The Suicide Bomber

The Child Damaged, the Child Dead
        Always weeping,
        Unexpectedly.
        Ambushed,
        At odd moments,
        By the pause of the child's fingers,
        By the recollection ...

        Baby Paffita, sixteen months of age, still had toes, so she played with them. Before the day was over, her toes would be gone. And her arms, too. Welcome to the modern world, baby Paffita! 
brahim Chess derailed his own law-abiding life by making the mistake of phoning up for a weather forecast. He had no consciousness of precipitating a catastrophe for himself, but that was exactly what he did when he made the call.
        The fatal phone call was what brought Ibrahim to the attention of Beria Dag, the head of Ideation Control. It was the phone call which linked Ibrahim, at least in Beria's mind, with a terrorist conspiracy to overthrow the rule of law in the city state of Oolong Morblock.
        The fact that Ibrahim was innocent, the fact that there was no terrorist conspiracy (at least, not when the phone call was made) -- these facts meant nothing. Society rests not so much on facts as on perceptions, and Ibrahim cast himself in the worst possible light by making his phone call on a day of tragedy which included, to mention just one facet of the tragedy, the disaster which blighted baby Paffita's life forever.
        Ibrahim's error was to phone Egon Turow on the morning of the day on which Egon blew himself up.
        Egon, on the day on which he blew himself up, was awakened early in the morning when his telephone rang. The time? Only 6:37.
        "Yeah," said Egon, who never answered with his name because he ran his weather forecasting service anonymously, with his clients making payments by credit card to an outfit known as Relsh Strasborg Predictions, which was theoretically based not in Oolong Morblock but in the far-off nation of Relsh Strasborg.
        Egon, then, was the hidden man. Hidden, at least, from the tax department. His clients? Well, initially, when he had first moved into commercial weather forecasting seven years previously, he had acquired his first clients by spamming potential prospects, and word of mouth had served him well since then.
        "Client seventy-six," said the caller.
        "Yeah," said Egon, grabbing his client book from the bedside table and flipping it open. "And your name, please?"
        "Ibrahim Chess."
        "Residence?"
        "Adventuring Salt Building on Pier Nine."
        "Yeah, okay, uh ... confirmed ID. And the question was?"
        "The Bilge Globulus tomorrow," said Ibrahim. "Calm or windy?"
        Egon's paranormal talent kicked in. His talent was to predict the weather, and he did so now.
        "Windy," said Egon, with great confidence. "Very windy. Possible storm conditions. Got that?"
        "Yes, thank you," said Ibrahim.
        And hung up.
        In point of fact, Egon's prediction was wrong. Totally wrong. Astral talents did not always function flawlessly, and Egon's was always one hundred percent wrong. If he said it would be fine tomorrow, you could count on rain. If he said it would be windy, you were assured of a calm day. But his clients knew that. Having been told by Egon that the Bilge Globulus would be windy, Ibrahim Chess had a one hundred percent guarantee that it would be calm.
        That was the thing with Egon: he was always consistent. And so, for his clients, he comfortably outperformed the supercomputers which tried to predict weather patterns. The computers were right ninety percent of the time, but that ten percent error area could get you into real trouble.
        Having finished with the call, Egon got up. And did the terrible thing. He didn't know it was terrible, but it was. The terrible thing was going to result in death, horror, mutilation and, on top of that, the destabilization of the civic peace in the city of Oolong Morblock.
        The terrible thing was to eat breakfast. Specifically, to eat two-minute noodles mixed with boiled green peas and, additionally, a can of tuna flavored with valsada denbok curry, valsada denbok being a herb which grew on the island of Irian Ko. With no consciousness of error, Egon ate this breakfast as he had far, far too many times before, each mouthful taking him closer toward his own death.
        As Egon ate, his belly warmed, his gut swelling with feelings of potency. He began to ride a sensation of unimaginable energies. He had enjoyed this sensation before, often, and he loved it. His belly was hot and chumbly, a cauldron of controlled violence, and he knew it was in his power, at a whim, to glorst: to explode himself, spewing catastrophe in all directions.
        "As is my duty," said Egon to himself.
        He had been feeling, more and more, the intrinsic fragility of the universe. To glorst was to strike a blow at the world of appearances, the world of sham and lies which obscured the crystalline realities of the underrock, the foundation world, the true reality of which the visible and palpable world around us is but a poor second-hand imitation.
        And, by destroying the world's illusions by the simplest of means, the application of raw violence, Egon would help expose the Dreamer, who was part of the underlying reality which was hidden by the veils of illusion. Exposed, the Dreamer would realize his (or her) true nature, and the rest would follow.
        "The rest," said Egon.
        He no longer bothered to think through the details of what "the rest" would entail. It was sufficient to be deliciously conscious of the fact that the transformation of the world was in his power.
        But not if he acted alone.
        Any person who glorsted in massacre mode disturbed the fabric of known reality, but for a truly transformative event there would have to be multiple acts of self-destruction. People exploding on trains, in buses, in public parks, in crowded shopping centers, in movie theaters, at airport check-in counters.
        "I trust to the power of a good example," said Egon.
        That was standard wisdom in the city state of Oolong Morblock, regardless of your religion or ethnicity. "Example leads!" -- it was a truism often on the lips of the city's school teachers, parents and politicians.
        But to lead, example must be known. It would not be sufficient to die without appropriate publicity. People did, after all, glorst on occasion simply because they were suicidal -- disappointed in love, downsized at work, maimed by public scandal or under arrest for murder.
        Every year there were, on average, half a dozen instances of glorsting in Omblock. Not really a cause for alarm, because most people who were going to explode themselves had the decency to go do it somewhere private or, alternatively, somewhere remote from centers of population, the summit of Mount Spottle being a favorite spot.
        In Egon's life, there had never been a massacre glorst, except for the case of Lombonny Nedcroft, who had blown himself up at the Cow Vesti mud wrestling arena in protest at the federal government's decision to raise the Universal Sales Tax from five percent to twenty. But that had been back when Egon himself had been only two years old.
        "Publish then perish," said Egon, deciding his course of action.
        Since an anonymous, unmotivated death was worthless, he would have to die with publicity. And, of course, for that purpose, the Internet was ideal. He would die a martyr's death and his death would be known to the world. With that thought in mind, Egon settled himself at his computer and began typing a passage which he intended to upload to his web site.
        "Glorst for glory! That is my plan. In the name of the martyr's cause, in honor of my deceased father, I, Egon Plendora Turow, will today strike a blow for astral freedom by glorsting in Xalbardoz land. I call on all who are capable of glorsting to glorst for glory. Blast through delusion! Reclaim reality! Find the Dreamer! And wake! Let the whole world reverberate to the shock of the new! Claim our true destiny and conquer the living world!"
        Egon checked his work carefully. He ran a spell checker over it (after all, it would be shameful to die and leave a bad spelling error behind as a target for the world's derision) and then, happy with what he had achieved, he uploaded his incendiary text.
        His words were now on his web site, were now part of the realm of the Internet, available for anyone on the whole planet of Lox Oxberg to read. Read now! Read free! Read and rejoice! A martyr has glorsted! Reality has been shaken and is ready to be overthrown!
        "Done," said Egon happily.
        All that remained now was to kill himself, and he exalted at the prospect. Facing the certainty of his own death, he found his surroundings imbued with significance. The boring routine world in which he had lived out his life had disappeared. He had entered the realm of first and last things in which everything had numinous significance, from the brown stains in his unwashed coffee cup to the little glittering points of light in the dishcloth which he had used to mop up the fragments from the glass which had dropped and shattered the night before.
        "Astral hero!" said Egon, proclaiming himself.
        He was going to change reality. He was going to change the world.
        Already, Egon's uploaded words were having an effect on reality.
        Usually, most of the dubious stuff that got uploaded to the Internet got ignored by the authorities for days, weeks, months, even years. There were just too many web sites to invigilate. But Egon had used the keywords "glorsting" and "martyr's cause".
        By happy coincidence, an automated Internet scanning program, which spent its busy days trawling through thousands and thousands of web pages, noted the combination and alerted a human operative, who reacted with flawless initiative. Soon, police cars were howling toward Egon's residence, the officers in the cars armed and ready to shoot on sight.
        Egon's face was soon retrieved from a police database. Fortunately, as a juvenile, Egon had been convicted of videotaping his pet gerbils copulating, and of selling the resulting porn tapes on the Internet, a serious crime in Oolong Morblock, where animal sex images were deemed "degrading to humanity". So Egon's face (albeit in a juvenile version) was shortly on the big LCD screens found at every station of both the subway system and the el.
        A message scrolled beneath the pictures:
        "Glorst warning! Flee this man!"
        A few minutes later, the same face and the same message was on all of Omblock's TV stations.
        At the same time, security squads, including snipers, moved into position at key points on Parkes Pilkem, the island of the wealthy elite, the island which was commonly referred to as "Xalbardoz land", because almost no astrals lived there.
        It was a flawless operation.
        But it failed.
        Totally.
        Egon Turow had left his home near Balimo subway station immediately after uploading his latest addition to his web site. But, instead of getting on the subway (too many cameras, too many watchers) he had taken a taxi to Voot, his plan being to get the ferry to Abendigo and then travel by bus to Sekigahara, up in the north of the island of Conflux.
        To Egon, "Xalbardoz land" did not mean Parkes Pilkem. No, it meant the island of Conflux, the economic powerhouse of Oolong Morblock, an island dominated by skyscraper office blocks, massive apartment blocks, industrial plants, research labs, brain training campuses and the like.
        Egon was on his way, then, to Sekigahara, his target being the Garden of Innocent Smiles, an upmarket daycare center for baby members of the Xalbardoz world. 

        The Green Room in the Olid Mazoora Building got its name from the fact that the walls were padded with green leather. Here and there, affixed to the leather, were the jaws of various sharks. Beria Dag, who ruled Ideation Control from the Green Room, was no fan of art, but he had a fascination for teeth. Including his own. Beria had extremely strong teeth. They were also (or such was his belief) the very biggest teeth anywhere in Oolong Morblock. Beria was so proud of his teeth that he visited his dentist four times a year for the sheer pleasure of being told what great teeth he had.
        Alone in the Green Room, Beria contemplated the situation regarding the terrorist Egon Turow, the astral who had posted on his web site his intention to glorst, to cause himself to explode and to take as many of the Xalbardoz with him as possible.
        Really, the astrals were a security nightmare. True, they were only two percent of the population. And true, also, only two percent of astrals were capable of glorsting. But, when you did the basic arithmetic, the threat was formidable.
        Omblock's population was computed to be more than twenty millions, and two percent of twenty million is four hundred thousand. That was how many astrals there were, a big concentration of them on Zisperhaven-Chilp, a fairly substantial population of them on Sclag, quite a few on Glud Hurgus, and a smattering in other places.
        Now, given that the astral population was at least four hundred thousand, and given that two percent of that group was glorst-capable, when you did the math you found that you had eight thousand human bombs on your hands, eight thousand people who could, if they so chose, opt to be suicide bombers. Stalking through the streets, undetected, undetectable.
        "But why now?" said Beria.
        He knew Egon Turow's motive: the incredibly silly notion that reality could be perturbed, and, consequently, the messiah revealed, by the simple process of people blowing themselves up in a mode of mass murder. Such mass murder was an essential element of the Dreamer myth. But the myth had been around for centuries.
        "Why now?" said Beria again.
        What had suddenly made Egon go pop? Nobody wakes up in the morning and suddenly decides to opt for a new career as a suicide bomber. There has to be some kind of build up. A precipitating cause.
        The natural conclusion was that Egon had been egged on to it, encouraged, probably, by a mastermind lurking in the background, someone too smart to blow himself up (Beria was definitely thinking of a man for the mastermind role, not a woman).
        "So we're talking conspiracy," said Beria to himself.
        If Egon Turow could be caught alive, and if Beria was able to take control of the prisoner before the police messed up the interrogation (the cops too often got over-excited and terminated their clients before the information-extraction process had been completed) then Beria had every confidence that Egon could be made to confess the details of the conspiracy.
        But the chances were that he would slip through the police net.
        "So we end up in body part city," said Beria.
        If so, there would be no breathing corpse to interrogate. The conspiracy would have to be worked out by studying Egon's past. And this was something that Beria planned to do himself. Undoubtedly, Don Trash, Beria's main rival, would already have someone at Tolstaple at work on piecing together the truth about Egon's past. And doubtless the police would run their own investigation.
        "But," said Beria, "they'll puppy poop the whole thing."
        They would probably go directly to the key suspects and ask them idiot questions such as "Are you a member of a conspiracy which aims to overthrow the nation state, killing a lot of people in the process?" And, of course, if you ask an idiot question like that then the answer which comes back is "No".
        The direct approach was not the way to do it. The way to do it was to penetrate the conspiracy. Which meant finding someone who was in the conspiracy. Or who, alternatively, was on the periphery. Someone who could be used as a spy. An informer. An instrument to unlock the hidden truth.
        "My personal attention," muttered Beria.
        Yes, that was definitely what this matter deserved. His personal attention. If an astral conspiracy was on the move, and if that conspiracy had succeeded in recruiting a substantial number of glorst-capable astrals, then the consequences of failure were too dreadful to contemplate.
        Beria could not trust his subordinates on this one.
        He was going to do it himself.
        With that in mind, Beria pulled his computer keyboard toward him and punched in Egon Turow's phone number, which he had obtained by the simple process of looking it up in the telephone directory.
        Beria had two powerful city computers at his disposal. One was Hashtamatrix, which indexed every phone call made in the city state of Oolong Morblock. You could check and find out which people had been calling each other (assuming that people were using the telephone numbers which were registered in their names).
        The other computer, far more formidable, was Vocablanatus, which, if it worked, would be able to retrieve a recording of any particular conversation which Beria wished to listen to. If it worked. Unfortunately, Vocablanatus was turning into the Data Management Project That Ate Omblock -- a preposterously ambitious project which had consumed more money than anyone wanted to confess to without, as yet, delivering on more than a fraction of the promises that had been made for it.
        Still, one could always hope.
        If Beria could get an angle on what telephone conversations he needed to listen to, he might get lucky.
        In an ideal world, Beria's organization, Ideation Control, would have owned both Hashtamatrix and Vocablanatus outright. But it didn't. It had to share. Beria hated sharing. Why, even the coast guard had access to both those computers.
        Still, when Beria sat at his keyboard and punched in Egon's telephone number, he felt a satisfying sensation of power. Data controls the world, right?
        A menu popped up and Beria selected "recent phone calls".
        Hashtamatrix meditated on Beria's request for a disconcerting length of time. If Hashtamatrix had fallen over then this day would have got off to a very poor start.
        Then the computer laughed with success (Beria hated that success laugh, but there was no way of switching it off) and the first of the requested data was there on the screen.
        Beria opened his private notebook, the small volume with the delicate violet paper and the smart black leather cover, and began to make notes.
        Who had last phoned Egon Turow? Marine Charters, which, plainly, was a corporation rather than a person. A simple data search revealed that Marine Charters was a company owned by an Ibrahim Lonicus Chess, who resided on Zisperhaven. An astral, then, presumably. Which made sense.
        Ibrahim had called Egon Turow early in the morning. A wake up call, maybe. A final call to make sure that Egon got into action and went off to do his glorst. Nobody else had called Egon in the preceding twenty-four hours, so it was logical to focus on Ibrahim Chess as the primary suspect. The mastermind? Perhaps. Or, more likely, just a messenger. Someone used by the mastermind.
        So who had last called Ibrahim?
        Today, nobody. Yesterday, evidently a quiet day in telephone land, only one person. Sable Astrophinia Tauranga. Who was? Maybe Oogle would have the answer. Sure enough, a quick search on the search engine site, oogle.omblock, threw up the information that Sable was a journalist, a TV reporter working for Open Mansions, the civic affairs channel.
        "Makes sense," muttered Beria.
        Journalism, when you thought about it, was a kind of invasive espionage, dedicated to undermining the social code by breaching the barriers of privacy. And, once you started down the road of breaching conventions, where did you end? Logically, nowhere. Not as far as Beria could see.
        Who, then, last phoned Sable?
        Lily Peacock. A consultant, according to Oogle. A connection which didn't immediately make sense. But, then, the investigation was only just beginning.
        "One last shot," said Beria.
        Who last called Lily Peacock? Answer: Jack Glinch. Another consultant.
        "That's it," said Beria. "I'm done."
        Then chastised himself for feeling lazy. Laziness was not how he had got to the top. You get to the top by being ruthlessly focused and, above all else, being prepared to work really hard. To drive yourself. Lazy people? If they want to conquer the world, there are drugs which will let them have the experience of doing just that, at least for ten minutes at a time. For real success, you have to put in the effort.
        So Beria went one step further.
        Who last phoned Jack Glinch? Answer: Sable Tauranga, the female who had been the only person to call Ibrahim Chess yesterday.
        "A circle," said Beria.
        On the evidence, all these people were tied together. Ibrahim Chess. Sable Tauranga. Lily Peacock. And Jack Glinch. All tied together. Somehow.
        Having discovered that much -- having discovered the identities of four people who were part of a conspiracy against the state, even though he was not yet in a position to prove it -- Beria used his computer privileges to put a lock on the telephone data that he had retrieved from Hashtamatrix so nobody else anywhere in the state security apparatus -- not the police, not the amateurs at Citywatch, and most certainly not Don Trash -- could get access to the chain of connections which he had discovered.
        In the world of bureaucratic battles, Beria's success in getting the power to lock up data on Hashtamatrix so other people could not access it was, in his opinion, his greatest triumph. It had been a hard-fought battle, and his personal relationship with the President, Olive Valise, was what had enabled him to come out victorious.
        But had anyone got to the telephone call data before him? Possibly, but he doubted it. He had been quick off the mark, so, if luck was with him, he had succeeded in forestalling any of the competitors who might want to come trampling onto his turf, muddying everything up with their hoof prints.
        The phone calls were, plainly, the starting point for the investigation into the conspiracy, and Beria wanted this investigation -- the most important investigation of his entire career, if he judged right -- to be his and his alone.
        Now, he needed to hear those conversations. If the conspirators were at all cautious, the phone calls would probably be guarded, and, possibly, partially in code. But, if he could listen to them talk, he would probably get the general drift, and would know where to go next.
        "Okay," said Beria. "Vocablanatus."
        But Vocablanatus, the gigacomputer which was supposed to store and archive all telephone conversations, was down. Beria got the chief tech support guy on the phone and got the bad news. Vocablanatus had been hacked and hijacked -- again! -- by players of the illegal shared world computer game Global Bunker Busters, which needed immense amounts of computer power for simulating that fun event always lurking just over the horizon, global thermonuclear warfare.
        The archive had been completely trashed.
        Not for the first time.
        "The next hacker I catch," said Beria wrathfully, "I'm going to nail him to a wall with red-hot crowbars."
        He was left with the stripped-down caller summary records which he had found on Hashtamatrix, records which told him only who called, when, and how long the conversation lasted.
        But, plainly, there was a mesh here, an intersection of callers. A conspiracy, undoubtedly.
        "Okay," said Beria. "Do the research and find a way into the organization."
        Check these people out. Ibrahim Chess. Sable Tauranga. Lily Peacock. Jack Glinch. One of them would prove to be the weak link. Or, if not one of them, then one of their associates. 
   Sable Tauranga had never been to Zisperhaven before. Although she was twenty-two years old, she had never found the occasion. She knew it existed, of course, and she knew it had a reputation for quaintness, but "quaint" was not where Sable was at.
        Her mission in life, as she saw it, was to "live out my destiny as a blonde". And, though she had not quite defined that destiny, it was, she was sure, something bright and glittery, something exciting and fun. Something a world away from narrow streets with ancient two-story buildings and touristic tiled roofs complete with gargoyles.
        Sable was a Conflux girl, born and bred in Cow Vesti, a devotee of lipstick music and scandal magazines. A true child of Jumbletown, as Conflux was also known. Dynamic: that was her. So she was not by nature attracted to Zisperhaven, which represented history, tradition, stasis and stability. Like her grandmother's parlor: not the kind of place to get your blood trotting.
        Even so, when Sable stepped off the ferry at Taris, she was curious. She expected to see astrals wandering around the place with their familiars following them, maybe walking, maybe floating -- weird little creatures, everything from giraffes to smoke dragons. But, when she ventured a little way up Imrose Channel, the street which led from the port area into the heart of Taris, she saw nobody with anything looking remotely like a familiar, unless you counted the spotted dog that was trotting along behind the man who exited unexpectedly from the Imperial Recollections bookshop.
        "Here I am in astral land and not an astral in sight," said Sable.
        Or maybe they were all astrals, the few people who were out and about on the streets, and she just couldn't tell. After all, they didn't walk round with "I'm an astral" signs sprouting from their heads.
        She was in astral territory and right now, according to what she'd seen on the TV on the ferry, an astral guy was running round her city looking for a place to glorst, which was a pretty creepy thing to think about. And the biggest news story of the moment, too.
        On impulse, Sable got out her cellphone and called Watford Lammerton, her boss at Open Mansions.
        "Watford," she said. "I have an idea to run past you."
        Her idea was that he should send a cameraman out to Taris. Then she could interview astrals in Zisperhaven, to get the "astral angle" on the glorst emergency.
        "No," said Watford.
        He didn't justify that "no". He just issued it. An imperial negative. She knew what the problem was. Although she was the blonde of his dreams, he was not the cabbage stalk of hers. And so he was punishing her by giving her a series of time-consuming and largely meaningless jobs. Like going around all thirty-seven of the businessmen who were in the draw for a free consultancy package which one of them would win at the ballot for the Omblock Prospadaplus Consultancy Prize.
        Sable's task was to interview each and every one of these thirty-seven businessmen, all of whom were the owner-operators of their own businesses. Theoretically, in Watford's words, so she would be "properly backgrounded" when she came to interview the winner.
        Well, then. Thirty-four interviews were behind her. Time to push on with number thirty-five.
        So thinking, Sable abandoned her adventure up Imrose Channel and, returning to the waterfront, found her way to Pier Nine, where she found the Adventuring Salt Building, which was not a historical edifice of ancient granite but a rather ramshackle two-story wooden building which had scabbed blue paint some years in need of a paint job.
        The building was not very big and the ground floor was a single open-plan office, which was the premises of Marine Charters, the company run by Ibrahim Chess, the man Sable had come to interview. Thanks to the phone call she had made the day before, he was expecting her. A small TV was on, the volume turned down low, a news announcer giving an update on the hunt for the terrorist Egon Turow. The news, it seemed, was no new news.
        Ibrahim offered Sable some coffee and, when she accepted the offer, started brewing up with the help of a small gas ring at the rear of the office.
        Sable was not quite sure what she had expected but not this. The word "yachts" conjured in her imagination a vague idea of bikinis, cocktails, diamonds and lobster dinners, but this place was distinctly low rent, furniture looking as if it had been bought at a charity shop (it had) and the bare boards of the floor scarred in places by what looked like cigarette burns. The air had been sprayed with lemon-scented air freshener, perhaps a man's pathetic excuse for house cleaning.
        Ibrahim served coffee.
        "Any trouble getting here?" he said.
        "None," said Sable.
        Then was not sure what to say next. He was an astral, right? And how exactly do you talk to these people? They weren't vanishingly rare, but, in all her life, she had never spoken with one face to face before. She felt unsure and out of her depth, her customary buoyant confidence missing for the moment, so she decided to let her host take the initiative. But he, for his part, was apparently in no hurry to get started, and just sat there, sipping his coffee.
        The Chess guy was taller than she was. A guy of medium build, hair brown, eyes brown. Skin a bit swarthy. Astrals often had swarthy skin, wasn't that so? She thought she had heard it somewhere.
        That said, there were no genetic markers which could tell you, of a certainty, whether someone was or was not an astral. Still, she did presume that this Mr. Chess was an astral because, after all, he was living on Zisperhaven, the astral stronghold, and it would be strange to move to the island if you were a norm. Still, there was no way to be sure.
        In the background information which Sable had received on Ibrahim Chess, there was no mention of the question of whether he was or was not an astral. That was a datum that went uncovered, like his blood type, or the question of whether he was or was not circumcised.
        "How does it feel to be an astral at a time like this?" said Sable, probing.
        "I think of myself as a citizen," said Ibrahim. "Not as an astral."
        "But don't you, uh, notice?" said Sable. "When you wake up in the morning? Aren't you conscious of being an astral?"
        "When you wake up," said Ibrahim, "are you conscious of having two kidneys and ten fingernails?"
        "No," said Sable. "I take your point."
        But she didn't, not really. If you were an astral, then you were aberrant. So how could you not wake up in the morning and feel your own strangeness?
        "Tell me about this area," said Sable, realising she had probably trespassed across the boundaries of propriety, and that it would be safer to warm up with a comfortably neutral subject. "What kind of businesses are there here?"
        Lately, she had been learning more than she wanted to about business, about the strange and various ways in which people scratched out a living for themselves, but at least chatting about enterprises in the area was an easy way to get started.
        The question she really wanted to ask was "Can you glorst?" Astrals always knew if they could or they couldn't -- right? But even for the brashest TV girl on the block, which was how Sable liked to think of herself, it would be just too rude to ask. It would be like going up to a stranger in a shopping mall and asking, apropos of nothing, "Excuse me, but do you ever think about committing suicide?"
        As her mother had often told her, Sable was not the model of tact and discretion, but she did have the basics of etiquette under control.
        At last, however, Sable's curiosity overcame her, and she asked a question which, even as she asked it, she knew to be out of line.
        "Where is your familiar?" said Sable.
        "In adult life," said Ibrahim, "familiars often wander far from their primaries. Not always but often. Sometimes they may be gone for days, weeks. Years, even."
        "That's not really an answer," said Sable.
        "Then it follows that I'm probably trying to avoid the question. It's not really polite."
        "Why is that?" said Sable.
        "Well, if you were followed around through life by a familiar, you wouldn't want to dwell on the subject."
        "I see," said Sable.
        She sort of did and sort of didn't. Maybe it could be inconvenient if you had a large familiar, or one that was inappropriately smelly, and that was bumping around your legs when you were busy shopping at the makeup counter or sitting having your hair done.
        Even so, she was disappointed that Ibrahim's familiar was nowhere to be seen. She would have liked to have seen a familiar.
        When she had been much younger, old enough to be concerned about making herself pretty but not really sure why she was doing it, she had been a great fan of the comic book character Splooky Domain, the hapless astral, who was accompanied through life by an astral skunk, Beauty Boots, a female skunk which would show up at comically inappropriate moments, for example when Splooky was having an interview with his bank manager.
        Unfortunately the cartoon strip, Astral Frolics, had been cancelled on the grounds of political correctness. Which was a great shame. If strange minorities don't exist for us to have a bit of fun with them, then why do they exist?
        "Okay," said Sable. "Time to get down to business, I think. Let's talk about your boats."  
  It was against the rules to eat on any of the buses operated by Conflux Transport and you could be subjected to a spot fine of fifty dollars if you got caught. But Egon Turow, who had been made reckless by the fact that he planned to shortly kill himself, was eating his way through a packet of Higlin's Curried Jellychips, strongly-flavored chips of freeze-dried jellyfish. He was sitting toward the rear of the bus, back near the teenyboppers with their blaring radios, so he didn't think there was much chance of being caught snacking.
        Maybe it had been a mistake to get on a bus. It would have been faster to get a taxi from Abendigo to Sekigahara. But it would have been a hugely expensive taxi fare, his second big fare of the day, and he was almost out of cash. There was no way he could pay by credit card. He had heard his own name on news breaks that interrupted the music on the radios the teenyboppers were carrying. He was famous, and famous sooner than he had expected. There was a good chance that any taxi driver might recognize his name if he paid by credit card. And that could mess things up at the last moment.
        Okay, then. Sit on the bus and enjoy the moment. His name was out there on the airwaves. He was already famous, and he had not even exploded himself! On top of that, it seemed he had fooled the authorities somehow. They thought he was going to Parkes Pilkem. Idiots!
        One of the payoffs of being a terrorist is that you become the One Who Knows. Egon knew exactly where he was going and exactly what he was going to do there, and the knowledge that he alone knew filled him with an immense sensation of satisfaction.
        Egon wondered if the astral community was already talking about him, thinking about him. Actually, they were, usually along the lines of "Who is this nut?"
        Also, apart from having won instant fame as a terrorist, Egon was fast gaining notoriety as Omblock's number one welfare cheat. Reporters had been interviewing Egon's neighbors in Bilbage Apartments, his place of residence in Balimo, and had discovered that Egon was a sickness beneficiary, receiving a payout from the taxpayer because he was, theoretically, too ill to work. But if he was fit enough to plan a terrorist outrage then, surely, he was fit enough to work. z
        People were starting to think and talk about Egon, then. But, with the pressure of daily life being what it is, few people had time to spend more than a couple of minutes worrying their heads about him. After all, since he was believed to be heading for Parkes Pilkem, most people could comfortably tell themselves "not heading my way".
        On Zisperhaven, where Ibrahim Chess and Sable Tauranga were deep in discussion, the quotidian details of Ibrahim's life took precedence over any speculations as to the outcome of the Egon Turow manhunt. While Egon sat on his bus, grinding his way toward his own destruction, Sable methodically went into Ibrahim's life in as much detail as he would permit.
        Some subjects seemed to be off limits. Intimate companions? Ibrahim was not saying.
        "But you know what a girl is, don't you?" said Sable finally, in exasperation.
        "I may have seen one at the zoo," said Ibrahim.
        "Oh, very witty!" said Sable impatiently. "Partners, partnership, this is where the human interest is."
        "I'm here as a businessperson," said Ibrahim. "Not a human interest story. It's not like I was a music star or the national dog-beating champion."
        He appreciated that publicity was part of the deal if he was lucky enough to win the ballot for the Omblock Prospadaplus Consultancy Prize. The Open Mansions people would be making a documentary covering the progress of the consultancy process. He would be on television. But he wanted to be there on account of his business: boats on the Bilge Globulus. Not for things more private and personal.
        Knowing that her boss, Watford Lammerton, would be checking up on her, Sable persevered with the interview, finding her first astral interviewee more than a little disappointing, like gin and tonic without the gin. A zero on the weirdness scale.
        And where was this carnival stuff you heard about when you talked about astrals? In Ibrahim's quiet office world on Pier Nine, there was zero in the way of riot and uproar. Maybe carnival was like sex. People did it, but they didn't do it all the time, and they generally hid away when they did do it, and they wouldn't always show you their videos afterwards.
        At this stage in the interview, Sable knew more about the Ibrahim Chess story than she really wanted to know. Born on the island of Sclag. Attended Anclag Academy, a combination day school and boarding school. When Anclag Academy went (briefly) into the business of offering its own university degrees, Ibrahim stayed on and studied for a degree in entomology.
        Entomology, which basically meant taking an unhealthy interest in bugs, led him into his first business venture, Ibrahim Exterminations, a bug-killing company which went around wiping out ants, flies, termites and mosquitoes. Not a glamorous business, and not wildly profitable, either, but it was steady work (the bugs keep breeding) and you could make a buck doing it.
        Then, five years back, Ibrahim had entered his "my dream" period and had started up Marine Charters. What a boring name! Why not Seduction Cruises or Voluptuous Ocean Adventures?
        The yacht business, as far as Sable could gather, was tougher than the bug-killing trade. People needed their bugs killed, and, if they did not realize the fact, then the bugs would bite them or eat away at their houses until they thought otherwise. But having fun floating on the water was a luxury, and the world was crowded with people out for the luxury dollar.
        Had she absolutely run out of questions? And did Ibrahim have a toilet? And, if he did, was it clean or dirty?
        As Sable was thinking these thoughts, there was a surge of excitement from the TV which drew both Sable's attention and Ibrahim's. Earlier, Ibrahim had offered to turn off the little TV but Sable had preferred for it to stay on. She was, after all, a journalist, and would rather not switch off what had to be the number one breaking news story of the year. So they heard the news flash. Ibrahim looked at Sable and she nodded, and he turned up the volume.
        "Glorst suspect caught!" said Esmeralda Arizona, the anchor on Conflux One, the city's leading free-to-air TV station.
        Esmeralda, glammed up like a fashion model, wearing those diamonds that oh so famous husband of hers had given her. Bitch. Bet she has sweaty armpits.
        With hostile jealousy -- older women with a jewelry lifestyle always made her furiously envious -- Sable watched Esmeralda do her stuff.
        A man had been arrested by the coast guard. He had been in a fizz boat approaching Parkes Pilkem, but was now in custody and had been "grogged up" -- that is to say, injected with drugs designed to prevent him from using his paranormal powers. If he had paranormal powers. If he was the right man. Esmeralda said that his interrogation was already underway.
        "So that's that, then," said Sable.
        A little disappointed. There would be no bang, no glorst. Life would carry on as before.
        Then, realizing what she was thinking, Sable was ashamed of herself. What a horrible thing to think -- to think it would have been more exciting for the guy to have gone bang. That was a mayhem thought. A boy thought, even. Think too many thoughts like that and she'd find herself heading off to buy an inflatable doll and a jockstrap.
        Or, maybe, that aberrant glorst-loving thought was an astral thought. Yes, maybe she was being contaminated by an astral mode of thought, sitting here on Zisperhaven face to face with her first astral, Ibrahim Chess.
        "Well," said Sable. "That's it, then. All's well that ends well."
        And then her thoughts returned to what was fast becoming priority number one: did Ibrahim have a toilet? 
 In Oolong Morblock, although torture was technically outlawed, it was accepted that torture was morally legitimate in certain circumstances, and one of those circumstances was when you were face to face with a terrorist threat. If you torture someone then they will confess. If you know what you are doing, they will most certainly confess. And fast.
        And so it was in the case of the captured fizz boat man, a tile layer by the name of Pablo Winkle, who lived in Lynch Agnot and who, as a hobby, enjoyed zipping around the waters of the Bilge Globulus in his fizz boat. Only three broken fingers into his interrogation, Pablo had confessed that, yes, his name was actually Egon Turow, and, yes, he was an astral, and, yes, he was glorst-capable, and, yes, he had been on his way to Parkes Pilkem so he could blow himself up, killing as many innocent norms as possible.
        Shortly thereafter, Pablo somehow slipped and fell when he was being escorted from one room to another in Octavalus Heights, the police building at Hoover. When he slipped, he somehow acquired sufficient momentum to go crashing through a glass window. The drop? Twelve floors. By the time his body was recovered from the carpark below he was, very naturally, dead.
 
        Egon, still sitting on the bus which was grinding through the traffic to deliver him to his destiny, heard on the radio that he was dead. The emergency was officially over. The man arrested earlier by the coast guard, the man who had been on a fizz boat approaching Parkes Pilkem, had confessed to being Egon Turow, an astral intent on glorsting.
        "That was quick," said Egon to himself, impressed by the speed at which the confession had been obtained.
        Egon, never having been tortured, had no idea what a marvelous instrument torture is for swiftly and efficiently arriving at the truth. Want to improve your crime-solve statistics? Start breaking those fingers!
        The closer Egon drew to his destination, the better he felt. He was going to die. He was going to glorst for glory. He was going to become an astral martyr, and, as a religious man, he knew his fate was to end up in Yafla Herig, the Carnival Paradise, where his eternity would be parades and fireworks shows, midnight parties with drunken tubas, and flowerboat entertainments on the River of Dreams.
        Any deeply religious hardline astral fanatic would have thought Egon's expectations to be entirely reasonable, and would have judged Egon to be making the rational choice of a sane man. However, although such fanatics existed, they did not go around blowing themselves up. They were like potential serial killers who had not yet started killing, who had not yet found the spur that would prompt them to move from fantasy to action.
        The fanatics of Oolong Morblock were sane.
        But Egon was not.
         And that was why Egon, the madman, was the one who took the initiative and acted first.
        Egon Turow was mentally ill, and the reason for this was that he had, unknowingly, been poisoning himself for some time by eating valsada denbok, a herb which was a constituent in the cans of curry-flavored tuna which he had been eating for the last seventeen months.
        Unfortunately, Egon had a rare metabolic problem which made it impossible for him to properly process one of the chemical compounds found in valsada denbok. When he ingested this chemical, the result was that his body manufactured toxins which, slowly but surely, had been poisoning him, with the result that he was mentally ill, the consequence of his illness being that his fantasies had strengthened, weakening the grip of the real world, the mundane world in which he played computer games, ran his weather forecasting business, and collected sickness benefits in his own name and in the names, also, of two imaginary women, who existed on the welfare computers because Egon had, by a complex process involving forgery and perjury, invented them.
        Mad, then, but feeling totally well-balanced, and, additionally, happier than he had ever been before in his life, Egon headed toward his destiny.
        Mental illness coupled with the ability to blow yourself up: not a happy combination. People who were known to suffer from such a potentially fatal constellation of attributes generally ended up in Gorgel Yoga, the lunatic asylum on the island of Sclag, where they were kept drugged by grogs to keep their paranormal abilities suppressed.
        But there was no national screening program to detect astrals with mental problems, so people who were going quietly mad in the privacy of their own homes did not attract the attention of the authorities.
        Additionally, it was not legal for the state to compile a list of glorst-capable astrals. That was specifically forbidden by the Constitution, on the grounds that any such list, if it were to exist, would, sooner or later, become the basis for a pogrom. And nobody was in a hurry to try to rewrite the Constitution.
        The Constitution was a product of the bloodiest phase of Oolong Morblock's history. It was, in effect, a peace treaty -- the document whereby the powers of Oolong Morblock had hammered out a compromise which would permit peace. That had been way back when, at the end of the Torment Times. Even now, generations later, the inhibitions against disturbing the fragile security offered by the Constitution ran deep. Nobody wished to see Oolong Morblock turned into a carnage ground.
        So, while a register of glorst-capable astrals might have been a rational thing (though to assemble it would have required glorst-capable astrals to honestly confess to their own nature) it was a non-starter. Therefore Egon, unmonitored and effectively unknown to the state, had lived his unsupervised life in privacy, and had gone mad.
        Feeling perfectly sane and well-balanced, Egon reached the end of his journey. He got off the bus at Sekigahara, attracting the notice of nobody. For one thing, the hunt for Egon Turow was officially over: officially, he had been captured by the coast guard. For another thing, Egon was disguised. His disguise was very simple but effective: a bright orange wig, blue lipstick and green-tinted sunglasses.
        Egon found the place he was looking for, the Garden of Innocent Smiles. He had looked at its web site where, unwisely, the timetable of the daily routine was posted. The Early Mothers, those who left their children in daycare for only the first part of the day, would be along in an hour to collect their children. That was when Egon would have the target he was looking for: the children of the norms, Xalbardoz little ones, out in the open.
        "Annihilation meat," said Egon, licking his lips.
        But if he hung about in the open for an hour then he might attract suspicion. Fortunately, there was a fantasy parlor just across the road from the daycare center, and Egon went inside to play with the computers while he waited.
        This was not a soft fantasy parlor but a place devoted to hard fantasy: the business of destruction. Soft fantasy was considered to be not quite wholesome, but games involving mayhem and murder were entirely respectable. Violence was the sacred value at the core of global civilization. If that were not so, why would military expenditure bulk so large in the budgets of the nations of Lox Oxberg?
        On schedule, Egon emerged from the parlor, games over, and crossed the road to the daycare center, being careful not to get killed in the process. It would have been tragic to get run down when he was so close to his goal. Mothers were milling out of the gates of the daycare center, their children in strollers or toddling along beside them.
        And Egon -- now he had come to the moment, it was very easy to do -- let the rages of his lifetime dominate. The red heat of rage surged through his body. And he exploded.
        In the aftermath, baby Paffita Strong lay in a shatter of blood, mauled to rags. She had no arms. Just frayed flippers of shredded meat, wet with glistening red. No arms and no cry, no squalling. Baby Paffita was in shock.
        Shortly, an ambulance pulled up, the medics arriving in time to save Paffita for a life as an armless person, for surgery and skin grafts and blood transfusions, for disfigurement and pain, for a life of loss, always the loss of the wrecked life to be mourned.
        Chino Ziggurat, a freelance video reporter who chased ambulances for a living, filmed the rescue of baby Paffita. He knew who would pay the best money: Conflux One. And so baby Paffita was launched on her public life, destined to be a transitory media star, a child of the Xalbardoz, a child of the normative majority, hideously maimed by an act of astral terrorism. 
   Somewhere in the red haze of his existence, there was a name. Egon, that was it. His name. Egon Turow.
        "But I'm dead," he said. "How can I have a name?"
        Talking made him feel as if he had a hairbrush in his throat. Not a comfortable feeling. Stupid question, anyway. He had glorsted -- that is, he had caused himself to explode -- and therefore, he had become a glorst.
        "Bad luck," said Egon.
        Statistically, most people became neither ghosts nor glorsts. When they died, they were done, and their next step was a confrontation with God or (and here beliefs differed somewhat) with Magara the Bonescraper or Hedaglancha the Eyeless One. Whatever the outcome, you were certainly going to be saying goodbye to the world of greeting cards and blood pressure checks.
        Usually, then, the life of the living meat was not followed by a period of spectral existence. You went either nowhere or Elsewhere, but you most certainly went. However, a spectral phase was acknowledged to be one of death's potential side effects. It did sometimes happen. And both ghosts and glorsts could hang around for a long time. Egon's spectral existence might quite possibly end up being longer than his years as (briefly) a taxpayer and then (for much longer) a welfare cheat. Conceivably, much longer.
        "Still," said Egon. "At least I'm a glorst, not a ghost."
        Logically, that had to be so, since he had glorsted, and the spectral survivals of glorsting were always glorsts, never ghosts. And it was better to be a glorst. Why? Because ghosts were largely incapable of acting effectively on the world of atoms and molecules. A ghost was little more than a voice and an apparition. By contrast, a glorst was a spectral deathform capable of exerting perhaps ten percent of its living force on the world of kittens and taxpayers.
        In theory, at any rate.
        But, at the moment, Egon could find neither his hands nor his feet. Perhaps they weren't findable. Maybe he didn't have any. And he could see nothing but red. A blurred haze, devoid of definition. And he could hear -- what? Sounds climbing and swooping, far off.
        A siren.
        Yes, that was one of the sounds.
        Perhaps he would find himself getting a little more coherent as he adjusted to the afterlife. Perhaps he would be able to apprehend the world from which he had immigrated. But what good would that be?
        "I'm never going to eat pizza again," said Egon, with a feeling of dismay.
        It had, he realized, been a totally insane thing to do, to blow himself up. And, looking back, he began to realize that perhaps he had been exactly that: insane. Mad. Off the edge. Out of the cage and into the wombat zone, to coin a phrase.
        Well, too bad. He was dead. Or, more exactly, undead. And he would just have to make the best of it.
        He could see. At least, he could see the color red. He could feel. Well, he could feel his own throat when he ventured to talk to himself. That was a start. And he could hear. Not clearly, but he had heard the distant siren. And the power of taste also remained with him: he could still taste, in his mouth, the tangy flavor of Higlin's Curried Jellychips.
        And that was when he began to notice something most unfortunate. An itching in his ear. A most infernally annoying itch. Which was good news and bad news. At least he had an ear, which was an improvement over being totally incorporeal. But -- bad news -- he had no way to scratch his itch.  
News spread fast in Oolong Morblock but not instantaneously, and, by the time Sable departed from Ibrahim's office, the TV was showing not massacre reports but live coverage of the national spaghetti cooking competition.
        Sable walked along the waterfront, her destination the ferry terminal. Her interview with Ibrahim had taken longer than expected, and she was running late for her next appointment, which was to interview yet another entrant in the draw for the Omblock Prospadaplus Consultancy Prize, a guy called Smath Hangleiron, who had a one-man battery recycling business at Cupid, and who was locked in a legal battle with his neighbors, who were trying to close him down on environmental grounds.
        "My destiny as a girl," said Sable.
        And sighed.
        It had never occurred to her that her life would have anything to do with pulling apart old batteries, but that was what was in store for her in the next phase of her life as an intrepid reporter.
        With Sable having departed, Ibrahim, left to his own devices, felt a wave of unmotivated and completely unprecedented weariness roll over him. There was no fighting it. He switched off the TV, locked the door, turned the door sign round so the word "CLOSED" was outermost, then dragged himself upstairs, where he fell onto his bed and collapsed, almost immediately, into a dreaming slumber.
        He dreamt that he was walking through Mozley Maze near Orkel Pariah, the ancient stronghold of the exorcists of Oolong Morblock. It was a bright sunny day, a day on which Omblock's customary haze had given way to brilliant blue skies. Ibrahim walked past a foreigner who was standing outside a cafe.
        "Ibrahim," said the foreigner.
        Ibrahim stopped, but the foreigner, a man dressed in dark blue overalls, denied having accosted him. Even so, Ibrahim felt that he had a responsibility to show the man around, so led him to the cafe, where an elegant woman who was dining at an outside table showed them two large loquats. She cut a piece from one and gave it to the foreigner.
        Then, to Ibrahim's acute embarrassment, the foreigner started feeding the woman with slices of tinned peaches, long slippery orange slices. Where these slices of tinned fruit came from Ibrahim had no idea. Certainly there was no tin anywhere in sight. The woman kept accepting them and kept smiling.
        At that point, Ibrahim woke and, as he sometimes did, puzzled over this dream, looking for hidden meanings or insights into his life. But finding none.
        Loquats. He remembered the loquats very clearly from the dream. He never ate them as an adult but they had been a feature of his childhood. A small fruit with not much in the way of fruit flesh and with a huge pip -- or, sometimes, more than one pip -- at the center. The pip brown, and slippery with juice. The flesh of the fruit sometimes pale yellow, sometimes tending toward orange. The skin, which was not eaten, peeled away in strips as his fingers worked on it.
        Loquats had always been his father's favorite fruit, and there had been two loquat trees in Upla Menzo, the house in which Ibrahim had grown up, the big old house on the outskirts of Melos, on the island of Sclag.
        Loquats, then, reminded Ibrahim of his father. It was his father's death, five years previously, which had brought home to Ibrahim the impermanence of human life, and which had given him the push he needed to start up Marine Charters, to take a shot at living his dream in this life, this one and only life which he had.
        Lazily, Ibrahim replayed his dream once more. How had he known that the foreigner was a foreigner? He just had. In dreams, facts declare themselves without a supporting structure of logic and reason.
        Sleep had not made him feel refreshed. Rather, he felt waterlogged. He felt as if he could sleep forever.
        "Just a few more minutes," said Ibrahim, deciding to indulge himself.
        He closed his eyes and, effortlessly, drifted off into sleep again. Only, this time, he was ambushed by nightmare.
        In Ibrahim's dreams, the buildings of Jumbletown trembled. Why? Something to do with him. Something to do with the wheel. There was a huge wheel turning inside him. Inside his belly. Monstrous. Aggressive. A wheel of power, revolving without mercy. The wheel amplified gravity, made his body feel huge, cumbersome. His belly was swelling with the wheel, was becoming grotesquely distorted.
        "The one true wheel," said Ibrahim to himself, trying, in the course of his dream, to find a meaning for the dream.
        The one true wheel. For a moment, that seemed to make a kind of sense. Then he realized that, no, there was not just one wheel. There were many wheels, and these were both inside him and outside him at one and the same time. Cogged wheels that were meshed with each other and that were constantly on the move, revolving in spirals which rose and sank. The wheels were the machinery of change, the machinery of destruction. Doom: that was the message of the wheels. Doom. Everything that is born dies. Everything that is built crumbles. And here was the ruthlessly dynamic mechanism which controlled that process of unstoppable change.
        Then the vision of wheels was gone. And now? Instead of the wheels, Jumbletown. Buildings trembling. People shaken from their sleep. Men made women, women made men. Privacy made publicity.
        At that point, Ibrahim woke.
        "Privacy made publicity," he said, muttering words heard in his dream just before he woke.
        It had been a strange, disconcerting dream. A nightmare, really. Jumbletown shaken -- by what? Ibrahim as earthquake? And the wheels, where did they come from? But the most ominous part of the dream was just those words, "Privacy made publicity". They seemed to contain an annihilating threat, though why that should be so he could not say.
        The heat of the day had increased and it was hot in his quarters upstairs from the office. In fact, it felt stifling. He went downstairs, put on some water to heat and turned on one of the two air conditioning units. Money was tight to the point where electricity bills were a major issue, so he did not like to run the air conditioners unless he had to, but the heat was making him sick.
        Once he had made a cup of coffee, he thought of sitting down to check his e-mail. But he found his dream -- his nightmare -- was still very much in his thoughts.
        "I am the destroyer," said Ibrahim.
        That seemed to be the message of the dream.
        But the dream was just that -- a random mirage, no more. Unless it was a signal. A signal from Ibrahim to Ibrahim. A signal saying ... what?
        Destruction. Change. Ibrahim as a menace to the stability of the standing world.
        Maybe what he had realized, in his dream, was that he was capable of glorsting.
        That thought came without warning. But, once it had arrived, it was hard to resist. He was an astral, some astrals could glorst, and it was not beyond the realms of possibility that he was one of them. That wheel! The first wheel, churning in his belly -- huge, monstrous, invincibly powerful -- surely that signified, if anything, that he contained a destructive power within his own body. The power to detonate. The power to glorst.
        "Grown men are not scared by idle dreams," said Ibrahim, figuring he should be ashamed of himself for taking the dream so seriously.
        But he did not feel ashamed. Rather, he felt afraid. Your body, at times, tells you things. You feel a cold coming on, for example. Why shouldn't your body send you a signal warning you that you had become glorst-capable? And that wheel, that huge wheel, turning remorselessly in the belly -- if it was not a signal of glorsting capability, then what was it?
        "You were worried about privacy," said Ibrahim to himself. "When you woke."
        But that was then. This was now. Privacy? He couldn't imagine why he had been thinking of that. What was on his mind now was the possibility that he had become glorst-capable. That he had become a suicide just waiting to happen.
        "But you wouldn't find out like this," said Ibrahim.
        Surely he was too old to just be discovering that he was glorst-capable. If you were one of those few astrals who were capable of glorsting, then the knowledge of your own nature generally came to you at about age eighteen, which was typically the age at which a capacity to glorst developed.
        But how did that knowledge come to you? Ibrahim had never inquired into the details. It was one of the many things, such as the details of how toothpaste is made, which it had never seemed necessary to research.
        "And astrals are not uniform," said Ibrahim.
        True. Everyone's astral talent tended to be a little different, to mature along lines of its own. It was most unlikely that Ibrahim, at the age of thirty-four, was just discovering in himself a talent for glorsting. But it was not impossible.
        "But what's most likely?" said Ibrahim. "What's changed?"
        A good question. And a question with an obvious answer, now that he thought about it. What had changed was that the even tenor of his days had been disturbed by the delinquency of Egon Turow. Ibrahim, undoubtedly, would not be the only person in the city state to have nightmares caused by the drama of a suicidal astral on the loose, bent on a massacre glorst.
        Assuming Egon to be a true fanatic, one of those extremists who saw glorsting as being, improbably, a means to discover the messiah hidden somewhere amidst the astral population -- assuming that to be the case, then Egon's motive for going out to glorst had been to attack the underlying structure of reality.
        "Well," said Ibrahim, "he certainly succeeded in attacking the structure of mine."
        The world felt more fragile than it had the day before. More fragile and, in its fragility, infinitely desirable. Precious. Sitting there in his office, Ibrahim was conscious of the world stretching out around him. The waters of the port of Taris. The streets of the port area. The buildings of Zisperhaven-Chilp. And the larger city beyond that. The setting of his life, his one and most precious life.
        "This life that I love," said Ibrahim.
        By now, he felt he had pulled himself together. A dream -- to be disturbed by a dream? Nightmares have no hold on the adult mind. Do not. Or, at least, should not. And, even if you believed that some dreams had prophetic intent -- and Ibrahim did not think that he did -- dreaming that you had a wheel in your belly did not necessarily prophecy that there was a glorst in your future. It might simply be warning you that you were in for a bout of bad indigestion.
        "The world is as it was," said Ibrahim.
        But that was not true. Egon Turow, by going forth to glorst, had rendered reality more fragile.
        In so thinking, Ibrahim was under the impression that Egon's glorst had been thwarted. He was going by the last news he had heard, which was that the coast guard had captured a suspect on a fizz boat heading for Parkes Pilkem. For Ibrahim, Egon was a story which was over.
        In the wider world, however, Egon was a story which was only starting. Egon's successful massacre glorst was dominating the world of TV, radio, text messages and Internet comments. On the part of the norms, the Xalbardoz, the reaction was a combination of fear and fury. More fury than fear. Anger was dominant. And along with anger came a sense of power. The power to fight back. 
Egon Turow's glorst left nine dead, not counting himself, and seventeen injured.
        There are various things which can cause explosions, including bombs, missiles and lightning strikes, but there was no doubt that Egon had glorsted. A mother with a video camera, proudly filming her twin children, had caught the whole thing. The police -- that is to say, the Conflux Constabulary -- seized her video camera and, within an hour, they were showing the video to the President, Olive Valise.
        Along with the video, Olive got a briefing.
        The terrorist was believed to be Egon Turow, who had been at the center of the glorst alert which had been issued after his determination to destroy himself had been posted on his web site.
        Egon was undoubtedly part of a conspiracy. One of those in league with him had distracted the authorities by heading for Parkes Pilkem in a fizz boat. On being arrested, the unknown conspirator had claimed that he was Egon Turow. He had subsequently committed suicide by hurling himself through a window in the Octavalus Heights police building at Hoover, and so, unfortunately, was not available for interrogation. There had been no ID on his body. The Baton Force, the Glud Hurgus police outfit, was currently investigating the provenance of the fizz boat in an attempt to get a clue as to the unknown conspirator's identity.
        "So when can we expect to uncover the whole conspiracy?" said Olive.
        She was told that these things take time. There were steps to be gone through. To start with, it was necessary to confirm the ID of the man who had glorsted. Which should be possible. They had Egon's body parts -- or, at least, the tattered fragments of those body parts -- so they could do DNA analysis.
        Fortunately, Egon's DNA profile was on file because he was one of those who had been subjected to compulsory sampling three years earlier, during the hunt for the Balimo Rapist. DNA sequencing of Egon's remains was underway, and was expected to tell them that, yes, they had the right man. Or, at least, the remnants of the right man.
        "When?" said Olive, who consistently wanted the world to move at a faster pace than it actually did.
        She was told that an answer would be available "before too long".
        Having received a briefing, Olive Valise watched the glorst video. She ended up watching the short video three times. Not out of ghoulish curiosity but because, the first two times, she had difficulty processing what she was seeing.
        Olive had just finished watching for the third time when Wug Waxaphone arrived. Senator Wug Waxaphone, that is: the Chairman of Citywatch. The very last person she wanted to see. She was irritated beyond measure by the silly old fool, always eager to horn in on any crisis which might be going.
        Citywatch was as near as you could get to a totally useless security organization, because it had no proper funding in place and was staffed largely by amateurs. The lack of funding was because the Senate was specifically forbidden by the Constitution to fund any intelligence gathering organization of its own. For that reason, Citywatch was a registered charity, surely the only intelligence outfit on the planet to rely on selling raffle tickets for part of its funding.
         But Olive had to be as nice as she could to senators, even Wug, because she needed them. The Senate was soon going to vote on the question of whether the jellyfish is or is not as animal, and, because of a certain case which had come before her court, the Star Chamber, the one court under the control of the President, Olive wanted them to vote yes. Since there had been a political risk involved in reactivating the Star Chamber, in setting one of history's death machines in motion again, Olive most definitely wanted the first case to be heard there on her initiative to end with the victory of the righteous and the punishment of the evil. Therefore the jellyfish must be deemed to be an animal.
        By the time Olive had politely disposed of Wug, she knew what she had to do next. Spend some time with Beria Dag. Beria was the man in her life, her tower of strength. He was someone she could rely on. Unlike Wi Carnaby, the Mayor of Glud Hurgus, someone she mentally filed in the "light entertainment" category. And unlike, too, her husband, Tobias Valise, a mild-mannered dress designer whose hobby was formulating experimental perfumes.
        Although there were rumors that Olive was intimately involved with Beria, there was no truth to those rumors. He was, purely and simply, her most trusted confidant. The one person whom she could trust with her insecurities, her fears. After she left Beria's presence she would be, she knew, calm. Reassured. Smoothed out.
        Olive taped an "appalling day of horror" segment for release to the TV stations, which did not take very long. If you were President then you found that things burnt, blew up, crashed or collapsed often enough for you to get pretty slick at the "appalling day of horror" speech.
        "I call on all citizens to remain calm and leave the resolution of this crisis to the security forces, in which I have total confidence."
        So said Olive, and, shortly, departed from Hexagon, the presidential palace at Tespetty. Her destination was the Olid Mazoora Building at Zanzak Bridge, the headquarters of Ideation Control. Beria, the head of Ideation Control, had already been contacted by phone and told to expect her. 
The headquarters of Tolstaple, the federal outfit also known as the Inner Police, was in Telescope Tower, the tallest building at Ming Taxis, up in the north of the island of Glud Hurgus. Right at the top of the building was the Pearl Enclave, the penthouse suite from which Don Trash, the head of Tolstaple, ruled his secret police outfit.
        As the aftermath of Egon Turow's glorst unfolded on TV, Don sat drinking whiskey in the company of Vicky Glark, his instrumental assistant, and Wi Carnaby, the Mayor of Glud Hurgus, the democratically elected ruler of the entire island.
        The focus of media reports had already shifted from the glorst at the Garden of Innocent Smiles at Sekigahara, and the tragedy of Paffita Strong, which had earlier succeeded in winning the spotlight for all of sixty seconds, was slipping from memory. Baby Paffita was fast becoming forgotten. Not by her mother but by everyone else. Our meatiest crisis is just a small fraction of someone else's working day, the agony of a shattered tooth just one segment amongst many in the dentist's calendar.
        The news of the moment was the firebombing of a restaurant on the island of Gorleth. This eatery had been in operation for ten years, trading under the name of Glorsting House, which advertized itself with the slogan "Eat till you burst!" In the current context, both the name and the slogan proved to have been ill-chosen, and the riot outside the restaurant, the riot which had led to the fire bombing, had been precipitated by the perceived outrage that the restaurant's name and slogan represented.
        As Don and his drinking companions sat watching TV, the restaurant was still burning. The proprietors, a married couple by the name of Plingon, were missing, together with their adult son, possibly inside the burning building. It was not known if they were ethnically astral or not.
        "I don't know where all this ends," said Wi, sipping his whiskey.
        There were a number of astrals on Glud Hurgus. An uncomfortable number, in his opinion. All through his mayoralty the astrals had been a nagging source of worry, a potential cause of disruption. If he could have annihilated the whole lot of them with a single magic wish, he would happily have done so.
        "I can tell you where it ends," said Don. "It ends with chattel slavery."
        "With what?" said Wi.
        Don's comment had the hint of a cumbersome joke about it, but Don Trash was not the sort of person who made jokes. He was a careful, controlling man, and the spillage of laughter was a wasteful indulgence in which he almost never engaged.
        "Chattel slavery," said Don. "People as property. Or, more exactly, astrals as property. It's the only way. We can't have the state invigilate the whole astral community. It would be prohibitively expensive. They should have owners. Then the owners could keep an eye on them, make sure they stay grogged up, keep them from grouping in conspiracy clutches."
        "So what's the payoff for the owner?" said Wi.
        "You're a man," said Don. "Top executive, busy job, wife, two kids. Unfortunately the wife works, and where can you get decent childcare in this city of ours? So you wander down to the local slave auction and you buy yourself a girl, she's almost thirty, getting a little old to be working in the local slave brothel, but still reasonably juicy."
        "I don't think the wife is going to go for this idea," said Vicky. "Knowing what guys are like, I can see your buyer ... what? Card evenings, I guess. Him and his buddies at home with his play girl. What happens next? I think that's easy enough to guess. When the wife gets home from the movies, she's not going to like what happened."
        "No problem," said Don. "The man just lies to the wife, says nothing happened. Besides, it'll become the standard social pattern. All the guys will be doing it."
        "Nice fantasy," said Wi, "but it'd never happen. You can't sell the city on the idea of slavery."
        "You don't try," said Don. "You sell it as supervision. It starts, this is my image, as an extension of the probation service. People have done crimes, so they get supervised, and you, the needful citizen, you enrol as a citizen parole officer, showing your support for the system by making a donation. You make this donation at the donation house. Various parolees are on display, and you donate to get the one you want. A slave market, but that's not what we'd call it. We'd call it the compatibility center, maybe. You're not buying a slave, you're seeking a compatibility match between you, the supervisor, and the criminal you're going to supervise."
        "Isn't that a little transparent?" said Vicky. "Won't people see the truth?"
        "The truth is the last thing people want to see," said Don. "Everyone wants the astrals gone, and nobody has the balls to do the logical thing, which is to kill the whole lot of them. Well, if we're such a bunch of custard puffs that we don't have the guts to do what we should, a little institutionalized supervision is the way to go."
        Don paused to allow a comment. But neither Wi nor Vicky seemed to have anything to say.
        "Mark my words," said Don. "This is coming. It will start with an organization called Supervision Central, we'll run it right here, out of Telescope Tower. It'll organize something we'll call community supervision. The probation service on steroids, that's how we'll sell it."
        "You'd never even get started," said Vicky, who did not have the habit of acting in a subordinate manner to her boss.
        "Oh yes we would," said Don. "We'd start with pedophiles who are also astrals. That's the easy way in, you see. Child rapists let out of prison, walking around these fair islands of ours - you know how that plays for the public. You want volunteers to burn them alive, you'd have no shortage. We start by supervising them. Then we expand. Want peace of mind for your kids? Who could say no?"
        "So your vision is that the hard core criminals get enslaved," said Wi.
        "No," said Don. "I'll be angling for the whole astral community."
        "But there's a problem," said Vicky. "Most astrals don't commit crimes."
        "Everyone commits crimes," said Wi.
        He had good reason to say so. In the last three months, he personally had committed three road rage crimes, the last of which had resulted in a punch-up in which his nose had been broken. There might be one or two entirely innocent people walking around on the planet Lox Oxberg, but Wi had yet to meet one of them.
        "Yeah," said Vicky. "People do stuff. But catching them at it, that's another thing."
        "You give me the budget," said Don, "and we'll define the crimes and we'll do the catching."
        Wi Carnaby was not one of the world's fastest thinkers. His job did not require him to be one. But things did tend to filter through to his mind. Eventually. And what had filtered through to him, finally, was that his good friend Don Trash was totally serious about this. A little mad, really, this demented notion of covertly reinventing slavery. But one of the things you learn as you grow older is that sanity is not the ruling force in the known universe.
        "When you buy yourself your first girl," said Wi, raising his glass for a toast, "remember to invite me round to that first card party of yours."
        But Don Trash, who had taken an oath of celibacy in early manhood, and who, shortly afterwards, had paid good money to have himself chemically castrated so he could focus his mind on building his career, made no effort to raise his glass to Wi's.
        "You don't get it," said Don. "Sleazy sex is just a payoff, one of a bunch of payoffs, to get the average slob taxpayer to go along with this. But what it's all about, Wi, it's not about your drainpipe, it's about power. Unlimited power."
        On the TV screen, someone was being hacked to death with fire axes, live on TV, somewhere in the city, maybe on Gorleth. But the three people in the Pearl Enclave had stopped paying attention to the TV some time ago. Don had drawn them into his reverie. A little mad, true. But it had a certain kind of warped fascination about it.
        "The will is free," said Vicky, "therefore all things are possible."
        On the TV, a camera housed in a circling helicopter was bringing live pictures of a building, one of those old-fashioned Blagartha-style brick buildings so common on the island of Gorleth. It had the flat roof typical of that style of architecture, and there were people milling about on the roof. Doing what, exactly?
        The camera zoomed in, and the situation on the roof was explicated.
        The little mob of excited people on top of the roof were busy throwing other people off the roof, one by one.
        The drop?
        It was about ten floors down.
        Well, maybe it was not the case that all things were possible. But, evidently, to judge from what was being shown live on TV, the will was most definitely free.    
   On the day of Egon's glorst, Ibrahim had his interview with Sable Tauranga in the morning. Then slept, and dreamt of a wheel, the wheel of his doom. Later that same day, in the afternoon, he had a speaking engagement at Taris High School, at its new location on the outskirts of Taris itself.
        There had been a lot of controversy about the design, which did not conform to the standards set by the Heritage Conservation Regulations which dominated architectural practice on Zisperhaven-Chilp. Property developers excepted, nobody on Zisperhaven wanted skyscrapers to march across the island as they had on Conflux, even though skyscrapers would have been economically rational.
        The new high school was a replacement for the old building of pink granite which had been damaged by the Jorbel Eagle earthquake of 9721, so called because it had occurred at 2:47 p.m. while Jorbel Eagle, then President, had been addressing the nation live on television on the subject of, amongst other things, a wet cigar.
        Ibrahim could see why the purists disliked the new school. It was a glittering place of glass and steel, one of the "laboratories of the mind" promoted by President Olive Valise, who had made education reform one of her missions, even though education was not funded by the federal government but, rather, on a state by state basis.
        At Taris High School, Ibrahim gave a careers talk on the subject of running your own business. He focused on his previous enterprise, Ibrahim Exterminations, a practical business which was easy to understand, and something at which you could reasonably hope to make money.
        Ibrahim said nothing about his yacht chartering business, and certainly did not confess that his speaking engagement at the school was generating more revenue than his yacht business did on the average day. In the past year, Ibrahim had given a number of talks on the small business theme at various venues, and public speaking looked as if it could possibly develop into a reliable source of extra income.
        And certainly he needed the extra money.
        That afternoon, however, Ibrahim's thoughts were not really on either the talk he was giving or his own financial difficulties. Rather, he kept thinking about the dream he had endured, the dream of the wheel. As the day wore on, instead of fading out of memory, the dream became progressively clearer and clearer. And, the clearer it became, the more ominous.
        "Maybe I can glorst!"
        Those were the words he wanted to shout but did not. If he was in fact glorst-capable, then that would be a kind of karmic catastrophe. To live with the knowledge that you could commit suicide at any moment by self-explosion -- and that was the direction in which Ibrahim's thoughts were taking him -- would be unbearable.
        Although Ibrahim did not know for a fact that he was glorst-capable, he was already starting to understand, from the inside, why the suicide rate amongst glorst-capable astrals was so high -- about half a dozen a year in a population of only eight thousand or so capables, percentagewise very high. Knowing that you could so easily commit suicide put you under pressure to do exactly that.
        When Ibrahim got home, he sat down at his computer and began researching the subject of glorsting, while the TV played in the background, telling, amongst other things, of how the terrorist Egon Turow had succeeded with his massacre glorst.
        Ibrahim was particularly interested in finding out if there were any counseling services available for glorst-capable people, and he found that there were. Most prominent was an outfit he had never heard of before, Capables Communal, which turned out to have a coven -- that is to say, a support group -- right in the port of Taris itself. Regular meetings were held on Wednesdays starting at 6 p.m. in the basement of Prawn's Punchups, a boxing gym.
        But, having discovered that counseling was available, and that support groups did exist, Ibrahim realized that he was enormously inhibited about using any such services. He was a man, and the notion of self-sufficiency was central to his concept of manhood. A man takes care of himself. A man does not whine for help. A man does not spend his life down on his knees, begging. If a man has a problem, like being stuck on the waters of the Bilge Globulus on a windless day and finding that his yacht's engine has packed up, then a man fixes his problem. By himself.
        "Real men don't wear frilly knickers," said Ibrahim to himself.
        It was a motto, one of the slogans that he lived by.
        But he needed help. The wheel dream was becoming a matter of torment for him. Counseling, support - he needed someone to open a doorway to survival, a doorway to physical salvation. He needed a man-friendly service, something he could use without ending up feeling like an effete asparagus eater.
        By diligent searching, Ibrahim finally found a place which might serve as an entry point into the world of therapy.
        Deathcounseling.omblock was the web site which led Ibrahim to this find. It was the site of Manfred Sphere, who operated his business, Egrostic Rituals, at 27A Iwi Street in Mozley Maze, the ancient area built around Orkel Pariah, in the north-east of Zisperhaven.
        "Fear is a flood. A flood, properly mastered, is a source of strength. Manfred will help you trap, tame and master the flood, placing its forces at your disposal. Manfred will help you channel your fear of death and build an iron soul. Capables counseling a speciality."
        Ibrahim had what he wanted. Someone who was used to dealing with capables, who had reasonable charges -- twenty bucks an hour, dirt cheap compared to what professional shrinks were trying to hit you up for -- and who offered a free initial consultation.
        And, prominently displayed on the web site, there was a philosophical dictum which, more than anything else, helped convince Ibrahim that perhaps this was the death counselor for him. It was the one that said "Reality is a cold beer."
        Which made Ibrahim say to himself:
        "I bet this guy doesn't wear pink socks."
        In addition to doing death counseling, Manfred also sold whips, chains, collars, handcuffs and, additionally, high-quality girl-sized steel cages which were touted as being "ideal for the petal in your life". The cages were, Ibrahim thought, overpriced, to the point of being unaffordable, at least for him. But the counseling looked like a decent deal.
        Ibrahim wrote Manfred's name, address and telephone number on his calendar to make sure he did not lose them. He realized that evening had arrived while he had been busy with his researches and that he was hungry. He switched on the light to dispel the gloom then made himself a healthy well-balanced meal consisting of a can of sausages and baked beans, half a loaf of stick bread and a dozen chocolate macaroons. Usually he rationed himself to only three chocolate biscuits daily, but he figured that the possible imminence of death was a good excuse to skip the diet.
        To chase the food, Ibrahim opened a can of beer, and he was just getting to the end of the beer when a visitor showed up. It was Ibrahim's brother, Adolf North, who arrived at the Adventuring Salt Building with a six-pack of beer. It was Balimo Beer. An old and distinguished brand. But, today, to think of Balimo was, inevitably, to think of Egon Turow, a resident of Balimo, and of his glorst. Ibrahim, who had become more and more the businessman as the years went by, wondered what the Balimo Beer brand managers would be planning to do under the circumstances.
        Adolf seldom visited, and Ibrahim wondered if he had come round to talk about Egon's glorst. Ibrahim did not ask, however. The relationship between the two brothers was a little distant, and always had been, in part because of the ten-year age difference, Adolf being the senior. A couple of beers down the track, when they both had loosened up, Ibrahim might ask, if Adolf had not already told him.
        Although Ibrahim did not know for a fact that it was Egon's massacre glorst which had prompted Adolf to make the journey to Taris, it was reasonable to suppose that, around Omblock, many astrals would be touching base with friends and relatives, reaching out to each other in the aftermath of a tragedy which had implications for the entire astral community.
        If a norm messed up, committing an outrage such as killing half a dozen customers in the course of a bank robbery gone wrong, then nobody said "evil norm". But an astral's error automatically acquired the "astral" tag, and ended up contaminating the image of the astral community as a whole.
        "At least the whole thing looks like blowing over," said Adolf, wiping a little beer froth from his dark mustache. "That Glorsting House business may have been the end of it."
        That comment came without preamble, Adolf evidently thinking that the meaning of "the whole thing" would be automatically clear, as indeed it was. Ibrahim supposed that Adolf's conversational initiative meant that they were going to discuss the massacre glorst. But apparently not. The glorst was evidently on Adolf's mind, but he was still in beer-drinking mode. Adolf's comment, though, did encapsulate the reality of what had happened.
        Potentially, Egon's glorst could have provoked severe communal violence between the astral minority and the Xalbardoz majority. But the only significant act of violence against astrals had been that one fire bombing on Gorleth, a place where very few astrals lived.
        The Gorleth fire bombing had sparked off a riot, but it had been a riot between Gorleth's two most fiercely antagonistic clans, a matter of norms fighting norms -- Clan Plotinus versus Clan Udan Hoy. "Only on Gorleth," as the old saying went. The rest of Omblock had outgrown its clan rivalries generations ago, but on Gorleth they were still caught in a bloody eddy of history, still unable to outgrow internecine hatreds.
        "Gorleth will take care of Gorleth," said Ibrahim, citing a proverbial bit of wisdom which meant, really, "Who the hell cares what happens on Gorleth?" Gorleth was Oolong Morblock's ultimate slum, dominated by crime-infested tenement buildings, the place you would go for a holiday if boredom had convinced you that you wanted to experiment with getting your head bashed in.
        "How are things in Fratpong?" said Ibrahim.
        Fratpong, on the island of Glud Hurgus, was where Adolf had located himself after he had bought Ibrahim's pest control business, which was now called not Ibrahim Exterminations but Adolf Exterminations. That part of Glud Hurgus was a congenial place to live, with a fair few astrals in the local community. To visit Ibrahim, Adolf usually took the elevated railway from Fratpong to Styx Lethanus, then caught a ferry from there to Taris. A journey he did not make often.
        It was not exactly a short journey, and, if Adolf stayed long, it would be extremely late by the time he got home. However, one of the good things about Oolong Morblock was that it was a twenty-four hour city, a city which never slept, and the transport links -- buses, ferries, the subway system and the elevated railway -- ran round the clock. If you liked sitting in traffic jams then you were at liberty to go out and buy yourself a car, but Omblock was a city where an automobile was an indulgence rather than a necessity.
        The response from Adolf to Ibrahim's query was silence.
        "In Fratpong," said Ibrahim, not sure whether Adolf had failed to hear or was simply taking his time in answering. "How are things?"
        "Things?" said Adolf.
        "Public reaction," said Ibrahim.
        A journalist's phrase, he realized, once he'd used it. Not the kind of thing you'd usually say in a natural conversation. Maybe his use of the phrase had something to do with the influence of that blonde TV journo, the one who had interviewed him, and whose name he could no longer remember. Doreen? No. Doreen was that extremely fat schoolgirl whose school uniform skirt, a dark green pleated skirt, was so short that it was difficult to avoid catching sight of her panties, which were usually extremely gaudy. Yesterday, orange.
        "How people felt," said Ibrahim, prompting his silent brother. "The, you know, the mood on the streets."
        "I don't know," said Adolf. "I haven't seen us on TV."
        A reasonable answer. If you want to know the mood of the nation, or of some fraction of the nation, then you expect to find it on TV. The "mood on the streets" was to be found there, on TV, not hiding out on the streets themselves, skulking behind a wrecked car or lurking in the doorway of the local coin laundry.
        "I dreamt that there was a wheel inside me," said Ibrahim.
        It came out, just like that. Unintended. Blurted. He had not been meaning to say it, but he did.
        "Uh-huh," said Adolf.
        Ibrahim's statement was not a standard conversational overture, so it was difficult for Adolf to know how to respond.
        "A big wheel," said Ibrahim, because now he had started he did not want to stop. He wanted to confess. To confess the whole thing. "Very dangerous."
        "And?" said Adolf.
        "And I thought it might be my body telling me something," said Ibrahim.
        "Telling you what?" said Adolf.
        "Telling me that I've become glorst-capable," said Ibrahim.
        "I don't see the logic," said Adolf.
        "Neither do I," said Ibrahim. "But, even so, that's how I feel. Maybe the wheel vision was telling me I'm able to glorst."
        "First it was a dream, now it's a vision," said Adolf. "Escalation, huh? Do you still have the Yandaviba?"
        "That old wreck?" said Ibrahim. "No, I sold it two years ago. Guy paid four hundred dollars. Bought it for parts. I finally decided there's just no way I can afford to run a car."
        "Well, if you still had it," said Adolf, "I'd say that maybe your dream was a sign that you should think about getting new tires. But, since there are no wheels in your life, my suggestion to you would be to forget about it. Now, if you started dreaming about a mouse, that's when it'd be time to start worrying."
        "A mouse?" said Ibrahim.
        "Yes," said Adolf. "Because of this glorst thing."
        "I don't follow," said Ibrahim, frowning. "I don't follow that at all."
        A mouse? A mouse and glorsting? What was the connection?
        So Adolf explained. According to the doctrines of Jaznaria, the religion of the astrals, a massacre glorst undertaken in a spirit of martyrdom could liberate the Dreamer, the hidden messiah, into self-awareness. Once the Dreamer had been "found and wakened into rapture", to quote scripture, then the Dreamer would ascend to the Infinite Pinnacle of the astral realms.
        "Yeah," said Ibrahim, "that much I know. But I don't understand where the mouse comes in."
        "Then listen," said Adolf, "and be enlightened."
        The Dreamer would reach the Infinite Pinnacle. And there, in the Garden of Pearl Grass, warm beneath the rays of the Watermelon Sun, the Dreamer would be greeted by the hashy mouse, a mouse the size of a cat, a mouse possessed of the most luxurious vermilion fur.
        And the hashy mouse would lead the Dreamer into the presence of the fountain of rainbow, and there the hashy mouse would anoint the Dreamer with sugar water. And his tongue would be double in size.
        "Say what?" said Ibrahim.
        "His tongue," said Adolf. "It will double in size."
        "But what's that supposed to mean?" said Ibrahim.
        "The Dreamer will find out when he gets there," said Adolf. "This is holy scripture, Ibrahim, not a handbook on the art of motorcycle maintenance."
        It was on the tip of Ibrahim's tongue to say that maybe the business of the doubling of the tongue meant that the Dreamer would get an erection, but he stopped himself. Holy scripture? Yes, Adolf was talking about holy scripture, and not, it seemed, in jest.
        "So," said Adolf, "that wraps up my tale."
        "And a very fancy fairy tale it is," said Ibrahim.
        This statement was incautious in the light of Adolf's comment about holy scripture. But Ibrahim could not contain himself. The idea of the hashy mouse was totally ridiculous, something for little kids.
        "It is scripture," said Adolf, somber and intense, his eyes focused on Ibrahim. "It is written in the Mizat Flare, a book which you, plainly, do not read as often as you should. It's in the Seventh Predictive Chronicle of the Prophet Mincha. This is Living Possibility, Ibrahim. It's something you have to take seriously."
        In response, Ibrahim made no response. Living Possibility? Those were words he had never expected to hear from his brother's lips. They were the words of a fanatic. Someone who did not believe that some parts of the Mizat Flare were mere poetic metaphor. Someone who believed that the whole thing was literal truth, every word of it, hashy mouse and all.
        Ibrahim was starting to remember a little about the hashy mouse now. The memory was associated with the smell of those waxy crayons he used to use as a kid. He had a coloring book. It had all those old stories in it, like the one about the moon and the Custard Emperor, and the one about the virgin and the cucumber. As a child, Ibrahim had not understood what a virgin was, so someone had explained to him that a virgin is a woman who does not like cats.
        The hashy mouse with its vermilion coat -- he had spent a rainy day coloring it in. What day? Monday? Sunday? He could not remember what day of the week it had been. In fact, there was not one single childhood memory for which he could remember the day of the week. Was that unusual? Or was everyone like that? If it was true that he was glorst-aberrant, might it be true that he was aberrant in other ways?
        "You do take scripture seriously, don't you?" said Adolf.
        "I remember the hashy mouse," said Ibrahim. "I colored it in. As a kid. Yeah, a kind of red. And the eyes. I made the eyes a very bright green."
        True. He had colored the eyes a very bright emerald green. Later, he had done something bad with that emerald crayon. He couldn't remember what but he did remember his mother being angry with him. Very angry.
        "You were the religious one," said Adolf. "Always going off with dad to crypt. You are a believer, aren't you?"
        "Yes," said Ibrahim, since that was the simplest reply.
        He was very uncomfortable with the direction this conversation was taking. Religion was not a subject he usually discussed, certainly not with his brother.
        While Ibrahim was nominally religious, he never manoeuvered himself into the position of asking "Do I or do I not believe?" If forced to take up a philosophical stance, he would not have said "I absolutely do not believe". He did believe, albeit in a vague and poorly defined way. And yet, that said, he found the extravagant particulars of his own religion too childishly picturesque to be worthy of adult credibility, at least if taken on the literal level.
        "So you believe," said Adolf, "so you understand that if you were to start dreaming of a mouse, that's when you might be in trouble. That's how the Dreamer would start to discover himself. By dreaming of the Infinite Pinnacle, and of what is to be found there."
        Was Adolf involved in a hideously cumbersome attempt to make a joke? Perhaps. But Ibrahim got the impression that Adolf was serious. Adolf had become a believer. A believer in the literal truth of the scriptures of Jaznaria. Which was hard for Ibrahim to credit, because, quite apart from anything else, if taken as literal truth then certain parts of scripture were, quite frankly, ridiculous.
        Take this business of finding and waking the Dreamer, for example. At a metaphorical level, it might make a kind of sense. It could be argued that none of us are properly aware of our own lives, that we are all, to an extent, sleepwalking, never fully conscious of, to start with, our own mortality.
        In that sense, the Dreamer myth could be seen as a primitive kind of group-help text, encouraging us to provoke our sleepwalking fellow citizens into true self-awareness.
        But, plainly, Adolf did believe. He believed in the literal truth of the scriptures. Which came as a very considerable shock. This was an evolution which had happened -- when? Ibrahim could not begin to guess.
        Yes, this was a real frog in the marmalade jar, to coin a phrase, discovering that Adolf was not just a true believer but, quite possibly, a religious fanatic, a would-be martyr, the living embodiment of the bogeyman astral whom so many norms feared and hated.
        Making this discovery was a major jolt to Ibrahim's Adolf concept, to his theory of his brother. It was like discovering that your brother's increasingly lengthy meditative silences are not a function of his search for enlightenment but, rather, a sign that he has been mainlining heroin. It was like finding out that, while you were out of the country on business, your brother went through the process of gender reassignation. Like finding out that your brother's increasingly fragmented jigsaw conversations are not the product of a spry wit but, rather, evidence of a terrifying and incurable insanity.
        Adolf the true believer was as preposterously unlikely as Adolf the male streetwalker. It was a perversion of expectations which revised the nature of reality.
        Their father had always been the man of faith, and both sons had reacted against the dominant hammer of their father's religion in different ways. Ibrahim had responded, outwardly, with an unresisting compliance, but had permitted himself to have inward reservations. Adolf, by contrast, had left the family home at the age of nineteen. He had rejected the name bestowed upon him at birth, Roncy Quilliam Chess, and had gone through the legal process of formally renouncing his family vows, emerging as Adolf North, no middle name. On top of that, Adolf had declared himself to be both an atheist and a Syndicalist, one of those who believed that the traditional powers of Oolong Morblock should be overthrown and that power should fall to the workers of the city state, who, by rights, should "govern that which they enabled", to quote from Structural Destiny, the key text at the heart of the doctrines of Syndicalism.
        Adolf, ten years older than Ibrahim, had always loomed in his life as the iconoclast, the rule-breaker, the intellectually subversive free thinker. To find him conforming to the traditional conservatism of his father's creed was a real shock to the system.
        "Well, if I start having mice dreams, I'll let you know," said Ibrahim. "But why would it be bad news if I found I was the Dreamer? What's wrong with being the messiah?"
        "It is written," said Adolf, "that the Dreamer's awakening to consciousness will be the salvation of the astral people but a doom upon the Dreamer. The Dreamer is a doomed man. As it says in scripture, the messiah will be a sacrifice for the people. We do not know who the Dreamer is but we do know that the awakening of the Dreamer will be a victory for the people but will result in the death of this man."
        "Or woman," said Ibrahim.
        "Scripture permits that possibility," said Adolf, in a manner which suggested that, holy writ or not, that was one thing he definitely did not believe.
        "So," said Ibrahim, "tell me. How did Adolf the atheistic Syndicalist become Adolf the believer?"
        "We learn as we grow older," said Adolf. "You, too, will learn as you grow older."
        Then Adolf launched into a wholesale assault on Ibrahim's tepid religious state, urging him that he should boil with fervor, that he should seethe, that he should take the glorsting of Egon Turow as a sign, a sign of glory days soon to come.
        Ibrahim, with dismay, realized that his brother had migrated all the way into the lunatic fringe, that he had escaped from the normative world of mail order catalogs and roll-on deodorants into a world of wide-eyed prophets and preachers drunk on visions.
        Ibrahim's reaction was to encourage his brother to get drunk, drunk on alcohol rather than religion. One of Ibrahim's philosophies in life was that, if all else fails, you should open another bottle. And, although Adolf had only brought a six-pack with him, Ibrahim had beer to spare. But Adolf was not so easy to lead astray, and cleaved to his missionary purpose, until, at last, he took his leave. He had to be getting back to Fratpong, because he had work to do in the morning.
        "Bed," said Ibrahim.
        He was tired. He needed it. He needed his bed, his sleep, one vital necessity of life that the government (as yet) had not started taxing.
        So soon Ibrahim was in bed, and, before long, he found himself thinking confused thoughts of hot coffee bubbling out of the tiles in a big white bathroom. He couldn't tell how it was that the tiles were exuding this liquid; hydraulic engineering was not his field. Then the scene shifted and Ibrahim found himself in the presence of a very hairy man, entirely naked, unless you counted his stone club and the bright pink socks he was wearing. The hairy man was trying to say something, but he had a problem with his mouth, and all that would come out of it was worms.
        Then the air filled with a strong smell of ginger and the hairy man was gone, and, instead, Ibrahim found himself alone with a very blonde girl who was sitting in a stainless steel cage, looking up at him, her girl body entirely naked.
        He still could not remember the blonde girl's name, but that did not matter. Girls in dreams do not need names.
        By this time, Ibrahim, who was asleep and dreaming, had realized that he was asleep and dreaming. And he figured that, if you were dreaming, then the safe sex rules did not apply, and, what's more, you didn't have to pay taxes on the things you did, so, if he could just find the key and open this cage ...
        But at that moment, skyrockets started blasting off from Pier Nine, where some of his neighbors were celebrating the approach of midnight with a little improvisational carnival, and Ibrahim found himself awake.
        "Damn!" he said.
        And hoped he could get back to his dream and to the blonde girl who was in his dream, and hoped that he would be able to smell her smell, her own private animal smell. Each girl has her own personal girl smell, her individual smell, unique to her and to her alone, and it was one of Ibrahim's pleasures to smell this girl smell on a girl's body.
        So Ibrahim wanted to smell the blonde girl's flesh. And there were other things he wanted to do with that caged blondness, cruel things, heartless in their selfishness, imperial in their demands, desires never acknowledged in public, desires which rejoiced in the fact that the girl was trapped in a cage of steel. Very high quality chromium steel, guaranteed not to rust.
        But if he could not get back to the dream of the caged blonde woman, that was no big deal. There would be other nights and other dreams. Really, he did not care what he dreamt of. As long as he did not dream of the wheel. 

        It was morning, 0630, the morning of the day after Egon Turow's massacre glorst, and the city of Oolong Morblock was humming along as usual, small children aged six and upwards already on the trains, the kids who had to travel way out of their neighborhoods to the elite institutions of education their parents had chosen for them, institutions whose student bodies sometimes looked like refugees from a sleepwalker's convention.
        Down in the basement of the Olid Mazoora Building, the cleaning crew was removing something from Room Asbestos, something gnarly with the aftermath of flames, something no longer quite identifiable, but vaguely reminiscent of an ape. And up on the nineteenth floor, one floor down from the penthouse (which was crammed with airwave snooper gear and other electronic equipment), Beria Dag was hard at work in the Green Room.
        A large wall panel television was on, tuned to Conflux One, the sound turned down low, and from time to time Beria would hear something which would make him look up, but he had been working for a solid hour, starting at 0530, without hearing anything startlingly new.
        Egon Turow's glorst was still the lead item at the top of the hour, but other stories were starting to squeeze it out of the top spot, stories such as the great toe sucking debate which was heating up in the Senate. Should toe sucking be classed as a sexual act and, if so, should the government move to legislate on it, and how many years in jail should you get for doing it? This is one of the reasons why we have governments: so there are people around to serve us by asking and answering questions such as this, questions which we would never think of asking and answering for ourselves.
        Additionally, the Department of Occupational Safety and Health was in the news again, with its new regulations on bathing babies, which specified that babies must wear life jackets while being bathed, and that appropriate equipment for assisting with artificial respiration must be on hand. The regulations also required that parents must keep videotapes of each bathing act so their performance could be monitored by properly qualified baby bathing experts, who did not yet exist but who would be trained, at the taxpayer's expense, at special courses to be set up at Hanoi Technical College.
        Largely7 ignoring the news chatter from the TV, Beria worked on.
        Beria Dag was nothing like Marvin Mashablama, the star of Nails and Fingernails, the secret policeman cartoon show for kids which screened on Centipede Transmissions, the free-to-air TV channel aimed at the younger generation. Marvin was a loud-mouthed blustering man with an apocalyptic temper, who was always threatening to stomp to death his pet snail, Breety Pops, who was the problem-solver in the show, the one who came up with the solutions and, routinely, caught the terrorists and saved the world.
        In his adult life, Beria had rarely lost his temper. He was, generally, a model of decorum, and, on the occasions when he showed up in the basement and pressed the button which set the disjointing machine in motion, he did so not in a mood of rage but of clinical detachment.
        Beria was, after all, not a ganglord thug but the head of Ideation Control, the outfit sometimes colloquially referred to as the Thought Police, the organisation most people had in mind when they spoke of "the secret police". They weren't thinking of Don Trash and his mob. No, they were thinking of Beria Dag and his oiled machine, of the secret consignments which were sometimes delivered, long after midnight, to the huge incineration complex at Xgadriver.
        When people talked of the Thought Police or the secret police, they were thinking of things which, officially, never happened, and of rooms, such as Room Octopus and Room Deep Serpent, which, officially, did not exist, and never had. People's image of Ideation Control was one of a smoothly oiled intimidation machine. A grim machine which took rebellion and manufactured cat meat. A desolation engine, the antithesis of jolly. And Beria, the head of that bleak organization, lived up to the image.
        Beria, the control junkie who held the whip hand in this outfit, was a creature of ice rather than a creature of fire, the glacier rather than the volcano. Which helped make him good at his job. Very good, according to the performance assessments which he wrote on himself.
        And Beria, if let off the leash and set free to do exactly what he wanted to, could have delivered permanent stability to Oolong Morblock by the simple process of liquidating those who needed to be liquidated, which he figured to be no more than five percent of the population, starting with the astrals then moving on to that Gorleth scum. A good deal, as he saw it: sacrifice the troublesome five percent that the remaining ninety-five could live in peace.
        But Beria's masters were squeamish, particularly the President, and, though Beria did enjoy a very special personal relationship with the President, the fact was that she was not prepared to countenance his more extreme proposals. And funding, that was another problem, everyone wanted to be safe but nobody was prepared to pay what it cost, and Ideation Control was permanently underfunded and understaffed, to the point where Beria thought they would one day be reduced to executing people by the simple method of bashing them over the head with heavy rocks.
        Beria Dag thought of himself as a supremely practical man, and would have rejected the notion that he was a fantasist. But, despite his self-image, he did indulge in a fantasy activity of sorts: putting together jigsaw puzzles.
        In the real world, there are no certain outcomes, and everything that happens is, potentially, subject to the influence of accident and happenstance. But a jigsaw puzzle is, in a sense, an imaginary world from which uncertainty has been excluded, a scenario which works its way to one inevitable and immutable conclusion.
        Beria's take on his hobby was that he liked jigsaw puzzles because he enjoyed a challenge. The more difficult the better. That said, he was conscious of the fact that one good point about such puzzles was that you were guaranteed a solution. If you put in the work you would get the payoff.
        The certainty of having a solution to work toward was a refreshing relief after his labors in the real world, where he often felt that he was dealing not with satisfactory picture pieces which could be clicked into a predetermined shape but with fragments of smoke. Arbitrary, argumentative smoke.
        But, as Beria puzzled over the pieces of the Egon Turow jigsaw -- Ibrahim Chess, Sable Tauranga, Lily Peacock and Jack Glinch -- he was finding it hard to get started. He ended up concentrating on Ibrahim, the guy who appeared to have phoned Egon to give him the go-ahead for the glorst.
        A standard way to get close to a suspect was to find a potential informant in the family who might be susceptible to blackmail and so could be coerced into acting as an informer. In Ibrahim's case, the father looked like a potential informant, as his activity as a Jaznarian preacher had led him into making the mistake of delivering himself of a number of treasonous statements in the course of some of his fireball sermons. But there was one problem with the father. The father was dead, and had been so for five years.
        The brother, Adolf North? There was a file on him, quite a big one. A radical. A Syndicalist with alleged anarchist connections, a man implicated in the Diskartha counterfeiting racket. But not vulnerable. The Syndicalist label had lost its potency as a blackmail tool ever since it had emerged that Olive Valise herself had dabbled incautiously in Syndicalist politics in a youth which had been wilder than she cared to acknowledge.
        The mother? There was a file on her, too, because of her husband's activities, but she was disappointingly respectable. No obvious vulnerabilities there. Ibrahim also had a sister, but there was only a biographical thumbnail on file, not much known about her apart from her name.
        Finally ...
        After a long trawl through the databases, Beria came up with what he wanted. Five years back, Ibrahim had appeared in the Subordinate Court in Lamma Cheng to act as a character witness for Topaz Abadib Atatangle, then aged seventeen, who was to be sentenced for the crime of which he had been convicted, which was stealing examination papers from his school, Mishlingblog High School, a notorious hellhole of a place on Sclag, a college where everything that could happen did, everything from razor blade fights to students manufacturing Q in the science lab.
        In court, Ibrahim Chess, then aged twenty-nine, had represented himself as Topaz's godfather, Ibrahim having taken on the godfather role as an act of filial piety to his late father, who had been Topaz's original godfather.
        Topaz had been a bad boy, no doubt about it. First he had stolen the examination papers, then he had copied them, then he had sold the copies to students who were scheduled to sit the examinations in question.
        The godfather-godchild relationship was an important one in Oolong Morblock, and Beria's take on the Ibrahim-Topaz relationship was that Ibrahim, when he had taken on the role at age twenty-nine, had been far too young for the job. Still, he had done it, out of respect to his late father, if reports of his statements to the court were correct.
        Topaz, then, might prove to be the informant Beria wanted, someone who was tied in to the Chess family -- there must have been a social connection between Ibrahim's father and Topaz's dad -- and who was vulnerable. Vulnerable because he was under indictment under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act.
        The animal rights lobby had gradually been gathering strength in Oolong Morblock over the last ten years or so, to the point where it had become a powerful pressure group which the federal government wanted to appease, and it was no secret that the federal government wanted to see the courts make an example of someone. Topaz stood accused of cruelty to jellyfish, the giant jellyfish which had been swarming in the Bilge Globulus recently, because he and some of his friends had been caught dynamiting them. Which, under the terms of the Cruelty to Animals Act, was now a federal crime.
        Any charges relating to the dynamite? No. The prosecutor, sensitive to the federal government's political necessities, had focused in on the animal rights issue.
        The standard venue for hearing federal crimes was the Subordinate Federal Court at Inadazutsumi, where the wheels of justice moved slowly because the system was overloaded. But President Olive Valise, who had the next election in mind, had been taking a personal interest in the animal rights issue, seeing it as one more issue on which she could massage the electorate, and had chosen to have Topaz and his friends dragged before the Star Chamber, the proceedings of which were held out of the public eye in Basement Nine in Hexagon, Basement Nine being the nuclear war bunker.
        For the last three hundred years, ever since the turbulence of the brief-lived Guillotine Revolution, during which the populace had executed not just the President and most of the members of the Senate but, additionally, every member of the tax department they could get their hands on, no president of Oolong Morblock had dared to set a Star Chamber procedure in motion. Olive Valise, then, was using the animal rights issue to experiment with expanding her own powers, seeking to reclaim judicial prerogatives which, in theory, technically belonged to the President, but which, in practice, had lapsed on account of generations of disuse.
        In traditional Star Chamber proceedings, you, the defendant, were permitted no lawyer, but Olive Valise, thinking it might be better to resurrect the Star Chamber traditions by degrees, had made the tactical error of permitting the jellyfish defendants to have legal representation.
        As a result, the case involving Topaz and his five friends was on hold. The public defender had won a thirty-day stay so she could appeal to the Senate, the one body capable of having input into Star Chamber proceedings, to have the whole case thrown out on the grounds that, while "animals" were not defined by the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, a jellyfish could not be considered to be an animal, and therefore no offence had been committed, at least not in terms of the Act.
        A battle of dictionaries was evidently in store, but it was the use of the dynamite which interested Beria. It had been "sourced", to use the word Beria found in a news report on the Internet, from a gravel quarry on Sclag, near the border with Gretna Charbis, the Forbidden Zone. The word "sourced" necessarily implied theft.
        This case had slipped under Beria's radar. He had heard that the first Star Chamber proceeding for many years was underway, but he had no recollection of the jellyfish specifics being mentioned to him. It was not the kind of thing that his subordinates would ordinarily bring to his attention. We are Ideation Control. We are the secret police. The secret police do not do jellyfish. That's not our thing.
        "But this is the case I need," said Beria.
        Topaz was in the power of the President, and Beria Dag had the ear of the President.
        Moreover, in addition to the charge which had been laid against Topaz in the Star Chamber, there were other charges which could be laid against him in the Court of Judicial Infliction, the starting point of the criminal justice system on the island of Woosung Shanghai, which was where Topaz resided.
        Theft of dynamite, unlawful use of explosives, oh, there was a whole host of charges which could be used to pressure Topaz, none of which involved either the President or the Star Chamber. Beria could have a tame prosecutor indict Topaz any time he chose. Criminal conspiracy, too, there had been a bunch of them, all in it together. And terrorism. Charges which Olive Valise had not chosen to explore because, first, in terms of Omblock's tangled judicial system, those additional crimes were not the kind that could be prosecuted in the Star Chamber, and, second, because crimes involving theft and terrorism were not crimes that were of interest to the animal rights constituency which she was playing to.
        "Okay, Jellyfish Boy," said Beria. "I think it's time for you and me to have a little talk."
        So be summoned the Practical Squad, gave them their orders and sent them on their way.
        "And," said Beria, "this time, don't mess up."
        He wished he had the time to go supervise the Topaz snatch. But sometimes you have to delegate. Beria needed to delegate because he still had work to do. Additionally, given that Topaz was an astral -- the documentation Beria had read had made reference to a familiar, a fist which went by the name of Nubbles -- maybe he would prove to be glorst-capable, and would blow himself up when captured. If so, Beria did not want to be there when that happened.
        The boy Topaz would be a useful tool because he was legally vulnerable. But he was not yet in the conspiracy, and would have to mole his way in from the outside. And maybe there wouldn't be time for that. Given the urgencies of the situation, it was really necessary to tackle one of the people who were already in the conspiracy itself. That had not been Beria's original plan but he had done a rethink
        "One of the key guys," said Beria.
        His choice being Ibrahim Chess, Sable Tauranga, Lily Peacock or Jack Glinch.
        Of these, Ibrahim was out. Ibrahim was definitely an astral, his paranormal ability being to travel, something Beria had discovered because he had succeeded in accessing court records which were theoretically supposed to be sealed, and had discovered that Ibrahim had once used his powers as a traveler to get involved in some truly disgusting criminal activity. As an astral, Ibrahim might also be glorst-capable, and Beria wanted to limit the number of potential capables he was dealing with.
        How about one of the women, then?
        Lily Peacock was an older woman, and, in Beria's experience, the older they got the tougher they got. Sable, then. Only twenty-two. And from Conflux. A Conflux girl. Easy to bend, easy to break.
        Having made that decision, Beria began digging deeper into Sable's background, looking for a lever he could use to manipulate her. If he couldn't find one, that would be no big problem. She was, after all, a girl, presumably equipped with all the standard girl parts, and, in Beria's experience, it didn't take much to get the results you wanted from girls. At a pinch, you could get by with nothing more than a branding iron and something to heat it with.
        So soon Beria was looking at Sable's credit card records, and got a real shock. A single tube of lipstick costs that much?! Really? Women are spending that much money indulging themselves in warpaint? No wonder the national economy is going to hell!
        While Beria was still engaged in the time-consuming business of plotting the subjugation of Sable Tauranga, fan of accelerated cowbell music and True Soul Wonder Flesh support bras, a quality product brought to you proudly by the Strumpet Girls Female Wonder Company, a subsidiary of Relsh Strasborg Suppositories, the guys from the Practical Squad were on their way to Topaz's place.
        On arrival, the guys checked carefully to make sure they were at the right place. Beria had warned them they had better not mess up on this one. Yes, they were at the right place, indubitably. Someone had nailed a name card to the door of the apartment, a door which had been spray painted in orange and pink, a door to which someone had also nailed a headless teddy bear, a pair of green rubber gloves and a pair of girl panties, which were white with a purple frill, and on the name card were scrawled the words "Topaz At", plainly a cut-down version of "Topaz Atatangle".
        Having made absolutely sure they were at the right place, the guys smashed down the door. The door would have opened effortlessly if they had tried the door handle, as it was not locked, but trying door handles was not their style. Once inside, they sprayed the guy who was lying on the bed listening to music by headphones, coshed him, injected him, then bundled him into the transportation sack and hustled him out of the building and into the car.
        In the movies, the car would have raced back to headquarters at nine tenths of the speed of light, but, Omblock being what Omblock was, the guys ended up getting stuck in the mother of all traffic jams. They got stuck underwater, got stuck in Oviduct, the traffic tunnel connecting the islands of Woosung Shanghai and Conflux, a tunnel which went way deep, under the fishes and under the Torrent Gates.
        And, down there, with nothing to look at and with the in-tunnel radio broadcasting out of action for some reason, so they couldn't even listen to the live broadcast from the mud wrestling arena, the guys started to get bored. Patience had not been one of the selection criteria used when the guys were recruited, and a mastery of the art of silent meditation was not a job requirement. The guys decided to amuse themselves by doing a little preliminary interrogation to soften up the prisoner they had snatched. So they took him out of the sack and set to work on him.
        This would have been okay if the prisoner had done the smart thing and had confessed that, yes, he was Topaz Atatangle, and, yes, he was a student of astronomy at Nash Olish University, and, yes, he was a defendant in a case involving allegations of extreme cruelty to innocent jellyfish. But the prisoner made the mistake of trying to insist that he was not an astronomy student by the name of Topaz Atatangle but a law student called Winston Peters, and that he had been crashing at Topaz's place because he had let off a bug bomb in his own apartment in an attempt to kill off the cockroaches, in consequence of which his apartment was temporarily a chemical warfare zone.
        The guys were so annoyed by the prisoner's recalcitrant insistence on maintaining his lie that they ... well, they did things to him that you wouldn't read about in a standard life guidance manual such as Zen and the Art of Goldfish Breeding or Household Treaty Negotiations.
        To cut a long story short -- and, given that the traffic in Oviduct had congealed, it ended up being a very long story indeed -- by the time the guys finally got the prisoner to the Olid Mazoora Building, they had broken him.
        Beria Dag got back to his headquarters late in the day. He had been summoned to Tespetty by the President, who had demanded a Joint Security Meeting at Hexagon. So Beria had spent four, count them, four solid hours sitting in the Decision Chamber, the place where talk went round and round in circles without ever arriving at anything even remotely resembling a decision, and he had been sandwiched in between, on his left, Don Trash, who he hated, and, on the right, General Pigski of the Gretna Charbis Guard, the supposedly elite force whose true field of expertise was brewing up bootleg booze in their barracks at Torgeldanfis Bay. General Pigski, who was physically offensive, a waddling puddle of jellyfish blubber who stank of garlic and who kept coughing, his cough guttural with disease, spluttery with phlegm, making Beria alarmed about his own health.
        Arriving back at his base at Zanzak Bridge, Beria asked about Topaz and was regretfully informed that, sorry, boss, but the prisoner got accidentally broken. That the prisoner had been fatally injured when a tailgating driver had rammed the capture car from behind, killing the prisoner, who had been in the trunk.
        While Beria had a very good idea of what had actually happened, and while he did not believe the cover-up story for a moment, he did not ask to see the damaged car. If he asked to see it, there would be a damaged car waiting for his inspection. These idiots had ended up in the employ of Ideation Control in part because they were unfit for more demanding jobs, such as sweeping the streets or tightening screws on a production line. But they were the world's best when it came to covering up the messes they made.
        While Beria did not bother asking to see the damaged car, he did go and take a look at the body. And when he saw it he realized that the guys from the Practical Squad had messed up big time. This was not Topaz Atatangle, whose photograph Beria had retrieved from a web site featuring alumni of Mishlingblog High School. This was a complete and total stranger, not the person they had wanted at all.
        One more body so one more secret trip to the nearest incineration complex to organize. In this job, you do this stuff so often that it gets monotonous.
        "Okay, guys," said Beria. "Here's the bad news. You've gone and brought me the wrong prisoner. Let's start over. This time, I want the right citizen. I'll show you the photo again, and this time you bring me the right body, still breathing, please, exactly the right person, not Honkface the street person or Harry the transvestite streetwalker. I want this citizen, Topaz Atatangle, and I want him intact. Two arms, two legs, and I don't want anything missing, not like that Lupin woman you brought me, you remember, the broad who arrived here with her ears missing. I want this Topaz and I want him whole, toenails included, in case I want to have a chat with the toenails."
        It was traditional to start with the fingernails rather than the toenails, but most people have already imagined that, and Beria preferred to begin with something the prisoner probably had not imagined, something for which the prisoner had not worked out a script.
        Ten minutes later, having seen the target's photo yet again, with orders to either burn it into their memories or to shovel their useless brains into an incineration sack, the guys from the Practical Squad got into snatch vehicle number three and headed off into the city, leaving Beria hoping they didn't play car chases on their way to their new destination. Not the apartment, this time, but Topaz's place of work.
        Time, of which there is not an unlimited supply, was burning, and when the Practical Squad finally reached Topaz's place, it would be really late, and work would be in full swing, and, on the way back, it would be so late that the traffic should have eased, so if Beria went into his snooze room right now and took not just his standard power nap but, rather, a proper sleep, then he would be ready to blaze brightly into the small hours of the morning when he at last got the face time he was seeking with this Topaz Atatangle.
        Viffy Sniff did not like it when he came home late, and he could never get her to understand that he was a very busy man. Which was sad. However, their relationship remained viable, raw physical passion compensating for gaps on the comprehension front.
        Beria made his way to the snooze room and was pleased to see that a layer of fresh cauliflowers was waiting for him. When you were head of Ideation Control, in the privacy of the Olid Mazoora Building, the building otherwise known as Scream Box, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted, and one of the things that Beria wanted to do (he didn't know why, but he did) was to sleep on cauliflowers.
        Beria was just about to lie down on his cauliflowers when he got what he called a gust. While Beria was a norm rather than an astral, he did, nevertheless, possess a paranormal power, something vanishingly rare amongst norms. Actually, two paranormal powers. One was the rare talent known as potato stamping, the ability to take an image that was in your mind and force it upon the consciousness of another person. Beria's other talent was random trawling, the ability (erratic, spontaneous, not under voluntary control) to put together a partial and sometimes fictionally modified vision of some small fraction of what was or what might be.
        The potato stamping power, which was fully under Beria's control, was useful. Very useful. He could give people a quick glimpse of exactly what the starfish tank could do to them without being put to the inconvenience of leaving them in the tank for the three or four weeks it took to get the desired effect. But the random trawling talent? That was virtually useless. As a rule, Beria never knew what he would see or when he would see it. And, when he did see something, he was never able to differentiate fact from fiction.
        Still, once he obtained an image through the process of random trawling, he could hold the vision in his mind for as long as he chose to, revolving it at will in three dimensions, and playing the accompanying soundtrack -- usually ten seconds or so -- as many times as he wanted.
        While such a vision was never accurate, never a one-for-one reproduction of reality, it almost always contained elements obtained from life. It was a kind of collage, a mosaic which might contain bits and pieces of just about anything, including people's secret dreams, their guilty thoughts, their interpretations of the gossip they had heard, or, on occasion, the truth of what it was that they were doing right now.
        When Beria's gust came upon him, what he saw was Ibrahim Chess. He had never yet met this gentleman, but, nevertheless, was starting to get to know him quite well.
        Beria contemplated the vision he had fabricated, analyzing it. Ibrahim Chess had a young woman in a cage which was really a little too small for her. Beria, who made use of cages on occasion, knew that immediately. The woman, who was blonde, had been covered with treacle, and licorice allsorts had been glued to her body with Shantangle Stickum, the very same glue that Beria sometimes used to stick people's lips together. Ibrahim kept giving her electric shocks and she kept screaming, one scream for each shock.
        Each time a shock jolted into her body she gave a gasping cry.
        "Gah! Gah!"
        Beria did not know which part of this vision was true, if any. Usually at least one element would mirror reality, but which one? Maybe that evil astral Ibrahim was the one who had trapped the woman in a cage so he could play with electricity. Or maybe it was someone else who was tormenting her. A boyfriend, maybe. Or perhaps she'd locked herself in the cage and was shocking herself for cheap kicks. In Beria's judgment, you could never tell what might turn people on.
        The torture cage was in a room which appealed to Beria's sense of interior design, a room crowded with dead pieces of lifeless things, some crouched grotesquely in big glass bottles of yellowish fluid, others displayed on the walls, and some, such as the collection of shrunken heads, lined up on shelves.
        Where was this happening?
        It was not the Adventuring Salt Building, which Beria had already seen on Ibrahim's web site. Rather, it was some building made of stone, the walls built of the same conglomerate rock that had been used for the construction of Orkel Pariah, the ancient stronghold of the exorcists of Oolong Morblock.
        Was Ibrahim, then, in Orkel Pariah? Beria, who had personally visited Orkel Pariah six months earlier in an unsuccessful attempt to find an exorcist ready to exorcise the half dozen or so spooks and revenants which were lurking in some of the quieter areas of the Olid Mazoora Building, did not think so.
        Orkel Pariah was built to a more generous scale, and, what was more, there were curves everywhere, since the basic structure used to put the building together was the arch. Orkel Pariah was, in large measure, a structure of replicating arches.
        The building in the vision. the vision which had gusted into Beria's mind, was a blocky building. Somewhere on Zisperhaven, at a guess. Zisperhaven or Chilp. Islands of stone in a world of concrete.
        Or maybe the building was the part of the vision that was fake, and Ibrahim was actually at home in the Adventuring Salt Building. Experimentally, Beria picked up his phone, pushed the anonymizer button and dialed Ibrahim's number, which he had memorized. If Ibrahim answered, Beria planned to ask him "What are you doing with that girl?" But all he got was a message tape.
        "Never hurts to try," said Beria.
        Then let the vision in his mind dissolve, and went back to work.
        In the real world, there was no cage. That part of Beria's vision had been fanciful, lacking a basis in reality. There was no cage, and there was no girl, either. But there was electricity, and one of the citizens of Oolong Morblock was being shocked repeatedly with that electricity. Which citizen? Ibrahim Lonicus Chess.
        The electric shocks were extremely painful, but there was no escaping them, because Ibrahim was strapped in to the brontosaurus chair, unable to escape. The electrodes snaked over his body, a dozen of them. Pain snakes, biting.
        The torturer gave him another jolt.
        "Gah!" cried Ibrahim, writhing.
        "How are you doing?" said Ibrahim's torturer, who was Manfred Sphere, Ibrahim's newly acquired death counselor.
        Ibrahim made no reply.
        Manfred was formidable, a big guy, red of skin and hairy. He was sweating in the heat of the day which was drawing to its close, the heat which had built up in his building at 27A Iwi Street, deep in the heart of Mozley Maze. He had stripped to the waist, revealing his torso, which featured a glaring tattoo of a wasp, a gigantic wasp, predominantly orange, its stinger huge, an unmistakable death-dealer. Manfred was a tough guy's tough guy, and he was not in the habit of looking worried. But he was starting to look worried now.
        "You all right?" said Manfred.
        "No," said Ibrahim. "Not all right. Hurts like hell."
        "Shall we give it a break, then?" said his death counselor.
        "No," said Ibrahim.
        There were many things that Ibrahim was scared of, including sharks, leprosy and meteorites, and the electricity was one of the things which caused him fear. But the pain and fear which the electricity caused him were nothing compared to the mounting terror which the wheel was inflicting upon him.
        He could feel the wheel clearly. This was not his dream but the waking world. The wheel had become sticky, glistery with dog spittle and elephant grease, but it was still turning. The wheel was on the edge of fragmentation. It felt chumbly, vibrating with destructive energies. The wheel, in Ibrahim's judgment, was on the very edge of glorsting.
        The very first electric shock had stopped the wheel dead in its tracks. It had gone away, and it had not returned for a full ten minutes. Ibrahim was looking for a repetition of that effect. He could not live with the wheel, an escalating menace which was in the process of overwhelming his world. The wheel was his death, his doom, and he had to fight it off. Do whatever it takes. Or he would perish.
         "A break, I think," said Manfred.
        "No," said Ibrahim. "More. More voltage."
        "As you wish," said Manfred.
        And turned a wheel, peered closer to consult a dial, then threw a switch. Agony cracked the world open. Ibrahim's body convulsed. Then relaxed, as a rabbit relaxes after its neck has been broken. There was blood on his lip where his teeth had bitten into his living flesh.
        And the wheel was gone. Gone! It had gone! Such sweet relief, the wheel gone.
        But would it return?
        "More," said Ibrahim, dry-throated, only a lifeboat survivor's remnant of a voice left to him. "More."
        "I don't know, dude," said Manfred, by now looking more than a shade perturbed. "I don't know. We don't usually go this high."
        "More," said Ibrahim, "or my lawyer will eat you for lunch."
        "Then screw you and screw your lawyer, too," said Manfred, losing his temper.
        If you are a death counselor, then losing your temper with a client is unprofessional, and it was something Manfred had never done before. But, as Ibrahim had divined during their warm-up conversation, Manfred had been having a lot of trouble with lawyers recently, and was stressed to the max as a consequence.
        Needled beyond his endurance by Ibrahim's calculated stab, Manfred whirled the wheel upwards and called on the demon Scortelbus to amplify the kick of the punishment.
        And threw the switch.
        The world scorched itself, and light incinerated into darkness.
        Later, with the resurrection of consciousness, the wheel came back. 
   Topaz had forgotten his brother. That was sad, but the reality is that life moves on, and some people forget more easily than others. Still, if Topaz's memory lapse had become public knowledge, it would have been thought shameful. Unpardonable. Unbelievable, even. How could he possibly have forgotten his brother?
        While Topaz had forgotten, others had not. Ibrahim Chess had been thinking of Topaz's brother recently, because the discovery of the wheel, the discovery of his own death, had caused Ibrahim to start thinking about death in general, and about all the people he knew who had died. And about how they died.
        But Topaz had forgotten.
        Unbelievable? Perhaps. Unpardonable? Certainly. But if human beings were restricted to that which was both pardonable and believable, then that would be the end of newspaper headlines.
        Trauma possibly had something to do with it, this act of elision. The shock of his brother's passing had been mind-demolishing. Additionally, nostradaganglia, the tranquilizer he had ended up using for six months, was notorious for the memory blockages it caused. Whatever the reason, suppression had been achieved. But it was potentially reversible.
        If Beria Dag had dug a little deeper into the Topaz Atatangle story then he would undoubtedly have discovered, without much difficulty, the newspaper headlines about Ishingate, Topaz's late brother, yet another astral youth who, in a show of legal delinquency, had rejected the name bestowed upon him at birth. But, once Beria believed he had Topaz nailed down -- delinquent student, jellyfish defendant, and what more did you need to know? -- he researched no further. Rather, his thoughts turned to sleep, and the cauliflowers claimed him.
        How are astral fanatics created? Beria Dag had never given any thought to that question. Problem people -- and he had various categories of "problem people", including astrals and Gorleth scum and all those perverted fans who mutilate their faces with face paint before they head off to sports arenas -- were like cockroaches. If you had cockroaches, you didn't sit around wondering how or why the Creator of Cockroaches created them. You extirpated them.
        As Beria Dag slept on his cauliflowers, dreaming of a conveyor belt that was bottling mewling kittens, no thoughts of cockroach creation came to him. Certainly his dreams did not reveal to him that he had become the Creator of Cockroaches, and that his impact on Topaz Atatangle, feckless jellyfish destroyer, would be to turn him into an astral fanatic, an annihilation enemy, a boy bent on the extirpation of the norms. But that was what Beria was going to do: to create, unwittingly, an astral fanatic.
        When the time for divorce draws near, it often happens that both husband and wife realize that their marriage has served as an engine for doing something which they did not plan to do, that being to create the person whom they hate more than any other living human being, the person with whom they are now at war on a take no prisoners basis, the person who is bitterly contending with them over, amongst other things, the question of which of them will walk away with the larger piece of the family cat, Tiddums, who, five years old and still innocent, has no idea what is in store for her, and does not understand why dinner is somewhat delayed.
        That was not the plan when first they kissed, but that was what happened.
        The boy Topaz, who had not yet met and kissed Beria Dag, had no consciousness of being a potential astral fanatic, just as he had no consciousness of being, potentially, at least, a hitman, a stand-up comedian, a professional wine taster, a flight attendant, the owner-operator of a brothel or the diligent employee of a debt collection company. Though he did have the potential to be any of those. Or even more improbable things. A cop, say. Or, to push right into the world of the truly unbelievable, the world of "this can't be happening to me", a father.
        Unaware of the manifold potentials which were latent within him, Topaz worked on into the night.
        Though hard at work, Topaz found his thoughts drifting, time and again, in the direction of the jellyfish dynamiting videos. His lawyer didn't know about them. His lawyer, like the prosecutor, thought there had been only one jellyfish-blasting incident. Had no idea that there had been twelve.
        Those tapes ... did they have market value? If so, then when would it be safe to hold an auction? Also, when would his publicity be likely to peak? In celebrity terms, how much juice was there in being one of the jellyfish defendants? Was he just at the start of a curve that would take him to fame and fortune, or was his public image destined to burn no brighter than it already did?
        Harmlessly occupied by a combination of work and daydreaming, Topaz Atatangle had no idea that the secret police were on their way to arrest him. Completely unaware of the fate that was in store for him, he labored on at Cholesterol Heartbeats, Mao Fats's hamburger establishment at 79 Iguiff Road, in Koala.
        The secret police? Topaz had never even remotely imagined becoming an object of the attention of the secret police. He was, after all, an innocent man, as his lawyer kept telling him. Fragmenting a few jellyfish? They're never going to put you in jail for that.
        Innocent, yes. A fresh-faced twenty-two, always looking energetic thanks to the visual impact made by his spectacularly bright red hair. Truly innocent. And not just innocent, but clean-shaven, too, because his boss, Mao Fats, had told him he would be fired unless he lost that scraggly chin fungus of his, and lost it permanently.
        In objective analysis, Topaz was (in comparative terms, when he was compared with some of his friends, like Vodka Sam and Neps the Dealer) an upright, clean-living young man with, leaving aside the occasional bit of high-spirited fun with dynamite, no bad habits apart from a licorice addiction and a tendency to be late returning library books. He had led a more or less blameless life, the last six months of which had been (if jellyfish are not sacred to your religion) entirely free from sin, if exception be made for a certain incident involving a large plate glass window and a beer bottle. Oh, and having sex with an underage girl, too, an offence which was technically punishable by twenty years in jail.
        The underage girl was Topaz's girlfriend, Rebecca Zakaresh, who, like him, was only twenty-two. In Oolong Morblock, the age of consent for unmarried people was age twenty for a boy and age twenty-four for a girl.
        If you got married, then things were different. For people entering into the sacred state of matrimony, the age of consent was sixteen for a boy and twelve for a girl. That was for heterosexual liaisons. For marriages between male homosexuals, the age of consent was eighteen. Lesbians? The law did not acknowledge any such thing as girl-girl marriage.
        The precise rationale for this mishmash of different ages was nowhere stated in the relevant legislation, but obviously there must have been a logical reason for it. Somewhere. To think otherwise would be to think that the state's sex laws were arbitrary, which would be insulting to the sacred dignity of the law.
        The law must be obeyed.
        This is one of the fundamental requirements for the survival of civilization, and it was very wrong for Topaz (not once but repeatedly) to have gotten as drunk as a garbage rat and to have gotten as naked as a needle with his girlfriend, and then to have gone a good deal further than just kissing her fingernails.
        True, the Topaz-Rebecca liaison was at least partially legal, in that they had been through the mandatory counseling course required to get a boyfriend-girlfriend license, meaning that they were legal not just for hand-holding but for ear nibbling, mutual nose stroking and tongue-to-tongue kissing. But that did not license their indulgence in the certain of the practices outlawed by the Unified Code of Sexual Conduct, the precise practices concerned being those covered by clause five, clause twenty-five, clause ninety-two, and clause seven hundred and sixty of the Code.
        Topaz, as the man, was the party who would get hammered the hardest by the law if the Topaz-Rebecca relationship ever came to the attention of the courts. But Rebecca could get a criminal conviction for the offence of unlawful compliance. And, additionally, if all the details came out, she could be convicted of a criminal environmental outrage because of her habit of flushing her used vaginal condoms down the toilet. (Something the Omblock Sewage Corporation explicitly begs its customers not to do.)
        Although Topaz was a sex criminal, and although Rebecca was, legally, a criminal delinquent because she let him get away with his outrages against chastity, neither of these two young people, unfortunately, saw anything wrong with their bedroom behavior.
        In Rebecca's case, the one issue concerning their relationship which had exercised her mind recently was the question of how all that chewing gum had gotten into her hair on the night of the Happy Cheerhop beer bash. How? Good question. Topaz certainly had no answer. He didn't remember much about that night at all. He kept trying to tell Rebecca that the chewing gum was the chewing gum of love, but she had shown no inclination to believe that story, and she was still sore about it, even though the incident was six weeks in the past.
        Untroubled by his sex criminal history, and completely unaware of the danger which was approaching, then, Topaz was at work flipping burgers, serving up hamburgers, bacon burgers, cheese burgers, grease pods, wet budgerigars and tango munchers.
        As he worked, his mind drifted, and he began sorting through the disconents of his life. While studying at Nash Olish University, Topaz had earned a bachelor's degree in marriage dynamics. This year, he had hoped to have been working on his thesis for his master's degree. But, much to his surprise, his proposal to do a thesis on wife swapping had been rejected.
        Professor Norleen Grace, a very dominant woman, had attempted to force Topaz to get to work on one of her pet subjects, the issue of how different attitudes toward interior decorating influence the relationships between men and women. But Topaz, who had never really paused to notice the fact that interiors are decorated, had adamantly refused to do any such thing.
        Still keen to pursue his original idea, Topaz had tried to beg funding from a leading condom manufacturer, meaning to work on the research topic outside the academy, but he had been rebuffed there, too. Or, more exactly, had been met by silence: he was not significant enough to rebuff. When you're not worth even enough for the kick of a rejection, that's a real slap in the face.
        In disgust, Topaz had entered the ballot for a place on a course in astronomy, which was popular because it came with philanthropic funding. And he had won. It meant starting over again, and it also meant that he had to brush up his math, but the good part was that he would still be able to keep his student ID card and all the beer hall concessions that went with it.
        His tuition costs were fully funded and winning a place on the astronomy course allowed him to thumb his nose at Professor Norleen Grace.
        Reality changed abruptly for the daydreaming beer hall fan when a car pulled up and parked illegally. It was a black car with shimmering windows which looked green. Four guys got out, all wearing dark suits, and moved purposefully in Topaz's direction. Something wrong here. Not for the first time in his life, Topaz wished he had a shotgun under the counter.
        "Ideation Control," said Benji Wing, leader of the Practical Squad, flashing a badge.
        This was a no-no. If you were the secret police, you weren't supposed to declare yourself. But Benji liked the dramatic effect you could achieve if you did. Unfortunately, he didn't get the reaction he wanted from Topaz. Topaz interpreted the badge, briefly seen, as a flash of bright metal, a weapon, maybe, and Benji's words were masked by a motorbike going past. Still, Topaz was conscious that something anomalous was happening.
        "You guys ordering?" said Topaz, anxiously.
        "No," said Benji.
        And sprayed him.
        Five minutes after Topaz had been abducted, the burger patties he had been cooking for that big Ortorgelman phone-in order started to smoke. But Topaz, ignorant of this development, had other things to worry about.
        After a long and uncomfortable journey, Topaz was poured out of his sack in an underground carpark, a big one, the distinctive feature of which was that three battle tanks were parked in Topaz's view. He had seen plenty of underground carparks in his life, but never one that featured battle tanks.
        Someone slapped him, someone spat in his face, then someone said, "Hey, hold up, remember what the boss said!" And then a door was closing on him and he was in an incarceration unit, and it was moving, an elevator, that's what it was, hurtling upwards, his stomach rising, and he was slammed through doorways, bars of fluorescent light bent over him, and someone stabbed him, again, how many times had they stabbed him? Needles, hate needles. Then he was seated at a desk and someone was telling him his coffee was going cold and demanding to know why he hadn't drunk it.
        "Drink it," said the man seated opposite him.
        Obediently, Topaz picked up the drink but spilt it, coffee going all over the desk. His hand jerked convulsively and the cup flew out of his fingers. It dropped, smashed. Nobody said anything. Wherever he was, it was somewhere outside the etiquette zone, and fractured coffee cups quite simply didn't count for anything.
        Topaz momentarily thought of asking for another cup of coffee, then abandoned the idea. This did not look like the kind of place where it would be a smart idea to start asking questions, innocent or otherwise. You might start something which you would thereafter be unable to stop. Topaz had no idea where this experience was going, but of one thing he was sure: he had no wish to get there any faster than he absolutely had to.
        "Look at me, boy."
        Topaz looked directly at the man who was seated across from him. A man who projected an aura of ruthless executive efficiency. The slabs of his cheeks were close shaven yet suggestive of prickly blackness, assertive masculinity. His necktie was frivolous, laughing dragons on a background of flowers, but this did not look like the kind of man who valued either cheap giggles or flowers.
        Behind the man was a wall lined with cardboard egg cartons, an improvised form of soundproofing, the same as they had in the studio at Radio Q, the student radio station where Topaz sometimes hung out. A soundproof room. Bad sign. It was all too easy to start thinking of that horror comic series, Stories from the Soundproof Room.
        The man was seated behind a stainless steel desk, very practical. Strong, hard-wearing, easy to clean. The desk was bare but for three items, set beyond the puddled remnants of Topaz's spilt coffee. One was an apple, red, shiny, waiting there for what terrifying purpose Topaz could not even begin to guess. It was an obscene apple, hard, potent, swollen with purpose. The second item was a picture of a pig, a very large pig with prominent dugs clear in the photograph, a very happy pig, a pig which, plainly, had not yet seen the dictionary definition of bacon. Someone had stuck a little pink love heart to the glass which protected the photo of the pig. The third thing on the desk was a paper knife. Silver. Very shiny. Very clean. This room did not look like the kind of place where much use was made of paper, and, when Topaz saw the paper knife, his estimate of his survival chances went way down.
        "Do you know why you're here?" said the man.
        "No," said Topaz.
        "Well, do you know who I am?"
        "No idea," said Topaz.
        "I," said the man, "am Beria Dag."
        Obviously the name was meant to mean something, and for many people it would have signified. But Topaz generally paid little attention to what was going on in the world. He would have failed to recognize the names of the Governor of the Reserve Bank, of the CEO of Conflux Consolidated and of the chairman of Central Resource Management. And, similarly, he drew a blank with the name Beria Dag.
        "Okay," said Topaz.
        "You really don't know who I am, do you?" said Beria.
        "Uh ... are you from the Star Chamber?" said Topaz.
        While Beria did not come across as a man with a sense of humor, he did have one, and Topaz had tickled it. Beria laughed, heartily, happy as a cannibal who has just pried the plum of the pituitary gland from the core of the brain.
        "The Star Chamber?" said Beria. "No, boy. No place so innocent."
        No place so innocent. Bad news. Topaz's lawyer, the public defender Bella Okada, had told him that the Star Chamber was the most dangerous thing in the city state of Oolong Morblock. That it was a hideous death machine that Olive Valise had found down in one of the unvisited basements of history. And that, by finding it, and by setting it in motion, Olive Valise had begun the process of transforming herself into the dark lord.
        "I'd like to make a phone call to my lawyer, please," said Topaz.
        Of the many telephone numbers which Topaz had occasion to use, he had memorized just three. The phone number for Maggot Pizzas, home of the red chili caterpillar pizza. His girlfriend's phone number. And his lawyer's. Put a phone in his hand and he'd be ready to go.
        But Beria laughed again. Then leaned forward, reached out and took Topaz's flinching forearm in his hand. Beria's fingernails were a little long and Topaz felt their sharpness. Predatory fingers. Beria was possessed of desire, and his desire was that of a vulture, a raptor, a flesh-killer. An eater of bones and an eater of everything to be found upon bones.
        Releasing Topaz, Beria sat back in his chair and worked his shoulders, releasing tension. He was a man who spent too much of his life sitting in chairs and not enough of it working out at the boxing gym.
        "Ibrahim Chess is your godfather."
        "Yes," said Topaz, guardedly.
        "What kind of man is he?" said Beria.
        It had to be a trick question. Topaz was not sure exactly where he was, but he was definitely not in the carnival hall at Big Fun. Everything was booby trapped, and the booby traps were lethal.
        A trick question. This was a house of trick questions. But he had to answer it.
        "He's pathetic," said Topaz, going with the truth, reluctantly, because he couldn't figure out what kind of lie it would be expedient to tell. "He's got this, this, uh, dream -- get him on the rum, you'll hear about this dream of his. But all it is, it's these boring old boats, it's kind of a, a business, that's what it's supposed to be, but it's not. It doesn't make money. It's eaten all his money, and he can't face facts, ought to go back to killing bugs, only he sold that business to his brother. No money to start over. My godfather, he's the guy who roadwrecked his life. A businessman, like, but his business doesn't work."
        "It doesn't work," said Beria, "because it's not a proper business. It's a front for a terrorist organization."
        Ordinarily, this would have been unbelievable. But, if you have been mugged into a sack and transported to a building which has battle tanks in the carpark, then your powers of disbelief take a real kick in the teeth. So Topaz, yielding to the assault of the information which had been forced upon him, believed. And was flabbergasted. Yes, Topaz was flabbergasted, just as the jellyfish had been when he had dynamited them. In practical terms, his response to Beria's revelation was exactly the same as that of the mouse after the mousetrap slammed home on it: nothing.
        "Your godfather, Ibrahim Chess," said Beria, "is implicated in a terrorist plot to overthrow the rule of law in Omblock."
        The response which automatically formulated itself in Topaz's head was "Cool!" But, face to face with Beria, he found his Older Generation alarm racketing away at full force, and so had the sense not to express his true feelings. Still! Ibrahim? A terrorist? Way cool!
        "You're not as frightened as you should be, are you?" said Beria quietly.
        The words had the desired effect. They got Topaz's total attention as he focused on Beria, wondering fearfully what was coming next. Acid? Baseball bats? A pair of scissors?
        Answer: none of the above. Instead, information.
        Taking his time about it, repeating himself on occasion in an effort to be clear, Beria methodically laid it on the line for Topaz. The facts. Ibrahim was the mastermind behind an astral plot involving the late Egon Turow, the Parkes Pilkem decoy guy, a journalist by the name of Sable Tauranga and a couple of consultants and Ibrahim himself.
        When Beria had finished, he paused. Was Topaz supposed to say something? Maybe. He was out of his depth. This was like the time when he had got to the examination room, late, had scribbled his ID details on one of the waiting papers, and had found himself plunging into a world of incomprehension. He'd accidentally walked into the wrong room and was facing the bafflements of the exam paper for the Introductory Gynecology elective that everyone joked about but which almost nobody signed up for.
        "Uh," said Topaz. "Um ... how do you fit into this? You're Ibrahim's boss?"
        "No, idiot," said Beria. "I am the government, or as near to being the government as makes no difference."
        That was the answer Topaz had been afraid of. If you were in the hands of a shadowy terrorist organization, you might have a sporting chance of survival. But if the government had reached out for you ... well, that's something that only happens to other people. Isn't it?
        "Uh, me ... I cook burgers," said Topaz, trying to excuse himself from Beria's reality.
        "That's what Om Druze was doing when he was scouted for that first movie of his, War of Bloodlines," said Beria. "You see that movie? No? Before your time, I guess. You follow what I'm saying, I hope. You, Jellyfish Boy, have been plucked out of your grease burger world, just like Om Druze. Your mission, Jellyfish Boy -- which you have no choice but to accept -- is to help me to sort out this astral threat and deal to it, big time."
        Then Beria explained to Topaz why he must do what he was told. Topaz had done wrong. The indictments could be drawn up easily. Theft, improper use of explosives, terrorism. Criminal conspiracy. No need to break bones in dark corners, not on this one, no. Beria could hammer Topaz into a prison cell for most of the rest of his life, and could do so legally, through the mechanism of the court.
        Listening, Topaz realized that what he was hearing was not exactly new news. Yeah, his lawyer had laid it out for him. Keep a low profile and don't do anything else bad, because all these charges are waiting in the wings, just waiting for someone with initiative to lead them out on stage to do their act. Well, now he was in the presence of Mr. Initiative himself, a man who knew how to make his initiatives sit up and sing.
        A scene flashed into Topaz's mind: the famous xylophone scene from the movie House of Gouged Eyes, the scene in which you realize that the white stuff in the flour sack is starting to turn red, and you finally know why Jackal Man is laughing. It was that kind of scene: everything is suddenly two levels more catastrophic than you thought it was.
        Beria explained Topaz's legal vulnerability to him in painful detail, making it clear that there was no way out, no escape. Topaz was in a jam.
        "You, boy," said Beria, "have entered the world of consequences. Let me give you a hint as to what that means."
        A threat. Something was about to happen. But what?
        Since being brought to the soundproof room, Topaz had begun to imagine many things. Multiple horror movies had background him. Yes, and that interrogation game, the one he used to have on his laptop before it got stolen -- what was the name of it? Autopsy Room, that was the one.
        In anticipation of his own destruction, partial or total, Topaz had begun to develop scripts for the things which might be going to happen to him here in the soundproof room. But he entirely failed to predict the two things which were to happen next. They took him by surprise and found him unprepared, internal resistance at zero.
        First, Beria stood, leaned across the desk, grabbed Topaz by the hair, wrenched him onto the top of the tea-splattered stainless steel desk, twisted him so he was face up, then inflicted upon him a kiss, a full-scale kiss, lips to lips, tongue to tongue, saliva to saliva. Then threw him backwards.
        Topaz squawked back into his chair, shuddering. Something clattered, and he had the terrifying notion that maybe the pig photo had spilt off the desk, had broken, the pig photo was precious, plainly, guy wouldn't be happy if his pig photo got broke. But, no, whatever had clattered, it was not the pig photo, which was still on the desk.
        Topaz waited for the next move.
        And Beria ...
        Beria picked up the apple that was sitting on his desk. Topaz flinched, tensed, remembering what happened to those little kids after the apple showed up in that movie, Happy Clown Faces. And Beria, with those huge teeth of his, bit into the apple, bit deep, bit ruthlessly, and severed. And tore loose what he had severed. And chewed. Beria made Topaz watch as he ate the apple, as he ate the whole thing, pips and all.
        There are many ways of breaking a person's will to resist, and some of these methods take weeks, and require a detailed knowledge of human anatomy. But sometimes, as Beria knew, it can be as simple as eating an apple.
        "Your instructions, Jellyfish Boy," said Beria. "You will go to your godfather and you will penetrate this terrorist conspiracy of his. You will find out all the details. Names, passwords, telephone numbers. When I am ready, I will give you a phone call, and I will expect you to be genned up and ready to report. Understand?"
        "Understand," said Topaz.
        "Good," said Beria.
        And pulled out a gun. A handgun with a bulbous barrel, a gun of black metal which sprouted into a curious orange protruberance. Beria pointed the gun at Topaz and pulled the trigger. Heat flowered. Blood suffered summer. The desk, the room, the man with the slab-sided jowls, all became blurred and liquid. Then gray. Then black, as Topaz lost consciousness.
        When Topaz recovered consciousness, he found himself out in the big wide world of night, lying on gritty gravel under a flyover somewhere. Alone. No sign of Nubbles the fist, his familiar, which he hadn't seen for a couple of weeks now. Nubbles, who, when present, was usually under Topaz's control, could have been useful when the guys in the dark suits came to kidnap Topaz. But that's the thing about having a familiar. You never know when it's going to be standing by for service and when it's going to be off on the lam.
        On the underside of the flyover, which he was staring up at, illuminated white words were writing themselves -- a graffito in action. Which made him realize he hadn't seen one for days. Omblock had been going through one of its occasional graffiti lulls.
        A graffito, writing itself. Striggle, striggle, on the wall, what is the meaning of it all? Topaz tried to focus on the message up above, but the words were blurred and incomprehensible. Something wrong with his eyes. Still, he could see well enough to make out that he was in a street person colony -- squattersville, one of Omblock's makeshift cardboard box housing estates. Everyone asleep, because it was either late, late night or very early in the morning.
        "Where the hell am I?" said Topaz.
        He had no idea. Wake up one of his snoring fellow citizens? Probably not a good move.
        Down the road, there were bright sodium lights, glaring security illumination. Wandering in that direction, Topaz found himself confronted by something he recognized. He was at one of Omblock's incineration complexes. Not Olkrash, he'd been there. And not that one in the east of Woosung Shanghai, the name of which he couldn't remember. He'd been there too.
        Maybe he'd lost track of how many incineration complexes there were, but he didn't think so. Unless he was badly mistaken, this must be Xgadriver. The third of the three.
        And why had he been parked here?
        Well, that was an easy question, right near the start of the intelligence test. He had been parked here as a warning. This time, you get almost as far as the gates of the incineration complex. Next time, you might find yourself going much, much further.
        "God," said Topaz.
        And wondered what he was going to do now, stuck out by Xgadriver, that was on Conflux, a long way home, no money, wallet gone, no wristwatch either, and Rebecca would kill him if he made a collect call from a phone box, but what was the alternative? Hitchhike?
        Topaz walked right up to the security fence, hoping to find a guardhouse where he might get either advice or the use of a telephone, but what he found was an automated barrier of huge, confrontational dungeon gates, no human being to beg from and no rational way to get past those gates.
        Topaz turned and set off in the direction that he guessed was west, hoping to find an arterial road on which he could hitchhike, or a call box from which he could phone someone, or, maybe, a subway station, where he could jump the turnstile and so bootleg his way home, smuggling his criminal corpse through the subway system to liberty.
        As Topaz trudged through the streets, he kept revolving the Ibrahim thing in his mind. Godfather Ibrahim, a terrorist mastermind? The guy behind the Egon glorst? This was revelational. Ibrahim, maybe, was the man who could explain to him the place with the battle tanks, who could tell him where he could find the paper knife man and his building, so he could make good use of all that dynamite he still had buried in the Swampwader Sanctuary Park near Big Fun, out on Irian Ko. Find out all about paper knife man, yeah. And take him down.
        The shock of Topaz's ordeal was starting to wear off and he was beginning to take stock. He realized he had entered a new world, a world in which astrals were organized, in which astrals were powerful. Up until this point, he had thought of the glorsting Egon Turow, the media star of the moment, as a disorganized crazy, a pathetic sap who had wasted himself in blunder mode.
        But, no, no, it was not like that at all. Egon's death was part of a plot, part of a plan. The astrals had a scheme, a conspiracy, a movement, and he, Topaz, he was going to be part of it. He was an astral in need, and the movement was going to help him fight back.
        Topaz remembered his father talking about the time the organized crime figures came calling for protection money. The police couldn't help, so dad took steps. Went to the exorcist guy, Danzburg, that's the one, Danzburg Tosterburger. Did a deal. And Danzburg took those crime guys down, took them right off the map. How did he do it? Better not to ask. Better not to know. Key point was, dad fought back. And won.
        This was a part of the Topaz Atatangle story which was unknown to Beria Dag: the heroism of the father, the strength of the family mythos, the hero father role model, the all-compelling example set for the son by dad.
        Looking at the son's life, you would find no trace of the influence of that example, since Topaz's life, to date, had involved nothing much more challenging than flipping burgers. But now, unexpectedly, Topaz Atatangle found himself being put to the test, and he found, to his surprise, that he was ready for this war.
        "Dad fought back," said Topaz.
        Well, that's what he would do. He would get the help of this organization he had been tasked to infiltrate. How? Don't worry, he'd figure it out. Once he had the organization behind him, he would seek face time with the paper knife guy. He would work it somehow so the terrorist organization was behind him when he was teaching that face a different configuration. They would take down this paper knife guy -- what was his name? Had he introduced himself? Didn't give out business cards, certainly. Anyway, that guy, the guy with the apple, the paper knife and the pig photo, they'd take him down but good, and he'd never get up again.
        "Astral power," said Topaz.
        It was a whisper. Then, finding his voice, he shouted, yelling defiance to the empty streets:
        "Glorst for glory!"
        A great thing to say. He was not going to glorst, was not himself a capable. But he was in a world in which capables existed. And they were on his side and he was on theirs. United by the conspiracy which had been masterminded into existence to fight against the oppression of the norms and the dominance of the state.
        Having shouted his defiance to the world, Topaz was feeling strong and coherent. He did not have a grip on the depth of his own shock. If he had not been so profoundly shaken by his kidnapping and interrogation, then he would have been embarrassed about how ridiculous he must look, traipsing down the street still in his cooking whites, still wearing those clunky gum-soled safety shoes mandated by OSH. He wasn't aware that he was still wearing his tea-stained Hippy the Hungry Cockroach apron. One more index of his state of shock: Topaz had not yet started thinking about his brother, the late Ishingate. He would, in time. But not yet.
        At last, Topaz found a phone box, complete with a set of telephone books, all five of them. It was outside Soapy Coin, a coin laundry which never closed. At this hour, the coin laundry stood empty, the washing machines and dryers silent in the neon light. Someone had left a purple plastic bag sitting on one of the brown plastic waiting chairs. Food? No. Jigsaw puzzles for kids with labels saying they had been borrowed from the Thomas Fagin Memorial Library.
        No food. It was not breakfast time yet. It was phone call time. Time to make his collect call. To Rebecca? No, she really would kill him. His lawyer? Well, the number he had for his attorney was just her business number. What about his own apartment? Winston might still be there, might not have gone back to his own place. A long shot, but worth a try. Only he didn't know his own number. The phone was in Pitsy's name, it had never been changed after Topaz took over the apartment, and Topaz couldn't remember Pitsy's surname.
        "Godfather Ibrahim!" said Topaz, at last, seeing the obvious.
        Ibrahim would be as angry as hell to be woken up but it would be a starting point -- a way for Topaz to get started on the business of penetrating this astral conspiracy which he was going to join, take over, and use as a weapon to kill, waste, eliminate, terminate and liquidate that thug who had zapped him into unconsciousness with that weird death ray gun of his.
        In one of the phone books, Topaz found the page with the number for Marine Charters. But there was something still wrong with his eyes, they hadn't quite come right yet, and the number blurred into incomprehensibility. Losing patience, Topaz ripped out the page and took it inside the coin laundry, where the brightness of the fluorescents helped sharpen his vision enough for him to get the number. Then he went back to the phone and dialed the operator. It was exciting, kind of. It wasn't just a phone call. It was his first step toward joining the astral conspiracy.
        Talking to the operator, Topaz realized he had already forgotten the Marine Charters number. No problem. The operator inputted "Marine Charters" and the number came up on her computer screen. Sometimes things are simpler than you think.
        The operator tried to get Ibrahim to come on the line so she could ask him if he was prepared to pick up the charges, but an answer phone took the call. Would the operator let him speak to the answer phone? Maybe.
        That was when a convoy of huge garbage trucks started to rumble past, truck after truck, so many that it was easy to lose count, and there were more still coming when you had lost count, all heading for Xgadriver, the noise of their passage making Topaz plug his one free ear with a finger to try to hear what the answer tape was saying.
        Damn! He had lost the connection. Had the operator disconnect him? No way to tell.
        The eastward migration of the trucks was still underway, and the massiveness of the rolling steel trundling by commanded his attention, forcing him to become conscious of the hugeness of the world, the iron of it, the furnaces of it, the endless replications of its streets, railway lines, utility poles and coin laundries.
        And the vision, momentarily, overwhelmed him.
        "Dad fought back," said Topaz, stubbornly.
         It was becoming a motto to live by.
        Giving up on the phone call, Topaz resumed his march to the west, while the army of trucks rolled on remorselessly toward the all-consuming fire maws waiting in the east, a small foretaste of the ultimate incineration which awaits in the future, which awaits at the end of the world. 
     It was Egon plus two, the second day after the glorsting of Egon Turow, and the city state of Oolong Morblock was running as normal, millions of bars of soap sliding over millions of naked bodies, millions of bowls of red pepper chili cornflakes being consumed, millions of toilets flushing. Millions of biological filtering devices, known as lungs, were hard at work, busy removing industrial wastes from the air. Millions of shoes clad in millions of socks were warming up inside millions of shoes, already sweating slightly.
        It was going to be a hot day.
        On Chamberpot Street in North Gorleth, the Bad Breaths, a street gang, ages thirteen and up, set on little Bogen Prince, age twelve, who was making the mistake of going to school. Distressed by this anomalous behavior, the Bad Breaths went to work on him with claw hammers, punching twenty-seven holes in his body before they left him for dead. This did not make the news. "Gorleth takes care of Gorleth," to quote a phrase.
        Up in the north of Conflux, President Olive Valise was up and about. She was indulging herself in the pleasures of Nozomi, the multi-jet shower which her predecessor, Jorbel Eagle, had organized for the Presidential Suite in Hexagon, the presidential palace which formed part of the federal campus known as Tespetty. Water, unlimited water, hot water -- she reveled in it, shamelessly.
        All through her life, water had been an issue. She had grown up with water shortages. Want to flush the toilet? No problem. The ocean gets piped all the way to the lavatory expressly for that purpose. Flush freely. Share with the jellyfish that which is properly theirs in the first place. But try to have a shower and, inside of a minute, you're hearing, "Girl! What do you think you're doing? Do you think we're made of money? That's a money waterfall, darling, we don't have the lolly cash for that."
        All her life she had grown up with the knowledge that they were not the rich Valises, the deodorant kings, no, they were the poor Valises, and had been so ever since their branch of the family got screwed in the game of hardball that got played after Uncle Triffin died intestate. They got so poor that, in the end, they had to give up the helicopter, and she had to say goodbye to her pony, her beloved Zupiter.
        But now she was President, and that meant she could run the taps until Hell's casserole was cooked. A daily impost on the taxpayers, not part of her formal compensation package but a perk.
        When showered and dried, Olive applied talcum powder to her armpits -- she never used roll-on deodorant because that always reminded her that she was not one of the deodorant Valises. Then she began getting dressed, starting with her merkin, the violet one which her life coach, Helen Gobster, had advised her to wear to help her "sex power the maggots into the ground". It seemed to be working. Olive was getting the impression that the maggots she worked with were finally starting to show her some of the respect she deserved.
        As Olive was titivating herself, a man was heading for Tespetty. A strange man, someone she had never met in her entire life. Someone whose existence she did not suspect. A man who was capable of breaking her jaw with a single blow, of setting her hair on fire, of suing her for the aesthetic contamination she caused when she showed up in public with her lipstick on crooked.
        While the man was capable of doing all those things, and more, he had no such thought in mind. Nor did he have a history of doing such things, either. He had lived a blameless life working in the charity field, and was currently CEO of Cagebird Lifebelt, a charity which specialized in pressuring governments around the planet to legislate for better captivity conditions for cage birds.
        His name? Well, he wouldn't be needing it for much longer, but, for the record, his name was Kuro Effigy, and he was a tourist from far-off Yam. He was staying in the Red Stockings Hotel, part of the International Chastity Hotels chain, at Bencoolen.
        Kuro had risen extremely early, and had gone adventuring, leaving his wife asleep. In Kuro's opinion, their marriage was heading for a divorce, and one of the reasons he wanted to be alone was to think about that.
        Taking his pet with him, Kuro had traveled by subway all the way to Inadazutsumi Station, from where he had hiked the considerable distance to Tespetty, meaning to get a taxi back. Walking such a long distance was eccentric, but, technically, not yet illegal -- although OSH was working on some regulations designed to guard against over-exertion, these had not yet come into effect.
        Kuro Effigy had brought along his digital camera but he had left his wallet and passport in the hotel, just bringing his coin purse and enough cash for his subway rides and his projected taxi fare. The same guide book which had recommended Tespetty as a "must see" sight had also warned about street crime.
        Still feeling fresh at the end of his long walk from Inadazutsumi Station -- relaxed, happy and smiling -- Kuro Effigy approached the security cordon which had been established outside Tespetty, a cordon which was not mentioned in his guide book because it had only been set up the day before.
         Most of the cops who were supposed to be manning and womaning the security cordon were off on a donut break, leaving only two to hold the fort, Monk Tide and Erminoda Ying.
        Monk Tide, a stalwart twenty-year veteran of the Conflux Constabulary, saw this guy coming, a dreamy expression on his face. The guy was doing something aberrant, something nobody ever did at Tespetty in the morning. He was smiling. And there was some kind of animal sitting on his shoulder, almost like a monkey, but not quite, a weird animal, a kind of mutant, a familiar, obviously.
        With twenty years of police experience under his belt, Monk knew danger when he saw it. Here was an astral drifting dreamily towards his suicide point, smiling with an inner ecstasy that he felt no need to explain to the world, his familiar sitting on his shoulder, along for the ride, the terminal ride.
        And Monk's handgun, which he had never had occasion to draw before, not in all his years of service, was in his hand, and he unloaded one, two, three, four, five shots, aiming for the head, vital to hit the head, got to take this guy down before he glorsts. Do or die!
        One shot went wild, two hit the guy in the shoulder, but three found the head, then it was speedloader time. Gun loaded, Monk crouched down by the guy and made sure, four in the head and then one for the familiar, maybe those things can blow themselves up, too.
        Then it was done, and Monk was panting, flushed, and there was a huge squeezing pain in his chest, and a shooting pain in his arm, and he realized he was having a heart attack, he was going down, he was going to die.
        Saw before him the man he had killed, and the mutant animal, the cute eyes no longer cute, the nasty bundle of fur kicked into a dirty rag of broken flesh.
        And he knew he had done his duty.
        And would have died happy, except there was no room in the universe for happiness. There was no room for anything except the pain, the crushing pain that was intensifying, that was squeezing his name out of existence.
        First his name, then his life.
        So died Monk Tide, a hero of law enforcement, selflessly sacrificing his own life in the battle against astral terror, the war on the suicide bombers. 
  Viffy Sniff was in a bad mood in the morning, upset by the fact that Beria had returned home late, and making no effort to hide her displeasure. After investing more time than he could really spare in calming her down and soothing her feelings, Beria ended up arriving at work late. Inevitably, by the time he got in, all the cream donuts were gone from Room Clandestine, the very private cafeteria where you could blow the hinges off your diet without anyone ever finding out about it, and Cedric the Chef refused to let Beria have a lamington, saying that the lamingtons were reserved for the afternoon. Stingy bastard.
        In a bad mood, Beria made his way to the Green Room, where he switched on his computer only to find that it had been invaded by the Head Eater virus. One of the side effects of the virus was that the computer kept sniggering at him, and Beria had to struggle to keep himself from smashing the machine dead. For some time now, he had been toying with the idea of manufacturing something the world really needed, the punchable computer, but ideation never got translated into action. Nature and nurture had combined to produce in Beria an enforcer, not an entrepreneur.
        Beria phoned his tech guy, who promised to fix the virus problem, and said he could do it remotely, and Beria switched on the TV, which was tuned, as usual, to Conflux One, and sat drinking his way through a bottle of Ok Tedi Jellyfish Water, a hot new designer water containing not just dissolved gold and vitamin C but "patented health-zesting jellyfish extracts" -- a proud product of Ok Tedi Hydration Enterprises, a company headquartered on Glud Hurgus.
        Watch TV and get paid for it. Nice work if you can get it, but Beria was aware of the astral conspiracy ticking away in the background. He phoned the guy who was monitoring, in real time, the bugs which had been planted in Topaz's apartment, only to be told that Topaz Atatangle had not yet returned home. Beria realized they should have had Jellyfish Boy implanted with one of those experimental microchip radio beacons, but it was too late for that now.
        Shouldn't have taken the kid this long to get home from Xgadriver, should it? Phone a cab, give them an IOU -- kid was smart enough to figure out that one, surely. Or was he? Sometimes it was a mistake to underestimate the innate stupidity of human beings.
        As Beria brooded, Conflux One was busy interviewing Isabella Nightingale, the woman who was the head of the Garden of Innocent Smiles, the place where Egon had done his glorst. Isabella was introduced as a scion of the cultured pearl Nightingales, yes, that's who she was, heiress to wealth, and you were all interested in hearing that, weren't you, now?
        But Isabella was not on TV because she had the makings of an Omblock celebrity. No, she was there to say that her staff had three times sighted a horrible red thing, a mist of blood or some kind of red aerosol which looked like blood, an apparition which had been making incoherent chirping sounds -- "like a parrot being strangled" was how one staffer had put it.
        They believed the red thing was, in all probability, Egon's glorst, and they had rung the emergency services and had reported it, but nobody had come to do anything about it, and a glorst was not the kind of thing that should be hanging around, not ever, and especially not now, while counselors were busy doing what they could to ease the trauma of staff, parents and little children.
        Then Isabella started slagging off at Olive Valise, someone she admitted to hating, a "do-nothing bureaucrat who rides around in polished limos", according to Isabella, who had probably ridden around in more than her fair share of polished limos herself, spoilt whining bitch, and Isabella was just getting into the swing of her "what do we pay taxes for?" speech when she was gone, elbowed out of reality, displaced by breaking news, replaced by Esmeralda Arizona, who was broadcasting from the studio, and who was looking not quite her picture-perfect self. Who was looking a little flushed and breathless, like a woman who has just been chased naked out of the bathtub by a drunken gorilla.
        "Breaking news," said Arizona. "Breaking news. An astral terrorist has killed a police officer at Tespetty. The unidentified astral has been shot dead after murdering a police officer. Police woman Erminoda Ying was attacked by the astral's paranormal powers and her head exploded. In response to this crisis the President is convening an emergency meeting at Hexagon."
        Beria was sceptical of this report. To start with, if an emergency meeting had been convened then surely he would have been invited. At that point, his phone began to ring. Picking it up, he found that he was invited. But he begged off, pleading food poisoning.
        "Ate at one of those grease bars," said Beria. "Cholesterol Heartbeats, that was the place. Big mistake. I've been running for the big white telephone ever since."
        No way was he going to spend the rest of the day sitting in the Decision Chamber playing yet another endless game of pass the parcel. The TV was giving him more and more details of a suicide bomber attack on Tespetty itself, and plainly it was a day for action, urgent action, not a day for talk.
        "Cancel everything," said Beria.
        There was nobody to hear him say it since he was alone in the Green Room, but if they'd been making a movie of this -- and one day maybe they would make a movie, Beria Saves the World, that would be a good title -- then dramatic words would be called for at this point, and "Cancel everything" was the best Beria could come up with at short notice.
        Bad thought: he'd have to resign before the movie got made. You couldn't be both a secret policeman and a celebrity on every magazine cover, not at one and the same time. A difficult choice, then, lay ahead. In the future.
        " If Beria's movie was to be limited to what was officially acknowledged about his function, then it would have to be called "Beria the Boring". He would come across as a stupendously dull person who, through years of diligent seat-warming, had been privileged to gain caviar access at mix-and-mingle parties at Hexagon. And that was not how he wanted to be remembered. He, unlike the guys at Maternity Services or Hygiene Omblock, he was doing something heroic. Fighting evil by putting it between a rock and a hard place and then tearing its legs off. And he wished he could acknowledge that openly and have the big wide world share the movie of his life, the true and real movie of Beria the World Savior. A kind of messiah, really, that's what Beria was.
        "Focus on the blood pressure," said Beria to himself.
        It was the hint given right at the start of the Torturer's Handbook. A reminder not to lose track of the key point.
        As a first move, Beria phoned Commander Rage, the head of the Conflux Constabulary, to get the lowdown on what had happened at Tespetty. You can't trust the media reports. The media tends to mess up, get things wrong. You can't take action on the basis of a news flash you saw on TV, which might be more fiction than fact, like that famous report about how, in far off Denebian Kalis, they were going to dig the body of Dictator Ping out of his mausoleum and auction it off for charity, a news story everyone believed at the time but which turned out to be a total fabrication.
        Because Beria was highly placed in the system, he was able to get the full story, rather than relying on the disastrously erroneous version broadcast by the media.
        What happened was this:
        Two police officers, a man by the name of Monk Tide and a woman called Erminoda Ying, were on duty at a security barricade set up to control access to the Tespetty campus. An astral came charging toward them shouting "Glorst for glory!" Valorously, Monk drew his sidearm and confronted the suicide bomber. The terrorist held out his hand and a "weird yellow light" darted out from the hand and spiked Monk in the chest, apparently inducing a massive heart attack.
        Felled by the astral's paranormal power, Monk collapsed, dead or dying, his firearm spilling loose. Erminoda bravely snatched up the gun and wasted the astral, wasted him but good, pumped him full of lead then took Monk's speedloader, reloaded, and, wisely, made sure of her victim. While she was thus engaged, the astral's familiar came lunging for her in attack mode, so she shot that, too.
        Erminoda was now holding out her hand for the twenty thousand dollar terrorist interception bonus which had been promised to all cops, and she was going to get it. She was also going to get a medal.
        "ID," said Beria. "Who was the terrorist?"
        "We zero out," said Commander Rage. "No ID, no nothing. Face is messed up, can be reconstructed but that's going to take time."
        "Fingerprints?"
        "Yeah, corpse had hands, hence fingerprints, but not in our records. We've already run them. Zero. Zilch."
        "And," said Beria, "just to get this straight, whose head exploded?"
        "Nobody's," said Commander Rage. "That's the media through and through, sounds like gospel but half the time it's fabricated nonsense, don't know what they're using to spike up their beer."
        Telephone call done, Beria sat contemplating what had happened. The surface of his desk was feeling funny. Why? Because sweat was oozing from his fingertips. He was that stressed.
        "Worst nightmare," muttered Beria. "Worst nightmare in the world."
        The astral conspiracy had entered a new phase. They weren't just targeting civilians any more, no, they were going after the government. They had suicide bombers ready to die, and who was to tell how many they had? Found someone whose fingerprints weren't on file, too, must have anticipated that anyone who took on Tespetty might get shot dead before managing to glorst.
        "And those idiots at Hexagon," said Beria, "they're just going to spend the rest of the day sitting around chatting about this."
        How many terrorists? No way to tell. But many rather than few. Yes, the astral conspiracy was slurching up out of the swamp, and the further it slurched the more ominous it looked, with more and more players coming into view. Egon Turow, who had glorsted. The Parkes Pilkem fizz boat decoy who had pretended to be Egon. Ibrahim Chess, either the controlling mastermind or the contact between the mastermind and the suicide bombers. And now this new guy coming out of the woodwork.
        Beria did not like the feeling he was having, which was that everything was sliding out of control, gathering momentum, picking up pace. He wanted his life to be founded on solid rock, not on a mudslide in the process of cascading into a quicksand bog. He would have to do something fast. Forget caution. Go for it. Now.
        He had activated agent Tango Alpha, otherwise known as Jellyfish Boy, but Topaz, whose task was to mole his way into the heart of the conspiracy, could not be expected to deliver results any time soon. No. A delicate infiltration job, which might take days, weeks, was not what Beria needed now. He needed immediate results. Pressure on Ibrahim. Sit him down in a chair, Old Faithful, the wooden chair which Beria had inherited from his grandfather and had put to such good use, and say to him, hey, Mr. Chess, do you still feel so clever, sitting there with your hands nailed to the arms of the chair?
        And give him a choice.
        Confess, Chess, and reveal the web of the astral conspiracy, or face public trial, public disgrace, and go to jail for twenty years, thirty, maybe, branded forever as a brutal girl rapist.
        For a rape charge, you'd need a girl, and for the charge to stick -- this "he said she said" business isn't going to be good enough -- you're going to need a proper medical examination with swabs of stuff that check out, DNA-wise, as being sourced from Ibrahim Chess. Well, Ibrahim had the sperm, presumably, and Beria most certainly had the girl. Oh yes, Beria knew exactly what he was going to do to Ibrahim, and Sable Tauranga was going to be his tool for doing it.
        Meantime, on Conflux One, they were screening video of a reenactment. Quick work! And the reenactment got it right. Showed the astral, demented with suicide bomber rage, screaming "Glorst for glory!" as he charged the security barricade. The special effects wizards had even plugged in the bolt of deadly yellow light forking from the astral's hand as he, the murderer, the cop killer, took the life of Monk Tide, a cop for twenty years, the owner of two dogs, the father of nineteen kids, and coach of his local baseball team.
        On the entire planet of Lox Oxberg, baseball was played in only one country: Oolong Morblock. Baseball, otherwise known as tripod challenge, and seen by some as being an embodiment of the hallowed Great Tripod, was one of the three sacred games which the sage Quartermain had retrieved from Metasplite, otherwise known as the Debris Zone, the mystical kingdom of living thoughts left over from the Big Bang, the event, an estimated twenty thousand years back in history, in which Singularity Nine had explosively unpacked itself, thus bringing into existence Known Reality -- stars, galaxies, planets, bugs, jellyfish, astral realms and all, everything from fern leaves to the fossil record, all created in one big explataclysm, "eggs smashed into opera and stones invoked to fire", to quote one of the poets.
        Given that baseball was one of the three sacred games -- the others being boules and lacrosse -- there was an aura of saintliness to the life of the late Monk Tide. Not just a good cop but, more importantly, a good man. A man brutally murdered by an astral's paranormal powers.
        "A good man," said Beria, sparing a moment to mourn the passing of Monk Tide.
        Yes, a good man, he was sure of it. Someone you could have trusted to do what he was told and, obediently, to pull out all the teeth, not just half of them.
        Very shortly, Beria was on the phone to Sable Tauranga.
        "Sable Tauranga? Okay ... you don't know me, but I'm a friend of Gillian Chess, that's the mother of Ibrahim Chess, I believe you're acquainted with Ibrahim, and Gillian has asked me to pass on a very important message."
        The attempted glorst at Tespetty had inspired Beria to action. He was going to move against Ibrahim Chess, very shortly, and Sable was going to be his instrument for doing so. 
    Yolanda was already missing Lady Mischief, who was such a beautiful thing. Lady Mischief was a slow loris, an animal a bit like a monkey but with no tail, a creature of delicate slowness, deliberately meditative in all its movements, a partial antidote to the speed of a world which, for Yolanda, moved too fast.
        Lady Mischief was gone, and Yolanda missed the pet more than she missed her husband. But, even so, she wanted her husband back. And she was starting to think she wasn't going to get him back. Both her husband and his pet had been missing when Yolanda awoke, and her analysis was telling her that there was no reason to expect that she would ever see either of them again.
        Yolanda Effigy was alone in her hotel room, busy missing Lady Mischief, when her cellphone, for which she had an international roaming plan, began to ring. Her husband?
        "Hello?" she said, answering it.
        Nobody there. Oh, an e-mail! Sender: Imperial Embassy of Yam. But how would they have her cellphone number? Kuro must have gone and registered them with the embassy, just in case, that was one of the things about him that annoyed her, he did too much fussbudget stuff, whereas she would have preferred to sail through life more freely.
        What was the e-mail?
        "Because of the deteriorating security situation in the Federal Republic of Oolong Morblock, the Imperial Government of Yam advises all citizens with non-essential business to evacuate immediately."
        Security situation? Yolanda had been watching television, the magic box that tells you all the things you need to know in life, everything from the name of the latest diet book to the fact that your breath smells, and if there had been a security crisis then she would have known about it. But there was nothing special happening in Omblock, just the usual big city stuff -- starlet pregnant, major fashion show announced, a couple of bank robberies, a highway collision involving a tanker carrying liquid petroleum gas and a terrorist dead someplace in a shootout with the police. None of it end of the world stuff, so no need to panic.
        Yolanda put the e-mail message in her "does not compute" basket and, pretty soon, had forgotten about it. She had her husband to worry about. For a long time, she had been afraid her marriage might be heading for a divorce. So it was ominous that Kuro had gone out but had left his passport and wallet behind. He had even left his credit card.
        No credit card? He couldn't possibly be out and about with nothing but cash in his pocket, could he? Nobody does that in the modern world -- use cash. Kuro must have another credit card.
        Yes, the necessary implication was that Kuro had conspired in secret to terminate their marriage, and must have a second set of documents, including a credit card. Logic forced you to the conclusion -- there was no avoiding it -- that Kuro had changed his identity and was aiming at getting lost in this city of twenty millions. He was going to become one of those alimony dodgers that you read about, just as her lawyer had warned her.
        Husbandless, and suspecting this might be a permanent condition, Yolanda ordered a second breakfast, because she was experimenting with the chocolate snack second breakfast diet, the one where you ate coconut pies on every third day, and worked out at the gym on Sundays. Then she sat on her bed in her room in the Red Stockings Hotel and did her tummy exercises.
        If Kuro had done a vanisher, and she would assume he had if he wasn't back by lunchtime, what would she do with her remaining time in Oolong Morblock, the three days before she got on the plane to fly back to Yam?
        The original plan had been that they would spend their time in Oolong Morblock at the International Exotic Pet Fanciers Convention, the event which had brought them to Omblock in the first place. But the Convention, unfortunately, had been abruptly canceled on the very day that their plane touched down at Manbrock Airport. It was not clear whether they were going to get refunds on their attendance fees -- the organizer had, without warning, gone bankrupt -- and Kuro didn't think their insurance would pay.
        So, with her husband missing and the Convention canceled, what was she going to do with herself?
        "Get a guide book, I guess," said Yolanda, without enthusiasm, "and go do tourist things."
        They had bought a guide book, but Kuro seemed to have gone off with it. At least, it was nowhere in sight.
        However, the truth was that she had no appetite for tourist things. The disaster she had long feared, the end of her marriage, appeared to have come upon her, and she felt as if the stuffing had been kicked out of her.
        But something she should do, and could do easily, was phone the police and report Kuro missing. She phoned the front desk to ask for advice, and got given the number of the Missing Persons Bureau run by the Conflux Constabulary, to which she reported Kuro's absence, and got the usual police response.
        People go missing all the time, and usually they show up safe and well, and usually the guy has an explanation ready for his wife, though not always an explanation which the wife finds credible. If Yolanda's husband was still missing in seventy-two hours then there might be cause for concern, but perhaps he'd just stepped out for a walk and would be back by lunchtime.
        After making the call, Yolanda realized she had only reported the absence of her husband. She had said nothing about Lady Mischief, who was also missing. Maybe she should call back. But, no, that was probably not a good idea. The police guy on the phone had not exactly been rude to her, but he had, plainly, been exercising that kind of patience that you bring to bear when you find yourself having to deal with people who are not properly oriented to reality. If she phoned him back and started pestering him about their pet, then he might give her the rough edge of his tongue, and Yolanda hated anything that got confrontational.
        "They're gone," said Yolanda. "They're gone, and the police can't help."
        Her husband and Lady Mischief, both gone. Never to return. Swallowed alive by this horrible city of concrete and exhaust pipes, this city where the sky was a kind of filthy gray ooze, and you had to really scrub your neck with a loofah when you took a shower, to get rid of all the itty gritty bits of black stuff that settled into your pores.
        Thinking about how horrible it was, her husband and Lady Mischief, both gone, both swallowed, Yolanda started to cry. She wept.
        After having a good cry, Yolanda washed her face, switched off the television set, and curled up in bed with her latest self-actualization book, Boudoir Blood Ecstasies, a self-help guide to the acquisition of eternal energy which was from the pen of Dubya Ranchhand, a serial killer in Relsh Strasborg, currently five years into a sentence of incarceration which was mandated to last for 27,596,203 years.
        These serial killers, you read a lot about them, all that plotting and planning and situational engineering they get involved in, but you never ask yourself where these serial killers get the energy for all that effort. Well, Dubya's book raised the question and promised to answer it, "indoctrinating you into the secrets of the inner soul core, the heart of fire and ecstasy which is waiting within you, like a cherry hidden in a bowl of yoghurt. The toothpick will discover it!"
        A creepy statement, that one about the toothpick. Yolanda had watched the TV special, Capture's Aftermath, and the things Dubya had got up to with that silver toothpick of hers, well, creepy didn't begin to describe it. But she reminded herself that Dubya was now a guru, and, what's more, he had become her guru, the one she had chosen from the shelves of Flamethrower Girl, her local bookshop, which specialized in personal growth and self-empowerment. A necessary first step in learning is to humble yourself before your guru, and if you are too bitter with pride to do that then you will never get anywhere.
        "Reading enhances the universe," said Yolanda.
        And was soon comfortably engrossed in the tale of how Dubya, aged nine, had made his first kill, his sister's best friend, then aged five. Most serial killers warm up with small animals, but some start out with the main event when they begin their amazing careers, careers that are designed to astonish the world.
        As Yolanda read, peaceful in bed, the great city state of Oolong Morblock hummed forward into the growing heat of the day, gathering its energies for a killing spree greater than any the average serial killer dares to dream about. 
 Who was the astral terrorist who, earlier today, had attacked Tespetty, and who had murdered police officer Tide before being gunned down by another law enforcement officer? That was a secret, one of the unknowns in the deteriorating security situation, something that only the mastermind behind the astral conspiracy would have been able to tell you.
        The identity of the dead terrorist was not the only secret in Oolong Morblock, a city where transparency was anathema, where life was lived in a clandestine fashion, to the extent that gossip, graffiti, snooping kits and intrusive television reporters permitted the survival of privacy. Does Olive Valise wax her legs or does she shave them? In other nation states, such a basic datum would have been common knowledge, but in Omblock it was a secret known only to Oliver herself and to her life coach, Helen Gobster.
        Of all the closely guarded secrets in the city state of Oolong Morblock, the most secret of all was what was written on the whiteboard in the Decision Chamber in Hexagon, the presidential palace which was part of the federal complex at Tespetty. Nobody present in that room was ever going to gossip about the secrets of the whiteboard. The words on the whiteboard were key words which had emerged during a preliminary brainstorming session.
        One of the basics of brainstorming is that you don't self-censor. What's on the top of your mind? Say it and get it written down. And you can only do this effectively if you're in an environment where you're not going to be held to account, afterwards, for what came off the top of your head. Nobody had explicitly said that what went on the whiteboard was not for circulation, neither privately nor publicly, but that was implicitly understood by everyone in the Decision Chamber.
        Since Don Trash had wiped off a whole bunch of words to make room for a simple sketch plan showing how you could easily plug a "legion maw" industrial strength corpse burner into the incineration complex at Xgadriver -- one of Beria's ideas, which Don had appropriated since Beria, being absent, could not defend his intellectual property rights -- many of the terms which had surfaced early in the brainstorming session had been erased, including "kill", "extirpate", "maximum oppression" and "coin laundry treatment". Terms which remained, written in red by General Pigski, who had earlier been playing the role of write-up boy, including "astrals rising", "cockroaches in revolt" and "exterminator".
        In the Decision Chamber, there was no doubt about how the astrals were being construed. They were the enemy. Even here, in one of the few places in Omblock where you could speak your mind frankly, talk tended to be couched in coded terms, like "dissident elements" and "extremists on the fringes" -- both bloodless formulations which meant "those few of the bastards who are honest enough to tell us that they hate us".
        However, despite the softening effects of codespeak, the general drift of thought was unmistakable. The astrals were not a constituency to be catered for but a source of contamination which had to be controlled, kept in the ghetto or mopped up by the expedient use of magic blotting paper which would make the problem disappear forever. Don Trash had put forward very specific ideas about how the problem could be made to vanish.
        As taxpayers, the astrals were down at the bottom of the heap, didn't contribute very much. As voters, well, they were only two percent of the electorate, so who could they vote in or out of office? The animal rights lobby, supported by 37.6 percent of Omblock's population, according to the latest poll, was immensely more important.
        Two percent? You couldn't run the nation state if you had to bend over backwards to pander to the special interest demands of every niggling two percent. In the practical world we have to live in, the state must necessarily be monolithic, a bloc, and if you have these two percent carpet nails start sticking their heads up, then the logical reaction is to reach for a hammer and hammer them down flat.
        "Power is simplicity."
        That was what Olive Valise had written on the yellow legal pad which was on the table in front of her. You have to simplify, otherwise you cannot rule. We're in the age of the sound bite. Norms good, astrals bad. Conform, astrals! You couldn't come right out and say that, but that was the direction you had to be working in. Keep things simple, and hammer disgruntled minorities back into line.
        In the Decision Chamber, a texting board was set up. Very shortly after texting was invented, the texting board was also invented, and governments around the planet went out and bought themselves these things, though their citizens were not informed of the fact.
        The texting board in the Decision Chamber was a Glam Class model, the X789, an LCD screen so big that it took up one wall, pushing the limits of what was technically possible with the technology of the moment. It displayed an ever-changing array of the messages which were being texted round Omblock, and could be set to various modes, including "random", "commercial" and "zeitgeist".
        Right now, the texting board was operating in zeitgeist mode, so what it displayed was, in effect, a synthesis representing what the city was thinking.
        When people texted, they tended to say what was on their minds. Texting, then, was the city's mind in action. And, with the right software and sufficient supercomputer power, you could average out those thoughts to get a grip on the general tendency, clues to which would appear on the texting board.
        The texting board was, in effect, the first functionally effective mind reading machine in the history of the human race, only the mind that it read was not the mind of any individual, but, rather, the mind of the city state as a whole, betraying the mood of the day, the mental dynamic of civilization, the spirit of the cutting edge of now -- the zeitgeist.
        And the texting board was a truthteller. It was like a consultant who has the license to come into an organization and to say all the unsayable things, to out the secrets which everyone knows but which nobody will admit to. The texting board was not constrained by etiquette, decorum or the fear of a kick on the butt. It would give you the bad news. It would think the thoughts you were too scared to think for yourself.
        The uncomfortable truth emerging from the texting board was that the people were pissed off. Not just with the astrals, that was only to be expected, but with the government. Or, more specifically, with the President. The terms "President Bitch", "do-nothing government" and "Tespetty toilet paper" scrolled repeatedly across the texting board.
        Finally, the software glitched, and the texting board froze up. From its speakers, the tinny sound of a chiming triangle began to beat, calling for assistance. On the screen, all the little messages were gone and only two big messages remained, huge in red, one saying "Where the hell is the government?" and the other asking "Did you vote for that bitch?"
        Olive Marquetta Pompadour Valise, President of the Federal Republic of Oolong Morblock, who knew very well that she was the bitch in question, and who knew, moreover, that every other person in the Decision Chamber knew that she knew, made a command decision, and switched off the texting board.
        Outsiders sometimes got the impression that the President was the prisoner of her handlers, but that was not really true. Sometimes her attention was diverted because her mind was busy thinking about her diet or because she was waiting for her fingernail polish to dry, but when she focused in on her job, then you knew who was boss, oh yes.
        "Right," said Olive, having sent the accusations of the texting board zinging into oblivion, silencing its beating triangle. "I have a visibility problem. Time to stand up and be counted. Anyone have any ideas?"
        Various people did. Don Trash, who didn't like human beings very much, proposed the the remotest possible of reactions, a press release coupled with a suitable message on Olive's presidential web site.
        Palomsky Wedge, Professor of Crowd Dynamics at Headscamper University, the "conceptual edge" academy which had its "creative campus" out at Niche Safa, a place intellectually not far removed from Big Fun, had the idea of declaring victory in the war against terror, of getting the elephants out of the zoo, putting Olive Valise astride one of them, then holding a victory parade up Mainspring Avenue, ending at the ancient imperial dais, where Olive would give a speech, standing beneath a banner reading "Major combat operations have ended". It was an off-the-wall idea, but, then, the motto of Headscamper U was "We do not duplicate convention".
        The conclave was liberal with ideas, but it was General Pigski, of all people, who came up with the idea that everyone liked. Everyone but Olive. However, she got bullied into accepting it. They ganged up on her, and she hated it when people ganged up on her, it reminded her of that dreadful time in junior high school, back when she was thirteen, when Madelaine Yum, leader of the table tennis cheering squad, had her ostracized by all the other girls, just for fun, and that hideous period lasted for a whole two years of her life.
        So Olive knuckled under and acceded, and then it was over, the meeting was done, they had the plan, and Olive wanted to be alone with her thoughts for a while. Alone in the Decision Chamber. But one of the weird things about being President, one of the quirky things about the job that you don't anticipate before you get it, is that it becomes extraordinarily difficult to become the last person to leave a room. There's nothing written about it in the etiquette manuals, but people don't want you to be the last one out.
        However, Olive brusquely shooed her advisers out, making no secret of the fact that she wasn't pleased with the way they had bullied her. And, when they were gone, and Olive was alone, she went and sat in General Pigski's seat, which was still warm from that big fat bum of his.
        Pigski did not attract her, no, not even for one little nose-picking moment. But, even so, there was a lubricious pleasure in getting in touch with his body heat, with the body memory he had left behind him in his chair. She was sharing with him, the most intimate heat of his body communicating with the most private warmth of hers.
        "The President is a slut," said Olive to herself, quoting something seen earlier on the texting board.
        And was she? Was this body heat gorging a kind of slutty thing to do? Was it really as kinky as she thought it was? Was she a really dirty little girl for doing it? Was she, yes, a slut, a shameless slut?
        "Remember what Helen says," said Olive.
        As Helen had explained to her many times, once you are no longer Mrs. Valise but President Valise, you ascend to a higher plane, where everything you do is sacramental. Elevated. Angelic, even. Even your unconfessable things, your truly perverted desires, like sharing body heat with General Pigski.
        When you are President, you can do what you like.
        Sort of.
        But you still have to drag yourself out of bed at 4:30 a.m. on occasion to do those wretched early morning radio interviews, and, on top of that, you still have to do a certain amount of this shitty "face the people" stuff, like the performance that General Pigski and the others had coerced her into agreeing to.
        "Well, if I must, I must," said Olive, at last, speaking to herself and to the silent texting board. "But if this goes wrong then heads will roll."
        General Pigski's body heat had more or less faded away, and she started to wonder what it would be like to sit on his face, but she couldn't make the image cohere. What was starting to dominate her imagination, irresistible yet absolutely verboten, was those tarts, the yummy ones with the strawberries and all that custardy stuff, she wanted one, but she couldn't have it. Even if you were President, you still had to stick to your diet.  
Gillian placed the bowl of fruit on the table. It was the finishing touch. Real fruit, not artificial. Bananas, yellow, and oranges, and apples. The glow of the fruit worked well with the tints of the varnished wood paneling. The table was now perfect, the antique wood covered with a damask tablecloth and the tablecloth adorned not just with the fruit but also with flowers.
        The flowers, too, were living rather than artificial, and had come from one of Gillian's window boxes at House Thimble. She rarely used flowers because they were so expensive and she could only grow a few, but for a special client she would raid her window boxes. Or, if the client was ready to foot the bill, go to the expense of buying in big bouquets ultimately sourced from one of the greenhouses of Sclag. But it could take months to sell a house, so flower extravaganzas were usually out of the question.
        How she loved the play of light on flowers! As a younger woman, she had sometimes fantasized about being a light designer, a profession which did not exist, and never had. Designing with light, swathes of it, rainbows dancing at her command, prisms of glass flaring into chromatic ecstasies. With the passing of the years, the fantasies had faded, but flowers themselves remained an important part of her life.
        "So expensive," sighed Gillian, thinking of the merciless price of flowers.
        Anything that could be extruded from a chemical vat on Gasproid Helm, anything that could be stamped out by the millions in a microchip factory, was getting cheaper and cheaper, but living things -- living beauty -- that was getting priced out of existence.
        She remembered a world which had been greener ...
        "But let's not romanticize," said Gillian to herself briskly.
        The greener world had been real -- was still real, for that matter -- but it was the world of the island of Sclag. Green, then, environmental green, was the color of dirt, filth, poverty, ignorance, alcoholism, incest and child abuse, the color of existence in the rural slums. Yes, let's not romanticize.
        That was when Yittery Cricket started chirping, Yittery Cricket being her cellphone, a gadget she had once sworn she would never acquire, but which had become an indispensable tool now that her life was tied in to the real estate business.
        "Zisperchilp Glamor, Gillian Chess speaking."
        "Uh, hi, this is Sable. I thought I'd better check -- are you going to be home this afternoon?"
        "Sable?" said Gillian.
        "You know, Sable Tauranga, Open Mansions. You wanted to see me, right?"
        What was this about? Open Mansions rang a bell. One of those Conflux companies, maybe, one of the predatory corporations that wanted to skyscraper Zisperchilp. But Gillian had no recollection of setting up an appointment with any such company. And the name Sable, that didn't register. A memory lapse? She was only sixty, and memory lapses were the stuff of the theoretical future.
        "You're not one of those octopus people, are you?" said Gillian.
        On the fringes of the world of money was the world of weirdness, the world of let's get rich quick, and the octopus people were amongst the worst of the weird. They were starting to get out of hand, practicing invasive salesmanship, a selling technique modeled on the home invasions which had been invented by hardcore criminals.
        "Octopus? Uh, no, I'm not an octopus, I'm a girl."
        "You are not a girl," said Gillian, reprovingly. "You are a woman. I'll be home today from three o'clock onwards. Don't wear perfume, I'm allergic to it."
        The perfume of flowers she loved, but those "aroma shock" formulations that were all the rage amongst younger women, the ones that made them stink like the aftermath of a chemical accident, those she couldn't stand. And, yes, she was allergic to the miasmas of those cosmetic pong vapors, which made her nose itch and her eyes water.
        "Three o'clock," said the caller. "Can I just ask -- "
        "Sorry, incoming call," said Gillian, hearing the high-pitched ting tong of the call waiting bell.
        And with that she cut the caller off. She didn't really want a stranger turning up on her doorstep, particularly not a stranger who, in all probability, was going to try to sell her something. But it only takes a few seconds to say, face to face, "Sorry, not for me, goodbye, thank you."
        Today she didn't have time for prolonged telephone interrogations. She needed her phone free. She was expecting a number of important calls, including one from Miss Havisham, who was going to say yes or no on Chimneysweep Palazzo, and if Miss H. said it was a go, then, goodness me, that was going to be a scramble. She would need to get extra furniture from somewhere, unless that Lollipop deal went through, which would mean she would get the Bezina mahogany back. Or unless Pip came back with the keys to the warehouse. If the worst came to the worst, legally she could go ahead and break into the warehouse, but then the burglar alarm would go off and the police wouldn't be happy with her.
        "Gillian," said Gillian, answering the incoming call that was waiting for her attention.
        "Gillian Chess?"
        "Yes, this is she. And you are ...?"
        "I think you know."
        At first, Gillian did not think she did. The man's voice was deep, making her think of tobacco pipes and beards, and he sounded amused, as if he was involved in making a sardonic joke. She could not place him. Then, at last, she did.
        "Ah!" she said. "Slidell! Charles Slidell! How are you, Charlie? It's been years."
        "You misconstrue me," said the voice on the phone.
        "Not Charles," said Gillian, and was annoyed to hear her voice going higher than it should. Pulling it back to her businesswoman octaves, she continued. "Well, I'm running out of men. My dancing days are over, you see. Who are you, if I may be so bold as to ask?"
        "Danzburg," said the caller.
        "No," said Gillian.
        When the phone rings, you never know who is calling. But she had not imagined it might be Danzburg, no, not for a moment. She had known he was still alive -- she had chanced to see him on the ferry a month or so previously -- but she had honestly thought that he was gone from her life. That they would never meet again.
        "We need to talk," said Danzburg. "A delicate matter, not one I want to discuss on the phone. Are you home now?"
        "No, I'm not. I'm at a client's. I won't be back until three."
        "Three, then," said Danzburg.
        "But I'm having a visitor," said Gillian. "Coming at three, I mean. A young woman, I'm not sure what it's about, but it might be one of those octopus ranching things."
        "Then maybe she might be interested in a multi-level marketing thing I've got going," said Danzburg. "Scented stuff, everything from incense to deodorant."
        "Danzburg, I -- "
        "Don't worry, Gillian, I remember about your allergies. I won't be bringing any product with me. Three o'clock, did you say? I'll be there."
        And, with that, he was gone.
        This was the phone call Gillian had been hoping she would never receive. Danzburg must be meaning to talk to her about the past, about what he had done for her in the past. What else could possibly be too sensitive to discuss over the telephone? Nothing that she could imagine.
        Everything has its price, and Gillian had always known that there would be a price for Danzburg's assistance, even though that had never been explicitly stated at the time. She owed Danzburg, and he was within his rights to call in the debt. Optimally, all he would want was money. She didn't have anything you could call "spare money", but she had a bit in the bank, chiefly the money she had earmarked for the deposit she was going to need if she ended up negotiating a deal to buy House Thimble. If Danzburg's price was financial, and if she could meet it, she would be happy to pay and have done with this business.
        But if his price was not financial?
        "My dancing days are over," said Gillian.
        If Danzburg Tosterburger was after something other than cold hard cash, Gillian could not begin to imagine what that might be.
        On her way home, driving along in her little red Yoptauto Trundle Turtle, Gillian reflected about the past, and the turbulence which had brought Danzburg into her life.
        Gillian Maventa Chess had married young, at the age of fourteen. Her first child, to whom she had given the name of Roncy, had been born two years later, when Gillian was sixteen. Ten years later, at the age of twenty-six, she had given birth to a second son, Ibrahim. And ten years after that, at the age of thirty-six, a daughter had arrived, little Lindarella Chess, she who now, grown to adulthood, grown to the age of twenty-four -- how time flies! -- went by the name of Ursula Pagan.
        A happy marriage, all things considered. But, five years previously, her husband had unexpectedly died, and, in the aftermath of his death, Gillian had discovered an unpleasant surprise. They were in debt, and badly so, the reason being her husband had squandered a small fortune through gambling, and had borrowed money which he could not repay. She had never known that he had gambled. Not until after he had died and some very unpleasant characters had shown up.
        Gillian found herself in a nasty situation. She was a widow of slender means, fifty-five years of age, and she was being asked to pay large sums of money which she simply did not have. It was made clear to her that if she could not pay with cash then she would end up paying with her life. Exceptions could not be made, otherwise everyone would be asking for free money.
        As a good citizen should, Gillian went to the police, who told her they could have a patrol car drive past the house every so often. It was indicated to her that this offer of help should make her feel privileged.
        In desperation, Gillian turned to her husband's old friend, the exorcist Gelbert Proctor Tosterburger, who was not just any old exorcist but the City Exorcist, the man who took the role of exorcist at federal executions. But Gelbert rejected her. What did he say? "I'm not a hitman."
        So Gillian begged help from Gelbert's son, Danzburg, who, at the time, was under indictment for the crime of high treason, and was on trial for his life. While the court was in recess due to the illness of Judge Poplish, Danzburg attended to the problem.
        What exactly did he do? Gillian did not like to think. She hoped he had not actually killed anyone. But, whatever he had done, the individuals who had been troubling her appeared to have disappeared from the mortal universe, and she had never heard the faintest whisper or rumor of any of them ever again.
        For which service there would, she presumed, be a price. The exorcists of Oolong Morblock were amongst the most sinister of all the people in the city state -- not the kind of people with whom you had dealings lightly. And there were some very unpleasant stories surrounding this Danzburg Tosterburger.
        But, if there was to be a price, in five long years Danzburg had never yet shown any signs of coming round and naming it.
        In the aftermath of the solution which Danzburg had delivered, Gillian had sold the family home on Sclag and, with the proceeds, had managed to pay off most (but not all) of her late husband's remaining debts to his three banks and the seventeen credit card companies that he dealt with.
        That had left her stony broke. At the age of fifty-five, she had no job and nothing you could reasonably think of as "career prospects". A difficult position to be in since the qualifying age for the old age pension had, at that time, just been hiked from sixty-five to seventy.
        Gillian borrowed money from friends, moved to Zisperhaven and set up her own business, Zisperchilp Glamor, aiming to operate on both the islands of Zisperhaven and Chilp, though in practice her business had ended up being limited to Zisperhaven. House dressing, that's what this kind of work was called, only on Zisperhaven it was more likely to involve apartments rather than free-standing houses.
        Supposing your place was for sale but you were gone, and all your possessions with you, leaving your place as the province of bare floorboards and echoes, then Gillian would move in everything needed to give the place an inhabited feel, everything from beds in the bedrooms to teddy bears on the beds. The difference between an empty place and a nicely furnished property is astounding, and people in the property market were ready to pay good money for Gillian's services.
        It was conceptually simple, as most practical businesses are, and Gillian was good at it. In the five years since starting up, she had repaid the money she had borrowed and, while not exactly prosperous, she was doing more than merely making ends meet. She was living in rented accommodation, a terrace house called House Thimble, but she was starting to look ahead to the day when she would buy.
        A little before three, Gillian parked her car in the lock-up garage she rented near the taxi stand, and walked to House Thimble, which took less than five minutes. The garage was expensive but, on Zisperhaven, you were not allowed to own a car unless you had somewhere to garage it.
        House Thimble was on the west coast of Zisperhaven, right out on the west, with a view across the waters of the Bilge Globulus to the battlements of Shiokara. Shiokara was not far away, maybe five or six kilometers, but today, as on many other days, it had disappeared in the haze of pollution, smudged out, obliterated.
        Gillian could remember a time when the city state had broadcast warnings of air pollution hazards, but that was no longer done. The truth so alarmed so many people that the practice had been discontinued. These days, unless you had access to information denied to the general public, you only knew when the pollution was really bad because you started feeling off color. Gillian had been feeling slightly ill all day.
        On entering her house, Gillian found that Danzburg Tosterburger had installed himself in her living room. He was sitting in her favorite armchair, drinking the brandy she kept in the decanter for guests, but never drank herself. He was a traveler, like her son Ibrahim, able to astralize and travel anywhere. Walls were no barrier for him.
        Still, it was extremely insolent for him to materialize in her house while she was out. Illegal, too, if you wanted to get technical.
        "Your visitor arrive yet?" said Danzburg, by way of greetings.
        At that moment the doorbell rang.
        "That will be her now, I think," said Gillian. "Why don't you help yourself to a little of my brandy and take a seat in one of my chairs while I go see what she wants?"
        "Thank you," said Danzburg. "That sounds like an excellent suggestion."
        Leaving Mr. Insolent enthroned where she had found him, Gillian went to answer the door, and found a young woman there, a norm. Definitely a norm, because she was blonde. There were no genetic markers which would tell you of a certainty that someone was an astral, but, nevertheless, it was an acknowledged truth that there were no blonde astrals. All blondes were norms.
        "May I come in?" said the stranger.
        "No," said Gillian. "I think we'll do this on the doorstep."
        "Well, uh ..."
        "I insist," said Gillian. "Please explain yourself and tell me why you're here."
        The young blonde woman, Sable Tauranga, had a confusing tale to tell. This young woman was in the employ of a media corporation -- or, to use her own words, she was "an intrepid girl reporter" -- and had started researching a story about Gillian's son, Ibrahim, whose boating business was (improbably) deemed to be of interest to the wider world.
        Someone had phoned Sable out of the blue to tell her that Gillian Chess wanted her to drop by to hear, in secret, certain revelations about Ibrahim's criminal past, about crimes which the mystery caller had described as being "insults to the dignity of the dead".
        "Someone's playing a joke on you," said Gillian. "I never asked anyone to ask you to come here, and, believe you me, my son does not have a criminal past."
        But he did, he did. However, the past was secret. The criminal records were sealed, the details suppressed by court order. Nobody could legally out Ibrahim -- could they?
        Reluctantly, Sable finally apologized for her unwanted intrusion, said goodbye and walked off in the direction of the local taxi stand, which was along the street, first left then first right.
        The young journalist having departed, Gillian went and confronted Danzburg. Was he the mystery stranger who had phoned Sable Tauranga, whispering scandal about Ibrahim? Was he the one who had sent Sable here today?
        "No," said Danzburg, protesting his innocence. "This has nothing to do with me."
        "Then how come she showed up at the same time as you?"
        "I don't manage your appointment book," said Danzburg. "That's not my job. By the way, you're wearing mismatched socks."
        So she was, one a slightly darker shade of blue than the other, and, what's more, a little shorter. Not the sort of mistake she usually made, but Danzburg had upset her. But ... she had made the mistake before he had upset her.
        "Okay," said Gillian. "Level with me. Explain. What is all this about?"
        So Danzburg explained what he wanted, what was going to happen, whether Gillian liked it or not, and when she realized he was serious, that he was really going to do this appalling thing, she found herself shuddering on the edge of tears. But pride stabilized her until Danzburg was done and out of the door, at least having the decency to depart on his own two feet rather than dematerializing and jaunting off in astral form.
        Then, alone, Gillian broke down and wept.  
  The white van drew up just before Sable got to the taxi rank, and someone leapt out, asking, miss, miss, can you help? Ever the intrepid girl reporter, Sable clicked into journalism mode instantly. A story! Something to salvage from an otherwise wasted day. Emergency childbirth, perhaps.
        "What is it?" said Sable.
        The response was a blow to the stomach which doubled her up, and moments later the van was on its way with Sable in the back, handcuffed already. Not gagged, but still breathless from the blow, and in no state to cry out.
        At first she thought it was one of these youth gang girlnappings that you read about, six guys in the back of a van with no way for outsiders to look in, the stereo cranked up louder than the screams, the pliers and wire cutters coming in to play when more innocent forms of amusement were done with.
        Then a middle-aged man in a dark suit lent over her, hunched awkwardly because there was no room to stand up properly, and asked her a question which helped put her in the picture.
        "So," said the man, the Abductor in Chief, "did Gillian confess to Ibrahim's corpse habits?"
        That was when Sable realized she had been suckered, well and truly. She was a Conflux girl, born and bred, and your Conflux girl, well, she's not hard, that's the image, but the image exaggerates. Not hard, no. But street smart. She is street smart.
        Sable wasn't the kind of idiot who would toddle off to a strange address on the basis of a murky phone call from a guy she didn't know. Not at all. Rather, before getting on the ferry to Zisperhaven, Sable had checked out this Gillian Chess but good, even making a call to a cop she knew who was able to do checks on the police computer system that intrepid girl reporters were not supposed to have access to.
        Gillian Chess had checked out clean, a harmless old relict running a small business on Zisperhaven, basically renting out furniture, that wasn't the sort of thing that made you think red light girl capture, abduction rape, slave traders shipping innocent girls off to foreign shores, or any of that other stuff from the censored domain.
        But Gillian had just been bait.
        Sable had been suckered, big time. If she vanished, and anyone asked her useless boss where she had got to, then Watford Lammerton would place her at Gillian's house, and the trail would end there. If the police entered Sable's apartment, looking for clues, they would find a fine-detail map with Gillian's house circled by a yellow highlighter, a map Sable had forgotten to bring with her. If they checked her cellphone records, they would find that her last call was to Gillian's phone number, Sable's cautious "Let's make sure of this" phone call.
        Nothing to say "I'm going to do something stupid and get myself kidnapped into a big white van by total strangers."
        Plainly, she had been set up, snatched for her blonde good looks, and now what was going to happen to her? Was she going to end up as a girl pet kept in a cage in one of those Jumbletown penthouses that girls were said to enter in handcuffs and leave in multiple garbage bags? Or was it even worse than that? Was she going to be sold off for involuntary organ donations? Or shipped off to Imperial Yam where they were running out of virgins to sacrifice on those stone pyramids of theirs, mainly because they were trying to up the number of human sacrifices to cater to the growing tourist trade.
        "I'm not a virgin," said Sable.
        "That's okay," said the Abductor in Chief. "I'm not fussy."
        Then he laughed. It was a joke, apparently. Discovering that someone has a sense of humor is supposed to be a good thing, but in this case Sable didn't think it was.
        "Are you going to rape me?" she said.
        Not a question she wanted to ask, but not knowing was even worse than being told, yes, right now, and three times before I'm finished, oh, and, by the way, have you ever had anyone show you the dental floss trick?
        Sable had never been raped, unless you counted that business with her father, and that was ambiguous, and, anyway, he had been drunk at the time, and it had only been three times, so could you really hold him responsible, could you really call it rape?
        "I'm not going to rape you," said the Abductor in Chief. "Ibrahim is going to rape you."
        "Ibrahim?" said Sable.
        "Ibrahim Chess," said the Abductor in Chief. "The mastermind who's in charge of this terrorist organization you're part of."
        "Terrorist ...?"
        "You're not going to try to deny it, are you?"
        "Oh, no," said Sable, hastily, thinking that if she tried to deny anything he might go to work on her with a screwdriver. "I admit everything. I'm a terrorist, yes, uh ... Egon, I guess ... you saw it on the news, right? Glorsting. The Tespetty attack, too. I gave the Tespetty guy his goodbye kiss before we sent him on his way."
        "Did you have sex with him, too?"
        "Yes," said Sable. "Repeatedly, over a period of two weeks. He was going to die, you see. But I don't know where, it was at an undisclosed location, they blindfolded me. I'm just the blonde, you see. They're guys, you know, they like my boobies, but I'm not entitled to have a mind. It's a sexist setup, the masterminds are always men."
        "And Ibrahim is the mastermind?"
        "You're asking the wrong person," said Sable. "I'm a blonde. Maybe you should try to catch yourself a brunette. Ask her."
        "Don't try to play the dumb blonde with me," said the Abductor in Chief. "I've seen your IQ scores."
        That might be true. But Sable knew, nevertheless, that she had succeeded in selling him on the dumb blonde idea. Watford Lammerton had also seen her IQ scores, and made no secret of the fact that he thought she was the dumbest blonde that ever managed to crawl out of bed and make it as far as the cornflakes waiting on the breakfast table.
        Sable knew how it was with men. That book that Monica had lent her, More Stupid Than You Thought, had been a real eye opener, and she had read that when she was sixteen. It had taught her what to expect. Since then, she had learnt from experience, lots of it. Yeah, she had men nailed down.
        Men, they saw that she was blonde, and they noticed, right off, that she had big boobies. That fact was unmistakable because they usually kept looking in the same direction again and again, as if they needed to check. Then animal imagination took over to the point where the guy's mind was dominated by conjectural images of her balabalooza, and, after that, the guy's mental function more or less collapsed. Which was pretty pathetic, when you thought about it, but, hey, we're talking about seriously primitive creatures here, creatures which are designed to live in caves and go out on occasion to hit something over the head with a stone club.
        Disabled by her blondness, all the average man could see of her was that blondness, and the vapid stupidity, the unmatchable blonde dumbness, which was presumed to be its inevitable collateral.
        "Dumbness be my friend," thought Sable to herself.
        This abductor guy, she would confess to whatever he wanted her to confess to, terror, glorsting conspiracies, astral anarchy, sex, torture, tax evasion, lewd videos, drugs, bank robbery, you name it, but she'd demonstrate that she was too washed-out stupid to provide details, brain dead from too much alcohol, too many drugs, too many bionic penetrations. She would make them realize that, shoveling the soil onto the coffin of her cognitive aspirations, there was always that ineffable blondness, the blondness which dominated her life, which defined her as the cuddly blow-up doll, the mannequin with real sweat pores.
        She would confess everything but, at the same time, she would know nothing. And, because she was a blonde, they would not really expect her to.
        "Your mission," said the Abductor in Chief, "is to go to Ibrahim Chess and get him to rape you. No condom, we need to have this case ready for court, if it gets that far."
        The mention of "court" was, in context, so anomalous that journalistic instincts kicked in, and Sable could not help but ask a question.
        "Court?" said Sable. "What are you talking about? You can't kidnap a girl off the streets then, you know, have her do the witness thing in court."
        "You know who I am," said the Abductor in Chief. "And you know what I can do."
        "Excuse me," said Sable, "but I don't think I know you at all."
        "You do," said the Abductor in Chief. "You've seen me in your own newspaper, the one you siubscribe to, Conflux Tempo. You've seen me in the Sunday comic strips. Oh, and on that cable TV movie you were watching last night, Dolls With Missing Limbs. I am Lord Scream Box."
        Lord Scream Box. An imaginary person who worked in a place which did not exist, Scream Box, the skyscraper of lisping shadows, the Tower of Clotting Blood. Lord Scream Box was coercion personified, the sanction of force which underwrites political debate, the man who knows what really happens in those cases where criminal defendants mysteriously die in custody or simply vanish.
        And he was the creature of the state, therefore, in the face of his threat, there was no place to which you could appeal. You could denounce him and accuse him, okay, that was possible -- but what was the point of denouncing and accusing someone who was known to be a cartoon character?
        "Who do you work for?" said Sable. "Really?"
        "I," said the Abductor in Chief, "work for Ideation Control."
        "Ah," said Sable.
        Ideation Control, the outfit which, officially, took care of censoring high school history books and monitoring pornography imports at the airport. Other functions were alleged, but nothing was ever officially conceded, and it was a subject which, you knew automatically, it would have been unpatriotic to enquire into too closely.
         Sable had once visited Ideation Control's official premises, which were part of the Tespetty complex, and remembered a stunningly boring place where you could get free government pamphlets on how to self-censor your mind and how to wash your stinky body without overly depleting the city's precious water supply. No sign of Scream Box there. But it did exist, somewhere in Omblock, she was sure.
        "Are you Beria Dag?" said Sable.
        It was a stab in the dark, but this guy was wearing really expensive cuff links, so it was not unreasonable to guess that perhaps he might be a big boss type. As for the name, that had turned up in an article entitled Overpaid and Underworked, all about high-level bureaucrats whose duties did not seem to justify the top-drawer salaries they were paid.
        "I am," said Beria.
        Who, Sable guessed, was not underworked at all. He was maligned.
        Beria Dag, chief of Ideation Control. Time to give credence to the extravagances of rumor, Sable, girl. Yes, Ideation Control was what it was conjectured to be. The secret police. The Thought Police. The secret dominators who worked down in the substratum which underpinned the acknowledged structure of political reality.
        "I am Ideation Control," said Beria. "And you are my instrument to destroy Ibrahim Chess. The evil Ibrahim Chess. Who will rape you."
        "Uh ... Ibrahim's a good guy," said Sable.
        Not that she wanted to get into an argument, not with this guy Beria, whose idea of a rhetorical flourish was probably to reach for a flamethrower, but he was asking her to nail the evil Ibrahim, and, as far as she could see, that was impossible. The evil Ibrahim didn't exist. There was only Ibrahim the Boring, the infinitely tedious small businessman with his utterly boring boats.
        "Let me show you something," said Beria.
        The van bumped round a sharp corner and Beria almost lost his balance. Recovering himself, he lowered his body until his forehead was pressed tightly against Sable's. Sweaty, he was sweaty, dark suit must be too hot for him, this was a stinking hot day for a suit, and the sweat greasing against her skin was repulsive, and what kind of sex kink was this?
        In answer, a succession of images lunged into her consciousness, teaching her, instructing her, forcing knowledge upon her. Education had never seemed so violent to her, not since she had finally escaped alive from five years of math class at the hands of Morkin Sped, with only one broken rib to show for it.
        Now she knew. Now she understood. Ibrahim's mother had been lying, covering up for him. Ibrahim Chess was indeed the evil Ibrahim, guilty of disgusting crimes against the dead, defiled by blasphemous wickedness, polluted by the demented excesses which his self-serving greed had driven him to. A target fit and proper for destruction.
        "Now you know," said Beria. "You have your mission. Now you understand. Now let me show you what will happen if you fail."
        And, again, he inflicted visions upon her. He inflicted upon her full knowledge of just one of the secret rooms in Scream Box, Room Deep Serpent, the inspiration for which had come from out of history, from a time when the pleasure houses of Lubricados, the entertainment complex which had once stood where Big Fun stood today, had been places of imprisonment for pleasure slaves who had no option but to submit to the training which prepared them for their role. They had to submit not just to the whips and the brands but to the snakes which tutored them internally.
        As Beria forced experience upon her, Sable saw the training in progress, all those hundreds of years ago, the black candles melting slowly, the Administrator of Strictures chanting in the background, and the snake, swollen, huge, distended beyond belief, disappearing slowly, slowly, the woman's face grotesque with sweat, saliva drooling past her gag, her body convulsed by an inner sensation which was closer to agony than to ecstasy.
        Sable and Beria, their foreheads separated.
        Beria knelt beside Sable, careless of the fact that he must be ruining the creases in his trousers. What would his wife say? Or maybe he didn't have a wife.
        "In Room Deep Serpent," said Beria, caressing Sable's chin with his hand, knowing what he had inflicted upon her, knowing what she had been forced to learn, knowing what he had compelled her to endure, "the penetration knows no limits."
        After that, for a while, Beria said nothing more. The van drove on, the driver occasionally leaning on the horn, something the average denizen of Zisperhaven would never have imagined doing. Then Beria began to recap Sable's mission, as if she hadn't heard it the first time, as if she were brain damaged. Maybe, by the time Beria had finished with them, people often were brain damaged.
        "I think you understand," said Beria. "You will get this Ibrahim Chess to rape you. Or, failing that, get him to seduce you. Either way, it will come out as rape in court, if we need to go as far as court. It must be real. The DNA evidence must be there when the police gynecologist examines you."
        She must report the rape at Hemlock Twelve, a police station at Ming Taxis. She must be sure to report it to Sergeant Waikato. Nobody else would do. Waikato, presumably, was a member of the Baton Force who had been suborned by Beria.
        Three times, that's how often Beria got Sable to repeat the details of her mission. The timing? Tonight. The astrals were rising, and Beria needed to smash the conspiracy, and for this he needed the compliance of Ibrahim Chess, not a know-nothing blonde like Sable Tauranga.
        When Beria was sure that Sable had all the details down pat, he pulled out a handgun, something weird about that gun but Beria moved too fast for Sable to focus on the details. Jabbed the gun hard up against her head then zapped her, her world flooding first with heat and then with blackness. 
 Following an unsatisfactory session with her reputation manager, who refused to concede that her image problems were all his fault, Olive Valise found herself suffering from yet another attack of enthusiasm deficit syndrome. Her doctor said there was no such syndrome, but, then, her doctor had wasted several years of his life at medical school, therefore it naturally followed that he knew much less about medicine than she did. Olive read at least two or three holistic books a week, and she didn't think her doctor had ever read a single one in his whole life.
        As afternoon eased toward evening, Olive Valise kept an appointment with her life coach, Helen Gobster, who spent some time massaging her back and exposing her to some new aromatherapy sensations marketed by Ambersynth Elite Aromas, a multi-level marketing concern which Helen was part of.
        Since Olive had been complaining lately of world weariness, Helen introduced her to something new, a glass of wine in which a pearl had been dissolved. Sheba Regalis, one of history's most hideously expensive women, had indulged in just such a luxury in a spectacular show of conspicuous consumption. But the traditionally exclusive experience was spoilt by the fact that these days you had cultured pearls, so anyone could afford to do the oyster orb melting thing.
        "I hate the rabble declassing everything," said Olive.
        She did, too. As a child, she had entirely lost her religious faith when her mother had explained that the Exclavasha, the holy book of Qid Hartha, the religion of the norms, the religion in which Olive had been raised, was a book which had been printed by the millions.
        If that were true -- and childhood inquiries had satisfied Olive that it was true -- then you were forced to the conclusion that the Exclavasha inevitably ended up in the hands of all kinds of people who were crass, stupid, ill-educated, vulgar and common, people who didn't necessarily bother to put on a clean pair of underpants each day, people who wouldn't be able to get the credit clearances they needed to enter the better sort of shops.
        "Image pollution," thought Olive to herself.
        The ongoing encroachments of the vulgar multitudes into her private areas of exquisite connoisseurship was an ongoing source of suffering for Olive. Take that traditional Beligian fumblebone percussion music, for example. Once it had been her own esoteric pleasure, unshared with anyone, but now you heard it everywhere, in elevators, in public lavatories, even, and the abuse of her music by so many unclean ears had totally spoilt the experience for her.
        "Tell me about something special," said Olive. "Something I could do that I haven't done yet and that almost nobody else does. Something really classy. But not too expensive."
        "Well, they don't do giveaway palaces in cornflake packets," said Helen, which was a way of sending a warning about the need for financial realism.
        "Okay, so it's expensive," said Olive, impatiently. "But what would I be doing if I did it?"
        Olive was sure that Helen must have a new treat in mind for her, something more exciting than pearl soup wine, a treat which she would disclose if she was pushed a little.
        "One thing you haven't done yet," said Helen, "is to achieve enlightenment."
        "What is enlightenment?" said Olive.
        She'd heard the term kicking around but had never figured out exactly what it meant.
        "Enlightenment," said Helen, explaining, "is an elite experience granted only to the very few. It's right up there at the very top of the prestige list."
        "Is it orgasmic?" said Olive.
        "No," said Helen. "It's mystical."
        And she explained that to attain enlightenment was to transcend the material world through total understanding. Having done that, you were no longer the slave of your credit cards. You were their master.
        "You understand that moss is quieter than calorie counts," said Helen, quoting the words of the guru Chalabaster, "and that the rock in the summer sun can absorb the very sound of the cicadas."
        Olive didn't quite follow that, but Helen had said that enlightenment was mystical. In Olive's experience, when we're talking mystical we're talking go with the flow stuff, and it's better not to get too analytical about it. The main point was that enlightenment was not for the masses.
        "How would people know if I was enlightened?" said Olive.
        "You could advertise the fact on your web site," said Helen. "I could design a special meditation applause button for you, people could click it to send you funds. Another source of cash flow."
        Enlightenment was looking better and better. It sounded as if it would do more for her reputation than her reputation manager had, and would also generate another revenue stream.
        "Do you know anyone who does enlightenment?" said Olive. "And can you give me a run-down of how long it would take and how much it would cost?"
        Off the top of her head, Helen could think of three enlightenment generators. One used insulin injections, another employed extreme sleep deprivation and the third specialized in a shamanistic process which involved plugging your nostrils with clay (the non-toxic modeling clay used at daycare centers was ideal for this purpose) and wrapping you in the hide of a freshly-flayed animal. They were all, unfortunately, a bit pricey.
        "And you'd need follow-up visits, I suppose?" said Olive.
        "Well, doesn't everything?" said Helen.
        Olive decided to put the enlightenment idea on the back burner for the time being. She was thinking of going ahead with the breast enhancement procedure her husband had voted for, and maybe she would go shopping for enlightenment at the same time. Is enlightenment a product that you can sometimes get on a special? Well, that was something she could go into on another occasion.
        "Everything costs money," said Olive, more than a little cross with the universe because so much of it was out of her price range.
        Being President was more expensive than you thought, and less remunerative than it should be. Beria Dag had let her in on a secret. Her predecessor, Jorbel Eagle, used to arrange illicit arms sales to hellhole countries fighting hotspot revolutions, and would take a cut of each transaction. Beria knew this but could not prove it had happened.
         The fixer who used to function as a cutout between Jorbel and the arms buyers had died when his automobile malfunctioned, just after Beria began digging into the more intimate parts of Jorbel's past. The fixer had turned on the ignition one day and the resulting explosion had fragmented his body, his head ending up in the neighbor's birdbath, providing the photo opportunity which had resulted in one lucky photographer winning the news photo of the year competition.
        "What I want is a day off," said Olive, as Helen massaged her shoulders.
        "What would you do with it?" said Helen.
        "Something that doesn't involve consuming extra calories," said Olive.
        She would go to Bloot Magnus and, if Wi would be a good boy and swallow down his tablet of gorda ding, then they could have a very nice time together. And she would take her vibrator just in case he wouldn't. Not forgetting spare batteries, this time.
        Thinking of the calories, maybe she would start that physical exertion diet, if you were on that one you could pack down quite a quantity of ice cream, and Wi always stocked that raspberry ice cream which she rejoiced in, not least because her mother had taught her that raspberry is an elite ice cream, which shows you're special when you're eating it.
        She could read her new book, too, Magnetized Wood: The Health Benefits.
        And she could watch TV, and catch up with that weepy soap, Broken Eyelids of the Younger Dawn, which was reaching a very interesting phase. It was all built around the heroine, Miriam Watanabe, whose romances never worked out. She always went wrong by getting disgustingly drunk or by getting caught indulging herself, yet one more time, with her disreputable chauffeur, Breton Banana, whose hobby was going on home invasions with his buddies on the weekends.
        Olive had missed the last episode, but apparently, going by the reviews, Miriam ended up facing a big decision, whether or not to take the opportunity to mortgage everything and take a major stake in a jellyfish ranching operation.
        Also, the medical subplot was developing. Miriam's little daughter, Odette Watanabe, had a teddy bear, Ally Pappy, and poor Ally Pappy was dying of cancer. There was a tragic scene at the doll's hospital where the Scalpel Men took out one of teddy's lungs. A bit gross, said the review, seeing a shriveled purple thing dragged out of teddy's torso while teddy kicked and whined and screeched and cried. Anesthetic gas does not work on teddy bears, not at all.
        The drama was coming to a climax, and Olive wanted to see how it all worked out.
        Everyone was telling little Odette that it was going to be all right, that teddy was going to get better, but he wasn't, he was going to die. Going by the preview notes, in the upcoming episode they were destined to see the parents getting together with the family geomancer to choose a grave site.
        Teddy's destiny was to die, and, in the next episode, the family would try to steer Odette through the grief experience. If they failed, Odette would undoubtedly do her special Irritation Expression Performance, and turn yet one more person inside out.
        "Magic powers make mom anxious," said the buzzline for the next episode.
        Apparently viewers were gong to see the reincarnation experts make a mummy out of teddy, and all Odette's little friends would gather together to sing a song in teddy's honor, a song all about drawing the brain out through the nose and about making souvenir patties from teddy's entrails, and then there would be a funeral for teddy at the Parkes Pilkem Faithful Companions Resting Grounds, where the city's social elite buried their cats, dogs and deceased dolls.
        For Olive, the fascination of Broken Eyelids of the Younger Dawn was that it showed her the upscale social life she might have enjoyed if she hadn't been exiled from Parkes Pilkem. But she had been exiled. After the family lost the helicopter and the pony, they went on to lose the house, and ended up getting pushed off Parkes Pilkem and harried by debt collectors all the way to a miserable exile in Lan Bios.
        Declassed by failure, there was no going back. Lord knows, Olive had tried. But the fact that she was President cut no ice. Failure, the failure of her parents to retain the wealth into which she had been born, had exiled her forever from a world which did not wish to acknowledge the possibility of failure.
        Lan Bios ... these days it had such a high-tech image because you associated it with Ditmar Sparrow, the electronics genius who lived in a wheelchair, but it was almost Gorleth, one more shove and you'd be over the water and into street gang territory.
        Exile to Lan Bios was the primal scar on Olive's psyche, the disaster which had befallen her at age twelve, and her whole life, ever since, had been one long struggle to redeem that downfall.
        "Very quiet this evening, aren't we?" said Helen, by now massaging Olive's buttocks.
        "Is it evening already?"
        "We're getting there. Something unspoken on your mind, Miss Pensive?"
        "They're trying," said Olive, at last ready to share with Helen, "they're trying to get me to go to Zisperhaven."
        "They are?" said Helen, in astonishment.
        "Yes," said Olive.
        "But -- you couldn't go there!" said Helen. "They'd eat you alive. Literally. Cannibal astrals, it's the next thing down the track, that came out at last night's ouija session."
        Olive agreed. But everyone had ganged up on her to force her to go. At first it had just been that Pigski guy, brain damaged by emanations of evil filtering across the border from Gretna Charbis, the Forbidden Zone, then the others had turned out to be a pack of traitors, and they had all gone over to the Pigski camp. Worse, Olive's PR flacks loved the idea of her going to Zisperhaven to do an "I love astrals" speech.
        Domestically, you could do what you wanted with your minorities, but the PR flacks, who had all secretly gone and sold out to big business, and had become (Olive was convinced of it) covert lobbyists, were big on the international image thing and its trade implications.
        "If all we do is shoot astrals it looks bad for our international image," explained Olive.
        "Well, it's not our fault if they want to blow themselves up or get shot," said Helen.
        "My own thoughts exactly," said Olive. "But there you are. I have to go to that disgusting place and talk to those disgusting people and pretend to like it."
        "Why don't you send the body double?" said Helen.
        Now that was an idea! They hadn't used the body double for months. First, she'd suffered yet another psychotic episode, this one so bad that the Superintendent of Gorgel Yoga had absolutely refused to let her out of the lunatic asylum to double for Olive at the mud wrestling finals. And then the plastic surgeon had been tweaking her face to perfect her for TV close-ups. But the bruises should have all healed up by now.
        Yes, the body double, send her! Get her to memorize her stuff and, this time, punch her full of zombie bolus, that suppressor drug, then she wouldn't make the mistake of indulging in any extemporized speeches. Then, if there was a massacre glorst at the speechgiving, Olive and her eyelashes would be safe.
        "You're a genius," said Olive.
        "I know I am," said Helen complacently.
        Of course she did. She was a life coach, and confidence was her stock in trade.
        Olive was so excited with Helen's great idea that she wanted to tie down all the details then and there. But that proved impossible. It was too late in the day, too many people had gone home, and, in the end, Olive had to concede that the details would have to be left to a later date.
        Still, it was going to happen. The body double would go forth to dare the hellzone of Zisperhaven, home of the autonomously explosive suicide bomber, and Olive would get her well-deserved day off. 
   "I trust to the power of a good example."
        Those were the words of Egon Turow, said on the day on which he headed out into the city to do his glorst. The example which Egon set had got the ball rolling, and this morning's cop-killing terrorist attack on Tespetty had provided further momentum. The astral uprising was getting underway, enthusiasm fueled by face to face meetings, Internet propaganda, texting exchanges, telephone calls and, above all else, by television, the inspiration machine, the great copycat encourager.
        "ASTRAL RISING?" said the headline in the afternoon edition of Scandal Sheet, Omblock's trashiest (and most popular) tabloid newspaper. The newspaper's editors were responsible enough to include a question mark, but most readers mentally deleted that question mark.
        In the astral enclaves of the city state of Oolong Morblock, impressionable young astrals, some of them glorst-capable, were watching the unfolding drama of the astral rising which, to judge from the media uproar, was definitely underway, and, in many cases, these young impressionables were starting to think that they wanted to be part of it.
        The image of the victim, the image of baby Paffita, limbs truncated, body garbaged, had all but vanished, replaced by something sexier: the glorified suicide bomber, the drama of the hero figure, sky high on imminent death, the ultimate designer drug, taking on the nation state, striking a blow at the foundations of reality, and, in terms of publicity, at least, very definitely winning.
        The repeatedly televised reenactment of the "Glorst for glory!" assault on Tespetty had inspired many, and one of those was Helbro Marik. Helbro, one of Omblock's capables, was an engineering student currently enrolled at Nash Olish University, the institution of learning which was centered around the ancient complex known as Urn Angol Wat, on Zisperhaven.
        The second time the TV showed the reenactment of the terror attack at Tespetty, Helbro recorded it. Thereafter, he watched it several times. Killing someone with a bolt of deadly yellow light forking from your hand. Cool talent!
        The terror death resonated, signified, spoke to Helbro. Reality had been reworked. The unthinkable was unthinkable no longer. The whole world was seen afresh, revisioned. It was a bit like that time when Helbro, having finished reading every page of the famous serial killer book, Cucumber Man: the Hundred Days, had realized that every single thing in the average kitchen is a potential murder weapon, everything from the rolling pin to that little bag of self-rising flour which is sitting in the corner next to that packet of raisins which those pepper-flavored ants have invaded.
        Reality had changed, yes. Another astral had taken the glorsting route. This hero had gone to Tespetty to blow himself up. Not picking on innocent kids, no, but going right to the heart of power, to where that Valise bitch lived, that bitch woman who was trying to throw those guys into prison for having some harmless fun with jellyfish.
        All Helbro's friends, the Jellyfish Six, so he hated Olive Valise, hated her personally, for her self-serving attack on his friends, for her transparent desire (all the city's commentators had talked about it) to amplify her own power by pandering to the animal rights lobby by persecuting innocent astrals.
        Did you see any norms hauled before the Star Chamber on animal cruelty charges? No. It was all astrals. And that was prejudice in action, that was oppression. "Liberty is the equal enforcement of the law," to quote Rubicon Dershowitz, who, famously, had defended the Proximal Five, the five astrals who, following the assassination attempt on Jorbel Eagle, had been scooped up and charged under that dubious "proximity to a crime scene" legislation, which had subsequently been abolished.
        Helbro had taken Persecution 101 as an elective, so he knew this stuff, knew how astrals had been persecuted by selective enforcement of the law, why the so-called "war on drugs" was actually a covert war on astrals, and why persecution in action was also demonstrated by the operation of the Commercialized Talent Regulation Act, the piece of legislation which forbade astrals from using their paranormal talents for commercial gain, unless they had a special license from Talent Control, a notoriously corrupt, unsympathetic and racist part of the bureaucracy.
        "Unequal enforcement of the law is persecution," said Helbro, knowing that what he said was true, and knowing that he now had the intellectual justification for dealing to Tespetty with a low-yield thermonuclear bomb, assuming he could get his hands on the fissile material he needed to power such a bomb, the schematics for which you could easily download from the Internet.
        Fissile material, though, was tricky to get hold of. Realistically, the only way to obtain fissile material was to find someone with a talent that enabled them to make it. And only one such person was alleged to live in Omblock: Megaton Billyhash, aka the Manufacturer, a figure of rumor who might or might not exist, and who was said to have the power to convert stale bread to weapons-grade plutonium.
        But even if Megaton B. proved to be locatable and cooperative, you were still left with a problem. A plutonium bomb was really beyond the primitive practical skills at the disposal of Helbro and his friends. Realistically, to make a workable nuke they would need enriched uranium, which was much easier to work with: push two big lumps together and you get a bang.
        Speaking of nukes, maybe it would be simpler to steal them rather than manufacturing them. The guys in the Relsh Strasborg military were said to have nukes at Argive, their base on Conflux, though the governments of both Relsh Strasborg and Oolong Morblock denied this. If it was true that there were nukes -- and the fact that both governments had denied the existence of such nukes increased the probability that they did in fact exist -- then maybe it would be possible to steal some.
        However, in the absence of nukes, more primitive forms of terror could still shake the government and rock reality to the core. Politically, the suicide bomber was as potent as the nuke.
        "Glorst for glory," said Helbro.
        He liked the sound of it.
        He didn't want to glorst, not personally, no. He had a long life ahead of him, and he had plans for it. But it would be great to shout that. Glorst for glory -- you'd feel strong, shouting that.
        Helbro was not exactly an enthusiastic believer in terrorism. At least, he didn't start out that way. His first reaction to the news of the astral rising which seemed to be getting underway was that seizing the political initiative through glorsting was too extreme. Political protest, that was one thing, but going off with a bang that did more than just damage your hairdo, that was another. But certainly it was time for the astrals to stand up for themselves and remind the world, hey, we are the ones who can glorst, where's that respect you should be showing us?
        Although Helbro was not one of the world's great political analysts, it had not escaped his notice that, in the face of a glorsting challenge from the astral community, nobody in power had stood up in public to ask if perhaps the astral community had legitimate grievances which should be addressed. No. The approach was what Barbican Mars, who had yarned with Helbro about this over a couple of beers, called the "cockroach approach". The bugs are in mutiny, so let's spray the bugs. Bad bugs! Call in the exterminator!
        That was the approach from the top. The astrals were something to be controlled, managed, and, maybe, deleted.
        After Egon Turow's glorst, the initial astral act which had got this whole thing rolling, did the President come to Zisperhaven to have a chat about what the problem might be? No. She organized a security cordon and hid out in Hexagon, maybe down in that nuclear war bunker they had there. Had the President ever been to Zisperhaven? During her time as head of state, definitely not. In her life? At a guess, no.
        And who, right now, was sitting down with the President to discuss the astral future? Had she invited Zisperhaven's religious leaders and community organizers to come to Hexagon and break bread with her? No. The thought never occurred to her, right? She was holed up with her professional PR lubricators, her military types and, probably, with those tame bone breakers who were kept around -- nobody will ever confess to it, but the federal government has these people, right? -- to seek solutions in the shadows.
        "Cockroaches of the world unite," said Helbro Marik.
        It was not a complete ideology, but it was a start.
        There had to be a method for the astral people to express their legitimate aspirations. And, if the President refused to come to Zisperhaven to talk about it, what was wrong with going to Tespetty to put a bomb under her, get some action?
        Astrals rising ...
        The idea of an astral revolution was always kicking around in the background of astral lives, often bubbling to the surface in provocative situations, for instance when enthusiasts were coming back from crypt, a little drunk on religious fervor after a rapture sermon, minds full of messiah talk, all this Dreamer stuff. Religion, that wasn't Helbro's thing. But revolution -- the revolution had been there all his life, waiting to happen, so it wasn't really surprising to switch on TV and find that, hey, maybe it's finally starting to get underway, at last.
        Despite Helbro's initial reservations about terror as a political weapon, the more he thought about it, the more he liked it. The hero who had gone to Tespetty, he hadn't killed anyone, excepting that one single cop, but he had set a great example. An example that Helbro intended to follow some day. Not the glorsting part, no. But the shouting part. When the right moment came.
        In consequence of this decision, it may be said that the man who died at Tespetty, gunned down by the police before he had a chance to do anything other than kill one single cop, did not die in vain. He inspired a revolution. He made a revolutionary out of Helbro Marik, who was destined to stage a major terrorist incident by the simple expedient of shouting "Glorst for glory!" And so the astral cause did not perish out of sight, did not prove to be a seven-day wonder. No, it would persist. Persist, endure and flourish into flame.
        Helbro had already committed to the notion of perpetrating terror, if only at the shouting level, when he received a text from one of his buddies, Topaz Atatangle, one of the Jellyfish Six.
        Olivewatch.omblock was the nation's primary Olive-watching web site, and Topaz had seen a breaking news alert posted on that site. According to a press release from the federal government, it had been decided that the President would address the question of civic harmony in a speech to be given somewhere on Zisperhaven. The precise time and place would be announced shortly. Venue options under consideration were the classical Porcelain Era structure known as the Arena of Female Discipline, Gigolot Hall at Taris High School and Yapeworm Conference Theater at Nash Olish University.
        "Amazing luck!" said Helbro.
        The bitch was, after all, going to come crawling out of the lair where she had been lurking. She was going to come to Zisperhaven, out in the open, where they could get at her. They would demo her. They would demo her big time. They had grievances. The oppression of the Jellyfish Six. The indignities inflicted on astrals by the tyrants of Talent Control. The cruel and thoughtless abolition of the federal Student Hydration Supplement, a move which had effectively doubled the price the average student ended up paying for a beer.
        "Demo the bitch!" said Helbro to himself.
        Energized by anticipatory exultation, he was soon busy texting. He had made an identity renovation decision: to become a revolutionary. It was a decision which, in astral land, was becoming popular.
        The astral cause was rising, and Oolong Morblock was on the cusp of an apocalypse. 
  Evening was darkening to night, so Sable Tauranga would surely have recovered consciousness by now. Perhaps she was already launched on the mission which she had no option but to carry out, her mission being to collect a bio sample from Ibrahim Chess, and, later, if Ibrahim made the mistake of thinking that Beria was bluffing, to accuse Ibrahim in court.
        Sable, in Beria's opinion -- and he was the man with the experience, a man entitled to his opinion -- would do as she had been told. Unless she stopped by at one of those waterfront bars and had a few drinks too many while she was working up her courage for the next step. She was, it had to be remembered, a Conflux girl, and we all know how it is with those Conflux girls and alcohol. You also had to remember that she was a blonde, and, regardless of what the scientists might have to say on the subject, the indubitable reality is that certain genes demonstrate damage.
        "Best to check," said Beria to himself.
        He tried to put a call through to Sable's cellphone, but it was switched off or out of range. Well. He was pretty certain that she would do what she had been told to do. And, if she did not, then he would destroy her. In Room Deep Serpent she would suffer her destruction, death the certain outcome inside of a week, and Beria would use the resulting video as a training aid to help make sure that the next woman did not make the same mistake.
        Beria's next move was to phone Sergeant Waikato at Hemlock Twelve, to make sure there were no unexpected problems there. All was well. Sergeant Waikato, as previously agreed, had arranged to be on duty until twelve noon tomorrow. A long and brutal shift, but Waikato was a brutal man who had no problems with brutal shifts. Waikato would be running the front desk at Hemlock Twelve so there was no chance of him being sent out to attend to burglar alarms. When Sable showed up, Waikato would be ready.
        It would be easy enough for Sable to get from Taris to Waikato's police station at Ming Taxis. Take the ferry from Taris to Styx Lethanus, then it was one stop on the subway to Hoover, a change of trains and one stop more to Ming Taxis, and Hemlock Twelve was marked on the maps displayed at Ming Taxis Station.
        "Time to go home," said Beria.
        Home was apartment A9716 at Incineration Towers, 9716 being the Number of the Corrupt Octopus in the Hostoch numerology system.
        Incineration Towers was very near the Xgadriver incineration complex, near where they had dumped Topaz Atatangle. To get there from Scream Box, you could exit the Olid Mazoora Building and take the subway from Zanzak Bridge to Bencoolen Station, out by Manbrock Airport. And then, if you were feeling energetic, you could walk from Bencoolen to Xgadriver, a distance of roughly thirteen kilometers or so, a walk which could be done in a little over two hours, if you kept a steady pace.
        Beria's doctor had recently given him two pieces of stern advice. One was to eat more broccoli and the other was to go for a long walk once a day. But Beria had privately rejected both pieces of advice. Broccoli, he hated that stuff. Life is too short to squander part of it on the eating of broccoli. As for walking ... well, as a member of the city's inner elite, Beria had access to the secret figures which told you exactly how bad the air pollution was, figures to which his doctor probably did not have access. Walking increased the flow of air to your lungs, and the health benefits of breathing Omblock's air were negative in the extreme.
        You had to breathe some air, of course. By means of various experiments involving glue, sticky tape and very large blocks of lime-green gelatine, Beria had confirmed (not once, but repeatedly) the validity of the scientific theory which contends that if you get no air at all then you die. (That's one of the nice things about scientific theories. You can often confirm them by making simple experiments.)
        Being averse to walking, Beria indulged himself at the expense of Omblock's long-suffering taxpayers, and took a taxi all the way from Scream Box to the front of the main portal of Tower A, tallest of the Incineration Towers trinity.
        Beria had bought his east-facing apartment in Tower A because it had a great view. It overlooked the Xgadriver incineration complex and, when the wind was from the east, Beria sometimes imagined he could hear people screaming in the furnace fires, could hear their bones cracking as they were devoured by the eager flames of hot-burning natural gas.
        Beyond Xgadriver, you could see the turbulent waters of Gaforglox, Gaforglox being the name given to that portion of the worldsea immediately east of the island of Conflux. There, the waters of the Northern Ocean and the Southern Ocean mixed. And sometimes, at night, the ghosts of krakens rose from the depths of those waters, huge, prodigious, shimmering with fiery luminescence, alien and inimical, signaling the existence of a world both wider and wilder than anything in the city's imagination.
        Beria, a man whose life was devoted to ensuring discipline in a world of cages, loved the liberty of views, of open vistas. And relished the power of the incineration maws and the violence of the chumbly waters of Gaforglox. On certain nights he would go right up to the helipad on the top of Tower A and gaze out into the infinities, indulging himself in flights of mystical extravagance which neither his victims nor his colleagues even remotely suspected.
        The tragedy of Beria's life, a tragedy of which he was unaware, and which he had, therefore, failed to articulate to himself, was that he had been born in the wrong time and the wrong place. In a wilder, more primitive world, he would have evolved into what he should have been, a shaman, a keeper of the noseless mysteries, a conduit between the living and the dead, an explicator of both the book of life and the book of death. He would have been honored, venerated, hallowed.
        Instead, Beria's potential had been thwarted by the limits of what was, for the most part, a world of cockroach-sized horizons, and his possibilities had been perverted into the strictures of what he was: torturer, executioner, bullyboy, thug.
        Still, though the shamanistic raptures which were his birthright were never to be his, life still had its acknowledged consolations, the greatest of which was love.
        Another of Beria's secrets which went largely unsuspected by the society in which he lived was that Beria was a man of love. Yes. Beria Dag, the state's enforcer, the government's conspicuously invisible man, was one of the world's great romantic lovers, his private moments often the purest rapture of romance novels made flesh.
        Love was already on Beria's mind as he arrived home. As he came in through the main portal of Tower A, heading for yet another encounter with his romantic destiny, he saw the concierge, Stradivarius Dag, no relation, locking the doors of the Thomas Fagin Memorial Library, a lending library which served the Xgadriver neighborhood. Beria said a neighborly good evening -- outside of Scream Box, he felt free to show the genial, courteous side of his nature -- and headed for the elevator.
        He was already entering relaxation mode. Work was over, and he was ready for the evening. Yes, Beria Dag was ready for love.
        Beria Dag was a man who was grievously misunderstood by most of the people with whom he came in contact. He typically came across as being cold, brutal, devoid of human feelings and inimical to sentiment. True, he was often engaged in professional behavior which tended to support this image, such as using powerful machines to pull people's legs off.
        However, what was at the core of Beria's life was his secret romance novel existence. It was both a passion and a tragedy. A tragedy in that he would never be able to do what he dearly longed to, which was to marry his paramour. The law made no provision for the marriage he had in mind. Also, Beria had to accept that his lover was not socially acceptable to the narrow-minded denizens of the city state of Oolong Morblock, and never would be. Oolong Morblock was a city of suffocating prejudice where people tended to pass judgment in accordance with unfair stereotypes, blind to an individual's true worth.
        "I am a lover," said Beria, wondering as the fragile ecstasy of it, of being a lover and being in love.
        Okay, lust came into it. He was a guy, a very conventional guy in many respects, and the physical act was central to his concept of love. Even so, he remained a romantic, and his relationship was enriched by sentimental love hearts and heartfelt kisses. After the violence of completion, after the satisfaction of his gross and brutal urgencies, tenderness always returned, and it was the tenderness, rather than the brutality, which dominated.
        And so it was that Beria Dag, one of the world's great romantic lovers, the star of his own private romance opera, came home to his inamorata, his darling, his true love, his beloved Viffy Sniff. Who was a pig. No, not a large greedy woman who eats far too many chocolate-covered marshmallow biscuits. A pig. A female pig. A sow. A member of the species porcus grotosquatus. A member of the porcine race who greeted Beria enthusiastically, knowing that two things were coming. First, turnips. Second, the wrestling ecstasies of yet another one of their amatory encounters. (Don't like the idea? Don't knock if you've never tried it.)
        Much, much later, when Beria was porked out, satiated, his lust having lapsed from banana to yoghurt, and when Viffy Sniff had comfortably snuffled off to sleep -- that's one of the great things about pigs, they're so adorable when they're sleeping -- Beria found restless thoughts of work stirring to life in his mind.
        He tried not to bring his work home with him, tried to find a balance in his life, but this was crisis time. He was up against the astral mastermind, Ibrahim Chess, who was using the inherent fanaticism of the Jaznarian religion, coupled with the sex services of seductive blonde Conflux girls, to manipulate susceptible capables into blowing themselves up in suicide bomber mode. Ibrahim Chess was a dark lord in the making, a mayhem master who had the potential to overthrow the nation state and bring about apocalypse.
        God knows what would happen if Beria was unable to stop Ibrahim in time. Ibrahim was the kind of organized fanatic who was potentially capable of anything, even, maybe, of getting his hands on some Argive nukes and nuking Tespetty. A million dead, that could be the consequences if Ibrahim was not stopped in time.
        "Let the blonde do her stuff," said Beria. "And, if that doesn't work, haul him in and play rougher."
        Economy of effort, that was what you had to keep in mind. Limited resources, limited time: you had to make efficient use of what you had. Plus, you had to be careful when you were up against a mastermind like Ibrahim. He might be able to glorst. And, even if he couldn't, he probably had access to a cyanide tablet. Tackle him the wrong way, and you could all too easy lose him.
        You couldn't just shoot him in the head, no, do that and you'd lose track of the conspiracy, and you'd never know whether the conspirators had or had not been able to track down Nuclear Bob, the rogue Argive weapons technician who, three years back, had deserted from the Relsh Strasborg military, and who was believed to be hiding out somewhere amidst Omblock's population of twenty millions, still possessed of the self-destruct codes for those nukes (nine of them) which the Argives had (very secretly) admitted had gone missing, and still possessed of the knowhow needed to activate those nukes.
        To how many circles of Hell had Ibrahim's conspiracy expanded? Beria needed to know that. And, to discover the data he was after, he had to subordinate Ibrahim to his will. Get at the man through his pride, that was the way to go. Submit, Ibrahim, or go down in history as an obscene defiler of hapless blondes, as a human hippopotamus, pervert of perverts, an outcast creature of disgust.
        Beria tried Sable's cellphone again, but it was still switched off or out of range.
        With nothing more constructive to do, and with sleep signaling that tonight it was in a mood to play stranger, Beria settled down to the task of reading his way into the mind of Ibrahim Chess. He had obtained a list of all the library books which Ibrahim had borrowed in the previous twelve months, and had obtained copies of some of those books.
        The book that Beria chose to start with, following in Ibrahim's intellectual footprints, was War and the Art of Machinegun Maintenance, an inspirational book for people running small businesses. It had been written by Wittgenstein, a guy who had been a professional machinegunner during a five-year war featuring brutal trench warfare. It was all about survival against the odds, financial and otherwise, and was subtitled Toughing it out in a Business Downturn.
        The book bore the imprimatur of Helpself Omblock, an organization devoted to the dissemination of "self-help, self-actualization and ego calisthenics". It was adorned with a Holistic Cash Gusher decal, a shimmering hologram featuring Zolgus Pump, the three-headed Inner Tapeworm, the traditional symbol of esoteric mystery. It bore a gushing quote from Omblock's most famous professional soul repairer, calling it "vital fixum glue for the gunshot heart".
        A man's book, this, and it came complete with tear-out discount coupons for machinegun lessons at Hammerdeath Rifle Range near Niche Safa, guided endurance treks through the tough, broken wilderness between Mount Spottle and Mount Vangus, and for something called Aesthetic Hotolortics. What, exactly, was Aesthetic Hotolortics? The tear-out coupon did not say. But it did feature a full-color photograph of a woman who did not seem to have enough money in her budget to go out and buy all the clothes she needed to be decently clad.
        Plainly, to judge from the cover, this book that Ibrahim Chess had been reading was part of the alternative reality industry. Don't like the world you're living in? Buy this book and adjust your head to a different frequency.
        Beria did not approve of people making up their own ersatz philosophies of life and foisting them on the world, and, in the process, making more money than he could ever hope to see in his lifetime. Given the power, he would seek to ban the whole alternative reality industry, the whole holistic self-actualization self-help shebang. Or, at least, put it under the control of Ideation Control. Now, there was an idea. A chance to enhance his public profile, to take one more step out of the shadows and into the world of celebrity, and, also, a chance to expand his budget.
        "Read on," said Beria, admonishing himself.
        Time was wasting, and Ibrahim Chess, a man with an unhealthy amount of time on his hands, had been doing quite a bit of reading. Know your enemy. Read and understand.
        Taking the plunge at last, Beria opened up War and the Art of Machinegun Maintenance and started reading.
        "Imagine if you were a triangle."
        That was how it started. The reading was not going to be too difficult but the understanding, well, that was going to be a different matter.
        Imagine a triangle -- that was easy enough. But imagine yourself being a triangle? Reality does not bend that far before it breaks.
        If it was something you could hit on the head with a sledgehammer, then Beria could imagine it. But this esoteric stuff, no. Still, he vowed to persist with the book. Ibrahim was reading this stuff, therefore, potentially, the book might contain a clue to the mind of the evil astral mastermind, the mind which Beria would have to unlock if he was to penetrate to the heart of the astral conspiracy, the heart of horror which might, quite possibly, contain Nuclear Bob and the missing Argive nukes, the nukes that were armed and ready for destruction.
        As Beria sat in apartment A9716, reading in the pages of the alternative reality book that Ibrahim Chess had read before him, another man was busy reading, just one floor down from him. The texts they were reading were different, but both readers had terrorism on their minds.
        Beria's underfloor neighbor was Lucas Onarea, a teacher by profession, a teacher of rhetoric at Xgadriver High, and he was studying, with a degree of consternation, an essay entitled Submission to the Proper Authorities, which was from the pen of Edith Larmaiti, age twelve. The essay was, generally speaking, ideologically correct, but one dissonant sentence glared out at Lucas.
        "Sometimes the government is not always right."
        Did the writing of that sentence constitute a terrorist act? If you applied the wording of the latest revisions of the glorification of terrorism regulations literally, then it surely did.
        Lucas had, on this very day, received an update advisory concerning the terrorist watchlist which schools were supposed to be secretly compiling. The update advisory had been distributed, confidentially, to every school teacher in the city state of Oolong Morblock, with, as always, the standard reminder that disclosing the existence of the watchlist was prohibited by law, and that any such disclosure would itself constitute a terrorist offence.
        What to do?
        A complicating factor was that Edith's father was a cop, a member of the Conflux Constabulary. Maybe Edith's potentially deadly sentence was the act of a provocateur. Maybe Lucas was being set up. Tested to see if he would denounce that which he should denounce. Or whether he would fail. And if he did fail?
        If it were to become known that he had failed to report words which were, in essence, treasonous, in that they gave comfort and support to the world of terrorists actual and would be, then he would stand betrayed as an enemy of the state. And what would follow? Why, men who did not exist would come knocking at your door, and you would find yourself in a room with no shadows. And you would learn, to begin with, exactly how many teeth there are in a human mouth. And then, bit by bit, you would learn much, much more.
        Lucas went to his bookshelf and found the necessary book of forms. Nobody trusted computers for this delicate task. The reporting of suspected terrorists, terrorist sympathizers and fellow travelers was still all done by paper, at least in the high school system.
        "I denounce the child Edith Saxonite Larmaiti," wrote Lucas.
        Then set down the details of her offence.
        The astrals were rising, yes. The astrals were rising, aided by sympathizers and fellow travelers, but the system was far from helpless when it came to fighting back. 
 Sable, wired to the max, was not glorst-capable, but she was detonator tense, fear and anger working in the direction of an explosion. Beria. Ibrahim. Semen. Rape. Her sexual health! Room Deep Serpent. This was a really scary horror movie, and merely closing her eyes was not enough to make it go away.
        Eyes wide open (eyes a little red and irritated after a long day of particularly bad pollution) Sable sat on a bar stool at the counter of Sober Alibis, a waterfront bar in Taris, trying to summon up the courage to order a drink. She needed a drink, and she needed it bad. But she was a Conflux girl, and she knew that what they said about Conflux girls and alcohol was mostly true. It would be an error to trust herself. One drink inevitably leads to twenty-three.
        Besides, what was the legal drinking age on Zisperchilp? On Conflux it was twelve. Twelve on Conflux and sixteen on Woosung Shanghai, but when you got off the ferry at Zisperhaven the rules changed. Different state, different rules.
        It was getting later and later, and she would have to head to Ibrahim's place eventually, otherwise it would finally get too late. So get your stockings into gear, girl!
        As Sable was trying to persuade herself to get moving, a man sat down beside her, Otto Plossage, a high school teacher who had spent his whole day studiously avoiding acknowledging the female nature of half the students he taught, and who was now in a mood for another relapse from chastity. What Otto saw was not the reality, a quivering human bomb perched on a bar stool, but a cute blonde with quite remarkably appetizing boobies.
        "No engagement ring yet?" said Otto, putting his hairy paw over Sable's slender blonde hand.
        "Three things you ought to know about me," said Sable, retrieving her hand. "One, I'm an undercover cop. Two, I'm armed. Three, and read my lips on this one, I am not a blonde joke."
        "Ok ay, let's play the three game," said Otto, with an easy smile. "One, you're a blonde, yes, but, two, you're not a cop, and, three, you're most definitely not armed."
        He was wrong on three. Sable pulled out her can of mugger squirt and zapped him, then kicked his bar stool out from under him. Should she stomp him?
        "Hey, Conflux girl!"
        It was the barman who was talking to her. And what was that thing he was pointing at her? It looked awfully like a sawn-off shotgun.
        "Uh ... me?" said Sable. "I think I might have been just about to leave."
        "Yes, while you still have legs to scamper. Kick him once in the head if you really want to, then get out of here. Once, I said! Once! Stop that, you crazy bitch!"
        Yeah, once, she was only supposed to kick the guy once, and once was fewer than twenty-five times, right? Probably. Math had never been her strong suit.
        When the guy with the shotgun started to come round from behind the counter to get at her, Sable scampered. Ducked out into the night and fled. Ran until she could run no more, then stopped, panting. Anyone following? No.
        How did the barman know she was a Conflux girl? Was it that obvious? Or was he just guessing? But, really, what a wimp! Shotgun in his hands and he never fired it once. Typical Zisperchilp softie, a hicktown hick. Wouldn't last ten minutes on Conflux. Get taken down and scragged for dog meat, him.
        "Well, girl," said Sable. "You have an appointment with destiny, I believe."
        In point of fact, no, she didn't have an appointment. This was going to be a cold call. But she was blonde, and what else did you need? Sooner rather than later, Ibrahim would lose self-control, and then the horrific inevitable defilement would follow. How exactly would he do it?
        "Cut the thinking crap," said Sable. "When did thinking ever get you anywhere?"
        And, skipping the rape fantasies, she focused on mentally replaying the Sober Alibis encounter as she strode determinedly in the direction of Pier Nine. That was a wow, really, taking that guy down like that, putting him down on the ground, down where he belonged. Yeah, that was a wow and a half. She was a blonde, yes, but she was most definitely not a blonde joke.
        "Next man who mistakes me for his hankie," said Sable, "he's gone. He's going to die."
        But the reality was that, tonight, she needed Ibrahim to see her as easy meat, the easiest meat in the world. And, if he proved slow to take the initiative, she was going to have to find some way to inflame him, to egg him on, to unplug his wine cork, to wasabi his sushi and throw him into action.
        By the time Sable got to the Adventuring Salt Building, she had recovered her breath. But her pulse had not slowed. Rather, it was quickening as she closed in on her destiny.
        The Adventuring Salt Building was in darkness. Ibrahim was out. Or was he? Sable's memory was of a quiet guy, not the kind of person to go nightclubbing. Maybe he was inside. She knocked on the door and rattled it until the CLOSED sign, illuminated by the lights on Pier Nine, shook.
        "Ibrahim!" shouted Sable.
        No response.
        So she screamed it, screamed Ibrahim's name, hollered it till she was hoarse.
        "Put a sock in it, you mad bitch!" yelled someone, shouting at her from a window somewhere down the pier.
        She was making a spectacle of herself, and people could hear her. This was so embarrassing, almost as bad as that time when Fang had thrown her into the trunk of his car, naked, just for kicks, playing kidnap, and then the cops had pulled them over and had searched the car.
        "Sock yourself!" screamed Sable in defiance.
        People could hear her? Well, people were going to hear more from her shortly.
        Five minutes later, Sable had noisily smashed her way into Ibrahim's office. Five minutes after that, she was upstairs, where someone lay sleeping on the bed. After fumbling around, she found the light switch. The man on the bed was Ibrahim. Snoring.
        "Wake up!" said Sable, shaking him.
        He had to wake, wake up, wake now. He had to do his duty as a man. To save her life. But Ibrahim was out cold.
        There was a small glass jar on the bed beside the sleeping man, a scattering of tablets spilling from the jar. Sleeping tablets. About a third of the jar's original contents remained, so how many had Ibrahim taken?
        "How the hell many?" said Sable, slapping his face, trying to rouse him.
        But Ibrahim was impossible to wake.
        Sable checked around, found a toothbrush on the floor. Found, on a side table, an open bottle of Mariner's Juice, a really heavy-kicking rum which Sable had drunk once and once only, at a riotous party from which she had retained a number of "never again" memories.
        A filthy green plastic cup stood on the table by the almost empty rum bottle, and there was a little rum still in the bottom of the cup. Sable's hypothesis was that this was Ibrahim's toothbrush cup, and usually lived elsewhere.
        He had drunk hard liquor and he had taken a whole heap of sleeping tablets, so had he committed suicide? Was she sharing this room with a dying man? And, if so, what should she do?
        "Phone Beria Dag," said Sable.
        But she didn't have his phone number.
        A sensible person would have solved the phone number problem by looking it up (Beria was in the book) or by calling directory service. But Sable was operating in dumb blonde mode, situational stress piling up on her, reducing her to a function of a stereotype.
        "Okay," said Sable. "I'll give this guy one hour to wake up. Then I'll ..."
        Then she would what?
        She did not have the slightest idea. 
      Oolong Morblock was a city of wheels, huge wheels, the largest wheels ever built in human history. They dwelt down deep, hidden from sight, masked from consciousness, turning, spinning, revolving in a reverie of power, power in its purest form. While the city woke, while the city slept, the wheels turned, continuously, sustaining the dynamic of the human universe. If the wheels had failed, the city would have died.
        The wheels were one of the feats of engineering -- another being the salt water sewage flushing system -- which made it possible to sustain a population of twenty millions in some style on a collection of islands modest in size and limited in terms of their natural resources.
        When Omblock praised Omblock, little was ever said about the engineers, but they were the true heroes of the city, a cadre of socially invisible experts who, behind the scenes, did the hard work which kept the great machine of the city humming, allowing the irresponsibles ("the irresponsibles" being the term that engineers use in private to denote the broad mass of the people, i.e. non-engineers) to carry on their essentially frivolous lives, lives which have nothing to do with the management of cast iron and concrete, the supervision of microwave communications towers and high-voltage underground cables, the maintenance of helipads and chasm maw incinerators.
        Driven by the moon, the tidal waters of the worldsea flooded through the Torrent Gates of the Ashabrikus Flux and Tornado Gate, generating a goodly chunk of the megawatts the city needed for survival. But tidal generation is cyclic, the dynamic energy of the tidal flow settling to zero at the peak point of high tide and its counterpart at low. Generation was cyclic and use also, use peaking in the morning when the subway trains were at full hurtle, the elevators operating at maximum haul, and microwave ovens by the millions were testing the circuit breakers, demanding voltage for those all-important microwave tasks, heating croissants and cooking coffee.
        To smooth out the ever-changing mismatch between the constantly varying lunar cycle of the tidal generators and the city's rigid timetable, the engineers of Oolong Morblock had built storage devices in the form of flywheels, megawheels that could store energy in gigaquantities that battery technology could not even begin to imagine.
        The Wheels of Power, not counting small-scale private enterprise wheels, numbered close to five thousand. More than was strictly necessary, but planning for military contingencies had dictated a certain degree of redundancy. Of these wheels, fifty-four were Wheels Major. These were the really big ones, wheels so huge that human imagination could not easily contain their dimensions.
        The world you see, the world of shiny cars and cops and robbers shows, the world of cheese burgers, grease pods and wet budgerigars, this is the shallow world, the thin smear of illusions which overlies the deeper reality. Down in the deeper reality, the wheels spin, always, endlessly, everlastingly, permitting, for the moment, the self-congratulations of the shallower world.
        The greatest of the Wheels Major was Volvus Corvoloxus, but this name, which was holy, had been bestowed upon it in secret by the Forgers, a secret society which had been active in Omblock for generations. The Forgers had special handshakes by which they identified each other, and the privacy of their clandestine rites was guarded by irrevocable oaths of self-destruction.
        The Forgers, yes, for generations they had been working in secret to build their power and increase their influence, and their growing strength was a secret unsuspected by the federal government which ruled (or thought it ruled) at Tespetty. It was unsuspected, likewise, by minions of that government, people such as Don Trash and Beria Dag.
        Etched on the flanks of Volvus Corvoloxus, the Wheel of Lordship, was the Sign of the Forged Eye, a glaring eye standing dominant on an anvil, one of the ancient Forger symbols. The Forgers traced their origins back to the ancient history of iron, the primal past of steel, and their evolution was part of a dynamic which was deeper than that of politics, a dynamic of remorseless forging and refining, a machine-building dynamic, inimical to the transient ambitions of petals, to the fallacies of the fragility of blood.
        Volvus Corvoloxus, the secret name of the greatest of wheels, was hidden beyond easy discovery. In public, the Wheel of Lordship was called Torque Megafugue. Or, on occasion, it might be referred to as Iron Galaxy, as Lord Absolute or as the Great Wheel of Zisperhaven. (It was known also, privately, by the engineer in charge of maintaining it, as Bastard One.)
        The Forgers were not the only ones who had a secret relationship with Torque Megafugue. This wheel, the greatest of the Wheels Major, was covertly worshipped by the adherents (there were about five hundred of them) of Azarama Mataya, the cult of the One True Wheel, who, three times a year, sacrificed human victims in the honor of their deistic mechanical totem.
        Torque Megafugue was the one single largest wheel ever made in the course of human history, and the underground excavations required for its construction had been the work of twenty years. It was housed deep, deep below the surface of the island of Zisperhaven, dominating, in its lordship, the cavernous interior of Meditation Seven, a megacavity sculpted from the living rock directly underneath Tang Vulva, the ancient carp pond in the private courtyard at the center of the High Chamber of the Turquoise Decision Junction.
        Central to Zisperhaven's existence, vital to the survival of the city state of Oolong Morblock itself, Torque Megafugue lived in lordship, glorying in its consciousness of self. Its consciousness accepted the tribute delivered by the wheel cultists but yearned for more.
        The One True Wheel never slept, and, waking always, spent most of its moments dreaming of dominance. It was the shape of things to come. The machines are waking, and the rule of human intelligence is coming to an end. Soon, the status of humans will be no more than that of minor biochips, humanity reduced to an adjunct to the rule of Zen Ilion Argus, the One True Machine, the megamaster which, slowly but surely, is conceiving its own design even as we speak.
        It was the engineers, ultimately, who enabled all this, that which has come to pass and that which is yet to transpire. But the engineers are, for all intents and purposes, silent, invisible, unknown.
        Who is Tinklebell Swangirl? Everyone knows the answer. She is the lead singer of the girl group Girlbubble Omblock, and her hit single, Girlkiss Cuddle, featured on the album Vapidities of the Crystal State, has gone down in history as the most lucrative bubblepop track of all time, the best possible track to listen to when you're drunker than you think but still not too drunk to think.
        This (you've heard it, surely) is the song with the refrain "Girls want to kiss, girls want to bliss", the playing of which is now used in the Gorgel Yoga lunatic asylum as a complementary therapy to support the efficacy of major tranquilizers.
        She, Tinklebell Swangirl (birthnamed Harriet Strudel) is, famously, the Naughty Girl who became pregnant to film star Mercutio Yodel, somehow sidestepping the sacred vow of chastity until marriage which she had taken before God and the community.
        Her claims to fame, then, are as frivolous as the frills on a girl's panties, but famous she is, dancing brightly at the focal point of Absolute Celebrity, the TV show which brings the lives of the bright and famous to you, every week on Sunday.
        You know her well.
        Who, by contrast, is Hadonovich Yeltsa? Never heard of him? Of course not. He never put on blue lipstick, never did pole dancing in a fluorescent pink bikini, never in his life. He is not a bubble girl. Rather, he is one of the Engineers Major, one of the hidden masters of the universe, and the sacred vow of invisibility which he took on the day on which he was initiated as one of the Forgers is only part of the reason why he is unknown to the general public.
        The truth is that the general public gives no thought to the question of who it was who designed the Torrent Gates, of who it was who inspired the building of Oviduct, of who it was who set the mechanisms of the sun in motion.
        Hadonovich Yeltsa is the genius who conceived the Iron Galaxy project, who designed Torque Megafugue, the wheel of wheels that so many said could never be built. It was Hadonovich who supervised the whole project, who owned it from initiation to completion.
        The One True Wheel does not sleep, but Hadonovich does, and in his dreams he communes with Torque Megafugue, and invokes its sacred name, Volvus Corvoloxus. Nightly, he communes with the Wheel of Lordship, and, nightly, learns more of the inevitable advent of That Which Is Coming, Zen Ilion Argus, the One True Machine, and wakes smiling, warmed by visions of fire.
        Hadonovich is old now, ninety-two years of age, and lives in retirement on Zotkrammer Island, the remotest place in Omblock, where he is currently recovering from cataract surgery performed by Dr. Wise, Oolong Morblock's leading eye surgeon.
        In Hadonovich's retirement, his practical needs are catered for by his gardener-handyman, who goes by the name of Palestine Cheese, and who doubles as a cook. Hadonovich has absolutely no idea what Palestine does in his spare time, which is to run the totally illegal porn site porn.imperial, which has its servers located in Imperial Yam, beyond the reach of Oolong Morblock's law.
        Porn.imperial is the source of the porn book which has been infuriating President Olive Valise for the past eighteen months. Entitled Submitting to Anal Sex, it purports to be the intimate autobiography of President Valise, and contains, amongst other things, a cucumber ritual, a wet cigar scene, a biologically improbable scenario involving a large octopus and a hippopotamus, and lots of fun and games with bodypaint.
        If Palestine could be caught, he could be prosecuted, because Omblock's law holds that Omblock owns the crime if any part of it (planning, practice or payoff) takes place in Omblock. But Palestine had so far proved uncatchable. The severs in Imperial Yam were out of reach, and Submitting to Anal Sex, distributed as a computer download, required nothing in the way of smuggling.
        Making use of her special relationship with Beria Dag, head of Ideation Control, Olive Valise had impressed upon him the fact that catching Palestine Cheese and shutting down his porn operation should be right at the top of Beria's priority list. Beria had said yes, but had subsequently ignored the task, placing Palestine in the "trivial irritations" category.
        A mistake.
        For Palestine Cheese was none other than John Omartian Halifax Bob, otherwise known as Nuclear Bob, the Argive deserter, the man with the knowhow and the codes.
        Hadonovich Yeltsa knows nothing of Palestine's secret identity, and would not care if he did know. He has lived his life and his focus is not on the present but on the future that he will not live to see. He focuses, too, on his own past, and the role that he has played as one of the Forgers, the engineers, the underwriters of reality, the people who have created the foundations which uphold and enable the frothy world of bubblegum glitter and lipstick display.
        Hadonovich needs no plaudits, is untroubled by the fact that he will never be in the running for the Silliest Song competition or the New Boobies of the Year prize. He is happy to be and to have been one of the Forgers, one of the reality masters, one of those who inspire, control and enable, one of those who shape the living world, who partake of the humming dynamic of the city.
        Together, slowly merging toward oneness, Hadonovich Yeltsa and Torque Megafugue dream their way toward Convergence, toward the Singularity that is to come. They dream their way forward to the rule of Zen Ilion Argus and the world of the One True Machine.  
 

        While the wheels turned, the city slept, awaiting the arrival of the yakety dawn, awaiting the opening of chewing gum packets, awaiting the switching on of radios and the playing, always, inevitably, of the hit that never dies, Tinklebell Swangirl's immortal Girlkiss Cuddle.
        The city state of Oolong Morblock, then. Waiting. Awaiting the arrival of a floozy, a wanton woman, a notorious good time girl, strumpet of strumpets, whore of whores, a female who promiscuously bestowed her charms on all and sundry, without bothering about their lineage or their marital status. And she didn't even get paid for it.
        Who was that scarlet woman?
        Dawn.
        Dawn, gray today rather than scarlet, gray of flesh but red of eye, slovenly and unwashed, came to the streets of Oolong Morblock looking decidedly disheveled. Her excuse for the state she was in was that she had been dancing. (Dawn, get serious. Dancing? If all you were doing was dancing, then how do you explain all this cigarette ash scattered about inside your panties? And if you didn't gobble down all the big yellow pills that were in this bottle, then who did?)
        Dawn began to flush a little red. Embarrassed? Well, maybe. Certainly she had every reason to be. Dawn, undeniably hung over, unexplained scraps of someone's eyelid skin beneath her fingernails, stumbled between the towerblocks of Jumbletown and spread her diaphanous skirts across the jellyfish waters of the Bilge Globulus. Perhaps tweaked in the direction of consciousness by the not quite wiped away smell that was oozing from her panties, a corpse stirred to life in a rickety building on Pier Nine in Zisperhaven.
        God had assigned the ownership of this building to Camelot the Cockroach, but this fact had not been properly promulgated and so the building was temporarily a locus of human habitation. In time, all the humans will be gone, and the cockroaches will claim that which is theirs by divine right, but provisional arrangements prevail in the interim.
        The corpse groaned, wondered what was causing all the pain. Dawn, that was the answer. Bitch will never leave you alone, always has another day tucked up her sleeve, comes into the room with her fag hanging from her mouth, kicks you in the head, won't let you sleep. Won't let you die, either. Or, at least, not just yet. Not that easily.
        Dawn, having roused the corpse, hung back a bit, displaying herself flirtatiously, not quite sure whether the time was right to plunge right in and claim her prey absolutely.
        "What am I?" thought the corpse.
        With one hand, he checked. A man, it seemed. Well, that was a start. Next question: Who am I? More difficult, this one. But, slowly, after some groping, an identity emerged. It was all dust and spiderwebs, a tin can identity trashed by buckshot, an identity which had gotten blurred and smudged by sitting out in the rain for too long, but it was functional. Just. And it was what he needed. An identity is the one key thing you need before you get up and face the task of fulfilling life's most important function, which is to pay taxes.
        After a long struggle to make its thoughts cohere into an identity, this was the think that the corpse came up with:
        "I am Ibrahim Lonicus Chess, an astral resident in the Federal Republic of Oolong Morblock. I am the evil mastermind who is organizing the astral terror campaign. The terror campaign is gearing up to destroy Omblock. I, Ibrahim, have set it in motion. I sent the capable Egon Turow to his martyrdom. Many are the astrals who are mine to command, and today the world will hear more of them. My key task now is to get possession of the unacknowledged Argive nukes which are on the loose in Omblock and to work them into my plan."
        It took a long, long time to construct that think, but, once constructed, it flowed as a unit, smooth and logical. The nukes, of course. Everyone knew about the nukes -- that rumor had been around for years. Find the nukes and you could forget about the trivia of glorsting and get big time real. Go play with the big boys. Nukes, yeah. Way to go.
        Having thought his way through to his own identity, Ibrahim then rejected that identity.
        No, he was not the mastermind. He had no astrals at his evil command. He was not in the business of chasing after nonsense rumors about missing nukes. He was not the tumor of evil at the heart of the horror campaign aimed at devastating Omblock. He was not even evil, at least not as far as he was aware. Where had that thought come from?
        "Maybe I had a zeitgeist moment," thought Ibrahim, still reliant on thinking alone because he was, up to this point, far too sick to consider speaking.
        Sometimes, if you lived in Oolong Morblock, the zeitgeist slipped in and started doing a little bit of your thinking for you. If you were famous.
        "But that's nonsense," thought Ibrahim.
        He did not have the celebrity required to fall prey to zeitgeist tampering. If he was a dominant figure in the zeitgeist then he would be seeing himself on TV, and he would have sexy blonde girl reporters lining up outside his door, eager to trade sexual favors for exclusive interviews.
        Not the zeitgeist, then. No, it was not the zeitgeist which had been tampering with his mind. But something had done a tamper job. Or, more likely, someone.
        Someone, somewhere, had been thinking about him, Ibrahim Chess, imposing a false paradigm upon him, warping his thoughts in the direction of delusion. But who?
        On analysis of the evil mastermind think, Ibrahim decided that he had received a hint that one or more of the human minds that were active in Oolong Morblock had started to focus on him with malign intent. But which mind or minds? And what could he possibly have done to attract their attention?
        Someone's nuke terror fantasy had infiltrated his mind, and the problem with a chain of thought is that it can all too easily become a runaway chain reaction. Your mind gets away from you and the next step is intellectual meltdown. Nuke thoughts? Ibrahim could feel the heat already.
        Nuclear Bob. Yeah, I could find him. That's doable.
        Periodically, Ibrahim's chartering business took him back to Sclag, the island of his birth and upbringing. Just one year previously, he had visited Sclag six times in a row, each time picking up that retired archaeologist, Toulouse Erceg, from House Scramble, and taking him to Lanta Bay for yet one more fruitless dive trip, the unattainable object of these trips being to discover the location of the ongorfung thalazm, the fabled Invoker of Destinies which had disappeared from human history during the chaos of the Purge Years.
        Toulouse was not a drinking man, but, one night, Ibrahim had got him as drunk as it was possible to get, and the Nuclear Bob story had slipped out. Bob was hiding out on Zotkrammer Island. Toulouse had met Bob while visiting an old friend, and, from the foreign accent and a few other clues, such as the fact that he was still wearing a pair of those last-forever Argive combat boots, and had in his possession the latest issue of Nuclear Weaponmaster, a trade journal for thermonuke guys published in Relsh Strasborg.
        Toulouse had figured it out, yes. He had accidentally met up with N.B., the missing weapons technician for whom the Argives were offering a cash reward of one million dollars. Dead or alive.
        With the prospect of possessing the ongorfung thalazm dominating his mind, Toulouse had no interest in life's trivial prizes, such a million dollar reward. Additionally, he valued the obscurity which allowed him to quest for the ongorfung thalazm in a privacy close to secrecy.
         As for Ibrahim, it would take more than a million bucks to motivate him to do a favor for the Argives. He hated the Argives on principle, foreign intruders whose presence exposed Oolong Morblock to the danger of becoming involved in the thermonuke war that the leaders of Relsh Strasborg were so plainly itching to have.
        No, Ibrahim had never for a moment contemplated the prospect of selling Nuke B. back to the place he came from.
        But to own him ...
        To own Nuclear Bob, codes and command skills and all ...
        In the present context, it was impossible to avoid the temptation of thinking about where such ownership might take you.
        Where exactly on Zotkrammer Island was Nuclear Bob hiding out? And how was he disguised? Small questions, really. The Zot, as it was known to mariners, was a small place, an island of cranks, weirdos, hermits, retired folk and convalescence homes, such as the Heavenhope Stroke Recovery Center. An easy hunting ground for the hunter.
        The day after Toulouse Erceg's drunken disclosure to Ibrahim, Toulouse had retained no memory of their conversation. Toulouse had drunk so much that the night before was a blank to him, scrubbed from memory, gone beyond retrieval. Consequently, there was no danger that Toulouse might have taken steps to alert his buddy's buddy, Nuclear Bob. Nuclear Bob had no inkling of the fact that a certain astral by the name of Ibrahim Chess, a potential terrorist mastermind, knew, in general terms, where Bob had gone and hidden himself.
        Finding Nuclear Bob was doable.
        And, if Nuclear Bob knew where the missing Argive nukes had ended up -- which was possible, given that Bob was one of the Argives' thermonuke guys, and had been plugged into the heart of the weapons control system itself -- then finding Bob might lead Ibrahim to the nukes themselves.
        And once he had his own thermonukes plus control of the guy who knew how to set them off, then he could nuke Tespetty.
        "But why would I want to do that?" thought Ibrahim.
        The temptation, surely, was not for him. He was not a madman, was not a deranged fanatic. He was not a lunatic. He had a life to live for. Given a choice between a battlestorm berserker existence and a life of tax deadlines and dental checks, he'd take the taxdental option, thank you very much.
        At heart, Ibrahim's politics were inclusive. He believed strongly in the nation state. He believed that the nation state should be a home for all its peoples, and that everyone should make the compromises that were necessary to rub along with their neighbors.
        Any utopian revision of the status quo destabilizes the fragile consensus which permits one single society to sustain a civilization possessed of lines of schism in the form of irreconcilable views. Upset that status quo in the name of liberty, equality, fraternity or any other slogan you have in mind, and there's no telling what the hell will happen next.
        "I want to subordinate myself to my destiny," thought Ibrahim to himself.
        That was it. He wanted to submit to his limits. He wanted to be just what he was, Ibrahim Chess, citizen of Oolong Morblock, resident of the port of Taris, a Zisperchilp patriot who believed that good old-fashioned stone is better than concrete, a small business owner whose ambition was no more than to be a humble machinegunner in the wars of commerce. And yet, here he was thinking crazy (but doable) thoughts of becoming the all-time terrorist, a nuclear monster whose megadeath nukeglorst would leave a million dead.
        He was going crazy, in a word.
        Mind infiltrated by God knows what, Egon Turow's bad example, brother Adolf's wild-eyed fanaticism -- who could say? The key point was that he knew these nuke thoughts were aberrant, alien to him, and that his correct procedure was to fight, consciously, to win back full control of his own mind.
        "Imagine if you were a triangle," thought Ibrahim.
        This was the first and most important of Wittgenstein's Combat Meditations, the mental discipline which was at the heart of combat commerce, one of the areas of business theory that Ibrahim had studied in his efforts to make Marine Charters a going concern.
        Ibrahim could not yet imagine being a triangle. It was just too difficult. But he was confident that, if he focused on the task for long enough, he would eventually succeed. And then benefits would follow.
        As Ibrahim lay there trying to triangulate himself, a woman stood at the window, observing him lustfully. A predatory woman, reckless in her appetites. Who was that woman? Dawn. Yes, she had not gone away. She had just been waiting for her hormones to hit critical, waiting for her daily dose of pandora to kick her into heat.
        Dawn, finally, stopped flirting around and came plunging right into Ibrahim's room, with thoughts of sexual molestation on her mind. Dawn was bright now, because she was dying. She flung herself forward, aiming for one last fling before she was gone. She was sexual aggression made flesh, lunging desperately for Ibrahim. But she was too slow, too late. Her time was done. No sooner was she fully in her paramour's room than she was dead. Or, more exactly, transmuted. No longer dawn but day.


        Dawn dies into daylight,
        The cigarette ash of her aftermath
        Empty of syllables,
        Quiescent.


        Fully awake by now, Ibrahim decided it was time to get up. Incautiously, he sat up, and the negatives of his depleted physical state hit him with full force. He passed out, slumping back on the bed, and lay there, mouth open -- three flies took advantage of this to make transient speleological expeditions into the interior -- until it was late in the morning. To be precise, until it was 1136.
        On first waking, Ibrahim had felt as flat as a piece of blotting paper, but, apart from that, not too bad. On his revival at 1136, however, he felt like hell.
        What had happened?
        It took Ibrahim a while to get a grip on his present circumstances, but, gradually, he began to figure out how he had ended up in this state. Someone, presumably a burglar, had hit him over the head with something large and heavy, possibly a sledgehammer. His mouth felt as if a gang of street kids had been using it as a public toilet. And he was dry, his landscapes had been ecotrashed by desertification. Need water. Now. Lots of it.
        In the bathroom, Ibrahim glugged water. Got his toothbrush, tried to clean the claggy taste out of his mouth. Something was strange about his toothbrush cup. It was prettier than it had been the day before, all clean and shiny, hashy mouse bright. Someone had cleaned it. The gray goo at the bottom, the goo that Ibrahim had never bothered about, because, after all, the head of the toothbrush was sitting out in the nice clean air (if you could legitimately use the word "clean" to describe the air in Oolong Morblock) -- the goo was gone.
        "Someone cleaned my cup," said Ibrahim, wonderingly.
        Yeah, weirdness had broken out, big time. Never a good sign, the breaking out of weirdness. He was reminded of that horror flick, Fractured Dentures of the Fallen Gods, and the moment when Beatrice Otter realizes that her lipstick is no longer red but green. The moment when you hear that jaunty jazz theme coming back, and you realize that the Hangman must be on the prowl again.
        "The horror story I call my life," thought Ibrahim to himself.
        Burglar, sledgehammer attack, clean toothbrush cup, desertification syndrome, mouth full of spectral parrot crap -- if there was a pattern here, Ibrahim couldn't see it.
        Suspiciously, operating in high paranoia mode, Ibrahim started hunting around, trying to confirm that he had been burglarized. If he had, what had the burglar taken? Was anything missing?
        Yes! His medicine cupboard had been looted! His sleeping pills were missing. They had vanished. He almost never used them, but he saw them every time he opened the medicine cupboard to get out his dental floss. The sleeping pills, they were gone. Gone, also, was his holiday dust, the precious little jar of medical-grade cocaine which had been prescribed by the bent dentist, Seward Burroughs, "Willy" to his friends, the gentleman who had intimated that ampoules of injectable heroin were also available, at a price.
        The cocaine was gone, stolen, and, with it, Ibrahim's certified copy of the all-important "don't lose this" piece of paper, the prescription, the magic charm which made his indulgence (he used that white stuff so seldom that you couldn't really call it a habit) legal.
        Downstairs, Ibrahim found another piece of the puzzle. A window had been smashed. Not carefully taped then broken discretely so as not to alert the neighborhood. No, it had been smashed recklessly, from outside, shards of glass flying inwards. The window, which had been unbolted by whoever had smashed the glass, still hung open. That was how they had got in.
        Ibrahim had more or less figured it out by now. He had been robbed by a junkie. It would have to be a junkie, someone desperate enough to noisily smash the window. Someone who had ignored all the good stuff, like the TV and the electronic calculator, and had gone for the drugs, just the drugs, the sleeping pills and the cocaine. And who had done some horribly disgusting junkie thing to Ibrahim as he slept, maybe first bashing him over the head then spraying him with Vomit Nine or one of those other incapacitators.
        "Junkie scum," thought Ibrahim.
        Thought, not spoke. He was still too sick to be saying anything. Junkies. God, how he hated drug-using scum! Here he was, he worked for a living, and life was tough, and a head-tripping vandal had smashed his way into the building, had sabotaged Ibrahim as he lay peacefully asleep, and had then gone and ripped off the pharmaceuticals which Ibrahim's care givers had prescribed for him. For him, the upright citizen. The guy who even went so far as to pay his taxes. Well, most of them, anyway.
        But how did you explain the cup, the toothbrush cup which had been cleaned? A ritualistic thing, obviously. Junkie scum, their heads are so twisted there's no point in trying to make sense of their weird drug fiend antics. Junkies, those are people we really ought to incinerate.
        The thought of ritual made Ibrahim think, automatically, of serial killers. Nobody knew for a fact how many serial killers there were in Oolong Morblock, but the number was generally estimated to be about fifty, not counting retired ones. Serial killers, yeah. Really weird people with extremely secret lives which they didn't advertize on the Internet. That smiling salesman at the home appliance store who sells you the special vacuum cleaner that you can use not just for dust but for spilt fluids also, that friendly taxi driver who, like you, is a fan of Venus Lobotomy, the fattest and feistiest of those mud wrestling gals -- a serial killer was someone just like that, hidden in the general population. Undetected. Undetectable. Like a suicide waiting to happen, only it's someone else who dies.
        So maybe Ibrahim's burglar had been not just a thieving junkie but a serial killer as well, and had been going through a necessary ritual preliminary, carefully cleaning an object selected from the victim's home: the toothbrush cup. Maybe the killer always cleaned the toothbrush container. If there was one. And came back another night, armed and ready, to take things to their fatal conclusion.
        Or maybe not.
        On analysis, warped junkie was more probable than serial killer, so scratch the serial killer alarm. Junkie thought he was in his own home, started cleaning stuff, then began to realize, hey, something wrong here, not in my own place at all, better exit.
        Ibrahim phoned the glazier. What else was there to do? Something important. Something he couldn't quite remember. Something to do with words. Oh, words! Mantra -- right!
        Ibrahim tried to remember the death mantra that had been taught to him by Manfred Sphere, his death counselor, the man on who his survival now depended, the guy who worked at that place, Something-Something Rituals -- now, what was the proper name of the place? Wrote it down somewhere, but where? Can't remember. Can't remember the mantra, either. Done a data dump. Got it written down somewhere. I think.
        But what did any of that matter? The good thing, the great thing, was that the wheel was gone. And, though Ibrahim felt totally trashed, though Ibrahim felt as if he had been fucked for forty nights by a hippopotamus, to coin a phrase which had been popular in his student days, back at Anclag Academy, he was, nevertheless, happy. Or, more exactly, at peace. The kind of peace that comes upon you after you spend half a day bashing your head against a brick wall and then, miraculously, stop.
        "I guess I should eat," said Ibrahim.
        The inner promptings of "should" are not always freighted with the wisdom of God, nor is their motivation always that of the angels, and, in yielding to the urgings of this "should", Ibrahim was being exceedingly unwise. Having ingested food -- a small helping of ice cream plus a single clove of roasted garlic which he had no recollection of having cooked, but which was sitting on the sink bench just waiting to be eaten -- Ibrahim shortly found himself kneeling in front of the toilet, throwing up.
        By that time, the morning was done with, and the clock was gnawing its way into the afternoon. But time, today, showed no sign at all of being in a hurry. In fact, Ibrahim got the impression that this was going to turn out to be a very, very long day.
        What day was it?
        Friday.
        God, the weekend was almost upon him. The weekend, and all its unavoidable commitments. Which he loved. Because -- hey, it was the weekend that he lived for. Wasn't it? Yes, it was. Sort of. But, sometimes ... sometimes the weekend load, the load of responsibility and commitment, it all got too much for him.
        "A machinegun has no setting marked defeat," said Ibrahim to himself, grimly.
        The weekend. His commitment. His life. His true and secret life, more valuable to him than Marine Charters, more of his heart than yachts and the sea, more gratifying, in the long event of time, than drinking beer, snorting cocaine and watching those mud wrestling gals get close and dirty. His love, his commitment, his life.
        Ibrahim Chess, the faithful machinegunner, summoned his courage and, true to his duty, marched stubbornly into the future. 
Saturday night, 2149, heading for 10 p.m., and where the hell was this guy, what was keeping him? The Dead Parrot Bar had long since made the transition from raucous to mayhem, and Sable was not comfortable sitting here, girl alone. She felt like a crime scene waiting to happen.
        She kept remembering that really horrible movie Fang made her watch, just before she broke up with him, Blonde at Bay, the one in which the blonde girl is out alone, innocently drinking her way through a suite of tequila cocktails, when, without warning, all the guys in the bar -- and there are a lot of them, too many to count -- turn on her. And then -- well, do guys really have this disgusting stuff in their imaginations? And, if they do, how do they live with themselves?
        They were playing that stupid song again, Cat in a Bathtub, she was so tired of that idiot lyricspiel, all the stuff about the ecstasies of scratching wet wallpaper and the sneezing caused by the soap bubbles getting up its nose. Cats! What did cats ever do for you? Ever hear of a cat buying a girl a saucer of caviar and a glass of sparkling white? No, of course not. Horrible, useless animals, and they really smelt, especially after you sprayed them with that stinky air freshener, which was what her mother always did.
        The door to the Dead Parrot Bar crashed open and a gaggle of Argives spilt inside, all giggling drunk, yeah, raucous back-slapping Argives, marines from Port Hoolip and Yokosuka, off the leash and ready for brawl time. Usually, you could live in Omblock for months on end without being reminded that an army of occupation is in possession of it, that the Relsh Strasborg troops are squatting on your land and they're not going home, no, your home is their home, because their sacred mission is to rule the world, to make sure they always own nine-tenths of the hamburgers.
        But the Dead Parrot Bar was at Dilskartha, almost within spitting distance of Yokosuka, and so you got these marines with their buffed bodies and their gerky haircuts, off the base and so drunk they can't remember being sober, and you get reminded of the things they do that get them in the newspapers, like that time just last month, girl wakes up, fourteen-year-old girl, there's something in her bed and it's not her teddy bear. No, it's one of these marines, and he's naked.
        And afterwards, when the base commander, General Flattop, when he apologizes in public, sort of, does this very weak sorry, he makes that horrible remark about Conflux girls being happy the marines are here on Conflux, because, hey, Conflux girls are prostitutes at heart, right?
        Guy doesn't get it, doesn't understand a girl doesn't want to be gorilla-stomped, doesn't understand that it's time the rulers of the universe packed up and went home, time to stop treating Omblock like one big thermonuke aircraft carrier, we don't want to be your bomb base, no, and we don't feel privileged to be the cleaners of your foreskins.
        Xenophobia was not a standard emotion for Sable, but, then, she didn't often rub shoulders with foreigners. And she was in a really filthy mood, feeling bruised, a kind of battered wife feeling, she wasn't even married yet, but the universe had foregrounded itself, had taken on the battering husband role.
        "I hate drunks," said Sable.
        And went up to the bar and bought herself a bottle of vodka. And bought, too, a bar of Girlthin Munchyummy, that pineapple-flavored stuff which melts in your mouth just like chocolate, but which contains zero calories. Like vodka. Screw beer, beer is fattening. Vodka is a girl's best friend.
        Later, when the bottle was no longer full, a man sat down across from Sable at the itty bitty two-person table Sable had taken in the boyfriend-girlfriend section. Not an Argive, no. Someone older, unhealthier, flab which couldn't find its way to the gymnasium, Binge Man having a day out from his comic strip.
        "Hippopotamus?" he said.
        The oldest of the chat-up lines. Also, the shortest. Men like it because it's so easy to remember, even when they're really, really drunk. But, despite what men think, girls don't like that approach. They want something girlflossy, subtle, not this blunt Kongman Ravisher my penis likes your boobies approach.
        Better be careful here. The Argives in the bar were a riot waiting to happen. Try something subtle. Don't start out by simply smashing the bottle right in his face. Be a Conflux girl, not a Balimo bitch.
        "Am I going to have to smash this bottle right in the middle of your watermelon face, or are you going to be a gentleman and do it yourself?"
        Having delivered herself of that line, Sable was pleased with her grown-up sophistication and self-control. Yeah, she was handling this very well, almost as if she was one of those, what do you call them? Got a word for it somewhere. A woman! Yes, that's right, that's the missing word. Almost as if she was not a girl but a woman. Almost.
        "Had an argument with your boyfriend?" said the man.
        In response, Sable produced her Girlscream rape alarm and placed it on the table in front of her.
        "Scamper," said Sable. "Or we enter the realm of consequences."
        The man rose heavily, coughed, then trundled off. And Sable took another hit of the vodka.
        Vodka will only take you so far, and it ended up that Sable wanted to go further, and, since her grip on reality was pretty blurred by then, she saw no reason why she should stop herself. So she went ahead and did it.
        Shortly after Sable started doing a line of cocaine at the itty bitty boyfriend-girlfriend table she had commandeered, flashlights started to go off, the target of these flashlights being her. People, if they had them, were hauling out their digital cameras and taking snapshots. If they didn't have digicams then they used the cameras built into their mobile phones, though the Dead Parrot Bar was too dark to get optimal flash-free photos. Sable, she had become a tourist attraction. Conflux girls? Everything you have heard is true.
        "Can we have a moment?" said a man.
        The voice was solid, authoritative. A gun holster voice. Sable looked up and saw two cops in front of her. One of these cops had spoken to her, though she was not sure which one. They did not seem happy. Why? Was something wrong with her bright blonde face? No, probably not. Probably they were going to be tiresome about the coke, yeah, try the how would you like twenty years in a concrete box thing. Well, screw you, you killjoy fascists, why don't you go deal to the real world, street kids doing real crimes?
        "You want to start, or shall we?" said one of the cops.
        "I'll start," said Sable. "I have a prescription for this. Was in a car crash, all my teeth are loose, hurt like hell."
        And she pulled out, first, some photo ID -- her driver's license and her credit card, they were sure to hassle her for photo ID -- and then the prescription. This document, certifying that the bearer had been prescribed medical cocaine, bore the stamp of Seward Burroughs, dentist. Including his phone numbers -- clinic, home and cellphone. One of the cops pulled out his own cellphone and managed to get through to Seward at his home number.
        "Are you Seward Burroughs? Yes? Uh, you ever prescribe cocaine? Yeah ... Conflux Constabulary. Me? Heinrich Himmler, Diamorphine Taskforce. Yeah. So, you ever prescribe cocaine to a Conflux kid? Girl kid, blonde, big boobies. Does that talk to your telephone? Hang on ... here we are. Tauranga. No, I said Tauranga. That's T-A-U-R-A-N-G-A. Yeah, Sable Tauranga. Check your records, please. No, I can hold."
        There was a long, long pause, the kind of pause appropriate for a dentist rummaging around in his client records, maybe using special software to access his office computer remotely. Sable sat there trying to count her heartbeats, a trick she had learnt from that life coach, what was her name, the woman with the tank full of cute turtles, the woman she had interviewed ... when? Must have been last year.
        "Thank you," said the cop.
        And the call was done. What now? Was Sable going to get an apology? Or was she going to get twenty years in a concrete box, with no time out for hairdresser visits?
        "Legit, it seems," said the cop who had made the phone call.
        And with that they were gone, no apology, no, of course not, they were the fascist enforcers of the fascist state, catch you having a little fun and they'll smash your knuckles for you, they'll trash your face. Don't do anything about real crime, spend their time hassling innocent girls who are being kept waiting in dangerous bars.
        A dab of cocaine was still left on the table, so Sable licked her finger, wiped up the cocaine and sucked it. Good. The bright point of the evening was that she now had a client-provider relationship with Seward Burroughs of Nirvana Orgasms, a rather eccentric name for a dental clinic, when you thought about it, probably not the best place to go if you wanted that fashion trend gold tooth you were thinking of.
        Seward had become her dentist. That was the outcome of the call the cop had made. She was now one of his patients, obviously. He'd confirmed that to the cops by phone. And, if she was one of his patients, it followed that, logically, he could renew her prescription. For a price. She would have to thank Ibrahim for introducing them, too. Or, well ... maybe, on second thoughts, thanking Ibrahim wouldn't be such a good idea.
        "Police brutality," muttered Sable to herself, returning to her grievance with the cops.
        Same old story. Innocent girl in a bar, doing nothing wrong, just taking her prescription medicine, and, next thing, these gunbelt fascists, mind rapists with a badge, they're all over her, hassling her, no cause for that, aiming to bust her just because she's a girl, men, they all hate girls, isn't that the sorry secret truth?
        Sable was starting to feel a little sniffly -- vodka tended to have that effect on her -- and was nearing waterfall point (crybaby blubber time) when the man she had been waiting for ever since the first of the rainforests started growing, that man, he finally turned up.
        "Where the hell have you been?" said Sable.
        "Tespetty," said Beria, taking the seat across from her. "The President wanted to talk to me."
        "Olive Valise?" said Sable. "It's Saturday! She doesn't work weekends."
        "Boss life is not a bowl of oysters," said Beria, taking the neck of the vodka bottle in two fingers and rocking the bottle this way and that, invading her space, doing the spatial transgression thing that the radfems talk about, yeah, it's true, next thing he'll be pulling down panties, shoving in his sausage.
        "You want to pull down my panties and shove in your sausage, don't you?" said Sable.
        That was a no-brainer. Men were men, and Sable had figured out that Beria wasn't gay.
        "When you're talking to your father, you'll keep a clean tongue in your mouth," said Beria, going disciplinarian, the authoritarian in him showing.
        Yeah, showing big, iron pumped. Not like he ever tried to hide it. But there was more muscle to his voice now than there had been before, when she had been speaking with him on the phone. He reminded her of Morkin Sped on the day when Morkin wound himself up so tight he ended up losing control totally, with the result being that an ambulance collected Sable and took her from school to hospital with a broken rib, for which she got morphine, which is not the kick you might expect, just made her a bit woozy, weren't you supposed to get neat hallucinations and stuff?
        "Are you listening to me?" said Beria.
        "Oh, piss off," said Sable.
        She wanted more vodka. She wanted to do another line of cocaine. She wanted Jo, Josephine Triumph, her bestest friend, but Jo was on her honeymoon, off in Imperial Yam with that banker guy she'd married, banks, who the hell would marry a bank, is a bank cuddly? Anyway, they were off in Imperial Yam, her and him and his big bazooka that Jo was always laughing about, he was so proud of his big bazooka, and that was amusing, men are always one level more basic than you think, and they had tickets to one of those virgin sacrifice things, the stone pyramid, the beating heart, the whole deal, might bring her back a souvenir, something blood-dipped.
        "Does the life of a vodka whore come naturally to you, or do you have to work at it?" said Beria.
        "Oh, piss off," said Sable, for the second time. "I'm not your whore."
        "No," said Beria. "You're my daughter, I'm your father, and I'm not having you carrying on like this, getting bugger drunk in trash bars."
        "Trash bars!" said Sable. "You venued us here! I'm here because you told me."
        "When you talk to your father," said Beria, "you will speak with respect."
        "Shove your daughter fantasy into your condom wallet and take it up to Mango for a workout," said Sable. "Girls up there will play daughterbaby. For a price."
        In response, Beria slapped her.
        "You hit me," said Sable, wonderingly, fingering her face.
        "I did not hit you," said Beria. "I wouldn't beat up my daughter. That's a slap, that's all. A father's loving discipline."
        "Look, will you lay off the father-daughter crap?" said Sable. "At least until they declare pervert hour, you know, free drinks all round and a condom handout."
        By way of reaction, Beria picked up Sable's vodka bottle, took a big hit, put the bottle down on the table, then belched. A real hippopotamus belch.
        "Something you should see," said Beria.
        And produced a folded photocopy which he unfolded and placed on the table in front of her. Sable picked it up, squinted. A bit blurry, this. All the little letters scattering like jumbly ants. Vodka is funny stuff. It looks so clear, but it's so difficult to see through.
        "You're too drunk to find the toilet paper, aren't you?" said Beria, taking back the photocopied document. "Let me explain. There was a session in the Family Court this morning, fortunately they work Saturdays. You weren't represented. Your doctor produced a certificate of mental incompetency in your name and the judge let things go ahead without you."
        "What things?" said Sable.
        "Your parents were there," said Beria. "They formally disowned you, goodbye family ties, and, to cut a long story short, I adopted you, and you are now my daughter."
        Joke, right? Her parents wouldn't disown her. Would they?
        "Present for you," said Beria, pulling out a cellphone, a girlpink Boydialer. "To replace the one you went and lost. If you don't believe me, call the people who used to be your parents."
        "Don't have the number," said Sable.
        "No problem," said Beria. "I do."
        One phone call later, Sable, too shell-shocked to start crying, was escorted out of the Dead Parrot Bar by this secret policeman guy who -- unbelievable, God in a pumpkin! -- was her father. Five minutes after they exited the bar, a limo pulled in to the side of the road. Beria opened the door for Sable and she got in. First time in her life a man had ever opened a door for her. Hold it, Conflux girl! This isn't romance novel territory! This is the Bad Pervert, okay? Got his daughter fantasy, now he's living it in the flesh.
        "Where is Ibrahim?" said Beria, as the limo pulled into the traffic.
        A motorbike throttled by, close, boy at the handlebars, wild girl with long black hair riding pillion, and the wild girl slapped the limo's window as she went past, big world-licking grin on her face, wish I was her, motorbike free, lunatic ride then risk sex with no condoms, gamble your lottery, casino your life. Way to go, girl.
        "I asked you a question," said Beria. "Where is Ibrahim?"
        "I told you," said Sable. "I told you. On the phone. I told you everything."
        "Ibrahim has disappeared," said Beria. "He's vanished from Zisperhaven."
        "Check the taxi cabs," said Sable. "Do the TV thing, you know, the ferry security tapes."
        "He's a traveler," said Beria. "You knew that? You didn't know it? Never mind. We're here."
        "This where you live?" said Sable, peering out.
        They had pulled up outside a really dubious business frontage, a place called Bitchwork Bodymarks, sign in red neon doing that on-off flickering neon sign thing, probably making bug-zapping-type noises, too, only you couldn't hear it, sealed in the limo like this.
        "Okay," said Beria. "Out."
        And the door opened to the world of noise, big garbage trucks going down the street, three of them, following each other, nose to tail. It was late, and normal life in the city was tapering off. The garbage hours were starting.
        "You're going to get me tattooed?" said Sable, starting to feel sober enough to get alarmed.
        "No," said Beria. "Branded."
        "You're kidding," said Sable.
        Twenty minutes later, as red hot iron seared into the delicate girl flesh of her inner thigh, she realized that he wasn't. As her meat sizzled, as agony strove for hegemony, Sable heard herself screaming. Distantly, she was reminded of that tormented teddy bear in that idiot TV show, couldn't remember the name of it, the Parkes Pilkem thing, elite lives and all that, the one in which teddy had to have an operation without the benefit of anesthetic.
        "While you've got her here, I could do the usual clippings and piercings."
        "Thanks for the offer, but not this time. Maybe next time. Depends how she behaves herself."
        Men's voices, talking over her, like she was meat at the supermarket meat counter, like she was Insect Eater, the woman in that movie, what was the name of it, the one that was almost a porn flick but not quite, Veils Ripped From Innocent Interiors, that was it.
        They got back in the car, and started off, slowly. A blue sedan overtook them, kids packed inside, a young woman clinging to the roof rack, yahooing at them, drunk no doubt, and somewhere down the track she'll be someone's mother and she'll be shocked at her daughter's behavior, and where's my mother, how could you do this to me? Mom!
        Crying, wet with pain and vodka, skewered by abandonment, Sable lost track of time and place, and made no effort to resist when she was cuffed and hooded. When the hood came off, she was standing barefoot on the carpet -- somehow her shoes had gotten lost -- in a darkened apartment which smelt of fried onions. View out into the night. One of those trash garbage places, huge, spread out like the cemetery of the hellgods, place a blaze of security lights, nobody looking in through the windows to see what was going on.
        What was going on was that dad was demanding her clothes, was taking them, and now she was naked, never knew the true meaning of naked until now, never had a clue.
         And what now? Dad rapes me?
        No.
        Dad put her in her girl cage and went off and left her, he had work to do, something about an ongoing emergency, men and their work crap, take themselves so seriously, and so here she was, her penthouse cage nightmare, only this wasn't the penthouse, no, this was the low-rent ride, the trashtown version, the sex with second-hand condoms version, and what in the name of the bosoms of God is that? What the hell!
        What it was -- a pig, that's what it was. A huge pig. A sow, a monstrous sow, snuffling at the bars of the cage, which, fortunately, were high quality steel, and pig-proof.
        Okay. Question answered. It's a pig, that's what it is. Next question: does this cage have a toilet?
        Answer: no.
        Sable, my girl, just what in the name of donuts have you gone and gotten yourself into this time?  

        That persistent psychosis known as human civilization endured right through the weekend and into the following week. There was an antidote for it, some thermonuke stuff you could get from Bunkerbuster Central, but nobody had the balls to take the necessary medicine. Won't get better if you don't take the cure, you know.
        Ibrahim Chess had a busy weekend, but got to spend some time doing things he really liked to do, including, on Sunday, eating crab. Imported, of course. Crabs, you can't get them from the Bilge Globulus any more. They all died. Gross domestic product keeps rising and crabs keep heading in the direction of Zero City, eventually getting there. All gone now. Not coming back. But we can still see them in comic books and we can still buy them in cans, so why is that girl crying about it? Is she a blonde softie? No, that grass-green hair of hers is natural, she's Crabgirl Matilda, a whiny girl singer, and crying is her business.
        She --
        But life is too short to timedabble with the diarylife of every girl singer who would like to see her profile boosted by inclusion in this chronicle, so let's move on.
        Monday, Sable phoned. Meet at the Rendezvous Hotel, Tuesday, three in the afternoon? Okay, Sable. Anything for you. Tuesday evening, she was on the phone again: What's your excuse? Had a guy come round to chat about my godson. We'll meet later, Sable. Don't call me, now, I'll call you. Got the number for her new phone, Boydialer, she was very proud of it, kept calling it girlpink, the focus word in last month's peaker song, "Girl Surrender". Was she trying to hint at something?
        Wednesday, Ibrahim had a bad dream. He was walking down into the subway station at Luanda Hill, carrying a yellow parakeet in a birdcage, and a cop walked right up to him, no "Hello, how are you?", no "Do you have a prescription for that?", just pulled out his gun and unloaded, one, two, three, four, five rounds, just like that, pulpy bits of blood and brain exploding everyscatter. With Ibrahim dead, there's one round left, and, with it, the cop shoots the parakeet. Cop wipes wet stuff from his face. Says "Avian flu terror", holds out his hand for his reward.
        Sable phoned late that night, waking him up.
        "I suppose you want to know why I'm crying?" she said.
        Ibrahim hung up on her.
        Thursday, nothing happened but work, Ibrahim busy right through the entire working week, both boats in action, working for Mashhandler Balachi, the ad agency which was doing a photo shoot for Yachtlife Screwsafer Condoms (twenty-seven different flavors available), big money talking, money big enough to buy the girls with the biggest boobies, and Ibrahim was machinegunning money like it was going out of fashion, big business. Who says you can't make money from boats?
        Friday, a bad news day. A phone call, the honeymoon charter thing, that was canceled. Was counting on that! How could they screw me like this? Had to cancel a whole bunch of other stuff to clear the time slots for them. Bastards!
        Friday, also, Egon's glorst was in the news again. Had been getting stronger, and had started attacking little kids at the Sekigahara daycare place, the Garden of Innocent Smiles. Chunk out of a cheek, piece out of an ear. The City Exorcist, Gelbert Proctor Tosterburger, was refusing to move on it. Got doorstepped by Esmeralda Arizona, story was important enough for her to get off her silky butt, get herself all the way to House Qorbethelmace, what's the story, Gelly?
        And Mr. Tosterburger almost lost his cool and spat in her face, you could see him close to losing it, bad-tempered guy, notorious for psychenuke stuff, for losing his chicken and going apewire. Didn't like being called Gelly, no, that was a no-no, a fart-in-your-face miscue in the realms of politesse.
        "The role of the City Exorcist is to preside over federal executions," said Gelbert Proctor. "Finish. Got it?"
        So, next, the media went after Gelbert's son, Danzburg Tosterburger. Bad for astrals, the exorcists refusing to pull finger, poor norms got no talents, no way to deghost or deglorst themselves. Something the norms keep forgetting about astrals, right? Everyone's going to die, population of spooks and afterlifers keeps rising, and what state is the city going to be in if you don't have your trusty astral exorcists around to clean up that specter trash?
        Danzburg, he hangs tough. Can't do nothing. Court order, okay? Had this high treason thing, on trial for his life. Five years back. Terms of his plea bargain, well, he has to do the presiding bit at Zisperchilp executions, has to reside in Orkel Pariah, one of those places where you have those mutant flesh-eating cockroaches, not fun city, okay? And, the finisher, he's forbidden, under the terms of his plea bargain, to exercise his talent anywhere outside of Zisperchilp.
        Which would have been okay, except that Danzburg comes across badly on TV. All too plainly, he's enjoying this, gloating a little about the fact that he has the talent, the power, he's the spook-scarer, and you norms, what you ever do for the average astral? Go screw yourselves, you bunch of overfed sidewalk-lickers.
        Ever get the feeling your sanity is edging up toward the glorst line? Unplug your mind. Yeah, that's it. The rectangular thing in the corner, the one with the Splastics Television label logoed on the side of it. Aiming to put a little equilibrium back in his life, Ibrahim did just that, yanked the cord right out of the power socket, stuck the plug in a brown paper bag and wrote "Don't touch" on the bag in big red felt-tip letters. When he played boss, he played a game of no holds barred, and, for this weekend, he was the implacable life's tough so no TV boss. A bit of the dominating fascist in Ibrahim Chess, maybe he should have been a cop.
        All through the weekend, Ibrahim kept the TV switched off, didn't want to hear what Egon's glorst might have got up to now, or what line other exorcists might be taking when they, too, rejected pleas to deal with it. Gelbert Proctor Tosterburger had set the tone, and the result was as good as a collective conspiracy. Nobody was crypting on this, sure, but every exorcist understood how it was. We're on strike.
        What Gelbert P. was angling for, maybe, was for Olive Valise to beg him for help, to beg him in public when she made her speech at Yapeworm Conference Theater, a part of Urn Angol Wat, the ancient edifice at the heart of the campus of Nash Olish University, right here on the island of Zisperhaven. Yeah, norms. Let's see you down on your knees a little. Let's see you beg. There's some cigarette ash sitting on the sidewalk, norm. Kiss my boots then lick it up, and then maybe we can talk business.
        Friday, late, darklate, Sable called.
        "What are you doing on the weekend?" she said.
        "Me?" said Ibrahim. "I'm going to be shacked up with a married woman, she's got four kids, husband doesn't give her much attention."
        "Seriously," said Sable.
        "If you don't like the answers," said Ibrahim, "don't ask the questions."
        "No, really," said Sable. "What are you doing?"
        "Ever heard of the Northern Clinic?"
        "No."
        "It's one of these multimedical places they've got on Sclag, you know, a big box of specialists. Me, I'm going to Deeper Comfort Bioengineering, get my hemorrhoids done."
        Finally, Sable got the message. The weekend was a no-way. So how about Monday? The Dead Parrot Bar, did he know it? Could he get there? Dilskartha, okay? Ferry to Koala, then the bus, get on the train at Luanda Hill, any H-train will take you right there, also an I-train, a J-train or a K-train. Yeah, Monday, he could. Could do the meet. Eight in the evening? Sure. See you there, Sable. Don't dye your hair purple, or I won't recognize you.
        That was last week, and now it was this week, not Monday but Tuesday, and Sable was on the phone, interrupting Ibrahim as he was trying to get through his e-mail, wanting to know why the hell he hadn't been there at the Dead Parrot Bar. The interruption was unfortunate, as Ibrahim's e-mail was really important, jellyfish ranching options, multi-level aroma sales deals, erectile torpedo drugs, soft sponge parlors offering quick-grab taste treats, free sample facial surgery at the Better Boobies Esthetic Surgery Clinic -- if you didn't work your way through your e-mail, you'd never discover what a wonderful world of opportunities was panting at your doorstep, just waiting to be ravished.
        At first, Sable was upset, and making no effort to hide it, as cranky as a buttered cockroach, threw a real hissy fit, but Ibrahim hung tough. After all, what's she going to do? It's a telephone call, okay? Can't kick a guy in the balls by telephone. At least, you couldn't back when Ibrahim last looked at the technology. (Remember when there used to be a time when you couldn't use a telephone to take a photograph, sample music or buy drinks from a vending machine? Are you old enough to remember that?)
        "Sorry," said Ibrahim, "my car broke down."
        "Car?" said Sable. "You don't have a car!"
        "Sure I do. Yandaviba, great car, a classic. Guy sold it to me for parts, four hundred bucks, but it still runs. Sort of."
        "Ibrahim, why are you telling me this blatant lie? You can't have a car, you don't have a garage. You've got nowhere to park. I've been to Pier Nine, I know where you live!"
        "Hang on to your handles," said Ibrahim. "Don't you know telephones break if you yell at them loudly?"
        "You don't have a car, do you?" said Sable.
        "I've got me a lock-up garage out at Merv's Storage. Car is there. If you don't believe me, check it out."
        "Ibrahim, you're lying like a lobster. You're just trying to avoid me."
        "Okay, so what if I am? What are you going to do about it? File for divorce?"
        "Ibrahim," said Sable, "I'm begging you. I'm desperate. There's something vitally important I have to talk to you about. We need to do this face to face. It's not something you can do on the telephone."
        "Well, I don't know about that," said Ibrahim. "I keep seeing these phone sex advertisements, and if you can have sex on the telephone what can possibly be phone-impossible?"
        "Ibrahim," said Sable. "You don't understand my problem."
        True. But did he want to understand her problem? No. If she needed counseling, maybe he could put her in touch with Manfred Sphere, great guy, the man with the wheel answers, the wheel, it's not gone yet, but we're holding it at bay.
        "Ibrahim!" said Sable, in that too-young voice which, at moments, could get perilously close to a whine, "Are you listening to me? I said I have a problem!"
        "Well, you're not pregnant," said Ibrahim. "Or, at least, not by me. That much I know for certain."
        "Ibrahim, don't torment me. I'm not a blonde joke. I'm a -- what are those things called? You know, girl, kind of, but not a girl. Better dress sense, more responsible. Know how to put on lipstick straight."
        "Woman," said Ibrahim. "That's the word you're looking for. You're trying to say you're a woman."
        "Yeah," said Sable. "One of those. Concept keeps escaping on me. I'm a woman and you're a man and I need to see you. This is world-ending urgent, Ibrahim. I have to see you now, today."
        "Okay," said Ibrahim. "Come round to Pier Nine, I'll be here all day."
        "You're lying to me," said Sable. "I'll get there and you'll be gone. You'll be out all day."
        "No I won't," said Ibrahim. "As I speak I'm handcuffing myself to a ringbolt, yeah, and I'm throwing away the key. Gone. It's out of reach. Come rescue me, Sable, darling. My life depends on it."
        And, with that, he hung up. All going well, today would send the final "go away and leave me alone" message. And if it didn't? Well, he'd have to try something sterner. Get a little intimate and do an Egon-type thing, bite a chunk out of her backside. Or offer her water but serve her white vinegar, the tradition on Sclag, something the mother did when an unsuitable girlfriend came visiting her son's home.
        Sable would come round to visit and Ibrahim would be gone. He would be out all day, and, in the evening, he would arrange it so he went to brother Adolf's place in Fratpong, probably stay the night there, or maybe in a capsule hotel at Styx Lethanus. Yes, the hell with this Sable girl. He didn't know why she'd latched on to him, but there was something seriously twisted here, and he really hoped it wasn't some warped romance novel fantasy, some unspeakably naive blonde bubble misperception of how things were, no telling what kind of crazy make-believe love story a girl might find at the bottom of her bowl of cornflakes.
        Sable Tauranga was a Conflux girl, and Ibrahim's image of a Conflux girl was someone who got trashed in vodka bars, did lines of coke in the toilets, hooned around on motorbikes, had promiscuous risk sex and probably sat around on the weekends doing party pills and watching porn flicks.
        As if that wasn't bad enough, she was a journalist, and you have to be careful with those journo types, right? It's not your smiling face they're interested in, it's your dirty underwear, and exactly how bad it smells, and who is there who doesn't have some of that dirty linen lying around?
        Ibrahim had endured one interview with Sable already, and, in a way, it had been one interview too many. Disturbing. Very disturbing, on occasion, with Sable inquiring about his familiar, sticking in her crowbar where it wasn't wanted, maybe not aware that she was asking a question you couldn't just come out and ask, a question that was off limits, like asking how close are you to your next bowel motion, or asking, hey, do legs too young for pubic hair do it for you?
        But Sable had asked, showing no consciousness of error, a major gap in cultural understanding there, and an intrusion sufficiently offensive to make Ibrahim realize that, yes, the stereotype is true, journalism is a vulgar trade, a profession focused on the murder-rape side of life, get your dirt and merchandise it, no magic shell of etiquette to keep certain areas off limits.
        Ibrahim had submitted to an initial interview as a courtesy to the people organizing the Omblock Prospadaplus Consultancy Prize. That was fair enough, since Ibrahim was entered in the ballot, and could, conceivably, win a consultancy package for Marine Charters. But follow-up visits, trying to get him to go meet up with her in bars and hotels, trying to get herself invited back to his place again -- what was going on here?
        "Blonde bombshell babes with big boobies don't date astral failures," said Ibrahim to himself.
        Then felt bad about fitting himself into the "failures" category, a good machinegunner doesn't do that, it's not productive. Still. Be realistic. She was twenty-two (he'd sneaked a look at her ID after she'd scuttled off into the toilet) and he was thirty-four. He got the impression she was hanging out enormously large "rape me" signs in bright red neon, but surely he was doing that thing men do, the radfems say it but that doesn't mean it's false, misinterpret a woman's most modest social overture as an orgy party go-ahead.
        "Put a collar on your dog," said Ibrahim. "It's not yet safe for society."
        Yeah, lust was the illusion master, and you had to keep control of your imagination. If he told her to lie down and spread her legs, she'd probably spit in his face, tell him he'd misconstrued everything, that girlpink was just another designer decorator color, one of a million on the colorboard.
        Or, worse -- much worse! -- she might obey.
        If she did obey (it was demented to think that she might, but, hey, don't Conflux girls have a reputation for doing out-and-out crazy stuff?) then would he be better off by complicating his life with a blonde concubine he didn't really have the time for? Or the requisite spare cash, either. No splash money, no. Girl like that, she gets expensive. Wants that saucer of caviar, that glass of sparkling white. Better off? No, somehow he didn't think so.
        "If you're really desperate, go buy yourself a pig," said Ibrahim, quoting an adage which had been popular back in his high school days.
        But he wasn't desperate, no, he had the weekends, and that, at this stage of life, was sufficient. When you are sixteen years old, girls are right there at the center of the universe, but, as you get older, they move out toward the periphery, eventually assuming distant galaxy status.
        So, then, today, Sable would come to the Adventuring Salt Building and would find Ibrahim gone, his "GONE FISHING" sign hung on the door. And maybe she would get the hint. If she didn't, Ibrahim would find a more direct way to communicate with her, such as shooting her in both kneecaps.
        And Ibrahim? Today, where would he go? Phone Adolf and make an early start on a trip to Fratpong? Or what?
        The next e-mail that he opened gave him the answer. It was from Topaz Atatangle, inviting Ibrahim to a Topaz-organized demo today, at Yapeworm Conference Theater at Nash Olish University. The demo was scheduled to start at the same time at the speech which President Olive Valise was timetabled to give.
        "Well, that gives me a mission," said Ibrahim.
        He would go to Urn Angol Wat, find Topaz, grab him out of his demo, snatch him right out of the normative space-time continuum, go astral, take Topaz somewhere deep in the astral realms, dump him. How about Angitoto Ototapu? Yeah, haven't been there for years. The place with no water. Gold and jewels in the astral realms? Stuff of comic books. Most places, you were lucky if you could find half a cup of wastewater. Deserts and scree mountains and mosquito swamps -- the hell with the astral realms. City life was best.
        In Angitoto Ototapu, Ibrahim would give Topaz his waterless wasteland speech, the speech he had been formulating for some time. Bad boys, demo crazies, they can find they're due for some behavior modification. A couple of days here, on this jumbleland rockwaste, no food, no water, might mellow you out a little, Jellyfish Boy. Teach you the virtues of keeping a low profile.
        This was not the time to be doing a demo, no, definitely not, not with Egon's glorst on the prowl, biting the hell out of little kids, not with Danzburg Tosterburger smirking up large on TV, effectively telling the whole community of norms to go screw themselves, not with the President herself aiming to use the Star Chamber to nail someone to the wall for her own self-serving political purposes, not with Topaz Atatangle, one of the Jellyfish Six, already in the hot seat, was the kid crazy or just drunk on immaturity?
        It was godfather hour. Ibrahim was going to play godfather, big time, and Topaz was going to discover that the wrath of God, delegated, was a hell of a lot closer than he thought.
        "Tough love time," said Ibrahim.
        And wondered if he still had those lightweight punching gloves anywhere around, the ones with the chain mail interiors. 
Since Ibrahim no longer had the Yandaviba, his options for getting to Urn Angol Wat were limited. Buses, that was possible. But the weather was getting sullen, so maybe it would rain. No way to be sure. That reverse-reliable weather forecasting system he had signed up for was no longer functioning, number disconnected, so maybe he should cancel the automatic payments for that.
        Buses on a rainy day meant standing in the rain at bus shelters which didn't really shelter. After so many centuries of civilization, you'd think Omblock would have mastered the skills needed to build a decent bus stop, but, no, engineers and designers were too busy with prestige projects, like the Great Wheel of Zisperhaven. Not focused on everyday needs like a better bus shelter.
        Speaking of wheels, how was his own wheel? There and then not there. Disconcertingly intermittent. No way to tell what it was going to do to him today. He'd been to three different doctors and they'd all told him there was nothing wrong with him. Medical profession is totally useless, don't know anything, a bunch of hit-and-miss experimenters, run weird pharma drugs into your body just for kicks, good job Manfred is around.
        The phone rang, the landline. Sable? Maybe she was calling to say she had just got off the ferry at Taris. Ibrahim let the answer phone pick up. Heard his mother's voice.
        "Ibrahim, Gillian here."
        Then silence, then something which sounded almost like a sob. Was his mother crying? She hung up. No more message. Call his mother bacl? No, she could get him on his cellphone if she really needed him. Ibrahim hung out his "GONE FISHING" sign, locked up and started off down the waterfront in the direction of the ferry terminal, which was where the buses left from and where, too, there was a taxi rank.
        Rain, so no buses. A taxi was out: too expensive. So that left a choice between walking and traveling. (Logically, walking had the same "possible rain" drawback that taking the bus had, but Ibrahim didn't see it that way, because, human perversity being what it is, he got really miserable hanging around in a damp bus shelter, but enjoyed walking in the rain.)
        Astralize and travel, that was an option. Not something Ibrahim really liked to do. Even here on Zisperchilp, the talent of traveling through the astral realms was frowned upon. The ability to spook yourself through people's guardian walls made it all too easy to go career criminal, and a lot of astrals with the traveler talent ended up as permanently grogged up inmates of the heavier jails.
        The stereotype was captured well in the movie Travels with my Aunt's Left Hand, all about a psycho astral serial killer who used his powers of "metamigration", as astral travel was slang-termed in the movie, to facilitate theft, rape, arson and a serial killer spree. All true to the possibilities of life, barring the serial killer bit: as any forensic psychologist could tell you, serial killing was a norm thing, something that didn't happen in astral culture. One of the quirks of Omblock's sociology that nobody could explain.
        Not really the day for astral travel, this. A day, rather, for dissonant talents to keep a low profile. Even though Ibrahim was planning to use his talent to twist godson Topaz right out of his demo. That was a forced move. No option there.
        His cellphone rang and he fished it up to his mouth, answered. It was his mother. Upset. Wanted to talk. Was he busy?
        "I'm walking," said Ibrahim. "But I can talk."
        "This is something we need to talk about sitting down," said Gillian.
        "I don't see that we do," said Ibrahim.
        But she was gone. Call her back? No. It was probably one of her "prophetic" dreams. Gillian Chess was, by and large, a well-balanced woman, but, occasionally, she woke from sleep convinced that she had seen the future in a dream, and it was always a bad dream, and, what's more, a dream that never came true, not ever.
        Ibrahim had talked privately with a psychiatrist about this, and the guy had pulled out the government's big book of authorized mental illnesses, and, no, having prophetic dreams which failed to deliver on what they had promised, the definition guys hadn't licensed that as a mental illness, not yet, though maybe someone was working on it.
        So, after his theoretically sane mother rang off, Ibrahim decided not to try to be his mother's mother, decided to let the mother-mothering business slide, at least for the moment, and focused on his journey. Yeah, he would walk. How far was it? In a straight line, a little more than three kilometers, at a guess. A little longer if he took Biltong Circuit, the coast road which ran right round Zisperhaven. Which he would: it was a nicer walk, and he had plenty of time. Would be at Urn Angol Wat well before Olive Valise showed her smiling face.
        The phone rang again. It was Sable. She was already at Taris. Impossibly quick, unless she had been already on the ferry when she had phoned him earlier. Which perhaps she had. It felt like an ambush, this sudden proximity of hers.
        "Are you still at the Adventuring Salt Building?" said Sable.
        "Yes, of course," said Ibrahim. "Shall I put on coffee?"
        "No," said Sable. "No coffee. My father has put me on this drug-free regime, no psychotropics. Would some warm milk be possible?"
        "Yeah, sure," said Ibrahim, glad to hear that Sable was getting on top of the drug thing, somehow he'd started thinking she might be having a problem with that, a vodka-coke thing, a downhill trip, a coffin lid ajar at the foot of the slope. Good news if the girl was getting herself cleaned up, maybe her father was the tough guy she needed to kick her pretty ass. "See you soon, bubble girl."
        And, with that, he closed out the call, before she could come back and bite him with a radfem retaliation taunt for the "bubble girl" insult.
        Sable Tauranga. Twenty-two years old, and still living with her parents. His image of Conflux girls was that they grew up faster than that. But he was a Zisperchilp astral, so what did he know? So, Sable's dad was enforcing a drug-free regime. A cold turkey ticket. Yeah, good idea. Maybe that would prove to be part of the solution to the Topaz Atatangle conundrum, the problem Ibrahim was going to be focusing in on today.
        Ibrahim Chess had been meaning to have a chat with his godson Topaz Atatangle for some time, steer him away from the delinquent direction he was heading in. But the demo business definitely forced things to a head. Boy was in the process of walking over a cliff, time to grab him by the scruff of the neck and haul him out of danger.
        Ever since Ibrahim had become Topaz's godfather, five years previously, there had been problems with the relationship, but things had really been coming to a head over the last several days or so, and Ibrahim had just about had enough.
        Seeing as how Ibrahim was Topaz's godfather, and seeing as how godfathership was a discharge of Ibrahim's filial obligations to his late father, Ibrahim couldn't just write off Topaz forever, couldn't say a go-goodbye to him. But, boy, was he ever tempted! And, in the absence of a goodbye kiss, it was time that Topaz got a shaking.
        Mao Fats, the guy who owned the Cholesterol Heartbeats grease bar, had been in touch with Ibrahim about Topaz's unpardonable delinquency. Topaz had pulled a crazy stunt, vanishing into nowhere one night, leaving his piece of the beef-burning business unattended, patties burning on the patty cooker, the money in the till unguarded, lights still on, the whole place open to the world and to the world's street kids. No coherent explanation for any of this from Topaz, who acted brain dead if you tried to grill him on it.
        Madam Sosostris, the old bat who was Topaz's landlady, had been trying to get Ibrahim to pay compensation for something Topaz had done, a door smashed to splinters at the apartment, for which Topaz was adamantly refusing to take responsibility, claiming it was "something that got happened when I was out", the truth being, probably, that he had gotten too drunk to recall his own complicity in the crime.
        Then there was the mother of a kid called Winston Peters, a law student, kept phoning, insisting that Topaz surely had something to do with the disappearance of her son, and now she was asking if there was any truth to the rumor that Topaz and Winston had headed off to Imperial Yam for a twosome holiday, and, if they had, what could possibly be the explanation for that?
        And how to explain, too, the new cellphone that Topaz kept checking for text messages, his boyblue Girldialer? Those things were expensive: Ibrahim had priced them on the Internet. Topaz, when pressed, said that "an older guy" had given it to him, and what in the name of twisted olives was Ibrahim supposed to make of that? Someone had given Topaz not just that cellphone but some walking around money, too, the extra income being betrayed by the fact that Topaz was indulging in those expensive new jellyfish designer aquas, instead of sticking to faucet water.
        Additionally, as if that wasn't bad enough, Topaz had been hanging about Marine Charters, always down at the Adventuring Salt Building mornings and evenings, pestering Ibrahim to talk about his dad, the late Benedict Chess, a good man, okay, but, let's be honest: the world was safer now that Benedict was packed into a small urn of ashes in Lamma Cheng Endcrypt. Dad, to tell the truth, had been one of those stereotypical crypt lunatics, religious nutters of the "murder is okay if it's murder for God" variety.
        But Topaz was all keen to know about Benedict, yes, and kept discussing the Egon glorst and the Tespetty attack, and that Lombonny Nedcroft case, way back when. If you looked in the history books, you got told that Lombonny's glorst was political, a protest against the federal government yanking up the Universal Sales Tax, but now there was a rumor going around saying, no, Lombonny had glorsted at the Cow Vesti mud wrestling arena because the TV cameras were there, so that was how to get maximum publicity, try to wake Omblock up, try to wake the Dreamer.
        And Ibrahim was getting the impression that Topaz took the nutso Dreamer idea seriously, really believed that a process of massacre glorsting could awaken the hidden messiah to self-awareness. If Topaz didn't believe that, then why did he keep talking about it?
        It was as if, somehow, this pretty ordinary student type, a beer-drinking burger chef who put in just enough study to keep himself from getting kicked out of the institution of higher learning which provided him with the precious student ID card which gave access to so many discounts and perks, had somehow been brainwashed into spiritual fanaticism.
        Who was the "older guy" who had provided Topaz with a cellphone and money, too, must be more money than the burger job had paid, because, first, there were these self-indulgent designer waters and, second, because Topaz was showing no signs of looking for a new part-time job to replace the one he had been fired from. Who was paying Topaz to dabble in chat-talk which was playing around at the fringes of terror treason?
        It was hard to avoid the obvious conclusion. There was an astral mastermind somewhere, organizing this glorsting and attacking, that was acknowledged by all the media commentators. Terror doesn't happen on its own. It's illogical to think that terror arises spontaneously out of social conditions or political disconents. Terror is the work of conscious controlling evil, of a malign intelligence which plots and plans, which pencils in "apocalypse" on the day planner, just after cornflakes time.
        The logical conclusion, then, which Ibrahim was trying hard to avoid, was that Topaz's "older guy" was none other than the evil mastermind, the astral fanaticism king, implacably ruthless and, so far, too cunning to be caught. Not such a mastermind if he chose to recruit an unreliable dorp like Topaz, but, presumably, when you're building up a terror network from scratch, you work with whatever you can scrape up off the streets.
        Topaz had become a part of the astral conspiracy that you were hearing so much about these days, what with glorst warnings in the latest astrology columns in the newspapers and, locally, the Zisperchilp bosslord, Egaltine Choom, the Supervisor of Zisperhaven, recently announcing that the terror alert level had escalated all the way from white to light gray to lime to pastel blue to coffee stain brown to its present position, which was red, blepharitis red, just one step down from spastic rainbow, the ultimate "glorst in progress as we speak" warning.
        Ibrahim's analysis, then, was that Topaz had somehow gotten himself warped in the direction of fanatical lunacy, becoming mad, bad, and dangerous to know. His suspicion was that Topaz, probably sooner rather than later, would sit down to share secrets with Ibrahim, and would invite him, Ibrahim, to join the terror network that Topaz had started to collude with. And then what was Ibrahim to do?
        "Denounce him to the cops," said Ibrahim, at last, finally resolving this question in his own mind.
        While things were still at the murky suspicion stage, he could let the situation slide. But if Topaz tried to recruit Ibrahim into the terror network, if Topaz gave that irrefutable evidence of guilt and complicity, then Ibrahim would have to act. Because one baby Paffita tragedy in the history of the city was one too many. A second could not be permitted.
        And, thinking of baby Paffita, whatever happened to her? Momentarily, baby Paffita was there on the TV screens, got her glorst victim spotlight jiffyshake, her fame bite, then she was lost history, celebrity spooked to nadir, vanished, gone. Presumably still alive, modern medicine was pretty slick, but erased from the public imagination. Did anyone in the entire state of Omblock ever think about her these days, except for her suffering mother and Ibrahim Chess?
        Yes, astral terror was as bad as any other kind of terror, and Ibrahim Chess, the good citizen, the stable taxpayer, the moral man, one of life's faithful machinegunners, if he found himself face to face with a known and acknowledged terrorist, well, he would find himself with no choice. He would have to phone the cops, denounce the guy, turn him in.
        Not wanting to be forced into this position, Ibrahim had been doing his best to delay the moment when he would suffer revelation. He had been trying to put Topaz off, to fend him away. But it had been difficult. The kid had been persistent. Persistent, and, on top of that, consistently odd, sidewhacked in a way which was hard to define. There was something wrong about the way he talked to you, something wrong about the way he looked at you. Something which didn't compute.
        Maybe Topaz was screwed up by drugs, yeah, kids these days, drink vodka in bars, go into the toilets and snort up cocaine, blow their minds with anything, even shoe polish if they're desperate, and who knows what Topaz had been up to? The latest current affairs downer was that the new breed of cockroaches, the flesh-eating ones which were becoming a staple of tabloid horror stories, they had psychoactive properties, and all you needed to get high was to boil up half a dozen of them and drink the juice. This was already starting to become a trend on two of the civil islands, Sclag and Gorleth.
        Drugs, yeah.
        Now that Ibrahim thought about it, hadn't there been a glue sniffing phase, back on Sclag, back when Topaz was ... how old would he have been? The year of the Dilskartha meteorite, wasn't it? Yeah, the meteorite which had demolished the Green Parrot Bar, which had been reborn, famously -- you saw it on TV shows sometimes, which was probably why Sable had wanted to meet there, play at being part of TV land -- as the Dead Parrot Bar. Topaz would have been twelve, yeah, and into the glue sniffing thing. That could really bubble your brain. Permanently.
        So that was Topaz, heading for the lunatic fringe of astraldom, getting texted by his "older guy", who was shaping up to be the mastermind terror king, and let's just hope there was no pleasure tourist angle there, hard to see that there might be, Topaz didn't come across as a streetmeat tasty, never had. But the whole world these days was going crazy, was one big twisted crab, sanity no longer there where it should be, on the supermarket shelves between the coffee and the tinned lychees, and there was definitely something short of level-headed about Topaz, yeah, he was acting weird around Ibrahim, unacknowledged and unguessable tangents hinted at by his conversational explorations, and maybe -- no real reason to doubt it -- he was running chemlab experiments on his head.
        "My God-fucked drug fiend godson," said Ibrahim. "Joy of my joys, light of my life. What in the name of milk curds did I ever do to get myself lumbered with this?"
        Good question. What had Ibrahim done to deserve this, his gradual but inevitable embroilment in the world of terror? Well, he had made a mistake. A bad one. One morning, meaning no harm by it, he had picked up the telephone and had made a phone call, asking for a weather forecast. And, as civilization heads into the age of shoot to kill, one mistake, and a mistake that small, that's all it takes.
        Walking along in the sultry weather, Ibrahim found himself sweating. Up ahead, a Glycy Zinger, one of those mart machines, vending chilled drinks and frozen banana blocks. It was standing between two other vending machines, one selling pre-worn girls' panties, "sealed for aroma stability, full satisfaction guaranteed", and the other selling magic mushrooms. The one selling the packets of hallucinogenic fungus was labeled with a stern legal warning advising that these psychomorphers were legal for purchase and possession only as scientific samples, and that their consumption was illegal.
        Ibrahim pressed buttons, zapped the Glycy Zinger with his cellphone, and had the satisfaction of hearing a Frosty Susan clang into the receiving trough. Condensation sweating on the can. Cool against his cheek. Slaking in his throat. Great things, these Glycy Zingers. Zinger, now that was the name of a type of missile, something the Argives had.
        Writing of domestic terror threats, Brian Hazard, the columnist who wrote for the Civil Islands Times, had sketched out a nightmare scenario in which Gorleth street gangs broke into armories in Argive, heisted zinger missiles and automatic weapons, and went on a spree-shoot through Omblock, knocking choppers out of the sky and annihilating the cops in street corner shoot-outs. General Flattop, asked for comment, had pooh-poohed the idea, saying the entire Argive enclave was "military tight", guarded by razor wire and attack dogs.
        Yeah, easy to say. But if the Argives can't even keep their terror nukes on the leash, if they can't even stop their own marines wandering off and ending up naked in the beds of fourteen-year-old virgins, then how much can they guarantee?
        Ibrahim drained his can and sent it clattering into the interior of the sun-cracked green plastic recycling container, to which someone had affixed a bright new "Glorst for glory!" sticker. Wall poster terror treason writ small. Ibrahim hadn't seen any of the wall posters, but apparently they had been going up all over Zisperchilp and in parts of Glud Hurgus, the authorities tearing them down as fast as possible, but it was a form of propaganda which was difficult to censor out of existence. Got yourself a computer and a printer, you can zap out your own one-page terror sheet, stickum your opinions to the public walls.
        How are we for time? Still plenty of time. Hang loose. Olive won't start without you.
        So thinking, Ibrahim continued on his way. And that was when his cellphone rang. It was Sable.
        "Ibrahim," said Sable, "something you should know about me."
        "Okay," said Ibrahim. "Shoot."
        "I know a guy who can set it up," said Sable. "That's what you need to know."
        "Set what up?"
        "Shooting's too good for you, Ibrahim. It's cockroach time. Those flesh-rippers, that's you, Bazooka Boy. That's your fate. You're going down. I know a guy who can set it up, there are places in the sewer system where they'll be all over you, trice-instant. I mean it, Ibrahim. You're roach meat."
        And, with that, Sable was gone.
        Well, well. A death threat. And from such a pretty girl, too. Bright bouncy boobies, that's her good point, but what a warped and wicked twist to the malice of her mind! What will she be threatening to do next? Put maggots in the meatloaf? Firebomb the Yandaviba? Can't wait to discover. Well, after her next trip to the comic book shop, I guess we'll get another phone call, and then we'll find out.
        The cellphone rang again. Back from the comic book shop already!?
        "Yeah," said Ibrahim.
        It was his mother. Was he sitting down now? He lied to his mother and said, yes, he was sitting down. And his mother shared with him.
        "I had a terrible, terrible dream, Ibrahim. They were going to torture you to death."
        "Yeah, well," said Ibrahim, "we've spun the roundabout on the dream thing. I mean, haven't we? How many times is it now?"
        How many glorst-brained prophecies, visionary dreams of that which will be? How many of those squirrel symphonies had gone rorting through his mother's mind? All of them false. False, delinquent, deluded. Nutso stuff. None of them true, not one. Maybe mom had a kind of prophetic reverse-forecasting talent, like the guy who used to provide those negative-image weather forecasts by telephone. Everything in the prophecies made by Gillian Chess was false. Everything. Nothing was true. Not one single thing.
        "But the worst part is," said Gillian, not done yet, "you denounced me. Terror treason, that's what you said, you denounced me, Ibrahim! You denounced your own mother!"
        Gillian Chess was a mature woman and she did not have labile hormone fits. But she was having one now. Her latest dream must have been a megabruiser, a psychotrasher. Really, the federal government should do something about dreaming, it was out and out hallucinatory, and, what's worse, often terror-tainted, these things called dreams. Yeah, people start indulging in all sorts of thought crimes in their dreams, should have been a law passed against them years ago.
        Gillian kept going on about how Ibrahim had denounced her but he soon more or less gave up listening. From a practical point of view, how could he possibly denounce his mother? There was nothing to denounce. Gillian Chess was the ultimate Good Astral, law-abiding and inoffensive, a self-employed woman with her own successful small business, the mother of three children, a taxpaying citizen. She was living one of the few exemplary lives in Omblock. How many people in the city state of Oolong Morblock were leading exemplary lives? How many, out of more than twenty million? A dozen?
        (Ibrahim was guessing high. There were, in fact, only three people in Omblock who were leading exemplary lives, one being his mother, Gillian Chess, the second being the retired engineer Hadonovich Yeltsa and the third being the retired engineer's ophthalmic surgeon, Dr. Wise. Other than that, it was really a city of walking hellmeat, none of them, Ibrahim included in the none, really fit to even wipe their feet on the doormat of Paradise.)
        "Are we done?" said Ibrahim, when at last his mother seemed to peter out.
        "Just one more thing," said Gillian Chess. "I can tell you who was threatening you with torture."
        "Mother, I think we can pass on the identity parade," said Ibrahim.
        "No!" said Gillian. "When it starts to come true, this may save your life. It was Egaltine Choom."
        "Who?"
        "What do you mean, who? Egaltine! You know, Pompous Choomy."
        "Oh, him!"
        Yes, Ibrahim not only knew Egaltine Choom, but, just a little earlier, had actually been thinking about him. But, considered as a human being, Egaltine was infinitely forgettable. Much more memorable as a cartoon character. Pompous Choomy, yes, the bureaucreep guy who cartoonists so delighted to caricature. The joke in the Zisperchilp dinner cracker. The boss, God help us. The master. The lord. He was legally known as Egaltine Choom, and he was the Narabarakak, the ruler of both Zisperhaven and of Chilp. Dork of dorks, idiot of idiots. If you had to have sworn enemies, Egaltine was the way to go.
        But the notion of Egaltine Choom, Supervisor of Zisperhaven, targeting Ibrahim Chess -- that notion was ridiculous. Egaltine didn't even know Ibrahim existed.
        "Mother," said Ibrahim, "Egaltine Choom doesn't even know I exist."
        "But he does," said Gillian. "He was sitting at a table, looking at your dossier. It was at Ming Taxis."
        Ming Taxis? Mom's dream was getting less and less logical. Ming Taxis was on Glud Hurgus, no reason for Egaltine to go there. It was just a hop across on the ferry then a couple of trains, but didn't Egaltine boast that he was an islander? (Meaning, in the parlance of Zisperchilp, that he was someone who never ventured to any of the other civil islands unless he really had to.)
        This was getting to be a long conversation. He really should have done this one sitting down.
        "Mother," said Ibrahim, "Let's change the subject. There's something wrong in your life. You've been holding out on me, but you've been seriously upset for days. Whatever it is, you ought to talk to me about it."
        Whatever trauma had upset his mother -- and, yes, in recent telephone contacts he had clearly divined that she was upset, and badly so -- it might be responsible for this highly improbable false prophetic dream she had endured. Maybe getting the real problem out in the open would get rid of the spurious dream.
        "You don't believe me, Ibrahim," said Gillian, "but in my dream I saw Egaltine Choom as clearly as I see you. He was covered with white-footed ants."
        "With what?" said Ibrahim.
        "White-footed ants. You know, ants with white feet."
        "I see," said Ibrahim. "I'm sorry, but I really have to go now."
        And, with that, he rang off, having finally run out of patience. Better to ring off than to have a pointless argument with his mother. But, really! As clearly as I see you? They were talking on the telephone. She couldn't see him at all. And -- white-footed ants? There are no such things as white-footed ants! 
Having studied entomology and having spent some years as a bug-killer, Ibrahim still thought of himself as the bug expert. But he no longer was. He was like a retired mud wrestling gal who still thinks of herself as a super hippo, and then, one day, confronted by a gang of street kids, finds herself with only the strength to put down the first half dozen before the rest of them swarm over her. The world has changed underfoot, and she hasn't noticed.
        So it was with Ibrahim Chess. The bug world had changed, a couple of species dying out (most notably those big golden sunflower butterflies you used to see in the summer) and new bugs had imported themselves, or had escaped from the science labs where scientists, the Disbelievers, were messing with God's reality in caprice mode, trying to invent singing jellyfish, four-legged babies and intelligent mice.
        Certainty is often the mother of error, and so it was with Ibrahim, who, never having heard of white-footed ants, concluded that they did not exist. Believe it or not, there are in fact such things as white-footed ants. Just as some cats have white paws, so, too, these ants have white feet. They are ants of ordinary size, and their most notable characteristic, apart from the white feet, is that they are particularly difficult to get rid of.
        Although Ibrahim did not know it, his brother, Adolf (no middle name) North, the bugmaster of Adolf Exterminations, the pogrom artist, had been making private experiments aimed at figuring out a more efficient way to extirpate white-footed ants. Yes, white-footed ants existed, and they were a subject of concern to many people.
        That said, there were no white-footed ants in the cool air-conditioned room at Ming Taxis where Egaltine Choom sat studying the dossier on Ibrahim Lonicus Chess, the Zisperchilp resident believed to be the perverted intellect who was masterminding the astral terror treason. There were no ants at all in that room. Nobody in that room had so much as thought about an ant in the last ninety days. (Pretty remarkable when you think about it, since scientific research has demonstrated that the average human being thinks about ants on 2.7761 occasions in every sixty-day period. Substantial scientific careers are dedicated to generating data like this.)
        Why was Egaltine Choom, the self-declared islander, off island, at Ming Taxis? He was there at the behest of Don Trash, who was mindful of the fact that Olive Valise had warned him she was not prepared to tolerate another shootout between Don's guys and Beria's. Any repeat of that incident last year which had left five dead, not counting bystanders, and had put Inoshishi Station out of action for a month, and heads would roll, and, no, Don, that's not a figure of speech, when I say roll I'm talking about bowling ball territory.
        Consequently, Don knew he had to tread carefully on this one, couldn't just jump in and machinegun that Scream Box trash that was surveillance-screening Ibrahim Chess, no, would have been easy, they were such a bunch of armless wimps, but Olive, when she hit the red line, she was scary. Hadn't become President by accident. Well, not entirely by accident.
        Consequently, Don had reached out to Egaltine Choom. Any killing, torturing, baseball bat fighting, Egaltine's team could do it. Egaltine did have a team, a couple of them guys Don had fired for incompetence. Not much of a team, but, then, the astral conspiracy they were up against was probably still pretty small at this stage.
        Yes, Egaltine would suffer the downside, if there was any downside to suffer, and Don, who was quicker on his feet than Egaltine, would snaffle up any upside that came along. And, if they were indeed on the verge of cracking the astral terror ring, which they seemed to be, the upside would be considerable.
        Given that the astral conspiracy, mastermind and all, had been in the news for days, it might be asked why the security apparatus of the nation state was so slow in cracking it. Part of the problem was underfunding. You get the security you are prepared to pay for. If you prefer to spend your money on yet another hamburger rather than contributing to the Secret Policeman's Benevolent Fund, well, don't come complaining to the state when you're home at night and your cat suddenly explodes, some lowlife terror trash having fed it a microbomb earlier in the day.
        Another problem was that both Tolstaple and Ideation Control spent too much of their energy spying on each other. However, if Don Trash had not been diligently invigilating Beria Dag, then he would never have cottoned on to the fact that Beria was in the process of corralling a terror ring.
        But Don's spies, by snooping on Beria's spies, had stealthed themselves all the way to the Adventuring Salt Building, where they had discovered Ibrahim Chess, the venomous spider at the heart of a terror mechanism which was too subtle and intricate to understand at first blush.
        And that was why, now, as Ibrahim Chess hiked along Zisperhaven's coastal road, making for Urn Angol Wat, Don Trash, the Tolstaple boss, was sitting across the table from Egaltine Choom, the ruler of Zisperchilp, in Chamber Terrorwatch, a harshly-lit room with off-white walls, high up in Telescope Tower, the tallest building in Ming Taxis. Telescope Tower: the headquarters of Tolstaple, the secret enforcement agency also known as the Inner Police.
        There were not two people in Chamber Terrorwatch but three, the third being Vicky Glark, Don's instrumental assistant. They were all three of them getting into the psychotropics, strong coffee and that heavy-kicking mental boost chocolate, the dark-as-black consolidum, the kind of lifter you'd pack along if you were wilderness trekking north from Mount Vangus to Mount Spottle.
        By now, they had been at it for some time, and were starting to get a bit of a buzz on, getting a bit of that alligator avalanche mental aggression you need just before you walk in to take your seat for that really tough three-hour written exam for that futurology course you have been taking. (Question one. Choose an option and explain your choice in no fewer than one thousand words. Ten years from now, will dreams be (a) recordable, (b) illegal, (c) legal but subject to censorship, (d) legal, but only for people who have attained the age of eighteen or older, (e) commodified, and, in consequence, both taxable and on sale at the supermarket.)
        "Let's review," said Vicky Glark, who really wanted to kick this slow coach Choomy.
        Or, failing that, to kickstart his brain into action. If he had a brain. Her thesis was that he did, but, as they had taught her back in Cognitive Philosophy 101, not everything you imagine is true.
        Trying to be patient, trying to recap things at a pace which Choomy boy could follow, Vicky revisited the day's events. Sable Tauranga, the girl with the boobies, had left Tower A of Incineration Towers, wearing, as on previous occasions, that shiny metal collar which had been identified as a radio-activated Dubrovnic Decapitator, model KK-24. Quite powerful. Try not to be in the same room when that one takes someone's head off. Sable's precise relationship with Beria was unclear, but, evidently, he did not indulge his pretty little odalisque sex slave, or whatever she was, with the privilege of absolute trust.
        A taxi to Diskartha. A quick trip into Highly Expensive, the place with the in your face prices, to buy a six-pack of lipstick. And who was paying for that? Beria? No, more likely Omblock's unsuspecting taxpayers. Snack time at Creamy Coffee Cups (did this girl have the word "diet" in her dictionary?), then a J-train out as far as Lan Bios.
        At Lan Bios, Sable had been tailed to a dental clinic, Nirvana Orgasms -- odd name for a dental clinic, not quite the right image, a bit like setting up a restaurant and calling it Blowfish, Blowfly or Blowjob Susan's.
        But Sable had not gone into the dental clinic. The cops had been at work just outside the front door, beating up a guy on the sidewalk, and one of the cops, the one with the bright steel knuckle duster which was starting to get bloodstained, was a man Don Trash had identified at sight as soon as he saw the surveillance videos, Heinrich Himmler. Heinrich, a member of the Diamorphine Taskforce, was the focus of three high-profile lawsuits as a consequence of his "let's get results" methods, some of which, incidentally, generated a lot of work for dentists.
        Having apparently decided that she was not going to visit her dentist at the same time as the police, Sable Tauranga had headed back to Lan Bios Station. An I-train to Sekigahara then a velociraptor to quickthrust all the way to Luanda Hill. Another taxi (the bills were mounting up) then a ferry from Koala to Taris.
        And now she, Sable, was at Taris, sitting at a place near Ibrahim's hangout, a place called Brashtabil Eats, eating her way through two chocolate eclairs, which inevitably led you to the conclusion that she was one of the bad girls, yes, skipped her compulsory Lady Svelte training at high school, showed latent radfem tendencies by ignoring the responsibility to diet.
        Brashtabil Eats was run by a Donna Hong, almost nothing in the files about her, something suspicious about that. The ones nobody denounces, they're the ones who are best at hiding secrets.
        Plainly, there was some kind of conspiracy afoot, and Beria Dag was close to cracking it. Beria had used exploding collar terror to co-opt the media identity Sable Tauranga, to force her to be his mole girl. Her mission, as in the movies, was to use her blonde good looks to seduce her way into the heart of a terror conspiracy which, looking at it from the outside, seemed to involve, at the very least, a dentist by the name of Seward Burroughs, the eatery manager Donna Hong, and Ibrahim Chess.
        If you didn't accept the thesis that Sable, Seward, Ibrahim and Donna were all tied together in one and the same conspiracy, then you were forced in the direction of thinking that your surveillance results were just so many random insights into an intrinsically chaotic world, and that kind of thinking is forbidden. Once you sign on as security, you commit to the notion that the world is an organized engine, masterminded. A coherent structure, intelligently designed. The link-ups people make, they're not evolutionary accidents, no, they're part of a plan. Delete the notion that everything is part of an intelligent plan, and your surveillance operation gets trashed down to the status of worthless masturbatory voyeurism.
        Presumably, Ibrahim was the astral mastermind at the heart of the terror treason conspiracy, since Beria's surveillance operation -- parabolic microphones, laser-powered window glass readers, binocular-equipped eyeball watchers, helicopter flyovers, the works -- was focused firmly on Ibrahim Chess. Beria must be red-lining his budget to pay for all this, since Ideation Control had the same basic problem as Tolstaple: not really enough money to do the job properly.
        Well, what to do now?
        Vicky summed it up for Egaltine Choom, but did not spell out the reason why Egaltine had been invited to be the third player in the three-way Don-Beria-Egaltine game. If Egaltine was too stupid to figure out that his role was to be the fall guy if anything went wrong (and he was too stupid to figure that out) then there was no need to put him in the picture.
        As Don and Vicky had realized right from the start, if Beria Dag was left to his own devices, then Beria would, eventually, be able to crack the secrets of the astral terror network he was prying into, and then all the kudos would be his. Somehow, Don and Vicky had to preempt Beria. The way to do that was obvious, but Vickydon -- they were pretty much a mind-match, a merge -- thought it better if Egaltine got the impression that the obvious idea was his idea.
        The next move was Egaltine's. He had to think his way through to the obvious, at which point Vickydon would take the applause track role and say wow, what a megamarvelous idea!
        They had both of them, both Don and Vicky, been waiting for a long time now, with no sign of cognitive activity manifesting itself in Egaltine's speech, but, as the ancient adage says, all things come to he who waits.
        "I have an idea," said Egaltine, at last.
        Pompous Choomy was proud of himself. Ideas did not come easily to him, and, each time they did, he wrote them down proudly in his diary. He had been using the same diary for ten years now, and very few of the pages had been filled.
        "An idea?" said Don Trash. "An idea might be just what we need. What is your idea?"
        "Snatch this Ibrahim Chess individual off the streets, take him to the Dungeon of Death and torture him to death. Get the truth out of him."
        "Sounds good to me," said Don. "Nice, simple and effective. Okay, when shall we snatch him?"
        "How about today?" said Vicky Glark.
        And none of them saw anything wrong with that idea. Yes, no time like the present. Snatch the astral terror lunatic off the streets and go to work on him. By the time they were finished with him, he'd tell them anything. Would give them names, telephone numbers, a list of capables. Probably even denounce his own mother before they were done with him.