Dummies in the desert

The balloon hung off in the distance.  I couldn’t see any heads peeping over the edge of the basket, but that didn’t make me any less nervous.  I kept my hand near my gun, which was conveniently wedged in between my belt and the waistband of my trousers, just in the right place to shoot me in the foot if I was lucky, going through my knee on the way down if I was unlucky.  I didn’t care.  I’d been out in this scrub wasteland the locals liked to call a desert for thirteen days now and I was beginning to feel like Jesus, except that there were no temptations to be seen.  No-one had appeared and offered me dominion over all the cities of the world, no-one had turned up with a mine-cart full of gold ingots and told me that they were mine for the taking, and no-one had handed me a geological map with the sites of four oil-wells marked on it.  I was feeling a little aggrieved.

I looked up at the balloon again, and my trigger finger twitched.  Maybe there was one temptation after all.

All around the wasteland stretched out, pretty much flat except for the lumpy bits, which adequately described my first wife, our first bed, and the sex as well.  Scrubby little shrubs poked up every few feet in every direction, sucking all the moisture they could find from the ground, which was dusty and cracked.  Now and then there’d be a bigger expanse of space, and then a tree would haul itself arthritically out of the ground, a scattering of leaves like a monk’s tonsure all it afford.  I’d tried climbing one of them and the branches had just broken off under my weight, and I’m not heavy.  Especially not being out here for thirteen days, living off bugs stupid enough to get close enough to catch, beef jerky I’d been given before I left, and some can of beans I’d found stashed in a crevice in some rocks.  I figured someone else was  probably starving now, but better them than me.  I looked up at the balloon again then, wondering if they were in there, following me, waiting for a chance to get their cans back.  I hoped they weren’t.

I tramped on, looking for something, anything that didn’t belong here.  Now and then the landscape humped up a little, nothing as sophisticated as a hill, more like a big termite mound, and I’d have to walk round it.  Just as it was getting towards sunset, and the sun was low in the west making me shade my eyes to see anything that way, I rounded another hump in the desert and found myself at a bus-stop.

There was no road, and no sign of any bus either coming, or ever having arrived.  The sign stood there, rusting slowly away in the ground.  It advertised the number 12 route, and the 55 night-bus, only I knew for a fact that Persecution, the nearest town for fifty miles, only had two buses, the 1 and the 3.  The 2 had been blown up accidentally a year back and the town had voted not to replace it.  The road was way off in the distance somewhere, out of sight at least.  No bus would be coming this way, which made the queue all the more puzzling.

When I got a little closer and got the dazzle of the sun out of my eyes I saw that the queue was made up of headless mannequins.  The shop dummies were a little battered, with chips and chunks knocked out of knees and elbows, and most of them were missing at least one finger.  They were all rough to the touch, scoured by the dry earth and near-sand that the wind carried when it got up and started blowing.  They formed an orderly line, the front one actually holding on to the bus stop pole with one damaged hand, one foot raised up on tiptoe as though getting ready to walk.  The whole scene was a little eerie, and I was all set to walk on by and forget about it until I saw the dark patch in the earth near the back of the queue.  Dark like water.

And there it was, hidden at the back, shorter than the rest, the mannequin that had a head.  Only the head belonged to Jenny, the little girl out of Persecution I was out here looking for.  Her blond curls formed ringlets over her forehead, and her filmy blue eyes stared off into the distance, towards the balloon in some unpleasant coincidence.  A tiny trickle of dried blood ran from the corner of her mouth, and more, much more, ran down the mannequin to pool in the earth at its feet.  The head had been put on there while it was still fresh.

Something whined past me, and a puff of earth geysered up beside me.  I dropped like the bullet had hit me, scuttering round in the dust so that I was lengthwise beside the line, hardest to hit.  Someone in the balloon had started shooting at me.  I humped my back like a caterpillar, ignoring the spasm of pain from my vertebrae, and gently pulled my gun free from my waistband.  I would shoot back.  Jenny was a friend of mine.

Tapestrisations

Tabitha was wearing purple, and when she chose to wear a single colour she made sure that everyone was aware of it.  She had arrived in the office in a vibrant purple raincoat which matched her shoes and her umbrella (despite the fact it wasn’t raining and the weather-forecasters were talking about heatwaves), and discarded it casually on her secretary’s desk.  Underneath was a three-piece suit, each piece in a subtly different shade of purple, making her appear like a pantone colour chart.  Her hair was dyed a bluish-purple, her lipstick was black-purple, and she was wearing amethysts on her fingers and around her neck to match her amethyst contact lenses.  To almost everyone walking past her that day, she was the living embodiment of purple, and frankly, slightly terrifying.

Katalysta tapped on the door to her office, which was slightly ajar in a way that hinted at secret conversations rather than a not-very-busy boss, and stepped inside.  She was wearing amber-tinted sunglasses, which filtered the purple down to brown quite nicely.

“Kat,” said Tabitha, her voice quavering slightly as it always did.  There were rumours that it was the aftereffects of too much alcohol, the side-effects of too many drugs, and the intended effects of a failed assassination attempt.  Tabitha refused to talk about it, either in- or outside of work, and certain videos of team-building events had had sections carefully deleted.  The delenda were hard to spot, but now and then a particularly sharp intern would note a continuity error and have to be taken aside and told to unnotice it quickly.  “Kat, tell me about tapestrisations.”

Kat had recently been promoted to Zeugmoid Vice President for Soft Power, Furnishings, and Fillings and was actually bringing in a report of the democratisation of the production of Mille-Feuille in the Aleutian islands and the effects that was predicted to have on both the economy and the national feeling of pride.  There were, she felt, knock-on effects of taking the puff-pastry production out of the traditionally-schooled and long-apprenticed hands of master bakers and declaring that anyone with access to flour, water and butter could enter the marketplace.  Section 46, where she discussed the likely extension of this to the caramel producers and the probably collapse of the Napoleon export industry, was a key point that she’d been hoping to discuss with Tabitha.  Instead, she was being asked about one of the more obscure elements of soft power, and one she’d not completely come to terms with herself yet.

“There are tapestrisations being prepared for the Northern Irish office,” she said, knowing that this one sentence constituted everything she could confidently say about them at the moment.

“Really?” Tabitha sounded surprised but her expression didn’t change.  Kat suspected industrial-strength botox treatments and had been quietly researching the effects of botox-poisoning on her own time.  “I wouldn’t have expected a strong narrative there.”

“Economically?” asked Kat, edging a little closer to things she was sure about.  She’d written several papers on the economic Euro-zone a couple of years ago before various member states had decided to virtually go bankrupt.

“Ah, you’re thinking of an economic tapestrisation?  That is interesting.  Have you been talking to Manguy at all?”

Kat dropped her report in shock.  Papers fluttered over the carpet, and Tabitha tutted.

“Pick them up, girl, and don’t be so nervous.  You are expected to talk to your colleagues around the office, and indeed I want you to make sure you do so.  We cannot know what other people are planning if we don’t listen to what they’re telling us.  We remember that they are endeavouring not to tell us about what they are up to, and so we listen for the gaps in their words, we find the places where their cover stories don’t quite match up, and then we infer the reality of the situation.  This is, in fact, the precursor to tapestrisation.  You need to grasp this, as we have a delegation interested in talking to us about this next Tuesday.  Are you going to pick them up, or do I need to call the cleaners and have them remove the trash?”

Kat knelt down and started gathering the papers together, her thoughts racing in her head.  “Which delegation?” she asked, while mentally rehearsing her calendar for the next three weeks.  She had a three-hour slot free on Tuesday, so this wouldn’t require too much rescheduling of appointments.

“They represent a group calling themselves American Drivers of Healthcare Distribution, or ADHD in their literature.  They wish to purchase a small island, preferably on the East coast, and convert the entire area into a private hospital complex.  Funding is being handled already, mostly through private donations from interested individuals, and they have drawn up a short-list of islands, all of which appear to eminently purchasable.  Our legal team are drawing up a statement of incorporation and a Charter for them, by which they will evolve their own Constitution in readiness for secession.  They intend to invite their patients to also become their subjects, with the aim being in five to seven years time having a small army to support their intention to secede, the best healthcare in the Western Hemisphere with access to it passport restricted, and enough leverage from their desirability to largely control political nominations for the next two hundred years.  They need their plans tapestrising to provide a dynamic narrative progression that they can codify and follow without fear of their successors going off-message.”

Kat was nodding along with this description, each step fitting neatly into place before her eyes.  She waited till Tabitha had finished speaking though, before she pointed out the obvious flaw.

“Haven’t we been hired by the American Hipsters to deliver the Presidency to them?  Surely there’s a conflict here that cannot be resolved by a mere warp-and-weft shift.”

“Delivery of the presidency will happen three months before the ADHD will complete the purchase of the island,” said Tabitha complacently.  We’ve made no promises for after that election, so we are free to act on behalf of other clients at that point.

Kat nodded again, her concerns allayed.  She stood up, and dropped the messy pile of paper on Tabitha’s desk.

“I’ll get right on it,” she said.  “I assume the usual back-door clauses have already been inserted?”

“Of course,” said Tabitha.  “And approved by the ADHD as well.”

Angst

“But is it art?”  Geraldinium screamed at the top of her lungs.  Her chest heaved as though she’d been running a marathon, and the three sets of pearl-strands she was wearing clattered and shivered as they were thrown around.  “Is it ART?  IS.  IT.  ART?”  Her voice echoed around the workshop, a vast attic space that ran the length of an entire terrace of houses, coming back to her at different times from different angles until it seemed as though there were a chorus of sycophants questioning right alongside her.

The orphan, released from hospital into Geraldinium’s very reluctant care, was tied by her ankles and wrists to a sheetless bed in the corner of the attic.  Her head turned from side to side, almost as though she was trying to escape the myriad mingling of voice and echoes.  Geraldinium ignored her though, as she’d ignored her mewling cries and her pleading for food.  A camera on a tripod was set up at the foot of the bed, and a silver reflector sat like an umbrella left out to dry nearby.

“Is it art?” said Geraldinium, much more quietly now.  She looked along the attic to her sculpture park wondering for a moment if she should go and rage at the unfeeling stone, but the thought of walking that far deterred her.  She loved the space, for all that she had no idea how anyone could think that a room the length of a street was a good idea.  It took four minutes to walk from one end to the other and she’d been able to set up areas dedicated to most contemporary art forms and still have space for the kitten-press, three-hundred china cups of undrunk tea, and a small still cunningly disguised as a tailor’s dummy.  The exact locations weren’t based on availability of light, relative heating or even how often she used them; instead she put them over the houses of her downstairs neighbours who’d done things to annoy her.  Right at the moment the sculpture park was making her floorboards (and hence his ceiling) groan intermittently over number 35, whose owner had asked her three days ago about the orphan.

“Are you a paedophile, then?” he’d said, inwardly telling himself that he was the kind of a man who called a spade a spade.  Geraldinium, who was the kind of woman who called men like him bigoted racists half-smiled and told him that the Daily Mail depended on his readership.

“Is that a yes then?” he’d demanded, his little, piggish eyes screwing up tightly in his sweaty, shiny face.

“No,” said Geraldinium.  “She’s an orphan, remanded into my care by the courts.  I’m her saviour, in a very real way.  So keep away from her, or I’ll have the police round and your picture in your favourite newspaper before you can pronounce my name properly.”

The orphan’s bed was over number 72 because the couple who lived there were both stone-deaf and shouted a lot at each other.  Geraldinium would sometimes sit on the floor above them and listen to their conversations, lines of thought bedevilled by their joint inability to hear what the other was saying.   She wrote down what they said, gathering the most interesting pieces together for an exhibition: she planned to write them out calligraphically on parchment ribbons and hang from the ceiling as guide-points through an ill-lit maze.  At the centre of the maze would be ancient and modern hearing-aids in a glass case polished to the point of invisibility so that the audience could reach for them but not touch.  Finally, the exit from the maze would be short, a brisk walk through a corridor lined with the accoutrements of the grave.

The ant farm, which she’d been preparing for an exhibition on the worthlessness of indentured labour, was on the floor over number 2, but the ants had all escaped last week and were probably ruining either a home or a garden.  Geraldinium just set up an easel and started to paint the scene, seeing a perfect continuation of her theme in the departure of the slave labour for more hospitable climes.

“It is art,” she said, nodding her head.  She turned to look at the orphan, whose heavy-lidded eyes rolled a little in her direction.  “You are art,” she said.  “You suffer, and that is just because art is all about suffering.  You mostly suffer because you are deluded and believe that you are Batman, despite the obvious gender discrepancy and your plummet from the roof of this building three months earlier.  But you also suffer because you are tied to this bed, which you constructed from an IKEA flatpack during your first morning back here so that I can legitimately say that it is a bed of your own making, without food or succour so that I may photograph you over a three day period and showcase the folding-in of the human soul on itself.”

The orphan whimpered a little, but in her tiny, mad mind where her thoughts fizzed like sodium cast carelessly into water she barely heard a word Geraldinium said.  She was, in her dreams, prowling darkened rooftops dressed in too much leather and not enough warm clothes, hunting for imbalances to redress.

“This, too, is art,” she said, her arm describing cavernous attic around them.  Everything I do is art, everything has worth, and nothing exists until I show it.  What kind of life is led, unlived until the spotlight falls upon it, then only to be scrutinised by people who envy and fear it?  What life is this the artist conveys, suffering in silence, brought to animation in brief bursts like angels caught in strobe lights?  Is this art?”

The orphan whimpered again, her wide-pupilled eyes blind to everything but the images of violent, blood-stained retribution playing on the inner cinema of her mind.  Geraldinium stared at her for a moment, then ran to the camera and took a staccato burst of photographs.  Behind her, the floor creaked beneath the sculptures, and fine plaster dust rained down from the ceiling beneath onto a middle-aged man sitting up in bed, the Daily Mail crossword in his lap.

A natural death

Janet O’Steen, Ireland’s foremost logodisciplinarian, tapped her pen meaningfully against the newspaper.  A little way away from her, in an uncomfortable chair designed especially for public libraries to keep the homeless and illiterate from taking up valuable space for any length of time, an ill-shaven man with wild-eyes and a breathing problem looked nervously around.  His eyes darted frantically, hunting for a librarian who might be sufficiently enraged by his appearance to come over and demand that he leave, but before he could find one, Janet spoke.

“This crossword is wrong,” she said, her pen tapping steadily against the paper.  “The answer to A work of outstanding nautical fiction featuring a man and a surprisingly big fish is clearly Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, yet the grid provides space for only eight letters and claims – hah! – that the answer has only two words.”

“I can’t read, mum,” said the ill-shaven man, his eyes now firmly downcast and his hands, clad in filthy fingerless woollen gloves clutching one another as though trying to pull themselves to pieces.

“When you have to read rubbish like this,” she shook the paper at him and he flinched back in his seat, “you should be grateful you can’t read!  I can’t believe that they charge money to read this thing, it’s quite frankly communist composting paper and nothing more!  You should hear what they had to say about my book Bride of Prejudice when they reviewed it.”

The ill-shaven man looked truly terrified after a couple of seconds, when he realised that Janet had said ‘hear’ and not ‘read’ and that she might actually intend to the read the review to him, undoubtedly with added commentary from the author.  And while there were surely people who would be thrilled to get such a reading, he had been on the end of several of Janet’s harrangues over the past few weeks and was desperate not to have to sit through another.

“I’ll find it,” said Janet, her gripe with the crossword now forgotten.  “Just you sit still there, I know it’s in the coffee section somewhere, because the illiterates who put this thing together wouldn’t know a book if it bit them, so it’s far too much to hope that they have a book review section.  Hah!  Heaven forfend!  What is the matter with you?”  She stopped rustling the pages of the paper and stared at her reluctant audience.  The ill-shaven man had decided to throw away any dignity he had had left and was faking a heart-attack.  His hands clawed at his throat, and his dirty, torn fingernails were already raising blood, while he enthusiastically choked and gagged.  His eyes bulged from his face and his feet drummed on the floor.  When he finally slid off his chair and rolled from side to side half-under the reading desk, a librarian came over, summoned from her cubicle of quiet book-repair, and looked first at Janet and then at him.

“What have you done?” she said to Janet, her tone of stern reproof making it clear that she felt Janet was guilty.

“I offered to read to him from this paper,” said Janet, waving the crumpled edition at her.  “I’m not at all surprised that he’s taken ill.  I would too, were I not accustomed to the drivel they print on these pages.”

“You’re not to read to the patrons,” said the librarian in the aggrieved tones of someone who’s had to say the same thing a lot.  “And you’re not to fill the crossword in in pen, it’s not your paper.  It’s the library’s.  Photocopy it like anybody else and fill in your photocopy.”

“No-one else would want to read it,” said Janet, a little hotly.  “And the crossword is appallingly wrong.  The setter has no clue what a decent book is, let alone how to write proper clues.  A five-year old could solve these, if the setter had only known the answers he was asking for.”

The librarian went a little cross-eyed as she tried to work out what exactly Janet was trying to say and then gave up.  She bent down and poked the still-thrashing ill-shaven man.

“Get out,” she said.  “Go on, off with you, or I’ll let this nice lady read to you again.”  He leapt up with commendable agility for someone in the throes of dying, and departed the library with a grateful smile on his lips.

“Be quiet,” said the librarian to Janet.  “Or I’ll throw you out too.”

“You can’t throw me out!”  Janet was scandalised.  “I wrote some of the books you have in this library!”

“Doesn’t matter,” said the librarian.  “There are some books that libraries are improved by not having.  That paper you’re so cheerfully turning into a crumpled mess that no-one else will be able to read put it rather well in a recent review: ‘any library would be enhanced by the absence of books by this author’.”

“They were reviewing my book!”  Janet turned pinkish purple with shocked outrage and finally let go of the paper, which slid off the reading desk and onto the floor.

“Well then,” said the librarian unfeelingly.  “Be quiet or I’ll throw your books out instead.”  Janet’s mouth opened and closed like a goldfish with Alzheimer’s.  “Bear in mind,” said the librarian turning away now that she’d restored order to the library, “that at the end of that review the reviewer opined that it would be a tragedy if society allowed the author to die a natural death.”

Janet squeaked, the most she could manage with her throat so constricted with rage.

“That reviewer died, you know,” said another voice, this from a middle-aged woman standing at the nearest shelves, seemingly waiting while he son picked out novels by William Burroughes.  The librarian arched an eyebrow, and the woman continued, “It was in the papers – not that one, mind you, far too gruesome for that – she was beaten to death with the dug-up remains of her own grandmother.”  The librarian halted in her tracks, staring disbelievingly.  “Oh yes,” said the woman.  “Macabre and mysterious!   The police are saying as they think it was a woman who did it, but there’s no motive.  Except, I suppose, if you’d got a bad review.”

“That’s preposterous!” said Janet quickly.  “No author would bludgeon an interviewer to death, and especially not with her grandmother’s shin bone.  I mean, how would they find out where the evil old biddy was buried in the first place?”

“Interviewer?” said the librarian looking puzzled.

“Shin bone?” asked the middle-aged woman, looking gleeful.  “Ooh, I hadn’t heard that detail!”

“I meant reviewer,” said Janet, recovering herself.  “And the shin bone… well, that’s a Mark Twain quote isn’t it?  About wanting to beat someone over their head with their own shin-bone.  Though I don’t know how he’d do it, they’re far too fragile.  Upper leg’s the bone you want, the hip joint at the top has a nice heft to it.”

She paused, aware that everybody nearby was now looking at her.

“Research,” she said, a little hopefully.  “For… for my new book.  I’ve just started writing it.”

“What’s it about?” asked the librarian.  Her face had relaxed a little.  “I read Clementsy a while back about the murderous meth addicts.”

“That was a classic love story!” Janet snapped.  “Um, the new one, is, um, well, I don’t like to talk–“

“Oh come on,” said the middle-aged woman’s son, smiling.  “You’ve just told us all about researching beating people to death with their own limbs, I think you have to tell us what the new book is about now.  Zombies?”

“Why is it always zombies with you?” asked his mother.  “If it’s not weird novels that don’t make any sense when you read them, it’s zombies.”

“Er, yes,” said Janet, thinking hard.  “It’s going to be… a revisit… of Sense and Sensitivity… but with zombies!”

“Which one was Sense and Sensitivity?” asked the middle-aged woman.  She screwed her face up as she tried to remember.

“The one about the murderous sisters who kept their mother’s remains in the bath,” said the librarian who’d read them all.

“That was a study of traditional family values!”  Janet looked more outraged than before.

“And matricide,” said the librarian.  “I’ve read all your books, you’ve never met a mother you wouldn’t murder, have you?”

“Oh my!” said the middle-aged woman stepping smartly behind her son, who looked unimpressed.

“The alleged issues regarding the strong female characters in my books have been discussed,” said Janet, hoping they’d infer “from serious works of literary criticism” from her unfinished sentence.

“On the Jeremy Kyle show,” said the librarian.  “And in several of the trashier celebrity gossip magazines.

“But they’ve been discussed.”

“In disgust.”

The librarian and Janet glared at each other like cats on opposite sides of a mesh fence.  Slowly, without breaking their staring match, Janet muttered, “I should be getting on, zombies won’t rise from the grave and write about themselves.”

“I’ve got books to shelve,” said the librarian equally slowly.  Without actually agreeing it, they averted their gazes at the same time, and then pretended that the other wasn’t there.

Healthcare solutions

“Promotion?” asked Manguy.  He was walking past Katalysta’s office and had stopped in the doorway to watch as she slid the brass nameplate out of the triangular block on her desk.  Another one, ready to be slid into place, was lying face down on the desk.

“Lateral,” she replied with a shrug.  She had honey-coloured hair and skin that was naturally only slightly darker, making her look like she had a year-round tan.  Her face was pixie-shaped and there were rumours around the office that she’d had her ears done to be pointy as well; Manguy hadn’t had the opportunity to smooth her hair back and find out.  “I’m the Zeugmoid Vice President of Soft Power, Furnishing and Fillings.”

“Reporting to Dipali?”

“No, Dipali’s gone.  There was a small incident… well, you either know or you don’t I suppose.”  Manguy nodded; he didn’t know what Dipali had done wrong, but it was a fact of life at Data Analytics Marketetic Normalisations that any slip could be fatal, and sometimes not only for your career.  In fact, when he thought about it, the word career was exactly the right one to describe the job trajectories here.  And Katalysta was just doing what they all did: hinting at things he perhaps should know about, baiting him to see if he’d admit to not knowing – a cardinal sin – in order to learn what she knew.  He wasn’t about to fall for a ruse as unsubtle as that.

“He was in a precarious position,” said Manguy, nodding.  His black hair fell over his eyes as it did a lot at the moment.  It annoyed him, but the Justin Bieber haircut annoyed many of his colleagues more so he wasn’t going to change it just yet.  “I was expecting him to go a little later though; I’ll have to check who the pool’s paying out.”  It was a little bit of a low blow, as he knew that Katalysta entertained little paranoid fantasies about the office pool on who would be next to go.  Sure enough, she winced.  “Who’s replacing him then?”

“The role’s being split,” said Katalysta.  She slipped the new brass plate in, and adjusted the triangular block to make sure that it was clearly visible to anyone entering her office.  “Tabitha’s taking Global Healthcare solutions, Tapestrisations and the Clotho-problem, while Trepanna’s got Soft Power and Broken Cuddly Things.”

“Makes sense,” said Manguy.  He nodded again after a moment’s silence.  “Trepanna’s got the knack of Broken Cuddly Things.  You must be reporting to Tabitha then.”

Katalysta looked startled, and Manguy controlled a smile.  He’d worked at Data Analytics Marketetic Normalisations longer than Katalysta realised and he knew the basics of how their matrix management filtered through operator algebras to produce an organisation chart that required a research mathematician to draw and an epistemological philosopher to understand.  Pretty much the only thing anyone was sure of most of the time was that Jeremy Diseased-Rat was head of the whole organisation.  That she would be reporting to someone with a distinctly different title was obvious to him, and it helped that he knew a lot about the different divisions of Soft Power, and just how soft power could be.

“Yes,” she said, clearly having trouble deciding what to tell him.

“So, Tabitha’s first focus will be the Tapestrisations,” he continued, enjoying the feeling of control he had.  “So you must be looking at the regional health care solutions.  I suspect you’re analysing how we can make a name for certain centres of excellence that have failed to market themselves adequately, and so acquire a position in the global healthcare markets that are expected to open up after 2025.  I’ve only read a couple of reports, mostly peripheral you understand, but I’d suspect that Texas is likely to be big.  And they’re desperate to get known.”

Katalysta was nodding along, apparently unconsciously, because she smiled with just her teeth and said, “No, it’s not like that at all.  Tabitha’s first focus is the Clotho-problem because of its wider-ranging implications for market inputs in the old Soviet Union and its satellites and my studies are underpinning the solutions she intends to present to the Board.”

Manguy raised an eyebrow politely, and said, “That’s a shame.  There’s a lot of interest in healthcare and I was looking to establish a small trans-departmental study group to determine where strategic acquisition and purchase might drive openings.  I need someone dynamic and flexible to head up the steering committee to make recommendations based on first-hand reportage.  I guess I’ll have to ask Tabitha who she’d recommend then.”

Katalysta flushed a little, and Manguy waved jauntily and walked away from her office.  While he had never had any intention of inviting Katalysta to a co-operation, he did already have inquiries in from two corporate clients regarding the possibility of purchasing large healthcare facilities to reduce insurance costs, and there were a number of significant grey-market opportunities for the essentially-private facilities that these would become.  Perhaps, he mused, Katalysta could play a role as a first-hand front-line reporter.  Obviously she’d need a reason for being treated at one of these facilities, but that wouldn’t be too hard to arrange for….

Lake Hali

I had, of course, read about Lake Hali when I was younger.  I had spent a little time in the library of the thirteenth arondissement, which curiously is in London and nowhere near Paris at all, and had acquired a card to their reading rooms and the delicate, difficult-to-read books therein housed.  They didn't have most of esoteric tomes that the books they did have referred to, but as I grew older I began to appreciate the wisdom of that.  And the sheer difficulty in obtaining a copy of them.  There was a tale, little more than a rumour that would occasionally come over over a glass of heady wine late in the evening when sensible people would be going home to their families, or wishing they had families to go home to, that there was a quiet initiative to get some of these books typeset so that they could be printed on demand.  Not even remotely an attempt at mass-production, but simply a way to get enough copies available for serious academic study.  The problem, if you could call it that, was that finding skilled people mad enough to do this was hard; so the solution, as it were, was to get mad people to do the bulk of the work and then hire skilled people to finish the job, thus exposing them as little as possible.  Just a rumour, but I still have a living will lodged with a lawyer to make sure I'm never committed to a madhouse in a certain part of North London.
Having read of it, I knew about its most famous resident, but equally it seemed highly unlikely that this Lake Hali, being in the desert, could be the same one that I'd read of, being rather much elsewhere.  I still felt unnerved though by the coincidence of the name though, and it occurred to me that the author of the graffito might have known exactly why they were giving this feature of the desert this name.
I started along the flagged path, trying to step only on the flagstones to keep the music as clear as possible, reasoning that changes to it might alert me to things ahead.  I knew that I couldn't turn back from this now without knowing what the desert had to offer here, and I had some small confidence that I'd survived everything the desert had shown me so far, which might yet save me again.  But I couldn't quite keep my breathing under control, or my heart from beating strongly, and I was gasping just a little by the time the flags broadened out into a terrace and the desert fell away below it into a valley of some kind.
The music clearly arose from the valley and there were higher notes in there now, that might have been flutes and violins.  There was a slightly frantic note every now and then, almost as though a terrified first violinist was sawing at her instrument, trying to reach the end of the piece so that she could flee the orchestra, which I'd actually once seen happen.  The terrace was smooth and flat, with wind-blown sand scattered across it and crunching under foot.  From the terrace three or four winding paths led down, cutting through rock which quickly left the covering of sand behind.  Scrub bushes poked out here and there, clinging tenaciously to the rock, and one or two had obvious bare patches where hands had grabbed hold, either on the way down or the way up.  The valley was steep, at least at this end, and quickly fell away, both in terms of land and detail, but at the bottom, glittering in the sunlight, was a large lake of silver water.
"Lake Hali," said a musical voice off to my left, only just audible over the clicking and beating of the drums.  I turned, tensing but trying to control my face to an impassive mask, as though I'd been expecting to be addressed.  A young man, clearly not out of his teenage years, was stood on the terrace looking back at me.  He was wearing shorts, a faded t-shirt with some band's logo on the front, and a white tennis sweat-band around his left wrist.  His face was smooth, and looked untroubled by a razor, but his eyes were the things I sought out immediately.  Sure enough, they gave him away as being from the desert, for all they were green, nearly turquoise and surrounded by the dark shadows of the chronic insomniac, because they glittered in a way that had nothing to do with the bright sunlight or the reflective sand.
"So the sign said," I said, watching him carefully, ready to back away if he seemed to be approaching.  "Not the Lake Hali, I suppose?"
"Depends which one you believe came first," he said.  "You don't trust me, do you?"
"Do you trust me?" I replied, an automatic response to buy me time to think.
"No," he said immediately, and smiled in a mostly friendly way.  "I've no idea who you are or what you're doing here, but things in the desert that trust you when they meet you are usually powerful enough not to care what you might try and do."
"Don't you live here then?"  I was surprised now, I'd seen no signs that any of the things in the desert moved around much, except for the travelling houses of plants that orbited the abyss.  I'd concluded early on that unless you were crossing the desert there was no survival value to moving away from known sources of food and water.
"No-one lives here, this is Lake Hali," said the boy.  "This is a transition point, a place for things to go to other places.  If you stayed here... well, you'd be noticed."
I shivered, and he grinned.  "Yeah, that kind of noticed," he said.  "You've been here a while then?"
"In the desert?"  I didn't wait for his nod.  "Longer than I'd realised I think.  The graffiti on the stones back there...."
"Seemed a little too familiar?  Hah, yes, I've heard that before."
"You've met other travellers?  People like me?"
"Not like you, no," he said, and I wondered how he was appraising me.  His eyes still glittered, and he hadn't moved towards me, but there was no real warmth in his his tone.  We were talking more because we were both there, and I'd not spoken to anyone in several days.  "But I've met others.  Most of them going to the Lake."
"Did they know what to expect there?"
"I can only hope they didn't," he said.  "I'd worry about that kind of madness otherwise, and I prefer to sleep at nights."
"Did you hear that?" I said, my hand cutting through the air to silence him.  He tilted his head to one side as though listening hard, and shook his head at me.  "The music's stopped," I said.
For a moment he said nothing, and then he seemed to stretch upwards, growing impossibly long and thin, racing to the sky like a stop-motion film of plant-growth.  He stayed like that for a couple of seconds, then snapped back so fast there was a tiny pop of displaced air.
"You can go," he said, his eyes now silver pools of light, reminding me of a night I spent with a stranger in my tent.  "You should go, in fact.  And I think – I hope – you'll leave the desert, too."
"In my own time," I said, and turned away.  I only managed six walking pace steps before terror seized me and I ran the rest of the way back along the flagged path, leaving Lake Hali and whatever was coming from it behind.

This way to Lake Hali

The desert was noisy when I awoke.
This was a surprise.  Despite the tough conditions, and the constant fear that some desert animal would decide that the moist, warm confines of my sleeping bag was something they'd like to share, most mornings I woke to near-silence from the desert.  I slept well there, and I appreciated it.  This morning though, there was noise, and (in terms of the desert), lots of it.
I dressed first, in the tight confines of the bubble tent, and then opened the zip-door cautiously.  More than once I'd found that the wind could mound sand up against the door that needed to be pushed away before I let it in and effectively drowned myself in the dry.  There was nothing up against the door this morning, and so I opened it fully and stepped out.
There was nothing to see around me except that small outjutting of rock amidst the sand that I'd picked to anchor the tent against.  Golden brown sand rolled away as far as the eye could see, mounding and floundering like frozen ocean waves, and a relentless cerulean sky met it at the horizon and then stretched back overhead.  On the strange days when the sky and the sand both seemed cast of the same strange leaden colour and I couldn't tell where the horizon was it was easy to believe that I was trapped in some gigantic snow globe, waiting to be picked up and shaken.  But from all around a steady clicking came, like sticks tapping against rock, rhythmic and compelling.  As I stood listening, I realised that there was a quieter counterpoint as well, a dull thudding almost like a drum-beat, that carefully picked its way between the clicks.  For a moment I was intrigued, and then I was wondering what the meaning of it was.
Because if there was one thing I'd learned from my time in the desert, it was that everything has a meaning, but it's vital to know which meanings are the important ones.
I packed the tent away quickly, drinking water for breakfast and deciding to worry about food later on. Until I learned what the noise was I wanted to be able to respond quickly to it, and eating in a place where further food was scarce was not the best way to be alert and reactive.
There was nothing to help me know where it was coming from, no matter how I tilted my head and moved around the hard surface of the rocks it seemed to always be coming from all sides of me.  Finally I tried tilting my head upwards to see if it was coming from there, and even that didn't help.  So I struck out, pretty much at random.  After the night, without a compass, there was no way to know if I was going the same way as I had been the day before.  I'm sure there must have been whole days where I spent my time traipsing backwards and forwards along my steps, not knowing that I kept reversing my path.  The sand was still cool where my feet sank into it, though the surface was becoming warmer and the air was still fairly pleasant.  I gripped a bottle of water in one hand, and strode on.
It was definitely less than an hour later when I stepped onto a flagstone that I'd not seen until my foot struck it.  As soon as I was stood on it fully the sounds resolved themselves, unsurprisingly coming from along the flagstoned path that I could now see poking out here and there from underneath the sand.  The sounds seemed to have more coherence now as well, the clicks could be distinguished into three separate sounds, and there was a musical quality to them, as though insects had decided to have a party using themselves as the instruments.  For a moment I was overcome with the urge to laugh at the thought of cockroaches partying.
I stepped off the flagstone and the sounds became a repetitive clicking again, with a dull counterpoint that was hard to follow.  I looked down, then knelt down and cleaned the sand from the flagstone.  Everytime I touched it the music became clearer, and the whole sensation was like having a blanket pulled off and dropped over my head at a bizarre concert.  The cleaned flagstone was square-cut and looked dressed, but someone, or someones, had carved all kinds of graffiti into it.  Most of it made no sense, some of it made sense but only because of the time I'd already spent in the desert.  That graffiti worried me most, as it made me realised how long I'd spent out here now.
And the last piece of graffiti I found was the most interesting, and the most cryptic.  It was a deep-carved arrow with ragged edges, as though whoever was carving into the rock was enormously strong and had done it in three single strokes with some massive knife.  Above the arrow, in similarly grooved but far smaller letters was the legend, "This way to Lake Hali."