Divergence

rumbling.

“MTPH everywhere,” explained Maurice. “I can read it on my console: it’s in the air, in the food, in the water. It sparkles like fairy dust! This whole world is dipped in MTPH, and the Watcher has plugged its senses into everyone here, so that it can feel what they can feel.” He waved his hands around the busy crowd. “Do you really want to be part of that?”

He pushed his green hood right up close to her face and Saskia was transfixed by his eyes, half seen in the dark, gazing into hers.

“Do you want that, Saskia? Do you want the Watcher feeling you, knowing you? Do you?”

“No, I don’t, Maurice.”

He made a grunting noise and pulled away from her and they strode onwards, heading towards a fairy-tale castle situated at the end of the parkland: a white building decorated in blue stripes, golden domes flashing boldly in the sunlight.

Miss Rose gave a cough; she was trying to speak. She coughed again, clearing her throat. “This is not what I was expecting, dear,” she managed to say.

“Nor I, Miss Rose, nor I.”

Saskia felt so happy, and yet she wasn’t sure why. She was on Earth, the most dangerous place in the galaxy. Everyone said so. And yet, it felt such a comfortable place to be. It was home . This was where she had come from; this was the cradle of the whole human race. Of course it felt right. It had been shaped and molded and sanded and polished by the Watcher to become the perfect place for a human to live. Suddenly she felt rather churlish for having stayed away for so long. Edward felt it too. “It’s so pretty,” he sighed. “I always thought Earth was meant to be a bad place.”

“So did I, Edward,” Saskia replied sadly.

“Nearly there,” Vanya said to Judy. She was strolling along with Constantine by her side, staring fixedly at the ground. Vanya had noticed this; it seemed to hurt his pride in some way. There was quiet satisfaction in his voice as he continued speaking. “Look to the left and you will see the avenue to the stars.”

Saskia looked up then, and she found herself unable to move farther. It was so beautiful. It was beyond beautiful. It gripped the heart in wonder, and made it swell larger and larger just to encompass the scene. She put her hand to her hood, meaning to pull it back in order to get a better view, but she remembered herself just in time. She wanted to curse Maurice for his silliness, but this was soon forgotten as she gazed in awe along the avenue in front of them. She began then to grasp the size of the Watcher’s mind. The avenue began, here in the park, with a broad path paved in white stone and surrounded by low hedges. After that…Saskia could only guess that its course sloped upwards ever so gently. There was no other way to explain how she could see so far, seemingly beyond the horizon itself. After the hedge came two lines of poplars, and then the colorful walls of the city. Then the taller buildings, the silver spires and the skyscrapers. The avenue must widen the farther away it got. Out there, kilometers away, could she walk across an expanse of white stone and look at the towering buildings on either side, their tops wider apart, separated by the curvature of the Earth?

But her mind was lost in that vast space, lost in the arrow-straight path that led to the stars, lost in the line of hedge and tree and stone that led to the heavens. And there, hanging above the end of the path, framed by the farthermost buildings of all, she could make out the shadow of the Shawl.

“Come at night,” said Vanya. “Come on the twenty-third of September when the moon is framed below the Shawl. Hah, come anytime you like and it is just as good. Is it not beautiful?”

“It is beautiful,” Saskia whispered. Then something caught her attention, something black and baleful at the edge of her vision, tucked away just beyond a row of trees. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing. Vanya smiled tightly and his eyes became hollow. “Oh that, it is nothing. Now come on, the Lite station is just down here.”

“What can you see, dear?” Miss Rose asked.

“I don’t know,” said Saskia, turning up the vision on her active suit. It was hard to make out the shape, lurking as it was behind the trees. It seemed to be a fat, rounded pillar, banded in black and white, five or six stories high.

“Maurice,” Saskia said, “maybe you should take a look at this?”

“If you want to know what it is, find out for yourself,” Maurice replied petulantly.

“Judy?” Saskia persisted.

But Judy had already gone on ahead with Constantine.

“Be like that then,” Saskia muttered. She reached out with one hand, using the active suit’s senses to try and feel the sinister object, but it was too far away.

“Come on,” urged Vanya. “Come on!”