Grailblazers (16 page)

When Bedevere made an uncharacteristically impatient gesture, Turquine went on: ‘You don't seem to have tumbled to it yet, young Bedders. We're talking mysticism here.' He broke off to avoid and swear at a T-registration Allegro which had churlishly insisted on its right of way on the roundabout. ‘You remember what old Beaky Maledisant used to say about mysticism.'

Bedevere confessed that he'd forgotten. Turquine nodded.

‘Thought you had,' he said. ‘I seem to remember you spending the Wisdom lessons looking out of the window at the girls from the—'

‘Anyway,' said Bedevere.

Turquine changed gear noisily. ‘The point is,' he said, ‘if you're looking for a lost city, or a lost priory, or a hermit's cell under an enchantment of oblivion, anything like that, it's no good going through the index at the back of the
A-Z
; you've got to get lost yourself. Then it sort of finds you. That's,' he added proudly, ‘logic.'

Bedevere raised an eyebrow. ‘Logic?' he asked.

‘Well,' Turquine replied, shrugging, ‘theology, then. All those that are lost shall be found, or words to that effect. Hell fire and buggery,' he added, staring at a road sign, ‘that's the Stirchley turn-off. How the devil did we get here?'

Bedevere smiled wanly. ‘Theology, probably,' he said. ‘That and taking the wrong exit back at Brownhills. You want the A37.'

‘Give me the map a minute,' Turquine said. ‘I know a short-cut that should ...'

Bedevere was about to protest, from long experience of Turquine's short-cuts, when it occurred to him that all that stuff about being lost on purpose sounded uncomfortably reasonable. ‘Great,' he said, therefore, and even added, ‘Good idea.'

Turquine's short-cut, predictably, took them up a single-lane cul-de-sac terminating in a deserted farmyard. They always did. In fact, Bedevere had often felt, if only one took the trouble to get out of the car and have a look, it would probably turn out to be the same farmyard each time. Which made sense, somehow...

‘Right,' he said, releasing his seat-belt and opening the door, ‘we're here.'

Turquine looked at him.

‘What on earth are you doing?' he asked.

‘Following your premise to its logical conclusion,' Bedevere replied, grabbing his haversack from the back of the van and putting on his hat. ‘Coming?'

‘But...'

Bedevere smiled nicely, slammed the door and set off towards the farmhouse. After a moment's therapeutic blaspheming, Turquine followed him.

‘You see,' Bedevere explained, as they squelched through the slurry, ‘if you've got to be lost in order to find a lost city, it follows that you've got to be as lost as humanly possible. I think a farmyard up a five-mile lane with grass growing up the middle of it is about as lost as we can get without actually poking our eyes out with a stick, don't you?'

He smiled and knocked at the door. Surprisingly quickly, the door opened.

‘Good afternoon,' Bedevere said. ‘We're looking for Atlantis. Can you put us on the right road?'

The woman who had answered the door looked as if she probably could, in a sense. She struck Bedevere as the sort of woman who has a son called Oak and two daughters called Skychild and Mistletoe, and she was wearing rather a lot of that peculiar silver jewellery that nobody ever buys at craft fairs.

‘Sorry?' she said.

‘Atlantis,' Bedevere repeated. ‘You know...'

‘Oh,' said the woman, ‘yes, right. You don't look the type, that's all. You'd better follow me.'

She led the way into the house, and Turquine and Bedevere exchanged looks.

‘That's probably the nicest thing anyone's ever said about me,' whispered Turquine under his breath. ‘God, this place smells a bit.' He sniffed distastefully. ‘Looks like they go in for the old wacky baccy around here.'

The woman opened a door and stepped aside.

‘In here,' she said. ‘You know what to do.'

It was an odd room, in context. It was, Bedevere decided, exactly like the more fashionable sort of building society, except that there were no girls in uniform sitting behind the computer screens. Not a pentangle or a cabalistic sign in sight.

‘If you need anything,' the woman said, ‘we're all in the scullery, meditating.' She closed the door, and the knights could hear the plopping of her bare feet in the corridor.

For about a minute, neither of them spoke. Then Bedevere shrugged.

‘All right,' he said, ‘maybe we should have gone left at the Shard End underpass.'

Turquine sat down behind one of the screens. ‘Not at all,' he said. ‘I think I'm getting the hang of this. Neat,' he added, with a hint of admiration. He closed his eyes, flexed his fingers like a concert pianist, and dabbed the keyboard at random.

‘After all,' he said, as the screen went blank and the machine beeped a couple of times, ‘there's lost, and there's lost. Now, then.'

‘Do you know how to work one of those things?' Bedevere asked.

‘Previous experience is not essential,' Turquine replied. ‘Think of a number.'

‘Seven.'

‘And why not?' Turquine tapped a key. ‘For example,' he went on, ‘when was the last time you had any dealings with the Inland Revenue?'

Bedevere blushed. ‘I ...' he said.

‘All right,' said Turquine, ‘the telephone people, DVLC, British Gas, any of that mob. People who use computers a lot.'

‘They all have screens at the office,' said Bedevere, the insurance salesman.

‘And,' Turquine went on, ‘what's the commonest explanation for things getting cocked up?'

‘Lost in the computer, of course,' Bedevere said automatically, and then bit his lip. ‘Oh,' he said, ‘yes. I think I see what you're getting at.'

Turquine smirked. ‘Took your time, didn't you?' he said. ‘How to lose something while still permitting it to exist. Feed it into the computer. Easy. I mean, it'll be in there somewhere; it's just lost, that's all, along with half a million renewal notices, paid parking tickets, standing orders, estimated meter readings and revised assessments. And all you need to do to get it back again is type in the magic word.'

Bedevere smiled, full of admiration. ‘Which is?'

‘Ah,' Turquine wheeled round on the swivel chair. ‘There you have me. Still, we're almost there.'

Bedevere slumped a little; then he perked up. ‘Absolutely,' he said. ‘Allow me.'

He pushed Turquine gently out of the chair, sat down and rubbed his hands. ‘They do this at the office,' he explained, ‘whenever the wretched thing has a bit of a paddy and nobody can get anything out of it. You're not meant to, of course ... Ah, here we are.'

He found the button he was looking for and pressed it. The screen went blank and a floppy disk popped out of a slot. He pressed it back in, pressed the button again and smacked the side of the console with the flat of his hand.

There was an interval while the machine swore at him in morse code; then the screen went completely blank. Bedevere was just about to start feeling a complete idiot when letters appeared on the screen.

 

‘Bingo!' Bedevere exclaimed. ‘Right, let's see.'

He typed in a message, one-fingered, and the screen went blank again.

‘What was that you just—?' Turquine started to ask, but Bedevere shushed him.

 

 

 

 

‘Brace yourself,' Bedevere whispered. ‘This could be a bit disconcerting.'

‘How do you mean, brace myself? Brace myself against what?'

‘Ssh!'

 

 

 

 

The world vanished ...

 

 

The question, ‘How did people manage before there were fax machines?' is fortunately academic.

There have always been fax machines, but they have gone under other names, and some of the experimental models bear as much relation to the modern versions as, say, a pair of cocoa tins connected by a piece of string bears to a cellular carphone.

For example; the Pyrolex IV Turbo, which had a passing vogue in the Near East around the time of the Pharaoh Rameses II of Egypt, operated by a primitive form of fibre-optics, whereby concentrated beams of light were conducted through the upper air in the form of radio waves, collected by a rough and ready transducer - the leaves of a rare variety of palm tree, now long since extinct - and then focused on to the receiving medium through an organic lens formed by the tree's blossom.

The fax was, of course, known to the Romans, who used it to communicate with the gods. The Lector Lucius model favoured for this purpose was reliable but slow; the message was relayed into the DNA of a flock of sacred chickens, and was read by cutting open a chicken chosen at random and having a look at its entrails.

Albion used a form of fax technology very similar to our own; but after the fall of the Albionese kingdom we enter a period known to information-technology historians as ‘the long dark winter of the postcard', during which only a vestigial form of fax was available.

The exception, of course, was Atlantis, where the fax machine has been known since the very earliest times; so much so that the seminal text of the Atlantean Apostolic Church,
The Gospel According to St Neville,
begins:
which suggests that at the time the Gospel was first reduced to writing, the Atlanteans were still using the Mark IVc.

Where the Atlanteans outstrip all other fax-using nations, of course, is in their ability to transmit more than mere facsimiles of the written word ...

 

 

‘Bedders?'

The word hung for a moment in the empty air, glowed like embers, and died away. Then there was nothing but the faint howling of the wind that blows round the stars.

‘Is that you, Turkey?'

The same, except that these letters flickered with a pale blue fire, and crackled in the thin air like sparklers.

‘Where are you?'

‘Over here.'

‘Where's here, for God's sake?'

‘I don't know, do I? Turkey, what's going on?'

And then they both felt the message; felt, not heard or saw. The message was:

Two disembodied voices started speaking at the same time. It was a bit like Guy Fawkes Night.

Shut up and listen, then, came the message. There is no here or there, up or down, you, me, they, he, she, now, then, right, wrong, fat, thin, black, white, yellow, green, alive,
dead. There is only information. Transmitting.

‘All right,' the blue fire traced irritably. ‘Transmitting what?'

There were a few spurts of inchoate orange fire, and then a blaze of virtually illegible pyrotechnics. From the fact that most of the words spelt out were extremely vulgar, one can hypothesise the presence of some part of Sir Turquine.

Look at it this way,
suggested the message.
You know how heavy gold is, right? And all money, broadly speaking, is gold. And you can send money by telegraphic transfer, right? Well, then.

The orange flames flickered testily but got no further than a bad-tempered incandescence. Then everything went black.

Two enormous rollers grinding out a roll of paper; except that it isn't paper. It has one dimension too many for that.

Sir Turquine and Sir Bedevere emerged from between the rollers as two-dimensional silhouettes, flopped out and gradually began to take shape, like balloons being blown up. Not until they were fully inflated did they animate; but as soon as that part of the process was over, Turquine at least was profoundly animated.

‘Right,' he said, grimly. ‘Nobody shoves me head first through a wireless set and gets away with it.' He rolled up his sleeves and looked round for somebody to take the matter up with.

‘Turkey,' whispered Bedevere urgently beside him.

‘What?' said Turquine, not looking back. ‘Don't try and talk me out of this, Bedders. Somebody is going to get their heads punched for this, and—'

‘Turkey.'

‘What?'

‘Look down, will you?'

Reluctantly, Turquine obeyed. He noticed that they seemed to be standing in a ploughed field. The earth was a pale reddish sort of colour, like clay. Very pale. Almost pink.

‘Turkey,' said Bedevere, ‘we're standing on somebody's finger.'

It's very hard to get yourself accustomed to truly enormous scales. The eye can only take in a certain amount of information, and the brain can only process a certain amount of the eye's input. You need to be able to eke these resources out with a lot of imagination if you want, for example, to identify a twenty-five-foot-wide strip of ground as a finger.

‘Oh yes,' said Turquine quietly, ‘so we are.'

Welcome,
purred the message,
to Atlantis. Do you want to be enlarged?

‘I think so,' said Bedevere, ‘don't you, Turkey? I think that'd be a jolly good idea, if it's all the same to—'

‘Understood.'

The finger shrank, until it became a hand, and it shrank and it shrank and it shrank until the hand closed over Bedevere's fingers and shook them warmly. It was attached to an arm which connected it to a round, bright-eyed, middle-aged man in a dark grey suit.