Deep Secret

A little before Christmas, when most of the other small and large things connected with Stan’s death were done, I had a serious look at the list he had given me. There were five names on it, two of which were female. The addresses indicated that one of these women was British and the other American. The males were from Britain, Holland and – I had to get out my atlas – Croatia. I sighed and tried to look forward to travelling to meet all of them on various invented excuses. At least three of them spoke my language. I could call that lucky, I supposed. Stan had also supplied the dates of birth for all of them except the Croatian. The British girl and the man from Holland were both young. She was twenty, he was twenty-four. That was a point in their favour. The other two were in their forties. I found that a bit daunting. I had just been twenty-six, and the idea of having someone so much older for a pupil filled me with apprehension.

But I set to work to find them all.

I do not wish to describe the frustrations of that search. With interruptions from my neighbour – of whom more hereafter – and my mother’s natural desire to have at least one of her sons home for Christmas, I was divining, travelling or querying my various sources non-stop for six weeks. I flew to Amsterdam to find the Dutchman, Kornelius Punt, only to discover that he had won some kind of scholarship enabling him to travel. He had taken serious advantage of it too. I went down to Avignon, where he was last heard of, and found that he had gone to Rome, Athens and then Jerusalem. After a maddening four days, dealing with the Greek and Italian telephone systems, I came home to find a fax from a Magid visiting Israel informing me that Punt had gone to Australia. I gave up and decided to wait for him to come back. My American contacts traced the older woman, Tansy-Ann Fisk, soon after that. I was just preparing to fly out to Ohio when all sources sent urgent messages not to bother. Fisk had gone into retreat in some kind of all-female clinic where men were not allowed. Looking up this clinic in Magid records, I was a little perturbed to find it carried the remark ‘Query dubious esoterica’. Still, she could have entered the place in good faith for a simple rest-cure. All I could do was wait until she came out. The British man, Mervin Thurless, was equally hard to trace. Eventually it emerged that he was on a lecture tour in Japan. As for the Croatian, Gabrelisovic, I don’t have to remind you that there had been a war there. My NATO sources rather feared he was among the many who had vanished in it without trace.

I turned to hunting for the British girl with some relief. At least we were both in the same country. Moreover she was younger than me and possessed, according to Stan’s list, the greatest amount of untrained talent of the lot. She was the one I secretly hoped to select. I even allowed myself very agreeable visions of her as a pretty and intelligent young woman whom it would be a pleasure to instruct. I visualised myself laying down the laws of the Magids to her. I saw her hanging on my every word. I looked forward to meeting her.

I couldn’t find her either.

She had a slightly complex family history. The address I had for her proved to be that of an aunt, her father’s sister, in Bristol where Maree Mallory seemed to be a student. I stood on the aunt’s doorstep in Bristol, in the pouring rain, while damp children pushed in and out of the house around me. Before long, the children formed a yelling, fighting heap behind the aunt. She shouted at me above the din that poor Maree had gone back to her mother in London, didn’t I know? Parents divorced. Sad case. I bellowed to be told whereabouts in London. She screamed that she couldn’t remember, but if I didn’t mind waiting she’d ask her sister-in-law. So I stood for a further five minutes in the rain watching the aunt across the fighting heap of children while she telephoned further down the hall. Eventually she came back and screamed an inaccurate address at me. I wrote it down, with further inaccuracies caused by damp paper and blotches of rain, and went to London the next day. It rained that day too.

The address was in South London. That part I got right. But when at last I found it, it proved not to be called Rain Kitten as I had written down, but Grain Kitchen. It was a healthfood shop. The lady standing behind a glassed-in display of more kinds of beans than I knew existed was tall and slender in her white overall. The white cloth round her head revealed youthful fair hair. She was so young-looking and comely that, for a moment, I had hopes that she was Maree Mallory herself. But when I came nearer, she looked older, possibly even over forty. She could have been Maree’s mother. My blotched notes said that in this case she would be a Mrs Buttle; but the sign over the door had read PROPRIETORS L. & M. NUTTALL. I decided not to risk names. I told her politely that I was looking for Maree Mallory.

She stared at me with her head on one side, in a summing-up way I found slightly ominous. “I’m not helping you,” she announced at length.

“Can you tell me why not?” I asked.

“You think too well of yourself,” she said. “Posh accent, shiny shoes, expensive raincoat, not a hair out of place – oh, I can see well enough why you let her down like that. You thought she wasn’t good enough for the likes of you, didn’t you? Or didn’t she iron your shirts to your liking?”

I know I was speechless for a moment. I could feel my face flooding red. I do, certainly, like to be well dressed, but I found myself wanting to protest that I always iron my own shirts. It was too ridiculous. I pulled myself together enough to say, “Mrs – er Buttle – Nuttall? – I assure you I have not let your daughter down in any way.”

“Then why is she so upset and saying you have?” the lady demanded. “Maree’s not one to lie. And why have you come crawling to me? Realised you let a good girl slip between your nicely clipped fingernails, have you?”

“Mrs Buttle—” I said.

“Nuttall,” said she. “I never did like men who wear cravats. What’s wrong with an honest tie? Let me tell you, if I’d seen you when she first took up with you, I’d have warned her. Never trust a cravat, I’d have told her. Nor a mac with lots of little straps and buttons. Clothes always tell.”

“Mrs Nuttall!” I more or less howled. “I have never met your daughter in my life!”

She looked at me disbelievingly. “Then what are you here for, dripping all over my shop floor?”

“I came,” I said, “because I am trying to trace your daughter, Maree Mallory, in connection with – with a legacy which may come her way.” The idea of a legacy was perhaps a poor one, but I was too flustered to remember all the cleverer pretexts I had invented on my way to Bristol the day before.

It seemed to impress Mrs Nuttall. It was her turn to blush. Her fair pink skin went a strong purple and she clapped both hands over her mouth. “Oh. You mean you’re not this Robbie of hers, then?”

“My name is Rupert Venables, madam,” I said, hoping to rub the embarrassment home.

“Oh,” she said again. I assumed she was about to relent and summon her daughter from a flat upstairs or somewhere. Not a bit of it. “Prove it,” she said, as her flush died down. And when I had shown her a business card, she said, “Anyone can have a card printed.” So I produced my driving licence, a credit card and my chequebook. She looked at them long and hard.

“I didn’t bring my passport,” I said, not altogether pleasantly.

To which she said, “Well, Rupert’s not much different from Robbie as a name.”

“There’s all the difference in the world,” I said.

She returned to my business card and looked at it broodingly. “It says here Computer Software Designer. That’s you?” I nodded. “And this Robbie is supposed to be training for a vet,” she mused. “That is different. But why aren’t you a lawyer if it’s about a legacy?”

“Because,” I said, “I am the executor of the will. The deceased, Stanley Churning, named me executor in his will. Mrs Nuttall, much as I applaud your caution, I would be grateful if you would let me talk to Maree.”

“I suppose I have to believe you,” she said grudgingly. “But Maree’s not here.”

My heart sank. “Where is she?”

“Oh, she went to her dad when they found he’d got cancer,” Mrs Nuttall told me. “She would go. It’s not my fault she’s not here.”

“Do you mind giving me her address then?”

She did mind. She was suspicious of the whole thing. I applauded her instinct even while I tried not to grind my teeth. Eventually she said, “I suppose if it’s over a legacy…” and at last gave me an address north of Ealing.

I thanked her and went there. It took hours. And when I got there I found the house locked and the lower windows boarded up. A neighbour informed me that the owner was in hospital – a long way away, she couldn’t remember where – and the daughter had closed the house up and left.

I drove home, seething the whole way. The M25 was at a standstill. I tried to go cross-country and there were roadworks every half-mile. Talk about a run round the gasworks! I slammed my car door viciously when I finally got out in my own yard. I kicked my back door open and then slammed it shut. I tore off my damp mac. I slammed cupboards hunting for a glass. I slammed my way into my quiet, orderly living room, poured a stiff drink and threw myself into a chair. After the first swig, I had a thought. I swore, tore off my cravat and threw it at the fireplace.

“If I’d only known what you were letting me in for, Stan!” I said. “If I’d known! As it is, I give up. Now.”

“Why? What’s the matter, lad?” Stan’s voice said.

I stopped dead, with my whisky tipped towards my mouth. “Stan?”

“Here, Rupert,” his voice said, husky and apologetic, from the space by my big window. “Sorry about the delay. It’s – well, it’s not as easy to come back as I thought. It’s not like you think. There’s conditions to be met. I had to argue my case with the Lords of Karma as well as the Upper Room, and Lords of Karma aren’t easy. Not all of them are human. I don’t blame you for not looking happy. What’s the problem?”

I think if Stan had arrived at any other time, I would have had trouble accepting him. Something about that unembodied presence brought me out in cold shudders, even annoyed as I was. But I was so fed up that I drank the rest of my whisky in one gulp and told him what was the problem. And finished by yelling, “And it’s all your damned fault!”

“Steady! Steady on!” husked his disembodied voice. I had heard him talk to unquiet horses the same way. “It isn’t my fault. Another Magid has to be found. And you’re going about it all wrong anyway.”

“Wrong?” I said. “In what way wrong?”

“You always were prone to it,” he said. “Going about it like a normal person and forgetting you’re a Magid. You’ve got enormous powers, lad. Use them. Go after them the Magid way.”

“Oh,” I said. “All right. But not until I’ve had a square meal, another stiff whisky and a pint of coffee. Does your present state remember the needs of the body? Can you wait that long?”

“They’ve given me a year, these folk Up There,” he said. “If you can be ready before then.”

That was the Stan I knew. I laughed. It made me feel better.

An hour later, I took off my jacket. I was just about to hang it over a chair in my usual precise way when I thought of Mrs Nuttall and threw it after my cravat. Then I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, with Stan’s voice occasionally husking hints and short-cuts. It was a long evening. And a frustrating one. Thurless was thinking of staying in Japan permanently. Kornelius Punt had decided to go on to New Zealand. The Croatian and Maree Mallory were still untraceable—

“Well, they would be,” Stan’s voice observed, “if they want to be. They’re the two with the really strong talent.”

“And Ms Fisk is probably having a nervous breakdown,” I added.

“That follows again,” Stan said. “It’s the penalty of being odd when most people are normal. We might have gone the same way, you and me, if we hadn’t been picked out for Magids.”

“Speak for yourself,” I snapped. My mood had gone bad again after this further frustration. “I regard myself as a stable personality.”

“Do you now?” said Stan. “You forget. I knew you when you were a schoolboy. This Maree. I agree with you she’s the most likely one. Dowse around for her father. He’ll know where she is. They say fathers and daughters are always pretty close.”

I followed his advice, and it was excellent. A week later, I drove to a hospital in Kent and interviewed a tired, sagging, small man in a wheelchair who had already lost most of his hair. I could see that he had, only recently, been a fat little man with a twinkle. I could see the cancer. They hadn’t done much for it. I was desperately sorry for him. I gave that cancer a sharp flip and told it to go away. He doubled up gasping, poor fellow.

“Ouch!” he said. “First Maree, now you. What did you do?”

“Told it to go away,” I said. “You should be doing that too, but you’re hanging on to it rather, aren’t you?”

“Do you know, that’s just what Maree said!” he told me. “I suppose I do – hang on to it – it feels like part of me. I can’t explain. What should I be doing?”

“Telling the thing it’s an unwanted alien,” I suggested. “You don’t want it. You don’t seem to me to have finished what you set out to do with your life.”

“I haven’t,” he said sadly. “First the divorce came along, now this. I’m not like my brother, you know, book after book – I have just the one thing. I would have liked to patent my invention, but, well…”

“Then do it,” I said. “Where is Maree at the moment?”

“In Bristol,” he said.

“But I went to see her aunt and—”

“Oh, she’s gone to her other aunt, up the road. I made her go back, love affair or no love affair, money or no money. She’s training to be a vet, you see, and it’s not a thing you can stop halfway over.”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Would I find her through the university, then?”

“Or the damned aunt,” he said. “Ted’s wife, Janine. Hateful woman. Can’t think why my brother married the bitch, frankly. Made even more of a mistake than I did, but Ted stuck by his – for the boy’s sake, I suppose.” He gave me the address, maddeningly enough in the same street as the house I’d gone to before, and then said anxiously, “It’s not really true I can get shot of this cancer by just thinking, is it?”

“A lot of cancers do respond to that,” I said.

“I’m not so good at thinking positively,” he said wretchedly.

Before I left I did what I could for Derek Mallory. It was no good hitting the cancer when he was embracing it so fervently, so I hit a few centres in his brain instead, trying to turn him into a more cheerful way of thinking. I suspect he felt every hit. His face puckered like a baby’s. I thought he was going to cry, but it turned out that he was trying to smile.

“That helped!” he said. “That really helped! I’m all for the mind stuff, deep down really. I’ve often argued with Maree about it. She can do it, but she won’t. Makes scathing remarks instead. She lacks belief, that’s her problem.”

So I went back to Bristol again. But not until a week had passed. First I had to earn my living. I had a lot of deadlines to meet that week, and I would have met them too, with time to spare, except that as I was sorting the last and most intractable problems, my fax machine began making the little fanfare of sound I had set it to make when it was bringing me Magid business. I went and picked up the sheet. It said:

Iforion 10.2.3413. 1100 hrs. URGENT

Emperor assassinated. Come back to Iforion

Imperial Palace soonest for immediate conference.

This message by order of the Acting Regent,

General Commander Dakros

“Oh good!” I said. “Hurrah!” That was my first reaction. That man Timos IX really had it coming, and not only because of Timotheo, either. I hoped the assassin had hurt him first. Rather a lot. Then I thought again and said, “Oh shit. No heir.” Then I thought again and added, “And what am I supposed to do about that? I’m their Magid, not their nursemaid.”

“Tell them to go whistle,” Stan suggested. He was evidently reading the fax over my shoulder.

I faxed back that I would come tomorrow.

They faxed back:

Iforion 10.2.13. 1104 hrs URGENT

Imperative you come now. Dakros

I faxed again:

Why? I’m busy here with Magid business.

Dakros (whoever he was) faxed in return:

We got the assassin’s accomplices. We’re dealing rebellion/other chaos. We need you to find the next Emperor. Real problems there. Only a Magid can solve it. Please, sir. Dakros

It was the ‘Please, sir’ that got to me. The man was a General and Acting Regent and he was saying that, like a small boy pleading. I faxed that I was on my way and, since it sounded like the kind of problem you have to spend time on, I started to pack an overnight bag. Doubtless I could borrow stuff, but in the Empire they slept in a thing like a hospital gown, tied up with tapes, which I dislike, and I hate their razors. I could feel Stan hanging over me as I packed, wanting to say something.

“What is it?” I said.

“Don’t get too involved in that Empire, will you?” he said.

“No fear. I hate the place. Why?”

“Because there’s a sort of directive out to Magids about it – not as strong as an Intention, more of a suggestion – to leave the place to go to hell in its own sweet way.”

“It can, for me,” I said. “What directive is this? A deep secret you forgot to tell me, or what?”

“No, it’s something I picked up after I – while I was – was over there – negotiating with the Lords of Karma and so on,” he confessed. “I had to go even higher up in the end. It came from a long way up. Them Up There want the Empire left alone.”

“Happy to oblige,” I said, hurling my washing things into my bag. I zipped it up and set off downstairs. “Are you coming to Iforion with me?”

There was an unhappy pause. It lasted while I hurried from the stairs and into the living room. Then Stan’s voice husked, “I don’t think I can, lad. I think I’m fixed on Earth. I may even be stuck to this house of yours.”

“That’s boring for you,” I said.

“There’s no rule that says life – I mean afterlife – has to be interesting,” he said ruefully.

I sensed him hovering wistfully in the middle of my living room as I set out for the Empire. It took several moves, from lattice to lattice, with its attendant feeling of being a pawn on a chessboard hopping from square to square – but downhill, since I was moving Ayewards. I thought as I went that Lewis Carroll got it right in Alice Through the Looking Glass. No one had ever told me, but I have always suspected that Carroll was a Magid. It is a very influential thing to do, to write books like the Alice books; and influence is what being a Magid is all about. Subtle influence.

I emerged in Iforion, as before, in the small cubicle in the palace they call the Magid Gate and found myself in a roomful of dust – pungent, old, bricky dust. My eyes and nose instantly streamed. I got my handkerchief out, started to blow my nose, and then changed my mind and held it over my nose and mouth as a filter. While I was dumping my bag in a corner, two soldiers edged into the tiny room.

“Posted to take you to General Dakros, sir,” the man said hoarsely.

They surprised me, and not only because they appeared so suddenly out of the dust. One was a woman and both were younger than me. Their uniforms were of a very low-ranking kind, dark blue and grey, such as I had seen only in the far distance before, herding aside those of the common people who were allowed within (or probably just beyond) shouting distance of the Emperor. Both looked deeply weary. It was in the way they moved, as well as their pale faces and dark-circled eyes. The man had clearly not shaved for several days. The woman’s hair was clotted with grey-red dust.

“If you’ll keep close to us, sir,” she said, as hoarse as her companion. “Parts of the building are dangerous.”

I saw what she meant as we set off into the fog of brick dust. Almost at once we turned sharply into a domestic-seeming corridor, a low, stone-floored passage I had never seen before. When I craned back to look at the corridor I was used to, I had a glimpse of sky there among bent and splintered girders. I could hear quite heavy pieces of masonry dropping from higher up. I jumped at the first crash, but the soldiers took no notice. It was happening all the time and they had obviously grown used to it.

“Was the place bombed?” I croaked.

“Big bomb in the Throne Room,” the man replied.

“Blew a hole through the middle. Weakened the structure,” the woman added. “Took out all the Chiefs of Staff and the Council too.”

“And all the Imperial Wives,” said the man. “Lot of important clerks killed when the service rooms caved in.”

“Lot of military too,” said the woman.

“Elite guard was surrounding the Throne Room,” the man explained. “Nearly all got crushed.”

Not to speak of the Emperor too, I thought. Bull’s-eye. Nice timing, whoever you were. All the top echelons of the Empire at one stroke, by the sound of it. It made me shiver and want to laugh at the same time. I put on a suitably grave face under my handkerchief and stepped cautiously after the two uniforms. Even in this safer corridor, the flagstones had heaved up here and there. In places, the stone ceiling bulged downwards. We kept close to the walls where that happened.

At length, after a long and roundabout walk, we arrived in the doorway of an arched stone vestibule. It glared with some kind of emergency lighting, making the hanging dust into a sort of bluish pea-souper. My glasses were coated by then. I had to take them off and clean them before I could see anything through that fog. While I wiped at them with my gritty handkerchief, I was aware of my two soldiers pulling themselves into smart attention with an evident effort and snapping slightly flaccid salutes. They said, in hoarse unison, “Magid Venables has arrived, sir.”

Inside the light, a tenor voice said, “Thank goodness!” Another person coughed hackingly, and a third, deeper voice said, “Great. Get him in here.”

I put my streaky glasses back on and advanced. Considering what the soldiers had said, I suppose I should not have been surprised by the people currently in charge of the Empire. But I was. They sat, the three of them, in various attitudes of deep weariness, at a table crowded with stuff. The tenor voice belonged to a wizard – mage, or whatever they call themselves in the Empire – who looked younger than I was. His eyes were so red with dust that I thought at first they were bleeding. One of his arms was actually bleeding, or had been. He was using the pompous short cloak the Empire decreed for its magic users, very sensibly, as a sling. Its gilded Infinity sign glittered off his left elbow. The one coughing was female, a very pretty lady even through streak upon streak of soot and brick dust, most oddly dressed in a pair of striped drawstring trousers and a blouse-thing sewn with sapphires and pearls. The third one was clearly General Dakros.

He wore the blue and grey uniform of the second-grade soldiery, as far as I could see it. It was torn and dusty and, in places, burnt. Like his private soldier, he had not shaved for some time. His chin was blue-black, matching his close-cut wriggly black hair. He was evidently from one of the swarthier races of the Empire, those not selected for the elite troops or high responsibility, and though this had saved his life, it had thrust upon him the shattering demands of running the Empire. His face, as he turned to me, had a hunted, nightmare look, hollowed at the temples and with muscles clumped at the blue jaw. But his eyes, I was glad to see, looked at me and appraised me quite sanely. He was older than the rest of us, but young for a General, from which I deduced that he was good at his job.

He turned away almost at once. There was a second arched doorway across the vestibule and several figures emerged from it as I walked to the table, materialising out of the dust fog with quiet urgency. Two laid faxes on the table. One, in the gold and royal blue of the elite soldiery, but looking drab and strained, came and muttered respectfully in the General’s ear. I was glad to see that respect. It proved that this Dakros really was in charge. It was some urgent talk about a captured World Gate. While it went on, I examined the table, which carried swathes of dust-covered faxes, several portable battle computers, a mind-speech receiver (something I wouldn’t have minded owning myself) and more empty plastic coffee cups than I could count.

The elite guard left and Dakros turned back to me. By this time I was coughing nearly as hard as the pretty woman. I said, “General, you have to get out of here before you ruin everyone’s lungs!”

“I know,” he said. “There’s just been a new fall. We’ll get out as soon as you’ve helped us solve our problem.”

“It’s in the Throne Room vault, you see,” the woman said.

The young wizard put in, in a tone of fretful pride. “I am doing what I can to keep it all up.”

He was, too, I realised when I sent my senses upwards. There were tons of masonry and it was half killing him to support it. I did what I could to help shore it up. Stan might have objected, but I didn’t care. The whole broken palace seemed to be on the slide. The young wizard gave me a grateful grimace as I slid my supports in around his.

“We’d better make it quick, then,” I said. “Which way is the Throne Room?”

The General heaved himself to his feet. He was a fine, tall fellow, even sagging with weariness as he was then. “We’ll show you.” As the other two stood up too, he seemed to recollect the manners of yesterday’s Empire. “Oh. Sorry. This is Junior Mage Jeffros and this is the High Lady Alexandra. The High Lady is the only one of the Emperor’s consorts who survived the blast.”

At this, the High Lady gave me a shamed sort of smile, as if she’d been caught stealing the jam or something. Perhaps one would feel guilty, I thought, when others of much higher rank had died. The Mage Jeffros evidently did. As we all hurried away down another long stone passage, he told me, “I was just left sitting in the rubble. All the senior mages around me were killed. I feel really bad about that. It was so senseless that it should have been just me left.”

The passage led us to a sort of canyon open to very blue sky. Broken building towered on either side – sliding, I could feel it sliding. I hastily did a lot more shoring. Then I looked at the canyon floor and, with difficulty, recognised the Imperial Throne Room, mostly by the shattered patterns on the floor, the remains of age-old mosaic littered with its own little stones and fragments of stained glass. The remains of the dais were at the other end. There was a black bowl scooped in the dais where the throne had been. Otherwise nothing. I whistled. They must have collected the Emperor and his staff in shreds, if at all.

“How on earth did you escape this?” I murmured to the High Lady.

“I was in the toilet,” she murmured back. She said it with defiance, but defiance that was in some way worn out. Poor girl, I thought. She’s been having to admit to it for hours, to soldiers.

“Don’t talk here,” Jeffros whispered.

“And don’t walk in step,” the General added.

He stepped carefully into the middle of the skylit canyon and walked lightly and swiftly towards the dais. The rest of us pattered after him, stepping in blank areas that had once been priceless designs in semi-precious stones, crunching through rubble and glass shards, and setting little cubes of mosaic rolling. Meanwhile, the cliffs of masonry on either side grumbled softly and, in places, suddenly subsided, letting out squirts of dust. I found it terrifying. But halfway along I was distracted by something worse. It was the smell of – well, sewage, garbage, butcher’s shop and gunpowder, I suppose, with a strong reek of ozone. I gagged quietly into my handkerchief. Ozone? I thought. Ozone is frequently an aftermath of magic. I felt about mentally, as far as I could bear to. Yes, the bomb that did all this had been guided and triggered by magic. It must have been one of the Emperor’s senior sorcerers on a suicide mission, I guessed, who had done it. A brave man. Or maybe a desperate one.

We mounted the dais beside the scooped hole, where the smell was nearly unbearable, and I found there was a roof over the back of the platform and a wall behind that which seemed almost intact. Though the roof bent and creaked and sifted dust on us, my instant, anxious probing revealed that this part of the building was immensely strong, reinforced with girders, granite and magic. Good. We could relax a little. If the Emperor’s throne had been set just two feet further back, he could have been relaxing too.

It was dark under there. All I could make out was the black hole of a doorway, with a hugely thick door hanging out of it. Jeffros reached out with his good hand to touch a wand that had been rammed upright into a crack in the dais. It flared like a torch, and so did a line of such wands, into the distance beyond the door. I could see glimpses of some kind of installation in there. The light also showed the door to have buckled in foot-thick waves, as if it had been under the sea.

Wow! I thought.

My three companions were already climbing over the doorsill into the secure chamber beyond. I hurried after them. It felt quiet in there, and safe, and it was almost dust-free. I took my handkerchief off my face and used it to clean my glasses again. After that I could look properly at the ranks of screens, keyboards and computers which the Emperor had used to control the eleven worlds straddling the waist of Infinity.