Odds and Gods (34 page)

‘Thigh bone,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘The thigh bone connecka to the hip bone, the hip bone connecka to the—’

She looked up. The voice had sounded just like him, except that there had been no sound and no voice. She pulled herself together and picked a few bits of fluff out of what she believed was the left kidney.

‘Osiris?’ she asked faintly. ‘Osiris, is that you?’

‘Where are you? I mean, where is it?’

Sandra stood up hurriedly. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Gosh, so that’s what they look—’

There is something horribly comic, under all imaginable circumstances, about a head with no body attached to it. No matter how desperate the grief, how bewildering the shock, there is always the temptation, lurking in the blackness of the mind, to stick one’s fingers up the neck and try to say
Bottle of beer
without moving one’s lips.

 

And, when the First Day dawned, the wicked prince Set looked out from his throne and saw the sun. And he turned to his two brothers and asked them what it might be.

And his brothers turned to each other in amazement (they had perfectly good names but somehow always ended up being called Game and Match) and confessed that they did not know. Something, they suspected, had gone wrong somewhere . . .

And Osiris had risen from the dead, made whole again by the love and faith of his wife, and had thrown Set and his treacherous brothers into the Pit. Thenceforth there had been day and summer, and there was no more Death except for those who did not truly understand . . .

Or so they say. It’s one thing to believe in the existence of a video recorder, and another thing entirely to build one from scratch out of a cardboard box full of knobs and bits of old wire.

Except that to the gods, all things are possible . . .

 

‘Yes, but where does this bit go?’

Osiris’ head blushed; quite some feat considering that his blood supply was some five yards away. ‘Stay at home a lot in the evenings, do you?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Sandra replied, frowning, ‘as a matter of fact I do. Why?’

The head sighed. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘I haven’t actually used that bit for so long that I’m not absolutely sure myself. Ask Pan, he’ll know.’

Kurt Lundqvist, meanwhile, had wandered off, quite unnoticed by his companions, on the pretext of finding the two doctors and pulling their lungs out, but really to go and have a nice sulk in the bushes, if he could find any. All this time, he reflected, he’d been tagging along like some accredited observer, pleased and grateful if anyone asked him to pass a spanner or lift a wheelchair. True, whenever he had had centre stage to himself he hadn’t exactly cut the most heroic of figures, but that wasn’t his fault, he felt sure. Perhaps he should just leave them a note and slip quietly away.

‘Hoy, you!’

He turned.

‘Whatsyername! Thingy!’

He was being addressed, he realised, by a disembodied head; and although this wasn’t in fact a novel experience for him (compare the Grendel contract of AD 792, for example; or the Medusa hit, right back when he was just starting out in the business) it was nonetheless a sufficiently rare occurrence to leave him standing there with his mouth open making a sort of
Gark!
noise.

‘I’ve got a job for you,’ said the head. In his already bewildered state it took Lundqvist several seconds to notice that the head was being supported by a column of ants, none of whom seemed to know particularly how they came to be doing this.

‘Pardon me,’ he eventually managed to say, ‘but shouldn’t you be, um, over there. With the rest of you?’

The head sighed. ‘They’re in conference,’ the head replied. ‘Trying to work out which order the toes go in, would you believe. I think they’ve got as far as the little piggy who had roast beef. Anyway, it’ll be ages before I’m needed. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to give you your orders.’

Lundqvist took a deep breath. ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been thinking it over and I guess I’m not really achieving anything here, and I’ve got this pretty major practice of my own back home that needs my full attention, so maybe it’d be better if we just call it a day, huh? I won’t be sending in an invoice, naturally, because . . .’

And so on. That at least was what he intended to say, but in reality he only got as far as, ‘Tha.’ Academic, in any case, as to the gods all things are known and no secrets are hidden.

‘Easy little job,’ the head continued. ‘For someone with your qualifications and experience, that is. Spot of fighting, a touch of abseiling in through windows and throwing grenades, silent elimination of sentries, all that sort of carry-on. Right up your street, I reckon.’

Lundqvist nodded eagerly. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘No problem, glad to be of service. What exactly did you have in—’

‘Well.’ The head grinned. ‘What it boils down to is, I want you to liberate Sunnyvoyde.’

‘I beg your . . .’

The head ignored him, and a seldom-used part of his subconscious mind reflected on the humiliation of a six-foot-seven man being talked to by a severed organ positioned the height of an ant’s shoulders above the ground. ‘Go in there,’ he said, ‘take out all the guards, get the residents organised, lead them to death or glory. Well, glory anyway. You think you can manage that?’

‘I guess so,’

‘You’re sure you don’t want any backup? Helicopters, armoured personnel carriers, dog-headed fiends from the land of the Dead, that sort of thing?’

‘No, that’s fine,’ Lundqvist replied, mentally reviewing his various pre-departure checklists. ‘When do I start?’

‘Now,’ replied the head.

‘No time to lose, huh?’

The head nodded, and in doing so squashed flat about forty members of its escort. But that sort of thing is par for the course if you’re a tiny individual caught up in the ebbing and flowing of the tide of Destiny; just as you’re about to overthrow the forces of Darkness and bring back the old King or whatever, along comes some bastard and treads on you. Still, there it is.

‘If I were you,’ the head said, ‘I’d get on to it right away. Tell them,’ it added, ‘I sent you, okay?’

‘That’ll help, will it?’

The head considered. ‘I expect so. Still here?’

Lundqvist nodded; and then frowned, as a thought struck him. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Which way is Sunnyvoyde from here?’

The head grinned, and rolled its eyes directly upwards.

‘If you lie on your back,’ it said, ‘just follow your nose.’

 

Misha Potemkin, assistant distribution manager for the Novosibirsk Tractor Co-Operative, woke to find himself in the toilet of a standard-class carriage of the Trans-Siberia express. This was pretty much what he’d been expecting.

Painfully, he pulled himself to his feet and pulled up his trousers. Too much vodka on an empty stomach at the Jaroslavsk Tractor Industries Fair, combined with not getting all that much sleep over the last four days, had obviously caught up with him. Just his luck, he reflected bitterly, massaging his querulous temples with the palm of his hand, if he’d missed his station. If he had, it’d be another twelve hours before he’d be home again.

Cautiously, he rolled back the door, staggered out into the corridor, and looked out of the window. He observed three things which gave him cause for serious thought.

He saw no train.

He saw no track.

He saw no ground.

With a gurgling noise he collapsed back into the toilet and slammed the door, bolting it behind him. His senses told him that outside the window there was nothing at all. Not even a distant prospect of the ground, such as one might expect to see if the train had derailed on a hairpin bend in the mountains, leaving half the carriage hanging out over a ravine; or clouds, or sky.

A man who has spent twenty-seven years in the nationalised tractor business knows better than that. Obviously he was suffering from hallucinations, the result of cheap Georgian vodka (probably made from freeze-dried oven chips), and until they’d stopped he was likely to be better off where he was. The last time he’d had the DTs, immediately after the Miss All-Siberian Reaper and Binder awards ceremony the May before last, he’d hallucinated some pretty unsettling things, all of which had been far too large to fit inside a small, confined space like this. They’d be hard put to get just their heads in without banging their noses on the sink.

Half an hour later his head still felt like the contents of a turbocharged cement mixer, but he hadn’t had to contend with so much as a single sabre-toothed wolfhound coming through the wall at him holding a bunch of flowers. Probably, he decided, it’s better now. Just to make sure, however, he opened the door on the other side of the corridor and looked out.

Still no train.

Still no track.

But at least there was some ground; there was, in fact, a stereotypical Siberian landscape (snow, snow and more snow under an iron-grey sky that looked like a photograph taken with poor quality ASA 400 film). That, he reflected, was a material advance. He closed the window, crossed to the other door and looked out.

No train.

No track.

 

The holding of high-level peace conferences in railway carriages straddling the borders of the conflicting nations is an inoffensive, even picturesque tradition, and its very lack of originality gives it a degree of innate respectability, extremely useful when organising a last-ditch attempt to reach a negotiated settlement between two implacably hostile factions.

It had been Pan’s idea, of course, and a very good idea too. Since Osiris had refused to return to Earth, and Julian had declined categorically to visit the extended parallel dimension, at right angles to reality, in which Osiris had pitched his base camp, it was also pretty well the only option. It had, however, taken some setting up. Simply getting the dispensation from the Physics Board of Control had been bad enough.

But there the carriage was, half in and half out of the universe of space and time, and on board were the two teams of delegates: the hand-picked elite of the legal and accountancy professions at one end of the carriage, all briefcases and laptop computers and go-anywhere fax machines, and Pan, Carl, Sandra and an old Olivetti portable at the other. Whether by luck or by judgement, however, the divine delegation had scored one of the most telling victories of the conference before a single word was spoken; they’d got the end of the carriage with the toilet.

‘All right,’ said one of Julian’s team, a jet-propelled intellectual property lawyer from New York, attended by no less than three Principal Minions and seven Nodders First Class, ‘we’re prepared to back down on the watercress
if
, and this is a very big if, you guys can see your way to accommodating us on the pastrami. How about it?’

Five hours into the conference and they were still discussing what to have in the sandwiches.

All this had come about because Kurt Lundqvist had stormed Sunnyvoyde. Scroll back and edit; not so much stormed, perhaps, because he’d gained admittance by ringing the front door bell and asking to be let in, on the pretext that he’d come to mend the ballcock. Once inside, however, he had made inflammatory speeches, distributed subversive pamphlets, done all that could be expected of a front-line professional agent provocateur and diagnosed Minerva as having tonsillitis. His appearance had at first had the effect on the residents of a small Friesian calf in a ceramic pipe factory, but eventually . . . Mrs Henderson was now besieged in the linen cupboard, fifty thousand tins of tapioca pudding had been dumped in the swimming pool, and the gods had signed a hurriedly drafted Declaration that dealt in lofty terms with such concepts as life, liberty and the pursuit of Black Forest gateau.

It is one thing, however, to storm the Bastille; quite another to consolidate your position to the extent that you can start issuing your own postage stamps. The godchildren had immediately retaliated by sequestrating all divine assets invested in the World Below; and, since these consisted of about ninety-five per cent of the World Below, this constituted one of the few known cases of effective economic sanctions. The next step could only be war; and, as is well known, you can’t have a proper war without a failed peace conference first. It’s like having dinner in a really expensive restaurant and skipping the starter.

Pan looked round and conferred briefly with his colleagues.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I think we’re not as far apart on this as you imagine.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘We’ll hold our hands up on the pastrami if you’ll consent to a multilateral regulatory agreement on the mineral water.’

‘Policed by UN observers?’

‘If necessary, yes.’

The lawyer frowned. ‘We must insist.’

‘Sure.’ Pan nodded gravely. ‘It should be plain by now that we have nothing to hide. Can we move on now, please?’

There was a general shuffling of papers. ‘We now come,’ said the lawyer, ‘to item number two on the agenda, and I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that your party are already in flagrant breach of the pre-conference consensus on this one.’ He shook his head, like a wet dog trying to shake off the sins of the world. ‘I mean, come on, guys. We specifically agreed that the five coathooks nearest the doors were going to be ours.’

Pan hesitated. True, the first rule of negotiation is, Give the bastards a hard time on absolutely everything. On the other hand, his knee itched and he was getting pins and needles in his left foot. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s no big deal. You can have ’em.’