'The Corporation, of course.'
'Of course,' I said. 'Spread the blame widely enough, and no-one's really guilty.'
'We expect our employees to live their lives for the Corporation,' said Mr. Alexander, ignoring me to concentrate on Eamonn. 'But you always held back. You wouldn't give us one hundred per cent.'
'My wife and family have always been more important to me than my job,' said Eamonn, and his voice was firm and unimpressed. Werewolves might throw him, but he knew where he was with Mr. Alexander. 'I only work here, that's all.'
'And there we have the problem, in a nutshell,' said Mr. Alexander, smiling smugly. 'We like our employees to think of the Corporation as their family. Their first loyalty should always be to us. Our needs should be their needs. How else can we survive and prosper in this competitive age? You showed such promise, Eamonn. We all thought so. You could have gone right to the very top. I'm getting old, you see, and an obvious successor has yet to appear.
So I chose you, or, to be more exact, I chose the man you could be, with a little input from us. A little persuasion from outside.'
'Finally,' I said. 'You do like the sound of your own voice, don't you?'
'I called in a specialist,' said Mr. Alexander, still ignoring me. 'You can find any kind of specialist, in the Night-side. And he brought you here, to act as a lodestone for all the other versions of you, from other time-lines. So you could fight it out, survival of the fittest and all that, until one man was left. One strong and dominant Eamonn Mitchell, suitable to be my successor.'
'Why involve me?' I said, a bit sharply.
'Because I was asked to,' said Mr. Alexander, turning the full force of his smile on me for the first time. 'Walker came to see me, representing the wishes of the Authorities. He'd heard about my little plan, but then, Walker hears about everything. He had a favor to ask, and of course, one doesn't say no to Walker. It seems the Authorities want you kept busy and distracted for a while, Mr. Taylor, while they decide precisely how they're going to deal with you.'
'The Widow's Mite isn't what I thought it is,' said Eamonn. 'Is it?'
Mr. Alexander nodded approvingly at the first clear stirrings of anger in Eamonn's voice. He leaned back in his expensive chair, lacing his fingers across his bulging waistcoat, looking distinctly pleased with himself. 'Here in the Corporation, we pride ourselves on taking the Long View. We back causes and businesses and people whom we believe most likely to bring about the kind of future we desire. A future where we hold the purse strings on all those who matter. Where we are in charge; because whoever controls the world's finances, controls the world.'
He leaned forward suddenly, holding Eamonn's eyes with his. 'It's not too late, you know. You could still agree to enter the fast track, to be personally groomed by me. I'd
call off the dogs, and everything would go back to normal. You'd have to adjust your thinking in certain ways, of course, learn to see the world as we do ... but eventually all the riches of the world would be yours.'
'I already have everything that matters,' said Eamonn, his voice calm and even. 'My wife and my children. How many times do I have to say this? I am happy, and content. Can you say the same, for all your wealth and power? Get thee behind me, Mr. Alexander; I will not sell my soul to your Corporation. You have nothing I want or need.'
Mr. Alexander sighed heavily, leaning back in his chair as though suddenly bored with the whole business. 'Well, if you won't do what's necessary of your own free will, I'll have to replace you with another you who will. Allow me to present my specialist-Count Video.'
And just like that Count Video was there in the office with us, as though he'd always been there, but we hadn't noticed him. The man himself, wrapped in shifting plasma lights, tall and pale and ghostly in his tattered black leathers, his colourless skin studded with silicon nodes and sorcerous circuitry. Heavy black stitches and metal staples held his skin in place. Whoever had reattached it, after it was flayed from him during the angel war, had done a good job. Though his face did look a bit taut, his thin-lipped mouth pulled into a constant mirthless grin. His hands twitched at his sides, eager to weave binary magics and rewrite probabilities. He did so love to show off what he could do. Count Video had no natural gift for change magic; he'd made himself the way he was through dedicated research into the more insane areas of quantum physics, and a little help from a Transient Being.
He's supposed to have had sex with a computer. The things a scientist will do for knowledge.
And to further complicate things, the last time I'd seen Count Video had been in a vision of a possible future where I destroyed the Nightside. He had been one of the
Enemies trying to hunt me down and kill me here, in the Past, before I could do whatever terrible thing it was that brought about the end of the Nightside, and the world.
'Hello, Tristram,' I said. 'You're looking ... well, a lot better than the last time I saw you.'
'Hello, John,' said Count Video, sitting easily on one end of Mr. Alexander's desk. 'Not many people get to see me these days. Everyone thinks I'm dead, and I like it that way. Operating in secret, in the shadows, behind the scenes. You see, after what happened to me during the angel war, I had something of an epiphany. No more messing around with magical theory and forbidden knowledge; I wanted all the good things the world has to offer, and I wanted them now, while I was still able to appreciate them. So now I work secretly, for the highest bidder, and I don't care what I do as long as it pays well. Does that make me sound shallow? Well, I find having your skin ripped off concentrates the mind wonderfully on what really matters.'
'Tell me what you've been doing to Eamonn,' I said. 'You know you want to.'
'Don't mind if I do,' said Count Video, settling himself comfortably as he switched to lecture mode. 'For everyone else, alternative timetracks are only theory. But to me, every time-line is as real as any other. I see them all, flowing past me like so many rivers, and I can dip a toe into any of them I please. Sometimes I go fishing, and pull out all kinds of strange and useful things. Like all those variant editions of Eamonn Mitchell. All the people he was and might have been, if only things had gone a little differently. I scattered them across the Nightside, armed them with wands charged by my probability magic, and sent them after your client. Most never got to him, of course. The Nightside is such a dangerous and distracting place.'
'Yes, but why wands I said.
Count Video shrugged. 'When dealing with amateurs, keep it simple.'
'And there's no way I can persuade you to walk away from this?' I said.
'Not at what I'm being paid. And you needn't look at me that way, John. You're not powerful enough to stop me, and you know it. I have seen your futures, and in most of them you're dead.'
'Most isn't all,' I said. 'And you really should have looked more closely at my past, Tristram. I'm not what everyone thinks I am.'
He heard the threat in my voice and stood up abruptly, pulling his power about him. Plasma lights sparked and scintillated all around him, and the sorcerous circuitry embedded in his flesh glowed with an eerie light. Anyone else would probably have been impressed. But for all his magic, Count Video was really quite limited. All his power came from the terrible technology implanted in his body by the Transient Being known as the Engineer, and Tristram had never really appreciated its potential. He used it to see possible futures, like a video junky flipping endlessly from one channel to another. That was how he got his name. And with all those other Eamonns out there in the Nightside, draining his energy, he had to be running low on power by now. All I had to do was keep him busy, and his clockwork would run down.
Assuming he didn't manage to kill me first, of course.
He laughed suddenly, a happy, breathless sound. He flexed his hands, and the whole office disappeared in a moment, replaced by a craggy mountainside under an erupting volcano. The heat was overwhelming, the air almost too hot to breathe. Lava streams flowed down the cracked mountainside, cherry red and steaming, and blazing cinders flew through the air. But my gift was strong in me, too, and I could See the office behind the volcano. I found my way back to the office, and the volcano timetrack disappeared, snapped off in a moment, like the changing back of a channel. I took a step towards Count Video, and the office was gone again, and we were standing on a bare stone
plain, surrounded by huge iron monoliths. Lightning cracked down repeatedly from an overcast sky, and slow misshapen things emerged from behind the monoliths, dragging themselves across the grey plain towards us.
