First part of Fal.

If you could read, you might learn something, but of course you know everything already, without being able to read. 
Extract from The Anile Heir © 2006.I, Ysabel Jehan Howard, hereby assert and give notice of my right under s.77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act1988 to be identified as the author of this book.
I Kyse must intervene.  Stable, me?
If I resign and return home or install myself in Azt what actually should I do?  Historical research.  I guffawed.  By the way, for whom should I be working?  Things get complicated when you think about them too much.  I guessed most of the people in the Imperial  saw themselves as good citizens of Vasucula or Ciletij carrying out the aims of Vasucula or Ciletij.  My new friend must have some views on this and in the sprawling apartment that was home in the City I mailed her.  The bit in the middle wasn’t a problem.  It was the end and the beginning.  Hi, Fal?  Dear Fal?  Dear, dear Fal?  Love, Kyse?
Lots of love?
Neither of us had said anything.  Make that Said Anything.
I clicked Save not Send and sat back and started to think about something difficult.
It must be said at this late date…One of the reasons I hadn’t cast aside my books and rushed off to the pulsating hub was that I had been in a relationship. It was a perfectly good relationship – I guess I mean imperfectly good.  We were very alike and that I saw with hindsight had been fatal.  On-lookers on life.  Chroniclers.  I understood that if I became involved with Fal I shouldn’t be able to sit back and watch.  Or want to.  But was it for me?  Mel had opened that door for me.  I’d looked inside, smiled approvingly, gosh, you do lead a varied life, and withdrawn.  I doodled the word ‘extremes’ with lots of curlicews on the ‘x’.  Surely there were normal people, people who found a happy medium.  I considered Fal and my mind and body wandered off into a rather enjoyable fantasy.  I reined them in and drew a vertical arrow down from the centre of the ‘x’.  Hmmm.  No-one who’d known her ten years ago would have dreamed she’d be living alone growing pettifer in Carlin.  Life is both, I wrote.  Congratulations on that vast glimpse of the obvious. Ah yes, the balance.  So my life was heavily out of kilter – and at the other extreme that of many others too obvious to name.  But there would be an election.  There would be respite.  It’d be Fal who’d be Senator, not me.  So she’d be in Azt.  So – my mind went blank a moment.  So she could be killed.  I felt a sort of fury that that was a possibility.  The Matter of Kadun stared at me and said do something. 
Oh.
What are they all in it for?  A society in which people were not assassinated.  The rule of law.  I do the rule of law.
They didn’t need me to write the laws.  Conceivably they needed me to write the history.
I wrote: the unknown and possibly the unbearable, then underlined ‘the unknown’ a lot.
I couldn’t in all honesty, I said to myself with a sort of leer, even if I wanted to, say ‘it wouldn’t work’ because I didn’t actually have the faintest conception what ‘it’ would be like. 
There was of course also the small detail of whether she’d want me.
Dear Fal.  Lots of love, Kyse x.
 
Dear Kyse.
It was a long answer and some of it was hilarious.  She spared herself no pains telling me about being handed over to Sarat.  People like us, she wrote, are so obviously Mel’s team that we shock ourselves when we find we aren’t.  I think the ground rules are some automatic assumptions.  I trust we all know our Constitution.  Let’s say we’re functioning solely in the context of Dabida a minute.  We assume the whole thing isn’t going to go pear-shaped, which is to say we assume the interests, values etc of Crown, State and People are identical.  It doesn’t occur to us that by being ‘Mel’s team’ we’re being in any way divisive.  Mel had to take the other two-thirds with him and he did.  In the context solely of Kadun, there’s Mitch, absolutely ‘Sarat’s team’  and the same applies.  There the assumption is a bit bigger and its roots are more complicated because pro tem anyhow the State and the People are all represented by ‘Sarat’s team’.  But really it’s not a question of that three-pronged animal ‘the nation’ it’s a question of the interests and values and, as I said to you, what you do to further those values, so there is no conflict.  Only that there might be.  In the long run that ‘might be’ is real, but I don’t think it is in our lifetimes.  In other words Kadun is not going to declare war on Dabida!  What could happen, though I don’t think it will, is I could find myself in a Senate with an anti-democratic (and nationalist) majority.  So who would ‘the People’ be then, the people who’d elected me or the people who’d elected them?  If Mel, Sarat, Tar, Vanya, took a pronounced anti-democratic turn, I’d oppose them.  It’s so easy for the little hierarchical brain to say ‘Mel’s team’ but I’m not, you’re not.  We’re irretrievably committed to certain values, we’re not on anyone’s side, except the side of those values.  Consequently, theoretically, I could yet find myself a resistance fighter holed up in the Lausanine.  It is – fortunate the power bases of the continent are equally committed to those values, but that’s all it is, true for now, not true-true, a law of the universe. That’s what I mean, it’s a shock.  Shock to find I’m something apart from a loyal little Dabidan.  But that’s what they mean when they say PANTHER works for no-one, not Kadun, not Fidub, not the Emperor.  We mean, I mean to say, of course, yes….It gets embedded, doesn’t it.  It doesn’t really matter unless the chips are down.
 
There was a bellowing in my brain: soul-mate.
I realized that I wasn’t really all that interested in chairing a seminar for the planet’s brightest on exchange rates and the Mosai Wars. 
Oh dear.
But honing the minds of the leaders of tomorrow is so rewarding. 
I took that one on in 3D.  They’d been honed.  If the Matter of Kadun still went pear-shaped, it would take more or rather less than finely honed minds to straighten it out.  Sub-machine guns sprang to mind.  Was I not then a leader of today?  Oh yikes.  No, whatever I might become I was not leadership material.  I grinned to myself.  If Fal was leading the resistance from the Lausanine I’d be in the back room organizing the communications.
You’re in a program, Kyse, I told myself and many are the cunning snares programs lay to trap the unwary because you think – thought – you made a free choice. 
Highly successful academic career.  Moderately successful human being.  Help old ladies across the road.  All the right instincts.  So why aren’t I acting on them?
Fal and I continued to correspond.  How dry that sounds.  I think we had an understanding that I was winding up my life in the City when suddenly the chips came down.
 
MAYA DEAD
MAYA ASSASSINATED
SHE DIED IN HIS ARMS
 
Can you be numb with fury?  Or maybe stripped?  All I can really say about that moment is all the intellectualization and introspection fell away and all that was left apart from the pain and fury was WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING HERE?
 
Oh and a little insanity.  I resigned.  I walked out.  Instantly.  No notice.  Sorry about the classes and the timetable and the committees and the rest of the crap.  You’ll manage. You’re bright enough.
Where I’m going I shan’t need a reference. 
Calm down, said Qartly.  You knew her of course.
Not really, I said.  That’s not the point.
Give my love to Mel.
I am behaving abominably. 
About time, said Qartly.
I wasn’t about to go into that one.
Thank you, I said.
 
The buzzer had gone off on the hill, the alarm, the one that never went off, the one that meant fire,  invasion, flood, freak wave warning, catastrophe.  Someone was screaming.  Mel had been talking peaceably to some minor politician.  She started.  He jumped up. 
“Fire, flood…”
She picked up her papers.
Mel was at the door cannoning into Por.
“Maya,” said Por. [Unspeakable image.]   He picked up the remote. Maya died in Sarat’s arms in front of them.  It was the third re-run of the day.  
All the minor politician would say afterwards is I should not have seen that.  I should not have seen Mel see that.  She vanishes from our story.
“Auto-pilot,” said Mel.  Por clasped his shoulder. “Somewhere I’m screaming.”  He reached for the intercom.  “Turn the alarm off now.”. He walked slowly out.  The worst has happened.  We should try – he said afterwards, words a moment failed him.  Why should we try to keep calm?   Bomb the City.  How calm I feel.  The worst has happened, he said again.  Now we must grieve.  We do no good to ourselves or others, to the living or the dead,  by being deranged, no matter how we feel.
The ‘phones started to ring, incessantly, mindlessly, thought Mel, were abruptly silenced.
“Pietri,” said Mel.
“Fal,” said Por.
“I must ring…” said Mel.  He meant Sarat.
“I should imagine,” said Por, “at this point Sarat is beyond words.”
Cantilip had been in the studios of Zur Live admiring their new technology. There was a flurry, then a sudden silence then people who’d been calling her babe two minutes earlier were on their feet, tears running down their faces, and  looking at her and saying gently,  my lady, and her heart turned over..  I see, she said. Then everyone stood up and they played the national anthem and then the imperial anthem, over the air, because it sort of seemed the right thing to do, but as Cantilip told Mel with that devastating honesty for which he loves her so the truth was no-one had the faintest idea what to do.  Least of all me.  Seize the mike. It gave me time to think.   Cantilip will speak. It – it perhaps not for me to speak for Kadun nor even for Dabida on this terrible day. All of us involved in – in this Matter of Kadun have long lived with dread and now it has happened.  Mel and I send all our love to Sarat, to Pietri and Caluna, Vij,and all those who share our devastation, in Dabida, in Kadun.  This shared loss of our beautiful, our entrancing, our wonderful Maya – I nearly stalled, she said after.  What about our shared loss?  Some piece of sickly nonsense about how it may bring us still closer?  There are few who did not, who do not love her.  I salute Maya Talal ban-essa, Anile Empress, our darling Maya.
 Mel was trying Fal’s mobile.  It went on ringing.  Hallo? she said eventually, sounding perfectly cheerful.  You’ve heard?  Heard what?  Oh no, thought Mel, it gets worse.  He put all the love and support into his voice that it’s possible to send down a telephone line.  Fal, my dearest, my darling – Maya’s dead.  No, she said.  Mel, you didn’t say that. I can’t leave Zur, he said.  Of course you can’t bloody leave Zur! she said.  Someone needs to be with you.  I’ll call As, she said.. Oh Mel.  Love, love, love, love, love, he said. 
Por looked at him.
“At least Sarat knows.”
“I cannot tell Pietri over the ‘phone.”
There are worse ways of finding out.  Caluna had been in the Mall.  Like most places, Zuri electronics shops have TVs on in the window.  We interrupt this broadcast.  She stared sightlessly at the screen. Her legs gave way. 
“Normal work is clearly over for the day,” Mel was saying, “perhaps for many days.”  This is my culmination?  To bury my cousin?  “Hot sweet tea I think is in order. Let’s go,” he said to Por.
Por committed what is usually Zur’s greatest crime, driving through the walking-streets.  No-one noticed.  A small crowd had already gathered at Pietri’s.  Pietri came out of the kitchen, shaking his head, looking suddenly old.
“I am going to Azt. The heli is waiting.”
“Pietri – “ began Mel.
“Say nothing,” said Pietri, “nothing is best.”
Mel kissed him.  Pietri briefly clasped Mel’s back.
“Where’s Caluna?”
“Vij has gone to her,” said Sarshi.  “She collapsed in the street.”
“You have many calls on your time,” said Pietri.
“Blame me,” said Mel
“No, Mel.”
“It is only unbearable?” asked Mel.
Pietri laid a hand on his nephew’s shoulder.
“You have spoken to Sarat?”
“Not yet.  Let me try….”
Baz’ mobile was off too.  He seemed to have deleted the number of Paw’s. 
“I imagine,” said Pietri, “the problem is it keeps ringing.”
 “Try Faun…”
“Faun.”
“Mel. I want Sarat.”
“Turn your television on.  He’s gone back.”
“TV,” said Mel.  Sarshi ran to put it on. “What’s Paw’s number?” he asked down the ‘phone.
Scenes of devastation from Azt.  His Imperial Majesty has returned to the scene of the blast that so tragically.
Pietri sat down suddenly.
Sarat talking to rescue-workers, Sarat talking to the rescued. Sarat still bloody. 
“You go out there,” said Mel, “and you damned well do it.  You do it when your heart is broken, you do it when you’re screaming, you do it when you’re bleeding to death from internal wounds.  You just bloody do it.”
Pietri shook his head.
“I have no animosity towards Sarat.”
“The dread,” said Mel.
“That is the same for all.”
His Imperial Majesty will speak
Someone had a radio outside.  It was turned up suddenly, hurting the silence.
Sarat finished.  Someone outside began to sing the imperial anthem.  A few voices joined in, then faltered and stopped. 
Pietri looked suddenly resolute, turned and walked to the front door.  He opened it and walked out to the crowd.
“On Sarat’s behalf, on behalf of my beautiful Maya, I thank you.  Please continue.”
He turned on his heel and returned to the house.
Mel hugged him.
Mel’s ‘phone rang.
“Mel.  Papa!  I’m at Pietri’s.” 
Pietri looked up sharply.
Mel thought: don’t talk to me like this.  Don’t talk to me the way you did when I was six and my puppy was run over, because I’m liable to cry like I did when I was six.
“I’ll give you Pietri,” he said at length.  “I’ll get a glass of water.” 
Sarshi followed him into the kitchen.
“You loved Sorg.  You loved Maya.”
“I don’t think I ever knew,” said Mel, “exactly what people meant by a living nightmare.”
“It must end!”
“It must not,” said Mel, “each time become a little harder.  No faltering in our resolution.  How to recapture - ?”
“I think it changes,” said Sarshi.  “Hardens.  I – I never thought of myself as having – resolution. After Sorg – this will not fail and that’s that. If I have to fight for Carlin, I’ll do it.”
“Oh Sarsh.”
Pietri came in.
“Your mother.”
Mel drove back with his mobile off. A queue had begun to form, snaking up the hill.  He got out and walked, shaking hands, touching shoulders, hugging. 
“The following people want to talk to you and your bloody mobile is either engaged or off.  That’s without the ones who are actually here.”
“This is hell,” said Mel.
“Worse than that,” said Por.  “There is a – contingent who want the funeral in Zur.”
“No,” said Mel.
“Vanya’s in The Room.”
He walked in.
Our deepest regrets, our sincerest condolences.  The funeral…
“It is not,” said Mel, “and cannot be my decision.  Pietri’s gone to Azt.”
Eventually he escaped.
“I must ring Baya.”
“They may not be there.”
“That’s not the contingency plan.”
Por’s face showed what he thought of contingency plans.
Mel made one more ‘phone call.
“Now I ride,” said Mel.
He made it back to his office once more.
Julin and Maitlan sat watching the scenes from Azt.
Julin turned and smiled
“Reporting for duty, sir!”
“Am I glad to see you,” said Mel.
“Our deepest regrets,” said Maitlan.  “Our sincerest condolences.  All the rest of the helpless, useless crap.  My poor Mel.  Our love.”
“Poor everyone,” said Mel.
Maitlan looked at him questioningly.
“Am I sufficiently detached?” 
“Oh yes,” said Mel.  “I just hadn’t got around to it.”
“That was Julin’s reasoning,” acknowledged Maitlan.  “He rang me.”  Julin looked innocent.  “What Mel needs  now is people to help him do what he has to do without  - “
“Wounds of their own,” said Mel.
“Reakoed,” suggested Maitlan.
“Reakoed is too important where he is.”
Maitlan laughed.
“If Dabida turns,” said Julin.
Mel closed his eyes.
“Fortunately that seems unlikely.”
“The nationalists will use it.”
“No-one pays them any attention,” said Maitlan.
“It’s as though,” said Mel, “everything we’ve done was a preparation for now.”
“Real people,” said Julin, “people you know, people who love each other.”
“People who suffer,” said Mel.
“How can we be of use?” asked Julin.
“Go down into Zur.   Make sure there are loos, water.  Tell them the funeral is for Pietri and Sarat to decide and no-one else.”
“Shit,” said Maitlan.
 
By the time I ran into Kai at the airport I was a bit saner.  Fake sane, the way one is.  Good at giving tissues to the Economic Liason Officer to the Anile Throne.  When I’d seen Kai off in a cab to the Imperial, my brain started to work.  I was just about to hire a car and mutter, Carlin, fast, out of the corner of my mouth, like they do in the movies, when it occurred to me that she probably wasn’t there.  I knew she and Maya had been close.  I couldn’t imagine how she was coping or not with double devastation.  Wouldn’t she go to Pietri’s?  But wouldn’t Pietri and Caluna go to Azt?  Would she be with Mel?  With Sarat?  Clearly darling I wanted to surprise you wasn’t on even if it was altogether appropriate.  I got out my mobile. 
No answer.  I didn’t know if that was good or bad. 
This you will of course understand is totally unlike me. Hating crowds isn’t unlike me, especially unhappy and therefore bad-tempered crowds.  I retreated back into the concourse and spied a giant sunshine yellow steaming mug with a toothy grin.  I knew the franchise from the City.  At least the coffee would be good.  I shrank into a corner, making mountains and valleys in the froth with a sunshine yellow plastic stirrer.  Then I realized the television was on.  Our heroic rescue-workers.  Wreckage.  Sarat, silent and unsmiling, leaving the Jumesit. People crying.  People angry.  People with flowers.  We turn now to.  Here is.  We move now to Zur.  I looked at the queue circling the hill.  This conveyed  to me that wherever the hell I should be it wasn’t at an outlet of Rise ‘n’ Shine.   I examined my other self and the barricade around it which said Dabidan which had just been breached, the remarkable human faculty for saying something is over there and not really anything with which I was personally involved. Oh, and the basic response to violent death which is to wrap one’s arms around someone.  I really had no reason to think Fal was remotely romantically interested in me or anyone else alive.  Did I really want to compete with a ghost?  Did I really want to get involved with someone so psychologically complicated and possibly insane?  Did I think these things?  Only at one remove, through a mist.  They were as naught compared to a sort of agonising empathy generally known as love, which told me she was all alone and needed me. This particular derangement of love appeared to have some basis in reality.  Somewhere it seemed to me that the breaching of my defences mirrored a wound to Dabida and I couldn’t readily see how any of the Six could rush off to Carlin to hold Fal’s hand.  Except of course for.  Mental squeal of brakes. 
 
She hadn’t talked about Tet. Why should she?  Tet had never found anyone else.  My mind only too readily constructed a touching scenario of shared pain, shared grief bringing them once more together. 
I hadn’t even spoken to Mel!  I’d told Kai that what I had to say to Mel was not (puh-lease!) for the telephone.  I was going to Zur, I said.  Right on cue, the Tannoy had boomed and a military-sounding voice authoritatively told us that Flight Delta Foxtrot Zero-Niner-Seven to Zur was boarding at Gate 15.  I expect it’s full, she said.  I felt a moment’s boundless certainty that DF-097 was half-empty, but she didn’t ask why I was therefore about to take flight to Azt, which was just as well because I didn’t have an answer.  Why did I assume Fal was sitting at home consumed in grief?  She might have gone straight to Azt – to Zur, to the House, any bloody place. 
Wherever she was it was intimately bound up with the loss of Maya.  Now, Kyse, you moron, is not the time. 
I tried Fal’s mobile again.  Off.  Why not off?  With Pietri, with Caluna, with Sarshi, with Vij, with Mel, with Sarat.  Who the hell wants it on.
She must be in Zur. 
Her landline probably had a nice explanatory little message on the voicemail.  I didn’t know her landline.
I had to get among people I knew who’d know what was going on, probably the most un-me thought I have ever had in my life.  That meant the Imperial.
I took a cab to the Imperial, or at least to the Colonnade.  Can’t go no further, mate.  There are things I am incapable of saying to Azt cabbies.  One of them is, I’m a friend of Mel’s.  Pull the other one, mate.  Hundreds of people can vouch for me, I thought irritably.  All it needs is a routine check.  I paid up and got out, armed only with my intellect, integrity and the increasingly strong feeling I should be in Zur.  My intellect started to ask me what the crowds thought they were doing there.  How could it help?  My integrity told me I am an upright citizen of Dabida, not a bloody journalist, because of course what the cordon was about was bloody journalists, bereft at no longer being flavour of the month.  My increasingly strong feeling I should be in Zur looked around rather helplessly seeing no immediate means to get the hell out.
I turned to the nearest person who happened to be a middle-aged woman.
“Excuse me, can you tell me where the bus-station is, please?”
“Oh, you’re way out, love.  Right over in Gizzan.”
“I can’t walk it, then?”
“Well, you could.  Take about an hour.  Where do you want to go?”
“Zur!  I’m Dabidan.  I need to get home.”
“Oh love.  Tell them we’re sorry, we’re ever ever so sorry.”
“I will.”
“That poor young man.”
“Yes,” I said
“Train’s best…”
I realized she was wondering how poor I was.
“That’d do!” I said brightly.
She gave me directions to the train-station and I started walking.
After about a quarter of an hour a metal pole embedded in the pavement near the kerb loomed before me.  Attached to its top was a board reading COACH-STOP.
Hey, long-distance buses actually stop on their way out of this hell-hole!  Sorry, Sarat.
Carlin Village.  You mean I’ve done something right in this mess?  The next one wasn’t due for 40 minutes.  I can wait!
That is how I came to be sitting on the bench by the Memorial in a village that was apparently totally deserted. Curtains were drawn.  A lonely flag flew at half-mast. What did they do at a time like this, go to the House?  A noise behind me made me turn.  The everything shop was opening up. 
“Loife gotta go ahn.”
“Where is everyone?”
“Gahn to un shroine.”
Kyse, you really are a moron.
“I’m a friend of Falita’s.”
“First the Major.”  Distinctly more friendly tone.  Do I look like a journalist?
“Yes,” I said.
“Int it gohn end.”
“It will end!” She was lugging one of those things you find outside shops into position and it looked heavy.  “Can I help?”
Yes, Kyse, it’s just the word escapes you.   Roughly thigh-height, hinge at the top, four legs, two boards.
That is how I came to assist with the opening of the everything shop. 
People began to trickle back in twos and threes, Fal not among them.  By this time – all that fresh country air – my brain was beginning to resume normal functioning and I’d realized that here among those who’d lost terribly twice was probably, my beating heart notwithstanding, also not the best place for me to be.  If Fal was at the House, I could only be an intrusion.
As the new counter-assistant in the everything shop, I attracted attention.
“Friend of Fal’s.”
“I was hoping to see her,” I said.
“She’m gahn ‘ome.”
“Zur, you mean?”
Foot right in it.
“Bark to un cahtage.”
“How do I get there?”
“You’m roide a boike?” asked my new employer.
In other circumstances pedalling through country lanes would have been idyllic.
Oh look, it’s a field of flowers.  Lots I didn’t know.
 
I arrived at a gathering.  I can’t think of a better word.  Maybe wake?  There were people in the front yard, perched on the fence. I dismounted, feeling very conspicuous.
“I’m a friend of Fal’s,” I said.  “From Zur.”
Fortunately at that moment she came out into the yard.
I hugged her with considerable enthusiasm. 
“Thank you,” she said, “thank you.”
She stood back, holding both my hands in hers.  Ecstasy!  Holding me at arms’-length as you prefer.  She smiled.
“He’m uzz’n.”
 I guessed Asdinan smiled and came forward and introduced himself and we all went inside.  Around the kitchen table sat two youngsters looking as I supposed you might look if your parents had been slowly disembowelled in front of your eyes.  Assorted country people leaned against the dresser or sat on the stairs.  It was really rather strange, like a cocktail party with no sound, but it was right. Is there a collective noun for a gathering of the bereft? I wondered. A communion of mourners.  I guessed these were the twice bereft sharing something they didn’t even have to mention. 
Thus I was wholly superfluous to requirements, other than as a chronicler, an onlooker to life.
“I just wanted to make sure you’re all right,” I mumbled.
I put the kettle on and smiled sympathetically at the kids, not knowing what to say.  I am absolutely starving! didn’t seem quite the thing.  I looked around hopefully.   There were some plates out on the dresser, a couple of broken biscuits, the end of a cake.  Clearly others had ravened before me.
“Is Mel all right?” asked Smudge.
“As much as he can be. “
“You must live in Zur.”
“I’m Zuri,” I said,  “but I lived in the City.  That’s where we became friends.  At the Schools.”
“You’m come ‘ome now?” asked Zulan.
“Yes,” I said.
Asdinan came in.
“Rackon it’s toime we was arf neow.”  Zulan gave me a long appraising stare. “Zuri.  Gaht ‘n lots to tark about.”
“Zo long as we bain’t leaving ‘er,” said Zulan.
Smudge said: “It’s funny – “ then stopped. 
Asdinan put a hand on his shoulder. 
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
Like a big sheepdog, I thought.  The sheepdog very gently shepherded the gathering to a close.
At last we were alone! 
“I’m frankly ravenous,” I said.  Great romantic openings of the age!
“There isn’t much,” she said. 
I made myself a great mound of toast, not because I have simple tastes, but because that was about all there was,.bar the end of cake and the broken biscuits.
“You need someone to shop for you,” I said firmly.  “I have contacts!”  I told her about the everything shop.
“Sooty’s a darling.  Her real name’s Sootic.”
There are two big armchairs, one on each side of the hearth.  We sipped cocoa, goat-milk cocoa.  It’s an acquired taste, but it was hot and wet.
“How did you hear?”
“Radio.  I then went mad.  Got sane.  You choose!  I just had this one over-riding thought: what the hell am I doing here?  I picked up my toothbrush and headed for the airport, pausing only to quit my job. I felt – some brake had been taken off and I was going to jump in.  It’s touched Dabida.  It’s touched me, as a Dabidan. Is that – not an awful thing to say.  Inappropriate?”
“All the stuff endlessly threshed over,” said Fal.
“Making nonsense of.”
“I don’t know,” said Fal.
Fal is not a small woman and I don’t suppose she was feeling all that lost, either, but the L-word had no difficulty seeing her as small and lost.
“Would it be – inappropriate if I put my arms round you?”
She looked at me over the top of her mug, mercifully not sunshine yellow.
“I’d like that.”
I went over to her. 
“Ia there room for two?” 
They are really big chairs, huge.  I mean I wasn’t suggesting she sat on my lap. 
“I’ll hudge up,” she said.
It took a few minutes to get comfortable, but when we did comfortable was clearly where it’s at, the apex of delight, or would have been if the phone hadn’t rung from time to time, tweaking my conscience.  I hadn’t realized Fal had quite a large family.  I have quite a small family.  I do actually have a mum and dad.  I ought at least to acknowledge their existence.
“I ought to see my mum,” I said.
“I’ll come,” said Fal. 
“Shall we put the box on?”
Channel Five burst into life, or death, as you prefer.   It’s like the whole city is wearing armbands.  Is it really?  Dabida does not share the sensitivity of the imperial family towards black as the colour of mourning but out of deference to irtubi sensitivities these armbands have a silver stripe.  Some folk are wearing pure silver.
“Sher-it,” I said.
This is for the Anile Empress, the commentator was babbling, perhaps unwisely.  Someone walked in front of camera and said loudly.  This is for our Maya.  For everyone’s Maya, said someone else. 
“Start a bloody riot,” muttered Fal.
Including Sarat’s Maya.  This is about people, man.  Right!
You knew Sarat when he was in Zur?  asked the commentator.
“Oh yeah, bosom buddies!  Sarat was like part of the scenery.”
“I bet,” said Fal, “he comes from the west.”
I grinned.
“Ah yes, the Two Nations Theory.”
“Bah!” said Fal.
When Sarat had walked into Carlin, and they’d run out of anyone else to talk to, our wonderful media had remembered there was a rest of Dabida and interviewed some folks in Jansi,  A Small Town in the Middle of Dabida.  On the somewhat tenuous grounds that some folks in Jansi were not going ape like Zur, the Two Nations Theory had been born.  If you remember your geography, you will recall that west of where the Great Divide peters out, our border is no longer with Kadun but with Vasucula.  The not-so-friendly naturally fell on this like eagles on rabbits to say we can only wait and see if Dabida splits between the east, which is frankly, historically as currently, obsessed equally with Kadun and with Fidub, which, historically as currently, is indeed the meat in the sandwich there and the west, the overwhelming links of which are with Vasucula, a border that has always been open, accents that are almost indistinguishable. 
Once it was voiced, Dabida – the whole of Dabida – mostly said bollocks!  This didn’t of course stop there being a grain of truth, that being that some folks had no clue about the peculiar and exceptional circumstances of recent history.  What the hell they were doing employed by Channel Five was another matter.  You only had to have been a student to see Sarat and Maya cluttering up the union caff.  Even I knew that.
 
A queue of people snaked first down the hill then round it.  H-W kept the road clear.  We slowed.  It’s me, said Fal.  It must have spread through the crowd.  Someone shouted, “It’s Fal!”  She froze, then got slowly out.  Fal, love!  We’re so sorry.  I remember the two of you skipping about.  I realized we were going to have to walk up the hill.  There were actually people who knew me too.   Had I not made my name (nailed my colours to the wall) at Sarat’s Pad! Mel’s mate, aren’t you.  Kyse, by all that’s!  I’d been at school with Holan.  We shared commiserations while my ears wagged.  We called him our pet spy!  ‘Course afterwards, everyone knew who he’d been spying for, the Army, that’s who!  Brave, brave lad.   I’d come home in the vacations.  I knew vaguely that Sorg had been regarded as one of the sights of Zur, sort of tourist attraction.  The vultures had been clustered at the arch but now sniffed prey.  Of course you were friends from an early age. Remembering the two of you skipping about got an airing too, except it wasn’t skipping it was splashing around in the toddlers’ pool on the quay.  Twice now the Cult has stripped you of those you loved most.  Yup, said Fal.  As an introduction to public life, it was pretty harrowing.  It got worse.  That sort of day.     
For the first time in either of our lives we weren’t instantly received.  Mel, said Por, was with family.  There’s an awful lot of family after 600 years.  I remembered vaguely that Mel had  once said Maya’s parents hadn’t been entirely keen.  I wondered how many people held Mel responsible for Maya’s death and if they included Pietri and Caluna.  Don’t give Mel a hard time! I thought. Fal looked at me wanly. 
“Lisping six-year-olds.  Leggy teens.”
I put my arms around her.  What was there to say?  So there we were, a vignette of pure misery, when another vignette of pure misery finally emerged to greet us,
“Oh Mel,” said Fal.
“Darling girl.”
We all hugged. 
“Everyone must be devastated,” I said after a while.  It was really just the small talk I’m no good at – I wasn’t fishing - but Mel briefly recounted his ordeal by relations. 
“The words ‘bloody Sarat’ were heard.  I am so angry.  Most of them barely knew Maya, let alone Sarat.  Oh, family parties.  They didn’t know her. Fortunately Pietri went straight to Azt, where the funeral will duly, correctly and totally in line with my wishes be held.”
“I know,” said Fal.  “He rang me.”
There was a single copper on guard at Pietri, but she really wasn’t necessary.  The crowd was practically silent.  We were shown in.
“Falita, my dear,” said Pietri.  Sarshi ran to Fal and they both burst into tears.  That was grim.  Fal’s mum was conceivably worse.  She was such a good friend to you, love. My parents at least hadn’t been attached to either Sorg or Maya by bonds of steel.  Coming back down Yan-sitian, we ran into Hass talking quietly to people and he held Fal as though he’d never let her go, then we came across another silent queue and for a moment I couldn’t think why, then remembered the Kadun Rep Centre was round the corner.  The flag was at half-mast.  On impulse, Fal, who really wasn’t dressed for saluting a toy soldier, walked forward, came to attention, saluted and said – proclaimed: “Her Imperial Majesty! Maya-ban-essa, Mistress of Kadun.  My best friend.”  She turned sharply on her heel and walked back to me, mouthed, “Let’s get out of here.”
Click, click, bloody click.  I don’t know whether it was a surge of adrenalin caused by fury at the ever-present camera or what, but I suddenly grinned and grabbed her hand. 
“Run!”
There’s an opening, a few strides-worth of paving, a couple of steps, at the end of Sumesit.  We ducked down there and out into the Gilyan Road.  She knew what I was doing now and realized I wasn’t entirely insane.  I do love a woman who can really run.  We flung ourselves onto the trolley-bus stopped at the lights.  The conductor began to expostulate.  See that, it says Danger!  He pointed to a red triangle asking people not to alight at the lights.
“Are you a 35 or a 12?” asked Fal.
“12,” he grumbled.  “Some people use bus-stops.”
“We could go all the way to the Lido,” I said.
“Turning round at Kanavil.”
That was one of the commuter stations where the slow trains stop
“Dabida lies before us!”
“You’re Fal, aren’t you.”
“Yes,” said Fal.  “This is a friend of Mel’s,” she added, doubtless feeling some explanation in order.
“We were escaping the Press,” I said, definitely feeling some explanation in order.
“Those farts!”
“Poor little bastard,” opined someone.  “Brought it all on himself, didn’t he.”
“Holdan!” reproached someone else.
“These things have to be said.”
“Maybe so, maybe no.  Now is not the flipping time to say them!”
“I think we’ve thrown them off the scent,” said Fal, slightly too loudly.  “If we get off at the next stop -
“Now look what you’ve done!”
“No, really,” I said, “we were just going.”  Ly-ing, Kyse, the word is ly-ing.
“You give Mel our love, now.”
“Don’t want him getting the wrong idea because some people have no tact.”
Thank you, thank you….
The next stop was Tabin’s Merchant-Builders, No Order Too Small or Too Large.   Except today, when it appeared deserted. 
“Cross over and get the bus back,” said Fal in an ever-so-sensible voice.
“Maybe we can avoid paying twice running.”
We caught each other’s eye.
“We could plead extenuating circumstances.”
She was patting her pockets.
“Have you got your ‘phone?”
I checked.
“Yes.”
“I think I left mine at mum’s.”
Opposite were some large freshly painted green sheds.  The word may be warehouses.  We were on an industrial estate, which would have been fine had there been any industry.  IMPORT-EXPORT.  We reach the four corners of the world!  A lorryman embraced the globe.
“Oh look, there’s Toy Mania.”
“Maybe we could steal a scooter.”
“A whole new meaning,” I said dreamily. “Fal scooted into Zur.”
“I have to get back to Carlin,” she said, but not crushingly, or even decisively, almost questioningly, as though it were a sudden realization of which she was unsure, then more certainly, “That is my – duty to Maya.”
“Then we’d better steal a helicopter. Fal – “  Oh please Kyse, not on the pavement in a particularly unromantic backwater of Zur.  “I care about you a lot.”  Oh, the hell with it.  “I love you.  I understand if you’re not ready to even think about it, but I hope you will think about it.”
“Kyse.”  She kissed my cheek and smiled.  “I’d like to think about that.”
“I know I choose my moments.  I know now is the -  I wanted to say it anyway.”  She squeezed my hand tightly and didn’t let go.  “I’ll be in Zur.”
“Let me get the funeral over.  Sarat has asked me to ride in the procession.  People who’ve lost to the Cult.”
“Oh my darling girl.”  The hell with sensitivity and delicacy. I wrapped my arms round her, about which there is to say that I enjoyed it immensely and she showed no signs whatever of not enjoying it.  “I like this,” I said at length.
“I like it too,” she said, leaving me to have the brains to work out that liking it didn’t necessarily mean it was the blueprint for the rest of her life.
The bus back was a 23, confounding us both.  How dare it?  Been away too long.  As such,. it stopped just round the corner from mum and dad’s. 
“I’ll have to go back to the City,” I said.  I patted my rucksack. “All I’ve got is a toothbrush and a change of underwear!”
“I’ll mail you,” said Fal.
 
It was not of course the most harrowing day of my life ever.  That day was the day of funeral while I waited for her to be blown up.  Nonetheless, I had previously had a pretty feeble notion of what it is to be emotionally drained.  Only later did it fully penetrate that every day of my life would be waiting for her to be blown up.  But that, I said to myself, would be true whether I was with her or not.
 
I wondered what her mum and dad did.  They didn’t seem posh people but it was a decidedly posh flat.  Oh, of course.  I had somewhere absorbed that Falita San-yaega-baht had probably inherited rather a lot of money.  How much?  Certainly enough to set Mum and Dad up.  The last thing I am is a guy who'll object to his partner earning more than he does.  Having the bucks running out of her ears was different – not necessarily worse, just different.  Entailed? Property?  Hers was hardly a life of conspicuous consumption.  I supposed that in Kadun the newly transparent the details of the estate must be available but felt it would be shoddy to look them up, almost prurient, unless it were my business and if it were my business she’d tell me.
 
“I answered them all, dear. It’s so good you’ve got all these people who care.  I told them all you’d gone off with that nice young man who’s Mel’s friend.  Then of course they all saw you on the news.  Sarat rang himself.  I told him, I loved her like she was my own.”
Tears ran down Mum’s cheeks.
I thought: if I can’t cry like a baby in front of mum and dad, there really is something wrong with me.  I cried.
After a while, I sniffed, wiped my nose and looked at the list of callers.
I must –  I thought.  Go to Azt.  Karci, Vrin, they’d all rung.
“Do you like Kyse?” I asked.
“Seems a decent young man,” said Dad.  “Not pushy.”
That’s right,” I said , rather enthusiastically.
Mum and Dad exchanged glances I pretended not to see.
I am allowed to sleep.  I went to bed.  Different.  Emotional turmoil total, good and bad.
 
When Mel rang, my first thought was there is nothing more death can do to me. Then I felt – when I shattered,  when people talk about people shattering, breaking apart – they mean all the bits they’ve pretended were joined and glued together – it wasn’t like that.  All my bits were the same, like  breaking a plate.  That’s why it was so intense.  Unified collapse, no being pulled in different directions.  It was – like I had to get down on the kitchen-floor with a brush, find the fragments that had rolled under the dresser, sweep myself into a little heap.  When Mel told me about Maya, I felt I should have been there, looking after her, it’s my job.  I felt a tremor, like – like the plate was wondering whether to fragment.  Then two things.  I said no and no to that particular piece of self-indulgence, whipping myself, but was it.  Wasn’t my whole life since Sorg a self-indulgence, when everyone else – it’s my life!  If  we talk about making Maya’s death, Sorg’s death in any way – meaningful, maybe in a sense avenging – fighting for a free Kadun.  I have made my life in Carlin, my life. This is how I do it.  My commitment, my conscience, my soul demands it.  It – oh, all right, they, they don’t demand I fight for Kadun in a particular way.  Reakoed understands.  Kyse will never ever interfere with my life. Kyse sees that, you see.  You think you’re making a free choice, striking a blow for your autonomy!  It’s reactive.  It’s not you.
 
And a fat lot of use I should have been to anyone in little bits on the kitchen-floor.  That should not have happened. 
 
I had never, until I found myself in a bad dream on the kitchen-floor, lived alone.  I knew to stabilize myself I had to hack this on my own.  You’ll have realized I don’t have a 100% positive press. Ice-maiden, nympho, don’t touch with barge-pole, and these are my friends, those I’d trust with my life, my death and even to buy the right brand of shampoo.  What I’d been doing when not milking goats and harvesting briony is of course thinking about me, my future, my past, where I’d gone wrong, where I’d gone right.  Then Kyse appeared, clearly ready to sweep me up into a life of paired bliss, which I appreciated, and equally clearly, which I appreciated even more, with the freaking sensitivity and intelligence to realize that he was not the solution to Maya’s death. 
 
I hadn’t thought I was going to stay single for ever.  What I had in mind was a mature future, a peaceful old age.  An assumption therefore, that the Matter of Kadun would be positively resolved, assuming I survived to see that resolution.
 
Reakoed rang me.  Kyse, said Reakoed, is the first one that’s good for you. He has a quiet and well-founded confidence in his abilities.  He is not the slightest bit fundamentally insecure.  He is, however, modest and a little shy.  He has no flair for the stage.  He has neither a talent for nor an interest in holding a roomful of people in thrall to his words.  I had to laugh.  He’s a lecturer! I protested, but meekly.  You know perfectly well what I mean, said Reakoed. I knew. Why is that good for me?  It means you go on writing your own script, said Reakoed. I have wondered, I admitted, Tet and I.  Don’t do it! said Reakoed.  I was surprised, make that shocked, at the vehemence.  We’re both grown-up now, I said.  What have we just said? he asked.  I sighed.
 
Among the endless jittering mountain of  words brought forth by Maya’s murder was the notion that there is nothing more they can do to Dabida.  Oh really.  And who is the other Zur-chick who has thrown in her lot with Kadun? I saw clearly that once I emerged from my rural hide-away there was no guarantee I had a future. It didn’t take long for some bright little spark to twitter of course Falita,  San-yaega-baht’s widow, you know…List of things to be discussed: of course they might kill me.  Put it on the to-do pad.  Why not?  Everyone else had. 
 
The other thing they blathered on about endlessly was the wound to Kadun’s heart.  Do they never shut up?  Of course sometimes it was the wound to Dabida’s heart. Whatever.  Naturally we did not think the metaphorical wound was fatal and equally naturally we wanted to stitch it up, fast. 
 
It’s very easy to love someone who bundles you onto a trolley-bus to escape the bloody Press.
 
Really, what was I babbling about, my duty to Maya.  I was desperate to explain something in ten words that could have taken ten days about feeling there was no longer a space for this cog in the Zur wheel or the Azt one.  My space was in Carlin.  My purpose was in Carlin.  To – to lead or if not to lead to represent the new Kadun.  To bloody do something.  I don’t know that when I finally got back to Carlin via Azt I did anything more than I should have done in Zur.  Perhaps it was simply being there that was important.  I got to see Sarat.  He looked more awful than I have ever seen him look in the whole of his life, which I told him.  It is my duty to Sorg to hold Carlin.  What kind of mad crap is that? True mad crap. 
 
Let me start with the Six, who were sometimes the Eight, occasionally the Ten, more rarely the Thirteen and in some ways the Three. I am going to tell you the Six is a media myth. Mel’s set, Mel’s gang, it’s all horse-manure.  Actually, if you’ve been following the narrative really closely, you’ll have worked that out.  And they spent all their holidays together.  Simper, simper.   Mel and Hass spent every summer with Baya and Essa, you know that.  It’s all nonsense.  We’re Mel’s family.  I suppose I have to expand?  We are those with whom Mel formed bonds that simply were.  I knew you wouldn’t like it.  If your sister moves to Ciletij and you don’t see her for ten years, she’s still your sister. I hear you beginning to argue.  It did all become rather incestuous, didn’t it, in all senses.
 
Actually I’m a victim of Mum’s theory of child-bearing, which is you space them out.  My brother’s eight years older and runs a fast-food joint on the coast.  My baby sister is no longer a baby and just off to college and views my oh so public life like a soap.    
 
The S Factor runs through it all like a knife.  If you ask yourself who we weren’t, we weren’t the plotters.  Of course in the end we all got immersed in one way or another but the key to Tet, Reakoed, Maitlan and I was we weren’t obsessed with the Matter of Kadun.
 
Reakoed, Maitlan and I were the Three. 
 
In the mythology, we all spent our teens lounging in the Saa’nda Senta, and ‘we’ have become confused with Sarat and Maya, even with Mitch and Karula.  The Six has become a synonym for plotters.  That is the S Factor and it irks. The S Factor changed everything.  The S Factor was politics and so Mel in his official role.  I am actually finding this quite hard to explain. 
 
It’s not coincidental that Tet and Maitlan took themselves off to the furthest corners of the world.  As Maitlan put it, one can immerse oneself in the Matter of Kadun or one can get a life.  Is the Matter of Kadun interested in me? asked Tet.  Of course we understood the politics.  We understood Mel didn’t want a hostile Kadun on the doorstep.  We understood the Cult had to be stopped.  It was too big for us, outside our range.  I think there’s an intermediate step there.  We understood Mel would one day be King but that too was outside the terms of the contract, the range of the radar.  What marks us is that we don’t give a hoot who Mel is.  Or didn’t.  Or don’t.  I guess what we’re really talking about is the point at which you couldn’t separate the little boy twiddling his toes in a rock-pool from the shaper of the world, where – where you couldn’t have one without the other, and that in a sense ended the Six.  The heyday of the Six was when we were about 8.  It was over by the time we were 13.
 
What we’re talking about is before and after puberty.  The Six was a childhood construct.  Doesn’t that sound good?  Afterwards it was something else. 
 
That doesn’t make any sense, does it.  Maybe it will later.
 
To invoke the S Factor is to evoke another myth.  Sarat then was the worm in the apple?  Sarat politicized things.  That too is tripe.  I made one friend early, Maya.  Mel made two friends early, Maitlan and Reakoed. Hass made one friend early, Sarat.  They really did play with alphabet-bricks on the floor of the Room.
 
That’s the same thing, isn’t it, it becoming impossible to separate the little boy who turned the white house in the dunes into a zoo and was more concerned about his hamsters than about his homework, separating the little child of nature from the Anile Emperor.  NoZone of course marked the transition. 
 
I think really, not sure, but let’s go with it, the key to us all was Sarat and Hass.  Mel was obviously born camera-food, so there were pictures of Mel twiddling his toes in a rock-pool but when Mel discovered politics it was – what it wasn’t was proselytizing to the masses.  Mel started to become what parents call difficult at around 12.  He argued at home, he argued at school, he argued, yea verily, in the Saa’nda Senta.  Kids have fave dives in which they hang out.  In Mel’s case it was Sorito’s.  My little point is that, while most certainly he lounged in the Saa’nda Senta, it was a Mel thing, rather than a Six thing.  If Mel wanted a private talk, he had a private talk, many private talks indeed, usually with Reakoed, who is the deepest of us, apart from Hass, usually on the hill, in our homes, on the beach.  There’s a point where people stretch their legs, let’s go into town and have a soda, then they’d go on talking but there was tacit recognition this was no longer a private talk and anyone could join in. What’s usually described as Mel holding court outside Sorito’s usually meant  he’d gone for a soda- ice and Zur took it from there.  The point is none of this was standing on a soap-box, handing out leaflets or manning a stall selling fetching little woolly toys. . Sarat used NoZone, of that there is no doubt, but equally of course NoZone used Sarat and Hass. Sarat and the petition you know about.  There were those who asked if Hass’s involvement was wholly appropriate.  Healthy criticism, said Tar briskly.  He wasn’t the Anile heir.   As Hass became involved in Zeph’s lot and GASH, Tar became still brisker.  WYSIWYG. 
 
Difficult.  Mel.  Became.  I am reminded….The rules of Tar’s ship were few.  One was that his sons and heirs showered, changed and dressed for any dinner at which guests were present. Whether their presence was commanded depended on who were the guests, an exercise in learning grown-up conversation.   If their presence was not required they could munch where they liked. At 15 Mel pushed it.  Tar looked up and told him to go away and come back when he wasn’t embarrassing.  Mel argued that he was still himself whatever he was wearing. Yes, darling, said Saski, but others have made an effort to look nice.  You are too idle? asked Tar cheerfully.  Hass said he thought that stung more than Tar meant.  In the presence of  half the Cabinet?  I doubt it.  Anyway, Mel rallied but couldn’t yet stop himself turning a truly delectable shade of pink There was no embarrassment until you stirred it.  I’d have slid quietly into my seat and so charmed our guests that they wouldn’t have noticed what I was wearing.  He shook his head sadly.  You wish to be difficult.  Mel sat down.  It’s a matter of principle, he said.  You tell us to think.  I’ve thought.  Tar said: Mel has been a little unwell of late.  The disease is generally known as adolescence.  I really think, darling, said Saski, you had better go and lie down.  Fasting, said Tar, clears the head.  Mel looked from one parent to the other.  Supposing I stay put.  Aaargh, said Saski.  Out! said Tar, shoo!  Mel looked at him.  Tar looked back.  Mel gave a heavy sigh and extremely slowly stood up.  I apologize for the hiatus in the proceedings.  May we continue this later, Father?  I look forward to it, said Tar. 
 
Cut to the following morning.  The papers had been left open on Mel’s chair. The Zur press, you will have gathered, is not an assembly of anal sticklers for etiquette.  Zur was fond of Mel, but not so fond that it didn’t know a good story when it heard one.   Everyone’s favourite cartoon was Mel as a large benevolent looking and extremely muddy pooch slinking out of the Room, looking over his shoulder guiltily at the great muddy paw-marks he had left behind..
The question on every parent’s lips is: does Tar know how to make them tidy their rooms?
Tar, said Hass, grinned at Mel evilly and said, “I too can play to the gallery.”
“Owwwww!” said Hass.
Everyone who saw that cartoon knew it was Mel to the life and that it had been drawn by someone who loved him – well, everyone except Mel, who seethed at the notion the paw-marks were a source of remorse.
The other really good cartoon was Mel raising a clenched fist for the rights of the dishevelled, the rights of the untidy and especially the rights of those with uncombed hair.
 
Mel, acutely aware that whatever he wore that day would attract comment, contemplated nakedness.
 
Maitlan’s dad offered Maitlan fatherly advice.
“You want to give Mel a ring.  Find out what he’s going to be wearing.  Don’t want to clash.”
 
A few of the kids took it the wrong way, glad my dad doesn’t drop our rows in the Gazette, but most people grasped this wasn’t about a tiff with Mum and Dad, this was about public behaviour.
 
Mel said he sort of understood that but it was over-kill.
 
Some people are born waterproof and stain-resistant.  Hass was.  Mel wasn’t. You know those pictures in the glossies of exquisitely coiffured models with flawless make-up and impeccably pressed shorts who are supposed to be hoisting sails or weighing anchors.  Hass was like that, at 8, at 18.  Hass could and can come in from the beach and look ready for a formal dinner. Tet called him Non-stick.  The rest of us were not so blessed.  We hung out in the boatyards.  We helped with the catch.  The only reason we weren’t absolutely filthy at the end of the day was because we swam.  Still, I do remember the day we got fishy and mum’s bath oil made no inroads.  Mum’s household disinfectant did the trick. 
 
Let us surrender a moment to Mel’s uncertain dress sense.
 
At the age when most of his contemporaries were working on looking as tatty as possible, Sarat (while still of course remaining Sarat) had understood the world runs on image and the eyes of the world would be on his image. Mel, he thought, could get away with looking like a beach-comber, but he could not, or at any rate not often, not if he wanted to be taken seriously by conservative and/or hostile and/or elderly persons in faraway places.  An air of efficiency was therefore the order of the day.  Fortunately he liked clothes – clothes liked him.  The Look was born. 
 
There was one other guiding factor.  Baya insisted they did their own laundry.  Or at any rate no-one was going to do it for them.  If they wanted, and their allowances were not small, they could pay to send it to the laundry or indeed totter off to the laundrette.  Just, therefore, as HIH was determining how best to be a icon of radical chic to astound the entire continent, he was faced with his own ironing.  Fraught, was it not, Sarat’s early life. Oh knickers!
 
He had formal clothes.  It was what he was going to go to school in, what he was going to wear for NoZone, what he was going to wear lounging around in the Saa’nda Senta – Sarat most definitely lounged in the Saa’nda Senta,
 
He had (of course) informal clothes.  You think Baya let him wander around naked?   He didn’t look like the Anile Emperor.  And what the fuck, he asked himself with some asperity, does the Anile Emperor look like? 
 
What expressed the essential them?  Is this not the perennial dilemma of the pubescent?  What expressed their contempt for the ways of the world.  What precisely Tar thought of his son and heir performing party-tricks in the Rep Centre in a semi-transparent (but spotless and well-ironed) white cotton shift falling off one shoulder is, alas, not recorded.  I must ask him.   Please take the black silk loons underneath into account as a mitigating factor.
 
Sarat devised The Look and eventually they all wore it.  It was unisex.  It was simple. Inevitably it was para-military   Half the tatty radicals on the continent wore army surplus but these were tatty radicals who meant business. Sorg and in fact every soldier knew exactly what it was and was in stitches.  He called it army uniform on acid.  The austerity of the dress of the young officers was mitigated by the usual inclusion of one or more items of total frivolity such as acid pink flip-flops or a tie-die T, or paste jewellery, of course, depending on gender.  Maya and I discovered the true depth of the word ‘accessories’.  Your clothes, we decided, are like a canvas, a backdrop.  In themselves they should not attract attention, unless of course they are grey, or imperial silver, as you prefer.  Other kinds of problems would arise in Azt when a noisy minority wanted the Anile Empress to drip with real diamonds, but that was far in the future. 
 
Moving on from that, Maya and I devised the Leotard Look, black footless tights and a skin-tight black T. dressed up with some piece of frivolity.  Of course clothes should not attract attention. 
 
You didn’t have a problem thinking you were looking at the Anile emperor - except  it was impossible.  It was too far outside everyone’s range.  Sarat and Mitch, Mel and Cantilip, I think people understsood that something had changed in the world, that the world might as a result eventually change, but no-one outside the magic circle saw how it could be realized, made real.  Sarat’s Pad electrified everyone who saw it but outside of the small, tubby and baldings and the Bals there was enormous difficulty attaching any kind of reality quotient to it.  It all seemed to peter out.  We should have listened more in Biology!   I mean pregnancy is just the start, everyone makes a fuss, then there are labour pains, then something pops out and it’s small and insignificant but it grows.  The apparent flurry of activity wasn’t about rocking.  It was about finding out how to rock.
 
I suppose you could call the Six pregnancy.  Mel collected around himself a set of young persons….It’s all such crap.  If anything, we collected Mel.  Let me think about that one.  I think it floats.  We collected Mel and transported him to Planet Normal.  We were in and out of the hill and he was in and out of our homes. 
 
Public, private, there we have the nub. Mel has friends you haven’t even heard of  - you’ve just heard of Julin.. We are they who did not leak, ever.  Boy, do we have stories to tell and now we’re telling them, but no scrap of private conversations, with Mel or Hass, with each other, ever reached the Press.  Junin will duly tell his own story.  Let me just say Junin is the best. 
 
That is the kernel of truth at the heart of the myth and the root of obsession with the myth.  That united plotters and anti-plotters.  We are a sealed room, a bank vault. 
 
Now I pull the short straw. What is all this about me and Mel?  It wasn’t about Mel at all.  There, you knew I should instantly clarify things.  It was about Hass.   Some children are born perfect.  Hass was merely born laid-back.  Nonetheless at 15 he was vulnerable, as we all are, less vulnerable than most but vulnerable nonetheless, and of course with far more baggage, knowing his private life never would be.  I was 16.  I was vulnerable too.  Mel wanted to protect all of us, and Hass most of all.  You think our little relationships were on the complex side?  You ain’t heard nothing yet.  What is perhaps what you should most bear in mind is that all of us except Tet had been spoon-fed from the cradle the same amount of gender-bending other matter.  It’s a wonder any of us knew which gender we were.  Teenagers like things simple.  The key to Tet in all this was he was fairly straightforward young human male.  Also he was in love with me.  Like a lot of people, he thought Mel and I were given.  There is a girl in the gang because she’s Mel’s girl.  Hass and Tet kept in touch.  At some point Hass said something that indicated I wasn’t taken.  There were a lot of reasons Tet came back.  I was one of them.  Unfortunately, between Tet’s pricking up his ears and deciding to get his act together I….Voice trails off.  Very, very complicated.
 
I knew about Sarat and Hass.  I decided I wanted that, too. Hass didn’t. I, excuse me, perfectly reasonably, couldn’t see why not – if the fact that Sarat was essentially hetero didn’t mean anything to the bloody Whole, why was the fact that Hass was gay fundamental here?  Of course it wasn’t a question of gay or straight, but of that simpler diversion, male or female.  Thus was it duly reborn as guy-stuff.  Young men fully exploring their female side.  Very laudable too.  Unfortunately none of us – repeat none of us – actually fully understood that at the time.
 
There were a couple of other blindingly obvious things we didn’t understand either.
 
I didn’t realize how much I was upsetting Hass, meaning to some considerable extent that, not exactly surprisingly, I didn’t realize how much he was attracted to me.  Mel was pissed off with me.  I answered in kind, meaning I told him to mind his own bloody business.  Ah yes, some of the best rows of my life have been with Mel.  Mel and I had lost our virginity – virginities? – to each other about a year earlier.  Because each of us was safe and we wanted to know what it was like and we were a pair of giggling kids.  We did it a couple of times and decided not to do it again, but there we were, throbbing with hormones, having a blazing row and somehow it ended in kiss and make up and kiss again.  Mel is really very sweet and only occasionally raving mad.  I think he thought of himself as a sort of consolation prize. I think there are two things here.  One is that other people had noticed the tension between me and Hass, though the last thing they put it down to was sex, which was a problem because that made them nosy.  The other is that Mel and I were still in giggling kids mode.  Maybe at one level we always shall be.  What happened could not have happened if we hadn’t known each other for ever.  We plotted, in short.  We invented our relationship.  If people thought the prob was Hass didn’t approve, well, what idiots they were.  It was our little conspiracy.  It gave us lots of time alone together to yell at each other.
 
At which point a very fragile Tet returned to Zur.  Hass told him hastily that Mel and I was a sham.  Nor did he leave it at that!  He told him why.  But if she’s in love with you, said poor Tet, excuse me, perfectly reasonably.  No, she isn’t, said Hass, any more than Sarat is in love with me. That had a kind of ring of truth about it.  Meanwhile I’d debriefed on Maya in considerable anatomical detail.  I had reservations about the sexual act.  Maya said. Fal, darling, it’s not just you sound as though you don’t love Mel, you sound as though you don’t even like him.  I went ape.  No! I said, there’s a lot of tenderness, a lot of affection, of course I like that. I loved being cuddled and stroked and caressed and generally treated as though I was the most important thing in the universe. But I really couldn’t get the hang of the next bit. It’s just that viewed dispassionately it’s so bloody peculiar. She stroked my hair.  I wasn’t uninterested.  Afterwards I pronounced that it was still bloody peculiar. You don’t really want Hass to make love to you, do you, she said.  No, I said.
 
Ice-maiden was a public assessment.  It would never have come from Mel.  Ice-maiden came from my lack of interest in the dating-game.  Ice-maiden means something like ‘we think she’s gay but she can’t be, well she’s certainly not interested in us’.  When Maya and I had had our little fling I enjoyed it more than with Mel but I certainly didn’t think, ah, that explains everything, what I like is girls.
 
Mel said it was as though I had a hairline crack.  Why I was fixated on Hass was because Hass was whole.  I’d never be whole, said Mel, until I healed the crack myself, I couldn’t use other people to do it.  Hence do not touch with barge-pole.  Well, thanks a bunch, Mel.  Would you like to tell me more? I said that I was no more incomplete, fractured, unwhole, unevolved than anyone else who’d had the same damn’ education in the other matter, thank you very much, but he said, you’re whole, you’re more complete, only there’s the crack, a fissure, two halves are imperfectly joined.
 
Maya went ape.  Total male pig-shit.  She doesn’t want to make love to me so there’s something wrong with her.  Unfortunately the basic problem with this adolescent crap is that it was largely accurate. The crack of course, Mel said, was between love and sex.  Hence don’t touch with barge-pole.  I just didn’t see the point of sex.  It was like my heart was a party and sex was a gate-crasher I felt didn’t belong.  I always slumped with my head in my hands, made tearing hair gestures and rolled my eyes when Mel got poetic.  Perhaps I should have gone on the stage.  Perhaps I did.  The thing was, said Mel, mental, no, spiritual nakedness, getting messy.  It was a question of my image.  For f’s sake, Mel, look in the mirror!
 
Exactly what he said to Tet, and I only knew about it when Tet threw it at me in Azt, was if I were you I shouldn’t touch her with a barge-pole.  What the hell did you mean?  I screamed. Of course when you confront someone with something like that you rather hope it’s not what he actually said.  He meant I’d hurt him.  I hurt him.  He meant I’d reject him.  I rejected him.  The flaw in this prescience is that I hurt and rejected him for Sorg.  I shattered along the crack, you see.  Mel might not have been right about what it was, but he was right that it was.  Like the two halves fell apart onto a stone floor!  But after Maya died the crack wasn’t there any more. 
 
Jolly good.  That’s all right, then.  Happily onward into a blissful future – when I understand.  I have to understand something to move on.  Wouldn’t it be bloody wonderful if I knew what? 
 
Meanwhile I was changing. I think it’s called growing-up.  When someone frankly adores you, and Tet adored me, it’s seductive in itself and I was thinking about everything and feeling/deciding/realizing what I actually wanted was someone who loved me.  That I’d been experimenting with being someone else who wanted the extension of friendship and blah but my body refused to lie. I found I wanted Tet, maybe I could want Tet because I was sure Tet wanted me. . I did and do love Tet.  Am I absolutely sure it’s ‘like that’?
 
And of course I went and joined the H-W.  It’s probably the last thing I should have done. I should have got right out of the magic circle.  However, I did it and so was assessed, as we so delicately put it – turned inside out, upside down and side to side.  You only have to be mega-together if you want to mess around in people’s heads.  I definitely did not.  I told Bandi the unvarnished truth and she hooted and murmured boys will be boys  - it can be a problem.  Then she looked inside.  Ah, the famous crack.  Essentially she told me exactly what would happen and it happened.  End of story.  She said it was rather a network of cracks – gulp - most young people – PLU, that is – had one – phew! all the same I might kill him – it healed naturally, it could only be a problem if, but this was terribly unlikely of course, I was under extreme duress before it had healed.   Yes, but what is it?  Immaturity.  
 
So my plate shattered.  No big deal.  Everyone who knew anything knew why my plate shattered.  So what is my problem?
 
Bandi was much more concerned I should not, repeat not, be a colt on the hill than about anything inside me.  Getting me out of the magic circle.  But Tet! I wailed, envisaging being sent to some border-outpost.  We compromised: airport security. 
 
People like Bandi don’t necessarily put things to bright young people in the way they put things to each other but say what’s comprehensible to the level of the experience of the striplings. 
 
When Kyse bounded into my life, I rather felt I didn’t have any second chances left.  My emotional life had been a little hairy, by no means of course all down to me.  Whether there were external causes or not, my reactions had also been pretty hairy.  A little young for the serenity of age, said Reakoed.  Oh shut up! I said.  I was going to detox!  Take myself through it all and get it right.  I didn’t know about Venga’s wonderful assessment of me but I did strongly feel that – that if I screwed it up with Kyse, it would be all down to me and that would be very bad news indeed. 
 
I realized I wanted to talk to the other woman who didn’t want to be Queen of Dabida.  
 
Shall I come to Azt? I asked.  I’d love a day in the country, she said.  I’m a lady of leisure, right now.  The matter, one might say, has passed out of my hands.  Not that it was ever in them.  Remember, whatever you’ve been told about my vital role was nearly all bull-shit.  Mel’s pet-expert on the Cult!  What sort of crap is that?  They’ve only been fighting the Cult for 1500 years. 
 
I think I'm going to find Estanzia Morsen's daughter refreshing.
 
Just two girls talking over lunch.  We peeled pettifer.  We fried onions.  We ate at the kitchen-table.  We washed up.  And I ran through the stuff that had been bugging me.  We made mugs of tea and stayed at the kitchen-table.
 
“How it seems to me – if Mel hadn’t been raised to be leader of the pack, he’d have been a very esoteric kind of guy.  He is a very esoteric kind of guy and Cantilip is a very esoteric kind of gal, if she hadn’t been raised, etc, etc.  Everything that Mel and Cantilip mean and are to each other is indissoluble and inner and eso.  That’s the relationship he wanted and needed.  Same with Hass and Venga.”
“You and I not.”
“Do you want to talk about Sorg?”
“Alive or dead?”
“Alive.  Why did you do it?”
“It was like starting my life again. 
“And that time it went right.”
“And I couldn’t bear it.”.
“It’s more complicated than not wanting to be Queen of Dabida.  It’s what Mel is not who he is.”
“You adore him too.”  It started as a question and ended as a statement.  “But you – you were mad enough to see.  I didn’t.  I’ve said that.”
“That’s who I am.  To grow up in the City is to be angry the way Mitch was angry.  It’s inevitable I hitched my wagon to people who were actually going to do something.”
“It was real to you.”
“Searc is very real to me.  There’s a sort of innocence about Dabidans.”
“I suppose there is,” I said after a minute.  “Was.”
“Sorry.  Was.  I think Mel collects people.  Not you three, OK, that was when you were infants.  He collected me!  He collected Bal, which is much more interesting.  Bal likes and admires Sarat but he’s goo-goo about Mel.”
“He collected Kyse.”
“Definitely.”
“We seem to have strayed from the point.”
“Have we?  Is Mel not the sun around which we all revolve?  The way it sounds to me is you had a normal childhood.  He had a fantasy childhood in which he was allowed to be normal.  Reality kept intruding.  What did happen about the dress-code?”
“Oh, he came to terms with reality,” I said airily.  “That was me busking it,” I admitted.  “I hadn’t thought of it quite like that.”   
“I don’t think Mel ever wanted to be a regular guy.  Far too much fun being who he is.  That doesn’t mean it didn’t have its down side.”
“That’s roughly what Tar said.  Isn’t it what Mitch says?  You are on show.  You go out there, you put on a performance.  You do not fluff your lines.”
“I didn’t know you could mimic!  So Mel didn’t – wouldn’t accept that could apply to dinner with Mummy and Daddy.”
“Mel debriefed on Hass.  He was actually more het up about it – I was going to say than Tar knew, but that’s probably not true.  As far as Hass could tell, he kept it formal, intellectual when he confronted Tar.  He was very, very pissed off about the papers.  This is my home!  He felt it as a violation.  I know he said to Tar that if he’d turned up to dinner at the Ciletij Rep Centre looking derelict that would have been different.  He didn’t say he wouldn’t have!  Hass thinks there was more to it – it was short, sharp shock time.  Mel had been increasingly bloody impossible anyway and to waste Tar’s time – Tar’s words.  Drama-queen, indulging himself at the expense of guests.”.
“Yeeee-owww!”
“Actually it was Tet who bashed Mel’s head in – Mel’s words.  Tet is more than a short fuse, he thinks about things he thinks are worth thinking about!  Also he didnae quite like to intrude between Mel and his dad, being a foreigner and all.  Tet  generally looked like a tramp, but as he pointed out, he wasnae the heir to anything and he wasn’t crawling with money.  If he wanted to look like crap, well was he not a penniless student, scarcely able to afford a crust and who the hell cares, a nicely ambiguous one.  Tet told Mel it was a flamin’ insult to the poor to make what they had to wear into some kind of fashion statement.  Mel never to my knowledge looked – “ I grinned.  “ - odd again unless he was wading through cow-dung or something!”
“His secret hobby?.”
“Eeek!  You didn’t hear - ?”
 “No, she said cautiously.”
“There was this sick cow.  It was of course in Carlin.  What comes out the rear end of a cow with an upset tum is not something to focus on.  Mel hadn’t packed bioprotect gear.  You know he likes mucking in!  Genuinely likes it.  I’m not sure about how basically eso he is.  Personally I think he’d have made a rather good builder!  Anyhow, the vet had said every last strand of straw had to be burned and the whole byre disinfected. I think he actually wanted to burn the whole cowshed down, but they’re a conservative lot in Carlin – “
“Probably slept in by Narulis, “ muttered my guest.
I cackled.
“ - It was midsummer.  Basically everyone’s solution to this jolly task was to work as near naked as poss, thus making the hat mandatory.  ‘Xcept it wasn’t a hat. It was the brim of a large straw hat, no crown, the very battered brim, with untamed bits of straw sticking out at angles. The in-between bit was all right, old shorts.  It was the other end.  It must have been deliberate.  I can’t believe they couldn’t have found him a pair of wellies.  He’d made socks out of bin-bags.  Click!”
“Tar must have taken an awful lot of crap one way and the other.”
“So to speak…And then!  And then!”
“Don’t follow.”
“Venga and Cantilip.  Some people stopped talking when I came into the room.  Mostly people just looked pleading.  WTF?  Why don’t they just taken Kadun citizenship and be done with it!  Questions were asked in the Senate.”
“It was Cantilip and Mel who lounged, wasn’t it.”
I sighed.
“Lived in the bloody place!  Why didn’t they just set up a tent and be done with it!”
“Little placard above her head.  This is a nice lady.  Get to know her.  It brought Sarat’s Pad forward, you know.”
“I didn’t.”
“Mel understood – well, Tar, Saski, Vanya, Airoch!  Mel really did understand that he had to lay his cards on the table.”
“Do you still want a job when you grow up?  Light laugh.”
“Sarat really wasn’t quite ready but he understood too!  Nothing in his thoughts about Kadun included Mel with Cantilip za-fenan!”
“Is this another delicious diversion?”
“You tell me.”
“I think Hass is the sun around which.  I don’t think either of them would do anything Hass disapproved of.”
“What did Hass think?”
“He didn’t really understand the problem.  Partly he was younger, fewer raging hormones.  What do you think?  Hass the impeccable.”
“Mel decided to like dressing up.”
“Hass pointed out the obvious.  Mel didn’t like it.  Yes, Mel, it’s our home, and if we want, most evenings we can eat where we like, wearing whatever we like, in the company of whomever we like.  Am I clear about me?”
“Are you?”
“I think – what you just said about Mel, that’s the same, isn’t it.  I like being female.  It’s fun.  You have to accept the down side.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“Don’t say that word!”
“You’ve edged round it.”
“I know that!”
“Sorry.”
“Much more fun to be diverted.”
“Load of adolescent males slavering over you!” She frowned suddenly. “They didn’t, did they.  Because of Mel.  That’s how you were safe.  But you knew they were slavering inside!”
“Naïve and Mel,” I said slowly , “aren’t words that readily go together.”
“I don’t suppose they did locker-room talk in front of him – well, not about you.”
“Do you begin to see - ?” I started, then grinned.  “Means I begin to see.  How critical it is I knew them all when I was 5.”
“Except Tet,” she pointed out. “You hated it, didn’t you, bitterly, bitterly hated it.  That’s why you made such a thing.”
“I wanted to be loved for me.  Doesn’t everyone!  I’ve been very lucky.  Three men have loved me for me.  So why am I wasting our time on this crap!”
“Three not five?”
“Or seven! I understand – understood and understand that Mel and Hass really, really love me.  I think – I think I didn’t understand that it’s not how men love women.  But my body did?”
“Not like that ought to be the motto of this freaking story.  I take it talking to Cantilip is out.”
“Maybe when we’re about 70.”
“But there’s quite a strong parallel, isn’t there.”
“Yes.”
“She said through gritted teeth.”
“I am reasonably sure that if I had shown the faintest enthusiasm for the proposition, Mel would have been happy to make a go of it.  I’m really not sure he distinguishes – how men love women.”  She looked shocked.  “Well, then, anyway!”
“You’re not the only woman in the world to fall for a gay guy.”
“I did not fall for him!”
“OK, what did you do?”
“I’m going to crab round this.  Adolescent females can drool too.  You know what they said about Sarat and Maya.  Well, you probably don’t actually.  They thought it was a kids’ conspiracy to keep the slavering teens at bay. Now, for obvious and – and less obvious, at least less obvious at 17, Sarat’s choice of partner was pretty limited.  She had to love him.  Not the beauty.  Therefore Sarat and Hass, on both sides.  That’s what I wanted to – replicate.”
She grinned suddenly.
“OK, let’s make that you did not fall for him in any sense known to those not more beautiful than pictures, any more than Sarat did.  What about the other two, Reakoed and Maitlan?”
“They had girlfriends.  They’d got a life.  I said, it was over at 13.”
“Did Mel make you feel it was your fault?.  Something entirely in you.”
I looked at her.
“You are nobly restraining yourself from saying I’ll kill him, I’ll strangle him with my bare hands.  It wasn’t exactly like that. I wasn’t absolutely sure I wasn’t gay.”
“Enough to make anyone gay.”
“I gave as good as I got.  You’re missing the point!”  Raised eyebrows.  “Could that be because I haven’t told you what the freaking point is?  It didn’t matter.  It didn’t scar me.  Haunted not.  OK, it wasn’t quite water off a duck’s back.  It was other matter stuff.  Maybe he had a point on that level.  Tet and I were happy.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Oh!  I must have been mad.”
“While at the same time being born anew?”
“I wrecked it.  That came from me.”
“Do you have any idea how many relationships have been wrecked by this Matter of Kadun!”
“I know.  Working together, a permanent high – a sort of insanity?”
“If the crack has gone, what’s the prob?”
“Am I going to repeat the trick?”
“Oh no.”
“That’s how I feel about it.  I need to be awfully sure that seduced by the buzz of Kadun’s first free Senate – assuming, of course….I s’pose Kyse thinks the relationship didn’t work.”
“Do you sincerely want to screw up your life?  That’s our theme for today?”
“I’ve moved on a bit.  Screw up other people’s lives.  Kyse is so – blameless and normal.  Relatively, anyway!  Even Mel can see that Tet is not the most peaceful person to be around.”
“But you liked – loved that.  No quesch dear old Tet  back home is boring.”  I spluttered.  “Does it occur to you this is really very simple and you’ve known it all along?”
“The script?  Yes.  I still think I’m missing something.”
“What? Why?  When!  Who!  Try – I read some of Sorg’s stuff.  Mel showed it me.  It was brilliant!”
“I am going to get it published.”
“Fantastic!  I think – kick me if you think I’m off-key here.  The dashing young officer brimming with vim and squat thrusts – he was actually pretty eso, wasn’t he.”
I giggled.
“He never did squat thrusts.  He devoted his military career to evading what the Army likes to call physical training.”
“No-one says he wasn’t a bright guy.”
“Yes.  Yes, he was. Eso.”
“OK, now I’m not saying Mel wasn’t tender, gentle, delicate, loving – I know that!  It does just occur to me that compared to the high esoteric plane on which you – imagined a relationship with Hass it might have been a quick one behind the bike sheds.  Her voice trailed off.  Giggling kids.  Nothing you’ve said suggests…”
“OK, so?”
“How about Tet?”
“Where are you going, Kai?”
“I’m really not sure.”
“I don’t think I’m going to like it.  That doesn’t mean you won’t be right.”
“Thanks!”
“Tet is poetic, but not particularly eso.  Tet – recited to me.  Brought me unexpected presents.  Turned up in Azt to surprise me.  Sorg was of course aware that I was someone else’s partner.  He did once sneakily pluck a rose and hand it to me saying it suited me more than him.  Obviously he wasn’t going to shower me with gifts or surprise me with weekends away.  He never touched me.  Well, more than he could  get away with.  I teased him about it, half-understanding and then – it’s actually how it came to a head.  He was helping me out of the car and I giggled and said you know what your old-fashioned courtesy is really?  It’s an excuse for touching.  He looked at me very steadily and said of course and didn’t let go my hand, and I didn’t let go of his hand either. Damn, damn, damn, I’m trying not to cry.  Yes, it was all in the head.”  She left me to say it.  “I think I’m going to get that with Kyse, do I?”
“That would rather depend – you might have reached its – the whole ghost thing.  He has gone now?”
“Or I have healed that devastating hole in me.”
“Which must then be a hole in Sarat.”
“I don’t know, Kai.  I just don’t know.  When people are as hyper, as permanently hyper.  Would Sorg and I have lasted?  I don’t know that, either, do I.”
“Don’t hit yourself with that one.”
“Is that what Reakoed means by steady.  Someone who won’t do my head in to the extent that I go potty when he’s killed.  That doesn’t explain the bloody crack.”
“I wonder.  Don’t you think Sorg might have healed it and anguish - ?  What I personally think, just my opinion, others well-known to both of us, possibly including you, may differ.  I think the ghost was keeping  bloody men at bay.  Which doesn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t real.”
“I am going to cry, period.”
“You’re not over him,Fal.”
“Over?  How can I ever be over?”
“Don’t be difficult.  The world moves on.  People move on.  Time heals.”  She grinned.  “And other readings from the Book of Pious Crap.”
“You’ve never – sorry, that was below the belt.”
“I’ve never.  But I live with the possibility.  Cioulis escaped with scratches.”
“I’m really, really sorry! I didn’t know.”
“When I met Kyse at the airport I was absolutely ape, even though I’d spoken to him. Cioulis I mean.  My imagination had supplied all the details.”
“You and Cioulis.” 
“A good lad.  Hidden depths.  He is of course senoki.  He has introduced me to dimensions of earthpower markedly absent from my mother’s ramblings about womanspirit.  Fal – I know, though I shouldn’t tell you this, though they’d freaking kill me for telling you, slowly and painfully, you have a genuine military fan club, shall I say, not just looking at the body and the face.  For what you are, for who you are, for what you’ve done, for what you intend to do.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning you seem to be giving yourself a limited number of options.  Like two.  You still want safe, don’t you.”
“Owwwwwch!”
“You’re not 16 any more.  You have a very public track-record.  I know you’re a pin-up, golden girl, legs unlimited.  But – but the squaddies who have reasonably decorous pin-ups don’t just think of you as a pair of tits.  Nobody does.”
“Exactly what are you saying?”
“Oh, BPC, Chapter 83.  Let it all go, let them all go.  Do your thing.  When it’s right, you’ll know it without agonising.  Kyse cannot be bad news for anyone, he’s just not that kind of guy.  Tet, I suspect, could be.  Everyone knows he has a tongue in his head and knows how to use it.  If I were you, I’d tell Kyse I wasn’t ready, because you’re bloody well not.  Maybe, maybe, who knows, I don’t know, I’m not declaiming it couldn’t be perfect and permanent with either of them. I am saying, it’s my view that, not starting from now.”
“Being on my own,” I growled, “and public is very unsafe indeed.”
“You share things with Kyse that are more profound that gosh, we both like the countryside.”
“I didn’t say that!”
“Yes, you did.”
“I mean I didn’t say it was the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun.  All the stuff I was rambling about.  It clicked with me this was the only gig worth  playing but it seemed Tet still didn’t understand.  He was content with his life in Zur..”
“And now he’s in Azt with everyone else.”
“Including Kyse.”
“I am the total outsider.  I walked into this of my own free will.  Like – like everyone did who wasn’t in at the start.  Does that make sense?  It’s like a magnet.  Do iron filings have free will!  Once it had happened, there was only one place to be.”
“Kyse.”
“Kyse is probably the last fully sane person left on the continent.”
“I’ll be sure to tell him!  What d’you mean?”
“If you were a plumber, if you were an electrician, if you were a doctor, if you were a civil rights lawyer, if you were a radical feminist, if you had any kind of specialist skill, knowledge, talent pertinent to this Matter of Kadun you flocked to the happening of a lifetime.  Kyse felt he didn’t.  Some people came with nothing to offer because it was the happening of a lifetime.”
 “Do you have to be getting back?”
“Not really.  It’s bliss. A life free of airports.”
“We could pop down to the Rabbiters’.”
“I’ve never been.”
I stared.
“Coat.  Scarf.  Instantly!  There is someone involved in this gig who has never been to the Rabbiters’?”
“I confess it freely.”
“How many more of you are there hidden away?”
 
Life goes on, as Kai had so caustically observed.  It goes on whether you want it to or not.  That is not (puh-lease!) a declaration of a suicidal tendency.  It’s just that there are some frames you’d rather freeze. 
 
I mailed Reakoed and Maitlan
Have you got an evening, guys, for some light relief? I need to move on here.
 
Reakoed   This is automated response from Matchmakers Unlimited.  Anything that propels you in the direction of Kyse automatically has top priority.  Anything that may advance the Fal-Tet axis on the other hand – I’m biased, I told you.
Me: Or how about I stay single?
Reakoed: Now you’re getting interesting.
 
Maitlan: They allow me out most evenings.  Office-hours, you know, a bizarre innovation.
Me:  Eek!  You’re still on the hill?
Maitlan  I found I rather liked the job.  The captain is intelligent.  I meekly requested the transfer we made permanent and to my enormous surprise my request was granted.
Me: Cutting the cord was enough then.  You could come back as your own man.
Maitlan: You have been thinking!
Me:  I have been thinking mega.
 
I took a deep breath. 
“They say the spectators see most of the show.  I’m going to bend your ears with my life-history and Caithan’s opinion of it – “
“Cai – “
“I seem to have acquired a new female friend.  The significance of that is about the only thing not relevant here. This,” I sighed, “is about the men in my life.”
 
“The passage of time,” observed Maitlan, “and a maturity Mel notably lacked leaves one slightly appalled.  Did you actually invite all this crap?  Mel, please tell me everything you think is wrong with me.”
“I was a major pain in the arse.”
 “We were all like that,” said Reakoed.  Maitlan raised his eyebrows.  “Except for those who weren’t?”
“You admit it?” he asked Reakoed.  “Did you ever think he was subconsciously attacking you?”
I felt my face go blank.
“No.  Not possible.  Not possible that was it, not possible I thought that.  You have to see it in the context of the trip.  Aspects of the bloody Whole.”
“I do not recall,” said Maitlan, “having to physically drag you off Hass.  Were you a major pain or was that Mel’s verdict?”
“The prosecution counsel takes the stand,” murmured Reakoed.  “So you joined the H-W, and Bandi turned you inside out and passed you fit.  So WTF?”
“It’s different.”
“What’s different?”
“Me from you, for a start!  You don’t have to be mega-realized to do what I wanted to do.”
“I do know the regulations!”
“Stop grinning like that!” I said to Maitlan.
“I have said nothing.  I too have no interest in the farther reaches.  My own feeling is it came from Hass.”
Reakoed started, then laughed.
“He’s not just a snazzy uniform, you know!”
Maitlan smiled.
“I should say that to this day there are some things – some kinds of things - he runs by Hass. These were Hass’s thoughts.”
“They came out wrong because they came – via Mel.”
“Dogmatic instead of fluid.  If a guy who’s just working on being gay starts to talk about being – uncertain, it has a different feel to it to someone you think of as wholly hetero, wholly male.”
“If Hass didn’t want to talk about it with you, Mel would have taken that as major.”
 “To the best of anyone’s knowledge -  “ he looked around at us, “ – Hass has never been to bed with a woman, yes?”  We nodded.  “I should imagine most gay men haven’t.  There is nothing whatever remarkable about that except in the context of the blah, rites of passage. I should also guess that you holed Hass below the waterline.”
 “I’d guess,” said Reakoed, “Hass was strongly attracted at one level.”
Maitlan ruffled my hair.
“Beauty.”
“In the wrong shaped body!”
“The whole theory fell apart, didn’t it.”
“To be reborn,” murmured Reakoed, “as you correctly surmise, as guy-stuff. Interesting you couldn’t cope when the scales should have fallen from your eyes.”
“What scales!”
“I had the grave misfortune – “ Maitlan’s eyes were dancing.  “ – to be at sea.”
Reakoed made a moue.
“I wasn’t invited.”
“It was a pact.  While the grey and hoary sat around conference tables, Mel had his own unique approach.”
“Doesn’t that make the Matter of Kadun guy-stuff?”
“The Matter of Kadun is the exemplar of guy-stuff.”
“OK,” I said.  “I’m going to float something that 1) I hate and 2) I think is crap.  What am I missing!  What is – supposedly – obscure to me as a female but obvious to all the rest of you?”
They grinned. 
“I shall pretend to think deeply,” said Maitlan.
“It’s a hard one,” agreed Reakoed.
Maitlan looked at me doe-eyed.
“I never slavered, Fal.  Truly.”
“It’s basically a question of aesthetics,” said Reakoed airily.  “The eye naturally follows the line of the legs to its source.”
“You were going out with – oh, what was her name, big hair with streaks – “
“Danit!  A childhood construct…There were other people in Zur.”
“That seems,” said Maitlan drily, “to be very much Caithan’s point, with which I fully concur.  There are other people in the world. Let me say something obvious even to a female.” He ducked quickly.  “Time passed.  I do not find it coincidental you recall Mel at his worst.  You found the adolescent male a raging nightmare. Every adolescent male.”
“Did Mel hurt you?” asked Reakoed.
“Physically?  No, and that’s a bit too obvious.”
I turned to Maitlan. 
“Everything you say except it doesn’t work.”
“If,” said Reakoed, “one’s mind and body are not fully engaged in the matter at hand, there isn’t much else to think except, this is weird.”
“Quite the wrong question,” I said.  “It was his first time too.  He said he didn’t know what he was doing.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the point.  It wasn’t just feelings generated by Mel or rather not generated by Mel.  It was I didn’t feel anything  (much) generated by me.  Desire is the word.  Just looking at Sorg made me – “
“The juices run,” said Maitlan innocently.
“You have such a sensitive way of putting things.”
 “Do you understand what you did to Tet?”
“Tell me.“
“Tet is not a trusting person.  He trusted you, Fal, with his vulnerability, his insecurity, his disability.  Then what did he say?  What, really is eating you?”
“He said Mel was right about me.  Do not touch with barge-pole.”
“You think that relationship has a future?” asked Maitlan.
“It would have been all right!” I said. Tears ran down my cheeks.  “Aaargh!”
“Tissue Alert!”  Reakoed jumped up.
“On the dresser.  We were really, really happy.”
“But darling girl, you weren’t, not really, really, really, totally perfect happy.”
“I wish I could be sure of that.  It’s too pat. There’s one more thing.”
“No, no!”
“There’s nothing more they can do to hurt Dabida.  Isn’t there really?”
Maitlan got up and stood behind my chair, put his arms around my neck and kissed my forehead.
“That would devastate us all.”
“I’m sure Maya could have sorted me out.”  Unconsciously I echoed Sarat.  “She’s not here any more.”
“There’s one more thing,” muttered Reakoed.  “Face it, Fal.  You do not want to die.”
“What!”
“I’m an idiot, I should have realized.”
“What are you talking about?”  I thought I understood.  “I am not looking for a way out!”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Well, what do you mean?”
“Does apple-stock have medicinal properties?” asked Maitlan.
“Only to knock you out.  There’s some brandy in the kitchen cupboard.”
“You have been having a truly absorbing time grappling with your future. It has become all-important.  Vital you clarify.  Critical you decide.   I suspect this is because it’s hit you that you may not have a future.  At least Kai had the bloody sense to tell you to stop trying to manipulate.”
“I want to scream that that is total crap but I don’t think I can.”
“We all play a game. Kadun will have free elections.  Kadun will have a democratically elected  Senate.  Such are our charms to ward off evil.  These things will happen.  That is true.  What is not true is that their occurrence will mysteriously mean that Kadun has become safe.  You – oh my darling girl, you are not alone in – it was impossible no-one died.  That didn’t mean people would go on dying.”
Maitlan returned.
“The kettle is on.”
“Like the rest of us,” said Reakoed, “you can only do what you have to do.  It’s not exactly surprising you’d like someone’s arms around you while you do it.  Like the rest of us.”
“I wonder,” said Maitlan, “exactly how much Caithan understood.  It would seem to me excellent advice to look up Sorg’s friends as comrades in arms doing what they have to do, like the rest of us.  Let me make the coffee.”  He turned at the door. “You have to decide nothing, today, tomorrow, ever.”
At that point for definite light relief, there was a knock on the door.  Maitlan answered it.  It was Lattic, who took one look, smiled shyly, muttered, “Old friends, that’s great,” and scurried away.
“Who was that?” asked Reakoed.
“Not another would-be suitor,” said Maitlan.
“No way!  Lattic is one of life’s little casualties.  Mel picked him up and rescued him, turning his head inside out on the way.  He’s better with plants than people and came to rest in Carlin.  Where he has been fantastically kind to me.   He says being kind to someone instead of thinking of himself all the time makes him think he might make it as human being. “ I giggled suddenly.  “Believe me, one can tie oneself in far worse knots over the Brothers Talal than I ever managed.  I’m not going to tell you, because I really don’t think that’s fair.”
“Not the relly in the City!” said Reakoed.
“Who told you?”
“Tar, when it looked like it might make the front-page of every paper in the world.”
“I think I can accept that as a reason…”
 
My imagination is, I should say, pretty average, but it didn’t take creative genius to stand in front of the mirror and ask myself: do you sincerely want to die for Kadun?  Nor was it beyond me to close my eyes and visualize Sarat’s image in place of my own, Maya, Hass, Mel, Venga, Cantilip, Mitch, Karula, Sorg, Karci, Vrin, Cioulis - Asdinan, Saryulin, Duvi -  inevitably someone known simply as The Unknown Soldier. I tried briefly to jump ship by saying that wasn’t the question, Kyse’s and my deliberations on our over-riding commitment and blah were, but they weren’t.  I realized that was why Kyse had stayed out of it.  The border was everything here.  Why didn’t I enter Dabidan politics?  I had taken Kadun citizenship.  I was a subject of the Anile throne.  By my choice.  I realized there was – had to be – one hell of a corollary.  Providing it all comes right in the end.  I have a scratch-pad in the kitchen for shopping-lists.  I pencilled: the border stopped being meaningful to Kyse.  The day Maya died.  WHY?  Then: I may not be the only one who’s not quite as together as he/she looks.  But Kyse was no adolescent and (I judged) just about the last person in the world to say ‘I love you’ if he wasn’t sure.  It was the tragedy that had prompted him to say it, not the tragedy that had prompted it.  No-one, I pointed out to myself, had been exactly sane in the days immediately after the bombs.  Nonetheless, he had been………..adult.  Really?  Towards me, anyhow!  I wasn’t sure I could make flinging oneself across the ocean the epitome of maturity.  The thing is, I wrote firmly, I love Sorg.  Present tense.  Time heals etc.  For the moment there is only one man in my life and the fact that he is dead is rather irrelevant. 
Yes, well, that rather settles that.
Kyse by now was back in Zur in a rented apartment.  I picked up my car-keys.
 
“Well, hallo!”.  Fond hug, kiss on the cheek that (just) stopped short of being lingering. Both reciprocated.
“Kyse….”
“Come in, come in!  Sit down.  Relax.”  He looked mildy amused, if anything.  “You are going to Say Something?”
“I am going to Say Something.  You’ve got a balcony!  Fantastic!”
“I’ll make some coffee.”
Not only a balcony, but one with garden chairs on it.  I leant over the balcony, supposedly rapturous at a view of the Old Port I could have drawn in my sleep and I knew I was a fraud, in all things a fraud.  What the bloody hell did that mean?  Darling, they want you to be real. Maya, Maya, Maya.  I half-collapsed into one of the distinctly unreal (fake veneer of age) garden chairs.  You’ll gather it was pretty easy for me to say to Kyse:  “I’m not as together as I look.  Hope I look!  I love Sorg.  I’ve been through it with – people.  Exactly how crazy it sort of is.  They all say the same.  Time heals.  Not yet.  I’m – you could say it was the second blow opened a – wound that wasn’t fully healed.”
He touched my hand.
“I can understand that.”  I rather wanted to scream why are you so bloody decent! but of course I didn’t.  Ah, but wouldn’t that have been being  real?  “I’m here anyway.  Call me if you need me.”
 “Thank you.”  Light laugh.  “Have you got a job yet?”
“Oh yes,”  he said.  Clearly he was finding something very funny.  I hoped it wasn’t me.  “Imperial historian.  Is there any external evidence to back up the version of history in the journal, differing as it does from the standard version, or is the bloody journal a fake?”
“Wha - !!!   Look, I don’t know anything – even I’ve heard of carbon-dating!  Can’t people like, well, you, tell the age of a manuscript?”
“Oh, it’s old, all right.  It might even be contemporary with Narulis.  That doesn’t mean it’s not a fake.”
 “’They came, the skull-faces,’” I said, a bit shakily. “I should really, really hate that to be a fake.  Did Sarat know?”
“That is attested to elsewhere.  Narulis, so far as anyone knows, said it.”
I touched his hand.
“You – you didn’t come back just for me. I’m glad of that.”
“I didn’t come back just for the journal.  I’m always glad to see you, Fal, whatever the – status of our relationship.  It’s important to me you know that.”
“I’m going to travel,” I said.  “I’ve been far too much in too few bits of the world.”  I hadn’t realized that until about ten minutes earlier.  “Send you lots of postcards.”
 
In case you have been too absorbed in my rich inner life to work out the obvious, Sorg’s death had left me with more money than I’d ever heard of, let alone possessed.  It hadn’t seemed quite right to take it all but the family wouldn’t let me not take it all.
 
Effectively I’d been bought.  It was a repulsive thought but I was in the mood for looking at all the angles. If I did retreat to Zur, I’d have to do something with the dosh – give it to CLIK!  Well, some of it.  I didn’t think Sorg would want me actively poor.  I’d never even seen most of Kadun – the self-sufficiency trip.  You can’t disappear for three days when you have goats or not too often.  Barfanu was always willing to mind the shop. Lattic hasn’t quite got the hang of goats, but he’s a mean gardener.  How much was my support network a self-constructed trap?  I’d driven away from Kyse’s intending to give myself a break here, pick up lunch in the deli in Tamsin, sit outside in the sun and like it.  I’d got as far as the car-park on the edge of the walking-streets.  I knew I was mentally running from that scene in Azt and forced myself to be there.  They  want you to be real.  Maya, I whispered, Maya.  Then I muttered furiously, I am NOT going to talk to Mel.  There are other people in the bloody world!   Cut the cord, come back as your own man.  How far was that true of Kyse?  I wondered if he’d felt some relief, had regrets over his own insanity, but I didn’t think that was it.  He wants me.  He doesn’t need me.  That was a refreshing thought.  I liked that thought, though it was only really what Reakoed had said about how Kyse would never walk over my life.  How the bloody hell do I cut the cord? I quite wanted to look in on Maitlan, but I might run into Mel.  If such a thing had been possible, I’d have been staring at myself.  I’m avoiding Mel?  I just let it hang there.  OK, right at this minute I’m avoiding Mel.  I suspected that would be because right at this minute anything I said in passing would be pretty fake.  But wasn’t that just life?  But sometimes it matters.  I  knew that even before Maya’s death nobody else had been skating it, either.  Now, if I could just get out of the freaking car-park and start enjoying myself, everything would be just cool.  The thought lingered that someone else’s input would enlighten me and end – what? A possibly fruitless spiral of introspection.  Fal, you are a moron.  You are a screaming idiot.  Why must it always be a struggle?  I’m in no-man’s land, I thought, Carlin a half-way house.  I don’t throw in my lot with Karci and the guys.  None of the people whose ears I had recently bent was irtubi.  I am Dabidan.  I grew up in Zur.  Would the fact that my friends were largely Zuri be an issue to anyone else on the planet, would it!  Duvi, as I knew so well, recognized people in crisis when she saw them, but her remedy for life’s lesser difficulties, whether hers or other people’s, was generally the herb garden or a brisk walk.  I laughed suddenly, imagining myself saying to her,  “I’ve tried the herb garden school of psychotherapy.”  I thought momentarily of Lattic.  I too was a good neighbour.  I did things for others.  I was proud of the relationship I’d established with the kids.  I was actually a member of the governing body of the youth club and disco and liked – I began to titter – encouraging the youth of Carlin to expand their horizons.  They want you to be real.  I’d expressed my pain, largely in the literal sense, like you express milk.  Once I’d got over being an uncontrolled wreck I wanted to give back to the people who’d been kind to me.  Self-doubt, the bad kind.  I suddenly felt a tremendous irritation.  There is something going on in my life and I don’t know what it is.  Come out, wherever you’re hiding! I was still in the bloody car-park.  By now I was ravenous.  Move, woman!  I’m going to sit here until I starve to death? But when I got out I didn’t head for the nearest caff.  I walked a bit, bought some fruit at a stall and went for a wander.
 
While naturally people recognized me, mercifully I didn’t meet anyone I actually knew well, anyone who (oh horror of horrors!) might say, let’s pick up a coffee and chew over the fat.  I was enjoying myself.  There was a swing in my step.  I was positively sauntering.  Uzz’n wen’ un ‘ad one of they toime slippages that I didn’t know were so tediously commonplace. 
 
Where I was sauntering was down Cobaul Lane, where there’s a sweetshop with (and it always had had) a stripy awning, loads of lusciously tempting if you’re 7, brilliantly coloured, jars of tooth-rot in the window (some of those were striped too),  and a freezer with a sliding-top outside fully of lusciously tempting etc lollies.  You have to go inside to get ice-cream because lollies are mass-produced but ice-cream is an art.  It says that in the window too, well, not the bit about lollies.  This is not surprising, because the shop is called The Art of Ice-Cream.  It nestled between a junk-shop and Hadal’s Finest Furnishings, lots of stripes and bright colours there too, bolts of cloth, a box of remnants, contrasting prettily with carpet samples in more muted hues.  The junk-shop, I was just noting vaguely, was no longer there, when suddenly it was and Maya and I were standing rapt in front of it slurping our ices and possessed with a painful longing for a string of multi-faceted beads which changed colour as the light hit them. That’s just so clever, we breathed.  Look, we were 8, all right!  I knew what happened next, the old guy who owned the place pushed aside the curtain shielding the window-display from the inside of the shop, stepped into the window and with magnificent aplomb removed the beads from the dummy and disappeared again.  In all senses.  I was looking at or rather through  a plain window with an office inside.  Samit-va, for a really personal service.  No case too small.  We serve all your legal needs. 
 
I suppose he must have died, I found myself saying.  The obvious thing was to saunter into The Art of Ice-Cream and ask, but I still felt I didn’t want to talk to anyone who actually knew me (I’d still been slurping their ices at 20).  I drifted on lost in thought, which mostly means I was wondering why I didn’t want to cry.  Close on the heels of that one came what the hell have I done to myself now!  Whether the thing perceived has independent existence or whether it’s a hallucination, its starting-point is in you, you have either grossly disturbed your perception or done something to your consciousness enabling you to see other levels of reality. I want to talk to someone who doesn’t know me!  I want to talk especially to someone who hasn’t known me since I was 5.  Do I really?  And have to explain every last detail?  Faun was pretty well permanently in Azt.  So far as anyone could tell the whole of PANTHER was in Kadun.  That couldn’t be right, though.  Someone must be holding the fort in Fidub.  Perhaps there’s some nice old cat on the retired list who’s got a few hours to spare.  Probably find she reminisces over the old days with Gorse’s mother.  The tentacles of the Matter of Kadun stretch far and wide and no more so than in Fidub! There is a barrier here.  Intimate details of our sex lives.  I mean, mine, OK. I can cope with that.  That really left only one nice old cat.  Don’t be silly.  After all, he is the head of PANTHER.  I suppose he is.  I thought Sarat might be.  Whose time shall I waste today?  I felt that something possibly serious had happened.  I rang Vax.
“Do you think Cho could spare me some time?  I need to talk about the other matter.  I need to talk about Sorg, about a lot of private stuff, including – Mel and I when we were kids.  That rather limits the field.  I also need to talk to an older person.”
 
“Tar and Saski are staying.”
“Oh shit!  Sorry.”
“Don’t run away.  Where are you?”
“Zur.”
“Come over.  I’ll sort it.”
“Vax, I can’t do that.  I cannot tell Tar and Saski about sex with Mel!”  I think.  I remembered Maya and then Mel having Tet and me in stitches relating Trial by Saski.
“I’m not a complete idiot.”  He tutted.  “People always forget about Amida.”
It gets worse. I was sure Mel had told me Sarat had told Cho.  Did that automatically mean Amida knew?  Or for that matter Vax?
“If – Sarat had confided something to Cho – what you might call guy-stuff – “
“The cottage?  Amida knows all. Amida hears all.  So, by the way, do I. How in the world – “
“Does that have anything to do with me?  My relationship with Hass is a factor here.”
“Your what?”
“I didn’t say physical relationship!”
“That is true.  It sounds one hell of a story.”
I sighed.
“Just the story of my life.”
“How about we meet you at the quay?”
“That would be incredibly wonderful.”
“I am incredibly wonderful.”
 
The car headed off into the countryside.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere we shan’t be disturbed,” said Amida.
“I’m really putting you out.  I didn’t mean.”
“Sssh,” said Amida.
 
We arrived at another town, a mixture of whitewash – well, this was Fidub, pinkwash, applewash, lemonwash – and ultra-chic mirror-glass affairs,  but unlike most places these were no higher than the older buildings.  They looked much more likeable.  We took a nosedive to the centre of the earth, or in other words descended into an underground carpark, took the lift up to what was apparently someone’s house. 
“This is really rather gorgeous.”  Although modern, it was not minimalist but comfortable and welcoming, despite being austere in colour.  PANTHER have a serious thing about grey/imperial silver.  It was also austere in that it showed no signs of being inhabited, no personal effects on view.
Vax grinned.
“How are the goats?”
I grinned back.
“I of course live in a barn.”
I hoped I wasn’t expected to get through this without coffee, but Vax delved into his rucksack and produced supplies, not only coffee and milk, but two yummy-looking chocolate-cakes, newly baked bread, soft cheese and fruit. 
“I hope I’m not going to seem a trivial lunatic,” I said.  “I’ve run it past Caithan, Reakoed and Maitlan.”
“Caithan?” asked Amida
Vax smiled.
“The city-chick.  Usually known as Kai.”
“Ah, Mel’s ex,” said Amida apparently totally casually.  I thought I shouldn’t comment on that just yet.
“That’s not what’s driven me here.  Something happened today.  I had a time-slip. I’m pretty outer and exo – “  Amida’s lips twitched.  Yes, well, she’s heard that one before.  “ – and apart from the obvious – I don’t – didn’t make a habit of these things.  I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.  I’ve been sort of collecting myself.  Someone proposed to me which kind of brought it to a head.  On the day Maya was killed.  So things have been. It rather seemed to me that this was something I’d done to myself and – it’s one thing to – to work on, to train a faculty, as in you’re in control, and another to have sort of loosed it accidentally and not have the faintest idea what you’ve done.”
“My dear girl!” said Vax.
“I know – extreme stress can trigger – I guess I thought that was a one-off – I know the difference between extreme stress and where I am now.  Isn’t that implicit?  I mean it was a modest little memory of Maya.”
“No chorus of dancing-bears,” sighed Vax. “Reakoed and Maitlan.  “Shall I hang around or is this ladies only?”
I said: “This is mostly about young men.”
Amida said: “A common problem to young women.”
Vax said: “Not about the control of psychic phenomena?  Is that yes or no?”
“Your input could be good.  May I – change my mind later if I feel like it?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Now,” said Amida, “It sounds perfectly delicious.  Where would you like to start?”
I sighed.
“When I was 5 and Maya became my bessiest friend?”
Like Reakoed on a certain other occasion, they laughed in all the wrong places.
“Oh dear,” said Vax, when I got to insisting that there wasn’t any rational difference between Sarat and Hass and me and Hass.
Amida – really the only word is guffawed at my poor Maya telling me I sounded as though I didn’t even like Mel.
“That which cannot be told Saski!  We did rather assume, darling, some enthusiasm. One is quite relieved,” she added.  “It did just occur to us that you had at this late date discovered you are hopelessly in love with Mel.”
“Hopelessly in love, yes.  Mel, no.”
“I have always thought Maitlan an excellent young man,” murmured Vax.  “Did you invite this crap!”
“But it wasn’t crap,” I said.
“That,” he said, “is the only reason Mel should not be shot.”
“That is a little harsh, darling,” murmured Amida
“Perhaps.”
“I still don’t see it like that.  Kai said virtually the same as Mel – the sexual relationship I imagined with Hass didn’t actually have any sex in it.”
“Is that true?”
“Basically, yes, as in to me sex couldn’t have been important in Sarat and Hass because Sarat isn’t gay.”
“Have some more cake,” said Vax.  “Keep your blood-sugar up.”
“It may be useful,” said Amida, “to look at this ‘crack’ linearly.  Externally is perhaps a better word.  You were out of step with them over the inner and eso.  You were out of step with Tet over the Matter of Kadun.  Tragically, you were in balance with Sorg.  You are out of step with Kyse.  Lastly, you are out of step with you, a Dabidan ready to surrender her life for Kadun, in a trap which would be hell to escape, should you decide to try, yet having discovered the primacy of your own autonomy.”
Vax stopped playing with the cake-knife.
“There is nothing in that last bit not true of Sarat and Maya.  If we think back.  The die can be cast before the event!”  He picked up a mouthful of crumbs.  “From the moment – Sarat came to Cho in some distress, not because he thought himself insane but because he felt unable to as Maya to share the risk.  There is nothing – there can be nothing – we who have stayed safe, in Fidub, in Dabida, can say.”
“Maya did not have to do it,” I said.
 “Your duty to Maya, your duty to Sorg. Who has spoken to the world of his duty to Maya?”
“Sarat has – absolutely no choice.  I could find other ways.”
“Oh my dear, no.  Sarat had choice.  Bullet-proof glass.”
“The word was ‘skulk’,” Vax helpfully reminded me.
Amida smiled gently.
“And you wonder her death has sent you flying?”
“Exactly how stupid am I!  Until Maya’s death I wasn’t trapped, was I.  People would have been disappointed, even disappointed in me, but – Dabidan politics, say, that would have been a legitimate choice.  I sat in my little rural haven.  I can do what I like.  I can make a free choice.  Because I could make a free choice.”
“Continue,” said Vax.
“If Kyse’d proposed before Maya died, it’s at least possible I’d have accepted.  But he couldn’t’ve. It’s like – invisible lines crossing lives.  You’ve got it all pat how things are, then they change.  The terrible thing is you weren’t wrong in the first place”
Vax and Amida smiled at each other.
“Who has created – the new continuum?”
“You have.  Only you didn’t notice!”  Vax laughed.  “I made a commitment without coercion.  The coercion crept up behind.”
He laughed again. 
“Let me ask you a truly vicious question.  Do you like history?”
“Don’t torture the child,” murmured Amida.
But I said: “Don’t you mean historians!  I mean, if someone’s idea of a family day-out was ancient monuments, that could pall.  It’s his work!”
“Good answer,” acknowledged Vax.  “What do you think – and let us project with abandon – you are happily paired, you have at least one child – what is Kyse’s idea of a family day-out?”
“Assurance we’d have one?  I think he’s pretty laid-back, but it would upset him if we didn’t have – yuck! ‘quality time, honey’.  And quantity!  The Senate of a country that whatever our fond desires is not safe cannot work office-hours.  I have thought – we’d have to have somewhere in Azt.  What’s more to the point, I have thought that, Azt being a historian’s dream, Kyse would have no probs there.”
“And your child?  In the imperial archives with daddy or the Senate with mummy?”
“No child for the duration of hostilities.”
“Have you discussed that with Kyse?”  Amida
“Did Tet want children?”  Vax.
“Later, now, later.”
"And Sorg?"
“Very much.  But later.”
“No child for the duration of hostilities.  You would say that is standard form?”
“Basic issue.  Among – a certain set of people.  I have not talked about it to Kyse.”
“What is the exact rationale?”
“The entire load falls on the remaining parent, to the detriment of his/her – not necessarily efficiency.  Flexibility.  Alternatively/concurrently there are doting grandparents, aunts and uncles, brothers/sisters and sisters/brothers-in-law.  The other half is of course the vulnerability of the kid, the caging, the – the murder of childhood.  When I think of our childhood – the absolute hideousness of keeping a kid indoors, I mean it would be like a cage.  Or else – what is the point - ?  I’m so sorry,” I said.
“What is the point in having them if you never see them, if they grow up in another country. We offered of course.”
“Mitch and Karula live with it.  That’s not something people are queuing to copy.”
“I’m sure Kyse would understand that,” said Amida.
“We – we also think wherever the kid was he/she’d be a potential target and so – resources would have to be diverted.  There – there are no circumstances in which Maya’s child could have wandered freely in public space.”
“True,” said Vax.
“But you of course,” said Amida.  “Was there a grown-up with you?”
I started.
“No!  It’s completely unimaginable.  Not at that minute.  We were out with Caluna.  She was talking to some friends.  Please, Mummy, may we get an ice-cream!  Of course, darling.  We came right back, babbling about the beads.  I wonder if Caluna remembers!”
“Such good children,” muttered Vax.
“No auger of anything, darling,” said Amida.  “Mel’s extreme difficulties with civilization.”
“Awww,” I said.
“And you?” said Amida.  “One would be tempted to assume that since your looks were a difficulty you dressed down but the Leotard Look suggests otherwise!”  After a second she added, “My dear, you look as though you’ve been knifed!”
“My image of myself is in swimsuit with a smudges of mud all over me holding out especially muddy mitts because I’d just built a truly fantastic mud-castle.  That of course is nonsense. Or rather an accurate picture of when I was 8.”
“What is the relationship between the Leotard Look and the slavering?”
“You have to ask!”
“I am asking.”
“I am my own person, etc, etc.”
“But in the end you all fell in.”
“Maya liked looking like a sex-kitten.  Sarat liked Maya looking like a sex-kitten.  Unfortunately, the eyes of the world were upon them.  Actually it wasn’t so much the sexy bit as the frivolity bit.  The insistence on the yellow flip-flops is the real key to The Look!  Puh-lease, we are serious people!  Not too serious, of course.”
“Did Mel say that?”
“Yes.”
“There is some difficulty?”
“Only the obvious.”
“Pretend we’re thick.”
“Don’t wanna be serious people!  Not that way, anyhow.”
“Which way?  Pretend I’ve forgotten being 16.”
“First of all you want grown-ups to take what you say seriously.  Sometimes.  Not all the time, that would make it too easy for them.  If they listen carefully enough, they’ll understand there’s really one thing you want them to take really, really seriously, and that of course is that the adult world is full of compromises, hypocrisies, irrationalities and even lies.  You are different.  Sometimes.  Your horror of the slightest untruth doesn’t quite extend to not smudging exactly how thoroughly you have tidied your room.”
“The business at dinner, you are sure it was before the Matter of Kadun?”
“I’m sure it was.  I think!”
“I have an image, Mel beginning to stretch, slowly extend one paw, whoops, something in the way, perhaps if I go in this direction…What was his relationship with the Press?”
“Sarat,” said Amida, “said, OK, you want to photograph me.  Better give you something to photograph, then, hadn’t I. Hence, I suspect, the fashion icon.  And of course.”
Vax laughed.
“As though his face alone.  I should suspect Mel also thought that.  Another way of manifesting it.”
“I like a good gossip,” I said.
Vax laughed again.
“But what about me!”
“Darling,” said Amida, “how much older than you was Sorg?”
“Most of us grow up in the end,” said Vax, “honestly.”
“We think of you all as much of an age,” said Amida, “but of course you are not.  You must talk to Sarat.”
“Sarat?  He doesn’t want to hear my life-history!”
“Probably knows most of it,” said Vax.
“I imagine,” said Amida, “Sarat heard it from both sides.”
“Tell him,” said Vax,  “his grandmother says you are in a new continuum.” 
Amida picked up her bag.  I thought she might be getting out a tissue or something, but no, she slung it over her shoulder. 
“That’s it?”
“Do come back if you need to.”
“You’re nearly there,” said Vax, “so close it seems a shame to spoil it.”
Er.
 
I didn’t run off to mail Sarat.  It was a bit gross, wasn’t it.  I could guess that I could have a soothing, perhaps even cathartic, time with Sarat, shared memories of Maya, but what Amida had proposed was hey, Sarat, what I really want to talk about is me.  Amida hears all, Amida knows all.  There must be something she knew that made it make sense.  My mind ran on.  Nor, puh-lease, did I fear we might end up comforting each other.  We’re a monogamous lot – well, in my case serially – and I was sure Sarat would be equally repelled by that one.  A monogamous lot, especially when in both cases the other half is dead.  Er-ooh, is that the lesson of the day?  We have both lost our partners, traumatically, hideously.  What does that mean besides we have both lost our partners, traumatically and hideously.  Oh no!  That I have to ask, and fast.  I rang Vax back and got Amida’s email addy, then gazed at the screen wondering how on earth to put it.  Briskly, I decided.
“Sarat, we both loved Maya.  Of course what I really want to talk about is me.”  That strikes me as totally gross - ???? Is Sarat having a – a Sorg experience?  
My dear, the answer to your second question is no.  It is the right territory but the wrong part of it.
 
Oh Sorg, my sweet, my love, they want me to think about you objectively?  Can’t be done, not yet.   And?  So Kai had the sense to tell me to stop trying to manipulate, foreclose.  Maybe Sarat wouldn’t want to talk about a new continuum.  I mailed him, again briskly.
I’ve been thinking about some stuff, ended up debriefing on your grandmamma!  She said I should talk to you about being in a new continuum - ?
!?! replied the Master of Kadun, a tactful and well-brought-up young man.  I winced as I translated it into what the fuck have you got to talk to Amida about.
Sex with Mel, I typed, then felt that was too brisk, made it sound as though I had a problem with – you mean I don’t!  The whole – some of the stuff – our relationships when we were kids.  There is a very limited number of people it is possible to debrief on!
I heard a rumour, you and Kyse?
Not at the moment, I typed back.  That at least was the simple truth.
Maya, typed Sarat.
Yes, I typed back.  What did I mean?  I don’t know.  I was in a train of thought that ran Maya is what the fuck you have to talk to Amida about.  Why the fuck didn’t you talk to me?  Because, moron, you are running Kadun!  Oh and because it didn’t occur to me.    I added: I didn’t think you’d want to hear me droning on about me, then got into whether that should be ‘don’t’ and ‘you want’.  I changed the tense then changed it back, then typed Mel! then deleted it, then typed Hass! and sat back to see what that provoked.
Ah, typed Sarat.
I laid it bare: Amida said she reckoned you heard it from both sides.
I did! typed Sarat.  A new continuum?
It’s a long story.
I know, typed Sarat.  Shall I come to Carlin?
And that, as I sat noting that I had not instantly been invited to Azt, was the last thing I expected.
Do, please!
Go to the House. I’ll fix it with As.  There are some kinds of crap neither of us needs.
SARAT I parked outside my door all night! I thought but didn’t type. 
I could come to Azt.
Hass and Venga are here.
Ah.
 
Scene: A Room in Carlin.  I don’t think I could find my way to it again, up stairs, down stairs, nearly as bad as the hill.  Like every other room in Carlin it is astonishing, but I am not sure what sort of a room it is. Anywhere else it’d be a junk-room, but one that has been hollowed out, in which the junk has been carefully piled against two of the walls.  There’s a bed along another wall, with an old CLIK poster above it.  Yoof was here!  Mardis?  Incongruously it hung, curling slightly at the edges, next to a painting of the house somewhere past exquisite.  That counts as junk in Carlin?   A bookcase was piled with books, mags, a CD player, a pile of CDs, a piece of sculpture, abstract, modern I thought, not that I know much about art, and also somewhere past exquisite.  In the middle is an old but not antique table and one of those swivel office-chairs.  On the table is a pile of books and a tray of welcoming coffee.  There is a  window-seat.  On this Sarat is sitting and gazing out of the window.  He jumps up.
“I am so glad to see you!”
We hug.
“Good!” I say. “I mean I really wasn’t sure I’m top of your to-do list.”  Then I wished I hadn’t because I knew from Maya that Sarat had strong views on finding time for the people close to him and we all knew that it could never be quite like that. 
“You cut yourself off, Fal.  We worried about you.”
“I had to.  I needed to.”
“Coffee?”
“Please.”  He poured.
“Can’t remember.”
“Black!  If you’re going to be kind and attentive to me, I may lose the thread.  Not that I’m sure I have the thread in the first place.  Shouldn’t it be me being kind and attentive?”
“I am very well looked after.  Hass and Venga have decided I need them.  I am truly and infinitely grateful, except when Fal wants to talk about Hass at 15.”
“I think I’m going to dive from the top board.  You and Hass.  You are not gay.  Me and Hass.  I am not male!  What is the difference to the bloody Whole?"
I knew by his face that whatever he’d heard - from both sides – it hadn’t been that which must mean – I shut my eyes – Maya hadn’t told him – the truth but then out of a jumble of emotions came maybe she’d told him what was real – maybe I was talking out of my backside
“Perhaps you should talk to Cantilip,” Sarat was saying in a voice that, OK I was a bit sensitive, I just might call over-gentle.
“Oh come on!” I said.  “The fact that you’re the second person to say that doesn’t help!”
“Who was the first?”
“Kai.  This story’s been aired – to people it was airable to.”
“Mel?”
“Mel is the problem not the solution.  Could I possibly need to expand on that!”  I filled him in.    “Maitlan, Kai, Vax, Amida all say Mel was not – constructive.”
“So why did you end up with Amida?”
“Time-slip.  Maya and I were 8.”
“Of course,” said Sarat, “you’re a really outer and exo.”
“Sorg wasn’t,” I said. “And nor of course was Maya.”
“When you lose the other half of you,” said Sarat. “The other half of you?”
“I’m trapped in Carlin,” I said.  “The fact that I want to be in Carlin doesn’t mean I’m not trapped here.  Does that make sense?”
“Oh yes,” said Sarat. “I’m trapped in Azt.”
“Eeek,” I said.
“Once upon a time,” said Sarat, “I thought I’d like to be Anile emperor when I grow up.  And if it worked, and it was a big if, etc, etc.  I don’t know, Fal.  I don’t know how I saw the rest of my life.”
“The Dabidan model,” I said cautiously.
“The Dabidan model does not entail – or maybe that’s did not – fighting, I guess is the word.  Being in a permanent state of war. It’s as much a hands-on job as it was on Day One, d’you see.  There’s a level at  which the existence, I trust, of a democratically elected Kadun Senate is simply irrelevant..  The way I do the job must change but the job itself.”
“I wanted to do it for Sorg.  I have to do it for Maya.”
He smiled.
“Something like that.  I seem to be missing a few chapters here.  What on earth has that to do with?”
I grimaced.
“I don’t know!  All of this ear-bending I’ve been doing is basically because I can’t find the root.  Umm, you didn’t answer the question.”
 “But you talked to Kai.”
It took me a moment to suss that one.
“Not about earthpower,”
Sarat’s turn for the top board.
“Why are they all so furious with Mel?  Where, by the way, I cast my vote.  Fal-girl, has it not for one second occurred to you that you were right?”
After what seemed like forever, I replied, “No,” then, “Guy-stuff,” then, “The whole weight of the facts seemed – “
“Facts?” interrupted Sarat.
“Events? What people have said to me.  Including Maya.”
“We were so mature?  We knew – “ He grinned. “ – our arses from our elbows, especially in the dark?”
“What,” I asked cautiously, “do you now think about that?”
“It was fun, it was educational, it was genuine.  What it was not was a profound statement about the cosmos.”
“How do you see it?”
“We have – we are encased in – bodies.  Bodies have biological gender.  Mentally we’re both male and female.  I wish you would talk to Cantilip. Or Mitch!  I heard it from Mitch.  She said the hurt was that somewhere there is a female person who would knock Venga for six but it wasn’t her.  Mitch didn’t quite get the hang of that.  We’re conditioned, she said, to think we can only love male people or female people, or blondes or brunettes for that matter.  The hurt was – I’m extrapolating – everyone saying, pityingly, but Cantilip, he’s gay!  He’s not bloody gay!  That’s Cantilip.  Is Hass gay?”
“You’re not just losing me, Sarat, you’re freaking me.  Alternative answers. Of course he’s bloody gay!  You should know!”
“Just trying to make you think.  Look at it from my point of view.”
“I hate it when people say that.”
“Which bit?”
“Come to think of it, both!  Tell me your point of view!”
“You interrupted me.”  I gave him A Look.  “OK….I love Hass very deeply.  I gave that physical expression, first singly, then severally.  Hass is and was sure he was gay, from the first adolescent wriggles aroused by another human being.  I am and was sure I was straight.  Making love to Hass, and being made love to, was the first and about the only eso experience in my early life and struggles, because – you want to join the dots?”
I shook my head.
“Still floundering.” 
“I dissolved my barriers. Love dissolved the barriers.   Hass was simply making love to a guy he loves.”
I squealed.
“You’re saying!”
“Tell me what I’m saying.”
“Hass would have – “ I realized my voice was still a little high and lowered the register.  “Hass would have had to dissolve the barriers – “
“Loved you, I’m sure, cared deeply, not enough to – go all the way.”
“Which is not to say there isn’t a person in the entire world in a female body – it’s not the same.”
“That’s because of Venga, not you, Hass or Cantilip.”
“What does that mean?”
“Venga doesn’t really have any barriers. Nor really does Hass.  He wasn’t 15 any more.  You didn’t read the runes, Fal.”
“Oh thanks!  Which runes would those be?”
“As I see it, you were just part of the gang.  Suddenly it obtruded onto them that you are a female of the species, with whom certain things are possible or impossible, as the case may be.  It gets worse.  Not only were you female, you were right.”
I jumped without bothering to hold my nose.
“And they were both such sexist pigs they conspired to put down the silly girl.  No, Sarat.”
“No,” said Sarat, then looked away suddenly, continued, “I was about to say no and yes.”  It meant nothing to me and he didn’t expand.  “Equal honours.  You understood something they didn’t.  They, however, understood things you didn’t. “ He laughed suddenly. “I do remember The Leotard Look, you know.  Intimately.”
“Enough about me,” I said but he shook his head.  “Therapeutic?” I suggested.
“This is,” he said. “I’m really not quite sure why.”
“Your memories,” I said softly, “are all good.  So basically are mine.  Which kind of makes nonsense of all this – agonising.”
“Suppose I say, the basic questions are…Then you can look at me pityingly and tell me what the basic questions actually are.”
“OK!”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life with Kyse?  Complicated by possibility of not having a rest of your life.  Do you want any of it?  Would you rather spend the rest of your life in Zur?  With or without Kyse.  I could be spending the rest of my life in Zur with Maya.  I chose not to.  We live or die with the consequences of our choices.”
That came out rather abruptly, I thought, but then it would.
“But it worked,” Sarat was continuing.  “The only thing worse could be the context of failure.  So I am Anile emperor and you are Falita San-yaega-baht and the changes are rather violent, no?  Dislocation.  We have changed, we have grown.  We have thought – what have we thought? The change is – organic, it follows.  It is.  It did.  But the real new continuum – continua? – started the day I entered Azt, the day – “ He began to grin.
“Don’t remind me of that day!”
“Why not?  Your past interests you.”
“Grrrr,” I said, then, “where the road forked.”
“Irretrievably.”
“So the people we are haven’t quite made their peace with the people we were?  Or is that the other way round?  A crack I had at 15 can’t possibly be intimately connected with Sorg’s death.  Can it?”
“You seem to think it is!”
“Nobody else has the problem.”
“Mel and Hass don’t have the problem.  Cantilip has the problem.  Kai has the problem.  I don’t think they notice.”
“The obvious,” I said.
“I really don’t think it has much to do with it.  You know Kai wanted to be President of Harn?”
“I vaguely heard that!”
“Meaning she wanted to hit the bastards and hit them until finally they died.  Instead she’s part of my gang dedicated to just that.”
“Organic?” I hazarded.
“The fact that she’s living with an officer of the Imperial Army who is really rather unusual, even by our standards, is in comparison superficial.”
“Tell, tell!”
“Cioulis is senoki.  Think Cantilip and square it.”
“Secret belief he’s a tree?”
“Not far off.”
“She said a couple of things.  She doesn’t really have the problem.  Which I guess is why the Fal must talk to Cantilip camp.  Fal isn’t going to talk to Cantilip.”
“The roots are outside,” said Sarat.  “That’s the point.  What we have become.”
“Instead of growing from roots – the whole history of Carlin is on my back!  You were the Anile heir.”
“What did it mean?  I made it mean!”
“Made it real?  What did she mean, they want you to be real?  There wasn’t anything realler.”
“Oh Fal.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Suppose I say you’re thinking of how much of private conversations with Maya you want to share with me and whether it matters any more.”
“Way off target.”
“Sorry.”
“Start thinking you were right.  Really get into it.”
“What was I right about?”
“Ex-actly.  I think you did exactly the right thing, you know, goat-farming.”
I began to giggle.
“I’m just thinking, is that what everyone – Fal, oh, she’s goat-farming.”
“Where you did it – not totally off-target.  I was thinking – not if I wanted to share, if you wanted to know, and not Maya.  The bloody field of flowers!”
“Sorg?”
“Do you have time for the weight of being Anile emperor?”
“Try me.”
I mostly said, Mee-ah, like a freaking sheep. After a while, my brain started working again.
“A glitter of sparks.”
“The sexual relationship you wanted with Hass didn’t actually have any sex in it.  Of course,” he said with mock-ponderousness, like some old guy propping up the bar, “if you want to know what I think.”
“That could be interesting.”
“It is of course all confused and confounded by the ages of the persons in question.  None of you, none of us – “
“Yeah,” I said.
“I think something like you understood the end-point.  They understood the methodology.  Half-understood in both cases.  Oh and Hass understood the end-point too.  His body rejected getting there with a girl.  Your body rejected getting there with anyone.  What you wanted to do was be there.  When it came to it.  What you wanted to do was leave your body behind, out of it, it wasn’t relevant..  You were furious because essentially Hass’s rejection, while he loved you like a sister, the unique precious individual you are, etc, defined you by your body.  Of course it doesn’t matter to the bloody Whole!  Mel couldn’t explain.  What the poor sap was trying to get at is it can’t be done.  We’re all of a piece. Unless we get to sit on the Anile throne, of course.”
“Do I detect a certain dryness?”
“If anyone had told me when I was 17… Mel was right too.  Half-right.  Not love and sex, Love with a capital L and sex . D’you want to tell me about sex with Sorg?”
“We got there.”
“So?”
“Where are you going?”
“What if anything does that have to do with your little heap on the kitchen floor?”
“I think,” I said slowly, “I really want some thinking-time on that one.  It’s like yes, but as soon as I try and put words to it it vanishes.”
“We could talk about something else?   I really don’t want to talk about Maya,” he said softly, almost meekly, beseechingly.
“Oh Sarat.  I could say perhaps it would be good for you.”
“And other readings from the Book of Pious Crap!  What is there to talk about?”
“My time-slip.”
“Isn’t that a bit obvious?” he asked, but gently. 
“Pre-dislocation?”
“My last memory is of Maya dying in my arms,” he said, still gently.  “What the bloody camera did not show is that we were joined at the time.  That the culmination of our very eso relationship, in a sick sort of way.  I don’t want to go there, Fal, not yet, not with you, not with anyone except possibly Hass.  Sorry.”
“Sarat! Sorry. Oh Sarat.”
“The undoubtedly pretty mind of my grandmother runs (of course!) on several levels at once.  They think I need to talk about Maya.  If I won’t talk to them, perhaps I’ll talk to you,, who have also suffered violent loss.  Who also loved her.  I know you did.  Do.”
I touched his hand.
“How about I come over all practical and recommend more coffee?  Where’s the kitchen in this joint?”
“Next door,” he said.  “It might look like a bathroom to you, but to As it’s a kitchen. This was his study when revising. It still is his hideaway.”
“Dislocation,” I said, feeling on firm ground with that one.
“Part of the family,” said Sarat.  Again there was a certain dryness.  Sarat, I decided, had changed.  Yup, I really clapped myself on the back over that one. 
 
I certainly wasn’t going to report back to Grandmamma, so that left me with exactly no-one to talk to – except possibly Hass, which had the net effect of making me laugh because it was all so ridiculous.  It was better than wincing.  I am Falita San-yaega-baht.  Of course I want to die for Kadun.  Well, not want to, exactly.  Oh, you know what I mean.  He is Anile emperor. Of course he wants to, etc.   But suppose I make myself Falita Landia.  You didn’t know Kyse’s surname, did you.  Fsyb is still a part of me and potentially a very unreconciled one.  I had never tuned into the feminist thing about women adopting the names of their partners but now I saw there was definitely a point, if not their point.  Ditch it: I am Falita, known pretty well universally as Fal.  What does a Fal do?  Stick to the point.  Think about the heap on the kitchen-floor.
 
Put it in context.  I was right.  And wrong.  So which adolescent ever born is wholly right?  But the crack wasn’t healed by Sorg alive, only by Sorg dead.  What the hell did – could – that mean?  My relationship with the eso was clearly rather rocky.  From one extreme to another…. About the one thing everyone including me had agreed on was that Sorg hadn’t been a time-slip because Sorg was aware of being dead, but now I wondered if time itself could be confused.  If all times are now, couldn’t Sorg have been both alive and dead?   I’m going to start at the end-point and work backwards, I thought, then wondered how I could have come to such a thought and how I thought I was going to do it, I was able to do it.
 
How about sitting in a field of flowers, so conveniently on my door-step.  I didn’t really know what I had made of all that but clearly no-one else had any answers either, it was a fine day and I could do with a walk.  I sat among the flowers and forced my busy buzzing mind to stillness.  For a while nothing happened or seemed to happen, just a natural mild drowsiness and peace.  I was just about to get up and go home, refreshed but nothing more exciting than that, when I sort of realized home wasn’t there; certainly the flowers weren’t.  The field was pasture, rich thick grass, and a cow was looking at me speculatively.  Not again! I thought.  I turned and a guy was running towards me waving wildly and my heart practically stopped, but no, it wasn’t Sorg and he stopped short frowning slightly.  Your pardon, my lady.  I mistook you.  Me too, I said.  I – I’m a stranger here.  May I ask who is emperor? 
He laughed.  I, my lady, I!  I’m sorry, I said.  What – what year is this?  He seemed completely unfazed and smiled.  As we measure time from Narulis, it is the year 632.  Then you’re Kaminua, I said.  He laughed again and bowed.  I have that honour!  Your time is when?
 
Cut, leaving a very shaken little Fal-girl, whose thoughts, I must admit, were about as numinous as cow-dung, being oh shit! This isn’t me indulging myself.  This is the bloody Matter of Kadun.
 
Whatever else I do, I need to live somewhere else.  This landscape is not good for a girl.
 
Auto-suggestion?  Whatever else is or isn’t going on in me, I am clearly very vulnerable. Oh yeah, and who had put the idea of Maya slurping ice-cream into my little mind?  Just possibly me.
 
It happens when I relax.  When I let go.
 
Because right now my eso side is screaming to be let out, forcing its way out of the cage I have trapped it in. 
 
That must be garbage.  Last gasp, more like.
 
There’s an urgent addy monitored 24/7.  I typed it, thinking I really don’t want to do this, as I consigned my immediate future to the Matter of Kadun.
 
The reply was almost instant: Describe him.  I did, then rambled on about obviously I didn’t recognize him, suppose there’s a picture at the House, never consciously registered it. 
 
The next reply was signed Sarat:  Why did you think it was Sorg?
 
That seemed to me silly:  I would, wouldn’t I.
 

 
The Matter of Kadun, however, showed no interest in my immediate future. I half-decided to actually move, on the grounds that my here and now was quite complicated enough without half of history muscling in on the act, but where should I/could I move to, when moving seemed a defining act, a setting of in a direction in which I didn’t necessarily want to go, meaning of course Kadun or Dabida.  After all, I was trapped in Carlin.  Aaargh. 
 
I did not at that point know about  Casin-ruhn.  I don’t know what it would have done to me to know that.  I did not therefore know that Sarat, not wholly convinced the special effects department wasn’t on permanent over-time, didn’t rush off to the lake to ask Kaminua if he’d been to Carlin lately.
 
 I had an idea, not about moving.  The number of topics on which I implicitly and unquestioningly trusted my own judgement was dwindling rather alarmingly, and this one seemed particularly fragile.  I looked at it nervously.
 
OK, you know how the gig works.  Any member of A-M is available.  The gig had been re-imported.  Then any member of Sarat’s family is available?  Despite living a blameless fairly private life in Fidub?  There were rather obviously two things there.  One, just how many people do I intend to entertain with my crap?  Two, why on earth did I think Shavli would illuminate me. 
 
Oh and three, Amida had intimated I was going to have to do the work myself but not doing it wasn’t where I was going with this.  The more I examined this brilliant idea of mine, the more interesting it seemed but alas also the  more deranged it seemed. 
 
Shavli and Hass both float around on little pink clouds.  Both are, however, the heirs and strange though it may seem, I do not quite know how it is done, no-one doubts that in either tragic eventuality etc, etc both would be entirely capable of doing the job – no-one apart from the obvious of course, but the obvious aren’t pululating about the pink cloud but about the gender/orientation.  Everyone knows what Hass is, and I don’t mean they know he’s gay.
 
Some things Mel runs by Hass to this day. 
 
So Shavli, it’s not me I actually want to talk about, it’s you, it’s what it all looks like on the little pink cloud.
 
Maybe I just talk to Hass.  Wouldn’t that be the grown-up thing to do?
 
Real.
 
Damn it, what am I missing? 
 
Start with the obvious and brutal.  No-one else, whatever their, no, all right, his, and that’s not being finickety about grammar, heartaches and sorrow, has run away to goat-farm, but then no-one else has shattered. 
 
Self-indulgence.  I know that.  Or what?
 
Everyone else is real. Did I just go round in a circle there?  Everyone else is properly centred.
 
Understanding began dimly to dawn and I approached it not so much nervously as with tweezers in bio-protection gear.
 
I built – I don’t think I like this. 
 
The crack was healed by Sorg dead.
 
It’s then I’m centred?
 
A completely ludicrous image came to me and I worked on it.  It’s like – it’s like a mushroom, one of those big, broad, flat ones.  Like a plate.  Hmm.  So – so everyone else spreads out from the centre, but I grew a thick stalk and built – a plate, bound to shatter. 
 
I think I’ll go back to thinking about moving.
 
Dislocation!
 
Just what is my problem!  Why is everything an issue?
 
Let me approach this with ruthless pragmatism!  That does sound impressive.  OK.  If I wasn’t off-centre before, I am now.  Meaning it’s like everything’s thrown up in the air and I don’t where it’ll land, only it’s not like that, because I decide where it lands.  Do I or don’t I want to stand for election?  Because if I do then I need to get back into the pulsating hub and actually know something about Kadun politics. 
 
I can still learn about Kadun politics. That’s not a commitment.
 
We live or die with the consequences of our choices.
 
Oh dear.
 
What life seems to have taught me is all decisions are irrevocable.
 
At least that explains why I don’t want to make any.  Excuse me, didn’t Kai have the sense to tell me not to try to foreclose. 
 
Where do I want to go back to?
 
When I was 5 and Maya became my bessiest friend.
 
OK, not exactly go back to.  That shaped the rest of my life.  Irrevocably?  Well, it certainly shaped my life to date.
 
I wrote slowly: I have no idea what I would have been.  Dislocation!
 
That’s ridiculous!  You can’t be dislocated at 5!  Then every kid who starts school, finds not everyone’s like his family –
 
Organic.  Growth, change are organic. 
 
Or?
 
You can be dislocated at 17 and I’m not talking about Hass.  The bloody Matter of bloody Kadun.
 
Yes, but why is it dislocation?  If everything follows from what was before, how can that be dislocation? 
 
Which it does?  Oh those lines crossing lives.
 
There’s no way I’d be sitting in a field in Carlin chatting to Kaminua without it.  Isn’t there.  Is the border not open!  Sound of trumpets.  Do we not uphold the free movement of peoples!  There is no reason why a really laid-back Zur-chick called Fal should not have taken it into her head to find somewhere cooler and greener and emigrate. 
 
With Tet?  Double aargh.  Try and join a few dots here.
 
So there I am covered in mud on the foreshore with my friends, having got to know fellow-Zuri.  Gosh, that’s exciting, isn’t it.   I grew up and joined the H-W.  That’s – organic. 
 
I ended up in Azt.  Isn’t that bloody organic?
 
Me and half the continent. 
 
The frame of reference has shifted for the entire world, not just little me. 
 
Try another word.  Inconceivable.  Not necessarily not following from but inconceivable.  Sorg.  Inconceivable.   Nothing in Cioulis’ past could have pointed to living in paired bliss with a City-chick who is Mel Talal’s ex!
 
He however, etc.  Duh!
 
Or for that matter my lady Van-senok Queen of Dabida.
 
 Suppose something happened to Cioulis.  There’s Kai, bereft only doing what she wanted to do and doubly wants to do.
 
So what did I want to do?  Commitment to a certain set of values.  No dislocation.
 
Except of course I’m really demonstrating that commitment by goat-farming.  Gulp.
 
So I plunge back into the melee.  Except I don’t think I do.
 
What is all this stuff about writing my own script?  Honestly, how on earth did Tet stop me?  I’m so fragile to – eh-uh.
 
My hard drive being overwritten, like maybe the cap of a large mushroom?
 
Moron!  Idiot!  Imbecile!  Bloody Amida!  Just look at the crack differently, darling.  It’s horizontal, isn’t it, between the cap of the mushroom and what it grows from.
 
But I wrote my own freaking script!  I pelted off to Azt, commitment etc. But the crack was there before the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun.  
OK, OK, the sexual relationship didn’t actually have any sex in it.
 
“He only loves me for my body!”  He doesn’t love me for my body at all, that’s about as far away from it as you can get.  If for instance he’s gay,  how much more assured can a girl get that he doesn’t only love her for her body.
 
Ah yes, the slavering.
 
I knew perfectly well Mel didn’t only. 
 
What did happen to you, darleenk?  Adolescence happened to you, you grew into a female of the species.
 
You know what they said about Sarat and Maya. 
 
Maya was pretty but she wasn’t beautiful
 
Beauty is not SA.  Ice-maiden and nympho, guys?
 
It was not apparently necessary to convince those old and/or conservative folks that the Anile Empress was not a sex kitten.
 
There are angles there that have nothing to do with sex.  Sarat and Maya knew it was real and – permanent, but had no problem with other people thinking it was a convenience, a scam, or at any rate at their age it can’t possibly last.  Tar’s niece on the Anile throne was a rather large angle.
 
Maya, oh my darling Maya.  The one thing everyone noticed was that Maya got on with being Maya, and they made of it whatever they wanted to make of it.  Obviously she was in it as deeply as the rest but Sarat’s determination to put her on the Anile throne shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of anything!
 
OK, it sounds weird.  It was the opposite: organic.  When she got to Azt she’d be Maya in Azt.  Meanwhile, she’d be Maya in Zur.
 
An object-lesson to anyone who happened to be noticing.
 
Such as me!
 
Maya and Hass
That was what I wanted.  Which could just be a bit obvious.
 
Back to the BPC a minute.  Let go, Fal, let go!  What of?  I have been stripped of the two people who mattered most to me.  I haven’t got anything to hang on to.  What does that mean?  Anything?
 
My body was in the way, wasn’t it.  Not ‘the body’, about which so much crap has been written, my body.  If I’d been a plump and spotty teen, instead of leggy and flawless (aargh), my life would have been different, even if I’d matured into leggy and flawless.  I underlined that bit several times.  Because I assumed Hass would want me.  But that’s the opposite - ?
 
Exactly what am I saying here? 
That I wanted to leave my body behind.  The only way I could be sure it was left was with a guy who had no interest in it?
 
Cantilip is – good-looking, not pretty, not beautiful.  Mel is besotted with what’s inside.
 
I just wanted to leave what I looked like right out of it.  But what I look/ed like is also me.
 
Meanwhile I was mentally composing a list of my friends, who are my friends, in that I’d rightly trust them with my life, death and shopping for shampoo, and wondering if it was interesting that I had a total no-no about talking to any of them, meaning Mel, Hass and Tet.
 
I’d have rather liked to talk to Sarat, but he’d made it clear Maya was off-limits.  At which point it clicked that Sarat and Hass – uh, took their bodies with them.
 
The crack is between love and sex, said the oracle.  And they’re all pissed off as hell with him.  But he was right.  Between the physical and the mental. 
 
Well, why didn’t he freaking say that?  That, I guess, is why they’re all so pissed off with him.  Because he was seven-freaking-teen and he didn’t freaking know, of course!  I surprised myself with this sudden urgent defence of Mel.  Ah well, he is my fwiend.
 
Where does this mesh with my mushroom?    What seeded it?  Do mushrooms seed?  What fertilized it?
 
I grew – I don’t think I’m going to like this.  I grew a sort of me that was nearly me but not quite and enabled the dynamic out-going Fal the continent loves so well.  Or something.  So I’m really much more like Kyse than I think.  That thought took me by surprise.  Why should it, when here I am retired from the world, for the most part making Kyse look a mover and shaker? 
 
What’s more to the point (I think) is the connection between nearly-me and the Leotard Look.  Pretending to enjoy my body when really I wanted to get rid, again emphasis MY body not the body? 
 
Some girls deliberately get fat.
 
Nearly-me.  I think I’ve got things in the wrong order here.  A quick glance at the right order doesn’t fill  me with ecstasy.
 
I was me with Sorg.  The plate had cracked but not shattered.  It wasn’t Sorg’s death that cracked it, it was Sorg’s death that shattered it.  That doesn’t make sense, does it.  Trouble is, I think it will.  I mean, if I was me, why was nearly-me involved?  Organic.  A part of me.  If the crack is in the horizontal plane, do you see.  It’s all me but there’s this part that hadn’t quite got the hang of it, which felt like me, which I acknowledged as me, as in I shattered, but also as not-me, in that there was me looking on, and indeed me on the kitchen floor getting to sweep up the pieces, which one of the pieces clearly could not do, which all sounds increasingly daft but so what!
 
Or in other words I’m so used to the idea of my self being divided that I don’t even notice how it matters.  Maybe.
 
So exactly what freaked me?  It felt like my grasp at last on being me – at least this is taking me places I know no-one has the answer to.  Sorg as projection.  Except I don’t think he was.
 
I am me now.  It’s just there’s so much other stuff I don’t know how to be me.  Think about that one.
 
I needed Sorg around until I could get the hang of death not being wholly significant.  Yes, well, a lot of bereaved people might say that.  If we can just keep the Matter of Kadun out of this!  I can’t, can I.  If he wasn’t a projection, it’s only the MofK that enabled him to be around.
 
Oh, I see.  Whatever I do next, I want to be sure it comes from me, and I’m not, and I don’t exactly see how I can be.
 
Guess it’s time to make a cup of tea. 
 
Who does or does not want to be with Kyse?  I love Sorg.  I do, of course, but Sorg is dead.  Do I think I’ll stop being me if I draw a line under that relationship? 
 
When I’m calmly at my centre I’ll know what I want to do next.  I think that sums up the Matter of Fal.
 
.So what do I do, nothing, absolutely nothing, literally nothing?
 
I mailed Amida, briskly.
 
I think I’ve hacked it.  I’m off-centre.  I need to get back to base but I don’t know the way!  Who?
 
Back to Fidub, this time Cho’s little two-up, two-down, it being safely Tar and Saski free.
 
He said, said Cho, I don’t know how to be without her.
 
He won’t, I said.  He made that quite clear.
 
Cho laughed.
 
He does.
 
Amida said, My dear, you must forgive doting grand-parents.
 
Cho laughed again.
 
He doesn’t. 
 
We were evaporated, admitted Amida.  Now, who is the answer to your question?
 
You? I hazarded, having thought about it a bit and recognized that the same stuff applied about there being a rather limited circle to discuss things with.
 
Good try, said Vax.
 
Oh no, I said.  Girls do girls.
 
He is not gay?
 
Look, I said, I may not know very much but I know girls do girls to avoid the possibility of a sexual dynamic evolving where it really isn’t wanted.  The whole point is I managed to have a sexual dynamic anyway!
 
You yourself, said Amida, observe, sex was in fact not present.
 
This may be totally out of court, I said, but I’m going to say it anyway!  Exactly what Sarat said to me was he didn’t want to go there with anyone except maybe Hass.
 
This is not, said Cho, an attempt – another attempt – to persuade Sarat to talk about Maya. 
 
There may be, allowed Amida, the possibility Sarat will talk about Sarat.
 
He seemed – I started.  Quite willing to do that, but I didn’t say it.  My mind was racing over my conversation with Sarat.  It started to gurgle and yelp.  If, I said, if I agree to this, if I go ahead with this, what makes you think - ?  Is there anything I ought to know?
 
We do not know the exact sleeping-arrangements at the Jumesit, said Cho.
 
Karula, you will see, was not the only person to put two and two together and make three.
 
Ah-oooh, I said.  There are rumours?
 
No, said Vax, on the whole no.  Sarat’s public face is about as hetero as one can get.
 
I don’t get it, I said.  I move into the Jumesit and the whole world –
 
I think Hass would come to Carlin. 
 
For me?
 
For Sarat.
 
For Maya.
 
You must mend that fence, said Cho.
 
Grrr, I said. 
 
You cannot spend the rest of your life skirting round Mel and Hass.  You are too close.
 
Remember, repeated Vax, we all grow up.
 
I was not of course aware of the following at the time…
 
Sarat is sitting no, not at his desk, which is large, highly polished and minimalist, but on it, reading a piece of paper.  He has headphones on.  They are (of course) of excellent quality.  It cannot therefore be discerned whether he is listening to heavy metal or the music of the spheres. 
He looks up and grins, zaps the music, puts the paper down
“Coffee,” says Baz and vanishes pdq.
“Grandpapa,”  says Sarat meekly.
Cho laughs.
“You’ve come to apologize,” suggests Sarat.
Cho bellows with laughter.
“Far worse,” says Cho.
“Sit down, then,” says Sarat.
Cho arranges himself on the settee to die for and Sarat sits beside him.
Cho launches into the purpose of his mission.
Cho said after Sarat just looked at him and he felt his eyebrows were raised even though they physically weren’t.
Your views, said Cho.
On Fal?  I love her dearly.
That is not a view, said Cho.
It will have to do, said Sarat.  He paused.  It was, you know, pretty well the only private conversation I have had with Fal.  Apart from about Sorg.  I suppose you could count That Fateful Day.  Three, if you were trying hard.  We were plotters!  If Maya went off somewhere Fal and I talked, we talked at parties, we talked.  Not about Fal or Sarat.
Tell me about the guy-stuff, said Cho.
Sarat grinned.
I read you like a book, you know.
Then I raised you well, said Cho.
Not recently, no, said Sarat.
 
From Hass Cho got the same impression of politely raised eyebrows.
The fence must be mended, said Cho again.
It isn’t broken, said Hass.
She thinks it is.  It annoys her unspeakably, said Cho.  That no-one else feels the split.  Hasiyata – Hass made a moue.  Cho pretended not to notice.  You are Dabida’s heir. You have an irtubi partner.  You have apparently moved in with the Anile emperor.
So? asked Hass, then, That is why?
Thus Maya.
Certainly she moved in with the Anile emperor.
Sarat, said Cho.
Hass’ lips twitched.
Truly your concern is Fal?
I like everyone to be happy, said Cho.
He is happy, said Hass.  Bruised, of course, but happy.
You will do it?
Anything for Fal-girl.
Then perhaps I have misunderstood, said Cho.
Hass grinned.
 
I really do not think, said Hass to Sarat, your revered grandpapa gets it.  Why does he not see - ?
Sarat sighed.
Of course he sees.
 
Hass mailed me.  Should we go to a grand hotel somewhere?  Otherwise there is an imperfectly renovated cottage off the Senshal Road.  I should be delighted to offer you a sleeping-bag and an oil-heater.  Perhaps you will cry I cannot leave my kids?  I am confident and resourceful.  I confess I have so far failed to find anyone who knows a damn’ thing about goats, but I do not doubt I can rise to the occasion.  Are you feeling too fragile to see the funny side?
 
No, I mailed back, not too fragile, then, it’s lovely to hear from you, because it was. I’m sure I can find a baby-sitter.  How long for?
 
Days, weeks, months, up to you.
 
I know what you mean.  I also know what I mean.  I also see, I thought, that you are getting me back into Dabida.  Nor is this all!
 
See how you feel after a day of my undiluted company.  There are walls unplastered, excellent for climbing. 
 
No H-W?
 
Reakoed and Maitlan?
 
I thought about that a minute.
 
You have just communicated you’re totally on my side.
 
Might I not have communicated that you will need defenders!  Of course I’m on your side!
Whose side are you on?
.
Grr.  Where are you right now?
 
Azt.  I live here.
 
Doesn’t it blow your mind, Hass?
 
Organic, sweetheart, organic.
 
Ummmm……………
 
Not recently, no.  It appears to be the question springing to the lips of a select few.
 
Cho?
 
Asked Sarat.  They do not grok.  They may not be the only ones.
 
You don’t think anyone will notice?  Tet and Mel to name but two.
 
That could be interesting.
 
Hassssssssssssss……
 
Yessssssssssssssss?
 
Someone just told me the mind of his grandmother works on several levels at once.
 
I’m much worse.  Mine works in 3D.  You quail at the thought of seeing Tet and Mel again - ?
 
Of course I don’t!  Not exactly. 
 
First, the basics.  Then we’ll get onto the interesting stuff.
 
I know the basics (growl).  It’s all churning around inside me and it should be out. 
 
(Grin)
 
The venue, Hass, the venue. 
 
My territory?
 
Or guy territory!
 
How about we start in Carlin?
 
Which just happens to be roughly equi-distant.
 
Just happens to be.
 
There’s probably some kind of metaphor there about fulcrums and balance and hedging bets.
 
Bah!
 
Clinging like a limpet to Carlin because it has to be Azt or Zur.  It doesn’t.
 
For about 20 seconds I thought of getting some travelling in, see the world.
 
The goats?
 
Good an excuse as any.
 
Ssssh, I’m thinking.  A large sign at the border, perhaps.  DABIDA WELCOMES GOATS. 
 
What am I walking into!
 
The country you were born in?
 
Double grrr.   The cottage - it doesn’t have land attached, does it?
 
I am of course desperate to off-load it. 
 
(Helpless giggles)  That’s the cover?  We’re dealing in real-estate?
 
I didn’t think of that one.  I think you may be able to tell me if it has possibilities.  Should it reach Mel’s ears that we are plotting, he will sigh theatrically and murmur sorrowfully about addiction.   I doubt he will give a moment’s thought to what we are plotting, knowing that all will duly be revealed.
 
I see a problem there.  Yes, my lightning brain grasps it in one.
 
We can iron out the detail later.
 
How about we compromise?  You could pick me up on your way south, stay a couple of nights here.
 
I’ll talk to Smudge.
 
I didn’t quite catch that.
 
Our deliberations are not to be interrupted by goats.
 
Should I disconnect the ‘phone!
 
Good idea.
 
OK.  Don’t bother Smudge. I’ll sort it.
 
Fine.
 
What is Maitlan doing in Azt? Apart from its being the centre of the known world, I mean!
 
A fact-finding mission.  Finding out what the hell everyone else is talking about.  He describes the Fleet as a sort of time-capsule, if not isolated from the events of the day, certainly isolated from intimate knowledge of the Jumesit, the Imperial, and most of the key-players.  It seemed to him, he says, Mel was speaking a foreign language, of which only odd words were comprehensible.
 
! And how does skiving off to the Senshal Road fit in?
 
Think of it as a jig-saw.  The most disparate pieces….
 
Form part of the bloody Whole! 
 
Aw, don’t be like that.    Be with you about 4?
 
TODAY?
 
Couple of years’ time? 
 
This is of course when all the people you know would be happy to help are out, away or with their ‘phones disconnected.  I really didn’t want to bother Lattic, because I knew he’d just Found Love, but I was running out of options.  I got the Fidubi partner, who fortunately merely found it entertaining.  He did, however, point out that he had no idea how to milk goats.  It’s really easy, I said, I showed Lattic.  He’s not ace at it, but he’s OK. 
 
I got as far as packing a couple of pairs of knickers and my swimming-costume before picking up my phone and calling Reakoed.
 
The cottage.  What am I letting myself in for here!  Physically.  Nights under the stars?
 
He choked.
 
It’s actually perfectly habitable.  There’s even a pool.
 
Hass said sleeping-bags!
 
Certainly sleeping-bags.  It’s – what the word – structurally –sound.  Running water.  Main drainage.  All mod cons in the kitchen.  Carpet under foot.  Lots of cushions.  Not much in the way of actual furniture.  People use it from time to time to chill out.
 
We’re going to fast?
 
I was just about to sort that.  Everything’s under control!
 
Darling, what do I wear!  I mean, I know Hass.  Is he going to take me off into the sands?
 
Would you like that?
 
I set the agenda?
 
Sound of tinny music. This is your time, honey.
 
Clap hands together in girlish glee.
 
Scarcely had I rung off, when Lattic rang back.  Anything for you, darling!  By that time I knew him well enough to tease: anything for Hass? 
 
I went to say good-bye to Benji
So here I sit with my rucksack, poised for – whatever.    Sound of engine. Hass at the door.  We hugged.  I didn’t think we’d stop, he said, unless goats demand!  Sorted, I said.  Lattic would do anything for you.  He grinned.  I must thank him, he said. 
 
You are now crossing the border, intoned Reakoed.  Whether you want to or not!  Oh shut up! I said. Otherwise conversation was general.  Maitlan, who was driving, nearly went the wrong way.  That is the way to Zur, he pointed out.  But we’re not going to Zur, we said. 
 
The Great North Road led to the Kilawi Junction and here we are on the Senshal Road.  Next on the left, said Hass.
 
In the end I didn’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t this.  There was a drive, like a farm-track, furrows with grass and weed down the middle.  On each side of the track, tumbleweed grew waist-high.  At the end of the drive indeed was a cottage.  It’s tiny! I said.  Maybe it just seems dwarfed. 
It goes back quite a bit, said Hass.  Essentially it’s two-up, two-down.  We tacked a kitchen and bathroom on the back.  I pretended to count on my fingers.  We’ve agreed to share, said Reakoed.  The sacrifices we make! sighed Maitlan. I’ll sleep in the sitting-room, admitted Hass. After he’s exhausted us all, said Reakoed.
 
Finally we settled – on cushions – in the primrose-washed ‘sitting-room’.  There was a long low and curvaceous table which seemed to have been honed out of a single block of wood.  You said there was no furniture!  No, I didn’t.  That’s not furniture, said Hass, that’s art!.  Venga made it.  Truly you know we did not spend all our time…Should be a plaque, said Reakoed.  Here the plot was born!