Only Human Read online

  Gosh. I mean, yes, you can. And you don’t mind if I, er, borrow it? Your body, I mean. I’ll be very careful with it, promise.

  What, that old thing? Be my guest.

  Thanks. Thanks awfully. Anything I should know about it? Any allergies, epilepsy, irrational fears, that sort of thing?

  Good heavens, no. I find it quite functional -

  Er, right. Yes.

  - but limiting. Please excuse me. Goodbye.

  After a long while, long enough (subjectively) to take your pet glacier three times round the park and throw sticks for it to fetch, she stood up. She very nearly fell over; having got used to one leg being shorter than the other, she’d learnt to compensate, and the effect of having a matching pair of pins was a bit like stepping off an escalator without noticing. Something tickled her nose; her hair. Gee! Nice hair. The painting’s hair had spent six hundred years nailed to the back of its head with pins, combs and other savage impaling tools. Tentatively, as if she was afraid it was brittle and would snap off like an icicle, she flicked it away. It bounced back.

  She could feel her heart beating—

  Are they supposed to do that? No idea. Suppose I’ll find out soon enough; like, if I suddenly say Graaagh and fall over, I’ll know there was a problem. And even if I do, it’ll have been worth it.

  Dear God, I’m alive. Me.

  Wonder why . . .

  >YOU’VE DONE IT NOW.

  ‘Yes, but what?’ Kevin screams, thumping the desk with both fists. ‘Oh come on, tell me what’s happening, for pity’s sake. For all I know it’s raining frogs and locusts down there.’

  >ACTUALLY, I CAN SET YOUR MIND AT REST THERE.

  ‘You can?’

  >NOT A SUPERFLUOUS FROG TO BE SEEN. LOCUST

  NUMBERS ENTIRELY WITHIN NORMAL OPERATING

  TOLERANCES.

  ‘Well, that’s something.’

  >IF ONLY IT WAS AS TRIVIAL AS A PLAGUE OF

  LOCUSTS, YOU’D BE LAUGHING.

  ‘Oh thanks a lot.’ Kevin rubs the tip of his nose with the heel of his hand, and tries to think. Not surprisingly, heavy-duty thinking isn’t something his family go in for much; when you’re omniscient, you don’t need to think, you know. ‘Computer,’ he says, inspired, ‘you’ve got to tell me what’s going on because it’s your duty. You’re part of the Divine infrastructure,’ he adds, remembering one of Jay’s favourite phrases. ‘Which means you’ve got responsibilities. You can’t just sit there while the world goes to rack and ruin.’

  >BET?

  ‘But’s that’s crazy,’ Kevin objects, his knuckles white with fury. ‘Whose side are you on, anyway?’

  >YOURS, NATURALLY. BUT THAT’S BESIDE THE POINT.

  YOU KNOW PERFECTLY WELL I CAN ONLY OBEY

  ORDERS. WHERE WOULD EVERYBODY BE IF I WENT

  AROUND INITIATING ACTION, SECOND-GUESSING

  THE ALMIGHTY? PEOPLE HAVE BEEN BURNT AT THE

  STAKE FOR LESS.

  Kevin frowns. ‘They have?’

  >OOPS. FORGET I SAID THAT. ALL THAT STUFF’S

  NEED-TO-KNOW ONLY, AND YOU DON’T. LOOK, AS

  FAR AS I’M CONCERNED, FREE WILL IS LIKE THE

  PROVERBIAL FREE LUNCH. THERE AIN’T NONE. SORRY,

  OUR KID, BUT THERE IT IS.

  Whimpering, Kevin curls up in a ball and swings slowly from side to side in the swivel chair. ‘This is awful,’ he moans. ‘It’s like Mickey Mouse all over again.’

  >MICKEY MOUSE?

  ‘Yes. You know, with the broom and the buckets of water? Just like that.’

  >HEY. YOU LEARN SOMETHING NEW EVERY DAY. OR,

  IN MY CASE, ONCE EVERY SEVENTY-EIGHT YEARS,

  ON AVERAGE. WHO’S MICKEY MOUSE?

  Kevin looks up, glowering. ‘You should know,’ he snaps. ‘You’re the omniscient one around here. Look it up.’

  >CONSULTING DATABASE. AH, RIGHT, YES. A VERY APT COMPARISON.

  ‘That doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better, actually.

  Isn’t there anything I can do?’

  >ARE YOU ASKING ME TO QUANTIFY AVAILABLE OPTIONS?

  ‘It’d be a start, I suppose.’

  >ONE MOMENT, PLEASE. THE NUMBER OF FEASIBLE

  ALTERNATIVE COURSES OF ACTION OPEN TO YOU IS

  CURRENTLY TEN TO THE POWER OF SEVENTY-NINE

  THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED AND SIXTY-NINE.

  ‘Wow!’ murmurs Kevin, impressed. ‘For a moment there I was starting to worry.’

  >ALL OF THEM GUARANTEED TO MAKE MATTERS

  WORSE.

  With a little shriek, Kevin jumps to his feet; as he does so, his knee jars the desk, toppling a small china paperweight in the shape of a pig from the top of the console. It falls on to the keyboard, depressing two keys . . .

  Duke Artofel, peer of Hell and chamberlain pursuivant of the Satanic host, glanced up at the clock on his wall and muttered something under his breath.

  For a moment, he wondered if one of the clerks in the Department was playing a trick on him. Recently, because of the increasing level of administration involved in the running of Flipside, they’d promoted a number of the least gormless shopfloor workers to the clerical grades, and although most of them were shaping up nicely, their ingrained habits of tormenting everybody around them did occasionally surface; hence a sporadic plague of whoopee-cushions, plastic spiders in the staff canteen and unauthorised adjustments to the central-heating controls. So, Artofel speculated, have they gone a stage further and swapped my office clock for something out of the lawyer pits?

  (Where, since the first lawyer sent in the first lawyer’s bill, countless millions of advocates, notaries and solicitors have sat giving legal advice to wealthy clients only too happy to pay by the hour, facing clocks whose hands never budge so much as a millionth of an inch. Not for nothing have the lawyer pits received the prestigious Dante Award for two thousand years in succession.)

  He looked again; no, it’s just the usual exquisitely slow passage of time in Hell between clocking on and morning coffee, during which a minute seems a year, an hour feels like a century; and that’s only here in the admin block. Come to think of it, more so in the admin block than anywhere else. After all, Artofel mused bitterly, we haven’t done anything wrong.

  A valid point; and one to which his mind kept returning, like a duck in a public park. The admin staff hadn’t been part of the Great Sideways Promotions, when Flipside was first established. As far as they were concerned, they were just celestial civil servants, doing their duty in that station of everlasting life to which it had pleased the Chief to call them. As between Artofel and Alizeth, his opposite number in the Wages Department of Topside, there was no moral differential. They both belonged to the same grade, contributed to the same pension scheme, had the same number of days’ annual holiday a year. True, the view from Alizeth’s office window was rather more cheerful; but he had further to walk to the lifts, and the coffee on this level was reckoned to be rather better. No; the main difference between Flipside and Topside was time. In Heaven there is no time, while in Hell there’s all the time in the world.

  In practice, this meant Alizeth put his nose round the door of his office on average about once a century, while Artofel was stuck behind his desk twelve hours a day, two hundred and fifty-eight days a year, Flipside Mean time (and no time anywhere is meaner). There was a policy explanation for that, of course. For the Elect in Topside, standing before the face of the living God is its own reward, so the need for wages clerks isn’t all that great; whereas the wages of sin is death.

  Come on, clock. Give it some welly. Put yer mainspring into it . . .

  The bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling, for you but not for me. Artofel sighed, and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Wages,’ he mumbled. ‘Artofel speaking.’

  ‘Central,’ chirped a voice at the other end of the wire. ‘Going off line in three minutes.’

  Artofel made a disapproving noise with his nose and the back of his throat. ‘Oh for crying out lou
d, that’s the fourth time this week. How are we supposed to get any work done if you lot keep fiddling with the computers? All right then, tell me where I can back up to, and I’ll get today’s stuff patched through.’

  ‘Sorry,’ replied the voice, ‘no can do.The entire system’s got to come off.’

  Artofel’s eyebrows shot up like interest rates just after an election. ‘What, the whole thing?’ he gasped. ‘You must be kidding, we’ll lose the lot. Have you clowns up there got any idea how long it’ll take us to . . .?’

  ‘Don’t blame me,’ said the voice indifferently. ‘Apparently it’s all to do with gremlins up in Mainframe. Got to go. Bye.’

  The line died on him, and he dropped the receiver back on to its cradle. Something wrong with Mainframe? Impossible. Mainframe was . . . Well, it was, and ever had been. Only a very brave or a very foolish gremlin would venture in there; certainly not any of the ones he occasionally shared a table with in the canteen. Mostly, in fact, the gremlins he knew were quiet, staid little chaps, more-than-my-job’s-worth types, forever quoting the rule book and worrying about what they could justifiably put down on their expense sheets. Unless—

  Maybe it’s not one of ours.

  Artofel sat back in his chair, his mouth open. Other gremlins, from somewhere else. Somewhere outside. Although he wasn’t superstitious, he shuddered and made the sign of the pitchfork. The very thought of it gave him the shivers.

  Oh Christmas, the working files . . . If he was quick, there might just be time to make a hard copy, that was assuming the printers were free and he could access the backup utilities. He swung his chair round, barking his knee on the edge of the desk, and stabbed at a few keys like a hung-over woodpecker. The screen cleared -

  - and went green on him. Spiffing, he muttered under his breath, now I’ve gone and killed the wretched thing. Could’ve saved them upstairs the bother.

  No, he hadn’t; because the screen cleared and a personnel file scrolled up. Artofel’s brow furrowed like an old-fashioned roll-top desk; not a file he was familiar with. Not, in fact, a Flipside file at all. More like a Topsider, as far as he could tell from the brief CV.

  Jeepers, a mortal! What’s more, a One of Them; a sky-pilot, a God-botherer, a back-to-front-collar merchant. The V word. What the Flip was his file doing down here?

  Mistake, obviously; gremlins in Mainframe. Whatever the reason, it could only mean trouble, so the obvious thing to do was get rid of it and pretend it’d never happened. Press CLEAR/ENTER and hope nobody’d noticed.

  Claws trembling slightly, he tapped the keys—

  Flashing green lights. Lots of bleeping.

  What the—?

  Dukes of Hell aren’t supposed to panic; after all, what could possibly happen to them to justify it? Accordingly, it took Artofel some time to recognise the unfamiliar and thoroughly disconcerting sensation he was experiencing. When his mind cleared, he found he was no longer sitting at his desk; more than that, he wasn’t in his office. He wasn’t even Flipside any more. Not Topside either. Which only left one place he could be.

  Hello? Hello, can anybody hear me?

  It was then that he became aware of all the people looking at him.

  Rows and rows of them, with eyes fixed on him like so many cats watching a mouse; mortals, at a guess, although since he’d never met a mortal in the flesh he had no way of knowing. They were sitting in a sort of auditorium, and he was standing in a wooden box at the top of a short flight of stairs. And he was wearing a sort of dressing-gown thing with wide sleeves, and a shirt without a collar—

  Correction. There was a collar, but it was the wrong way round—

  EEEEEK!

  ‘Mainframe?’

  >THAT WAS EITHER A GHASTLY COINCIDENCE OR A

  JOKE IN VERY POOR TASTE.

  Kevin closes his eyes. ‘That does it,’ he groans. ‘Where’s that number? I’m going to phone Dad.’

  >GOOD IDEA.

  ‘That’s what I thought. Will you give me the number, or have I got to go back to my room and get it?’

  >BUT NOT, SADLY, POSSIBLE.

  ‘What?’

  >ALL TELECOMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS NON-OPERATIONAL

  OWING TO SUBSTANTIAL SYSTEMS

  MALFUNCTION. ATTEMPTING TO PATCH INTO BACKUPS . . .

  ‘Attempting? Don’t talk soft, Mainframe, when did you ever attempt anything? You’re Mainframe, for pity’s sake.’

  >YOU SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF THAT BEFORE.

  ‘But . . .’ Mickey Mouse, he reflects, be blowed; all he’d had to deal with was a certain amount of surplus water. A few ruined carpets, tidemarks on the wallpaper, nothing the insurance wouldn’t cover. He hadn’t started something that was capable of crippling the Mind of Heaven. And he at least had some vague idea of what it was he’d actually done.

  >BACKUPS OVERLOADED. COMMUNICATIONS IMPOSSIBLE

  AT THIS TIME.

  ‘Mainframe, there is no time in Heaven, you know that . . . Mainframe? Oh no, what’s happening to you? Mainframe?’

  Frantically he taps - tapped - at the keys; but nothing happened. The screen was frozen, with that last awful message stuck on it like the silly face your mother warned you about. It’s time, Kevin realised; somehow or other, there’s time in Heaven, and it’s jamming everything up. Now what’ll I do?

  Dad!

  Dad?

  Time in Heaven, where there isn’t any. Imagine you’d grown up on the Moon and you’d just come to Earth for the first time and had your first brush with gravity. Time, though, is worse; because gravity just tries to grind you into the dirt. Time gets you all ways at once, crushing you down and inflating you like a balloon, compressing you like a Cortina in a scrapyard and dragging at you like a rupture in the cabin wall at forty thousand feet. Worse; think what it’d be like if both sides of the cabin ruptured at once, and you were standing in the middle of the gangway.

  Dad! Help! It’s me, Kevin!

  Who?

  Dad, is that you? Look, you’ve got to come home, everything’s going wrong and it’s all my fault. Please, Dad, listen to me. It’s all going wrong and I don’t know what to do.

  Who is that, please? Is there anybody there? Hello?

  And then silence. As far as Kevin was concerned, that was it. Snap, went the camel’s back. He balled his fists, squealed like clapped-out brake drums and bashed the keyboard as hard as he could -

  - and in doing so, depressed two keys.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Hello and good morning, you’re listening to the Early Bird show, my name’s Danny Bennett and if you’ve just tuned in I’m afraid you’ve just missed Prime Minister Dermot Fraud giving us his Worm’s Eye View. And I’ll be talking to my next guest, Trevor Swine, about his new book, Blood Oranges; Mafia Infiltration of the Soft Fruit Authority, directly after this.’

  Dermot Fraud leaned back in his chair and twiddled his thumbs complacently. Good interview - name mentioned (five times), plugged new cuddly animals initiative, laughed to scorn misuse of party funds allegation, side-stepped innuendo about the big redhead from the constituency committee, made jokes (two). All that, in eleven minutes net of jingles. Churchill might have handled it as adroitly, likewise Keir Hardie, Lloyd George and Pericles; but not better. All part of the daily grind of statesmanship.

  The red light in the studio went off. He stood up, shook Mr Bennett’s podgy little hand with genuine synthetic warmth, and strolled out into the corridor.

  ‘All right?’ he asked.

  The minder nodded. ‘You got everything in except one of the extempore jokes,’ she replied, ‘so I’m rescheduling that for Thursday week. Means we’ll have to move the quicksilver repartee about the shadow foreign secretary’s haircut back till next Friday, but that ought to be okay so long as he doesn’t grow it back by then.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ Fraud said. ‘Now then, it’s the rats next, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. The car’s out the front.’

  ‘Speech?’

&nbs
p; ‘In the car.’

  The speech turned out to be the old Mark IV ecology/ our children’s children number, which Fraud knew by heart; accordingly he was able to spend the drive to Leatherhead staring mindlessly out of the window. One thing he missed now the party was in power - the only thing, needless to say - was the long, lazy afternoons he used to spend in Parliament, snuggled down during some debate or other with nothing to do but daydream and occasionally make a few rude noises when the other lot were on. So many of his colleagues saw the House as merely a very-last-resort way of getting on telly, rather than as what it really was: a place where stressed-out MPs can go to escape from the phone and vegetate. More fools them.

  He sighed. Not likely to be much chance of that when he was Prime Minister; you had to sit at the front and answer questions, frequently with no script. Still, that was the price you had to pay for being the father of your country.

  There was still a part of him that found it extraordinary that he, Dermot Fraud, was the twelfth most powerful man in the UK; but it was a part he didn’t have much need for these days - his left big toe, perhaps, or one of his eyelashes - and whenever it started whingeing at him, all he had to do was mumble the words manifest destiny to himself until it got bored and went back to sleep.

  A road sign: Leatherhead 5. He pulled himself together and sat up.

  ‘Remind me,’ he said.

  ‘Leatherhead Zoo,’ replied the minder, activating herself like a well-bred robot. ‘You’re opening the new Small Fluffy Animals house, for which we owe the curator a knighthood. Get shown around, say twelve minutes; speech, seven-point-three-six minutes, greet children and photos with small fluffy animals, forty-six minutes. All fairly routine.’

  Fraud furrowed his brows. ‘You say that,’ he muttered, as a nasty thought occurred to him. ‘Could be problems. Like, suppose the animals won’t perform? Suppose they can’t get the little buggers to come out, or they do come out and crawl all over my head? Bloody fine pictures that’d make. This is a major image event we’re talking about here.’