*
They found Sarah-Kelly inside the marquee tent, cranking at a Banda machine. She shook Bartram off when he wrapped his arms around her.
“Gerroff! I’ve thousands of these to do.”
Bartram stood with tears running off his cheeks.
“We thought you were blown in bits, Skay.”
“Get more ink—there’s tins over there.”
“Look…” Bartram eased Sarah-Kelly from the machine and nodded for a younger brother to take over. Her face was haggard, her eyes worn from sobbing. Bartram cuddled her. When he turned her to face Donald, she staggered back in astonishment.
“Oh my good God.” She laughed a great sarcastic cackle and added: “You make a convincing slummy, well, sort-of.” In that cackle, with all its rich derision, Donald instantly knew why Lawrence would have fallen for this young woman. “Your sort don’t belong here. This is our tragedy, not yours.”
“It’s everyone’s tragedy.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Stop having a go at him,” Bartram said. “He was at the craters, he chanted with all the rest.”
Sarah-Kelly frowned, eyeing Donald from this angle and that, as if he were a tempting but unknown fruit—one that might or might not be poisonous.
“You can’t trust those people. I know some of them have joined the Party, they’re all hypocrites; they know we’re going to win.”
“I came here to apologise to you. I called you a liar and I was wrong,” Donald said. She showed him her backside—a firm and shapely backside, he noted—bending to pile leaflets into a box. “I’m at risk just by being here, so don’t waste my time telling me whether I mean it.”
The anger in his voice impressed her enough to straighten up and face him again with a more contemplative pose.
“So you came to apologise. That’s nice. I accept your apology. You must have taken a lot of trouble to get out here, as you can’t have come out under your real identity. What do you want?”
“Details. I am not going just sit on my arse while my brother wastes his life pounding gravel for a crime he didn’t do. I need details to get started.”
“We can’t talk here. We’ll go back to North Ken.”
This suited Donald. The shelling of the asylum had turned the National Party annual conference into an emergency room. Messengers constantly came and went. Banner remained buried from view in a seething clot of advisors, lackeys, agitators and pontificators. Donald was not going to be able to have useful discussions with Party officials, so he was taking needless risks by remaining. When he saw a familiar face enter the tent, he knew it was time to get out of sight. The face was that of Team Lieutenant Theo Farkas, the glory officer who had brought him home from the Lands of Dasti-Jones. He was dressed as a typical asylum resident in denim dungarees and heavy boots.
“I’ll see you outside,” Donald said.
*
At the frontier of the Friendly Cooperative of North Kensington basin, Donald was delayed in the customs house. By the time he was through, the Newman brood had already gone home.
He walked a mile around the basin to the gate of the Newman business. It was locked. No one was in view. The Tibetan mastiffs lifted their ears and did not so much growl as rumble.
While wondering what to do, he ambled to the edge of the quay and admired a large flying boat moored just outside the Newman’s basin. It was a fabulously futuristic machine relative to the clumsy biplanes he was accustomed to seeing. This machine was constructed like a ship, of metal plates rivetted together. The fuselage was sleek like a dogfish, broad at the front narrowing to a single thin fin with blade-like tail planes. Two thicker fins projected low down, just behind the cockpit. These were half-immersed in the opaque basin and presumably gave the hull stability while afloat without the drag of wing stabilisers. Most impressive were the wings, long and impossibly thin like the wings of a seagull, perched on a pylon above the fuselage. The engines were streamlined within slender nacelles set across the wings like rowing skiffs. It all suggested an heirloom of the Public Era. If so, it was in remarkably good condition for being more than seventy years old.
A hatch in the cockpit roof banged open and a man climbed out. He was a tall fellow, with broad shoulders, a prominent, sharp chin and well-developed pectoral muscles. He moved on his toes, cat-like, stepping down footholds in the side of the hull to a small rowing boat, all the while wrapping up a bundle and not even looking down. When he turned to sit in the boat, he spotted Donald and stopped dead.
“What do you want?” he shouted.
“That’s a very beautiful machine.”
Now the owner of the flying boat was across to the dock, up on the quay and staring through the gate all in a matter of moments, without the mastiffs having raised their heads. At this close range, the trim body and its agility became the more surprising, for he was not a young man. The hawkish face creased deeply around the mouth and nostrils. Thin eyes scraped details, lingering on Donald’s face, memorising, prompting Donald to take a step back out of the reach of those yard-long arms. This was like swapping stares with a pissed-off leopard at a zoo.
“Tell me who you are.”
The flying boat’s owner spoke with a meticulous clarity. The voice lacked any hint of background, be it asylum or public school.
“Do you need to know?” Donald said.
The thin eyes flickered. He turned one cheek away to look sidelong, becoming curious.
“My name is Prentice Nightminster. You’ll get more out of life when you see comrades, instead of strangers.”
This news startled Donald. Thirty-three years after the Sack of Oxford, Nightminster, once the beau of Victorina Krossington, must by now be in his early fifties. Yet to the casual eye he looked about forty. Relative to the photograph from the evening of May Day 2073, the hair had receded
