A FEW WEEKS AGO

"If a rich man can't get his camel to pass through the eye of a needle, where's the problem? He can always pay someone else to do it for him!"

-- Clients' Handbook (3rd edn, 2108),
Oliver North Church of Fundamental Sanctimony

"Lemme tell you a true story," said the grizzled old space veteran, taking another gulp of imported quasiskotch, "about love."

He drew the back of his hand across his stubble-covered chin and peered red-eyedly at his companion. All around them raged the customary noises of the patrons of the Bellevue Tavern having a hell of a good time. Over in a corner a holographic blind saxophonist was playing an old Flaming Ghoulies number while under one of the tables a couple appeared quite definitely to be copulating, although it was hard to make out the details through the haze of opium smoke.

"About love," repeated the vet, draining his glass and hammering it on the bar. "Another of these, Betsy!" As the burly, tattooed barman hurried to comply, the vet repeated it yet again: "About love."

"Love," prompted his companion wearily.

"Yeah, that's right. Love. Ain't it a bitch? You give your heart to someone, and then wha happens? They jus chuck it away like it was so much garbage for the resyk. But there ain't no resykin hearts -- once they's busted, they's busted, and that's that."

"Busted."

"Yeah, like I was tellin you." Glug went the old man's throat. Glug. There were tears in his eyes as he carefully lowered the depleted glass to the bar's traditionally grained aluminium top. "I fell in love with a navigator on the Titan run. I was only nineteen at the time -- all this was fifty or more years ago -- and he was nearer thirty, but I thought it was love all the same . . ."

"'He'?"

"I'd have gone anywhere in the known Universe for that guy." Glug. "He had a waxed moustache and useta wear these really cute bow-ties over his uniform suit -- one on each arm, jus like in the history books. That was only in deep space, min you: back home he'da been had up before the . . ."

"'He'?"

"So finally, on this one trip, I stowed away aboard his ship, only, when I was caught, he pretended he'd never seen me before, and I discovered he'd got a whole string of other boyfriends -- some on the ship, some in the lunar colonies, even a defrocked Enforcement Officer in Titan base. They clapped me in the brig, and when we got back to Earth I hadta do six months' community service in Megalo-Pittsburgh dredgin through the sewers lookin for coins and other valuables that people had, like, you know, swallowed." Glug. "But I could never get that dood out of my heart -- knew I never could if I stayed in Megalo-Pittsburgh. So when I heard that the ol' Back in a Jiffy was lookin for colonists to drop outta sight and come here to the Big Dunkin Donut in the Sky, I signed myself up and was one among the chosen." Glug. "Then, when you bozoes from Earth finally rediscovered us a few years ago, it seemed I could offer my space-jackin services to the new wave of colonizin ferry ships." Glug glug -- Pa-haaaa!

"'Him'," said the old vet's companion, shaking his head. "I guess I must have come into the wrong kind of spaceport bar." He peered through the clouds of opium smoke at the couple under the table. "By God! Yet how could I have known? It seemed just like any other bar. There was no obvious clue that . . ."

"Betsy!" bawled the vet to the barman. "Bring us nuther bucket o' that snot ya call quasiskotch! Well," he added, turning back to the man perched on the stool next to his, "that's me done with the confessin. How's about it bein your turn? You surely musta got some secrets hidden behin that great mask o' yourn." Glug. "Cheers."

His companion was saved from answering by a sudden crash. The Bellevue Tavern's main door was thrown open, hammering against the holojuke so that the saxophonist's shades shot from his nose and the music died in a querulous avalanche of muffed notes. Every conversation in the bar ceased abruptly, and the holojuke's cacophony sounded all the more startling in the sudden silence.

The figure standing in the door, silhouetted by the red light of the Big Dunkin Donut's sun, seemed for a moment to be bigger than any mortal man could be. This was an illusion -- created in large part by the massively padded shoulders, the vast helmet and, most tellingly of all, the rippling thigh muscles above the folds of the long quasisuede boots. At the centre of the man's ornate belt was a gryphon-surmounted shield -- looking, more than one patron of the Bellevue Tavern thought mistily, somewhat like a misplaced codpiece -- and there were roughly similar shields on the front of the helmet and embroidered over the left breast of the man's bottle-green uniform. Across this latter shield were emblazoned the words "ENFORCEMENT OFFICER D. KNUCKLE". The helmet's vizor shrouded the man's eyes and all of his nose except the very base; beneath its line there was a tight-lipped mouth and an aggressively outthrust jaw.

"Say!" said the vet, his mouth dropping open as he turned back to stare at his companion. "That big bastid looks jus like you! You guys here in the Donut for a convention or sumpin?"

His companion had spun around on his stool to face the newcomer. His right hand had strayed to the ornamented butt of the mighty Thunderguts G2 at his belt. The cape that he had been wearing on arrival at the Bellevue Tavern had fallen open to reveal that he, too, bore on his breast an embroidered shield labelled "ENFORCEMENT OFFICER D. KNUCKLE".

"Hi there fellas!" said the man at the door to the company in general. His voice was high and whimsical. "I was told this was where all the action is. Am I in the right place?"

The vet's companion snarled. It was a low and infinitely menacing sound. Instinctively the vet retreated; another centimetre and he'd fall off his bar-stool.

"Wha . . . wha . . . whazzup, buddy?" he said. His grizzled face had grown pale; his eyes had turned from red to a sickly pink.

"Outta my way."

Knuckle rose to his feet. His Thunderguts was out now, its lethal snout combing the bar as patrons dove for cover. The facsimile in the doorway remained perfectly motionless, seemingly as tense as a harp-string.

The pause was not so much pregnant as about to go into labour. The vet retreated a further centimetre. Noisily.

"Hey, man!" said the holographic saxophonist tinnily. "You done busted my shades. Ain't no one gonna bust Blin Boy Zimmerman's shades without . . ."

His voice had shattered the spell.

The newcomer's left fist swung round in a great arc and smashed into the plexiglass front-plate of the holojuke, starring it. The broken images of the saxophonist looked around themselves in terror and then bolted for the dusty corners at the rear of the display frame. Already the newcomer had dropped to his knees, his right fist coming up fast with his own Thunderguts clutched firmly in it, its sights fixed steadily on the shield at the centre of his double's helmet.

"Hold it!" snapped Dave Knuckle, pushing himself away from the bar. "Hold it right there!"

"You hold it!" responded the man in the doorway.

"I charge . . ."

". . . you with . . ."

". . . impersonating . . ."

". . . an officer of . . ."

". . . Law and Enforcement, the penalty for which is . . ."

". . . death!"

Both Thundergutses spat simultaneously, their explosive charges ripping chunks out of their targets. As the man in the doorway slumped sideways, blood spouting from his right shoulder, the jamb beside him erupted in a flurry of splinters. The man by the bar toppled backwards, firing an additional shot into the ceiling as his helmet crashed down onto the bar, spraying shards of broken glass. Lumps of plaster rained from the ceiling. The Knuckle by the door collapsed further, falling face-first down the few steps to the floor, his smashed arm out ahead of him with the Thunderguts still firmly gripped in its fist. His opposite number slithered gorily to the floor, ending up in a shambles of limbs with his back to the base of the bar.

Again the guns thundered, and both men's bodies took terrible punishment.

"I'll deal with you two later," said one of them to the couple under the table in the instant before his larynx collapsed.

"Behaviour conducive to a breach of the peace," explained the other tersely through a bubbling spray of blood.

"Stop it!" rang out a new voice as the echoes died. A woman's voice.

She was standing in the crooked doorway, blinking as she gazed into the tavern's gloom. She was small -- smaller than any of the men in the bar -- yet no one could have dismissed her as negligible; her slender form did little to conceal her supple, wiry strength. She was dressed, like most of the women in the Big Dunkin Donut, in as little as possible, and it suited her. Her fine blonde hair hung in a waterfall to her waist. Couched in her sleek arms was the all-too-memorably phallic shape of a Multigobbet Autotronic Offense Weapon. She looked capable of using it.

The two stricken Knuckles slowly swivelled their heads to look at her.

"I knew it was a mistake letting you lot out on your own!" she said, biting her lower lip angrily. "'Nothing but trouble,' I said to the big honcho boneses, but would they listen to me? Huh!"

No one dared move a muscle, except those few patrons who thought to cross their fingers she wouldn't look at the picture on the dartboard.

"Toss the Thundergutses out into the middle of the floor." Her tone was weary. "Nice and easy."

One of the Knuckles seemed inclined to disobey, but a twitch of the Multigob brought immediate acquiescence. The vet pulled himself up from the floor, supporting himself on a canting bar-stool, and looked blearily askance at the two huge hand-guns. The blonde woman stepped forward, coming fully into the Bellevue Tavern for the first time, and, eyes warily on the recumbent figures of the Lawmen, hooked up the Thundergutses on the fingers of her free hand. The vet whistled silently inwards through pursed lips: the Multigob must weigh thirty kilograms or more, yet the slight woman held it steadily in one arm, its muzzle moving in a controlled arc backwards and forwards between the heads of the two prone Knuckles.

"Children!" she spat contemptuously, retreating towards the entrance. Dropping the Thundergutses with a clatter by her ankles, she switched the control on the side of the Multigob to "stun", making her movements slow and easy, holding the weapon up in front of her so that everybody -- especially the two Knuckles -- could see what she was doing.

"Bloody children -- that's all you are! Now I've got to get you both back to Imm-Decryp so that the boneses can patch you up. Like I was your bloody mother. Covering up for their bloody mistakes. Pah!"

Two thunderclaps in quick succession. Total stillness. Even the blood stopped flowing from the prone men's wounds.

"Well, what are you guys just standing there for? Call the bulances, someone, and let's get this mess cleared up."

A couple of men broke their stillness, coming forward sheepishly. Behind the bar, Betsy stooped and began to click out numbers on the vidphone.

Kneeling beside one of the Knuckles, checking to see his breathing was uncongested, she looked up and caught the vet's eye. Her own were silver-grey.

"What're you just standing there with your mouth open for? Never seen a pair of boobs before? Come on'n give me a hand."

# # #

"You did right to tell me this, Pandersnatch," hissed Dennis the Complete Bloody Sadist's voice. "Very right." One of his free-floating eyes focused on the man in front of him; the other had drifted off to stare vacantly into space through the plexiplate window that filled one whole end of the office.

The vet from the Bellevue Tavern, considerably spruced up since his encounter a few hours earlier with the Knuckles and the blonde woman, was standing at attention. At the office's far end were three of Dennis the Complete Bloody Sadist's goons, fingering their weapons and chewing bubbleguck in near-perfect synchrony. The sharp angles and projections of their hardware contrasted incongruously with the room's luxurious furnishings. The pile of the pink carpet on which the vet stood must be ten centimetres thick, flopping over the tops of his dusty shoes and covering them entirely. The walls were covered in a material that looked like age-yellowed parchment; only the occasional tufts of hair, the slight whiff of leather in the air and, in one place, a distorted oval that couldn't be anything else but a flattened nostril betrayed the stuff's true origins.

"I aim to please my customers," said the vet nervously. He tried to concentrate his full attention on the jar in which floated Dennis's brain and eyes, and on the voicebox on the richly polished quasi-oak desk in front of it. Dennis's body, propped up in a chair behind the desk with the cap of its skull hinged back to reveal the cavity within, was too disturbing a sight.

"And please me you have." The voicebox reproduced Dennis's speech patterns perfectly, but apparently no one had been able to eliminate the static susurrus. "Others had told me that the Overlords had sent for assistance from Earth, but this is the first I've heard of that assistance taking the form of a herd of Lawmen."

A goon coughed discreetly behind the vet, as if he wanted to dispute the point, but a tightening of Dennis's pupil stifled any interruption before it had even started.

"One Enforcement Officer would have been bad enough -- but it sounds from what you say as if there may be dozens or even hundreds of them."

"I'm not sure thas true," said the vet, trying to keep the quaver out of his voice. "The two Lawmen in the bar both had the same name on their shields, an they both lookit the same to me. Hard to tell with their masks an all, but Ida thought . . ." His voice trailed off.

"Dupers," whispered the voicebox. "Easy enough to do with the Shatter-Recon. They've saved on manpower by duping a single Enforcement Officer. Clever idea." Dennis sounded almost approving.

"I don think so." The vet was drawing on his deeper reserves of courage now; it was well known throughout the Donut's underclass that Dennis the Complete Bloody Sadist did not take especially kindly to contradiction. Had it not been equally well known that the plutocrat could be exceptionally generous in his payments for useful information, the vet would never even have thought of coming here, let alone worked his way through the obfuscations of the employees in the outer offices. "Not deliberate, like. From what the woman was sayin, there'd been some kinda piggup at Imm-Decryp."

"Hmm," said the hissing voice in evident disbelief. Piggups at Imm-Decryp were almost without exception fatal. "What was the name on the shields?"

"Knuckle."

There was total silence. One of the goons gave up blowing mid-bubble, so that a thin layer of pale green bubbleguck collapsed against his face. Even the voicebox's static vanished briefly.

"That puts a completely different complexion on things," said Dennis after a pause. Eerily his second eye floated around to join its fellow in staring at the trembling vet. "I have heard of this . . . Knuckle, Pandersnatch. You would have, too, if you hadn't spent the best decades of your life here in the Donut instead of back in Megalo-Pittsburgh. Believe me, you have little to rue for your absence from that less-than-fair burg. The man's a menace -- the sworn enemy of . . . hmm . . . entrepreneurs like ourselves. Your string of rentboys would have been smashed long ago, Pandersnatch. As for you yourself?" Floating in their preservative, the eyes jerked slightly, as if in a shrug. "Ever tried breaking rocks with your skull? He'd have sent you down for a lifetime of it."

Pandersnatch didn't know what to say. He risked a glance back over his shoulder at the goons, but their faces were impassive -- even the one gazing at him through an additional skin of green.

"And for me?" The voicebox had begun to make small hops on the shiny red-brown quasiwood and to emit a curious rhythmic noise, like a cat preparing to be sick. It was several moments before Pandersnatch realized that Dennis was laughing.

At last the crime supremo had his amusement under control. "Me he sentenced to something far worse than that -- worse, even, than death. Oh, yes -- he apprehended me once, just over four years ago, back in Megalo-Pittsburgh. My brain was to be extracted for implantation into the lowliest of urinal bots, so that I'd spend the rest of eternity being able to do nothing more than adjust the frequencies of my flushes and suckouts while all the world and his brother was pissing down my throat. 'Giving me time to reflect upon the seriousness of my crimes' the big-jawed bastard called it." Again there was that disconcerting juddering noise. "Luckily some of my . . . friends burst in before the transformation had been completed, and were able to rescue me. The irony is that Knuckle could never have guessed how much I would learn to love being able to float free and easy like this, using my body only when I had to."

Pandersnatch eyed the voicebox worriedly. Much more of this rough treatment and it was likely to catch fire.

"But," said Dennis, his electronically reconstituted tone altering abruptly. Now the sound coming from the voicebox was like a shiv slipping between a man's ribs. "But he's sure as all pig going to learn about it now!"

Another of those terrifying silences. This time it was broken by a soft click! as one of the goons made an adjustment to his sidearm.

"You read my mind, Garbucci," said Dennis quietly. "Our good friend Pandersnatch has brought us excellent and valuable news, but we can't run the risk of him taking it out of these offices and maybe blabbing it into the wrong ears, can we?"

"Hey, jus wait a minute!" began the vet.

"A minute's an awfully long time," reproved Dennis, as if to a small and not particularly bright child. "Time costs money, you know."

"Yeah, but I -- !"

"Make his death a quick one, Garbucci," continued Dennis calmly. "As I said, he's our good friend, and I wouldn't want him to think us ungrateful for the help he's given us. A minute at the most -- just so that he can discover how long a minute really is."

"Thikthty thecondth, bothth," agreed Garbucci heavily, moving forwards.

# # #

Nothing but the wind and the cries of high-flying birds disturb the tranquillity of the Omphalos. The vast mountain complex -- the largest of any kind known in the Solar System, dwarfing even Mars's Olympus Mons -- sprawls across nearly eighty thousand million square kilometres and stretches up towards the dim red sun of the Big Dunkin Donut in peaks nearly seven thousand kilometres above base level. Only its lower slopes are habitable; the tree-line is surprisingly high, in terrestrial terms, at twenty thousand metres, but thereafter the terrain becomes increasingly hostile until, at an altitude of just under fifty kilometres, water ice mixes with frozen carbon-dioxide and methane where the Big Dunkin Donut's atmosphere peters out into soft vacuum. Higher up than that, the peaks are scoured clean of all loose matter by the inward gravitational tug of the subdwarf. The few spaceships in use inside the Donut to transport goods swiftly from one part of the shell's interior to another can see the Omphalos jutting out like an island continent in a sea of clouds.

Three times in the half-century since they came to the Donut the Overlords have sent major expeditionary parties here to attempt to scale the Omphalos. They were equipped with power suits, bot porters, rocket pitons, antigrav boosters, Kendal Mint Cake and every other technological assistance known to man, yet all have had to turn back with their goal unachieved. The loss of life was significant: for the first few hundred kilometres' altitude the centrifugal "gravity" created by the Donut's spin is the implacable foe; thereafter -- thanks to Korax's aesthetic tinkerings with the laws of physics -- the greater danger slowly becomes that of falling off into the empty space between the shell and its red-subdwarf primary, there to die long before the inexorable spiral towards the sullen little sun has properly started . . .

Korax has walked those peaks. Thirteen times she has ventured to the Omphalos's summits to nurse her soul back to health.

Standing by the vast mouth of her eremitic cavern in the foothills, she gazes upslope towards the hazy line where the sides of the Omphalos vanish among the clouds, and remembers another cave-mouth, where she squatted four million years ago and watched the machine arrive -- the machine that gave her its name. It is only now, since the advent of the Toadstones, that she knows that it was a machine, not a god . . .

Where in the cosmos are you now, Mother?

She pulls her spun-gossamer robe closer around her shoulders as if for warmth. but it's a purely decorative garment and, anyway, the cold she feels isn't of the Omphalos but of time.

A seemingly almost infinite expanse of time. So long since the big machines brought her here, along with a few pitiful hundreds of others of her kind. To her alone, however, they chose to bequeath immortality and other powers; to this day she is uncertain as to whether those have been treasures or curses.

Life, she muses, would all be so much easier if I had only myself to think of. I'd be quite content to spend in solitude the rest of the time until the Universe dies -- my own thoughts are company enough -- but I cannot abandon my people . . .

Her people. Her poor suffering people. In the four million years since they were brought here to the Big Dunkin Donut, the Skysouls -- as they call themselves -- have evolved independently of their terrestrial root race, becoming tall, gracile beings with delicately boned faces and a crest of soft, bushy hair that runs all the way from the forehead to the coccyx, just above the crease between the buttocks. Their eyes are like faintly tinted water; their voices, when they use them, are like wind-chimes -- but most often they communicate with each other wordlessly, using a form of empathy virtually indistinguishable from telepathy. Their limbs are long, especially their arms, which reach almost to their knees, ending in small, inordinately sensitive hands whose fingers can precisely manipulate objects smaller than most Toadstones can see. Requiring no clothing except for decoration -- the climate within the Big Dunkin Donut is rarely harsher than equable -- they can run at speeds in excess of three hundred kilometres per hour and can climb with speed and ease inclines only a few degrees from the vertical. They have a written and oral history going back four million years, an astonishingly rich musical and artistic heritage, and the ability to live in complete harmony with their surroundings.

The Overlords, arriving from Earth half a century ago, immediately recognized them as an inferior race, renamed them Nandies -- for Neanderthals -- and enslaved them.

I could have done something about it, then, she muses miserably, ambling easily through the scattered boulders across the mouth of her home. I could have commanded my people to rise up against them and drive them back out of here. But we've never had much use for weaponry or war, and we thought the strangers would become our friends . . .

And now I feel my powers ebbing, because of the Toadstones, the Earthlings. They've shaken the faith of my people, almost as if they knew that my abilities must feed off that faith. In the past, with all of the Skysouls holding me as their deity, I could have transformed the World entirely, moulding it so that it became even more of a paradise for us, or even shifting it into another time. But not now: now I can scarcely move a mountain . . .

She pauses, casting her eyes around the vast dome of the sphere above her.

At the very least, I could have destroyed the matter transmitter that the machines left behind. But I thought that the Toadstones would never discover the MT . . . or that, if they did, they'd never be able to unravel its workings . . .

She would weep, were that an act her people knew how to perform; somewhere along the pathway evolution chose for them, the ability to weep has been lost. She remembers tears, and the consolation they once gave her, but they are no longer available to her. Korax has made it a point of honour that, unless there is particularly pressing need to do otherwise, she always looks and behaves like an average Skysoul.

But there is one of those pressing needs right now. If she is not to infect her people entirely with her grief, she must find somewhere she may mourn in isolation.

For the fourteenth time in her almost immeasurably long life, she is seeking the spiritual and physical silence of the vacuum that plays around the Omphalos's summits.

Her steps pick up speed.

# # #

They're a dour lot, these Big Dunkin Donut bureaucrats, thought Petula McTavish sourly as she finally left the Imm-Decryp building. Like most of the buildings in Brando's Carbuncle, at a couple of million the sole population centre of any size in the Donut, it seemed unpleasantly squat to her: she was too accustomed to the towering edifices of Megalo-Pittsburgh and the other megalopolises of Earth to feel comfortable in a place where the buildings rarely extended above four or five storeys, yet could spread out to either side for a kilometre or more. The worst of it was that, as a xenotheologist, she was supposed to be one of the most adaptable people on Earth.

Except for their relative emptiness, the streets were much the same here as at home, though. There were still bums and winos on the sidewalks, still shopfronts offering improbable bargains, still waste paper and used condoms and broken syringes in the gutters. Motorized vehicles were few and far between, and moved with a solar-powered whine rather than the familiar roar; pedal cycles and skateboards were much more frequent in a world where metals were rare. Yeah, maybe, she thought as she walked across the broad thoroughfare without having to wait for the lights, on second thoughts even the bloody streets aren't the same as at home . . .

The two Imm-Decryp pen-pushers had tied her up for over six hours -- and pen-pushers they literally were. Though she guessed that the core of their system must be computerized somewhere, almost all of the clerical work was done manually, with data storage being in the form of the kind of paper files and card indexes that had sunk out of existence on Earth a century ago or more. McTavish had found it quite interesting at first to see the ancient art of handwriting -- but only at first: after the initial couple of hours her patience had worn remarkably thin. She suspected that, had it not been for a judicious bit of Multigobbet Autotronic Offense Weapon-waving at appropriate moments, she might have been there for another six hours. Still, at last the two unconscious Knuckles had been accepted back into the care of the Imm-Decryp boneses; they would be off her hands for the next couple of days while their injuries were being nulled -- longer, if she had her way.

Two down, she thought glumly. Ninety-eight to go.

Shrugging, she turned down a side-street, heading for the sleazy hotel she'd booked into. Most of the other residents were Nandie slaves, installed there either by wealthy Overlords deceiving their spouses or by pimps running them as call-girls or -boys. It was about the one place in Brando's Carbuncle where McTavish didn't feel underdressed.

"Psst!"

She stopped in her tracks, looking around her. A couple of cyclists sped by, heads down as they pedalled furiously. At the next corner a huddle of people was gathered around a news-stand, but the sidewalk was empty between there and here. She seemed to be on her own. She looked up at the orange-brown wall of the building beside her, expecting to see someone hanging out of a low window.

Nobody.

"Hey, lady! Hey, pretty lady! Help me!"

The voice was coming from the depths of an alley so narrow she'd hardly noticed its existence. At sidewalk-level the black, vertical crack was partially obstructed by a heap of overflowing garbage bins, crumpled paper and discarded clothing; someone had dumped a bloodstained mattress at the side of the pile. There was no metal, of course: in BC, like everywhere else in the Donut, the smallest shards of scrap metal were hunted down for resyking.

The hairs at the back of McTavish's neck prickled.

"Yeah?"

"Help me!" The pleading voice was no louder than a whisper. It sounded like a child's -- quite a young child's.

"Where are you?" She peered into the darkness. Even the darkness here is tinged red, she thought.

"In here, miss. My leg -- it hurts real bad."

Wrinkling her nose against the stink, she took a couple of cautious steps into the opening, and waited for her eyes to accustom themselves to the dimness. The buildings might be low, by Earth standards, but the strip of orange sky above her head seemed a long way away.

"Over here."

"Where?"

Something moved in the gloom off to her right. Shifting the Multigob in her arms, she took another couple of paces, keeping well clear of the mound of garbage.

"I still can't see you properly," she said.

"My leg. One of the guys hit it with his stick. I think he broke something. I don't remember much after that."

Now she could see a bit better. The stack of junk at the alley's mouth was only a continuation of the interior. There was all sorts of stuff in here, covering the ground in a thick layer -- cloth, paper, rotting food, crushed plastic canisters, bits of broken furniture with the screws removed, dead animals and Nandies . . . and a colonist kid. He lay with his shoulders jammed half into a busted wardrobe, so that he was having to crick his neck up in order to look at her. His legs were out in front of him, one of them twisted at a weird angle from the other. Even in this lousy light McTavish could see that he was half-naked and that his body had been badly cut about. He was horribly thin. She guessed that the blackness of his skin hid a multitude of bruises.

She climbed over what was probably a corpse to reach him.

"Hey, kid, what's happened to you?"

The juve sniffed. "Buncha guys," he said. "Caught me out back and thought it'd be fun to kinda pig me over a bit. It happens, lady. Dragged me in here n beat the shit outta me, pardon my French, then somethin musta scared em off or somethin. Dunno. I thought I was dead, lady."

McTavish looked around her. Behind she could see a thin slit of street. Up ahead, away in the distance, there was a corresponding glimmer representing the far end of the alley. She couldn't see anywhere an assailant could be hiding, though there might be a thousand doorways along those dark walls and she wouldn't be any the wiser. Her spine was feeling chill, as if she were in the presence of danger, but she dismissed that as mere superstition: tests at home had never detected the faintest trace of psi in her. Besides, she had the Multigob in her arms, a knife in each boot, two hand-lasers at her belt and a garrotte concealed in her brief halter. She began to grin. In enumerating her weapons she hadn't thought of her hands and feet, potentially the deadliest of all of them. There wasn't a lot she should be worrying about.

"OK, kiddo," she said, reaching out a hand. "Let's see if we can get you up onto your good leg."

The hand that took hers was dry and cold. It gripped her fingers tightly -- tightly enough that the broken nails bit painfully into the flesh of her palm.

"Hey, go easy there," she said.

The pressure hardly slackened, but she pretended to herself that it had. Balancing the Multigob carefully in her other arm, she hauled on the kid, so that he slowly came up beside her, standing gingerly on his left leg.

One glance at his face was enough to tell her that he was about to lose consciousness again. She let the Multigob fall to her side and caught him as his eyes rolled up.

Suddenly the darkness was alive. The stiff over which she'd just climbed reared up like a mummy vaulting murderously from its case, shedding its shrouds of stained sheets to reveal a half-naked white man crouched forward with a long, hooked knife in his single hand. His face was more scar tissue than skin; as well as an arm, he'd lost an eye -- not long ago by the look of it.

She let the boy drop; out of the corner of her vision she saw him scuttling away on all fours. Then she was dodging a wild sideswipe of the hooked blade. Her heel caught on the Multigob's bulbous butt and she half-tripped, throwing out one arm to catch herself on the alley's slimy wall. While she was still off-balance the one-armed man kicked out at her, catching her painfully in the groin. She half-doubled over, wheezing unnecessarily loudly. While he was cackling his satisfaction her hand snaked down to pluck the knife from its holster inside her left boot.

She straightened in a whirl of limbs and hair, stabbing outwards and upwards with the cold blue blade. The point tore into his stomach, just below his breastbone, and she rammed the blade in further, twisting it around before dragging it downwards, slicing through melting flesh. He bawled in agony and frustration, dropping his own weapon as he instinctively reached for his gut. She stepped lightly back, reflexively flicking the knife to twitch off the blood. In the darkness it was hard to see what was spattering the garbage underfoot. Bellowing hoarsely, he aimed a punch at her face, but she swung her head back, feeling the fist whistle past her nose. As he lurched forward, falling towards her, she neatly whipped the blade across in front of her, gashing through his throat, cutting almost to the bone. His scream died in a gurgle.

She spun around, ignoring his final gasps of agony. Swooping, she grabbed up the Multigob and in a single movement triggered it skywards. For a second the whole of the alley was lit up as if by an arc light. Eight or ten metres away, yelling incoherently, the juve was scrabbling along in a half-crouch, trying to put as much distance between them as he could. His terrified face shone as he snatched a glimpse over his shoulder at her, then he renewed his flight. So much for the broken leg.

She almost left him. She would have, if she hadn't seen the thick welts across his back.

"Come back here!" she yelled.

He ignored her. A heap of rotting cardboard collapsed on top of him, muffling his yells.

Resheathing her knife, McTavish sprang forward and grabbed him by the ankle. She yanked, hard, and felt the joint dislocate. He wouldn't be running away from her any more. Now even the thick, wet layers of cardboard couldn't mute his screaming. She got a grip on his calf and hauled him backwards. He kicked blindly at her, but she had no trouble dodging his flailing feet. Half-turned towards the alley's opening, the Multigob cocked and ready, she dragged him roughly over the cooling corpse of the man she'd killed and all the other noisome crap until he was lying face-down on the open sidewalk, his thin shoulders shaking as he sobbed.

Some of the people from the news-stand were running towards her. She raised the Multigob, as if in greeting, and they abruptly lost interest. The one good thing you can say about BC, she thought grimly, is that at least they don't have any bloody Lawmen. If this were Megalo-Pittsburgh I'd be surrounded and stunned down by now . . .

She bent forward and looked more closely at the boy. Those welts on his back weren't faked, that was for sure. A couple of them were still bleeding.

Looking backwards and forwards warily, she knelt beside him. Propping the Multigob up against his shoulder, she grabbed his foot in one hand and his leg in the other and, with a swift, dextrous jerk, clicked his ankle joint back into place.

The boy hiccupped a funny little whoop! of exquisite agony and passed out.

McTavish got to her feet and treated the slowly retreating bystanders to another wave of the Multigob; they became swiftly retreating bystanders. Standing astride the juve's motionless form, she looked down on him and suddenly began to wonder what she was going to do with him now that she'd got him. He looked about fourteen, maybe younger. From the moment that his accomplice had reared up behind her she'd been acting on instinct -- instinct and training. Here in BC she didn't know what you were supposed to do about muggers. Kill them, she guessed. But she wasn't into killing unconscious juves, particularly ones that looked as if they'd been having the shit beaten systematically out of them every day for the past five years of their miserable lives -- he'd been telling the truth about that part of it, at least. And she wasn't about to try to report this to the proper authorities, either -- such as they were in BC.

She hunkered down on the sidewalk, her knees up and the big black weapon between them. The muscles of her back suddenly began to protest about the frenzy of action she'd subjected them to, and she was glad to lean against the cool stone of the wall.

"What am I going to do with you, little boy?" she breathed. "What in the name of God am I going to do with you?"

Biggins would have known, but Biggins would be halfway around to the other side of the Big Dunkin Donut by now.

If all was going well.

# # #

McTavish's room at the Belle et Bête Hotel was not luxurious, but it was adequate -- and at least it had twin beds. She slung the inert form of the boy onto one of them, hearing the straw mattress wheeze and squeak in protest. His wide eyes peered at her over the adhesive bandage she'd strapped across his mouth; more bandages locked his hands behind his back and his ankles together. She made a note to replenish the supplies in her first-aid kit first chance she got.

"I'm not going to hurt you," she said quietly. "I'm not going to do anything to you at all. You're safe."

Small grunts escaped from under the sticky tape.

"Yeah, I can guess how you're feeling right now -- a bit frightened, a bit apprehensive, maybe even a bit angry. I'll cut you free in a little while, once you've calmed down a piece."

The grunts became more urgent, but she ignored them, turning away to look with distaste at her surroundings, as if probing at a sore tooth. The room was quite a reasonable size, although the ceiling seemed to tower over her -- the insides of the buildings in BC suffered from similar unsettling proportions as did their outsides. The walls were covered in a drab grey-green substance that she recognized -- from the time she'd taken a semester out from xenotheology to gain a quick doctorate in archaeology -- as paint. Just off-centre in one of the longer walls was a framed picture of a tousled-haired woman with a face in the same shade of grey-green; on first arriving she'd found a small camera behind it, pointed at the larger of the two beds, but she'd stuck pink bubbleguck over the lens. There were other bugs in the room, she knew -- insectile and electronic alike -- but she'd left the latter in place, reckoning it was better to know where they were than to have them replaced by new and less easily detected ones.

Most of one of the shorter walls was window, glazed with some cold, hard plastic she hadn't come across before. Just to one side of it was the holovee, babbling away in a loud murmur. One of the reasons she'd been able to get this room so cheaply was that, although you could turn the volume down low, it was impossible to switch the machine right off; covert experiment had proved to her that, unlike vidscreens back home, Donut holovees were impervious even to concentrated bursts from the Multigob. Now, as she watched, a fifty-centimetre-tall man in a sober grey suit and a gaudy tie was taking a couple of steps out from the front of the screen across the stained orange carpet to stand behind an ostentatiously decorated lectern. Another bloody holevangelist show, she thought wearily. Don't the folks in the Big Dunkin Donut ever want to watch anything else?

The boy on the bed had stopped struggling. His face looked a little red and his rapidly moving eyes seemed to be trying to tell her something, but she just shrugged at him.

"Once I know I can trust you, little fellow," she murmured, "that's when I'll cut you loose."

If the room as a whole was dingy and drear, the view from the picture window made up for it. The Belle et Bête was one of the taller buildings on this side of BC, and her room was on its second-top storey. From here she had a breathtaking view over the Donut.

The centre of all was Korax's Eye, of course. The small red subdwarf would have been inconspicuous in the night sky of Earth, being little larger than Jupiter and shining mainly in the red and infrared, but from a distance of only 14.5 million kilometres it was more impressive than she had ever seen the Sun. She scratched the back of her neck ruminatively. Maybe the difference was that, back on Earth, when you looked at the Sun it was always in the middle of such a big expanse of sky; here, inside the Big Dunkin Donut, you were conscious of the fact that there wasn't really any sky at all, just the sphere extending all the way around the other side and then back to here again, with Korax's Eye floating in solitary splendour in the middle of an invisible bubble of soft vacuum. Narrowing her own eyes, she stared for a cautious moment at the angry red surface of the star: it was blemished, as it always was, by a flock of starspots following around its midriff like a skein of migrating geese.

There was no such thing as night here. The same was in a way true of Megalo-Pittsburgh, of course, because the lights of the streets never dimmed; but at least at home you had some awareness that somewhere far above you the sky was changing its shade. When she'd been out on field expeditions -- both on Earth and on Markovitch's Hellhole, circling Sirius -- that was when she'd seen true nights, with the stars scattered across the arch of the heavens like a sturgeon's roe. Here Korax's Eye was always at the zenith: it was perpetually noon within the Big Dunkin Donut. The nearest the sky came to darkness was when one of the great shoals of clouds that swung around the sphere's equator drew overhead; then the only light for days or even weeks would come, disconcertingly, from the horizon, lensed in from more brightly illuminated areas by the Big Dunkin Donut's atmosphere.

The total land area she could see from the window was something she had never troubled to calculate; one of the Nandie bellboys downstairs in the foyer had told her that, because of atmospheric lensing, you could see a greater hectarage from the roof of the Belle et Bête than the entire surface area of the Earth, oceans included, but she had no way of knowing if this was just tourist bullshit. She wouldn't be surprised, though. Looking out through the window was a bit like peering into a fish-eye lens; the difference was that, with the fish-eye lens, it only seemed as if the world were all packed onto the inside surface of a sphere, whereas here, of course, it actually was. Even so, the lensing effect of the atmosphere threw the lands about sixty degrees away around the interior out of all proportion to those closer by. Directly ahead, past the rooftops of the lesser suburbs of BC, she saw the browns and greens -- close to black in the light of Korax's Eye -- of the semi-cultivated plains that surrounded the city, seemingly stretching away in flat tracts for a while and then, vertiginously, beginning to climb up overhead. Further away, level with her gaze, there were blotches and splotches that she knew were great seas and hardwood forests so huge and thick and impenetrable that Earth had known nothing to compare with them for almost a millennium. Here and there, on the shores of the seas, she could see what looked like a pattern growing in the shape of a spreading tree: a major river and its tributaries.

When atmospheric conditions were just right, you could see, all the way across the sphere, a spectral white squidge that represented the Omphalos Mountains. For almost a decade after the first colonists had arrived in the Donut -- flushing themselves in through the colossal airlocks that had been left by whatever unimaginable aliens had built this artefact -- they had had no idea what that crumpled shape in the distance could be. McTavish smiled as she recalled what she'd been told about their theories. Some of the Overlords -- as that first immigratory wave had dubbed themselves -- had assumed the Omphalos to be a manufacturing flaw, and had taken solace from the fact that the ancients couldn't have been all that great, could they, if they were as capable of piggups as the human race. Others, more mystical, had called the shape the Omphalos, the Navel of the World, and hypothesized that the Donut was a living organism that had grown itself, upwards and outwards from that tangled knot, until eventually its exploring edges had rediscovered each other and united to enclose the space, and the star, between them. It had been almost a disappointment when the Overlords had finally got their act together and gone there to discover that it was just the most spectacular mountain range in the known Universe.

Yet it was still a mystery. There was, obviously, no volcanism within the Donut. The Omphalos had been created, all right -- created by the ancient builders -- but their purpose remained an enigma. Perhaps -- and here McTavish ridiculed her own fancifulness -- it was a religious monument of some sort, erected to honour some deeply alien god.

No one had troubled to ask the Nandies, of course.

That's another trouble with this godforsaken dump, she thought, leaning forwards to rest her forearms on the cold surface of the window. No one ever does think to ask the Nandies.

She made a mental note that she should take the opportunity, as soon as this bloody mess with Knuckle had been sorted out, to spend some long sessions with Nandies, trying to penetrate their culture. The few she'd spoken with so far had struck her as being not only more intelligent than herself but also wiser. Of course, that could be an illusion: one of the first lessons she had learnt in her undergraduate xenotheology courses back at the Old Cap'n Birdseye Polytechnic of North Londinium had been that such judgements were impossible, and almost always wrong, across the inter-species barrier. And yet the Nandies were human -- sort of -- weren't they?

She needed sleep, she realized. Although there had been no change in the view from the window, she had the sensation the sky was getting darker. She glanced at the Kronowiz on her wrist and saw it was four in the morning, Megalo-Pittsburgh time -- the bloody instrument wouldn't recalibrate, despite her best attempts. Through a blur of weariness she reckoned she'd been on the go for nearly twenty hours -- testing hours, too, what with having to argue with the bozoes at Imm-Decryp.

Swinging back towards her tawdry room in a waterfall of pale-straw hair, she looked at the trussed boy for the first time in maybe an hour.

His body was arched against his bonds, and his face was the colour of freshly ejected lava. His flooding eyes looked as if they might pop from his head at any moments, the whites turned to a sickly yellow.

"Oh, God!" she yelled. "Don't go and die on me!"

Beside him, on her knees by the dusty-smelling bed, she yanked away the bandage covering his mouth.

"The john!" he shrieked.

# # #

Much later, watching the white curve of McTavish's shoulder rise and fall regularly as she slept, Heidegger grinned lazily and stretched himself in his own bed, luxuriating in . . . well, not so much in the comfort, exactly, as in the fact that it wasn't soggy cardboard.

Turning over onto his back, he looked at the ceiling: apart from the fact that Korax's Eye was missing, it looked not dissimilar from the scene outside the window, with cracks and stains and pockmarks substituting for rivers and forests and seas. It looked beautiful to him.

Over in the corner, the holovee was still chortling away. Heidegger turned his head and glanced dourly at it. Every ointment has its fly, as his dead mentor Aristotle had so often told him. Heidegger wished he could think up some way of turning it off -- permanently -- while Petula slept, so he could give her the nice surprise of silence when she woke.

Something made him look back at the holovee.

At last -- at very long last -- the grey-suited man behind the lectern had been replaced by a woman. She was clothed in a bright red dress through which her flesh seemed to be trying hard to erupt; Heidegger was reminded of an over-inflated balloon -- a collection of over-inflated balloons. He leant out over the edge of his bed, squinting at the woman, trying to get a better view. She was clutching a woolly ball of dirty white something to her ample bosom.

Heidegger strained his ears.

". . . and Ah had this vision," she was saying in a squeaky electronic voice, "a vision that was granted me not by some supernaturinal boogieman, ma friends, but by the good grace of our sponsors, Country Vistas^TM Plush-Lined Organic Nasal Tissue, out of the deep lovin throat of their kindness."

The blob in her arms suddenly stirred, revealing itself as a small, white, cross-looking dog. While Heidegger continued watching, startled, the dog barked . . . barked words. "Finger-lickin good!" it yipped.

"That's right, Scooper," said the bulging woman approvingly, tossing her curly brass-coloured hair. "You know, ma friends," she continued ruminatively, disconcertingly lifting her head to look directly at Heidegger, "I always say to my good friend and hubby Rick 'The Man' that there's more truth and salvation to be foun in a single shyeet of Country Vistas^TM Plush-Lined Organic Nasal Tissue than there is in every single writin that's ever been produced by the organized ree-lidge-huns" -- she pronounced the word as if it tasted of decay -- "of the entire Universe, and beyond.

"But lemme," she carried on, "stop talkin as if you was just a mass of viewers watchin me. You're all innaviduals, all different, all with your own lives. Lemme just talk to one of you in partickler, someone I want to say somethin special to."

Maybe I could just throw some wet towels over it, or something, thought the boy.

"Yes, you!" insisted the woman, pointing a tiny yet swollen finger at him. "Heidegger!"

I'm dreamin! he thought, retreating from the edge of the bed, bunching the meagre blankets around him. I must be!

"What's the matter, Heidegger? 'Fraid of someone lessn a third your height? An a woman at that?"

"Are you talkin to me?" he whispered, trying to keep his voice steady.

"Ain no one else as I can see I should be talkin to," she said, "ceptin Scooper hyere."

The dog raised its nose and licked the underside of her chin cutely, then settled back.

"I'm most certainly not talkin to that dumbass broad in the other bed," said the woman, bending with some difficulty to deposit the dog on the carpet. "For one thing, she's fast asleep. For another, I reckon she truly is one evil woman."

"Evil"? Petula? I can't believe it! But then I can't believe any of the rest of this is happening, either . . .

"Yup, bub, truly evil," said the woman, shaking her head in mock sadness as she advanced across the carpet towards him.

"Ke-k-keep away from me!" he whimpered, finding his voice at last, the back of his neck jammed against the clammy wall at the head of his bed.

"I can't do you any harm, ma friend," said the woman, although she paused momentarily, mid-stride. "I's jus a image outta a holovee 'cast. Name's Maraschino Hamfist either way, o course."

"You can't get that far away from the holovee set, either," said Heidegger, tugging the bedclothes away from her as well, "but you jus have."

"Shucks, that's nothin," she replied, shrugging. Her smile had grown so broad, as she looked up at him from the side of the bed, that Heidegger thought he could hear the molecules of lipstick screaming for mercy. "Firs time I dun the right thing an turned my face away from God to look at the real gritty truth of the Universe, I realized what it was givin me -- it and our sponsors, of course, Country Vistas^TM Plush-Lined Organic Nasal Tissue, did I mention them already? -- what it was givin me was the knowledge that there wasn't no bounds to the abilities I could have if I just gave myself up to it."

She had a grip of his underblanket by now, and was using it to shin with incongruous nimbleness up onto the bed.

"Although I'm a ryeal live person in some ways," she said, completing the ascent and sprawling on the crumpled sheet as she lost her footing, "that's not the ryeal me, the me that's talkin to you: the aspect of me that you're now lookin at is what a gal could call a 'technological artefact'."

She had righted herself and was trudging up towards his pillow.

"That was a truth the emptiness of the Universe gave me an Rick. It said: 'Hey, bubs' -- called us bubs, y'know, all familiar-like -- 'Hey, bubs, why not give up on that ol fascism of self, an stop forcin all your projections to behave xackly like yasself, whether they wanna or not, as they mostly not? Stead, why not make friends with them, get on equal terms with them, so that you an them can start cooperatin? That way, the fleshly yous can be doin one thing while the arte-fact-chew-al yous can be doin something else.'"

"Keep," squeaked Heidegger, "back. You're -- you're jus a dream."

"Ain't no dream can sock you one on the nose like I can, is there?"

"Ow!"

"So much for the dream theory, eh, kiddo?"

"That hurt!"

She rubbed her knuckles while pretending not to. Heidegger guessed she must have hit him harder than she meant.

"Will you go away now, please, ma'am?" he said.

"But I ain't hardly started talkin to ya."

"You've talked to me quite a lot already," he said. Years ago Aristotle had taught him this voice, like a cross between a choirboy's and a catamite's. He gazed at Maraschino with soulful brown eyes to match. "I do think you oughta go. Petula's certain to wake if we carry on talking like this much longer."

"Not afore I tell you why McTavish is evil," said the miniature firmly, fixing him with her dark eyes. He tried to tear his gaze away. "You musta guessed," Maraschino continued, "she's an offworlder -- she came to the Donut only a few days ago."

"She tol me," he mumbled.

"Never trust offworlders." Maraschino licked her lips. "Aristotle musta said."

"You could never trust Aristotle," Heidegger blurted.

"Safac," agreed Maraschino, smiling. "But take it from me, bub, she's been wrappin ya roun her cutesy little finger. Ya take one look into those cool grey eyes a hers, not mentionin her other at-trib-boots, an your little knees go knickety-knock, and you're ready to believe whatever line a bullshit she feeds ya."

"She's . . . very pretty," Heidegger conceded. "I like her a lot."

"Xackly!" Maraschino reached out her hand and rubbed the end of his nose. "But she's all set to enslave Donut humanity for the rest of time!"

Heidegger tried to get his mind round that idea. With an effort of will he wrenched his eyes momentarily from Maraschino's and took a glance at Petula's sleeping form. She'd half-turned towards him, so that he could see her snub nose peeping out through a scatter of silky blonde hair. He couldn't imagine a dishonourable thought being able to find a footing inside the mind that lay behind that nose.

"I don believe you," he said stoutly.

"Oh, yes, ya do," said Maraschino with quiet confidence.

And all at once Heidegger did. A tiny peripheral part of his mind was shouting at him that this was all nonsense, that Petula McTavish was his friend -- but the rest of him found itself agreeing wholeheartedly with Maraschino. Even if it's bullshit, this part coaxed, this is all just a dream, anyway.

"She plans to enslave us," he breathed. "That's . . . no wonder you said she was evil!"

"Evil ain't the half of it, bub. I dunno who's given her her orders, and I dunno the whole of their motives. But I do know she wants the good citizens of the Donut to return to worshippin" -- she looked around her in mock-fearfulness, as if expecting an enemy to pounce -- "gods!"

"Oh, yuck!" said Heidegger.

"An she's prepared to stop at nothin to get her way. But ya can help me an Rick 'The Man' frustrate her wicked schemin." Maraschino leaned forward so that her face was barely a centimetre from his. "An afterwards, you'll be a hero, adored by the masses, your exploits sung about in spaceport bars n places."

"Wow!" said Heidegger, his mind abruptly a ferment of writhing breasts and buttocks. He knew the kind of exploits people sang about in spaceport bars.

"An all ya gotta do, right now," added Maraschino confidentially, "is lyet a little bit of me climb inside you."

Heidegger looked at her perplexedly. His mind, emptied of flesh, seemed to echo. "Whaddya mean?"

"Well, at some time in the nex few weeks, there's gonna be a single act you can perform to thwart her vile ma-shin-aysh-shuns," she whispered. "I wanna bit of me to be with you alla time, lookin out through your eyes, so's when the time comes I can say, 'Hey, bubs! Here's the momen for kickin ass!', an tell you what to do."

"Seems sensible enough to me," said Heidegger.

"Awl-rightee, now jus you sit an watch," she said, relaxing herself, her face drawing away from him. "And member, this part looks a whole lot worse than it ack-chooly is -- oke?"

"Oke," he said.

Her face twisted in concentration, she stared down at her hands, knotting and unknotting them at terrifying speed. Suddenly Heidegger saw that her long, silver-painted fingernails were growing even longer, their sheen ebbing as they grew and flexed, uncertainly at first but then with growing urgency. Ten moist-seeming grey tendrils, like thin new roots exposed abruptly to the air, crept silently along the crumpled surface of the pillow towards him. He tried to move his head and body, but his muscles were powerless, as if all the purpose had been leached out of them.

"No," he said weakly, through rubbery lips, as the first of the tendrils touched his naked arm. "No . . ."

"Ya wanna help us banish the enslaver, don ya, kiddo?" said Maraschino, her voice grating with exertion.

"Yeah . . . but . . . no."

Arching and stretching like a caterpillar, the first grey filament twitched its tip over the crest of his shoulder and began to quest surely along the line of his collarbone. Four of its less speedy fellows were swarming up his arm.

"I'll be like the mudder ya never had, bubs," said Maraschino's strained voice. "Only, I'll be closer than any mudder, cos I'll be right inside ya, lovin ya, alla time."

The leading tendril was on his face, creeping with steady assuredness up past the curve of his nostril towards the inner corner of his right eye. Its touch was curiously light, making him want to wrinkle his nose and sneeze.

"Ain't no offworlder strumpet gonna hurt ma sweet little babby."

He tried to keep his lips firmly closed, but two of the probing filaments forced their way into his mouth, one on each side. He felt them gently caressing the corners of his tongue. The tip of the first tendril wavered, monstrously blurry and huge, in front of his eye. Then, as it plunged, there was a pain unlike anything he'd ever felt before -- an agony that seemed to shoot electrically along every nerve in his body, arching his back and his pelvis, so that for an instant he was supported on the bed by only his heels and shoulderblades. Just as suddenly, his body flopped back, his forehead a wet and chilly sea.

"That's the wors over, hun -- well, almos."

And I suppose this is hurtin me more than it's hurtin you? His mouth refused to form the words; inside it, the two feelers had twined themselves together and were now moving like spectral surfers along the length of his tongue towards the convulsing chasm of his oesophagus. A further pair of tendrils was busy beneath the bedclothes, one probing his urethra and the other his anus. Maybe as a mercy or maybe just out of coincidence, they struck into their targets at exactly the same instant that another stabbed into the corner of his left eye. This time the pain was so intense a gasp escaped his lips -- a scream stifled almost before it could start.

"There, now, there's a brave little boy for Momma," said Maraschino, now once more squatting easily on the pillow. "This time there really is nothin much more to worry about."

There was very little left of Heidegger's rational mind to doubt her. Slimy worms were advancing up his nostrils towards his sinuses; two more creepers were at his ears, so that the sound of Maraschino's voice was clumsy and sludgy, as if he were hearing it shouldering its heavy way through shallow water. The plates of his skull shocked as the tendrils simultaneously punctured his tympani.

And then, miraculously, the pain fled. With its departure returned the ability to move, to think coherently.

"I . . . uh . . ."

The long roots had severed themselves from Maraschino's fingertips. Like strands of spaghetti, their twitching lengths were being sucked into Heidegger's various orifices. In less time than it took to focus his eyes on them, they had disappeared.

"You shoulda warned me," he said, amazed at how steady his voice sounded.

Maraschino threw back her head. Her neck-folds wobbled massively as she laughed. "If Ida told you, kiddo, chances are youda told your sweet ol Momma go pig herself."

Heidegger wasn't listening to her. All his senses seemed to have been stripped down, reintegrated and given a final polish. The room was larger now, and the grey-green of its walls glowed with cold opalescent richness. The sounds from the streets outside came to him with a sort of artificial clarity. The dull red starlight was a tapestry of subtly beautiful shades. McTavish's breathing, formerly too faint to be audible, was like the purring of a big cat basking on a hot day.

"Like I said, little feller," remarked Maraschino, clutching the torn cloth at her shoulder and picking herself up from his pillow, "when the time is right, the bitta me that's inside ya will tell you xackly whaddya gotta do to put an end to the offworlder broad's malign ma-shinn-aysh-shuns. Otherwise ya won hardly know I's there widdya . . . ceptin, that is, if ever ya need a bit of cuddlin and need ya Momma to wrap ya in the warmth of her love."

"It's not her that's the magic," asserted Scooper from the floor, "it's Country Vistas^TM Plush-Lined Organic Nasal Tissue."

"Ain he jus a card?" said Maraschino, scrambling down the side of the bed. She winked up at Heidegger. "An maybe it's time ya Momma's liddle cham-pea-un had a little piece a snoozle-pie, cos ya mus be a mite tuckered up from alla this."

"Sleepy," he concurred, his eyes closing.

It was only a dream, said Maraschino's voice caressingly in his mind. When ya wakes up, ya'll not member hardly anythin of this.

# # #

McTavish awoke with a deep sense that something had gone terribly wrong.

Pulling the hair back from her eyes with one hand, she pulled herself up onto her elbows and looked around the room. The holovee was still babbling on in its perpetually mindless way, but otherwise nothing moved. Heidegger was asleep, she was glad to see. Sleep made his face look five years younger; she half-expected to see his thumb in his mouth. She still had no idea what she was going to do with him -- she couldn't just adopt waifs and strays whenever the fancy struck her -- but that was a problem that could wait for time to solve it.

Maybe she'd had a nightmare that had fled the moment she awoke.

With a last contemptuous glance at the strutting miniature holevangelist on the carpet in front of the set, she settled herself back into the warm-smelling comfort of her bed. A few more hours' sleep wouldn't harm her, even if a lot of things needed to be done . . .

But sleep played hard to get. Instead she found herself lying in a doze, her mind casually ambling through the events of the past few months, the things that had inevitably drawn her here to this decrepit room in the seedy Belle et Bête Hotel, in a suburb of Brando's Carbuncle, within the mighty alien-built sphere mankind had dubbed the Big Dunkin Donut . . .