Timelike directions

 The house at Westrill, which went by different names depending on the direction you approached it from, was built atop a small rise.  Looking west towards it now, as the name suggested, it appeared to be ancient: it was black-beamed and white-plastered and, if it were a cottage, could easily be believed to have been built six or seven hundred years ago.  As it was it seemed to have two stories and a couple of outbuildings and so maybe had been built only two or three years earlier.  Smoke rose from all of its eight chimneys, which clustered together in the middle of the roof, creating a tiny grey-white cloud above the house.

Around it, daffodils were springing up from the grass of the rise, and the tiny river, the rill, that contributed to the house's name was running in full spate by my feet.  There was a distant lowing as cattle grazed nearby, but I couldn't see any of them and it was entirely possible that I was hearing them along the time-axis and they wouldn't be here for a few hours yet.

Justin smiled at me and I bit back my frustration.

"Cows?" he asked.  I nodded.

Justin is one of the Timeless Ones.  They have a proper name that matches with Schehdim and Seraphim but I'd forgotten it again.  It's not like I need to refer to his kind on a regular basis anyway, unlike the others.  He and his kind seem to have an effortless control over time; they can move around in it to suit themselves.  I haven't figured out yet what kind of changes they can effect but Justin seems interested in showing me.  There's something about a point-of-reference that is crucial: you can change things after the point-of-reference because that's the 'future' and you can't change the 'past' but after you cover that he starts getting mathematical and my head starts to swim.

"I can hear them, but not see them," I said.

"Point to them."

"I just said I can't see them!"  I pointed anyway in the direction the lowing seemed to be coming from.  He nodded.

"About a year away," he said.  He vanished for a moment and I realised, too late, that he must have walked off in a timelike direction for a better look.  He reappeared a moment later looking sweaty so I guessed that it must have been a fair distance there and back.  It was nice of him, I supposed, to put the gap in between his disappearance and reappearance so I knew what he'd done; he could just have seemed to have the knowledge already.  He was laughing now.  "You should definitely come back here in a year's time," he said.  "It's hilarious."

"Can't I go there now?" I asked, trying to see where he might have gone.  Looking timewards feels very weird to me, like trying to see the back of your own eyeball.  Sometimes it hurts, too.

"Only if I guided you," said Justin.  "You're getting better, but that's a long way to go by yourself.  At the moment.  But... let's come back in six months, you should be able to walk the other six by yourself then."

"Thanks," I muttered, feeling slightly useless.

"But anyway," he said, sitting down and let the water run over his hand.  "Tell me about the angels who want you dead."

Recyclable

 Cavern Supermarket was well named. It was at the bottom of a tower-block on a narrow street that was practically an alley.  Before the invaders had come and spent eighty years rebuilding and putting in infrastructure it had been an alley that led from another alley down to a slightly larger street that these days qualified as a main road.  The other buildings along the street had been residential homes first, but had morphed, slowly, into shops with flats above them.  Now there was a hairdressers's where six stylists lounged around looking louche and anorexic and no-one ever seemed to be getting their hair done; there was a pastry shop run by immigrants that did a roaring trade as their pastry recipes were all from their home town and not the locality, and there was a model aeroplane shop with dusty boxes and dead flies in the window that opened twice a day for an hour a time.

Cavern Supermarket opened until 10 every evening and at 7 every morning and was generally busy.  The shop stretched back, like an actual cavern, and took up three floors of the tower block plus the basement level.  There was a parking garage nearby and a secret there that only the workers in the supermarket knew about: the parking garage also had a basement level and that was how the supermarket took in new stock.

At least, it had been a secret (of sorts) until the new scheme had been announced and finally delivered on.  Now it was completely obvious to everyone that there was a basement level, and that there was a problem down there that was stopping anyone else from using the garage.

"Recycle!" proclaimed the signs outside the shop; large plastic banners in bright red and white that were pinned to the walls and across the plate-glass windows.  "Bring your recyclables here!"

On the ground floor, where they used to stack the baskets (both the ones you carried and the ones on wheel, like mini-trolleys) were now four large machines that looked like vending machines but took recyclables off you and gave you money back instead.  The baskets had been moved further into the shop and were creating their own problems as people went looking for them, then tried to return to the entrance to shop as they usually did and the streams of people were too much for the narrow aisles and crowded shop floor. Each machine gleamed in the fluorescent lighting and the easy-to-use slots and buttons were already greasy with unwashed fingers using them and worn at the corners.

The problem was that the locals were attempting to recycle anything and everything as they saw the machines as a source of free cash.  Despite the signs indicating the validity of bottles, plastics, boxes and everything else, the locals were determinedly pushing anything and everything into the slots and then hammering on the machines in an attempt to extract money when the machine declared the item invalid.  One man had even put his baby into the machine and was at the customer service complaining that the euro he'd been given was insufficient for recycling a child.

This in turn had lead to overcrowding of the storage area where the machines were emptied to, and then this had forced the owner of the supermarket, Charles Cavern, to call the operators of the scheme to come and collect all this 'rubbish' as he tactlessly put it.  They sent four large trucks... which promptly got stuck in the narrow alley and the underground parking garage.

Enterprising locals were already considering dismantling the trucks and seeing how much they could get from the machines for recycling them.

Elinore

 The building was ugly: it was a concrete box with barred windows.  The bars had been painted white, once, but the paint was flaking and peeling away and the iron underneath had rusted orange and had stained the concrete around it.  The square corners of the building had been eroded by wind and rain and there was graffiti on two walls -- the ones with the sheer drop below them as the building was sat on the edge of a cliff.  The two walls that were easily accessible had been ignored, probably not enough of a challenge.

There was no sign of a door.  There was a hatch in one accessible wall though: you could walk up on a broken-flagged path with green weeds poking through the cracks, or you could drive up to it as the path got very narrow indeed as you reached the hatch.  There was an iron handle, also rusting, which you could pull down and it revealed a small, padded box inside.

This was the baby drop-off.  Here you could deposit your unwanted children, close the handle on the hatch and walk away.

The law was clear: since the repeal of the abortion Act and the demonisation of medical care during pregnancy, the lives of all children were now, somehow sacrosanct.  It might be nearly impossible for a woman to give birth safely, and helping her do so could make you an accessory to a crime, but once she did the baby had to survive no matter what.  The hypocrisy and stupidity of the situation wasn't lost on many people, but seemingly it was on the majority of the voters.  So the drop-offs were enabled: after you'd been forced to risk your life having a child you didn't want you could at least be rid of it and make it the problem of the people who'd made it your problem to begin with.  Petty, vindictive, and entirely in keeping with the way the nation was going.

Inside the building was a nursery, a day-care, and medical facilities for looking after children.  The doctors and nurses that worked here came in through an underground tunnel that connected to a strip-mall a few hundred metres away so that there was no indication of where they were going or what they were doing.  Security guards were stationed along the corridor at three intervals, though the medical staff nervously joked that they might just be there to execute them if the law changed again.  The guards were implacable and impassive and, sometimes, terrifying.

The whole operation was overseen by Elinore, or rather ELINORE, a supposedly AI system that would monitor the medical activities, ensure the health of the children, and distribute once they were old enough to be rehoused, to needy families.  Assuming any could be found.

It was Monday when Elinore announced that there were no more deserving families to deliver children to.

The train station

 The island was so small that you could see to all of its coasts if you stood on Mount Pasquale (laughing named as, while it was definitely higher than the surrounding terrain, it was barely more than a hill; a pimple in the local geography).  The land was mostly scrub grass and stunted bushes over dry, friable soil and soft rock.  To the west side of the island there were the remains of trees, cut down for fuel at first, and then because they got in the way of the rich people's houses having views of the sea, and on the east side of the island the erosion was worse.  While the island had no real hills or mountain, it certainly had the eastern cliffs where the sea was eating away at the land and pulling it down.  Every year another few metres of land crashed down onto the rocky, detritus-strewn beaches below and killed an unwary tourist or a bored local.

The capital city, which was in fact the only city on the island, but the locals (in an attempt to seem more continental) called all their village-sized settlements cities, sat astride a natural inlet that served as the island's port and docks.  Due to the deep waters around the island ships could make anchor here that couldn't get closer to the mainland so there was a busy trade in smaller ships ferrying goods across.  The buildings were tall for the island there, sometimes reaching 17 stories while across the rest of the barren landscape they rarely reached more than 8.  The winds, having no trees to break them up, scoured the whole island regularly and tore rooves away and threatened to topple any building that reached too high.

Central in the capital city was the main tourist attraction and the oddest sight imaginable for an island you could walk across in half a day: the Grand Regatta Train Station.  No train had ever left it, and the tracks that emerged from it failed spectacularly only two hundred metres away where the ground had opened up during a rainstorm and formed a gully that swallowed the tracks, eight cars and two entire families.  The station was a wonder of architectural madness though: grand stone pillars flanked every entrance and exit and though the carvings were already weathered to the point of imperceptibility the pictures of them after they were finished were museum-worthy.  Inside no expense had been spared: marble floors had been imported from the continent, glass-blowers had been brought it to design and make the six-metre high windows that looked out over poverty-ravaged and sewage-strewn streets, and luxury woods from half a world away had been imported to fashion the ticket kiosks and help-desks that were now silent and empty.

A single train sat in the station, never to leave, and had been converted into a luxury eight-bed mini-hotel for the richest of the tourists; spending their days on a train on an island where the only possible destination was into the sea.

Wool Factors

 The new brochures had been stacked neatly at one end of Jeronica’s desk where she could sweep them into the bin just by stretching out her hand.  That she hadn’t so far indicated that she hadn’t been in her office since they had been placed there by her Executive Assistant.  They were glossy, shiny, and featured an alligator holding a rifle on the front and an endorsement from one of the less intelligent politicians in the state where Guncare had launched.  The chosen slogan, which Jeronica found pithy but trite, was recuperate with a rifle!

The door of the office whooshed open with a breath of chill air from the corridor surging inside and shivering the leaves of an aspodistra in the corner.  Plants were generally deplored within the building as Jeremy Diseased-Rat claimed he was allergic to many of them but here and there a couple lurked and lingered subversively.  As a nod to the requirements of promotion this plant was carefully set behind an empty picture frame and a small plaque underneath read ‘Ceci n’est pas une plante’.  Jeronica strode in, her hair brushing the ceiling as she was wearing 25cm stiletto heels, which required special scaffolding hidden inside the shoe to support her feet.

She glanced at the pile of brochures and gestured to them as Margoyle stepped in behind, carefully checking for approved corporate booby traps.  Diseased-Rat’s opinion on them was they were a good way of backing up quarterly reviews and determining candidates for promotion, so exaggerated caution was required in all executive offices.

“Recuperate with a rifle?” said Margoyle picking one up delicately and making sure she had as little skin contact with it as possible.  Poisonous inks were déclassé this year but she had been at Data Analytics Marketetic Normalisation for five years and had learned a trick or two herself.  “Guncare?  This has launched then?  I believe on the quarterly product plan this would be… early.”

There was a moment of tense silence.  While underpromising and overdelivering was praise-worthy there was the obverse of that coin as well: doing things without permission or adequate oversight could be very detrimental to one’s career.

“The pilot project has launched,” clarified Jeronica.  She stalked around the desk and sat down in her chair, slipping her shoes unobtrusively off and allowing her abused feet moments to ache in freedom.  “One hospital in one state; access to the ER is by NRA membership only and the proposals for a more-specific membership card will be presented at the next executive meeting.  Staffing levels are adequate for the care intended, and there are indications that this will have soft-power repercussions in the next elections.”

“Adequate for the care intended,” mused Margoyle.  Her skin was faintly grey and looked dusty but that was a side-effect of the cosmetics she used.  She had a pearl choker at her neck and was wearing a blue cashmere sweater and a very severe skirt.  “May I speak off the record?”

Jeronica tapped her desk and a panel in it revolved to reveal a keyboard and inset flat screen.  She identified herself to it by fingerprint scan and then tapped away for a few seconds.

“Yes,” she said.  “Privacy screen is enabled.  We have thirty-three seconds from… now.”

“This reads very much like the standard of care is being fed to an alligator,” said Margoyle flicking swiftly through the brochure.  “Although, at a guess, if you shoot the alligator successfully you might get seen by a nurse.  I can’t find any indication that there are any actual doctors in this — facility?”

“Pretty much,” said Jeronica.  “It is two steps up from the standard of care around the state though, and there are plans to have actual doctors there once enough poor people have signed up to pay the bills.”

Margoyle shook her head as though refusing to believe Jeronica.  “Remarkable,” she said softly.  “I thought Stephanotte’s Soft Power innovations would win the award for most profitable intervention this year, but I can see she has real competition.”

The keyboard in front of Jeronica beeped and both women fell silent for a moment.

“I would estimate that this has a ninety percent likelihood of continuing,” said Margoyle, sounding as though she’d been thinking things over.  “I think the expected lifetime of our input here should be in the two to five year range, so there should be opportunities here to push forward our agenda on Diplomatic Consanguinuity as well.”

Jeronica affected a grave tone.  “That is Manguy’s remit,” she said.  “I believe he’s currently involved in waterway issues.  He could hardly be expected to take on Guncare when he’s neck-deep in Reservoirity and Reservations.”

“Demetrion should have space,” said Margoyle, nodding sagely, “but it seems to be that the resalination project has hit some unfortunate difficulties that really should have been foreseen.”

“That would mean I would need to take on Diplomatic Consanguinuity,” said Jeronica as casually as someone inquiring about the weather.  “If that were to happen I might have to ask you to look after the Wool Factors for me.”

“Would you now?” said Margoyle with the faintest hint of a smile on her lips.

Lapin mariné

 It sometimes seems that certain streets are destined to house restaurants.  You can walk along one for five years, noting the shabby pub on the corner and the bizarre, tiny, neo-fascist shops that never seem to have any customers yet never go out of business and have names like Only Britain, Nicely British, or Home Rule.  I went in one of them once, mostly to see if any of the items in there weren’t made in China and was astonished to find that almost everything was expensively provenanced from the British Isles.  As I left, empty-handed and with my tail a little between my legs, a woman wearing a t-shirt bearing a print of Andy Warhol threw a cup of Pho at me and called a Mussolini-licking little bitch.  I was so surprised that I stood there, cabbage sliding down my face, while she ran off and I found myself wondering how long she’d had to wait for that opportunity.

But then a restaurant will open on that street and, suddenly, in what seems like a space of weeks there are six of them and four more announced and a sour-dough pizza place already being constructed.  Almost as though the street was always destined for this and it just took a while for it to realise it.  To come out as a restaurant street, as it might be.

My destination last Thursday night was for just such a street, though happily not the one where I was assaulted with a Vietnamese soup, and a restaurant called Le Lapin mariné which my schoolboy French suggested meant the pickled rabbit.  Whether this was a rabbit immersed in vinegar or a very drunk rabbit was more than I could remember, though neither suggested that a care for animal welfare would be written on the menu.  The Blonde declined to join me as Thursday is her yoga evening and she and two of her friends have a bet over how long it will be before the yoga teacher breaks down and cries, so I was on my own.

The restaurant looks warm and inviting from the outside, and inside you rapidly learn that looks can be deceiving.  I was seated in a draught and when I complained I was moved to a table closer to the kitchen where there were two draughts and the tablecloth was stained.  I considered complaining again but after looking around I realised that there were yet worse places to be seated and held my tongue.

The walls are painted one of those off-white shades of which there are too many to count or learn the names of, so let’s call it Magnoli-esque and be done with it.  Written in black marker are a collection of names: Nora, Robert, Genevieve, Sam (at least three times), Gillian and more.  I asked the waiter, as he was handing me the menu, the drinks menu and a list of daily specials about them and he fixed me with a steely glare.

“Are you complaining that you’re not up there?” he asked in the tones of someone who gets those kinds of complaints a lot.  “Because if you are—“

“Not at all,” I said.  “I was wondering what they’re there for.”

“They’re all the people the owner has slept with,” said the waiter.  He raised an eyebrow as though expecting me to start complaining.

“I hope he devotes as much effort to the food,” I said and turned to the menu.

The front page was a full-page, full colour picture of a preserved rabbit in a Kilner jar that made me wonder what I was in for.  Much to my relief the remainder of the menu, though brief, was much more standard fare.  There was a choice of three starters (‘Henry’, ‘Chloë’, and ‘Patricia’), a page with six main courses, also indicated solely by name, and finally a Desserts page with once again three names on it.  The drinks menu, at least, listed wines with their traditional names and descriptions so when the waiter returned I ordered a bottle of a recent Chablis, ignored his pointed glance at the empty place opposite me, and asked about the menu.

“Ah,” he said, his eyes raising to the ceiling as though to invoke some higher power.  “The Chef decided to take inspiration from the owner.”

“That’s nice,” I said, trying to be patient.  “But what does it mean?  And what is ‘Henry’, should I choose to order it?  The pickled rabbit?”

“Rat,” said the waiter.

“What?”

“So, the Chef thought that if the owner could put the names of all the people he’s slept with on the wall, the Chef could name all the dishes after the people he was trying to sleep with when he first had them,” said the waiter quickly, as though expecting to be interrupted.  “So ‘Henry’ is who he was trying to get with when he first had pickled rat, ‘Patricia’ was there when he tried pasta alla amatriciana, and so on.”

He stopped, looking like he was expecting an outburst and I waved a hand indicating he should continue.  That evidently confused him and he remained silent.

“Really?” I said eventually.  “What’s the point of the menu if I have to ask you what each dish is in turn?  How can I choose from a list of names?”

“Well,” said the waiter, “you might have slept with a Chloë too, and then you could pick her name and get the memory—“

“Of what the Chef was eating when he tried to sleep with her? Chloë’s a common enough name that I’d hope we weren’t both trying to sleep with the same one,” I said.  “And I’ve never tried to sleep with a Henry.  Or wanted to order pickled rat.”

“My name’s Henry,” said the waiter.  He smiled for the first time.

In the end I just drank the bottle of wine and tried not to listen to the waiter as he explained the circumstances behind the naming of each dish.  The wine was excellent, but everything else… left just a little to be desired.  Much like the lists of names that adorn the walls and menus of this odd little place.

Nivello II

 “About fifteen minutes,” said Jasper, scrutinising the display in front of him.  The displays faintly reflected Honoré behind him and it looked, in the blurry incomplete image, like she was glaring.  “It looks like light traffic out here this evening.”

“That’s too early,” said Honoré after a pause.  “He won’t be ready by then.”

“We can park up aro—“

“No!  He was clear about that; no stopping, no waiting.  We drive by when he’s there and pick him up and go.  Minimum fuss.”

“Parking is hardly a fuss,” said Jasper, sounding slightly irritated.  “It’s a gravity-car, I can put it down just about anywhere for five minutes.  Ten if there’s no patrols.”

“No!”  Jasper turned his head, though the bulk of his neck didn’t let it go very far, and saw from the corner of his eye that Honoré had turned red, her cheeks flushing and the colour descending down her neck.

“Fine,” he said, resigned to her intransigence.  “Then I can find somewhere to park now and we can wait until we’ll arrive on time.  Whenever that might be.”

“Don’t get snippy with me!”  Honoré looked out of the window and the wolverine chose that moment to rattle its cage again.  Jasper jumped at the unexpected noise, and Honoré’s gaze snapped back to the cage and she smiled.

“Dr. Veille,” she said.

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes.  You have to deliver this thing anyway, and it’ll take the time we need to lose.”

“I can deliver it later.  In fact, I’d rather deliver it later.  Tomorrow, around lunchtime.”

“Dr. Veille doesn’t go out for lunch,” said Honoré watching Jasper like a hawk.  As she guessed, a look of shame and dismay appeared on his chubby face reflected in the windscreen.  She thought he had no idea about the reflection as he made no effort to hide it.

“Ah, but she… she has to be there to take delivery of it… anyway.”

“What is the problem with Dr. Veille?  I don’t get it; she must pay well for these deliveries, that’s a live wolverine you have there.  Well, if it gets fed it’ll be a live one.”

The gravity-car dipped a little and adjusted course to the left, sliding gracefully from one air-lane to another.  Inside the zero-g bubble they barely noticed it; just a tiny inertial kick making them shift in their seats a little.

Jasper hesitated so long that he saw Honoré start opening her mouth again for another harangue and decided quickly that he didn’t want to listen to that.

“She’s Nivello,” he said and then wished he hadn’t.  Even listening to Honoré’s often bizarre opinions of other people would have been better than telling her that.

“What?!”

“She’s yellow,” said Jasper, knowing he was clutching at straws.  “She’s a member of the… Yellow Party.”  He had no idea if Lustrous’s byzantine politics had a Yellow Party, either by truename or nickname, but he was hoping that Honoré wouldn’t know either.

“You said she’s Nivello,” said Honoré.  “And I—“

“No I didn’t!”  Jasper didn’t quite shout, but he still spoke loudly enough to drown her out.

“Car!” Honoré’s tone would have brought an entire class of unruly schoolchildren to immediate silence and immotion.  “Replay conversation—“

“There’s no need for that,” said Jasper sounding defeated.  “Fine, I said she was Nivello.  I was joking, I meant she was Yellow.  Yellow Party, I just thought you’d find it funny.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Honoré.  “You said it and you meant it.  Why are you defending her if she’s Nivello?  She’s one of them.”

The planet and its four moons, possibly plus an outsize comet that might or might not have been a moon once, were together called Nivello and named for the extrasolar navigator that had determined that the planet and two of the moons were habitable.  Nivello was also the title of the planetary ruler, essentially a figurehead position whose views and opinions were largely written for it by the Union of Governments of all the significant countries and realms on the Nivello worlds.  The people who worked directly for the Nivello were also known as Nivello, by association, and formed a small, elite coterie scattered across the planet and moons.  They were more frequently referred to as them and They and every policy or decision that people disagreed with, or just bad luck, was ascribed to them.

“I’m not defending her because she’s not Nivello,” said Jasper doggedly.  “I was just joking, I thought it would be funny.”  The car changed path again, this time to avoid a collision with a gravity-car that was descending through the air-lanes seemingly without looking where it was going.

“She’s always been one for disappearing without notice,” said Honoré, who seemed to be ignoring his denials now.  “That would make sense now.  I can’t believe I didn’t spot it myself though!  She’s ruthless too, I can’t believe I just overlooked that.  I bet she’s using these animals for experiments!  Vivisection!”

“Look, do you want to go and deliver this wolverine to her or not?” said Jasper hunting for any reason to change the subject.

“Of course I do!  Now I know what I’m looking for!”

Jasper’s hands hovered over the controls as he hesitated; he’d been expecting Honoré to refuse to go until she’d had time to think about it and make plans.

“Sure?” he said, trying to think of anything to make her change her mind.

“Yes!  Get on with it!”