Banneth rolled her eyes as the rest of the bodyguard hurried out around her. Cars had been halted in the street to let them
cross. They hurried into the ground floor mall of the Parsonage Heights tower opposite the station. Three more sect members
were waiting inside, standing guard beside an open lift. The magus and eight bodyguards crowded in around Banneth. They rode
it to the top floor, where it opened out directly into the penthouse vestibule. More sect members were inside, toting their
weapons and finishing off the new security sensor array.
“No fucker’s going to sneak up on you while you’re here,” the magus said confidently. “We’ve got every approach covered. There’ll
be guards outside, and in all the stairwells. Nobody gets in or out without a secure access code, which you have command authority
over.”
Banneth walked into the penthouse, which occupied the whole fortieth floor. The absent owner had chosen its decor straight
out of a thirty-year-old catalogue file specialising in unashamed chintz: green leather furniture, Turkish rugs over polished
marble tiles, glowing primary-colour sketches hanging on the walls, and a red marble fireplace complete with holographic flames.
A glass wall had swing-up slab doors which led out to a roof garden with a swimming pool and hot tub; the sun loungers were
sculpted blue plastic frogs.
“The fridge is full,” the magus said. “If you take a fancy to anything, just let us know and we’ll have it sent up. I can
get anything you need. My grip on this town is total.”
“I’m sure,” Banneth said. “You, you, and you,” her finger singled out two attractive girls and a teenage boy. “Stay. The rest
of you, fuck off. Now.”
The magus blushed heavily. Treating him like a piece of street shit in front of his acolytes would be a serious blow to his
authority. She stared right at him, a silent direct challenge.
He snapped his fingers, gesturing everyone out, then stomped through the big blackwood doors without looking back.
“Dump the guns,” Banneth told the three remaining acolytes. “You won’t be needing them in here.”
After a moment’s hesitation they left them beside the kitchen bar. Banneth walked out into the small paved garden. Night fuchsias
spilled their sweetness into the air. It had a balcony of high, one-way glass, allowing her to look over the glimmering crater
of lights which defined the city. Nobody could see in. A reasonable protection against snipers, she acknowledged.
Did I cause a big enough splash?
she asked Western Europe.
Oh yes. The dear magus is currently screaming at London’s High Magus about how big a shit you are. All the covens will be
talking about your arrival by this evening.
Evening.
She shook her head irritably.
I hate train lag.
Not relevant. I’ll have the little traffic-stopping scene downstairs logged on the police intelligence bulletin as well. The
patrol constables will ask their informants for further information about the coven’s new activities. We’ll have the whole
arcology covered. Dexter will find you.
“Shit,” Banneth mumbled. She beckoned the nervous acolytes out onto the roof garden. “One, find me a decent glass of Crown
whisky; then take your clothes off. I want to watch you swimming.”
“Um, High Magus,” one of the girls said anxiously. “I can’t swim.”
“Then you’d better learn fast. Hadn’t you?”
Banneth ignored their whispering behind her, and looked upwards. Long strips of faintly luminescent cloud curved round the
dome, breaking into agitated foam as they hit the surface flow boundary. Patches of night sky were visible through the choppy
fringes. Stars and spacecraft shone bright against the blackness. There was the hint of a hazy ark above the northern horizon.
This penthouse is difficult to reach from the ground, but wide open to the sky,
she observed.
That means an SD strike.
Correct. I have no intention of using a nuke inside the dome. But an X-ray laser can penetrate the crystal with minimal damage.
If he can survive that, then frankly there is no hope for us.
There certainly isn’t for me.
You created him.
B7 created me.
We permitted you, there’s a difference. You were convenient for us. Under our patronage you fulfilled most of your ambitions.
Without us, you would now either be dead or an Ivet.
If I can take him out…
No. I don’t want you fighting back. He must not be made to turn invisible again. I only have one chance at this. It’s quite
poetic really: the whole world’s future depending on an individual.
Poetic. Fuck, what the hell are you people?
I believe our original agreement was that B7’s patronage would be provided on a no-questions-asked basis. Despite your predicament,
you still don’t qualify to ask that question, and I have no intention of indulging you. When you are dead, then you can observe
me from the beyond.
Some people make it past the beyond. That’s what the Edenists claim.
Then I wish you bon voyage.
Banneth glanced out over the preserved city again. The first pale grey photons of dawn were slipping up from the eastern horizon
to lap against the bottom of the giant crystal dome. She wondered how many more dawns she was going to see.
Truthful estimate, knowing the way she’d put Dexter together, no more than a week.
The acolytes were splashing about in the pool now, including the non-swimming girl clinging resolutely to the shallow end.
Banneth didn’t care, the whole point was just to see their great young bodies glistening wet. Indulging herself with them
was definitely one-up on the customary last meal. However, there were files stored in her neural nanonics which had to be
edited and prepared. Her lifetime’s work. She could hardly allow it to go to waste, though finding an institution that would
accept it might prove difficult. It wasn’t just that she wanted it preserved, she wanted it studied, utilized. An important
body of knowledge: human behaviour under the kind of extreme conditions that would forever remain closed to academic medical
circles. It was unique, which made it all the more valuable. Perhaps some day it might become a classic reference for psychology
students.
She went back into the lounge and settled into one of the dreadful green leather couches, ready to start indexing the files.
It would be amusing to see how long the acolytes stayed in the water.
______
The Lancini had been built at the start of the Twenty-first Century, a huge department store intended to rival London’s best:
set on Millbank overlooking the Thames, it had a
trÈs chic
view which along with its retro-thirties decor was calculated to bring in the affluent and curious alike. As with all outsize
endeavours, its decline was never going to be swift. It had limped along for decades with falling customer numbers and negative
profits. The image it attempted to foster right from the start was dignity without snobbishness. According to the market survey
programs worshiped by its executives, such a policy would attract older shoppers, with their correspondingly larger credit
funds. Floor managers, left with no margin for innovation, kept ordering established, unhip, brands to serve their loyal,
ageing shoppers. Every year, fewer of them returned.
The execs really should have known that; if they’d just cross-linked their market surveys with the store’s own funeral service
department, they would have seen just how far their customer loyalty extended. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite extend to after-burial
purchasing. So 2589 saw the very last traditional January sale ending with an undignified auction to dispose of the store’s
fittings. Now only the shell of the building remained.
Nothing changed, because nothing was allowed to change. The London historical buildings continuity council made quite sure
of that in its rigorous defence of heritage. Anyone was free to purchase the Lancini and start a commercial business up in
it, providing it was refurbished to match the original interior plans, and that business was retail shopping. Another setback
to refurbishment was the price the receivers were demanding to satisfy the store’s creditors.
Then news of possession and the beyond reached Earth. And, quite paradoxically, age suddenly became a highly motivating factor
in change. It was old people who sat on the historical buildings continuity council. London’s most venerated (and richest)
banks and financial institutions were mostly governed by centenarians. These were the people who were going to be the first
generation of humans who would enter the horror of the beyond knowing it was waiting for them. Unless, of course, a method
of salvation was found. So far the Church (any/every denomination), Gov-central’s science councils, and the Confederation
Navy had been unable to provide that salvation.
That just left one possible refuge: zero-tau.
Several companies were quickly formed to supply demand. Obviously, long-term facilities would ultimately be needed to carry
these customers of oblivion through the millennia; mausolea more enduring than the pyramids. But they’d take time to design
and build; meanwhile the hospital chaplains remained in business. Temporary storage facilities were urgently required.
By a near unanimous vote, the historical buildings continuity council quickly approved a change of use of premises certificate
for the Lancini. Zero-tau pods were shipped in from the Halo and taken in via delivery gates more used to household furnishings
and haute couture. The ancient cage lifts had the load capacity to take them up to every floor. Oak floorboards, seasoned
by five centuries of dehumidified conditioning, were strong enough to hold the new weight distribution pattern. Heavy-duty
cabling laid in for the floor displays carried sufficient electricity to feed the pods’ power-hungry systems. In fact, if
it hadn’t been for the building’s projected three hundred year lifespan, the Lancini would have made a good eternity crypt.
Certainly Paul Jerrold thought it appropriate enough when he was shown to his pod. It was on the fourth floor, one of a long
row in the old Horticultural section, lined up opposite the windows. Over half of the big sarcophagi were active, their black
surfaces absorbing the dust-choked sunbeams as if they were spatial chasms. The two nurses helped him in over the rim, then
fussed round, smoothing down his loose fitting track-suit. He kept quiet through the nannying; at a hundred and twelve he
was becoming used to the attitude of medical staff. Always exaggerating the attention they gave their patients, as if the
care would go unnoticed if they didn’t.
“Are you ready?” one asked.
Paul smiled. “Oh yes.” The last couple of weeks had been busy ones, itself a blessing at his age. First the devastating news
of possession. Then the slow response, the determination by himself and the others at his elite West End club that they should
not become victims of the beyond. The web of discreet contacts put out, offering an alternative for those who could pay for
it. His solicitors and accountants had been tasked with shifting his substantial holdings into a long-term trust that would
pay for maintaining his stasis. It didn’t cost much: maintenance, rent, and power. Even if the trust was badly bungled, he
had enough money in the bank to keep himself secure for ten thousand years. Then once it had been arranged, there had been
the arguments with his children and their swarm of offspring, all of whom had adopted a quiet waiting policy to obtain his
wealth. A brief legal battle (he could afford much better lawyers than they), and that was it, and here he was: a new breed
of chrononaut.
His habitual dread of the future had faded, replaced by a keen interest in what awaited. When the zero-tau field switched
off, there would be a full solution to the beyond, society would have evolved radically to take knowledge of the afterlife
into account. There might even be a decent re juvenation treatment available. Possibly, humans would have finally achieved
physical immortality. He would become as a god.
A flicker of greyness, shorter than an eyeblink…
The pod cover lifted, and Paul Jerrold was slightly surprised to see he was still in the Lancini. He’d expected to be in some
huge technological vault, or perhaps a tasteful recovery room. Not right back where his voyage through eternity had started.
Unless these new, magnificently advanced humans had re-created the Lancini to provide their ancestors with the psychological
comfort of familiar territory, a considerate way to ease their introduction to this fabulous new civilization built in his
absence.
He glanced eagerly through the big, dirty window opposite. Dusk had fallen across the Westminster Dome. The thriving lights
of the south bank glimmered brightly in front of the steel grey clouds smothering the vast arc of the dome. A projection of
some kind?
The pair of medical staff attending him were somewhat unconventional. A girl leaned over the pod, very young, with amazingly
large breasts squeezed up by a tight leather waistcoat. The adolescent boy standing beside her wore an expensive pure-wool
sweater that was somehow wrong on him; his face was stubbly, with animal-mad eyes. He held a loop of power cable in one hand,
plug dangling loosely.
Paul took one look at the plug, and datavised an emergency code. He couldn’t get a response from any net processor; then his
neural nanonics crashed. A third figure clad in a jet-black robe slipped out of the gloom to stand at the foot of the pod.
“Who are you?” Paul croaked in fright. He levered himself up into a sitting position, skinny hands with their bulging veins
gripping the edge of the pod.
“You know exactly who we are,” Quinn said.
“Have you won? Did you defeat us?”
“We’re going to, yes.”
“Oww shit, Quinn,” Billy-Joe protested. “Look at these old farts, they ain’t good for nothing. No soul’s gonna make them last,
not even with your kind of black magic.”