The battlements were strangely deserted and I vaulted up onto them at one of the corners. Then I remembered the trapdoors, climbed back down and opened one of them instead. Before I lowered myself through I looked down: it was a long way. But I had to go. I had to go back and find what I'd left behind. I'd be back for dinner though, I was sure of it.
I dangled my legs through the hole, feeling with my toes for a foothold on the column. I found one and slid quickly down until my shoulders were through, scrabbling for handholds. Then I was clinging to the column, scuttling down as quickly as I could.
I had to go. I had to go back. I had to find it, and once I'd found it I could come back again. I'd find it and come back, and I'd be back in time for dinner. I'd hardly be gone at all. I'd be back in time for dinner. The column was much taller than it had been before and it wasn't going down to the plain we'd crossed any more. It just kept going down and down and I wondered desperately where it stopped because I had to get to the bottom and find my way back to wherever it was I'd left whatever I'd left behind behind. I had to find it,; and bring it back.
My hand started to slip and before I'd noticed It was hanging on only by my feet, my weight' toppled gently backwards, pulled by mild gravity." I waved my arms, trying to regain my balance.
I'll hardly be gone at all. I'll be back in time for dinner.
I fell away from the column and felt myself tumbling downwards, falling quicker and quicker, falling down towards the bottom, and all that mattered was that I had to find it and I had to be back in time for dinner and I fell and fell and fell and just as I thought I must surely hit the bottom soon I came to with a massive jolt to find myself sitting bolt upright on the sofa in my apartment in Colour Neighbourhood.
For a moment I sat there, tensed rigid, not really knowing where the hell I was. When I realised I leapt to my feet and swore viciously, shockingly, stamping round the living room and waving my fists.
The gist of my drift was that I couldn't believe it. I said so a number of times, couched in terminology that would have made Ji shake his head in stunned disapproval. I really just couldn't believe it.
When I'd calmed down very slightly I quickly checked round the apartment. The front door wasn't sealed, and there was no one out in the corridor. The Centre had obviously decided that it wasn't worth staking out the apartment when they could have someone at all the mono stations. It was possible they might have someone down in the lobby just in case, but that was a problem I could deal with later.
I fished the BugAnaly® out of the desk and had it do a quick scan of the apartment. It was clean. The machine sensibly remained very polite and deferential throughout the procedure, calling me 'sir' in a hushed tone. I think it sensed that this was a time when I might very well carry out my longstanding threat of teaching it to fly the hard way. In the remains of the kitchen I nuked some water and made myself a cup of Jahavan and then stomped furiously back put into the living room, smoking heavily.
I couldn't fucking believe it.
You have to understand that I know Jeamland very well, and for me to get caught out like that never happens. That's the kind of thing that happens in real dreams, or to people the first time they go there. It shouldn't have happened to me. I knew damn well that the impulse to go back and get something, and the belief that you'll return and everything will be all right, is complete nonsense. It's Jeamland playing a trick on you. Even if you do get back, the people you were with and the situation you left will have disappeared. Worse still, you may never get back, or you may fall awake. I'd woken up and left Alkland in there by himself.
What's more, he was stuck there. I'd told him the truth when he'd asked about taking a break. Normally you can't just wake yourself up, or most people can't. You have to be a complete moron and get caught out by a random flicker like I had. Alkland was there for the duration, and I was here. What a complete disaster.
It could have been worse, of course. It could have happened in the jungle, or somewhere even more dangerous. As it was, Alkland should be fairly safe where he was, for a while at least.
Without me there to direct him, however, he could end up on a completely different dream-line, one that could be dangerous to him and make him more difficult to track down once I got back in. All it would take would be another bubble rising to the surface and he could find himself in a lot of trouble.
Getting back in was something I had to do as soon as possible. The deal with Jeamland is this: the first time you go in, you have to go via the plain, you have to do things properly. After that, if you happen to wake up, you can only rejoin the track you were on by falling asleep and dreaming. The problem, of course, is that the more you want to go to sleep, the more difficult it becomes. You can't use drugs to get you off, because they screw up your dreams and you end up having a spectacularly bad time.
I closed my eyes speculatively and had a go at concentrating on nothing for a while, just letting my thoughts pass in front of me. It clearly wasn't going to work. I wasn't going to sleep.
So I might as well do something constructive. I had a quick and much-needed shower, and even found myself grinning slightly at the realisation that Alkland would be doing the same thing, with a BufPuff in attendance. I was sorry to have missed out on that. The more I thought about it, the idea of having someone else, however platonically, share your shower sounded like quite a nice idea. Taking a shower gets boring after the first thousand or so times, don't you find? There you are, alone with the water, trying to avoid getting scalded or frozen, spreading the soap around and, that's it, really. Not very exciting, interesting or sociable. Maybe they hadn't been such a bunch of berks after all.
I ran the clothes I'd been using through the CloazValet™, but the thing seemed to be working properly again, as nothing changed colour or anything.
Then I constructively paced up and down the living room for a while, still seething in a mild sort of way, trying to work out what to do next. I thought I heard a sound out in the corridor at one point and took up station behind the door with the gun, but it was only another resident. It was Zoe, in fact, the woman who lives a few doors down. She's a two-dimensional male fantasy figure. I'm not being sexist. It's her job. It's on her passport and everything. I suddenly remembered that one of the King's consorts had looked a little like her,. and for a moment that part of the dream flared up in my memory and then faded.
In case you're wondering, pulling the gun on Alkland's monster would have been a complete waste of time, and a dangerous one at that. Again, I know, I've tried. It went badly wrong. The mind is like a troubled community, with different races and creeds jostling up against each other and having occasional fist fights. If you try charging in to sort things out you end up with a riot on your hands. And mental riots are the worst: they don't make much noise but boy do they leave a mess.
I checked my in-tray and found a note from Ji, telling me to get in touch. I rang the bar but he wasn't in, so I left a message saying I was back for the time being. I thought briefly about calling Zenda but knew I couldn't. Her line would be bugged to hell and I didn't want to connect her with me any more than she already was.
I paced fretfully up and down a bit more, then made myself sit down at the desk and apply a little method. The thing to do was turn the problem into an advantage, use the time to check through what had happened and see if there was anything worth thinking about. That way I'd be better prepared when I finally managed to get back in again. Checking my watch I saw that I'd only been out half an hour. Not much could have happened to Alkland in that time, I hoped, so I sat down and concentrated.
He'd seen the babies. The first thing he'd run into was the babies. That was not good. I'd known from that moment on, really, that he was in deeper trouble than we'd realised. The babies are a very bad thing, and more than that, they're not a natural part of Jeamland.
The fact that he had Meg Finda-style associations, on the other hand, was mildly encouraging. People who read that kind of thing as a child, who had their psyches rounded out with comfortable stories where things turned out all right in the end, those people tend to fare a little better in Jeamland. More and more children aren't seeing that kind of thing when they're young, and they have a pretty tough time. Nowadays everybody thinks realism is better for children, that they shouldn't be deceived about the way the world works. I can see their point, but actually it's a crock of shit. When your mind is as wide open as a child's, realism is the absolute last thing you need. To a degree, the world works the way you think it does, no more so than in Jeamland. I once escorted someone who grew up in one of the harsher districts of Turn through Jeamland: boy was that a bad time.
The most significant thing was the monster. Monsters are always the most significant thing. I knew what I'd picked up from it, but there was no way of telling how close that was to what Alkland had felt, what it meant to him. One thing was clear though: there was something rotting away underneath the Actioneer's still waters. Whatever was after him knew about it. I thought I'd better find out about it too.
My memories of the chase were pretty fragmentary. Believe me, when something like that is after you all the clever bits of your head, the storage banks, the rationalising facilities, they all go on hold. They send all the energy they've got to the 'Let's-get-the-hell-out-of-here' centres, and let them get on with it. All I could remember was Alkland saying that something wasn't his fault, and saying it over and over again.
Something bad had happened to him, something that he hadn't faced in a long time. Chances were he might not even remember it himself. As it was, he wasn't around to ask, which felt a bit weird. When you've spent seventy-two hours shepherding someone about the place it feels strange to be back on your own again, without anyone to look after.
I activated my desk terminal and patched through to the Centre's Guest Data Mainframe. I have a couple of logon aliases, courtesy of Brian Diode IV, but I worked quickly in case the one I was using had been discovered. The Centre's GDM holds the information on the Neighbourhood that outsiders are allowed to access: it's only a fraction of the stuff on their main network, but it does hold a lot of information on the Actioneers themselves. Boasting, mainly.
I found Alkland's family tree and went back a generation. His parents were both dead. They'd died of heart attacks over twenty years ago. Most Actioneers do, as it happens - that or gastric ulcers. They couldn't help me, but I found something else interesting. Alkland had a sister.
Or did have. Her name was, or had been, Suzanna, and she'd been born two years after Alkland, making her sixty now. When I called up the most recent picture the GDM had, however, what came on-screen was a little bizarre. It was a picture of a three-year-old. A pretty, laughing little girl, straw-blonde hair thrown across her face by a breeze which had long ago faded to nothing. She was standing in a park in front of a playground, clutching a teddy bear tightly, and in the background knelt her mother, dressed in the fashion of sixty years ago, smiling proudly at her daughter. There was something a little odd about the picture, though I couldn't work out what. Something about it made me feel a little sad.
Suzanna was a dead end, however. After the photo, there were no more records on her. Cautious man that I am, I logged out and then on again under another alias, and negotiated my way back towards Alkland's tree via a completely different route. He had no cousins, it appeared, or any other family.
I sat back from the screen, closed my eyes, and tried to remember as much as possible of a poem I once memorised as a kid. It took me a while, and I was saddened to see how little of it I could get, but it did the job.
When my mind was clearer, I turned it back to Alkland, and tried to remember everything I could about him. I knew he'd worked in the Department of Really Getting to the Heart of Things. It was possible that some of the people there might know something about him, but there was no way I could get in touch with them. If I tried I might get the wrong person, and ACIA would be on top of me like a ton of heavy things. I couldn't go into the Centre and try to approach them individually. If I tried to use my Authorisation I'd get nowhere. Well I would, but it wouldn't be anywhere that I wanted to be. The Centre was off-limits to me for the time being.
Then I got it. I navigated back to Alkland himself again, and scrolled down a few years, searching through his early school days. Apart from a slight unexplained hiccup when he was six, the records were as good as one would expect, but that wasn't what I was looking for. Children in the Centre have two classes during their school days. Until they're ten they're taught in classes of sixteen. Then the class is split into four groups of four, and they stay together until school shades into work at sixteen. They're still technically students until age eighteen, but as most of them are already clawing their way up Departmental ladders by then, it doesn't mean much.
I captured the names of everyone who'd been in Alkland's original class. It was probable the person I was looking for would have been in the smaller later class, but setting a search for sixteen wouldn't take appreciably longer than four, and it was better to cover all options.
Having clipped all the names I set the computer on a basic biog search, getting it to provide me with summary information on all the names. By the time I'd got back in with a new cup of coffee, it was finished.
Of Alkland's original classmates, three were dead. Two of old age and one killed by a falling dog, which sounded intriguing. Of the remaining thirteen, all but two were still in the Centre. Two had transferred to Natsci. I cross-referenced to Alkland's later class and saw that only one of the transfers had stayed in the same class. Spock Bellrip had to be the man I was looking for.