Ghostwritten

 The meeting room where the Cabinet traditionally met was quiet except for the Minister’s breathing, which rose and fell like the tides of the sea.  He was sitting in the central chair of the long table on the side that looked across the room to the windows, which in turn looked out onto the remains of St James’s Palace, and turning the pages of a thick book that looked, at first glance, like a novel.  Every now and then he would murmur ‘hmm’ gently and at one point he sighed and carefully tore a page from the book, discarding it into the waste-paper bin.

The silence was broken by a knock at the door; a steady rat-a-tat-tat that gave no indication of how nervous the knocker might be.  The Minister, whose favour was mercurial and ephemeral, was certain that the visitor would be nervous, however.

“Come,” he called, aiming for imperious. His voice was stentorian and resounded off the walls and a picture trembled in its frame.  The door creaked open slowly, and his Aide came in followed by the Private Secretary.  He smiled at the Aide, who name he couldn’t remember, and frowned slightly at the Private Secretary as though he couldn’t remember who this woman was either.

“Minister,” said the Aide, smiling back.  She looked moderately uncomfortable, which the Minister felt was appropriate for her station and replaceability.

“Indeed,” he said, since he really couldn’t remember her name.  He was sure he’d known it at one point.  It wasn’t terribly important, just a nuisance that he couldn’t use it to let her know her place.  “I am thinking of a biography.”

The Aide looked at the book in front of him.  “Kissinger’s?” she asked.  “Although I thought that was a two-volume affair.”

“I can have two volumes?  Or… maybe more?”

“Usually it depends on how much of one’s life one has to write about,” said the Aide.  “Though there are so-called celebrities out there who seem to manage multiple volumes based on the same three sad stories.  Do I understand you to want to write your own biography?”

“I hardly think the Minister has time for that,” said the Private Secretary.  The Minister felt she sounded a touch indignant.  The woman was in her late fifties, a career civil servant, and was dressed like his memories of the Queen.

“I don’t,” he said.  “I’m not even sure I’d know how to go about writing a book.  There are people to do that already though, aren’t there?”

The Aide and the Private Secretary exchanged a look and the Minister wondered what was contained in it.  From where he was sat they both looked confused; but he’d been pretty clear with what he’d said.  Perhaps… perhaps it was time for them both to have a mandatory mental-health checkup.

“Do you mean authors?” asked the Private Secretary after a longer pause than the Minister liked.

“Or ghostwriters?” asked the Aide.  “They do similar, but slightly different jobs.  Like… doctors and nurses, say.”

“The one that writes it for me,” said the Minister.  “Are you always both this tiresome?”  He noticed with secret joy that they both straightened up just a little at this indication that his mood might be slipping.

“Ghostwriters then,” said the Private Secretary.  Was it the Minister’s imagination or did she sound disapproving?  “Do you have anyone specific in mind, Minister?”  Before he could answer she spoke again: “You can, of course, tender to the lower bidder, but if you particularly like someone’s writing style, or feel that a particular author would reflect your world-view in their own, you might prefer to approach them directly.”

“Stephen King, perhaps,” said the Aide, who was leafing through the torn pages from the bin.  The Private Secretary coughed.

“Who?” said the Minister.  “No, actually I… well, maybe.  Maybe.  You mentioned Kissinger, before, right?”

The Aide and the Private Secretary exchanged another look and the Minister decided to add a mandatory hearing test to their mental-health checkup.

“He’s nearly dead, Minister,” said the Aide.  She said it slowly as though she were choosing her words carefully.

“And perhaps his reputation might be considered?” asked the Private Secretary.  She sounded as though that were an order.  The Minister bristled slightly.

“He is a diplomat and a statesman,” he said.  “What else is there to consider?”

“Vietnam?” murmured the Aide, but the Private Secretary was already speaking.

“His age makes him quite likely to die before completing your biography, Minister, and even if he doesn’t he has made some derogatory statements concerning policies of yours.  Would it really be a good idea to let him have free reign to criticise you in your own book?”

“I get to edit it before it gets published!”

“Yes Minister, but will you?  Or will you delegate that to someone else as well?”

The Minister started to snarl a reply, but halted, resulting in just a growl.  He didn’t want to read his biography, he just wanted it written.  And who could he trust to get it right?

“I see,” he said.  “Who was that other guy you mentioned?  King?  Isn’t he a fiction writer?”

The Aide looked modestly surprised and the Private Secretary looked despondent.  The Minister decided that was a victory on both counts.

“Well Minister,” said the Aide, “were you intending to tell the truth throughout the whole book?  Or would it be useful if the… aha, real truth were brought to the fore?  The truth that is always there but is sometimes occluded by messy reality, as it were?  The aims behind the policies so that people’s failure to implement, aha, those policies can be emphasized?  The vision for the future that cannot be seen from the valley of the present?”

“Well,” said the Minister feeling rather pleased that the Aide was so understanding.  “That would be rather good, wouldn’t it?  A book that helps people in the here and now understand why we’re doing what we’re doing for them!  Capital idea!  Get me this King person and write me an autobiography!”

Madonna in Heat

The Madonna in Heat was delivered to my office while I was out as part-payment from Master Licko. When I returned in the late afternoon I first heard cries of mild anguish coming from my office while I was stood in the outer office wondering where my secretary had gone. I allowed myself a half-smile, it is good when clients know their place after all; but shortly thereafter it occurred to me that if I wasn't in my office explaining the psychopathy of the law then no client should be in there either. I set down my briefcase, ruffled my cilia into my most intimidating stance, and opened the door.
The Madonna in Heat, a motile statue of a human woman designed by Master Licko for a collector of religious art, had pinned my secretary against the wall underneath the family portraits and was lunging her head at her repeatedly, her tongue flickering in and out of her mouth like a garshgwa. My secretary gurgled a little, her cilia greenly inflamed, and the Madonna lunged again. I dialled the combination in the legal cupboard to my left, and pulled a semi-automatic taser out. The settings on the side of this model offered me Counsel, Mediate, Remediate and Court Action, and as I didn't yet know why the statue was there I selected Mediate to avoid damaging it too much.
Sixteen taser darts lanced into the Madonna delivering enough voltage to stun a stampeding earth-elephant, and I was delighted to see the Madonna freeze in place, her eyes rolling up in her alabaster face and her hands falling to her side.
"She actually looks like a statue now!" I said to my secretary, but she was clutching at her throat and having a panic attack. I dialled the taser back down to Counsel and switched it to single shot and tased her.

*
"I don't actually want any artwork in my office, Master Licko, nor do I intend to accept it as payment for my services. I am a lawyer-at-arms, not an art-afficionado."
Master Licko whined on the other end of the phone, telling me in a round-about and tedious manner that my services were proving rather more expensive than he was in a position to pay for at the present time. Finally I hung up on him, and then made a note in my desk-pad to have a couple of violent criminals sent to him for community service. Then I went to take a look at my new statue.
The Madonna was fairly quiescent for now, and a little research had revealed that she'd been attempting to be amorous with my secretary; according to the human television channels this was a very common pastime for their females. However, while doing the research a different human television channel had also caught my eye, and I'd seen some potential, the kind that drops the garshgwa amongst the pigeons, so to speak.
The outer door opened and a would-be client intruded. The Madonna swung round on her plinth, hissed like a boiling kettle and produced two pistols from somewhere in the folds of her clothes. They both pointed at the would-be client's forehead ridge, right where any bullets fired would be guaranteed to ricochet around inside the recipient's head. The client swallowed nervously, and his eye-stalks sought out my secretary, who was shivering at her desk.
"I have an appointment!" the client squeaked, and my secretary checked her screen. She nodded, and the Madonna lowered the weapons.
"This way," I said, trying to remember how to smile. Normally I only smile when I'm delivering bad news. "Do you like our new statue? We're calling it the Madonna packing heat...."

Travelogue VI: The wreck of the Aidolate

The wind howls like a woman mourning her lover, tugging at the sand and occasionally flinging small handfuls of it into the air. The grains scatter down again, pattering like dry rain on the orange desert below. The scent of cinnamon is strong here, and the orange sand is stained darker and darker, shading almost to brown, as the wreck is approached. Scrubby plants cling to life, mostly bare brown branches with tiny buds of olive green leaves tucked on the underside to hide them from the wind.

The Aïodolate crashed down almost vertically, and its speed caused it to embed over two-thirds of its length into the ground. There is speculation that it stopped because it met bedrock, and more speculation that it stopped only because the engines gave out. Either way, the wreck resembles an iceberg, both in that most of it is hidden below the surface, and in its general outline.

The engine housing is cratered and craggy, standing proud like a burnished metallic mountain. A few hardy souls each year attempt to climb it, and so far routes have been found to half-way up but no further. The metals used for the engine housing were commonplace save for a small amount of exotic bonding material, and that reduces friction and toughens the alloy. This makes climbing harder, and hammering in pitons almost impossible.

All of the access doors are below the surface somewhere. The engine housing stands proud of the desert, but the eighty metres between the start of the engine and the desert sand are either smooth metal panels or docking junctions for probes. The Aïodolate was known to have launched many probes shortly before starting its cataclysmic descent, and conspiracy theories about them abound. There are telemetry stations set up at regular intervals around the Aïodolate to watch for the return of any of the probes, in the hope that they might have some information that would explain the crash.

No-one knows if anyone survived the crash. No-one has emerged from the Aïodolate in over one-hundred and fifty years, but it did have a number of experimental stasis generators aboard. People could be asleep in there, waiting for rescue.

The political climate has changed at last, and there is talk; quiet, not-quite-insurrectionist talk of attempting to dig down to an access hatch and investigating the wreck at last. Our plans are being drawn up, and people are silently hoping that it's been long enough that if anyone crashed it for a purpose, that purpose is long gone.