Only Human (30 page)

‘Quite,' Artofel said. ‘Do you think it'd be a good idea if you went after him?'

‘Hang on,' muttered the second demon, as he struggled to remove bank statement kebab from his left-hand tine. ‘We still don't know he was him.'

‘Don't talk thick, Darren,' grunted the chief, extracting himself from the ruins of the rocking-chair he'd fallen on. ‘Stands to reason, if he wasn't him, he wouldn't have done a runner.'

(Ah, said Artofel to himself, that old police logic, works out every time.)

‘So what'll we do, boss?' asked the third fiend.

‘Go after the bugger, of course,' replied the chief. ‘Don't just stand there. Get him.'

Quick as mercury, the two subordinate enforcers piled out through the window, squashing a footstool and knocking over the laser printer as they went. The chief, however, stayed where he was.

‘Aren't you going too?' Artofel asked. ‘Not that I'm trying to get rid of you or anything,' he added courteously. ‘Always delighted to pass the time of day with our boys in black.'

The chief enforcer was staring at him thoughtfully, like a customer in a Hong Kong restaurant choosing a carp from the pool. ‘So you're a bishop, then,' he said.

‘For my sins.'

‘Funny,' the enforcer said. ‘You're not a bit like I thought you'd be.'

‘Really.'

The enforcer nodded. ‘Nah. They told us bishops were these big heavy buggers in jackboots and leather who go around looting and killing and roasting live babies on their bayonets. You don't look the type, somehow.'

‘It's my day off,' Artofel replied. ‘So you know a lot about bishops, do you?'

‘Yeah.' The enforcer straightened his back, stood to attention. ‘Bishops,' he recited, ‘are the scum of the heavens. The only good bishop is a dead bishop. That's what they told us in Motivation, any road.' His eyes, twin rubies in the encircling darkness, gleamed fiercely. ‘You
sure
you're a bishop?' he said.

‘Scout's honour,' Artofel replied. ‘I'm fresh out of babies at the moment, but if you can lend me a bayonet I'll demonstrate the basic technique with this cushion and the storage heater.'

The enforcer shrugged his nebulous shoulders. ‘All right,' he said. ‘We shall meet again, Bishop,' he spat. ‘And when we do, you'll be laughing on the other side of your face.'

Whereupon the shadow climbed out of the window, nothing more than an impression of a deeper darkness passing through the frame, leaving Artofel to reflect that at least he had a face on the other side of which he could conduct laughter should the need arise. He also spared a little mental capacity for the question of whether it was really necessary for his side's standing army to be quite so heavily motivated, and came to the conclusion that it probably was, or else how on earth could the poor chaps ever manage to take themselves seriously? Having dealt with these reflections he switched off the screen, took out the disk, swung open the mutilated door and left the house.

 

‘So, friends,' orated Dermot Fraud, casting his eyes theatrically round the crowded burrow, ‘if we can learn to pull together, tighten our belts, put our shoulders to the wheel and march forward towards the light of this new dawn, then and only then we can be assured of a brighter tomorrow, not only for ourselves and our litters, but our litters' litters; one small step for a lemming, a giant standing-still-and-not-leaping for lemmingkind.'

Stunned silence, followed by tumultuous applause as four hundred and sixty lemmings leapt up on to their hind legs, cracked their heads on the tunnel roof, sat down again and cheered until the ground shook. This is great, Fraud reflected, as he smiled and waved graciously; almost as rapturous as the last party conference, and it didn't take three days of rehearsal to get it right for the cameras. Got to hand it to these characters, they were born to be an electorate.

When the pandemonium had at last died down and you could just about have heard a large bomb go off two feet to your left over the residual clapping and cheering, a long, thin lemming rose cautiously to its hind legs, keeping its neck bent and feeling for the headspace with its offside front paw, and cleared its throat.

‘That's wonderful,' it said, ‘really. So what do you want us to do?'

Fraud cursed silently. It's always the way; you're going along swimmingly, got the audience in the palm of your hand, one word from you and they'd storm a whole arcade of Winter Palaces like a rat up a drainpipe, and then some bastard comes along and stops you dead in your tracks with a trick question. Fortunately, Fraud knew how to handle troublemakers.

‘That, my friend, is easy,' he replied. ‘Go forth and prepare for not jumping.'

Which started the standing ovation up all over again, with two thirds of the lemmings clean forgetting about the low ceiling in their excitement. Fraud was feeling justifiably pleased with himself and was wondering whether this would be a good time to give them the strength-through-unity stuff when he noticed that the heckler was still on its hind feet.

‘How right you are,' it said, and Fraud noticed big fat tears rolling down the sides of its snout. ‘But what do we actually
do
? You haven't told us yet.'

Who did this creep think it was, Jeremy Paxman? ‘I'd have thought that was obvious,' he said, still smiling. ‘Not jump, of course.'

As millisecond-perfect as the dream studio audience, the lemmings burst into hysterical laughter. And in spite of everything, the damned heckler was still on its damned hind legs. This was getting out of paw.

‘Yes, of course,' it said, and this time the tears it brushed away were tears of laughter. ‘But apart from that. There must be something else, surely.'

For the first time since he was born, Fraud couldn't think of anything to say; a terrible feeling, like not being able to breathe. He was about to choke on his own lack of speech when the heckler blinked a couple of times and nervously asked if it could possibly make a suggestion. Reluctantly, Fraud gestured that it could.

‘All I was thinking was,' said the heckler, ‘how'd it be if we made you our new leader? If you wouldn't mind, of course. Only it seems the only logical thing to do, doesn't it?'

About a hundred birthdays and Christmases rolled into one, with the lingering deaths of all his enemies and two thirds of his cabinet colleagues thrown in for good measure, plus a really juicy disaster he could be statesmanlike about; dammit, this lot aren't as good as people, they're
better
than people. Then and there, Dermot Fraud decided that he didn't
want
to go home, even if he could. He wanted to stay here for ever.

‘What, me?' he said. ‘I don't know what to say. The thought never even crossed my—'

‘Oh go on.' ‘Please.' ‘Oh you must, really.' The babble was deafening, and Fraud glanced nervously at the roof of the burrow; so much sound, so many vibrations, how much more could it take before the whole lot caved in? But the crowd didn't want to stop; they were enjoying themselves too much, like ordinary decent folk baying for the blood of an unfashionable minority, and their disparate cries had welded together into one inspiring chant:

It did your heart good to hear it. Finally, right at the back, a few bits of roof did start coming down, and that helped restore a modicum of order to the proceedings. Fraud held up a paw; immediately, there was silence.

‘Very well,' he said. ‘Regardless of my own personal feelings, I cannot ignore the call of my people. Together, we shall not go forward. Together, we shall stay exactly where we are. Together—'

He was just about to say something really inspirational when a black shadow in the darkness behind him grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.

S
eventy-two hours into the eclipse, and people were beginning to notice; it had, after all, been featured on
World in Action
and mentioned in passing in
The Cook Report
. Newshounds had shoved cameras at it and then stood in front of them, pointing out that it was there. Kilroy had interviewed it; and if the conversation had been more than a little one-sided, it only served to restore a touch of much-needed normality to the situation.

After the initial chaos, the first twenty-four hours had been fun. So long as you edit out the falling-bombs aspect, Spirit-of-the-Blitz is a rattling good game, and all over the Western Hemisphere mankind waggled a fist at the sky and cried, ‘We can cope!' Mind you, it helped that this part of the twenty-four hours coincided with the time when it would have been night anyway. When they woke up in the morning and saw that the stupid thing was still there, people began to mutter. Then they filtered it out of their minds and ignored it, with the resilient defiance of a hedgehog curling up into an impenetrable ball of needles in the middle lane of the M6.

Now, what with it being As Seen on TV, and Mulder and Scully apparently not hurtling to the rescue, you could hear something thoroughly unnerving on every street corner in the world: namely silence. It was the silence of many millions of people doing mental arithmetic.

There were a few odd things about it, too. It wasn't getting cold. People who'd succumbed to the last solar-energy craze were still getting hot water out of the taps. Holidaymakers returning from a day on the beach were examining themselves by torchlight on the way back to the hotel and finding they were acquiring a reasonable tan. According to those refugees from televised snooker who'd managed to find something more interesting to watch, paint still dried. As these facts began to sink in, there was a general unclenching of muscles, combined with a vague feeling of anticlimax. There was, according to the media, No Cause for Alarm, the first recorded instance of such an admission being made by any mass information system in the twentieth century. The Government gained seven points in the polls. The FT Index went nine hours without either a meteoric rise or a catastrophic fall, an all-time record.

For one interested observer of the human condition, it was bitterly frustrating, since it meant he couldn't observe. Compared with the ambient light levels on his own planet, Earth was pretty fair average dark at the best of times. Now, thanks to this piece of unwarranted astronomical interference (obviously a regular event, judging by how calmly they all took it), Zxprxp couldn't see worth spit; not without standing where he could be seen himself, something he'd decided was a bad move. Even navigation in his fully automated ship was hazardous - he'd already narrowly missed one completely unilluminated tower block (Government offices; conserve energy, no lights on between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m., rules is rules) and decapitated an awful lot of trees. No alternative but to put down somewhere and sit it out; which is what he did.

He couldn't have been expected to know, or care, that what he'd landed on was the flat roof of a small backstreet industrial unit in the Fourth Ring of Birmingham. In fact, he'd been in a physical/mental recuperation coma for several hours when he realised that he was being talked at.

In his own language.

No, not his own language, because if he listened to it as a noise rather than a medium of communication, it didn't sound like speech, it sounded like two female
rgfesdq
fighting inside an underwear resuscitation pod. Nevertheless, the translator unit wasn't registering activity.

He scowled until all seven lobes met under his knees.
Not
a systems malfunction.
Not
a wiring burnout in the indicator array.
Not
his inflight entertainment unit picking up good ole Station ZZZ from two thirds of the way across the galaxy. Possibly not even his imagination.

It was the machine. Something was talking to it. Not
through
it.
To
it.

‘. . . where you come from. Sounds a bit like oil. Go on, try a drop. It's just a cheap little forecourt SAE20/50 but I think you'll be amused by its . . .'

Something was talking directly to his ship; which was why it wasn't registering on the translator. His ship was being
chatted up
by an alien intelligence.
Dammit, how many times have I got to tell you not to use these circuits for private calls?

‘. . . what, this old thing? Just ordinary titanium, with a few scraps of 430F stainless I happened to have just lying about. If you like, I can give you the blueprints . . .'

He was about to shut down the circuits in a fit of pique when he realised:
Hey, I'm jealous. I'm jealous because my ship's talking to someone. Next thing I know, I'll be waiting up for it and demanding to know where it's been.This is
. . .