Feersum Endjinn

'Why then, not a rat, a mouse!  What say you, good mouse, or hast the cat your tongue?'— the King paused there.

It was always a moment to savour, in this branching of the improved story; the point where the Prince began to get his act together and behave neither tactically too rashly nor strategically too hesitantly.  From now on you just knew he was going to prevail, avenging his father, marrying Ophelia, ruling wisely in a flourishing Denmark and living happily ever after (well, until he died).

The King liked happy endings.  You couldn't blame the ancients for coming up with unhappy conclusions so often — they each spent all their single short life waiting either for oblivion or some absurd after-death torture — but that didn't mean you had to stick faithfully to their paralysed paradigms and ruin a good story with a depressing denouement.

He sighed happily and got up from the bed, exiting via its foot so as not to disturb the voluptuous forms of the sleeping Luge twins, between whom he'd been lying.

Adijine had woken — still sated but desiring some form of diversion — a little earlier, in what might fairly be termed the middle of the night.  His pillow contained a transceptor array similar to the device in his crown which let him access the data corpus; it made a pleasant change to dip into the crypt without that thing on his head.  The revised interactive Hamlet was one of his favourites, though it could still be a little long, depending on the choices one made.

He left the Luge twins breathing softly beneath their silk sheet and padded across the warm pelt of the bedroom carpet to the windows.  He took some satisfaction in pressing the button that opened the curtains, rather than simply thinking them apart.

Moonlight spilled across the mountains that were the roofs of the fastness; the sky above was cloudless.  Stars filled half the vault.  The darkness of the other half was absolute.

The King stared up into that inkiness for a while.  That was all their dooms, he thought, all their rash mistakes and compensating hesitancies, on the far side of the curtain.  He let the drapes sweep back and — stretching, scratching the back of his head — returned to the bed.

The sight of the Encroachment had left him restless.  He lay between the sleeping girls and pulled a cover over himself, unsure what to do next.

He glanced into the crypt, first at the paused Hamlet, then at the general security situation, then at the state of the war — still stalemated — and at the progress the bomb-workings were making in the level-five south-western solar — still struggling, still hoping to initiate in a few days, and still tightly controlled by Security — then swung through a few minds, finding various couples coupling and finding his own sexual interest piqued despite his earlier exertions with the almost insatiable Luge twins.  He turned away from that for a moment, roaming through the accessible minds still awake in Serehfa, and looked for a moment into that of the Security agent they'd placed with the Chief Scientist Gadfium.

So, they were still up at this hour.

Adijine pondered the significance of the strange and unprec­edented circular pattern the stones had formed, and wondered if Gadfium had come up with any explanations.  Were the stones also linked into the crypt somehow?  His Cryptographers seemed puzzled by some of the corpus' deeper-level behaviour as well as by some of the upper-level and even physical manifestations of those disturbances.  Was the crypt preparing to intervene in the present emergency?  If it was, he wanted to know.  Gadfium was no more trustworthy than any other Privileged, but she had had a habit of making good guesses in the past, and if anybody was to furnish him with the first warning of the crypt's interference, it might well be her, one way or the other.

Gadfium.  It had annoyed the King throughout his this life-time — and Gadfium's last two — that she had stuck with the male version of her name; why hadn't she changed it to Gadfia when he had become a she between incarnations?  Wilful type, Gadfium.

He listened in, through the agent.

'I beg your pardon, Chief Scientist?' Rasfline said.

'I said,' Gadfium replied, sighing, 'I'd like the data on brand new births displayed related to each clan's vault, from five years before the new dating system came into use, compensated for clan size.'

'I beg your pardon,' Rasfline said, obviously embarrassed at seemingly being caught either day-dreaming or dozing. 'At once.' The wall screen cleared the previous three-dimensional display and replaced it with the new bar field.

'Hmm,' she said, scrutinising the display and realising she could not recall exactly why she had asked for it.

'I do apologise, ma'am,' Rasfline said, sounding mortified.

'That's quite all right,' Gadfium told him, still staring at the display. 'We're all tired.'

She glanced at Goscil, who was yawning again, though somehow still with a look of concentration on her face as she sat, eyes fixed straight ahead, unseeing, while she reviewed some other aspect of the Sortileger's files.

The same light tragenter that had taken them to the mobile observatory on the Plain of Sliding Stones had returned them to the elevator, which had dropped them through the thickness of the roof itself and the kilometre- deep space of the room below; a cold, gloomy, barren place where flutes of scree and bahada lay slumped against the walls and thin lancet windows cast mean slivers of light across a dark desert of broken stones where even babilia struggled to grow.

An Army scree-car had jolted them to where a hole let into one wall led to a tunnel and a restricted funicular; they exited to the sixth level on a broad shelf where subsistence farms made the most of the cold and still thin atmosphere and the light came from broad, full-length windows looking out onto a sea of air where little puffy clouds sat like white islands.

A hydrovator had lowered them to the floor and a piker swept them between machine-tended fields to the terminus of the clifter they had ascended in.  The tethered balloon had vented gas and sunk quickly through the next three levels, their ears popping as they entered a sunny farm room, a shady suburb solar and then an artificially lit industrial chamber two concentrics in from the Great Hall.  They had passed through dark, deserted, outlaw chambers beneath Engineer-controlled room-space in a fast armoured monorail and ascended to the Sortileger's office — an old yamen housed within a piscina in the sunlit eastern chapel — by airship.

The Sortileger Xemetrio met them at the dock, alone. 'Madam Chief Scientist,' he said, taking her hands. 'Thank you for coming.'

'My pleasure,' she murmured, smiling at him, then looking down and taking her hands from his. 'I think you know my staff; secretary Rasfline, scientific aide Goscil.'

'A delight, as ever,' the Sortileger said, nodding.  He was a tall barrel of a man, and another near- contemporary of the chief scientist.  His face was much lined but still firm and his hair was a convincing jet- black.

Rasfline and Goscil returned the nod, Rasfline with a knowing smirk to Goscil which she did not acknowledge.

'You seem to be much in demand, Chief Scientist,' Xemetrio said as he led them to the doors.

'Indeed.'

'Yes, I understand you've been busy elsewhere today.'

'That's right,' Gadfium said, nodding.

'Ah.' The Sortileger looked like he wanted to inquire further, but as they stepped through the doorway Gadfium asked:

'And what may we do here?  Have you another of your… glitches, Sortileger?'

Xemetrio nodded. 'It is the same problem, Chief Scientist, and my staff seem unable to divine the source.  Security maintain it cannot be deliberate falsification by an operative, Cryptography insist everything is in order at their end, therefore the problem must lie here.  Two days ago we predicted a cryptosauric event which did not happen and today we failed to foresee the assassination of a… well, somebody important.  If this goes on we'll soon be unable to forecast the weather…'

Goscil stood, her back stiff.  She rubbed her eyes and stretched. 'No.  If there's anything here, I can't see