On their green hillock, the circle of children were dancing ring-a-roses.
Atishoo-atishoo…
Five kilometres to the north in Park +000000114-000000254, an identical circle of children were dancing. So they were five kilometres eastward in +000000113-000000255, and every five kilometres, north, south, east and west for ever and ever and ever. Every five billion kilometres, the numbers themselves began to repeat.
Little Rose ran to the top of the highest hill in the Park and stopped to look around. Houses, towers, hills stretched away into the distance. But, many repetitions away, a whole section of the City disappeared as she looked, as if a great mouth had bitten it off and swallowed it. After which there was a flurry of ghostly traffic all around her, a muttering and murmuring, like a wind of soul-fragments, hurrying towards the gigantic hole where that section of city had been.
yibbly dibbly deeble dargle, yibbly dibbly deeble dargle… went the whispering traffic of ghosts.
Then, for the first time since Mr Gladheim was struck dumb, she heard a voice speaking real words.
‘Don’t just stand and look at it! Can’t you see the danger?’
It was a thin man, as thin as a stick, sketched out in black and white, his face a diagram of fear.
But under his arm he carried a second head, a second diagrammatic head, which looked at Little Rose and smiled reassuringly.
‘What larks eh?’ said the disembodied Head.
But the thin man clucked his tongue.
‘You’d better come with us!’ he said, ‘We have to get away from that thing over there or it will eat us too.’
To her own surprise, Little Rose just smiled.
The Head chuckled.
‘How can you laugh?’ exclaimed the Thin Man urgently. ‘It’s coming! Look! Run!’
Across the City, Park +000000113-000000249 disappeared into an invisible maw.
yibbly dibbly deeble dargel… went the ghosts as they hurried towards oblivion.
Even the letters in the sky were flowing towards the gap.
Poor Little Rose. Her whole life had consisted of running to new safe places as old ones were violated. But if monsters invaded SenSpace when she no longer had arms or legs or eyes, then where else was there left to run?
She felt terror, and rage… but oddly too, she also felt relief.
‘Come on!’ called the Thin Man.
‘No,’ said Little Rose, ‘No. I think I’ll just stay here.’
‘Bravo,’ said the Head, ‘Me too! I’ll stay as well!’
‘You certainly won’t,’ said the Thin Man, grasping his bodiless companion firmly and taking to his heels.
‘Follow us!’ he shouted back. ‘Do you want to be devoured?’
The Head gave a kind of bodiless shrug as it was whisked away.
‘Good luck!’ it called out to Little Rose as it disappeared from her view.
Little Rose waited, watching the nothingness draw closer like a tide. Another Park, another Downtown, another Residential Area. The ghosts yammered more and more loudly with each new and nearer bite.
Soon the thing was eating through the nearest Downtown, the nearest Artists’ Quarter.
Then it went gulp and there was nothing beyond the lake.
yimmer yammer… went the ghosts voices.
Gulp went the mouth again, and the lake was gone.
Gulp.
Gulp.
Gulp.
49
Little Rose found herself back on that high platform under the stars. She was looking out over the patchwork of the SenSpace worlds. There was the seaside, there was the forest, there were the mountains, there was a little part of the City without EndTM, all laid out for her to choose from, just as if nothing amiss had ever happened.
‘I’m very, very sorry, my dear,’ said a familiar voice. ‘You must have had a dreadful time of it. There was a technical problem with the interface, I’m afraid.’
Little Rose turned smiling to Mr Gladheim. He put a protective arm across her shoulder. ‘You know I’ll never feel quite the same about you again,’ she said, ‘now that I’ve seen you vanish in slices.’
Mr Gladheim didn’t know what to say.
‘Are you under the control of a human operator at the moment?’ asked Little Rose.
After a moment’s hesitation, Mr Gladheim nodded.
Little Rose nodded.
‘What’s your name, operator?’
Again Mr Gladheim hesitated.
‘I don’t know if I’m…’
‘Go on,’ said Little Rose.
‘Er… Janet,’ he said, ‘Janet Müller.’
Little Rose smiled at the notion of a woman speaking with Mr Gladheim’s manly baritone.
‘Ruth Simling,’ she said, ‘That’s who my operator is. Not that there’s much left of Ruth Simling.’
Mr Gladheim nodded, sagely, Janet Müller not knowing what else to say.
‘Everything’s back to normal down there in the City,’ she made Mr Gladheim say after a pause. ‘Your House is back how you made it. I expect you want to go back there don’t you? Maybe we could sort out that orchard you wanted?’
Little Rose turned away from him and looked out over the many worlds below them.
‘Be honest Janet, how would you like it if this was the only place you could be?’
Janet did not know what to say to this either, so she let Sol Gladheim look shrewd and sympathetic and not say anything at all.
Little Rose, however, was looking out over the worlds.
She noticed some bare mountains in the distance she hadn’t seen before. She thought perhaps she’d go there.
50
All the mountain roads were decayed and rutted. The way into the village of Anachromia was little more than a stony track climbing over a narrow pass and down into a stony valley. There were a few fields at the bottom of it but the crops grew so sparsely there that at first sight they didn’t seem to be cultivated at all. Overhead the sky was a leaden grey.
The streets of the village were empty, except for a few chickens and goats wandering the potholed paths between the rough stone houses. There were no children playing, no faces at windows looking out. The entire human population of the village – a hundred or so men, women and children – were gathered in the small village square. Under the supervision of a white-bearded priest holding aloft a silver crucifix, an adulteress was being publicly flogged by two sweating soldiers of the Greek Christian Army. Beside the priest stood the woman’s tiny, bewildered, husband, a meaningless smile on his face.
The woman cried out with each blow. Her husband winced. The priest muttered prayers. Some villagers smiled, some wept, some shouted abuse. In some way or another, everyone was busy with the ritual that was taking place.
But when the car appeared, the whole village turned to stare. A hundred gaunt and malnourished faces watched silently as the vehicle passed among them. Even the soldiers and the cuckolded husband stared, even the victim herself hanging from the whipping post. They all stared with the same blank incredulity as the foreigners went by: Lucy and I sitting stiff and upright as we approached them, passed through them and then proceeded slowly out of the village again, along another rutted track.
I think it must have seemed to those villagers that they were watching ghosts, visitants from a mythical age when there were televisions, Coca-Cola, a weekly bus down to Sparta – and there were tourists, those strange stiff wealthy beings who came down from Northern lands, and stared and took photographs, and seemed so stiff and inhibited, yet wore hardly any clothes.