gestured his protest. ‘I got my ethical position to think of.'

He hesitated. For some reason he was finding it hard to concentrate on anything apart from the muzzle of the .40 Glock that had suddenly appeared in Lundqvist's hand.

‘Ethical,' he said slowly, ‘schmethical. Hell, Kurt, what are friends for?'

Lundqvist considered for a while. ‘Decoys,' he replied.

 

Imagine . . .

You can't, of course. It's impossible. Nobody in the plush suburb of History we call the twentieth century could possibly conceive of the stunning, mind-stripping shock of seeing, for the first time . . .

It is 1492. Three tiny wooden shells bob precariously on the meniscus of a blue-grey infinity. High in the rigging, a man turns, stares, opens his mouth to shout and closes it again.

There is, he decides, no tactful way to put this. But he's going to do his best, anyway.

‘Hey, skip!'

On the deck below, a short, weary individual looks up from a chessboard and shouts back, ‘Well?'

‘Skip . . .'

‘What's the matter, Hernan?'

‘Skip . . .' Hernan bit his tongue. ‘I spy,' he said, ‘with my little eye, something beginning with A.'

‘You what?'

‘With A, skip. I spy it. With my, um, little eye.' Hernan drew in further supplies of air. ‘It's a game, skip. You've got to guess what it is I've—'

‘Have you been at the applejack again? You know it's reserved for the scurvy.'

‘Go on, skip, be a sport.'

‘Look . . .'

‘Three guesses?'