Good Omens (24 page)

“H-huh,” stuttered Pepper, as the rising wind whipped at her T-shirt, “I don't s-see why Wensley's got America an' all I've g-got is just Russia. Russia's
boring
.”

“You can have China and Japan and India,” said Adam.

“That means I've got jus' Africa and a lot of jus' borin' little countries,” said Brian, negotiating even on the curl of the catastrophe curve. “I wouldn't mind Australia,” he added.

Pepper nudged him and shook her head urgently.

“Dog's goin' to have Australia,” said Adam, his eyes glowing with the fires of creation, “on account of him needin' a lot of space to run about. An' there's all those rabbits and kangaroos for him to chase, an'—”

The clouds spread forwards and sideways like ink poured into a bowl of clear water, moving across the sky faster than the wind.

“But there won't
be
any rab—” Wensleydale shrieked.

Adam wasn't listening, at least to any voices outside his own head. “It's all too much of a mess,” he said. “We should start again. Just save the ones we want and start again. That's the best way. It'd be doing the Earth a favor, when you come to think about it. It makes me
angry
, seeing the way those old loonies are messing it up … ”

“IT'S MEMORY, YOU SEE,” said Anathema. “It works backwards as well as forwards. Racial memory, I mean.”

Newt gave her a polite but blank look.

“What I'm trying to say,” she said patiently, “is that Agnes didn't
see
the future. That's just a metaphor. She
remembered
it. Not very well, of course, and by the time it'd been filtered through her own understanding it's often a bit confused. We think she's best at remembering things that were going to happen to her descendants.”

“But if you're going to places and doing things because of what she wrote, and what she wrote is her recollection of the places you went to and the things you did,” said Newt, “then—”

“I know. But there's, er, some evidence that that's how it works,” said Anathema.

They looked at the map spread out between them. Beside them the radio murmured. Newt was very aware that a woman was sitting next to him. Be professional, he told himself. You're a soldier, aren't you? Well, practically. Then act like a soldier. He thought hard for a fraction of a second. Well, act like a respectable soldier on his best behavior, then. He forced his attention back to the matter at hand.

“Why Lower Tadfield?” said Newt.
“I
just got interested because of the weather. Optimal microclimate, they call it. That means it's a small place with its own personal nice weather.”

He glanced at her notebooks. There was definitely something odd about the place, even if you ignored Tibetans and UFOs, which seemed to be infesting the whole world these days. The Tadfield area didn't only have the kind of weather you could set your calendar by, it was also remarkably resistant to change. No one seemed to build new houses there. The population didn't seem to move much. There seemed to be more woods and hedges than you'd normally expect these days. The only battery farm to open in the area had failed after a year or two, and been replaced by an old-fashioned pig farmer who let his pigs run loose in his apple orchards and sold the pork at premium prices. The two local schools seemed to soldier on in blissful immunity from the changing fashions of education. A motorway which should have turned most of Lower Tadfield into little more than the Junction 18 Happy Porker Rest Area changed course five miles away, detoured in a great semicircle, and continued on its way oblivious to the little island of rural changelessness it had avoided. No one quite seemed to know why; one of the surveyors involved had a nervous breakdown, a second had become a monk, and a third had gone off to Bali to paint nude women.

It was as if a large part of the twentieth century had marked a few square miles Out of Bounds.

Anathema pulled another a card out of her index and flicked it across the table.

2315. Sum say It cometh in London Town, or New Yorke, butte they be Wronge, for the plase is Taddes Fild, Stronge inne hys powr, he cometh like a knight inne the fief, he divideth the Worlde into 4 partes, he bringeth the storme. [. . . 4 years early [New Amsterdam till 1664] … . . . Taddville, Norfolk … . . . Tardesfield, Devon … . . . Tadfield, Oxon … < . . ! . . See Revelation, C6, v10]

“I had to go and look through a lot of county records,” said Anathema.

“Why's this one 2315? It's earlier than the others.”

“Agnes was a bit slapdash about timing. I don't think she always knew what went where. I told you, we've spent ages devising a sort of system for chaining them together.”

Newt looked at a few cards. For example:

1111. An the Great Hound sharl coom, and the Two Powers sharl watch in Vane, for it Goeth where is its Master, Where they Wot Notte, and he sharl name it, True to Ittes Nature, and Hell sharl flee it. [? Is this something to do with Bismark? [A F Device, June 8, 1888] . . . ? . . . Schleswig-Holstein?]

“She's being unusually obtuse for Agnes,” said Anathema.

3017. I see Four Riding, bringing the Ende, and the Angells of Hell ride with them, And Three sharl Rise. And Four and Four Together be Four, an the Dark Angel sharl Own Defeat, Yette the Manne sharl claim his Own. [The Apocalyptic Horsemen The Man = Pan, The Devil (
The Witch Trials of Lancashire
, Brewster, 1782). ?? I feel good Agnes had drunk well this night, [Quincy Device, Octbr. 15, 1789] I concur. We are all human, alas. [Miss O J Device, Janry. 5, 1854]]

“Why
Nice
and Accurate?” said Newt.

“Nice as in exact, or precise,” said Anathema, in the weary tones of one who'd explained this before. “That's what it used to mean.”

“But
look
,” said Newt—

—he'd nearly convinced himself about the non-existence of the UFO, which was clearly a figment of his imagination, and the Tibetan could have been a, well, he was working on it, but whatever it was it wasn't a Tibetan, but what he
was
more and more convinced of was that he was in a room with a very attractive woman, who appeared actually to like him, or at least not to dislike him, which was a definite first for Newt. And admittedly there seemed to be a lot of strange stuff going on, but if he really tried, poling the boat of common sense upstream against the raging current of the evidence, he could pretend it was all, well, weather balloons, or Venus, or mass hallucination.

In short, whatever Newt was now thinking with, it wasn't his brain.

“But look,” he said, “the world isn't
really
going to end now, is it? I mean, just look around. It's not like there's any international tension … well, any more than there normally is. Why don't we leave this stuff for a while and just go and, oh, I don't know, maybe we could just go for a walk or something, I mean—”

“Don't you understand? There's something here! Something that affects the area!” she said. “It's twisted all the ley-lines. It's protecting the area against anything that might change it! It's … it's … ” There it was again: the thought in her mind that she could not, was not allowed to grasp, like a dream upon waking.

The windows rattled. Outside, a sprig of jasmine, driven by the wind, started to bang insistently on the glass.

“But I can't get a fix on it,” said Anathema, twisting her fingers together. “I've tried everything.”

“Fix?” said Newt.

“I've tried the pendulum. I've tried the theodolite. I'm psychic, you see. But it seems to move around.”

Newt was still in control of his own mind enough to do the proper translation. When most people said “I'm psychic, you see,” they meant “I have an overactive but unoriginal imagination / wear black nail varnish / talk to my budgie”; when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have.

“Armageddon moves around?” said Newt.

“Various prophecies say the Antichrist has to arise first,” said Anathema. “Agnes says
he
. I can't spot him—”

“Or her,” said Newt.

“What?”

“Could be a her,” said Newt. “This is the twentieth century, after all. Equal opportunities.”

“I don't think you're taking this entirely seriously,” she said severely. “Anyway, there isn't any
evil
here. That's what I don't understand. There's just love.”

“Sorry?” said Newt.

She gave him a helpless look. “It's hard to describe it,” she said. “Something or someone loves this place. Loves every inch of it so powerfully that it shields and protects it. A deep-down, huge, fierce love. How can anything bad start here? How can the end of the world start in a place like this? This is the kind of town you'd want to raise your kids in. It's a kids' paradise.” She smiled weakly. “You should
see
the local kids. They're unreal! Right out of the
Boys' Own Paper!
All scabby knees and ‘brilliant!' and bulls-eyes—”

She nearly had it. She could feel the shape of the thought, she was gaining on it.

“What
's this place?” said Newt.

“What?” Anathema screamed, as her train of thought was derailed.

Newt's finger tapped at the map.

“‘Disused aerodrome,' it says. Just here, look, west of Tadfield itself—”

Anathema snorted. “Disused? Don't you believe it. Used to be a wartime fighter base. It's been Upper Tadfield Air Base for about ten years or so. And before you say it, the answer's no. I hate everything about the bloody place, but the colonel's saner than you are by a long way. His wife does yoga, for God's sake.”

Now. What was it she'd said before? The kids round here …

She felt her mental feet slipping away from under her, and she fell back into the more personal thought waiting there to catch her. Newt was okay, really. And the thing about spending the rest of your life with him was, he wouldn't be around long enough to get on your nerves.

The radio was talking about South American rainforests.

New ones.

It began to hail.

BULLETS OF ICE shredded the leaves around the Them as Adam led them down into the quarry.

Dog slunk along with his tail between his legs, whining.

This wasn't right, he was thinking. Just when I was getting the hang of rats. Just when I'd nearly sorted out that bloody German Shepherd across the road. Now He's going to end it all and I'll be back with the ole glowin' eyes and chasin' lost souls. What's the sense in that? They don't fight back, and there's no taste to 'em …

Wensleydale, Brian, and Pepper were not thinking quite so coherently. All that they were aware of was that they could no more not follow Adam than fly; to try to resist the force marching them forward would simply result in multiply broken legs, and they'd
still
have to march.

Adam wasn't thinking at all. Something had opened in his mind and was aflame.

He sat them down on the crate.

“We'll all be all right down here,” he said.

“Er,” said Wensleydale, “don't you think our mothers and fathers—”

“Don't you worry about them,” said Adam loftily. “I can make some new ones. There won't be any of this being in bed by half past nine, either. You don't ever have to go to bed ever, if you don't want to. Or tidy your room or anything. You just leave it all to me and it will be great.” He gave them a manic smile. “I've got some new friends comin',” he confided. “You'll like 'em.”

“But—” Wensleydale began.

“You jus' think of all the amazin' stuff afterwards,” said Adam enthusiastically. “You can fill up America with all new cowboys an' Indians an' policemen an' gangsters an' cartoons an' spacemen and stuff. Won't that be fantastic?”

Wensleydale looked miserably at the other two. They were sharing a thought that none of them would be able to articulate very satisfactorily even in normal times. Broadly, it was that there had once been real cowboys and gangsters, and that was great. And there would always be pretend cowboys and gangsters, and that was also great. But
real
pretend cowboys and gangsters, that were alive and not alive and could be put back in their box when you were tired of them—this did not seem great at all. The whole point about gangsters and cowboys and aliens and pirates was that you could stop being them and go home.

“But before all that,” said Adam darkly, “we're really goin' to
show
'em … ”

THERE WAS A TREE in the plaza. It wasn't very big and the leaves were yellow and the light it got through the excitingly dramatic smoked glass was the wrong sort of light. And it was on more drugs than an Olympic athlete, and loudspeakers nested in the branches. But it was a tree, and if you half-closed your eyes and looked at it over the artificial waterfall, you could almost believe that you were looking at a sick tree through a fog of tears.

Jaime Hernez liked to have his lunch under it. The maintenance supervisor would shout at him if he found out, but Jaime had grown up on a farm and it had been quite a good farm and he had liked trees and he didn't want to have to come into the city, but what could you do? It wasn't a bad job and the money was the kind of money his father hadn't dreamed of. His grandfather hadn't dreamed of any money at all. He hadn't even known what money was until he was fifteen. But there were times when you needed trees, and the shame of it, Jaime thought, was that his children were growing up thinking of trees as firewood and his grandchildren would think of trees as history.

But what could you do? Where there were trees now there were big farms, where there were small farms now there were plazas, and where there were plazas there were still plazas, and that's how it went.