Man of the World by Robert Gibson

36:  apocalypse

                                       I

Before they set off on their mission inside, they had to show themselves, one last time, to the distraught crowd who had to wait outside in the deepening gloom of Sparseworld.
    For the sake of those dimly massed folk, the Portal’s giant main doors were swung wide and the envoys lined up in the lobby just inside the threshold. Avidly the throng peered at them while all ears strained at the voice that boomed over all: “Men and women of Sycrest!" cried Assigner Alsair, "behold your advance guard. What shall we call these scouts? I’ll tell you: we'll call them the useful cheats, the heroic queue-jumpers who will prepare the way for you, who will take the first hits for you: so that when you go in, finally, the brush will be cleared, the mines exploded, the static discharged.” The crowd stirred.  A muddled roar issued from the throats of a people confused and excited at the many-sided promises and mixed metaphors of the Assigner - promises sufficient, for the time being, to restrain the crowd from stampede. Currently they merely jostled indecisively this way and that, while Midax, in recoil from the stress of their hopes, turned his back on them, seeking to view his own path.
    He peered into the Portal building to observe how the structure had been gutten by fast-working staff in the past few minutes.  The throne now appeared skeletal, the machinery of Judgement reduced to bare essentials. Past it the way stretched newly clear, from outer to inner door; that is, from Sycrest right through to the interior of the Luminarium.  It was time for him and his fellow envoys, or cheats, or prophets, to move that way.
    However, as they took their first steps, from behind them resounded a distant, magnified shriek. Someone else besides Alsair must have obtained access to a megaphone.  Midax turned again, one last time, to look back outward, to strain his eyes at the crowd’s edge – for the shriek had seemed to come from that periphery.  He spotted a lone, gesticulating figure that stood high above the level of the rest of the multitude: this person must have climbed atop one of the abstract sculptures which dotted the Olamic estate.  Now another wail, a cry of contempt and despair, burst from that direction. Who could it be that uttered that agonised jeer?  Such a sound could only issue from the throat of some doomed reject.    
    A bolt of memory flashed through Midax’s brain, to cleave the encrustation of Time and to bare the long-gone occasion on the banks of the Swenng, that ancient pre-life encounter between Midax Rale and the Chief of the Splashers, Mapennel Deen! That orange-haired, pleasure-seeking, idle, urbane mocker - it was he, or one of his followers, now reduced to frenzy in the evening of the world.  Midax had no trouble guessing the content of the shrieks. The rejected Splasher must now be cursing the government, cursing it and simultaneously crying to it for succour for himself and his gang –
    Well, tough luck, friend. You made your choice, you refused to heed my advice, and now you and your kind are going to be locked out in the dark.
    Pity, yes – no doubt this was a time for pity. But also it was a time to concentrate on the task at hand. And you are out of the picture, Mapennel Deen.
    
“Keep your faces forward,” Klari spoke behind them. The door, the inner Door, was cycling open.  “That’s right, keep your eyes pointed ahead. If you look back, after you’ve stepped through,” added Klari, “it might delay the… process.”
    Other lips moved as they repeated the instruction Keep looking ahead, while in their faces grew the brightness of proper day. They stepped across the threshold; they staggered and halted under the golden sun. This was not yet a proper return to Life – the jell process had not yet recurred – but they blinked and swayed as if caressed by the potential for Normality. Here in the Luminarium interior, the onset of Everyday was only a matter of time.  The countryside around them, frosted with its countless tiny mirrors, gleamed its promise to improve upon reality – though as yet it was a mere promise: they were still visibly in a box, the dream of Life was latent and would remain so until they jelled... When that happened, that would be the real return – but how would he, Midax, endure it? Was it worth asking that question? When the moment came – he either would or he would not cope.
    Either he would remain reasonably stable, or he would crack so abruptly that, well, he might never know it.  No alternative to smoothness existed. If the operation were to be carried out with any success at all, there must be no mistakes. The slightest breach in mental armour would surely invite disaster. To prepare himself, he must don the armour plating of confidence, arrogance even, though as these thoughts ran through his mind he was not sure of their rightness.  Well, they might not be right, but they were heartening!  He must comport himself as though he had some angle on this eerie business. Here he was, not-quite-back-in-Life, in this terrific glass box that (for now) was still just a box, with its superior light as yet un-jelled for the impudent little band of revenants. In such a situation, what could one do but remain alert to the ooze of surrounding hints, to each lurking quiver of suggestion? His companions, he strongly sensed, felt the same way.  Saunter, smoothly; it’s the only thing you can do, Midax. Gaze around, observe the various summary features of this précis of a landscape: rocks which must stand for mighty crags; copses which must stand for forests; little fields for continental prairies; a brook for a mighty river. In the packed tautness of this scene, the objects, when stared at, almost seemed about to pounce.  It was as if the entire scene, the world in miniature crowded with so many neatly arranged terrain types, was eager to burst its wrapping of smallness and jump at you. You couldn’t really catch any movement, yet you were left with that sweaty trickle of a threat of vast change.  It oozed from each and every packed-and-ready object; not long to wait now, thought Midax. 
    The band had indeed been warned that this time the “jelling” would work more quickly.  Quite likely their very dreaming mood of wonder would encourage it to happen. Their co-operating thoughts thus sucked into an anticipation of hugeness, the revenants began to walk.  They weren't actually sauntering after all; instead they kept close and careful formation, two abreast along a scrubby path, darting glances to right and left as well as ahead and behind, their eyes interested in every direction as far as the glassite walls.  They padded warily, seeking to catch the moment when those walls would leap back in a sudden retreat to form horizons.
    The Pamek brothers were in front. Midax Rale and Boalo followed. Monto deRoffa beside Mezyf Tand brought up the rear.
    Boalo coughed. “Funny thing,” the ancient philosopher rasped, “I’m becoming less the man I was when I was here last. Of course, that was a few thousands of years ago.”
    “Oh?” said Midax edgily. “You mean, less the founder of the Shapers’ College?”
    “Well,” chuckled Boalo, “it was a long time ago.” He added, “You look scandalised.”
    Midax said, “What was done in our first lives can’t be undone. Shouldn’t be undone. I mean, the achievements –”
    “Who’s talking about ‘undoing’? But be honest, doesn’t it all flutter away? What are the doings of history? Just stuff in a box!”
    “But you said,” began Midax –
    “I know, I know. Transcendence; the life beyond; and I was right about that. Nevertheless, those who were right, like me, as well as those who were wrong, like Famaones and Thilkru and all the other forgotten idiots I had to contend with – we all were pretty small, you know.”
    “But we’re not here to be small, on this mission.”
    Boalo seemed not to care.
    “We’re all diminished in this final episode,” the old man mused. “I am beginning to think that there’s always a next truth.”
    “What do you mean, Master?” asked Midax, half-ironically.
    “Transcending of the transcendence, maybe.”
    Midax heaved a noisy sigh and with a kind of disgusted amusement said, “Ah, just when I was thinking that it might be helpful to have been through it all before, now you hint, Sir, that we’re too small to profit.” Yet he wasn’t really much annoyed.  This was conversation for the reassurance of hearing each other’s voices.
    They came to where a meadow stretched its yellow-green blanket in their sight. It was at least a third of a mile wide and was sparsely strewn with collections of huts. The central cluster was larger than the others, amounting to a hamlet.  Rezram Pamek said, “So here we are, the Great Plains, with Thilpar in the middle.”
    The others heard his words as if in a vaporous dream, their minds and eyes fogged, oppressed by the sense that the jelling was imminent. At any moment, the scene might expand into rich and immediate Life: then they’d be looking at the capital of Larmonn. Yes – the city of Thilpar would spring into view around them, if they were just a bit further over there when it happened –
    They began to run.
    Instinct had made up their minds for them. The practical, essential thing was to reach Thilpar rather than be stranded in the Plains. Amidst the huts: that was the place to wait for the jelling. So they reached the huts and stopped. Breathing hard from their burst of speed, they waited.
    Nothing happened at first, except that the sense of expectancy remorselessly intensified.
    A surreptitious glance at the ex-President enabled Midax to note a peculiar expression of longing upon Waretik’s face. Ah, the fellow might well be falling back into love with life and power. Midax forced himself to think. He indeed feared that Waretik could soon forget what they were here for. What to do about this possibility? He, Midax, perhaps ought to have been chatting to Waretik instead of Boalo – but on the other hand, come to think of it, it would have been risky, he might have put the President’s back up, done more harm than good maybe... Compose a letter.  Yes, that was an idea!  Imagine a possible scene, a few days from now, in the Presidential Palace at Merod, back in Life, when the busy man picks up the envelope, and sees that it is from the Discoverer. Surely he would read it then.  Dear Mr President, it would go. Have you felt forgetful lately, or do you sense something big on the edge of your mind, hovering just beyond your grasp? If so, this is the most important letter you will ever receive.  Remember that coma you suffered, a few weeks ago? Did you dream that you were taken out of the world? It was no dream!  And the warning it contained is one you must heed. You were taken out of the world, into that same higher reality in which I crossed the Zard, and in that state you were informed of the imminent end of your everyday world. You were requested to return to it for the sake of your people: to help gather the world’s population into the Valley of Zednas, the place of comparative safety on the last day. So you need to believe that your "coma" was no coma, and the dream, I repeat to you, was no dream, and now you know, Sir, what you must do. How you accomplish the task is up to you. Play it straight – or, if you think that will get you committed to an asylum, then do it in a roundabout manner. Advertise holidays in Serorn if you like! Encourage cut-price flights. Hold conferences, sports events, or anniversary festivals in the Valley of Zednas. Make the place fashionable as never before.  Do whatever it takes to get people to go there…
    
Anxiety grew in Midax as his eyes pierced the middle distance. Minutes ticked by while he made a constant but vain effort to spot the beginning of the jell. He had thought himself prepared up to a point – prepared to experience strange mental effects; yet unexpectedly he was gripped by a fear which had nothing to do with effects of the jell but, rather, consisted of the fear that the jell was not going to happen at all.  A tresspasser’s guilt plagued him, made him feel as if he had wandered into a vacant lot of dead time. In addition an absconder’s or slacker’s guilt whispered to him that he had come here to evade his duty. He did have a motive for evasion: the idea of returning to Life had begun in some way to seem dreadful –
    Nevertheless the alternative thought, of not going back, not even for a minute’s farewell to a world that was about to end, seemed far worse.
    Then - swing of a pendulum - his inner ear and a sinking of the stomach and a flicker at the corner of his eye told him that he needn’t worry about the thing not happening, for, within a split second, the texture of his surroundings voicelessly screamed, this is it.
    All around him, objects were backing off as if composed of shrinking mosaics of colourful rod-tips retreating, and as the tips drew back they separated one from another, allowing gaps to appear between them, gaps straightaway stuffed with further colour, with extra shapes allowed by the corrugation of the light, reassembling the entirety into a far larger picture than before.
    Inevitably along with that corrugation of the light came concepts to perform their packaging function upon the suddenly enriched abundance of shapes, tidying that profusion, organizing it, so that instead of being forced to stumble and gasp in chaos, Midax could move and breathe within a history, a geography, a cosmology… in short, a world.  He rubbed tears from his face. Life, here I am! The world was huge around him, sturdy and solid and believable, and he – having undergone a most welcome diminishment – was but one among the teeming millions on the continent of Larmonn.
    He saw a bench and lurched towards it. With a sweep of his hand he cleared it of leaves. He plonked himself down, determined, whatever urgencies might exist in the cosmos, to waste some minutes enjoying the luxury of being. He took a deep, contented breath. He – was – back!  Among the skyscrapers of Thilpar!  Stretching against the bench, he gazed up at some clouds sailing high above the great buildings.  
    Never mind the President – how was he himself, Midax Rale, going to remember his supposed mission now that the world, the normal old world, embraced him?  Now that Life whizzed and blazed around him in the shape of traffic and shop-fronts, memory of Duty faded, faded the more for every moment that he swayed with delight upon his bit of avenue-pavement in the great city of Thilpar.
    So stupendous was his wonder, so dazzling his astonishment at the fact that this outcome, which was supposed to happen and expected to happen, actually had happened, that he wanted to shout a hymn to the miracle of existence. What in all the jumble of creation could equal this wonderful holiday from the oppressively big last things?  How could anything beat this refreshing bath in the tub of the everyday?  Wonderful it was to feel with every passing instant more and more as though he had never left this world.
    Only, after some stretch of bliss he remembered:
    Some unpleasantness about a shooting.
   
Uh, yes, hmm, he had died, been Judged, and now he was back with some sort of job to do –
    Hmmmm… that business of having been shot dead: might it still be a problem?

                                      II

Having been assassinated once, he might not find it easy to resume his old life without too many questions being asked… Dead men, especially famous dead men, ought not to come back lest they create (to put it mildly) a stir.  Well, he might have to lie low for a few years. Change his name. He’d fortunately prepared several aliases while world-famous, having forseen a possible future need for a quieter life; in fact he had credit card accounts in four different names…
    Then, appalled, he lurched to his feet: skies above, he had completely, for a moment, forgotten what he was here for. Has it really slipped your mind, Stupid, what the real world is facing? Forgotten, have you, that no “years” remain in which to lie low? In real Outside time, possibly mere minutes remained before the end!  What that real Outside time might mean in terms of time here, he could not be sure, but surely it was no use behaving as though he were on some sort of holiday - for heaven’s sake! Duty called and he must get on with it.  He must, pretty smartly, check out the President’s current whereabouts and activities, write out that letter and see that he gets it. Pity we were scattered on entry, pity I lost touch with Waretik and the others; we ought to have held hands, or tied ourselves to each other with ropes.
    
Of course, Waretik remember his duty anyway; he might not need supervision.  But suppose he did; then he really must be told, by letter or (if that didn’t jog him) in person.  One way or another he must be kept up to the mark, forced, if necessary, to admit that his people must be helped to the Valley of Zednas in order to be in readiness at the end of things.  And this letter - how ought it best to finish?  Perhaps like this:
    Mr President, listen to me. Granted that you don’t know whether I am who I say I am, why take the risk of ignoring my message? Be sensible, Mr President. Legends of the Last Things do not arise for no reason. The Valley of Zednas – we must all gather there, please don't forget. Yours sincerely, the late Discoverer, Midax Rale.
    
Pitiful. Mad to think he could affect matters with words like these, peddling myth so infinitely far from the gritty realism of Everyday… no no you pessimist, that’s limited worldly thinking; don’t start admitting let the limitations of so-called “ordinary” or you’ll never get anywhere… Forcing himself to concentrate upon the task at hand, Midax turned up the collar of his coat and began to stroll among the other pedestrians, making his way along the boulevard towards the city’s centre, Tramboleion Square.
    Must find a post office, he muttered. And a newspaper kiosk. No mistakes now. I’m on my own.
    As a matter of fact he felt sneakily glad that there was such small likelihood of meeting any of the other “prophets” who had returned to Life with him. He supposed he had better keep his eyes open for them, but their crucial mistake, in failing to link hands during the jelling, meant that their separation of inches in Glight might well have become a separation of many scores of miles or even hundreds of miles in the world of Everyday, and so the chances were that he could neither help them nor be helped by them, for the time being.  Let them do their jobs their own way while he, in his way, did his. Separation was not only inevitable but, he suspected, desirable…
    From somewhere his ears picked up a cheery burr:
    “Paperrrr, Paperrrr…”
    It was an old man in a cloth cap. Stooping, clutching a pile of newspapers which he had taken from a delivery van, the decrepit but cheerful vendor plodded along, calling out to passers-by: “Paperrrr…” He reached his kiosk and plonked the new pile of papers onto a shelf.
    Midax stepped over to the kiosk and scanned the racks of periodical titles.
    A brimful of nostalgia. The Larmonn Messenger. The Connoisseur. The Administrator. The Thilparan. Country Leisure. The Ocean Breeze. Nation’s View. Dranl Shield. They made it clear to him as nothing else could (not even the wide world and sky) that he was back in that mundane cyclorama, the pageant of ordinariness called everyday life.
    The old man’s voice chivvied him: “You all right, gov’nor? Larmonn Messenger just come in. President Thanth recovered from his coma.”
    “Yeah, right, sure,” said Midax, reaching in his pocket for a coin. He kept his face averted from the vendor.
    It was not a bad idea to buy the Messenger, with its pro-Merod bias and its gossipy slant. Quite possibly it would inform him where he might best hope to find the President soon.
    But the vendor’s eyes were on Midax Rale; beady, bright, observant eyes, to sheer away from which the Discoverer hunched within the circle of his upturned collar and hurriedly strode away. 
    He felt an urgent desire to remain incognito while he worked out what to do. Was that right, was it dutiful that he skulk in this manner?  Did, on the contrary, those who sent him here expect him to use the Discover’s prestige? Use it with all speed? Use it on the side of right action?  Proclaim his immediate intention to shepherd the population to the Vale of Zednas on his own authority in preparation for the end? His instructions were not clear on this point. The only explicit orders he had received were to make sure that the President stuck to his promise. That meant reminding the fellow – that was all; and if that turned out not to work, what then?  What more could be done? Ah but surely, thought Midax, I’m expected to do more than just tell him; a publicly-returned Discoverer could find a way to put pressure on the President if need be…  Not sure, not sure, thought Midax.
    He stalked along, trying to think and at the same time looking for a park and another bench to sit on or a tea-room to enter. With each step he took, the pavement seemed to shoot Everydayness up through his legs.  His memories of Glight grew fainter. Perhaps, he thought, he could simply post that letter to the President and that would be that.  This job wasn't turning out to have the taste he expected.  Earlier, before coming back to Life, while boasting of his usefulness to Assigner Alsair, he, Midax the great Discoverer, had made it sound as if he would zoom around the world, dipping in and out of Glight, awakening people to the finish of things; but now the name “Alsair” was now faint in his mind, and as for Glight, he was falling back into regarding it not as reality (though he knew it was) but as a mere dimensional back-alley which left the weight of true reality HERE.
    In which case why not cling to one’s enjoyment of the moment?  He had every right to the sunny day, the delicious common-sense prospects of life that tempted him so sorely. A great reversal, which he had not foreseen, had swung his desires round to focus on this jelled “ordinary” world and endow it with unprecedented magic so that all the longing he had formerly felt for the sunset clouds and the transcendent Beyond was now concentrated instead upon the beloved Everyday. Everyday, in short, had now snatched the allure which Otherness had once possessed!
    Oh let this dream continue a bit longer, Midax pleaded; let not this enchanted bubble be burst. Surely it was not too much to ask that he bask for a while in Life again before catastrophe swallowed it all?
    He almost bumped into another periodicals-kiosk. They were strung out every hundred yards or so down this avenue.  He remembered, now, that some of them also had racks of paperback books with a few best-sellers. Like that one which caught his eye:

                Who Killed Midax Rale?
                                by
                         T’Az Droam

A smile overspread Midax’s features. He was unable to avoid reaching for the book.
    Doyen of conspiracy theorists, the blurb ran, T’Az Droam reviews the many explanations which have been offered for the Discoverer’s assassination. Giving due attention to the arguments of those who have blamed the Vevtians, the Poidalians, the transport unions, the transport managers, the crime syndicates, the Security services, the military, the Shapers’ College, the Larmonnian Government and the World Government, Droam comes to the startling conclusion that…
    
“You!” rasped the kiosk attendant, as his glare popped sideways into Midax’s field of view.
    Alarm pinged along every nerve in Midax’s body as he lowered the book he’d been holding. Part selfishness, part sympathy for the kiosk attendant intensified the dismay. It must be no joke for an ordinary newsvendor to have common-sense ripped aside like a curtain and a live dead man revealed before his eyes. 
    “You,” the man said again, in a dazed whisper.
    “I, er," Midax stammered, "had to drop out of things for a while.”
    “But the headline said – the Discoverer was shot dead – and I watched on TV the state funeral, watched you buried.
    “It wasn’t as serious as it seemed at the time,” admitted Midax.
    “Hoy-hoy-hoy,” wheezed the vendor.
    “I know,” Midax went on, “news is your business, but please, give me an hour to get clear before you spread it about...”
    With a groggy shake of the head, the vendor replied: “You can rely on me, Discoverer.” He looked up and a sudden proud light shone his eyes. “I can give you more than an hour.”
    Midax, as he hurried away, thought, Kiosk-man who expects great things, and Alsair-who-demands-great-things, and the entire perishing world of folk who need great things, you can all rely on me. I’m doing what I’m doing for you all, because I can’t withstand your united expectations, so yes I’ll do what needs to be done.
    Ultimately, that is. Not quite straightaway. Must allow myself a bit of space first. I cannot bear to break the mood before I absolutely have to. Every moment is precious. Let peaceful normal life continue as long as it can –
    
He found himself wandering in a rug-shop. Carpets and rugs were stacked around him, their smell a further enticement to belief in the everyday. A corner of the shop sold hats. Thank goodness for brisk impersonal service: he was able to buy two of the hats without being recognized.
    He calculated that he needed two, one to hold in front of his face while he paid for the other, so that then he could put the first one on his head and slope the wide brim down while he paid for the second. Unnecessary precautions, maybe, but he felt the better for them. To improve his sense of security still further, he bought a pair of dark glasses in another shop. It did briefly occur to him that by such concealments he might actually draw more attention to himself, but still he felt a compulsion to purchase these coverings. Besides, Thilpar was full of eccentrically dressed characters, as was any great metropolis.
    Fifteen minutes’ walk then brought him into the noisy midst of the Tramboleion Square.
    He stood in that mighty clearing in the forest of skyscrapers with its three central fountains and the pool on their raised level, and gathered his wits.
    Don’t think, just use your eyes, he told himself, while he emotionally drank it all in and his mind slipped further into acceptance of the everyday.  He could view the heavy bronze statue of the great, long-dead Rezram Pamek on its plinth beside the pool and at the same time squash down the little thought, “Haven’t I seen that man quite recently?”
    Further off, at the far end of the square, the stone-built Tramboleion reflected its own structure in the glass giants which loomed about it, just as it had done when he came here to enrol in the Shapers’ College, years ago… A fraught time, that had been. Now he could gaze at the great structure with less urgency, for he had no emotive business there any longer. In fact this trip to Thilpar could count as a holiday, could it not? The weather was fine, and behold all those people taking advantage of the warm day, thronging the steps that led up to the pool and also the area around the steps, and crowding the benches where white-collar workers sat eating packed lunches or reading their papers, which reminds me, thought Midax, I have my Larmonn Messenger to read.
    Luckily managing to nab a place on a bench the moment it was vacated, he settled himself and opened his paper.
    Apparently the newly-recovered World President was in Derom, attending the last day of an international conference. Quick recovery!  The thought had a sardonic tinge, but it was immediately smudged away by everyday-ness.
    Then, however, a counter-acting force awoke in the mind of Midax.
    His honesty.
    Honesty could never quite die.
    It now told him: you can only think Time is generously available because you're inside this box-life where Time is extended like Space, in accompaniment to the jell which has corrugated light to increase the subjective size of the universe. You know what’s really going on; don’t pretend to be asleep to it. You won’t gain anything. None of this is going to last much longer.
    Oh well, thought Midax. Can’t really live a lie, can I?
    Though it was a good try.
    He sighed, folded his paper and pondered his next move.
    He would have to admit the necessity of a short-cut through Glight: it was the only way he could be confident of getting to Derom soon enough to have a chance of catching the President before he left the place.
    Midax was definitely not looking forward to the trip, but he saw no alternative. He would just have to dart through Glight, thus leaving the living world while he went into hateful short-cut mode –
    There had been a time when it wasn’t hateful, when it had filled him with a sense of wonder, but now the sense of wonder was bestowed the other way, on the jelled world, the wonderful everyday world, just when it was about to end – typical! Smiling crookedly at his own contrariness, Midax rose from his bench and began to stroll in the direction of Thilpar Central Station.
    He could at least begin the voyage in an orthodox way.  He knew there was an express to Derom every two hours; indeed at any one moment there must be a dozen trains strung out along the enormous Northern Coastal international route from Thilpar to Derom. 
    Why start the trip in this Everyday style? Why begin with such inconsistency?
    
He had no answer, except stubbornly to decide upon buying a change of clothes and a backpack from one of the stores close to the train station.
    Feeling the need to refill his purse with cash from a till, he thanked his lucky stars again that he had had the foresight, when harried by his own celebrity, to open various accounts under assumed names.  He used a bit of plastic (cardholder “Tallamer Farr”) to draw out a comforting wodge of paper money; then he bought the clothes and the rucksack.
    Then he paid for a train-ticket from one of the modern automatic dispensers, which he’d never liked to use before, glad for the first time in his life for such anonymous gadgetry.
    As luck would have it, a train was due to start in a few minutes and so he was soon underway, sitting at a carriage window and staring with half-seeing eyes at the smear of colours and shapes hurtling by.
    Ordinary travel! Being alive! Too good to last, of course; he couldn’t allow himself to ride all the distance; the train was not really fast enough, and besides, he was bound to be recognized sooner or later if he stayed on it – perhaps by the conductor when he came to check his ticket, or by a fellow-passenger who entered this compartment… no, it wouldn’t do, he’d have to shift…
    But for the moment, as desire came at him in another wave of intense thirst for the everyday, Midax simply could not resist the cling of the world. The recently-lost, recently-found-again world, so sweet, so irresistible.
    Honesty therefore subsided.
    Now and then it piped up in the thinnest of voices, What am I doing on this train? My full intention was to travel on foot, along the Coastal Strip in a series of little dimensional hops while keeping my eye on the Everyday, so why am I not doing that?
    Doing what?
    Doing what I told myself to do!
    My plan had been to keep in touch with this concoction of eked-out angles of vision, corrugations of stimuli, making-more-with-less that is called the World, without getting too absorbed in it, but look at me now –
    I’m going native, I’m useless!
    Well, perhaps you can’t do more. Perhaps you’re doing the best you can.
    Oh come now. I bet the other “prophets” are doing better.
    You don’t know that. Anyhow, it’s easier for them. They belonged to more distant ages and cultures. They’re not really coming home to what they knew before; they aren’t in temptation’s way... Oh yes, it’s all very well for them. But darned hard for me…
    And it must be even harder for the great President Waretik, must it not? Full of years and honour. How much harder for him! To avoid the slide back into illusion, I must hope that his personality is stronger than mine.
    
Midax’s ticket entitled him to a berth in a sleeping-car, and as evening descended upon the continuously speeding train he made a quick visit to the shop-carriage where he bought toiletries including shaving gear for the morrow. Then he sought repose, and was rocked to sleep by the rhythm of the train, dollop-a-toss, dollop-a-toss…

                                       III

He got off at Diorole, a village station not far from Derom, capital of Cenland. His plan was to stay in this area for a few days, giving himself a rest from decision-making. Too much stress, he was vaguely aware, must have brought about some form of amnesia; but if he just took things easy for a while, it all ought to work out all right and no doubt he’d remember whatever it was that he had forgotten.
    He aimed to find a comfortable “B&B”. As a matter of fact he owned a house in Derom, but with a peep of common sense the reminder surfaced, “You’re supposed to be dead.” A place whose owner was dead would be sold off by now, or, even if it wasn’t yet sold, it would be under some degree of surveillance. Scrub the idea of staying there. Much better find a B&B. He was on holiday, wasn’t he?
    After a stroll among the yellowish stone cottages of Diorole he found a place called “Frann’s” which had a “Vacancies” notice under its “Bed and Breakfast” sign. But rather than walk immediately up to the door, Midax first went to a phone booth on the street corner and rang the number on the sign.
    “Frann’s,” came the answer.
    “I see you have a room free,” began Midax; “what are your rates please? …thank you, that’s fine… just one point: you’ll maybe laugh at this, but – I bear a strong resemblance to the late Discoverer, and I’m sick of being mistaken for him. So may I ask, no jokes about my face, all right? I’m on holiday to relax… Good – thanks – see you in a minute. My name’s Tallamer Farr.”
    Mrs Frann Dmuld turned out to be a slim, brisk, motherly widow. She swiftly brought a tray of tea and cakes into the lounge.
    “I can imagine,” she chatted, “the trouble you must have with your famous face, but it doesn’t bother me, because, you know, I actually have had quite a few really famous people as guests.”
    “You’re close to the corridors of power, here.”
    “I am indeed. A nice little bolt-hole for the politicians, this house is. Placed just right so that they can scurry over and forget themselves for a while. I give them what they need above all.”
    “Peace,” nodded Midax.
    She looked gratified, and, sensing that her company was welcome, sat on the armchair opposite, prepared to chat some more. “Peace, indeed, that’s it. Peace from the media which lie in wait to catch them out whenever they say something that contradicts what they said on some previous day – the poor things.”
    “It’s overdone, this condemnation of inconsistency,” agreed Midax, pouring himself a cup. “Real life is armchairs and tea. Consistency be blowed.”
    “By the way, Tallamer,” the lady smiled, “do you mind if we have the news on for a few minutes? It’s just coming up to six o’clock.”
    “Go ahead,” nodded Midax. “I wouldn’t mind seeing it myself.” So long as I don’t have to do anything about it, why should I care?
    
Frann turned on the TV.
    The melodramatic gong announcing the six o’clock news grated only slightly on his nerves. Let it pom-boing-pom-boing all it wants; see if I care. Of course it was their task to make the news sound exciting as possible… But now what was that announcer saying? What ridiculous thing was this?
    “…central statue of Tramboleion Square, Thilpar. Since the look-alike appeared beside it, half an hour ago, he has been causing consternation in the crowd. Over to our correspondent in Thilpar, Lantti Ollamdl.”
    
The picture jumped closer. A rain-coated man held a microphone and spoke at the camera. “I am standing about twenty yards from the focus of attention in this world-famous square. I have a strong sense that if I tried to get closer, the crowd would stop me. A cleared space surrounds the man beside the statue of Rezram Pamek: a space seemingly spontaneous and caused by no authority other than superstitious fear, which I have to say is understandable insofar as the man is a remarkably convincing double of the stone figure. The atmosphere in the Square is strongly charged.  Which may explain why we have had no action from the city-police who have appeared in force at the edges of the crowd. The police are watchful, but so far have taken no action. Apparently they are awaiting instructions from the civil authorities. Meanwhile the crowd seem far from united in opinion…”
    
Further jumps of the picture. Snatches of speech from members of the public.
    A lip-curling sceptic: “What kind of stunt is this?”
    
A gawping barrel of a man: “Spitting image of Rezram Pamek!”
    
A scoffing companion: “Yurrr… ‘the end is nigh’ – ha-ha!”
    
The reporter resumed his commentary.
    “…As you can see, not everybody here professes to believe in the omen which has caused the excitement. But even the unbelievers are at one with the more credulous in agreeing upon the need to stay backed off from a man who so resembles the Founding Father of Larmonn… with the result that nobody has yet approached the author of the disturbance – ah, wait! Let me see now. We have –”
    
The picture slewed. Someone must have violently knocked the camera. Then the image from Thilpar disappeared altogether and the news studio re-occupied the screen.
    “Sorry, we seem to have lost the transmission from Thilpar. We shall c –”
    
A buzzer sounded in the newsroom. The newscaster looked to one side and then faced frontwards once more and said, “We have another report. It seems that the Pamek look-alike has… disappeared.” Lamely, with a harassed expression: “We shall bring you more news as soon as we can.”
    
Frann looked at Midax and said kindly, “Had enough of this, have you? Let’s get on with our tea,” and taking his dumb nod for permission she switched off the set while the newscaster was just beginning to talk about the latest round of civil-service pay-negotiations.
    (Just for a second, though, Midax caught her eye and he winced at the thought, She knows, she knows! And then he corrected himself: What does she know? Don’t ask.)
    
“Yes,” Frann went on reminiscently, “the politicians love this little bolt-hole of mine. They know, and I’m proud that they know, poor dears, that I look after them here. They know I won’t tell on them. Even if the Discoverer were to turn up here, incognito, his secret would be safe with me.”
    “The Discoverer,” gagged Midax, spluttering tea.
    “You’ve heard the rumours, I dare say,” nodded Frann, calmly handing him a napkin. “That he hasn’t really died.”
    With a supreme effort he kept his voice cool. “Ah, the usual conspiracy theories, flying around, as ever.” Give a yawn and finish your tea. It’s your only chance. “I think I’ll turn in now, Frann. Thanks very much for all this,” and he waved at the tray. “And thanks for the chat too. You’ve got a really nice atmosphere here. I must come here again – especially if I become a politician.”
    She chuckled at that, as she reached for the tray.
    “Goodnight, Tallamer.”
    
                                     IV

Matters seemed less fraught the next morning. He was cheered at breakfast by the TV, of all things. Amazing that he could ever feel grateful for the noisy intrusions of breakfast television. It was quite surprising that Frann, committed as she was to peace and quiet for her guests, should have the thing switched on at all.  She explained, as she brought him his egg and bacon, that she’d heard the World President had just been interviewed, and didn’t he, Tallamer, agree that it might be nice to hear what the recently-recovered statesman had to say?  “Hope he’s going to tell us he’s fit and healthy now. Or even if he doesn’t say so, I’ll know if he’s well, by the look of him, poor gentleman,” she asserted. But for Midax, when Waretik Thanth appeared on screen, speaking from the Ellipse Room in the Presidential Palace at Merod, the outcome was even better. Waretik began by merely confirming that his own health had improved to the point where further worries were unnecessary; but then his face seemed to take on an extra glow of statesmanlike, fatherly reassurance mingled with a touch of amusement:
    “It seems,” the President remarked, looking the camera in the eye, “that, while I’ve been in hospital, all sorts of rumours have been flying around, apocalyptic rumours about the end of the world. To those jokers who’ve spread them, I say: All right, you’ve had your fun. And if you leave off now, you will be forgiven, because, I hope, the good result of all your nonsense will be that we become more grateful for what we have, for the continuance of life and all the beloved appurtenances of everyday. Just remember, though, that any joke sours if persisted in too long. – I think that’s all I have to say on this subject.”
    Frann switched off the set.
    She said, “Nice to see him looking so well.”

                                      V

About twenty minutes after breakfast Midax had settled his account with Frann, had packed his rucksack and slung it on his back, and emerged from the front door. He stood on the path, she on the step, to say their good-byes. Her eyes were on a level with his as she said, “You look all set for a good day’s hike, Tallamer.” Those clear eyes brimmed with a knowledgeable satisfaction which made him look away as he replied:
    “Yes, you’ve looked after me nicely. Nothing like a good break.”
    “I could tell you needed it,” she said. “I can always sense when someone needs to disappear.”
    Resolved to put on a grin, he did so and said, “Now you see me – now you don’t!” – and strode off with a wave.
    Through the gate and down the road, he went out of sight of her; no more shrewd landladies, thought Midax; no more staying in guest-houses; I shall buy a tent! It’s great to wing along on one’s own, one’s utter own. (Sigh upon sigh of relief.) I look after myself from now on. That’s who I am. I need, therefore I am. Get a tent, that’s the thing. One of those new-fangled, automatically inflatable, one-man portable tents. Perfect. Saw a campsite not far from here; washrooms available; shops nearby; just what I need. Be a loner, live off society – a dependent independence - inconsistent? – yes, inconsistent according to my need to be inconsistent. Needs must. And I have allies. The solidities, the worldly solidities, those hugely objective things are my friends and allies.  Astronomy, cosmology, light-years, galaxies, stuff like that: sturdy infinities which cannot be boxed; they should last my time. Now where was that shop-window? In the next village, yes, that’s where the tent-emporium is to be found; that’s where I shall buy my refuge. In my tent I'll be able to draw all worldly knowledge about me like a cloak against the cold.
    The young salesman in the shop was sincerely keen to recommend the Vagabond X19.
    “Shelters you in all weathers. Takes only two minutes to inflate. Weighs only three pounds; compresses to 300 cubic inches. Five-year warranty: that’s how confident the manufacturers are,” he concluded.
    “Sounds good,” beamed Midax. “That’s the one for me.”
    Next, the final preparation for his comfort zone: he went to the village bookshop. This being a tourist area, the bookshop was a good one, and he soon found what he wanted – works on geology, cosmology, paleoanthropology… big things, big stretches of space and time, the can’t-be-boxed things. He stuffed the volumes in the side-pockets of his backpack while the tent occupied the main compartment.
    Now for it!
    Before dusk he reached the Liddoor site, between the historic villages of Dlecom and Dcifen. Strangely, it was almost deserted; he counted only three other tents. He had plenty of space for himself. Perhaps the news from Thilpar had put people off going on holiday. Forget the news from Thilpar – it wasn’t going to spoil things for him.
    He laid his pack down on the earth, extracted the Vagabond X19, unfolded it, made sure it was correctly spread, and pulled the pump-switch. The flat plastic hissed and began to swell, just as it was supposed to do. Midax in that moment was full of admiration for human ingenuity, for manufacturers’ sheer cleverness, and while he stood back and watched the inflating tent, the thought of all that cleverness translated itself into wider reflection, admiration of accumulated expertise and of built-up philosophies, structures of thought reaching through space and time – all those luminous concepts in the books he had bought…
    The hiss had come to a stop. The tent had reached full size. He unzipped the door-flap and crawled in.
    The tent floor was soft enough to sleep on comfortably, with further inflatable spots that at a touch could become cushions, and there was a dimmer-switch to control the ceiling-light; the manufacturers seemed to have thought of everything. There was even a rectangle of transparent plastic to serve as a window, with a roll-down blind. He went out again to fetch his pack, brought it in and began at last to feel that he had attained peace.
    Soon, lying down, he began to open one book after another. They all told him what he wanted to hear. They built up a picture he could bask in, in which the ubiquity of radiation, all wavelengths wiggling corrugatedly by transverse waves, brought humanity knowledge of a limitless stretch of space and time.
    …The radioactive decay of carbon-14 proves that thirty-two thousand years ago the first humans crossed the northern land-bridge from Larmonn to Poidal…
    …Uranium isotopes from meteoric fragments show that the World and the other planets formed about 4,650 million years ago by accretion of particles in the solar nebula…
    …The Valiant5 probe has successfully used its mini-nuclear plant to provide the power needed to return pictures by telemetry from the outermost planet, Cloombar, thus completing Man’s first survey of the Solar System…
    …Red-shifts on one side, blue-shifts on the other show that the Galaxy itself rotates once every two hundred and fifty million years…
    
Great stuff, thought Midax contentedly. Better sleep now. Campsite has to be cleared each morning – it’s the rules.
    In good time, he stood up beside his tent at a cold breezy hour early the next day, and reached for the stopper. It was so easy to pack up the Vagabond X19!  He simply pulled out the stopper, and the hiss sounded again, and his little temporary house, his emotional refuge, his mini-universe, began to sag. It was an unfortunate analogy. Oh brother, talk about broad hints. The firm, roomy plastic structure collapsed within the minute to a wrinkly mess, its ends flapping in the breeze while Midax’s confidence followed the plummet towards zero. What had he been imagining, the evening before? The size of the cosmos? A wiggly-light trick, no more; for it was way too obvious that if you extend a system of information-waves in geometric series, in accelerating derivatives of powers of powers of powers, why, in no time such corrugated light can produce effects the size of that imagined universe, real so long as the tent of belief is inflated, but no longer believable once the stopper is pulled –
    Midax Rale looked up, and though he could still see the Everyday sky and the muddy campsite around him, he knew he had no right to deceive himself any longer. Paralysed with self-disgust, he stood there in the damp morning air, his face twisted in a bleak smile: how, he wearily wondered, could he ever again believe in himself or in any of his objectives, after such a deflation as this? But while he blinked under an overcast sky, an equally wan but comforting thought crept into his mind: “Nobody need worry about things like reputations, or their consequences, any more. All such reverberations, such knock-on effects, are about to end. Sequences of petty anxieties shall cease to accumulate – shall soon be dumped with their tallies in the cosmic bin.”
    That being the case, what was left of Midax Rale could, in theory, start afresh. Drained he might be, but drained in a good way. The drastic purgation must have washed a slurry of nonsense out of his system.
    Above all, he was rid of that absurd sense of entitlement, which had previously emboldened him to cling so fiercely to what might be termed an imaginary “right to Everyday life”, now exposed as a vacuous concept, its meaning shrivelled to nothing. A less silly outlook henceforth might take hold, though the lesson’s price was high - its cost amounting, perhaps, to mental and spiritual exhaustion. For it was as if decades of stress had been packed into the past few minutes. He swayed as he stood. What to do? Which muscle to move? Indecision and apathy continued to paralyze him.
    Oh well, time now to make a proper effort, he supposed. Decide precisely when, and where, he could best make himself known. “It might well be too late for me to make any difference,” he told himself gloomily. “But that’s not for me to say.”
    However, the decision to act was taken out of his hands.
    At the edge of the campsite and in the direction he happened to be facing, stood a grubby playground. It had a slide, a few swings, a sand pit and some structures to climb on. Half a dozen small children were there messing around, making the best of a dull morning while their parents were packing their gear or cooking breakfast. Too late, Midax focused downwards from his horizon-surveying stance to realize: “Some of them are staring at me.” And then one little boy openly pointed – while pulling at his smaller playmate’s sleeve – pointed unmistakably as he spoke out to the others, his words guessable to Midax.
    Look out, your cover is about to be blown, came the old way of thought that was of no use any more. Ah, stow it, sprang the response from the newer lesson in awareness. What’s the use? What’s the need? Why bother to hide any more?

                                      VI

A pair emerged from the play area: the boy who had pointed; little sister in tow. They linked arms, giving each other courage perhaps, as they approached and craned their necks before the figure who, in recent culture and legend, was widely considered a kind of magician by many children. After a bit of mutual jostling and nudging between brother and sister the boy dared to pipe up:
    “Please, are you the Discoverer?”
    Playing instinctively for time, Midax replied: “First, tell me who you are.”
    “I’m Jof Lodd; this is Resha.”
    The girl added solemnly, “Our dad drives the No.5 bus. The one that stops at Ditter Street and goes to…” Her voice petered out when her brother dug at her with his elbow as if to say, Never mind the details. Meanwhile, these moments were used by the Discoverer to kick his habit of concealment, a habit for which he could see absolutely no further justification. “Well, Jof and Resha, yes I am the Discoverer; and what can I do for you?” Fully expecting some unreasonable demand, he thought it best to confront the issue – get them to reveal their expectations, and then he could break it to them sharply but kindly that he was no magician. And if they were disappointed, never mind; far bigger issues were about to overwhelm them all; though it wasn't easy to figure out how to put that to such young minds…
    Jof surprised him, however. The lad did not ask for any immediate favour. “Please, Discoverer, when the day comes, will you teach us how to fly?”
    Midax felt stumped. “So that’s it,” he murmured.
    Honesty denied him the easy options. How to fly? A matter of definition! How to explain to these little ones what they would soon be forced to know?  They were watching his face; they could see he did not know how to answer… and for some reason they looked satisfied, perhaps because it was obvious that he was taking them seriously.
    Jof spoke again, “It’s going to happen one day, isn’t it, sir?”
    ‘One day’? That’s bad. They don’t have any idea how little time there is.
    
The figure of Mr Lodd abruptly loomed behind the children. They turned:
    “Dad,” cried Jof, “this is the Discoverer!”
    Mr Lodd signalled to Midax, by the confidential medium of a wry, long-suffering expression, that he had heard enough about look-alikes in the news recently. “Joke’s gone this far, has it?” he said out loud, tapping his children’s heads. And his grimace was such as virtually to demand that Midax reply on the lines of, “yes, it’s a problem isn’t it, when people’s imaginations run away with them so far, that they think they’ve found the Discoverer in a campsite; high time to call a halt to this nonsense, I agree.” A reply which Midax could not honestly give. 
    “Rumours?” he asked, playing for time.
    “Yeah, pesky rumours as usual,” said Lodd. He sighed. “I saved up for this holiday, taking a chance on the weather. The weather’s not brilliant,” and he screwed his face up at the sky, “but as for the news on top of it, well, one can do without that.” He looked back down at his son and daughter and said to them, “So! What shall we do today, I wonder! Where shall we go? Somewhere nice?”
    “Dad,” said Jof meekly, “if he is the Discoverer…”
    “He’s not the Discoverer, Jof. You heard him ask me about the rumours. The Discoverer would know.” Lodd spoke with forced patience, with another side-look at Midax. “I dare say, if you ask him properly, he’ll tell you his real name.”
    Midax was well aware that he could prove his identity in an instant, just by disappearing into Glight, and he was prepared to do this if the only alternative was to perjure himself or let the children down. Nonetheless he hesitated, looking for a way to save the father’s face.
    “Oh well,” Lodd shrugged, disappointed at the other’s silence. “Wrong move.” He tugged the children gently, “Come on, let’s get going. Leave the gentleman to his packing.”
    “But Dad –”
    “Come on.”
    “Sorry,” called out Midax, “it’s too late. Look over there.”
    “What?” snapped Lodd, and turned. Then he saw.
    A vehicle the size of a furniture van was crunching over the muddy pebbles as it pulled in to park close to the site entrance. Everyone had stopped to stare; the Presidential seal was emblazoned on the side of the van. Four men got out, opened the back doors and began to lower a field-phone booth to the ground. Meanwhile two more cars drew up and disgorged some men and women aiming flashbulbs. Behind these came a couple on foot, whom Midax recognized. One of them was his recent landlady, Frann Dmuld. Even from fifty yards off, he could see her face was wild with excitement as her gaze lifted to fix upon him. And the man to whose arm she clung as she pointed was the revenant, Klalel Pamek.
    Midax narrowed his focus, strode past the gap-jawed Lodd and made straight for Frann and Klalel, at a faster pace than that of the reporters.
    “My thanks to you,” he said to Frann, “for leading him here. It was the right thing to do.”
    She nodded, gulping.  Tears were bursting from her eyes.  “I did feel I had to.” 
    “Klalel,” asked Midax, “can you advise me? My judgement has been off for a while. What should I do now?”
    “They’re going to ask you to use the field-phone to talk with the President. If you want, we can consult after that.”
    “I do want,” nodded Midax. Turning, he noted that the reporters, though keeping an eye on his every move, had skirted his path rather than approach him directly – perhaps they had the same gut fear as everyone else, that a sudden wrong move might make the slippery Discoverer vanish again. However, they had found someone to interview – little Jof Lodd! The lad was being encouraged to hold forth while his father, standing confusedly to one side, was the one who more epitomized a lost child – to the pity and amusement of Midax, whose acute hearing picked up the fellow’s soliloquies (“Come on, Belena, I need you,” and: “Now of all times, she has to be in the shower”).
    “Right,” said Midax to Klalel, “I’ll go to this telephone thing.”
    “Looks like you’ll have to go round the back,” said Klalel Pamek.
    This advice was confirmed by a subdued-looking man in neon jacket who stepped forward and said respectfully, “This way, if you please, Discoverer.”
    “Thank you.” The door was indeed round the back of the booth, which had been unfolded to the dimensions of a small cabin. So at least, thought Midax, nobody is going to stare directly at me as I emerge after having spoken on the phone to the President. Might even have time to collect my thoughts in private. But there I go again. The old routine of believing that it matters. Whereas really it matters not a hoot whether my thoughts are "collected" or not. I must forget all littleness, and concentrate on what I owe to my fellow box-dwellers: love, compassion and esteem in our last hours together.  As for me, the current of events requires nothing - except that I swim in it manfully.
    He pushed at the cabin door; it swung open; he froze for a moment when he saw the seated shape inside.
    It beckoned, and he could do naught else but resume his own motion. So he entered, and sat on the one vacant chair.
    No need for a phone call.
    President Waretik Thanth waited till the door had swung and clicked shut and then said, without greeting or preamble, “I don’t want to force people to get used to too many things at once. Now is not the time to reveal to them, that their President has learned to travel through Glight.”
    Midax cleared his throat.  "Er... secret talks wouldn't be  so good by phone, anyway.”
    Waretik with a tight-lipped smile nodded: “Better to meet face to face, to reach some understanding, late though I am.”
    “Not as late as I’ve been, sir,” said Midax. The urge came to abase himself, to disburden himself of his sense of failure. However, he was also dimly aware that this was not the time to inflict his own self-disgust upon others, and that the deployment of any asset, even an undeserved reputation as Discoverer, might still make a difference for multitudes at this crucial time.
    "Whichever way we apportion the blame," the President nodded slowly, "it is now very late. The sun is dimmer already, and I’ll bet that's not just due to the overcast sky. We must lose no more time in shuffling as much of the population as we can towards Zednasvale. I could do with your help. Will you let bygones be bygones?”
    Midax at first suspected irony, and hesitated over the wording of his answer, but then, realizing that the drag of seconds was enough to worry the other man, he hastily agreed, “Of course I’ll do what I can, Mr President, but what do you mean, bygones?”
    “I had you killed, didn’t I?”
    Come to think of it – “So you did!”
    Upwelling mirth caused both men to splutter at the same moment. They almost roared, but fought against laughter’s threatened explosion, for although the cabin was supposed to be soundproofed they sensed the closeness of the public.
    “But, but,” panted Waretik, “we’d better get serious….”
    “Still, it’s just as well to get a laugh out of having to play this stupid game… Mr President.”
    “Please, not that tone,” Waretik wagged a finger. “You’ll have me in hysterics.”
    “All right,” said Midax, “granted that we were friends outside the box, yet now that we’re back inside for the short time that’s left, we should continue to play the box-game – Mr. P.”
    “Hm, not good enough: say it properly. Or do you feel another rebellion coming on?”
    “No, the Presidential growl is firm enough.”
    “Ah, be quiet.” Waretik continued: “It seems we can trust each other not to be petty about what’s over and done with, so now let us focus on what needs to be done. We prophets, or revenants –”
    “Glad to hear that word ‘we’…”
    “I’m perfectly aware, yes, that I am one, though the public doesn’t yet know that I died during my ‘coma’ – As I was saying: we revenants must share the shepherding. Apportion the flock. Otherwise it’ll be chaos.”
    “It will be chaos anyway.”
    “Worse chaos, then. We may only have a few hours. To funnel the entire population into one valley is too great a task for one man. Klalel Pamek has agreed to do Poidal South, and Rezram will see to Vevtis; Boalo is heading for Larmonn East – and I will do Serorn itself, Cenland and (if necessary) Poidal, though the Poidalian Chairman said he’d co-operate when I saw him at Hustendoov... But the hardest job has not yet been allocated. It’s one I’d like you to take on.”
    Midax experienced one of his increasingly faint urges to say something modest. This time the tug towards self-deprecation was more easily resisted than ever before. The current of events had borne him beyond either arrogance or modesty; he hardly felt personal at all – he was a mere mote of awareness among a horde of such motes being sucked into a vortex of fate. “I’ll do my best, Waretik. Just tell me what the job is.”
    “I want you to take the West Coast of Larmonn. Base yourself in the State of Orame.”
    Midax with a quirk of lip said, “I’ve always wanted to see the Golden State. What with one thing and another, I never got round to it. Now it’s rather late for sightseeing. Still, never mind.”
    A serene look momentarily brightened the President’s leathery features. “Thank you, Midax.” He rose and held out his hand. They shook, and Waretik said, “You’ll know what to do. Make up your own rules. I hope we meet again – after the end.”
    “After the end? Hmm… I might use that phrase.”
    Waretik Thanth dryly exhaled, “In Orame? Eschatology in worldy Orame? Rather you than me.”
    “Sounds like you’re trying to put me off, but –” and Midax shrugged, “why worry about a bunch of trendies at this late hour?” He put on a Farao drawl, the accent that symbolized the West Coast: “‘No worries’; ‘no sweat’; ‘no way’.”
    The President nodded, unsmiling now. “So go and inform the trendies that the trend is against them.”
    “I shall,” and with a casual wave Midax went out the cabin door.

                                      VII

The watching folk of the campsite, together with the official arrivals from the media and local government, drew breath as he stepped into view, their faces expressing the questions which were about to boil out of them.  He had not doubt that the first of them to move would precipitate a rush forward, in their desperate resolve to throng and beseech the Discoverer for guidance.  In addition a single look upward might trigger a panic, for the sky had gone strangely, excessively grey.  Midax could detect the crowd's gathering sense of being hemmed in or constricted, yet on him the  growing eeriness of this peculiar day had a different effect - he felt his options widen.  A lot of bothersome dither now became redundant.  (Which is best? Stay visible for a while, talk to the folk, or shoot off immediately into Glight and get on with my mission? And if I stay, how long do I stay to talk to them, to explain to them what they must do?)  All that stuff.  Now promptings arose from a merger of forces within him, of which the crowd could have no inkling. They only knew that he was famed for his disappearances; hence the shouting and the gesticulation began. “Mr Discoverer! What did the President say?” “Mr Discoverer! Tell us what to do! Listen to us, we need you to –” “Hey Midax! Midax! We’ve heard things –” “Is it true we must go to Zednasvale?” Voices heightening, wailing: “Have we heard right? Is it true? The Valley of the End?”  
    Pitying their terror of being left in the dark, Midax moved amongst them, and raised his arms with a swim-stroke gesture he declared loudly to all, “I can get you there.” He turned, and repeated: “I can get you there.”
    Next they’d have to face up to having got from him what they wanted.  During the breathing space of their wonder  the Discoverer took the initiative for good and all, surpassing his previous sleight-of-vision to achieve a combination never attained before: inner and outer eye in cahoots, he began to produce – while still in the “ordinary” everyday world – an ocular picture of what his mind really knew, in such a way that the Glight-view, instead of replacing the familiar world, stole into translucent competition with it, to form with it a montage in which the bones of reality gleamed through the flesh of Everyday.  Thus was revealed to him, behind all the embellishments of the Wide World of Everyday, the compressed and summary features of the Luminarium; and because that box-world, three miles by two, was actually the real world – because therefore its distances were the true ones – and because the crowd, also, had begun seriously to sense the truth of this in its collective gut, though as yet their eyesight was inferior to his – the folk around Midax began to move as he did.
    Four or five of them, including Mrs Belena Lodd and Jof her little son, tried to keep hold of his sleeves, Belena crying out for Resha her daughter to hold on too. Scuffles broke out as others tried to grab at him. A few wiser heads shouted in vain, “Hold, just hold, don’t push” or “Form a chain!” – this was to assure those who weren’t close enough for direct contact with the Discoverer, that the touch at one remove was enough. It was not easy for stressed throats to screech this instruction efficiently, or for stressed minds to get the idea. Midax would have been in dread of trouble, except that his visionary leap was contagious, rapidly exerting an influence on those who touched him, perhaps through the unconscious rhythms of his pliant movements, and those rhythms spread even to those who, in startlement, had let go of him.  From the first strides onward every motion made it clearer that the local ‘Everyday’ was being drawn out into a colourful smear, a banner woven of vapour-trails; the jostling folk billowed as embroideries on that banner along with scenic souvenirs, local portions of the "everyday" landscape, rags of the old world superimposed upon their abbreviated march through reality towards Zednasvale.
    A little winding walk it was, maybe a quarter-mile stretch of box.  Along the margin of the Zard Pond their route took them towards Zednas Province of Serorn; they’d be there in five minutes or so, though it was hundreds of Wide World miles away.
    More recruits joined the group as they passed through 'villages' and 'towns'. Nevertheless the crowd did not appear to swell; the world must be so close to its end that its low real population had become apparent. In any crowd scene in Everyday most of the figures, Midax knew, had always really been mere emanations or reflections, and this extravagance of “extras” (typical of Everyday's explications and multi-mirrorings of a few representative objects) could not be expected to outlast the End. Therefore during the walk to Zednasvale the number of "extras" was pared down by countless line-of-sight occultations of body by body turning into permanent coalescence. By journey’s end, so many reflections had merged with their “reflectees” that most people whom he saw must, he guessed, be real individuals: the residue of the funnelling trend of Everyday into Glight. He had begun with about fifty people in the group. He reached Zednasvale with about that same number, but this final fifty were drawn from a much wider area.
    Thank goodness these people all seemed to realize, silently, that this was not discussion time. Pointless to seek words, to pin down their experience of the event. What mattered was that they had arrived - 
    Most people had seen the Vale in geography books and articles, and perhaps five per cent had actually been there, mostly to examine the photogenic ruins of its ancient battles, which littered the sweeping dry valley, thirty miles wide in Everyday, sun-drenched and dotted with scrub.  Now perceiving Zednasvale as it really was, the arrivals saw before them a small hollow, perhaps a hundred and fifty yards across, strewn with a few hardy fruit-bearing shrubs, and carpeted with soft moss.
    It provided tolerable space for the two thousand or so people in the box-world to lie down.
    “Here we are,” cried Midax Rale simply, in the soft glow of dusk. What can I say to these people? ‘Here you can rest in peace while the world ends’? No. They’ll want more. Give them a reason. “Mini-climate, light-trap, call it what you will…” His words tailed off as he gleaned from many faces that they did not need further explanation, after all. They were experiencing a dazed comfort. They were on the way to grasping for themselves that this place was to be the focus of what energy remained in the dimming world. Lo and behold, folk were sitting down quietly on the moss, or wandering among the bushes and then sitting down on the moss; the children bounced on it a few times, before quietening. Well! Midax smiled tiredly. He had, he supposed, made a fair start. He had brought about fifty real people to Zednasvale. And not only these, but other small ex-multitudes could be descried in the middle distance, in marching lines of dots, tramping on or below the ridges of the former Wide World, as its deflated populace was funnelled towards its end.
    “That’s probably the President, bringing his bunch next,” he said to the pale beings around him. “So you’ll have company in a few minutes.”
    A small, dapper man touched his sleeve. “I am Doctor Sooskler,” he said, “physician at Folcom –”
    “Good, then until Waretik Thanth arrives, I’m leaving you in charge.”
    “But wait, Discoverer! Don’t leave us yet!” Sooskler, his eyes darting in panic, was obviously resistant to the calm that had enveloped the rest of the group. “Tell me what you know! What is wrong with these people? Why are they lying down so lethargically? I have never seen anything like it before.”
    “Doctor, there’s nothing wrong with them. You’ve never seen anything like it before because none of us has seen The End before.”
    “But you are not collapsing! Neither am I!”
    “Shhh,” said Midax. “Not so loud, please.”
    The bewildered doctor continued to twitch. In his nervous agitation he was darting glances of agonized need at the Discoverer, who realized the intensity of the man’s craving for an explanation: it had to be satisfied, else Sooskler would not keep quiet; with a sigh Midax sought to provide this balm: “You’ll have to think back, way, way back, Doctor. It won’t come easily; you’ll have to make an effort. Think back. Way back. Beyond your present life. Go on, do it.” He scrutinized the little man’s face. Under the pressure of this unique end-time, the first hazy signs of ancient memory were beginning to show. “Ah, you remember that reality outside the box, don’t you? The real life-before-life. Serenth, Korm. I’m guessing now that you were born close to the Fount, like I was. Yes?” Murmuring on, half to himself, Midax added: “Mine was the Rale Rock, a rock closely splashed from the Fount itself. Vivid-splashed, it was; no wonder my tissues are still fully wakeful, despite Sparseworld’s dimming of all things. I think, Doctor, you must have been born from a similar Fount-side spot; I wonder who else…”
    Sooskler’s voice rasped out the words, “Yes, now I do remember, the Sooskler Rock. Comparable…” He interrupted himself with a racking cough; then, recovering, asked: “So you and I – we have too much, yes?  Too much force within us?  Where does that leave us?”
    “As part of the few, who will stay awake. Excuse the simple answer,” said Midax, “I must go. I have been told by the President to go to Orame. The west-coast folk, they may need some prodding. Meanwhile keep an eye on these people, will you? Look after them till the President comes?” With a pat on the dazed doctor’s shoulder, Midax turned to the west, and strode off along the darkening shore of Zard Pond.
    Little now remained of the extended vistas of ‘Everyday’. The dim and shrunken reality of the glass-boxed Luminarium dominated his vision now. And, he guessed, the vision of most others was close to matching his, to judge from the looks and the gait of most of the people he passed, for as they shambled towards Zednasvale, they could see him as well as he could see them, and many a hunch-shouldered refugee from the darkness straightened up to point at him in the milder gloom. A few times, when he was close enough, he shouted to encourage them on their route, lest he – going in the other, darker direction – might otherwise undermine their faith. But that seemed not to be a problem: those who saw him appeared to understand that there had to be some official reason why he was going away from, rather than towards, the haven of rest.
    What they did not also need to know was that he had a small piece of private business to attend to, on his way round the curve of the Pond. Within a minute he was approaching the cluster of huts which in Everyday had comprised the mighty port metropolis of Dranl. He composed his thoughts: if she turned out to be there, he would offer his help; but he would not expect anything in return. Budgeting emotionally for a meeting that must disappoint, he opened the door of the hut in question, in the darkened little street – and found the room empty. So that was that. She had already left.
    Perhaps he had passed her on the way, in the dimness. Or perhaps she did not exist as a separate person, perhaps she was a mere emanation, a multiplication… no, he could never believe that. Pjerl/Jerre was an original if ever there was one.    
    Midax shrugged. Whatever she was, she was not for him; he ought to know that by this time. And he ought to have guessed that she would not be waiting for him here… for her to be here would have been too un-typical of the way things were arranged. Instead, it was quite “par for the course” for him to rush to this place in order to offer help to his destined Other Half only to find that he had fallen again for yet another T.W.O.T. or Typical Waste of Time. Darn silly to expect her to be here when of course she must be anywhere but…
    He turned disgustedly to continue his way. And as he passed a corner he more or less bumped into Pjerl Lhared.

                                       VIII

“Hi,” she said with a short, rattling laugh. “Another one.”
    “What?”
    “I mean, first Pamek, now you.”
    “Yes,” admitted Midax bitterly: “I'm yet another news item, yet another famous dead man who’s not dead any more; that’s what you mean.”
    “Or else we’re all dead,” muttered Pjerl, as she leaned, willow-like, against the nearest wall.
    “Depends how you look at it.” Of course it’s too much to expect you to fall into my arms and cry for joy. “I, er, came to find you,” he ventured.
    The undying dagger-sparkle in her eyes swept past his face and panned across the darkening world.  “What’s going to happen to us, Splasher Midax?” she asked, her look and tone slicing through the layers of identity with which Life had covered their former selves.
    “Ah, so you remember us,” said Midax; for a marvellous moment it seemed to him as though by "us" she meant to refer to herself and him as a destined couple, destined way back in Serenth, before Life - rather than, much more generally, all people.
    But no.  “I mean, all of us. What’s going to happen to us all?”
    Midax acidly replied, "Well, you were on the Olamic course as well as I, Pjerl. You learned as much at the Institute as I did. You can answer your own question, surely."
    “Don’t be like that, Midax. You’re the great Discoverer, aren’t you?”
    He thought he’d give that the silence it deserved. 
    “Phew, it’s getting cold,” he sighed. “We need to gather in Zednasvale. That’s all I can say to anybody.”
    “Yes, on the news I heard… about Zednasvale.  “What's left of energy must be pooling there, I understand. But still, I suppose it will be in short supply, won’t it? An ebbing pool?”
    “We can share what’s left,” assured Midax.  (Share!  An excuse for a mutual snuggle during the aeons while the residue of light and warmth trickled away?  Too much to hope for, of course.)
    Did she guess the trend of his thought?  “You,” she said, “were born close to the Fount, weren’t you, Splasher? So you will stay awake orders of magnitude longer than people like me.”
    Implication: we’re not well matched for sharing.  
    
Midax raised both hands and let them fall.  Might as well name the entire outcome Neverness.  To wait for Pjerl to adhere to any romantic script was as hopeless as… well, as the whole wash-out this reunion beyond the grave had proved to be, and was bound to be.
    “I'll be seeing you, Pjerl,” he said.  "The President has given me things to do."  And he continued on his way.
    He struck directly west now. Across the stretch of field which used to signify the Great Plains of Larmonn, he headed for the westernmost province, Orame; distance a numbing antidote for Neverness.
    It was as hard as ever to spot the Luminarium wall directly. No – actually it was harder. The boundary had only ever been detectable via the change in terrain between inside and outside, rather than by sight of the barrier wall itself. But now, in the dimness of Sparseworld, the contrast was less marked, and confusion or a possible surprise were even more likely to await explorers who arrived at the box-world’s western edge.
    However, he wasn’t going quite so far west as that.  Not right up to the glassite wall.  Therefore, surely, the district of Orame would not look too different from the rest of the darkened box-world.   
    His first inkling that this assumption was wrong, came when he approached the minor hills which bulwarked the end of the grassland. These were the hills which in “Everyday” comprised the great range of the Stony Mountains. Across that mighty range – or rather, on the other side of the little hills – lay Orame. But in that case –
    Orame must, for some reason, be still glowing!  Why else would he see a fuzz of light as he wended his way through the tiny pass between the hills?
    It was a local light, not illuminating far, but it grew as he approached into a quite respectable glow. At length, as he topped the rise, the radiance was revealed to him as an actual hemisphere of daylight containing the city of Farao, Orame’s capital, on its beautiful bay with its Silver Bridge, the architectural wonder of the west coast, and the Capitol building, and the Governor’s Mansion, and all the other famous landmarks he had seen in books and movies.
    With sad appreciation Midax descended the path into the bubble of light. And as he sank further into the locality, the vision of Everyday naturally returned in strength. Landscape flung itself into renewed vistas in all directions.  The richness and complication of the big world returned, as far as it could, within the bounds of Orame.
    No wonder Waretik had foisted on him the task of convincing the Orameans that the end was nigh. Even for the Discoverer, it might be a hard message to put over in this realm of lingering day. But at least he might get a hearing.
    Publicity turned out not to be a problem. Bystanders swiftly noted his approach. The news spread fast, and before he had set foot on the outskirts of Farao he was met on the road by a motorcade, a deputation led by Governor Harlei Ollamdl himself.
    Reporters flashed their bulbs at them as the two men met at Cantrell’s Diner by the wayside overlooking the dip of Constitution Hill. “This is a historic occasion, Mr Discoverer,” declaimed Ollamdl. “We’re honoured to have you with us, honoured and relieved, at this uncertain time. A time of environmental crisis –”
    More bulb-flashes. Handshakes, gestures towards seats at the diner… Midax and Ollamdl each took a chair. Midax leaned forward.
    “Mr Governor, the time is not so much uncertain, as used up.”
    Ollamdl grimaced. “You have come here to tell us we need to evacuate the entire state because of some environmental hazard? To relocate, lock stock and barrel, to that place we’ve hearing about – Zednasvale? The entire population of our state? Twenty-eight millions of people?”
    “Probably more like two hundred and eighty,” smiled Midax.
    The scene seemed to waver for a moment. The Governor set his jaw and said:
    “I won’t get into a quarrel with you, Mr Discoverer.”
    “What will you do, then, Mr Governor?”
    “Show you something.” Ollamdl stood up and fished into a pocket. Out of it came a handheld phone. “Next stop, the Remkest plant,” he remarked as he led Midax out of the diner.
    They went to the foremost car in the fleet parked outside. Saluting staff opened and slammed the doors; the chauffeur gunned the motor as soon as Midax and Ollamdl had settled in the rear seats; Midax wordlessly watched the passing cityscape give way to suburbs and then to brightly irrigated farmland. Within minutes the gubernatorial motorcade drew to a stop outside a high-walled structure.
    Ollamdl turned in his seat, knowing full well that Midax knew that this place was another landmark familiar to the world from articles and photographs. He made no move, as yet, to open the car door. Instead he said, “Looks solid enough, no? The Remkest Nuclear Power Plant. Worth remembering, we have nuclear power, and we’re using it successfully to light our corner of the world. Why should we not continue –”
    Midax lifted a finger. Ollamdl fell silent.
    Midax gently said, “You’re using nuclear power to light the air?”
    Ollamdl hesitated.
    Midax said, “You want me to see this. So...”
    The Governor clicked open the door on his side, swung his legs out of the car and himself went round to open the door on Midax’s side, performing every action crisply, as if to say, look for yourself, At any rate, you’ll darned well see something. Midax could tell that Ollamdl was basically content for his show-piece to have lasted this long, and did not expect a lasting triumph. Doubtless in his heart of hearts the Governor was sufficiently proud that the Golden State would be the last bright light to go out.
    Security was tight around a nuclear plant, but Midax had no difficulty in Glighting his way through the walls – they were no more than skimpy fences to him, and he noted that Ollamdl succeeded in following his every move, partly no doubt by official means, but also (Midax suspected) because the fellow was likewise Glighting without admitting as much, so that the two men wormed their way to the heart of the plant in seconds, in a double vision that throbbed between Glight and Everyday.
    However, when the Governor and the Discoverer finally stood in the Remkest’s shed/control room, the Everyday vision, as generally in the bright Oramean landscape, seemed the only plausible view of reality. What was more, in this room of dials and switches and control-rods, with the half-dozen staff vigilant on their swivel-chairs in front of their viewscreens, there reigned a special conviction of solid metallic permanence; and when this phrase occurred to Midax Rale, he saw no reason why he should not use its very words. “Metallic permanence,” he smiled to Ollamdl. “Impressive. Yes indeed.”
    “Except you’re about to knock it down, somehow,” suggested the Governor, not in his orotund political voice any more, but in a resigned tone. The earlier, sharper Harlei Ollamdl was back – the man who had first achieved prominence as a redoubtable interviewer. Or – wondered Midax – was that earlier one a different Harlei? A different splinter of being?
    “Yes,” agreed Midax, “I shall de-categorise your ‘nuclear power plant’, right now. Reel its thread back onto the bobbin of simplicity, if you get what I mean, Ollamdl. First, the engineering and the outer machinery; reel that back to the ‘usage’ category of which one manifestation can be classed with another. Next, the particle-jigs in the reactor itself; I reel them back to ‘energy production’: energy is just energy, is it not? So the ‘reactor’ shrinks to – that. That thing lying there. Not even atomic any more.” Midax pointed to a glowing fragment lying on a sideboard, in the ghostly hut which remained in the muted, real, Glight-world.  He continued softly, “There’s your so-called nuclear power. Just a chip of kolv, a standard rarity, probably the only such gem that happened to lie in the soil in this part of the Luminarium. That’s what gives some accidental lingering light to Orame, but it is not going to last much longer. Only one isolated chip, Ollamdl. Look how it fades even as we watch.”
    Ollamdl made a wry face.  “Let’s get out of here.” He raised his voice. “All of you,” he called to the staff, “it’s time to go home.”
    It was indeed; for at that very moment the kolv’s brilliance faded below a certain threshold, and the solidity of Glight overtook that of Everyday in the eyes of the population at large as well as of Midax Rale and Harlei Ollamdl. The staff of six slid across Midax’s field of view as the six became two, and those two, obeying the Governor’s command, got off their chairs – now rickety stools – to push at the hut’s door. It swung open with a creak. The two staff members, and Midax, trooped out. Ollamdl meanwhile picked up the kolv fragment from its place on the sideboard, put it in his pocket and then followed. The four men gathered in a line to gaze at the final sunset of Orame. It was, for about half a minute, a literal sunset, splendid from the top of a last remaining vision of Constitution Hill, with the red solar orb touching the horizon of the western ocean. Then a smear of correction and there was suddenly no western sun, no low sun at all: the vision’s sustenance was gone. Ollamdl dipped into his pocket and gazed down at the now dull fragment he held. The kolv chip had emitted the last of its stored power.
    “Those folk – look there, give ’em a wave,” urged Midax, nodding at the couple of hundred figures who wandered among the huts below. “They’re your people, Ollamdl.”
    Obediently, the Governor waved, and shouted and beckoned, “This way, this way! Come on, the show’s over!” Under his breath he added, “It was good while it lasted.”
    “That’s the spirit,” agreed the Discoverer, clapping him on the back. “I think you Orameans have enough stuffing left in you to walk to Zednasvale. Just don’t delay any more, eh?”
    No more argument, no more trouble from the Golden State… Midax had had it easy, after all. He had fulfilled his last task. And it was as nothing compared to what lay ahead of him – the dread absence of tasks.

>>>next chapter>>>