“Wasn’t there an auction of Star Trek stuff?” Billy said. “A couple of months ago? At Christie’s or somewhere? I think I remember… All the auctioneers wore the uniforms. They sold the starship model for like a million quid or something.”
Dane half closed his eyes. “Rings a bell.”
“It’s going weird in-between,” said Wati from a scuffed stone dog. “I think it wants us to turn left.”
“We’re circling,” said Billy.
They slowed. They had done three turns of a towerblock, orbiting it as if the ill-kept concrete pillar were the sun. They were not alone on the street, but none of the pedestrians paid them any particular mind. “It wants to take us there,” said Billy, “but it’s scared.”
“Alright, hold on,” said Wati from a plastic owl, a bird-scarer on a chemist roof. “I’ll have a look.”
WATI WENT TO A TINY COSY PLASTIC DASHBOARD VIRGIN; TO A cemetery and a headstone angel, seeing through birdlimed eyes. Staccato manifested moments to the base of the tower, eyeing the building from a bouncing horsey in the children’s playground.
He could feel familiars in a few of the flats. All union members. Two on strike; the other, a-what was that?-a parrot, still working but with dispensation for some reason. The unioned three felt their organiser’s presence with surprise. He stretched out, found a child’s doll in the ground floor. It took him scant moments to see through speck-sized Barbie, to go again, finding a terra-cotta lady in the next-door flat, seeing again, nothing of interest, moving to a China shepherdess on next-door’s mantelpiece.
He slid through figures. His moments of statued awareness proliferated in a cloud. He strobed through floors in doll figure carved-soapdish rabbitsextoy antique relic, seeing, fucking, eating, reading, sleeping, laughing, fighting, human minutiae that did not interest him.
Three storeys from the top, he opened his consciousness in a plastic figure of Captain Kirk. Feeling the seam of his moulding, the hinge of his little arms and legs, the crude Starfleet uniform painted on him, he looked into a ruinous apartment.
Less than a minute later he was back in a novelty alarm clock shaped like a chimney sweep, in the window of a shop where Billy and Dane loitered.
“Hey,” he said.
A clock is shouting at me, Billy thought, so loud anyone with a hint of nous would have been able to read it. He stared at Wati. Little while ago I was a guy worked in a museum.
“Third floor from the top. Go.”
“Wait,” said Dane. “He’s there? Is he alright?”
“You’d better see.”
“JESUS,” WHISPERED BILLY. “IT STINKS.”
“I told you,” said Wati. Dane held him out like a weapon. Wati was in a ripoff toy, a “Powered Ranga!” they had brought.
The curtains were drawn. The stench was of rotting food, filthy clothes, uncleaned floors. The rooms were littered with mouldering rubbish. There were tracks-cockroaches, mice, rats. Tribble whimpered. The ridiculous scrabbly thing pulled itself out of the bag and half rolled, half hairily oozed into the living room. From where came sounds.
“More of you?” A voice stretched taut. “Can’t, can’t be, I’ve accounted, or you have, you’re all done, aren’t you, that’s us, isn’t it? Tribble, Tribble? You can’t speak, can you, though?”
“That’s him,” said Dane. “Simon.” He drew his speargun.
“Oh Jesus,” Billy said.
On every surface was Star Trek merchandise: model Enterprises; plastic Spocks claimed emotionlessness more convincingly than the character they represented; Klingon weapons hung on the walls. There were plastic phasers and communicators on the shelves.
Sitting on the sofa, staring at them, Tribble on his lap, was a ghastly looking man. Simon’s face was pale and thin, scab-crusted. His Star Trek uniform was dirty, the insignia one blot among many.
“Thought maybe you were more of them,” he said.
He was surrounded, encauled, coronaed with whispering figures. They fleeted in and out of visibility, made of dark light. They entered his body and exited it, they faded up, they ebbed out. They moved around the room, they crooned, they hooted in faint lunatic imitations of speech.
Every one of the figures looked exactly like Simon. Each was him, staring in hate.
“What happened, Simon?” Dane said. He whipped his hand through the air to disperse the shades, as if they were insect-clouds or bad smells. They ignored him and continued their cruel haunting. “What happened?”
“He’s lost it,” said Wati. “He’s completely gone.” In his agitation he went from toy to toy, speaking snatches from each. “Imagine dealing…” “… with that…” “… every moment…” “… every day…” “… and night as well.” “He’s gone.”
“We need an exorcist,” said Dane.
“I knew it was trouble,” Simon said. He shied from the angry him-spirits. “I started feeling them, in the matter stream. But it’s always one last job.” He made a shooting motion. Several of the figures in joyless mockery finger-shot him back. “Couldn’t not. They made it real, God.”
“I told you,” said Billy. Amid scattered novels set in the favoured universe was a box, still surrounded by paper and string. It contained a big book and yet another phaser. The book was the catalogue of an auction. A very expensive Star Trek sale. The model of the Enterprise-it was from Next Generation, in fact-had a reserve of $200,000. There were uniforms, furniture, accoutrements, most from the Picard years. But there were a few from other spin-offs, and from the first series.
Billy found the phaser listed. The details were geekily precise (it was a phase pistol type-2, with removable type-1 inset, and so on). The reserve price was high-the prop had been used on-screen many times. Billy picked it up, and the translucent Simons looked at it wrathfully and wistfully. Below it was a card, on which was written: As agreed.
The weapon was surprisingly heavy. Billy turned it experimentally, held it out and pulled the trigger.
The sound was bizarrely and instantly recognisable from TV, high spitting crossbred with mosquito whine. There was heat, and he saw light. A particle beam of some impossible kind burst out of the meaningless weapon, seared the air, light-speeding into the wall as Dane shouted and leapt, and the spirit-Simons screamed.
Billy stared at the thing dangling in his hand, at the scorched wall. The stupid toylike lump of plastic and metal that shot like a real phaser.
“ALRIGHT,” SAID DANE, AFTER MORE THAN AN HOUR COAXING sentences from Simon, shielding him from the Simons that surrounded him. “What have we figured?”
“What are they? The hims?” Billy said.
“This is why I wouldn’t travel that way,” Dane said. “This is my point. For a piece of rock or clothes or something dead, who cares? But take something living and do that? Beam it up? What you done is ripped a man apart then stuck his bits back together and made them walk around. He died. Get me? The man’s dead. And the man at the other end only thinks he’s the same man. He ain’t. He only just got born. He’s got the other’s memories, yeah, but he’s newborn. That Enterprise, they keep killing themselves and replacing themselves with clones of dead people. That is some macabre shit. That ship’s full of Xerox copies of people who died.”
“This is why he stopped working?” said Billy.
“Maybe he knew it wasn’t doing him any good. Something was making him nervous. But then he comes back and does it again. And it’s a huge job.” Dane nodded. “The kraken. Tips him over the edge. You know how many years Simon spent beaming in and out of places, “getting coordinates,” beaming out with merchandise? You get me? Do you know how many times he’s died?
“Almost as many times as James T. fucking Kirk is how many. That man sitting there was born out of nothing a few days ago, when he got the kraken out. And this time, when he arrived, all the hes who died before were waiting. And they were pissed off.