There remains of course my mind.  Deadheads really don’t like minds, especially if the deadheads possess the suppurating egos of little doctory cockroaches.  Minds are threatening, offensive, minds don’t show respect for jumped up little pieces of shit, minds dissect the sick drivel they spew, What do you do with creatures as vile as these?  I don’t know.  It’s not actually my unique personal problem, but you back me, help me, support me, you uphold a free, democratic, rational and civilized society, not one run on the ravings of psychopaths and the whiinings of animals, not one based on lies and butchery, on desecration, the rule of the intellectually and morally derelict, the coward, the liar, the animal, the rule of filth who crawl around behind closed doors, offal who refuse all fact and reason, offal who refuse public establishing of the facts, offal who refuse point blank to say what their problem is in public, where it can be challenged, offal who think a woman’s body is a punchbag and a woman’s mind is a joke. 

There are my kind of people who will argue about anything because it’s fun, mind-exercise, is it technically exact to say the sun rose at 5.21 or should it 5.22, and then there are bone-heads and these are bone-heads.

​Or rather you don’t, you fawn on offal, prostrate yourselves before offal, hang on every word that drips from their dirty twisted animal mouths, protect and uphold them, throw them my body, throw them my life, Of course nothing may be done to help her, o master.  Of course you need not adhere to fact and reason, of course there can be no question of making you state your problem in public or save your bloody breath, of course a great one such as you is far above any question, challenge from common people, ordinary people, that’s such an unspeakable and evil slur on your perfection, isn’t it, o master, can’t have doctors or nurses being questioned, as though they were ordinary people, as though they could have power removed from them if they have been shown to abuse it, any vile nonsensical democratic filth like that.  Of course it’s evil to disobey you o master, wilful, insolent, arrogant, of course disobedience must be ruthlessly punished. 

Of course your spite and malice must pursue me to my grave.  You have of course, being a twisted sick mad animal, yet to tell me what I have actually done.  This is probably because initially I hadn’t done anything, just been, existed, an offence in your sight, a free democratic literate intelligent educated woman capable of independent thought.  No-one may help me, it is forbidden!  The sick bowl is by my side. 

No-one may uphold democracy.  It is forbidden.  No-one may interfere with the physical abuse of a medically vulnerable woman.  It is forbidden.  No-one may assist said woman.  It is forbidden.  WHAT is this fucking garbage, this diseased ape-shit.  Doubtless that can be expanded.  No-one may indicate approval – of a woman insisting her mind and body are her own property, of a woman insisting I can’t be crippled and nothing be said or done, this is a free country and a democracy.
 
It's so farcical it’s beyond absurd.  But everyone goes along with it. 
 
What twisted filth do you whine, I know it’s hard for her but she must learn to do what she’s told, what pervert animals did they leave me to, freaks who believe in obedience, who think they convince me of anything other than that they are complete filth by wordless mindless physical abuse, freak filth who abandon all fact, reason, morality to the decrees of Authority.  What else do you whine, that I’m Jewish.  You know perfectly well that I’m not but that of course closes the issue across vast swathes of the so-called Left.  That I’m a drama queen, touch of arthritis, probably they mock me, ooh me back.  Anyone who was as I was deformed as an adolescent knows how animals behave.  So very easy to dispose of a woman.  Women ‘look after’ women.  Oh how they have ‘looked after’ me. What else, that I had to prove I was brighter on my own, as if I didn’t do that 18 years ago, knowing I was failing to convince psychiatric cases to whom fact and reason and morality are meaningless.Just put me the hands of maggot women, animal women, bags of rotting flesh who obey, who believe what they are told, who are dead from the neck up, doubtless described as ‘Good Catholic Women’.
 
And as for my boobs, I shan’t show but one was always a bit bigger than the other, a little quirk when they were small and round and firm but now they are large and droopy less than aesthetically pleasing. .
.All of it completely avoidable, were it not for the love of evil, the worship of evil, the love of filth and sickness and dirt and corruption, wholly contrived, its being inconceivable a woman could think she has rights over her own body and mind, a woman who has had major spinal surgery could possibly object to physical abuse, a miasma of sickness and disease and lies contrived by the foetid and that which is desired by the powerful.  The absolutely criminal and morally derelict shall rule, there shall be no standards of any kind to cling to.  . . The facts are on my side.  Better therefore that no-one looks, just some crazy old woman raving.

If a leaf has fallen, does the tree lie broken, rather more in my case if an axe is taken to it.  There’s a particular tree in Richmond Park frantically symbolic here.  It was apparently totally uprooted in the hurricane but every year it still grows and bursts into leaf.  And if we pour some water, does the well run dry. 

HOW YOU HATE INTELLIGENCE,
 
Blair, Milburn, Mandelson, Clarke, Linch, Goldstone, Naylor, Black, how you absolutely hate
intelligence you can’t manipulate.  How you absolutely hate learning you can’t bamboozle with lies, Murphy O’Connor, Nicholls, Sacranie, Sachs, how you hate anyone who can’t be suckered into your corruption, how you hate integrity, how you hate anyone who won’t go along with your evil.  Intelligence must be contained, limit itself to practical tasks, it mustn’t meddle in the affairs of its ‘betters’, meddle in how things are run, must be obedient, servile.  Only, as you perfectly well know, intelligence isn’t like that.  Rikki-Tikki Tavi, run and find out, what’s that. That makes no sense.  That’s garbage.  How does that work?  What is this thing called a planet?  What is this thing called life?  Oh how you love the stupid, the ignorant, the sly, the cowardly, the vicious, the bestial, the dishonest who do your dirty work for you, the bottomlessly corrupt who disregard all fact, reason, ethics.  I mean, you gotta do what you’re told. The ‘ruling-class’ just mustn’t be disturbed, must it, the cockroach coward ‘ruling-class’ who fix things in secret.  It has decided.  Its decisions are not to be challenged.  And all the sycophants and crawlers are rewarded for corrupting themselves by abandoning their capacity for independent thought and feeling, for becoming a creature of another’s will,  by having the pleasure of dispensing the corrupt will of the overlords, lording it over the serfs with supposed absolute power, unaccountable power, criminal power.
 
Oh haven’t we all got to be equal, equally criminal, equally  stupid, equally braindead, equally ignorant, except of course for the ‘ruling class’ who decree.
​
How you hate that which is inside people which is capable of saying, “No.”  How you hate mind.  There are so many people here that might have been got to at Oxbridge and still Catholic.  That particular moth attracted to the flame, exchanging one totalitarian system for another, seems rather common. We need look no further than McDonnell, who attended a seminary.
Once upon a time there were a bunch of student radicals, moths hypnotized by the flame. They grew out of it of course, became respectable citizens; perhaps their wings were singed, perhaps they saw too many other little moths flutter lifeless to the ground around them. Let’s pretend it’s impossible that one of them decided to be the flame.
Aw, shucks, guys, no welcome in the hillside when I came back home to Wales. I really can't think why.
 
I do not trust any doctor with my body, but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there.  Suppose I present myself to some apparently charming and caring physician, “Now Ysabel if we can just take the full history.”  What do I say? “Essentially Professor David Linch and Professor Tony Goldstone did this to me.”    Does the face of the charming and caring medic not change, does he or she not start to think, I have a right nutter here.  I may be less than mobile but at least I am at liberty.  I have no desire for the nice young men in clean white coats to be summoned and to find myself sectioned  I in fact have come across a horrifying story of an old lady who was a society girl in the South of France in her youth mixing with the crowned heads of Europe and movie stars, and who was dismissed as mad, a fantasist by bonehead tard medics and nurses who disbelieve anything outside their extremely limited experience. 
Put therefore I the hands of those to whom facts are meaningless, who responded, oo, I don’t think I can believe that.  Who gives a fuck what you don’t think you can believe.  What are the fucking facts?
It is not reasonable that I have received and that I receive no backing help, support, if we look at the facts.  Therefore we refuse to look at the facts.We bury them and me.  This is ridiculous vile nonsense! we trumpet.  Doctors do not behave like this.  Doctors are bound by medical ethics.  Yes, they do.  No, they’re not. 
You all want me destroyed.  I understand that.  An awkward sliver of fact, of reality, puncturing your dream, your fantasy.
The philosophy of the anarchists is bourgeois philosophy turned inside out. Their individualistic theories and their individualistic ideal are the very opposite of socialism
Lenin: Socialism and anarchism, 1905 
 
You really don’t like individuals at all, do you.  And all you can do, you pathetic animals, is destroy. 
It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do. For while under the present system a very large number of people can lead lives of a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness, under an industrial-barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would be able to have any such freedom at all. It is to be regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish. Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, his work will not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for others. And by work I simply mean activity of any kind.
I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours. Humanity has got beyond that stage, and reserves such a form of life for the people whom, in a very arbitrary manner, it chooses to call criminals. But I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.
…
 
Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment. But for the full development of Life to its highest mode of perfection, something more is needed. What is needed is Individualism. If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.
 
Individualism will also be unselfish and unaffected. It has been pointed out that one of the results of the extraordinary tyranny of authority is that words are absolutely distorted from their proper and simple meaning, and are used to express the obverse of their right signification. What is true about Art is true about Life. A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress. But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner. Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one's neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid. Or a man is called selfish if he lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realisation of his own personality; if, in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development. But this is the way in which everyone should live. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of ones neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses. Under Individualism people will be quite natural and absolutely unselfish, and will know the meanings of the words, and realise them in their free, beautiful lives
Oscar Wilde: The Soul of Man under Socialism
And something about a prophet without honour in his own land.
 
…it’s because of thinking that Sweden, Denmark, the whole of your island, half of Germany groan under the terrible misery of no longer being subjects of the pope.
[…….c’est pour avoir pensé, que la Suède, le Danemark, toute votre île, la moitié de l’Allemagne, gémissent dans le malheur épouvantable de n’être plus sujets du pape]
LIBERTÉ DE PENSER
 
Reason brought them down, fact brought them down, thought brought them down.  They really don’t like these things at all.  We must all be good little hairless monkeys bound by the primate pecking order
A confused little monkey in a white coat sat in a lab in Oxford and it beat in his brain, there is no god but DNA and Dawkins is his prophet. He looks at his god and his god is all and all are equal, all are identical, and there are no love, sex, pain, death and the whole damn‘ thing, there is no ‘human‘, there is only biochemistry, and we must all react in the same way and feel the same thing and cannot question what we think and what we feel and cannot change it, and if we do not react in the same way and feel the same thing that is false consciousness and bourgeois conditioning, and if we say we do not react in the same way and feel the same thing and we can change how we react and how we feel and each of us is different, that is bourgeois conditioning, because we are all equal, we are all the same, and the humanities terrify the little monkey by reflecting on love, sex, pain, death and the whole damn‘ thing, and our current ills are not the fault of liberty but the fault of failing to encourage people to exercise their hearts and minds because their hearts and minds don‘t exist and people who are emotionally whole do not break up their housing-estates and their fellow-humans who live there and people who do are not exercising their freedom but being slaves of the god but the confused little monkey knows better. The confused little monkey isn’t capable of taking into account the pain of people at seeing things smashed up, the distress of people at not being able to use the ‘phone box, the pain of people who are bruised and bleeding. The confused little monkey knows that bourgeois law exists solely to perpetuate the economic status quo.  There is no activity of heart or mind in the confused little monkey’s world.
 
But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.
Marx and Engels:  The Manifesto of the Communist Party
 
Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
Marx and Engels:  The Manifesto of the Communist Party
 
But the little monkey is frightened – sheesh, it lives in a permanent state of terror. People go on exercising their hearts and minds anyway and they come up with ideas and empathy and, worst of all people who don’t smash telephone boxes because they see it is unconstructive, unhelpful and possibly lethal, think they’re an improvement on those who do and criticize and are judgemental and condemnatory and it beats in the little monkey’s brain that we’re all equal and such people must be eliminated  (and of course the telephone-box smashers aren’t at fault because they are the victim of economic forces) and he’s a right case. But people fall on their knees before him anyway, because he’s a scientist and a rational man.
             You think it’s called dialectical materialism, scientific socialism for nothing? 98% of my DNA shared with the chimp!  And I brachiate!  It really obsesses them. Clearly the goal of biological evolution is strap-hanging on the Victoria Line.
             Right now the little monkey is very frightened indeed and what he is frightened of is Dezzi, who is singing her heart out on her new Website. Mind sits anterior to data. Mind sits anterior to data, questioning, synthesizing, comparing, creating and of course checking on the reality quotient.  The upper level of mentation, the capacity to select, order, analyse, question  and synthesize information and that faculty called imagination which breaks down what is into its constituent parts and remakes it as something new in the world,  has been denied.  Call it the upper storey.  They do not visit the top floor.  This is what I mean by the abolition of intellect (have to spell these things out for the brain-washed).  They can function, so far as they can be said to function intellectually at all, only within a given frame of reference. They are incapable of handling questioning of the frame of reference.  Indeed they are the brightest stars in the University's firmament. Mind is evident in the world.  Religious freaks call it the work of the devil and commie freaks call it insanity.  And by the Triple-Breasted Whore of Eroticon Six you can tell when it’s not there.  Just because you don’t have a mind, Doctor, it doesn’t mean no-one else does.
 
HARD WIRING
​Nothing can eliminate the hard-wiring, the instinct of the little hairless ape to be ruled by fear, to surrender to a larger baboon beating its chest: the primate pecking order.  The ape brain does not require speech and reason, only obedience and submission.
 
But the little hairless ape is also a heart and a mind, the little hairless ape is free to over-ride the hard-wiring; it is also human.  It can be set free to be human.  Being human can be protected and upheld.  The little hairless ape can make reason mainstream in its societies, as did the Ancient Greeks.  The little hairless ape can be insufficiently terrorized and continue to function independently, deem the dicta of the head monkey irrational ravings, deem criminal and vile the simply homely custom of the head monkey of torturing or murdering any who challenge it, insist on equality of rights, insist it has an equal right to its own views and an equal right to utter them; demand the head monkey deploy language and reason, not merely its club, and give rational justification for its conduct. 
 
Or of course it can be outlawed, defined as insanity or evil.  Thus Stalinism, thus Catholicism, thus Islam, All three fundamentally equally foetid death-cults of obedience enthusiastically injected into mainstream England with the intent of course of poisoning it by the so-called Labour Party.

All these are creatures that cannot bear human liberty, human individuality, cannot bear that when free to think people may end up thinking the opposite of their Troof.  Creatures to at least some of whose ravings no reasonable person would pay five seconds’ attention and creatures whom the vermin of the fascist fake Left have decreed we should defer to or be prosecuted

All this said time and time again, but it is ingrained in them that obedience is virtue, the obedient are good people, only bad people, freaks like me, fail to understand it is necessary to do whatever the head mokey tells you, to be, whatever the head monkey dictates.  But all they can do is brutalize, attempt to terrorize.  The NHS is run on terror tactics.  I tried to do something about it.  Nobody else wanted anything done about it.

Just watch the stinking shit-filled so-called Labour Party come down again and again on the side of the haters of liberty, haters of democracy, haters of intellect, haters of reason, haters of literacy, see how the foetid ape Milburn threw my body to animals.  How can I possibly be more intelligent, more literate, better educated, more moral.  Are we not all equally foetid.
And so they tried on me.  I suppose with my background it confused them a bit that I do not consider the screaming of the sick and evil behind closed doors binding.  How can I not understand that integrity, intellect, reason, democracy, liberty are all bourgeois constructs aimed at keeping down what are called the noble workers; what is meant is the criminal classes.  God is not mocked!  What sort of primitive crap is that.  All the crap about verbal offence to religion is just a mask, just putting barbed wire around rejection of religious barbarism, fascism, corruption, bestiality but oh the ravings of a sick animal are vastly more important than a woman’s body and woman’s mind. 
 
You  prefer to believe lies dribbled in secret by those whose absolute refusal to come out into the open indicates to anyone normal they’re lying.  Whatever I say, you continue to do so.  Your sad corrupt little brains have decided some people are mysteriously incapable of lying. It’s just too inconvenient to have important powerful people exposed as liars.  You fawn on them, assure them nothing will incommode them.
Yes, I thought and think I was far too highly qualified and experienced to do heavy manual work, that alone a red rag to the IQ5 nurse, but that wasn’t quite the point, was it, the point was that this was not the job I had taken and it was causing me back pain for the first time since my surgery 30 years previously.  The point was it was probably the work of the corrupt and criminal lying and whining behind closed doors.  
The point  is that complaints are to be investigated and this one was not: I was not put in front of an x-ray machine or asked to strip. 
 
It’s quite interesting having been among the scum of the earth.  Unfortunately it has cost me my health and possibly my life.  Has anyone questioned those who ordain nothing may be done.  Found out where their loyalties lies because for certain they don’t lie with hip cool C21st England and lie with some rabble of wheezing sleazy degraded old animals, yeah, right, I must not be given an idea being against religion is ‘acceptable’, against the rule of wheezing sleazy degraded depraved sexually sick old animals is ‘acceptable’.  Whoever they are they have in common they’re traitors, the enemies of democracy, what the vermin mean is that democracy is not to be supported,and of course despise women.  No-one could want his or her intelligent educated daughter treated as I have been.  Oh couldn’t they, if they’re disobedient, insolent, wilful, if they don’t kneel and grovel and suck master’s cock.  We’re just not going to go into the slimy depths of malice and hatred of those lovely religious men faced with a woman who doesn’t think they matter.  So much simplere to blame the woman, destroy the woman, of course there’s nothing wrong with men who watch a medically vulnerable woman being assaulted, crippled and do nothing. What they mean is there can never be anything wrong with sexually perverted obscenities of religious men.  What lies have these filthy perverts told about me, that I was happy being the butt of their malice, their sadism, knowing all would be well if I only crawled, submitted, took it all back  and all will be well.
​
Just apoloigize to the moron murderous nurse scum offal vermin tards for being intelligent, educated, literate, rational, capable of independent thought, free, democratic, just say there’s no such thing as democracy, that rule by bloody sexually sick psychopaths is normal, just apologize for objecting to being physically abused and crippled.  Hell, as you might by now have gathered, freezes over first.
 
Wouldn’t be a problem, would there, had everyone said of course this is a democracy, what is this garbage
Wouldn’t be a problem is everyone had said of course you can’t assault me.
 
 
These orders so unswervingly unyieldingly obeyed, appaera to come so far as it is poosible to tell from the dramatis personae, from a sexually perverted fascist ape they call the Pope, the enemy of the free world, the enemy of women, an animal who is part of the record thinks hitting someone is a permissible response to verbal insult, and a creature who has no authority in England, over me, whatever.  A woman is nothing, a punchbag for the malice of male apes.
 
And creatures unfit to practise medicine or nursing sniggered and smirked and gloated and yawned.
 
Huge laugh isn’t it.  Should keep me fucking marf shut if I didn’t want to be crippled by cowardly invisible criminal vermin.  What’s the fuss about.
 
It is very hard to bear that no-one gives a fuck what has happened to me, no-one ever will give a fuck.  20 fucking years I’ve been left isolated treated like a fucking leper, jeered at by monsters who belong in cages in the Zoo, surrounded by the criminally insane.  This is a democracy.  End of story.  It is very hard to bear that it has been decided that democracy is over and done with that henceforth, any capering cowardly animal can destroy anyone it takes a dislike to, that medicine is a sordid joke of ignorant ineducable psychotic freaks.  That everyone is agreed a woman’s body is just property, a punchbag, and a woman’s mind a joke to be wholly disregarded.  That the filthy animals who have done this to me strut around untouched and probably always will.
 
You are happy with what has been done to my body.  You are happy to continue to try to destroy me.  Anything goes, so long as the scum of the earth are happy and there is neither freedom nor democracy.
 
Why have I ever been put through this, what the fuck do a bunch of sick cunts believing a load of sick ape-shit matter to me, who the hell told these creatures  that they matter to anyone, a bunch of sick old animals in Rome who haven’t mattered to England for 300 years, how does anyone dare bother me with their ravings.  Or a bunch of senile perverts will knock yu around until you’re half dead and I still don’t care.  I have a mind of my own, is some part of that fucking unclear, you sick offal, freaks, nutters, psychopaths.
 
You just won’t do it, will you, you just won’t look at those lovely ‘holy’, ‘devout’ religious men and what religious men have done and do to women and say those lovely religious men are filth, vermin, scum, perverts, sickos, nutters, freaks, 
 
You pretend to be egalitarian and without turning a hair strip people of the most fundamental right of all, the right to their own opinions, the right to speak their own opinions, not those you permit them, you reject equality of rights.  The great socialists, the great egalitarians return us to the midden of the Middle Ages, where the few decide for the many and the many tug their forelocks, where managers are not to be questioned, challenged, a cavorting illiterate halfwit like Jackson throws his toys out of his pram because he has been called to account, where the powerful are free to hide, where decisions concerning others are taken without reference to those others, where you can conspire to attempt to destroy me.
 
Of course you hate literacy.  The last thing the few who decree for the many want is people able to analyse their drivel, express ourselves
 
Oh how Rowley and the criminal rabble of intellectually and morally derelict vermin that are nurses, ignorant, irrational, ridden with malice, illiterate, thik they are something.  Blair and the rest of his filthy kind are content with that, don’t want ‘graduates’ capable of constructing argument, discovering or checking fact, don’t want anyone with moral scruples, as of course Linch, Naylor and Goldstone are happy to have criminal animals running the place for them, boneheads who cannot be deterred by any fact, reason or ethics.  
 
All these brutes want is the destruction of democracy and this of course you all fall over yourselves to give them, the destruction of any right to challenge the cowardly cockroach psychopath who decrees from on high. And hey, they can have my body and my life thrown in, just to really prove what loyal obedient slaves of evil you all are.  Democracy is finished with, so far as those who misgovern this country are concerned.  I just want you to know I understand.  There is probably no point in asking any of this rabble of filth an intelligent question about their aversion to democracy.  Either the question would be incomprehensible to them.  They are {{{DOCTOR}}}} and {{{NURSE}}}. How can they possibly be open to question by common people, ordinary people.  They know best.  They cannot be misinformed, ignorant, stupid, flawed in their reasoning or evil.  They have no need of external input.  The views of the people whose lives they are determining are irrelevant.  They are in short raving mad.
 
Or else they would look completely vacant and say we just did what we were told. 
 
There remains of course my mind, which irritatingly contrary to the absurd reductionism and materialism of the ape continues to function perfectly well independently of my grossly abused body; that I think baboons like Professor Bellatrix genuinely do not understand.   I remain an Honours graduate of the University of London, who attended Bedford College (formerly) for Women, the first women’s college of the first university in England to award full degrees to women.  On those grounds alone, you do not do this to me and remain untouched.  I remain the grand-daughter of John Howard, socialist, Fabian, atheist, and Elizabeth Howard, socialist, feminist, Unitarian, Arthur Palmer, who worked to get the first Labour government into power. the niece of Richard Kisch, Communist journalist who fought in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, second cousin or whatever it is of Professor Rodney Howard Hilton, Party member from Balliol in the 20s until ’56.  On those grounds you definitely do not do this to me and remain untouched. 
 
There remains of course my achieving qualification for membership of British Mensa, so a special round of applause to you all for your unswerving determination to destroy one of the most intelligent and creative people in the country.  The head monkeys really don’t like intelligence at all. 
 
What I should like is some measure of financial security so I can finish my book, sort out my life at my own pace, which is of course physically slow, tidy up and disseminate PANTHER.  Otherwise, I don’t know what is going to happen to me.  Think I’ll leave the baboons with Fal and the Viledeen which probably incorporate everything they most loathe about me.  Do not give a fuck about you, you filthy little animals, do not give a flying fuck.  Do not give a flying fuck about the Vatican.  Of course no-one one part sane would think I do.
 
Dill: “Is this what’s called a propaganda war, Dad?”
Mitch: “No, I should not say that.  This is what’s called wiping excrement off the sole of one’s boot.”
 
Nah, ‘course they ain’t fucking illitrit.
​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.
 
MITCH: Greetings, worldlings, except of course for Azt, which is on another planet.  My partner Karula and I have been doing a little work for Sardun in the City, and are now safely back Kadun-side.  This work has included analysis of the Kadun economy.  We should be interested in discussion of the social and economic aspects of the – let us call it in this respect the Dabidan model: industrialized society did not of course exist in Narulis’ day. 
AGOU: That is the Mitch? Var-sega’?
MITCH:  I am he!
KAFV: Knew already but well done you!
AGOU: Indeed.
ASDINAN: Defo well done you!  Greetings ‘cross the plague-ridden wastes of Vaudos.
MITCH: A most unpleasant obstacle between us.
 
     Cantilip finished reading Mel’s Place.
     “There is more garbage here about earthpower than I thought existed.”
 
CANTILIP:  Hi, I’m Cantilip from Van-senok.  I do have to say some of you guys are a little out on earthpower, confusing it with womanspirit, invented by modern Harn. We do not do healing crystals! Look forward to talking to you.
HARNWITCH:  Now, excuse me, a whole lot of scholarship went into re-creating the ancient belief-system of our foremothers and womanspirit is nothing if not authentic.  What do you think you are talking about?
CANTILIP: The Cult. 
HARNWITCH: That does not seem to me to be an answer.
CANTILIP: That’s the point.  I’m renowned for my tact.  Let me say at least I do understand where women in Harn are coming from.  They burned us, too.  When they caught us, which wasn’t often.  As I understand womanspirit, it’s a pacifist reaction to High Harn, than which of course there was nothing lower.  Earthpower is non-aggressive.  Pacifist, not.  When we caught them, we killed them.  The other thing is that earthpower is balance.  If you take a list of opposites, strong-weak, passive-active, rational-irrational   The third thing, of course, is that the Cult only crossed the water to Kadun after the fall of High Harn and it sure wasn’t healing crystals and non-violence which caused that.
HARNWITCH: I can sure see that, at least.  But if you are saying your earthpower caused the collapse of High Harn - that makes no sense!  Everyone knows the darned Cult took over Kadun.
VARIOUS:    Burned you???  WTF?
CANTILIP:    Better than the cage.
VARIOUS:    The what?
CANTILIP:    You don’t want to know.
HARNWITCH:         I know.  It was beyond obscene.
 
“Time we saw the world,” said Baz.
MITCH: Ours was not derring-do, though of course it would not have been a good idea to have been caught by Searc, not least since I dined with him and attended several other events in circles not wholly virtuous. Naturally my reputation preceded me but young men are headstrong, are they not, they mature.  As a marketing consultant it was reasonably easy to argue that my chief concern in life was now selling soapflakes and establishing the public image of morons, and of course our three kids enabled Karula to play the perfect stay-at-home Mom, while occupying her rather fine brain with the real family business, Kaduna-gar-jaht, this matter of Kadun.  Naturally also of course a rift with my father, I wished no part of the politics of Var-sega’, of course the kids had occasionally to visit their grandparents, but we really could not stand the place. We actually got rather good at it.  At any rate we are still alive.  Our business was twofold, to use our position to get the hang of the undersea world and financial analysis.  The derring-do was that of those who extracted the information from Azt, where they are somewhat behind the times and still record critical information on dead trees.  This is not the place for spreadsheets for a variety of reasons but I think it may be useful to delineate the rationale for our work.
AGOU:  Bloody impressive stuff.
MITCH: I thank you.
VARIOUS: Like wow!  This is a-maz-ing! Etc.   
KARULA: Kadun is bought by the banks in the City, on the small scale as well as the State.  I of course was not raised in the world of high finance and was extremely entertained when Mitch explained to me some of its mysteries.  From the grass-roots perspective, the small shopkeeper, the prospective home-owner, the situation is somewhat opaque and I should like to shed light on it.  Kadun does not strictly speaking have ‘an economy’: it has two economies, clean money and soiled, which are conjoined.  In both cases the guys at the top deal with their own; the guys at the bottom don’t necessarily know who the hell they’re dealing with, hence the entwining.  But in order so far as possible to keep decent people safe and sound, some enterprises which are very far from profitable have to be underpinned. 
MITCH: We have for instance on the books a most interesting shop, dedicated to things arboreal.  (It is not of course wholly irrelevant, evil grin, that this concern is located in the north of Var-sega’, where we are under the influence of Van-senok.)  We failed to persuade them to floristry – you cannot cut flowers, you understand – but we did manage to persuade them to saplings and bushes and also to move to the outer suburbs where people might actually buy saplings and bushes.  In other words  businesses are propped up which would not otherwise survive – though perhaps in a new Kadun this one might take on a new lease of life!  I would not see these guys go under but I feel there may be new opportunities for both employment and self-expression to which they are better suited.
Harn attempted nationalization.  The bankers undercut the state companies which promptly went broke requiring more borrowing from the bankers, there being insufficient numbers of Harni willing to pay more for their gas.   If Harn attempts to cut loose, the banks call in their debts.  Harn cannot pay those debts.  Harn's capacity to borrow further is thus up a well known creek.  Unless some real nice guys over the water are prepared to lend? Of course Harn no more wishes to be in hock to southern capital than do we but we at least have choice. To Van-sandos it is actually not a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, but the lesser of two evils.
To prop up Harn while they do some serious killing.   Kadun is the cash-cow. We all know that.  We also know they have holdings everywhere the hand of man has ever set foot. Shark-hunting is an intensely complex pursuit involving nothing less than the global economy.  That the Cult corrupts individuals, specifically the poor and vulnerable, has indeed been delineated here previously by Asdinan (I should love at some point to hear more about that).  The City banks provide apparently limitless funding for the Cult.  Central government subsidizes the building of housing that is dangerous and the manufacture of food that is poisonous and so claims to assist the poor. If you ask how the housing is dangerous, how many ways can housing be dangerous? The wiring is unsafe, the foundations are inadequate, the roofs crack under heavy snow - I swear that actually happened. Fortunate indeed we are not in an earthquake zone. Fine shiny hospitals are built by big pharma, setting an example to the world, only down the road people are dying of pneumonia because they afford neither heat nor medicine. If someone from the south  were to go to Giraga on business, he or she would think it looks much like anywhere else, shops, supermarkets, theatres, but would probably not stray into where the workers live, and would not wear the clothes they are offered or  eat their food, especially the meat, unless possessed of a penchant for rat. Azt tells the world it has public health inspectors and food hygiene laws like everywhere else. It forgets to mention no-one pays the slightest attention to them. 
CANTILIP:    Longbows and cannon caused the collapse of High Harn.  As we know, the Cult has certain mind-control techniques, like hypnosis.  You do have to be in range, so to speak. Pacifism was not on the menu. Exactly what am I saying?  The Mosai Wars could not have happened if the indigenous culture of Harn had been pacifist.
HARNWITCH:  I am following that bit, but you are still not making any sense, if you will forgive my saying so!  Then the same must be true of Kadun and everyone knows it took Narulis to free Kadun.
“Baz has been posting about PANTHER,” said Num expressionlessly.
Seani snorted.
“Baz, who’s Baz. How can that possibly be news?”
“Nothing to what Mitch has been posting.  There’s brave and there’s brave. Mitch is a story on his own.  Sardun agent in the City.  Currently kicking the shit out of social conditions in the cities.”
“Zeshazesh!  Somewhere, somehow, this is revolution.  Do we  actually want to get in the way?”
“Spectator sport,” said Num.
QINE: Sardun, CLIK: There are folk here who are surely rolling, and I would like to ask them their views on capital. I would first say I’ve been up here with Sardun for many years now, segani by birth, and mixing with folk from different backgrounds broadens your views.  Then again like us all I’m only too aware of how capital can work for good or we wouldn’t flipping be here.  I have friends in CLIK in Zur and I am aware that AMI might as well be in a different world for all in resembles what the  average working-man in Kadun thinks is a factory and I know there are folk who’ve made a packet on the Grid though no labour but their own, so I do not want to be stupid about these things and I hope no-one else will be, either. It seems to me Kadun is somewhat divided between one lot of capital and another lot which for all the nice talk about democracy seems to me to mean that the power stays with the money.  I would like people’s views on that.
[Mitch PM to Qine: Where are you!]
Qine: I will catch up with you later, Comrade Var-sega’.]
MEL: Capital is power, agreed.  But in a democracy, all power is accountable, and I mean all, not like in Ciletij.  Put that in because I know Zulagan too and I hear a lot about CLIK in Ciletij. All AMI’s accounts are on the Grid.  Every business is legally required to put everything on the Grid and in fact there’re public accountants who just do check that it all adds up and that doesn’t just apply to business.  Every private individual who has above a certain level of assets, and that includes Tar, has to say what he or she’s spending on  So if I go into the Megamart and buy a packet of biscuits no-one’s noticing, I bought a Seanti, worst flak I got was from the environmental police, Sarat and Hass, but if I decide I want a fleet of private airliners or tanks the whole world knows. There is no safe space for pay-offs, private deals and the rest.  I think you might say and you’d be right that;s not the exact point.  If I want to pop across the Straits and talk to Airoch, it’s a five-buck ferry ride, so it’s pure matrix as above, not what you know, not even what you have, but who you know. 
SEANI: Straits Times.  Ah, the dear old matrix.  Good point. It’s not whether people travel by bus but what they say to the people they’ve travelled to. Unless every single conversation is recorded and published, it’s not possible to monitor it
MEL: Ah, so that’s why I found a mic in the plug-hole.
SEANI: Would we, would we!
MEL: Probably not.  Glitz would.
SEANI: [Sniffy expression of intellectual superiority]  You know Glitz hate you.  All those private jets you don’t have, the conspicuous consumption you don’t do.  WYSWIG, by the way, dear world, not that the décor on the hill is anything less than elegant.
MEL: Glad you approve.
GALLIA: (Batna-kri Chronicle) There’s stuff here about women in Kadun that is extreme.  It’s just so interesting.
“This is extreme,” said Karula.
“Inevitable,” said Mitch.  “Just enjoy.”
HASS: All the stuff you see in Glitz about jet-setters, we don’t actually jet-set because there’s nowhere to jet-set to.  Mel was at the Schools but the City’s pretty much off-limits to us now too.  Oh, we could have mega maximum security, but what a total pain.  Mostly drive into Carlin.  We do have a private plane and a heli, landing pad on the hill.  Fleet of jets not.  Then there’s the simple matter of accumulation.  If you don’t spend it it grows.  The basic expense of most people is somewhere to live and we’ve been in the same rabbit-warren on the hill for 600 years.  When Pietri, Tar’s brother, left the nest he bought himself a house.  It’s a very nice town-house but it’s not huge.  Obviously we’ve got relations scattered all over the places but none of them lives anywhere you could call ginormous.  That’s because there’s no conceivable reason they need to; the hill is sort of everyone’s private hotel, conference centre, formal party, informal party, we accommodate your needs!  It’s such a mad maze there’s room for half a dozen separate events at once. 
VIJ: Mel’s cousin, son of aforementioned Pi`etri.  Des res is on Gulia Plaza. Has to be said the parents are not exactly socialites of the year, but yes, essentially what Hass said.  It’s very much a question of people we know well, I think. Like, I think, most people, whom do we actually want in our home. I think it’s reasonable to say we’ve all got a sense of ‘home’.  Makes sense for any official entertaining of virtual strangers to take place on the hill.  Mitch, too damn long!
HASS: Home is for family and friends.  Except of course for poor us.  Couple of memorable occasions of overlap. Mel and I and our friends were having a distinctly informal party and Tar and Saski were entertaining some rather uptight guys from Ciletij.  Tar, damn him, decided it would be delightful to show his guests around.  I think he wanted us to shock them.  No, I know he wanted us to shock them.  So there’s Mel in his I am a child of the universe phase, which means shorts and thin shift falling off one shoulder, Maya and Fal in the Leotard Look, Tet in army surplus, Sarat practising chords on an acoustic guitar, etc. 
MEL: I think actually they wanted to meet Dabida’s heir.  They met me.  They may by now have recovered.  We’re not landlords.  We don’t profit from people needing somewhere to live.  Not many people in Dabida are, because of the LLR: Law of Limited Returns.  CLIK love it.  Limits the amount of time any landlord can charge rent.
“600 years?  ” asked Mitch. 
 
“Couple of cats pitched up,” they said to Saban.  That is not news.  “Ah, but these are special cats”  Anyone involved in Sarat’s exercise in insanity had at least heard of Baz and Paw.
“Greetings,” said Baz, “from the sun-drenched shores of Fidub.”
“Nothing like meeting new people,” said Paw.
“Bit of a loose end,” said Baz, “thought we’d do the rounds.”
Marula continued to scrutinize them with growing interest; she has rarely met anyone so wholly immune to her scrutiny.
“We know you’re getting the transcript,” said Paw.  “We are not here to meditate upon the inner Sarat.”
“What, then?” asked Saban.
“Curious, get a feel for how you guys live and work.  It’s got to be different from what we know.  Climate, geography.  Thought we’d fill you in a bit and see what you think.”
“We have a cunning plan all our own,” said Paw.
 
 
 
MITCH: Vij, my friend and ally! Indeed much water has passed under the bridge.  Your close family of course includes.
VIJ: As, Mardis, Pilo and Retri, Saryulin, Duvi, all the small fry. Gets quite crowded at times.
GALLIA: I think I am right in saying that there are no working-class irturbi women here, or if they are they’re silent.  Anyone any reflections on why that might be.
THEWALLFLOWERS: Yes.  They don’t think they can.  Partly it’s simply level of education.  Obviously the currency here is words and Kadun education isn’t renowned for teaching working-class girls how to express themselves.  But it’s more than that.  Class and education give us the confidence to think we can speak. And of course whom we’re speaking to makes us think we’ll be heard.  My experience is women of all classes talk readily enough but it’s below the radar.  Mostly they assume they won’t be heard, little mice squeaking in the corner.
SEANI: Ah yes, our intrusive and virtually totalitarian State intruding on the rights of property.  Think that was the The Voice of Reason.  Don’t think the Azt Star knows words that long.  But of course there is much there which requires further elucidation.  Evil grin.  Would it be at all possible to tell everyone about the sheepdog.
CARIE: CLIK.  Working-class girl.  Friend of Qine’s.  Kadun education teaches us to do the washing-up and sew.  What Mitch said about the clothes in the shops, absolute crap, fall apart if you look at them.  Most women make their own clothes, clothes for their kids to have decent clothes.  Tell you something strange.  Money’s tight, right, can’t afford to have everything.  People’ll have a sewing machine rather than a fridge.  Can’t spend your whole time with a needle and thread but going out every day to the shops, that’s no big deal, even if, as so rightly said, the food is crap.
GALLIA: Can I ask how the food is crap – apart from being rat.
CARIE: Veg aren’t kept properly, already wilting.  Same with everything, really.  You buy some eggs.  Half of them are probably rotten.  Think they probably make the bread with sawdust.
HASS: Mel at 16 was what the revered elders called bloody impossible. Just the age Tar and Saski thought he should start to mix with the grown-ups. The rules of Tar’s ship were few.  If we’d been on the foreshore all day, mostly we just came in and fended for ourselves.  This was dinner with half the Cabinet.  Mel pitched up in the aforementioned shift and shorts together with  flip-flops. Tar told him to go away and change. Saski pointed out that others had taken trouble with their appearance.  Mel argued.  Usual teenage stuff, how can a piece of fabric affect the essential me.  Tar explained that Mel had been somewhat unwell of late, a disease generally known as adolescence.  Saski suggested he go and lie down and return when he wasn’t embarrassing.  Mel said that they told him to think and he’d thought and he really couldn’t see what the problem was.  Out! said Tar.  Shoo, scram! Tar had really had enough of Mel and thought he needed a quick kick up the backside.  If he wanted to argue in the grown-up world, he could make his case to the whole of Zur.  As you know, he leaked it to your august organ in consequence of which the cartoon of Mel as a large muddy sheepdog slinking out of The Room looking guiltily behind him at his muddy paw-marks.   It was the difference between public and private.  When Mel was representing A-M, he had to look how Dabida sees A-M, which was not as a bunch of beach-combers.
KARULA: My family are not poor but like all ordinary people they do have to be a bit – cautious is I think the word.  When Dad finally bought a new car, he did not then splash out further.  I would say frankly that the gulf between the lives of ordinary people and rich people is no need for caution.  Suppose the House burned down!  It would be an emotional catastrophe for Heela.  It would indeed be a cultural catastrophe.  But financially it would mean nothing. 
GALLIA: Yes, of course.  Always got it if they need it.  May I ask what your parents do?
KARULA:  So long as you do not ask what colour drapes in the bedroom!  Dad is an architect and Mom a teacher.
GALLIA:  Honest, we’re not Glitz!  So two incomes.  Is that usual in Kadun?
 
“Oiling the wheels,” said Baz.  “What we thought – if we give you the outline of what PANTHER’s going to do, you can think about what Sardun’s going to do.  Sarat can go through every whisker and twig of it with you when he’s up here.”
SORG: Army, Caniba. Asdinan’s cousin.  Alas, I cannot desert my post.  But the grapevme is excellent.
SITSIN: KAF, Carlin.  Of course before it got hairy a lot of us used to pop down to Zur for the weekend or just for dinner.  Too damn’ far to get back in a hurry.
SEANI:  .  Any stories about Sarat?
AGONCOS: Few stories to tell that might be of interest, from the lads.  Dad died at 43 of pneumonia. Four kids in all.  One our lad, one in work.  Took a bit of time for our lad to hear of it because we were a bit busy at the time and the wages of the one working didn’t cover the rent, so they were evicted.  Tell you something else, Azt says there’s ‘social support’, but it’s garbage.   Then of course there’s you are going to work unpaid overtime, aren’t you, cos you’re out on your ear if you don’t.  Or attend our ***** little rally of course. Unsafe machinery, one bloke’s brother got electrocuted. Etc.
ME:  I’m a working-class woman in Vaudos.  Mum had ideas above her station and made sure I went to a decent school and my partner’s good at IT.  I think that’s dead right, what the ladies said about schooling, but there’s something very simple. You think we’ve all got terminals?  Even if we have, wouldn’t know how to register.
 
“A lot of people are going to scream,” said Baz.  “Sarat and Maya are going to start their own forum, so people can scream at them there.  They’ve made a vid for the landing-page.”
Black screen.  The Anile Emperor in letters of imperial silver 
‘They came, the skull-faces, but we laughed.’  Narulis’ Journal.
Screen fades. We are at the Great Gates. Death the guardian sits on the Anile throne.  A garbage-truck appears.  Sarat and Maya get out. “Yuck!” says Sarat.  “What is that! That’s my chair.”  A ring of shimmering silver is thrown at him from off-stage (detail, detail).  He catches it and throws it over the throne.  It falls to the ground. Death tries to lunge at them but is clearly contained by the circlet.  Death exhibits cartoon signs of rage, jumping up and down, smoke coming out of ears. “Terribly antsy,” remarks Sarat.  He and Maya confer.  “How’d it go?” asks Sarat.  “Begone, foul spawn of desecration,” says Maya.  “That’s the one,” says Sarat.  “Remember now.”  He turns to Death. ‘Begone, foul spawn of desecration.  Creature of slime and destruction, fell servant of dark and despair, I say to you, begone!’”  “It really pays to read,” says Maya.  “Pick up some awfully good lines.”  Sarat says, “You just never know when you might need a line like that.  Didn’t you hear me the first time?” “Me the second,” says Maya.  Little arrows appear on the screen identifying them; Narulis’ heir.  Zani’s heir..  “Need a hoist,” says Sarat and gets out his phone.  Another truck draws up emblazoned with ANILE ENTERPRISES INC, a black paw with silver claws on one side of the lettering and a silver birch on the other.  A giant hook descends, lifts Death from the Throne and drops him at Sarat’s feet with a truly satisfying cracking and crumbling of bone. “Needs a broom,” says Maya.  “I’ll get,” says Sarat.  He returns from the truck wearing rubber gloves and carrying a small vacuum cleaner, a second pair of rubber gloves and a broom, which he hands to Maya, and a bin bag.  Maya puts on the rubber gloves and sweeps the fragments up into a heap, while Sarat picks up the bigger pieces of bone and throws them in the bag.  Sarat switches on the vac and sucks up the crumbs then empties the vac into the bin bag, which he throws in the back of the refuse truck while Maya gets in the front seat and fiddles with levers.  The grinders staru t and emiscerate the garbage.  Meanwhile the hoist has collected the throne and the circlet and deposited them gently besides the garbage-truck.  Sarat and Maya load them into the cab then get in themselves and start the engine.  They fast forward through the Great Gates into Azt, pull up in the Colonnade, get out. “Needs a good spring-clean,” says Sarat.  They get out of the truck two buckets, two mops and a collection of bottles variously labelled PESTICIDE, RAT POISON, DISINFECTANT.  Azt is transformed, only it doesn’t look shimmering, unearthly, ethereal so much as like an advertisement for washing-up liquid, Screen goes whooshy then again black with silver lettering.  NARULIS’ RULES, OK!  (Punctuation is terribly important.)
Democracy – transparency – oversight
We do not do private deals.  We do not do hole in the corner. 
Free elections – equality of rights – minimum wage – healthcare for all
We do not do people frightened to speak. 
We do not do starvation wages.  We do not do rat-infested slums.
We do not do swanning around at Blatni.  We do not do criminals out of reach, untouchable.
(Inset of Searc and Sar-fenan dining at Blatni, heavy white linen tablecloth, crystal chandeliers, etc.)
Screen goes whoosh again.  Sarat and Maya are just finishing polishing a shimmering luminescent silver chair.  “Good as new,” said Sarat.  He sits on it.  “Room for two.”  “Hudge up, then!” says Maya.  He hudges and she sits beside him.  He puts his arm around her.  “You have a problem, my lord Krarlik, you have a big, big problem.  In fact two problems.
Screen fades to a black furry paw under which are strugglingly fruitlessly a number of rats with the faces of the government in Azt. 
 
“I do not think anything further need be said,” said Marula. 
Baz paused before wading into the inner Sarat, decided that what he was going to say was that he was not going to get involved in the detail.
“Being emperor doesn’t in itself mean much to him.  What it represents does.  That’s what they were trying to make simple.  My chair.  Not in a million years that on it.”
“I may have a copy?” asked Saban. 
Baz pulled his woolly hat further down over his ears.  Maps didn’t show that Da-conan, in a wide valley at the meeting of two rivers, got the wind straight from the Arctic.
“I have never in my life felt this much enthusiasm for a shopping mall.”
Double doors excluded the polar blast.
A mooch around the IT store confirmed all state of the art.  If there’s anything they need up here it’s comms. 
A seductive pile of sweaters caught their eye.  They walked firmly into The Great Outdoors.
“We’re visitors,” said Baz cheerfully.  Obviously.  Paw, chisel profile, long straight black hair, earrings, walnut tan, screamed Fidub.  “We’re really not sure we’ve got enough clothes for this weather.  We’ve got our thermals but we still weren’t exactly  warm.  Any tips?”
“Especially around the ears,” said Paw.
She examined their jackets and pronounced them good but recommended another layer, and hats with ear-flaps.  Fur hats.  They grinned at each other both thinking Sarat’d kill us. 
Tough, kill the whole of Van-senok.  Survival fur and fashion fur are clearly morally different.
“Got ice-grips?” she asked.
“No.”
 They came away with fur hats, oiled double-knit woollens and two vicious-looking pairs of ice-grips for their boots.
             “I’m sure there’s a man-made equivalent,” said Paw, imitating Sarat.
             “Ah,” said Baz, “but think of the natural resources that go into its manufacture.”
             Now for Loni’s Mart.  See what they eat around here.
             In-te-res-ting!  Frozen fruit, canned fruit, yes.  Fresh fruit, no.
             This is a peach-free zone.  Can we survive! Maybe in high summer.
             Hang on, there are no veggies, either.  Must have to go to a greengrocer.  Hope yet.
             Baz examined a few labels.  Not AMI!  None of the nutritional stuff you get in the south.  Probably 50% sugar.  Frozen won’t be.
             They checked a few more labels, especially those of a hearty stew to keep the family glowing and calcium is essential for strong bones and teeth, help your children grow tall and straight with our delicious yoghurt dessert.  Just doesn’t say how much calcium.  Defo no food regs.
             Our delicious yoghurt dessert came in a variety of flavours.  They selected blackcurrant and raspberry, and decided what went with their picnic-lunch, yeah right, we’re going to recline under a tree sheltered from the sun’s burning rays, was bread and cold meat. Similarly a butcher and a baker were required.  Convenience shopping in Da-conan extends, we hope, to all in one mall, not all in one store.  Home-delivery, they wondered.  Local shops have always done that.  Presumably if they can reach you through the snow-drifts. 
They found a scrumptious smelling baker, bought a loaf and asked where they could get some cold meat, smoked beef, maybe, a bit of ham.  While the assistant was slicing and wrapping, they surveyed the goods.  Woo-hoo, beef labelled not pre-frozen is twice the price.  Somewhere, presumably south a bit, is a prize herd.  Ah, a greengrocer.  You can tell that by all the greens.  Clearly senoki get their veggies.  There were many varieties of cabbage and onions, leeks, a sort of frondy lacy thing on a stalk which reminded them of seaweed but surely couldn’t be. There were large pink and green apples in plenty and a few oranges.  The woman in front of them was paying cash in small denomination coins, and apparently her eyesight was not good. The shopkeeper was being kindly. 
“We’re foreigners,” said Paw, “and this is going to seem a stupid question. Do you get soft fruit up here at all?”
“Is it because of the war?” added Baz.
The shopkeeper bellowed with laughter.
“You are from the south?  It is very different here.”
“Fidub.”
“I think Fidubi do not shop.  They pluck the peaches from the trees.”
“Bit like that,” said Paw.
“I have been.  When I was younger, merchant fleet.” We didn’t think of the sea.  Stupid of us.  “In season we get a little from Var-sega’  Mostly it goes to children and the Army.”
In-te-res-ting!  We didn’t have the Imperial Miltiary down as fructivores, though we have heard that for a lot of the lads the Army is the first decent meal they’ve had.
“Of course!” said Baz.  “Guess it’s apples or apples.  Don’t mean to be rude, but where do the oranges come from?”
“Harn.”
The sea, the sea!  Think hard about that one, wonder what else comes from Harn and it’s not necessarily edible.
“Could we have six apples and an orange, please.”
The shopkeeper gestured to them to help themselves. Not worried about transferring bugs.  Probably too bloody cold.
They arrived back at the double doors, where a small crowd was assembled, through which weaved their way a larger number of people coming in.  It had started to snow.  Women with shopping-trolleys were on their phones.  Can you come and collect me, guessed Baz.  It can’t do this!  It’s spring!  OK, the total Van-senok experience.  Snow-cats!  It’s not far to the inn. 
So. This – is – snow. It’d be all right if the polar blast wasn’t lashing it into their faces.
“Brrr!” said Baz.  “Afternoon!  Would you have two rooms for two nights, please.”
“Good afternoon to you!” said the receptionist.  “Will that be with dinner?”
“Yes, please,” said Paw.
They filled in the register.
“Wow!” she said, “Fidub!  I’ll need to see your passports.”  She sounded very apologetic about it.
They reached in their jackets and produced the circular, apple-green (yes, well, they stand out) passports of the Republic of Fidub.  Even Fidubi think the circles on the cover are weird, pretty, but weird: top left, off-centre and bottom right are embossed concentric silver circles.  She flipped through their passports.  All PANTHER passports have diplomatic stamps.  If she noticed, she didn’t say anything.
“Would there be lunch?” asked Paw, yoghurt desserts abandoned at the prospect of hot food. 
“Need to go to the bar for that,” she said.  “Plenty of time yet, finish lunches at half-two.  Show you to your rooms.”
The rooms were about the width of three beds and little longer with low ceilings and ye olde beams that were probably real.  They were also warm.  They sat on Baz’ bed.  Paw tore a hunk off the loaf. 
“No trace,” said Baz.
“How can you tell!” said Paw.
Whatever they saw and heard would get back to Sarat.  They assumed Sardun would track them out of an intelligent curiosity as to what that would be.  They also assumed that, this near to both House and Camp, anyone and possibly everyone could be Sardun.  Swaddled in fur and padding, senoki were not easy to tell apart. Since they enjoyed the thought of Saban being regaled by their interest in agriculture, they didn’t bother to get serious about whether they were being followed.
“Thought-experiment.  If Marula had been wandering around the mall, could you tell.”
“Rich, poor,” said Baz, “all swaddled under padding and fur.  Fur might be better quality!”
“We can assume no-one’s perishing of hypothermia in Da-conan.  Vaconik might be different.”
“Clean Air Act,” said Baz.  “I mean let’s assume everyone’s got a grate.  Every house here is going to have been built with a grate.  Modern housing maybe not.”
“Ciletij has masses of coal,” said Paw.  “No way anyone’s flying in coal.”
“Non-perishable.  Rail?”
They decided to stick to plain food, not because they weren’t adventurous but because there was no disguising what it was. After looking at the menu, they realized this was just as well because plain food was all there was.   Baz had a steak in a huge roll with fried onions on the side and Paw had tench and potatoes with mint and butter.
“Guzzling,” said Baz between mouthfuls.
“So fresh it’s wriggling,” said Paw.
“Don’t do gourmet specialties.”
“Bar lunch.  Maybe at dinner.”
Dinner indeed proved more exacting.  There was a choice of four main courses, one was grilled pork, one was fried shark, and the other two were written in irturbi. 
“Do a few things well?  This must be where the locals come when they want to dine out.”
“And the plain stuff is for aliens?”
“Really sorry,” said Baz, “we’d love to try something new, but what is it?”
“Moose.  It is a stew.”
“I’ll have that please.  Do you eat it with potatoes?”
“Bread.”
“Whatever’s usual, please.”
“I’ll have the shark please,” said Paw.
After they’d completed their order, Baz said, “That didn’t swim in any local river!”
“That’s the interesting bit,” said Paw.
Baz’ phone gave a small meow to indicate he had mail.
Taja to Baz:  What the pluperfect iridescent 3D quintessential hell are you two doing?  The vid is all over the Army!
Baz: Don’t exaggerate.  I gave Saban the distribution list.  WYSIWYG. 
Taja: That at least is true!  Where are you?
Baz: Da-conan. A Delightful Town In the Middle of Van-Senok.  Would be if it wasn’t brass monkeys.  We are hardy.  We are valiant.  We have been out in SNOW.  Doing a little recce-ing. 
Meow.
People around looked up once more.  I think Vibrate mode.  Did not expect to be in demand.
Cho to Baz: Excellent.  Double brownie points with crossed paws.
Baz: Get Deelan [Cho’s cook] to cook you up some figisi-jahsonan. It’s really yummy. If she can get the ingredients, which I doubt.
Cho: ROTFLMAO.  You are at the camp?
Baz: Doing good by stealth.  Looking at the local shops, seeing what’s available to eat round here.  I’m just working out how to break it to Sarat.  Fresh fruit, not a lot of.  Make that soft fruit nil.
Cho: I’m sure he will survive.
Baz: Lots of veggies.  Get their vits.
Five trains a day run from Vaconik to Ge’at in Var-sega’, a journey of thirteen hours.  The train stopped at This Halt and That Junction only if required.  Seems sensible, don’t suppose the numbers hold it up.  Oh right, think I get it, leave work in Vaconik, pick up your backpack, catch the 19.32 and you’re in Ge’at at a reasonable time to get some work done.  Sounds less aggro than flying.  Do it in reverse but who uses it the rest of the time?  From Da-Conan to Vaconik, the journey is three hours and 22 minutes according to the timetable.  Clearly not for commuters, then.    What do people go to Vaconik for, a day in the city, must be museums, theatres, big shops of course.  All the same, seven hours travelling.  S’pose you can sleep. The last train back to Da-conan was at a highly respectable 23.20.  Go to the theatre, if you want to get home at 3 in the morning.  Maybe not something to do all that often.  Paw differentiated firmly between 3 in the morning in a bloody blizzard when it was probably -200 and 3 in the morning on the Leolisle.  When they arrived at the station for the 8.47 they thought there’d be maybe half a dozen other travellers.  More like 20, 25.   Even Baz can’t walk up to total strangers and demand their purposes. After all, he didn’t have a clipboard.  Just doing a survey… Added to the list of find out more about.  The train was warm and comfortable with a buffet car in which they sat and watched Van-senok speed by.  At last the trees thinned out and gave way to heath, and then the beginnings of a built-up area, at first sparse, then modern housing, builders’ merchants, hoardings, a park, a playing-field.  Vaconik Central possessed what they ticked off as attributes of main-line stations, restaurants, a grand hotel, cash machines, a pharmacy, a newsagent and stationer’s, a coffee-shop, a food-store and senoki and presumably also some segani quietly availed themselves of these facilities.  Buzz, it did not.  Frivolity, such as art, music, entertainers, was absent.  Well, they are at war.  Paw gazed at the departures board and thought somewhere underneath this is wow!  Down to Wintawa, up and round to G-T, reach the whole continent.  Then they go to Vasucula and Vasuculi arrive.  A quick look round espied no obvious Vasuculat.  Train came in some time ago?   Central it certainly was and within minutes they were in Gava-san, the hub, a broad and ancient highway, still cobbled, closed to traffic, down which they slowly ambled.  Again, ‘everything’ was there, movie-houses, theatres, department stores, a music-shop or perhaps more exactly a shop for musicians, for it was huge, a department store in its own right, and, unusually, appeared to sell everything from grand pianos and exquisite violins to the latest drum-kits, synthesizers and amps.  Hip young men with green hair argued vociferously about guitar strings, but it didn’t break the tone, the mood of the place, which Baz thought decidedly subdued.  They wandered into a network of alleys and found ‘usual shops for alleys’, specialist book-sellers,   jeweller’s, shops selling items of the ilk of incense-burners, floor cushions, rugs, tapestries, scented candles and cheap sets of bowls and cutlery, which Paw designated ‘furnish your student lodgings shops’ together with grocery-stores and a bicycle-shop.  They must, they thought, be very near the Collegium: ‘usual shops for student quarter’.  We cannot have come this far and not see the ocean.  Their alley ended in a large plaza.  Oh.
             “The Shrine,” said Paw softly.
             “Maybe they don’t call it that,” said Baz cautiously, suddenly feeling totally ignorant of earthpower.
             “Old, old, old,” said Paw, “maybe as old as M-P.”
             It looked like but of course couldn’t have been a single block of marbled grey stone the length of the plaza, two storeys, two rows of round windows, a steep over-hanging roof, the edge of which was carved with leaves and flowers.  In the centre, the door, nearly the height of the building, had carved in it a silver birch and two women, one in armour bearing a sword and one with a bow.  Gaurding the door were two stone bears.
             Hasty consultation of phones.
             ‘The Viledeen is the oldest building on the continent still in use today.  The foundations were laid in 6700.’ 
             ‘The Ladies, as they are called, were once believed goddesses, one of the fight and the other of the word.’
             ‘The inscription at the foot of the door reads ‘Enter, who can.’  The meaning of this has long puzzled historians and archaeologists.’  Baz frowned.  ‘Perhaps ironically, the Great Door is now kept sealed.  Entrance is at the side.’
             “There’s a side-door on the left.”
             The side-door led through a long  passage to a (warm, covered) courtyard with noticeboards on the walls, benches and a single large slatted wooden doors with great black hinges opposite the Great Door. A couple wrapped round each other consulted their phones.  There was no centre-piece.  A tree before it got warm and covered? Can’t believe they’d have felled a tree! 
             The two rows of windows on each side lit the grey chamber.  They saw the roof was supported by pillars.  The walls were intricately carved, with trees, with flowers, with bears, with wolves, with stranger things, fantastic creatures, half-stag half-man, giants with many heads. Fragments of paint remained. There were inscriptions but in irturbi, so they didn’t understand.  There were thick dark green carpet (added? replaced?) and benches cut into the walls on which were thick dark green velvet cushions (added? replaced?)
             What, thought Baz, do you do here, what did people do?  He liked the absence of any plaques, sign-posts, translations, it made it current, not just a museum-piece, but they clearly didn’t expect strangers.  Right now, any way.  He thought that before the war Vaconik had probably enjoyed a steady stream of travellers if not tourists eager to partake of their ancient culture and doubtless knowledgeable about it. 
             It must have had some rites and rituals.  Mel would know.  There’s no centre, no centre-piece, focus.  It is the centre-piece.  You’re ye ancient trader, come in out of the forest with your skins or meat or whatever and this is the meaning of Van-senok.  What is? 
If you have the forest, you don’t need pictures of the forest.  Go back, back, back, impossibly far back.  What else was here in 6700? Probably nothing. It would have stood majestic, alone.  Don’t understand.  People who worship goddesses don’t do it sitting on benches.  Then he wondered if he did.  A house for them? Of course it was all painted.  Must be a reconstruction on the Grid. No furniture?
             Paw had already let go.  Time loosened not slipping.  Shadows of the past.  Green, green, their robes were forest green and they had flowers in their hair.  Then death, blood, such violence, pain, then tiny flowers, everywhere, the walls, the ceiling, a carpet, a canape of tiny red flowers
             Something happened, he said rather feebly.
             I know, said Baz. Not human…
             The violence was that of animals, grizzlies ripping and tearing, wolves devouring still living flesh.  And trees drinking blood.
             They had a zoo here?  Trees in zoos don’t drink blood. People were sacrificed to wild animals?  Not unheard of but the venue, no, the venue does not mesh with that. 
             At the First Turn, the pain, blood, death were gone.  I think I see, do I see, an attempt to conquer, an enemy repelled, the enemy? Now the carvings on the walls were all of trees and flowers, great trees, small trees, trees of fantastic size and shape, leaves and branches in spirals, leaves climbing up the walls, leaves in circlets as no leaves ever grew.  For a moment he saw it as it was, a magic forest of brown and green and gold. 
At the Second turn they are in what was probably a starry vault, painted, painted, remember it was painted.  Stars, constellations, spheres, sun and moon are carved into walls. Look up! hissed Paw. The ceiling gave the illusion of open sky, all grey but distinctly full of cloud in more shades of grey than they had thought existed.  
At the Third Turn they are in the sea, fish, crustacea, seaweed, crashing waves, and great ice-floes, seals, polar bears.  Totally amazing.  Why has my sadly limited Fidubi education not told me about the Viledeen.
The woman with the bow came to meet them.  Baz smiled, suddenly feeling he understood everything about earthpower, everything, nothing, it didn’t matter, all he needed to know.
             But of course there was no-one there.
             “I think,” said Baz. A succession of wild thoughts came to him.  Sarat must come.  He must meet her.  Narulis met her.  That explains everything.
             They emerged shaken back into the courtyard. For a while they just sat.  Whew! 
             They padded off to see what lay behind the Viledeen and followed the path round.  You can walk all the way round the outside too.  Does that mean anything to you?  At the back was cluster of single-storey buildings also of grey stone.  Clearly it was thought fitting modernity impinge on them for covered walkways linked them and there were signs directing you to conference rooms and café.  They made a beeline for the caff. The furnishings included the sort of hyper-hip chairs that don’t have individual legs, instead consist of a curved metal frame that is three sides of a rectangle.  A poster covered in diamonds in various shades of pink, red and purple, against which some rock hero unknown to them strutted his stuff was entirely in irturbi.
             They sipped coffee thoughtful.
             “An eye-opener,” said Baz.
             “Broadening of perspective,” said Paw.
He consulted a map of Vaconik, then brooded over a larger map of the coast.  “So the port is there but we’re well inland.  Flooding?”
             Baz said: “Funny.  Earthpower.  Has to include water!  I was thinking – did Narulis represent the sea?  Like the two halves of the Whole.  Can we get a bus?”
             “Oh, this is mega,” said Paw.  “The Cult marched in from the sea and headed for the Viledeen.  Vaconikans or whatever the word is apparently sat back polishing their nails and having another coffee.  The Cult had – like a totem, the IoD, they carried before them. 
After a while senoki wandered in to remove the corpses, all of which if not stricken by arrows – as well as being stricken by arrows – bore the marks of wild beasts.  History of course tells it as an ambush, hidden archers, couple of tame bears.  The totem was smashed and covered with tiny red flowers.
             “I have just had the Viledeen Experience,” said Baz.  “At this moment I’d believe anything.  Whether I do believe anything – does it say anything about her?”
             Paw was grinning.
             “Don’t laugh.  The general belief is she was a construction-worker.”
             “Say that again slowly.”
“Yes, she looks as the goddess was depicted, but the goddess was depicted as an upper-class senoki huntress.  They even have a name for her, Mivalia za-plenit, It seems she was killed in an accident on the site, as happens on the best regulated building-sites. And some people see her ghost.”
“I want,” said Baz, “to say that was no ghost!  However, my experience of ghosts is zero, so what do I know!”
“This is interesting.  Apparently the people who built it were all exiles, rebels, whose concept of earthpower was more sophisticated than that current at the time.”
“If there’s one thing for sure,” said Baz, “this place does not function on the level tree not like fire.”
Consultation with the girl behind the counter revealed a bus linking Vaconik to the next town on the coast, more of a suburb really.  Of course it’s really nice in the summer.  Nothing going on there right now.
             The bus-driver said cheerfully that he stopped on the promenade.  He did.  Baz and Paw pulled their hats down to their eyelashes and their scarves up to the tops of their noses and leant against the railings of the sea-wall watching a malevolent dark-grey ocean batter the shore and smash onto ancient groynes.
             Visibilty was good and far on the horizon were frigates.  Makes you think, doesn’t it, said Baz.  Coastal security, must be a freaking nightmare.  Anyone could slip ashore.  Don’t really think about the Fleet, admitted Paw.  A particularly vicious gust assailed them.  Don’t think we need to linger.  Behind them shops and cafes were heavily boarded up and battered hoardings gave glimpses of another world, half a smiling brown child wearing water-wings.  A quick circuit of Hinsinil told them its core was another Da-conan, neat grey stone houses, with modern bungalows on the outskirts.  Guess you don’t build high. Baz continued to mutter about the antithesis between sea and land.  I mean, sea is basically lethal.  You can’t drink it, you can’t water your pot-plants.  There’s something there and I’m missing it.  Paw pulled up pictures of Hinsinil in the season, unrecognizable, a fun fair with a roundabout with highly painted horses, families on the beach in swim-gear, the shops along the promenade adorned with tubs of shrimp-nets and flip-flops.  
             “There’s a documentary I saw once about the tundra.  How it comes alive in summer, covered in flowers.  I think it’s all like that.”
             Baz grinned.
             “Senoki?  They’re little green shoots just below the surface.”
             “It really throws us, doesn’t it, no street-life.”
             “Commuter-land, either working or at school.”
             Two men passed them, accompanied by large, thickly furred and very lupine-looking pooches.
             “hmm.  Nice fluffy pet for the kids.”
             “Cross-breeds?”
             “Dunno how it works.  If you let your bitch in season into the wilds, does she saunter back in an orgasmic glow?”
             “Is there abortion for dogs?  I mean seriously.  Do you sincerely want a litter of wolf-cubs?”
             “A few tame semi-wolves.  In the Viledeen?”
             Baz was chortling to himself.
             “Just thinking, vet up here, maybe Sarat just needed something a bit more dangerous.”
             “Steel gauntlets to talk to your patients?”
             “Bet you anything they’re fish fans,” said Baz.  Paw’s face said yer what? “Tropical aquaria, exotic jewel fins darting about the room.  Or else they like everything grey.”
             “Tundra,” said Paw again.
             A large square van decorated with pictures of baskets of veg and bread, smiling cows presiding over pitchers of milk, a cheeseboard with crackers slowly passed them.
             “Bet you that’s home-delivery.  They just don’t have to go out.”
“What about exercise?  Can’t have pools in the basement, can they?”
“I run.  You run.  I just do not have the urge.”
Baz slowly lowered his scarf.
“Mainly cos I feel the air would be ripped from my lungs.”
“They must get used to it.  Be used to it.  Think if you grew up here.”
They returned to the  train-station.
             “We could go all the way down to Wintawa.”
             “Recline in the sun-soaked lagoons of the archipelago.”
             “It’s the job,” said Paw sorrowfully.
             “How do we get from this Ge’at to the House?”
They returned to Da-conan for the night, resolved upon a day of wandering around (if it didn’t snow again) followed by the 17.09, which, they noted, had the decency not to get to Ge’at until 6.40.  Did it pause for a rest, did it just dawdle?  They suspected, rightly, that the view would be mostly trees. 
Thirteen hours of train, in which to sleep, read-up, watch the changing landscape (has to change eventually)  and catch up on email. Taza had gone silent so Baz decided to wake him up.
Baz to Taja: Was Narulis ever associated with the sea, particularly in Van-senok?  Thinks: earth/sea, two halves of Whole.
Taja: Diligent cats if somewhat wayward…Yes. The prince of water.
Baz: Meaning unity?
Taja: Yes.  Fidubi are/were called the People of the Sea.
Baz: We went and saw the western ocean.  Had thoughts.
Taja: You have never seen the sea?
Baz: Not after the Viledeen.  Did Narulis meet her?
Taja: !!! Yes. You – went – Viledeen?
Baz: Bloody amazing.  Enter, who can?
Taja: I understand, he said drily, the level of experience may be different.  The Cult attempted desecration.
Baz: Read that bit, lacerated corpses.
Taja: No comment.  Have you seen the Fortress?
Baz: Eek, no.  They knew about us, then, Fidub, before Narulis, I mean.  Got this far.
Taja: Or we got that far!  Not sure egg/chicken.
Baz: ‘There are many Fidubi artefacts in the museum at Car-sandis.’  Not sure that’s the important bit.   Shit, missed the museum.  Must be on-line.
Taja: Not in Vaconik?
Baz: On a choo-choo.
OK, museums Vaconik.  The National.  Why do I think that does not mean the nation of Kadun.  The National is the preserve of Van-senok’s historic.  Baz entered ‘Fidub’ in the search-box.  Woo-hoo! Of course there would be zillions of entries, silly of me.  Narrow it down.  Sea-faring? Why would they have sea-fared?  Turn south-east and start walking.  Riding.  Probably quicker. ‘Contact with Fidub.’    ‘During the Sirenian – ‘ the what? Quick detour. 
“The Si-turnit dynasty ruled Van-senok between 5903 and 6427.  They were overthrown by Sibenis za-fenan.  Marula’s lot.  I didn’t know that!”
Paw said: “What was the grouse?”
“Hang on…Slightly weird.  ‘The Sirenians occupied – conquered is too strong a word given that these regions were almost entirely uninhabited – ‘ Conquerors would say that.  “ – much of the north of what is now Var-sega’ and the north-west of what is now Vaudos.’  What is now?”
“We’ve always known the borders shifted a lot.”
“Za-fenan’s crew saw that as a dilution of earthpower, the strength of which lay in the trees. Actually wasn’t what I.”  He flipped back.  “Oh, double yikes.”  He silently passed the phone to Paw.
“As you say….”
‘This pair of exquisite silver dolphins was a gift from Fidub to the Suzerain of Van-senok.  Fidubi sailed the length and breadth of the continent but never settled in Van-senok, as they did further south, doubtless finding the climate not to their taste.’ 
“All right, all right!”
“You do just have to wonder exactly what they made of Narulis.”
“Wonder a lot of things.  If they were gung-ho for the integrity of their borders.”
“Empire fixed the borders?”
“Fidubi settlements in Var-sega’?”
They felt a bit subdued themselves: there’s such a hell of a lot we don’t know. At least it’s all ancient history.  See how Mel’s Place is doing.
 
BAZ: One or two.  There are four of them, right.  Between them, they turned that house into a zoo.  Essa, that’s Sarat’s dad, said fine, you’re the keepers.  How that house works is really pretty much the same as the hill. Run by cubs responsible for supplies. If in normal usage by sensible people they ran out of loo paper then cubs had to zip to the Megamart. Since we only train people who can count, that did not happen.  Sarat used the entire stock of kitchen roll looking after rabbits with the squits and he and his mate Petrush had to do the zipping.  Of course Tar only has the two of them.  Essa had four and then Mel and Hass in the summer and all their little friends. When they were all little it was simply nice family meals.  Then they got sick with adolescence, fridge-raiders.  Essa put his foot down pdq. They were capable of going to shops.  They could order on-line.  They could fend for themselves. They were given own larder and fridge and told to sort it.  And bloody well clean up after themselves. Sarat and Hass had a NoZone meeting to go to.  Sarat was talking. He’s good at that.  Somehow they just didn’t have time.  They did pile everything up as a sort of concessionary gesture.  You know how kids do.  That’ll be all right…Essa and Baya were entertaining unexpectedly. They did not appreciate the state of their kitchen.  Sarat got a right bollocking when he got back.  You have a phone.  You are capable of utterance.  He was still bleeding next morning.  Got him a plaster.
ME: Think a lot of people see this as Army too, meaning men.  A few ladies here doesn’t change that.
HASS: The fate of the skagga appears to have passed to me.  Whether I am able to bear that terrible burden is another matter.  The skagga’s basic problem in life is that it’s so stupid it bears its young in open land, where they promptly get eaten.
CANTILIP: I started to type the same with us, of course.  We in Van-senok do not bear our young in open land where they promptly get eaten  Where are supposed to be jet-setting to!  Especially with the plague-pits of Vaudos in the way.  I have been to Dabida and Fidub a couple of times, but what an appalling journey.  As it happens I did it by scheduled flights.  Can’t make it any quicker.  In the City of course there’s now a price on our heads.  Mummy’s put a fortune into Sardun.  I have to say what by most people’s standards is a fortune remains, largely I think for the reason given by Hass.  We don’t bloody spend it.  I bought a new sofa last month and indeed it was an extremely expensive sofa but conspicuous consumption is notably not my scene.
SEANI: Baz and Paw of course are Sarat’s cats.  Been with him for ever.
Fishing, Seani, fishing.
GALLIA:  Sorry, think I’ve been thick here.
BAZ:  Just conceivable there are naughty people in Azt who think the world would be better without a dynamic media-savvy radical doesn’t give a fart about dumbfuck crap Anile heir who happens to look like a movie-star.
Huge numbers of splutters of laughter off-line. 
SEANI:  That could well be.  Indeed that is the Sarat we all know and love.  But the skagga!  The ozone layer!  These appear gravely neglected of late.
AGOU: We have to confess our curiosity is piqued.  May we ask what kind of ‘dumbfuck crap’?
QINE: No servants?  I find that hard to believe, though as I say I have comrades in Zur who back it up..
MEL: Cubs, colts, trainees, as said.  Who had no hesitation in telling us to take a running jump if we got stupid.  And ahem the sheepdog, the business about public versus private.  Official/unofficial.  If it’s official, colts help out wait at table and we just have to hope they don’t spill the soup.
HASS: I think self-starting is the jargon.  The point is to make us fully functioning human beings, not dependent.  A sort of cosy basic training making damn’ sure we know how the world of ordinary people works and can function in it. Clothes have to be laundered.  Dishes have to be washed. 
Varulin choked with laughter.  My mum used to say but he didn’t post exactly what his mum used to say because Hass is gay.  His mum used to say there are no flipping kitchen-fairies.
AKADUNNCO.  Sounds to me like you lads were brought up proper.  My mum used to say there’s no kitchen-elves, no litte elves magicking the dishes.
YMOU: I think any parent who has experienced those suffering from the appalling disease of adolescence knows there are no elves of any kind, kitchen, bedroom, sitting-room.
VARNA: So Sarat can do the washing-up with the best of them.  Take out the trash, give the place a good spring-clean.
 
Now Varna don’t be naughty.  Videos travel fast.
 
BAZ:  If you want to be literal, he can fill and empty a dish-washer.
 
They were roused at 3 by soldiers whose apparent demeanour was we’re sure everyone’s a good guy, but we do just check: you are now entering Var-sega’ you are from where and your business here is what? They had decided that, if anyone asked, the best story was the closest to the truth: seems to us we can dawdle  south. Had business in Van-senok and a couple of days free, never been this far west before, thought we’d dawdle back south, look around, change at Ge’at.  Their pretty little passports were handed back to them with a smile.  OK, you don’t arrive in Ge’at raring to go after an uninterrupted night’s sleep.  Guess you get used to it, grunt and go back to sleep.  Waaa! said Baz as they passed through sheer snowy peaks illuminated by the light from the train.  Shit, we must be going straight through the middle of the Lausanine.  Total freaking awe, said Baz after a while.  As they emerged into rolling and occasionally steep grassland, the sun began to rise. This soon gave way to the less prepossessing outskirts of Ge’at.
“Industrial,” said Baz.
“Leave it to the heavy mob,” said Paw.  “Fidubi citizens arrested trying to gatecrash factory!” 
“‘We were just trying to take a quick look at the conditions for Sarat,’ said Paw, 43.”
“This looks the kind of place Mitch was talking about.  If you stray to where the workers live.”
They found a page reviling conditions in Ge’at’s slums, but it didn’t say where they are in relation to the town-centre.  It did, however, name a street: Finskit Lane.  They found it on the map.
             “Car-hire time, I think.”
             There was an Information Centre at Ge’at Station.  Paw picked up a random selection of leaflets.
             It was not possible to hire a car. Take a taxi, she suggested, rank just outside.
             “Bicycles?” suggested Paw.  “We’re strangers. Just want to look around town.”
             She seemed to think that was a rather suspicious thing to do, but admitted you could hire bikes.  Bosen’s Cycles, just round the block.
             “What,” asked Paw outside, “does that tell you about the average income of the arriver?”
             “Hmm. 
             They chose a route and cautiously set off.  Heavy traffic did not appear to be one of Ge’at’s problems and soon they were free-wheeling through a residential though not impoverished area.  It began to get run down.  The houses were less cared for; everything was less cared-for.  Pieces of old newspapers flapped in the gutters.  There was a smell of drains.  Sacks of garbage and miscellaneous domestic detritus, an old bedstead, lined the pavements.  They passed the high brick wall topped with barbed wire of a factory.  Yeah, we’re really going to get in there.  A banner along the wall proclaimed it VInin Associates – Plastics.  Round the next corner boys were kicking a ball around in the street. 
“Look where you’re bleeding going,” they shouted.
“Mind where you’re bleeding kicking,” retorted Baz.
He thought the ball was aimed at them but they had whizzed out of reach.
They had passed a girl of about 12 or 13 with a sacking shopping-bag who did not look warm, but since middle-aged men surround a young girl and demand what she’s wearing only if they’re very serious indeed about getting arrested if not beaten to a pulp by the throng summoned by her screams they hadn’t stopped or even slowed.  They would have liked to try out the Three Turnips, which offered food, but reckoned the risk of getting their bikes nicked too great.  Got to be some kind of grocery store around here, one of us can stay outside with the steeds.  Another factory, this time garment-manufacture, an ironmonger’s, some of his wares displayed in boxes on the pavement.  Since he stood in the doorway to make sure they didn’t steal anything, Paw took the initiative and said he was just window-shopping, what he really wanted was a spanner for the bike.  The man scrutinized the wing-nuts and said he had just the job.  Paw followed him in observed all that enabled this quarter of Ge’at to continue functioning: meticulously labelled drawers and boxes of every size of screw, nail, drill-heads, paintbrush, shiny pots of paint, though you could only have black or white, rollers, paint-trays, turps, pliers, hammers, screwdrivers, chemicals to unblock sinks and drains, paraffin stoves, ladders, and nor was this all for in a small yard behind the shop was a small amount of timber: window-frames and doors and some planks labelled SHELVES CUT TO SIZE.  Baz asked if there was store nearby, maybe get a bit of bread and cheese.  They could get a loaf and a decent bit of Canardan at Bentifil’s.  If they’d a mind for something hot, get a good pie at Creggie’s.  The dread question: not from round here of course.They had not been able to think of a good excuse for being in Ge’at, one that would check out, so had settled for something like the truth.  Had some business in Van-senok.  Never been that far west before.  Thought we’d take the opportunity.  Ge’at’s where the train comes so we came here.  Better places to see, he said, you want to go south, Miranavit, train’ll take you. 
They pedalled on and came to Creggie’s.  There was a large red and white sign in the window.  NO RAT.  BEST BEEF ONLY with a picture of a bull with a ring through his nose.  Ah-ooh.  Paw discreetly took a pic while pretending to fiddle with holding the bikes.
Baz emerged with in one hand two  paper bags, one containing two steaming square meat pies and one he held up proclaiming, “Chundil, local food, gotta try it. Veggie pie, leek, carrot, tomato, turnip, onion.” In the other hand were four sheets of kitchen roll which were apparently paper napkins in Ge’at and two plastic forks  They thought they’d eat away from Creggie’s watchful gaze; Paw had located a patch of green on the map. 
             Baz carefully lifted the lid off his meat pie, and grinned.  He pinioned a cube of meat, chewed for a moment, and grinned more.  “Got it.  It’s good meat.  There’s just not a lot of it. Four small cubes in mine.  Need spoons for the gravy.”
             They finished eating.
             “So far,” Paw pronounced, “as bang for your buck goes, the chundil has it by a direnta.  Bulging.  But if you want to think you’ve eaten a meat meal I recommend the pie.”
 
CARIE: Labour-saving things like dish-washers.  Course a lot of people can’t afford them.  The other thing is it doesn’t occur to the men anyone needs them.  Got a dish-washer, haven’t they, two-legged one.
VARIOUS:   Owwwwww!
Qine to Carie: Think that was a direct hit.
Carie:  Might just get the hang of this.
GALLIA: Would you say that applies to just about everything, vacuums, washing-machines.
CARIE: Yeah.  Yes.  And of course it’s all women’s work.  Lads say, oh we do the heavy stuff, like you need real muscle to fix a plug.  Nothing light about wet sheets.
QINE: Something else too, and I think this applies to rich and poor alike.  What was said about Sarat, had something on.  I would think there are many families in Kadun, the lad has summat  to do, naturally the lasses prop him up.  If he’s rich, it’s servants.  If he’s poor, it’s his mum and his sisters.  What women are for, supporting men.
Carie: Not so bad yourself.
GALLIA: So would you say it’s how boys are brought up, to just assume they’re more important?
AKADUNNCO: Not making excuses for anyone but I think there’s stuff here not quite what it looks like.  My lass, she’s 14 and right bright.  She wants to get on and I want her to get on.  There’s a phrase she got off the Grid, she says to me, Dad I know there’s a glass ceiling.  But it’s more than that.  Too young to understand.  Says her teachers are holding her back.  We do keep our girls down, there’s no denying.  Course some of it’s just prejudice.  Point is, where we are, lass gets anywhere near the top, she’s going to run into them.  Want to do politics, love?  Just run the flower-show.  We’ll do anything to protect our girls and **** what it looks like.
FRINSI: Carlin, sister of one of the guys at Vobin.  Army brats the pair of us, grew up all over, just as it was asll starting.  I really hate to say this but the Cult aren’t stupid.  They don’t spend the whole time doing horror.  What I’m trying to say is they manipulate, they play on existing prejudices.  If you’re in a group of people with certain attitudes, you don’t push it, you don’t argue, because you don’t know.
KARULA: I think that is a real important point.  I was taught from an early age, you do not speak freely to people you do not know and trust.
FRINSI: I think there are two things.  It makes for silent women, but also – don’t know what the word is exactly.  Cliques.  As opposed to CLIKS!  Same thing really.  Small groups of people talking together, no open dialogue.
SORVAN:  Army, bloody Tjulsit.  Again, not making excuses for garbage but what he does about the house, it is more important than what she does when it keeps the flipping place standing.  Unsafe housing, spot on, and what makes it possible to live in the bloody place, the work the lads do.  Tell you one example I know, windows were totally warped.  Would she rather lift wet sheets or have a nice icy blast roaring in on their kids?
SIMUL: Of course this array of spoiled striplings of the privileged classes can hardly be expected to understand that.  Really what filthy nonsense this all is.  No-one would deny the existence of poverty in Kadun.  Naturally we do our utmost to alleviate it.
SORVAN: Poor people haven’t noticed.  Funny, that.
MITCH: Who is ‘we’ in your post?
SIMUL: We the solid phalanx of the middle-classes, the backbone of Kadun, who actually work for a living.  I myself am a tutor at the Grindalsat Collegium.
MITCH:  And you do what to alleviate poverty?
SIMUL: I teach the children of the working-classes mathematics.  My partner organizes trips for them to the countryside.
MITCH: Honourable pursuits.
SIMUL: That is not the point.  You, my lord Var-sega’, what do you do?
At little hard to say just at this second. 
MITCH: At this moment I freely avow little beyond sit at a keyboard.  However, I have described the work I have been doing and it is my contention, or I should not have undertaken the job, that that work was vital to laying the foundations for a future Kadun.  With due respect to the work of you and your partner, I contend also that vital to individual lives as work such as yours is, an entire overall of society is required to nail the problem at its root.  I think I may say that many others beside you have attempted piecemeal solutions, the unions, my family indeed (my grandfather set up many hospitals) but I thnk we can agree that to make people better is inadequate if they return to cold, damp and dangerous housing.
SIMUL: That at least sounds honest, if somewhat deluded.  How can such a overall change be effected?  You envisage the working-classes rising in revolt perhaps!  Have you ever met a working-class person?
MITCH: Yes.  Several.  They tore my balls off when I was 17, resulting in my current politics.
SIMUL: That sounds extremely honest!
MITCH: I was taken to slums.  The residents refused to believe my father could do nothing.  The reason he could and can do nothing is the sacred right of property.  I think we may agree that certain laws are a joke, in any case toothless, but when upheld upheld against for example the sole proprietor, the samal man.  The big fish are never touched.
ASDINAN: My cousin Mardis ran a soup-kitchen in Azt.  I think we might also be talking about degrees of poverty.  Perhaps the conditions wherever you are yes, bad, but nowhere approaching the horrors of the slums of Azt.  And pretty much what Mitch said.  Mard saw right from the start, no point in yelping, you just get squashed.
SIMUL: Perhaps indeed I have been too quick to judge.  That indeed was also an honourable pursuit!  But you plan communalist revolution? A little hard to think of you destroying the rights of property, though of course undoubtedly there are abuses.
Either this is completely innocent or very clever.  Keep those ears flapping.
MITCH: I think we must differentiate between communalism and common decency.  I do not think any landlord in the south upholds the right to let property evidently unfit for habitation.
SIMUL: I see something here about a ‘Law of Limited Returns’.  That is perhaps not communalism, but I do not see Var-sega’ or Carlin surrendering their tenants.
ASDINAN: That goes back to what Mitch said about the sacred rights of property.  So long as Saryulin and people who think like us own the land  and refuse to sell, no - covert inroads can be made into Carlin.  It’s too too easy to think of fronts for the Cult sliming in, buying up piecemeal, before we know it, it’s an infestation.    As I understand it, sure Mitch will correct me, the difference in Var-sega’, why they’ve got slums in places like Tjulsit, we never got urbanized, industrialized like they did.  Don’t think even Car-sandis quite counts as a city.  Niyian, Gatrenol, Tecisan, they’re bustling commercial centres, but Carlin historically a) didn’t need heavy industry because of its proximity to the Azt region and b) was too busy feeding the rest of Kadun to bother. 
MITCH: Ah, the lush green pstures of Carlin!  As a matter of pure geography of course, only the lowlands stretching down to the Archipelago are fertile lands.  Much of us is mountainous or merely hilly and of course used for grazing.
SIMUL: All very interesting.  May I ask what in the current situation happens to Carlin’s produce?
ASDINAN:  That’s a fun one.  Increased trade with Dabida and Fidub. They say we’re revolutionizing the Fidubi diet.  AMI acting as middleman.  They can or freeze it and export it to Var-sega’ and Van-senok.  The surplus we dump gratis on Vaudos.  Serious, we will not be compromised by taking Cult money, but we odn’t actually want vaudosi to starve, so the squished, the curling, the yellow at the edges we dump in the plague-pits, if only to fee the cattle.  Of course Vaudos has plenty of fertile land of its own.
SIMUL: So if Carlin merely burned her surplus, Vaudos would be the worse for it.
SITSIN: That seems to me clever.  I mean if the farmer were all owners they’d have to take money.
SIMUL: Strangely it strikes me as not dissimilar to communalism: instead of the State owning the produce of the land, the San-yaega-bahts do.
CANTILIP:        Aaaaargh!  No, no, no!  Some of us call it the Fidubi scam.  The Cult landed on our west coast.  We failed to push them back into the sea.  We drove them east.  Perhaps I should fill in a few gaps.  Narulis did not arrive in Carlin to find irturbi passive under the heel of tyranny!  He arrived to find Kadun in a state of war.  His general position appears to have been is this a private war or can anyone join in.  The armies of west and east met broadly in the middle.
ASDINAN: That’s the broad picture.  To colour it in a bit, it’s more that all hell was breaking out in the west/ - literally - and rumour reached us in Carlin, people fleeing east to escape ye foe.  The second time it was because the Anile Court turned rotten.  This current infestation is more complicated.  There are three strands.  Industrialization and a poorly educated and plain poor population of workers to prey on.  Technology, spreading the word.  Behind both: apparently limitless capital from the banks in the City.  They snare people.  With sex, with drugs, with the promise of power for the powerless.  I know someone who answered some grubby little ad pretending to be a working-class guy.  He doesn’t know if it was Cult or not, being wise enough to get out before he found out, but it was all there, women at your disposal, promises of wealth and power. 
NONTIA-LI:  Hi guys, I’m Vasuculi, heard this was worth a look and wow, what do I find!  I’m reckoning if anyone can answer my question it’s you guys.  Why is Kadun susceptible to the Cult.  With all due respect, it seems to me there must be a vulnerability in this earthpower.  It doesn’t take any great knowledge of human nature to know that if people do not fight the bad guys take over but it has been emphatically stated earthpower is not pacifist.
CANTILIP:  The doctrines of the Cult are a foul inversion of earthpower.  Earthpower holds everything is in some sense alive, has energy, the Cult holds everything is in some sense dead, is inert, or if it isn’t now it will be.  Death is the one true reality of existence.  All life is to be lived in fear of death and if you’re not afraid of death the Cult will rectify that.  The torments they inflict in life will be yours to enjoy for eternity.  The relationship between that and inertia is not immediately apparent: what is inert is you.  You have no will, no choice, no hope.  Certainly earthpower is non-aggressive: we do not seek war.  Certainly it is not pacifist.  What one may call the vulnerability lies in the doctrine of being.  In earthpower, people simply are, at one with the universe.  This loss of self is perverted by the Cult into submission to its will, deemed co-terminous with the reality of the universe. 
NONTIA-LI: I thank you.  I am learning so much!  But how can any sane person believe you spend life after death in agony?  I personally would not be sure I believe in life after death at all, but I sure think that if I did it would be a field of flowers.
CANTILIP:  Evil grin.  What, not Va, the Silver Homeland?
NONTIA-LI: More Fidubi scam?
CANTILIP: We can be detached and academic about this or we can scream.  It’s a very simple scam.  When the empire was good it was Fidubi.  When it was evil, it was irturbi. 
MEL: And of course what the good guys in Kadun believe and think is what Fidub believes and thinks.
CANTILIP: !!!!
MEL: My innocent Dabidan mind was severely jolted by Carlin.
ASDINAN: Evillest grin.
MEL: The essence of what the Cult teaches is that people are filth. You will see that going around  merely telling people they are filth is not the most obvious way to win followers.  For that you need to refer back to what As said about sex and drugs.  By corrupting people you can get them to see themselves as filth.  By terrorizing them, you can get them to do filthy things.  Filth deserve punishment.  If I can just correct one thing Cantilip said, in the more - I use the term advisedly - diseased reaches of the adept’s brain it is possible to escape eternal pain by begging for ever greater torment.  At a certain level of self-abasement, not surprisingly ill-defined, one is released and subsumed into the Great Master.
             ASDINAN: Going back to what Cantilip said, it’s actually quite complicated, isn’t it.  Kadun sort of half thinks the opposite.  I’ll make sense in a minute!  What I’m getting at is lo our glorious empire, Narulis, symbol of the true Kadun.  Nobody thinks of Narulis as some Fidubi interloper.
             CANTILIP: Point taken!  That said, we weren’t quite so sure here in the west.  Did you know that when Narulis reached the borders of Van-senok we refused to let him in?  He carried the Flame.  Trees don’t like flames. 
            MEL: To some irturbi at least, he typed cautiously, the Fidubi belief-system was simply a particular kind of earth-power.   The archaeological evidence is fascinating.  Goes back to forever.  There’re Fidubi pottery, coins, weapons in the museum in Car-sandis and equally there’s a whole gallery in the National at M-P devoted to irturbi artefacts from the Utmost Isle.
            ASDINAN: Of course we’re sea-farers here in Carlin and Fidub meant everything to us, first landfall after the endless ocean, sign we were nearly home. 
            MEL: The lighthouse at Bela Point is said to be the oldest in the world.  That’s on the Utmost Isle.  There’s still a sort of travellers’ rest there but nowadays most major shipping goes on to the port at Famita on the Leolisle.  That’s everything from passenger liners to the Kadun Fleet.  Of course if they’re based in the west they stop off with us in Zur, in Batna-kri, in Wintawa.
            AFALIN: Wow, basically!  I mean I’m Fidubi and even I don’t quite think how old Fidub is. Here’s a pic I just found.  Isn’t that totally amazing.  Obviously it must have been renovated, electricity installed, but it doesn’t look renovated! Before electricity, they must have constantly tended fires.
            CANTILIP: You must therefore have met our Fleet.
            MEL: Sure, and the guys at Stok-chasit, Birindit and Insalta.
            ASDINAN: Mel’s been coming to Carlin since he was 10, it would be weird if he hadn’t.  The really fun bit is the Zur electoral roll.  Yes, there are Sybs, and I don’t mean my cousin Sarsh.  Half Zur must be descended from Jaizal’s army.
            CANTILIP: Var-sega’ of course has close ties with Vasucula and we with Ciletij.
             NONTIA-LI: Sure, I know many segani
…
 
I wonder….The ferries run nearly all night in the summer.  I grinned to myself.  Sarat would know.  Sarat probably still knows, underneath the avalanche of further fact that must have crowded his brain.  If they haven’t changed the timetables of course, which they almost certainly have.  I logged on and looked up the exotically named Fidubi Ferries while composing a letter in another part of my brain, which went something like, Dear Tet, I understand that I appeared with a good reference!  I mean you value Hass’s views and he thought I ought to talk to you and I’m not saying it would have been different if I’d appeared off my own bat (bat-wings?) but – but what, Fal?  There was a ferry in an hour which I could catch if I moved it, and one back at about 5 in the morning, which suited what I had in mind just fine. I ought to be able to create an absolutely soothing, silent and safe atmosphere in my own den of course, but I hadn’t.  I couldn’t go to Zur’s shrine, too many people would recognize me.
 
So of course the first person I saw was Vax.  He gave a quick yelp of laughter. 
“I have travelled many leagues,” I said, “lit and fig.  Whether I’ve got anywhere is something else.”
“I look in from time to time,” he said.  “I hear things in our island fastness, you know.”
“Maybe one corner of the puzzle is complete.”
“I’m around.”
There’s a café  for when you need to eat  and the party is in the basement if you want to talk  I didn’t want to eat or talk.
Carlin just thinks it’s old.   Did Narulis ever sit here?  No, why would he, he was young, adventurous, a sea-farer – so maybe he went to sea to escape from a broken heart!  If Sarat failed, if he were ever driven out of Kadun – where on earth did that thought come from?  It had to work, it had to.  With very little encouragement I could work myself back into a state wherein it was dependent upon me to make it but no, that had never been exactly.  If everyone didn’t do their utmost that would be a betrayal of Sorg.  The thought sat more easily now that I had defined my utmost and set it in motion. The pillars the colour of damp sand, intricately carved, just a little bit crumbly, shimmered in the candle-light.   I looked more closely and cocked my head. Were those letters?  If so it was no language I knew.  I closed my eyes and no, it wasn’t a time-slip, just an awareness of time, of waves of time, past, present and future, which I suppose is another way of saying the bloody Whole. No, that hadn’t been what I meant, Sarat hadn’t been what I mean, when they did fail, when they returned to Fidub, they must have come here to recover.  All times are now.   I might just as well have been some Fidubi wench from aeons past.  It was easy to be like that here.   I am sitting in a pale-green tunic – well, at least it wasn’t crimson corrugated iron, but I guess that’s part of the bloody Whole too.  I surrendered myself because here I am safe.  The shadows came but could not touch me, not here, shadows trying to blot out the light.  ‘They came, the skull-faces, but we laughed.’  I didn’t laugh, I just went on sitting.  Somewhere it seemed Vax was saying, “And what does Hass say?” and I almost looked round before I realized the conversation was in my head.  “I have to stop,”  I replied.  “I just stopped.”  I did laugh then.  Because it was all so funny.  It never works when you try to put words to what is – the messes people get into, that’s OK, but people being killed, people in pain: It is all so funny.  That makes more sense, the bloody gurgle of cosmic laughter.  Inside.  That’s the point.  It is inviolate.  It is untouched.  It is real? And all the human crap is not real, but we are human and have to be human.  I knew enough to know better minds than mine had lurched at this one, but that is the balance.  I had a sudden image of myself on – not exactly a tightrope, because it wasn’t much more than knee-high and it wasn’t that there was no safety net, the trouble was on the contrary that nets to catch me if I fell abounded, catch and trap me, but I was skimming along, easy-peasy.  Suddenly I felt sure the rope was going to break but no, I told myself, and it didn’t.  Yet.  Suddenly it snapped.   This, I thought, is not totally unfamiliar but this time I know what to do!  I threw myself clear of the nets.  I didn't seem any the worse for wear but I was sure I was somewhere else, thought it didn’t seem to be anywhere.  Despite this mental circus-act, I was feeling very lazy, very relaxed.  I suppose very safe.  I wanted to stretch out and found myself another cushion.  There were a few other people around but they too were lost in their own little mental worlds. I wondered about other people’s pain, grief, fear (that makes a change, huh?) and where it went.  I mean, I had no doubt that some of the people here were as distraught and devastated as I had been but it sort of melts away.  Because it isn’t real.  I sighed.  OK, so let me in this safe place ask myself what the hell is my problem with reality, but it really didn’t seem to matter.  Maybe that’s the only way to look at it, casually, creep up on it unawares.   The central fact of my life is – oh, do I have one of those? A determining fact of my life is that once I was in Azt – what?  Unreal is such an unhelpful word.  No, my relationship with Tet didn’t seem unhappy or boring or even not what I wanted, it just didn’t seem real.  And Tet is not a wishy-washy person.  It was just – somewhere else.  Like everything else is right now, which might just tell me something important if I only knew what.  There is a crossed wire, a plug in the wrong socket, like – like putting the headphones jack into the power socket. A little mental game came to me, unplugging all the major connections – like I knew what they were or anything, but just pulling out any plug I could see!  And Hass would say, I said to myself sleepily, just leave all the loose ends alone, don’t try to figure which should go where.  I can’t honestly say that this little exercise made me feel the slightest bit different, but I did drift into that really nice waking dreams state – is it alpha rhythms, can’t remember – and had a really nice though not remotely revealing, so far as I could see, trip.  I came to eventually, blinking and reflected that – possibly – spending the night with myself on the floor of the shrine at Maona-pri counted as my most insane act yet.  Thirsty.  Where is the caff?  I got up and looked around.  Half-open door with light on, that must be it.  It wasn’t very much lighter, the sort of people who want a drink in the middle of the night don’t want to walk into a blaze of neon, and much as described by Lattic, benches with cushions on and broader benches in front of them to serve as tables, and really rather strange lamps on each table, like mini-inverted chandeliers which, Lattic had said enthusiastically, give you enough light to read by without disturbing the ambience, which was pale pink; the walls were pale pink, and there were paintings which looked rather good, even in the half-light.   [The loos, I discovered, were pale pink too, everything including the bowl, with good paintings, and well lit.  There was a rather gorgeous one of a tree in bud.  I wondered if I could get a reproduction.  Somehow I had no doubt these were originals.  I didn’t think the shrine lacked funding and I wondered.]  Behind the counter a middle-aged man with a bushy beard was engrossed in a book. There was a water dispenser.  I drank thirstily.  There was a solid wall of books, vids and disks cunningly illuminated by under the shelf lighting.  Lattic had raved about this.  I made my way to the counter. The guy looked up and said hi.
Hi, I said.
Hunger? Thirst?
Hot drink?
Anything in particular?  You will be amazed at our range!
I looked around.  I shall?
Under the counter. 
Lemongrass?
Come to think of it, I thought, right this moment, I could do with apple-stock!  I wondered if I actually could or whether that was me tweeting Carlin at me.
And ginger?
And I’ve suddenly realized I’m ravenous!
Do you an omelette?
That would be brilliant!  Thank you!
Give you a shout when it’s ready.
The laughter gurgled up from somewhere
You shout here?
Didn’t you notice the juke-box?
I grinned and wandered over to the books.
The Illusion of Time.  That sounded a bit heavy, a bit theoretical.  Why Am I Here?  You pick that out wondering where is here.  Here turned out to be the universe.  Something a bit more local, I think.  Why is a Zuri in the shrine at Maona-Pri in the middle of the night?  This enchanting collection of meditation music from the Age of Calpedene.  The what?  Oh, it’s the name of the performers.  You don’t call yourselves The Age of Calpedene unless there was an Age of Calpedene.  Slap your wrist, Fal, you should have paid more attention to Fidubi history in school.   I could certainly try that one, my place could just do with enchanting music and indeed there were headphones and a drive to try it with.  Oh yes, oh this is gorgeous.  All I need now is something to read while listening to the enchanting music – er, do you buy, do you borrow, do you donate?  Oh, right, a sort of ledger with a pen tied to it.  The box for donations is in the wall to your left.  We ask you to write the title of anything you take so we can keep stocks complete.  That’s simple enough.  I continued browsing.  Put The Light On!  Why are you so darned unhappy?  So life has dealt you a lousy hand.  You are in charge.  I think I’m going to like this… Eternal Flame: A History of the Shrine at Maona-Pri.  I picked up a vid, Treasures of Maona-Pri, while I was at it. Who are You and What Do You Want?  That sounded – pertinent.   Death: It’s All One Continuum.  That was definitely going to engross me, but not one for reading in a caff, even this caff.   When the chef brought my omelette I asked him if he was one of the mentors and he confessed he was.  I felt suddenly shy but came out with it anyway.  My partner died and I had a sort of experience with what might have been his – ghost.  Some people said it was projection.  I have talked about this, I mean.  I wondered is – there anything you can recommend.  Anyone saying anything sensible about – that sort of thing.  Oh you poor girl, you, he said.  I felt immediately swaddled in love.  Oh I see, I said, that’s what you do.  He cocked an eyebrow.  People can say anything, everything because they’re safe and warm and cosy and smothered in love.  That’s about the size of it, he said.  Whom have you talked to, may I ask.  I sighed.  Hass. Hasiyata Talal.  His lips twitched.  And you want a – second opinion?  I’ve had second opinions, third, tenth, I said.  I think I’d like some kind of – overview.  That’s a good one, he said firmly, pointing to Death: It’s All One Continuum.  Let’s see now, hope we’ve got one…We do try and keep everything in stock…There we are!  He triumphantly produced a small cream paperback entitled Matters of Life and Death. Your dinner’s getting cold.  Unless you want to talk.  Thank you very much.  No, I said.  But I’d better…I gestured at the ledger.  You eat, he said.  I’ll write!  Thank you, I said again.
After a while I went back to my cushions then got up and walked slowly up to the Flame.  It rather seemed to me that I saw things in it, sparks and flashes, but I rather prosaically put that down to tiredness, except I couldn’t stop looking.  ‘Love and cannot leave,’ I said to myself softly. I looked up at the Window THAT AM I and an incredible collage of starburst and flame but – rather prosaically – I guess I’d disconnected again – what had me really gaping was the structure of the Window, its divisions, though the images were different. Yes, well, I’d seen that before; so that’s where the Dacunine Window comes from. 
I was just thinking time I was mooching off when the first rays of sun hit the centre of the starburst, were refracted.  Yikes!  It was as though the whole shrine had been set alight. 
A voice behind me full of laughter said simply, “Good, isn’t it.”
“Is there music in the glass?” I asked.
Just laughter.
I turned to face the stranger.  He was a tall, thin, elderly guy, slightly stooped, now looking at me with frank curiosity.
“The lady knows Carlin.”
“Oh,” I said, “the lady knows Carlin!”
The lady, I thought to myself, has just found another – project.  Ancient history! 
I got home, said good morning to Benji, told her my night’s activities, swallowed some strong coffee and set to thinking about – oh what a cliché – making my house a home.  Then I went to bed, though I didn’t sleep, but did another session of pulling out those mental plugs, an endeavour which seemed to me suddenly as important as regular physical exercise.
…
I went back to the Grid-site of the shrine. There were all the obvious soothing things for people who were feeling frazzled, art, music, dance, poetry, gardening.  There was a series of talks on things like The Window and The Building and another on what I suppose you could broadly call current affairs insofar as they impinged on the shrine or the shrine on them – give or take 1500 years.  The Shrine and the First Anile Empire.   That I have to hear.  Alas, as is usually the way when you come across a really interesting event on the Grid, you’ve missed it.  How about ‘When did the Modern Age begin?  What defines it?’  I put a mental half-tick against that one.   Then there was a section called The Inner Journey.  Self and Other.  Love and Power.  Form and Essence.  There was a section called simply Help which said the mentors can be reached 24/7 and how so to do.  Interestingly, I thought, the Study page mostly just said the same, but it also said there was a retreat house on the Leolisle.  My immediate reaction was rather that I’d done a lot of retreating and advancing was more what I had in mind, but I read on.  Somewhere between a first-class hotel and mental survival training.  You leave behind your family, your friends, your mobile, your netbook, your books, your magazines, your music, your anything you can escape from yourself into and learn to live with yourself.  You don’t even talk to anyone, except the mentors, presumably when after 24 hours you’re climbing the walls.  The menu is fruit, raw veggies, yoghurt and water.  However, our beautifully appointed rooms…Discomfort is not part of the trip, though you did do your own laundry (and make your own bed and tidy your own room if you wanted your bed made and your room tidied – the guest’s space is sacrosanct.  Be assured no-one else will enter your room from the time you enter it to the time you leave it).  You can stay in bed all day if you like and swim and ride if you don’t.   Yes, but can you paint smudgy sunrises?  Yes, there are many outlets for creative expression…  I have to try this. Hallet’s Cove was so far free of friendly goat-sitters.  Trust your friends.  I mailed Narak and Lattic and asked them if they’d like a holiday in Zur.  Whenever they felt like it, really, no rush. 
 
You didn’t book, just mailed or phoned to let them know you were coming.  I guessed they never turned anyone away even if temporary accommo had to be found in a sleeping-bag rather than a beautifully appointed room and that it was impossible to predict how long people would last out. I did know that although you are of course free to leave at any time you are asked to talk to one of the mentors first. 
 
I turned up.  The house was beautiful.  The diet didn’t bother me.  I didn’t have to stay if the other stuff did. I was a little ambivalent about what it was going to do for me but I supposed I’d find it a soothing and soulful experience.  I think I conceived it as a just slightly more disciplined version of what my life was like already, erasing all the little things that break up a day.  I settled in, nibbled some fruit and went exploring.  I found the Art Room.  There were paper, brushes, and boxes of paints, Oh I see, yes, this is good, what you also don’t have to do is start babbling in semi-explanation, gosh, you know, I haven’t painted since I was a kid, don’t know if I’ll be any good.  I noticed there was also a shredder, presumably if you found your work embarrassingly bad.   There was a slim dark girl about my age who looked up and smiled but of course we didn’t speak.  I started to mix colours until I had a pale pink I was happy with and started to smudge.  Pale pink, pale blue-grey, more a sunset really.  What this needs is a few clouds, pink ones of course.  And how about some land.  Yes, I can cope with that.  Those are fields and hedges, at least if you’re feeling generous.  It’s pretty, though. Flowers in that field, I think, little dabs of red, yellow, purple. It’s something else too. Where’s the stream?  Oh. I suddenly felt a block.   I put Carlin At Sunset aside a minute and stared out of the window.  Well it was therapy, healing, not preparation for my first exhibition. Was there a person in this landscape?  I thought there probably was but I didn’t want to wreck my achievement so far.  I took another piece of paper and dabbed out a human form, gender and identity indeterminate, hair mouse, dress dark green, quite tall, all of which told me nothing. Except not Sorg.  Not Maya.  Not for that matter Tet.  I suddenly laughed and went to find a pencil and a big fat rubber.  I was going to make a total pig’s-ear of this but no-one would ever know.  
When my attempts at drawing Tet, Sorg and  Maya were I thought as good as they were ever going to be, which was lousy but desperately well meant, I sat back and considered that actually this was technique rather than talent.  I just did not know how to get features right.  I could draw something that was clearly meant to be a nose but when I tried to make it a particular nose it evaded my clutches.  I suppose that like monkeys at a keyboard coming up with the BPC if I persevered for long enough by trial and error I’d eventually get it right but the key to my life didn’t lie in teaching myself to draw Maya’s nose and it was time to give up.  I surveyed my works.  My mysterious figure in green, I thought, needed some surroundings.  Damn it, I’m enjoying myself!   But the surroundings didn’t come.  Think I might be arted out for the day.  I guess you just leave - ? I gathered my bits together, wiped down the table and went for a walk in the gardens.  What’s that?  I giggled.  Like in the botanical gardens or the zoo, there were neat discreet boards identifying the growth, just in case you wanted to use what’s that as an excuse to start talking to someone.
I flopped down on the grass only mildly irritated by the perception that somewhere I’d mentally slotted this experience into the box on holiday and therefore given myself permission to do absolutely nothing.  There was the gentle buzzing of insects, the scent of flowers and – and someone standing over me, probably Sorg.  There was of course no-one standing over me, least of all Sorg.  I sighed. And anyone wonders why I like my eso safely behind bars?  Something sort of clicked.  All so vanilla…Yes, well, training in containing the esoteric is not one for the Grid.  Let baby not run before she can walk.  Starting by accepting the poor abused little creature would be good.  All are One.  Some do not know it.  Poor little eso! Love, love, love, love, love…My intellect protested, loudly.  OK, the bloody Whole.  OK, we do past, present and future.  Where in the past, present or future has Sorg stood or will he stand over you in a garden on the Leolisle? I answered back rather feebly, I thought, I don’t know it was Sorg and someone in the future could but as for stand over, stand guard over – whoops. And anyone wonders why I like my eso safely behind bars?   Hang on a minute.  I’d cracked – open?  And the eso roared out in the form of Sorg?  Don’t see how that – shut up a minute, I said to my intellect.  Just see what happens next.  I sank happily into alpha rhythms and a rather delectable moving picture show, places I’d never been and doubted existed to go to, strange, strange scenes of coloured rock and impossible skies, and beings that never existed on this planet.  So this is the connection, this is the trip.
The next 48 hours or so were pretty impossible too.  The most mesmerizing time-slip came as I helped myself to our renowned buffet of garden fruits and Sarat was there, emanating most discordant waves of fury.  Dragged kicking and screaming!  Oh, I think so. 
I am in a fully equipped operating-theatre.  I am under no requirement whatever to function normally.  Let’s just see if this settles down a bit first. 
 
It did a bit but I was under no illusion that I knew how to deal with it. 
 
I picked a female mentor who superficially looked 18 but close-up there were fine lines and was probably I guessed actually about 40.  She had long black hair and a sparkly bandana and she looked as though she might be fun.  Can I talk to you?  Sure, any time.
I’d given myself a bit of time to think how I was going to approach this.  I hadn’t got anywhere, but I’d tried.
“I grew up in Zur with Mel and Hass.  Maya was my best friend.  Some of the – outer aspects of how I ended up here are personal to other people.  I have talked before. To Hass and to Sarat, and to grown-ups!  Amida and Vax.  It’s the inner.  I have a very dodgy relationship with my eso.  I started going to the shrine.  Since then – it’s changed.  And since I’ve been here – time-slips, the lot.  So I thought I just want to talk about the inside.  Then I thought and my problem is what?  I mean – it is engrained in all of us, but you’re not exactly going to ring Glitz.”
She held her hand up to stem the flow of  babble.
“Which one was your lover?”
I sighed.
“Mel.  When both of us were unattached.  Maya. When she was with Sarat.  In neither case remotely turned on.  Later relationships fine.  Hetero.”
“Some people avoid talking about others so as not to appear to blame them.  Some people choose talking about others to avoid talking about themselves, whether or not blaming them.  Some people have a genuine sense of the private.  There’s a question of blame?”
He-elp. 
“That’s a chapter in itself.  It’s not – the – the key relationship doesn’t actually have anything to do with me.  It’s not a relationship I had.  It’s not even a relationship someone I had a relationship with had.”
“So it’s private.”  She nodded understandingly.  “But critical?”
“Sarat and Hass were lovers when they were 15.  There was never any question of Sarat’s being gay.  If they could express their feelings for each other like that. I couldn’t see why Hass and I couldn’t.  I am more recently assured this was an intellectual quest on my part.  Others have put it that the sexual relationship I wanted with Hass didn’t actually have any sex in it. It seems this rather upset the guys’ thinking on love, sex and gender.”
“We have all of us of course understood,” she said smoothly, “that you are all very close.”
I grinned.
“Not that close?  Sarat says now – it was he who was surrendering his boundaries.  Hass was just making love to a guy he loved.”
“Interesting.  When did Mel fit in?”
“After the Hass interlude.  Before I paired with Tet. Then Mel went off to the Schools, Hass met Venga, Sarat and Maya set up house in Zur.”
“And,” very softly, “you all thought you’d live happily ever after?”
“I did,” I said.  “That’s a rather large part of it.  I left Tet and went off with  Sorg San-yaega-baht.  Maya, Hass, Sorg, all frantically eso.  The general idea is I’ll look anywhere but.  There’s one other thing.  Because of my social circle I know about a lot of things that a lot of people don’t.  I know they exist, I mean.  If I refer to them, it’s not I’m claiming to understand them.”
She looked at me thoughtfully.
“D’you mind if I have a go at translating all that?”
“Er – no!  Don’t mind…”
“My intellectual knowledge is way ahead of my actual knowledge and I may be asking things or even wanting to learn things that might just raise an eyebrow.  These people aren’t idiots.  They’re not going to teach me how to put a key in a lock without finding out the whole story – but I don’t want to tell them that, so I hope my excellent references will in some way oil the wheels.”
I giggled.
“I think not exactly.  What I want to know is how to deal with me, how to be me, living in Zur, far from the foe.  What I know about is – what happened to Mitch and Karula, for instance.  I assume – “
“Correct.”
 “No-one else has cracked up, dropped out and taken up goat-farming. Least of all Mitch and Karula.  I’ve just realized – what they’ve been through is more than any of us but of course they’re older.  I  felt insecure compared to my friends, my contemporaries.  That – that I’d somehow failed.  Yesterday I had a time-slip at your renowned buffet of delectable garden fruits.  Sarat was there.  He can’t have been more than 18 and he was livid, that’s the overwhelming impression I got.  Dragged kicking and screaming from his mobile!  Then it came to me that everyone else was fast-tracked because of who they are.  Then I felt I put two and two together – this is the don’t really know what I’m talking about clause –   Tar, Saski, Cho, no-one would have let them within 20 nani of the border if they weren’t able to deal with the Cult.  That’s where the two things overlap.  I think.  I mean, I realize, I think, they all have – an extra layer of protection.”
Unexpectedly she grinned.
“Wise beyond their years.  Indeed.  Goat-farming?”
“I think I’d better give you a potted bio. Mel, Hass, Reakoed, Maitlan, me and Tet were a gang when kids.”  I sighed again.  “AKA the Seismic Six. Maya wasn’t part of it but my best friend anyway.  Tet and I paired.  I was H-W.  I went off to Carlin, then to Azt.  I ran off with Sorg San-yaega-baht.  After Sorg’s murder I crash-landed in Carlin on a back-to-nature kick, cottage, veggies, goat.  I also cracked, though Hass says I didn’t – fill in that in a minute.  I – experienced Sorg’s – ghost for a while.  I was just thinking I might be back if not upright then standing on one leg.  Maya was murdered.  I’d tried immersing myself in the life of Carlin.  I had more questions than answers.  I turned to my friends.  I got one thing straight and came home to Zur.  Currently living alone except for Benji, my goat.  I’ve been through what should I be doing, who am I, what is my name – I’m back to my maiden name –  which is my country. Bandi screened me for the H-W. She said I had a crack which wouldn’t matter unless I was under extreme stress.  I’d grow out of it.  Really, what stress was I going to be under?  I cracked along it instead. I’ve had a time-slip in Zur. That sent me running off to Amida.  I had one in Carlin. Kaminua mistook me for a lady of his time.  I’m told the particular field of flowers.” I could see she was quietly laughing at something else I knew about.  “The extent if any to which Sorg’s ghost, projection was also consequent upon the Matter of Kadun is something I accept I may never fully understand – why should I when no-one else does! But my more recent thoughts on that are that – more like, when I cracked I let out my eso which I’d kept – caged.  I had some rather odd convictions about the eso and I found it – chased it, needed it -  in Hass, Maya, Sorg because that was safer.”
I could see her digesting that lot. 
“Being here in Fidub with people who don’t know you is on balance less complicated than being in Zur with people who do?”
“I’m not actually sure about that one. I didn’t come to Fidub to talk to people.” 
I filled her in a bit on that one.
“But you’re talking to me, not rushing back to Hasiyata?”
I made wide eyes.
“That would be a bit rude!  When it comes to it, Hass has other things to do.  I think I probably want to do this independently.  It’s not I feel I don’t really belong in the – inner circle.  It’s I feel I don’t know how to belong.  Reakoed, Maitlan, Tet, they don’t have a problem.  They’re just themselves.  I’m not myself.”  I grinned.  “The general verdict is if I could just get over thinking I had to be Maya, I’d get somewhere.”  Her eyebrows flexed.  “Not – give my life.  Maybe risk it.  Definitely do something public.  That’s without the eso side.  I know this might sound an incredibly trivial side-line.  What I know is that Maya studied ancient languages while the plotters plotted.  She just got on with being Maya.   At the same time she was just as much part of the plot as Sarat.”
“By being themselves you mean distinct?”
“Yes, exactly.  No – overflow.”
She was laughing.
“It is your misfortune that your dearest most intimate friends, blood-brothers, I believe the Press has said, are the stars of the greatest blockbluster of the age and possibly of any age.  Reakoed, Maitlan, Tet, what do they do?”
“H-W, Fleet, artist.”
“It tells you nothing that you paired with the one who kept himself – distinct?”
“Ow!  Maitlan cut the cord.  Went off to sea.”
 “Sensible man.  Reakoed?”
“Reakoed doesn’t just seem one of those happy-go-lucky chaps who go through life unruffled, he actually is that.  Tet’s more complicated.” I explained my complicated Tet.
She seemed more interested in Maitlan.
What is it  they say about the Fleet?  It goes round the continent clockwise until it gets bored, when it goes anti-clockwise instead.  If called upon to serve his country concerning this Matter of Kadun, he would be as far as possible from the hub of events.”  She smiled.  “Or he just likes wide open spaces.”
“Neither,” I said briskly.  “Or rather I suspect the first, but not as you’ve made it sound.  He’s another Lido-extender.  Explain in a minute.  Maitlan is uber-cool and uber-bright.  I think he might have understood doing his bit lay in making friends in far-away places.  Not sure how that meshes with his most famous saying!  One can immerse oneself in the Matter of Kadun or one can get a life.”  Uber-cool, uber-bright mentors don’t piss with laughter, but her eyes danced.  “Maybe if you make it more personal?  Maitlan would have understood that whatever happened Mel was putting himself in the firing-line.  Politically I mean, as well as.  Why are we talking about Maitlan?”
She didn’t answer directly.
“Three young Dabidans.  I may assume you would fight to the death for Dabida, indeed for Mel.  It is part of your normality that your dearest friends are also Dabida’s heirs.  The rug is taken out from under you.  Your friends are the emperor’s cousins.  Mel is clear on the matter of sovereignty.  You would not fight to the death for Sarat – perhaps.  But Maya?  Is your personal perhaps rather than political loyalty to Alzani-Meta not also your loyalty to the Anile Throne?  Does it not betray Mel and Hass to ‘reject’ Maya?  You were the only one confused by Maya Talal Ban-essa?”
“There are so many things there,” I said.  “And then Maya wasn’t there any more.”
“The invisible link to Alzani-Meta is what I should imagine is the unbreakable bond between Sarat and Hass.”
“I guess,” I said, “no-one knows what Mel would do if Sarat were really in trouble.”
“No-one except Mel.”
“And Tar,” I added rather glumly.  “Mel and Hass adored her.  Maya.  She was very adorable.”
“So far they have admirably and brilliantly walked a tightrope.” 
I giggled and told her about my tightrope.
“Interesting.  So many things there?”
“This is a practical in the irrelevance of time?”   I sighed.  “I thought I’d got the loyalty one done and dusted.  Then there are invisible lines crossing lives.”  I filled her in.  “There might also – this is something I’ve only just thought of.  Dependency on the future of Kadun!  I mean a feeling that whatever I choose to do may be abruptly interrupted.  Sorg, Maya, if Kadun collapsed shouldn’t I feel I had to fight?  Tet says no.  One stray Zuri is not going to make the critical difference.”  Fill-in.  “Reason is one thing.”
“Why did you decide against the Kadun Senate?”
“I thought of something better to do!”  I told her about You Can Do Banking, Kai and Sar-fenan.  “Part of the other matter stuff is nattering about how Narulis learned to fight.  Then I was reading a history of the shrine and how mentors were the first PANTHER.”  I explained very briefly about Lattic and how the word ‘vanilla’ had entered my active vocabulary other than descriptive of a flavouring.  “Please may we talk about my eso!  My delusions are so basic here.  Don’t wanna be inner and eso.  Wanna be me!”
She smiled radiantly.
“Just getting a bit of background here. Your relationships with Mel and Maya?”
I sighed again.
“That means I have to tell you about the cottage.  Mel said – by loving each other we get that bastard off the chair.  He meant it rather literally.  He, Sarat, Hass and Venga had  - sexually experimental times together.  Maya and I were giggling about it and sort of naturally progressed.”
“An extension of your relationship.”
“Might have been if I’d been remotely sexually interested.  It was a good giggle and more but not sexually more.”
“Maya didn’t mind?  About Sarat?  She was with Sarat?”
“Oh yes.  I was about to say indissolubly.  Saski asked that.”  I grinned.  “The grown-ups were informed.  Cantilip had thought she might have a future with Venga. He went off with Hass and she had to deal with his not being gay.  Then she and Mel found each other and Mel thought Tar should know all about it.”
“I think I’m lost.  You and Mel?”
I explained about me and Mel.
“Ten of you, then, the core of whom – Reakoed, Maitlan and Tet did not take part - ?”
“They didn’t. This was future leaders of the world stuff.”
“I think I shall not attempt to analyse relations between the six of you  -  a family of six siblings traumatized during adolescence by the simple fact you were not?  The rest, one might say, is history.  What is clear is you  have caused no rift.”  I must have looked completely devastated because she pushed my tut! polystyrene cup of water towards me and murmured, “Have a sip.  Clear,” she repeated and began to laugh.  “Falita, nothing is more common than that friends of both former or otherwise side with one or other of a pair when a relationship breaks up.”
“The only rift is between me and Tet!” I considered.  “Bit pat isn’t it, sibs can’t be sundered.”
She looked pleased.
“Of course.  You have a better metaphor?”
“Not really.  There’s one thing missing.  It’s the way you put it – the idea of Hass and Reakoed being on different sides – though they do have very different views.  Hass said I half-think I have neither family nor friends.  I’m related to him.  Sarshi.  Sarshi is Sorg’s twin.  Her other half is Vij, Maya’s brother.  From their point of view, I cut myself off.  Which is sort of true.  I mean I don’t think it ever occurred to me everyone wasn’t a phone call away.  Busy, busy, busy.  There’s an element of lasting out on my own as long as I could.  When Amida said I should talk to Sarat I jibbed a bit, but that was sensitivity not distance!  Gee Sarat, we both loved Maya.  What I really want to talk about is me!  Eight out of ten,” I decided.  “The people I grew up with I’d say anything to and they to me.  I shouldn’t confide in Cantilip or Venga.”
“Time to stop, I think,” she said.  “Same time tomorrow?”
 
I supposed I’d wanted an independent view.  I felt, not shattered or anything but a bit strange.  I’d bared my soul (not just mine!) to a complete stranger.  But it’s so much easier to talk to people who’ve known you since you were five!  Or of you, or the frame of reference in which you dwell.  I wondered.  Plus side.  Independent conclusions, if they struck me as deeply wrong, maybe I hadn’t explained properly.  Minus side.  The other people weren’t putting their side.  Bit I said he said they said.   Maybe cheating a bit, but I couldn’t get away from that, have to go to the other side of the world and even that probably wasn’t far enough to find someone who knew absolutely nothing about the people I was talking about.  I made it into a mental game.  How far back would I have to go?  Obviously Narulis.  Where would I have to go?  Harn to explain the origins of the Cult.    You should write a book.  Someone should.  But then all the sexy bits would be left out.  To be published when we’re all dead, then?  Let us assume of old age.  How would our kids feel about it?  Maybe for private reading only.  But to be written now, while we remember.  Who has time to write a book?  Er, I do.  I just didn’t think it was my thing, though I suppose I’m not making too bad a job of my bit.  It does matter to the bloody Whole.  Kai!  She must be at a loose end.  So it came to pass in a beautifully appointed room on the Leolisle!
 
Aw shucks, I couldn’t even pick up my mobile and tell anyone.  I wondered if I’d been a bit naïve about the cause of Sarat’s uncharacteristic rage.  I suppose they’d turned him inside out and he didn’t necessarily like what they said.   Not as though I wanted to be Anile Emperor.  I considered Senta.  No cocoon of love had enveloped the little bird with a wounded wing.  I’d have to ask her about that. 
 
I was just thinking I might like to do something physical, maybe go for a swim, when I fell asleep.  As you know, my usual diet is light and, as you also know, I really love masali.  Perhaps it was another piece of self-deception that I should be unaffected by the menu.  Who cares!  I don’t have to do anything.  Mostly.  Umm.   I think I’d prefer to be clear-headed and well rested for further sessions with Senta.  I am, I thought, already aware of mild sensations of evisceration or perhaps that’s too strong a word.  Of being uncurled, as a fox might uncurl a hedgehog.  I didn’t mean to sound curled up, I protested feebly to myself.  It must have come across like that. I was just dozing off again when it jolted me to realize it was like that, I’d just said it was like that, sort of, anyway  It did feel strange talking about myself to a stranger.  I dozed anyway. 
 
 
I awoke feeling clear-headed, well-rested and pro-active.  Damn it, I’m going to talk about my eso!  Well, eventually.  I formulated my baseline.
 
“My baseline here is I really don’t want to find myself talking to Zani in the MegaMart.”
“But why ever not!”
“Social embarrassment? People might stare?”  I changed the subject.  Pro-active, you know.  “Taja in the shrine cocooned me in love.  I felt completely safe, completely relaxed.  With you I feel – just the tiniest bit on my mettle.  I’m wondering why, whether it’s you, me or both.”
“And?”
“It felt odd to have told a stranger the private bits, just because you’re a stranger.  Obviously this isn’t stuff I’ve clasped to my heart, my lips sealed.  It feels as though it is.  The – the sum of what Hass said to me, followed by what I said to myself.  Completely mad.  I took it all on board without feeling – what didn’t I feel!  Stripped?   Tet for obvious reasons was more – personally critical.  That sounds a bit feeble.  He was frank about having felt he hated me.  I’m not so delusional that that was something I hadn’t been able to conceive of.  There was a cushion of what you said, an unbreakable bond, a cushion of – love.  Shielding me from reality?”  That last bit came out in rather a rush.
“How can it?”
“That may be the question?  Hurt is illusion.”
“So?”
“So I feel that reality is illusion?  I’ve thought that.  But then it doesn’t make sense.”
“Reality is what?”
“Ah-uh.  I’ve asked myself if I have special Fal definitions of certain words.  I asked Hass about whom he talked to about Maya.  I’ve told you, he adored her.  Venga, Tar…But what he said was it happened.  I know it struck me as brutal.  It happened.  Sarat was standing where he was standing.  If he’d been standing where she was standing.  You can say it shouldn’t have happened but you can’t change that it happened.  That’s the – common-sense view of reality and it’s Hass’s view, so far as it goes.  And – everything that everyone else in the universe happened to be doing at the time happened.  Me digging the garden.  My Fal definition is rather that a sort of – film of unreality settles over that which is elsewhere.  It’s not exactly true that I never felt shocked or anything.  After my second talk to Tet I was appalled at myself.  I felt I’d managed to erase Sorg from the record.  I sat saying to myself.  You did that.  It happened.  Then – though I’m not sure about this one.  Ninety per cent of the continent didn’t think Sarat could do it, so I’m not sure saying it didn’t seem real to me.  But then in Azt it was like the only thing that was real.  Though I think that was a common ailment too.  I actually – I wanted to be sure people weren’t just being kind and I looked up the figures for relationship break-up consequent upon the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun!  But it was a very definite feeling.  Not that Sorg didn’t matter morally or emotionally or for that matter historically.  Not essentially that I was trivializing my feelings for Sorg or my betrayal of Tet.  More that it just didn’t happen. Tet and I had somehow got separated and now we might get back together.  I’m a sponge?  I asked myself that.  I seem to completely absorb – oh.”
She laughed.
“Oh?”
“That can’t be right, either.  A wider reality?” I wondered hopefully. “I’d told him I’d drivelled to Hass about how it had seemed to me we – Tet and I – had not grown-up, lived the lives of a couple of big kids in a delusional state about what was about to happen to our little lives.  He said nothing had happened to his little life except being smashed up by me. Cue for Fal absorbing life in Zur as all reality.”
“Or back into your life with Tet?”
“They weren’t the same conversations.  Oh, I see.  Oh shit. Sorry!  Tet was explaining – his reality was loving me as a friend, as a member of the Six, blood-brother, sister, etc.  To which of course.”
“To which of course.”
I had a strong feeling she was just managing not to giggle. 
“The word that occurred to me is ‘leaking’ which I find a bit weird.  More holes than a sieve I can cope with but it seems to be letting stuff in not out..  The bottom line is that my edges are blurred.”
“Necessarily.”
No giggle there, only a certain dryness.  Try harder, Fal?
“I can see – can I?  If I find, need, have decided that my eso lies outside me I must be – porous.  Leaking?”
“Uncontained, shall I say.  All over the place.”
“I’m telling this piecemeal,” I grumbled.  “It’s not I had it pat. It’s that one bit followed from the next.”
“Do tell,” she said.
I finally got to the rich history of my eso.  The only time she showed the flicker of a reaction was when I voiced my healthy suspicion of attraction to the shrine, but she didn’t say anything.
“It has of course occurred to you,” she said at length, “that as you change Tet may no longer be among what you want.”
“It has,” I said steadily.  “I don’t think so, but if I’m wrong I’ll know before not after.”
“And of course,” she said.
“No,” I said, rather firmly.  “By lose I mean lose as in dead or might as well be.  Never wants to see or speak to me again.  Both of us are in a – process of discovery of what can’t be lost.”
“How can you lose Maya?”
“That freaked me a bit.  ‘Cept I was in the shrine.  I think.  I think I think something like.  All the external stuff people tell me about stopping thinking I have to be Maya.  It comes from a – conception of Maya’s eso. Which I prefer to my own.  Stick to like glue?  Because I am just a little bit petrified.  All in the present tense.  Maybe.  One of the reasons I’m here is because I think I see that I can control myself by brute force, slam down the lid? Be a sort of fake me.”
“When?”
“Ever?! I’ve left out.”  I narrated That Fateful Day.
“Implying?”
“No, I don’t think that!  Except in the terms that I do!  Running on higher octane gas?  I don’t think they all know.  Knew.  Exactly what was wrong with me, Is.  I hate verbs!  Maybe Hass.  A – perception something wasn’t right?  Time!  We were all of us so hopelessly busy.  The idea that what Maya was thinking about, chewing over when she finally got a minute to herself with Sarat was me.”
“You didn’t tell me you were PANTHER.”
“For ten minutes.”
“You stopped.  Suddenly there was time.”
“Oh yes.  No Sorg, plenty of time.  I was stopped.”
“I disagree.”  I flexed my eyebrows so much they hurt.  “What is the source of your feeling of  inadequacy?”
“Oh. Control?”
“Do continue.”
I giggled suddenly.
“I guess it centres on the cup of cocoa? What they know, what they can do is stop it falling.  What I know – experientally is it was impossible not to crack.  What I know intellectually is there’s a place before the cup falls where you can stop yourself dropping it. You always have choice.  In theory.”
“What was it they said, vaccinating sheep?  Have you asked Sarat if he’d like to goat-farm?”
“He’d be bored silly.”
“And you are not?  Did you not say?  What is the difference?”
“What – what I think you’re saying.  Not least because Hass has already said it.  Why am I pretending to have had a breakdown?”
“You are more bereft than Vij and Sarshi?”
“That is painful.”
“That too is reality.”
“What you’re actually saying is a person always has choice.  No I’m not arguing, just trying to be clear.  There’s a level where I rejected choosing not to fall.  Or chose to fall.  Because it was what I needed to do.  To be me.  To be real.  But who’s me doing the deciding.  The eso I reject but which is there anyway….Which is totally divorced from me.  I think.  Thus making choices I don’t know about.  Ohhh.  It kind of forced its way through the crack and – manifest as Sorg - ?”
She held up her hand to stop me.
“As you say, why should you know when no-one else does!   I should certainly agree there was some kind of shudder in you.  I should also agree that your experience of Sorg was in some way consequent upon that.  The field effect we shall have to leave open.”
“That’s it,”  I said, feeling quite excited, “a shudder, that’s exactly.   But then that’s like there was a shell, a block with a crack in it.  I thought I’d discovered something when I thought of the crack as lateral, horizontal, between the mushroom and me.”
“The block in the maze?”
“Wha - ?  To mix my metaphors?  There was no crack in the block in the maze.”
“As you said, when Maya died, the crack wasn’t there any more.”
“But the block sealed tight?  Thinks: this is getting a bit esoteric.”
“D’you want to come up for air?”
“Thought that’s what I was doing….”
“D’you feel more relaxed now?”
“Now you come to mention it. I’ve just thought of something a bit weird.  I think it’s pretty trivial.”
“Tell?”
“I jumped from wow, I’ve never talked to a stranger to of course I have: Kai.   Depends what I mean by stranger.”
We called it a day.
 
 
I lay in the garden and tried to recreate the maze.  It didn’t want to come.  Means, I thought sourly, I don’t want it to come.  Had I learned anything?  Stop trying.  Sorry?  I thought my eso was rampaging through me.  Oh triple shit: not if I find the place I don’t want it to. Which as we all know I do without choosing. So I just need triggering, do I, Senta?  Hmmm.
 
Okey-dokey, try step by step.
Who’s in charge around here!  I seemed to remember something about laboratory rats and a maze but since I had no access to any source of information I hoped Senta was hot on laboratory rats and mazes. 
Ah-hah, o little maze!  I may not be able to read about you but I can draw you.
 
I could just paint it out, I thought, as I wandered off to the art-room.  The block, I mean.   My previous efforts lay untouched at the side of the table.  Look at them later.
 
Uh.  I am not gifted at drawing perfect circles.  I just found that out.  Why shouldn’t it be square?   My circles would do.  And it’s got an entrance.  And it’s wildly simplified, circle within circle, within circle.  This won’t do, might just as well draw a straight line.  What else is it?  The block, I mean.  The point about a maze is most of it doesn’t matter, most of it is just there to confuse you.  Hang on, Fal.  If you could just think occasionally.  Most of a maze is dead-ends.  The block, I mean, is just another dead-end.  So it’s not the way through at all.  I just think that’s the way to the centre?  Ah-uh.  I was absolutely sure.  But then I would be, wouldn’t I.   It’s a dead-end, you idiot, just a particularly flashy one.  Which doesn’t mean getting through it isn’t – dramatic.   There is an actual path through my five-year-old art-class maze.  
This does not do.  I need a picture of a really complicated maze.  It’s going to have to be square.  Set-square and protractor!  Does the equipment provided include a ruler?  It does!  As an after-thought I looked for a pair of compasses, but there wasn’t one.  I drew 20 boxes within boxes.  Now whadda I do?  Close my eyes and make arbitrary breaks?  They are – no, the dead-ends are – all my creations.  OK, put some breaks and dead-ends.  They don’t have identities, values, attached so they can’t be subconsciously determined.  That sounds impressive!  On the other hand I might end up with no way through my maze.  I guess maze design is quite complicated?  Narak might know.  Could there be a maze in the grounds?  Sort of thing landscape-gardeners have fun with. 
Time-slip.  Protracted, if not protractor.  I am eight and sitting at the kitchen-table with a puzzle book.  I have a fine-tipped green felt-pen and I am scowling horribly at the maze in the book.  Bunny needs to find his way back to his warren.  Warren?  The entrance to the warren.   I turn to the little crossword further down the page. 
I guess you could say the eso is a warren.
I sat doing nothing for a while before I turned back to my work.  Then I felt a ludicrous urge for a fine-tipped green felt-pen.  There probably was one, but I didn’t exert myself to look.  I had a pencil and readily re-created my eight-year-old’s scowl.   I also had a rubber and I stealed myself to at least giving my maze an entrance.
Need a coloured pencil to make my line of progress or retreat clear.  I got a green one.
OK, suppose I turn left, then right, then – I am travelling, very fast, like speeded-up film.  Not like being in a car or a train.  Why not like?  Along – I have no idea what along, never seen in my life, it winds and it has rails on both sides, ornamental ones with spires and curlicews.  Then it stopped, faded, no sensation of having run into something or indeed, I suppose, having fallen off the end.  WTF?
Surprise, surprise, I have come to a dead-end.
Supposing I’m irritating about this.  Just barge through, as a line on paper, you understand.  I barged. 
Quite disappointed that the point of my pencil didn’t break off or something.  I continued heedless on my merry way.  I knew what was going to happen now and it happened.  Until I met The Block.  Of course I am super-imposing…. It’s just a line of exactly the same thickness as all the other lines.  But I refuse to see it like that.   
Now where were we?
I’m talking about two different things here.  Not sure either of them makes sense.
Hallo, block. 
Oh wait a minute, it’s got to have a hairline crack.  A few moments’ delicate rubber-work.
No, no, no, no, no!  Excuse me, Bandi said I had a crack, not a block with a crack.   A crack which should heal. 
Unless of course after that I made the block round the crack?
This is doing my head in.  Ah well, it’s meant to.
I can’t draw a crack within the frame of reference of the maze without a block around it. 
Oh yes, I can.
I picked up my maze and went to look for the nearest mentor
I brandished my maze.
“Look this may sound silly, but I want to alter this but I don’t want to lose the original.  Is there a photocopier I can use?”
“Copy it for you.”  He broke into a grin.  “How many copies would you like?”
“Ten, please!” I said while working out that I couldn’t use a rubber on photocopies but I could use white paint.
When he came back, I said, “Graphics software.  I think I worked out that what a program can do is not what a person can do and a person can’t necessarily use a program properly.  Either way it doesn’t come direct from you. In instances like this…”
He smiled.
“Infinitely saveable, infinitely alterable.”
“That’s the one.”
“There you go.”
I wandered back, frowning slightly.  Maybe he didn’t have an answer.  I doubted that; it must be a common enough question. I diverted myself readily enough to technology.  A scanner, then, scan, save, print.  Suppose you wanted to take home on disc – well, you’d just have to have a scanner of your own, wouldn’t you.  This place has a specific purpose and I was entirely sure the people who had worked out what did and did not mesh with that purpose were very unthick.  This was in danger of preoccupying me.  Work-avoidance!
It’s all perfectly simple really, I thought to myself hopefully.  The crack runs straight through the centre of the maze.  Thick squiggly line.  Damn it, I want software.  Scissors and paste it must be to have the two halves slightly separate.  That means the eso is split.  That can’t be.  That means I feel the eso is split. So that’s what Mel was raving about. But the maze.  The only opening – one half is full of openings.  The other – ah-uh.  The only – what is the only apparent opening in it into the – space is blocked by The Block.  Peculiar but interesting….Oh no, of course, the rest have previous dead-ends.  The only path from the entrance that leads to my Great Divide. 
Now I may be where I need to be, where to start from.  Emphasis on ‘may be’.
Hallo, block.  So you’ve got a hairline crack in you, have you.  But you didn’t when - ?
This is frantically interesting but does it play in real-time?
OK, there I am with my lickle hair-line crack through the middle and it’s something and nothing, immaturity, I’ll grow out of it.  Then Mel puts his oar in and makes a thing of it.  Umm, it’s quite unusual for Maitlan to declare his best friend should be shot.  Nor do I think Vax makes a habit of wondering if people should be strangled – well, people who aren’t Sar-fenan, anyway.  I can either protect Mel or analyse this and know I may be protecting Mel.  Or I can jump Mel entirely, trusting my famously reliable judgement that what followed was not down to my having been in some way scarred by Mel.
Decisions, decisions. 
If it’s immaturity, then all the dead-ends are weak, they’ll collapse.  Except the Maya one which grew stronger?
Oh, oh, ohh.  I sort of feel I see something.  Not sure if I can find the words.
Let me not get ahead of myself here.
If I say, as I have said, that I was actually fully myself with Tet, taking all of me with me.  Then I can also say, yes, dear, but you didn’t feel that.  What graphically, where graphically - ?
That needs two divergent versions, superimposed.  How about an overhead?  I think I may be gurgling beneath the waves thinking I can draw this. Memo to the management of the retreat:  look, personally I think an OHP is critical.
Let me take this slow-ow-owleeeeeeeeeeee.
If I can stop gurgling a minute.  No, look, wait a min, if – but then I might as well tear my pictures up.
It’s only images.  Metaphors. 
Force you to rely on yourself.  If you can draw it, you can see it in your mind, not on a screen.  Hmmm.
Suppose this bloody crack is between my eso and what I thought of as my eso.
I rather wanted to take my sheets of paper, paint and pencils outside and arrange them round me but it was beginning to get dark.  I demand a flood-lit terrace!
Certainly I could go and nibble something, so I gathered up my latest work into a neat heap and vamoosed.
I returned to the art-room now of course in total darkness except for moonlight.  I put the lights on and returned to my task.  The light was OK, but it wasn’t dazzling.  It wasn’t as though I was working on intricate gradients of colour but there didn’t seem any reason I couldn’t continue this in my beautifully appointed room (at any rate if I didn’t get permanent white paint over the carpet – I sneaked a look at the tube: washable).  I slipped my kit into my pockets and retired for the night. 
There was a fat armchair, cream, a bit frilly for my taste, but nothing objectionable, by the window, and a reading lamp (and in the bathroom a separate tap for drinking-water).  I curled my legs up under me, sipped slowly and scrutinized my portfolio. 
Where was I?  Damned if I know…I was also – distantly aware, shall I say – I had or might have interrupted myself because I didn’t want to continue.  I was going to have to recreate continuation mode.  It apparently came quite easily and soon I was oh, yes, I see, I meant that-ing, but I was suspicious.  It was too like having been away from work for a couple of days and sorting out what was on my desk.  It wasn’t personal.  Fal, you have to really feel this…Feel is not the right word.  Be inside it, not an on-looker.  Guess that means going in the entrance to the maze. 
The crack itself, you idiot, you, is not real.  Or rather, it’s my crack, I put it there, and no-one can take it away from me, so there!  No-one else. 
OK, with Tet.  Taking all of what I think of as me with me.  Only – only what?  Only I have – imagined?  Good a word as any.  A split in my eso.  Based on this idea that I ‘can’t be’ eso because that’s not me.  Only I know that I need it.  Oh.  Again.  Gosh, did I do that?  There is something there about Mel and Hass both, but not sure it’s sharing with me.  I grew up in heavy water.  That still doesn’t mean I even knew what my eso was at the time of my non-existent relationship with Hass.  You mean I do now?  Maybe I can rephrase that.  Oh.  In triplicate.  Maybe I just sit and yowl?  The idea embedded somewhere that unity requires union.  Instead of with myself.
Union with someone else.
Half an eso looking for partner to make music with.
Gee, Fal, you really need to love yourself.
Yes, Hass, you told me that. 
Now, I am not Sarat: I am not a walking coffee-bean, pride myself indeed on lemongrass and nettle.  I allowed myself a giggle wondering how Sarat currently would react to caffeine deprivation (not earlier, don’t think he was hooked at 17).  In other words I could really do with a mug of really strong hot coffee.  Was that distracting myself from the matter at hand?  Probably!  Where was I?  Does it play in real time?  It sounds as though it does.  That may not be the same thing.
Sarat and Hass.  Sarat and Maya.  Where could I possibly have got the idea of the union of opposites?  It’s my crack, I made it, etc.
I internalized garbage in other words.  Twice over: the inner and eso is not me, only the outer and exo is me. 
Mel went ape.  Bandi said I’d grow out of it.  Mel was seven-freaking-teen and Bandi was in her 50s.  Both were right.  Discuss.
At what level did Mel go ape?  Can’t ask Maya.  Either.  Discuss.  Cantilip, I feel it is only honourable that you be present at a conversation about the relationship Mel and I didn’t really have.  Or at any rate know about it.  I imagined those delicately arched eyebrows rising somewhat.  Look, this isn’t just idle curiosity, it’s driven me halfway round the bend (only half?) and sent me to retreat on the Leolisle…  At some level – that may be a rather good let-out, but leave it for a min – at some level both Mel and Maya detected – sounds like scanning a freaking laptop – discerned that as far as Fal was concerned she didn’t have an eso to unite with – so – so they were loving but as far as Fal was concerned the whole thing was a dead loss.   Seven freaking teen.  Let’s say they didn’t have a lot of idea what they were looking for, only that it wasn’t there.  Could even have been (she said hopefully?) much more superficial than that, a – perception Fal just isn’t bringing all of herself along to this party.  Is not ready.  Is immature.
So I was a late-developer who hadn’t been fast-tracked because I and my immediate circle wanted to restore the Anile throne.  Bit of a gulf there.  I had to giggle and did.
Hang on, the bMbK wasn’t on the horizon then.  Oh.  No.  OK, who hadn’t been fast-tracked because I wasn’t the future freaking king/A-M/who just wasn’t the frantically eso Maya.
 I put aside the increasingly imperative talk with Mel and I took another look at my maze, the version of it where the only path that led to the centre ended in a block and a drop. 
OK, if that’s a block, I can rotate it (damn it, I want software!), make it a bridge.
Oh dear.  I don’t know exactly how I feel resistance and I do not rule out that I am making myself resistant
Maya is dead
I shall never see her again, laugh with her, hug her, talk to her, giggle with her.  Leech off her. 
I have memories.  I do not need this – phantom relationship.  I cannot lose her.  I cannot forget her.
I need to cross that gulf.
I love my eso.
I have – hurt it?  I have hurt me.  I am frightened of it. 
Lots of stuff about floating away on little pink balloons. 
I am so terribly afraid of letting go.
It’s not – it’s not a fear I can find.  It’s a fear somewhere in the maze.  A fear I have only pretended to confront, that I shall not want Tet?
But no, it was there when I thought I’d lost Tet.
Controlled by my strange notions of the eso?  I shall be someone I do not know?  I suppose I could say that is increasingly unlikely.  Only I am convinced of it.  What I need is someone, who sigh can only be me, to take the two halves and drag them together.  That’s you, you moron!  Now get on with it…
No software.
Forced to do it myself whether externally or internally.
I need a clean sheet of paper.  I turned over one of the mazes.
I drew – some things on half the sheet.  Not sure they looked like what they were meant to be but I knew exactly what they were.  A mobile, a goat, a fence, a plate, anything that came to mind to represent my exo world.  Then on the other side lots of clouds and balloons and starburst. 
They’re not separate, idiot. 
Of how to – infuse mobile, goat, fence, plate with starburst graphically or any other way I had not a clue, I felt, except they’re infused already. 
In my mind, in my mind, in my mind…
At least if I make a bridge between them, that’s a start! 
It was a rather good bridge, actually, one of my better efforts. 
It ran across my mind that maybe it could be over a river and that I could swim across, but my mind told me instantly that the current was too strong.  Thanks, mind.  I am really going to have to have a little talk with you. 
I accept.  I reject.
This is my mind I’m talking about and it really does not want me to do this.
Gee, well, no-one ever said this was easy.
Moron!  Idiot!  You’re still doing it.  Whatever you say, you still do it!  Deny the other half.  Start there, idiot. 
That half is not a maze.  Well, it is.  Not in my sense.  That half is open.  A curve with no boundary.  But no entrance except at the Great Divide.  Just pick up the rubber and make a way in. 
Feel.
It will not surprise you to learn that I didn’t want me to do this but I thought-experimented my way – in would be an exaggeration: to the threshhold.
Feel.
What?
 Lost?  There are no directions.  I had to giggle.  What?  I don’t have to run for the Senate or plough a furrow?  Whaddya mean, I can do banking?
Blind?  I am going to walk into a little pink cloud that loves me.
Like wrapping myself in a warm fluffy blanket.
Look for things.  Things infused with starburst.
Such as me?  THAT AM I.  This am I?  What am I?
I am somewhere.
I am?
Who is me?
This doesn’t feel real.  No, well, it wouldn’t.  Discuss.
It felt real in the shrine.  It doesn’t feel real now.
Dive.  That’s a good image.  I am paddling, not even paddling, more like you’re heating some milk and you dip a finger in to test the temperature. 
Let go, Fal, let go!
Even if you do hold your nose.
Mental climb to top board.  Look at all that sparkling blue water I mean pink cloud.  What’s on the other side of it?
At which point I had the clear feeling I was asking myself to be the cup falling from the first floor window which can’t stop itself.  I found myself saying to Hass.  I know perfectly well what you want me to do.  It just happens that I can’t.  Course you can, he said.  Let me show you.  Nice dive.  Very nice dive.  Only he didn’t come up. 
Senta!  He-elp!  Alas, it was 3 in the morning.  I was perfectly sure she was instantly available if I’d been about to cut my wrists or something.  Since that was just about the opposite…
Guess I’d better go to bed, then. 
OK, that’s clear enough.  I have this figured as suicide.  Death of the self, sigh.  The end of me as I know me.  But it’s not! 
What the freaking hell do I not want to lose?
It’s too late to have another go at infusing my mobile, plate, goat with starburst.  I really do think I shall just – I flopped on the bed and fell instantly asleep, without even cleaning my teeth.  Oh shock, oh horror.
…
The maze, you stupid bitch, you, is the bloody Whole.  What?  Where did that come from?  Suck it and see.  What I am lost in is the bloody Whole.  Need a map!  On the one hand that’s totally mundane and obvious and on the other - ?
 
Oh.  Oh? Oh, that’s where it comes from.  I am – am I not thinking myself to be – mysteriously separate from the bloody Whole, outside it.  Battling with it.  Trying to subdue it. 
 
In that context – ah-er-oooee.  Of course Maya is a freaking ‘dead-end’.  She’s dead.   In that case, Sorg must also be a ‘dead-end’ but I hadn’t found and don’t wanna look, feel block against looking, Because of course if – if ‘normally dead’ – but that doesn’t, if the bloody Whole – just what is the bloody Whole – and do I have a special Fal meaning thereof? 
 
Oh, oh, oh.  Indeed I do.  Fake detachment.  The Whole and I are at war!  OK, Hass, anyone, how can you be both part of the Whole, the bloody Whole, and detached.  Not that people find this difficult or anything
 
What is the bloody Whole?  Reality.  What happens, what has happened, what will happen, what is, what will be, what might be.  What could be.  Yes, well, clearly what could be is my – my what, my bad dream, my nightmare, my terror.  What has been isn’t so wonderful either.   You  can change reality or you can fake reality.  The two are different, only I don’t seem to know that. 
 
Discuss with particular reference to….Sarat hasn’t put a layer of paint over Kadun, he’s changed it.  Now, Fal, don’t run away from the point.  Which is? 
 
Sorg.
 
Let me creep up on this cautiously because I think this will hurt.  Try Lattic and his new life.  It’s real.  Then his life before was fake.  Or horribly real, depends, depends what you mean by real.  The realities of his scene were nasty and real.  But he was fake.  What is it they say, there is only the real, then everything else is fake.  But you can’t say that!  Makes it sound like – oh, I said that. Did I say that?  Not exactly.  Bad theatre.  That’s exactly what my life has been.  All of it???  Acting a part.  Back to Lattic.  How can you say killing someone is acting a part?  The curtain falls and everyone gets up.  But they don’t.  Maya doesn’t. Sorg doesn’t.  All one continuum.  Do I sort of fail to understand that they do?   After all….Somewhere.  But I think I’m running from the point.  Day-to-day reality.  Day-to-day reality is people die and someone somewhere loved them.  That’s not – what did Hass say, it happened.  Is that – how it’s all one continuum?  It happens, like everything else.  What is is.  Is what was is?!  Lattic stopped being fake.   That’s what gee, you make your own reality means.  At least when it’s not an idiot meaning be fake.  And  what do ‘they’ also say, love is the real, and it sort of makes sense at 16, even though it’s obviously crap…Because pain and death and hate are over there somewhere else.
 
Such as Kadun?  Ohhhh.
 
And when a gaggle of hyper teens, who at least have had an elderly relly die, if not a hamster, said, whaddya mean by that, what did ‘they’ say?  They said you need to try to love everyone, and see everyone as he or she is.  They said all crime comes from people being self-centred, lying to themselves, being fake.  They said when you love a particular person you – all right, all right, did I love Sorg or did I just love me and what I got from him.  I can’t bear it.
 
Or do I mean did I love Tet?
 
I wasn’t even ‘grown-up’ about it.  But then that would have broken the dream.   Flying visit to Zur, Hi Tet, I’ve fallen in love with someone else.  How could I, how can anyone, but that’s being grown-up and it’s tough.  Not as tough as the thought that if I’d had the sense to break the spell and got my feet over my doorstep.  Hi Tet, I’ve fallen in love with someone else, all right, me.  Isn’t that what all this chasing other people’s esos amounts to?
 
Why aren’t I screaming?
 
And we probably gave the seminar on divorce counselling a miss at six-freaking teen.  Was there one?  They oh they, they taught us not to fuck with other people’s feelings.  Underlying it, one now sees with hindsight, they didn’t expect our attachments to be perman- serious.  Underlying it also – we were going to have to learn to be civilized because you can’t drop math or change school because your relationship with a class-mate failed!  Run away to another country.  Yes, well, that class I failed. 
 
It was (of course) a class that failed to take account of the unique bonding properties – in my case unbonding – of the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun. Was that a surrogate, as in ‘clearly what was wrong’ with my relationship with Tet was that it didn’t have the magic glitter-dust all over it.  My main problem with that is that there’s a nasty little worm of truth in it.   Yep, we weren’t truly indissolubly bonded because – because what exactly, because we didn’t have a common obsession – and as to how this maps against the whole business of Maya being hopelessly unobsessed - ?
 
Maya was my role-model, except, except – don’t wanna be inner and eso, wanna be me.  Except I did vaguely grasp somewhere that I was not Maya and our lives were very different.  Not Saski: Maya.  Always my darling Maya.
 
 So  What would have happened if I’d let go when we – when she made love to me. Oh Fal.
 
Now I need to think.  Or maybe talk to Venga.  Or not Mel but Cantilip.
There is one female person with whom I’d be gay.  Was.
Think: my progress or lack of does not hinge on being unable to talk to Maya.  That is/would be a great cop-out. 
Think: exactly what am I saying here?/do I think I'm saying here?
Male and female, we are.  A continuum of gender, there is. 
And as usual I have it all the wrong way round.
That might just have blown my little mind into the stratosphere.  OK, I had no particular reason to define myself as gay, straight, both, neither – neither? - none of the above!  Depends on with whom!  Do I conceivably make my point?  My previous sexual experience having been limited to – just limited (?)  Put it this way: what can categorically be said about Mel and me is that it did not convince me heterosex was the cosmic all.  Subsequently, however....But that was after.  What else is fixed in this game of shifting sands?  Sarat and Maya.  And only now does it occur to me, do I let it occur to me, that Maya and me parallels Sarat and Hass and she was transcending her boundaries.  Or that Mel put her up to it to see if I was gay, though I think Maya could have come up with it herself.  But what no-one realized, least of all of course me, was – was that I was nuts about Maya, just waiting to fall into her arms, but it could never be, could only end in tears, my tears, and so I cut myself off from me. Indeed a repeat performance of Mel.  Is this plausible?  Unfortunately yes.  An advanced sense of self-preservation.  I thought hard then about my impeccable childhood.  It was given that A-M went to ordinary schools in Zur.  They'd been doing it for 600 years.  It was given that ordinary Zuri found friends on the hill.  That didn't mean – I rather desperately searched my memory for someone, aunt, dad, teacher who might somehow have implanted in me that I could get out of my depth, needed to stay in my comfort zone.  It clicked. Everyone was quite sure Mel would look after me, quite, quite sure.  Mel's little friend who treats the hill like a second home and happened to grow to have film-star looks.  Me, it came to me suddenly, was lost a long, long time ago in others' assumptions, others' expectations.   And me reacted.   Did I?  Or was I always in my own little world.  Something penetrated – not, alas that little world.  People made cracks about Mel and me and it just never occurred to me.  That it was real.  That it had a reality quotient.  Which I think means.  Which is somehow bound up with the dramatic story of my eso.  Nobody scared me but I scared myself.  Oh there is something there.  Wish I knew what.  A fixed idea who  I was.  But I don’t think I loved Mel Like That. 
 
FIREWORK DISPLAY!  BLINDING LIGHTS!  FAL,YOU ARE A MORON!  Explosion in my whirring little brain, even.  UNDER, you imbecile, not over!  Because if the eso is the core, the block can’t get down to it, can it, so what I have to do is dig and go UNDER the block.  Never quite seen myself as a terrier, but ludicrous mental image of little terrier paws frantically scrabbling.  I suppose.   My self-confidence, let it be said, is not what it was.  Senta!  I dawdled off to find her.
I suspected I’d earned a gold star, but all she said was, “You will find it well-defended.”
“Ramparts?”
“Cannon,” she suggested.
My scowl must have been nearly as good as my eight-year-old one.
“This is going to hurt…”  I tried to put pieces together.  “Lounging around in the shrine didn’t hurt because there was no threat….” I giggled suddenly.  “The thing is, who is firing the cannon.”
“Yes,” said Senta.
“I – am attacking me.  Or defending.”
“Continue.”
Thanks.
“Does the eso join in!” Thinks: there are three of us here?  Me?  Senta waited.  “I – this hurts my head already.  I mean if I say – I have said – it bursts out in – time-slips.  It’s not passive.”
“Whom d’you think is firing the cannon?”
“Oh no,” I said.  “That’s – cheating.  The cannon was defending the block.”
“You are threatening the block.  You are bombarding yourself?”
I managed a grin.
“Why not, I am divided.  These are – metaphors.  This is not going to be fun.”  Mental image of me in a hard hat with a light on it in a dark cave, clad in what seemed to be padding and armed with a pick.  I burst out laughing.  Then jumped and rolled out of the way of rock fall.
“Hmm.  What happens to it?  More a rabbit.  Burrowing, I mean.  If I dig my way under – oh.  I don’t like that one.  Wouldn’t the simplest thing to do to me to be to collapse onto me and crush me.  In my mind, in my mind, in my mind, if I don’t want to be crushed.  But really if I emerge triumphant does the block vanish, like in a fairy-tale?”
“That may depend.”
“On what?”
“What it is.”
“Integrate it?”
“Or you become integrated.”
I stared.
“That would seem to suggest – the block is the eso.  Hang on – I – whoever that is - made the block from my eso?”
She smiled.  Infuriatingly.  Somewhere I am screaming at Hass: You knew!
“Guess it’s time I started digging.” I got up but she raised her hand to stay me.  Oh.  That bad?  “That bad?”
“Interesting,” said Senta.
That really annoyed me.  I realized it was meant to but not why – laters.
“I am not a spectator sport!”  Trouble is, when things are on about 15 levels at once, “Serious?  I’ve gathered up the pieces of me once.”  The response to that one hung in my mind.  “I didn’t put them together right?”
She smiled rather gently for Senta.
“I’m around.”
“Thank you,” I said, meaning not just the obvious: thank you for knowing I have to do this on my own.
 
I retreated to my room and flopped in the chair, then got up again and gathered paper and pens.  This I was definitely going to have to draw.  A mountain-range came immediately to mind.  I can do that.  Shaded triangles.  I laughed suddenly and added a little mountain-goat, but leaping from peak to peak was not the point here.  Female person in hard hat. Did I label any of this?  That, I thought, was (probably) the crucial question.  I knew I very much wanted to, label it, reason it, order it.  Only I don’t know what any of it is.  Or do I.  Either it’s all the same stuff or some of it is illusory, and pffft, vanishes like the bad-fairy in a children’s story.  Then I realized I was as usual (why?) totally missing the point and my shaded triangles became diamonds descending to the centre of the earth or me, as you prefer.  Heavily overlapping, of course, no easy gaps.  I sat back and gazed glumly at my work.  OK, Fal, one thing you have achieved here is make a small black block into an impassable range. How interesting.  Try again.
Simple rectangular block with a line through the middle.  On which is small female person in hard hat.  Under or over?  Want 3D!  Want software!  Want female person walking round block inspecting it, which was of course ludicrous because if I could walk round it.  Can’t be infinite in length, can it.  Why can’t I walk round it?  Why have I never thought I can walk round it?  S-s-s-enta (it did come out rather a hiss) you haven’t been having me on, have you. Back to the maze.  The block blocks the path to the centre, but only because it is a maze, only because it has walls, if it was plain flat ground.  Only if the block has – sentience, it’ll stop being a block and form itself into a wall around the centre.  Giggle-time: fine, all I have to do is burn down the maze.  Maybe. 
Or have I totally distracted myself from the task at hand?
Because right now I’ll do anything but this.  I took another piece of paper.  Big black box labelled ‘Job to be done’.  I’m actually not that hot on drawing a female figure turning her back on something but I had the general idea full on.  OhIsee.  Your presence would force me to do something, would it, Senta.  I so wish I could get outside all of it and see what I’m supposed to do. 
 
Suck it and see.  So I had my lightbulb moment, did I.  The way I’m going on, you’d think I only had one chance and had to make the right choice.  No, it is not an impassable mountain-range, it’s – I spluttered into giggles.  It’s a – sandcastle.  Damn you, block, whatever you are, I made you and you can be whatever I want you to be.
 
Pause for sarcastic laughter.
 
I knelt on the beach in Zur with my trusty bucket and spade and began to dig. 
Yes, you’ve guessed. My spade snapped on solid rock.  Oh no, I said, this is an imaginary unbreakable spade and anyway there is no solid rock immediately below the surface of the sand. My next spade just might have looked less like a kid’s toy and more like something someone twice my size would use for shovelling cement.  It didn’t break.  That I suppose was progress.  It didn’t however, continue smooth descent to the depths, just stopped.  Common-sense Fal kicked in.  If I were digging in the garden and that happened, I’d take a trowel and scrape away the top-soil to see what the impediment was.  So I did, just slightly cautiously, as though it might be a nest of scorpions or something. Underneath the spade was – apparently – more top-soil.  To my surprise when I scrabbled at it with my trowel it shifted. Reassured this was moving a mountain of soil with tweezers, no threat?  I gave a particularly violent thrust with the spade.  It didn’t actually go very far but I had the distinct sensation of toppling into a hole after it.  Unnerved? Me? Fearless Fal?  Falling, falling, falling into Maya’s grave.  Nothing grotesquely obscenely screamingly awful happened like confronting her rotting corpse  I thought that was maybe because my self-preservation instinct kicked in but I forced myself to look around.  All on my own.  Whose grave?  Oh for - ! I’ve done the death of the self equals suicide bit!  Or was this the risk death bit. All the same I knew what I had to do next: dig down beneath my grave.  Senta is around.  Good!  I dug.  Bloody rabbit.  Do I bloody well go down the rabbit-hole?  I realized there was something a bit hysterical (does this surprise?) about my digging and paused.  I ought to – what ought I to do?  I couldn’t think of the word.  Shore it up, give it supports.  Think.  (I internalized it that) part of me died when Maya died.  I have to get beyond Maya’s death.  Which just might win the tritest remark of the year award.  Century?  Epoch?  My mind somewhat elsewhere as it often is when one is doing purely physical tasks (!) I imagined a few bits of broken stone and in a desultory and incompetent fashion shored up my tunnel.  I really think – OK, I’ve got this far.  It doesn’t have to be a bloody rabbit-hole, does it, it can be more human-sized, like an – entrance.  I am looking into a dark cave.  I giggled, remembering the Falsit.  I need a torch.  The cave was resistant to my attempts to illuminate it.  At the moment I so to speak crossed the threshold the word ‘pot-hole’ came to me and once more I was falling, falling, falling through free space, more floating, really, but I knew there was only one direction: down. As though I had a ‘chute. I am just – falling, endlessly falling.  Then – it wasn’t like ghosts or physical forms but – it was like Maya and Sorg were both there, smiling, and they both said, “You always loved Tet.” Which was all nicely calm and surreal except that I was choking and sobbing, tears pouring down my face and as far as I was concerned I might as well have been in a void for all sitting on the nice white carpet meant anything.
Except I landed.  In Tet’s arms with a white stallion he’d borrowed from Sarat not.  Back in normality not.  I don’t know where I landed.  I can’t explain where I landed.  Somewhere, nowhere, everywhere.  It had no identifying features.  That sounds good, doesn’t it.  Unless you’re there.  Maybe landed is the wrong word.  I didn’t fall further.  I was stationary.  It wasn’t frightening.  It wasn’t ethereal.  It wasn’t anything.  Chance to catch my breath?  Recall I am bloody well doing this to me.  What does this mean?  What am I telling myself?  Who is me? I ought to be floating if I’m nowhere!  I was actually then much nearer than I had been when sobbing to 1,2,3, end the trip, but well kind of I’d clearly been on one, arrived somewhere, even if it was meaningless. Even if it was meaningless, it meant something to me.  Open, open, what does open mean, no closed doors, no open doors, no doors, no divisions, whole.  If this is oo I have arrived where everything is whole, it seemed to me frankly – anti-climactic.  Wasn’t it more like – no possibilities.  What on earth have I done to myself now? Oh wait a minute.  I – make.  I focused on a bit of non-frightening non-ethereal nothing and demanded it be something, didn’t tell it what.   Whatever it was it needed to be it.  No, that was just being antsy!  If I just looked at it, I’d see what it was, if it was anything. I suddenly realized – maybe!  If I just totally let go.  I was refusing to see. 
The next bit was just a little hairy even by my high standards.  I was too dumbstruck to other than surrender to it.  Hmm, there may be something in that.  Think the best way of putting it is all my alternative futures.  One of the best ones was when I shot Sar-fenan but it also had me paired with Reakoed (Reakoed?), had me as some kind of ranger, had me crowned Queen of Dabida.  And had me dead, having thrust Maya out of the way and died in her place.  I died in Sorg’s place as well. 
And then it all faded and I was, I had put myself, back in my nice room.  I stretched out on the floor and went limp.  That was no effort at all. What the fuck did I just tell myself?  My eyes closed.
When I woke up it was dark.  I staggered to my feet and groped for the light, then sat blinking.
Who, me, dependent?  I have never in my life more wanted a cup of strong coffee.  I looked at the time.  I guessed it was possible to plead medicinal use but maybe not at 2 in the morning.  I found I badly wanted to talk to Sarat about the consequences of our choices.  I tried to see.  As if what actually happens isn’t complicated enough, in the background, if you don’t switch the bloody thing off, the busy little brain is also computing the might have beens and goo-ing you up with them too.  Hass said: it happened.  Only one thing happened at any given point, you stood here not there, you said this not that. 
That’s not quite the core of it, though, is it, Fal-girl.  The core is something less comforting: what is/was splitting me is in some way preferring one of those futures over what happened.  Lot of choice over being dead; Sar-fenan shot me in one of them.  Ohhh: is the death of the self suicide kick by any chance something to do with wanting a future in which I’m dead and at the same time of course deeply sincerely not wanting.  I dozed off again.
In the morning I popped in to see Senta
“Bit hairy.  Don’t think I’ve finished.  Just wanted to let you know I’m still alive.”
I decided I needed to connect with normality before playing any more games.   I went swimming, after which I ran round the grounds of the retreat, after which I stuffed myself at our renowned buffet .  After that I sat on a bench in the gardens and cursed no phone on which to play some stupid mindless game.  There are moments in life when what you really need is to play Right Angles.  I thought about Benji instead and wondered how Lattic and Narak were doing.  Then I got irritable because I couldn’t see where to start.  Having an immovable block is such a good concrete project.  Actually I had a horrible feeling I knew where to start and I wasn’t going to enjoy it.  Just replay the movie. A moment of excruciating pain.  I crumple to the ground.  I am dead.  Not much to say there really.  Try harder.  Is that what I want? Extinction.  Never mind what it might be, take it as is.  Would my world be a better place without me in it.  Sorg would be alive.  Would his world be a better place without me in it?  Would I rather be dead than sitting in a retreat on the Leolisle.  Yes, I did recognize these were increasingly absurd questions.  I was in fact near giggling at my enthusiasm for pursuing the subject of my previous demise.  It had to be done…What – no, what did I get out of the idea that I should have died in Sorg’s place.  Sacrificed myself.  My self, to which I otherwise cling.  Like grim death.  Hmm.
Proved I could sacrifice my self.  I did giggle then.  The only person who demanded that proved being me.  Proved I could tell my self to take a running-jump – just not off the high board.  OK, Hass, this time I’m going to dive.  No pool ever had that many steps to the top.  Varied though my life had been, I had had few encounters with heights.  I had dived real-time but not I now realized from very far up.  Why am I making myself climb into the stratosphere?  Why don’t I simply jump in?  That seemed to me a much more sensible idea and I (equally cautiously) descended and stood at the side of the pool glaring at it.  Then I remembered I had a perfectly good real pool to jump into.
I sat pool-side real time and – noted I was trembling.  Oh FFS!  Me, water, frightened?  I think I need to report the swimming-pool is full of sharks.  So the outside meets the inside, does it.  I stood brave and resolute, courageously facing death by firing-squad or something.  I took a running jump, surfaced, swam to the side of the pool, swam a couple of lengths as though I was competing for gold because I was suddenly seethingly furious.  Climbed out.  What was all that about?
Felt no different other than that I was visibly shaking.  Oh right, Fal came to the retreat to overcome her terror of water.  This did not seem a constructive path to pursue. I knew I had to have done it.  WTF. I felt a definite preference for the apparently formless nothing. Follow another alternative future.  Reakoed.  I wracked my little brain.  Had he ever given the slightest indication – bearing in mind my defo hopelessness at people.  Work avoidance: OK, Fal, why the fear, why the fury? I had actualized – now that’s a good word – something that metaphorically petrified me, but that wasn’t actually the point.  The point was my little mind had refused to differentiate between my exciting inner life and reality. Ah, yes, it would seem a block has been removed.  It’s the wrong bloody way round!  What (I thought) was supposed to happen was that I jumped metaphorically with the total lack of concern with which I jumped literally.  Hmm.  Why the fury?  Hence the fury!  I think I need advice on this one.
“Am I going in the right direction?” I finished.  “Feels as if I’m disappearing up my own.”
Senta finished laughing.  I suppose that was a sort of answer.
Then she teased me.
“You are sure no subconscious fear of water, pushed under by one of the boys, perhaps?”
“Quite sure.  All of us.  Fins.”
“Continue,” she said.
“Thanks,” I growled.
“You might revisit the cave.”
“Might I.”
Lovely day.  One of those days when you feel everything is perfect unless you’re obsessed with how it isn’t.  Don’t wanna revisit a cave, real or imaginary.  I lay on the grass and after a while recreated my cave.  What Senta had not said is I went in the wrong direction.  It’s my cave; this time I was sure to give it a floor, though I wasn’t sure I trusted the floor.  Damn it, the least I can manage is a trustworthy floor.  I concentrated hard on the floor being granite reaching down to the core of the earth.  I crawled in cautiously and made myself comfortable with a couple of cushions.  I seemed to have forgotten it was a road to somewhere.  Inwardly and outwardly I began to doze.  A path opened, like a cliff-path, cut in the rock.  I viewed it with high suspicion, surmising it was going to take me somewhere from which I was expected to jump, but I climbed, quite fun, lots of handholds.  It seemed to be getting lighter.  I came to a step so broad it was like a platform or a seat.  I sat.  I decided it had grass or at least hardy weeds in the cracks.  By the way, you need to understand – as if I did – this was kind of a joint effort.  I didn’t consciously create the ledge, for instance, but I did consciously decorate it.  yesiknow: that means two of me present!  Or did it?  Anyway, I felt vaguely positive.  I continued my ascent.  I was still suspicious of this climb but there was plenty to hang on to.  Except it was all in mind and my mind over which my control is still imperfect could make it vanish.  I came out into a field.  Not, I was relieved to see, a field of flowers, but maybe it was the wrong time of year.  It was of course the field by the stream and I felt tense and tearful before there was anything to be tense and tearful about.  The stream came to meet me, I can’t put it any better than that.  Actually I can.  It was coming in my direction and flowed past me.  I need to follow the stream.  I walked along beside it.
               When I surfaced the sun was beginning to set.  Refrain: and what was that about?
I went to find something to eat then headed for the Art Room.  If there was one thing I was clear on, it was the layout of that particular stretch of land.  X marks the spot I started.  Therefore the stream was headed for Zur.  Been there done that.  Apart from minor details like the stream representing Sorg.  “You always loved Tet.”  I shouted out loud: No!  No, it wasn’t all fake, no, I loved you, no!
Die in people’s (plural) places to prove I loved them.  To them?  To me?
Why did you come back? I asked Sorg.  Shakily.  If you came back.  If I imagined you came back. 
I had to believe I loved you. More than life.  Beyond death.
As you loved me. 
Sorg will always be looking after me.  Thus the time-slip in the garden.  Metaphor? Reality?
Because Sorg loved me like that. 
The only person I love like that – oh shit, I can’t die for Tet.  Safe, safe, dear boring old Tet is safe.
I think pale and drawn summed me up at that point.  Oh and shaking like a leaf in a hurricane.
Chasing risk, Fal? Chasing death?
Chasing love.
The relationship I wanted with Hass didn’t actually have any sex in it.
Did it have any love?
Hass, I was suddenly completely sure, would risk his life for me.
Some people avoid talking about others to avoid blaming them or appearing to blame them.
Or merely just designating them too as not totally perfect.
Because if there’s one thing that stands out about this four-sided triangle of mine it’s that I’m the only one who ever had a problem with anything.  True-untrue?
Sarat let go of his boundaries.  Hass didn’t.  Wouldn’t.  Couldn’t.  But then Sarat loves Hass like that and Hass didn’t love me like that.  Except I’ve just said he did. Does.  If it had been up there on the pink cloud Hass wouldn’t have refrained because of Mel any more than Sarat refrained because of Maya.
Maybe.  The parallel is not the same. 
I’m the only one who hasn’t resolved his or her problem with anything.
What my problem is would er – seem central to that.
We were six-freaking-teen.  Why do I give everyone a break except me?
I don’t love with my eso.  When I do I don’t recognize it.  So – so somewhere I ‘need’ the risk of external death to make up for not loving with my eso.  That is painful.  It is also very particular to the bMbK.  Whatever people’s questions and difficulties in normal life, the option of getting killed is not usually present.  I have to see something there.  Just not quite sure what it is.
More real.
Of course I embraced the bMbK – lit and fig.  It solved my problem.
It created my problem?
I thought my face was screwed up very tightly.  Bunny is desperate to get back to the centre of the warren.  I paused to relax myself.
In peacetime Dabida, peacetime anywhere, people don’t on the whole die suddenly and unexpectedly.  They have heart-attacks.  Tragic death of bather off Zalintan Head.  They don’t risk dying suddenly and unexpectedly unless they’re nuts.  Unicycling down the middle of the highway without lights while drunk?
The Matter of Kadun brought death into all their lives.  Sounds like something from the gutter-press.  Which doesn’t stop it being true. Before when it was given we’d all live out our lives and die naturally.  And after. 
Maya was ready to risk death.
But that must have clicked with something that was already going the wrong way in me.
Must it?
Fal, you screaming nitwit. Tet had been shot.  That is going to somewhere like I can only love people who’ll risk their lives.  Until in the end the life that has to be risked is mine.  What that is not is, you always loved Tet.  Bunny’s face was once more practically as if a spiralizer filter had been at it. Tet was defo – is – live till ripe old age until we perish of natural causes surrounded by doting grand-children.  Normality.  I sat back.  I sat forward.  I stood up.  I sat down.  None of it helped.  Of course I love(d) Tet but it couldn’t have been enough because I’d internalized – because Maya was my first love. Is that right? 
I was the only one anything was right with because I wasn’t hitched onto risking death for the bMbK.
That is another way of putting it.  Me and the rest of Dabida.  And Fidub.
So my problem with going back to Tet is what, emphasis, my problem, leave his problem out of this.  Forget betray Maya Sorg, betray the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun, Sorg bloody died for the bloody Matter of Kadun, Maya bloody died for the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun.  I am not Sorg.  I am not Maya.  Do Pietri and Caluna think they have to die for the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun because Maya did?  Vij, Sarsh? When I’ve quite finished getting furious with myself, I’d already come back to Zur.  Are you thinking I’m averse to helping Sarat?  Sponge.  I am very close to the B-word: balance.
Distinct, as in separate, as in running on a different track.  Vij must have been – but that doesn’t mean he got out the cammo and went off to – no, that’s – they’re all fighting this bloody war.
I don’t know how Fal fights this bloody war.  Without being consumed by it, literally, devoured. 
Crash-landing in Carlin.  Was that not now how I thought I had to fight this bloody war.  And all I can do is run it down, dropped out, broken down.  Pretending to have a breakdown.  Yes and no.  All I knew with total certainty is that my life was in shreds.  Sure, the car started.  That doesn’t mean I hadn’t reached rock bottom.  Or ground zero, as you prefer, being faced with myself.  I gambled with the bMbK being real and real it was,  kind of – kids have a plastic snake and put it in mum’s bed, only it’s real and its bite kills her.  That, I object to myself, is gambling with it not being real. My delusional trip.  What did they all think?  Does it matter?  I think most people have a sense – a funeral is some kind of closure, however inadequate.  It is to be completed.  Couple of stiff drinks, quick shot of sedative from the doc, whatever it takes not to throw yourself into the grave on top of the coffin, stand there screaming.  Maya and Jaizi held me up, literally.  Sarat wanted to be one of the coffin-bearers.  I think that was probably the only case ever when ‘not appropriate’ prevailed.  Only because he decided on something better.  Karci, Vrin, As, Mardis, Vishtu, Barfanu.  Then Sarat finished speaking and he walked over to me, and said possibly the only words that could keep me on my feet: “For Carlin.”  And so I spoke, but how much those two words went into me and through me and branded themselves on my soul and contributed to my current condition – we all went back to the House and I knew it was impossible for me to leave Carlin, impossible, rooted, not conceivable to so much as go back to Azt and collect my undies.  Then I saw the cottage.  I knew Saryulin understood, understood something basic.  He offered to do all the dealing with solicitors in Azt for me.  I said: I have to.  He nodded.
But my duty to Sorg is something I made up on the spur of the moment.  Doesn’t that sound wonderfully awful?  If it wasn’t quite that, what was it.  Something that came out of me, if a tree had grown out of me it wouldn’t have been any more shiftable.  At that on-going moment in time.  So what was it?  The perfect charade.  How the dashing young widow of the dashing young officer continues to fight the war.  Just exactly right, if I had neither past nor future.   If I weren’t me, more than, apart from.  Oh how desperately I tried to be only Falita san-yaega-baht.  It all made sense then.  But the roots I put down were real.  I wasn’t just there because of Sorg.  Real connections with real people.  What do they think of me in the Rabbiters’?  I need to talk to Vishtu.  Then Maya’s death broke it all open.
B is for Balance.  Nonetheless and heretofore it is the case that I am bound to Carlin.  If not by Sorg’s ghost.  If I want to be really vicious about myself and I want to be really vicious about myself, nothing like imagining I was communing with Sorg to keep me hog-tied.  Doesn’t any man break the rope?  I knew I was welcome at the House at any hour of the day or night with anyone whom I cared to bring with me.  Anyones: Tet and I and our kids.  Scream of brakes.  On the cusp of maybe Tet and I should live in Carlin.  After all, hasn’t he painted all the best bits of Zur by now. Just scream: have I achieved nothing but a huge circle?  I can live anywhere.  Got that bit.  Tet and I can live anywhere.  Got that bit.  How about Vaconik?  Don’t think we’d like the weather.  I knew there was something in Tet being before as well as after, but I wasn’t sure what.  Only natural, life goes on, of course Fal finds someone else.  Sorg was just a thin scraping of jam in between two thick slices of Tet? 
I dug out Senta and explained as briefly as possible that I needed to talk not to her, not to me, but to the Rabbiters.
 
Strange to be back in the real world.  I had a latte and suspected it made me high as a kite, but I wasn’t driving anywhere just yet.  Lattic saw me getting out of the cab and rushed to greet me. 
“Passing through,” I said. 
“It’s so lovely here, we’ll miss it!  But how are you!”
“I really don’t know,” I said. 
Narak came running over.  I owed them some kind of explanation at least.
Later I stumbled and tried to cover it with a light laugh.
Narak cocked his head.  Has the patient been wise to discharge herself?  Might she not be in danger of collapse?  The bloody car always starts. 
I muttered about not having eaten a lot and Narak frowned.  Senta, I observed to myself, thinks I’m a big grown-up girl capable of looking after herself.  I wonder if that’s true.
Tea and mounds of toast, which I wolfed.  Narak frowned more.
“Been fasting?”
“Not consciously.  I guess…”  What did I guess? “Guess I don’t think mental journeys need as much nutrition as physical ones.”
They listened.
Narak said, “You have to talk to Tet.”
That had occurred to me on the ferry.  It was an agreement I’d made with myself that I shouldn’t talk to anyone directly involved until I was right side up.  You can break agreements you make with yourself.  It’s really easy.
In this case I thought not.  Carlin would be bad enough.  How should I start?  It’s about my future relationship with Carlin.  Sounds like a bloody envoy negotiating a trade-deal.  That was the conversation I was resolved to have and I was going to have it.
I slept deeply, woke up dopey, devoured croissants and jam, picked up essential kit and got into the car before I changed my mind.
I stopped for some good cries and eventually turned up at the Rabbiters’.
Faces wreathed in smiles.  I wondered if they’d be so happy after I’d babbled for twenty minutes.
After a few minutes I said, “I need to talk to you guys about something.  Can we go in the back room?”
This is awful, I thought.
We settled in the back room.
“It’s,” I said.  I did actually wonder if I was going to get any further.  “As you know.”
“Personal?” asked Vishtu.
“Yes,” I said.
“Known each other long time.  Terrible times too.”
These guys have seen me a hysterical demented wreck.  They also know about Sorg’s maybe-ghost.  Just maybe they know everything that matters.
“Sorg,” I said.
“Life goes on,” said Barfanu.
“Can’t stay living in the past,” said Vishtu.
“There’s someone else,” I said.
“Natural,” said Barfanu.  “Lovely lady like you.”
Vishtu grinned.
“Anyone we know?  Better deserve you.”
“It’s more than that,” I said.  “More complicated.”
“Don’ tell un it’s young Asdinan!  Waiting for him to settle down.”
“No, it’s not As.”  Expectant pause.  “It’s the guy I left for Sorg.”
“War,” said Vishtu.  “Things calm down, they look different.”
“Are they allowed to?” It came out without thinking.
“No-one expect you to stay a single lady.”
What made me think the Rabbiters weren’t as conversant as anyone else with the findings of the Vasuculi Civil Affairs Department?  Is it not a story as old as humanity?
“It’s more than that,” I said again.  I am going to flounder here. “It’s – complicated.”  When in doubt, repeat yourself.  “We’re still working things out.  It’s as if I’ve got two countries now.   I don’t want – as though Kadun doesn’t exist, Carlin doesn’t exist, Sorg – didn’t happen.  It’s all part of me.  You’re all part of me.  He’s an artist.  He’d love Carlin.  If – say – we lived some of the time here, would anyone mind?”  Is this busking or is it busking?  Is it the opposite of what I convinced myself of in the retreat?  Is it having my cake and eating it too?  Hi Tet, I’ve just planned our future.  What was that about walking all over me?  These weren’t exactly after-thoughts, more pushed down below the surface, with Mitch’s famous granite slab on top of them.  Which didn’t 100% prevent me from knowing they were there.
“Sorg’d want you to be happy,” said Vishtu.   “Anyone got a problem it’s his problem.”
“Thank you,” I said.  By this time wet rags have more backbone.
“Artist,” said Barfanu.  “More the merrier, I say.  Liven the place up.”
“Oh yes,” I said, “Tet livens things up.”.
“Friend of Mel’s, int he,” said Vishtu.  “Saw his stuff on TV.  Beautiful, just beautiful.”
Somewhere under the granite slab I am squealing Tet’s stuff has been on Kadun television and I never even knew! Somewhere else I am asking myself how I could ever have thought Mel’s friend could be unwelcome. And of course somewhere I am giggling because the whole of Carlin undoubtedly knew everything external to the maelstrom there was to know about me.
 
Then I sat in my car a little way outside the village and realized I’d done the unforgivable at last, not of course for want of trying: I’d said Tet and I were an item when I was by no means sure of Tet’s view of that.  Except I was.  OK, either I’m right or my crowning achievement is to have rendered myself wholly insane instead of merely half-insane.  I drove back to Zur feeling happier than I had for ages.  Being wholly insane may be enjoyable.  Delight in it until Tet blows my head off.
 
I arrived at – my home.  There was a sign on the door. ART IN PROGRESS.  DO NOT DISTURB.  I texted him.  I am a work of art in progress all on my own.  May I disturb. 
 
“Oh now Fal-girl, that’s for the morons.  And to what do I owe?”
“You haven’t killed me so far,” I said, “so I’m gambling you won’t kill me now.  I’ve just been to Carlin to see how people would feel about you and me living there, at least some of the time.”  Silence, not, I thought, ominous.  “Everything I did was all right and all wrong,” I added, meaning mostly that what I’d been doing in Carlin was cool, perfect, if only all of me had been there.
“I seem to have missed a few episodes.  You’d be living with me in Carlin?”
I took a very deep breath.
“I’m thinking the point here is would you be living with me in Carlin?”
“You’re that sure.  The missing episodes, Fal.”
A nose is not so hard.  Perhaps one day I shall show you.  I should like to argue this question of software with them.  I have not told you that I am loosely involved in art therapy here in Zur.  An advisory capacity.  I would like to meet Senta.
When I was digging my way out of my own grave, he closed his eyes a moment, but he laughed at all the ways I could have proved my self to no-one but me by ending up dead.  Then he became serious.
“Twice you could have killed, Fal, and no-one’d think the worse of you for it.”
“Except me.”
“The rule of law?”
I nodded.
He sat back and howled at my discovery so late in life I was terrified of water.
“So if I take you swimming and I dare you jump off the high-board – would I be so callous!”
“Grrrrr.”
I’m thinking your mind moves ahead of you.  The stream connects Carlin to Zur.
Yes, I said, and it’s fluid, amazingly enough.
He simply said yes to my having been hijacked by the bMbK, that he’d thought something of the kind, though not so plainly. 
“Where is Sorg’s grave?”
That shook me. 
“There’s a family cemetery.”
“I should have come.”
“Tet…”
“We are not all perfect.  Was holding you up not my job?  ‘For Carlin’.  I do not have Sarat down as a moron but possibly the worst thing to be saying to you!  But then Sarat on that day.”
“How could he have possibly known!”
“So then it was seeming to you a statement – what did you say, a smear of jam, a denial of reality.  Not just a man, that is past, but a place, many people, that is current. If Fal and Tet live happily ever after in Zur it never happened, a critical part of your life erased, where is Kadun?”
“More than just a long weekend.  Less than everything.”
“That part of you that died with Maya. I cannot for a moment deny that the physical, the emotional aspects of another man in your life, but I am thinking there was always a third person in our relationship.”
“Yes,” I said. “Perfectly and utterly happy, only there was always someone else there.”
“You ran off with Maya.”
“Actualized – it’s my new word.  My delusion.”
“So now both people are dead and I – I do not think one death more critical to our relationship than the other.”
“It’s a bit,” I said.
“We cannot play what if.  Only what is.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“Am I not a simple lad at heart?  And if I say what is, what was, what was real is a line of fire burning through all the dross, is that not simplicity itself!”
“Give or take a few million words.  They told me I was not being real.  Can I ever forgive myself?”
“Have you not paid for your idiocy? A thousand times over.” Pause.  “I am thinking we are both on the high board and if we dive it is irrevocable.  But did you not just dive?  Did I not dive many years ago now?”
“Fire,” I said, “not water.”
He grinned.
“Who would not have doubts about flinging herself into the flames.  Perhaps too there is something in the idea we were kids.  Playing with fire.  But now we are not children. Should we not be looking at property, like responsible adult citizens?”
“Tet.”
“Oh my Fal-girl.”
Fire melted the coffee-table between us.
 
When we asked ourselves whom to invite we realized it was half the continent and absurd and should invite no-one, but after, after we should have a party. 
Mum and Dad.  We went together.  Mum gave a little squeal and threw her arms round both of us.
There were still shadows, my shadows.  Not dark deep dirty ones, but shadows.
Dear Karci and Vrin
I just – just?  Wanted – want? In person, don’t want you to hear it at second-hand.  If it’d been a piece of paper, I’d’ve torn it up. 
Where are they, anyway?  I have no bloody idea where they are.   Last seen in Azt.  I didn’t think either of them would be far from Sarat.  Hey, maybe I should make it a mass-mailing exercise: Hi, Everyone I Know in Azt.
Try again, absolutely plain.
Dear Karci and Vrin
I want you to hear from me in person that I’m getting back together with Tet.  We’re going to live in Carlin, at least part of the time.  Part of me is now carlini.  That’s just how it is.  Part of me of course isn’t. Fal
The other one of course I just had to drive across Zur. I didn’t want to give Sarsh a miscarriage.  Tet volunteered to come with me.
“What good would you be if Sarsh went into labour!”
He burst out laughing.
“Get some practice…I do not think Sarshi san-yaega-baht is so fragile.”
“I don’t really.”
“Metaphor.” He’d dubbed it the Sandwich Syndrome and we both knew he was right.
We also of course both knew that if we both pitched up it saved a lot of words. 
We pitched up in the evening and got told they were on the hill.
“Is it,” I asked cautiously, “something official, d’you know?”
Are you entertaining the leaders of the Pentangle, Mel?  Or just negotiating AMI’s future relationship with Carlin.  This is much more important.
But nothing like a bit of farce was more guaranteed to make Tet and I – Tet and I.  We chortled together and drove off to the hill.
Hass was extracted from whatever the gathering was.  He looked at us and laughed.
“We wanted to see Vij and Sarsh,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. 
When much later I was telling Hass the whole story, he said this bit reminded him of nothing so much as Sarat and Maya’s dilemmas over whom to speak to first.
“Darling,” said Sarsh, “you worry so much about things.”
Tet hooted.
“Free and easy type myself.”
“Good for her,” said Sarsh firmly. 
I wondered how much Sarsh knew.  I doubted Hass had told anyone anything, ‘cept maybe Sarat, but the state I’d been in in Carlin was common knowledge.  It was 20 years before I learned that Sarshi, who did believe in a – manifestation of a dead Sorg independent of my subconscious, had said half-laughing half-crying, Sorg, let there be an end.  Bad enough your being dead. And Pilo said: he will not leave Carlin with unfinished business. 
“I’m going to fret,” I warned everyone.  “I haven’t told your parents.  I haven’t told Saryulin, Duvi, As.  It’s just I don’t want people to find out second-hand.”
“Sorted,” said Sarsh briskly.
Karci to Fal:
Dear, dear Fal
Woo-hoo!  Look forward to the exhibition!  But you, dear Fal.  No-one expected being s-y-b to define you for life but Sorg is/would be (I’m a just don’t know on these things) so happy for you, it’s just so exactly on the grand scale, I mean what’s a border, a line in the sand or in this case a dirty great ravine, how he’d want it to be.
Love Karci.
I seemed to have forgotten about the grapevine.
Sarat to Fal:
Well, now, Fal-girl, and isn’t this is turn-up.  So glad for you both.  Maya would be so pleased. 
All our love.
I remembered I was a responsible adult citizen and reckoned Narak and Lattic and for that matter Senta would assume I stayed overnight in Carlin.  Text from Narak: Everything OK?  Everything, I replied, is just fine.
And so to bed.  I realized I felt shy.  Tet realized he felt shy.  Both of us realized each other felt shy but only one of us could say why we felt shy.
“As though it’s the first time,” said Tet. We flopped on the bed giggling and after a while stopped feeling shy.
Farce broke in again.  We wanted to go to the shrine, nab the first free mentor and just very quietly and privately get paired, but we still had to have witnesses and it would be good if they were people who mattered to us, not two stray Zuri hauled in off the street.  Reakoed and Maitlan were obvious, but that was only three-quarters of the Six. We have to have Mel and Hass.  And we had to have Cantilip and Venga.  Dual-nationality?  It’s a doddle.  This made ‘quietly and privately’ a bit problematic. 
“And Lattic and Narak,” I said.
Tet rang Mel.
               “What is the point of being King of Dabida if you can’t slip unnoticed in and out of your own shrine?”
               “Often wondered that,” said Mel.
               I knew this was the culmination of the conversation the five of them had been having ever since I ran off with Sorg and that nothing bar war or death would have kept them away.  I also realized that I didn’t really want this momentous occasion to see me clad in leggings and a T.
               I rang Narak.
               “Eek, darling, eek.  Of course we’ll  come!”
               “There’s a posh frock in the back of the wardrobe.  Dark blue.  Matching shoes.  Dark blue earrings.  Any make-up you can find!”
               “It shall be done!  Where are you?”
               Lattic brought a little posy of flowers from the garden.
               Narak grinned.
               “We nearly brought Benji but perhaps not.”
               “Benji,” I said firmly, “will be there in spirit.  No-one has had more of an earful from me than Benji!”
               I disappeared upstairs and duly emerged transformed.
               “Whew!” said Narak.  “Not seen you dressed up much.”
               “She is, isn’t she,” said Tet.  “Now, my lady Fal-girl, if you will do me the honour of accompanying me to the shrine.”
               “Nothing,” I said softly, “would or could please me more.”
               I am Falita Emery and I like it!
               We all crept, not really any other word for it, back to the house. I saw that a small but critical amount of catering had been fixed.  Maitlan examined a flagon of apple-stock.
               “I believe carlini live on the stuff?”
               Narak, Lattic and I produced a trio of most evil grins.
               But it wasn’t like a party and even less like a wedding-party.  It was much better than that: a family get-together.  I rapidly kicked off the posh shoes, which didn’t fit terribly well, but no-one would let me play hostess, so I reclined on the sofa I’d bloody well bought in a state of delirious contentment, with Tet beside me grilling Narak on the cultural scene in Carlin.  And schools.  And I grinned and said, hang on, we’re all foreigners!  Or honorary carlini as you prefer.  I think all three of us have roots.  Absolutely, said Lattic.  Hass grinned and said send them to the basket-weavers’.  The what? asked Tet.  What they call Simtian-Li, posh progressive.  As went there.  And me! Said Venga.  I looked up at Hass and he met my eyes and we both knew he’d avoided saying ‘what Sorg called’.  One day we’ll mention his name in normal conversation.  Not today.  Low-down on anything is in the village, Narak was saying.  Latest productions – director probably lives in the village!  It might have been the apple-stock but I pointed at Tet in mock-horror.  He has never been to the Rabbiters’!  Cantilip patted his hand.  Never mind, darling.  We can’t all be perfect.  For reasons I’d swear totally unknown to her, Tet and I creased.  She blinked.  Long story, I said.   The action is in Car-sandis, said Narak, but the nucleus is the village. 
The bell went.  Tet came back carrying a small box.
“PANTHER Courier Services. ‘Tis from Sarat.”
So everyone paused agog.
I opened it carefully.
In it was a huge translucent shimmering scarf.  The Leotard Look.  I laughed and cried at the same time as Tet carefully arranged it round my shoulders. But at the bottom of the box was a large book and I got all trembly again because I knew what it was.  It’s dark green leather with a clasp, the key still attached by a tiny chain.  I opened it and suddenly recovered myself, laughed, proudly displayed the front page.
               “You didn’t know we were talented calligraphers, did you!”
               This is Fal’s and Maya’s Unique Record of Everything
               But still only I knew just why this book.  I turned the pages slowly and carefully.  Had the pressed flowers survived the years?  Would they fall out?  There were poems meticulously transcribed. 
‘Love never dies.’  But that wasn’t it.  Birth-days.  I giggled remembering we argued about hyphenating it.  Maya was adamant: birth-day expressed the day you were born, not the anniversary thereof.  A snapshot had come loose and fluttered to the floor.  Sarat and Maya on the beach.  When we were six-freaking-teen and nothing could hurt us. Nothing can hurt us.  Nothing has hurt us.  Is that the last and craziest step of all? Mel picked up the picture and sat looking at it and it passed through me, but painlessly, others suffered, Fal, as much if not more.  Then there I was, six-freaking-teen, as drawn by Tet.  I showed him.  He said, Did I not always love you? And I knew that was the line of fire cutting through all the dross. Has anyone got a phone!  But no, what I wanted to say to Sarat was possibly beyond words but certainly not a public occasion.
               “It’s the same and it’s different,” I said.  “OK, I’ll make sense in a minute.”  Shall I?  I wanted to say nothing has changed, don’t you all see, nothing has changed.  Nothing real.  It was crazy.  The hell with that.  But Tet understood.
               “Should we not all go down to the beach?  Perhaps metaphorically speaking.”
               “Neither of us,” I said, very clearly, “none of us, wants today to be a public occasion.”
               Venga said softly: “Click, click, bloody click.”
               “Exactly,” I said, and laughed.  “Not sure where that gets us.”
               “I will not be trapped in my own home,” said Tet.
               “Ignore them,” said Cantilip.  “Perhaps they’ll go away.”
               “There are other things,” I said.  “People I haven’t told yet, people who matter to me.  Don’t want them to find out from bloody Glitz.”
               “Ah,” said Cantilip.
               “Then I tell them!” I said.  “It’s the same.  It’s different.  This party is moving to the Rabbiters’.” 
               “All or nothing,” said Mel.  “I wonder if Sarat can come.”
               “Is this mad or is this mad?”  Me.  Mel and Sarat both can command a decent amount of privacy if required, but I knew Mel knew what I knew: the party would not be complete in Zur.
               “I’m thinking,” said Tet, “it does not matter a damn what anyone else thinks this party is about.  We know what it’s about.”
               Small matter of explaining, I thought.  We’re not going to explain it.
               “It’s still not Batna-kri,” I said.  “The border.”
               “Fly,” said Mel.
               And so I stood in the drawing-room at the House and said, “This is my partner, Tet.  We’re going to live in Carlin.”
               Tet said only slightly mockingly: “It’s excellent work for the empire she does, I’m thinking.”
               “My dear girl,” said Saryulin.  “Welcome back.”
               “We’re having a party at the Rabbiters’.  Mel, Hass, all of us.  Mel’s there fixing it.”
               In due course Sarat arrived with Karci and Vrin.  If anyone thought, this is loony, OK, Fal’s got together with her ex, big-freaking deal, it’s a national event?  we didn’t care because we knew what this party was about.
               I teased As about not having ‘settled’ yet, and he said there is someone, she’s in Azt, so we’re keeping it very quiet.  Tell, tell, I said.  She’s an academic, translational philosophy, whatever that is, bit out of my depth, I confessed. 
               Finally I got two mins alone with Sarat.  I twirled my translucent chiffon.
               “Thank you.  Beyond words.”
               “Maya didn’t have much,” he said.  “Not in Kadun, left it all behind in Zur, but the few things that mattered to her I kept.” 
               I knew that also meant that Pietri and Caluna had borne the brunt of the horror of sorting through her things.  And that I was one of the things that had mattered to Maya.
               When I looked for Tet, he seemed to have vanished.  Ah well, can’t have gone far.
Unless he’s got lost!  I didn’t think Tet got lost.  When I saw him again he was drawing our party.    Narak and Lattic insisted that they had their duty to Benji and we should stay at their place and house-hunt. There were one or two problems with this, like no clean knickers and still being dressed up.  Oh, and technically speaking we were in a foreign country without our passports.  While we were sure Sarat could smooth our path, we thought on the whole Mel could fly us all back to Zur. Tet went to his place and I to mine.  I tried to keep a straight face about what I was packing for my honeymoon – wax jacket and combat boots – and observed to myself that while I meaning we had not had a sexy undies thing I really thought I’d like something more interesting than white cotton but I could hop into Car-sandis for that. Then lost in conversation with Narak and Lattic I didn’t really notice how long Tet was taking to pack.  Then Tet arrived and Narak handed us the keys and observed the freezer was full so we shouldn’t be forced to pop into the village if it was ‘inconvenient’, and just for our convenience put a box of tea, coffee, bread, milk, butter and eggs in the car, and we were off.
               I knew Tet was in love with Narak’s as soon as he saw it, but all he said was, “Is this a style of building common in Carlin?”
               “Yes,” I said enthusiastically.  It’s curved.  Set a little forward from the trees, it follows the curve of the woods, and the roof is a single slope.  “Not nearly big enough for a family.  Hopeless as a studio.”
               “Ah, but the potential.”
               Once inside, he looked at the grate and grinned.
               “There is no Imperial Clean Air Act in Carlin?”
               “No-one thinks wood-smoke counts.”
               “In that case we must lay a fire.”
               “Logs are out the back,” I said.
               When finally we were reclining before a blazing hearth sipping coffee, he reached for his bag and carefully lay what I knew to be a drawing – it was between two sheets of cardboard – between us. 
He took my hand.
               “Hass showed me where Sorg’s grave is. I wanted to have a little talk with him. Nothing I’m sure he didn’t know already.”  I felt as if the world had stood still.  “I told him you were safe now.  I told him he was more than welcome at our party for is this not his place.  I told him indeed he was welcome at any time.  I told him a man or a woman can love two people equally and in life that is complicated but when one is dead it is not.  And then I told Sarat my conversation and he said, of course she’s here.”
               I was still suspended in time and space.
“Silly of me,” I said.  “I just knew our party could not be complete in Zur.”
Tet laughed,
“Are there not strange metaphysical questions there, all of which we shall ruthlessly ignore. ”  He looked mischievous.  “Duvi I think had a more mundane curiosity as to what is this man called Tet.  Of course my lady of Carlin does nothing so crude as the third degree.”
“Inevitable,” I said cheerfully.
 “And now I’ll show you.  And others.  A few select others.  Is there a scanner here?”
There were Mel and Vishtu and Cantilip and Karci and Sarat – and Maya sitting on a table and Sorg lounging in the doorway and in the middle of all of them me, and I haven’t gone through life not realizing I was good-looking but just possibly not that exquisitely, transcendently beautiful.  Then I realized we were all just slightly translucent.
“We weren’t exactly in Carlin, were we, any of us.  That’s why they could come.”
I knew now I didn’t have to explain anything to anyone ever again.
We found the scanner.
Pilo and Sasala, Mardis, Vij and Sarsh, Pietri and Caluna.  Amida, Taja, Vax.  And Senta.
Subject: Our party
[image]  Tet and I paired today at the shrine in Zur.  At first we were going to be quiet and private, just Mel and Hass.  But that wasn’t right. We realized it was our party and went to the Rabbiters’. Tet drew it for all of us. We’re going to live in Carlin.
“Duvi gave me the names of some realtors,” Tet was saying.  “Shall we set to work?  I’ll make us some more coffee.”
Sarat, Saryulin, As, Karci, Vrin, Mel, Hass.
Subject: Our party
[image]
Sarat’s reply was instant, must have been one of the few ten second interludes in which he was sitting down.  Thank you.
Amida’s reply took longer to come.  Darling, Cho and I will treasure.  Long to meet your Tet, you must bring him to see us.
My dear, typed Pietri, if that was not so, then there was no point.
A number of other mails shot back and forth, which I didn’t know at the time.  The words ‘field effect’ occurred rather often.  Perhaps I should have mailed Kaminua.  The Rabbiters’ Rest, among other things in its long history the local for half an army, was not in or even particularly near the field and not noted for its ethereal nature.  But several things occurred to me all at once.  I followed Tet into the kitchen and stretched out against his back.
“Keep doing that.  Raises making coffee to another plane.”
I kissed the back of his neck, then whispered romantically in his ear, “I don’t know how much you’ve heard about the inner and esoteric aspects of the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun.”
I felt him grinning.
“A little, Fal, a little.”
“Would I be totally off-target if I said I can get really involved in the plans for the railways and you’d smile cheerfully and say Lido-extenders rule!”
His grin seemed to be spreading through the kitchen.
“But it’s not entirely true to say I don’t give a flying fuck about the bloody Matter of bloody Kadun!  We’re not living in that field, I’m telling you that much!  Our kiddies will be finding their own way not born half in another dimension or whatever it is.”
I buried my face in his hair and half-choked with laughter, then surfaced.
“So long as you know the lie of the land,” I said smoothly.  “How many?”
“That would be rather up to you, I’m thinking.”
“Don’t forget the studio will need an electrified fence.”
“That I’m thinking seriously.  A converted attic, a small retractable ladder?”
Later when we were slaving over hot Grid-sites the bell went.  Ridiculously, we felt surprised, as though nobody knew we were there. When Tet opened the door, there was no-one there, just (yet another) cardboard box of groceries, fresh milk, fresh butter, fresh bread, cream.
“Look arter un own in Carlin,” I said.
“Looked after my Fal-girl.”
“Oh yes,” I said, “they looked after me.  Nothing fancy, mind, nothing embarrassing.”
We went early to bed, not, we thought, because we were particularly tired, but in fact we slept like only intermittently tactile logs way through to 10 the next morning.  It had been a rather exciting 24 hours. 
“Lunch at the Rabbiters’, I think,” said Tet.
Half a story.
Tet approached Vishtu, who was directing moving tables around.
“If you have a moment, I do not think I thanked you for our very fine party.”
“Pleasure all ours,” said Vishtu.
“As you may know, I draw, and I drew our party and I should like you to have that drawing.”
Vishtu slowly took it all in and smiled.
“Put it above the bar.”
Tet turned
“And now I’m thinking there’s someone we owe a drink, someone who kindly left us groceries.”
“’Course they were here,” said Barfanu.
Tet, I thought, brilliantly concealed his astonishment that all the Rabbiters had assumed Maya and Sorg were at our party.
“It is not, you understand,” he said to me after, “I am being patronizing.  It is not a usual response by any standard.  The field?”
“Barfanu,” I said softly, “thought it was perfectly sensible and reasonable for Sorg’s spirit to be looking after me.  The Rabbiters – they’ve been here for ever, seen it all – all the history of Carlin.  So any – experience of broadening of what is normal was first experienced centuries ago and passed down.  It is their normal.”  I was grinning at something else.  “You do know you’ve just become carlini.  Tet, all they need to know about you is you know Maya and Sorg were at the party.”

Is this inflammatory, offensive?  Good.  I actually told them at one point or two or three, fine, you think you're so bloody bright.  Prove it.  Of course progressing to speech and reason, constructing arguments, adducing fact, would also prove it or not as the case may be