At the Edge of the Game (22 page)

The IRA
barricade is composed mainly of a couple of vans lying on their sides, in
addition to which are arranged some planks, pieces of furniture, bricks,
concrete blocks, bags of cement. A tricolour flies at the summit. A guard
stands atop one of the vans, holding a machine gun. He spots us, fires off a round
that hits the other side of the wall.

‘Crawl back
under your rock, boys!’

It’s a cultured
voice, vaguely Anglo-Irish. The most pernicious of all nationalistic lunatics,
that breed.

‘That’s Glandore,’
Heathshade says. ‘He is a cocky fucker.’

Glandore. So
that’s him then. Feared paramilitary leader, mastermind of the town’s takeover.

Heathshade
stands and empties barrels at him. The IRA man dives for cover. All of a sudden
there’s much shouting, cursing, and running around in the enemy camp.

‘How do you like
that, you bastard?’

Heathshade’s
pleased with himself.

‘Let’s go,’ he
says to us.

We beat a hasty
retreat across the river, keeping low behind the wall for safety. Submachine
gun fire splatters the other side, sending sprays of chip and dust rising
skywards.

Back at the
church, Heathshade summarises the tactical situation on a tourist map of the
town. There are high barricades at the West Gate, at the top of Bridge Street,
in the Church Street archway, and at the end of the Main Street. Approaches
remain relatively open from the quay to the Main Street through back alleys,
but these are likely to be covered by snipers stationed in upper Main Street
windows.

‘We need a plan
of attack, lads,’ he says.

The light of
authority is in Heathshade’s eyes.

‘We have to take
the initiative. We draw them into an ambush. How do we do that?’

He looks around,
but no one deigns to answer.

‘Here’s how. We
provoke them by attacking them.’

At least he
sounds like he knows what he’s doing. I’ll give him that.

‘But first,’ he
says, ‘we need to know our own strengths and weaknesses. Weapons. Manpower. Local
knowledge. You’re all locals, aren’t you? What do you know about their disposition?
What do you know about them? Who are they? Are they locals too? I want you thinking.
Tell me what you know.’

Temporarily
forgotten are cold, hunger, fatigue.

‘Good stuff,
Conor. Excellent, Dan.’

Each man wants
to be the first to deliver a nugget of intelligence to the Great Leader.

Claps on the
back. Manly camaraderie.

Heathshade’s got
it all going on now.

The icing on the
cake: a woman - her name is Daisy Carruth, I believe. She brings a mug of soup
to him, lays a hand briefly on his shoulder.

He takes it in
stride. I’ve seen him talking to her before, the two of them murmuring in a
corner as her little girl sat nearby with one of the chocolate bars Heathshade
stole in Banlian.

This may well be
the fall of civilisation, but it’s very probably Heathshade’s finest hour. These
last few days in this town have been an unqualified triumph for him. I very
much doubt that he’s ever had it this good. Hero, leader of men, attractor of
women…

But I fear that
the charlatan’s winning streak can’t last, that he will lead the town, and
possibly me and Helen with it, into the jaws of disaster.

For two days
I idled on my island. I scarcely had a conscious thought in all that time. My
universe had contracted again to the circumference of the bay, and nothing
mattered but rest, food and the warmth of the sun. But my mood soon began to
change again. A desire grew in me to visit the other planets, to see at first
hand how time, and whatever other forces might have been extant in the Solar
System in recent millennia, had changed them. I made the necessary preparations
and departed from the Earth on the third day after I had left Dexter to his
spiritual quest, or whatever it was.

The Unquiet
Spirit's gravitational field generator protected me from the crushing effects
of inertia as the ship accelerated to several percent of the speed of light in
only half an hour. This was incredible technology, well beyond the capabilities
of my time. Even without the huge relativistic boosters, the Unquiet Spirit
could function as a serviceable, if slow, interstellar craft.

I travelled
sunwards to begin with, and attained Venus orbit in five hours. In my own day
the planet had been in the late stages of an atmospheric seeding program. It
had been beginning to show some signs of cooling as the carbon dioxide level in
its crushingly dense atmosphere decreased. The thick, acidic clouds had been
thinning, revealing from time to time fleeting glimpses of small patches of the
scorched surface.

Now the
clouds were long gone, and so was the rest of the atmosphere. The surface of
Venus was touched by perfect vacuum, its mountain ranges beset not by the hot,
acidic winds of millennia ago, but now the unfettered particle wind emanating
from the Sun. The unconcealed face of Venus was composed of wide, dry ocean
basins and sinuous river valleys.

I did not
linger long over Mercury. It resembled the Moon of my own time far more closely
than the streaked, smooth Moon that presently orbited the Earth. Its airless,
cratered surface looked much as it always had. It looked like humans had never
had much use for Mercury.

Passing
through the solar corona, the Unquiet Spirit accelerated towards Mars. In a few
hours I was gazing upon the planet's icy surface from low orbit. Its red colour
was no more. Its clear atmosphere of carbon dioxide was fifty times thicker
than it had been in the 23rd Century, bringing it up to 500 millibars, on
average. Mars was now uniformly covered with ice except on the most violently
windswept slopes of the highest peaks. The windward side of Olympus Mons was
particularly bare and jagged.

The Unquiet
Spirit powered away from Mars orbit and skirted around the densest regions of
the Asteroid Belt on the way to Jupiter. The giant planet now had three red
spots. One hugged the equator, as though shepherded by its companions in the
tropics.

Of the
Galilean satellites, Io, Ganymede and Callisto were gone. At the time I
imagined that they must have been dismantled for raw material in some advanced
engineering endeavour. I discovered after I had returned to Earth that they now
orbited the Sun as independent planets between the orbits of Jupiter and
Saturn. Europa still circled Jupiter in its natural orbit, but had changed
dramatically in character. In the 23rd Century its ocean had lain beneath a
smooth crust of ice that shielded it from the vacuum of space. Now the ocean
roiled within a thick atmosphere primarily composed of water vapour and sulphur
dioxide. There was no land. Enormous bubbles of steam and sulphurous fumes
erupted constantly through the tortured ocean surface. The expelled water
vapour quickly fell again into the sea as sulphuric acid rain. Data gathered by
the ship showed that the Jovian magnetic field had intensified greatly since
the 23rd Century. As the satellite passed through this field, powerful eddy
currents in the Europan interior heated its core, driving the extreme volcanic
activity.

Saturn had
lost its rings. The thick clouds of its greatest satellite, Titan, shrouded the
cold surface of that enigmatic world in perpetual twilight. Titan's methane
oceans washed against jagged black shores of carbonaceous rock, and powerful
Saturn-driven tides flooded regions the size of small countries every Titanian
day.

In the 23rd
Century, the axis of rotation of Uranus had been almost perpendicular to the
plane of the ecliptic. Now it was nearly parallel. Like the destruction of
Saturn's rings, this phenomenon could have been natural in origin, but I
doubted that it was.

Though I
had discovered no ruins, detected no ancient, dead spacecraft between the
planets, it was clear that civilisation in the Solar System had at some time
reached the level of large-scale planetary engineering. The Neptunian system
contained the most overt trace of ancient civilisation. A threadlike,
gold-coloured tether joined frigid, patchwork Triton and its parent Neptune, extending
mysteriously into the giant world's turbulent atmosphere. Yet no other
structure was visible on Triton. The shining cable seemed to be anchored deep
inside its crust to no apparent purpose. The rest of the system had been swept
clear. Neptune's partial rings were gone, and there were no satellites except
Triton. There seemed to be no debris in Neptune's orbit more significant than
space dust.

Like two
snowballs mashed together, Pluto and its companion object Charon had been
combined into one greater - though still small and insignificant - world. I
flew by this new planet without slowing to orbit. I instructed the computer to
arc the ship back into the inner Solar System. It was time to return to Earth,
to see how Dexter was getting along, to make some decisions about what I would
do next. I had been away for several days, and it would take several more to
get home, even by the direct, high-energy route.

The stars burn
through sheets of green glow. The Northern Lights, making a daring southern foray,
are entirely in keeping with this new age. What particle would not accelerate
when confronted with a world in such a state?

Phase 1 of
Heathshade’s grand strategy has taken place, has been completed successfully.
We of Heathshade’s intrepid party began by making a long detour up the quay
towards Treacy Park, before veering back townwards, slipping through O’Mahony
Avenue and Pearce Square, finally reaching Carrick’s other church. We made our
reconnaissance, made contact with the others, and now we’re back, having
encountered no enemy.

In that other
church, things are just as one might expect when hundreds are crammed into an
enclosed space for several weeks. The people are hungry and sick, and the
stench is so unholy that it has probably driven God from his own premises.

Outside the
heavy doors is a pile of bodies. Also, the paramilitaries visit on occasion,
and they are of that ilk that can’t bring themselves to ask even routine
questions without accompanying them with punches and kicks.

Not surprisingly,
the St Nicholas people are willing to join Heathshade’s merry band. A diplomat
now, our hero orders a goodwill gesture to copper-fasten the alliance. Some
food is gathered together – not all that much, really - and a party dispatched
back across the river to deliver it. Short of a re-enactment of the
loaves-and-fishes incident of antiquity, it will be pathetically inadequate to
feed the huddled hundreds over there. But it’s the thought that counts.

‘You’re very
good to think of them,’ Daisy Carruth says to Heathshade.

‘They’ll
appreciate it,’ he replies.

Daisy takes her
daughter Joanie by the hand, and the three of them, very much the nuclear
family, go and sit on the blankets in her patch of floor space.

Helen watches as
Heathshade gives Daisy the benefit of his wisdom on some subject or other, and
Joanie settles down to sleep in her mother’s lap.

‘Cynical bitch,’
she mutters, more or less to me.

‘They’re
probably well matched.’

‘Are you going
to take part in his plan?’

‘I’m already
part of it. I was shot at, wasn’t I?’

Curious how
strong the urge is to mention this.

‘What do I do if
both of you are killed?’

Both of you?

‘You know what,
Helen? If they shoot at him, I’ll dive in front and catch the bullet. Then
there’ll still be one of us, and you won’t have to worry.’

I step outside
to get some fresh air, and to get away from her. The raw night-time cold hits
me head-on, but anger provides insulation. Pound down the steps of the Friary. Left
or right? Neither way leads anywhere I want to go. That red-brick house across
the road. I give the front door a few good, satisfying kicks and it yields. Completely
dark inside save for the dim night sheen in the landing upstairs. Up I go, and
find myself in a back bedroom, looking through the window across the river at
the enemy position. The reddish light of their fires marks out, just barely,
the roofline against an auroral backdrop.

What if I just
set out on my own? That would show her. Just follow the river, sixteen miles or
so through… what? Salt flats, lifeless white dunes. Then… some chance of
safety. I must make her leave with me, get out of here before it becomes a
battlefield. What can I do to make her trust me to do what she needs me to do? If
I could persuade her to leave, we could shelter for a while in the hut on the
African Wall. It’s not so bad there.

The enemy
circles the city, flies around a rotting corpse. Thousands of citizens pass by
the hut, trudging westwards. The Shapes come closer to the hut each day. I had
to repel one of them with the force weapon this morning. It withdrew over the
edge of the Wall, down towards Dublin Far City. I ran to the edge and watched
it spiral away, rejoining the white pulsing mass of the orbital swarm.