Mindgames: Fool's Mate (9 page)

The steel surface dropped at ninety degrees to the horizontal. The steel plain ended in a steel cliff.
Carroll squatted down and touched the edge, the corner. It was sharp, almost as if freshly machined. From that edge the cliff dropped down into mistiness. Far below the ground was grey, mottled with large patches of red.
More steel?
Though Carroll wondered if it was truly steel he stood upon. He was beginning to doubt it could be anything so prosaic.

The
mottled grey and red extended to a sunrise only slightly higher than before. There was nothing else. Of course, Carroll realized, if the Clown was telling the truth, and he saw no reason to doubt that he was, then ninety odd million miles of plain lay between here and the very edge of the sun. He moved away from the edge with a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach and unquestioning awe. What now? Where was the Clown? He moved back to the resurrection machine and sat down with his back against a cluster of tubes. His position in repose was exactly the same as the skeleton's.

♠♠♠

Red were the bars that caged him, red the prison, red the sky above and red the ground below. All colour and substance extended in discs around him. He was trapped, held as he had been held so many times before. But this time he had to be free. This time there were things he had to do. He reached through the gauzy fabrics of space, round all that enclosed him, to tap energy he had spent many years accumulating and had been waiting for many years to employ. The bars crumpled. The rings broke and fell away. And he was free, hurtling above a patchwork of hexagons where men died and burnt, then hurtling above an expanse of a substance like steel, but which was infinitely stronger.

♠♠♠

‘About time,’ said Carroll, getting unsteadily to his feet. His voice was hoarse, his face sick white, and his eyes red rimmed. He had been waiting for too long. He knew he was dying of thirst.

The image of the Clown hovered before him seemingly stronger than it had ever been before, its bell-toed shoes hovering a foot off of the ground.
‘You have your disc?’ he asked, and this time his voice possessed power.

Carroll
nodded and took out and displayed his disc. The Clown slid to one side and came to a bobbing halt beside the console. ‘Quickly, here!’

Carroll
staggered over to stand next to the Clown.

‘
Place your disc here,’ the Clown directed his attention to a small slot in the top of the console. Carroll did as bid. The disc sank halfway into the slot. ‘Touch your fingers now to red, green, red, blue, yellow, then red and blue together.’

Carroll
reached down and woodenly stabbed his fingers at the coloured patches. As he hit the last to colours the disc dropped into the console and he felt a wrenching sensation in the pit of his stomach. He fell against the console, gasping.

‘
Quickly now, enter the machine,’ said the Clown, and as he said this he peered up and to the side. Carroll followed the direction of his gaze and saw something silhouetted against the starlit sky, something lit by the occasional flickers of ruby light. He pushed himself from the console and moved drunkenly to the machine. The door stood half open. He entered, taking one last look at the object in the sky. It was a throne he realized as the door closed upon him; a throne in which was seated a manlike form with the head of a jackal.

Suddenly a crashing explosion
shook the machine, instantly overlaid by a flash of white and heat and a sense of dislocation, sickening in its intensity. Then the door opened and he was somewhere else.

Carroll
reeled forwards and out, the skin of his face loosening with the touch of airborne moisture and his ears popping because of a sudden change of pressure. He glanced up expecting to see Anubis bearing down on him and instead saw a steel cliff reaching up into starlit space and curving away on either side to be lost into misty distant. He took a pace forwards and something crunched under his boots like shingle. Then he realized:
boots.

Somehow he had been transported, clothing as well. He
gazed back at the booth in wonderment and there saw a flash of blue on its floor, unsteadily he reached back inside and grabbed up his soul disc and placed it in his pocket. It would not do to lose his life. Next something else penetrated the haze of his mind and he peered down again. Shingle? No, not shingle, but soul discs, millions of soul discs. Carroll felt numb and just stood staring at the ground in vacuous confusion.

‘
Towards the sun,’ came the Clown's voice out of the air after a time that could have been minutes or hours to Carroll. He checked around him and could see no sign of his eldritch guide. What he did see though, and what impinged on his awareness more than all else, was a pool of scummy water gathered in a depression in the grey ground. He went to the pool and drank his fill.

Almost
immediately his head cleared, and once sated he sat on a pile of soul discs and gazed across their scattered redness into the distance. From the cliff those red areas had appeared vast.
One disc for every human to have died on Earth?
He drank more of the metallic tasting water then stood and walked on. He was not surprised when on his way he passed two more corpses, bones gleaming whitely and flesh fallen away like something washed up on a beach. These, Carroll realized, were more recent. Such was the way of it. He wondered if he would be joining their number to pave the way for some other to walk on this sunset path.

♠♠♠

For how long or for how far he walked Carroll had no idea. He drank frequently at the many pools, gradually rehydrating himself, and he walked. Once he stopped to lie down upon a pile of soul discs. Then on waking he walked again. In time the cliff became a small square object behind him almost hidden by the haze that seemed to hang over everything. And the further he got from it the more disconcerted he became. As strange as the game board was it seemed familiar now in retrospect. He could not judge the passage of time because the sun did not move, and he could not judge distance because there was no curve to the horizon. All around him the red and grey ground disappeared into immeasurable distances.

     After a time he could not judge he saw something far ahead of him which he at first took to be illusory. Eventually it stayed constantly in his sights and he knew it was real, though it seemed to be moving. When he
got closer he heard a gravelly crunching and the whine of electric motors. At first he considered avoiding this thing, then he decided he did not care. Soon it came clearly into view: a machine like a huge insect mounted no shiny serrated wheels. He watched as with slow deliberation it rolled forwards picking up soul discs one at a time in tweezers at the end of its front appendages, placing them in a slot mouth as if to taste them, then spitting them out and moving on to the next. He watched it for a while then moved on. Was it searching for specific discs? He gazed around at the redness stretching into hazy distance and wondered how many it had checked, and how many it had left to do. The he left it to its task and went on his way.

Hunger became his constant bane, but all he could do was fill his gut with water and walk on. Twice more he fell asleep on piles of soul discs, there to have nightmares in which the only thing he remembered was the f
ear. Eventually there came a time when he sat down on a pile of soul discs and found no inclination to get up again. Almost as if this was what he had been watching for the Clown reappeared.

‘
And where have you been?’ Carroll asked hoarsely.

‘
Leading Anubis astray,’ replied the Clown.

Carroll
nodded blankly and stared into the distance. It seemed to draw his eyes from his head. He snapped his gaze away.

‘
People could never live here,’ he said with an edge to his voice, vaguely aware that he had forgotten something important.

The Clown gestured at the surrounding desolation.
‘This is not what I intended. The Four trapped me before I had time to finish my creation.’

‘
Yeah,’ said Carroll noncommittally, feeling annoyed and sorry for himself. ‘Why are you a Clown? Is it because you like practical jokes? The kind that end up leaving corpses scattered across your creation?’

‘
Before the Four trapped me in my soul disc my form was very much different from this–’

‘
Yeah,’ Carroll interrupted, then bowed his head to stare at the green scummy water around his feet. ‘Saw a machine earlier ... it was searching... I think.’

‘
Yes, it was a library robot that survived the ruin of my ship. All the discs were kept together there in chronological order, and the robot is trying to do the job it did there ... trying to keep the discs in order.’

Carroll
glanced up. ‘What's it looking for?’

‘
The disc of the first sentient on your planet.’

‘
And when it has found that?’

‘
It will look for the second.’

Carroll
shook his head and rested it in his hands. Such awe inspiring futility, he could think of nothing more to ask about it, but that the robot did search like that posed another interesting question.

‘
How do the Four get their discs ... like ... me?’

‘
When they destroyed my ship sections of the library came down intact. All that you see around you is a small portion of the whole. But library collections do not apply to you. Your disc, like the discs of some of your fellows, were ones recently recorded and taken directly from the receiver.’

‘
Receiver–’ began Carroll, and wished he had not.

‘
Yes, a gravity pulse receiver within the solar disc. The main recorder is in what is called the red spot on the planet Jupiter of your solar system. It records each of you then transmits the information here.’

Carroll
tried not to think too much about that. ‘Where the Hell am I going?’ he asked instead.

‘
You are going to my ship,’ replied the Clown.

Carroll
took that in and went on, ‘And why am I going to your ship? Not to re-catalogue your library I hope.’

‘
You are going to my ship to get weapons, equipment, whatever you may require to steal my soul disc.’

‘
I see.’ Carroll took his head out of his hands.

Weapons
and equipment were words that revived him. He knew what to do with weapons...

‘
How far away is your ship?’ he said, standing up.

‘
Fifty miles,’ replied the Clown, and Carroll groaned.

The Clown went on,
‘There will be food and drink there as well. Can you walk fifty miles?’

‘
Yeah, I guess I'll have to,’ he said. Couldn't you have put that transporter thing nearer to your ship?’

‘
No, because I did not put it there. There are many like it scattered across the whole disc, but they are thousands of miles apart. That one was the nearest.’

Carroll
nodded. ‘You always have an explanation.’ But he was not thinking about what he was saying. The Clown's previous mention of food was making his mouth water. Still nodding he drifted, staring at the non-horizon.

‘
My ship is there,’ said the Clown. Carroll turned to gaze where the Clown was pointing, to the left of the sun. There he was able to discern something, hazily. It did not occur to him until he started walking that if he could see it from fifty miles away then it must be immense.

Chapter Seven

It looked like the beached remains of some titanic cetacean: a great grey mass of improbable immensity with exposed ribs at its highest point, reaching into the sky like claws, but clad with metal plates lower down, clinging to them like mummified skin. Ahead lay a gigantic engine something like an airliner’s turbine, and as Carroll drew closer to it, stepping amongst lesser wreckage strewn all about, he wondered what the Four had done to bring this leviathan down.

The torn and shattered of machinery scattered on the ground am
idst the soul discs looked like nothing Earthly. Its component parts did not have the square order of human built machines, rather, they were close packed and rounded like organs, and were connected with what looked like veins, arteries, and intestinal tubes. Though the machinery around him seemed mostly to be made of metal Carroll had the disturbing feeling that he was walking amidst the remains of some huge and savagely mutilated beast.

At length he came to and passed
the massive engine, then followed the path of an unlikely sized cable to the ship. When he finally passed the sheared off end of the cable, which exposed its hollow silvered interior, he turned to his left and walked along in the ship's shadow. Here there was little wreckage and he could not see the exposed ribs above. The mass of wreckage he had passed previously he surmised to be some part of the ship that had come down separately and perhaps with greater force. Here all he could see that might have been damage was irregularities in the vertical curve of the ship's hull, almost as if in places it had collapsed under its own weight, or supporting struts and rib beams inside had bent or broken.