Here Comes the Sun Page 9

  Soon, much sooner than he had imagined, he was close enough to see the two wide belts of golden asteroids that encircled the planet, and a few miniscule sparkles of flashing metal which could only be space stations. He was nearly there.

  ‘Help!’ he screamed. It was, he knew in his heart, a bit early to expect anyone to hear, but there was no harm in just warming up, so to speak. He also stood up in his seat and waved both his arms.

  And then . . .

  It was one of those moments when the soul dies: when all the lights go out and all that remains is the horrible feeling of having got it wrong. He shaded his eyes with his hand, hoping against all the probabilities that he was mistaken, but he wasn’t.

  They weren’t space stations; they were parking meters, and he had no change of any sort whatsoever. Likewise, the things he had taken for a twofold belt of golden asteroids were something rather more prosaic but utterly unambiguous. They were double yellow lines. To ram the point home to the point of complete and utter superfluity, the planetary authorities had picked out the wordsNO PARKING

  in glowing red dwarves right across the azimuth.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said.

  If it had been a smaller planet, of course, it would have had to orbit him rather than the other way round. As it was, there was nothing he could do except scream a lot and wave his fists about and, after a while, once the lack of food and the helium-rich atmosphere began to tell on him, he couldn’t even do that.

  When he had been there for a very long time, so long that he could no longer quantify the time with any degree of accuracy whatsoever, he became aware of strange, immaterial figures wandering about the cockpit. They spoke in strange, distorted voices and had a disturbing tendency to walk right through him and out through the cockpit into the blackness outside. They ignored him completely, being apparently entirely engrossed in inexplicable conversations of their own which he was quite incapable of following beyond a few tantalising phrases.

  There is no reason to believe that he isn’t there to this day. Certainly, the inhabitants of the planet would have had no reason to disturb him, given that his timely arrival saved them the expense and trouble of launching a purpose-built satellite to bounce their afternoon soap-operas off. The fact that, by some strange quirk of optical distortion, Jason occasionally features in some of the episodes, probably adds to their overall enjoyment.

  ‘Now then,’ Staff said. ‘Let’s just pause there a moment, shall we, and recap for a minute. We have the following suggestions.’

  It was an hour and seven minutes later, and the pale, taut faces round the boardroom table were uniformly blank. Nobody was in any hurry to say anything.

  ‘First,’ Staff continued, ‘we have the proposal that we get the moon back down, spray it all over with luminous paint, bang it up there at sunrise, and hope nobody notices. Now, it strikes me that there are a number of potential difficulties with that idea.’

  He proceeded to enumerate them. When he had finished, nobody spoke, and he took the silence as his cue to move on to the next suggestion.

  ‘Next, we’ve got the proposal that we shove a big illuminated sign up in the sky saying Normal Service Will Be Resumed As Soon As Possible.’ He breathed in, and then out again, with the air of someone making the most of it while he still could. ‘Now I’ve got nothing against that, nothing at all, as far as it goes, but in the longer term . . .’

  There was no need to go on. The heads nodded. Ways and Means, Staff noticed with a flicker of amusement, was already fast asleep; which, given the circumstances, must be a Pavlovian reaction to being in Committee.

  ‘As for the idea,’ he went on, ‘that we run out an extension cable from the heart of the Great Cloud of Unknowing and try and rig up a set of floodlights as a temporary measure: I’ve got to admit that as far as I’m concerned it’s the best one we’ve come across yet, but I still think we’ve got some way to go before we’re actually there. I mean, logistically . . .’

  There was a cough from the side of the table, and everyone looked round at a small but extremely - well, normal-looking figure standing there holding a large tray.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Jane. ‘You ordered coffee.’

  She had been working late, trying to sort out the mess she’d made earlier on in the day, and when the Committee came stumbling in to use the boardroom, she had been told, as the only female life-form in sight, to get coffee for twelve. Being female, she had managed it.

  Staff smiled bleakly. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Just put it down there, we’ll help ourselves. Now then . . .’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Jane again. Everyone looked at her.

  ‘Sorry to butt in,’ she went on, ‘but I couldn’t help overhearing, and I was just wondering if you’d considered . . . ?’

  Finance and General Purposes sat upright, looking like a stick of anthropormorphic dynamite, but Staff caught his eye and he subsided.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Only,’ Jane said, in a small but clear voice, which reminded Staff of something vaguely familiar, something he seemed to remember from a very long time ago. What was it? Ah yes, he suddenly remembered: it was the sound of somebody being sensible. ‘Maybe you’re approaching this from the wrong direction, if you see what I mean. I know it’s really nothing to do with me,’ she went on, ‘but perhaps . . .’

  There were signs of unrest from around the table. Either this person - this mortal - was going to offend their ears with a stream of idiotic and untimely nonsense, which would be bad enough; or else she was going to make an intelligent suggestion. For her part, Jane was aware of a squashed feeling, as if she was an over-boiled potato under a steam-roller. As was her habit when she felt nervous, she smiled.

  ‘It just occurred to me,’ she said, ‘and I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but if you’re trying to find some way of bodging up some sort of substitute thing so that nobody’ll notice, I don’t really think you’re going to have much luck. No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘What I reckon you need is a diversion: you know, something to take people’s attention off the sun so that they wouldn’t notice even if there was nothing there at all.’

  There was quiet in the boardroom, compared to which the inside of the average tomb would sound like Rome in the rush hour. Just as the silence was about to solidify and start dripping down the walls, Finance and General Purposes shook off his air of stunned torpor, fitted a less than pleasant expression to his face and cleared his throat.

  ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘And what would you suggest?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Jane said.

  In the grey desolation of the small hours of the inter-stellar morning, the big abandoned lot, out round the back of the Great Cloud of Unknowing, hummed to the roar of an infinity of different kinds of power tools, variations on the scream of metal cutting into metal, instructions and swear words. The activity was indescribable; usually movement is perceptible because it is seen against a background of rest, but here there was no background.

  Everyone - the whole supernatural host, everyone - was on overtime.

  There were two main groups. The smaller group, comprising about a sixth of the whole, was cutting an enormous disc out of a galaxy-sized sheet of the first quality sixteen-gauge celestium carbonate, while an army of gantries stood by to install a million miles of electric flex and twelve billion light-bulbs. A sub-section of the group was fitting a huge black velvet bag over the moon and rigging it up with a tow-hook. In the distance, a fleet of astro-freighters were bringing home a hastily gathered harvest of small and relatively unimportant stars which were going to be used for fuel to run the generators.

  The other group was five times larger and infinitely busier. They were loading the boots of 1023 cars with 1074 cardboard boxes.

  Staff, watching the proceedings from a point of vantage on the roof of the Fate Office, glanced down at his watch and bit his lip. Three hours to go. Either this was going to work, or else he was going to look the biggest prawn in the
entire universe of time and space.

  ‘All right,’ he muttered into his walkie-talkie. ‘Tell Phase One to move out.’

  The empty vacuum of the back lot was suddenly stiff with the tortured vibration of sound-waves as the buzz-saws jarred through the last few miles of celestium carbonate. The disc leaned horribly and fell free on to the supporting cat’s cradle of titanium cable. There was a dazzling flash of welding gear as the electricians set to.

  The engines of the moon began to hum as her crew warmed her up for her unscheduled flight.

  ‘Phase One,’ said the walkie-talkie. ‘Ready, and rolling.’

  On a signal from the control tower all the 1023 cars started their engines at once. Trying to encapsulate the effect of so much noise in mere adjectives would be like trying to squidge the sea down into an egg-cup; suffice to say, it was loud. The column began to roll.

  ‘This had better work,’ Staff growled, as the structure of the cosmos braced itself to withstand the vibration of so many humming engines. ‘Because otherwise . . .’

  ‘Oh, I expect it’ll be all right,’ Jane replied, pouring boiling water from her thermos on to a teabag. ‘I mean, everyone was always saying how the old one was clapped out and on its last rays anyway, and wouldn’t it be a simply splendid idea to get a new one, except it would cost too much and take too long to build. I expect the idea was to save up Esso tokens for the next sixty thousand years and finance the refitting programme that way.’ She sighed. ‘It really only goes to prove that you can get things done around here, just so long as it’s an absolute emergency, and they think you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing for a totally different reason. Funny, don’t you think, the lengths you have to go to?’

  The new model sun, its lights blazing, was lowered from its scaffolding on to an enormous trailer, while the two-rope was lowered into position and made fast to the back bumper of the moon. Painfully slowly, complaining every step of the way at the unaccustomed weight, the moon began to taxi down the strip.

  ‘Here goes,’ said Jane. ‘Fingers crossed.’

  The details of the Great Diversion are so well known and form the basis of so many religions that it would be superfluous to recount them here. All that needs to be mentioned for our purposes is that when humanity awoke in the dim light of a weak, flickering 60-watt dawn, it didn’t notice anything funny about the lighting. Everybody’s attention was riveted to the towering letters of fire, pinned to the back of a rainbow that arched across the firmament and announcedBIGGEST EVER CAR BOOT SALE NOW ON!!

  to all mortals, creatures of a day, buyers on impulse, across the face of the globe. No sooner had their brains digested the message than the encircling horizon glared yellow in the indeterminate grey light with the glow of innumerable courtesy lights as 1023 car boots opened as one car boot, and mankind, lifting its eyes heavenwards, saw that it was true. As one leading theologian is reported to have remarked, as a way of proclaiming a New Covenant, it beat rainbows into a cocked hat.

  Those who comment on such things in the calm seclusion of history point out that, as diversionary tactics go, the Great Diversion was a pretty neat piece of thinking. Not only was mankind’s attention distracted long enough for the workshops of heaven to cast, found, finish and launch a brand new, all-alloy sun with teflon bumpers and an ABS braking system; the proceeds of the sale were enough to pay for the thing with enough left over to repaint the outside of the hangar and fit a proper padlock on the door, and the warehouses of General Supply were purged of twenty thousand years’ worth of accumulated junk; which in turn provided Norman and his staff in Records with the storage space they needed to put in place a new and vastly more efficient data storage and retrieval system. In fact, some commentators say, bearing in mind the circumstances of the event, and the person whose idea the whole thing was, there’s a good case for saying that that was in fact the underlying point of the whole exercise.

  ‘Well?’ Bjorn repeated. Old Gustavus looked sheepish and evaded his eye. He muttered something about a once in a lifetime bargain.

  Bjorn grinned. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Only you don’t know what it is.’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘And it doesn’t work.’

  ‘Um.’

  ‘And bits keep coming off in your hand every time you pick it up.’

  ‘It was a bargain,’ Gustav retorted, stung. ‘Twenty-four ninety-nine. And I beat him down from thirty-five.’

  ‘I know what it is.’

  ‘And it was the last one he had left,’ Gustav continued. ‘In fact, he said he was saving it for someone, but . . . You do?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bjorn replied, and yawned. ‘You’ve been done,’ he added.

  Gustav scowled. Then he noticed a mark on the back of the casing, took out his handkerchief, spat neatly on a corner and rubbed the spot until it was clean again. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘It was reduced. Slight exterior damage, he told me, doesn’t affect the working in the least . . .’

  ‘Right,’ Bjorn said, and bit the top off another bottle. ‘And I can see how, you being a woodcutter, it’s really essential for you to have a temporal distortion refractor that you know is going to work. Yup,’ he added, with a positive nod of his head, ‘I guess you’re right, at that.’

  Gustav blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’ he said.

  ‘Temporal distortion refractor,’ Bjorn repeated carelessly. ‘Used to use them a lot when I was on the Time gangs. They’re really good for flattening out time warps. Of course,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘that’s not a whole one, that’s just the mainframe stabiliser unit. Still, if you can get it to work, maybe the next car boot sale you go to, you’ll find the rest of the gear - you know, the rocker box, the induction manifold, all that stuff - and then you’ll be in business. And you’ll need the batteries too, of course.’

  He grinned again and drank some beer while his neighbour sat and stared at his purchase for a while. In the distance could be heard the soothing coo of a woodpigeon, sleepy in the warmth of a late summer evening.

  ‘I think,’ said Gustav firmly, ‘I’ll put a tablecloth over it and stand it in the corner by the log-basket. It’d look nice there, and I could use it to display my bowls trophies.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bjorn said. ‘Or it’d make a great footstool.’ He parked his boots on it, folded his arms behind his head and lay back.

  ‘Did you go to the sale, neighbour?’ Gustav enquired. Bjorn shook his head.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Any old Departmental stuff I wanted, I nicked before I packed the job in. It’s all a load of crap anyway, most of it. All clapped out, and it was junk when it was new, as often as not. Buy it cheap and flog it to death, that’s their motto. You take leap year, for instance.’

  Gustav raised an eyebrow. ‘Leap year?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Bjorn replied. ‘Leap year. Bloody typical, that is. I mean,’ he went on, warming to his theme, ‘suppose you were building a Seasons plant, you wouldn’t cut corners and go around buying in second-hand tat from the breakers’ yards, would you? No way. Stands to reason, you buy the real thing and then it’s not going to break down and you don’t have to go fixing it every five minutes when it gets out of sync. That’s not the way they see it, of course, oh no. And that’s why we’ve got leap year. You didn’t think it was, like, deliberate, did you?’

  ‘Um.’

  Bjorn sniggered unkindly. ‘No way,’ he said. ‘Main bearings completely shot, so a bloke I used to know on Maintenance told me once. Miracle the whole thing doesn’t pack up on them. Serve them right if it did.’

  He fell silent and lay on his back, scowling at his toes. A family of chipmunks scampered up and down the branch above his head, chirruping wildly. A dragonfly droned past, the sun flashing on its kaleidoscope wings.

  ‘What a beautiful day,’ Gustav remarked involuntarily. ‘Really, neighbour Bjorn, it does my old heart good to see it. Can’t you just -’ He paused. He knew he was wasting his breath, but he couldn’t help it. The infinite won
ders of nature never failed to move him, even at his age. ‘Can’t you just feel the thirsty earth drinking in the life-giving warmth and the seeds bursting into life under the soil. Can’t you just . . .’

  ‘Yeah.’ Bjorn was looking puzzled. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated, ‘you’ve got a point there.’ He frowned, sat up, absent-mindedly swatted the dragonfly with the back of his hand, and stared thoughtfully at the sun for a very long time.

  ‘Funny, that,’ he said.

  TEN

  ‘Ah,’ said Jane briskly, ‘I was hoping I’d get a chance to have a word with you.’

  Ganger’s hand had been on the door handle. He froze; then he turned round and smiled.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Look, just got to make a few quick calls, then . . .’

  ‘It won’t take a moment, I promise,’ Jane replied grimly - you could have sharpened chisels on her tone of voice - so that Ganger subsided and seemed to lose about an inch in height.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Come on in.’

  Although she’d spent the last two hours waiting for Ganger outside his office, this was the first time she’d actually been inside it. She wasn’t impressed. An office, her expression clearly said, so what? The fact that it has recording angels instead of dictaphones makes it different, not necessarily better. Ganger wilted a little more; if he’d had petals, some of them would have fallen off by now.

  He perched, nevertheless, on the edge of the desk, and waved her to a chair. ‘What’s all this about then?’ he asked.