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The Sigil

Henry Gee

Prologue

    Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave
    A paradise for a sect; the savage too
    From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep
    Guesses at Heaven: pity these have not
    Trac'd upon vellum or wild Indian leaf
    The shadows of melodious utterance.
    John Keats - The Fall of Hyperion

    It's hard to know where to start. I have so much to tell; I have so little confidence in my abilities to tell it (reticence being my usual state, as well as many years as a dry-as-dust academic); and I am of course uncertain of the reactions - even the identity - of you, my audience, except that each one of you will belong to one (or more) of twenty or so different species, and many of you will be out of sympathy with the particular species at the centre of the drama I am about to attempt. My problem, in short, is this: much as though I feel I need to set down this record, I am not at all sure that I want to.
    First to needs, then to wants. Of course, many of you will have good reason to despise human beings. They were the oppressors, the colonisers, the enslavers. Such, at any rate, is the modish view of certain among us whose opinions are constrained by neither memory nor experience. It is easy to knock a straw man, to caricature a thing that is no longer able to respond. While I do not intend to write a political treatise -- the contents should be sufficient proof that it is not -- a primary reason for my writing this memoir is to convince you that the story is more complicated, more compromised - and more painful - than many of you realise, those of you who never met a human being. I lived among them for most of my life, and for most of that I had no reason to doubt that I was one myself.
    A second reason is that, odd as it might seem, if it weren't for the sacrifice made by humanity - I would go so far as the ultimate sacrifice - none of us would be here. Our beloved planet Earth would be a dry, cindered husk floating in black space. It was a close run thing, of course, but in the end we live in a fresh new world, bought with billions of human lives. Those of you who have read some history could counter that a sacrifice is not such if not made knowingly and willingly, and that the human beings who laid down their lives did not know that they were doing it for any purpose whatsoever. At one level, you'd be right, but not at another - proximately, the sacrificial lambs were paralyzed with horror and dread for themselves; the good of the world was the last thing on their minds. Ultimately, however, as a species, their sacrifice prevailed. They died for us: we owe them our existence. Qui tollis peccata mundi, as an old friend of mine once put it (we shall meet him too, I hope).
    This is an unfashionable view, I know. People are entitled to their own opinions, and I own that most will differ from mine. However, I strongly believe that mine is the correct one, because I was there. I lived through it. I knew the people involved. I grew up with them, I worked with them. I have lived inside humanity under the deepest possible cover, for if none of them ever suspected that I was anything other than human (or did not, for a long time), then neither did I. The discovery of my true nature was a shock, followed by isolation from those I loved, as well as those whom logic told me were my own kind.
    So much for needs, and now to wants. My reticence is conditioned, very largely, by my recognition that to some what I am about to discuss will be a highly personal, indeed acutely painful agenda that could - will -- compromise my wider reasons for setting these thoughts in order and offering them to you. However, were these memoirs simply an annalistic treatment of dates and events, they would mean nothing at all to you, the reader. You would not engage with them, and you would, therefore, be out of sympathy with my view that the memory of the human race should be one held in gratitude if not reverence - and not become something dark and twisted, to be reviled. But as I lived through the events described herein, I am able to set down an account which I would say is involved, rather than compromised.
    For example: everyone recalls that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, and that King Harold the Second was killed by an arrow to the eye, fired by the bowmen of William the Bastard. But that's just a bald account, related by nobody who was there at the time. History is written by the victor, so nobody will ever know the pain and panic suffered by the vanquished King in his dying moments. As the force of the arrow snapped his head back, as his vision clouded with red, and then white, and finally black, we could never know - nor be in a position to speculate - that his final thoughts were of resigned futility: that he had tried his best to stem a tide of invasion from both the Danes in the north and the Normans in the south, and that, in his almost certain failure, the halls of his ancestors might welcome him the less, for all that he did his best despite his foreknowledge that on the field of Senlac Hill he would meet his doom. Once again, my argument is all about causation. Proximately, Harold died of a traumatic insult to the brain. His kingdom was lost along with his eye and his life, but his death, in the end was emphatically not about conquest and the fall of dynasties. Ultimately, he died of at least a provisional shame, until his case was judged by his own Angels, his own Gods. This might seem such a small thing, especially when suffered by an insignificant loser. But once we recognize the fact, we can feel his loss all the more keenly: the extinction of the Ancient English civilization by the barbaric Normans becomes, for us, too, a personal loss - particularly as he was denied any chance to purge his guilt.
    And so it is with me. In these notes I wish to express a similarly personal loss, and confess a potential shame which I have come to identify with the spirit of the age - but unlike Harold - who never got his chance -- I should like to purge it, facing down whatever pain and resurgent grief this might cause. Now, I know how pompous this all sounds, but to me, my own story, and that of the world in which I lived, revolves around one, single event for which I feel responsible. A confession, if you like.
    There are three human beings whom I have loved, and so this account is in a great part about them. But one of these three I loved the most, with a fierce and consuming love. I have always been a little reserved and perhaps a little secretive (I am told that this is in my nature) so she may not have realized the true strength of my feelings at the time (although, if I am honest, perhaps she did.) No, that is not the source of my shame. Some rueful embarrassment in later life, perhaps, but hardly worthy of the confessional. My shame comes from the bald fact that I killed her.
    Of course, you might add, once you have read the account, you will see that I did not mean to kill her - quite the opposite. She was full of life - no-one fuller -- and we two wanted to make more life still. In fact, I had no knowledge that I was killing her - how could I have done? By my own logic of causation, you might argue, I should be able to understand all this. And so I do, but acceptance is harder. I do not doubt that these circumstances are both true and extenuating, the fact remains that I killed her as surely as an arrow killed Harold. I have lived with this for far too long, and although I have tried hard to forgive myself, I cannot forget - and I do not, in fact, want to. Therefore I am driven to write this account, whether I will or nill.
    At this point I had planned to say that after you had read this, you might understand, and even sympathize. But in the act of writing this I can now conclude instead that this is not my own ultimate reason for ordering my thoughts here. Naturally, I'd be gratified were you to derive pleasure, even understanding, from their contents - after all, everyone loves to read the intimate doings of others. But that's up to you. No, the final reason, and perhaps the only reason, is that I owe her a great debt. She was a part of my life. A part of me, in fact, in a way that few of you still living will appreciate except by bloodless intellection.
    And so, in the end, this is a love story. It now appears that the concept of love as an ideal, an emotion strong enough to transcend pain, loss, even death, was an uniquely human attribute: in which case it is ironic (for me, at any rate) that our major religion is of human origin and, what's more, founded on the redemptive power of love. Whereas it is quite true that in the modern, post-human world there remains a great deal of sex, this is almost always taken for granted as a mechanistic means of procreation, even when it is not coloured by its frequent and variegated use in ritual observance. But that sex can be an adjunct of love - its glue, its amplifier - is, I dare say, beyond the wit or purview of most people. I own that this is a circumstance that such people cannot help, by their very natures. Indeed, many of them will find much in the account that follows deplorable, perverted, even bestial - if they find it comprehensible at all. I can only hope that they do not consider it maudlin or trite, which I would find a million times worse.
    A mystery remains. Given my own nature, that I should have felt the influence of love so strongly is a puzzle. Was a capacity for love born within me, or did I only acquire it by virtue of my upbringing? If the latter, could my love, as honestly as it appears to have been to me, be in reality a sham, a pale simulacrum of the real thing? I am unable to offer any resolution, and so this account serves - for me, and for no-one else - as expiation only.
    But to begin, as they say, at the beginning. Or, in my case, some while before it.

    Chapter 1

    (January 2001 - July 2003)

    Yþde swa þisne eardgeard ælda scyppend oþþæt burgwara breahtma lease eald enta geweorc idlu stodon.
    Anonymous - The Wanderer

    Cambridge is, as it always was, an anomaly, rather distant from anything else at all remarkable. A visitor to Cambridge today will see it much as it was in the Middle Ages, a cluster of picturesque University colleges on a wide river, in the centre of a small market town. Although closely surrounded by several small villages -- Cherry Hinton, Trumpington, Arbury and so on, the homes of the farmers and craftsmen who populate Cambridge's twice-weekly market in the shadow of Great St Mary's - the wider picture is of desolation. Nothing besides cheerless sedge and brackish fen, not even the meanest hovel, now exists between the village of Barnwell and the muddy tidal flats at the remote seaside fishing village of Ely. As for Cambridge itself, the Monastic Orders are different from those that held sway in those far-off days (and the students are, very largely, of different species) but the entire town could be described adequately by this general picture of quiet remoteness.
    How a century can change things. At the very start of the last century, every one of these villages was no more than a suburb of the City, which was alive and crammed with bustle. The religious orders had long been in retreat, replaced by the more immediately potent forces of science and industry, and the swathes of housing required to accommodate all those scientists and industrialists. The fens had been drained, making the land far more extensive than it is now, and oceans of wheat had displaced the mud flats and oystercatchers, the reeds and bitterns.
    It's hard to describe, now, how crowded it was. No - description is easy. It was hard to understand. The streets were perpetually jammed with motor vehicles of all kinds, each accompanied with its slipstreaming flock of bicycles, like a cow has its ox-peckers. People of all kinds (human kinds) surged and jostled along the narrow sidewalks: students, townspeople and tourists alike. Cambridge was then at its zenith as the seat of one of the two great and ancient Universities of England, pulling in the brightest and best of its young people to learn, and once learnèd, to teach.
    The bulk of the students were undergraduates, who came from their own dispersed homes for intense bursts of study that occupied in total less than half the year, spread in eight-week bursts over a frenetic three-year period. This learning was accompanied by leisure activities of all kinds, for if Cambridge undergraduates did anything better than most other people of their age, it was to live. It must have been an exciting time for them, especially compared with the more relaxed schedule today, when students are invariably in the novitiate and combine their studies with routine offices that occupy the whole year, with no distinction between terms and vacations.
    Back then, there was so much to offer, to excite, and you were not obliged to rise at four a.m. and muck out the pigs. They must have lived like the kings of old: but when each new and starry cohort of undergraduates had finally gotten over the euphoria of having been admitted to this select cadre, not to mention the after-effects of all the parties; the full-on assault of invitations to subscribe to the student parachute club (`join us and fall out with your friends'); the geophysical society (`stop plate tectonics NOW!') or the microbiological association (`we do it with culture and sensitivity'); and the liberation of living away, often for the first time, from the tyrannical eye of a parent -- they invariably discovered with a jarring bump that the lectures they were required to attend were, with few exceptions, dreadful. The dons (that is, the resident academics, who were at this time not required to be monks) would rather have been refining exotic superconducting phases of rare-earth-based ceramic materials or dissecting the use of punctuation in Paradise Lost than actually teaching the rudiments of their subjects to students, and so generally did the latter in the most perfunctory way they could.
    After all, despite this fervid activity, there were only as many hours in the day as there are now, and those not spent in tedious meetings with other academics were spent in precious research, or in raising the money required to fund yet further research. (How cynical I seem! If you can detect an edge to these comments, please remember that I was once one of them). If there were corners to be cut, it was in teaching, and the most prominent and frangible corners were the notes lecturers used to teach. Such hours as could have been spent in the long summer vacation to update lecture notes soon disappeared in field trips, conferences and even (whisper it soft) time spent with families. The result was predictable enough. Year on year, a lecturer's notes became progressively more dated. Perhaps the same is true today. I suspect that it is.
    But there were means to ends, and there was, in those crowded times, a ready if not inexhaustible supply of cheap labour to remedy this deficiency: for postgraduate students (that is, those admitted to courses of still higher learning) could, if they were organized and had a mind to, take in small groups of undergraduates, teaching them all those things that their lecturers seemed to have missed, and, not only that, accumulating a reasonable and very necessary income. These small groups were called `supervisions'. Jack Corstorphine was just such a graduate student, and with his tact, reserve, laconic humour - and a reasonable capacity for administration - he soon made a name among hard-pressed college tutors as an accomplished supervisor.
    Then in his second year of a doctoral degree (`Models of land use derived from geomorphology and lithic distributions in the British Palaeolithic'), Jack Corstorphine found supervisions filled a social void. Although attached to a college - as all Cambridge students were obliged to be - he found few attractions in college life. His field work was by necessity solitary; his laboratory work often more so.
    Not that he minded overmuch. Tall, broad-shouldered but rangy, and good-looking in a somewhat angular way, the long, lonely hours of research suited his naturally reticent temperament. And coming from a northern provincial town, where he had attended the local university as an undergraduate, he found Cambridge by turns confusing, exciting and depressing. He felt he should be stimulated by at all, and he was, up to a point. But he felt that nothing he could ever feel about his life and work in Cambridge would ever match the shining-eyed expectations of his parents, on learning that their only child, having been the only one in their family ever to have attended a university at all, was going to crown his study in what, to them, was a city of romantic associations: of punting on the river and May Balls, of strawberries-and-cream, champagne breakfasts and black-tie dinners, like something out of Brideshead Revisited. He hadn't the heart to tell them that his life in Cambridge was - in truth - rather ordinary.
    He enjoyed studying as he came to enjoy teaching, but his real love was the outdoors, tramping alone all over England, refining an already intuitive yet sharp sense of landscape, and how human beings (and other people) had shaped it over millennia. He poked into crabbed caves in the bleak limestone of Derbyshire, the foam-flecked Gower peninsula of south Wales, and bluebell-lined Torbay, trying to picture each scene through a Neanderthal's eyes; he tramped the Vale of Pickering beneath the North York Moors, where some of Britain's earliest farmers had corralled their cattle. For weeks at a time he'd live rough, fishing by day, camping in potholes or under hedgerows at night, returning to his disapproving landlady in Victoria Road stinking, bearded and bright-eyed, like a prophet from one of the more obscure corners of the Old Testament. "I was trying to find out what it must have been like," he would protest, weakly and futilely, as she prodded him (with her broom) towards the bathroom.
    Such was Jack Corstorphine at his most content. But no man can remain solitary for ever, and Cambridge was a maddening and frustrating place for such a man as Jack to find himself cast up: in those relatively short periods of the year when the undergraduates were in season, as it were, life was one big whirl. When they left, all was grey and dull. But by taking supervisions, he got to know quite a few undergraduates, and what he knew, he almost always liked. Even the dimmest Cambridge clod had something special about them. His students here reached greater heights and lower depths than his colleagues from his home town. They seemed more focussed, more colourful, more alive. And none more so than Jade Markham.
    Jack first saw Jade in a fluster of confusion one chilly January morning when she breezed into Jack's office five minutes late. A trio of students from St John's - all big, burly rowers - were already getting their notebooks out. A flutter of apologies - bike puncture, you know, happens all the time - and then Jack started on his prepared notes. Now, this was something that always amazed him. As soon as he drew himself up to speak - putting on his `official' voice - they were all attention. This never happened at his old university, where a patina of well-meaning dullness coated all endeavour, he thought: and (he admitted) it felt good, as a departmental dogsbody, to be treated as an authority, someone who Really Knew. Even then, Jack saw that Jade was just that bit more studious, more attentive, than any of his other students. Her initial lateness was the sole anomaly. Her assignments were always returned on time, and were always substantially better argued than anyone else's. Of course, he reasoned, Jade was very attractive - hardly difficult, given the three well-meaning but cauliflower-eared meatheads that made up the rest of her class. Could he be favouring her because she was the pretty one, the only female, as well as being the one with that extra sparkle? This caused him some anguish - something he laughed about in later years - so he tried a scientific experiment, asking some of his departmental colleagues who knew none of his students personally to rate their work. Jade's always came out on top. "Here's someone with some initiative, some promise", his doctorate supervisor told him, confidentially. "This is first class material, no doubt about that. Such a clarity of thought, of purpose - something only too rare nowadays. She could go far. Keep your eye on her."
    Not that Jack had the slightest intention of averting his gaze, but at least, he reasoned, he could appreciate her better without a guilty conscience. It wasn't long before she began to stalk his idle thoughts: she was long, lean and very leggy, with an open, round face; clear, slightly olive skin, and large, round, dark hazel eyes, so that while lost in thought she looked like a slightly surprised owl. When she spoke, her voice was neither loud nor shrill, but a modulated contralto (the product of a comfortable if not conspicuously wealthy Surrey background) that commanded the room.
    But what always caught Jack's breath was her apparently artless habit, while talking to the class in general - of, say, some arcane process of the evolution of postglacial landforms -- of piling her sprawling mass of very long, straight, glossy dark brown hair on top of her head, thus lifting her long, lovely arms, and thrusting out her small but exquisite breasts, each one crowned with a shapely nipple which could often be seen, if only just, pressing against the fabric of her clothes. Jack, in common with many of the legions of the overworked and sexually frustrated, soon evolved a gradation of female attractiveness. For a woman to pile her hair on her head was the third most alluring thing she could do while still completely clothed. The second most alluring thing was, then, for her to let a single strand of dark hair fall loose down her back, making a contrast against pale and curving shoulders. But the most alluring thing was her studied ignorance of the effect that these two small gestures would have on any male company. Suffice it to say that Jack was entirely lost. And the very moment that her time with him as a supervisor ended, he asked her on a date. And not just any date - but the Clare College May Ball. Oh, thought Jack, if she'd only accept: and if my parents could see me then! And if I should succeed in getting tickets!
    He shouldn't have worried that she might refuse. Jack wasn't to know that Jade was just emerging from the wreckage of an intense long-term attachment with a boy from her home town: a boy who'd only become more jealous and petulant as it became ever clearer that Jade's talents and ambitions would eclipse his own. She didn't show it, but she was finding it hard to sever the connection without being made to feel guilty and wretched. In which case, an old-fashioned, romantic night out with the kindly supervisor -in no way threatening or overbearing, and anyway, kind of nice -- would be just the tonic she needed (or so her girlfriends told her). He was clearly not the type to be jealous or possessive, which would be a relief. His twinkling eye, the way his mouth always seemed to curl upwards on one side as if he was just about to laugh, and (let one not forget!) his trim, yet husky and well-muscled form, gave the lie to the urbane exterior. She secretly suspected - she even dared to hope - that he might even be fun. And the venue! Clare College, on the river itself, with its charming stone bridge, was as romantic a date as anyone could ask for. And if he became attentive to an irritatingly juvenile degree (which would be a bore), or just plain boring (which would be irritating), she could easily lose him in the proliferation of sideshows, rock bands, jazz quartets and food and drink stalls that wafted the lucky guests from dusk until dawn. It was not unknown (she was secretly shocked to learn) for a girl to arrive with one consort and leave with another. And given that Clare May Ball tickets cost an absolute fortune and demand always outstripped supply, what sensible girl could refuse? And if Jade Markham was attractive, she was even more sensible.
    The Ball was an enchantment from beginning to end. After many hours of joyful worry, clucking over this outfit and that, Jade dressed in a plain, black strapless gown that showed off her clear skin, against which her dark eyes made a teasing drama, counterbalanced by her loose, cascading hair. She was perfect company, naturally poised and dignified and never clingy (which Jack wouldn't have minded so much) or bubbly (which he'd have hated), and he - well, he - he was the perfect gentleman he always knew he could be. With such a Lady on his arm, Jack felt like a Lord, like a million dollars, like James Bond, far more than the shy junior scientist he would be when dawn crept up over Clare's lawns and parapets. The night progressed smoothly on a seamless carpet of stars, and, much as he wanted to, he dared not make any obvious pass at her for fear of bruising that fragile magic, of shattering a perfect state of grace which could, with some careful and restrained management, persist indefinitely. Please don't end, he thought, he implored - please don't let it end.
    Jack dropped her off at the door of her house by car, his ageing and beloved if rust-pocked Peugeot 205 Diesel, whose back seat and trunk were littered with maps and paperwork mixed crazily with mud-caked camping and hiking gear: hardly Cinderella's carriage, but a car all the same, a luxury not permitted undergraduates in Cambridge's crowded medieval streets. They said nothing, neither wanting to be the first to break the spell, and so acknowledge, by the simple vehicle of speech, that even two hours after daybreak, the enchanted night had come to an end at last. But she was all excitement, her eyes the brightest things in the car's interior. That he had not made any advance whatsoever she was well aware, and for that she was grateful. Such a contrast with the boys - boys - she'd so far known, all acquisitive, hot hands, groins filled to bursting with unused testosterone, and no idea of how to cultivate the slow-nurtured romance that grown-up women really liked best -- or even any knowledge that such a thing might exist. Grateful, but not satisfied. She'd long been used to compliments, to being told how lovely she was, and soon learned to disregard all but a few as insincere: Jack was the first real man who'd asked her on a date, and while he had treated her with every old-fashioned courtesy, he had not shown any sign of deeper passion or intention. She strongly suspected, however, that Jack was no cold fish, and that not too far beneath the studied shell was a man as passionate as she could wish, and this suspicion teased and tickled her. As it was, however, the situation as it was could go on forever. If he wouldn't make the first move, then she would.
    As they came to a stop he was pulled up sharp by the first thing she said:
    "I'm so sorry about my name."
    "Your name?" Jack, in truth, had been wondering. He didn't think he was a snob, but he'd often wondered how such a name and such a girl went together - they seemed such ill-assorted company.
    "Well, it's like this. It's short for `Jadis'. My parents - my parents! - they were at Oxford, you know, and had a thing about C. S. Lewis."
    "But Jadis, wasn't she...?"
    "Yes, the Witch. You know, between the Lion and the Wardrobe," she paused - "the baddie!" she laughed. "I suppose my parents were expecting me to be a handful."
    "And did they...?"
    "Well, I had to live up to it. Didn't I?" And with that she reached over and kissed him, calmly, warmly and firmly. Her hair brushed his face and shoulders: as their lips came together, hers parted slightly in a sweet admission, her tongue probed out to meet his, questioning, exploring, in a contrast at once forceful and shy. Her mouth was so soft that Jack could hardly imagine anything could be softer without melting. Women, he concluded, revisiting his early classification with the tiny part of his mind not completely absorbed, were attractive because of their contrasts. Jade was soft and yet decisive, firm and yet submissive. What kind of Wicked Witch would ever cradle up into his arms - anyone's arms - quite like this?
    After a long, long moment they pulled apart. She couldn't invite him in, she teased, as she needed to get herself together before travelling home later that same morning. "Run along now", she giggled - "Or you'll turn into a pumpkin!" But as she rose to get out of the car, Jack brushed against her arm: at this, she sprang suddenly back into the car and his arms for another endless kiss. Jack drifted off home like thistledown, and as he had a late breakfast in his digs - still in his rented tux - he might as well have been floating on air. His landlady (who'd seen this all before, many times) permitted herself a rare smirk.
    "Welcome back, Romeo."
    The summer vacation seemed to drag on, but Jack and Jade met, and met again, and somewhere in a wooded dell in South Devon (where Jack was rooting around for some ancient caves forgotten for a hundred years, for clues about Palaeolithic behaviour), they came together.
    In later life neither could remember it without a fond smile: hiking boots, anoraks and rucksacks are hardly the stuff of romance. But to him she looked even sexier in her practical outdoors wear than she had in her ball-gown. Again, he thought, about contrasts. The harsh practicalities of rain gear against the unfeasible softness of her skin. The solid fabric of her hiking shorts against the filigreed nothingness of her underwear. The crabby roughness of the woolly socks against the long, cool smoothness of the inner surfaces of her thighs as she parted them and wrapped them around his hips. And as he came into her, her pure unselfish yielding stood sharply against her otherwise firm decisiveness. This is a girl, he thought, who always got what she wanted. And what she wanted was him, again and again.
    Life for the next two years was a constant bacchic buzz. It was hard to concentrate on work, but Jade, for all her teasing skittishness, could only be a party girl when her own strict, self-imposed timetable let her - and she had work to do. As her final exams approached, Jack and Jade met increasingly rarely. They avoided the temptation of moving in together, so that each meeting was a jewel in their busy lives, a cache of memories to be treasured, and when recalled, yearned for all the more. Jack continued his field work, criss-crossing the ancient landscape of Britain, but where he had once seen bald crags and meandering valleys purely as they were, his mind now infused each vista with erotic overlays. In the curve of a far hilltop at dawn, drenched in the blue of distance, he traced the swelling form of Jade's left hip, sweeping down to shadowed thighs and belly, as they had once lain together in the half-light of a secret, stolen early morning in her room. The clothing of leafy woods that clung in narrow crevices at the bases of shorn and billowing downland ridges became the warm fuzz between her legs that he had once caressed, as gently as he could manage, before she made a small, uncharacterizable sound, licked his earlobe, and then - oh, then! -gathered him inside her. Every curl of smoke from a village chimney stack became the soft cloud of her hair as she unfastened it, letting it tumble over her face, her shoulders, almost as far as the incurving of her waist: in the glint of sun on water - and even the reflection of light on the lenses of his surveying equipment, he saw her wide eyes, in a perpetual expression of happy surprise. Oh, what a basket case he was. But he had his work, too, and a career to pursue. Who knew where he would have to find work after his doctorate, always assuming he got that far? And who knew where Jade would go? He suppressed the thought that in the nomadic world of academic life, let alone the hectic mayfly existence of undergraduates -- they might be parted, and soon.
    At last - and too quickly -- the summer came when Jade took her final exams. She graduated at the top of her class (of course) and when she came out of the Senate House with the result, she was as flushed and excited as a little girl who'd just been given the Christmas present she'd always wanted. On seeing Jack, she turned from the small gathering of her friends, and, running to him, flung her arms round his neck and - before he had even a moment to whisper a word of congratulation -- rained kisses down on him like a summer storm. But as the rain slowed, it became slower, more leisured and more languid - and when they parted - as Jade, in another charming habit of hers, brushed herself down, making her breasts bounce and recoil ever so slightly - she looked up at him with her owlish eyes as if reappraising him all anew.
    "What is it?" he asked.
    "Well, now that's over, I can help you."

    Chapter 2

    (July 2003)

    The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
    Henry David Thoreau -- Walden

    To be sure, Jack found himself in need of help - and badly. Just how badly he was reluctant to admit to himself. He knew only too well how a blow to one's self confidence in the final stages of a research degree could destroy everything. He'd seen, so many times, how research students started with so much ebullience, only to find, more than two years later and within sight of the dreadful midnight watch they called `writing up', that what they had accumulated actually amounted to very little. Drifts of accumulated data vanished like April snow in the first, glancing light of critical analysis. Worse, that they had spent those years asking the wrong questions to begin with; that however good the data they had gathered, that there was, in sum, no case to be answered -- or, worse still, that they had, in technical language and with much circumlocution, done something that had been worked out already, but in some other way. Or - worst of all -- that they had simply proved, with certainty and without fear of contradiction, that x equals x. So much time wasted. And more than wasted -- those self-abasing, self-denying years when careers are built, and they might, like their school friends, already be in steady jobs with mortgages and some status in life, rather than living like overgrown students in drabness and in debt.
    But Jack was as tough as the roads he'd tramped for years. He was a rock as hard as the millstone grits around his Yorkshire home town, as eternal as the White Cliffs of Dover. He would let nothing shake him. In any case, his problems were not yet terminal, for he could make out patterns in his data - this, the most exciting sensation a scientist can experience, at least in working hours. He was simply at a loss to understand how they could be systematized.
    As a result of his long pilgrimages, he could view a landscape and immediately sense that people had been there, long ago. Jack had gone far beyond looking for traces of buried roads, post-holes, cave hearths and flint débitage: more than anyone alive, he could look at the angle of a hill-slope, or the way a river curved in its course, and tell that these things had been shaped by the hand of man, even without any other sign - and even accounting for the titanic forces of climate change that had shaped Britain over the past million years, in which glaciers had come and gone, scrubbing entire ranges of hills from the map and altering the courses of rivers over their whole lengths. His talent was so passionately internalized that he could no longer look objectively at its products. That these things were so he had no doubt - but he had no way of demonstrating that the slight and subtle clues he saw were not made by natural forces, unaided. And he'd look a right fool if his thesis committee asked how he knew that - say - the layout of the caves in Cheddar Gorge could not possibly have been natural, and he had had no answer ready save that they just looked like that.
    What he needed was some formal way of comparing his intuitions of ancient human presence in one place with those inspired by somewhere else, and then contrasting both of these with what nature would have created, unaided - a system that would corral the patterns thrown up by his gut reaction, to domesticate them, to make them make sense. But quantifying his intuitions? One might as well try to lasso the clouds. Despite much research and earnest questions to statisticians, no ready method existed - it was all too vague -- and he had neither the means nor the ability to derive such a technique himself. But without such a key he could go no further. In his mind, he could see his thesis: he was so desperate that he could almost taste it, but a barrier at once so intangible and yet so impassable stood between him and completion.
    The frustration was doubly agonizing by his certain knowledge that Britain had been populated for far longer and more intensively than anyone had ever believed or guessed - and his total inability to prove it. Were he simply to step up and say, without supporting evidence, that, say, fifty thousand years ago, Neanderthal Man lived in Britain in organized populations numbering in the tens of thousands, he'd be laughed off the stage as surely as if he'd said he'd discovered Atlantis.
    He had this recurring dream in which he and Jade were at a tropical beach. Jade, in a flowing, colourful sundress and a big floppy hat, stayed on the shore, nose in a huge novel, too engrossed to do more than wave carelessly when he announced he was going for a swim. Cut to himself fifty yards out, and despite all his efforts, in the thrall of a slow riptide which, slowly and surely, took him yet further away from land. He shouted to Jade for help but she didn't seem to notice. Perhaps she was beyond earshot? And just before he woke, his last thought was of being almost sure that Jade had taken off her sundress, and was naked but for the hat, but he couldn't be certain, as she was too far away now to make out very clearly, and he got fewer and fewer glimpses of her, sandwiched between a sunhat that had grown as large as a parasol, and what seemed like a self-generating library of books.
    It could be, he admitted finally, that he'd simply have to chuck it all in as an insoluble problem. Roaming around the countryside had been fun, he thought, but perhaps he lacked the talent to put it all together and make it work as a piece of scholarship. But he was loath to admit this to anyone, not to his parents, and especially not Jade - not yet. He wondered if he'd ever have the courage. And so, helplessly, he clung on.
    Jade's news, on the Senate House lawn, came as something of a revelation, the proverbial bolt from the blue - although he could kick himself for not seeing it coming, even though he was lost in his own worries - worries that he'd not yet had the opportunity to share with her. Their most recent mutual absence had lasted five weeks, while Jade studied for her finals, and Jack kept well away, exploring (in desperation, he thought) a new tack, in southern France.
    Long ago, he recalled from some sodden mental archive (now awash with a flood of incipient panic), she had been marked down as doctorate material. Indeed, how could he forget, as he was the first of her supervisors to spot her talent? (And how dare he, come to that?) But everyone knew that getting a doctorate place as a dead certainty, along with the grants to fund it, meant that the student had to excel in her undergraduate studies beyond almost all measure - to go right off the chart of the ordinary, and launch into new critical territory. And this is what Jade was now trying to get through to him, here on the Senate House lawn, with her expressive lips, the warmth of her hands under his jacket, on his shoulder blades, the cloud of hair brushing his cheeks and chin, the insistent press of her breasts against his ribs. She had graduated with sufficient honours that a doctorate course was hers, whenever she wanted it - and, because it was the starriest starred-first-class degree that anyone had seen for years, she could, pretty much, pick and choose her course -- and her supervisor.
    "I choose you, Jack," she said in a small voice, almost cracked, her eyes softening almost to tears, and puzzled by his momentary stunned shock, his distraction. "Darling Jack, I choose you. But -" she said, regaining (yet another of her charming quirks) a somewhat starchy and old-fashioned composure, as if auditioning for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, "they said you'd have to get your degree first. And a fellowship."
    It would be wrong to say, for Jack, that the clouds parted and the Sun shone. More, that Jade had become the persistent, never-to-be-deterred trickle of water that eventually erodes a secret cavern of breathtaking beauty beneath ragged mountains otherwise impervious to physical assault. But he felt himself smiling, and said something which, for all the intensity of their togetherness, for all its rightness, he'd carefully avoided saying for two years, for if he'd said it out loud, he reasoned, he'd bring the joyous youth of their relationship to a close:
    "I do so love you, Snow Queen." Jade buried her face into the expanse of his chest, and, silently - for she had never done so before - started to cry.
    Hand in hand, they crossed King's Parade and found a perch in a coffee shop, amid the jostling crowds of excited students. Jack was agog with surprise at what Jade now told him. Only her animated smile, the light through the window glancing from her flushed cheeks, her still-glistening eyes, kept him from the remorseful certainty that even with her evident acuity, of which he'd had the first and most intimate knowledge, he had still underestimated her.
    "A little bird tells me -" she began. "Or, actually, two little birds, that you've got stuck."
    He hung his head. Like a schoolboy caught thieving apples. She peered forward, looking up at his face:
    "Don't be so down. One of those little birds is me, remember? Even when we've been, you know - in bed -- you've been miles away."
    "Have I?" He tried to smile, and succeeded, although inside he now felt entirely wretched. This was, after all, her day, not his, and he was spoiling it, and what made it worse, she didn't seem to mind at all.
    "And when I saw you off to France, you looked like leave had been cancelled and you were bound for the Western Front."
    "That bad, eh?" His smile spread. "Well, I did miss you, Snow Queen."
    "And I missed you, too." For all those weeks, the hours spent revising, she had to keep working as fast and as hard as possible to stave off the ghastly ache that scraped away at her insides every time she thought about him - his smile, as if laughing at some long-remembered joke, his lovingly soft grey eyes, his lightly freckled shoulders. He called her his Snow Queen, but to her he was Aslan, the Lion - had he only known it: but she had never told him, for she didn't think she would ever be able to cram the fiery fluster of feelings that assailed her, whenever she thought of Jack, into the confines of language. He had become the Rock on which she had built - what? Herself! She had once been so sure of everything, that she knew what she wanted in life and how to achieve it. But now she could see that she had been nothing but a small child playing among the feet of giants, her assurance a product of her ignorance that the towering limbs all around her even existed. Jack didn't say very much, but what he said was always the right thing to say, and at least he was always there. Without him she was nothing.
    With the books, papers and printouts piled on her desk at three o'clock in the morning, when she'd had to take a break, only herculean effort could keep her away from imagining herself safely encircled in his warm compass; and (oh, and!) how when he was inside her, he was like a great oak beam wrapped in velvet, but so gentle, filling her with such warmth - and how, when she looked up from her dream, all was bare and monochromatic; she was pale, lost and utterly hollow, a discarded husk; and the long weeks stretched far ahead of her. But that was all over now, in the past, and she would say nothing of it to Jack. She leaned further across the small table, her hair haloed by the light through the café window, took both his hands in hers and kissed them very softly, as if she'd dusted them with goose down.
    "Well, you're back now. And here's the deal."
    She explained as they walked down King's Parade and did a circuit around the Backs. While he was away, she said, she'd run into Professor McLennane, a potential doctorate supervisor - and Jack's present one -- in the departmental coffee room, who'd said - well not actually said, but suggested, you know, as it wasn't really any of her business - that Jack had a lot of data, perhaps more than he could cope with, especially as he now should be calling a halt and writing it all up. This going off to France was all very well, but why a new direction now? Jade had explained that Jack - very considerately, she thought -- wanted to keep well out of her way while she was working towards her own finals, and Professor McLennane knew about their domestic situation, you know, which everyone in the department had probably known about for the past couple of years...
    Jack could well imagine the electricity of this exchange, and his heart went out to Jade for playing with fire, all for his benefit. Roger Sutherland McLennane was a bluff, hard-working scientist whose lust for life regularly spilled over into the thickets of impropriety. A smart and still dashingly handsome man who'd just turned sixty, he was the editor of the leading scholarly journal in its field; had papers in Nature more often than most people changed their socks; a wonderful, tolerant (and very rich) wife who had borne him six children; and a fondness of fast, expensive cars, which he would regularly crash. If that weren't enough, he had at least two mistresses - at least, these were the ones whose existence was common knowledge - and his extended periods in the field allowed free expression for his insatiable penchant for deflowering female research students. But if he weren't in the field and had worked his way through all the available and willing victims (and these were surprisingly many, as McLennane was generally regarded as a bit of a dish) he'd always make out with a nurse.
    "Roger by name - and Roger by nature", ran the departmental gossip.
    ]"McLennane's ability as a scientist is very great" one senior don remarked to another at High Table, "exceeded only by his capacity as a nurse-shagger."
    Anyhow, Jade said, as they walked, her eyes focussed inquisitively in the middle distance, McLennane had kind of, you know, leaned over towards her. She remembered, suppressing a giggle, how he had peered down the front of her blouse (which she had left just slightly unbuttoned in case of this very eventuality) - and suggested - confidentially, if you don't mind -- that with her fine analytical brain, and - ahem - other attributes - she might have a look at Jack's data for him? Perhaps give the old man a hand, if he weren't too stubborn to accept it, that is, Jack being something of a lone wolf? Proud man, you know, Corstorphine. But he could be an excellent mentor - of course, you know that, what? -- if he just pulled himself together, get the damned thing out of the way and claim the college fellowship he deserved. He's doing something genuinely new - so rare in this game, don't you know - way beyond most of the rest of us. He Is The Future! And so, my dear girl, are you, by all accounts (shouldn't really be telling you all this, what? Most unethical). Perhaps you could see your way to giving him some - ah - inspiration? Be his muse?
    At this point Jade did that thing with her hair, flashed McLennane her loveliest smile, made her excuses and left, leaving Cambridge's most notorious philanderer a sweet glimpse of heartbreakingly smooth, creamy thigh and the rueful prospect that some conquests would forever remain in the realms of the imagination. Lucky old Corstophine, that's all he could say. But he really hoped the young Markham could help, because his charge was deeply, genuinely -- and possibly intractably -- up shit creek. McLennane honestly believed that Jack was on to something truly new, but he'd exhausted all his own considerable resources trying to help him. Yet McLennane, like Jack, trusted his hunches. Perhaps a younger and nimbler mind could shine a light. His instincts told him that Jade, as well as being a prick-teaser (he thought, with a sigh) had - if her form were anything to go by -- the finest mind ever to be found atop a pair of pins as gorgeous as those. In truth, if MacLennane were forced into a corner, he'd be prepared to admit that this winsome filly (as he'd put it) was their final hope. He had to back her, because she was their last throw.
    As they walked across Clare Bridge their minds filled with reminiscence; they drew closer to each other, stopped and looked at the view: the river as it carried the punting, laughing tourists and students beneath them, like so many pooh-sticks. Jade was entirely aware of the delicacy of the situation: she knew that Jack was exhausted, boxed in, but not as yet sure how or why, and last thing she wanted to do was bruise his pride.
    "Darling Jack, you don't have to say yes..." She began to hesitate, to break up, the unwonted tears were again so close: "... and I won't blame you if you don't - but ..."
    Jack turned and pulled her into his arms, comforting her, stroking her hair as she buried her face into his shirt. Any lesser man, or a man less in love, would have felt stung by what could be seen as a betrayal of trust. But Jack realized (not for the first time) that McLennane was not only a sound judge of character, but would not have suggested such a crazy scheme if he didn't think that he, Jack, could pull it off - and that Jade was the key. How funny it was that a man such McLennane, with all the careless notches on his bedpost, believed at root in the power of love to conquer all adversity. And McLennane had undoubtedly realized that whereas Jack could smell data and connections that eluded all others, then Jade had a quite startling knack for seeing right through the data and grasping the point. Even way back, when she'd sat in Jack's supervisions, she'd solved every problem long before any other student had even begun to organize their ideas, and had come to conclusions which sometimes seemed orthogonal to the evidence, but which, on reflection, usually turned out to be right. And hadn't it been McLennane, back then, who'd advised Jack never to take his eyes off this promising student, lest she leave him standing?
    On the bridge, Jack looked down at this girl in his arms, this extraordinary girl who had given away her moment of triumph to the still-untested and possibly lost cause of helping him complete his work. Now, were one to be objective, as scientists are supposed to be, the whole idea was ridiculous. Here was McLennane - a man whose academic judgment had otherwise never been known to err, despite his recklessness with the feelings of others - putting all his chips on the slim shoulders of a girl who, while her abilities were not in question, was just twenty years old; who had been a postgraduate for less than an hour; and whom he expected to derive some kind of magic formula that all the statisticians Jack consulted were convinced did not exist. Were he a cynic, he'd simply admit that he had nothing to lose.
    But Jack was no cynic: he was a man in love. He longed to say `yes', but could he expose Jade to the chasm of disappointment that was widening between his feet, and risk her career, too? She could - she should - find some safer pair of hands. But in Jade's eyes he saw, beneath the sheen of softness, an edge of fire-hardened flint that could both cut flesh and set a forest in flames. Jade wasn't just some fresh graduate, she was his girl, and he knew what she was capable of. For him to deny her offer of help would be to demean her - and, by extension, him.
    In the end, their fates were bound together, whatever they did - of that he was now absolutely certain.
    "Look up at me," he asked, with determined evenness. His grey eyes, thoughtful with unguessable thoughts, met her broad hazel-brown ones, yearning for resolution, acceptance, absolution. "We're in this together, Snow Queen. Now - what's the question?" His lips broadened into a smile; her eyes sparkled with relief. They kissed, and as they parted, Jack felt a great weight of worry slide quietly from his shoulders and slink into the river. "But I do have one condition, Your Majesty."
    "You have only to name it!" she laughed, mock-serious, her apprehension vanished like smoke, her mood once again of uncrushable joy.
    He knelt down, and heedless of the crowds on the bridge, took her hands and said quite loudly:
    "Jadis -- Snow Queen -- will you marry me?" Most of the passers-by did not notice. But many stopped and smiled, a few applauded; and there were a few wolf-whistles. Jade pulled him up from the ground, not knowing where to look, wondering whether she'd simply fall apart with joy, her tears now quite open and full. The first thing she thought as she composed herself was how, if she was the decisive one, had it been he who had first confessed his love; he who had proposed, hardly an hour later, like one thundering wave after another? Perhaps there was something to be said for intuition, for sensing the moment - especially here, the scene of their first date, just twenty-four months and several geological ages ago. As it was, she was far behind. She had never told him how much he was her anchor. Like him, she had been reluctant to declare her love for fear of spoiling the bloom on a flower that might yet fade.
    She decided right there and then to make it up to him, that afternoon. And evening. And all night. And very early the next morning, as they lay together in her college room, wedged into a single bed, drowsy in a billow of sheets, she said, in a tiny whisper - not entirely sure if he was awake -
    "I love you too, you silly old Lion - so very much, so much it scares me, it hurts. Darling Jack -- hold me, please." But what she did not say was how, in that moment of confession, her mind crested a ridge of hills, and rather than seeing the expected summit, encompassed an unknown vista of opportunity - and of terror. He stirred, and still more than half asleep, pulled her into his embrace and muttered, just on the edge of hearing:
    "I'll always be here for you, Snow Queen. Always".

    Chapter 3

    (October 2004)

    No definition had spoken of the landscape-gardener as of the poet; yet it seemed to my friend that the creation of the landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Edgar Allan Poe - The Domain of Arnheim

    "Item: we have a Lion. We have a Witch. And now -- we have a Wardrobe!" announced Jade, flushed and breathless, after they'd heaved the second-hand hulk into the bedroom of the flat they'd rented just after she graduated.
    "But will we still get to Narnia?" said Jack.
    "That, Darling Jack, has yet to be determined," she replied, the steel of her eyes flashing between loose strands of hair.
    It was a one-bedroom Victorian garden flat in Chesterton, which they were paying for from a year's extension of Jack's doctorate grant, extra supervisions, and a few odd research jobs that Jade was doing for McLennane (who'd taken a proprietorial interest in both of them) on the pretext of her studying for a Masters while Jack finished his thesis - a prospect that seemed almost in his grasp, but forever just beyond his reach. The flat was dark and grubby, but it was sound and tolerably dry; the central heating worked at least some of the time; and a pot of paint on a summer Sunday afternoon always works wonders, even were one not to be distracted by trying to paint each other instead of the kitchen ceiling. In any case, Jack - who was never more content than when sleeping rough under a hedge - was pleased to have a base where he could think and work in peace and quiet, and where he and Jade could at least be together without prying landladies or college domestics.
    It also had the loveliest garden: hardly twenty feet by twelve, but surrounded entirely by a high wall, and, being north-east facing, made an evening sun-trap of the high, back wall. Jade rediscovered a fondness for gardening that she thought she'd left behind on her Dad's allotment when, as a little girl, she'd love to grow radishes and sunflowers and pick gooseberries. By the following summer it was a fragrant haven for herbs and cottage-garden flowers. On sunny days, Jack took his supervisions in the garden. He always felt happiest outside. He was, he claimed to a visiting French colleague, the last of the red-hot Palaeolithic lovers, at which Jade flushed and hid behind her curtain of hair.
    At the bottom of the garden was a knee-high raised bed that ran its entire width, restrained by a wall of reclaimed bricks, and in which some unidentifiable species of ornamental acacia grew over an unkempt understory of broom, rosemary and lavender. You could crawl right inside, under the bushes, and make a kind of nest on a carpet of herbs and the crusts of dead leaves, where nobody could find you. It baked in the Sun during the day, unleashing a lush torrent of fragrance, and even after dark, the old brick wall behind would radiate the accumulated heat well into the early hours -- warmth that the bushes would then trap, creating an almost Mediterranean microclimate . It was in the Nest (it was now capitalized), much more than in their first, new double bed, that they made love.
    On late summer evenings Jade and Jack would burrow into the Nest wearing little more than a bottle of wine, two glasses and a smile, and would not emerge until morning - their own private Eden. Jack remembered one chilly dawn awaking in the Nest to find them both slick with dew. A spider had spun drag lines across Jade's pale body, trapping drops of moisture that made a spangled net for the twining, leaf-adorned strands of her hair. Each of her long, dark lashes was crowned with a tiny pearl, just as if she were a sleeping fairy queen. For all that he was stiff, wet and blue with cold, Jack remembered it as a moment when his heart sang.
    And as for supervisions, ever since his best student had become his fiancée, he'd seen very few sparks of talent, or even (it has to be said) of much intelligence. One exception was a dashing and almost unbearably cocky young first-year called Avi Malkeinu, who was Israeli and knew all about Mount Carmel, famous for its honeycomb of caves rich in Neanderthal and modern human remains. Malkeinu had poked around them, boy and man, civilian and soldier, and had some outrageous ideas about the extent and depth of human and Neanderthal occupation in his country - outrageous to all except Jack, who learned as least as much from Malkeinu as Malkeinu did from him.
    Malkeinu got in very well with Jade, and at first Jack was worried. He needn't have been - Jade loved to flirt, but it was never, ever serious. In any case, Malkeinu, for all his affected medallion-man flash and fondness for offensively smelly after-shave, had been raised on an old-fashioned kibbutz where men and women grew up all together in a brash, matter-of-fact way, with none of the mysteries that complicated adolescence elsewhere. Malkeinu would have loved to have seen Jade without her clothes on - sure! What real man wouldn't? She was a babe! But he'd seen lots of beautiful women without their clothes on, quite often several at once, and he earnestly hoped to see lots more. The world was wide, a big new game made for his pleasure. There were no sliding panels about Malkeinu - you just took him as you found him.
    Which is why Jack was perturbed by a visit to his office by two rather shifty-looking characters claiming to represent some student organization or another, who advised him that he shouldn't be teaching Malkeinu as he'd served in the Israeli Defence Forces and was, no doubt, an Evil Agent of Zionist Oppression. Jack did something that he almost never did - get angry. Alarmingly, consumingly angry, so that he shed the shy, quiet academic that he tended to be in Cambridge, and became the wiry, weather-beaten, mad-eyed and rather piratical ranger that he was in the field. He listened quietly to what his visitors had to say, and then, still without meeting their gaze, invited them to go fuck themselves. When they began to remonstrate, he rose from his chair, as if, all of a sudden, he really had become Aslan, the avenger. "Listen, I thought I told you to fuck off," he said, as calmly as his sternly suppressed violence would allow, finally turning his scorchingly unflinching gaze upon them: "and if I see either of you again - or if you harass my friends - I'll fucking rip your fucking bastard heads off and stick them on poles. Understand? Now piss off." He had to say nothing further: in the ferocity of his stare, the grimness of his attitude, the two took flight and never came back.
    For ten minutes Jack remained his chair, his heart racing, his body shaking uncontrollably. He didn't think he had it in him: he'd normally do anything to avoid conflict, and immediately began to worry that there might be repercussions. But what began to dominate his mind, half an hour later, as he walked home through the searing streets -- it was already mid-October and term was in full swing, but the Indian summer had been as hot as a furnace, gathering itself for a final burst -- and seething further with every step, was that he'd heard spiteful rubbish like that before, from people in his own department, especially the social anthropologists: and those archaeologists who read the past not as it was, but through the lenses of current political preoccupation - and yet had the gall to call themselves `scientists'. Neo-archaeologists, processual archaeologists, feminist archaeologists, Marxist archaeologists, post-fucking-processual archaeologists, for God's sake, not to mention those idiots, quite often obscenely obese women from Berkeley or Pasadena, who climbed to the top of tells, stripped off and jiggled their leviathantine tits about for the benefit of some right-on Mother Goddess - as if (and this was the part he found really offensive) as if this charade had anything whatsoever to do with what prehistoric people actually believed or did! And there were people in his department who actually took that stuff seriously - the same people who'd cheerfully scorn a kitsch Hawai'ian hotel luau as having as much connection with authentic Polynesian culture as Mickey Mouse had with Mus musculus, simply because it was a product of capitalist colonialism. Prehistory was forged on the ground, not by political posturing, and it was people like Malkeinu - open-minded people, people only interested in acute observation - who had the best chance of finding out what it was, without prejudice. And they were damning him - because of his origins and national obligations? What utter, dismal, hypocritical crap. No wonder, Jack thought, that he'd spent so much time in the field, away from such pseudery.
    But as he approached Chesterton, and began to calm down, he realized that he was that close to being a pseud himself. Processual-and-whatever archaeology had, at least, been forged in the field as much as his own landscape-based approach, as ways and means to get to grips with patterns seen in data - patterns caused by the interaction of man and nature. But as yet he still had no way of interpreting the patterns he saw. He had to find something soon. Had to. To vindicate himself - and people like Avi Malkeinu.
    Jade, too, had had a rotten day, running errands for McLennane that meant scurrying to and from the University Library for books that didn't exist, when she was quite sure that they did; or if they did exist, were on shelves on the other side of the building; for papers which she wasn't allowed to see, even though she'd phoned ahead and received cast-iron assurances that they would be made available. It didn't help that the library was as hot as an oven, and that she was getting a headache. As she was sure she wasn't due for a period, this suggested that the oppressive weather had built up to its stifling worst before an imminent break - and not before time. In fact, when she paused to count days, she'd had her period about a week and a half before. This probably explained why, right now, she was as randy as a goat, which only added to her feeling of general dissatisfaction. It was about time, she thought, that Jack made some headway with his doctorate, because only then could she get serious about her own.
    She arrived home moments after Jack, determined to make some progress after a hot summer in which very little seemed to have been achieved. As she kicked off her sandals she saw his hiking boots and socks cast off in the hall, still warm; his bag on the kitchen table, papers pouring from it like the innards of a partially eviscerated dogfish. She found him where she knew he would be, in the Nest.
    "Wine?" he offered, barefoot, holding out a full glass of off-licence Shiraz Cab as she sat down next to him on the wall of the raised bed, beneath the lavender and rosemary, fragrant after this unseasonably scorching day.
    "Nicest thing anyone's said to me all day," she replied, taking a generous swig. "Correction," she noted, looking up, her eyes sharp, her lips stained with red, a rivulet running down her chin. "I'm sure you said something even nicer to me this morning."
    "I did...?" His lovely, unforced, unfocussed smile. Whatever clouds had gathered over him were beginning to dissipate. Responding, she warmed to him and snuggled up closer, sitting on the ledge between his legs, leaning back against his chest, completely enfolded by his arms.
    "Yes, you silly old Lion: you said" - she began to laugh - you said that tonight we really must have a brainstorm --"
    "Frankly, Snow Queen, I'd rather pour you some more wine ...", which he did. Then he put down the bottle and stroked her unfastening hair.
    "...and, you said that after the brainstorm, that I really needed a thorough seeing-to."
    "I said that? Doesn't sound like me. Are you sure that was me?" - he ran his fingers down her throat, unbuttoned her blouse, and let his hands steal lightly over her breasts, his fingertips teasing her tightening nipples through the fabric of her bra.
    "Yes, of course it was you," - her laugh was as warm as the wine as she reached her arms above her and pulled his face down to hers.
    "Nope. Can't have been me," he said. "Now, if it were me, I'd have said you needed a good seeing-to before the brainstorm. Nothing like a good seeing-to, you know, for clearing the brain".
    "Well, as it is you, and that's your view, Professor," she said, "why don't we...?"
    But before they could say or do anything else, the clouds broke with a deafening roar, and within seconds they were as drenched as if God had emptied his bathwater on their garden.
    "Aha, Professor!" she exclaimed, "the rainstorm that comes before the brainstorm!"
    "For that dreadful joke, Snow Queen, you really do deserve a good seeing to."
    "I do so agree, Professor," she said: it was the last thing either of them said for a long time.
    As they sat in the warm rain on the edge of the raised flower bed, her head under his chin, he ruffled her damp hair while continuing to unbutton her, peeling off her wet blouse and unfastening her bra, while she luxuriated in his love, his minute attention. She shimmied out of her long skirt and underwear, her feet raising splashy gouts on the lawn, and sat back. The rain coursed over their bodies: his hands slowly explored her breasts, her stiffly puckered, surprisingly dark nipples, her belly (shipping water in her navel), her arms, her upraised throat. She took his right hand in hers (he had a mental picture of a female saint holding a lily) and after kissing his fingertips very gently, placed them between her parted thighs. The weight of the immense drops of rainwater splashing on his fingers contrasted with the steadily radiant, tropical heat from between her cool, rain-washed legs.
    She rose, turned, in naked loveliness as if she were a dancing sprite in the dawn of the world, rain splashing and glancing and making sparks in all directions as it ricocheted from her glistening body, her hair swinging in lazy streamers over her face and breasts -- put one finger on his lips while she unzipped his fly. His cock stood up immediately, and while he was still perched on the edge of the raised bed, she bent down, kissed it, took it in her mouth, licked him, the ends of her heavy hair brushing yet lightly against his loins. Then she arose in languorous slowness and straddled him, gripping his hips with her firm, broad thighs, feeling him deeply, smoothly and hot within her, rocking back and forth, as he cupped her behind with one hand, and with the other, traced the rivulets arcing down the valley of her spine. As they moved, they kissed again, their lips meeting and parting, meeting and parting through the rain curtain, in a butterfly dance. After a minute or two he rose, and, with her legs still wrapped around his waist, picked her up, turned, and - sliding out of her - placed her inside the Nest on a deep carpet of leaves still dry and warm, the foliage above protecting it from the worst of the downpour. She lay there, almost buried in leaves, limbs spread, eyes burning in a soft glow as he shucked off his trousers and underpants.
    But before he could scramble into the Nest and take her again, she laughed skittishly and flipped over on to her knees and elbows, thrusting her leaf-strewn backside at him like a cat on heat, waving it from side to side like a flag, as if she had a tail. Although momentarily taken aback - this was a somewhat new direction for their sexual repertoire - he moved in towards her, feeling the irresistible, cool softness of the backs of her thighs against his groin, her swollen, pitted warmth between. He stroked the inviting curves of her hips, brushing the leaves away; traced the dips of her lower back, moving his hands forward, holding her waist before sliding them over her shoulders, massaging these as she moved back and forth, moaning; then weighed the ripe, hanging fruits of her breasts with their velvety-hard tips, and then, moving his hands back once more, parting her buttocks just slightly, feeling her soft and fuzzy wetness with his fingertips before clasping her waist with both hands and sliding into her as deeply and as fully as he could - and with such sudden and unexpected ferocity that he lifted her knees, for an instant, clear of the ground.
    Waves of electric shock coursed through her as he pounded into her; that she could not see him, could not feel his arms wrapped around her, could not kiss him - in fact, that she was completely passive -- was an alien and slightly frightening sensation. Even though she'd started it, she was not sure she liked it - this anonymous sex, this seeing-to - without the comfort of his face. But she needed him, deeply and with a savage, inhuman craving. His love was lovely, but needs must: she was a creature of decision, and she had decided that what she wanted most of all, right now, was to be fucked: thoroughly, completely, mechanically and forcefully, to have done, and bring this never-ending business with Jack's thesis to a head. She could tell from the way that Jack was throwing himself into her with such explosive violence that something had irked him, too - perhaps even stung him into a kind of remorse that demanded action, some kind of closure. But even after all that, she was beginning to experience the first waves of a slow burn which, if he kept up this relentless, kinetic bombardment - this fucking -- would lead to her own longed-for release. She forgot about the thesis, about the inaction, about her own academic holding pattern, concentrating on her love, her Jack, battering inside her, and when at length he came, in a vast and thunderous spasm, searing her insides with a surging tide that felt like it filled every crevice of her body and being, it was like - well, it was like being wrapped up in a hot cashmere blanket from the inside out. In other words, it had been her loving Jack, all along. With his last, sharp gasps she found herself panting for breath, shaking from head to toe, her soul dissolved, her body spent, collapsing on the bed of leaves, and as she did so, she felt him soften and draw out of her, a sensation both unbearably joyous and excruciatingly painful, all mixed together.
    They lay in each others' arms, exhausted and covered by wet leaves, him in a sodden shirt, her completely naked, saying nothing - their sex had been beyond the experience of either of them. They were both filled with a buzz and a flood of rapture, but in truth slightly embarrassed and awed by the animality of it all. He wrapped her in his arms, and, as the storm passed overhead, she felt herself doze slightly. It was gloaming dusk when she woke, her own Jack - not that animal -- stroking her hair:
    "Come on, Snow Queen," he said, "Time for that brainstorm".
    She could hardly meet his eyes as they made the few steps to the kitchen door and went inside. He made a big bowl of pasta (they were now very hungry indeed) while she showered - she felt she needed it. As the well-behaved and domesticated shower jets coursed over her body, replacing the screaming wildness of the rain, warming and absolving her, and sending the last of the leaves and dirt down the drain, she wondered how it was that sex could ever be separated from love. Men could do that, for sure (a quick chat with Malkeinu - or McLennane - was proof of that) but what about women who did that kind of thing for a living, servicing - fucking -- one faceless man after another as casually as any business transaction? She guessed that one could get used to anything in time, but she found it puzzling, alienating. And besides that, what with the intemperate violence of their sex, the extreme depths to which Jack had penetrated her, she felt sore and bruised, and perhaps even a little ill-used. She did not love Jack any the less - on dark days she felt that if he'd died, she'd simply snuff out of existence, like a candle flame - but this was a stern side of Jack she'd never seen. Somehow, perversely, this made her love him more - and that, she could not yet explain.
    After a supper during which they had hardly spoken they sat on either side of the kitchen table with Jack's papers, in an atmosphere of brittle nervousness. Their clothes, trashed, were shoved into the corner, waiting for a trip to the launderette. Jack had put on a long, white bathrobe (`Property of the Fairbanks Marriott') over faded grey tracksuit bottoms. Jade, her hair scraped back severely and tied in a long plait, wore nothing but a shapeless purple jersey so vast that it came down below her knees, its sleeves so long that she'd had to roll them in great puffs wedged above her elbows. She felt far too sore and bow-legged to wear anything underneath. But for all this informality their conversation was as stilted and as starchy as a job interview going badly, when both parties find nothing to say to fill the yawning pauses. As they discussed how to organize Jack's data, Jack longed to come round to her side of the table, but felt that she'd rebuff him. Jade, for her part, wanted his arms, his touch, and most of all that he should wrap her up like a baby, like a Christmas parcel and - well - to make everything all right. But each was too scared to move. And in any case, they had a job to do first.
    And so they bounced ideas to one another like the sexless talking heads that scientists are supposed to be: Jack, with his clear grey eyes explaining his intuitions, Jade with her hard hazels dissecting them with a cold, insectoid logic, shuffling them, probing them, parrying, throwing them back. Their language was framed in the cool tones of null hypotheses, falsifiability and significance levels, of distribution-free nonparametric tests; of circularity, of particularity and applicability. It seemed to Jade that the tables had been turned. She had become the teacher, he the pupil. Jack felt the same, and with that, the same kind of relief he'd felt when he'd asked her to marry him, of responsibility shared, of no longer being alone.
    But what neither quite realized was that their dispassionate discourse was turning into a loving exchange. As they came to see a shared picture of what Jack's course of action should be, their spoken sentences grew shorter as each one started was completed by the other. Cold eyes once again grew more animated, hands waved. Jade, still talking, rose to put the kettle on; Jack, to finish the drying up. They stood next to each other, at the sink, in their baggy clothes, arguing with force - but no animosity - over the details of what was beginning, almost, to look like an emerging strategy. A part of Jack that had detached from the argument looked face on at Jade in pure wonderment. To be sure, Jade was - how did Avi put it? - a babe - but more than that, she was his love, inseparable, and more than that, his colleague. He'd had enough hints - from McLennane, most of all - but with Jade to sculpt real shapes from the foggy nuances that made up his work, they'd be unbeatable, forever. But Jade was distracted, in full flow - about metadata, integration and whatnot - that he daren't stop her and just tell her - tell her - that he loved her. He didn't want to spoil it: even to touch her, to brush past her by accident, might break the flow of her argument. Even under that wonderfully hideous sack she loved to wear around the house, he could tell she was as taut as a string. She had to work it out of her system, for both of them.
    But then, it happened. Tea over, drying-up done, piles of notes made, they both rose at once in the tiny kitchen and - zap! - Jack's right wrist made a glancing contact with one dangling, purple sleeve, and - zing! - she was in his arms again, face buried once more in his chest, tears flowing uncontrollably. "Do you think you can take it from here?" she asked, looking up at him, red-nosed and eyelids full of water, racked with shuddering sobs, as if she'd had some intellectual orgasm. It had all been building up inside her for weeks - months - the way through the woods, until the tension had become insupportable.
    Later, when she'd calmed down, and Jack had tucked her up in bed, folding himself in behind her with one arm sleepily fingering loose strands of her hair, the other folded across her belly, she thought that perhaps a thorough fucking was all that she'd needed to break the deadlock. `Nothing like a good seeing-to, you know, for clearing the brain', Jack had said - she smiled at the thought.
    But a good seeing-to was good for other things, too. For when Jack's thesis was complete, after two months of sixteen-hour days; after more argument, more computer simulations, more anxiety, more sleepless nights, more testing, more checking and double-checking, and papers in unruly drifts all over the house, Jade discovered something else.
    She was pregnant.

    Chapter 4

    (December 2004)

    With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.
    Charles Dickens - Hard Times

    "It was that last trip to France that clinched it ... " Jack had started to explain, uncertainly, to the thesis committee gathered in a lecture room whose heating had been turned off for the winter. It was a dank, dismal day in December and the undergraduates had left town, leaving in their place an arctic chill that enveloped everything in a sullen lassitude. The committee was, clearly, yet to be convinced by his case. He looked to McLennane - as his supervisor, one half of the committee -- for an encouraging sign, a welcoming smile, but his patron averted his gaze: there was a lot at stake for him, too.
    He missed Jade - he missed her terribly, on this day, of all days - but this morning, before he'd left, she had seemed so wound up tight with some matter so internalized that she refused to tell him what it was. But he'd looked so miserable as he turned to leave that she relented, ran towards him and embraced him from behind:
    "I love you, so much, you silly old lion," she had said: "I know you can do it. Now, go and show them what you're made of." He turned to hug her, but said nothing, except, too quietly for anyone to hear but himself -
    "Snow Queen".
    And then he left, walking into town through the cheerless fog.
    In truth, he was worried. The remorseless tension in these final weeks before his thesis defence had taken its toll on both of them. Whereas before he'd been lean and sinewy, now he looked gaunt, and thin. She'd seemed distracted, perturbed, and whereas their lovemaking had always been frequent and rapturous, it had lately petered out to little more than a static, supine embrace. He felt, somehow, that he'd committed some offence, done some wrong, and that - cruelly -- she wouldn't tell him what it was, so he could at least apologise. Their infrequent discussions about marriage, always meant to be put off until after he'd gained that mythical, ever-receding fellowship, had now ceased completely. So what was wrong? No, she wasn't ill, she insisted, turning her eyes away from his questioning face. Yes, she still loved him. Yes, she'd still love him even if he didn't win his doctorate - silly question!
    But her hair seemed, to him, to give the lie to all this - this façade. Her hair was the key to her mood. When she was happy, she would wear it loose, so she could play with it, tease with it, flirt with it. Even if she tied it up, some of it invariably came loose in a mild disarray that always turned him on, her dark eyes flashing like a come-on beneath the wayward strands. And until now, she'd always been happy. But now her dark eyes were dull, from nameless preoccupation or suppressed anger, he couldn't tell: and her hair was tamed, more often than not, into a plait of Presbyterian severity, with no prospect of idle straying.
    As he plodded on, the feet in his mind walked backwards to see if he could work out where things had gone wrong - if indeed they had. He knew he'd taken far too long to get down and write his thesis, trying Jade's patience. And then - yes, that was it - that evening in October, when they'd sat down together and had had the famous brainstorm - perhaps she'd felt that she'd had to do all the work, when it was, after all, his thesis to defend, and his prevarication had meant that her own prospects were forever on hold.
    And - oh, yes -- what happened before the brainstorm. That was it, too. He loved her beyond any words, but as the autumn lengthened and she seemed to recede, almost imperceptibly slowly, it dawned on him that she might have been scared, repelled -disgusted even - by the unexpected and uncharacteristic violence of their sex on that weird, overheated night when the weather finally broke, the night when they'd both been wound up like coiled snakes, ready to strike. If that was the case, then, frankly, he should just die of shame right here. He traced his travels further backwards from that evening in the Nest, through the hot afternoon, to the argument he'd had with those students who'd tried to intimidate him about Avi. And - oh, sweet Christ - he'd taken it all out on her, his one support, the one person most likely to put up with him, lovingly and without complaint. After they'd had the brainstorm, and when, in the days and weeks following had sat down to work furiously at the thesis, they'd never discussed it, the reason why he'd been so very angry - because they were just too, frantically, busy. Not that this would offer any excuse for his behaviour - and she had still brainstormed the thesis into being, gave it birth, gave it life, nursed it to maturity - it was her. Her! And even this morning, she still swore she loved him. Him! So now he thought, in dejection utterly foreign to his usually calm and level nature, that the great gamble had failed. He really didn't deserve this thesis, and he certainly didn't deserve Jade, whose life he'd now so royally screwed up. By the time he got to the department, his mind was clothed in a fog as thick as the one that laced the streets in white, funereal shrouds. Go ahead, make my day. In the end he was just too tired: too tired to panic, too tired to care.
    "Mr Corstorphine - Mr Corstorphine?" This from the tiny but intimidating figure of Professor Ernestine Yanga, the external examiner and the other half of the committee, who, McLennane had said, was famous for saying almost nothing during thesis examinations until near the end, when she'd skewer hapless candidates with the one question they'd been praying nobody would ask. Ah, thought Jack, we must be near the end, then, and this must be the preamble to the famous Difficult Question that McLennane had warned him about. Best to get it over with, and get out. So far, the examination had flowed glutinously past him like a river of sludge making its viscid way down to a black and putrid sea: he'd supplied all the answers so mechanically, that once he'd uttered a word he'd immediately forgotten about it.
    "Mr Corstorphine - you were telling us about your trip to France?"
    "Yes - of course - I'm sorry. As you've read in my thesis, I had accumulated a great deal of data about hominid influence on geomorphology in Britain. But it was very hard to make anything of it. Thanks to some new methods developed in conjunction with a fellow student..."
    "Yes, I see that this is acknowledged. A Miss Markham, isn't it? She has a rare talent."
    Jack said nothing: his lips were pursed together in a thin line of remorse, and despite himself, he could feel tears starting to prick the corners of his eyes.
    "Please continue, Mr Corstorphine..."
    "Yes, sorry ... I had long suspected the existence of a gradient of human influence on the landscape in England, consistent over the past hundred thousand years at least, in an increasing trend from the northwest - where it is hardly significant according to the variants of the nonparametric tests I've used - to the southeast, where it stands out quite strongly from natural influence, but still in places not significantly different from expected natural or stochastic variation."
    "Very good. But enough of Albion's fair shores, I think? You were about to tell us all about France, I believe. Would you like to - er -- enlarge upon that?"
    Jack had had so much to say about France. About how his trip there had changed everything, given him hope - rooting his vague instincts in something more tangible, more real. About how, after looking at the British landscape, scored, ravaged and broken by glaciers at least eight times in the course of almost a million years of human history - glaciers so powerful that they had literally erased rivers as broad as the Severn from the map - his personal antennae had become so tuned to every nuance of landscape that, when he had come at last to a region that had seen a million years of relative and continuous calm, the signs of human influence shone out at him like blinding beacons, rang like fire-bells in the night. Britain had only ever been a sideshow, an outlier: he'd seen immediately what had occurred to no-one, that nothing south of the Loire was wilderness - nothing - and had not been so for a very long time. But right now, he didn't feel like explaining anything. His answers were bland, apathetic, hesitant, whatever. Looking down on the scene, as if he were hanging from the ceiling, he saw McLennane rise slightly from his chair, as if in concern - and then Jack snapped, jarringly, back. He blinked, disoriented. It occurred to him that he must have blacked out.
    With her well-controlled perm, her neat dove-grey two-piece and pearls, Ernestine Yanga could have been the president of the local Womens' Institute, except that she'd been raised in a grass hut on the western shores of Lake Turkana, until the age of five, when her village had been razed by Ethiopian bandits and the rest of her family had been raped, macheted, burned to death, or combinations of all three. She'd only escaped because she'd been a mile away at the time, gathering pathetic twigs for the cooking fire, and sluicing the filthy puddle that passed for the village waterhole into a chipped enamel bucket. On returning home to find it so casually expunged from the face of the Earth, she'd walked thirty miles to the nearest fly-flecked bush town in search of work. By the time she was thirteen she was handy with a Kalashnikov; she'd been a drug courier, a fruit seller, a moneychanger, a news vendor, a prostitute, a pimp, a bandit, a copper's nark, a murderess twice over (once a policeman, whom she'd stabbed after he'd tried to extort further bribes from her pitiful cache of change; the second time, a potential rapist, whom she'd emasculated with his own blunt and rusty panga and left bleeding to death) -- and riddled with at least six chronic, parasitic infections. Having understandably decided that she'd had quite enough of all this, she'd walked to Nairobi and camped out on the steps of the National Museums of Kenya, where she'd decided she'd await the Lord's Salvation. The Lord took the shape of a kindly assistant curator, whose prayers for the Almighty to send him a child to ease his wife's shameful barrenness had now, it seemed, been answered - and who took her in and cleaned her up. A week later she was the illiterate, unpaid assistant to the janitor - and after thirty-five years, the Director of Palaeontology. And now, at the age of fifty-five, what Ernestine Yanga didn't know about the influence of early humans on landforms in the Rift Valley wasn't worth knowing.
    She knew far more than that, however, about the symptoms of human suffering, to which she was as sensitive as Jack's spirit chimed to the shape and history of every hanging valley, every drumlin, every scarp and oxbow. Her reputation as a terrifying examiner was justified - after all, a woman in her situation could never succeed in life without what she called `true grit' (she was an avid fan of old westerns) - but in Jack she saw a good man who'd been worn almost entirely away by worry, and, like so many men, he was suffering as much from injured pride as from lack of food and sleep. He had tried his hardest, but despite all his efforts, all his denial, he'd felt he was not quite up to the task, and this insulted his being, his masculinity. But he need not have been so concerned, she thought. The evidence he had from that final trip to France was right there, in front of them. And from what Roger (such a charming man!) had told her, Jack was a dedicated field worker, the kind of person she preferred infinitely to pallid, deskbound museum types, who so often built their intellectual castles on the sweat of others.
    More importantly, it was clear that Jack fulfilled the first criterion of a doctorate candidate - to venture, without fear, outside the small, cosy nest of knowledge, and into the dark and infinitely greater continent of ignorance that surrounded it. That Jack had ventured so far out that no techniques yet existed to make sense of what he'd found indicated extraordinary fortitude, a brazen and almost breathtaking resolve: if Jack could make no headway with it, then that was hardly his fault, because nobody else (she thought) would have had the ability either. Not McLennane (he'd admitted as much) and certainly not herself. And yet, if Roger had thought the task impossible, he surely would not have assigned it to a doctorate student. This in itself, she felt, indicated that Jack really must be a man of extraordinary talent, and - she thought back to the fortune that had smiled on her on the Museum steps - talent was precious, and must always be nurtured.
    In any case, Jack was not entirely alone, without help. As Professor Yanga understood it, Jack continued to enjoy the best help possible in the form of the acuity of his young associate, Miss Markham, who seemed to believe in him and who, Roger had assured her, would go far - especially if she and Jack continued to work as a team. And Roger's instincts were never wrong. Especially not about attractive young women, and Roger had been very quick to note that Jack's associate excelled in those two virtues as she did in her wit and intelligence. Jack was, indeed, a fortunate man, as fortunate as he was deserving.
    "Mr Corstorphine, of course, I understand. But please don't worry yourself. Oh my, you look so tired", she said, and she smiled - a warm, radiant, motherly smile that made Jack want to dissolve. This woman, this supposedly ferocious, hard-bitten creature who took no prisoners, had smiled at him. She had looked straight at him, into him, and she understood. She knew. And in that moment he knew that there was hope. And so he started again, clearing his throat, which seemed unaccountably to be full of damp sandpaper.
    "I'm sorry - please excuse me. When we think of the French Palaeolithic, we tend to see the landscape as a wilderness, punctuated with some interesting and picturesque cave sites. But that's a view conditioned more by our prejudices about brutish cavemen than by the facts on the ground. When I got there, accustomed as I had been to the far more challenging and - in any case - more sparsely populated British terrain, France looked to me like nothing more than an almost completely artificial, settled - even industrial landscape, continuously shaped by human influence for perhaps a million years."
    "What form does that influence take, Mr Corstorphine?"
    This really must be it, the Difficult Question that went to the heart of the matter. But the Professor continued to smile - and in that, he thought of the loveliness of Jade's enormous hazel eyes as she looked adoringly up at him whenever she was in his arms, an expression that said that he, Jack, was invincible. Now he could not be stopped. The influence takes many forms, he said. Just to take a couple of things more or less at random: virtually no watercourse south of the Loire or west of the Rhône has been natural for any significant part of its length since the Late Middle Pleistocene. At the very least, watercourse curvature has been altered by 16 per cent during the Brunhes magnetostratigraphic interval, with the confidence limits that you'll see on page 176, I think you'll find (the committee members turned to their copies of his thesis as Jack felt, at last, to be in the driving seat). In support of this (he continued), the overall number of river channel infill deposits indicative of buried oxbow lakes is very much less than you'd expect by chance, had nature been left to take its course. This means that something - somebody - has been altering the lower courses of rivers in a systematic way for a very long time. And then there is the general topography. Volcanic activity aside, no hilltop exists in this part of France that has natural surface run-off characteristics, possibly an indication of the former presence of earthworks or other structures. In fact, I could find no grade that has been completely free of human influence over the same period. There's one hill, at a place just not far from Aurignac, called Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards ...
    His mind drifted to when he'd explained all this to Jade, with mounting excitement, promising her that after this wretched thesis defence was over, he'd take her there and show her. It was about a month ago, their last evening sitting out in the Nest before it became too cold: they'd had a bottle of wine he'd brought home from the off-licence. Retreating to the sitting room, she'd removed a stack of printouts from their sagging old sofa, sat down, pulling him warm and close. As usual, she'd worn her shapeless purple sack, but her hair was loose - funny, he'd forgotten that. She didn't always tie back her hair. Not even very often. Why had he forgotten that? How? As he told her about Saint-Rogatien, she looked at him with shining eyes.
    "This is it, Darling Jack", she had said - "This is the key. This proves it. This settles everything." She unbuttoned his shirt - her big brown eyes intent and sweetly cross-eyed with concentration - and rested her soft face on his chest, letting him tousle her hair into a blanket, covering and embracing him. And this was only a month ago? After the brainstorm? Why had he forgotten that?
    He explained to her - to Jade - to Professor Yanga - that his close survey of this unusual landform revealed to him that its geology was entirely at variance with the underlying bedrock and, furthermore, that its location could not be explained in terms of any local, structural faulting. It couldn't be a glacial erratic, either, because there had been no glaciers. Much of the landform had been worn away by wind and weather, but with an estimated original volume at least a thousand times that of Saint Paul's Cathedral -- he was proud to have worked out this comparison - it was just too enormous to have been set down by any kind of fluvial transport short of a catastrophic flood of the kind that had created the scablands of the Pacific Northwest, or which had carved out the English Channel - and there had been no sign of any such activity, either. In fact, its location was inexplicable unless ...
    At this point, on the sofa, Jade had trapped his gesticulating hands in hers, and forced them to encircle her. She'd seemed so warm and content, he'd felt that at any minute she'd start to purr. Why had he forgotten that? As he'd kissed the top of her head, he'd said that the only way to explain Saint-Rogatien - the only way - was that it had was an artificial structure. That someone had put it there. He'd once read about an ancient pyramid at a place called Cholula in Mexico. By the time the conquistadores got there, it had been abandoned for centuries, its masonry stripped away, and was covered in grass and trees. Assuming it was just a hill (after all, that's what it looked like), the Spaniards built a town around it and a church on the top. And that was only a few centuries. Imagine, then, if it had been left for a thousand years, a hundred thousand, a million? It would look just like a hill, revealed as artificial only by its strange geology and situation - and only then if somebody first suspected that something was amiss - which nobody had ever done. But when Jack had seen it, his antennae vibrated into overdrive. He knew it didn't belong there. He just knew.
    By this time Jade had been on the edge of sleep, but not quite.
    "You silly old lion," she had said. "You've just about wrapped it up. The ancestors of the first Neanderthals built gigantic pyramids all over France..."
    "... pyramids that made the Great Pyramid look like a pimple -- and they were doing it for hundreds of thousands of years, Snow Queen."
    "Well then, you don't need statistical methods to prove that, so why worry? That's just basic geology and your wonderful masculine intuition, you gorgeous man, you." She looked up at him, blearily. It occurred to him that her face looked drawn and thin, that what she needed most was sleep, and also that she'd read his mind. "You're right, Darling Jack. Time for you to wrap me up, too, and take me to bed."
    So he'd taken her in his arms and laid her gently on the bed, still in her purple sack, pulling the duvet on top of her. As he'd got in and nestled behind her in their customary two-spoons-in-a-drawer position, she'd pulled his arms up inside her jersey, pressing his hands against her breasts, smoothing them down the hot - too hot - skin of her belly and thighs.
    "I do so love you, Darling Jack. And I want you." And so, still in the two-spoons position, in the darkness, they'd made love as gently as before it had been rough, and then, together, slid slowly off to contented, companionable sleep on a smooth, even grade rather shallower than about one in a couple of hundred (he'd estimated), that of a languidly meandering river that makes its mazy, lazy way down to a delta in which it becomes blissfully lost in oozy, woozy thickets. Why had he forgotten that? Why?
    As if from an immense distance, he thought he heard Professor McLennane and Professor Yanga commending him for a splendid thesis.
    "Congratulations, Doctor Corstorphine!" Hands were shaken, but it was clear to both academics that Jack wasn't really there. They looked worried. The Professors exchanged nervous words that Jack didn't catch, and Yanga left, looking anxious.
    "Come on, Jack, I'm going to take you home," McLennane said as he put his arm around Jack's shoulders, walked him outside into the quad and steered him towards what Jack could have sworn was a Ferrari Testarossa. "Don't worry, old chap - not going to do more than thirty - that's a promise! But I want to get you home fast. Got to break the glad tidings to that lovely girl of yours, eh? I expect you'll be setting a date. And now she can really start work on her own project, after Christmas. And .... I've been meaning to tell you .... That Saint-Rogatien business .... We really do have to get a paper off to Nature. You, me and the lovely Jade can do it together. Her brains, your intuition, and my - er - putting you two together, as it were. I had lunch with the editor the other day, and..."
    Jack lacked the energy to interrupt. He was drained, utterly, to the dregs, alternately assailed by waves of light-headedness and nausea, not helped by the low-slung suspension of a car so obviously unsuited to driving through central Cambridge in a freezing fog that still hadn't lifted after ... how long ago had he left home? He couldn't remember. On the other hand, if he'd stepped out of the car, he didn't think he'd have sufficient energy to walk, or even stand up. He couldn't remember having eaten more than a couple of bites of anything for three days.
    They drew up outside the flat: McLennane had to haul Jack out of the car. When they knocked at the door, there was at first, no answer.
    "Just coming!" - he heard her lovely voice, after a few more seconds: "in the bathroom! Won't be a minute!"
    As soon as Jack had left, Jade collapsed on the sofa, eviscerated, as if her heart had burst from within her and now bounced along the street after the dwindling Jack, the world on his broad shoulders, an old gunslinger who, racked by his internal demons, seemed to be losing the will to fight. But she had things to do, an errand of her own, and so, grimly, she dressed, grabbed her bag, and left the house.
    Poor Jack - her poor, Darling Jack - had never looked so down. But as she was sympathetic (how could she not be?) she was, it has to be said, a little annoyed. Not for the simple fact of his low spirits, his anxiety - anyone could forgive him these! - but perversely, that his mood seemed so entirely out of character, and that was harder to accommodate.
    Not that she didn't mind being there for him, to cheer him up, even for weeks on end: because she didn't. She loved him, and she wanted to make him happy. But where once had stood an imperturbable rock, there had now limped, in the hallway, half-sunk, a fractious, fretful, friable thing she didn't recognize, and didn't want to. Realizing how selfish this was, she wanted her old Jack back, the granite-hard Jack, the Jack who had become her secure foundation, on which she could build castles of her own, and from whose unshakeable ramparts she could launch herself, on her own wings: so that should she ever falter, should she ever go wrong, she could always come home to him -- depending on him to forgive, to love and mend her, to dry her eyes and make everything all right, without question or prejudice. But if he crumbled, she would slip, lose her footing, and they would both fall.
    It was in this resolution that she'd finally - finally - settled, in her own mind, the events and consequences of the rainstorm before the famous brainstorm, when he'd fucked her so hard that she'd been almost too giddy to stand, and so physically sore, inside and out, that she couldn't wear knickers for days for the pain. This sudden and quite unexpected brutality - there really was no other way to put it -- had frightened her then, but after much worry and wonder in the still hours of many troubled nights thereafter, when Jack had lain fretfully asleep beside her, she'd solved the disturbing riddle of why she'd loved him all the more, nonetheless.
    For all her ambition, for all that she wanted to make her way in the world on her own, to succeed by her own lights, she realized that at heart she was an old-fashioned girl, who needed a man around to love, and to be loved by. The man with whom she'd fallen in love was a man's man, with a real man's frustrations, and a real man's pride, always so exposed to injury. But the reason why she loved him so much was that his masculinity had been so lightly worn, so assured that he'd felt no need to prove it, either to be a macho man like Avi Malkeinu, or an irredeemable rogue, like dear old Roger McLennane. This (she blushed to herself) was why she'd been embarrassed when Jack had referred to himself, in company, however self-deprecatingly, as the last of the red-hot Palaeolithic lovers, or whatever it was. This was why his force on that strange night had first seemed so shocking.
    But then, she continued, why should it? Because Jack was so complete a man in himself, he'd never feel the urges to which Avi and McLennane were forever prey, to throw himself into one conquest after another, as if he were not quite sure that he really deserved his manhood, or that it wasn't eternal, a given; nor that he ever felt the need to perpetually advertise the fact. She knew how much of a man he was, and that was enough - that knowledge was theirs alone, a private thing, like the Nest: it was not something she'd much like to share. And after all, it was she, she admitted ruefully, who had led him on, waving her backside at him, inviting him to take her - to take her, as if she were not a human being, but some transaction, and he'd responded - to satisfy her, and no other. She basked in that thought, held on to it, but added that for her then to blame him for her shock, her soreness, would be unfair, for they had both been participants in the act which, in the end, was - as she'd established - a private thing between the two of them, just Jack and herself, as much a part of their love as a shared bottle of wine and any other long, lazy night in the Nest. She realized that if, in the past few weeks, he'd been beating himself up with remorse about it - as she suspected -- then she knew for certain that he really was neither an animal (for all that she called him her lion), nor a man forever seeking to prove his virility, but her own, tender, loving Jack. Hers. And she should make sure he knew it.
    But there was that other thing, too: that when the burning soreness had faded, it was replaced by a nauseating wretchedness that racked her guts out. At first she thought it was a physical after-effect of the pain, or just some psychosomatic backwash of shock and fear, so she had told Jack nothing of it - even had he noticed from behind the tottering turrets of his preoccupation. But when it had continued for weeks, making her feel wan and drained, vitiating desire, it occurred to her that Jack might have proved his masculinity in the most obvious and traditional way possible (she began to perk up at the thought, and reddened a little). There was no need for Jack to make any song and dance about his maleness, she thought - no need at all -- if by virtue of his savagery and his hunger he'd made her pregnant - a tangible badge of his love, and their shared love, together - and also something which she felt, with a strength of possession that surprised her, was something all her own, for all that it bound her closer to him, and made her love him all the more.
    Jade was almost sure she knew, but craved certainty, even within statistical limits, explaining why she had now returned home from the supermarket with a pregnancy testing kit: and -- even as Jack, his ordeal over, was allowing his rangy form to be folded passively into the passenger seat of McLennane's latest penis extension - was undressed, in the bathroom, peering awkwardly down at herself and wondering how a mere woman could aim so accurately at a target as narrowly defined as a test strip. Oh, that a man should have to do this, she grinned to herself (flushing more than a little at the thought), he'd at least be in a position to take better aim. And just as she heard the knock on the door, presaging the proud return of her conqueror, bloodied for sure, but all dragons slain, the line in the small, crystalline window coalesced, like a chromosome in the very expectancy of division, of the prolongation of a life stretching back to when the world was young, and forward into illimitable futurity -- from a yellow nothingness into a single shaft of clear blue.

    Chapter 5

    (March 2005)

    At length burst the argent revelry,
    With plume, tiara and all rich array,
    Numerous as shadows haunting fairily
    The brain, new stuff'd, in youth, with triumphs gay
    Of old romance.
    John Keats - The Eve of St. Agnes

    Her nerves fell away as soon as she took her seat at the press conference -- McLennane to her left, Jack on her right - and had been introduced to the crowd of journalists, photographers and cameramen who'd crammed - almost on top of each other, it seemed to her -- in the small but unnaturally brightly lit library that the Royal Institution had arranged. Not that anyone paid very much attention to her two male outriders, because she'd looked (as they'd hoped) as marvellously un-academic as might be imagined.
    She'd fretted for several days about what to wear, as (she'd felt) she had little sense for such things, except that what suited her least of all was indecision. Her mother was no help, wanting to change the subject to things which she thought more important.
    "Oh, I don't know dear", she had twittered on the phone. "What do people wear at press conferences? Something nice. And do give my best to Jack - how is he? And when are you two going to get married? And how are you feeling? Not too tired, I hope. When I was at your stage, when I was carrying you..."
    The few women academics she knew were, in the main, as unconscious of fashion as she was - either that, or they went to the other extreme and dolled up to the nines, dressing to impress - something which she felt might be fine for some people, but only made her feel embarrassed and uncomfortable.
    That left the men in her life. Avi Malkeinu's idea of a suitable outfit hardly bore thinking about, probably more Knave than Nature. She was fond of Avi - how could one not be? He was lovable in his way, in the same way that a rumbustious golden-retriever puppy is loveable, but he was such a boy. The thought of the way he undressed her with his eyes every time they met - but tried to hide it -- made her giggle.
    On the other hand, she knew that Roger McLennane had perfect taste and would have loved to have taken her shopping. But the thought of a mildly flirtatious outing with Roger, being whisked off in his Ferrari and modelling a succession of sleek, expensive outfits, twirling before his not-quite-dispassionately appreciative gaze, made her giggle, too - not least because it brought to mind a favourite joke of her Dad's about `Salome dancing naked in front of Harrods'. However, she knew that she was in no danger of ending up as another notch on McLennane's bedpost, for Roger, despite his reputation, had always treated her with the utmost deference. What she had not quite realised was how much he was in awe of her, and grateful for helping save Jack's thesis - and with that, his own reputation as a doctorate supervisor.
    She was conscious, though, that McLennane might think that such a request - which he'd feel honour-bound to accept - might make him uncomfortable for a much earthier reason. She had, after all, if quite unwittingly, put him in what he might have called a `compromising position'. Her cheeks burned hot whenever remembered the details of Jack's arrival home after his thesis exam, when Roger had so kindly brought him to the door. She remembered, in particular, Roger's expression of red-faced, open-mouthed amazement as she'd answered it, test stick in one hand, door handle in the other, hair everywhere, dressed in Jack's Property-of-Fairbanks-Marriott bathrobe - which, because she'd had her hands full and had been called away from her scientific experiment rather suddenly, she had forgotten to gather up at the front. It was hardly her fault that it had no buttons and had long since lost its belt. But she'd only made it worse (the memory made her squirm inside) when she'd suddenly become aware - as her bare skin met the unforgiving chill of a Cambridge December - of her state of undress; and resorting to her nervous habit, when she thought she was being watched by men, of lifting her arms and gathering her hair up on her head.
    Which is why Professor Roger Sutherland McLennane, FRS, had had a gloriously full-frontal eyeful of a leggy twenty-one-year-old woman in the first rosy glow of pregnancy. It was no wonder that Roger had made a quick getaway, saying nothing more than "the hero returns!" - or some such - before roaring off up the street in his Ferrari whose paintwork matched his own high colour. No, she thought, she couldn't possibly ask Roger. Poor man, he wouldn't know where to look. Well, he would, but he wouldn't want her to know that he was, so he would try very hard not to, which she'd notice, thereby obliging her to try hard not to notice that he was trying not to... in the room the women come and go, she might have mused: towards absurdam, reductio. And all that while trying to control a 400-brake-horsepower penis-extension at over eighty miles an hour? There had to be another way.
    And Jack - dearest Jack - well, he was biased.
    "I think I'd have to declare an interest," he'd said, in his best mock-serious voice, as, shirt-sleeves rolled up, he'd rubbed her back as she sat up in the bath one evening several days earlier, "as not only do I love you, but I love you more each day, as there is progressively more of you to love" - at which she'd snorted and soaked him with bubble-laden water. He'd sat for a moment, quite still on the edge of the bath, wet through, smiling quizzically, but saying nothing. So he did what she knew he'd do - something so practical, so funny, so Jack. He'd stripped and climbed in behind her, a leg on either side. She was, by now, in hoots of giggles, the water surging and splashing around her, around him, and all over the floor.
    "Give me one of those Magdalenian mother-goddesses every time," he'd said, half laughing, half growling, kissing her neck, her left earlobe, and starting to rub her shoulders and neck, which she loved - but not without first giving each of her increasingly sore and swollen breasts a playful squeeze - which she liked rather less.
    She decided that she enjoyed being pregnant - she enjoyed the fullness of it, its warmth. The only bad thing about it, after the horrible first couple of months, was the back-ache, hence the time spent in the bath. But what had surprised her - and delighted her - was how much her desire for Jack had sharpened. She supposed that it might have something to do with her recent rediscovery of the sense of smell, and especially his smell, an ineffable sense of masculinity, nothing very strong -- not like unwashed socks or stale beer or anything like that - but an instantly recognizable presence that reassured her, and which lingered in the flat even when he wasn't physically there. But when he and his smell were there together, her desire for him was overpowering. Some mornings it had been extremely difficult to leave his embrace, as if she were attached to him by a bungee cord - even if she just wanted to nip to the loo (which happened increasingly often). That Jack desired her more in response only redoubled her happiness. Hence his candid lack of objectivity: whether she wore a stylish designer outfit; `Horrible' (his affectionate name for her baggy old purple jersey); or a dustbin liner -- he'd have adored her just the same.
    For his part, Jack found her pregnancy enchanting. Her body was changing in all kinds of ways that he loved to examine in the tiniest detail, as if he were a surveyor, mapping the topography of an unexplored continent in the throes of some incremental but ultimately profound change of climate, from the trimly temperate, to the lush and exotic. Consider: her eyes, now more brown than hazel, were set to a permanently radiant chestnut smoulder. Her lips were fuller. Her already chocolatey nipples had broadened and become darker still as her small breasts had filled out, changing their shape as they grew, with the right growing fractionally larger than the left (an observation that amused Jack hugely, and made him think of the limerick about the proverbial man from Devizes). Her hair had become even longer and more lustrous, and not just on her head: bracketed by hips that were becoming luxuriously fleshy, her pubic hair had shot out from being a well-behaved fluff into a robust springy jungle -- setting, as an offshoot, a very fine, single comb of short, stiff hairs that led straight up towards her navel. He'd also noticed small drifts of dark, downy fuzz in the small of her back, the backs of her knees, and on the nape of her neck. Hmm. Most interesting.
    But most fascinating of all was her skin, which had become, if that were possible, even softer than before, as well as half a shade darker. This was strange, as it had - at the same time - become milkier and rosier. Trying to sum up this contradictory state (his mind wandering back to her, at a hundred unguarded moments every day) he'd said she'd had all the `R's: Round, Roseate, Rubicund, Ripe, Rich, Rubenesque. He amused himself trying to add more words to this small thesaurus of adoration.
    Jack was not afraid that her body would ever fail to surprise him, even though he'd been its closest observer for almost four years. And yet, for all that, she was still the same woman: the same woman, he reasoned, only more so. Cradling her soft form in his arms as they sat wedged in the bath, her leaning back, eyes closed, her breasts rising and falling with each even, content breath, creating slow waves in the water, Jack had to admit that he too, was enjoying her pregnancy: her swelling curves, her masses of hair, were magnetic, and all of it had to be touched.
    For her, then, her weight taken by the water and Jack's taut body for a chair, her lover had crystallized into a pair of hands. Funny that she'd paid so little attention to them before, but pregnancy was sharpening all her senses, not only smell and taste. His were the hands of a man who belonged in the great wide open - the hands of a field geologist, the hands of contradiction - calloused, beaten, blocked and ridged as they endured frost, thaw and great heat, but capable of marvellously sensitive precision and agility, as those same rough fingertips felt their way towards a fossil or crystal so fragile that it might be shattered by a breath of wind, a drop of water, a single shard of ice - and cradled it unharmed to safety. And so she craved the touch of his hands on her body, the counterpoint of roughness and gentleness, as they traversed her curving body, as if constantly recording, measuring, trying to gauge her totality at any instant.
    The sensations of their passage were mixed. As he brushed his fingers on her lips, they plumped in expectation; but when they orbited her breasts, these had stung with pain, and sometimes her nipples burned so much she was amazed they didn't glow in the dark. But where she most wanted to be touched was between her legs - as her body swelled, so did her craving for him, until it was like a constant drone in the background of her life, an unfillable void, a thirst she could not slake. She tried to part her thighs, as wide as possible, tried to drag one of his hands to cup the swollen warmth welling from inside her, but the bath was too narrow to allow any comfortable movement. However, as her insistent desire resonated with Jack's own, she felt him rise and grow behind her, in the small of her back. And the water was getting cold, too.
    "Out you get, young man," she'd said, with fuzzily distracted warmth, unmoving, her eyes still closed.
    "'Fraid not, Snow Queen," he'd countered, "as I am at present pinned to the spot by a Dangerous Wild Animal." She roared play-fashion as she gripped the sides of the bath, put her feet together and crouched - wriggling the arced expanse of her behind at Jack, teasingly, mockingly -- and then stood fully upright. Just before she stepped out in search of a towel he'd looked up at her and for a moment she was a vast, cool statue, shining with water, the fullness of her body exaggerated by the foreshortened angle of view. Jack sank into the bath, filling the space she'd left, stretched out, looked up at her and said:
    "There was a reason for those Magdalenian mother-goddesses, you know--"
    "Hmmm?" She had started to dry her hair.
    "They illustrate the inherent superiority of women - if only in the geometrical sense." She turned suddenly to lean over the bath, a mad flurry of wild hair, eyes, towel and dangling breasts -
    "I said, out -- you -- get!"
    He stepped out and into her arms, and their lips met, hers as burningly soft and full as he could ever remember, even more than the very first time, when she'd sprung on him after Clare Ball. His hands fell around the incurving of her waist, his palms buried in her thickening softness, his knuckles teased by the waterfall of her hair plunging down her back.
    "I want you," was all she'd said, in a small voice full of woeful ache and longing, but with a note of irresistible determination. Much later, sweetly spent, she reasoned that her yawning desire was for her to be worn way to nothing; nothing more than a thin shell surrounding his maleness, forever -- to be annihilated by his love, so that they would merge, so completely that nobody would discern that they had once been separate beings.
    Later still, after a long pause in the darkness, he whispered into her sleepy ear from behind -
    "I know! Why don't you wear Fairbanks? Then you could stand up and give everyone a quick flash, you know..." Laughing, she turned towards him, took her face in his hands and said, as if to a small child -
    "Don't! It was terrible!"
    But Jack did, at least, have a constructive idea. If she couldn't ask Roger, why not ask Mrs Roger? She'd be at the celebration tomorrow.
    "You can ask her then. Quite a character, Marjorie McLennane," Said Jack. "I think you'd like her."
    "What do you think of her?" she asked, muzzling into his bare chest, pulling his arms round her, her hair sprawling over his arms and shoulders.
    "Me? Scary. I've never dared talk to her. But that shouldn't deter you, Snow Queen."
    If Professor Ernestine Yanga only looked like the President of a local Women's Institute, then Marjorie McLennane really was one. Although entirely aware of her husband's errant behaviour, she could hardly complain that he did not attend to her own wants and needs in those particular respects, whenever such attendance was required, which was (mercifully, she thought) seldom: and in any case, with a large family and many other things to attend to, she found him very often to get in the way. Such residual irritation as she felt she sublimated into ferocious domesticity on an industrial scale. An active member of the WI, she was also a church warden, a pillar of the Conservative Association, ran the village fête, organized the cricket-club teas, was a Church Commissioner, and judged a rubber of bridge with such frightening perspicacity that few ever dared challenge her. She would have it that as a daughter of a Brigadier-General, that her life was dedicated to service. But that was only an excuse, a cover for a full-blown case of Kipling's Syndrome - a compulsion to fill every minute with sixty second's worth of distance run.
    Most people found her too intimidating to talk to, or even approach, on those occasions (rare) when she accompanied Roger to departmental parties. For her part, she found most of the academics not to her taste, and even if they had been, they'd have very little to discuss. Many of them detested everything she stood for, and shunned her in what she considered a singularly ill-bred fashion, by talking over her in her presence, or simply turning their backs. But when Roger threw a small party to celebrate Jack's doctorate and the impending publication of the paper in Nature (`Large-scale anthropogenic landscape modification in the Upper Pleistocene of France', by J. L. Markham, John A. Corstorphine, Avram Y. Malkeinu and Roger Sutherland McLennane), she felt she could hardly refuse.
    "You really must meet Jack," Roger had implored - "and you must certainly meet Jade."
    Marjorie had snorted at this - Roger had introduced her to several young women before, a tactic she thought calculated to make her approve of any future infidelity by putting her in a position whereby she'd be obliged to fraternise with the enemy. And Jade? What kind of a name was that? She thought it common. But then, she sighed, this was likely to be her husband's finest hour, and perhaps a last hurrah before he was kicked out to pasture. So duty called.
    When she actually met Jade, she found her disarmingly unlike what she had expected (although, if pressed, the nature of that expectation would have been ill-defined). She saw in this darkly attractive woman a person remarkably self-possessed for all her youth, yet who still had not lost an engaging girlish innocence; determined, steely, thoroughly unlikely to let herself be intimidated by anyone, and yet very much at ease with herself and those around her. She'd also, like herself, grown up on the Surrey-Hampshire border (a region practically dedicated to the British Army), had been fond of horses, and loved gardening.
    Looking at Jade, Marjorie saw herself, reflected, as a young woman, a graduate of Girton with a Double First in Natural Sciences, which is how she had met her junior-research-fellow husband. But it had been much more difficult for women in her position to pursue careers of their own in those days. That they might do so while conspicuously pregnant was unthinkable - yet pregnancy seemed to suit Jade very well, as her filling figure chimed well with the ease of her general demeanour. That, and the fact that she seemed to be quietly incandescent with love. Marjorie had guessed that Jade Markham's fiancé, Jack Corstorphine, was the tall, unobtrusively handsome man talking with her husband: the man that Jade couldn't help stealing glances at with eyes as big and shiny as the buttons on a guardsman's overcoat.
    So she had taken Jade under her wing.
    At the party, when they'd discovered how much they'd had in common, Jade confided in Marjorie, confessing a problem that had not occurred to her before she'd had to put her name to an academic paper -- that of how she should style her own name. Although she loved Jack ("have you met him?" she'd asked, her eyes glowing) she wanted to keep her own surname, at least for academic purposes, even after they were married. She'd only be Mrs Corstorphine in civvies (Marjorie approved). But when she'd seen the name `Jade' in print, on the draft of the paper before Professor McLennane had sent it to Nature, she realized with jarring suddenness that although she'd been quite happy with it up to now, it was, in truth, only a hangover from her childhood, and that she'd outgrown it. So, in the end, she did what many female academics did, which was to disguise her name - and gender -- behind a defensive shield-wall of initials. But she didn't like that much, either. It seemed such a crabbed, anonymous, half-hearted way to make one's academic début.
    Marjorie's advice was refreshing and direct: "if your name is Jadis, my dear, that's what you should be called. Drop this `Jade' business. Doesn't suit you. Doesn't suit you at all, if I may say so."
    She began to argue that she felt far too content with her lot to be a Wicked Witch, but Marjorie cut her off:
    "Really, the derivation is of no consequence. A name is not necessarily a guide to one's character. Why, I know an arch-deacon called Brimstone. Charming man, very devout, fellow Commissioner - and would you believe his Christian name is Cain? He's certainly not hellish, and not a murderer, either, as far as I know."
    Jade laughed, and so encouraged, Marjorie confided that the Narnia stories had been a particular favourite of hers as a child, and - being somewhat contrary herself - she'd harboured a sneaking admiration for the White Witch.
    "Clearly a very strong woman. Not to be messed with. Stick to that!"
    Jade thought Marjorie had finished, but there was still one ball left in the over, one more left for the bodyline:
    "What, may I ask, does your fiancé call you?"
    Jade was not sure whether she wanted to become so intimate with Marjorie McLennane so quickly by divulging the pet names that she and Jack called each other, but now she was on the spot, she found herself unable to refuse, as if she'd been called up before a headmistress who, while kindly, has the knack of extracting confidences, of baring souls, as if methodically peeling the layers of an onion. Jack was quite correct in his assessment of Marjorie as scary. How does Roger manage to get away with it, she thought? Ah - perhaps he doesn't! And with that, she laughed to herself, and said, quite carelessly, as if the admission had been buoyed on her recollection of Roger and the Flight of the Ferrari:
    "Jack always calls me `Snow Queen'" - and then it suddenly dawned on her, as if she'd been granted a spectacular vision of the familiar world under the penetrating light of a brighter and alien sun, that she had no recollection that Jack had ever called her by her childhood nickname, except, perhaps, for when they'd first met, and he had been her supervisor, which didn't count. And on the one occasion when it had mattered most, he'd called her `Jadis'.
    "Sounds like a sound man, to me," said Marjorie. "I'd like to meet him. Would you introduce us?"
    Jade resolved that from now onwards she'd be `Jadis'. And as they wove across the room, through the excited scientists and students all enjoying a glass of warm plonk and cheesy dips, Jadis (she would now always be Jadis) had another stunning realization, doubly amazing in that she had never made the explicit connection: that it was no coincidence that she'd always thought of Jack as Aslan, her Lion, as he had been the only one who could, with a single glance, a smile, make her insides melt.
    It was too late to change the name on the Nature paper, but the sign on the desk in front of her, in front of the reporters and camera crews - the name that would appear in the press that evening, and the next day, and for weeks afterwards -- was `Jadis L. Markham'. She tried on her new name - the one she'd been born with. She liked it. It seemed to fit.
    As did the gown that Marjorie had chosen for her, when Jadis had called the day after the party at the MacLennane's imposing Victorian villa in Grange Road.
    "You can never go wrong with a Little Black Number", she had said, exposing a rail of Chanel gowns in her wardrobe to the kind of scrutiny which her late grandfather had reserved for drilling the troops before Mountbatten, as the Union flag had been lowered for the last time over Delhi. "We shall have to find something that suits your current state, however", she continued, sizing up Jadis's easy curves, her long legs, her wild, unconstrained hair, but mostly her swollen belly and breasts, " -- without looking too much the Dowager Duchess."
    The contrast between that tight, censorious, wizened image and the open, relaxed, blossoming young woman before her was so instantly incongruous that Marjorie couldn't help but smirk, which Jadis caught and laughed in response: the two women looked at each other and they laughed and laughed until they both cried.
    Marjorie could see why Roger was keen on this girl - besotted, really - but not because she would be - or could ever be - one of his conquests. She felt that beneath the ready warmth, there was a hardness about Jadis that wasn't to be trifled with. And for all his faults, she thought, for all his flummery and foppery and fast cars and living the high life (at her expense), she had stayed with Roger all these years at least in part because he was, and always had been, an impeccable judge of character. He owed his career not to any great scientific insight of his own, but to the fact that he had surrounded himself with clever people: Roger had undoubtedly seen through the artless appeal of this girl to the steel beneath. And, after all, long ago, so he'd chosen her. And why shouldn't he have done? She had once been a girl much like Jadis, long-haired and leggy, full of wit and life and spark, and widely considered a beauty. Perhaps - she mused - Roger had warmed to Jadis precisely because she reminded him of their youth together. She raised her eyebrows at this privately comforting thought as her fingers alighted on a dress that might be suitable for Jadis.
    "Try this - it was made for me when I had to go to some ball or another, when I was pregnant with Fiona. Ooh - that was... well, Fiona has children of her own now." But she could remember perfectly well, of course. It had been the Clare College May Ball, 1970. Deep Purple had opened the bill and Jimi Hendrix had closed it, one of his very last concerts. She remembered that for all its incipient chaos, the timing must have been inspired that had arranged for the final, shattering chords of Purple Haze to ring out over the lawns just as the sun rose, illuminating the early morning mist rising over the Cam with a rich, golden light. She had been the same age as Jadis, then, and like Jadis, had got a most promising degree the year before, married her supervisor and immediately got pregnant. Further academic work had been out of the question but, at six months gone, she'd been awarded a specially made evening gown as a consolation prize. Jadis could not see it - Marjorie was still facing into the wardrobe and had her back turned - but in this picosecond of intense reverie, Marjorie worked to choke back her emotion. Turning, once more composed, she held the dress out for Jadis to try on.
    Jadis quickly stripped down to her underwear and Marjorie helped the gown over her head. Marjorie and Jadis were about the same height, so it fitted perfectly. It was classically black and breathtakingly elegant. Jadis looked at the mirror, disbelieving, enchanted -- and then she looked at Marjorie, whose expression was unfathomable.
    "That's the one for you, my dear. Would you like to try some pearls?"
    It was only as Jadis was driving home in Jack's old Peugeot, the dress wrapped in paper beside her, the parcel folded into a Harvey Nichols carrier bag, that she recalled how much this dress looked like the one she'd worn on her first date with Jack, and - had she known it -- at the same venue where it had been worn for the first time, more than thirty years ago. What a wonderful woman, Jadis thought. Not really scary at all. But very strong - stronger than steel.
    In that moment she felt that she'd finally crested a long climb to look over a new vista of opportunity. She'd seen that view before, the night when she'd made love to Jack after he had proposed to her, only then it had been full of terror. But she felt she was woman enough to meet it now, for this was nothing more than adulthood. And if she knew she was strong enough to accept the trials ahead, whatever they might be, she knew also that Jack - in his suspicion that Marjorie would meet her match in her, something he never could achieve -- was still the stronger. And when she thought of that, she burned with love, and the new life inside her stirred.
    Marjorie McLennane saw Jadis Markham drive away, scrunching across the gravel drive, through the curtain of yew and box, and off towards central Cambridge: a grateful wave, a smile, a billow of hair, and she was gone. Marjorie felt a yearning tug inside: a part of her youth, long forgotten but not entirely extinguished, a part which she could have - she should have reclaimed for herself at the time, and let the consequences go hang.
    "Lovely girl," she thought, turning to go indoors. "Good luck to her." This time, she let a single tear escape. Just one - and nobody saw it -- but it escaped nonetheless.
    At the back of the press conference sat Marcel Montgolfier, a distant relation of the pioneer balloonists, but proximately the veteran London correspondent of Agence France Presse. A press briefing in London on the topography of La France Profonde seemed an incongruity that bordered on effrontery, but no matter; in any case, one could forgive these English scientists in their startling assertion that French civilization was so ancient that it had preceded humanity itself .
    This offered by the suave and distinguished figure at the right of the panel, the man Montgolfier's press pack described as Professor Roger Sutherland MacLennane, FRS, from the University of Cambridge. Not that Montgolfier didn't know this, of course - McLennane was a well-known scientist, always good for a quote and a source of gossip, not all of which had to be vetted by AFP's legal department. Our picture of Neanderthal Man as the primitive savage (McLennane continued) was a distortion caused by the fact that history is always written by the victor: when the first Homo sapiens came into Europe 40,000 years ago, it was not to meet a debased race like Charles Darwin's Fuegians, but a civilization that had -- in his words -"endured for eight thousand centuries, and had created megaliths the size of mountains."
    The theme was continued by Dr Jack Corstorphine, the tall young scientist on the left of the panel, in the casual jacket and polo shirt, who explained, with a quiet but compelling authority, that the breadth and extent of this ancient civilization would have been incomprehensible to our own ancestors, who would therefore have seen only wilderness, weaving the bones of this great and ancient culture into the legend and myth of centuries. As the ruins of Rome had appeared to the barbarian Saxons as the works of mythical giants, so the megalith at Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards had appeared to our ancestors - and also, said Dr Corstorphine, to ourselves, until our own researches had recognized it as being "something quite extraordinary". Dr Corstorphine was a new face to Montgolfier, but in his assured delivery he could tell that he was one of McLennane's latest protégés.
    But he and Corstorphine were the sideshows, the hors-d'oeuvres, compared with what was obviously the main attraction, a young woman who was looking up at Corstorphine, as he spoke, with an expression of adoration so intense that it could have melted titanium. When the girl (identified as `Miss Jadis L. Markham'), rose to speak, the room fell utterly silent, except for the sound of a few people swallowing and some quickly stifled coughs.
    This was not a scientist - this was a movie star. As Jadis Markham discussed, with a dignified poise, how the ancient inhabitants of Europe had done more than leave a few isolated monuments, but instead had modified the very face of the Earth, Montgolfier and the assembled press corps began to lose the thread of the story and take a greater interest in its speaker. She was dressed in classic Chanel - Montgolfier (who had covered fashion in his time, in between stints on the diplomatic desk) thought her gown had been a couture item from the sixties: could anyone name any scientist, let alone such a débutante, who could carry off such cool retro chic? And - unbelievable - she was at least five months pregnant, and yet the strapless gown fitted her as if pregnancy was her natural state, the state in which she was most at ease: she simply glowed with beauty. The whole effect, the way her outrageously untamed cloud of glossy dark hair (who said scientists were buttoned-up?) tumbled over her pale shoulders, her décolletage, was enchanting! And her face! Framed - and indeed, sometimes partly obscured - by this nebula of hair, were two star-bright but yet unfathomably dark wells of intelligent, calculating ferocity. She was like a cat, a wild thing, he thought, her wildness kept in tight coils by an adamantine composure which on the surface appeared easy and carefree, but which - he was sure - was, not so far beneath, passionate and determined. All this in a girl of how old? - twenty-one? If this was another of McLennane's protégées, Montgolfier would bet that she would be his last, his swansong, because she'd be impossible to follow.
    As Montgolfier sat enraptured, it occurred to him that although the story itself was important - it certainly was that, and would be the centre of all discussion for weeks and months - he was not watching a press conference so much as a wedding, or a coronation. All this from tiny things he'd noticed that were never spoken out loud for all that they were quite evident, even from his place at the back. How Jadis, for all the poise and control that belied her years, for all that she conducted the wolf-pack of journalists as if she were Karajan directing the Berlin Philharmonic, would frequently glance at Jack, only for a moment, but with an expression of such - how could he describe it - supplication? - and his face would bestow a warmth of reassurance in return. And all this presided over by McLennane, who watched both of them with proprietorial satisfaction. Now, Montgolfier had never much cared for C. S. Lewis, but he did know his Tolkien, and this was nothing so much as the wedding of Aragorn and Arwen, with McLennane playing his accustomed role as Gandalf, Kingmaker. This would be a great story, he thought, because the people were at least as interesting as the tale they told. This is the next dynasty of archaeology in the making (he would write). He hoped he'd be able to get a picture of Jadis.
    At the very end, Montgolfier essayed a question for the young Elf Princess, deftly handled by McLennane as chair ("One last question? That man at the back! Ah, it's you, Marcel! Good to see you, what?")
    "Miss Markham," he asked, "excuse my presumption, but how will you reconcile your - how shall I say - imminent family commitments - with what promises to be an extensive programme of field research?"
    Jadis looked at Jack, who simply continued to smile back, and then turned her lighthouse eyes on Montgolfier. She paused for a moment, and it seemed to him that her hair gathered around her face like a brooding storm cloud as she said, with an unexpectedly stern asperity that made him start:
    "I'll take them with me of course. What else would I do with them?"
    And then the storm clouds dissipated as quickly as they had arrived, her face opening into a smile as bright as the sun, and of such innocent loveliness that he thought he'd die right there, at the pinnacle of his long career -- and in England.
    After the conference, when they'd managed to elude the last of the cameras, supplementary interviews and questions, Roger treated them both to lunch at Fortnum's, but then announced he was staying overnight on in London:
    "Business at the Royal - I'll billet at the Athenaeum," he'd said, hailing a cab in Piccadilly to take Jadis and Jack to Kings Cross. "But don't forget, you two - my office, oh-nine-hundred precisely, the - er -- day after tomorrow. Might have a bit of news, what?"
    The train home pulled through the cramped crenellations of North London and eventually eased into flat country under the immensity of the East Anglian sky, the land beneath now becoming clothed with the brilliant green haze of early Spring. Jadis leaned into Jack, and neither said a word for a long time. Not that they had nothing to say to each other, but that their communication had now become almost entirely intuitive, telepathic.
    Although she could never clearly have put it into words, Marjorie had been the spark, the catalyst that had fired her out of the last shreds of her girlhood, and into herself. It had to have been an objective eye: Jack could never have done it, and it was to his credit (she pulled him closer) that he'd realized this long before she had. The result, now, was that she and Jack were the indissoluble union that she had so inchoately, so blindly craved; that Marjorie had fired her, had let her loose, and the press conference - somehow, she couldn't quite express why - had been the last crucible.
    She suspected that Roger, bless him, had been the shrewdest of all. He should surely deny it if confronted directly, but she wouldn't put it past him to have woven the whole grand design: to have arranged for Jack to pursue the riskiest doctorate imaginable and give him his head; then, to introduce Jack to her (had he? She couldn't remember); and then, in the most audacious step of all, launch her at Jack's problem like some guided missile - all the better to add them both to Roger's starry crown. She had a feeling that this is what this meeting in two days' time was all about.
    Jack was silent, lost in thoughts all his own, until a full hour into the journey, when he pulled her closer still.
    "Might I ask you a question, Miss Markham?" he began, in his best Monty-Python French Accent. This time her smile was just for him.
    "But of course!"
    "You said, them. That you'd take them with you, into the field, when we get to excavate."
    "Well if there are, it's all your fault, you gorgeous man," she said, pushing closer still: and then more quietly, looking directly up at him and smiling, blearily yet, but just for him: "`Nothing like a good seeing to', you said, `for clearing the brain'".
    She began to nod, and it was only then that Jack realized how tired she must have been - the trip had taken it out of her: that, and the spotlight. How marvellous she'd been - how they'd all been. And how he still had to listen to McLennane's advice -- just make sure you're not the one left behind! How he'd struggled through his thesis defence, when she - a graduate student just starting out -- had had all those journalists under her spell. And most of all, how much he loved her.
    When the train pulled in to Cambridge, she was asleep in his arms.
    The next morning, as she looked over the breakfast table for the Oxford marmalade, Marjorie McLennane saw Roger's unopened copy of The Times. Such a waste, she thought, given that he'd get his own copy at his club. Then she remembered why Roger had been away and took another look at the lead story. `Civilization dates back a million years, scientists say', read the headline, but the picture was of a young girl, hair awry, who for all her loveliness had steel in her eyes.
    "Good for you, Jadis Markham", said Marjorie, marmalade now quite forgotten.

    Chapter 6

    (May 2005)

    Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
    Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
    The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
    Making the green one red.
    William Shakespeare -- Macbeth

    It was a relief to be here, at last, and to breathe the air. Not that Saint-Rogatien-Les Remillards was anything like she'd expected. To be sure, she'd known from Jack's pictures that it wasn't a wind-blasted, isolated place in the middle of nowhere, the kind of place filmgoers always associate with prehistory: but she hadn't expected it to be quite so tame. Remember Cholula, Jack had said, and he'd been right. The village of Saint-Rogatien clustered around the now-famous hill and up its slopes, and there was, indeed, a church and churchyard at the top. And not only a churchyard, but across the cobbled square - the tiny Place Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire -- the Mairie, a small but elegant pink-washed building, set back between the boulangerie and the Sanglier D'Or (restaurant, bar, tabac, café, pression and most importantly Hotel). Jack loved to tell her how, when he had first inquired about a permit to dig, the Mairie official had asked precisely where in the commune of Saint-Rogatien Jack had wanted to dig, and the expression of perplexity when Jack had pointed straight down at the tiled floor and said `Ici!'
    As they lay abed in the Sanglier D'Or, the occasional yellow headlight beams from the square below tracing sweeping lighthouse arcs across the ceiling, Jack reminded her that all was not as it seemed. The village had been built on the eastern spur -- just one corner -- of what had been a much more extensive structure, most of which had been eroded away into the valley. The present-day church did not mark the ancient summit, not by any means. Because of this erosion, there were some places around the village where one might get a direct view of the innards of the monstrous monument. Tomorrow, he'd promised, if she'd felt up to it, he'd show her the foot of the cliff-face that plunged from the churchyard wall, a full two hundred feet to the valley floor. This cliff, Jack thought, was where part of the megalith had been undercut by water and slumped, creating what he thought was cross-sectional slice right through part of its base. He'd picked up a few peculiar lithics there on his scouting trip, and there, he thought, she'd have the best chance of getting results fast - no need to dig or remove overburden, just map the cliff face and dig a few test tunnels in places that looked interesting.
    On the other hand, as it was, after all, their honeymoon, and they were both tired, they could relax, potter about, look around -- or even just stay in bed -- and look at the cliff another day.
    "Silly old lion!" she'd said, as cheerfully as she could given her fatigue from their two-day journey in the Peugeot, from Cambridge almost to the foothills of the Pyrenees, but Jack had the feeling her mind was elsewhere. He didn't inquire, but pulled her closer still.
    She lay bounded by his arms and chest, comforted, but still tired after the long drive. The journey (she'd driven the first few hundred miles herself) had aggravated the soreness in her back, and the aches in her legs, her belly - indeed, more or less everywhere -- were making sleep elusive. Her pregnancy had turned, in the past two or three weeks, from a phase of blossoming and almost boundless vitality to one of continual effort, and her general sleeplessness threatened what reserves she had left. She felt pale, awkward, bloated and huge, like a stranded whale. Her buzzing brain raced ahead far faster than the rest of her bulbous form could match, and thoughts whizzed around her head like so many golden midges illuminated by the slanting rays of autumn.
    First, there had been Roger's meeting, as promised, two days after the press conference - a meeting that had opened up amazing vistas for Jack and herself: if she weren't too worn out to reach and take them. But she knew her pregnancy would end, one day, and soon: she just had to stick it out in the meantime, to get over the next couple of months. Think ahead, she urged herself. Think ahead. Think beyond the uncomfortable present, to a secure future in another country, with her wonderful, gorgeous husband, and a project all her own.
    Jack's wedding present to her had been a slice of the past. For her doctorate project, he told her, she was to direct the proposed dig at the Saint-Rogatien cliff face. She'd be in charge of recruitment, management and budget as well as interpreting any finds they might make. Further, she'd have to find a base of operations that would last them for at least the next three years, as an expedition quarters as well as a home, a place to raise their family: their days as full-time residents of Cambridge would soon be over.
    He'd help her when he could, of course, but he had mapping and exploration of his own to do. His original trip to France had been an addendum, an afterthought, to a project entirely based and predicated on Britain. He now had to survey the region around Saint-Rogatien to the same level of detail, so that they could set the megalith in context. This meant that the Saint-Rogatien operation itself was hers, to do as she would.
    "It'll be your Kingdom, Snow Queen," he'd said, smiling his sweet, quizzical smile; "when I'm at Saint-Rogatien, I'll work for you."
    Her heart soared when she thought of how much trust Jack had placed in her, how much love. Her eyes filled with quiet, bright tears as, cosseted in his embrace, her mind catalogued, wandered, recalled - and, finally, rested.
    They were, all three of them, pie-eyed, fractious and spent, having handled around a hundred media requests each since the press conference. The press had even tried to get at Avi (whose surprisingly expert skills at data-analysis grunt-work had earned him a credit on the paper), but he had, wisely, disappeared. Three days later he'd sent Jack a text to say he'd gone home, but everything was cool, back in a week - alongside a photo of himself, outside a nightclub in Tel Aviv's swinging Dizengoff Street, wedged between two excited-looking blondes and obviously having the time of his life.
    Jack found the whole media circus daunting, at times overwhelming, and in the end, depressing. The questions seemed inane, irrelevant, often stupid, and he was only too aware of how awkward and uncomfortable he must have looked. He felt cramped, stifled, longing to get into the open air and away from all this crap.
    Jadis, who had attracted most media interest, and a disproportionate amount of that had been of the inane and stupid sort -- had coped better, but tired more quickly. Jack had noticed a new and disturbing quirk; that rather than answer a question, she would pause, and her brown eyes would, quite literally, switch off. Their lustre would disappear in a second, as if her sight were questing inwards, as if searching for something she couldn't find. Her brow would then furrow, and she'd rub her swollen belly distractedly, before returning to reality.
    "No, no, don't worry about me, I'm fine," she'd insist, resisting Jack and Roger's protests, trying to smile her loveliest smile at Jack but not quite succeeding, as if it were an injured butterfly, labouring to get airborne.
    Finally, Jack was so worried that he'd called Marjorie, swallowing his earlier fear in the knowledge that the two women had become close friends, to ask whether she might say something, because Jadis wouldn't listen to him: and so Jadis was sternly advised to take things more easily for a day or two. Marjorie also insisted that Roger handle all media enquiries - an obligation he was happy to fulfill - and that Jack find a portrait of Jadis that could be released to the press, so as to assuage the torrent of media requests.
    Rifling through the dreadful clutter that their flat had become - both of them being too tired or too busy to do much about it - Jack had come across a portrait of Jadis, filed in his laptop, that he'd completely forgotten about. It was a picture of her in Torbay, on their first summer vacation together. She'd been standing in a wooded dell, just outside some pothole or other he'd been studying, the sun through the trees making an aurora for her hair. While the surface of his mind concentrated on the practicalities of whether this casual snapshot would be a good enough for a press portrait (was the contrast right? Would newspapers want something of higher resolution?) -- the rest of him surged with reminiscence.
    He could no longer quite be sure, but this photo might have been taken on the very day they'd first made love. Perhaps even at the very same spot. Her face in the picture was open and smiling, flushed and happy, and she appeared to have been caught saying something to him - he could not remember what. But he did remember, as clearly as if it had been yesterday, how they had sunk into the dell, in the leafy remains of the bluebells; his first ever sight of her smoothly incurving waist, her bare breasts, her wild brown hair tumbling across them; and how pale and, well, exposed they'd seemed in the dappled summer sun, framed by her pale arms, and how white they were against her dark, upward-pointing nipples. He even remembered how her nipples tasted; her laughter when he tasted them; the smile of longing and surrender in her eyes when she'd at last opened herself before him, and the sudden feeling of rapture and completeness when he was inside her for the very first time; and, coincident with this, the strange and unexpected feeling that he had come home.
    It struck him, then, how much she'd changed since; that her spirit seemed to have become more urgent, more inward-looking. Like the taste of a wine set to age, their love which had once been gay and simple with no thought of the future, was now darker and more complex, with overtones of sorrow and joy, worry and long experience - and foreboding. His heart ached for her, for the girl he'd first dated, as well as the woman she had become. As her pregnancy had advanced she had become reserved, fiercer, controlled, and a little less inclined to present to the world at large anything other than a hard and steely resolve. The girlish warmth that she had once spread so gaily and casually she tended to hoard for him alone, focusing it at his heart in concentrated, overpowering blasts. The world knew nothing of this. To anyone but himself, the photo showed a pretty eighteen-year-old on holiday. He emailed it to the University Press Office.
    The morning before Roger's meeting - the day after Jack and Jadis had returned from London -- she had been in the corner of the office that she shared with Jack when, looking up from the flood of unopened emails, she saw an enormous camera lens peeping in at her through the window. A tabloid journalist had climbed up the wall with a ladder carelessly left by a contractor, and had been hoping for some unauthorized, exclusive shots of the New Face of Science. Jadis fled to the departmental secretary, who called security. In the departmental office she'd met Jack, who'd left for work later than she had: he'd been trying to sort their domestic paperwork into some kind of order, but not getting very far. (He tended to get swamped, distracted by details, whereas Jadis only had too look sternly at a pile of papers and they'd sort themselves.) Jack now reported that the flat was under journalistic siege. Unable to exit through the front, he'd had to scale the high wall behind the Nest and make a getaway across a neighbour's garden. His clothes were muddied, his arms scratched. Jadis cooed concern for him, ignoring all else: it had not yet occurred to either where they might go next - for they couldn't go home for a day or two - when they turned at once to see Roger, standing in the office doorway.
    "Please stay with Marjorie and me," he'd said, "until the heat's off. And we can have our meeting there. Much nicer, what?"
    It felt very peculiar to be in bed with his fiancée in the house of his former doctorate supervisor. For all that the spare bedroom was welcoming in a chintzy sort of way, and much tidier than their flat, Jack felt like a refugee. More than ever, he wanted to get out into the field, to take Jadis with him - to escape. When he awoke with these fretful thoughts, his first sight was Jadis, sitting on the side of the bed with her back to him, legs slightly parted to accommodate the bulge of her belly, combing her hair with urgent, rapid strokes, as if it were a task best over and done with. He wondered why she hadn't asked him to do it, a much more relaxed experience they both enjoyed, especially as it often led to other things. It was what in their private language they called their Bipcog ("baboons-in-pre-copulatory-grooming") routine.
    Jadis heard Jack wake behind her, and read his mind.
    "I'm sorry, Darling Jack. I just don't feel like it much here," she said, not turning round. "Here. At Roger and Marjorie's. It would seem like.... Well, having sex in the vicarage."
    Still sitting there, back to him, he saw her skin ripple, her shoulders shake with silent laughter, but the tenor soon turned and she began to emit small, spiky, sobs which she stifled only with difficulty. Jack got out of bed and rushed round to comfort her, quieting her in his arms. She did not explain her change of mood - even if she could have done - and Jack did not ask her. Which is why I love him so very much, Jadis thought. Which is why I must not let him down, her thoughts added, with an anxious and poignant edge, for somewhere deep inside her, she felt that her soul had begun to crumble.
    Roger's news, after breakfast, went a considerable way to cheering them up. Some years ago (Roger began), a Chinese-American investor and philanthropist called Ginsberg Wang had approached the University, offering a donation of several billion dollars if they'd build a new college with his name on it. After the common-room titters had subsided ("Who'd want to be a Fellow of Wank College?") the University, being used to such requests, politely thanked Mr Wang, and deftly pointed out that whereas the University had an elegant sufficiency of colleges, it sorely lacked front-rank research facilities that could benefit the whole University, if not the whole world, and mightn't Mr Wang think along those lines instead? And so Mr Wang had receded and it was generally assumed that he'd decided to take his billions elsewhere.
    However, it turned out (Roger continued) that the Senate had badly underestimated Mr Wang, who had indeed taken the University at its word, and had been consulting widely on the kinds of research facilities that the University might need - and which, he felt, he'd like to support. Mr Wang was known as a shrewd investor in what at first seemed an eclectic selection of interests, from carbon sequestration technologies to genetic manipulation, from geothermal power to personalized space travel. When Forbes magazine asked him, in the only interview he was ever known to have given, if he could characterize his investments in a sentence, he'd said "sure, but I'll do it in just two words: `The Future'".
    Hence the Universities' puzzlement when he chose to endow two new research institutes in Cambridge, neither of which seemed to have anything to do with technology or a brave new world, but both very much with cataloguing the past. One such concern - the Wang Astrometry Institute - had been busy in Madingley for two years now, cataloguing the recent spectral history and proper motion of stars in the solar neighbourhood, for reasons that nobody could fathom.
    "And the second?" Roger asked: "well, that's where we come in."
    It turned out that Ginsberg Wang had been watching the progress of McLennane's research, and that of his students, for some years, but had only finally chosen to make a commitment when the Nature paper had become public.
    "That's why I couldn't come back from town with you both," he explained, "I had to meet Wang's people at the Royal. Naturally, I couldn't breathe a dicky bird. I'm sure you'll understand."
    The upshot was that Wang, through his philanthropic GW Foundation, had chosen to endow what he'd called the GW Institute for Historical Geomorphology. This would - at least initially - be a `virtual' institute, made of people within the current Department and associates elsewhere.
    "Wang knows that institutes are made not of walls, but of people," said Roger. "The GW Foundation has asked me to head up the Institute, and I've accepted. After all, I've only a year or so to run at the University proper before they'd boot me out anyway, and I can't hang around here - Marjorie would never stand for it."
    Jack and Jadis congratulated him, but he pressed ahead.
    "My first act as the Head is to appoint you, Jack, as its first Senior Research Fellow; my second is to recommend that Jack takes on you, Jadis as its first doctorate student. No need to worry about money or grants - we've got pots of it. You could start tomorrow, but I forbid it. There's some paperwork to get done, and anyway you two need a break. Start work in a couple of weeks, after the Easter Vac, perhaps, eh, what?"
    The first thing Jack and Jadis needed to do was keep the promise they'd made to themselves that they would marry as soon as Jack got an academic post. Now this had happened, neither felt that they had had any time to waste. Ignoring protests from both sets of parents to have what Jack's father called `A Bit Of A Do', and what Jadis's mother called `A Proper Wedding, dear, you know, in a church', they booked a slot in the Cambridge Registry Office for the following week, and invited everyone they knew to meet for a drink in the nearby Isaac Newton pub afterwards.
    "Why have a proper wedding, Mum, Why?" said Jadis: "I've been living with Jack for ages, just as if we already were married. I love him. What's more, I'm having his baby in less than two months, so there'll be no time to plan anything, and after the baby's born, well, you can imagine."
    What she didn't add (because her mother just wouldn't get it, and in any case, she didn't want to hurt her) was that her marriage to Jack had existed in her own mind since he'd first asked her out. To Jadis, that a marriage should be before God and a congregation was neither here nor there. Concerning the existence of God she had no firm opinion, and the congregation, while nice to have, was irrelevant, because their marriage was really a private matter, between her and Jack, into which nobody - nobody, however much they loved them - could ever intrude. All she said was,
    "Mum, it would be lovely to see you there, if you can make it." Jadis' mother was the image of her daughter. As she put the phone down, she distractedly gathered her long brown hair behind her head, and in the dark pools of her eyes wondered how - when? - her daughter had learned to be so matter-of-fact, so hard?
    Deep in the first night at Saint-Rogatien, Jadis was having a dream in which she'd been in the garden in Chesterton, trying to plant out some summer bedding, but the plants shriveled and died as soon as she put them into the ground. She worked faster and faster, as if trying to beat some innominate contagion, but still it spread. The rising mound of dead and dying plants all around her turned from green, to grey, to red, dripping blood on the grass. When she studied the plants more closely, she saw that they were fetuses, and as she watched in pure horror, the blood smeared and spread, up the wall of the raised bed and into the Nest, up the trees, until, at the end of the leaves, it gathered and rained down on her in a torrent. She looked down and noticed blood rising up her bare legs, but she was stuck fast, unable to move or do anything to stem this tide incarnadine. But just as she thought she would drown in blood, there came a regular pulse, a subsonic thrum, like the heartbeat of the Earth. Assaulted by this calm but unstoppable vibration, the blood coagulated, dried, shattered and blew away like harmless dust; and before her, a vast and green plant rose clear out of the ground, bursting above her head into an immense Van-Gogh sunflower that became the sun. And still the Earth pulsed.
    She woke, still in Jack's arms, the shreds of the dream dissipating like fairy gossamer: but the pulse still beat, softly and insistently, just below the level of hearing. She knew her own pulse, and that of her love. But this was a new pulse, the pulse of a new life, strong and steady, beating inside her. Or, rather, a pulse returned, a pulse she feared had been lost for some time. Wave after wave of relief coursed down to meet it, and she embraced the pulse with triumphant inner shouts of radiant joy. She slept again in a state of happiness that she had not experienced for several weeks.
    When she awoke in the dawn, she'd forgotten about the dream, and now stood in the window of the small bedroom, looking down over the sunlit square. She felt amazingly refreshed after a night in Jack's arms, all her aches and pains were gone, and she was eager to meet the day.
    "Come on, silly old lion!" she'd teased, pulling the duvet off Jack's still recumbent form, yanking the curtains apart to admit the strong spring sunshine.
    "Okay, Boss," came the uncertain reply, but when Jack tried to pull the duvet back, Jadis snatched it away again in a furious cloud of fabric and hair, jumped on the bed, whacked him quite hard on the backside, and sprang for the door. Half an hour later, as Jack ordered coffee on the pavement terrace of the café below, Jadis went next door to buy croissants. If this was to be her new home, she felt she could accommodate its easy pace very well. Jack watched her return with the paper bag, and at first he didn't recognize her as his wife. The woman he was watching was indeed heavily pregnant, like Jadis, but unlike Jadis had been in the past two or three weeks, this voluptuary had acquired a devastatingly sexy hip-sway that accommodated both her legginess and her bulk with elegance and poise, her long train of hair waving to the rhythm of her movements, just as if she were dancing in her own one-woman conga line to some deep dub pulse. It wasn't until she'd stopped at his table that he was sure it was her.
    "What...?" she asked, looking at his astonished expression, while pulling out her chair and sitting on it in a single soft, cloud of fluid movement that simply exuded sex. Jack turned to his coffee, slurping it far too fast, coughed at its bitterness, and looked up, a rim of froth on his upper lip. Jadis laughed, and to Jack it sounded just like the romantic-novel cliché of tinkling bells.
    "Snow Queen, will you marry me?"
    "But we're already married!"
    "... to each other?"
    "Simultaneously, even" - she wore her mock-serious expression, shading her glinting eyes beneath the shadows of hair. Deep within her -or, in truth, not so deep -- she surged with renewed joy at her life, her fortune, and that she was married - married - to this man. She wanted him. Right here, on the street, if necessary. What fun it is, she thought, to flirt with the man you're married to!
    "And at the same time? I'm astonished."
    "In which case, I can't. Sorry!" She ran her tongue sexily around her lips, chasing flecks of coffee and croissant.
    "But this is terrible! Who's the lucky man?"
    "You are. And I expect you to take me upstairs, right now, and treat me to mad, passionate lunch.... I'm hungry", she added, leaning across the table towards him, leering like a pantomime villain and giving him an eyeful of rich, shapely cleavage.
    "But we haven't even had breakfast. Now, eat up, I have something to show you."
    And after ten minutes of silent contentment, the couple (who were, after all, on their honeymoon), sauntered out of the café in the way that honeymooning couples always will, as if they had the world at their feet. Hand in hand they crossed the square and Jack led Jadis into the churchyard. The graves closer to the street stood in well-tended, ordered lines, each stone adorned with garish sprays of plastic flowers and photographs of loved ones behind clear glass or Perspex frames. As they rounded the church they entered the cool shadows of a dark bank of cypresses and yews, where the graves were sparser and more sombre, and at length they came to a crumbling stone parapet that gave onto a magnificent view of the landscape stretched out below them to the west, with ridge after ridge of limestone hills fading to invisibility. She turned to him and kissed him calmly, warmly and firmly, just she had done for the very first time almost four years earlier. Alike - and yet not alike. There were three lives here, not two, and a new home to find, and a new life to explore.
    Two weeks later they were back in their flat. They'd been worrying what they might find, and their sense of anticipation was sharpened by the increasingly aberrant performance of the old Peugeot which toiled and grumbled up the last stretch of the M11 towards Cambridge, so much so that they began to think that they'd never arrive.
    "I promised the old Field Vehicle," Jack said, pointedly "that if she got us back home safely, I'd treat her to a thorough servicing."
    Jadis - half asleep in the passenger seat -- had begun to giggle at this.
    "Mmm.... Like you did me, you mean? Your capacity for seeing to things, Darling Jack ...." she yawned, stretching, "...knows no bounds."
    Despite her increasing discomfort and now continual back-ache brought on by the long ride home, her mind was floating on the gentle bubble of memories of her honeymoon, with long afternoons of leisured lovemaking between concentrated bursts of more serious activity. They had paced out the precise location for the first excavation season, scheduled for this time next year. And with the help of a friendly, English-speaking estate agent, they had scouted a few likely properties that could be used as live-in field stations, and would recommend the one they liked most to Roger, who'd have to authorise the funds to buy and remodel it.
    It was a big, old and mildly dilapidated farmhouse on a quiet lane about a quarter-mile away from the village centre. A large barn and the house itself formed respectively the west and north sides of a sheltered tarmac quadrangle, braced against the prevailing Atlantic westerlies. The shingles on the barn's roof looked rickety, but the beams were sound; there was plenty of scope for dividing it into a machine shop; laboratory and store rooms, and there was an extensive stone cellar beneath.
    The house itself was large without being ostentatious, with an enormous kitchen, (accompanied by a large, tiled back-kitchen, laundry room and pantry) that could serve as the centre of family life. Jadis could already imagine herself in it, with piles, and piles of children, students and field workers, cats and dogs running to and fro, an oak table in the centre laden with hot meals, lab notes, toys, specimens, in an ongoing jumble...
    There were eight large bedrooms - so plenty of room to accommodate themselves and several colleagues, children and friends at once - but only one tiny bathroom. Have to do something about that, thought Jadis. And put one in downstairs, too. She thought of herself in the future, shepherding shoals of small children in and out ...
    But best of all, there was a large garden, already in cultivation, that could be used to help supply the home and field kitchen. In the middle was a dense spinney of mature trees. It didn't look very extensive from the outside, but as soon as you stepped in, you had the distinct impression of being in an endless forest. Jadis immediately thought of the Nest. She warmed to this, and the pulse within her quickened in response.
    When they got back to the flat, well after dark, and expecting the usual explosion of disorder, they found it a picture of neatness. Papers were stacked, clothes washed and ironed, dishes put away, floors swept, and there were even flowers in vases. A note from Marjorie (who'd had the key) explained that she'd asked her cleaning lady to give the flat a spring-clean. "A welcome-home gift'", she explained.
    The next day, Jack rose early and went into the department, to give a progress report to McLennane. Jadis thought she'd stay behind for a while - the car journey had been hard on her; she was rather stiff, and she wanted to potter quietly around the garden for a bit, pulling out a few Spring weeds. She said she'd come into the department later. Maybe they'd have lunch? Great idea, said Jack: they kissed, parted, and he was gone.
    After Jack had left, she rose, shucked Horrible over her head and went into the garden. Leaning over to pull a few small grassy interlopers from the edge of the raised bed, she idly thought of the coming summer, a baby dozing in a pram, and - who knows, that Normal Servicing might be Resumed in the Nest. Her presumption was met instantly with a jolt so painful, so sudden, that she was thrown clear off her feet and sent sprawling forward into the wall of the raised bed. She stood up, dazed, sweating, gasping for breath, thinking that she'd been hit in the back with a battering ram. But before she could recover, a second bone-crunching impact cut her to her knees. The world whirled around her. Her head swam. Her crotch felt damp, and, raising Horrible's hem, she looked down and saw a trickle of blood running down the inside of her right thigh.
    Her head cleared immediately, as often happens to soldiers in the extremis of battle. No time to call Jack; an ambulance would take ages to get here; the answer was clear. She'd take herself to Casualty -- now. Stopping only to clean the thin line of blood from her thigh, to find a clean pair of knickers, and (regretting that pregnant women don't have much use for tampons or sanitary towels) stuffing as much loo paper as she could down her knickers and up between her legs, she grabbed the car keys and left. The Field Vehicle spluttered glutinously into life.
    After their long journey of the day before, Jadis hoped she'd have enough fuel to get herself to Addenbrooke's. In the event, this hardly mattered. Coursing down Elizabeth Way and across the river, another huge, shuddering spasm wracked her lower body. She gripped the steering wheel in fierce concentration, ignoring the fact that her insides were hemorrhaging. As she worked the pedals, she could feel that her inner thighs were slick with great massy gouts. She made her way carefully along East Road and past Parker's Piece, pulling up at the lights, signaling to turn left into Hills Road and the southbound straight to Addenbrooke's Hospital. Almost there.
    Willing the lights to change, she gunned the accelerator - the only way, she'd learned, of getting the diesel engine to make a quick getaway, but the long un-serviced Field Vehicle was slow to respond. At last, the lights changed, and Jadis steered into Hills Road, making sure that nothing was coming from the right - extra carefully now, as although the spasms had lessened in intensity, she had lost a lot of blood and was feeling a little light-headed, just as she had been in the night before last at the Sanglier D'Or, when, with the curtains swirling in the Spring breeze through their open window, and when her Darling Jack ...
    But what she hadn't seen, as she turned, was a police car, lights flashing, screaming northwards at eighty-five miles per hour up the wrong side of Hills Road, to her left.
    The police Volvo Cross Country hit the Peugeot almost head on, with a combined velocity of more than a hundred miles per hour. The Peugeot flipped forward and turned a full somersault over the top of the larger car. As the Peugeot righted itself in mid-air, the G-force pulled the safety belt clear from its fastenings, and Jadis was catapulted as a bloody comet forwards through the windscreen, landing face-down on the bonnet of a northbound car twenty feet away; a car whose driver braked suddenly, so that Jadis slid down the bonnet and came to rest on the ground in front of it. The Peugeot itself, now driverless, ploughed through the air, and, cratering nose-first into the road behind the police car, burst into flames.
    "Darling Jack..."
    The world whined and wheeled, and was silent.

    Chapter 7

    (September 2011)

    O for a beaker full of the warm South!
    John Keats - Ode to a Nightingale

    "Domingo, would you do the honours..?"
    "Yes, Jadis, of course." The big man in the radioactively loud aloha shirt and oversized Bermuda shorts waved his ham-sized hands over the table, and the happy chatter all around it ceased at once. Nothing could be heard but birdsong, the late summer wind sighing in the high branches of the spinney, the lazy plop of a frog into the pond and the distant, excited rasp of the grasshoppers in the field that opened at the end of the garden.
    "Benedictus, benedicat."
    The chatter resumed. Jadis had been standing in the doorway of the back kitchen, and now added an enormous earthenware bowl of lemon chicken and rice to the already laden table. Sitting down at its head, she slid off her sandals and buried her feet in the furry, dependable bulk of Fairbanks, her gigantic, lion-maned golden retriever, who looked up momentarily, emitted a contented nut-brown growl, and went back to sleep on the cool tiles under the table -- almost.
    Although very much fulfilling his job description as Mobile Self-Warming Hot Water Bottle and Guard Dog (Fierce) for his mistress, he still kept half an eye open, monitoring his arch enemy. This was none other than Horrible, the rapacious, greedy and thoroughly unlovely squashed-faced tabby that had adopted the household three years earlier, and, impervious to its protests, brought with it a truly titanic infestation of worms -- and a cloud of fleas that had made everyone scratch for weeks. The puling pit of scruffy kittens discovered one afternoon under a pile of dirty laundry, some weeks later, was the only outward sign of the animal's gender. But Horrible was in no mood to tease the dog today, for her tiny and sadistic mind had already been distracted. She slunk off towards the long grass and reeds at the edge of the pond, in search of small witless invertebrates to persecute.
    Jadis looked up at the human company, and felt a warm mixture of emotions: the glow of achievement, salted with a twinge of regret, and excitement about the future. For all that this was the final Saint-Rogatien field crew, at the end of the final season, and this, the final dinner, she was in a mood of quiet celebration. The dig had closed down that very afternoon. The last earthmover had replaced the overburden, grass-seed had been sown, and the mayor of the village had had a little ceremony to mark the passing of a remarkable, surprising, trail-blazing but ultimately frustrating archaeological endeavour. In the days ahead, Jadis would pack up the lab specimens, crating them for Cambridge, where, no doubt, they would make a few doctorate projects for graduate students to come. And in the meantime, she and Jack were clearing the decks for something new.
    Jack sat, unchanged and unchanging, at the other end of the trestle table, laid out on the back terrace in the dappled shade of a vast and ancient sweet-chestnut tree, its fruits already swelling. He returned her warm gaze, seeing her as she now was, as if at the end of a long journey. What he saw was his wife, of course, and someone he'd never tire of looking at, ever different from moment to moment, but always just the same, an eternal landscape under ever-changing skies. If he'd had to summarize a long-term, secular trend, he'd say this: that her long hair was, if any thing, even longer and richer, her dark eyes yet more lustrous and expressive (or had he just got better at reading them?) And after five - no, six - seasons at what the residents of Saint-Rogatien had called Le Dig, she had been winnowed by experience, and was now as toned and slender as a hazel switch, her dark skin toasted to a yet warmer shade of taut softness.
    Jadis felt Jack's eyes upon her and momentarily lost interest in the rest of the world's affairs, as the two of them exchanged in a moment what might otherwise have taken many hours of speech. Oblivious to the swirl of conversation around them, Jack raised one mock-serious eyebrow, just for her - we have our news, Snow Queen, but not yet. Her hand flew to her mouth to stifle a giggle, and then, lovingly and reprovingly as a mother, she affected a sterner but still-smiling countenance, a mental finger-wag: silly old lion! She was the hostess, and had her guests to look after! And so with a small shake of her head, her hair a shimmering cadence, she broke the telepathic link and the noise of the party flooded back. The entire exchange had lasted hardly more than a second. As if to compensate for her reverie, she waved her hands yet more animatedly at her guests, imploring them to begin, to dig in, dish up, have more wine.
    Not that they needed any encouragement: nor that they had taken much notice of the intimate currents sparking above their heads. At Jack's left, Primrose Tsien and Faye Callaghan were laughing uproariously as Avi Malkeinu, sat between them, his tight, dark curls bobbing, was telling what was probably a very salacious and undoubtedly exaggerated story about his latest stint as an Israeli army reservist. At Jack's right, Domingo was deep in conversation with the studious and startlingly freckled and red-headed Mathilde Reynard - to her right, Eric Onoye was laughing with Marjorie McLennane.
    The McLennanes, now retired, had broken off a motoring tour to visit Saint-Rogatien and close another chapter in the story of their last and most favourite protégés. Which left Roger - dear, silly, shrewd old Roger, seated at her right, in his off-white linen suit and panama hat - who looked at her with solicitous eyes and put his hand on hers.
    "Are you feeling quite all right, my dear?" Her smile was as warm as only she could make it:
    "Dear Roger - thank you, of course I am. Why shouldn't I be?"
    She liked to think of the 2011 crew as her Dream Team, the brightest and best she'd ever assembled. I mean to say, she thought, just look at them! First, and greatest, there was Avi, who'd just published a terse and thoughtful paper in Nature on his analysis of the still-mysterious artefacts from what the locals had come to call Le Dig, artefacts that she -- his doctorate supervisor -- had named as `Remillardian' in her own thesis, two years before. These featureless, geometrically perfect, polygonal coins of flint and obsidian were the sigils of a lost and ancient civilization that had dominated this part of the world for hundreds of thousands of years, except that their meaning - and their makers -- remained frustratingly elusive.
    And yet in the heat of this never-ending battle with the unknown (and at her kitchen table, no less!) she and Avi had fused his talent as a data wrangler with her ability to slice through a problem like a hot knife, and in so doing, they had created a new approach: what a commentator in Antiquity had called `Analytic Archaeology' and hailed as something that might one day become a potent force in their field, for those adventurous and gifted enough to unlock its potential.
    Jadis and Avi had not long returned from Avi's doctorate exam, and a rare trip to Cambridge, at which she had met Ernestine Yanga for the first time. She'd heard wonderful things about Professor Yanga from Jack, about how sympathetic she was. Jack's clear eyes had misted over at the memory. It was another time, long ago, another life, he explained. Avi's exam had been brief, almost routine. Afterwards, in the departmental coffee room (so familiar, but so, well -- alien), Professor Yanga had confided in Jadis that Avi's work was quite brilliant -
    "So bold, and so brash, I suspect, that he might find himself in very hot water!" She smiled, casting herself back to Jack's own troubled but ultimately triumphant defence -- and then said something that Jadis found perplexing.
    "And I have longed to meet you, Dr Markham. I can see where that husband of yours gets it from."
    Jadis had said nothing, but looked up with a half-smile of inquisition.
    "You don't know? Why, my dear, it's you! Your fortitude."
    She wanted to tell her that no, it had been the other way round - that if only she knew - that without Jack to tie her to the Earth she would probably have long since dried up, burned like stubble, or carried away like chaff on the wind.
    Over the previous two years, Avi had been called up regularly to serve two-month stints in the Israeli Army as a reservist, especially as the perpetually broiling Middle-East Situation was entering a more than usually sticky patch. With the mild, peacemaking Kingdom of Jordan having been swept aside by the green and black flags of the ever-advancing pan-Islamic Khalifa that had already swallowed most of the rest of the region, the incoming tide of war threatened break through the ever-fragile, ever-shifting dunes of armed truce. If the Khalifa defeated the still-resisting Saudis, there would be nobody left to fight - except the old adversary. Israel had decided that Avi's scientific skills were too valuable to be wasted on the dead past when they could be applied to the uncertain future. So Avi would be gone in a week: as it looked, this time, permanently.
    But perhaps, one day, Avi had said, he'd get back to science, for he had something up his sleeve -- a proposal to apply the new analytic approach to the whole Mount Carmel cave complex, where Neanderthals and modern humans had lived, alternately, like some great Palaeolithic time-share, swapping the same caves, over and over, for a hundred thousand years. He'd discussed this deep into the night with Jadis as he finished his thesis, papers strewn on the kitchen table and onto the floor (where, in one of those hazards of fieldwork, he found them the morning after, decorated with the remains of a semi-digested dormouse that Horrible had regurgitated).
    Jadis had confided Avi's grand plans to Jack later that same evening. The house asleep, the grandfather clock ticking, they sat together before the fire, on the same saggy sofa they'd had in Chesterton, the great dog snoring on the floor. Reviewing the day: it was something they tried to do every evening - or, at least, when Jack was around.
    Not that anyone listening would have heard very much more than a few half-snatches of actual words, because their conversation had been so worn by familiarity that it had transformed into an intensely, indecipherably private exchange, words distilled into nuanced signals of posture, gesture, hands, eyes that any casual observer would have missed. Jadis curled into a ball, tucked her feet in below her knees, loosened her hair, leaned up against Jack, and stared into the ebbing flames in the grate. She wished she could have stayed like that forever.
    They remembered the first time they'd met Avi, when as a raw and cocksure first-year undergraduate, he'd come to Chesterton for supervisions, full of the most amazing ideas about Mount Carmel. And yet, perhaps more prescient than cocksure - for he might even have been right. But as things stood now, who knew if any either of them would ever hear from Avi again? Jack detected her concern in a slight tension in her shoulders, which he began to rub, firmly and slowly in a deep, strong rhythm -- for a first graduate student is like a first child, especially when he flies the nest, and into danger: he knew this, for she had once been his.
    So he drew her close, tousling her hair with gentle playfulness, as if to say that there were other things to remember about their garden in Chesterton, besides Avi's visits. She stirred in recollection and, in response, stretched up towards him, her softly sunburned lips parted: they kissed, a tiny and briefly ecstatic moment in the quiet night. She subsided once again in his arms, her face obscured by clouds, her last sight before falling asleep the dancing light from the softly cracking logs silhouetting the waving mane of the dog at her feet.
    Not that Avi had any particular worries, and why should he? Here he was, in La France Profonde, in his favourite situation, that is, between two pretty, vivacious women who were hanging on his every word. As she looked over this, the Last Supper, Jadis did not know - how could she have done? - what discoveries Primrose Tsien, her Chinese-American technician (squeezed, giggling, in the crook of Avi's muscular right arm), and all-Texan cowgirl Faye Callaghan, her current doctorate student (embraced by his equally beefy left) might make, what renown they might achieve - or none?
    And one might ask the same of Mathilde Reynard, a postdoctoral researcher from Montpellier, her slim, pale, freckled form like a thin white ash against the dark thundercloud that was Domingo to her left; and Eric Onoye, one of Ernestine Yanga's graduate students, laughing with Marjorie. What would the future hold for them?
    But wherever they might go, and wherever their lives might take them, she silently wished them all the good fortune she'd had. And maybe some of them might like to stay on, for she was convinced that Saint-Rogatien was just the beginning of their adventures. Caught once again in the sough and swag of sweetly remorseful daydream, she paused, stopped what she was eating and, fork held in mid-air, looked up at Jack, now deep in conversation with Domingo and Mathilde. Her expression would have been unintelligible to anyone who'd witnessed its brief passage across her face, but the fathomless glints in her eyes turned to sparkles of curiosity, and then laughter: for in one of those random lulls that punctuate dinner-party conversations she heard:
    "... Domingo García Vasquez Santéria Sanchopanza de Orellanzana von Hohenzollern und Taxis."
    Jack sat back, incredulous: "if I might say so, Domingo, that's quite a handle." Mathilde leaned forwards on her elbows, gazing in open-mouthed awe at the huge man.
    Roger: "You're having us on, old boy!"
    Avi: "Hey, Domingo, run that past me again!"
    Domingo just smiled one of his winningly tombstone-toothed smiles and said, in his characteristically resonant, almost impossibly deep voice:
    "Of course, my friends just call me `Pongo'".
    There was a brief but significant spell of utter silence, and then everyone started laughing at once. Fairbanks, startled from sleep, sat up, tail wagging, jumping from guest to guest, eager to learn the reason for all the commotion.
    Her first sight of Domingo had been when, two years earlier, she had been hurriedly making herself a sandwich before taking Fairbanks for a walk. All of a sudden a vast shadow loomed in the ever-open kitchen door, and for a fleeting moment she could have sworn there'd been a total eclipse. Looking up, she gasped, as the apparition before her resolved from an inchoate blur into quite indisputably the ugliest man she had ever seen - and one of the most instantly loveable.
    "Please, may I come in?" he'd asked. And so Jadis invited this monstrous troll over the threshold. it was one of those days when Jadis had been rushing around in a fury and a foam of business, trying to do too many things at once. He thought she looked tired.
    "Please, Dr Markham, sit down, and let me deal with that." So without knowing quite how or why (let alone how he knew her name), Jadis found herself sitting at the table eating a sandwich and drinking a mug of tea that he had made for her. This gave her plenty of time to study this strange, uninvited guest.
    He was, indeed, immense in all possible directions. Well over six feet tall and broad to match, he had an immense nose; an immense chin; an immense mane of thick, black, spiky hair that ran down the nape of his neck; immense steam-hammer hands, and teeth that looked like Stonehenge. But the perpetually cheeky twinkle of his eyes (each buried beneath a brow seemingly the size of a small hedgehog) revealed this same immensity on the inside, too. As she was later to discover, he was immensely kind, generous, gentle, cultured, sensitive and hard-working. (He was also immensely strong, and became known around the village as the L'incroyable Hulk.) He had originally come from Andalusia in southern Spain, but had travelled, and spoke fluent English (and several other languages) with an accent so slight that one would not have been able to identify its location.
    Jadis had invited him to join her on her daily round of the village, an act that gave an anchor for her day as well as necessary exercise for the dog. She also found it a great way to get to know new people, for the fame of Le Dig had, over the years, attracted many callers, some of them unusual or even frightening, which was one reason she was grateful for Fairbanks, especially during those heart-aching periods in which Jack was away on one of his own explorations, or - now that Roger had retired - as Director, on Institute business.
    As they bowled along the cow-parsley'd lane that led from the back garden in a slow grade up to the village square - Fairbanks bounding on ahead, twirling his feathered tail like a propeller - they made a contrasting pair. Him in what she came to realise was his invariable uniform of Bermuda shorts and Hawai'ian shirt (making his bulk seem even greater), she in the long mackintosh she reserved for walking and shopping. He explained that he was a Catholic priest, newly ordained, who had (he said) "been given some time off for good behaviour" before seeking a flock of his own. Even just the way he said things made her giggle like a little girl - she imagined him as some kind of friendly fairy-tale giant who invites small children to play in the gardens of his castle, simply from the goodness of his heart.
    He had recalled that there was a long tradition in Catholicism for clerics to go out into the world, and even be scientists for a while, all the better to appreciate the Mind of the Creator. His greatest hero had been the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, usually noted for his role in the Piltdown Man hoax of 1912 and for some challenging ideas about collective intelligence, but revered among palaeontologists as a skilled and tireless field worker. But he had also become something of an expert on the Abbé Gaston de Bonnard, a tireless archaeologist and man of God who had worked in this part of France in the late nineteenth century.
    Would it be possible, he asked, to "do the Teilhardian thing" and join Le Dig? Perhaps for a few weeks? Jadis had said yes even before she'd known she had, and Domingo had been there ever since.
    The dinner was sinking into cheerful disarray, just as the golden ball of the Sun touched the western horizon, beyond the village, making a dramatic silhouette of the church on top of the hill that had ruled their lives and dreams for so long. Jack and the students cleared the plates (Marjorie laid a hand on Jadis' arm before she could stand: "let someone else do the work, dear"); candles were fetched and lit (bringing out a flutter of moths); coffee was made, brandy brought from the cellar, and the company pushed their chairs back. Roger - ever the most refined judge of such things - felt that it was time for a toast.
    And so, rising to his feet, he asked the company to charge their glasses with whatever was handy and raise a toast to "Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards, and all who sailed in her!" The enthusiastic response sent a murder of evening crows flapping from the spinney.
    Clinks of glasses, more happy chatter, and then Eric Onoye said -
    "Yes, Professor McLennane, but who, precisely, did sail in her? That is the question!"
    It was the one question they could not answer, the brick wall that had stopped every avenue of their investigation. Many trenches and tunnels had been essayed into the cliff under Jadis' direction, and they had found tons of animal bones and plant remains as well as the strange, precious, mystifying Remillardian artefacts. But of human bones they found not one; not a single tooth in six years of careful, fingertip search, not one tooth despite the arduous sieving of enough sediment to have buried the hilltop church steeple-deep -- twice over.
    If the megalith had been a pyramid, any capping masonry had long since been eroded away or stripped, if it had been there at all, and there were no signs of voids that might have hinted at some unvisited tomb or sarcophagus. The bulk of the megalith - its filling - had been like a compost heap, a disorderly mass of earth and rocks, more or less glued together with the limestone precipitating out of the groundwater, making a breccia, a kind of geological blancmange whose antiquity is notoriously hard to judge.
    This was, indeed, another problem: Jadis had called in teams of scientists from all over the world, each an expert in one or other of the many arcane techniques of age determination, from electron spin resonance to amino-acid racemization, from optically stimulated luminescence to uranium-thorium dating -- and yet each had come up with their own estimates, to which they held with the stubbornness of the several Blind Men of Hindustan in their variously confused contemplation of the Elephant. In the end. the best that anyone could offer was that the megalith had been built sometime between 800,000 and 250,000 years ago, but of the makers there had been no sign. It could have been that there were several different races of maker, different species even - each one adding a little more to the megalith over endless, unrecorded millennia.
    And so they all talked of the depth of civilization, the antiquity of intent, that had been the legacy of Saint-Rogatien, confirming Jack's suspicions gathered in a single flying visit so long before - a visit undertaken as a desperate, last throw, and so as not to distract his pretty undergraduate girlfriend from studying for her finals.
    "You know," said Domingo, "what I find most intriguing about the whole panorama is not so much antiquity, but recency."
    "How do you mean?" Roger said. Domingo had a way of holding an audience, so that whenever he spoke, or even seemed like he might wish to, everyone instinctively turned their heads to him in expectation.
    "Well, do you remember the whole business about Homo floresiensis?" All nodded in assent - the discovery of a strange species of tiny human-like creature that had lived on an isolated island in Indonesia until almost historical times had been the archaeological sensation of the last decade. "Just think about it. If these creatures were wandering about until as recently as - whatever it was - ten thousand years - how do you know they're not still around?"
    "But they aren't!" said Avi - "people have looked! Even though they're tiny, they couldn't have crawled under rocks or something..."
    "Hey, guy - aren't you forgetting something?" This from Faye, disentangling herself from Avi, lighting a cigarette and looking at him sternly: "you know, `In A Hole In The Ground There Lived A Hobbit?' Maybe we haven't found all the holes!"
    Laughter, and, had anybody noticed, a sage twinkle in Domingo's eyes, like tiny newborn stars emerging from beneath the vast interstellar gas-clouds of his eyebrows.
    "To be sure, Flores is perhaps not such a good example - too isolated, too far away. But what about here? When did our megalith builders stop building their megaliths? And why?"
    "Perhaps modern Cro-Magnons came in and stopped them?" ventured Mathilde.
    "That's, of course, possible," Domingo replied, his huge dark form looking down on the tiny, pale-skinned, copper-haired girl to his right, a tableau that reminded Jadis of nothing more than King Kong and Ann Darrow. She tried not to chortle at the thought. From the way that Jack was struggling to suppress laughter, she guessed that the same image had also flashed through his mind. They tried not to look at each other in case they had hysterics.
    Domingo continued regardless, with an easy yet precise fluency belied by his apparently unwieldy frame:
    "Consider, if you will, the Neanderthals. We have always had them in our sights for Saint-Rogatien. But that might be an error, might it not? Think of the age of the thing - when the Neanderthals first appeared, Saint-Rogatien was already well over half a million years old!"
    "And your point is...?" teased Avi. He and Domingo had become firm friends, and had often been out on Le Dig together, one each side of a great box-frame sieve, shaking out and winnowing the sediment for tiny plant remains or flint flakes, their eager conversation as dense - or as airy - as the clouds of tan dust they produced, wafting across the site.
    "My point, my dear Avram Yitzchak, is that their antiquity is a side-issue. But what, I ask again, of their recency? As far as I know, the latest known Neanderthal comes from my - er - neck of the woods, and is around twenty-two thousand years old..."
    "Twenty-one!" corrected Primrose, giggling.
    "I do apologise, and I thank you for making my next point ... that the age keeps dropping. Will it keep dropping forever? How will we know when we've seen the last of the Neanderthals? It's a bit like" - he waved his great hands expansively "-- it's like trying to know if you've got rid of every last one of Horrible's Little Friends!" He paused. "You can't!" They all laughed at this: September was peak cat-flea season and Jadis and Primrose had been busy fumigating all the bedrooms.
    Domingo was now a dark shadow in the deepening night, visible only by the glint of candle flames in his eyes: indeed, people could now only be seen from reflections, glances of yellow light on spectacle frames here, a curve of the face there, making them all look like a collection of off-duty models for one of Goya's Witches' Sabbaths. This only enhanced the drama of Domingo's speech: he was a Caliban, an Ariel, a Tyger, stalking the forests of the night that runs along the edges of dreams.
    "You know, my friends, I shouldn't be surprised if the Neanderthals survived, perhaps just long enough to have come into the very earliest legends of the human race. And perhaps even more than that."
    There was a long pause, and then came a strange new voice.
    "Ha'nephilim ha'yu ha'aretz ba'yamim ..." intoned Avi, his eyes focussed as if on some immeasurable distance, as if speaking to a lost past. The table was hushed by his unwonted seriousness. He had never been known to speak any language in their company besides English or French. This was a private side to Avi the existence of which nobody had been aware - none, that is, except Domingo.
    In their long hours together at the dig, Domingo and Avi - the Catholic priest and the Jewish atheist - had turned, inevitably, to religion.
    Domingo had wondered at what he saw as the manifest contradictions of Avi's upbringing; that he'd been raised in a Marxist kibbutz community in a land reclaimed by the Jews.
    "This is a delicious irony, Avram Yitzchak, is it not? That as soon as the Jews found the Land of Israel, after much heroism and effort and struggle, they abandon their religion! And - this is all the more intriguing - those Jews in Israel who cling most firmly to their religion deny Israel's very right to exist!"
    Avi just laughed. It was not that he was uncomfortable, or that he thought Domingo was trying to convert him, because he knew his friend too well for that. It was just that he completely failed to see what Domingo was getting at.
    So, over the months, Domingo tried a different tack. The argument that had worked was that if Avi was really as serious about archaeology and antiquity as he appeared to be, he might find it all the more enriching were he to have a better appreciation of history, especially his own.
    "After all, Dear Avram", Domingo had said, "the Jews are the custodians of the deepest traditions of written history in the western world. Yet bereshit is a fickle mistress: who really knows how far back that history goes?" It was the mention of bereshit - the Hebrew for `In The Beginning', and the name for the book of Genesis - that had made Avram sit up with a start and look with yet further admiration at his strange, new friend, whose erudition seemed bottomless. He would remember it ever as a key moment in his life.
    The company now looked at Avi in equal awe, as if he'd just chanted a spell, whether for good or evil they could not tell. Only Domingo had sufficient presence of mind to answer.
    "Avram's words are entirely apposite: gigantes autem erant super terram in diebus illis - in those days there were giants that walked the Earth," he said. "And let us not forget what the giants were up to." At this point he muttered a string of Latin under his breath, as if trying to find the place in his mind before translating it: "Ah yes, postquam enim ingressi sunt filii ...um... Dei ad filias hominum illaeque genuerunt isti sunt. Hmmm -- potentes a saeculo viri .... er ... famosi." And then, more clearly: "That these giants were great men, who interbred with the daughters of men, who bore great and mighty sons."
    "But hey, Domingo, my friend," said Avi, sitting back in his chair in his usual relaxed way, the seriousness of his face lost in the shadow beyond the table. "The word nephilim in Ivrit does not translate as `giants'. It means `the fallen ones'..."
    Avi and Domingo now had the floor before a rapt audience.
    "But that's precisely it, Avi. They were giants because they were great men, not necessarily that they were aliens or trolls or Neanderthals or anything like that, because the Bible would not have the appropriate language for such things. But we know that they fell, before the Flood, but before they did, they intermarried with human beings. Perhaps the Bible is telling us about human beings and - er - other people, before the floods at the end of the Ice Age? Now, I do not believe that every word of the Bible is true - can be true - but when something is said so plainly..."
    Domingo's point tailed off into silence.
    "Perhaps we can put Domingo's ideas to the test," said Jack, alleviating the suddenly brooding mood.
    "A-ha!" exclaimed Roger, "I just knew you and Jadis had been up to something!"
    "Well, possibly. But we have been thinking of our next move now that we're winding things up here at Saint-Rogatien. I've been scouting around quite a lot, as you know..." General laughter and some groans. Jack's habits of wandering off for days and returning looking like an ill-used tramp were well-known. "And I think I've found something rather .... well, odd."
    No laughs at this - it was Jack's instinct for following the bones of the Earth that had brought them Saint-Rogatien in the first place. Everyone was eager to learn of this new adventure, as if the legacy of Saint-Rogatien - after six seasons of nail-snagging, knee-grazing, back-breaking labour - was already long forgotten.
    "So I took Jadis to see it, on her birthday..." Wolf-whistles from Avi, catcalls from the girls.
    "...and she likes it, which of course is the most important thing ..." laughs, hoots of "hear! hear!" and "well done, Jadis!"
    "... and she thinks we should have a more serious look around. Perhaps early next month, dig a few test pits, and see if there's potential for a field season there."
    "Of course, my dear chap," said Roger, "we're all intrigued. Where is this interesting place, what?"
    So Jack told them, and the discussion continued deeper into the night until, well past moonrise, the Last Supper finally came to an end.
    Jadis had known what Jack was going to talk about anyway, so she started to the clear remaining plates and glasses into the kitchen. Marjorie, in contrast, had no particular idea of what Jack was going to talk about, but decided to help Jadis, all the same. And so, with the conversation still audible through the back door - now counterpointed by an intermittent frog chorus from the pond -- Jadis and Marjorie stood together in the kitchen, one washing up, the other drying.
    Like the two old friends they were, like two bookends, they stood together companionably, chatting amiably about gardening, and the lives and loves of the friends and colleagues they had in common, and what Roger was going to do with himself now he'd retired ("get under my feet, worse luck!") but neither feeling any need to start a conversation simply for the sake of it. They had both been through too much for that. For her part, Jadis felt that she was more in Marjorie's debt than she could ever express, or thank, let alone repay.
    Marjorie's thoughts were more complex. From the very first time she had met Jadis, she had sensed an inner toughness quite at variance with her easygoing exterior: but that her mettle had had to be tested quite so brutally was shocking, beyond comprehension. The facts of the accident were quite trying enough, even without further discussion. That Jadis had survived at all was remarkable - that she had thrived, a miracle. Looking at this self-possessed, evidently happy and, frankly, beautiful woman, her friend, you'd never have guessed that she'd endured so much. This, and the fact that she never once discussed or referred to it, was a testament both to her fortitude: that, and (she had to admit) the support of her husband.
    As the two women finished their work and turned to say good-night, Marjorie's hand brushed the sleeve of Jadis' sweatshirt, and they embraced. Neither with ardour, nor with passion, but as friends will, as an expression of knowledge shared that need not be spoken; and in the hope that such shared confidences might help to ease an otherwise intolerable burden.
    One question remained, a question that Marjorie kept to herself, as she settled down in the guest bedroom of the farmhouse next to a snoring Roger, the full moon hanging low over the eastern fields: for she never could - never would -- have broached it with Jadis, let alone anyone else. And that question was this: had Jadis managed to reach the hospital unscathed, could she have saved her unborn child, or would she have miscarried anyway? But Marjorie's mind was wired for certainties and decision, not hypotheses and counterfactuals, so she soon abandoned the struggle and surrendered to the arms and armies of sleep.

    Chapter 8

    (June, 2011)

    My beloved spake, and said unto me, rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.
    Song of Solomon 2, 10-11

    Jadis burst from the kitchen door like a rifle shot, a spinning mass of hair and legs and bags and baggy shirt and denim cut-offs and eager excitement. Jack threw open the passenger door of the open-top jeep and laughed.
    "No hurry, Snow Queen, they can't start the Ball without you!" Jadis threw the bags in the back, scrambled aboard, strapped herself in and said -
    "Let's go!"
    Avi was left in charge of the dig; Primrose promised she'd remember to take Fairbanks for a walk ("if you're too busy, just ask Domingo"); but once down the much patched-and-potholed drive lined with shimmering poplars, and through the twin stone pillars that supported their sagging, never-closed front gate, they were away, a bolt for freedom, if only for a couple of days.
    She couldn't imagine she'd feel such sudden exhilaration: that this must be the way champagne corks feel, when, all strain released, they career carelessly into space. But when she paused to think about it, she hadn't left the village in weeks and had become as taut as over-wound clockwork. Starting a dig was easy: just shift a spadeful of dirt and you're there. But finishing a dig -- that was another matter entirely. Contracts to terminate, forms to fill in, volunteers to send home, equipment to inventory, specimens to catalogue and ship, and endless, endless, reports to write. Not to mention the tedious process of environmental restoration (more forms, more reports), transforming a site that had been dug and heaped and levelled and scraped and picked over for six years back into a place that looked just as it had done when they'd first found it. Turning an omelette back into a raw egg, she thought, might even be marginally simpler.
    Late one evening in the middle of May, she was sitting alone in a pool of light in the darkened kitchen, working through another draft of her monthly accounts report for the GW Foundation. As the rows and columns of the spreadsheet expanded balefully before her tired eyes, she started to wonder if it would ever end; if Jack's much-delayed promise of a new dig site would ever gallop over the horizon and rescue her.
    To make matters worse, Jack had been away for three and a half weeks - a fortnight of surveying, followed by a conference in America and a meeting with the GW Foundation in Cambridge. She accepted his absences as necessary, but even after all this time, she found it hard to lie in a bed that lacked his presence. The first two or three days were always fine, as long as his smell lingered. For a few days after that she tried to compensate by inviting Fairbanks into bed - something that was never allowed when Jack was `At Home'. But that was no help, either. Fairbanks snored (something Jack rarely did), and, what's more, he smelled of dog. She realized that this was hardly his fault, and she couldn't really blame her faithful, uncomplaining companion for the fact that she missed her husband.
    It was just dawning on her, then, that she should, by now, be getting more used to Jack's absences, not less, and wondering why this might be, when she looked up from the spreadsheet swimming before her eyes to see Jack himself, standing by her side. She flung herself upwards at him like a firework and threw her arms tightly around his neck.
    "You need a holiday", he said.
    And so it was that they were now hacking along the country roads towards Aurignac, a small, sleepy village but with a remarkable distinction. For Aurignac can make a fair claim to being the epicentre and fountainhead of human consciousness. If the human race can be said to have started anywhere, it is here.
    Chipped flints had been the apotheosis of craftsmanship for almost three million years, but these had no more been the products of creative imagination than are the filigreed webs of spiders, or the great reefs secreted by a trillion mindless polyps, for all that their mighty works can be seen from space.
    And then, something happened.
    Quite suddenly, around forty thousand years ago, a spark lit up, and human beings emerged from primeval night. It was as if they had previously imagined the cave they inhabited as their entire universe, and had -- quite by accident, perhaps by turning a different corner - discovered the cave mouth, a portal to a brighter, wider world of limitless possibility. The effects of this stunning event were so profound that they had left their mark in the record of human endeavour four hundred centuries later. Could the skyscrapers and cities of the twentieth century ever be such enduring memorials?
    The most dramatic change was the manifestation of consciousness that human beings later came to call `art'. Before, there had been nothing. And yet now there were cave paintings that had brought the animals of the late Ice Age vividly to life; statues made with love and devotion and the worship of the strength of men, and the love of women, and the earliest known images of the human face. There were imprints of hands that said, more eloquently than any written language -- `I am'.
    This breathtaking revolution burst all over Europe within a geological eyeblink, but among the first discoveries had come to light here, at Aurignac itself, which therefore had the honour of giving its name - the Aurignacian - to perhaps the single most important event in the whole of human history: the moment when human beings first awoke from their long sleep. Or so it had been thought. For there were yet older, more enigmatic signs, more mysterious still because they might not have been made by humans at all, and would, therefore, not have been recognizable as art, at least, not to our, human eyes. Jadis' mysterious Remillardian stone-tool culture might have been one of these signs, but with no context, no maker, it was hard to tell.
    If a pilgrimage to Aurignac were not wonder enough for two archaeologists on a spree, the modern village had in Le Cerf Blanc a jewel of a hotel attached to a luxurious and expensive restaurant. A treat for them both. After all, it was her twenty-eighth birthday and she deserved it.
    And, as Jack explained as they drove -- Jadis' hair streaming out behind her like a flag, the laddered avenues of poplars and planes casting rippling zigzag shadows across the car, the fume of poppies and dust and the ripening maize whizzing past them on either side -- they had some planning to do. He'd found a site on the way to Aurignac which his intuition had told him might be something special, something new - something to wake them all up after the ravelled enigma of Saint-Rogatien. He wanted to show this new site to her, before anyone else: to give her a sense of place, in the hope that she'd pick up at least some echo of the vibrations that had sent his internal antennae thrumming, on his first visit, blotting out all else -- that in the seemingly modest little cave of Souris Saint-Michel there might be a door to a new world, if only he had the wit to see it.
    Jadis looked at Jack through the hair blowing across her face, and then at the road ahead of them, and felt, deeply inside her, deeper than words, that this journey represented far more than a short drive on some dusty summer back-road, more than a pleasant interlude in the lives of two busy people. No - this was a tipping point, a phase transition in existence, as it had been for the first Aurignacians. They were riding, like them, into a new life, awakening.
    She felt like the very first cave artist, reed brush poised stiff, dripping and overloaded with wet ochre, in the split nanosecond before it made contact with the cave wall, and, with this tiny pregnant act, had he known it, catapulting the human race into an entirely new realm. She felt as if she were now, finally, ready. Ready to be born --
    A soft pulse, lost in space and time. Sleeping, ageless, without thought, without form, and void, without ... guilt. Until --
    I Am.
    A pulse, one only. The other is lost. Blood, blood, so much blood. Lost in the garden, the Nest. Am I drowning in blood? No, I am not drowning - I am floating.
    I Will Not Die.
    Pain. I have pain. "Darling Jack ..." Whizzing, wheeling, into space. I do so love you, Snow Queen.
    I Will Not Die.
    I love you too. So very much, so much it scares me, it hurts. Darling Jack, hold me, please.
    I WILL NOT DIE.
    I'll always be here for you, Snow Queen. Always.
    I am. I am ...alive. And so, I wake --
    Jack swung off the road and into a back lane between two maize fields. The unsurfaced track dipped towards woods of maple and birch, oak and sweet chestnut, coming to an end in a small, dusty car park on the shores of a lake. The lake was perfectly smooth and still, and the colour of the eggshell blue sky above. Jack pulled the jeep across the car park and on to a narrow sandy beach right by the water's edge. Apart from two picnic tables, their planking warped, bleached and faded, there were no other signs to betray the hand of man. Through a belt of pines on the other side of the lake Jack had discovered a fern-choked track leading up a hill to the small cave he'd become so excited about, the last site ever excavated by Gaston de Bonnard.
    "Souris Saint-Michel," he said. "It's a bit of a mystery. I think we can solve it." At that moment it occurred to Jack that he had been talking to himself, and had been doing so for several minutes. He turned to his right, towards Jadis, but she was quicker, leaning towards him and kissing him lovingly, deeply. Unfastening her seatbelt, she climbed over on top of him, placing her bare thighs on either side of him, her elbows on the seat back on either side of his neck, her hands - smooth, yet with the floury patina of fieldwork - cupping his face, kissing him as if she'd never stop, hungrily as if she felt her lips might never gain purchase, her tongue seeking his with the desperate anxiety of a nestling squab whose mother had been too long away.
    He held her close, his arms sliding up inside the her oversized, faded `Saint-Rogatien-2007' sweatshirt. He found that she was naked underneath: he ran his hands across her back - brushing the pendulous softness of her hanging breasts on his way, finally reaching a comfortable place on top of her shoulders, her neck. There can be no God, he thought, for those who have never felt the skin of a woman, in all its glorious, unutterably luxurious, dry smoothness, its yielding tautness. No wonder that once human beings had come into the light, that their first expressions of reverence for the divine had taken the form of female nudes which, in their exaggerated curves, spoke of contrasts - of yielding, pillowy softness, and inexhaustible generative power. Jadis sighed, pulled herself away, and looked down at him with a strange expression, not so much of love, or adoration, or tenderness, but of inspection: as if she were at a market stall choosing cheese or eggs or apples. And as if she'd seen him, properly, for the very first time.
    "Jadis -"
    She sat up, tossed her hair out of her eyes, and brushed the creases from her sweatshirt.
    "Let's go and look at this cave of yours. It's my birthday!"
    It was as if nothing had happened. But then, he thought, everything had happened: that it really was her birthday, the very day of her birth. To him she looked like something newly hatched, a young jewelled lizard in fresh rainbow colours unsullied by care or age, as if she'd sloughed an ugly, warty skin that she had worn for years, but which had become invisible to him through long and resigned usage. She unwound her long, lean legs and got out of the Jeep, beckoning for him to follow. And so, hand in hand, they walked up to the cave.
    They had both known something of its history, and that of its first discoverer, de Bonnard; that it represented his last, most enigmatic and potentially most exciting find - and yet, frustratingly, incomplete. Domingo had filled in details that they had not known, especially about de Bonnard's little-appreciated years as a desert explorer, and some of what he'd found out in his own researches had made their hair stand on end.
    In an age when so many sites had been wasted, despoiled by sloppy and slapdash trophy hunting, de Bonnard's digs were ahead of their time -- bywords for accuracy, meticulous documentation and uncompromising thoroughess. Souris Saint-Michel seemed like just another expression of this approach: when de Bonnard passed through a site he was like a plague of locusts, so that there was nothing - nothing - left for later excavators to pick over. But Souris Saint-Michel, his swansong, just might have been the exception.
    De Bonnard's long life had indeed been touched by greatness. Born in 1769, the twenty-year-old seminary student had weathered the French revolution by working at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris with the dashing but eccentric zoological genius Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. In later life de Bonnard had briefly served in the parish of Saint-Rogatien, and Domingo suspected that it had been he who had named the village square in Geoffroy's honour.
    Like his mentor, de Bonnard had been part of the scientific expedition that Napoleon abandoned in Egypt after the Battle of the Nile in 1800. As Geoffroy had spent the years of his exile describing Nile crocodiles and conceiving ever crazier castles of theoretical zoology, de Bonnard had become an explorer, venturing into the Sahara further than anyone had yet been, into south-eastern Libya, and possibly even as far as the foothills of the Tibesti massif in northern Chad.
    His exploration journals -- as everything essayed by their writer, models of pitiless accuracy, clarity and deftly wrought detail -- made reference to half-buried monuments of indescribable antiquity, and of a size that made modest tumuli of the Great Pyramids. And were any other author but de Bonnard to have described what he'd called les Prètres du Sable, the tall, pale, living guardians of these cyclopean, all-but-abandoned monuments, and who conversed with him in what his friend Champollion assured him was like nothing he'd ever heard so much as biblical Hebrew -- nobody would have believed him at all. As it was, few did, and after his return to France, these accounts were quietly sidelined, ignored, and then forgotten, except, perhaps, by one or two laudanum-addled English romantics in search of the antique and the picturesque.
    As an almost-retired cleric in 1830 he'd witnessed Geoffroy's great debates with his old adversary Georges Cuvier, father of palaeontology, as yet another revolution closed in. And yet he'd had more than three decades more on this Earth. Souris Saint-Michel had been de Bonnard's last dig. The indefatigable cleric finally died in 1866, not more than a couple of months after the field season ended, but before he'd had a chance to compose his thoughts on it into any final, publishable form. It was believed that this is what he was doing while he was climbing a neighbour's apple tree to retrieve its more inaccessible fruits, when he fell out and broke his neck. He was 97.
    The composer Camille Saint-Saëns (a particular fan of palaeontology) had played the organ at the funeral. The only published report on the site had been a bare summary, cobbled together post mortem by de Bonnard's collaborators. Jack was convinced that there would have been more to say, had not de Bonnard died before the task was complete.
    Jack and Jadis talked of de Bonnard and his last dig as they crossed the beach, walked into the woods on the other side, and wound their way up a muddy, winding track that took them up an increasingly steep slope. With each step, Jadis felt that another part of her old self had fallen away, and that she was climbing out of a dream. Or, more pertinently, that she had finally come out of some extended rehabilitation. And so as with one part of her mind she ran through de Bonnard's jousts with antiquity, a film of her own past was spooling in the background, until, fading in the bright light of a new sun, the harsh colours of pain and poignancy shrivelled away to leave a comforting sepia, as if it had all happened a long time ago, and to someone else entirely.
    She could not remember the accident itself, and thought she never would, except perhaps in dark dreams of nameless, vertiginous horror when she would cry in the night and roll over to lose herself in Jack's chest.
    She had no memory of the first week, mercifully, in which her body, bruised and broken, still had to fight the horrific, raging inflammation caused by the sudden rupture of her uterus and the consequent brutal injection of masses of fetal tissue into her bloodstream. And in which she had nearly died - twice. On the second occasion her heart had stopped for a minute and a half.
    Her memories of the first six months were patchy. She could never be sure, when she'd tried to recall them, whether they were genuine traces of that dark time itself, or only synthetic impressions her mind had created from things that Marjorie had said later, because she had demanded to know: and because Jack had been too beside himself with grief and horror and rage to tell her himself. All she knew she could remember was the pain; in her chest, where she'd broken several ribs, two of which had punctured a lung; and in her right shoulder, which had been wrenched apart and had had to be pinned. She felt it still, sometimes, as a dull ache, especially on damp winter mornings. And most of all in her lower abdomen, where she felt her soul had been torn out and burned in front of her waking eyes.
    What she did not know at the time was how, when she had been in intensive care, Marjorie had moved into the flat and camped out on the sofa, because she felt that Jack had become quite impossible and needed to be looked after. He had tried to be strong, tried to hide his grief and fear, but when he no longer could - when he came into the department with tears constantly running down his face, whether he wanted them or not, and no matter how hard he'd worked to check them -- Roger had asked Marjorie to take him home and get a doctor and a bag full of sedatives.
    Neither did she know what the trauma surgeon had told Marjorie: that given the scale of her injuries, it was a miracle that Jadis had not died. Indeed, had she not been a very young woman in good physical shape, she certainly would have. And Marjorie had kept the obstetrician's news to herself, for a very long time, that although Jadis' burst and shredded uterus would heal itself in time, she would, almost certainly, never be able to sustain another pregnancy.
    It was Marjorie who'd had to break this news to Jadis' mother.
    A year after the accident she was living with Roger and Marjorie while Jack moved their home to France and set up the site at Saint-Rogatien. Although she would always be more grateful than she could possibly express to the MacLennanes, she pined for Jack terribly, to the extent that Marjorie felt that she should just go, to start work on Saint-Rogatien.
    "What that young woman needs is something to do", Marjorie had said, and being a do-er herself, she reasoned that activity would be the best medicine. When Jack met her off the plane at Blagnac, he'd had a nine-month-old golden retriever puppy riding shotgun, its ears too huge for its face, its tongue hanging out in a great, guileless clownish grin.
    "Fairbanks, meet Jadis: Jadis, meet Fairbanks. He'll be your Guardian Angel". She didn't know which of them to hug first.
    And so it had been: therapy, and very effective, but therapy nonetheless, which implies that a state of full health has yet to be achieved. But now she had come through, completed the course. Saint-Rogatien had done its work, and it was now time to live.
    But there was one part of her rehabilitation in which neither Marjorie nor Saint-Rogatien could help, and in which she was initially completely on her own. This deficiency hit her every time she woke in the night, over the first two and a half years, doubled up in agonizing spasms, wracked with cramps; and when she was forced to endure intense, bloody periods at irregular intervals, each followed by bombazine-shrouded processions of loss, guilt and grief for the still-small pulse that she would never feel again.
    As a side-effect, she had completely gone off sex. Or, to be more specific, she liked the idea of sex, the desire she always had for Jack to be inside her all the time in some non-specific way, as a comforting and reassuring presence, but she found that she couldn't face it as a physical reality.
    Pain itself was sufficient deterrent for many months, but even when that had faded, she felt that it would be too uncomfortable, for her, and for Jack: perhaps from fear, from concern for Jack - or perhaps from some horrible sense of guilt, that had she not been so foolish as to have driven to the hospital herself, then none of this would have happened. At its basest, she was concerned that she'd never be able to relax, to lose herself in the act, that she'd just be too dry, so that Jack would never have been able to have entered her at all - and if that happened, she thought, it would only set things back even more. In the meantime, therefore, her body had decreed a complete moratorium, in the hope that, one day, things would just sort themselves out on their own.
    But the very worst thing of all - the thing that most sapped her confidence -- was that she felt she simply could not possibly share these concerns with Jack. If she'd tried, she knew he'd understand, but he had been through so much, had stood by her through all this - that she desperately didn't want him to be hurt - or, shamefully (she felt) that she was unable to expose her own feelings of guilt to wider scrutiny. That Jack seemed to have grasped all this without being told only made her love him more, and this in itself started to solve the problem.
    During the day, her therapy was Saint-Rogatien, its organization, its direction, and the ordering of its people - Avi, Domingo and all the rest. During the night, her therapy was Jack who was, ever so gradually, coaxing her terrified body back into the light. Now that the weight of Saint-Rogatien had been lifted, she felt that she had been healed in another way too, and she could at last start to give something back: back to Jack who, as he'd always said, would be there for her, always.
    The very last slope was the steepest of all. Jack scrambled up to find that it had been the rampart of a wide, flat lawn before the cave mouth. The short, springy sward had presumably grown over the mass of soil and cave sediment that de Bonnard had removed in 1866. Jack reached down to pull Jadis up, too, and they stood, arms around each other, facing into the cave.
    "This is it," said Jack.
    "How much do you know about it?" Jadis asked, as they walked towards it, crossed the threshold and she began to explore. Jack hung back, as if to watch her reaction. The cave was surprisingly small, hardly more than an abri, a rock shelter - no more than fifteen feet across, twelve feet high at its tallest, and twenty feet from its lip to the back wall, now seated in shadow.
    "Not as much as I'd like - I've never had the time to follow it up. One thing just led to another. But after we're done here, I thought we'd go into Aurignac, meet Balthazar, and ..."
    It was then that Jadis stopped dead, in the middle of the cave, looking at the back wall with the same expression of awe and revelation as if she'd been shopping in Leclerc or Lafayette and looked up to find that the checkout clerk was the Archangel Gabriel.
    "Darling Jack, it's .... it's the wall."
    He rushed towards her, scrambling over the slightly rough, bare floor, embracing her from behind and gazing, over her shoulder, at the pinkish-grey tympanum that formed the back wall of the cave. Although it sparkled with the tiny crystals of flowstone, it was otherwise utterly flat and featureless.
    "I know, Snow Queen. When I first saw it ... it..."
    Jack thought back to his own moment of revelation when he'd first climbed to the cave as evening fell, the last rays of the setting Sun striking the back wall directly before he and the cave were plunged into night, and his utter conviction that for all its coating of natural flowstone, of stalactite, the back wall of the cave was not natural -- someone had put it there.
    He explained this now to Jadis, who was now standing right up against the wall, tracing her hands across it, pressing and probing, for all that she might find some hidden mechanism, a catch that would open a door through the wall and into another world.
    "Caves just don't end so abruptly, she muttered, almost to herself, "they just ... don't". She returned to Jack's side so they could both stare at it together.
    In truth, Jack was relieved that Jadis had felt so strongly about the wall. That was one of the reasons he'd brought her here. For when he'd first seen this cave a few weeks earlier, his natural empathy with the landscape had been blown off course so strongly, right off the scale, that he'd almost been knocked to his knees with the shock. Perhaps, he thought, I've been doing this too long, and too alone, without calibration, without consultation, without ... collaboration. But now that Jadis had felt it too, he was convinced, more than ever, that his first impressions had been wholly correct. And if the wall had been put there on purpose, that meant ...
    "...there has to be something behind it, Jack. Has to be. I'll hire in some sounding gear. Magnetometers, ground-penetrating radar, perhaps even shot-blasters and seismographs and..."
    Jack smiled. Jadis had opened her birthday present and was already taking charge of the next field season. Jack pulled her towards him and kissed her, lightly, on the top of her head.
    "But can we have some lunch first?" he said. "I'm starving!" She turned to look up at him and laughed.
    Balthazar Desplaines met them in the bar of Le Cerf Blanc, holding out a kir for each of them and smiling from ear to ear.
    "Welcome Jack, enchanté, Jadis!" he exclaimed: "please, take a seat, and I'll get a menu!" he continued, gesticulating to the barman.
    Desplaines had been an aerospace engineer from Toulouse who had taken a stupendously generous early-retirement package from Aérospatiale, bought a small but exquisite town house in Aurignac, and devoted himself to his hobbies - gastronomy and antiquity. In pursuit of these twin goals he shuttled between the bar at Le Cerf Blanc and Aurignac's small museum of antiquities which, despite the fame of the locality, was usually open only by appointment. When it became apparent that Desplaines spent more time there than the official guardien (who was often woken up at odd hours when Desplaines felt he just had to look at this Gravettian point or that Solutréan flake), the town awarded him the honorary curatorship, gave him the key and said that he could come and go whenever he liked.
    When Jack had first moved to Saint-Rogatien, while Jadis was still convalescing, Balthazar had been one of his first visitors. Jack had met him for the first time, albeit briefly, on his pre-thesis scouting trip, and, like all professional archaeologists, appreciated the value of local knowledge, even if amateur or (as it sometimes was) somewhat eccentric. Indeed, before Jadis had arrived to take on the full-time direction of Le Dig, Jack had found Balthazar a pillar of strength as a local fixer, relying on him to secure the services of everything from builders and plumbers (the house had needed a lot of renovation) to earthmoving contractors and even on one occasion, a helicopter.
    Six years on they were firm friends. Desplaines - long divorced and with no children of his own - clucked over Jack and Jadis as if they were the offspring he'd never had. The first time she'd seen him, in neatly pressed slacks and a striped blazer, Jadis thought he looked like Roger MacLennane would have done had he tried to impersonate Maurice Chevalier, and this prospect always made her smile.
    Lunch was a long affair, and merry, and it occurred to Desplaines that Jadis was looking a lot more cheerful than she had done of late. In fact, he thought, looking proprietorially (as well he might, in his role as Favourite Uncle) at her animated hands, her flowing hair, her bright eyes, that he'd never seen her look lovelier. When he ventured a compliment to this effect, she put her hand on his and told him of Jack's wonderful birthday gift.
    And then, of course, they started talking about the abri of Souris Saint-Michel and the mystery of de Bonnard's last dig, and that they might re-open it, starting again from where the great man had left off. As they talked, Desplaines' expression clouded and became serious, conspiratorial.
    "Do you know what happened to de Bonnard's field notes from Souris? And his collections from the last season?"
    "I always assumed they'd have ended up in Paris, at the Muséum," said Jack. "I wish I'd had the chance to go and see ..."
    "Ah yes, the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle - in memory of his old mentor, Geoffroy. And so they did. Or," he tapped one finger on his long, beaked nose, "... they might."
    "Don't be such a tease, Balthazar!" This from Jadis, laughing. She always laughed around Balthazar, she thought: perhaps it because he always made her feel like something out of Gigi, a little girl to be pampered and spoiled.
    "But not at all, my dear! Of course de Bonnard sent every scrap of paper and every chip of stone back to Paris, as soon as he'd completed any project. He was always such a stickler for accuracy and protocol - never leaving any loose ends - that I always assumed that he'd done the same for anything he'd found at Souris Saint-Michel, as soon as he'd found it. But when Jack told me you were coming today, I thought some more... and it occurred to me that the good Abbé had still been working on Souris Saint-Michel when he died. He'd been based here at Aurignac at the time, and he hadn't finished with the collections yet. So I did a little digging of my own, in my little museum here, and, quelle surprise ..."
    Jack and Jadis looked at Balthazar in amazement.
    "Oui, mes enfants," said Balthazar, enjoying the moment of drama and waving to the waiter for the check: "I have a little birthday present of my own to give you, my dearest Jadis. Shall we go and open it?"
    What Desplaines had to show them made them giddy with amazement, and he was clearly playing it for all it was worth. After all, it is not every day that an amateur antiquarian, even one as knowledgeable and well-connected as he was, found himself in the possession of information that blindsides the world-famous professionals. So, much as he was fond of Jadis and Jack, he relished his moment in the spotlight to the full.
    So, first, he showed them the Abbé de Bonnard's very last field journal. They clustered round Desplaines' desk in his small and cluttered office - Jadis in the chair, Jack and Balthazar leaning over her left and right shoulders -- the huge cloth-bound ledger before them in a pool of yellow light. The language was, of course, no problem to either Jack or Jadis, who'd lived for so long in La France Profonde, but de Bonnard had made it as easy as possible by writing in the most elegantly cadenced French, penned in the clearest copperplate.
    "I wish every archaeologist was as organized as this," said Jadis, admiringly, clearly recognizing in the long-dead cleric a kindred spirit. But what they read in the measured tones of the blessed Abbé had made them gasp. The very last entry of the field-log for 1866 ran like this:
    The excavations of 1866 at the antediluvian rock shelter known as Souris Saint-Michel have been productive, thank the Lord. However, I feel sure that the present eastern wall of the cave
    "That must be the back wall..." said Jack.
    does not represent an autochthonous feature of the present shelter, but is, in all probability, the result of emplacement of travertine subsequent to the cave's formation.
    Jadis was open-mouthed.
    "Darling Jack, you were right - not that I ever doubted you, of course, but..." Flustered, she pushed her increasingly disordered hair away from her face, so she could read more.
    Such secondary emplacement might indeed be inferred from the stratigraphy of the cave floor which dips very strongly towards the east, as if directed beneath any secondarily emplaced stalactitic formation.
    "Amazing," said Jack. "I never noticed any such dipping."
    "That's the Abbé for you," replied Deplaines. "I expect most of the present cave floor is overburden from the 1866 season, which Desplaines replaced and levelled, to protect the strata from disturbance..."
    "... leaving them mothballed and ready for the next season," continued Jack...
    "... which never came." concluded Desplaines. "But how typically tidy of the good Abbé! I expect that when you remove the overlying sediment, you'll see it all just as it was almost a hundred and fifty years ago, not a speck of dust out of place. Knowing de Bonnard, it wouldn't dare!" They would have laughed then - all of them - but were too engrossed in the notes, following them, like hounds, to their end.
    Should the Lord in his infinite grace and mercy preserve me for another season, I shall inquire about the purchase of suitable equipment, in order that the integrity of the eastern wall might be tested. For if the wall is a secondary feature as I now suppose, it follows that further voids might lie behind it. To summarise -- I am convinced that the cave as originally formed was much more extensive than it now appears. Only the Lord knows what secrets lie behind the eastern wall, and, were I not to be chastised by my presumption, I should also care to ponder that selfsame subject.
    The text ended there.
    "He was, indeed, chastised for his presumption, and soon," said Balthazar.
    "How so?" asked Jack -
    "Looking at the date of this memoir, and what we know of his life, he was killed the same day that he wrote this. I imagine he got up from his desk - possibly in this very room where you are sitting, Jadis - went straight to his neighbour's orchard, and fell out of the avenging tree. What you are looking at is the very last thing de Bonnard ever wrote."
    Jack and Jadis looked as Desplaines in astonishment and awe.
    "But there's more. Come with me."
    Desplaines hurried them into a dim side-room filled, from floor to ceiling, with cabinets of wide, flat wooden hardwood drawers - the signature furniture of any museum collection, for all that these looked stained with antiquity and not a little neglect. He turned on a single, dusty bulb that had the effect of making the room appear even darker and dingier. His eyes squinted and scanned the labels until one met with his recognition.
    "Truly, I'm amazed I had never come across this one before. But there's always something more to find, even in a small museum like this. Look!"
    He pulled out a drawer marked `SSM 1866' ("I had no idea what it meant, Jack, until your phone call made me put two and two together"). The drawer squeaked and protested on rusted runners as he pulled it out. Jack and Jadis looked inside. Jadis felt she was being sucked into a vortex, her knees that they might buckle, and she had to gasp for breath. For what she saw, arranged in a muddle of old newspapers and pasteboard boxes, was a collection of twenty-four pristine Remillardian artefacts.
    "There are five more drawers, just like this one," said Desplaines. "About a hundred and fifty pieces in all. And all come from the 1866 season at Souris."
    "... no wonder de Bonnard never described them," said Jack - "like us, he wouldn't have known what to make of them."
    "Balthazar," said Jadis, "did you say a hundred and fifty, and all from that one, tiny cave?"
    "Indeed so, my dear Jadis."
    "But that's incredible", Jadis said, the excitement in her voice rising with each syllable. "You know how much sediment we shifted at Saint-Rogatien over six years. You saw it, Balthazar -- it was vast. And yet in all that time we found ninety-three Remillardian artefacts. Ninety three! And de Bonnard finds half as much again in a small cave in a single season - and nobody knew this?"
    "Apparently not, Jadis. I agree, c'est incroyable, but there it is. And now it's your turn - de Bonnard was taken from this Earth by the Almighty and his neighbour's apple tree. But you're still here, and here, I think, is your destiny. For if you and Jack and the shade of the good de Bonnard are correct, who knows what might lie beyond the eastern wall?"
    Jadis gasped, looked at Desplaines with open-mouthed wonder and joy, and - to Desplaines' lasting delight - flung her arms around him.
    "Oh thank you, Balthazar - what a wonderful, wonderful present!" Jack just laughed and laughed, all tension gone, and when they'd all recovered, managed to say -
    "Balthazar, after that performance, dinner is on us."
    Much later, after another hearty, artery-challenging dose of Gascon cuisine, Jack and Jadis lay in their suite, the only light from a pale yellow streetlamp, some way off, filtered through the blinds. They exchanged not a word - they didn't need to, for each knew that the other was thinking over the shattering revelations of the day. Jack lay on his back, looking up at the ceiling, imagining a Remillardian artefact in each imperfection, each shadowing of the plaster. What further wonders lay beyond that wall? Jadis lay with her left arm flung over Jack, idly stroking his chest, her hair spread over his upper body like a cloak of invisibility, her face shadowed in thought.
    All of a sudden it occurred to Jack that they could all be wrong - Jadis, de Bonnard and himself -- that the cave wall was a natural structure after all, perfectly solid, with nothing further to discover behind it. Jadis caught his thought and replied:
    "If that's the case, Darling Jack, then I'd like another birthday present."
    "Hmm? What did you have in mind?"
    "I'm not sure," she replied: "but I expect I'll think of something." And with that she traced her fingers from her chest, smoothing them over his belly and stroking him, her touch lighter than a breath. He stiffened in a second, and became so painfully hard that he had to draw breath: he felt that were a passing butterfly to flap near his glans, he'd detonate. Then, very softly, she said something he hadn't heard for a very long time - not since they'd been in Cambridge after their first trip to Saint-Rogatien. No - before that - since the last, lovely night at the Sanglier D'Or, with the warm wind through the open window making sails of the curtains, so many painful long aeons ago, and before so many things had happened.
    "I want you, Jack. Very much. Please, now."
    "Jadis - are you...?"
    Her voice suddenly switched from coy gentleness to a mixture of school-marmish asperity and heartbreakingly painful, imperative need:
    "Please, Darling Jack. I need you. I want you inside me. Now. I've missed you so. It's been far too long." He turned over onto his elbows and knees as she moved underneath him, gripping his shoulders and gasping, panting " -- now, Jack. Now!" - and he was inside her, fully inside her, in what seemed to him a hot, eager embrace of liquid velvet. "More, Jack, more - fill me --" she begged, raising her legs and crossing them over his back, almost under his shoulder blades, squeezing him into her.
    As she did this, her whole body started to vibrate, to hum like telephone wires in a gale, each throbbing to a different subharmonic, some just audible, but many well below the range of human hearing. The vibrations built and amplified and, as they did so, reinforced one another. She dug her nails into Jack's shoulders as if afraid that the uncontrollable, random shivering might sweep her away, and with one last, terrible spasm, arched her back towards Jack, driving him inside her to the hilt. Jack exploded inside her like a star shell, and they collapsed like spent fireworks. The entire episode had lasted seventeen seconds.
    They lay, panting, in much the same position as they had before, both soaked in sweat, Jack on his back, his head full of wheeling stars. After a pause, she raised herself on her elbows, looking down at him with that slightly crossed-eyed intensity he loved, and started to kiss him, all over his face, his eyes, his chest; and, in between kisses -
    "thank you, Darling Jack - you gorgeous man -- thank you so much" - and, in between these, her silent tears began to flow until she could no longer control them. Jack enfolded her in his arms and cradled her against him like a small child until the tears had ebbed, and she had fallen asleep.
    It had been sudden, cathartic, he thought, but it had been a strange day, and - for him - a little frightening. But, stroking her hair that had spread over both of them like a silk blanket, he could see that she was, at last -- after all these long, painful years -- fully whole, and at peace.
    Jadis, wrapped in his arms, felt like she'd turned into a fluffy pink cloud sailing off into a vast sky of perfectly clear blue, over a landscape of mountains and summits that had once, inexplicably, filled her with dread. She tried - not very hard - to remember when she'd first fallen in love with Jack, but she could not. She was vaguely aware that there might have been a time before that, but the point was moot, as she'd been a completely different person. In any case, she thought, the only moment worth thinking about was now, the continuous present, in which she was secure in the arms of this man, the moment that had, for her, persisted since the beginning of time, and would endure for all eternity.

    Chapter 9

    (March 2012)
    It was a twilit grotto of enormous height, stretching away farther than any eye could see; a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion.
    H. P. Lovecraft -- The Rats in the Walls

    It had been six months of frenetic activity into which Jadis had poured her heart and soul. And finally, here they all were - Balthazar, Primrose, Faye, Eric, Mathilde, Domingo, Jack and herself -- standing on what remained of the sward outside the cave at Souris Saint-Michel (or `SSM' as it was now universally known among the field crew). The rock drillers were on station at the back wall, and about to make first contact. Jadis had painted a neat red cross on the precise place where, she thought, the sealing wall was at its thinnest.
    Much had changed. The immediate landscape around the cave mouth now gave the impression of cramped and coiling industry rather than bucolic calm. The car park by the lakeshore was, more often than not, busy with jeeps and trucks. The forest track had been widened and graded, allowing motor vehicles access to the site. Even so, what with the still-lingering snow and ever-present mud, a helicopter had to be used to bring in some of the bulkier items, such as the twenty-six-foot mobile home that Jack and Jadis would use as a site office and temporary quarters if needed.
    The compressor and generator for the rock drill stood close by on the back of a Toyota pickup, together with separate generator to drive a water pump, pulling water up from the lake to lay the dust created by the drilling; and a third generator to bring in power for tools, and for the racks of lights that would be needed to illuminate any voids beyond. A trailer bearing eight large cylindrical tanks of LPG supplied fuel for all of them. Cables and pipes snaked in and out of the cave through a tough polythene membrane that had been fixed over the entire entrance. Balthazar's reaction at the transformation spoke for everyone.
    "If this is a mouse," he said, "it will be a mouse that roars!"
    Not that there had been much doubt that there would be something to find. As soon as the dig at Saint-Rogatien had officially closed in September, Jadis had applied to the GW Foundation for a small exploration grant to sound out the back wall. With the paper she was about to publish in Nature on de Bonnard's lost artefacts ("Remillardian artefacts from the Souris Saint-Michel rock shelter, France", by John A. Corstorphine, Balthazar Y. Desplaines, Domingo G. V. S. Sanchopanza and Jadis L. Markham), a grant was soon forthcoming, and by mid-November she'd established that the inside surface of the other side of the wall was more or less parabolic in shape, the apex - marking the thinnest part of the wall -- about a metre above ground level on the hither side. The signals had been clear. Twenty centimetres beyond the red cross she'd marked, give or take a couple of centimetres, was thin air.
    And not a moment too soon. The day after the first sounding results came in, all work had to be suspended - literally lashed to the decks -- before an Atlantic gale of demonic ferocity. They had been used to the vagaries of the weather, of course, but this storm was the sternest they'd yet faced, and indeed worse than anyone could remember. While still in full force, the wind veered to the north-east, and with it came a blizzard that cut off remoter villages for many days, burying livestock and stranding motorists. After a week of quite infernal battering, in which the dig crew had barricaded themselves inside the shuttered farmhouse, enduring power outages that lasted days at a stretch, the weather suddenly dropped, leaving a panorama of icy blue and white. Jadis remembered the day when they'd finally been brave enough to open the kitchen door, and how Fairbanks had bounded out to frolic in the snow, bulldozing the drifts with his nose and coming up with tiny white pyramids on its end.
    Nobody had seen Horrible at all for the entire duration of the storm, until, a day after it ended, she was seen picking her way across the snowbound yard, shaking each paw in evident disapproval at the unwonted, uncomfortable wet whiteness that had landed without leave on her territory, stirring her from her accustomed winter state of inept repose - and dragging the mangled corpse of something or another along in her jaws, spotting the clear, smooth snow with drops of red-black blood.
    The storm left human casualties in its wake, too, including the priest at Saint-Rogatien, who had been returning to the church after pastoral visits when a loose slate from above, lifted by the gale-force wind, scythed downwards and sliced open his jugular vein. Even this was not the first casualty in the commune: new graves sprang up under the yews on the edge of the cliff as elderly people succumbed to falls, or simply to the severe cold.
    Two weeks before Christmas, things had eased sufficiently for Jack to get away on a much-delayed trip to the GW Foundation in Cambridge, to finalize plans for the upcoming field season. Jadis was overjoyed to hear him, while they were washing up after supper one evening, declare that this would be his last trip away for the foreseeable future.
    "SSM should produce enough to keep us both busy for a while," he'd said. "So I am yours to command, Snow Queen."
    "I can think of ... oooh .... all sorts of things you can do for me," she'd laughed, flicking him smartly on the backside with the wet tea towel, after which they'd chased each other screaming round and round the kitchen table, suds flying, Fairbanks leaping and barking to join in this entertaining new game.
    The wintry landscape inspired Jadis to do something special for Christmas, so with Jack away, she decided, the last Saturday afternoon before Christmas, to go to the bird market at Seissan in search of a goose. Domingo volunteered to come along for the ride. He had been looking pensive: he clearly had something to tell her.
    Jadis was fascinated by the Gascon devotion to poultry, and in particular to its organized dismemberment. The market hall, a large covered square about thirty metres on a side, was crammed with rows and rows of stalls, all devoted to poultry, the position of each row giving a clue to the state of butchery of the products to be found therein. The first row, as you walked in, had live poultry - baskets of chickens, ducks and geese, and cheeping day-old chicks. The second row had much the same poultry, only dead. The third and subsequent rows exhibited birds progressively plucked, beheaded, dressed, spatch-cocked, quartered, filleted and preserved, so that the stalls in the very last row showed only the last stages in the process, the final apotheosis and zenith of Gascon cuisine - jars of pâté, confits and foie gras. Jadis knew that some of it was cruel, but she was always lost in admiration at the industry of it, and relished the smells, noise and bustle of French market life. She realized how much she loved it, and hoped that none of it would ever change.
    Domingo helped her choose a couple of jars of confits de canard, but to their surprise, one could not simply buy a table goose in the bird market, most geese having been bred especially for their livers, rather than for their corpses in general. However, a quick tour of the butchers nearby produced a simply enormous goose - plucked, beheaded and ready to roast -- and Domingo carried the not inconsiderable load to the jeep. As they loaded it into the trunk, she looked at him, noting his expression of distracted, brooding concern. She went up to him, put a hand on his immense barrel chest (clothed, as ever, and incongruously given the weather, in a Hawai'ian shirt of lysergic vividness), and said:
    "Domingo, what is it?"
    "Might I treat you to a coffee?" he replied " - and I shall reveal all."
    They sat a very small table in a sports bar opposite the market (not that any table ever looked large when Domingo sat next to it), their hands warming round steaming grand-crèmes. The bar was full of people and pre-Christmas chatter, the windows fogged with the accumulated heat of the customers and the steam rising from their meals and drinks, but most of the attention seemed focussed on the TV monitor above the bar. This was switched to English Premiership football where the hitherto unassailable might of Brighton and Hove Albion was being pummelled into the dust by underdogs Chelsea. There were many close-ups of the hopeless anguish that creased the handsome face of Albion's player-manager, Sir David Beckham, each time another goal thundered into the Albion net. The author of most of these was Honoré N'Dour, Chelsea's recent star signing from Toulouse - explaining the local interest and the frequent cheers from the bar, interpolated with calls of "vive Honoré!", "à bas Becks!" and -- what made Domingo smile -- "Albion perfide!"
    "What is David wearing?" asked Jadis, incredulously. Domingo peered at the screen.
    "It looks like a designer frock," he said, "and so, very soon, shall I be." He gave Jadis his best expression of unfathomable knowingness, the bright glints in his eyes betraying it, as ever, with the promise of puckish mischief.
    Jadis looked even more incredulous.
    "No, dear Jadis - I'm not going to run away to the Stade de France, nor venture on to the catwalk" - the mental image of Domingo modelling designer dresses made Jadis laugh - "but I do have to go. I have, at last, received my calling. I very much regret that I shall have to leave our happy band, at least as a full-time participant."
    He took Jadis' slim, brown hands in his own vast paws. Her face was a mixture of joy at his news, and sorrow that this wonderful man, who had become almost indispensable, would have to leave for pastures new -- just as they were on the verge of new discoveries.
    "But don't be sad, I won't be too far away. What with the somewhat ... er ... abrupt gathering-in of my brother priest at Saint-Rogatien, and with the season of Advent well advanced, I took my chance. The authorities have agreed that I can take over at Saint-Rogatien straight away. And as for designer frocks, I now have vestments - I had to have a special fitting!" He grinned, but his face turned serious again: "I now have much to prepare for the community, much to organize. I shall, of course, be moving from the farmhouse, as there is a small house that goes with the position. This implies that I won't be able to come to SSM very often, but I shall certainly be there as often as my duties allow - if you'll have me."
    "Oh, Domingo - of course! You'll always be welcome. Always! You're - well, you're part of the family". Jadis would never be able to articulate how Domingo, with his steadfastness, reliability and ready wit, had been part of her own recovery, even had she wanted to tell him.
    As for Domingo, he was happier at this news than he thought he ever could be. Up until his arrival at Saint-Rogatien, his life had been dark and troubled, and yet all inquiries as to his history had been met with nothing more than an enigmatic toothy smile and a change of subject. Nobody was even sure how old he was (he was, in fact, the same age as Jack). But only he knew what he had endured, and only he and the Merciful Father would ever know. As it was, Le Dig had been a haven, a retreat, and Jack and Jadis had become almost as foster parents to him. Jadis would have been surprised to learn (and probably a little embarrassed) that she, especially, had always been in his prayers, and had assumed in his private pantheon a place close to that of the Holy Mother herself. He experienced a sense of unutterable happiness and gratitude that Jack, Jadis and all the crew came to help him celebrate his first Midnight Mass at Saint-Rogatien - and to invite him home for their reveillon.
    And here he was, with the rest of them, wearing his most migraine-inducing shirt, standing bare-armed and open-necked in the drizzle of a raw March morning. A shout came from inside the cave, and a few people made their way out through the slit in the heavy door membrane. The drilling was about to start. The noise was fearful, only slightly dulled by the polythene sheeting. What the men inside must be enduring, Jadis could hardly imagine. Even with face masks and ear defenders, the yammer and thud of a rock drill in a confined space as it made its way through ten centimetres of limestone was incredible. But within five minutes, it was all over. The crew emerged, covered in dust and filthy water, looking for all the world like South African diamond miners emerging from a twelve-hour shift.
    "We're through!" said the foreman - "Come and see!"
    It was mid-afternoon by the time the drill crew had packed up and gone, and the contractors had returned for the water pump. Peace reigned once more. Jadis's first sight of the cave after the breach was a damp, reddish puddle in the cave entrance, just beyond the membrane, the floor climbing up towards the back wall. This looked quite different from the surface that Jadis had first seen, nine months earlier. It was milky white, its normally dirty pinkish-grey colour bleached by the harsh glare from the racks of powerful halogen lamps mounted on stands. The hole in the wall made a sharp contrast with the general whiteness, a ragged circle of blackness about forty centimetres across - the size of a small trapdoor -- and a metre off the ground.
    "Nobody's looked through yet, Jadis," said Primrose: "Director's prerogative!"
    Jadis smiled, took a torch, and peered through the breach. If she was nervous, she hid it well. What lurked behind the wall? A monster from Tartarus that would bite her head off? At first she could not quite work out what her beam illuminated, but it soon became clear that it was a smooth, backward continuation of the cave, narrowing after three or four metres into a tunnel. The tunnel was not the irregular fissure one might have expected in a natural cave, nor even a rough passage, but a more or less symmetrical structure, tubular - with a diameter of two metres of so -- and with a flattened floor. It looked like the kind of tunnel that two people could walk down in comfort, as far from a tortuous, sinuous pothole as might be imagined. As far as she could tell it went directly into the side of the hill for as far as her beam could penetrate.
    In later life she was often called on -- by journalists, especially - to recapture this moment. But she could not. She had been stupefied. With surprise? With anticlimax? She could not tell. Of course, she'd expected something - after all, they knew that the false wall in the cave had been artificial, so the tunnel behind it was likely to have been modified, too, presumably by the same people. Her earnest hope was to find some sign of the makers of the Remillardian artefacts, and with them, the builders of the hill of Saint-Rogatien, and a dozen other, similar structures Jack had since found all over Gascony and Languedoc. But the tunnel, as it was, was bare and featureless.
    All she knew at this point was that the tunnel had to have been bored at least twenty-five thousand years ago, for that was the best date for the emplacement of the flowstone in the wall. No doubts, this time, about the age: tried-and-tested uranium-thorium dates on small samples of rock material drilled from the wall over the past few months had confirmed this beyond all doubt.
    She pulled her head out. Nobody who looked at her then - her face framed by her hair and a bright yellow safety helmet - could read the expression pooled in her dark, thoughtful eyes. Only Jack had seen it before. It was that look of intense, slightly cross-eyed concentration she'd only ever worn for him. He laughed, breaking her reverie, and so they laughed together.
    "Well, we're in," she said. "Let's make a bigger hole tomorrow, so we can explore. Let's meet here at ten a.m.?"
    The team drove away in the farmhouse jeeps: except for Domingo, shoehorned into his brand-new second-hand hippy-trippy pink-and-purple-Paisley Citroën 2CV which, he said, he did not so much as drive, as wear ("think of it as a motorized aloha shirt", he'd said.) Jack and Jadis were to stay on site, in the caravan, at least for the first few nights, just to keep watch. Primrose and Faye were to take on the next shift, next week. After they'd waved the crew down the track, Jack made tea in the tiny kitchenette while, not a metre away in the sitting area, Jadis made a play of reviewing a sheaf of official site documents: permits, contracts and so on. But when Jack found her, sitting quite still in a pool of light, she was clearly miles away. He chose not to disturb her.
    Jadis flung open the flimsy caravan door on a bright, fine morning, the close drizzle of the previous day quite gone, the weather having lifted to reveal bright Spring sunshine and birdsong. By the time the rest of the crew arrived, she and Jack had coffee on the go, and invited them all in to discuss strategy. Domingo had sent his apologies ("duties on a higher plane", he'd explained) but promised to visit the farmhouse later and walk Fairbanks, who, with the rest of the crew increasingly preoccupied with SSM, was coming to enjoy accompanying Father Domingo on his parochial rounds.
    That left Primrose, Faye, Eric and Mathilde, and it suddenly occurred to Jadis that they'd paired up into two couples. She knew about Eric and Mathilde from the way Mathilde flushed as red as a traffic signal every time Eric turned up on the dig. She'd been doing this for ages, except that Eric hadn't seemed to pay any attention. But now, as they walked up to the caravan, they were trying very hard not to hold hands, or even look at each other, and patently not succeeding.
    Primrose and Faye, on the other hand, did nothing to avoid each others' gaze, and couldn't help bursting into fits of giggles any time they made eye contact, as if they were a pair of nine-year-olds sharing secrets about boys at the back of the class. But they'd had more serious moments when, each seemingly lost in her own thoughts, held hands - subconsciously reaching out to the other -- oblivious to anyone who might notice.
    Jadis was almost sure Jack hadn't grasped any of these sexual undercurrents, but she thought it was all rather sweet - and mused on the things people got up to in the farmhouse, or in the spinney, as soon as she and Jack were away. She had no reason to complain, or even mention it, but it did make her feel rather old: responsible, like a schoolteacher, or a parent.
    The crew was as excited as a sports team about to run into the field for the crucial fixture that would win the trophy - or lose it. After coffee and croissants (brought by Faye from the boulangerie in Saint-Rogatien) they strapped on their backpacks, which they'd filled with anything they felt they might need, for all that none of them knew what they might encounter on this, their first scouting trip. Mathilde had raided the farmhouse medical kit, while Faye - a keen mountaineer and sometime spelunker -- had brought along several coils of nylon rope, some of which was already festooned with the assorted bric-a-brac of climbing gear that none of the rest could name. All had geological hammers, digital cameras, spare battery packs, waterproofs, sweaters, gloves, a small amount of food and water, and each bore a yellow miner's helmet adorned with a large headlamp.
    Once inside the cave - the atmosphere foggy with adrenaline and expectation -- it had taken only a few blows from Jack's rock hammer to make the hole left by the rock drill big enough for them to crawl through, one by one, without extravagant discomfort. Once on the other side - a drop of almost two metres, the level on the hither side of the cave having been raised by the backfill from de Bonnard's last dig -- they stood in a small huddle, switching on their headlamps so that they became a small, nervous cloud of nodding fireflies in the gloom.
    It was decided that Faye, who'd had most experience of underground exploration, would be the team leader for the day.
    "Everyone stick together," she'd said. "There are six of us. If you can't count another five lamps at any time, just stay put, and holler!"
    And so they started, carefully pacing along the tunnel, two by two, like Noah's animals had in their own epic journey into the unknown, long ago - Faye and Primrose, Jack and Jadis, with Eric and Mathilde bringing up the rear.
    The solemnity of the occasion had blanketed their excited chatter into silence. To Jadis it had seemed almost sacred, given the anticipation, and despite her own indifference to religion she had longed for Domingo to have been there, offering some kind of blessing: permission, almost, to go forth. As they tramped along the passage - smooth, and, the further they got from the entrance, increasingly dry and dust-free - Jadis became conscious of its airlessness. There was air, but it was static, stale, like the air trapped inside a rarely-used museum storeroom. It was also very cold, and she was glad of her synthetic fleece and gloves. There was nothing to see apart from the sweeping beams of their own headlights, illuminating near-featureless stretches of wall - white with cool, glistening limestone, but not quite smooth, like the whitewashed roughcast walls of a seaside cottage. The passage seemed to continue without limit in a dead straight line, although after a kilometre or so it began to dip downwards, at first very gently and gradually, but after another few hundred metres it became much steeper, the floor puckering into treacherous ruts and ridges, which, after they had clambered over a few of them, they began to think of as very worn steps - steps for giants.
    By the time they had reached the bottom of the staircase and the passage had resumed its smooth, gently downward grade, they were cold and exhausted, as if they'd just scrambled down a frozen waterfall. Faye called them all into a huddle, and they decided to stop for a snack, and to take stock.
    Faye looked at her wrist logger.
    "We've been down for forty minutes, and have covered three kilometres in a direct line from the cave mouth." Expressions of shock and disbelief. "I know, I know, seems like we've been down here forever!"
    "I wonder how much longer we'll go before ... before..." This from Eric. They sat, eating chocolate and dried apricots, the sound of self-conscious champing and chewing punctuating the atmosphere of silence and thought. They hadn't brought any sleeping gear - this was strictly a day trip, reconnaissance on-the-fly, not a full-scale hike. But when would they decide to turn back? Again, what were they expecting to find? The cave, this long passage, was entirely unlike anything that anyone had seen before, for all that it had (so far) turned up very few surprises.
    "Okay," continued Faye. It's now a quarter after eleven. I vote that we carry on until - say - one o'clock, and after that, we turn back - whatever happens. Jadis?"
    "Agreed," Jadis nodded. It was hard holding a council when you couldn't see anyone else's eyes, all lost in the impenetrable shadows cast by the brims beneath their headlights.
    "How much have we dropped?" asked Jack. Faye looked again at her logger.
    "About four hundred meters from the cave mouth. Of course, most of that was in the staircase behind us. Just a thought - we ought to leave a little extra time for climbing back. Me and Primrose might have to climb up first and lay some guide ropes. That should put our start-back time to, oh, let's say twelve-thirty, tops. Agreed?"
    A general chorus of nods, after which they packed up their litter, got stiffly to their feet, and plodded on.
    After another few hundred meters the passage began to narrow, imperceptibly at first, but it wasn't long before they found they were marching single file. This allowed Jadis to take a closer look at the walls, which now, more than ever, looked as if they had been artificially chiselled and shaped. The ceiling, rather than being a simple rough arch between two ill-defined walls, now looked as if it had been squared off, making the walls on either side distinct from the ceiling itself, and giving the passage more of a box-section profile.
    It was this, more than anything else, that forced Jadis to realize the implications of what they had found. What with all the years at Le Dig, and Jack's researches before that, she had become inured to antiquity, taking it for granted. The working currency of all who venture into the depths before history, where the skein of written record breaks and fades altogether, is time - measured in thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years, yet few stop to consider what these intervals of time really mean in terms of the scale of human lives. The world at large had been stunned by the implications of Le Dig: that there was a civilization in Europe that was at its height perhaps half a million years ago. Jadis, at the epicentre of discovery, was quite used to it, or so she thought, swapping talk of tens or hundreds of millennia with other professionals as casually - or even more so, in fact - as if she'd been discussing the price of fish with a market stallholder. In any case, the bulk of her life was less scientific than administrative, filled with the minutiae and frustrations of directing the dig on a day to day basis.
    When Jadis did stop to think about the meaning of it all, and to chat about it with Jack - and, lately, Domingo -- she felt nothing more than a sense of frustration. The megalith at Saint-Rogatien was really only a giant midden, a huge pile of backfill. It had been an artificial structure, for sure, but it had revealed, ultimately, as much about its makers as a well-rotted garden compost heap might of the dreams and desires of the gardener that made it. The sensational artefacts she'd described were teasing, only deepening the mystery.
    But when she looked up, at the neatly chiselled cornicing above, it struck her quite suddenly that here was a sign of a maker and his mark, creating a recognizable structure for a purpose. The purpose of the megalith at Saint-Rogatien was unknowable - of the artefacts she'd discovered and described, perhaps hardly less. And yet here in this structure, these tunnel walls, was a sign, speaking through ages too great to imagine, of intelligence, and what's more, intelligence that could be interpreted. The sign said `follow me!' - but to what end, she could not guess.
    Lost in reverie, and looking upward more than forward, she noticed that although the passage remained the same width, the ceiling was getting higher and higher until it was entirely lost, the beam of her headlight disappearing into shadow. This was more than a little disorienting, and she felt herself becoming a little light-headed. She began to wonder whether she might soon have to make way for a white rabbit hurrying past, or come across a glass table bearing a small bottle labelled `Drink Me'. At that moment she realized that she was at the back of the file, and that the rest of the team had moved on ahead. Snapping back to reality, she was just about to raise her pace when she heard, far ahead, a male voice - she thought it must have been Eric -- shout "Whoa!"
    She scrambled forwards, afraid of what she might encounter, and as she did so the passage widened suddenly, the walls suddenly falling away on either side, running into a platform whose width could not be guessed, its edges lost in darkness. Ahead of her were five figures, heads haloed by their lights, standing at what appeared to be the brink of a precipice, the edge of which stretched on either side further than she could see. She joined them - noticing that the air seemed cooler and less stale -- and looked into the void beyond.
    What she saw made her feel small, immeasurably and inconceivably small, a mote, a mustard seed, a cobweb, prey to the fortunes of the whims and the winds of the world. She had sufficient presence of mind to notice that the person standing next to her was Jack. She clasped his hand, like a small child suddenly confronted by a vision of vastness beyond experience or imagining. Hers was met by a grasp that was firm, and yet trembling. His voice was small, nervous, and seemed to come from an infinite distance as he said, without turning towards her,
    "Oh, Snow Queen..."
    The view was, initially, an immeasurable and utterly black void. If there were an end to it, or a bottom to the cliff on whose edge they now perched, their headlights were far to weak to illuminate them. But as the beams swayed to and fro, they caught flashes, here and there, of what looked like structures in the void - an edge, a corner, but no more than hints. It was then that Mathilde spoke.
    "Has anybody noticed how the air in here is fresher than in the tunnel?"
    Several agreed. Jadis noticed that despite the volume in which they found themselves, Mathilde's voice seemed close, intimate - the space was so enormous that even noise died before reaching any surface whence it might be reflected. There were no echoes.
    "Yes, there could even be a very slight ... breeze", added Eric. They all stretched upwards, noses in the air, and had anyone been able to see them, they would have looked like nothing so much as a row of meerkats which, having risen from their burrow, stand up to sniff the air. "But where... what...?"
    "I think that there must be ventilation shafts in the roof of the cave, far above, leading to the surface," said Mathilde. "And if there is air, there might also be light. Very faint, it's true, but who knows? Perhaps enough to see more than we can with these headlights - and with our cameras, we can always enhance any images we get, even if shot in complete darkness."
    "Hell, yeah," said Faye. "We can use ultra-long exposures. Not as if we're trying to shoot anything that's moving..."
    "Don't!" said Primrose, giggling nervously - "This place is spooky enough as it is!"
    Everyone agreed that it was a good idea, and they all took out their cameras. It was harder, however, to persuade everyone to turn out their headlights. They agreed to do it in sequence, along the line - and Jadis was last. She did not show it, but felt the first waves of that species of terror, the primal fear of the dark - that petrifies small children whose knowledge of the world extends hardly further than their mother's breast, and certainly no further than the front door.
    The lights went off along the line - flash, flash, Eric, Mathilde - she saw their afterimages as red glows, dying - flash, flash, there go Faye and Primrose, but as Jack extinguished his light - flash -- he held her right hand. She would not be alone in the dark. And so, with one last flash, she twisted the knurled rubber ring round the outside of her headlamp bulb and they were all plunged into sickening, stupefying, heart-stopping blackness.
    It was like nothing she had ever experienced. As if she'd been switched off like a bulb herself, she instantly lost all sense of space and time. For what most people call darkness barely deserves the name. The darkness of cities is no darker than a dim, orange glow of street lights far away. Even in isolated, lightless country lanes, there is still some glow from the sky, the stars and the moon. Human beings have grown up with light, and so, to them, darkness is by its very nature inhuman. Only cavers ever experience darkness in its totality, the darkness that existed before humanity, and which was one of the very first casualties of his evolution. And the darkness that now enveloped Jadis was complete, darker even than death that still has the memory of light: as dark as inexistence, a state that memory and light and time and human consciousness have yet to penetrate. Without Jack's fingers as a lifeline to reality, she wondered if she'd ever be able to come back, to climb out of that bottomless pit of fear.
    And yet, as she forced her eyes to stay open (assuming that they were open), and holding on to Jack's fingers, she began to experience a new sensation. Mathilde had been right: her eyes were slowly accommodating to the darkness, even here, and as she looked out into the void, she became aware of a panorama slowly, very slowly, inching into view. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, so deprived of light that they had started to create their own pictures to compensate. And yet the image firmed and grew.
    And it was this. Hardly brighter than pitch, and cast in shades of charcoal grey, what she saw before her feet was a city.
    The crew stood on a height, perhaps five hundred meters above the western rim of a bowl that stretched ahead, and to the right and left, as far as their straining eyes could see. The bowl was absolutely full of jumbled structures - polyhedra, cubes, cylinders, indeed buildings (they had to be buildings) of all shapes and many different sizes. Although it was very difficult to get any sense of scale, many of the buildings were very large indeed, and would have dwarfed anything ever created by Man. Straight ahead of them, and five kilometres away (as they later discovered) stood a pyramid, towering over all, whose apex must have stood as high as they were now.
    This was a city that had lived and died when the Aurignacians were painting their first pictures, carving their own Venuses, and imagining themselves the victors in a strange, wonderful and conveniently unpopulated new land, in which tales of giants and their works were fit only for old women to burble to infants. Well, how wrong they were, thought Jack - and how foolish we were ever to have believed them. Jadis wondered what Domingo would have made of it. She had a strange feeling that he would not have been at all surprised.

    Chapter 10

    (December 2012)

    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
    The lone and level sands stretch far away.
    Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ozymandias


    In the lee of the erg the winds slowed to an eddying lull just enough for their words to be heard, were anyone there to hear them. A small group of tall figures gathered round another who, though prostrate on the ground and virtually inaudible, appeared to be leading what passed for the chant:
    Jjeshmaii Zraal!
    Jjeshmaii Zraal! came the response, a dismal blizzard of guttering croaks as of the last autumn leaves cracking in the grate.
    Ajjhnaai ajjhnaai'hnuu! Ajjhnaii Hjajhaad!
    The prostrate figure, once kneeling, now fell full flat on its face, a flutter of dirty robes not quite disguising the extreme etiolation of its form. Two other figures stepped in, and, stooping low like a pair of ungainly cranes, helped the central figure to its feet. Surprisingly, it towered a head above all the others - so high, that even in the shadow cast by the colossal ruined sphinx behind them, the final rays of the setting sun crowned its head with fire, illuminating its leonine mane. As if refreshed, the figure took the ram's horn proffered by another and blew three mighty blasts. Blasts that would once have caused walls to totter and empires crumble. But the last such walls had been ground to dust thousands of years before, and these wanderers were the last of their kind - the raucous notes on the zjhjfaar seemed as futile as the croaks of vultures over long-abandoned skeletons.
    Life had not always been so desperate.
    Long ago, when the ancestors of these people came to this region, it was a promised land, a land flowing with milk and honey. Or, at least, waving with endless prairies of windblown grass for grazing, and rippling with immense lakes full of fish. Ostriches, elephants, giraffe and other animals, nameless by virtue of their later complete extinction, were chased by cheetahs and lions in abundance seemingly without limit. The people looked at this immensity of plenty, and settled down from wanderings soon much magnified in myth. A myth conflated by the legendary arrival of a great prophet bearing on two tablets of stone what they came to call the Jhaad Hjesa, the One-to-Ten. And because of this, in time, they came to call themselves Jajda h'Adami - `The Men of Judah', a proud heritage, worn away by time and desiccating wind to the terser and less pronounceable Jajkhadi.
    Many hundreds of years passed. The Men of Judah replaced their grass and wattle huts with more imposing structures of mud-brick. Their villages became towns and then cities, each guarded by demon-headed sphinxes, avatars of a God whose depiction in human form was forbidden. The greatest city, famed in legend, was the blessed City on the Heights, with its grand courts, its splendid temples and palaces faced with ivory, silver and pure gold, its impenetrable walls, its fountains, and towers that stretched to heaven. The people changed, too. After further uncountable years, they became tall, Kings among Men, taller than the other Men who appeared at the margins of a vast empire - themselves written in the margins of a dozen cultures. The Great Old Ones. The Ancestors. The Atlanteans. The Men like Gods. The Nephilim.
    But with cities came war, and slaves, and tribute, and flames, and destruction. And with cities came the dwindling of the ostriches, elephants, giraffe and the other large, nameless animals. They became less common, and then rare, and eventually the day came when even the eldest sage could not recall having seen such beasts at all, not even as a small child - images for such elders being as bright as gems, even when the fever and fret of later years had dulled the immediacy of more pressing concerns.
    And with cities came the taming of the great grasslands, the trammelling of the vast lakes to feed fields of wheat and barley, sorghum and millet, that stretched from sky, to land, to sky. Nobody could quite recall the precise year when the smallest of the great lakes dried out completely (smallness being a relative thing - this lake was as large as the glacial wilderness which would, one day, be called Scotland). And nobody could recall the precise year when that lake failed to be completely replenished by the rains of winter. And as more time passed, nobody could recall the year when the rains of winter failed to arrive, and turned instead to storms of choking dust.
    The toll of years built like the grains of sand left to accumulate to windward of the cities as they died, one by one, toppling the towers and burying the majestic walls as if they had never been, but leaving a few monuments exposed, a few isolated pillars, as enigmatic remembrances of glories past. The Men of Judah remained tall, but gaunt and weathered as they dwindled to a ragged tribe of herdsmen, managing to hang on in remote canyons of the Tibesti Massif - mountains echoing their once-great cities standing amid the fertile plains, now sere and barren rock. And yet in caves bored within the rock they maintained their ancient religion, itself wearing away at the corners but keeping its core essentially unchanged, the Way of the Jhaad Hjesa.
    After dozens of centuries, the Way had become nostalgic. The shaman would talk of a blessed future when the Jajkhadi would regain what they had lost, when they would return to their blessed City on the Heights. Every year, to mark the fall of what passed for the first droplets of spring, they prayed for the imminence of this last journey -- next year, maybe.
    And one day, just in time, when almost all they had ever had was lost -- that day dawned.
    The Elders of the very last settlement of the Jajkhadi convened in the lee of a Sphinx believed by the more credulous to represent the artistic peak of their ancestors, to discuss the latest in a long litany of bad news. Even though adapted to aridity to a degree not seen elsewhere, the tribe had to move on. The other tribes in the lands round about could not weather the Tibesti like the Jajkhadi could through long usage, but these others did have a new and deadlier advantage: automatic weapons. The Jajkhadi would have to move on before they were flushed out and slaughtered. That they had to move on no-one could doubt - but where, then, could they move? Their enemies surrounded them on all sides. Straitened in their last redoubt, they had recourse only to prayer, and to fast-vanishing hope. Hope that the great prophet of the One-to-Ten would appear from the skies on a flaming chariot as was foretold, and smite their enemies. Hope sustained by the comfort of ritual. But the tallest Elder had blown his last: the shrill notes of the zjhjfaar resounded among the rocks and died away.
    At last, the silence of the desert, eternal and without reproach. The Elders remained still, poised, waiting for deliverance, or for the end. After some minutes came the sound not of fiery chariots but of bullets, the answers to the horn-blasts. Hope died. Careering up a slope and over the jagged horizon came a technical - a jeep with a machine gun mounted on the back - driven crazily by bandits in green and tan fatigues. The bandits, hanging over the sides of the technical, whooped in devilment, firing their guns into the arcing sky. These Tibestian tribesmen would be easy prey. And what's more, they were Jews, so the Government far away - mired in its own concerns -- would turn a blind eye, even if it ever got to hear at all of the coming mayhem, the murders, the rapes, the impaling of children, the decapitations - the everyday story of pillage far from civilization.
    Even from a distance of a thousand yards the keen eyes of the Jajkhadi could see the bandits' bandoliers rise, sway and flop around their ragged bodies, the menacing gleams of white teeth in black faces, the glimmer of machetes and the pitted barrels of machine guns. The Elders were all that separated the coming onslaught from their last village, their skeletal flap-breasted women, their starving, bloated children. The Elders stood fast and began again to chant as one -- Jjeshmaii Zraal! They closed their eyes, waiting for the end: but were surprised by a second noise, a deeper, constant roar imposed on the staccato stutter and crazily slipping clutch of the technical.
    The Elders opened their eyes once again and faced their foes, only to see, rising behind the jeep, the promised deliverance. Not chariots of fire, but something else equally wonderful for all that it lay beyond their experience - a flotilla of ten, vast Chinook helicopters. The first helicopter let rip its judgement - a pair of rockets scythed away from the fuselage and smacked into the technical, which vanished in a dull rumble and a ball of grey smoke. Shards of metal and scraps of human flesh spattered the Elders standing at the feet of the sphinx. A head, removed by the blast, rolled and stopped by the sandaled feet of the eldest Elder, looking up at him as if in surprise. This is not how things were meant to turn out, it seemed to say. This is not how the story ends. It had not escaped the notice of the eldest Elder that the number of the sky chariots was ten - the same number as the Laws of the Prophet. And this, he reasoned, had to be a Good Thing.
    One of the Chinooks picked its way over the wreck and landed delicately a few yards away, close enough to the astonished watchers - but too far for them to be discommoded by the down-draught. The breeze was, however, sufficient to lift and make flags of their ragged robes, marking their otherwise silent stillness all the more starkly. The other nine sky-chariots roared overhead, looking for the village.
    Two people in fatigues (much like the bandits', but more recently cleaned and pressed) alighted and ambled towards the Elders, chatting with each other as if this was an afternoon stroll, as if the Elders were not there at all, or if they had been, they were an arrangement of statues by Giacometti. Ho hum, thought the eldest Elder. Not quite how he had imagined it, but the Prophet had come, nonetheless, with chariots in the sky, with fire to smite their enemies, who now lay thoroughly smitten. How could one possibly complain?
    As the two newcomers came closer, it became clear to the ragged watchers that they were as stocky and dark as the Elders were tall and pale. One, a woman, with very long, black hair, cleared her throat, and looked to her brawny male companion and said:
    "Hey, Avi, help me out here, big boy. Much as I hate to admit it, I never know what to say on such occasions".
    "You want I should do this?" Avi smiled his best ladies'-man smirk - always a danger with this particular ball-breaker, but, hey, nothing ventured.
    Commander Rivka Mizrahi of the Israel Defence Forces (Covert Aliyot Operations) narrowed her coal-black eyes.
    "Of course - you're the Digger," she spat. "You'll know what to say to ... to ... Lost Tribes. That's an order, soldier!"
    Avi Malkeinu wondered (not for the first time) whether his commanding officer would be as fierce in the sack as she was out of it, but decided (wisely) to put that delicious thought aside for later. So he simply smiled at her, gave a casual mock-salute and moseyed towards to the Elders, who had remained completely silent and still, except for their shreds of robes swaying in the light breeze. Avi stopped, wondering which one of these nearly-dead skeletons he should address first. Nobody had said anything at all about this before the mission - comparative anthropology, cultural sensitivities, even future shock. The terms of reference for Operation Elisha had indeed occupied a lengthy pamphlet written in Old High Military Jargonic, but the semantic content could have been boiled down to read: "go there, pick `em up, get the hell out."
    This directness, this simplicity -- this matter-of-factness of things -- would not normally have worried Avi in the slightest. He was just a regular guy, after all. But when he'd returned to his homeland, just after Le Dig had wound up, his luggage contained more than clothes and after-shave. There were memories, too, especially of that dinner, when he'd had those two fantastic girls, Faye and Primrose, practically eating out of his hand. And when Jack had told them the tale of Gaston de Bonnard, and when Domingo had bowled them all over with his amazing tales of de Bonnard's desert journeys in which he'd met the les Prètres du Sable, but nobody had believed him, especially when he'd said they spoke ancient Ivrit (Avi had perked up at that).
    But some legends turn out to be as plainly reported as de Bonnard intended. The Abbé's engravings of these creatures looked exactly like these ragged sticks standing motionless before him, and lived in the same places. In fact, it was Avi who'd casually mentioned the legend to a fellow soldier-archaeologist who - to Avi's consternation - had taken it all extremely seriously, and so Operation Elisha had got started in the first place.
    Avi now stood equidistant between Rivka and the Elders. He looked back at Rivka, who waved him on, crossly. It was all very well for Rivka to say that she never had suitable words for such things, after all, she was the kind of girl who let her uzi do the talking (and what a girl was that!) - but she'd never thought to ask Avi if he could do any better. And all Avi knew were chat-up lines. My God! At times like this you really needed to have rehearsed your Neil Armstrong moment, not some pick-up line that might work in Dizengoff Street, or, then again, might not. And if women were challenging and unpredictable creatures, what about these poker-faced statues - these aliens? But there was no more time to lose. He could feel Rivka's eyes drilling holes in the back of his skull, so he stepped forwards and his best Voice-Of-Israel Hebrew, looked up (up!) at the eldest Elder and said:
    "Boker tov, chevrai. Ever hear about `Next Year in Jerusalem?'"
    He could hear Rivka trying not to laugh - an effort that failed catastrophically a moment later, for what happened next took their breath away. As soon as he had uttered, all the Elders had, as one, prostrated themselves before Avi's feet, mumbling what he swore was a prayer in Ivrit, for all that it sounded so odd and distorted. Jjeshmaii Zraal, these weird, stretched Bedouin seemed to say -
    Shema Israel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad -- Hear, O Israel, the Lord is your God, the Lord is One.
    No doubt about it. They had come to the right place. Surrounded by quivering white masses and unable to move his feet without inadvertently kicking one of the supplicants in the face, Avi turned on his hips to throw Rivka a shape of perplexity, miming - like, what the fuck do I do now? But Rivka's expression, a mixture of ferocity, wonder, tenderness and mirth, sliced through Avi's heart.
    He'd seen that face only once before, when Jadis and Jack had returned from Aurignac, after their first scouting trip to Souris Saint-Michel. It was the unfathomable expression in Jadis' eyes whenever she'd looked at Jack. Lucky old Jack - but whew! The intensity of it! He wondered what Jadis would look like in battle-dress and toting a machine gun. No, don't even go there, at least, not in working hours. Jadis was a honey, no doubt about it, but you never crossed her on Le Dig. No way! For sure, she and Rivka might be sisters, and at that thought, he started to laugh, and found himself saying the standard response:
    Baruch Shem K'vod Malchuto L'Olam Va'ed -- His glorious majesty be praised for ever.
    At which utterance the Elders rose as one and marched, calmly, and without once looking at either Avi or Rivka, to the waiting helicopter.
    Avi had much to think about on the long flight home. Strapped onto a bench seat on one side of the helicopter, looking across at the Tibestian tribesmen webbed into the other side - unspeaking, unsmiling and, remarkably, uncomplaining - his mind was cast back to the long, long conversations he'd had at Le Dig with Domingo, ever needling at him about religion. Religion! he thought, well, I need this like a hole in the head. Religion, he'd said to Domingo, has caused far too much trouble already. True enough, said Domingo, but that's because people really care about it. More than sex, more than life or death. And why? Avi had been unable to answer. Because, said Domingo, it's what marks us out as human beings. It stems from the same impulse as love - and is therefore as unreasoning, as passionate. It sustains us, it defines us. Without religion, said Domingo - and without the love of God -- we are no more than beasts.
    But humanity? He looked across at the Tibestian Prètres du Sable -- Sand-Priests. They were Jews, of a sort, and their religion had sustained them through many ages of adversity, but were they even human? Okay, he admitted to himself, ruefully, most human beings thought of Jews, most of the time, as a race apart, perhaps not even proper humans, either. But more seriously, he continued, thinking mostly about the conversations he'd had with Domingo, perhaps religion transcended and even antedated humanity. Perhaps - now, there's a thought -- humanity evolved because of religion. And as Domingo had said - don't forget love. It was part of his own Catholicism, it was true, and (he said) he wouldn't want to push it too much, but as far as he was concerned, he'd said - and the big man's eyes seemed to mist over, looking inward -- love and faith are inseparable.
    Avi was not sure whether his long conversations with Domingo had had any single, marked effect. For sure, he hadn't dropped everything and become a yeshiva bocher like his grandfather, but it had made him reassess his own place in the great scheme of things.
    His grandfather had started as a market trader in Tashkent, in central Asia, and after many long years had made it to the status of middleman in the Chinese textile import-export trade. As such he was simply a facet of a tradition that had endured for millennia, part of the great Silk Road, the mercantile artery that had traversed Eurasia since before the dawn of history. And where there was trade, there had always been Jews. But the resurgence of Islam in central Asia had made things hard for the Jews, who had, first in ones and twos, then whole families, made their way to Israel. Perhaps none too soon, thought Avi - Tashkent was now just one part of the seemingly unstoppable Khalifa that would, he thought, soon stretch from Indonesia to the Atlantic Ocean. The reason why the Chinooks had been able to fly without hindrance across the Sahara was because the secular governments of Egypt, Libya and Chad were deeply distracted, fighting their own, hopeless wars against the resurgent Legions of the Prophet.
    Avi's grandparents settled in Israel, traded Uzbek for Hebrew and started again, and lived in a tiny flat in a scruffy part of Tel Aviv, a part of town where sand poked through the cracks in the baking, neglected roads and sidewalks, creating tiny dunes. By dint of working hard - and, as his grandfather had emphasized, praying hard - they managed to make a modest living and raise a family, which, in time, dispersed. Avi's own parents, raised in the new country and unencumbered by the traditions of the old, were uncomfortable about religion, and he dimly remembered the arguments between his father and grandparents when they visited the flat for Shabbat or Pesach.
    The grandparents had never approved of Avi's mother, an outspoken, blonde American feminist Avi's father had met while studying at the Technion in Haifa. She may say she's Jewish, they said, but does she keep a kosher home? Shabbat? festivals? No! This presumptious shiksa wants to work, be an engineer, and not be a good Jewish wife and mother, staying home and keeping kashrut. We managed it, said the grandfather, so why can't you? By this stage Avi's grandfather was spending less and less time working, and more and more at a small synagogue with other Uzbek Jewish emigrés, thinking about old times while studying Talmud -- and returning home, head full of religious zeal and pockets empty. Avi was far too small to remember the arguments, the recriminations and the final break, when his parents abandoned religion altogether, although he did remember moving to the Marxist kibbutz within sight of Mount Carmel - a mountain continually riding high on the horizon of his thoughts. It was at this kibbutz where he'd grown up, where he'd had lots of fun with the other kids, and where God was only ever mentioned as a profanity.
    But now ... well, Army life is mostly a lot of boring hanging around, during which his mind became less and less occupied with girls, and more towards turning over everything Domingo had said to him, about religion, and his heritage as a Jew, and, very slowly, the long-buried thoughts of Friday nights at his grandparents' flat came back. The rich, spicy smells of chicken and lamb, rice and couscous as his smiling-eyed grandfather had opened the door, lifting his tiny, squealing grandson in his wiry, brown arms ("shabbat shalom, little Avi!) The solemnity of the moment when his grandmother lit the Friday-night candles, how she filled the wine goblets and broke the freshly-baked chollah; how - as a four-year-old, he was always asked to say the age-old blessings (he winced inwardly at the thought, but it was a sensation mixed with the pleasure of nostalgia); and how lavishly his grandparents praised his lisping, uncertain efforts. And how this - this holiness - blended with the cosy family atmosphere.
    His later experience backfilled these memories, enriching them with the thought that Domingo had been absolutely right: this is how religion must have started, with a human family gathered round a fire in some cave-mouth to thank God (or whatever) for bringing them safely together. Families, thought Avi, were more than a way for a species to propagate - they were a uniquely human invention, bound by family and gratitude for divine providence. Fuck me, he thought, I'm getting old! I'll be joining Likud next! But he reflected on his own expression of religion, his search for God, as it were, which had become directed into the search for the very beginnings of human culture. Which, he supposed, was how he'd come into Jack's orbit, and then Jadis's.
    The chatter of the soldiers and airmen, the thrum and throb and chop of the big helicopter's twin engines continued, but Avi was oblivious, thinking once again of Jadis, his doctorate supervisor, and a woman who'd gone so much further in his estimation than a barrack-room pin-up which - for all her commanding zeal, Rivka Mizrahi would only ever be, really. Okay, okay, he thought, backtracking -- what a sap he was! - in mitigation, he'd met Jadis for the first time when he was at a very impressionable age, having only just arrived in the maddening and mysterious maelstrom of Cambridge. And so, of course, she'd made an impression.
    But even afterwards, when he'd go to know her well -- when he'd been her pupil, and when they'd worked so hard together at Saint-Rogatien, and had stayed late into the night poring over the findings, systematizing them - she seemed to exemplify for him the very essence of what fascinated him about women. It was the contrasts: between softness and steel, between acquiescence and determination, between a girly skittishness that only ever lived for the moment, and depths of humanity and experience winnowed by a drama that seemed to go back to the beginning of time, and in which poor hapless men had arrived relatively late, to be dazed and startled by what they found.
    Jadis had been playing on his mind more than usual (and no, you schmuck, not because Rivka looked like her) but because of the reports from SMM she'd been sending by emails so well encrypted that they'd briefly baffled the IDF censor (something he was very proud of, having installed her encryption programs himself).
    They'd started in March, with a brief and breathless report on what they'd first found inside the cave, and continued in length and frequency ever since. Although Jadis never wrote anything other than clear, plain facts, unencumbered by anything superfluous, he could read, between the lines, a steady increase in intensity, excitement - and desperation. There's so much here, the messages seemed to say. So much to tell - too much -- I wish you were back here to look at it - can you come? - what are we going to make of it all? - Help!
    The news that Jadis had to tell, buried in stray bits, would blow the lid off the world, and suddenly Avi was conscious that of all the human beings (and other people) in this Chinook, only he had any idea of what Jadis was about to unleash. He wondered why his head wasn't glowing like a distress flare, and why nobody seemed to be taking any notice of him whatsoever.
    The latest email had contained two lengthy attachments. The first was the paper that she intended to send to Nature ("Subterranean Palaeolithic settlement at Souris Saint-Michel Rock Shelter, France", by Jadis L. Markham, with Jack, Faye, Primrose, Mathilde, Eric, Balthazar, Domingo and about sixty-five other names he didn't recognize). The second, much longer attachment was the more monographic treatment she'd send to Antiquity, pending the deliberations of Nature's editors. The email's covering letter, written in her own words, not in the careful, measured understatement of a scientific report, had made his blood run cold. He'd read and read and read it again, until he'd known it by heart, even more thoroughly than the standing orders of Operation Elisha. The Nature paper is a stop-gap (she'd written):
    The Antiquity paper has a lot more analysis. After all your help with data analysis you deserve a co-authorship on both papers, if you'd like.
    (He'd agonized over this but decided to decline, as he'd never been to the site himself, and there were too many authors on the paper already).
    For now, just to sum it up (she continued), what we've found goes like this. The city covers about thirty square kilometres. All of it consists of buildings in a pristine state. There are no ruins. We have found no art work, nor any sign of writing, but there are Remillardian artefacts everywhere. At first we did not know what they were for.
    Then we discovered the cemetery - that's what we're calling it for now - just below the western side of the Great Pyramid (that's what Balthazar called the largest structure. You can see it in Fig. 2 of the Nature paper as Structure SSM-255-9-1). We have not so far been able to do more than a pilot excavation in one corner of this area (this is locality 255-9-2), but so far we have found 86 Neanderthal skeletons. All are complete. Some seem to have been dressed in Remillardian artefacts. Mathilde thinks that each artefact is a small plate in a suit of armour that would have been held together by leather, but we are not sure yet. At any rate, we now know who made the Remillardian artefacts, which is great news.
    How typical of Jadis, thought Avi, not to have mentioned that this one fact alone - the discovery of so many pristine Neanderthal skeletons in one place -would be enough to turn anthropology on its head, quite apart from the other findings. These now came thick and fast, wave after wave of startling revelation, until Avi had to take a breath, to pause, to allow him to come to terms with it all.
    When Jack and Faye went to the top of the Great Pyramid they found it did not taper to a point, as we had first thought, but was flat. On the flat surface, a square platform about 25 meters on a side, they found several other structures. One contained skeletons of what seem to be anatomically modern humans. Some of these are pristine, but others have been decapitated. A preliminary analysis of cut marks suggests that this mutilation was deliberate. In a nearby structure they found what look like the skulls from the mutilated bodies. The tops of the skulls had been removed. Some of these calvaria have a kind of resinous deposit inside and there are signs of burning.
    Even in the cramped, hot fuselage of the Chinook, Avi's blood chilled every time he replayed this particular detail.
    What's really puzzling is that apart from these instances of fire on the top of the Pyramid, and a few hearths inside some of the buildings, there seem to be no signs of any additional artificial illumination. The inhabitants of the city - we are already calling them the Remillardians - must have lived most of the time in complete darkness.
    The email went on for a while in this vein before concluding:
    Thanks again for your help, Avi, we couldn't have done it without you. So until we see you - I hope it won't be too long - everyone on the team sends their love, Faye and Primrose especially, and Jack of course, and Domingo reminds me to tell you that you are in his prayers. Fairbanks sends a bark and a lick, and Horrible would probably send you a dead dormouse if she could (!) With fondest love -
    However, at this point, Avi had always drifted off, because he couldn't help remembering something his father had shown him when he was a teenager on the kibbutz. In his quest for a perfect socialist Zionist utopia, and a world in which there would be no borders and in which Jews would never again be persecuted, Avi's father had read up on some of the older ideas of world government. Perhaps inevitably, his reading had drawn him to H. G. Wells. Although Avi's father had found Wells' idealism rather hard going, he was instantly sucked into the power and drama of his fiction, and it was this that he shared with his son. His father had read him The Magic Shop and from there it was only a short hop to The Country of the Blind and - what had the most lasting impact - The Time Machine.
    Avi wasn't sure if Jadis knew any Wells or had caught the parallels - in any case, literary allusion wasn't really her style. But he couldn't help thinking of the subterranean city as a landscape that Wells would have recognized. Not in The Country of the Blind so much, but in the future landscape of England that greeted the Time Traveller, who found the Eloi living witlessly in a sylvan idyll, unaware of the technically advanced Morlocks dragging them down to a horrific, subterranean fate. His father read in this story a parable about revolution and class warfare. But for Avi, now, it had taken on an additional, grisly reality.
    A gear-change in the helicopter, betrayed by a slight shift in the ceaseless rumble of its engines, indicated that they were about to land at the desert air-base, and the Tibestians would take their first steps on the hallowed soil they had desired for so many millennia. But even in the hot Negev sunshine, Avi's blood would run thick and chill for several hours afterwards.

    Chapter 11
    (September, 2020)

    And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking.
    Mark 8, 24

    Tom and Fairbanks were playing in the sun-baked yard outside the kitchen door, chasing the crisped, fallen leaves as they eddied and swirled in the first gusts of autumn. The boy grabbed and grasped at the leaves - missing them every time - while the dog barked encouragement. He was too old to do much active chasing himself (his back legs were arthritic and far too weak to propel his bulk into the air, as they once had) but he enjoyed watching the small boy run round in circles, laughing and hooting.
    Which is why the big old dog was perplexed, and then worried, when the boy sat down abruptly on the ground, covered his eyes and screamed at the top of his voice. He was not, judged the dog, calling for his mistress in particular, but was instead letting out an inchoate cry of utmost pain and terror. It reminded Fairbanks of the sound made by a vixen at bay in the field adjoining the garden, or that made by one of The Horribles' multitudinous small victims just before they'd had their necks broken. Naturally enough, Fairbanks was concerned. He advanced on his friend, whimpering, nosing apart the hands covering the boy's face, sniffing out his fear (he detected that the boy had peed himself) and trying a few consoling licks. The boy calmed down somewhat and threw his arms round the dog's neck, grasping handfuls of his mane. Then, with his face buried in the dog's fur, the boy tried to open his eyes again.
    This time the searing, burning sensation wasn't quite as intense as it had been a moment earlier, when he'd opened his eyes and let all the world pour in at once. No, this time, he could smell the dog, feel the fibrous strands of his outer coat, the softer nap of his inner fur, the ripple of his muscles, and hear his steady breath and the beat of his heart. But there was something else too, a new dimension to the smells and sounds that took the form of a large, blocky patch with furry edges. The patch moved slightly, taking the smells and sounds with it. And then the patch made a noise - a kind of conversational growl of encouragement - and he realized in an instant that the patch, sounds and smells went all together, and that they all belonged to Fairbanks, his most bestest friend in the whole world, who always understood, always knew.
    The boy screwed his eyes up so tightly that tears began to squeeze out and ran into the house with Fairbanks in lolloping pursuit. Tom's hands and ears and nose guided him up the stairs, where he heard the quick footsteps of his mother hurrying down to greet him, her arms picking him up and hugging him, her smell tinted with anxiety -
    "Darling, what's the matter? Why are you crying?"
    It was only a little while later, when she had settled Tom on the sitting-room sofa, that Tom had calmed down enough to say:
    "Maman - my eyes hurt when I open them", but he'd refused to open them when they'd asked. Afraid that Tom's eyes had trapped some irritant, they called the village doctor, who administered some drops as well as he could, and left. Later still, and long after nightfall, when Tom had returned to more or less his usual, happy state - except that he kept his eyes tightly shut - he asked his mother:
    "Maman, can you hear and smell with your eyes?" she had at first said nothing, but turned out the light, hugged her son and said:
    "Yes, Darling, you can. Perhaps you'd like to try it now?"
    Although he was reluctant, the burning heat on his eyelids seemed to have disappeared, and he opened them - on a dim vision of blank, angular spaces, except for one, a more curving, irregular form that was moving and changing its shape as it did so. He smelled it and knew it was his mother. Around her edges - edges - were lots and lots and lots of long thin lines, which he touched and discovered were his mother's hair. His hands flew to her face, which he knew to be in the middle of the hair, and felt - saw - that it was moving in an odd way and was wet. The wetness was coming from the two large holes in her face that were her eyes.
    His mother's shape changed further, as if she were some tentacled hydra, extending two long outgrowths which, rather alarmingly, got larger and larger at the ends. He began to flinch, but just in time he smelled that they were only her hands, her fingers, reaching out to caress him.
    "Oh, you sweet boy. Everything's going to be all right. You'll see." Tom didn't know what she meant, but she was his Maman and apart from Fairbanks the centre of his tiny world, so whatever it was, it was probably okay. He turned over and dreamed the dreams that only blind people know: dreams that he would soon leave behind.
    She walked very slowly downstairs, making sure she placed each foot carefully on the creaking wooden treads, in case the rich and uneasy mixture of emotions currently assaulting her mind lifted her physically off her feet. Fear, terror, dread, horror, joy - and relief, and hope. Relief that a long and nagging worry had been lifted; hope that her little son would soon be walking out into the light, unafraid.
    Jack was waiting for her in the sitting room with a glass of wine, which she accepted gratefully. They both sank into the ever-more-sagging sofa in front of the fire, she curling up in his arms, as they'd always tried to do as part of their routine.
    "He's fine - just fine," she'd said in response to his unvoiced expression of concern, and added: "you know, I'm probably being the classic hysterical mother..."
    Jack snorted. A mother less hysterical than Jadis would be hard to imagine. The past six years had been difficult, both at work and at home, but somehow Jadis always managed to hold everything together. As her girlishness had begun to fade, the steel had come to the fore more often, and although she had never, to Jack's knowledge, raised her temper at SSM, he knew that some of the younger members of the eighty-strong team referred to her as the Wicked Witch. It was no coincidence that these were the team members who never stayed very long. But Jack knew there was a young girl in there somewhere, just for him, and so began to stroke her hair, as he always had.
    "What's up with Tom, then? You may not be hysterical, but he was. I know he's only six, but Tom's always been unflappable. Even Fairbanks was worried."
    Jadis smiled, thinking of how Fairbanks had adopted Tom as soon as he'd seen him, a tiny infant just a year old, and had never let him out of his sight. She lost count of the postmen, academic colleagues, friends, relations and stray visitors who'd given Fairbanks a wide berth when the vast, snarling bear of a dog thought that anyone was coming too close to his infant charge. She thought that Fairbanks had got on with Tom so well because of a shared view of the world - and wondered how much Fairbanks had actually taught Tom, perhaps without even knowing that he had. Tom was blind, and Fairbanks would never have done very well on an eyesight test, either. The world of boy and dog had been one of hearing, touch and smell. But things, it seemed, were changing.
    "Oh, Darling Jack, where to begin..." sighed Jadis, grasping his right arm like a mast to steady her in a storm: "you know, all those ophthalmic surgeons, those psychologists, those specialists we took him to, one after blessed one after another - and they all said that yes, he was blind, but there was nothing actually wrong with him?"
    "Mmmm..." - he continued to stroke her hair, teasing out each strand, spreading them all out as a great scapular around them both.
    "And do you remember the one in Toulouse who said that he might even suddenly learn to see, one day?"
    Jack remembered. Ah yes, that was the one occasion he could remember - the only one - in which Jadis had become really, incandescently furious. He remembered how her skin had turned white, her eyes coal-black and her hair had seemed to take on a life of its own, streaming out in all directions like turbulent seaweed, when she'd turned on the hapless specialist and said words to the effect that she'd hoped that the doctor would have spoken to her like a fellow scientist, and not give her the standard patronizing brush-off treatment, but, sadly, she wished she'd trusted her expectations instead, which were, she'd said, disarmingly, poignantly low. Not that she'd raised her voice - quite the opposite - but her tone was so commanding, her articulation so pitilessly precise, that all the doctor could do was hang his head and shuffle backwards out of his own office.
    Jadis' constant uneasy shifts in Jack's embrace, as if she weren't entirely comfortable, said it all. She was remorseful, embarrassed, because the doctor had been right after all. But this was no time to press the point, thought Jack. Time to move things forward.
    "So what do we do now?"
    After a thoughtful pause, Jadis sighed, and said, quite decisively, " I think we should just let things be." Having made up her mind, she relaxed suddenly as if released from some kind of possession, and sank contentedly back onto Jack's chest. "Let Tom work it out on his own. He's always done so before..."
    "If it ain't broke...", added Jack, but Jadis was already on the margins of sleep, as if she'd shed a heavy load that had long weighed her down, and, having been relieved of it, could now afford to collapse from exhaustion. Jack continued to caress her head, staring into the sinking embers.
    He thought back to the long, agonized conversations they'd had a few years back, when SSM was well under way, about children. Jack had been reluctant - the memories of her pregnancy were still too painful - but Jadis, who after all (she said) had been the one who'd suffered the pain, was adamant. She kept saying something he didn't quite understand about a lost pulse, and a horrible, bloody recurrent nightmare she'd had about the Nest, and how it was about time she'd done something about it.
    And then there was the dismal year or so when they'd been `trying for a baby' - a phrase that Jack thought quite the dreariest in the English language. Despite the fact that they'd had sex more frequently than they'd ever had, none of it had been very much fun. Jack remembered one night when they were holed up in the caravan at SSM, the rain flooding down outside, and he'd had one of his extremely rare colds. Now, he thought, most men, even when running a temperature of a hundred and one, would find the prospect of opening one's eyes to find oneself being ridden by a nude and sensationally sexy woman at least cheering, if not arousing. But being told in stentorian tones that he was to perform because she was ovulating and that if we missed this chance we'd have to wait another whole month - well, it was a turn-off.
    After a while they'd both decided that this mechanically procreative effort was more likely to damage their marriage than produce offspring. Natural reproduction was a complete failure - as they'd known it probably would be. And, as it turned out (after many consultations), although Jadis' uterus had healed, there had been a lot of scarring, making the chances of implantation and placentation very low indeed, even had they managed to conceive, either naturally or in vitro. The only chance was some kind of surrogacy - which Jack found too weird, and Jadis flatly refused even to consider. That, or adoption.
    This would have been easy but for one thing: a worldwide shortage of spare babies. The European birth-rate had been in long-term decline for decades and was now so low that children under five years old were almost never available for adoption. Babies from other parts of the world were also increasingly rare, as even in what was once called the Third World, birth rates had been slowing, and the demographics were made more complicated by endemic war, famine and disease: over the past decade, much of sub-Saharan Africa had been depopulated by chronic famine, exacerbated by malaria, AIDS and a seemingly constant barrage of pestilences nobody had heard of before, each one more horrible than the last. Few had realized it yet, but the populations of every country between South Africa and the Equator had sunk below the level of viability. Many of these states had effectively ceased to exist except as flags of convenience, and were in fact administered by a variety of multinational concerns, some of which used them as game reserves. Elephants, lions, gorillas, cheetahs and zebras were on the increase as the human tide receded. Eastern Asia had long been a source of babies for adoption, but even here the market was drying up as the regional economies soared. In fact, the trade had switched in the opposite direction as Korean and Thai would-be-parents competed for the few remaining babies in Russia and Romania.
    Jack and Jadis were becoming reconciled to childlessness until they decided to discuss the issue with Domingo on one of his increasingly rare (and cherished) visits - his talents had been recognized in Rome and he was now, more often than not, at the Vatican. For their part, Jack and Jadis had come to regard him as their confessor, and appreciated his own concession to their agnosticism in that he always visited them in what he termed an unofficial capacity - in baggy shorts and customarily eye-watering 5XL aloha shirt ("I wouldn't want anyone to know it was me", he'd said). And he was, they thought, a good listener, and most of all a good friend. Domingo knew of Catholic agencies that rescued babies from the burgeoning slums of Catholic countries such as Brazil or the Philippines, and he'd gladly make some discreet enquiries. He'd never seen Jack and Jadis look so anxious, he thought privately. His heart surged out towards them. As he wrote on his private recommendation to the agency concerned, it would not be God's will to deny children to these people. He omitted to mention, however, that these were the same people who had given him his own first taste of a loving family, even though he'd had to attain his own maturity to get it.
    And so it was that one snowbound December day in 2015, Tom Markham Corstorphine made his way up the potholed drive, swaddled in a blanket and carried in the arms of Father Domingo Sanchopanza on the last stage of a journey that had started a year earlier in the middle of Borneo, when Islamist rebels fuelled by the thoughts of the Khalifa had razed a remote jungle village, massacring all the inhabitants - all except one, who had come into the world just a few hours earlier.
    Domingo handed baby Tom over to Jadis in their kitchen, with Jack and Fairbanks in attendance, all looking in wonder at the new arrival. As Jadis cradled him in her arms, cooing softly and searching every wrinkle of her new baby with her softly intent, slightly cross-eyed gaze, Domingo started to laugh - softly at first, but building into a great, hearty guffaw.
    "You know what day it is, of course!" he said, wiping tears from his eyes with his vast, hairy arms. It had occurred to none of them that it was Christmas Day. Fairbanks jumped up at his old friend, eager to share the joke. Domingo patted him - "can you play the ox and the ass both at once, my friend?" he'd asked.
    It wasn't until Tom was four and attending a day-nursery in Panassac that they discovered that he was blind. No, the teacher said in response to Jadis's evident disbelief, he'd had the first of a standard set of eye tests and had failed them comprehensively. No possibility of doubt, Tom could not see anything at all. Yes, Madame Corstorphine, we were as surprised as you are. Of course, Madame Corstorphine, you're right, he's otherwise well-adjusted and settled, but no, Madame Corstorphine, we can't have him here. We haven't got the resources, you know, and then there's safety..."
    What utter nonsense, Jadis wanted to say, before bringing him home. The happy four-year-old sat in the passenger seat of the jeep, burbling merrily about all the scrapes that he and his friends had gotten into that day, while Jadis tried to think of any cause they might have had for thinking that anything had been wrong with Tom's eyesight. Tom had been exploring the house since he was a toddler, coping with stairs and doors and every other hazard; since the age of two he had known the huge garden as well as she had, and played near the uncovered pond without incident.
    They had even taken him to SSM and - hang on, this was it - she now recalled when she and Tom, then aged three, were visiting the long avenue they called the Champs Elysées which, like all the thoroughfares of the ancient city, had now been illuminated with giant-sized halogen street lamps, so that it looked no darker nor more threatening than any other cityscape at night, for all the strangeness of the brooding polygonal monoliths and pyramids. She was chatting with a group of surveyors who'd just opened a structure called the Hexagon when all the lights suddenly went out, and they had been sucked into that same gut-wrenching blackness that had greeted her when, for the first time, she and Jack and the others on the first exploration crew had switched off their headlights. She heard others scream and whimper as the primal darkness swept into every crevice. The blackout lasted less than ten seconds, when an emergency generating station came online. She had immediately looked down at Tom, holding her hand, who looked no more than slightly confused, and said
    "Maman, why is everyone scared?"
    She had been so swept up in her own fear that she had not at first realized that her small son had not noticed the blackout - because he lived his life in such darkness.
    As she drove, half-listening to her son's innocent prattle, she realized that blindness must be, for Tom, a natural state - his other senses reported his world so well that vision would only ever be, at best, a corroboration of more reliable modalities; at worst, a source of confusion and anxiety. Even without sight, he lived so well in the world that they had always assumed he was as sighted as anyone else. But that, she thought, could have been an assumption dictated by our own narrowness of perception, living as we do in a world in which vision the most dominant sense, the sense we live by, and which has forced our other senses into an undergrowth so deep that we lack the language to describe flavours and textures except by metaphor. We have no words, Jadis realized, for the colours of smells. Because of this, Tom would never be able to describe his world to her, and this sudden knowledge hit her with a pang.
    Apart from behaviour, though, did Tom's eyes themselves ever give the game away? Did they flail anxiously hither and thither, like the eyes of blind people? No, they didn't. Were his eyes closed and sunken, like sightless eyes, long unused? No, they weren't. Indeed, they had given every appearance of being keen and alive. They were very large, fringed with long black lashes, and with yellow-green irises so broad that they left little room for whites. The pupils were not circular, but very slightly elliptical, almost pointed at the top and bottom.
    When they were thinking of names for him, Jack had remarked that his eyes were so cat-like that they'd just have to name him `Tom'. "That," he said, "and the fact that he's got an enormous, well... just look at him" Jadis looked down at the nether regions of her new baby (Jack was changing his diaper at the time), saw what Jack was pointing at, and giggled.
    Well, Jadis thought, on the very edge of sleep in Jack's arms, Tom had been blind for no apparent reason, and now he could see, equally miraculously. No sense in wondering the whys and wherefores of it: instead, her mind started to reorganize her schedule for the next several weeks so she could spend as much time with Tom as possible, guiding him very gently into what would be a strange and terrifying new world.
    Jadis' schedule had indeed become horribly crowded. Within the first few days of establishing an illuminated base camp on the western edge of the underground city, they realized that the resources they'd had available would be sorely unequal to the task of mapping, exploring, collecting, cataloguing, preserving - and interpreting - the potential of what was almost certainly the greatest single archaeological find ever made. Even with a hundred times the manpower Jack and Jadis had at their call, it would take years. As things now stood, it would take centuries.
    Jack, as GW Institute Director, flew to the GW Foundation's headquarters in New York for an urgent meeting with the Board, proposing that the Institute relocate from Cambridge to Saint-Rogatien, where it would devote ninety per cent of its resources to SSM. After showing them the data and pictures acquired so far, he hit them with detailed plans for the immediate acquisition of expertise, requiring a massive injection of capital and a thirty-fold increase in operating budget.
    The cool, bland, Fifth-Avenue suite could have been the offices of a cheap sting operation rather than the largest venture capital firm in the world, for Ginsberg Wang preferred to spend his money on his projects, rather than his own surroundings. Jack had never met any of the Board before except by videoconference (which, he thought, is never as good as the real thing). The six men, all of whom he'd have passed without a second glance in the street, betrayed no reaction whatsoever to Jack's performance. He was introduced to none of them, and he had no idea which one - if any - was the legendary Mr Wang. The end was greeted in absolute silence, until the anonymous man at the head of the table raised his hand to an earpiece, cupping it and exchanging a word, and said to Jack -
    "Dr Corstorphine, a limousine is waiting for you in the lobby. Goodbye."
    Well, that's it, Jack thought - we'll just have to do what we can with what we have, even though it would be like trying to cut down every tree in the forest with a scalpel, leaf by leaf, twig by twig. But the limo wasn't taking him to JFK, as he'd assumed, but to the Freedom Tower at the southern tip of Manhattan. Two suits met him kerbside and escorted him to the elevator, pressed the button for the 217th-floor penthouse, and left. Jack's stomach hit his shoes as the elevator rocketed upwards, and in no time at all the doors opened and he was met by a tiny man with green, startlingly cat-like eyes and an unruly shock of snow-white hair.
    His host was wearing the bottom half of an Armani suit, held up over a red-and-white striped Jermyn Street shirt by a pair of novelty suspenders decorated with rubber tyrannosauri. His feet were bare and - Jack couldn't help but notice -- remarkably hairy. And he talked non-stop.
    "I don't believe we've ever actually met, Jack - may I call you Jack? I'm Ginsberg Wang -- please call me Ginsberg -- I've been very impressed with your work - very impressed -- so naturally we'll give you everything you and Dr Markham need -- pity you didn't both come, I'd like to have met her. I like a girl with spunk." Jack smiled. Wang continued as if he were really talking to himself.
    "Did I say everything? Yes, everything -- don't stint -- just do it and send us the check. Sorry -- scotch? Wine? Tea? Ah - I know --" Wang hurried to a drinks cabinet without waiting for Jack to respond and came back with two tumblers filled to the brim with an Islay single malt so dark and peaty that Jack almost choked, pausing only a moment to wonder how Wang had known that this was his most favourite drink, even though he rarely got the opportunity to sample it, as Jadis hated the smell and wouldn't allow it in the house, and Jack never liked to drink on his own. How?
    "Why will we be so accommodating, I hear you ask? So of course I'll tell you -- you can't take it with you, and I'm older than I look, but apart from that, the Board and I are convinced that the work you and Dr Markham are doing is of the utmost importance - the utmost importance --we think it might even save the planet. How will describing a city that's been dead for 25,000 years save the planet, I hear you ask? You do? Great -- so of course I'll tell you -- I haven't the faintest idea. But I have a hunch, that's all it is, a hunch, and I always follow my hunches, because they've never let me down -- that's something that you and I have in common, I believe? Like my hunch that you're an Islay man, am I right? Of course I'm right!" The little man laughed and slapped his thigh as if he'd cracked the most amazing joke.
    "So drink up, Jack, you've got just enough time to get the last plane -- I've arranged a very nice upgrade, I hope you'll agree. Goodbye - and good luck!"
    Hunches, Jack thought, as the sleek stealth-winged private jet wafted him, his good news and several tumblers of Talisker smoothly homewards at Mach 4.7 across the inky black Atlantic, the ocean hurrying backwards beneath him as if actively trying to get out of the way. His world had been a castle built on gamble after gamble; that McLennane had backed his own then-unframed, untested hunches about landscape, which had later borne fruit at Saint-Rogatien and now at Souris Saint-Michel. And McLennane's last and greatest gamble - that Jack's own hunches could be brought to maturity not by some accomplished Professor, or even a rising academic star, but by a green girl just twenty years old, whom, on a hunch on Clare Bridge nine years earlier, he'd asked to marry him. Science is not built from certainties, he thought (inexplicably, in the voice of Ernestine Yanga), for we cannot extend knowledge by forever elaborating on what we already know. No, we have to take chances. Hunches -- that's what it's all about. And when he thought of his wife, his hunch was that the best chances are always those that one knows instinctively are dead certainties. He felt sure that Ginsberg Wang would have agreed.
    And so their work had been transformed. The farmhouse was no longer accommodation for an entire field crew, but for them only, most of the bedrooms being converted into offices for a team of full-time administrative assistants who commuted in daily. Universities and Institutes all over the world were invited to send research teams, who were accommodated at the GW's expense initially at Le Sanglier D'Or and (if Full Professors) at Le Cerf Blanc, until the entire Institute took up residence in a disused teacher-training college just outside Aurignac which, once refitted, had plenty of space for accommodation as well as offices, laboratories, storage space for the flood of material coming up from SSM, even a museum which, one day, would be open to the public. Jack and Jadis' own administrative staff moved into the new GW campus and, once again, they had their home back. Jack felt that his wandering days were over and that he now had to pay his dues, so he became what he called a `house-husband', running the administrative side of the Institute. This left Jadis to direct the actual research.
    Eight years later, by the time that Tom first opened his eyes to see, Jadis' research had given them a city. There were no written records, no pictures, no carvings, nothing that a human eye would recognize as art: but the ground was littered with stone artefacts of such sophistication that the Remillardian type proved to be just one of the simpler varieties. There were millions of animal bones of all kinds, many representing species never before recorded from Ice Age Europe. And there were thousands of Neanderthal skeletons, yielding billions of bases of DNA, enough for several whole genomes. Analysis confirmed that the Neanderthals from SSM were no more closely related to any single modern human group to the exclusion of any other, but stood outside the modern human range - at least, as far as could be told using the then currently available human genome samples.
    Even in the absence of written records, Jadis' severely analytic approach to the data - the layout of the city and the radiometrically established ages for the buildings, skeletons and artefacts -- had teased out sufficient patterns for her to be able to sketch the city's history.
    For more than half a million years, the Neanderthals and their immediate antecedents had sculpted Europe to their liking. Without agriculture or written language, they had created a landscape that supported their population by practices that encouraged the animals and useful plants on which they lived. They dammed rivers, changing their courses, shaped mountains to farm the winds, and built immense pyramids whose purpose was initially obscure, but generally assumed to have been religious.
    But when modern humans arrived just before 40,000 years ago, the original Europeans faced a new threat. The invaders bred far faster than the Neanderthals, and swept all before them, despite their clearly inferior culture. It was then that the Neanderthals decided to go into hiding. They abandoned the surface, building Souris Saint-Michel and perhaps other cities that remained undiscovered, though Avi Malkeinu's group had found what seemed to be a smaller, older version of SSM beneath Mount Carmel. SSM itself ceased to be viable some time after 26,000 years ago, for no reason that Jadis could yet discern. The last inhabitants left, sealing up the wall behind them.
    Balthazar had been right when he suspected that Souris Saint-Michel would be a mouse that roared. The world was stunned by all these revelations, and Jack and Jadis had become much-sought academic superstars - rôles they did not much like, although they did their best to accommodate reasonable requests. But they'd had to post round-the-clock security at SSM, and were glad that they did not live close to the site itself or to the new Institute campus at Aurignac. Press interviews always made Jack irritable, and although Jadis usually managed better, she was often withdrawn and silent for hours afterwards.
    One concession they made to celebrity was the acquisition of a television - something they'd never had any time for, and now found hard to get used to. But when asked to give interviews, they had never heard of the stations that journalists represented, and could rarely understand the references they made to the TV and current affairs shows in which Jack and Jadis' work now featured. Reluctantly, they felt that they should be better informed: and so, cautiously, they called their long-standing and long-suffering electrician, Laurent Gaspard, who had occasionally been called in at strange hours when it was found (for example) that a dormouse had gnawed through a cable in the attic, and he'd had to venture into this dark sanctuary for rodents, owls and other wildlife (and their refuse) and perforce do battle with one or more of The Horribles on the way. Gaspard was a brave man, but, Jack thought, his bravery was amply reflected in his call-out fee.
    In addition to his electrical services, Gaspard ran a TV sales and rental franchise in Masseube. Jadis called on him one day while on the way back from Seissan market, to see if they might rent something, you know, just to see if they could live with it.
    Their first TV was not a success. Jadis felt that she couldn't relax with Jack in the evenings because she felt that the set was looking at her, intruding. It went back to the shop after a week.
    "We can't have that thing in here, Laurent", complained Jadis: "Looks like a giant bat. Can we try something less... well, obvious?"
    Gaspard then supplied them with a flexi-screen ("latest organic semiconductor technology!") mounted in a gilt picture frame which, he said, could go on the wall above the sitting-room fireplace. It could double as a remote computer monitor if they liked (they didn't) and could even be used for videoconferencing (which they admitted had possibilities.) But after five minutes of sales talk, Jack and Jadis felt their eyes glazing over. Jadis said that this was all very well, but how, mon cher Laurent, did you switch it on, or more to the point, off?
    The agent, sensing this imminent technophobic ennui, moved to the main selling point for any reluctant TV owner -- that this model would, in standby mode, look indistinguishable from a framed painting or print, indeed, any picture they wanted. And if they got bored, they could change the picture on command. He showed them a wide selection of possibilities, most of which were either clichéd, pornographic or both. Jack said he rather liked the surprising diversity of exuberantly flesh-toned Titians, and started to recite a rude limerick on this theme in English, which left Gaspard looking nonplussed and Jadis practically doubled on the floor with mirth. After she'd recovered her composure, Jadis emerged from behind her hair and asked the agent if they could have a custom picture?
    And so it was that the monitor now looked exactly like the picture it replaced, a now-faded framed reproduction of Riña de Gatos (`The Cat Fight') by Goya, something they'd had since their Chesterton days, and which they'd kept as the two furred and be-fanged protagonists looked so much like two of the The Horribles.
    Having now finally installed the TV - which Jadis would only ever refer to as the Thing - they found themselves extremely averse to switching it on, at least to begin with. Their end-of-day winding-down had become a sacred, special time that nobody had been allowed to disturb, with the exception of Fairbanks, and Tom, when he had been very small and reluctant to go to sleep on his own (and who, being blind, never watched TV anyway). Now, however, they felt obliged to watch the Thing, to force themselves: which they did, in increasingly horrified fascination.
    The TV news was ever varied, but ever much the same, in that every single item seemed coloured by the implications of the discoveries at SSM. Politicians were more guarded, more cautious, as if a greater, older power was always looking over their shoulder. Comedians became wild-eyed and edgy: if human existence had been a late coda to a vast, lost civilization, little remained that was sufficiently important to make fun of, so they launched into one of two opposite directions - unspeakably bestial crudity or mannered, knowing surrealism.
    Reporters in the increasing number of war zones, or covering the steadily rising tally of death from famine, disease and the more overt manifestations of climate change, seemed to struggle to make their voices heard, as if the immediate tragedy and horror of their subjects paled before the immensity of time that civilization had been known to exist - and that this immensity was, by and large, inhuman. It wasn't long before Sir Raphael Dimbleby, the doyen of the more thoughtful TV pundits, wondered openly whether SSM were the final proof of the ephemeral futility of human existence, quoting Macbeth's lines about life as a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.
    Jadis, watching, pulled Jack's arms around her and said, in a dry, cracked voice:
    "What have we done, Darling Jack - what have we done?"
    Jack kissed the top of her head and, looking more intently at the latest report on the ongoing rebellion in somewhere or other, said
    "I still think we should have gone for the Renoir. Or the Titian. You know, while Titian was mixing rose madder, his model reclined on a ladder..."
    Jadis sat up, suddenly bright-eyed again, and walloped Jack with a cushion. Jack fought back -
    "her position, to Titian", he managed to utter, between whacks "... suggested coition..."
    Fairbanks joined in, and the whole melée ended up on the hearthrug, the Thing, playing to itself, now quite forgotten.
    Later, softly on the edge of sleep, Jadis, now half-clothed but warmly wrapped in Jack's embrace on the hearthrug, muttered, laughing to herself
    "... so he leaped up the ladder..."
    "And `ad `er...", Jack concluded, eyes closed.
    In times of existential crisis, people by and large turn to the certainties offered by religion. Whether or not these certainties really exist is a secondary question that few choose to confront. And what most gripped the world about Souris Saint-Michel was the definite, indisputable signs of Neanderthal religion, and in particular the sacrifice of modern humans to the nameless Gods of their captors. This news, summarized in one of a seemingly never-ending series of reports in Nature ("Evidence for Neanderthal funerary and sacrifical custom" by Jadis L. Markham and twenty-seven others), was both denounced and welcomed in editorials and pulpits.
    Denunciation was very much in the rule among the more austere Protestants, especially in the United States, who felt that religion in non-humans debased the very idea of religion itself, as well as being a challenge to biblical literalism. Jews were, by turns, fascinated, repelled and awed by the antiquity of it all, even though the more Orthodox rabbis claimed it was a scientific fraud designed to undermine the sanctity of Torah. Avi Malkeinu had written to Jadis of the small ultra-orthodox contingent who'd set up demonstrations outside his own dig at Mount Carmel. ("I get most work done on Shabbat, when they've gone home," he'd said). The Imams of the Khalifa, finding no ready guidance (and indeed more concerned with their own internal schisms), wisely said nothing. And yet the news from SSM might have had the effect of increasing religious fervour in the Islamic world generally, spurring the Khalifa ever onwards.
    The only positive reaction came from the Catholic church.
    "It goes without saying that His Holiness deplores human sacrifice as barbaric", a black-garbed Papal legate said in a news package on FoxTurnerNews in their main bulletin one Friday evening in 2020, a few weeks after Tom received the dubious gift of sight.
    "However, with the new encyclical Undique Humanitas, His Holiness proposes that the problem of the non-human origin of the religion from Souris Saint-Michel can be solved very easily --by the simple expedient of widening the definition of humanity."
    At this the legate flashed a twinkling, toothy smile that made Jadis and Jack sit up at once, in wonder: the name at the bottom of the screen, not that they had any need to read it, said `Mgr. Domingo Sanchopanza, Vatican Science Advisor'.
    The Papacy had, it seemed, been well ahead of the game. For not only had the world to worry about the implications of non-human cultures in the dead past, but those that were still very much alive. The surprise 2012 airlift of the Tibestian Jews had been a news item for a day, but a longer-lasting and much-debated preoccupation was the revelation the following year that Tibestian DNA had evolved along a trajectory utterly foreign to that of the rest of humanity. The implications of this were hard to unravel: either that the Tibestians had undergone a series of unusually harsh population crashes over many thousands of years, sculpting their DNA into strange, inhuman forms - or that their lineage had been distinct from that of modern humans for almost a quarter of a million years. In other words, well before modern humans evolved.
    Whatever the answer, a number of other strange, lost peoples now started to emerge from long obscurity in remote regions of the world, taking their cue from the Tibestians to claim their share of the limelight. It was a common human conceit to imagine that by the start of the twenty-first century, people would have rustled every bush and looked behind every tree in search of undiscovered species. But the world is far greater than even the arrogance of scientists can imagine, and undiscovered species, if they are sentient, often have a knack of being discovered only on their own terms.
    In 2013, a tribe of very peculiar pygmy `hominids' (that had become the convenient, media-friendly catch-all term) emerged from the jungle in northern Sulawesi to give a press conference. With their all-over pelage of thick black fur and enormous, circular, completely red eyes, these people looked even less human than the Tibestians. From their point of view, however, it might have been better had the Sulawesians chosen to remain in hiding, because their press conference - aired on live global webcast -- was disrupted by a band of equally unknown but much larger hominids who decapitated the pygmies (and a few reporters who came too close) and ran into the bush, taking the A/V equipment with them.
    No trace of either species had been seen since, and people were beginning to wonder if it had all been an elaborate stunt, until the emergence in 2015 of the menehune people who had been living for millennia, completely unsuspected, in the remote Alaka'i Swamp in the highlands of Kaua'i, Hawai'i: and the incident the following year in which a brigandish tribe of sasquatches burst into a bar in Dawson's Creek, British Columbia, baying for whiskey and human sacrifice.
    After that they started popping up all over the place.
    Looking at Domingo, on sparkling form, as ever, Jack and Jadis felt that whatever their own views on religion, the Papal stance was the best - indeed, the only civilized course. Good for Domingo, they both thought, and now that the Thing had had their attention, it showed them news that turned their expressions from vicarious glory to outright horror. It was news - of a sort -- of what had happened to Faye and Primrose.
    The Saint-Rogatien Dream Team of 2011 had always occupied a special place in Jadis' heart - especially as it was very largely this same team that had broken ground at Souris Saint-Michel. She tried to keep up with them all, as far as she could. Eric and Mathilde had got married and had taken over Ernestine Yanga's office in an increasingly beleaguered Nairobi. Primrose and Faye had also become partners at home and at work, having established CATS Adventures, a very successful expeditions business, taking all-female teams of explorers up the many still-unconquered peaks of Tibet. Although the Chinese government had loosened access to the region, much of it remained wild and hardly visited by human beings, let alone westerners. In the globally harsh winter of 2018, Faye and Primrose and their party had been trekking up a peak so obscure that it was known only by its GPS coordinates, when they lost contact with their base camp in unseasonably heavy weather, and were not heard from again. Jack and Jadis were perhaps some of the more anxious among the worldwide TV audience following the long but ultimately futile attempts to trace them.
    So news of Faye and Primrose guttered and petered out - two years on, news watchers were now fascinated by the furore that inevitably greeted Undique Humanitas, and the strangely compelling personality of the Science Advisor at the Court of Saint Peter. And then, after the news, came Zenge.
    Michael Zenge (`Remember - it rhymes with Henge!') hosted the most widely syndicated chat show in the world. His success was widely attributed to a complete lack of gimmicks. Polite but warm; mild and self-deprecating to a degree just short of self-indulgent; conservatively-suited, silver-haired Zenge would just sit next to his guest, posing what seemed the most innocuous questions -- and then just let them talk. In so doing, guests often let slip the kind of revelations that more up-front interviewers could never manage to prise from their victims.
    Another Zenge hallmark was that he never went for the obvious roster of wall-to-wall celebrities, but sought genuinely interesting and varied voices, many of whom would be unfamiliar to most people, and sometimes even downright eccentric - but all of whom had interesting stories to tell, and whom he presented as sympathetically as possible. Jack and Jadis had been guests themselves about five years back, in the only live TV interview they'd ever consented to give since their Cambridge days. Zenge was almost the only thing on the Thing that they enjoyed watching.
    "Who's he dug up this time?" asked Jadis, remembering the captain of the trans-Antarctic nude pre-op transvestite cycling team of the previous week..
    Jack, who'd risen to refill their wine glasses, looked puzzled. "Not sure ... I don't recognize him. Too much hair."
    "More hair than last time, anyway..." Jadis took the wine, her own cloud of hair swaying. She snuggled close to Jack as he sat down again, trying not to spill the wine as, laughing, they re-lived the nude polar cyclists. "No danger of frostbite with this one, then," she said.
    And so in static fascination they watched the emergence of yet another new species of hominid on the world stage.
    "Freddy, can you tell us why you like Tolkien?" asked Michael Zenge.
    "Freddy who?" asked Jadis. "I don't know, I missed the credits", replied Jack.
    "Yes, of course, Michael, of course I can," replied the guest known only as Freddy.
    "And....?" Zenge prompted.
    "Oh, I see, you actually want me to tell you, what?" The studio audience laughed.
    "Yes, please, if you would..."
    The guest scratched his left nostril with the second index finger on his right hand and adjusted himself awkwardly in his seat. Something about him made Jadis squirm. He just looked all wrong.
    "But of course, Michael. It's like this. When I first looked into The Lord of the Rings, I was struck at how all the different peoples of Tolkien's Middle-earth are happily living together, with harmony and cooperation in place of strife and discord."
    "All the Elves, Dwarves and so on, all living in racial harmony? What we used to call a `multicultural' society'?"
    "Yes. But don't forget, Michael, the stone giants in the mountains. Not to mention those glorious tree giants, the Ents, so sadly declining to extinction - with, I have to say it, such British fortitude. I found it most admirable. And affecting. A model for our times, what?"
    Jadis tensed, her lips pressed together in a hard line. "Jack, I don't like this one at all. He's ... he's .... a creep." She had now sat up, perched on the edge of the sofa, her front now illuminated by the wash from the screen. Jack saw her eyes burning like coals, the tautness in her neck muscles. Jack tensed up too: she was right - there was something very, very odd indeed about this guest. He braced himself for what his instinct told him was a nasty surprise around the corner. Part of his mind replayed another occasion when Raphael Dimbleby quoted Macbeth: by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.
    Zenge again: "How did you come across The Lord of the Rings, Freddy? If I might say so, it is a very popular work in many countries, but it's a surprise to hear its praises sung from the Tibetan Plateau."
    Tibet, thought Jadis... oh no, it can't be ... and Faye was always going on about hobbits. Jack pulled her back down, close to him, hugging her to his chest. Her eyes got wider with each new revelation, and she started to bite her nails.
    "Great literature transcends cultures and geography, Michael, as I am sure you're aware. But I admit it, foreign literature is somewhat hard to come by in my neck of the woods, what? Ha ha ha!"
    Freddy's laughter was like the sound of concrete blocks being dragged over corrugated iron at four o'clock in the morning: Jadis winced as if physically slapped. The guest, a thousand miles away in a studio in England, was seen quite obviously to scratch his groin. The camera panned (perhaps over-rapidly) to his face, or what could be seen of it. The guest's eyes were completely covered with wrap-around designer shades, the rest furred with long off-white hair.
    "Is this guy for real?" asked Jack. "Isn't this another hoax?"
    Once more, the guest tried to adjust himself in his seat. The problem was that he seemed far too big for it. The audience, once sympathetic and warm, had now become edgy and nervous. Zenge, affecting not to notice, sat forward in expectation. As if on cue, the guest leaned slightly forward as if to share a confidence.
    "It's a very interesting tale, how we acquired Tolkien's masterpiece, Michael. Most interesting indeed, what?"
    "That's the tale everyone knows? About the all-woman expedition to Tibet and what happened to it? Can you dispel the myths?"
    Jadis' face burned hot, she was confused, flustered - were they talking about Primrose? Faye? Were they? All she could say was:
    "Oh, Jack..."
    "Ha ha ha!" The sound of a dinosaur being dismembered by a chorus of unsharpened chainsaws. "Yes, oh yes, Michael, we made them feel most welcome at our humble mountain fastnesses, or, to be poetic, our Caves of Ice, whence flows the Sacred River Alph, what? Ha ha ha!" This last a roaring screech like a battery chicken farm sustaining the glancing blow of a rocket-propelled grenade. This time the studio guest needed no further prompting:
    "So nice to have a visit from others in Middle-earth, if you will. I am pleased to say we gave them a very warm welcome. Anyway, one of those nice ladies had The Lord of the Rings in her baggage. A long read, one supposes, for those long days when blizzards confine one to base and one cannot find a good film on the television. Ha ha ha!" Plate steel attacked by ill-tuned combine harvester at full throttle.
    "Fuck me," said Jack under his breath, holding Jadis tightly. She had begun to shake.
    "Could you read it, though? Straight off the bat?"
    "Naturally, Michael. To be sure we see very few others at our home - which is why any visit from outside is to be treasured. But we are not completely ignorant, you know. Some of us have even scaled the heights of Henry James, what? No, no, we could hack our way around Tolkien very passably, thank you".
    The guest now idly picked at his left nostril, teasing out a long, lime-green skein of snot, which he ate, chewing appreciatively for some seconds, wiping his fingers on large handkerchief from the breast pocket of expensive-looking Navy-cut blazer.
    "You say that visits from the outside are to be treasured.... So treasured that they never come home again?" said Michael Zenge, the implications of the guest's story just beginning to sink in. Not often one had a confession of mass-murder on his show, but for now, he must play this fish for all it was worth. And Freddy took the bait:
    "As the old koan from the lamasery has it, `you can check out any time like, but you can never leave', what? Ha ha ha!" Police sirens being dragged as fingernails down chalk board the size of a skyscraper.
    The guest now sat back expansively. This had the effect of thrusting his pelvis forward, spreading out the lower limbs, and making the guest's gender shockingly, vastly apparent even beneath heavy cavalry twill trousers. The guest smiled, baring huge yellowing canines.
    Jadis now sprang up, struggling free of Jack's constraining embrace, and threw the wine bottle at the screen.
    "You bastard!" she yelled at the top of her lungs. The bottle bounced, splashing bloody gouts of Bergerac on the carpet and into the fire, creating fizzing bolts of hot liquid that shot out over the hearth. One hit Fairbanks on the nose. He'd been distressed by the obvious, rising anxiety of his mistress, but this was just too much. He yelped and ran for it, padding up the stairs and hiding underneath Tom's bed.
    Jadis's screams from downstairs continued: "you evil bastard!" She punched a hole through the screen: sparks arced across the gap and died, but the picture, being formed in a distributed network of organic semiconductors, continued regardless: "You ... you ... filth!"
    The studio audience was tittering like a lunatic on the verge of running amok as Zenge and Freddy skirted around the delicate topic of how Faye and Primrose and their colleagues had met their grisly end at the hand of this - Thing. Jadis now turned on Jack, fists pummelling his chest - "turn the fucking Thing off, Jack! Turn. It. Off!"
    And so he did, but when he'd tried to take her in his arms and still the incandescent eyes, the flailing arms and ragged masses of hair, she fought him back.
    "Look what we've done, Jack - look what we've done!" she screamed at much the same volume as before.
    Tom had now got up, roused by the racket, and was standing at the sitting room door, in pyjamas and dark shades, Fairbanks at his side.
    "Maman? Papa?"
    Jack's first instinct was a strong urge to flee, but a second later knew that this would be unhelpful at best. So he simply held her, and held her again, until she could flail no more, and crumpled into his arms, wracked with sobs - Oh Darling Jack... He laid her carefully on the sofa, saying to Tom and Fairbanks - Maman is fine, just tired, you two go up to bed, I'll come and tuck you up in a minute - and sat by his wife, calmer now, stroking her hair. She pulled herself into his lap as if she was a cat, her arms thrown around his waist.
    He wanted to say so many things, but he was not a man given to long speeches, and everything he could think of seemed either pat or trite. Shared horror for Faye and Primrose? Yes, he'd loved them both, too, but they were grown women in the high-risk adventure business who'd knowingly put themselves in danger: that was their choice, not ours.
    That had Avi not heard about De Bonnard's work, here at Saint-Rogatien, he'd never have rescued the Tibestians? Possibly, but think of what would have happened had he not done this. The Tibestians and perhaps all the other hominid species might have perished without our even knowing it, which would have been a greater evil.
    That he and Jadis should not have followed their hunches? That would have been a disservice to science, and a worse evil still. Jack thought of Ginsberg Wang and regretted that Jadis hadn't met him.
    That they should not have followed their hearts? Inconceivable.
    However, it remained the case that their discoveries had changed the world more profoundly than anything since relativity, or evolution, or gravity, in which case Jadis was partly right -- that we cannot simply discover things and unleash them on the world without taking some measure of responsibility. That was something that would just have to be borne. There came to his mind a favourite line from Middlemarch, a book he'd read in the past few years and found - to his surprise -- greatly to his liking, partly because he saw in Jadis an echo of Dorothea. It was something about the greater good of the world being forged by unhistoric acts. And with that, Jack resolved to do what he could in the only way he knew how - by the mild, quiet and deliberate exercise of love.
    In the end Jack said nothing, but as so often happened, Jadis sensed the currents of his thought, sat up, parted her hair, and kissed him: her lips were swollen and warm, and tasted of tears.
    "Oh Darling Jack, I'm so sorry..."
    "Don't be, Snow Queen. And I have an idea." She smiled then through the tracks of her tears, so radiantly that Jack felt his heart might break. "I think," he continued, "that the Thing should go back to the Black Lagoon whence it came."
    She laughed. "But before you do that, you silly old lion..."
    The next day, Tom barged into his parents room to find them curled up like two spoons and fast asleep, even though the sun was climbing fast into a blue sky. Oh well, he thought, I can feed Fairbanks myself. On going downstairs he was puzzled to see the flexi-screen, rolled up and shoved into a black plastic bag outside the kitchen door.

    Chapter 12

    (April, 2034)

    What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
    John Keats - Ode on a Grecian Urn

    Shoshana Levinson shouldered her backpack and clambered wearily up the jetway. The six-hour journey crammed into a budget seat on the Stansted airship had been gruelling. She should have saved up and got the train, as everyone had advised. In the arrivals hall at Blagnac, she looked round at the small cluster of people, each one with face drawn, eyes expectant, waiting to see a friend or loved one emerge. A few - bored taxi drivers, mostly -- held up signs. Although some were in uniform, it was easy to make out the skeletally tall Pamir Kaptars, their cream-and-dirt-orange manes either shorn or pinned back in laughably vain attempts to make themselves look human. Not that one should ever laugh at a Kaptar, she thought, not after what they'd been through at the hands of the Khalifa. And especially if you didn't want your head bitten off. Or worse.
    She stopped, scanning the reception committee, and now that her mental search image had become attuned to fur and hair, her own committee became apparent. It was a tall, bronzed woman in a baggy sweatshirt, denim shorts and extremely aged sneakers, but distinguished mainly by an shaggy and unkempt mass of hair which reached down past her waist. It was dark brown - almost black - but here and there streaked with grey.
    At first Shoshana couldn't make out her face, until the woman tossed the hair from her eyes and stared at her with a gaze so dark and piercing that - just for a moment - Shoshana imagined herself in one of those anxiety nightmares in which you are looking for something, but in which everyone else is unable to help you, or to notice that you are naked. It was Jadis Markham, of course. Shoshana recognized her from innumerable news pictures, none of which had captured the instant and overwhelming intensity that hung about her like a cloud. But then Dr Markham smiled, and everything changed. The eyes lit up like firebrands, and but for the crows-feet, her face seemed to be that of a girl in her mid-twenties. Not at all like the serious, distinguished academic of fifty that Shoshana knew Dr Markham to be.
    "Shoshana Levinson? Lovely to meet you. Quick - let's get out of here. The car's parked illegally..."
    Shoshana hurried to keep up with Dr Markham's tall, easy strides. Nice legs, too, she thought, for a wrinkly.
    "Hop in," said Dr Markham, gunning the motor as Shoshana flung her pack in the back seat of the open-topped Toyota jeep and climbed aboard. It was great to have shed the load, and to feel the warm springtime breeze of France on her face and arms, the loose sleeves of her t-shirt flapping, blowing away the shrouds of miserable London with each passing mile.
    For a long time, Shoshana was too awed by her company to say anything. Jadis Markham was her heroine. She'd read about the fantastic discoveries at Souris Saint-Michel since she had been a little girl, and Jadis had been an inspiration for her even during her darkest hours - hours that had increased in both frequency and darkness until she'd made the final break from home. The fluke that had scraped her through the Cambridge entrance exam to read Analytic Archaeology, with a good but not spectacular diploma result, had a lot to do with that. She whispered a grateful prayer for the old-girl network, in which her college tutor had been a student of Professor Reynard at Cambridge: ("And by the way, Mathilde, I have a student who's bright but has had a hard time, could benefit from interview after the exam and also field experience in her gap year. Could you...?") Shoshana knew that Professor Reynard had been one of the very first people to see the underground city at Souris.
    She could not, of course, know that Mathilde's own life had been clouded by tragedy. Just six years into her stint in Nairobi, her beloved Eric had died in the most awful spasmodic agony, having succumbed to the new and lethal Naivasha-6 virus, probably contracted from contaminated blood during an operation for a ruptured appendix that had itself gone badly wrong. She counted herself lucky that had not caught this highly contagious disease herself - either that or any number of even more horrible diseases which, rumour had it, were stalking the bushlands. She'd heard some of the junior staff gossip about a curse that had struck distant relatives in remote villages - a curse that transformed the victims into some kind of black, inhuman monster. Such talk was easily dismissed as folk superstition, especially in these days of crisis, but after what had happened to poor Eric, she did wonder.
    Nairobi itself, wracked by shortages, disease and a flood of migrants from the increasingly lawless countryside, was no comfort. Mathilde had fled, at first to Jack and Jadis' farmhouse where by happy chance Domingo was visiting, and being a good Catholic herself, she was able to discuss her concerns with him in depth and detail. The sensation of spiritual healing, of absolution, of uplift, had been palpable. She thanked God for confessors as sensitive and as articulate as Domingo (because, honestly, you hardly know it, to look at him). In time, the Chair at Cambridge came up, and her application was successful. But for the rest of her life she would regard the farmhouse at Saint-Rogatien as a haven untouched by care or worry, and would recommend it most warmly to any promising student, even one as inexperienced as this Levinson girl. Nothing like a good start in life, Mathilde thought, and if Shoshana was as good as Jadis had been at the same age - eighteen, was it? - then she'd be fine.
    Mathilde had seen Shoshana at interview, much as Jadis saw her now. Sizing Shoshana up with a glance in the afternoon sunshine at Blagnac, Jadis' first thought was that she'd have to be careful in case she drove some of the male crew demented. Shoshana was hardly more than five feet tall even in trek-booted feet, but packed every inch of her frame with what Jack would have called `personality', before he started referring (as corroborative evidence) to Magdalenian mother goddesses and the more fleshly works of Titian. Jadis strongly suspected that Shoshana was well aware of her own appearance and its effects. She thought of Tom. No - no need for her to worry on Tom's account: he could handle himself quite well. He was in the middle of his second year at Cambridge with Mathilde, and had (according to her) broken a few hearts already. With his stocky, rugged good looks, matinée-idol French accent and permanent designer shades, he looked more like a rock star than a trainee archaeologist. No, Tom was more than capable of looking after himself.
    In fact, Jadis thought, as Tom was at Saint-Rogatien for the Easter recess, she might ask him to show Shoshana around. There had also been talk of Shoshana going to Israel in the summer as a volunteer on Avi's project, as Tom was also due to do. The fact that Shoshana had a smattering of Hebrew and had been to Israel already this year (according to her letter of recommendation) was a big factor in her favour - she could show Tom the ropes there as he would do for her at SSM. It could all work out rather well, but for one thing: Jadis wondered if Tom would be able to keep himself from showing Shoshana the latest and hitherto very secret discovery at SSM. She rather wanted Domingo to see it before anyone else outside the immediate team, because it was - well, puzzling. But Domingo had promised a visit soon, so perhaps it wouldn't hurt for Shoshana to get a sneak preview.
    Jadis' first instincts about Shoshana, her appearance and how she might exploit it, had been entirely correct. Shoshana had been raised an only child in a conventional Jewish household in North London. Although her parents belonged to an Orthodox synagogue, she went to a secular secondary school where she was very happy. And then came the day when, aged twelve, she'd returned home one Friday evening to find the mirrors turned to the wall, a blanket over the TV... and her mother in the kitchen in such distress that she was initially quite unable to talk.
    "Where's Dad?", she kept asking her mother, receiving no reply but shakes of the head and more tears. Only when Aunt Jess, her mother's sister, called a little later did she learn the full horror - Barry Levinson, aged fifty-three, moderately successful chartered accountant, loving husband of Myra and father of Shoshana, had been robbed and pushed under a tube train by assailants unknown. He had died two hours earlier from his injuries at the Royal Free Hospital.
    It was then that the nightmare started. Over the days and weeks, the full history of Barry Levinson's past came back to haunt Shoshana and her mother. They knew that he'd come from a rigidly Ultra-Orthodox background but had somehow escaped. He had gone to University as Baruch but re-emerged as Barry, joined a middle-of-the-road Orthodox congregation and did his best to avoid his more intolerant and intolerable relations. His Achilles heel was his brother Howie, with whom he'd started his business but who was now a sleeping partner. Shoshana loathed Uncle Howie, who had backslid into religious fundamentalism as his active interest in his brother's business waned - while still raking off a share of the profits.
    But Barry was dead, and the mishpoche scuttled like gaberdine-clad cockroaches out from under their stones with indecent haste. It was made clear to Myra that unless she married Howie, and Shoshana went to a decently Torah Jewish school and stopped hanging around with goyim - both demands made in accordance with what he felt was his religious obligation - he'd have to pull the plug from the business. Which, he didn't need to add, would require them to sell their home. What with death duties, and what Howie thought was reasonable recompense for the accountancy firm (which he'd have to wind up), this would leave Shoshana and Myra destitute. So Shoshana acquired a stepfather she hated, and who Myra feared. Shoshana suspected that Howie beat her mother - and worse - for all manner of infractions to do with modesty, decorum, kashrut, the list was endless. If her new school weren't bad enough - run by a load of creepy rabbis who didn't so much as teach the students as yell at them -- attendance at synagogue was compulsory every weekend. She remembered when her mother was forced to shave her hair and wear a wig, and how she'd looked so beaten, so defeated.
    Like most of her friends, Shoshana had had no reason to complain about the more tolerable strictures of her religion - it was part of her life. She had always been fascinated by the historical and cultural roots of Judaism, especially its antiquity. She'd enjoyed cheder each Sunday morning and was reasonably proficient at Hebrew, and it always amazed her that words like shemesh, meaning the sun, had been used continually and without change for more than three thousand years, the word having been used for the name of the Assyrian sun god: and yet the English she spoke in her everyday life had been recognizable as such for much less than a third that time. But the new régime at home and at her new school convinced her that whatever the glories of its history, the purpose of Judaism now was to say `no' to everything and generally to make life as miserable as possible. It was hardly her fault that this growing and understandable antipathy met the full force of her surging teenage hormones and her own fascination with her newly voluptuous figure - and the possibilities it offered.
    And so she became a rebel. Hardly a week would go by without a stern conference in the sitting room in which Howie - in Homburg and tzitzis - would berate Shoshana about the damage that her behaviour was doing to his reputation, and Shoshana shouting even more loudly that she couldn't give a flying fuck for his reputation, as he wasn't her Dad, and what the hell was he going to do about it anyway? Lay his tefillin even more tightly? Perhaps one day he'd do them a favour and strangle himself with them. At which she'd claw her way out of the house and not be seen until dawn. Shoshana's only worry - and who worried about such things when they're a teenager? - was what this was doing to her mother. But her mother had let herself be a doormat for this creep to trample on, so maybe she deserved what she got.
    The last straw came when Shoshana was expelled. They'd been on a school trip somewhere or another, and Shoshana (whose position in the school bus had moved ever backwards to match her plummeting academic, attendance and behaviour records) had apparently (and this was not in quite the roundabout form that her parents had been notified of the event) climbed into the back window and flashed her abundantly fabulous tits at the motorists following.
    The sitting-room conference was much as expected - Howie raging, Myra standing behind him, pale and anxious, and Shoshana swearing and storming out. But the result of her motorway escapade had caught up with her. Wherever she went that evening she was followed by boys from school - and other, less savoury characters - demanding that she `got her kit off for the lads'. Outside a pub at about ten thirty she was surrounded by a gang of men she didn't recognize, one of whom she'd only just manage to fight off, but others had started to remove belts, get out knives... when she was saved by a couple of cab drivers. One was her cousin, Frank, a burly ex-boxer who kept himself fit at the gym when he wasn't out cadging fares. The other was an eight-foot Kaptar who went by the name of Big George.
    "Hey, Suzy," said Frank, piling her into the back with Big George -- "you're getting into bad company." Big George made as much room for Shoshana as he could, but said nothing.
    "Piss off, Frank", she said, playfully - but her eyes sparkled with gratitude.
    "No, seriously, girl. You should wise up."
    "So what do you think I should do, Frank? You seem to know everything."
    "Do me a favour -- ditch that Dad of yours. I shouldn't be saying this, but that shlemiel, he's a loser. I'll never convince Myra, but you, you're a clever girl. Think about it."
    "Yeah, right". Shoshana felt that the domestic situation, while bad, wasn't something she could do much about. And whatever she thought about her Mum and her reaction to Howie -- akin to that of a rabbit about to be mown down by a truck -- she could hardly leave her. And in any case, where would she go? She was only just fifteen, had no qualifications, and with the way things were going, the chances of her acquiring any were slim and receding daily. Frank and George dropped her, still shaking, clothes torn, lip bloodied, at her front door.
    "Now listen," said Frank, hanging out of the window, motor humming: "I'll let you off the fare if you sharpen up. When you've got your exams, then you can wave those nice boobs whoever you want, but only if you think they deserve it. Okay?"
    Her chance of freedom came that very evening. It was Friday night and the house was totally dark, for Shabbat. The only sound came from the sitting room - smacks and small, choked yelps -- where through the open door she saw her mother's form, cowering on the floor, Howie standing over her, whipping her with his belt. Shoshana's blood went cold: her head cleared and she sprang into action. She got out her cellphone, burst into the room, snapped on the light and took several pictures. All Howie, hatted and bearded, could say was
    "Turn off that light - it's Shabbat!"
    After that things turned out better. Shoshana mailed the pictures to her own private webspace, and threatened Howie, then and there, that she'd release them if he didn't let her mother alone; if he didn't allow her to continue her education at a sixth-form diploma college; if he didn't stop her studying what he considered blasphemously Torah-threatening goy science - and if he didn't allow her to leave home as soon as convenient. Howie had no choice but to agree. The very next day, Shabbat be damned, she was living with her aunt Jess ("so relieved that you got out of that house, love, even though poor Myra...") and had taken cousin Frank's advice.
    Two years later she had got her diploma and scraped her entrance exam to Cambridge, the interview with Mathilde Reynard being the clincher. The day after the result came through, she told her mother to flee to a women's refuge or else, and released the pictures anyway: to the police, the News of the World and -- to Howie's chagrin -- the weekly newspaper that Howie and all his friends read, a self-appointed organ of smugly censorious Orthodoxy. Howie got fifteen years, and the tabloids had had a mild field day with the fiery, feisty (and notably busty) young woman whose testimony had done most to put him behind bars. Then, to kick off her gap year, she'd gone to visit Israel with some old friends from her cheder - and had been transformed. Her life was now set.
    Jadis didn't know very much of this, but what she picked up was that Shoshana was a strange mixture of knowing and naive, gauche and street. Perhaps she herself was like that at eighteen, but she had a feeling that Shoshana had escaped from something, whereas she, Jadis, had had a comfortable and happy childhood, with no baggage to shed. She resolved to do whatever she could for this young woman.
    Tom, for his part, had never been happier. He'd come home for Easter and was looking forward to his seasonal task - digging a bean trench for his mother, on her potager. Beans needed a lot of water and nutrients, and before they were planted, he had to dig a trench twenty feet long, three feet wide and two deep, fill it with compost and shredded paper ("Tom - I have boxes and boxes of old field reports!"), and backfill with the removed topsoil. The work was backbreaking, but after a term of study it was just what he needed to loosen himself up.
    But what he enjoyed most about this ritual task was the refreshing sensory symphony that accompanied it. The soil was heavy clay, but his mother had worked it diligently for almost thirty years, so it was now rich and loamy. He loved the pungent smell of wet earth each time he pushed his spade into it, turning it - a smell, he thought, of the promise of growth coiled up tight and just waiting to burst forth. He loved the feel of the well-rotted compost as he crumbled it through his fingers. He loved the angular plosh and plash of the water as it hit the shredded paper, the gurgle as it soaked in. And all this against a background of breeze and birdsong. The only thing he missed - still missed -- was the shuffling swish and pad of a golden retriever following him up the garden, the contented `harumph' as the dog subsided onto the grass next to him - but his childhood companion had died when he was ten. Fairbanks' grave was somewhere over there, beyond the spinney, the retriever himself having long since made his contribution to the regional soil structure.
    So that's what Tom was doing as evening fell, when his mother brought home a gap-year student who wanted a little field experience. He knew that his parents were deluged with such requests, so he reasoned that this one must have been a bit special to get through the screening. Perhaps the fact that she was going up to his own department had something to do with it. His mother and Professor Reynard had always been close.
    Not that Cambridge was anything like it had been when his parents had been there, as far as he could judge. They seemed reluctant to tell him much. Jack had just looked distant, as if lost in a dream. His mother either changed the subject or, if he'd pressed the point, said something to the effect that he'd soon find out for himself.
    Tom's suspicions had been entirely correct: by the 2030s, Cambridge was not half the place it had been at the turn of the millennium. The smaller and less well-endowed colleges were closing, and because the town depended on its colleges, Cambridge itself was shrinking. There were two reasons for this, the first being a precipitous decline in revenue from the admission of foreign students. Prosperous countries in East Asia and the Americas now tended to educate their children within their own borders. The African market had all but dried up, the death-knell being the collapse of Nigeria in 2019, before the two-pronged advance of the Khalifa and the Sahara desert.
    Climate change was indeed starting to have marked effects on the global economy. A combination of international carbon treaties (too little, too late) and shortages of oil meant that long-haul jet travel had ceased to become routine, except for the super-rich and business people with generous expense allowances. Fewer travellers meant fewer foreign students and tourists, tipping Cambridge further into decline. The droves of Japanese tourists who once crowded King's Parade and Trinity Street, weighed down by their Pentaxes, became small flocks and then stopped altogether.
    Even had students and visitors continued to arrive in Cambridge as they had a few decades earlier, climate change would still have left its mark. Although Cambridge had always been a chilly place, the winters of the past decade had been harsh even by East Anglian standards. A dramatic season of storms each November presaged Arctic blizzards, a frozen Cam and snow on the ground continuously until April. After a brief Spring, late May onwards would be lived in a furnace blast of alien heat, making the exam season all but intolerable.
    And if his lecturers and fellow natural-sciences students were to be believed, the Autumn storm-surge season built on rising surface temperatures in the North Sea. With the consequent expansion of seawater, the grain prairies around the Wash were inundated each November, ruining all winter wheat and making the land too wet and salty to cultivate. After the rains came the big freeze. Even cold-tolerant Manitoba and salt-hardened `Sahelized' wheat cultivars failed to thrive as dikes and drains were regularly overtopped. Some ambitious farmers switched to salt-hardened rice varieties, but after a couple of years the land became too salty even for these.
    In the end, enormous acreages of East Anglia had been abandoned to fen and salt marsh, undoing more than a thousand years of careful reclamation in less than twenty. The coastline from Skegness to Blakeney in North Norfolk had become a vague and fickle thing, an uncertain merger of land, sea, and big, big sky. King's Lynn had been evacuated and abandoned, Boston was once again a sea port, and the interior almost as far as Peterborough was dotted with half-submerged villages and the long-forgotten calls of bitterns.
    The students had changed, too. The regular crowd was punctuated with traditional garb of all sorts, not just from the young sultans and princelings of the Khalifa. You could occasionally spot a Kaptar, one of the Almai or the various Sulawesians, even a Sasquatch, and there were rumoured to be a couple of Menehune at Christ's: the hominids had come to town. Tom was fascinated by all this diversity: he intended to study them in greater depth, someday. For tens of thousands of years, Homo sapiens had thought himself the only species on Earth capable of holding a conversation. But now there were so many different sorts of human, some of whom had been distinct species for far longer than dear old Hom. sap. What opportunities might this variety not present for a comparative anthropologist? That, thought Tom, was where his career path should be headed, though he'd not said as much as yet to his parents. He'd never yet seen a Tibestian - these were pretty much all in Israel. But he was going to Israel this summer to work with Professor Malkeinu. He thought he'd heard his parents say that this new gap-year student had planned to do that to, ("and maybe Tom could look out for her?") So maybe he'd see one then. Thus happily occupied, Tom went on with his work.
    Tom heard the thrum and scrunch of the jeep as it hit the gravel drive. He stretched, feeling his back muscles snap back into place, and, walking in through the arrière-cuisine and out through the kitchen door, he went to greet his mother and the newcomer. He sensed the quick, decided steps of his mother as she alighted, the swish of her hair and her sharp smell. But there was a new and intriguing odour, too - yeasty, buttery, almost like - what was it? - cinnamon? -- and in any case quite definitely female. Tom had been around women all his life - the majority of his parents' colleagues were women; mostly young, all of them intelligent, many highly sexed and some very interested in Tom. But he'd remained aloof: without consciously being aware of it, he was wary of forming any attachments on his parents' home turf. Cambridge was a another matter. Once free from the apron-strings of home, he found himself endlessly fascinated by women: their compelling odours, intriguing shapes, and most of all, by their quite unbelievable textures. That women seemed equally fascinated by him offered plenty of scope for experience and experimentation.
    But this one seemed somehow different, even in a world where every woman was, to Tom, so gloriously different from every other. To be presented with such an example on his parents' own doorstep seemed to break a taboo. Then, she spoke - "Hi, Tom! Great to meet you" - a voice that was full of contradictory contrasts. It was full of laughter and yet seemed rough and strained at the edges -- almost distorted by an ugly accent he couldn't place -- these corners bracketing a warm and appealing smoothness that seemed incongruous.
    He felt a strong urge to remove his shades, but vision was something he generally only used for corroboration. He found that he was never able to trust his eyes as primary sources of evidence, so he tended to keep his almost impenetrably opaque mirror shades on, even at night. Women found this more alluring, somehow. Some women, anyway. So he always made a big fuss and feature of his shades, always choosing the trendiest designer labels he could afford. And in any case, he found that even a small exposure to sunlight hurt his eyes. But this time - this time - he thought he had to make an exception. The odours and sounds seemed so varied and - well, interesting - that he just had to see for himself how they would all merge together. And so he took of his shades, squinted for a few moments in the still-bright evening light, and accommodated his eyes to a view that would change his life.
    About half way through the journey, Shoshana and Jadis had begun to converse, at first in a rather stilted manner, but then with increasing animation. Shoshana was awed and shy, but it was plain that Jadis wasn't going to go out of her way to make it any easier. Shoshana had resigned herself to this. After all, Dr Markham did have a reputation as sharp and frosty as her first name. But as they progressed, Jadis would turn to her passenger, bestowing on her a series of increasingly lovely smiles, which Shoshana interpreted as encouragement, as if they were just two girls together, in the mood to share confidences. Perhaps, she thought, here was someone who didn't say much unless it was worth saying. If so, this was a refreshing contrast to her own Jewish upbringing, counterpointed as it had been by incessant talk, whether conspiratorial, loving, angry, sad, lamenting, catty, barbed, reproachful, sarcastic, gossipy, joyful or just everyday. She'd never met anyone who'd had the restraint to say nothing, as a default option. But her upbringing got the better of her, and she gave way to an overwhelming urge to fill the void with a confessional stream in which Jadis was given perhaps a fuller account of Shoshana's life than she'd intended to vouchsafe, and was left in no doubt about what Shoshana thought about it and where it was going.
    Jadis learned about how Shoshana's recent horrific experience of Judaism had been transformed by her trip to Jerusalem that winter, in which she'd shaken off her old cheder companions and went exploring on her own. How she had seen so many different kinds of Judaism, and other religions and peoples, all muddling along in a city so ancient that history just dripped from every crevice. She'd seen the western wall, but had also visited the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, preserving the last footprint of Mohammed before he ascended to heaven on the great beast Al-Buraq. She'd marvelled at the crazy warren that was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in which each Christian denomination had its own jealously guarded corner ("and the poor Copts are banished to the roof, with the washing!") She had followed a troupe of Niger-Coast pilgrims as they walked the Stations of the Cross. It was all, she said, quite wonderful.
    In the course of this, her own pilgrimage, the anger she'd felt at her upbringing was distilled into a kind of sadness at how narrow it had been, and how the people imposing the narrowness seemed to have lost all perception of the joys of their heritage. Their relentlessly precise codification of Judaism had squeezed out all possibility of challenge or inquiry, so that Judaism was preserved simply for the sake of preservation, as if it had no other contribution to make. Rather than rage, she now felt regret for her stepfather and his ilk, about how they had walled themselves into a ghetto without hope of rescue.
    On hearing all this, Jadis made no comment but could not help but think nostalgically of Avi and his long discussions with Domingo, and more generally of the Dream Team of 2011, and how Shoshana seemed to have some of the flair and grit that had made that crew so special. She was now convinced that here was somebody who would be well able to take care of herself in Israel, and help Tom along if he needed it. And also that here was a girl full of pluck and life who deserved every encouragement. As they turned off the lane and bounced up the drive to the farmhouse, Jadis turned to Shoshana, smiled warmly, touched her hand and said,
    "Welcome to the team, Shoshana. I hope you'll like it here. Ah! Here's Tom!"
    As the jeep pulled to a halt in the courtyard, Shoshana saw a young man clad in scruffy khaki Bermuda shorts and a faded but still lurid Hawai'ian shirt that seemed several dozen sizes too big for him. His large hands were stained with dirt; his skin was as brown as teak, his black hair was very thick and stuck up in peaks like a meringue silhouette, and on his face he wore mirror shades and a smile as big as his mother's. Everyone's at it, thought Shoshana - looks like one happy, hippy place to be. Thus buoyed by the sudden warmth of their welcome, she couldn't help but laugh a little as she said:
    "Hi, Tom! Great to meet you".
    She leaped from the passenger seat and found, now that she was facing him, that although he seemed stocky and well-muscled, he wasn't very much taller than she was.
    Then Tom took off his shades - an act that Jadis seemed to find hugely amusing.
    "Tom", she said, her voice full of smiling, suppressed mirth: "meet Shoshana. Can you show her around? Make sure she finds her room?"
    "Sure, Maman, d'accord," Tom replied distractedly as Jadis hurried inside, his eyes fixed on Shoshana. "So, you're Shoshana!"
    Shoshana had the weirdest feeling that an insect might have had if pinned to a cork board by an entomologist, and finding, much to its surprise, that it enjoyed the experience. She gazed back at Tom's curious, unblinking cat-like gaze, and his sunny, easy-going smile. As she did so, she couldn't help but smile back: her own eyes widened, and Tom saw that they were big, round and the deepest blue, a colour so dark that they were almost purple, fathomless and full of intelligence. These were eyes that could swallow you whole. It took all of a quarter of a second for Tom to examine the rest of her. She had a long nose, a rather wide mouth, full lips and quite a lot of teeth, some at curious angles. Her skin - her skin? - this was the source of the lovely smell he'd sensed as the jeep arrived. How would you describe it? It looked just as flawlessly buttery as it smelled, was all he could think of. Her hair was long and straight and the very darkest shade of blonde, the colour of wild honey, smelled like freshly made bread with a hint of salt, and there seemed to be a lot of it, rather like his mother, in negative. Tom put his shades back on, held both hands out to Shoshana and said - "Viens!" Her hands were dry and slim and gripped his firmly, full of resolution.
    Tom led Shoshana round the farmhouse, delighting in showing her every last nook and cranny, and making sure she knew where her room was in relation to the bathroom, the stairs and so on. "Just come and go whenever you want," he'd said. "It's your home." Her room was a small but comfortable nook with a view over the front yard, containing a double bed, a stripped pine chest with a mirror on top of it, a bookcase with a lamp and a pile of books and magazines, and a bentwood chair. The wallpaper had a cheerful floral pattern but was spotted and peeling in places: lived-in and relaxed without being luxurious. Most of the rest of the rooms seemed to have been variously used as store rooms, offices and bedrooms, or a debatable mixture of all three. There were books everywhere - unceremoniously stuffed into bookcases, littering tables, piled in tottering stacks on the floor, wedged into doors, even in the bathroom. This was a house in which books were meant to be read and used.
    At one end of a long, broad corridor hung with torn hessian ("Aïe! Ils sont Les Horribles! - I hope you don't mind cats! In this house they are everywhere!") was a large, open space with two windows overlooking the back garden. In the centre stood a two huge and well-worn oak desks, facing each other, with computer monitors on smaller tables to either side. More bookshelves lined the walls, crammed not just with books, but papers, boxes, stone tools, chunks of ancient masonry and all kinds of equipment, spilling on to the floor in untidy drifts. More papers were piled high on the desks themselves. Battered steel filing cabinets, drawers half open, disgorged further paperwork.
    "This is the office," said Tom, "where my parents do some of their thinking. Let me show you where they do the rest of it. Come!"
    So Tom showed her the kitchen - a crazy mixture of a room that seemed to be part study, part greenhouse, part garden shed, with only the range, a sink and a corner of a worktop to betray any culinary activity. This was where Jadis seemed to do most of her actual work, (rather than in the study, which is where she just dumped it); and the sitting room, where an enormous and utterly hideous sofa, its upholstery ripped and stained, stood before a broad fireplace, its grate heaped with logs, more logs stacked haphazardly in the alcoves. A strange picture of two fighting cats hung above a mantelpiece crowded with framed prints of Tom and several other people Shoshana didn't recognize, including a golden retriever and a very large and breathtakingly ugly man who seemed to share Tom's fondness for loud shirts. Shoshana pointed at the picture above the fireplace -
    "More horrible cats?"
    Tom smiled. Shoshana was awed - this crazy, untidy house was where it had all happened, where Jack Corstorphine and Jadis Markham had changed the face of human history. It was as if she was being given a tour of Einstein's office, or Faraday's laboratory - or, perhaps most of all, Down House, the big, rambling country home where Charles Darwin had thought about evolution and raised a family in one big, joyful mess. She was confused, elated, but most of all, tired, and looked at Tom with a smile that conveyed all this to him in a split instant,
    "Shoshana, I'm so sorry," he said. "You're worn out. I haven't even asked if you're thirsty. Would you like some tea? Tiens - why don't you go upstairs, wash up, have a lie down, I'll bring you some tea." Shoshana didn't know whether to laugh, cry, to say yes or no - but Tom looked at her and smiled again - "vas t'en, go! I'll bring your things up with me."
    Shoshana made her way up the broad, creaking wooden stairs, tottered to her room, kicked off her boots and collapsed on to her bed. The candlewick bedspread and duvet beneath swelled up around her in a cool embrace. She felt as if all her batteries had expired at once, and now closed her eyes. She hadn't slept at all on the flight - her memories of this morning were a dawn rush as Aunt Jess had pushed her on the Stansted Shuttle from Liverpool Street, the constant taking-off and putting-on-again of her rucksack during the innumerable security checks ... the endless flight in which, unable to sleep, she'd seen three films but couldn't remember anything about any of them ... and now, here, at this strange but special farmhouse that exuded a casual happiness.
    And her guide, Tom? Funny, but even though she'd seen him less than two minutes ago she couldn't quite picture him. Not because she didn't want to - in contrast, she startled herself by her desire to recall every aspect of him - but because he seemed so utterly different from anyone she'd ever met, including Jadis Markham herself. To be sure, her experience was largely limited to the young and mostly Jewish men she'd known since she was a girl, most of whom seemed pallid, predictable, serious and most of all utterly weighted and freighted with the tribal baggage of millennia, a load which they'd only seek to pass on to her, if she got too close. Tom seemed like a free spirit, like Peter Pan, who could soar into the sky on a whim and go wherever he wanted, do whatever he liked, and if she wanted to come with, well, great - and if she didn't, that was great, too.
    She'd always known what to do with men, how to use them, how to manipulate them. It was easy, she'd thought, because all that men had ever done on first meeting her was look down at her tits, their gaze rarely straying thenceforth. Tom had instantly confounded this well-used and almost instinctive strategy. He'd looked at her face, constantly. Well, by `looked' - she wondered if he'd really seen anything. His eyes were strange, huge, green like the sea, slightly cat-like, unfathomable. In contrast, he'd seemed more focussed when he'd had his shades on, and his eyes were obscured. And yet she'd felt that he'd looked right through her. No, not like he'd undressed her with his eyes like all those schmucks from home, but something more genuinely appreciative, respectful, making her want to undress herself for him, at her own pleasure, rather than his. Was that right? No, she couldn't put it into words. She was too confused. Too tired.
    Tom fumbled up the stairs with a tea-tray. What a jerk he was being, dragging this girl round the house like he was a six-year-old wanting to show it all off. How could he have lost it so badly? There he was, parading her round the place, with her following him like some golden glow, muted by her own tiredness. He'd known lots of girls - lots of them - he had, in truth, got well into double figures within his first year at Cambridge - but Shoshana was as different as he'd thought she might be. To be sure, all the Cambridge girls were tough and self-assured, but Shoshana seemed just as tough as they were and she hadn't even got to Cambridge yet.
    But here was the contrast, and why he was so flustered, so confused. To appreciate Shoshana he'd had to use his eyes. This put him, as far as he was concerned, on thin ice, in new and dangerous territory. When Tom and his friends went chasing girls, he noticed that some of his friends invariably chose blondes, whereas others usually went for Asian girls, or redheads, or women with big boobs, or long legs, or whatever. To Tom it seemed unusually restrictive to base one's choice on categories defined by vision which, to him, couldn't be trusted as a modality on its own. To Tom's friends, his own choice of women seemed eclectic, even eccentric, but this was because he never chose them by sight, but by a private combination of well-honed senses too refined and subtle to be understood by those born as slaves to vision. But with Shoshana he felt that he had been forced to open his eyes, and because of this, he would be at a disadvantage. As he reached the top of the stairs, he felt that Shoshana Levinson had done what no other woman had achieved. She had penetrated his eyes and was setting up residence in his soul.
    It was enough trying to carry her rucksack (slung in the crook of an elbow) and manhandle two mugs of tea on a tray up the stairs without being assailed by these confusing cross-currents. Damn, he hadn't asked if she wanted milk - he'd made it black with lemon and sugar. Oh well, perhaps too late now. He knocked at the door with his booted foot. A tiny voice from within bid him enter. As the door opened she rose from the bed in a single fluid, curved movement that raised all kinds of smells - the dust from an unused room; newly washed sheets; a cat that had been hiding (unbeknownst to Shoshana) under the bed; fly paper; but most of all her own odour, accented by exhaustion but salted with relief, relaxation and something else - exultation? Wordlessly, she took the tea-tray from him, putting it on the chest of drawers, allowing him to drop the rucksack.
    As he rose she was standing before him, an expression of intensity and determination, eyes wide open, lips slightly parted in concentration - and before he knew it, she'd reached up and, very precisely and slowly, removed his shades. All he saw were her purple eyes, focussed on his, and her lips as they approached, her eyes closing as they made contact, her arms reaching round his back and up inside his shirt. Her lips parted more fully, her tongue pressing gently between his own, flickering, probing, asking, demanding, and finally acquiescing as he came to his senses, embracing her in response. Lost as he was in the breathless cosmos of her kiss, he felt the live pressure of her body against his, the pound and flutter of her heart, the contours of her breasts against his chest.
    They parted, briefly, and she exhaled a breath - a sigh -- of Muscat and warm October honey. Although still embracing like a pair of Brancusi statues, they looked at each other's faces, not quite believing what they had found in the other. For Tom, no longer afraid to see, she was beginning to make sense. Her expression was something like revelation. Looking back at her, his own eyes widened, his face broadening into a smile of understanding: quand le coup de foudre frappe...
    She pressed herself closer to him, grasping on to him more firmly, but rather than kiss him again, she buried her head beneath his chin, as if to say that now she'd arrived, she'd never leave again. He moved his right hand, tracing it up the line of her spine to the nape of her neck, feeling every ridge of her backbone, every hair, until his fingers met the rich, glossy hair on her head, stroking it, feeling the strands separate and part and drop through his fingers. She looked up at him again, eyes now slightly moist. "Hey, now..." he said, before she kissed him once more, just a short demonstrative peck, fluster all over now, normal service resumed.
    "Thanks for the tea, Tom - I'm bushed. I think I really will have that lie down, now." Her eyes lost their focus, as holding his hands, she lowered herself onto the bed.
    "Of course, Shoshana - of course! Sleep well!"
    Tom was in a daze and could hardly remember what he did or where he was for the next hour or so until Jadis called him into the kitchen to say that dinner was almost ready, and could he call Shoshana?
    Shoshana - the tingle of her lips on his, that strange expression of her eyes, the press of her warm curves, the peculiar, gut-fluttering sensation of coming home - even though home was where he was! Wasn't he?
    "Tom - you're miles away!" said his mother, a knowingly playful glint in one eye peeking from beneath loose strands of hair. She remembered Jack looking rather like that.... When was it? It seemed so long ago now: it was the day she'd learned of her final exam results. Oh, poor Tom. Perhaps he couldn't be relied on to look after himself after all.
    The following day started early, and soon they were bowling along towards Aurignac, Jack driving, Jadis shotgun, hair flying; Tom and Shoshana in the back. Jadis kept looking round at her son and the new gap-year student, playing a game with herself to see if she could catch them holding hands. That they clearly wanted to was painfully, instantly obvious. Dinner the previous night had been a strange business: Shoshana clearly didn't know where to put herself, contorted expressions replacing one another on her full lips faster than the speed of thought, her eyes trying very hard not to gaze at Tom with a curious mixture of supplication and proprietorial watchfulness (and failing). Tom could always retreat behind his shades - but hang on, where were they? She recalled that he hadn't worn them all evening. Unused to the etiquette of naked-eye expression, Tom was staring longingly at Shoshana as much as he could. No wonder Shoshana looked like she was just emerging from the shower to be doorstepped by a phalanx of press photographers.
    Later that evening, on their sofa, Jadis found that the drama had conjured in Jack the same reminiscences that it had in her.
    "Oh, Snow Queen, were we really like that?"
    "What do you mean, were, you silly old lion?" came the reply, Jadis - resting as ever with her back against the nearly supine Jack -- pulling his hands closely around her, pressing them onto her breasts. He leaned forward and nipped her ear.
    "Be careful what you wish for, Snow Queen - the Old Boy still has some lead in his pencil."
    "Grrrr!" she teased, eyes closing - "promises, promises".
    Within a minute she had begun to snore softly, under the blanket of her own grey-streaked hair. Jack, who was now completely grey, marvelled - not for the first time - about how his wife seemed like a different woman every day, yet somehow always the same. She had thickened around the hips, although her legs were still lovely and long. Her breasts had changed shape in all kinds of ways that he couldn't quite summarize. Her skin was not quite as perfectly soft as it once had been. But, he reflected, the more they both aged, the more he saw in his wife not this recent escapee from the menopause, but the eighteen-year-old who'd made love to him in a dell one summer in the morning of the world. Where was it? He could hardly remember the location. Recalling the date would be an effort. But he could remember her touch and her taste as if it were today. And even now, her eyes were as dark and as full of unquenchable, inexhaustible life as ever they were.
    Rattling down the lanes in the jeep, Jadis turned away from Tom and Shoshana, now that her game was over (Tom had finally grasped Shoshana's hand, and she had returned it with a smile of total worship, now quite oblivious to anyone or anything else) and was catapulted into her own thoughts. Eighteen months ago, on the day that she and Jack had seen Tom off at Blagnac for his first term in Cambridge, they'd returned to the house looking forward to having the place to themselves at last. But on the way home from the airport she had felt progressively more nauseous, so that by the time they got home she'd felt clammy, hot and headachey, and she was unable to do anything other than lie motionless in Jack's arms and - unusually for her - actively complain of being ill.
    Her health fluttered up and down for several months until she'd finally admitted defeat and went to the doctor, who looked her up and down critically before asking her age. This puzzled Jadis - Doctor Makembe had been her physician for almost twenty years, and knew perfectly well how old she was.
    "Jadis," said the doctor, "we're none of us as young as we like to think we are."
    Jadis was puzzled. What was the doctor getting at? In her mind she was always eighteen and had just met Jack.
    "Jadis - Jadis? Are you listening? You have to face facts. You're fifty years old. There is nothing wrong with you but the menopause. It hits us all, God help us." Dr Makembe raised her eyes to heaven. She'd just gone through it herself. "But with an implant I shall now prescribe you'll escape the worst of it and be right as rain again, eh?"
    The truth dawned on Jadis only very slowly. Menopause? Fifty? Where had it all gone? But the implant had taken the edge off the horrible cocktail of misery, the sweats, the feelings of anxiety, the dreadful nightmares edged with blood and a pulse forever receding into the background but maddeningly never quite fading away. Her love for Jack remained as strong as ever, but their lovemaking had changed - as intense as it always was, but stretched out. It had undergone a phase change, a definite break, as if the menopause had been a September storm that separated the ferocity of summer from the slow-burning days of autumn. Funny though, she still felt like a young girl. Although she had heard from Mathilde that Tom was quite the heartbreaker (the pair of them giggled on the phone like two teenagers) it had taken the physical reality of her son, plainly helplessly in love, to make her feel old. No, she didn't mind - it was all rather sweet, really - and in some ways, positive. She had always lived life one day at a time, not worrying much about the future and not caring greatly about the immediate past. But Shoshana's arrival and its effects on Tom had made her see her whole life all at once, as if spread before her like a map. Jack had always been there, of course, a constant like the sky or the sea, but the landscape itself was marked with the milestones of discovery. And it struck her with some force that Jack had first taken her to Souris Saint-Michel twenty-three years ago: she had spent almost half her life exploring it. And now they were going to look at perhaps the greatest discovery of all - and the most worrying. So worrying, in fact, that Jadis was beginning to think she should keep it a secret forever.
    Shoshana's first view of Souris Saint-Michel was of a parking lot full of tourist coaches. Between the parking lot and the lake stood a graceful, low-rise building that contained the visitor centre, restaurant and shop: for the wonder of the age had become a tourist attraction. From the parking lot, visitors would board a robotic vehicle that would take them, thirty at a time, into the city, round a preset course and back again. They would see the Great Pyramid and hear about its human sacrifices; parade down the Champs Elysées, past the Hexagon where a series of nameless and still-inexplicable rites had been practiced (Avi Malkeinu had seen signs of similar ones under Mount Carmel, but was equally mystified) - and into the Place de la Concorde, with its immense granite obelisk marking a thousand graves, each body clad from head to foot in exquisitely wrought flint-plate armour.
    The two-hour circuit would, it had to be said, leave the visitor more mystified coming out than going in. There had been many lost cities that would match Souris Saint-Michel in grandeur, even in scale - Teotihuacan, Imperial Xi'an, Minoan Knossos -- but even if one could not grasp the purposes of their monuments, one was always reassured to know that such things might one day be fathomable by virtue of the fact that their builders were human. With Souris Saint-Michel this reassurance dropped away beneath one's feet like the trapdoor beneath the hanged man, leaving one with a sense of vertiginous unease, almost of terror.
    Compounding the mystery was the fact that despite all the mapping, despite the years logging every centimetre of the city over its thirty-seven square kilometres, the team had found not a single recognizable work of art, and no sign of writing or record-keeping of any kind. No inscriptions, no engravings - nothing.
    Now that the city had been charted to its full areal extent, Jadis had started on a new tack - digging downwards, excavating test pits beneath selected buildings and in certain streets. It wasn't long before she realized that SSM was much older than anyone had guessed.
    Jadis had always assumed that the city had been built around 40,000 years ago, when modern humans invaded Europe, forcing the almost unimaginably ancient Neanderthal and pre-Neanderthal civilization underground. Within a few months of the new project, Jadis had to confront the scale of her error. The city she had mapped was the latest of no fewer than fifteen cities, built one on top of the other, and even then, there were signs of earlier, pre-urban occupation. The deepest level beneath the pit known gnomically as TP255-9-2A, dug in the graveyard next to the Great Pyramid, was capped by a stalagmite layer laid down three and a half million years ago - meaning that the level itself was even older.
    The Nature paper reporting this finding ("The extreme antiquity of the earliest occupation layers at Souris Saint-Michel" by Jadis L. Markham, Mathilde Reynard, A. Y. Malkeinu, John A. Corstorphine and thirty-eight others) was initially greeted with scepticism. Jadis found it hard to accommodate the fact that some people simply refused to believe her findings. She raged and fumed until the age was confirmed by three separate, independent teams of experts. But the conclusion was clear. Someone, or something, had lived in this cavern more or less continually from just before 25,000 years ago back to a time when no humans or indeed any known species of hominid had ventured out of Africa. And for those hominids in Africa itself, cities would be a dream beyond imagining, because for these creatures the first chipped pebble still lay a million years in the future.
    This is why the latest discovery at pit TP255-9-2A was still a secret, and why Jadis really wanted Domingo to see it before she made any announcement. For the first time in her life, she felt she needed some kind of religious counsellor.
    Jack drove the jeep across the car park and through the gate towards the cave itself, greeting the security guard with a wave. The road into Souris Saint-Michel was broad, smooth and brightly lit. Shoshana could hardly imagine what it must have been like when Jack, Jadis, Mathilde and the others had first walked through the pitch-black tunnels into the unknown. Tom could imagine this more clearly, as his first trips to SSM had been in darkness anyway. The road narrowed - Jack had to stop at a signal to led a robo-train pass - until, widening again, it swept them up to a broad viewpoint, where the full extent of the illuminated city could be seen. To Shoshana, the lights seemed to stretch forever to the left and right, as if she were in a small plane coming in to land over a big city at night. She had seen this view many times, of course - it was the poster that had adorned every student bedroom for the past twenty years - but the real thing was eerie, ominous.
    "Don't worry, Shoshana," said Jack, sensing her unease. "It's something to do with the lack of echo. When we first got here, it gave us the willies, didn't it?"
    He turned to Jadis as he said this: she was quite still in her seat, reaching out to hold Jack's hand.
    Jack swung the jeep down to the left, so that the descended a long, broad ramp that took them into the city itself, past two more robo-trains and several groups of scientists, some of whom waved cheerfully as they drove along the Avenue Gaston de Bonnard to the foot of the Great Pyramid itself. Looking up from its base at its entire illuminated immensity, Shoshana was initially unable to grasp its scale until she glimpsed, on the very edge of sight, a few motes at its apex - and realized that they were archaeologists working at the summit platform.
    "Everyone out!" said Jack, and they followed him towards the large plastic tent that covered much of the graveyard area. The tent, illuminated from within, looked like a giant Chinese lantern. Inside it was a hive of activity, both human and mechanical: a guard handed them all hard hats with emergency headlamps, and Jack and Jadis stopped several times to chat to the various surveying and digging teams. They all knew Tom of course, and some of them - particularly the younger women - gave Shoshana what she thought were rather resentful looks.
    In the centre of the tent was a pit about three meters square.
    "I hope you're not scared of heights," warned Jadis to Shoshana, as they boarded an old-fashioned miners' cage mounted in one corner of the pit. Jadis pressed the start button and they descended for what seemed like several minutes down a shaft whose sides were clearly demarcated into distinct layers. Many were marked with coloured tags, indicating artefacts, bones or buried structures for later investigation. The tags were densely placed in the upper layers, becoming progressively sparser as they descended further into the Earth. Shoshana felt that she was losing all sense of time and space. Even though she was wearing a fleece borrowed from Jadis, she started to shiver - Tom put a reassuring arm around her, and she pulled closer into him. She thought she'd known enough about this site to be prepared for the vastness of it, but the reality was an almost nightmarish shock.
    The bottom - two hundred and five meters beneath the cemetery floor -- was a blank three-meter square of hard-rock floor. Jack explained that they were standing on the controversial but continuous layer of three-point-five-million-year-old stalagmite that covered the deepest layer of SSM yet found. In the corner of the square opposite to the cage was what looked like an upturned crate. Jadis now walked towards this with a curious expression that mixed determination and excitement, as if worried that what she might find beneath the crate might be different from what she had found beneath it last time - or even of hope, that it might somehow be different.
    For she remembered the day two months ago when a survey team had called her down to look at something interesting beneath a slight mound in the flowstone layer - a large block of granite that had been shaped with curious accuracy for something so old. Indeed, to have found granite here at all was itself unusual. When the flowstone had been removed, Jadis and the three surveyors stood back aghast. First, because of the high polish of the perfectly smooth, flat, grey surface of the rock: a polish that implied purpose, and a high degree of technical skill.
    And second, because the rock bore the first and only inscription found at Souris Saint-Michel.

    Chapter 13

    (July 2034)

    Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.
    There is no speech or language, where their voice is not heard.
    Psalms 19, 2-3

    The journey to Israel had been even longer than Shoshana had imagined possible. After all, she and he small gang of old cheder friends had managed it perfectly well on a scheduled El-Al turboprop just the previous winter, and were at Ben Gurion just seven hours after leaving Gatwick. This time - only a few months later - it was as if they'd been thrown back to the earliest days of air travel. And, contrary to popular belief, she'd thought, it had been anything but romantic. Or would have been, had Tom not been there with her.
    First had been the budget turboprop that had meant to go from Toulouse to Athens, but had been diverted to Brindisi. Weather conditions had been blamed: the desert winds that scoured the Sahara had been taking unusual northward turns of late, dumping vast tonnages of sand in the Mediterranean and posing a real threat to aircraft, some of which had been literally sandblasted out of the sky. This particular wind had sent a tongue right up the Adriatic, preventing the crossing to Greece. The plane took off again after twenty hours on the ground. This meant an enforced rest wherever they could find a spot in the crowded, overcooked airport, and a tiny allowance for food grudgingly doled out by the airline.
    Things wouldn't get very much better next day, after they'd hopped from Brindisi to Athens. Their connections now all in disarray, they'd finally managed to squeeze on to a 19-seat prop to Ben Gurion, but this had to make an emergency stop in Nicosia where they were once again grounded overnight. As he told Shoshana later, Tom thought that one of the passengers had looked ill and had been behaving strangely, furtively, disappearing rather often into the toilet cubicle. When the stewardess finally broke down the door, her screams of terror would have been sufficient to have grounded the aircraft all on their own. None of the passengers knew what was going on, and were told no more. Suffice it to say that screens were raised, the plane landed and the passenger was removed from the plane in a hail and scream of sirens. After another hour of uncertainty, Tom and Shoshana and all the other seventy or so passengers were escorted off the plane and put up in hotels.
    "No, we don't know what was wrong with the passenger, either", said the airline agent at Nicosia, trying not to make eye contact, especially not with Tom - "but we were told not to use that plane again." She sighed, having explained this a dozen times already. "This means we'll have to charter another one from somewhere. We'll take you to a hotel and call you in the morning. I'm sorry, that's really all I can say. Okay?"
    The final hop to Ben Gurion on a rickety old DC3 that ought to have been in a museum passed, thankfully, without incident. Tom was cradled in Shoshana's lap (just like the big tomcat he is, she thought, fingers running through his thick, untameable hair), and didn't see that the plane had acquired a pair of IDF Elijah jets to escort it down. Shoshana was grateful for this attention - she remembered something similar on her last flight here. Air traffic into Israel had come under increasing threat from the Khalifa. So far it had just been routine saber-rattling, but one never knew when this posturing might acquire real teeth. And so, two and a half days late, they touched down in the land of Shoshana's remote ancestors in the afternoon sunshine, and as they stepped out of the air-conditioned prop and into the smoggy fug of Israel's coastal plain, Shoshana felt as if somebody had dropped a hot, wet blanket on her head.
    When Tom saw Avi at the gate, he dropped his rucksack right there, rushed towards him, embracing him as enthusiastically as a small child might have, and as strongly as a cursed mariner whose albatross has finally been excised, beyond expectation or hope. Parting, they looked at each other, the broad smiles and shining eyes betraying a love and trust from which Shoshana had, temporarily, been excluded. Not that this was in any way intentional. Avi had been a frequent visitor to the farmhouse throughout Tom's childhood, and what with his open and playful demeanour, Avi had become, for Tom, a kind of elder brother, or long-lost favourite Uncle, and someone he loved to be around.
    Joshing and punching each other for joy, they started jabbering excitedly to each other in French too fast for Shoshana to pick up any more than one word in ten, until, as one man, they turned to look at her: Avi, a broad grin in a handsome, brown face under tight, grey curls, and Tom -
    "Shoshana, I'm so sorry, it was very rude of me. It's just, well, it's Avi, it's been so long, and..."
    Shoshana threw a mock-punch at him - Tom play-acted the stunned victim, staggering about - and she turned to Avi, shook his hand, and addressed him in passable Hebrew. Avi's expression became serious, appreciative, and he answered in the same language,
    "You are most welcome, Shoshana. But what's a nice girl like you doing with a schmuck like him?"
    She'd heard from Jadis that Avi had once been a ladies' man, but that he was now sternly, fiercely and firmly married: Jadis could never help snorting with mirth whenever she thought of it, recovering her composure long enough to peep skittishly from beneath her hair and say that Avi only ever referred to his wife as "The Ballbreaker." Shoshana was always slightly shocked by all this - Avi was almost as great a hero to her as Jadis had been her heroine. But when he met the man in person, she realized that Jadis had been right all along (of course). Even our heroes are human beings, just like us. Avi looked like a big kid. She could see why he and Tom got on so well together: they made a good pair of Lost Boys who'd sail off on an adventure together without a second thought, and Wendy would just have to trail along as best she could.
    Not that she had any intention of giving up. Now that Shoshana and Avi were chatting in Hebrew - for all that it was far less fluent and easy than Tom and Avi's rapid-fire French -- it was Tom's turn to affect confusion, looking to Shoshana and then to Avi and back again as if they were Martians. Eventually the three of them ended up in a three-cornered embrace. Avi became suddenly and acutely conscious of the perfect smoothness of Shoshana's arms, her slender hands, the curve of a full breast brushing and yielding against his shirt, and even tiny details, such as the way her skin dimpled in the crook of her elbow. Phew! He knew that Tom had a reputation to maintain, from what Jadis and Mathilde had said, but this one -- she was quite something. And Jewish, too.
    He made an effort, with supreme concentration, to think of his wife. Her thunderous expressions of disapproval? That wouldn't do it: not enough to take his gaze from the spray of broad freckles across this girl's butter-cream shoulders and neck; her long, glossy hair; her broad mouth with its odd assortment of teeth whose haphazard pattern seemed somehow instantly engaging; her big blue eyes, and (wow!) that fabulous figure, which he'd defy any man to say that its very sight didn't make his fingers (and other places) itch. Okay, so, fair enough, his wife's cooking? Not bad, but still not half as good as his grandmother's, may she rest in peace. He knew there was a reason he'd eventually consented, twenty years ago (was it really twenty years? -- he could have sworn it was thirty) to get tied down. Ah yes, his wife was good in bed. Perhaps too good. Terrific, in fact: three times a night for more than two decades, with a matinée on Shabbat. Whew! No wonder he always walked around like John Wayne. That, and because she preferred to let her uzi do the talking. Could only ever be my Rivka, he thought, and the romance of military weddings. He smiled more broadly still:
    "Come," he said, "we have a long way to go before nightfall. And I regret it won't be comfortable."
    Just outside the terminal building they had to wait for only a few minutes before a green army pickup squealed to the kerb, driven by a woman in fatigues as green as the jeep, who leaned out of the cab and blasted Avi with jagged and guttural shards of what sounded like abuse, in fluent Arabic. Avi turned to Tom and Shoshana.
    "Sorry, what with all the flight delays, this was all I could sign out from the Army at short notice - you'll have to pile in back, I'm afraid. I have business to sort out ... er ... upfront." He looked slightly embarrassed. "I'll explain later, yes? But you have to hurry! We don't want a taxi marshal to book us for stopping too long kerbside".
    Too tired and puzzled to remonstrate, Tom hauled their bags to the back of the truck, up on to the footplate and beneath the canvas. He helped Shoshana inside: the windowless interior was baking hot. The bench seats on either side were entirely occupied with wooden boxes containing a strange assortment of goods. One had burlap sacks; another was full to overflowing with lettuces; a third contained a jumble of greased and grimy car-mechanics' tools. Two uzis were scattered just behind the drivers cab. But what took up most of the space were about a dozen truly vast, green-striped watermelons, wedged under the bench seats.
    The only concession to comfort was a filthy, stained mattress spread out on the floor. Being the only available space for them and their luggage, they stretched out on it together, wedged in between their rucksacks and the watermelons, perforce in each others' arms. And so they lay there, looking into each other's faces, sharing each other's hot breath, and laughing at the invisible but animated, frequently heated and occasionally violent conversation emanating from the driver's cab as the truck lurched crazily out of the airport and hooked into the highway towards Tel Aviv and thence Haifa.
    There were also some long silences - one in particular when the truck pulled to the side of the highway for reasons that neither Tom nor Shoshana could immediately identify. Shoshana put her ear to the metal of the cab, beckoning to Tom to keep silent. Her eyes were sparkling with mischief when she resumed her spot beside him.
    "I think I know what they're doing..." she said, conspiratorially.
    "What?" asked Tom, puzzled.
    "This", she replied - embracing him tightly and kissing him - initially with some force until she felt he'd really got the message, before subsiding into a hot, lengthy, loving and yearning finish. He drew her head beneath his chin so she could rest against him, cradling her head in his hands, hers clasped round his waist. Exhausted from the trip, Tom dropped off to sleep. Shoshana envied him his ability to catnap more or less anywhere, at no notice, leaving her to brood.
    The long journey had given her plenty of time to analyze and review her feelings for Tom, and to marvel at how far they had come in so short a time. When she met Tom - when was it? Just three months ago? -- she had been no stranger to men, or to sex. In fact, she thought, she'd probably had far too much of both, which was something she now regretted. But what had first perplexed her most was that with Tom, uniquely, she was no longer in control - even though he made no demands on her whatsoever - and, more perplexing, was that this was something she welcomed, craved, even.
    She'd always had men exactly where she wanted them, and had begun to use them rather cynically, picking them up and dropping them when it suited her. To be sure, there had been downsides. The first few boyfriends she ditched usually followed her around anyway like lost dogs. Some of the later ones became petulant to the point of violence, and occasionally beyond it. She had come to regard sex in much the same utilitarian way, and with few exceptions, she hadn't enjoyed it very much more than any other pleasurable experience, such as - say - going shopping with a girlfriend. On reflection, she thought this rather sad, and this thought alone pulled her up short: that before she'd come to the farmhouse, she thought that her life, while miserable in many ways, was the kind of life that most people learned to expect and took for granted.
    It was only when she'd met Jadis and seen how happy she was, married to the solid, dependable Jack, who plainly adored her, even though they'd been together practically since dinosaurs walked the earth, that Shoshana had any way to calibrate her own experience. Her teenage years had been lived in an atmosphere of brutal repression, and although she had known this to be true at the time, these same years had been the backdrop to her adolescence and puberty, and had done much to shape her character. She told herself that by using men as things she would not end up an abused house-mouse like her mother, but in seeking the other extreme, she now feared she ran the risk of ending up in substantially the same place as her poor, meek mother had done - beaten, and alone. The kind of romance she saw in Jack and Jadis, lived in an easy and carefree style, bound by respect, trust and love freely given and accepted -- and certainly without the constant worry about rules, demarcation and the strictures of religious duty -- was, she thought, only to be found in slushy TV dramas. But now she knew that it could really happen, and that she could be a part of it, if she wanted.
    And with Jack and Jadis there came an added bonus prize - Tom - who had forced her to rethink everything she'd ever thought she knew about men and sex. Here was a man utterly different from any she'd ever met. He was a free spirit, not easily tied down: she had the impression that he'd slept with at least as many women as she had with men, but with one crucial difference. Whereas she used men as a means to an end, Tom loved women simply for what they were. Because of this, his lovemaking, while earthy, was always courtly, respectful - perhaps a little old-fashioned, in that he always seemed to care very deeply about her own satisfaction, before his. And this was vitally important for Shoshana, who until she met Tom had not quite realized that her desire for conquest was fuelled by a need for sexual satisfaction for which, the more she strove to achieve it, the more it remained out of reach - and because of this, sex became more an act of politics than of love.
    But there was another thing, too. Tom, having been raised in an atmosphere overflowing with love, gave his love without expectation of return. It was this, as well as his obvious consideration for her (which he would have thought of, if he'd thought of it at all, as simple good manners) that had evoked a response in her that was far more than reflexive or mechanical. She felt that she wanted to demonstrate her feelings for him likewise without thought of any recompense, but simply because he was there, and she felt like it. Because she loved him.
    She'd known this instinctively within a few minutes of first meeting him, when with a casual smile he'd removed all her defences and rendered all her usual stratagems at naught. But it had taken her much longer to admit it to herself, to fight her way through to this conclusion, past a host of snares and demons.
    The first two weeks at Saint-Rogatien, before Tom had to return to Cambridge for what was still called the Trinity Term, had been exciting as well as deeply frustrating. They rose early each day and had too little time for confidences: Tom rode off with Jack to the GW Campus the other side of Aurignac, where he was learning about laboratory techniques for handling ancient DNA.
    The Neanderthal skeletons at SSM represented the single biggest source of high-quality ancient DNA from any species anywhere in the world, and now that Jadis had opened up significant time depth, the team was beginning to shed light on Neanderthal genomic evolution over the course of hundreds of thousands of years in detail unprecedented for any species.
    Shoshana accompanied Jadis to SSM itself. Jadis felt that Shoshana, as a school-leaver, should get more of a general flavour of an archaeological site rather than learn anything particular in any depth. After three or four days, Jadis felt that she could bounce ideas off Shoshana, who had the interesting combination of obvious intelligence and curiosity with no more knowledge than an interested outsider. As such, Jadis felt that she could be an honest sounding-board.
    And so she put Shoshana on the spot - what should she do with the inscription at the bottom of the pit? Should she publish it? Shoshana was initially flustered and a little embarrassed to be asked such a thing - that she, less than a week on the job, should be quizzed by the greatest living archaeologist on a discovery that could change the world. But Jadis didn't seem to be playing games. It was as if Jadis really did want to know, much as her Aunt Jess and (more pointedly) her mother seemed to be relying more and more on Shoshana to make important decisions about their finances, their living arrangements - their very lives.
    So Shoshana reviewed the evidence as she saw it, Jadis at the wheel, listening quietly while concentrating on the road ahead.
    "Well, first, it's an artefact," started Shoshana: "the inscription can't be natural." Her mouth had gone dry. She licked her lips and for a fleeting instance imagined Tom before her, his eyes staring intently back at her. She smiled at the vision.
    "Go on," said Jadis -"You're doing fine."
    "The age - that's interesting. It is clearly more than three-point-five million years old. Bottom line - it's a mystery." Tom's imaginary eyes stared back at her from the inside of the windshield. They smiled. Before Jadis could prompt her she asked, almost rhetorically: "so what would I do about it? If you're asking me, I'd do nothing: keep it a secret."
    "Why should I do that?" asked Jadis, who felt the same way, but was genuinely intrigued to learn Shoshana's answer: as a scientific ingénue, her views were likely to be more honest than those of Jadis' immediate academic peers. It was what Jack always called the `Emperor's-New-Clothes Effect'.
    "Because ... well, because the whole thing just sounds completely crazy." Shoshana thought she'd gone too far, but Jadis only smiled at her, willing her on.
    "The inscription isn't natural," Shoshana continued, "so somebody must have made it." She swallowed, forcing her nerves back down her gullet. "But who?" The first hominids in Europe that made tools lived a lot later, maybe two million years ago? Max?" Shoshana was beginning to think she'd been trapped into some kind of oral exam.
    "Keep going," encouraged Jadis, "so what does it all mean?"
    "It means that you have ... " she hesitated ... "you can have no idea who made this artefact, not even a single suggestion. Apart from aliens! That's why, if it were down to me, I'd keep schtum until we knew more about hominid history. Maybe you could get some clues from the bones and other stuff in the lower layers you've been digging out? But I don't know anything, and you're, well, you're..."
    "Shoshana, don't worry," said Jadis: "I won't bite. This isn't a trick question, and I really am interested in your opinion. And for what it's worth, I agree with you. I'll keep quiet. At least for now." Jadis thought about the misery she'd suffered when she'd had to bear much criticism, some of it unpleasant, from people who refused to believe that the lowest layer of SSM was as old as it evidently appeared to be. Perhaps she'd been spoiled by success, she thought - everything for her and Jack had been so easy, they'd had it all on a plate. But to announce an artefact of this age now, without further context, would be to court ridicule.
    What's more, Shoshana hadn't even touched on the significant point that this was the first inscription of any kind found at SSM. Or even what the inscription itself might mean. Oh, she wished she could ask Domingo, but as a Cardinal now more or less permanently at the Vatican his diary was, inevitably, always full.
    But what Shoshana really wanted to talk about was Tom, although she knew that this was the very last subject she'd broach. Jadis knew perfectly well, at least from what she'd seen of Tom, that he and Shoshana had formed an attachment, and although she tried to conjure up some feeling of parental anguish, she found that she could not. Even though her head told her that Tom was now a grown-up and would have to follow his own star, and that any effort that she'd be likely to make to influence it in one way or another would almost certainly backfire, she felt that her heart should be more censorious, more rebellious - but it wasn't. Was this because Tom wasn't her biological offspring? Ridiculous! No, she thought, decidedly and instantly, it's because Jack and I found each other in much the same circumstances, at about the same age. Somehow we just knew. And neither of us even let our parents have a look-in, not even about the wedding. She had a feeling that her mother (who was still alive, and in a nursing home in Godalming, and whom she visited far too rarely) had never really forgiven her for that. So she could hardly expect to come the stern and disapproving parent with her own son. In any case, whatever she might have felt about Tom's love life was probably irrelevant.
    Shoshana's thoughts were more clouded. She'd known Tom hardly a week, but her heart was racing ahead, careering out of her knowledge and control, and this was disturbing. She wanted to ask why, apart from that first kiss (which she'd initiated), he'd remained nothing more than polite. Warm and smiling, to be sure, but also just a shade uneasy in her company - even though his eyes, when uncovered, were on her constantly. It was agonizing, and she was dying to ask Tom what his feelings were, but if there really were a spell, she didn't want to break it; and in any case she felt she didn't know Tom at all well enough to put such things into words in case they might be misinterpreted. (She was too young to know that most people, even in marriages of half a century, have similar doubts from time to time.)
    Now, were Tom any other man, she'd simply have shrugged off all these worries and got on with her life. But the simple fact was that he had already won her, conquered her, had he but known it: the question was whether she should just declare unconditional surrender (in other words, just show him), or let himself work it out on his own. No - the way he looked at her was clue enough that he had worked it out, but why was he so hesitant? Could it be because he didn't want to come on to her in his parents' house? Maybe, but he hadn't had the chance to take her anywhere else. Or perhaps he already had a girlfriend, and was trying to spare her feelings by toughing it out until he got back to Cambridge? This was entirely possible, and the realization made her recoil in anguish. How could she not have thought of this before? And so the first week continued, her eyes exposed to the wonders of the ancient world at first hand; her heart in misery and doubt.
    She couldn't go on like this, she felt, as the second week drew on, and Tom was due to return to Cambridge at the end of the third, and then she'd be stuck here for eight more weeks, marooned, still in search of resolution. It would be intolerable. Some answers came when Tom came to her room with a cup of tea early one Sunday morning, and, putting the tea down on the chest of drawers, sat on the edge of the bed, pulled her up to him and, without a word, returning her kiss of their first evening together. Parting, he said:
    "I've an idea. I'm really sorry I haven't showed you around at all - we've just been so busy. So let's go for a picnic. Just you and me? A date?"
    Although this was just what she'd been hoping for, her own feelings surprised her. Men asked her on dates all the time. Sometimes she agreed, sometimes she didn't, and quite often she agreed but later on found something more interesting to do instead. This time she felt she was a little girl again and her Dad (her real Dad) had given her a present she'd always wanted, or had taken her to some fabulous place, like the park, or the zoo, just the two of them. So the tears that now started in her eyes as she sat up and embraced Tom were partly of joy, and partly of regret, for she knew in that moment how much physical affection she'd been missing, for years on end: and that she'd finally traversed a parched desert into which she'd effectively been banished the moment she'd heard that her Dad had died.
    So they raided the kitchen for bread, cheese, fruit and wine, and Tom drove them to a byway just outside Marciac that led to a small lake of clear blue with an idyllic, secluded, sandy beach. They made camp on the beach, eating and drinking as much as was possible between holding hands and kissing. Where Tom had been hesitant, he was now demonstrative: Shoshana decided not to inquire about Tom's seeming change of heart, and to enjoy what would turn out to be a memorable day for them both. After they'd eaten, Tom stripped down to his shorts and, inscrutable behind his shades, stretched out in the strong spring sunshine. Shoshana, lying next to him, hesitantly ran her fingertips over his taut, brown and almost hairless chest.
    He turned to her and kissed her again, and then did something completely unexpected, for, quite suddenly, he got up, said "Alors - time for a swim!" and ran full tilt into the lake. She felt that she had no option but to follow him: she dropped her shorts and chased after him, laughing, catching up with him in the water, and finding not a man, but a maelstrom of splashing and noise. He drenched her, ducked her, pulled her under, laughing all the while - and she did the same to him - until, just as suddenly, they stopped and were close together, quiet in each other's close embrace, up to their necks in water.
    Shoshana's long t-shirt had ridden up and was floating around her neck like a sodden scarf. Tom amazed himself that he had not previously noticed the curves of her figure, so entranced had he been by her smell. Now this was doused by the water, he became aware of her fullness, her bare breasts pressed against him, and how beautiful they were. As her mouth sought his, he felt her nipples against his chest, each as hard, big and round as a coat button. He ran his fingers up and down the curve of her spine, tracing the fleshy roundness of her broad hips, letting his hand slide beneath the waistband of her bikini bottoms, and feeling himself harden. Shoshana felt his pressure against her thigh and, emboldened, reached down to unzip his fly as best she could, tracing her fingers along his shaft, languidly exploring every vein, every ridge, every corrugation. It could have been the water, it could have been the strange position they were in, but she was convinced he was huge, at least as big as any man she'd encountered.
    "Where are we going to put all this?" she teased, but privately wondering whether it was, in fact, possible.
    She hoped she hadn't been too brazen, hadn't put him off: but to Tom, the flutter of her fingertips on his cock, all unseen under the water, had been the most exquisite sensation, and he knew that he wanted her. But if their first encounter was to be here, in the lake, it had to be hors-d'oeuvres only. Sensing she might be disappointed if he stopped kissing her, stopped loving her, just at this moment, he drew her close and whispered in her ear -
    "Shoshana, I want you. Really. I'm sorry, we're always so busy, but I want us to spend time together, properly." So he turned to kiss her once more, and as he did so, he slid his fingers into her bikini bottoms, caressed the curled, springy fur inside and touched her very gently between her legs, just for the briefest moment, but as he did so she closed her eyes and sighed, parted from him and rested her head on his shoulder. He took her by the hand and led her from the lake. As they emerged he noticed that her smile was wide and beatific, her eyes were round and innocent and huge, and were for him only. They pierced his heart.
    They walked back to the jeep for towels to dry themselves, or at least to sit on as they drove home. Shoshana felt ecstatic with anticipation: she could hardly keep her hands off him, and as they drove, she had to restrain herself from unzipping his fly again so she could at least have a good look - and a touch, and a taste - of the wonders within. It took half an hour for them to arrive back at the farmhouse, and as they approached, Shoshana worried that their escapade would be instantly apparent from their damp clothes (which had, in any case, dried in the sun and wind) if it weren't written all over their faces. But Tom didn't seem to be worried at all, and as they arrived, Jadis came into the yard to greet them. Shoshana was grateful that she didn't ask them about their picnic, as she was clearly bursting with news of her own.
    "Domingo just called," she told Tom. "He's in the area, and he's coming for supper. Isn't that wonderful?"
    Domingo arrived on cue along with Jack, just as Jadis was dishing up a farmhouse supper of new loaves, cheese, pâté and pickles. Jadis hugged the huge man even before he'd had a chance to cross the threshold.
    "Domingo - it's been such a long time - we really could use your advice ..."
    Shoshana recognized him as the very ugly man in the Hawai'ian shirt from the mantelpiece photo, although he was now bearded and grizzled, a vast mane of silver hair running down between his great shoulders. He was wearing a Hawai'ian shirt now, rather faded and a little tight around the girth, and Shoshana realized where Tom got his from. For his part, Tom embraced the big man as if he was Father Christmas. Domingo produced a grin so full of molars you'd have thought he was going to bite someone's head off, unless you also looked at his eyes, each almost buried beneath an eyebrow the size of a small cumulonimbus - deep reservoirs of intelligence, and most of all, love. Strange as it seemed, Shoshana thought, Domingo looked more at home here than anyone else, and she realized that one of the most important things in life was just that, a secure feeling of home. It was something she'd lost at a crucial time in her life, because the people who should have made her home for her had betrayed that obligation. But she could, if she'd let it, find it here, in this same farmhouse, as Domingo seemed to have done.
    Her eyes must have lit up and they caught his: he ambled over to where she was sitting at the table, took her hands in his (enclosing them) and said:
    "You must be the delightful Shoshana. I hope you like it here, just as much as I always have."
    And so, she thought -- he knew. Somehow, and as unlikely as it seemed, the middle-aged, deeply learned Catholic priest forged a connection with this young Jewess, a connection that, for these two people alone in the farmhouse, that spoke of early lives filled with wretchedness and hurt that was, for him at least, finally exorcised here, as it might be for her, too, were she to allow it. Her thoughts split up into a host of confused, separate but intertwining strands, one of which told her that her experience as a Jew would have been so much richer had the pettifogging rabbis at her school been a fraction as understanding as this priest.
    She later discovered that this was the very same priest who'd drafted the Papal decree that allowed Christians to welcome any hominid species to God, transforming the Church. She'd learned about that, of course, wholly in the negative, damned by rabbis who were still arguing over the narrow definitions of who constituted a Jew, let alone a human being (the status of Tibestians being an issue that was still to be resolved in many corners of Jewry).
    Shoshana had known Jewish kids at her secular secondary school who went to synagogue regularly - far more than she ever did -- and yet were barred from Jewish youth clubs and Jewish schools, not because they didn't believe in God, not because they weren't academically qualified, but simply because their mothers weren't born as Jews, or hadn't undergone the strictures of Orthodox conversions that were designed not to welcome new converts, but to admit them as grudgingly as possible, and in the process to do everything they could to throw obstacles beneath their feet.
    She remembered slanging matches with Howie about this, stinging him with the accusation that his kind of Judaism was a kind of Nazism in reverse.
    "Some of my best friends are untermenschen!" she'd screamed: "And how about `Ihre papiere, Bitte'?" miming a Gestapo agent who, like Orthodox rabbis, were forever in search of hard, documentary evidence to prove one's Jewishness, as if faith and commitment were not themselves sufficient. "What do you think of that, Howie?"
    Howie had either averted his gaze, or muttered words to the effect that teenage girls who lacked respect for their elders couldn't possibly be expected to understand.
    In Domingo she saw an elder who commanded respect without demanding or expecting it. Now she'd finally met him, she wouldn't have been at all surprised if she found herself wanting to escape from her Judaism altogether as her father had once tried to do - but she realized that this was impossible. If you are born a Jew, that's that. And, as Howie often added -- no matter how much you paint yourself white, you're still a schwarzer underneath. It wasn't meant to be racist, he'd said - that was just the way Ha'Shem made the world, and we had to accept it.
    Supper was as full of merriment as any meal at the farmhouse always was when Domingo was around. He was now a Cardinal and one of the Pope's closest advisors, but had been granted a few days' leave before helping to plan the Pope's state visit to Israel in July, when he'd hoped to meet Avi, but expected that his schedule would keep him firmly at the side of His Holiness. Domingo was amused to learn that Shoshana would be making her second trip to Israel at about the same time, that Tom would accompany her, and that they'd be spending a couple of weeks on Avi's dig.
    "Please give that young rogue my best regards, won't you?" - his eyes clouded - "we had such wonderful times here, Avi and me, and everyone, such wonderful times, in the good old days." He looked at Jadis, who was smiling radiantly back: "Ah me! For a beaker of the warm south! Now, what was it you wanted me to see?"
    And so Jadis told Domingo about the inscription, the strange sigil that had lain beneath SSM for more than three and a half thousand centuries, until her team had uncovered it. Domingo betrayed no emotion, but asked if he could see an image of it. Jack went upstairs to the office to fetch a tracing, and, clearing the table, they unrolled the sheet of white paper, weighting it down at the corners with pickle jars and coffee mugs. The inscription was actual size, traced directly from the rock. It lay within its own rectangular frame or cartouche, about a meter from side to side and perhaps a fifth that distance from top to bottom.

    Inscribed within the rectangle were three circles: one at the left-hand end of the frame, one at the right, and one in the middle. Between each circle stood a crescent, like the crescent moon, their horns pointing outwards, away from the central circle. Fine lines radiated from the central circle to all corners and edges of the rectangular frame.
    "When I first looked at it," said Jack, "all I could think about were those joke drawings about birds-eye views of Mexicans frying eggs."
    Jadis held Jack's hand and laughed, looking into his eyes with an expression that Shoshana could see was one, quite simply, of love. Nothing dramatic, nothing spectacular, and perhaps easily missed by those not looking out for it, but there it was, all the same. Until she came to the farmhouse, she hadn't realized just how seldom people look that way at each other, especially in company, and yet it seemed to be legal tender round here. She looked across at Tom, who was gazing back at her silently, with the same peaceful longing. So she smiled at him, remembering their picnic, and blushed a little when she recalled their swim - and his smile back made her ache even more. Domingo noticed nothing of this.
    "First, there can be no doubt that this is intentional. Nothing natural makes patterns as geometrical as this," he said. "And I'd hazard that what we're seeing is a picture, albeit stylized, of a total eclipse of the Sun."
    Jadis nodded - she had suspected the same thing, but desired some kind of confirmation. Shoshana was amazed. She had no idea what the pattern of lines and shapes might have meant.
    "Imagine that this circle on the left" - Domingo pointed at it - " is the solar disk. Then, reading from left to right, it is occluded from the left by the Moon, and we can see the eclipse as it progresses in the crescent. In the central circle, we see totality. The disk is completely covered except for the solar corona ..."
    "That must be the radiating lines ..." said Jack.
    "Exactly so. And as we go towards the right, we see the Moon moving on, leaving the rightmost disc as the Sun, once again uncovered." Domingo paused, still thoughtful, as if he hadn't finished.
    "But, my friends, I am puzzled. Usually, records of eclipses in ancient astronomy refer to particular eclipses..."
    "That's what I thought", said Jadis, "and had I the confidence, I'd ask an astronomer to look at this, if I knew any, but I don't think it would be possible to tie this to any one eclipse, not one so long ago." In truth, Jadis was still smarting at the general disbelief at the antiquity of the oldest layers at SSM, so much so that she did not want to make herself look any more foolish by asking astronomers - people outside her field -- to look at an artefact whose very existence would be certain to shatter what reputation she'd have left.
    "I believe that the Ginsberg Wang Astrometry Institute - your sister body! - might be well placed to offer some advice. My brothers at the Vatican Observatory have forged some useful links with them lately", continued Domingo, "very useful. I've become quite a fan of their work of late. However, I can understand why you might want to sit on this one, for a while. Too much like Chariots of the Gods, eh?"
    Jadis smiled, weakly: the work at SSM had trawled up its share of cranks and conspiracy theorists, and reprints of Von Däniken's hoary old aliens-and-humans bestsellers from the 1970s were enjoying a new vogue. This was just the kind of thing she wanted to avoid, and she was grateful that Domingo understood.
    "In any case," Domingo went on, "I am not sure whether any astronomer might have been able to help, in this instance. This picture, you see, works however you look at it - up, down, or from right to left. I suspect that this isn't a record but a pictogram, a statement of eclipses in general, rather than any one that might be identified."
    "But why?" asked Jack. "Could it be some kind of sympathetic magic?"
    "Like cave paintings of mammoths and bison, you mean?" asked Domingo. "Summoning up success in the hunt? It's an interesting thought, my dear Jack. But who'd want to conjure eclipses? In all societies they are seen as omens of terror.
    "The ancient Chinese, you know, had an engaging myth about eclipses. They thought the Sun was being swallowed by a dragon, which was very large but also very shy. The legend was that if enough people came outdoors to shout at it, the dragon would be frightened away. Isn't that lovely?"
    Jack joined in Domingo's mirth
    "--and what do you know, they must have been right, because it always worked!"
    Domingo became serious, with a suddenness that startled them. "Yes, dear Jack, it has always worked - so far."
    Before anyone could inquire further, Tom spoke: for the first time, and his eyes were locked on Shoshana.
    "But that's just it, the sign-makers didn't want to encourage eclipses, to bring them on..."
    "No, it was the other way round," said Shoshana: "They wanted to ward them off, at all costs... to find a way of chasing the dragons away ... "
    "D'accord," said Tom. "It could even be a warning."
    And at this, Tom and Shoshana turned as one to look at Domingo, who looked stunned, pleased, and then, as if recalling something he really ought to have remembered earlier, profoundly worried.
    "My dear Jadis," he said, " I fear that your young protégés are quite correct, though I'm not sure why. And so my advice, if you want it, is to keep this discovery quiet, at least for the moment."
    He would not elaborate further, but asked if Jadis had any more of that good coffee, and some more of her `world-famous' Gascon chocolate cake? Jadis always fell for people complimenting her on her cooking - something at which, in contrast to her expert gardening, she felt rather deficient, and therefore responded eagerly to all encouragement.
    Later, lying in bed, Shoshana was abuzz from the visit of this strange and strangely compelling new visitor, but before long she thought back to the picnic with Tom, how it had ended so abruptly, and when Tom intended to spend time with her, as he'd said, properly, because her insides ached for him. She had not long to wait, for in the darkness she heard his voice whispering at the door.
    "May I come in?"
    Before she could do anything else, even answer, she found she'd sprung up at once to embrace him, to pull him into bed with her. Tom felt that she was naked, but this time her gorgeous buttery-yeasty smell accompanied the ripe softness of the curves he'd felt in the lake. This, and the fact that there was no water to mask her rising heat, now made her irresistible: that, and also that the room was quite dark, increased his confidence. In the darkness, he always knew his way.
    Once beneath the quilt, Shoshana wasted no time in teasing him with her fingers, her lips and her mouth, cooing and pecking and fussing excitedly around his cock; indeed, the various probes of her love and excitement were everywhere, but soon she gave way to his, as she felt that it was time she was conquered, and she desperately wanted him to touch her all over, at once, now. She pushed her breasts at him, inviting him to suckle her. Her nipples were enormous, each one filling his mouth, tasting of raspberries so ripe they might explode at the slightest touch. When he ran his fingers around them, pressing and kneading them, she felt that they'd traced electric arcs in the darkness that made her skin tingle. She wanted more, and yet more, and pushed his head down between her thighs. It was then - when she spread her legs in absolute surrender - that Tom became most conscious of her smell, her musk, the hot rawness of her need for him. More than simple willingness, complicity, this seemed commanding and imperative. He'd wanted to take the time to explore her more, taste her more, make love to her more, but he sensed very powerfully that, for her, such things could wait. And so, stooping over her, he entered her as deliberately and as gently as possible.
    To Shoshana he was as a slow-building wave of pleasure beyond imagining, and as he slid more fully inside her, she felt that he was indeed as huge as she'd first thought, and was grateful for his gentleness, because he filled her completely, as if he'd pinned her to the bed. She made her insides caress him, grip him as he moved, pulled her thighs up and cross them over his hips to feel him more deeply still, and before she was even aware of it she was seized with the first spasms of release. She abandoned control, let herself go to this man, this lovely man who was now methodically impaling her with what seemed like a telegraph pole wrapped in wet silk. She was now too far gone to realize that this was the first time, in more than a dozen men and hundreds of couplings, in which she had felt such trust, and as she came, she felt that it was because she had willed her own defeat. Did that make sense? She trying to make her hazy mind comprehend this when Tom came too, scoring and scorching her like hot shotgun blasts.
    The last few days before Tom departed for Cambridge were spent in a daze. She wanted him constantly, insatiably. Although Tom was flattered - naturally - he was also worried. Although he was used to being chased by attractive women, as far as he could remember he'd never been pursued with such hunger: most of the women he'd been with were as happy-go-lucky as himself: they weren't addicts.
    And when Shoshana was away from Tom - at SSM, with Jadis - she sometimes wondered at her own change of mood. It was not like her to lose control like this, but she felt neither the desire nor the capability to pull herself together. She thought she was probably making a fool of herself, but shocked herself with the realization that she didn't care. The farmhouse was a different world from her home. It was a place of love freely given and received, not a trading floor where every action required a payment, a contract - and she wanted a part of it - no, she wanted all of it -- now. At last, she had found a place, a haven, where there was no need, any more, to be political about sex. Her body had decided, days and days before, that Tom was for her, and it was besieging the last redoubts of rationality in her mind with the message that what she wanted - needed -- most was to belong to him, because she was tired of having to rely on herself, as she had done for as long as she could remember. So she went from one extreme to the other, from the calculating predator to one who would hurl herself headlong beneath the wheels of her lover's chariot.
    Tom was quick to understand this, and felt that what Shoshana needed was to be brought down, very slowly, to a pitch of intensity that would at least allow him to make love to her slowly and nurturingly, rather than - as she had - wanting him inside her, instantly. He knew that he was well-endowed, because it was the first thing that every girl had ever said to him as soon as she'd found out. After the novelty had worn off, he admitted, he was getting rather tired of being thought of as a big cock with a man attached. But his experience (rather than his intellect) told him that Shoshana had never really been loved herself, and therefore did not have the equipment that would allow her to love in any way except full-on, or not at all. From what little she'd told him of her sex life, it had consisted mostly of extremely brief, unsatisfactory couplings. And given the even fewer details she'd let on about her family background, he had to confess that he wasn't surprised. If sex is all about rules, he thought, rather than fun, for all involved, well, it might as well be reduced to cats and dogs, comme Les Horribles. Eurgh!
    For the last few nights of the vacation, Tom took it upon himself as a private project (not that the task was onerous) to talking down this screaming jet of a girl, teaching her how to love - and, more to the point, how to be loved. The unwelcome payback came when he had to leave and return to Cambridge. The next ten weeks would be hell - and they were. The colourful, carnival world of the university was muted and sorrowful. There were moments of the day, especially during the long, sun-slanted evenings, when, at a party; or passing an open window, a curtain swinging lazily outwards; or rounding a street corner, he'd catch a tendril of her smell like new-made, buttered bread, now counter-pointed with hot and musky desire, and was projected back to one of their last nights together -- only to bump into someone else entirely. Tom knew that were he to mistrust his sense of smell, he might as well be struck deaf, dumb and blind. Shoshana had shattered his world, and he needed her to help him put the pieces back together.
    He thought he'd done his best to leave Shoshana on a high, glowing with love, but she was distraught after his departure, nonetheless. She loved him - all of him -- perhaps more than anything. On the other hand, she had never known that love could be so exquisitely painful physically as well as mentally, but whenever he came inside her she felt that she'd been branded. But this, or so she thought, was precisely what a part of her really wanted: for love to be bought with pain, for only then could it be of value. She had not understood the physical facts that her insides had been stretched, burned, and perhaps even a little torn. For a day or so after he'd left she was feverish and shivery, and Jadis was worried, insisting that Shoshana relax, perhaps spend some time in bed, asleep. And so she did, but her first night was troubled with appalling nightmares that were both phallic and biblical, involving pillars of cloud and of salt and of fire, and waking to sharp pangs between her legs as if she'd been sitting on a hot bayonet rubbed in chillis. She felt that if Tom were only there with her, it would all go away, but nothing she could do to ease the pain, or even to pleasure herself, made her feel anything but empty and wretched and lost. After two days the fever and soreness subsided, and she returned to work trying to act as normal and cheerful as she could. But in her heart she knew that this wasn't the real Shoshana, but just a phoney. Inside she felt as useful as a squashed football.
    If Tom could try to lose himself among the distractions of Cambridge, his departure left Shoshana no such luxury. Without Tom around, she was even more exposed and alone, as a guest in the house of his parents, whom she hardly knew, so of course she couldn't tell them of her overwhelmingly passionate and physical feelings for their own and only son. Had she known him better, she could have certainly talked to Jack -- and Jadis was, for her, on a pedestal, and nobody confides in a statue.
    For a couple of days after Tom left, Domingo had passed through on an another flying visit, returning to Rome from one Papal errand or another, and when she was well enough to climb out of bed she wanted to talk to him - what was the word, confess? - but she thought it would be just too weird. Her religious world was very much constrained by her past, which she realized was not just a straitjacket, but a star to steer by. She could not - could not - abandon it for something so alien, for all that her instincts screamed at her that this man was a neutral party, likely to be a good listener, and that her worries would go no further. In any case, he'd gone, and she never knew (for nobody told her) that Domingo had sat by her bedside during her fever, her hot hand in his, willing her to come round, and, in truth, wondering why she was so ill, for no reason that he or Jadis could fathom.
    So she was left in the house of strangers, trying to be on her Shabbat best behaviour. Until, one evening about six weeks later, she could manage this charade no longer. She and Jadis were sitting at the kitchen table, Jadis lost in a spread-sheeted morass of figures, Shoshana pecking her way through a file of site reports and papers on SSM that she felt duty bound to study, making notes on her tablet. Jadis worked away, getting used to the movements and stylus taps from across the table, a blur in the corner of her eye. But after a while she realized that all movement had stopped. She looked up to see Shoshana staring fixedly into space, her deep purple-blue eyes wide open, with one tear stealing down her cheek. She got up and rushed to her side of the table, crouching down beside her.
    "Shoshana, what's the matter?"
    Shoshana collapsed into Jadis' arms, as deflated as she felt, an inchoate mass of heartbreaking loss and defeat. For she knew that she'd failed when the first thing she said to Jadis was:
    "I'm sorry, so sorry ... " and then, without meaning to, "I miss him so. I'm so sorry, but I love him so much ..." before trying to get up, her intention being to pack her rucksack and ask to be taken to the airport, for now her secret was out, she was fit to stay in the farmhouse no longer. She could hardly be banished from Eden if she chose to leave of her own accord.
    At first Jadis said nothing, but sat on the kitchen floor with her arms round this girl who'd seemed to have endured a great deal of she-knew-not-what, but was clearly pining for her son. She knew that Tom was in love with her from a thousand signs that only she as his mother could recognize, in addition to his quite obvious distraction and uncharacteristic seriousness, but Shoshana, being a stranger, had been harder to work out, at first. It was only then, in this climax, that it all became clear to Jadis, and she was cast back to a time long ago and almost forgotten when Jack had left her, to go to France, so she could study for her final exams in Cambridge. She recalled herself then, how her own insides had consumed themselves with longing, and how doubly lonely Shoshana must feel, with nobody but her own confused self to fall back on.
    "Oh, you poor, poor girl ..."
    A little later, Jadis had steered Shoshana up to bed, and sat by her on the bentwood chair, and talked to her - really, for the first time. She did not inquire about Shoshana's past life or present needs, but sought to reassure her that the farmhouse was her home, and always would be, whenever she wanted it. Shoshana realized how much and how hard she'd been fighting against this gift, this offer to relieve her of her past life, as something too good to be true. But here was Jadis, making it entirely plain that if she wanted Eden, all she had to do was accept it, with no thought of recompense.
    "Come and live here - move in!" she said.
    So Jadis told Shoshana of the story of how she met Jack, realizing just then that she'd never revealed to a soul just how much she'd missed him when he'd left for France, and that she understood what Shoshana now felt for Tom: that you could be in love so intensely that you felt actual, physical pain. Jadis recalled how the absence of Jack was like a twisting knife in her abdomen; and Shoshana, without words, but in the way she sat up and hugged Jadis , admitted that the way she felt for Tom was just the same. It all seemed so silly from this distance, thought Jadis, keeping that part to herself, for even the echo of the pain felt by the young was painful enough to recall. And Jadis felt herself crying, because she had at last found someone with whom she could share this long-buried, long-resolved, deeply private anguish, and soon the women were crying together, and then laughing, and Jadis remembered many other, similar moments with Marjorie McLennane, who'd been a rock, a guiding star and to whom she owed so much, and who was now gone. It occurred to her that Shoshana must think her as forbidding and unapproachable as she had once thought of Marjorie - until she found that a very different character lurked underneath, that a younger heart still beat, that she could be the fastest of friends.
    It was this that brought her up sharp, for Shoshana, plainly, had nobody she could turn to, nobody at all.
    "Shoshana," she said, quite deliberately, so she wouldn't seem patronizing, "No matter what happens - and especially no matter what happens with Tom -- I'll always be here for you, if you need me. Always."

    Chapter 14

    (August 2034)

    I say to you that I am dead!
    Edgar Allan Poe -- The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

    Their home for the next fortnight would be where Avi had spent the greater part of his childhood. The Kibbutz that was once Avi's world had turned from the collective endeavour of idealistic pioneers into a quest for a different kind of idealism that was also his personal fiefdom, his research base for the best part of two decades. What was, essentially, a field outpost of the GW Institute had taken over the accommodation blocks and kitchens of the collective farm where Avi had played in the dirt, shot his first hoops, made out with his first girl. The Kibbutz itself was only glad to be rid of it all, for the Institute's generous rent had allowed the kibbutzniks to pave over groves of olives and oranges and build spacious, modern apartments. For where once the inhabitants had been farmers, making a living of sorts from limes, turkeys, a small herd of Friesians and (its pride and joy) an orange-juice processing plant, they had now largely shaken the dirt from their hands. They had exchanged their tractors and denim coveralls for high-tech, high-paid jobs in Haifa, as far from the Soviet-style kibbutz image of agrarian toil as might be imagined. Farmland was no longer needed - flats and houses most definitely were. But Avi's parents still lived on the kibbutz, so for him it would always feel a little bit like home. He had, however, moved on: his own home, with Rivka (a military communications specialist) was an army barracks the other side of Haifa, and he had to commute in through the morning sprawl.
    Tom and Shoshana were quartered in what was affectionately known as the `Old Town' - the original heart of the settlement, built back in the 1920s and hardly improved since. This was a double row of about two dozen peeling wooden shacks, each row facing the other across a broad dirt square, in the centre of which was a vast and ancient olive tree. Long ago, somebody had strung lines of coloured bulbs between the shacks and the tree, and a haphazard collection of tables and chairs had accreted beneath it. This was the social centre for the younger volunteers, whose parties would often last until the early hours. Tom and Shoshana were assigned a shack at the far end, closest to the washrooms and the avocado plantation that bordered the settlement, beyond which lay the track leading up to the first and closest of Avi's many dig sites, spread all over the Mount Carmel massif.
    The shack was certainly nothing fancy: just an iron-framed bed on a chipped linoleum floor, a table and a couple of chairs, bare wooden walls and roof, and an entertaining nightlife featuring cockroaches, columns of ants, the duel-to-the-death struggles of geckoes, and on one occasion, a title bout between a scorpion and a praying mantis. Tom and Shoshana loved every minute of it. The evening they arrived they'd joined in the general merrymaking of the polyglot volunteer throng that lasted well after midnight. Tom knew one or two of the other students, and felt a great thrill to be able to introduce Shoshana, who was in her element. She loved parties, chat and bustle, and felt that she'd had far too little of that kind of thing lately. Sure, she loved Tom to bits and forever, and the farmhouse was now her home, a long-sought anchor for her life and a special place in her heart (she'd arranged with Aunt Jess to ship her things to Saint-Rogatien, permanently). But a girl has to get out, now and then, to laugh, to dance and to flirt, and having recharged her batteries, she spent the energy regained, much later, with Tom - whom she led, blue eyes flashing with purple shards of mischief, into the warm leafy darkness of the avocado field -- whence she flew him to the moon and back.
    Thankfully, Avi allowed them the next morning to acclimatize: when they finally ventured out of doors, they found a world refreshed by a light rain in the early hours. Their first sight was a pair of hoopoes displaying to each other in the morning sunshine among the litter of candles, bottles and overturned chairs in the square, whose hard-packed ground exhaled all the tangy richness of new-washed earth. Avi had to teach that morning at the Technion, he explained, and wouldn't be able to show them round his latest dig site until later. He wanted to show it to them himself -- so they should take the opportunity of resting up after their long journey and wild night. He was surprised, though, to learn that they actually wanted to sit in on his early morning class, so all three of them rode in together (this time in the relative comfort of a four-seat Subaru pickup) to see Avi in action.
    The class was almost as wild as the volunteers, but it was a wildness kept always one ever-shifting step from abandon: Avi held the first-year students in the packed hall teetering on a tightrope of chaos. For Tom, who couldn't understand any of it (it was all in Hebrew), it was almost like a comedy show, a clown act. Avi's eyes, his hands, his expressions - they'd made him laugh when he'd been a small child - all were now being put to good use. Tom wished his lectures in Cambridge were half this much fun. Professor Reynard had warned him what to expect from Avi's "Bones 101" class, as she called it. "It's a bear-pit!" she'd laughed.
    "The noise! It's amazing he actually teaches anyone - but somehow, he always does. They love him."
    Shoshana, who picked up maybe one word in three - the Hebrew was much faster and more colloquial than she could comfortably follow - lost herself to Avi's compelling kinesis. The irrepressible, grey-locked teacher bounded across the podium, up the aisles, cajoling and returning, pitching and fielding questions and answers in a constant, rolling exchange with first this student and then that, gesticulating, eyes flashing, whirling constantly to point at the screen or write something in rapid-fire cursive Hebrew strokes on the chalkboard: this was teaching as free-form ballet. After the lecture it occurred to her that Avi had not stood still for the whole hour. He was all animation, all movement, like a particle whose motion defines its nature, and for which the concept of rest-mass is meaningless except as a convenient fiction for theorists. She could see why Avi's classes were so popular.
    Thus reinvigorated, Avi took Tom and Shoshana on what he called a `special VIP tour' - just them, nobody else - to his latest dig site. He had to do his routine inspection of several others first, like a butterfly flitting ceaselessly over flowers in a meadow, tasting each before moving on. Over the years Avi had opened up more than fifteen new sites on Mount Carmel, digging at each new one himself for a season before his curiosity drove him on, passing on each site to a student to run more or less independently. It was a hit-and-miss way of working, but the hits had outnumbered the misses, and in so doing he'd produced an entirely new picture of the prehistoric Middle-east. Tom and Shoshana got a concentrated burst of all this, twenty years of work compressed into two hours.
    Israel is, as it always has been, a crossroads of clashing civilizations, at the centre of an ongoing human ferment that produced agriculture, the great early empires, and the three great monotheisms. But for those who care to read it through the eyes of landscape, its history can be read further back, even from the very earliest stirrings of agriculture on the shores of the Sea of Galilee more than twenty-five thousand years ago. It had long been known that the caves on Mount Carmel hosted among the earliest populations of modern humans to have emerged from Africa, around ninety thousand years ago. As the climate shifted over the millennia, the cave complex harboured waves of Neanderthals and modern humans, each replacing the other.
    That had been the view, at least, until Avi arrived. The new view, thanks entirely to his research and that of his students and associates, was that Mount Carmel had been wall-to-wall Neanderthal, and had been for almost a hundred thousand years.
    Mount Carmel -- Har Ha-Carmel -- had been a great city, or complex of cities, built largely underground, in the manner of Souris Saint-Michel, but sometimes had extended above ground in massive ramparts and fortresses. Avi had learned well from the feet of his master, Jack Corstorphine, for the mass of Mount Carmel was far from natural. At its zenith, Mount Carmel was a gigantic morass of quasi-independent city states, alliances constantly shifting, but always at war: although there was no writing or images, there was Remillardian-style flint-plate armour in abundance, and each city had its own fashion of armament, suggesting clannishness and constant conflict.
    And then modern humans arrived from Africa, bands of savages, strangers in a strange land. When they blundered into the Neanderthal civilization, they would never have known what had hit them.
    "We always used to think that the modern humans from the caves of Qafzeh or Skhul, here at Ha-Carmel, were free-roaming hunter-gatherers," Avi explained as they drove. "Wrong-o! As soon as they hit the Neanderthal storm front they became slaves, sacrifices, farm animals. Those modern-human caves were pens, cow-sheds."
    "But Avi, what happened?" asked Tom - "The Neanderthal cities didn't last forever."
    "For sure, Tom. And we used to think that they just burned themselves out from lack of resources. And hey, maybe they did. But Hom. Sap. Had the last laugh." He refused to say more, because, he said, it would spoil the surprise.
    And so, as the Sun reached its searing height and started to descend seawards, they reached the end of a dirt track high on the north face of Mount Carmel snaking just above the most distal suburbs of Haifa, the hazy Mediterranean gleaming in the distance. A small complex of buildings - just two prefabricated huts and a machine shop - framed a steel door in the side of the hill, as innocuous as if it were the entrance to any suburban double garage. Two or three field workers waved to Avi, exchanging a few words, as he pulled the Subaru to a stop.
    "But first - lunch!"
    Avi took a cool box from the back of the truck and carried it up a narrow, gritty path to the shade of a small cypress grove. It was an idyllic spot. The trees shaded a small, scrubby lawn that gave them complete cover and yet allowed them a magnificent view towards the sea.
    "Go on, dig in!"
    There was the usual kibbutz travelling brunch of cucumbers, tomatoes, bread, yoghurt and fruit. As they ate, Avi told them of an email from Jadis.
    "You two lovely young things are getting first look at a lot of big news," he said. "What's the latest about eclipses?"
    So they told him about the inscription that Jadis' team had found at SSM. Avi had heard something of it from Jadis, but he was especially keen to learn what Domingo had made of it. "Hey, Shoshana -- what do you think of my good friend Domingo? Quite a guy, eh?" At the mention of Domingo's name Shoshana blushed and looked down. She had an awful feeling that in not talking to him, one-to-one, she'd missed a golden opportunity, and the way things were turning out, this chance might not happen again. She did, however, recover some of her composure to say that Domingo passed on his good wishes to Avi, and that he hoped they could meet in Israel.
    "Sure - he's here next week," said Avi. "The Pope is doing an open-air mass thing in Ramat Gan Stadium, so I guess Domingo will be busy - how did he always say it? Yes - `matters on a higher plane'" Tom laughed at Avi's impersonation of Domingo's voice, its intriguing mixture of cultured tones and bear-like gruffness. "Actually," said Avi, "I think Domingo's really here as a warm-up act for the Stones!"
    Tom and Shoshana both laughed, then, thinking of Domingo, red-capped like a cardinal but still in an aloha shirt, doing a stand-up routine before a stadium packed with screaming rock fans. The prospect of the Rolling Stones' latest comeback was the talk of the volunteers, some of whom were trying to get tickets to the stadium show - the day after the Pope's open-air mass -- and the opening concert in a promised eighteen-month world tour to promote their hit download, Restart Me Up. Tickets were hard to come by and those few that were still on the market circulated for small fortunes. Stones tours happened once every three or four years or so, with such inevitability that people had long since stopped wondering whether Keith Richards (a sprightly ninety) and Mick Jagger (just turned ninety-one, and as lithe and athletic as ever) had traded sympathy for the Devil for longer-than-usual life-spans, and had accepted that they were probably immortal anyway. The big wow was the much-trailed reappearance of Brian Jones, who, the rumour had it, was either an imposter; a product of a secret Korean cloning laboratory; or both.
    As for the inscription, Avi agreed that Domingo was probably right that it should be kept secret.
    "I hope we never find any prehistoric art here," said Avi. Imagery of any kind was becoming very hard to square with the bubbling religious and political situation. The Orthodox rabbinate would never stand for it, he explained, "and with the Khalifa breathing down our necks, well..." Everyone in the archaeological world - and indeed the world in general - was still reeling from the rumours that just two months earlier, the Khalifa had dynamited the beautiful ancient city of Petra, because a visiting Imam from Yorkshire had declared its statuary `offensive'. But as no western journalist was ever likely to be able to verify anything that happened inside the Khalifa, the rumours remained just that.
    "Just imagine if we found religious iconography from a non-human species here, in Israel?" said Avi: "It would blow the whole lid off everything. The Imams are on a hair-trigger - they want Jerusalem so badly they'd need no more excuse than that for jihad."
    He did not mention, of course, Rivka's pillow-talk (from her perch in military intelligence), about the immense armies parked in the desert beyond Jordan and along the parched banks of the Yarmuk; the desert airfields packed wingtip-to-wingtip with the products of a decade of round-the-clock production in factories from Tabriz to Timbuktu, Tripoli to Tashkent; the gigantic rail-gun howitzers and mobile launch-pads lining up on the Euphrates. The European Union, mindful of vocal support from the Khalifa from within, and still trying to digest a skittish Turkey, was turning a blind eye. America was in one of its more isolationist moods: Israeli mutterings that given the unity and armed might of the Khalifa, she'd have no option but to `go nuclear', made the US ambassador nervous and run for cover. It was all behind the scenes, of course - if it hadn't been, His Holiness, and probably the Stones, would have taken their immortality elsewhere, and there'd be panic in the streets. Yet panic or no panic, Israel was alone and poised to fall -- and Avi, by digging up some figured stone or other, would be damned if he'd be the one to push it over.
    But Avi was thinking of a far more ancient war when, after lunch, he took them down to the machine shop, found miners' helmets from the team store, and ushered them through the metal door.
    "Forget eclipses. They're for little old ladies like my old friend Domingo. What I'm going to show you is strictly adults-only. It will blow your minds."
    The door led into a short tunnel, down a slope and into a broad and brightly lit cave, dotted with geometrical monoliths, as impressive as SSM, but on a smaller scale.
    "We've found lots of these all over Ha-Carmel," explained Avi. "We call them `SSM-lites'. As you probably know, each one was probably a clan base for an extended family, maybe for a few dozen generations. But this one, this is odd: usually there are cemeteries, like the ones at SSM. But there are no bones here at all, not one. It's as if they've all been dug up, or swept away."
    They walked past the ranks of silent monoliths, perhaps for three or four hundred metres. Above their heads, the cave roof gradually sloped down to meet them.
    "So, after me and a small team discovered this cavern last year, we kept pushing inwards, further and further, looking for the bones we knew must be here, until we found - this!"
    Avi's timing was as perfect as it had been in his lecture early that same day, for just as he finished his sentence they saw that they'd reached the edge of a black ravine, and that the cave roof had arced over their heads to plunge before them, downwards into the abyss.
    Avi steered them to a path a little way to the right that led them down the slope of the ravine, which was neither as steep nor as deep as they had first thought. Perhaps twenty metres below the level of the cavern floor, they found a lower, larger cavern opening before them, stretching as far in all directions as their lights would penetrate. Unlike the cavern above, this lower cave was yet to have a full lighting system installed. At present there was something like the emergency lighting system in an aircraft - a pattern of lights on the ground marking out paths where it was safe to walk, their weak, local illumination making deep and eerie shadows of small objects close by, throwing them - hugely magnified -- into the illimitable lightless voids beyond. Avi led the way down to the cave floor, and it wasn't long before they started noticing bones. First in ones and twos, then a few together, until, by the time they were thirty or forty metres in, there were drifts of bones in great waves, in high dunes to the left and right, their extent made all the greater by the fact that only a few caught the localized ground-level beams from the pathway lights, the rest fading upwards and outwards into the musty dark, present only by virtue of horrible and horrifying suggestion.
    But what little they had seen was quite enough. Few of the bones seemed in any order at all. There were skeletons, and parts of skeletons, bones scored and charred, shattered, scattered and thrown awry in a massed idiot-dance of death. The litter of carnage seemed to go on forever - it was a sea, an ocean of bones. Shoshana and Tom drew close to Avi, who had stopped before a vast and shuddering pile of skulls. They were stunned with horror and utterly silent.
    "Yes, my friends," he said, his voice subdued, his upper face in a shroud of weird, Hitchcockian shadow cast by the pathway light at his feet, "it's quite something."
    Shoshana, dry-mouthed, plucked up just enough courage to ask a question, if only to break an oppressive and almost malevolent silence that threatened to close in and suffocate them.
    "How far does this go on?"
    "We - that's me and the team -- we think it links up with another cave system on the east side of the mountain, but we're not sure. We haven't got there yet. We've penetrated three kilometres into the cavern so far, and it still goes on and on, just like this. Where we're standing is just the start. As of now, we can see no end to it."
    Shoshana: "just ... bones?"
    "Yes, just bones," said Avi. "There are a few simple hearths, just bonfires, really, but we haven't found any buildings at all. The bones are mainly Neanderthals, but - hey - let's get out of here before I explain any more. I don't mind telling you, this place freaks me out."
    So they retraced their steps, and even Tom, who had lived his formative years in darkness, was never so pleased to have reached the surface as he was then, when they ascended the slope to the cypress grove to greet the Sun as it began its downward slope over the Mediterranean.
    To Shoshana, the Sun, while welcome, seemed sickly and apologetic. She felt cold, preternaturally cold: she hugged herself to warm up, and then clung tightly to Tom. When they'd sat down and had assumed a measure of equanimity, Avi started to talk again, and this time it was with a seriousness that surprised them.
    "Now, if I tell you a few things, you must promise - promise - not to breathe them to a living soul. I shall tell your mother, Tom, because - well, davka, just because. But what I am about to tell you must never get out. Not until I'm ready. I'm not sure that I ever will be."
    They promised.
    "But first, I must ask you a question. Why is it, do you think, that humans came out of Africa maybe a hundred thousand years ago, but took another sixty thousand to get into Europe?"
    Silence. And then Shoshana said, warily, like a shy student at her first tutorial - "because the Neanderthals were already there?"
    "Good," replied Avi. "But that's only a part of the story. All the reasons we hear - and, I am ashamed to say, the reasons I still teach in my class -- are just a pile of cheap excuses. That the first modern humans were still too primitive to go north, or that they first went east into Asia before venturing into Europe, and so on. All just glimpses of the truth, but not the whole of it. I think I can now supply the missing piece, from that pit of bones."
    And so he told them a story. How much was truly based on the evidence, how much informed conjecture, and how much he'd just made up, they would never know.
    When the first modern humans had stumbled, innocent and blinking, out of Africa a hundred thousand years ago, they had the misfortune to run straight into a Neanderthal civilization at its most powerfully rapacious. After many millennia the warring clans had lately been united in blood under one single chieftain, the King Under the Mountain, whose armies of stone-clad warriors commanded Mount Carmel and all the lands adjacent. The Kingdom had blocked access to Europe, and had found in the steady stream of newcomers a life-saving resource.
    For the might and extent of the Kingdom was increasingly a sham. Although at its very peak of power and majesty, it had in fact started to decline long before, rotting from within. The troops had to go ever further to exact tribute to bring to the Holy Mountain, the City on the Heights. The forests, long depleted by a civilization still dependent on hunting and foraging, were in retreat. The Kingdom might well have been unified, but it was starving to death from the inside. Until, that is, the Moon Goddess had brought them a ready supply of man-flesh, just in the nick of time.
    The decline of the Kingdom was suddenly thrown into reverse, and for a while the Neanderthals grew to yet greater power by refashioning their whole economy around human beings. They enslaved them for tens of thousands of years, rounding up more wherever they could find them, farming them for sacrifice to the Moon Goddess, the Destroyer of Suns: and for food. Young human males could be gelded and fattened into choice meat: the young females could be forced by stud males (itself an entertaining spectacle) and, once pregnant, milked. After lactation they were sent to the Moon Goddess and publicly eviscerated, for what the Goddess loved best were the lungs and still-beating hearts of young human females. And humans in terror, of any age or gender, always made amusing sport for the King's menagerie of giant hyenas, saber-toothed cats and cave-bears.
    Even when dead, no part of a human being was wasted. Apart from the meat and offal, marrow and brains, their body fats could be rendered down into oil, their skins used to make baskets and boats, their bones and teeth wrought into tools, furniture, musical instruments, even toys for children. Human testicle-and-eyeball soup was a delicacy reserved for the High Table of the Kings. More and still more humans had come from the South to replenish the never-satiated moloch. Whenever humans became scarce locally, raiding parties were sent to find them, penetrating the Nile Valley as far as modern Ethiopia. And so the bloody story continued, for age upon age.
    Until, around six hundred centuries later, new tribes of humans appeared in the South. These were tall, wild and fierce, completely different from the flabby, cowed race that the Neanderthals had dominated for so long. And they were bent on conquest - and vengeance. They would tolerate the raids no longer. No more human tribute would be sent to the City on the Heights. They had come north to see the Kingdom Under The Mountain for themselves, and to wipe it from the face of the Earth.
    So the King Under The Mountain had ordered that all his humans, his chattels and broodstock, be gathered together in this cave, and that they should all be slaughtered - rather that, than for them to be taken. This deed was done, and the bones of these humans could be seen in a vast drift in the centre of the cave. There were tens of thousands of them. Men decapitated, their brains bashed out. Babies broken in two. Women spatch-cocked like chickens when not otherwise raped, impaled, beheaded, sacrificed in a last and desperate throw before the unforgiving, merciless Moon. The floor of the cave became slick with offal and broken bodies and tides of blood. The brutality of it was unimaginable. Some of the humans fought back before they died, but not many.
    The only thing the King Under The Mountain feared, almost as much as the vengeance of the Moon Goddess, was the wrath of the Neanderthal Chieftain he'd usurped many years before and driven across the Jordan. The hated rival was now back, his legions marching on Ha'Carmel. It was a fine judgement as to who would arrive first, the Neanderthal raiders from the East, or the Men of the South. In the event, it was the well-drilled columns of Neanderthals, and in considerable numbers. In this very cave, they started to do battle with the King's troops for control of the remaining humans. We can tell this, said Avi, from the presence of two kinds of flint armour, the immense drifts of skeletons associated with Remillardian artefacts -- and that some of the humans appear to have been pulled in two, as if victims of an internecine squabble for who would get to make the bloody ritual obeisances first. Evidence from hearths and scattered coprolites suggests that some of the Neanderthals paused from their warfare to engage in impromptu banquets of raw, living human flesh.
    The battle was futile, for when all the humans were dead, and the two Neanderthal tribes had almost finished slaughtering each other, the Men of the South arrived to finish the job. Within a few years, the great Neanderthal civilization of two thousand centuries was destroyed. And Homo sapiens found that the gates of Europe were open wide.
    By the time Avi had finished his story, the Sun was sinking into the Mediterranean in a florid rash of barred clouds. Tom held Shoshana close: he was pale with shock, she was trembling, her eyes, deep violet and indigo in the sunset, were wet.
    "Look," he said, "I do not apologise for telling you this, or for bringing you here. If I hadn't, you see, you'd never have believed me."
    "Avi, how much of this do you know to be true?" This from Tom, and in French, barbed with anger. Avi replied in calm, measured English, but it was clear that he was keeping his own emotions under a tight rein.
    "What's the truth of it? Well, I know this much. That the bones accumulated in a single event, for carbon dates taken from all over the cave all cluster around a single date, about forty-three thousand years ago. And the bones, Tom, you saw them."
    "Look, Avi," Tom returned, holding Shoshana close, his anger rising, perhaps in the cause of protecting her - "you cannot frighten us with this ... this lurid rubbish. Eyeball and testicle soup - Pah!"
    Avi, still calm -- "Tom, you're a scientist, you are rational. Of course, it is rubbish to you. But even if a tiny fraction of what I have told you is true, you can bet that once people get hold of it, there will be all kinds of stories, elaborations, used and perverted to all kinds of ends. And let me tell you another story. When you were very small, the effects that the discoveries at Souris were having on the world almost drove your parents apart."
    Tom and Shoshana sat up at that, and Avi returned to the fray, with increasing vigour.
    "You didn't know that, Tom? Well, perhaps you should. And let me tell you more things you didn't know. It happened not so long after me and Rivka rescued the Tibestians from certain slaughter in Chad: when Faye Callaghan and Primrose Tsien - dear friends of your parents, and also of me - were lost in Tibet.
    "We didn't know what happened at the time, but it turned out that they were ambushed by Almai. When they finally got the truth out of the ringleader, he confessed that our friends - my friends, who I loved -- had been blinded, their tongues ripped out, their hands and feet chopped off, and then they were systematically fucked until they died, in the cause of Almai traditional religion! So how do you like that?
    "And it gets better! They were then dismembered and eaten raw! And what's more, the schmuck told all on Prime-Time TV! He thought he was doing them a favour. And yes, guess who was watching? Yes, Tom, your Maman and Papa. It tore your mother to pieces, so much so that Jack couldn't cope - he was this close to walking out on her. You were about six years old."
    Tom was wide eyed with shock and anger. He vaguely remembered, long ago - a confused night of pain, fractured shards of new and unfamiliar sight, his mother rampaging at Jack, Fairbanks in a rank fume of worry, a rolled-up flexi screen by the back door. Shoshana could hardly believe that anything would be strong enough to force Jack and Jadis apart. But perhaps even the strongest marriages have to be tested.
    Avi sat down behind them both, embracing them.
    "So now you understand. I'm sorry it had to be this way. Now you can see why I can never make this public. Just imagine what it would do, not only to us, but to the world? It was my old friend Domingo who created Undique humanitas, the document that welcomed the hominids into humanity. Now, he announced that the day before the Almai confessed to murdering our friends. Jadis hardly talked to Domingo for weeks afterwards. It took all his diplomacy - and that's more diplomacy than you'll ever see from anyone - to talk her down. And those two are real close. So if news of this battleground ever gets into the media, just imagine what will happen. Undique humanitas will be no more than a straw in the wind. They'll be hanging Tibestians from lamp-posts. The Kaptars will have to run for their lives in case they get flayed alive and made into rugs. Those Pendeks - you know the ones, they drive all the cabs here in Tel Aviv, they'll be locked in their cars and torched alive. And when all the hominids are gone, where then will the lynch mob turn its fury? Who'll be next, eh? Humanity will destroy itself."
    They drove back to the Kibbutz in silence through the deepening night.
    "Don't worry, and sleep well," said Avi, stiffly. "I'll come find you in the morning".
    But sleep was hard to find. They tried to make love, but could not raise much enthusiasm, so they simply rested close together. Shoshana insisted on keeping the light on, so Tom put on a pair of dark shades -- so that even though he'd had his arms around her, he seemed very far away. As usual, he was the first to fall asleep. Shoshana sank eventually, turning off the light and allowing Tom's arms to curl round her like angels' wings.
    But her sleep was troubled. She had a dream in which she'd looked down at her body, which was made of glass, and found a black blob the size of a golf ball in her womb. The blob grew as she watched, turning from a rough sphere into a star shape and sending out threads and tendrils that ramified through her whole body until they burst out through every orifice at once, swelling at the ends into buds that disgorged enormous blood-red flowers and bloated fruits that rotted where they hung. She should have been horrified by this, she thought, but found it no more than mildly unpleasant. But then she looked up at the Sun and it was black. She screamed.
    Domingo himself had had to be on his mettle a fortnight later when the cavalcade of Papa Linus Secundus, Episcopus Romanus, rolled into town. As his Personal Private Secretary, Domingo had the closest possible access to His Holiness: and although Linus II was affable enough, Domingo felt that they weren't really getting along at the moment, or, at least, not as well as they usually did. Even when they'd tried to compensate for this loss, by setting time aside deliberately to brainstorm about things - like when they'd forged Undique humanitas, fifteen years earlier -- Domingo had the sensation of intellects sliding past each other. It could simply have been their different backgrounds, now coming to the fore at a time of heightened tension.
    Linus II had once been a street kid from North Dublin. To be sure, he himself had come from a lowly background, and perhaps it was no more than a difference in climate: the parched heights of the Sierra Nevada versus the damp and vivid green of the Emerald Isle. Yes, perhaps that was it.
    But it was more likely to be the current circumstances themselves. Domingo was sure that His Holiness, who was usually in pink and rosy health, was looking pale and peaky. It could have been the journey, which had indeed been exhausting, with many delays enforced by technical problems and the weather. And maybe His Holiness had picked up a cold en route. He'd have to attend to him carefully.
    The night before the Open-Air Mass, His Holiness was attending a private reception at the official residence of the Prime Minister of Israel, so naturally Domingo came too, along with a small squadron of Armani-suited, bulging-pocketed Swiss Guards. They were to stay the night.
    If Domingo found his boss a little distant, he had hit it off immediately with the Prime Minister, a man of sparkling wit and intelligence called Seamus O'Shaughnessy.
    "If I might say so, Prime Minister...."
    "Yes, I know. Odd name for a nice Jewish boy like me. But I am an Israeli, a sabra, born right here, if not very well bred. My folks are another matter, They're as Irish as shamrocks, and in fact I spent most of my boyhood in the Old Country. That's where I met His Holiness, in fact. We go back a long way. A long way indeed..."
    It struck O'Shaughnessy that the Vicar of Christ didn't look quite as chipper as he'd remembered, or hoped. He had been notably light on the Guinness at the party and had retired early, claiming that he'd need a good night's rest before the service. What a contrast with the old days, the Prime Minister thought, when they'd be carousing until dawn on days when the once-Parish Priest would take Mass with perfect composure.
    But the erstwhile Davy "Davy-Boy!" Leese had looked more than just tired. He was gray, like freshly burned ash, and he kept having to wipe away beads of sweat that persistently broke at his hairline (like blood from a crown) which, if not stopped, rolled glutinously down his face like something out of Death In Venice. Yet he'd waved aside any offer of help - all the care he'd needed was already present in the person of his Personal Private Secretary, the enormous, ferociously ugly and surprisingly engaging Cardinal Sanchopanza ("All my friends call me `Pongo'", he'd said, baring an impressive set of molars, each one of which looked as big as the blarney stone.)
    Taking the Prime Minister aside, the Cardinal agreed that His Holiness looked unwell, but confessed that he was somewhat stubborn and would routinely refuse local medical help.
    "So what can I do?" asked O'Shaughnessy.
    "Nothing much," came the gruff reply. "All I can do is persuade him to take some ibuprofen at vespers and hope for the best."
    And so Cardinal and Prime Minister bade each other good-night.
    The next day, however, the Pope seemed to have taken a turn for the better, and was excited about the open-air mass. O'Shaughnessy couldn't make the motorcade to Ramat Gan, and would indeed miss the service - urgent business at the Knesset - but waved off his friends, old and new, with all the good wishes he could muster. It was not until his committee meeting was over that he heard the appalling news.
    The meeting had gone on even longer than planned delays, diversions and procrastinations usually allowed. Knesset committee sessions always overran in any case, but this must have been a record. The ongoing problem of the Khalifa loomed over everything like a pall of smoke from an oil fire, dragging everything out, sapping all energy. Israelis were usually practical to the point of rudeness (and beyond), getting on with the job in hand, no matter how trying the circumstances. But tendrils of fatalism were beginning to creep in, even here, to the committee rooms of government. Nobody had said it out loud, but you could see it in peoples' eyes - that they were living in the Last Days.
    So sighed O'Shaughnessy almost three hours later when a trim and pretty aide led the way from the council chamber and into the fresh air - when the Prime Minister noticed, in that contrast between acrid staleness and tart freshness, just how hormonally horrid the atmosphere had become in camera. There is nothing as evocative as the human sense of smell, and O'Shaughnessy was drawn straight back to the pallid, perspiring face of his old friend. He'd completely forgotten about the open-air mass. Caught in reverie, he hardly noticed the aide, concern on her face, trying to engage his attention.
    "Sir," she started nervously, as if half-afraid of pulling the Prime Minister from his daydream, "Sir, I have some news..."
    But she was too late, for in that moment he caught a TV monitor in the Council Chamber Ante-Room, tuned to FTM News One, the staff glued to the set. The picture showed the Pope being stretchered offstage to a waiting Magen David Adom ambulance. Cut to screaming sirens, motorcades, police cordons, crowds of concerned worshippers bearing candles.
    "What happened?"
    "The Pope, Sir", explained the aide, momentarily casting her eyes floorwards, "He'd just got to the end of the Aleynu - I mean, sorry Sir, the Agnus Dei -- and then.... he just ..."
    "Collapsed?"
    "Yes, Sir". Well, God be thanked that Linus had pretty much finished the job before expiring onto the stage soon to be occupied by Sir Mick Jagger. "Get me to wherever they took His Holiness - at once! - And get me his secretary on the line!"
    More police sirens. More crowds. Streets darkening towards evening, a light wash of rain. Helipad. Whirring, whining racket.
    "Prime Minister, I'm so glad you called," said the deep, resonant voice of Cardinal Sanchopanza, incongruously squeezed into the Prime Minister's earpiece. "We're in the emergency room at the ... er... Hadassah Hospital. I have to say, things look grim."
    "I'm on my way, Your Eminence."
    And finally, sliding doors of the Emergency Room, a section thrown hastily under guard, with Cardinal Sanchopanza standing outside, deep in conversation with several doctors. The white-coated throng parted to admit O'Shaughnessy and two bodyguards, adding to the crowds - two Swiss Guards stood outside the section in which the Pope was currently confined. Something was, clearly, up.
    "I know that there are ... er... protocols about isolation," Domingo was saying to one of the doctors, "but please might I be allowed to see His Holiness, as his aide, and in such moments, his confessor? Perish the thought, but I might have to administer the last rites."
    "I understand, Sir, ", came the reply, "but really, I'd advise against it. The patient is - uhhh - in a bad way. Really bad. Unconscious. He's very ill indeed, I'm afraid. I very much regret..."
    At this point O'Shaughnessy felt he ought to at least try to tilt at a windmill to help his new friend: "oh honestly, Doctor -- how ill can he be? Flu? Coronary? Overwork?"
    "None of the above, Sir," said the doctor, whose name badge read `Dr Mohamed Al Hajj, Resident', turning to the Prime Minister with such cool professional detachment that he appeared not to recognize him for who he was. "Or, at least, we don't think so. In truth, it's like nothing we've seen before. But I understand you were with him last night - you might have seen some symptoms?" Death in Venice. "Anything you can tell us, anything at all, could be immensely helpful."
    A small crowd gathers. Ambulance drivers, paramedics, nurses, secret servicemen, Swiss Guardsmen. A gentle, steering, hand. Ah, it is Cardinal Sanchopanza. A quiet side office, a desk, some chairs, a wastebasket overflowing with paper and food wrappers, medical charts, vending-machine cups, a pennant for Maccabee Tel-Aviv, a CCTV screen labelled `Isolation Room 1' in embossed red tape: and the smell of sweat and fear. And now a Muslim doctor from Gaza, a Cardinal from the Vatican, and the Prime Minister of Israel. All three great religions in one tiny office. Not the usual ER crowd. But not the usual patient either. And not with any of the usual complaints.
    O'Shaughnessy sat, his collar increasingly tight and sweaty. He loosened it as Al Hajj ushered out the secret servicemen who unobtrusively took positions outside the closing door. "Please, Prime Minister, and ... er... Your Eminence - please, look at the screen. Pay close attention. Then you will see."
    The screen was flickering and monochrome, but even with such a low-quality image you could hardly describe what was happening as in any way normal. Linus was in a hospital gown, lying on a gurney - or, rather, manacled to it, so great were the convulsions sweeping through his body.
    "Can't you do something, Doctor?" This from Domingo.
    "I'm afraid we've done everything usual in a case of - say - coronary arrest, or even just fatigue. We've tried sedatives, but we're afraid to overdo it. We've had to restrain him as you see -"
    "But what of his mouth?" snapped O'Shaughnessy, impatiently. "Couldn't he bite through his tongue?" They gazed in horror as the blurred image of the silent scream of the prostrate Pontiff bounced from the curved screen, caromed off their astonished corneas and bounced back again.
    "That's just it - his mouth is locked wide open in tetany. We couldn't close it again if we wanted to." O'Shaughnessy was about to apologise for his earlier asperity, his heightened mood - the doctor was clearly doing what he could -- but the three watchers were overtaken by events.
    The Pope, jaws agape, eyes bulging, suddenly sat up. He did so with such force that his hands were both neatly severed by the unyielding restraints. Blood squirted everywhere in looping, jetty gouts. All Hajj went white and screamed into an intercom.
    "Get someone in there - quick!"
    Big, burly nurses in full-body outbreak suits appeared on screen, trying vainly to restrain the Pope while not being repeatedly hosed in blood from his scything stumps. Retreating, they too gazed mutely at the scene, for even though the Pope had now stopped moving - as suddenly as he'd begun - they made no attempt to move in on him. They, like the three observers in the office, could only stare at the patch of inky blackness that appeared at the Papal throat, and which had begun to spread even as they watched.
    None could now intervene. No action seemed advisable, even possible. As the wave of darkness lapped slowly up the patient's neck, over his ears and jaw line - and down over his collarbones and under his hospital gown - it took on the dull sheen of taut PVC, as if the now motionless and unbreathing form were being slowly melted into a body bag. The blackness seeped over both cheeks, his nose, and - encircling his mouth like an `O' - bridged that, too, closed it off in a broad meniscus. After another twenty seconds, the head - the eyes - were completely encased. It was this wave of blackness that finally choked off the blood dripping from the wrists, and - after yet another twenty seconds - closed in over the tips of his toes. Only the hands, once the hands of a healer, hands that gave the benediction times beyond count to grateful multitudes, remained beyond the dark tide - severed, lifeless, bloodied, on the gray floor of the isolation room.
    The three watchers exhaled in unison, as if a terrific tension had been released. Too soon. The nurses on camera moved out of shot as a further monstrous transformation took place. The black caul around the Pope tightened and thickened, drawing his knees up beneath his chin, squashing his face between them so that the black membrane, once in contact with itself, fused together. The Pope was sealed in, redoubled, and yet the dark shroud contracted further, squeezing his legs and head inwards and downwards so that they lost all recognizable shape and distinction. The stumps of the arms were drawn in until, after a minute and a half (the watchers had in fact lost all track of time: this fact was only noted later from CCTV records and corroborated by comparison with dozens of similar cases that the hospital would see over the coming hours, before a Khalifa fighter jet, its pilot in the grip of the same affliction, plunged into the hospital, blowing it to smithereens) the Pope now looked like nothing more than a shrinking, melting black candle.
    And still the collapse continued, remorselessly, until what was once a man had entirely disappeared, replaced by a black sphere of radius precisely 15.68 centimetres, and which would prove refractory to all forms of penetration or inspection immediately available to the hospital.
    At last, Linus had become an oyster in negative, a black pearl against the white folds of the hospital gown, seasoned with spatters of red as nicely as any Passion. As for transfiguration - well, that had to be another matter entirely. For the time being, as the transformed Pontiff toppled from the gurney, bounced once, and rolled beneath a rack of life-support equipment -- Noli Me Tangere.

    Chapter 15

    (August 2034)

    Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
    Arthur C. Clarke, The Nine Billion Names of God

    Tom tried to swim in it on his front, but found that his body was almost skating across the surface. With only his chest and knees submerged, his hands and feet couldn't gain enough purchase to move. Shoshana tried the more customary seated method, like all those photos of people taken while relaxing in the water; in hats, sometimes with tea-trays, but always reading a newspaper. But those pictures had been taken decades before, when the Dead Sea had less deadness in it than it had now, and she found it hard to keep herself from bobbing out of the water like a cork. In the end they just lay on their backs, side by side, propelling themselves by gentle sculls with their hands. They felt like two tiny pond-skating insects, whose world is forever confined by the unforgiving, rubbery and dead flat tyranny of surface tension.
    The water itself had a curious texture, both oily and salty, and it made their hands sting where they'd suffered even the tiniest abrasions, the result of Avi's whirlwind field school - the incessant handling of bones and stones. The water stung Shoshana horribly between her legs, but she decided to ignore it.
    For the first few days they'd stayed pretty much in the kibbutz, learning to recognize and classify animal bones and stone tools. Tom knew much of this already, and could have gone, pretty much, to any of Avi's roster of currently active dig sites. But he welcomed the chance to be with Shoshana, the relative novice. Not that they spent much time chatting: the effects of the Battle Cave had left them both profoundly thoughtful, and - as they couldn't tell anyone else about it -- they preferred to be thoughtful together, rather than separately.
    At the weekend Shoshana felt that what they needed most was a change of mood, insisting that they both catch a bus to Jerusalem, for she wanted to show Tom around.
    "You'll never know how amazing it is until you get there," she'd scolded, when he showed even the tiniest reluctance. The visit, however, had been a frustrating failure. The suq, usually overflowing with bustle and noise, was sullen and subdued. When Shoshana had visited it the previous December she'd found it as entrancing as Aladdin's cave, the stalls and open-fronted shops on the narrow alleys crowded with the same scenes that you might have witnessed five centuries earlier, or ten.
    There were stalls selling nothing but orange juice squeezed for you then and there, on the premises; itinerant coffee-sellers dispensing thimblefuls of their scalding, cardamom-scented brew from large, ornate silvered urns carried on their backs. There were dimly-lit alleys in which the all shops sold nothing but halal meat, the butchers hard at work in full view of the customers (although Shoshana hadn't wanted to look too far past the hanging racks of carcasses), and the exchange of greasy money and gossip was accompanied by the decisive sounds of slicing and dicing. Shops that had seemed unfeasibly tiny at the front gave on to room after amazing room, piled high with the most exquisite carpets, each with vivid patterns of confounding intricacy. And there were, as there always are, merchants selling basketloads of the tackiest souvenirs.
    She particularly remembered one especially enthusiastic stallholder chasing her down an alley with a whip - "for your husband!" he'd yelled, as she scooted round a corner: "for your wife!"
    And the smells! Coffee and cardamom, cloves and cinnamon, onions and garlic, leather and wool, and meat, and fruit, and textiles, and people, and animals, and (most of all) money, all in one great intoxicating sensory onslaught. But now most of the shops were closed, their filthy, graffitoed shutters down, and Tom and Shoshana as among the very few visitors felt that they were unwelcome. That they were being watched. To Tom, it smelled of rotting fruit cooking in hot trash cans.
    Another disappointment was that the Temple Mount was closed, so they couldn't visit the Al-Aqsa mosque, nor the shining blue-and-gold jewel of the mosque of Omar. Riot fencing barred the gates to the mosque precinct, to which a trilingual sign had been attached. In English it said `Closed for Renovations', but Shoshana swore that the Hebrew version was more eloquent and included words like forbidden and security and danger. What the (even longer) Arabic sentence read, they were unable to fathom. But the IDF troops guarding the gate looked grim, and neither Tom nor Shoshana felt like inquiring further. The Western Wall below the Temple Mount had also been barred (not that Shoshana had any desire to mingle with the `black hats', as she'd called them), and was uncharacteristically deserted; the Church of the Holy Sepulchre bore only its complement of the variously denominated clerics, outnumbering visitors and pilgrims at least six to one. And nobody, not even Shoshana, visited the Copts on the roof with their lines of washing.
    "Tom, I'm so sorry ..." Shoshana began, "but I think Jerusalem is closed."
    Her disappointment was deepened by the feeling that she'd taken Tom on a wild goose-chase, and by her confusion, that this really shouldn't be happening. It wasn't a religious holiday, as far as she was aware, because she'd checked (this was, after all, Jerusalem, where every day is usually a religious holiday for someone), and those few tourists they'd seen had looked lost, as if they were really expecting to be in Milan or Cozumel or Blackpool but had taken a wrong turning. They decided not to stay the night as they'd planned, but to head straight back to Haifa, where things seemed more, well, `normal'.
    The second week started with an early-morning call: Avi was to take them to a site he was working on personally, where they'd have a chance to help excavate part of a Neanderthal cemetery for a few days. On the way, they'd told Avi about Jerusalem, how muted it was, how - threatening -- as if they'd been partygoers who'd unwittingly stumbled into a private funeral. Avi looked troubled, and what little he said seemed couched in riddles.
    "Okay, make this your very last day," he'd said. "Tomorrow you're free to go. Your time is short. See as much of my wonderful country as you can, while you can."
    And so the very next morning they'd taken their leave. They'd both hugged Avi, who seemed much more tense, more serious than the overgrown puppy who'd greeted them just eight days earlier. He didn't say anything, because he didn't have to - but he looked like someone who knew he was entering the Last Days.
    They would never see him again.

    First they went to Tel Aviv.
    "If Jerusalem can't cheer us up, then Tel Aviv will," promised Shoshana, and this time she had been right. They cadged a spare sofa for a couple of days in a flat currently occupied by Alina Jacob, the elder sister of one of Shoshana's old cheder friends, and whom she'd met last December.
    Alina was an ex-pat from Finchley who'd made Aliyah and was now working as a real-estate agent, selling expensive seafront condos to other soon-to-be ex-residents of North London. Her boyfriend, David, was a fighter pilot and on duty increasingly often, as he was now, she knew not where: so she welcomed the company -- and the chance to show off Tel Aviv's wild side. For two whole days without stopping they'd all got drunk and expired on the beach; they'd drunk some more and partied and pubbed and clubbed until dawn. It was - it really was - just what they'd needed to beat the Battle Cave Blues.
    Two days later, Shoshana woke late to find herself crammed on the sofa next to a man who seemed utterly dead to the world. Drink-sodden nights out had been the backdrop to her life since she was twelve, but oh, poor Tom - until he'd gone to Cambridge, he'd had very little experience of drink at all, and was now flat out, comatose. Not that it had taken the edge off his lovemaking. Quite the opposite, she thought, pulling on her baggy T-shirt and wandering blearily and (she confessed to herself) a little bandy-legged to the kitchen, in search of anything like an aspirin - for she was convinced Tom would need one when he eventually surfaced.
    But she needed one right now, because her insides burned like petrol alight in a ditch. She was convinced Tom hadn't given her a dose of anything, because, despite his promiscuity, he just didn't seem the type - and anyway, she'd been vaccinated against everything imaginable, including pregnancy. Her mother, in one of her rare outbursts of decision, had insisted on this. Part of the problem (not that it was a problem!) was that there was such a lot of him, and after three months of frequent sex, her more tender regions had been stretched, bruised and abraded. Yet this could hardly explain the doubling and redoubling of burning intensity each time they had sex - and, in particular, when he climaxed inside her. Nothing she knew of had symptoms like that. At least, there were times when she could regain some measure of control, like when she had been riding him, last night, settling gently down on top, shimmying down to find a comfortable level, swivelling around until she felt she fitted over him like a glove, and...
    "It must be love," said Alina, joining her in the kitchen, catching her thoughts. Shoshana suddenly realized she'd been standing quite still, with a silly grin all over her face.
    "You're so lucky to have found Tom," she cooed, filling the kettle and putting it on the stove - "he's gorgeous."
    "You don't know the half of it," replied Shoshana, gesturing like the angler whose fish has got away "... or the whole of it..." and the two girls collapsed on each other in fits of mirth.
    "Is he ... really?"
    "Yes, he is - and he's lovely -- and I'm so sore. Have you got any aspirins or something?"
    Alina, still chuckling, partly in admiration, partly in envy, rifled around in a cupboard until she found a small bottle of pills, and gave them to Shoshana. But has she handed them over, her expression switched from morning-after playfulness to a soft yearning of regret, of loss. It was her turn, too, to look distractedly into the distance.
    "What's up?" Shoshana asked.
    "Oh ... it's nothing." Alina turned off the gas beneath the kettle and upended the boiling water into two cups of spiced, unfiltered, heavily sugared black coffee. "Hey, drink this - usually it's my Mum's PG Tips but, you know, needs must."
    She turned away when Shoshana looked at her, wide eyes full of questions. But it was only for two or three seconds. When Alina turned back, her own eyes - pale, ice-blue - were blazing for all that they looked inward.
    "David came home last night..."
    Shoshana remembered a time lost amid the small hours when, being more than half asleep, she half-thought she'd half-heard the frantic gasps and sighs of sex, but had half-dismissed them as an echo of her own dreams.
    "... but he was gone well before any of us woke up."
    Silence. And then, Alina standing in her own kitchen, began to shake, wiping tears on the sleeve of her bathrobe.
    "Oh, fuck it, Shoshana - everybody's selling, nobody's buying, I haven't had any decent commission for months, and if I could go back home, I would." She subsided onto a chair.
    Shoshana still standing, held her friend, pulling her face into her warm bosom, stroking her black hair. Alina, as if through some foggy haze: "it's what David said. He told me to ... to... well, he said I should be prepared for the worst. So we should party and drink and fuck each other silly, for tomorrow ... well, who knows?"
    So that was it, what had been eating Avi and the whole of Jerusalem, and why deep in the desperate night Alina and David had screwed each other's brains out, like they'd never have another chance. Israel was the last man standing against the Khalifa.
    Alina untangled herself from Shoshana's embrace, stood up, wiped her face and made herself busy with cups and plates.
    "But don't mind me. We'll pick ourselves up. Nobody else will, after all. Now, do me a favour - take that gorgeous hunk of yours and bugger off out of here as quickly as possible. In two days the city will be gridlocked for the Pope, and then the Stones, so escape now. Go and see the Dead Sea before it's gone. And Masada too..."
    The defiance of her eyes continued her sentence: Masada will be enough to show you that we've been fighting off bastards like these for practically ever, and we'll be here still, when the fucking Khalifa is dust and forgotten.

    Alina saw Shoshana and a groggy Tom on to the bus, and within half a day they were here, at the Dead Sea, trying to swim in it like any two fun-loving tourists, for all that the Khalifa loomed from mountains in plain sight. After a while the sunshine and salt were becoming oppressive, so they sploshed and clambered awkwardly from the clingy brine. The water evaporated immediately, leaving them crusted in a thin armour of salty plates.
    After using the creaking, paint-peeling showers, they laid themselves side by side on the stony beach. Tom gazed at the yellow hills in the distance, lost in his thoughts, wondering how many Khalifa field-gunners were staring back. Shoshana decided to do something useful instead and went in search of food. Breakfast at Alina's now seemed like ancient history.
    Perhaps ten minutes later, Shoshana came back with drinks and falafel from a snack stand next to the bus stop, shaded by a couple of straggly palm trees. Tom looked up and out from his dream, squinting through his shades at her sunburned form, her long and increasingly sun-bleached hair shading her face, but roused mostly by her aura of salt and warm flesh and the swelling, freckled curves of her breasts, their tops exposed in the billowing neckline of her T-shirt. She sat down next to him, put down a couple of cans of coke and passed him a warm pitta in a square of white paper. It was full of shredded lettuce, brimming over with tomatoes and golden falafel, cool tahine dripping over the edge.
    "Thanks - that's great!"
    They sat companionably together, eating and staring across the great, phosphoritic puddle that was the dying Dead Sea, until it occurred to Tom that she'd not said a word since she'd come back from the snack stand. He turned to her and saw in her face an unfamiliar expression, an unclassifiable mixture of shock, horror, wonderment - and revelation. She looked more lonely and alone than he'd ever seen her, and yet, somehow, connected. So, moving closer, he put an arm around her and said in a low voice:
    "Shoshana, what's happened? You look like - you look like you've seen a ghost!"
    "Well, I, um... in a way, I think I have." And so she started to tell her story. Her falafel grew cold in her hands as she spoke, and by the time she'd finished her eyes were brimming with tears - of rage, of sadness, of joy, he could not tell.
    When she went to the stand she'd joined a small crowd milling around it - mostly soldiers taking a few hours' snatched leave, plus an assortment of back-packers and boho tourists, you know, the kind of people you see hanging around every working day in the summer.
    One of them had stood out from the rest, at first because he was extraordinarily tall, and second because of what he was wearing. No backpack, no uniform, but a long, brilliantly white, hooded robe that stood out sharp against the general sea of green and tan. Because he had been a little ahead of her in the snack-bar queue and had his back to her, she did not take much further notice of him - until she heard his voice, as he ordered falafel from the seller. It was less a voice than a completely dry and tuneless hiss, like someone suffering badly from laryngitis. She looked up then, and met an unreadable expression from the stallholder taking the order. The transaction completed, the hooded figure turned.
    And then she saw his face.
    Framed in a lion-mane of golden hair on an unusually tall, narrow head was a thin parchment-white face in which two eyes glinted amid curiously folded eyelids. The eyes were palest grey, almost white, as if he were suffering from cataracts. The nose was long and beaked, but with narrow-slit-like nostrils. The mouth was disconcertingly wide, but very thin and almost lipless.
    The first thing it said to Shoshana was "Excuse me", in English, but with a curious accent that she couldn't place, before standing aside to allow Shoshana to place her order. The stranger seemed eager to talk to her - out of politeness, she supposed - and offered his name, which sounded like the noise that might be made by a cat with emphysema caught in articulo mortis while coughing up a rusty bicycle pedal. When she looked like she might embarrass herself trying to pronounce it, he came to the rescue -
    "Of course, all my friends call me `Zeke'." So she volunteered hers in return.
    "My name's Shoshana. I'm a student, from England. But today I'm just a tourist!"
    Zeke tried to repeat her name, but through his lips it emerged as the crackling of kindling in a frozen winter bonfire. Yes, he too was a tourist, but only from a moshav outside Dimona. Yes, he whispered, wasn't it a funny feeling swimming in the Dead Sea? The hacking gasps following this sentence Shoshana interpreted as laughter. And, yes, he was Jewish.
    "Sure! I'm a Hebrew Israelite".
    Taking Shoshana's quizzical expression as a cue, he continued. "Of course you mightn't have heard of us", Zeke's quiet, serpentine voice like the soft evening wind of late summer blown through shredded sandpaper. There aren't many of us. A few more in America of course. Florida. And who are we? You are justifiably curious, young lady. No, I don't mind at all. We're the Lost Tribe of Judah. To be sure, you'll have heard lots of people say they're the Lost Tribe. But we're the real deal, straight up. We've been Jewish for hundreds of years, thousands, maybe forever! Would you like a cigarette?"
    And so Shoshana put two and two together, and made a vast, intuitive and daring leap. She was standing before a real, live Tibestian, and she wouldn't miss her chance.
    "Yes, I've heard of the ... er... Jajkhadi."
    Zeke the Tibestian smiled at this brave and rare example of anyone else trying to pronounce their own great and holy name. He bowed to her in appreciation. Thus emboldened, Shoshana continued: "I've been on Mount Carmel," she said, "studying with Professor Malkeinu. Do you know him?"
    The two turned away from the snack stand and sat on one of a number of heavily weathered wooden benches nearby. Zeke looked at her, his reptilian stare from deep within his hood glowing with an inner fire.
    "Avi Malkeinu is our returning prophet, our avenging angel, our saviour. Without him we would be as ashes and dust. If you know him, you are to be blessed."
    Then he rose from his place, knelt before her, took her hands in his long, bony claws and kissed them, and said, at the back of his throat but with passion for all that it was close to silence:
    "Avinu Malkeinu, aseh imanu tzedakah v'chesed v'hoshiyainu."
    With a startling jolt, she was transported back to London, to every Yom-Kippur morning service she'd ever been reluctantly dragged into, amid all the other children and the women, and she found herself mouthing this most solemn Hebrew prayer along with this stranger: our Father, our King, treat us with charity and kindness - help us.
    After two beats Shoshana joined in Zeke's prayer, singing it to the haunting, minor-key tune full of imploring, keening loss, sorrow and hope; the melody she felt she'd known since her earliest childhood, before her Dad died, in the morning of the world when all was fresh and new and happy, and which she'd always found inexpressibly moving. How could her stepfather have been so narrow, so proscriptive, when here was this alien in this scruffy desert who had internalized their religion as completely as he had? Who, then, was the Jew? If Jewishness could encompass Zeke the Tibestian and her stepfather in a single sweep, then everyone was Jewish, all humanity - and beyond it.
    And more than Jewish. She thought back to Noah, the tower of Babel, a record of an age before there were Jews, when people had lived together on the Earth, humans and others, in an idyllic time before they had challenged God and had been punished with the realization of their own sundering diversity, to give - what? Tibestians, Neanderthals in the Battle Cave, the Almai that had eaten Avi's friends in reverence, Souris Saint-Michel, the Inscription, Tom, Avi - and herself.
    Domingo was right - religion did not transcend humanity, it defined it. Any creature that raised its head above the murk and sought the face of God, however hopelessly, and however lowly, alien or strange it might have been, was a human being by definition.
    This inner blast of revelation did not stop, for now filling her head were words she'd learned in her diploma-college biology class, that came now as if in answer -- from a source that would have had Howie Levinson squirming with horror: that there is a grandeur in this view of life, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful have been, and are being, evolved.
    Shoshana sat in stunned silence with the ghost of Darwin and the memory of her Father and Mother and her avoteinu v'imoteinu back to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the nephilim and Homo erectus and apes and all the creatures that had crawled out of the slime, all there on the bench with her, looking up at her young face in expectation of an answer that did not come.
    Before she could say anything else, the Jew whose name was Zeke but was really something utterly remote and inhuman stood up, collected his paper-wrapped falafel, and walked with a loping, stork-like gait to a waiting sherut, which drove off in a clash of gears and dust.
    "Tom, I'm sorry ..." she started, inwardly cursing that she always seemed to be apologising to him all the time, "I wanted to bring him to you, I know how much you wanted to meet a Tibestian, but when I looked up, he'd just disappeared. Like he was a dream, like he'd never ... like I imagined the whole thing."
    "It is nothing, Shoshana." Tom was disappointed not to have had another hominid to add to his collection, but was more awed and troubled by Shoshana's expression, her eyes, which had now become huge, pupils like pinpoints, irises at their fullest and the deepest purple, like Indian ink.
    "It was weird, Tom, he was so, like, other. But he knew, Tom, he took me back to when I was a little girl in the synagogue: I could see it all, Mum, Dad, everything -- it was all there before me, in my mind."
    Tom paused for a long time, looking at the maps of her eyes that were like the boiling, unfathomable coronae of young alien suns, and then, as if pulling something from a long-forgotten well: "you know, it's like something Domingo once said, when I was little."
    Shoshana looked up. "What ...?"
    "Well, you know Domingo and I have always been close. He's been more mon père than Jack, in some ways, like he's always looked out for me, even from far away. And one day - I think - yes, I was about nine or ten, and Fairbanks had died. Who was Fairbanks? He was my dog, and my best friend."
    Shoshana recalled the picture of the big golden retriever on the mantelpiece at the farmhouse.
    "I was very distressed, at losing my good friend. But, you know, my Maman and Papa have never been very religious, and they didn't seem to have ... to have the right things to say, when Fairbanks died..."
    "Like you needed a ritual?" prompted Shoshana.
    "Yes, that's exactly it, a ritual. To be sure, they tried: you know what people say, `Fairbanks is looking down on us from doggy heaven'; `Fairbanks is free from pain now', and so on. But nothing they seemed to say worked for me. So I was as upset as ever - remember, I was only a little boy!" Shoshana loosened up a little at this, wrinkling up her nose with laughter, fluttering her lashes over the intensity of her eyes, leaning up against him.
    "In the end they just shrugged and told me to wait for Domingo. So next time he was visiting, he did a ritual for the dog in the garden. Just for me. Nobody else was there. I don't know, maybe my parents kept out of the way on purpose. But I swear, Shoshana, he must have made it up as he went along," Tom laughed in remembrance, Shoshana now embracing him as they sat on the beach.
    "But it was just something he said. That although his church said that Fairbanks had no soul, we two - you know, if it was just entre nous - we could always ... er ... stretch a point for special friends, on one condition: that if, and only if, we'd loved Fairbanks as though he was a person -- then God would love him too."
    Shoshana, leaning up against Tom, said nothing, but looked across the still, flat lake, regretting once again that she'd never had the courage to take Domingo into her confidence. She marvelled at the sensitivity - the informality -- of a ritual that the priest had made up to ease the bereavement of a child. But the sentiments were not patronizing, and very far from childish. They were eternal. Domingo had understood that if a sense of religion defines any creature as human - that was the basis of Undique humanitas, which must then have been still quite new and raw -- then something else is necessary, too. For religion implies awe, and devotion, even fear: and these things are impossible without love.
    So Domingo had made the obvious connection. That if we love someone, or something, we are in effect transferring something of our souls to them, just like every scribbler of every cheesy love song ever written had always understood.
    But there is a flipside. Only those that can love have souls to share. And her blood ran cold with revulsion at the religion of her upbringing, at least as interpreted by her stepfather. Domingo realized that religion must have rituals if it is to survive, but can only remain meaningful if there is space for these rituals to be stretched, and for love to find its expression. For without love there can be no soul, and no humanity, and therefore no religion.
    But Judaism The Howie Levinson Way was all about ritual coming first, no matter what, and love was a long way down the list. His religion had survived for thousands of years despite the earnest attempts of many to destroy it - but at what cost? Without love it was meaningless, with the pointless, bureaucratic cruelty of any Kafka short story. The tragedy was that this inhuman austerity was quite unnecessary. For what she'd seen in Zeke's burning, alien eyes when she'd mentioned Avi Malkeinu was nothing but awe and devotion, and love. She would pray for her stepfather's soul, if she was confident he had one.
    The sun was beginning its descent down behind their backs. It was time to move on, to Masada. They'd learned from Alina that you could usually hitch a ride there from the Dead Sea, straight up the highway. A small crowd of people was already milling around the bus stop beyond the snack bar and the showers, and some them said they were Masada-bound. Staying the night at the summit of the ancient hill fortress was officially discouraged, but unofficially tolerated as an item on the student-boho-backpacker List of Things To Do.
    So Tom and Shoshana joined up with a small group who'd fallen in with a muscular young man with an American accent who'd just become an Israeli citizen and had completed basic training in the army. His name was Danny Forbert. He was chatting with a sandy-haired and studious-looking Englishman who Tom thought he recognize, but whom he couldn't place; and a couple of other backpackers, both Mexican. One was a slim and well-groomed lawyer called José Luis, the other an engineer, Carlos, a bearded and ramshackle bear of a man who must have weighed three hundred pounds. Most people were amazed to learn that they were, in fact, brothers - perhaps less so that they were passionate Stones fans and were in Israel to catch the first date of the latest and possibly last world tour of the group they called Los Rollings. Tomorrow they'd head to Tel Aviv in the almost certainly vain hope of getting tickets. And if they didn't, hell, they'd get drunk anyway.
    Danny Forbert was one of those natural leaders, whose calm authority meant that decisions were reached with perfect consensus, with little or no argument beforehand. And so it was under his direction that the six of them flagged down a sherut for the couple of stops to Masada.
    Tom wished Jack could have seen it. If there were any proof necessary that landscape could be shaped by the hand of man and still look like landscape, this was it. Masada had once been a mountain like any other, but it had been converted into a palace and fortress more than two thousand years before, by Herod the Great.
    Although now demonized for the Slaughter of the Innocents - a tale almost certainly mythical - Herod was undeservedly less well known for his more concrete accomplishments. He'd built a vast sea port at Caesarea that had made Roman Judaea the maritime capital of the Eastern Mediterranean. He'd created the amazing cylindrical palace of Herodium just outside Bethlehem that would have looked avant-garde even in the twenty-first century. And most of all, Masada.
    Herod's engineers started with a natural feature but had flattened the summit, using the overburden to make the sides almost sheer and impossible to climb, especially if the summit were fortified and manned. But its final days had been wrought in blood. Long after Herod, Masada had been the last redoubt of a caste of Jewish religious zealots, who committed mass-suicide when the fortress was finally stormed by the Roman Tenth Legion, the only force capable of taking it - and even then only after a long siege. The Romans had added to Masada's landscape, by building an immense ramp from the valley floor all the way to the summit. The ramp still existed, now, like the table mountain, just another feature of the Wilderness of Judaea.
    Danny was the only one of the six who'd been to Masada before, and he promised them all a `special treat' when they crested the summit. He led the way to the foot of a dusty and treacherously steep track that switchbacked up the western face of the hill. That they could climb it at all was testament to the effects of two millennia of erosion on Herod's almost unbreachable redoubt, the dry desert winds aided by tens of thousands of eager feet -- and the lack of military resistance. When Tom, Shoshana and the others finally stormed the hilltop they were sweaty, dusty, seared by the still-strong evening sunshine and fit to drop. All except army-hardened Danny, and, surprisingly, Carlos, who thundered over the ridge like a bright-eyed Visigoth on the rampage, adrenalin trumping exhaustion, and ready for anything.
    Flushed with achievement, they started to look around the low, grey stone walls - all that was left of the ancient fortress - and looked up at the stars. Tom had been a latecomer to stars, but when he'd first seen them as a child he was entranced, fascinated. He always exulted in nights of stars, with no Moon or streetlights to spoil them. How could nights be so dark and so dazzlingly bright at the same time? And for all the many nights he'd spent in the garden of the farmhouse, gazing upwards, he'd never seen stars like this. The stars he saw from Masada were the best stars he had ever seen, pinpoint perfect from one horizon to the other in the dry desert air, with no moon to spoil their radiance, and no nearby cities to wash the sky with dirty orange fog. The Milky Way was an unbroken bridge above his head. For the first time in his life he could understand what the stars must have meant to the ancients, before the press of human illumination forced them into the background, to be viewed properly (or at all) only in planetaria or textbooks. Until, that is, a bright green distress flare, and the sound of voices broke this celestial peace.
    Advancing twenty yards or so further in and peering over a wall, the huddle of tourists saw what looked like an entire legion of the Israeli army all set up for a party. There were tables laden with produce, a barbecue and a detachment of marines setting off fireworks. A small disturbance at the edge of the crowd showed that despite their silence and relatively hidden state, the tourists' presence had been noticed. A single soldier in full battle dress came over. He exchanged a few words with Danny in Hebrew - Tom hoped they were friendly, as indeed it proved.
    "We saw you here", said the soldier. "I'm the only one who speak shit good English, so the Commander she say I make talk with you. We fire guns, yes? So you can stay here, but you stay here behind this wall, good? When we say yes, you come join in, yes? We have a great party, yes?"
    Danny confirmed that this indeed had been the treat he had promised, as he had undergone it himself. Newly recruited Israeli soldiers celebrated the end of basic training (if celebrate is the right word) with a sixty-kilometer desert route march in full gear, the final flourish being an ascent of Masada using the eastern ramp constructed by the Romans during their siege operations. And when they reached the top, they'd get medals and have a party. We watched the ceremony, with each new graduate greeted with a crackling salvo of automatic fire. Then they'd eat and drink - and that's when the tourists got some free Israeli Army hospitality. But despite the jollification, there was something hesitant in their demeanour, a deep, dark look in their eyes that was a mixture of resolve - and dread. Tom had seen it in Avi's eyes as Shoshana had seen it in Alina's. The Army left as silently as their presence had been noisy. By midnight the last jeep had hummed off into the night, and Masada belonged to the tourists and the stars.
    Danny told them stories of his own experiences. Shoshana - who'd followed the party conversations better than anyone apart Danny, had also picked up on the mood.
    "Yeah," he'd drawled. "They told me that too. This could be the last new detachment they can train for a while. Everyone will be on active duty very soon. Including me." Suddenly, his dark eyes seemed to focus on something far away.
    "Friends, be thankful that I'm not allowed to tell you half the things I know, for they would scare you shitless."
    It was then that the sandy-haired Englishman spoke.
    "In the absence of such intelligence from Danny, I have some news which we should all know," he said, fingering an earpiece. "I have just heard it on the news - the Pope collapsed at the end of his Mass. They say he's ... died." Tom and Shoshana looked at each other and thought of Domingo. José Luis and Carlos crossed themselves, hugged each other and looked on the verge of tears. They bade Tom, Shoshana and the others good-night and retreated behind a low wall a few meters off. They heard the two of them talking anxiously and low for some time afterwards.
    It was then that Danny said, "maybe the rest of us should get such sleep as we can. We have to rise early and get off this rock - by seven a.m. the Sun is too scorching to tolerate. Then, maybe we can learn about the Pope. Anyway, I'm beat. Layla Tov!"
    He and the Englishman each wandered to small private nooks in the deep shadows amid the maze of low walls.
    That left just Tom and Shoshana, who found a sheltered corner, unrolled their compact sleeping bags, which they zipped together, and climbed in. The desert night cooled rapidly, and they were glad to have each other's warmth. Tom felt Shoshana's hot breath on his mouth, the press of her body against him, its fragrances in the confines of the sleeping bag.
    "I love you, Tom," she said, quite casually, looking at him and yet invisible apart from the glints in her eyes, and Tom recalled that she'd never said this before. But before he could answer, or even say anything at all, exhaustion had claimed her, and the only sounds left on Masada were titanic snores from Carlos, punctuated by curses from José Luis.
    But Tom couldn't sleep: he was still on a rush, a high after the strenuous climb, exultation at the stars. And the girl in his arms had confessed her love for him. He hadn't realized it then, but that had been the source of his confusion. From the time in the yard at Saint-Rogatien when he'd sensed her smell, heard her footsteps, and when he'd finally dared to take off his shades - oh then, for sure, he'd known.
    Tom felt a strong urge to get some air, clear his head, and to walk alone under the stars. They seemed to sing at him from heaven. His heart was buzzing with happiness - he hoped he'd remember this moment always. So he unfurled himself from Shoshana's embrace. He kissed the top of her head tenderly, and set off for a stroll among the stars. As he sought a tolerably comfortable perch for a solitary stargaze, he saw a figure silhouetted against the faintest glare from cities of tiny lights in far-off Jordan.
    It was the Englishman. Apart from his shocking news about the Pope, he'd said nothing during the entire trip, and Tom didn't even know his name. The fact that he'd looked vaguely familiar to Tom increased Tom's shyness. He didn't want to introduce himself only to realize that he should have known him anyway. He was a trainee clergyman, at an Anglican religious seminary in Cambridge. This explained why he seemed familiar - Tom must have seen him around in that fishbowl of a town -- and his name was Fearon Brimstone.
    "Unbelievable, I know. Parents, eh? It's as if I was driven to my vocation to make up for it."
    Brimstone seemed suitably impressed by Tom's name and archaeological connections. "The Jack Corstorphine? The Jadis Markham?" Brimstone affected doffing an imaginary hat. Tom laughed when Brimstone continued: "I am in the presence of royalty!" before dropping his own bombshell.
    "We are, then, in a sense related. My grandfather was Roger MacLennane, who would have been your Mum and Dad's ex-Professor. He always used to chuckle about how he introduced them to each other." Tom was open-mouthed with amazement, at the coincidences that brought him and Brimstone together on this desert mountain top in the middle of the night. After which, they fell into easy conversation.
    Like Tom, Brimstone had come out to look at the stars. "Not often you see stars like this", he said. Tom wondered if Brimstone was going to say something about being closer to God, and had he done so, he wouldn't have been surprised. He was still trying to digest Shoshana's revelations about the Tibestian. What Brimstone said did have God in it, but was something far, far stranger.
    "Did you ever read a story called `The Nine Billion Names of God'?" he asked.
    Tom was about to confess that he hadn't, when he remembered a battered anthology of science fiction stories that Avi Malkeinu had passed on to him when he was about twelve. Avi had been a fan of science fiction, ever since his father had read him H. G. Wells.
    "Hey, Tom," Avi had said, "nothing like The War of the Worlds for sweet dreams! Maybe that explains a lot about how I turned out, eh?" The memory of the young Tom saw Avi's mad staring eyes, his flashing teeth, and laughed.
    And so Tom recalled for Brimstone the very brief tale, about a lamasery in Tibet where the monks are working out the nine billion names of God, and having got a computer to help them, complete their task thousands of years ahead of schedule. Who'd written it? Someone in the early twentieth century.
    "I think it was Arthur C. Clarke. But I forgot how it ends. Why do you mention it?"
    "Well, you know," said Brimstone, "it turned out that the enunciation of God's names was the final and culminating purpose of Creation. When the American technicians, who had installed the computer, leave the lamasery - on a bright, starry night such as this one, they notice the stars slowly going out."
    The chill fell between them like a frozen shroud.
    "It is a creepy thought", Tom said, more to break the silence than anything else. Brimstone turned towards Tom, looked up at the stars again and said,
    "Creepy? Yes, I suppose it is. But just imagine it, if it were really true. You know, we could be those two technicians, high on a hill in the wilderness, looking up at the stars and wondering that very same thing."
    Just for a second, Tom wondered if he had found himself, miles from anywhere, alone with a lunatic.
    "What makes you say that?" he ventured, nervously.
    "Well, it's a funny thing", said Brimstone. "You know, at college, we study a lot of theology, homiletics, ancient Hebrew, Latin, the usual stuff. But we're also encouraged to do as much science as we're able, especially evolution, and cosmology."
    "To keep one step ahead of the unbelievers?" Tom's head was still whizzing with Shoshana's shared thoughts. Poor Shoshana seemed so weighed down with religion as he was relatively free of such things. But perhaps, here, in Israel, everyone you met had a view about religion. And then he thought of Domingo, and his mind started to make some connections of its own.
    "Ah! No, not a bit of it," Brimstone answered. "All that creationist piffle is past, and in any case, most honest theologians didn't give it the time of day anyway. Dismal theology. Worse science. A no-brainer, really. We study these things to do what scientists of the past did - the greats, you know, Einstein, Newton - to magnify the name of the Creator, and to better understand what the Old Chap was on about. Especially as he seems to have given up appearing as pillars of cloud or burning bushes. So there we are, looking at modified brane theory, quantum gravity, nucleosynthesis, developmental macronomics, all that stuff. It's good honest work. I like it."
    Tom nodded, thinking that this was probably the best course to take.
    "So there I was in my final tutorial before the summer vacation - before I came here - and my tutor, a sweet old darling - not really a scientist, more at home writing tomes on Perpendicular church furniture. " Tom pictured oak pews standing on end, like totem poles. "He took a few of us aside and told us some disturbing news - about the fate of the stars. He couldn't make much of it, and wanted our opinions, more than anything. You know, maybe you could shed some light on it? I'm grateful for anything, because I'm puzzled. And worried."
    Tom confessed his ignorance of astronomy: but then he saw what Brimstone was getting at. Jack and Jadis had been the best-known scientists of the GW Institute, but Ginsberg Wang had long been funding a sister Institute in Cambridge. Tom remembered Domingo talking about this, when Jadis was puzzling over the Inscription from SSM. The brief of this other GW Institute was to map the positions and movements of the stars in the Solar neighbourhood. Brimstone, with his family connection to Roger MacLennane, would certainly have been aware of this. But apart from that, Tom was genuinely in the dark, and said so. He did not yet articulate a faint unease at where (he thought) this might all be leading.
    "No matter. Perhaps it'll take a casual bystander - no offence - to see what this is really about. No, really, I'd like your views."
    So he told Tom about a tiny, obscure paper that had been deposited in a tiny, obscure physics archive by a tiny, obscure group of astronomers in New Zealand, some of whom had been funded by the GW Astrometry Institute. The press hadn't picked up on it, and Tom had not heard of it.
    "Not surprising really - negative results don't often get noticed. But this was more than negative. You see, these astronomers were doing some recent curation of wide-field plates to assess the proper motions of nearby stars." Tom looked blank. Brimstone sighed.
    "That's basically what the GW Institute funds - cataloguing proper motion. You know, the stars we see aren't fixed, like they're stuck on the inside of a black velvet bowl. They move around. Some towards us, some away from us, some from side to side. All stars do this, but the ones closer to us seem to do it more because - well, they're closer. The movement is appreciable and measurable over years and decades."
    Tom look surprised. Brimstone laughed - a warm, musical sound after these chilly intellectual magnitudes. "You know, not everything in astronomy is ... er - "
    "... Astronomical?"
    "Exactly! Anyway, the astronomers picture the sky every so often, compare the pictures with older pictures, work out these movements, so they can update star maps and so forth. But what they noticed seemed very odd. Sure, some of the stars had moved, but a few - two or three out of thousands - weren't there at all".
    "Like, they'd vanished? No débris? Rocks? Gas - radiation - whatever?"
    "That's just it. Vanished. Rubbed out. Pouff!" He waved his hands, like a deity casually swatting the fates of billions. "And yes, before you mention it, they'd checked that they'd taken the proper exposures, and that the stars hadn't moved so fast that they turned up on other plates, and so on and so forth. And they got another lot of astronomers in Chile to check the findings. No, these stars had disappeared down the back of the celestial sofa. And there was one more thing. The stars that vanished weren't randomly distributed. They were all clustered close to the celestial South Pole - which is a particularly boring patch of sky, so it's no wonder that nobody had noticed anything odd before. And they were all tiny, dim red dwarfs, and all between fifteen and seventeen light years away from us. Now that's the real strangeness. The non-randomness of it all."
    Tom would have been convinced that Brimstone was spinning a yarn, or trying to tell some obscure theological joke, but if so, this would hardly explain the hairs standing up on the back of his neck, and his sudden recollection of Domingo's strange, knowing expression, knowing and yet almost terrified, when he and Shoshana had hypothesized that the Inscription had been a warning, a totem to ward off eclipses. The disappearance of stars. Perhaps they'd been far closer to the truth than they'd realized. Tom felt suddenly as if he'd sobered up.
    "Non-randomness implies that it's almost as if there's a purpose to it all," Tom heard himself say, and, to his own horror, he continued, "as if it were meant to happen. But if that's true, it's a purpose quite different from the Clarke story, which gives the impression that the stars were going out more or less randomly, non? And Clarke's stars were big ones, that the technicians could just casually see as they were walking along. They didn't have to go looking for them."
    "The astronomers in New Zealand didn't say anything like that, of course," said Brimstone, "they just documented the absences. But you know what I think? I think that there's someone or something out there that's trying to creep up on us and bite us on the bum."
    Tom felt that his heart had stopped, and that he was covered all over in a blanket of clogging, wet chill.
    "Yes, I know," said Brimstone into the silence. "Monumentally paranoid. But what else is there? And even if this whatever-it-is isn't Out To Get Us in particular, something definitely is happening. And whatever-it-is caused my tutor some theological heart-searching. Me too. Has God decided to come out of hiding? If this the twenty-first century equivalent of burning bushes? Is it a test of faith, in the guise of science? Frankly, I don't know what to make of it."
    When Tom awoke the next morning, spooned around Shoshana's peaceful, fragrant warmth, all thoughts of cosmic disturbance had vanished from his mind - for apocalypse had arrived.

    Chapter 16

    (August 2034)

    Blood and destruction shall be so in useAnd dreadful objects so familiarThat mothers shall but smile when they beholdTheir infants quarter'd with the hands of war.
    William Shakespeare - Julius Caesar

    The pilot once had a name but he had forgotten it. It had been drilled out of him in a dozen training camps from Kandahar to Khufra. But he was content to have done so, to have allowed himself to have become subsumed in a greater mission, a greater conquest. For the final moment had come, when the Khalifa would regain Holy Al-Quds and drive the Zionists into the sea at last. Secure in the cockpit of his strike jet, he was wired so thoroughly into its computer, its avionics and weapons systems, that he could control them all with a flicker of thought. He and his aircraft were one, and yet just one barb of one vane of one feather in the thousand wings of the Prophet.
    With his remaining spark of individuality, he was proud to have been selected for this, the very first wave, to demonstrate that the Khalifa had the resolution to sweep all opposition away, and not (for shame) talk so vividly of blood and skulls and death and yet run screaming like children at the faintest hint of opposition. Those times were over. His task now was not destruction, but terror: to fly beneath the Zionist radar too fast for their missile systems to follow, buzz the rooftops of Tel Aviv, circle over the sea and return. After that, the batteries of missiles would pound the cities into dust, and the waves of ground troops would achieve the blood, skulls and death so long and so earnestly desired.
    Not that the passage of an aircraft flying at Mach 7 less than a hundred metres over the city wouldn't be destructive in itself. The turbulence of its wake would be as a white-hot airquake, piercing eardrums, shattering windows, ripping any unprotected object smaller than a laden truck off the ground with the demon rage of a twister. Buildings immediately beneath its path would have the air sucked out of them and implode, and anything organic within fifty metres would burst into flames. The effect on any exposed human being in this range would not be far short of that of a nuclear strike.
    The pilot mused on such things with satisfaction as he arrowed across the Jordanian Desert, the currents of his thoughts exalting as his craft danced and wheeled to his direction through the canyons, tracing the contours of the grey and yellow mountains on the wings of dawn, generating a roaring cloud of dust in its train. This was true exhilaration - to have achieved the dreams of centuries, to be as free as a dove, as a raven, even though on an errand of war.
    That his senses were occasionally clouded with spots of blackness he attributed to the lurching shifts in acceleration as the plane altered its course constantly under his direction. His own, human body, wired into the system, was physically immobile: and so at first he ignored the visuals that warned of increasing damage to his peripheral nervous system, and that his skin conductivity and heart rate now deviated markedly from mission-optimum levels. A message intruded from the outside world, relayed by satellite from Strike Mission Control in Tabriz. The message said:
    TELEMETRY ERROR: ABORT MISSION
    And, of course, he would have obeyed this command instantly and without question. But he found that he could not. The aircraft was guided, moment by moment, in the only way feasible for a machine that could travel at such speeds so close to the ground -- by the thought of a human pilot directly interfaced with the aircraft's systems. And yet to broadcast such overriding imperatives to his avionics, he would need to underline the point by sub-vocalization. First, to ensure that the commands were clear, and, second, to convince the conjoined, near-sentient machine that his thoughts were significantly beyond the normal variation expected of the merely human. Even though the pilot would not actually need to move his mouth to do this, only to enact the movement in his mind, he found that his jaw muscles were locked in tetany.
    Terror rose to the surface as he felt his body squirming helplessly within the shock-gel that lined his flight suit, itself slotted into the cockpit with no room to move. Subdermal proprioceptors registered extensive bruising as his body convulsed within its artificial shell. Motion detectors in his bones traced sharp, jagged movements consistent with uncontrolled muscular spasms. His heart muscle had begun to fibrillate: chemosensory channels in his kidneys and intestines reported rapid spikes in ionic concentrations, indicative of unwitting evacuation into recycling and life-support.
    The black spots that he had attributed to G-force were now permanently hovering before his eyes, until they completely obscured his vision. So he would not have seen the sudden rash of heads-up displays, each competing for attention and burning off the chart, recording that his organs were liquefying from within, and that his bones were imploding like popcorn crushed in an armoured fist.
    No longer directed by its human component, the mind of the jet had to improvise. It could not respond directly to Mission Control, whose designers had decreed that the human pilot must always have the override, unless it could be demonstrated that the pilot had died. But although telemetry from the strike craft indicated the signs of an extraordinary transformation, they did not reveal unequivocal signs of death. The brain waves were unprecedented in shape and utterly obscure in meaning, but they were brain waves nonetheless.
    The aircraft did its best to keep to the planned course, but without the constant corrections of its human partner - who had drifted off into some unrecognized brain-wave cycle, deeper than the merely subconscious, which it could have done something about - the course deviated every nanosecond from that which its pilot would otherwise have chosen, until it came on a sudden upon a landscape that was passing it too quickly for it to be able to process the topography into its dead-reckoning system. Somewhere in the Wilderness of Judaea, perhaps inevitably, it met a mountain it did not recognize quickly enough. The mountain rushed up to meet the aircraft at almost five thousand miles an hour.
    Not that the Duty Lead Controller in Tabriz was aware of this incident in particular, as he had his own problems. Of the fifty strike jets in the first wave, sixteen had reported similar pilot-interface problems, of which eleven had disappeared altogether. Clearly, something was desperately wrong, and, frantically, he recalled as many of the aircraft as he could before things got any worse. But try as he might, screen after screen turned from green to amber to red and, finally, to black. Two of the Junior Mission Controllers had suddenly gone off sick, grey and sweating. The Lead Controller assumed, at first, that they couldn't stand the pace. But when his own bladder was full to bursting and he'd had to go to the washrooms, he found his absent colleagues. Or, that is to say, he found their clothes, alongside what looked like two black bowling balls. He could not account for this. Were they going bowling in the nude? What was going on? The day had started with so much promise. He had woken up, looking forward to his shift, on what heralded a great day for the Khalifa. They were, finally, going to do for the Jews, he told his admiring wife and three sons as he set off for Mission Control. But now it was a nightmare, from end to end.
    The Lead Controller felt that he had to take responsibility for his abject failure, reconciled to a harsh and possibly lethal sentence. He hoped that the General would treat his family kindly. But when he had reported to his own superior, the secretary would say only that the General had been `indisposed'. The secretary had dropped her gaze from his, which was very proper, but then she collapsed on her desk, all decorum gone, looking at him directly with wide, desperate eyes:
    "I saw it, Major. I saw the General turn into a monster, a black ... thing! It was horrible, horrible!"
    From its shock value alone, the mission had actually been a great success, for the eleven missing jets had become ballistic missiles of terrible power. To be sure, six had plunged into the sea, and a seventh had smashed into the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, transforming the First Wonder of the Ancient World into a very large pile of barbecue briquettes. But an eighth had scored a direct hit on a fashionable condo complex in Tel Aviv, demolishing most of a city block and killing at least fifteen hundred people. Alina Jacob had not stood a chance. Her last thought before being atomized was whether she should tell David that she'd booked a one-way ticket to London.
    A ninth had dropped like a meteor onto the Hadassah hospital, vaporizing Dr Mohamed Al Hajj, Resident, all his staff and several hundred patients. Dr Al Hajj had been examining a number of cases of the same affliction that had destroyed the Pope, whose remains - if that's what they were - had been removed by an ashen-faced Cardinal Sanchopanza. From what Dr Al Hajj could discover -- darting all over a hospital that was cycling into in a state of rising panic, to see each case for himself as it ran its terrifying, unstoppable course -- the patients had been transformed, but had not actually died. Even though no equipment at the hospital that he could lay his hands on at short notice could penetrate the matt-black shells of the ... er... `patients', not even the most powerful X-ray machine, he was still convinced they were alive, even though he could not have said why: and because of this, he had hesitated to commission anything more invasive.
    Working late into that same night, Dr Al Hajj drafted a small note to an online medical bulletin describing the condition. He noted that its incidence seemed too patchy and indiscriminate to be consistent with any kind of contagion. And he also had the honour of naming it: he called it Postembryonic Oolithic Petrosis, or POP for short. Like all conscientious medical men, Dr Al Hajj felt that once a disease had a name, one was at least half way to curing it. He was musing on life and death in this fashion as dawn broke through the window of his tiny carrel of an office, when he sent the note to the server and, a split instant later, his own angel arrived.
    The scientists in the Khalifa, being more technically advanced than anyone had suspected or even thought possible, had far more powerful equipment than that available to Dr Al Hajj, and were less squeamish about its use. The first cases of the affliction had come to light in the Khalifa several days earlier, but had been kept secret. Families and colleagues of `patients' tended to disappear themselves not long after reporting a case - until the pestilence, plague, or whatever it was, became too widespread for this lockdown policy to be feasible. But discerning what had happened to the patients proved impossible. Boiling them in oil, toluene, nitric acid or molten tungsten; dropping them into nuclear reactors; applying the kinds of pressures typical of stellar interiors - none had any effect at all. They didn't even warm up. They remained similarly refractory to particle-beam weapons developed for space warfare, even at close range and in high vacuum. The last straw came when a few patients had been exposed to the two-million-degree plasma in the experimental fusion torus at Rawalpindi, but the trial had to stop when the plasma threatened to break out of its magnetic confinement. The patients were completely unharmed, their surfaces as smooth as if they'd had a bath. In the end the scientists gave up: the black spheres that had once been people kept their undead secrets to themselves.
    The tenth dove nose-first into the middle of Ramat Gan stadium, replacing it with a crater sixty metres deep and full of molten rock. Casualties, thankfully, had been relatively light: apart from the Stones' road crew, lighting riggers, sundry maintenance staff and `Mr Micawber' - a 1950s blonde Fender Telecaster reputed to be Keith Richards' favourite -- the stadium had been empty. But the concert would have to be cancelled.
    The eleventh struck the eastern face of Masada about a hundred metres short of the summit.
    In the early hours of the morning, when unfamiliar stars wheeled just before the rising Sun, Shoshana stirred in her sleep and, half-waking, stretched, smiled, brushed Tom's lips with hers, and curled up again beneath his chin, her hands slowly, dreamily, stroking his chest.
    Tom awoke then, his first sight the top of her head, her long, glossy hair glinting in the Sun's first rays. He wanted to wake her, very slowly, and make love to her, while they were both still half in the arms of sleep: it was at this time of day that he desired her most, for there was something about her smell just as she was beginning to wake that was powerfully alluring. If there was a word that could describe that smell, it was `contentment'. Her skin was also slightly saltier than usual, and tasted even lovelier than at any other time of day or night. He ran one finger up inside her ever-present baggy T-shirt, following the curve and dip of her spine, marveling as he always did at the smoothness of her flesh, and was wondering whether he should unclasp her bra, when something caught his eye, just above the low, eastern wall of ruined building in which they had slept.
    He thought he saw a column of dust in the dawn, the flash of something silvery, and then heard a sonic boom from a great distance, eastwards. He raised himself up to peer over the wall, and his world went instantly, searingly white, a flash accompanied by a roar of inhuman volume. The ground shook, buckled and liquefied beneath him. He ducked down in the utter agony of his eyes, his mind cast back to a yard far away when he was chasing leaves with Fairbanks and the world of light had cascaded in on him like two comets drilling into his terrified skull. But now the sky really was falling and the ground beneath him heaving upwards to meet it. Their bivouac which a moment before had been a haven of the quiet promise of love had become the uncertain centre of a crashing, sliding maelstrom of overwhelming noise and a rain of boulders. Tom - blinded and almost deafened -- threw himself over Shoshana and put his hands over his head. The sleeping bag that contained them both took off like a wayward surfboard in a tubular breaker. He thought he heard Shoshana screaming, two inches away from his ear and at the top of her voice, but he could only just hear it.
    What seemed like hours later - it was, in fact, about twenty seconds - the storm of dust and rocks ceased. Shoshana was now fully awake, uninjured but in shock. That she'd had her eyes closed and her face close to Tom saved her sight, but she was dazed and at first had no idea where she was, or why. The world was dark, partly because of Tom's spasmodic embrace, but also because they had been half-buried in rubble.
    She did not know this, but all their companions had perished. José Luis and Carlos, the Mexican Stones fans, had been asphyxiated by a pyroclastic flow of white-hot dust and buried beyond all hope of recovery. Danny Forbert, sleeping closest to the impact, was vaporized in a dead flat picosecond by the exploding plasma fireball. But Fearon Brimstone had expired several hours earlier -- quietly, all alone and in unspeakable pain -- from Postembryonic Oolithic Petrosis.
    She was aware that the surface of Masada had changed completely. The maze of buildings from the evening before was now an unrecognizable slush of broken scoria. As the Sun began to climb, its rays penetrating the ubiquitous yellow, choking murk and the thicker columns of dust and smoke that fumed all around, she knew that she and Tom had to get off the ruined mountain as soon as they could. She pulled herself out of the sleeping bag and, slipping and sliding in the rubble, struggled unsteadily to her feet. She realized that she'd been hurt - her left ankle was twisted. Putting any weight on it sent red-hot needles of pain up her leg, making her pause for breath. She was aware of the silence of the world, as if her ears had been stuffed with cotton wool. She looked down at Tom, curled up like a fetus in the rags of the sleeping bag. Blood ran from his ears and from a myriad small wounds in his scalp and arms. And where he wasn't red, he was yellow, caked in filth and grit.
    Awkwardly, she knelt down next to him in the smoking scree.
    "Tom, we have to go. Somehow - but we have to." Her voice sounded adenoidal and very quiet. Tom said nothing. Shoshana, lightheaded and groggily uncertain of the extent of Tom's injuries, felt he'd probably come round eventually if left to himself.
    So, with the mindless optimism of all refugees and blast victims, she pecked around the rubble for their possessions. Their rucksacks, almost buried in rubble, had been ripped from the foot of the sleeping bag where they'd stowed them, and were torn beyond repair. She pulled out their money and ID-tags and, buried right at the bottom of her rucksack and mercifully in one piece, she found her ancient phone. God, a phone. Tom never used one, and she had long since got out of the phone habit that afflicts all teenagers. When had she last used it? When she'd phoned Alina to see if they could doss at her flat. She murmured Alina's name at the handset. No signal. Or perhaps there was, but she just couldn't hear it. She didn't have a contact for Avi and didn't know how to search for him. She felt she couldn't be bothered to dictate a message, and her fingers felt too much like numb sausages to write anything. Oh well, they'd simply have to walk out of here.
    Slowly, Tom came to his senses. To be completely blind again after all this time was a shattering blow. To be sure, he felt that he could probably function without sight as he always could, and who knows, maybe it would come back again, but now that he'd been shown the colour and vibrancy of the world, to lose it now was almost more than he could bear. And to lose the sight of Shoshana, her hair, her skin the colour of golden honey, the freckles on her shoulders, the way her nose wrinkled when she smiled, her strange, purple eyes - he might never again see something and know that it was `purple'. He got up, quite easily avoiding every obstacle, and apart from the blood caking his scalp and running like scabby rivers from both ears, what seemed like a thousand painful scratches, especially on his hands and arms, and enough bruises to make him feel like he'd been hit by a train -- he didn't seem to have suffered major physical injury. He took his hands away from his eyes and - nothing. He sensed Shoshana close, her early-morning smell clouded by dust and blood and pain.
    "Shoshana..."
    "I'm here, Tom - I'm here." And she was there, in his arms. He reached down to her and kissed her, as frankly and lovingly and as seriously as he knew how: her tongue responded to his, and there they were, cast away and injured in the midst of utter ruin and desolation, lost in each other's embrace. They parted and Shoshana looked up at him.
    "Tom, open your eyes."
    He did, and they looked to her as fabulous and green as they always did.
    "Shoshana, I can't see a thing. Nothing at all. But really, I'll be fine, you know that."
    By now, Shoshana had heard all about Tom's mysterious childhood blindness that had lifted, just as mysteriously, when he was six. Now it was back. "But Shoshana, I wanted to tell you something last night, but you had fallen asleep."
    They both paused. The Sun climbed further.
    "It's - well, now is not a good time, maybe. But it's just that - well, I love you. Like nothing else. I only wished I could have told you that when I could have seen your face, your beautiful face. You know, it was only when I took my shades off that I knew... so if I can never see you, I don't know if..."
    His hands reached out towards her, navigating her body from her shoulders, to her neck, to the rounded surfaces of her cheeks and lips, and to her lashes, and her eyes, which were filled with tears.
    "Oh, Tom - my own, poor, sweet Tom." She pulled herself towards him, head once again beneath his chin. She knew that she loved him for so many reasons, but mainly because he had made her whole, a proper mensch, a human being, with a soul to share. She reached up and gently stroked his lashes, his flickering eyelids, the streaks of tears and blood and dirt that striped his cheeks.
    "Come on, let's go home," she said.
    How they found themselves in Ben Gurion airport, neither of them could recall. There must have been a bus, or a sherut, or a police car, or something - it was all too foggy. They were still too deep in shock for anything much to register on their battered minds. But somewhere along the line they'd run into someone helpful, for they'd been cleaned up and Shoshana had a splint for her ankle. So now, here they were, in what they thought was the international check-in except the signs didn't really mean anything to her and which was full of a sea of anxious people screaming children people bandaged and whimpering trying to get a seat on whatever flight they could out of wherever it was they were. Were they checked in on a flight? If so, where were they going? They no longer had any idea. Eventually, Shoshana and Tom found themselves too tired to care any more. They would have sat there forever in numb stupefaction.
    The constant news bulletins on the screens above their heads reported the two Khalifa suicide jet attacks on Tel Aviv, the destruction of the Hadassah hospital. Masada might have got a mention and there were reports of movements of ground troops into the Galilee and then there was this strange disease. It was all too hard to tell. Tom couldn't see anything anyway and they were both still partially deaf and the noise all around them of swirling shouting people was distracting and got confused in her mind with the news reports really her mind might as well have turned to her Bubba's lockshen pudding.
    This strange disease was called Pop! Pop! Pop! -- and didn't seem to have any pattern said the doctor at the Hadassah who had died. The Khalifa was on the march but hey! Pop! Pop! Pop! Their planes had fallen from the sky which had fallen on them both and she knew she loved Tom so much even though he was blind and buried in rocks and there was something about a pillar of fire and a pillar of salt and loneliness and pain and Jadis - it was Jadis - who reached out to her and said she'd always be there for her just like Jack had told her he would and then there was Zeke who was also her Dad her wonderful Dad who looked down at her - no, up at her -- and said avinu malkeinu aseh imanu tzedakah v'chesed v'hoshiyainu...
    And so without thinking about it, a well of silence within the crowds, Shoshana took her phone and dictated a text to a number she really should have thought of much earlier, a message that read something like

    Jadis Jack we're here we're here we're safe we're alive we don't know what to do please treat us with charity and kindness help us.

    Jadis had returned home from her morning round of the village. She had learned many things on her journey, but none of them added up, and she had exhausted all possible means of progress. And so, by way of displacement activity, she was busily trying to focus her mind on the July accounts for SSM. Not that she really needed to, nor - as Jack explained, patiently -- that she needed to send quite so many exasperated notes to the Institute's Accounts Department, given the pressure it was under. But organization had always been her way of averting and diverting stress. She felt, instinctively, that if you could only arrange your own life, then the increasing disorder all around you would matter less, or in any case seem less disorganized, and anyway, even if it didn't, that at least you were doing something rather than just climbing the walls. If there was one thing she hated, it was being in the position of having too little information on which she could make a decision. But life's like that, she sighed - and science was a microcosm of life, requiring the ability to make educated guesses, shots in the dark. Jack was always so much better than her at guessing games.
    Her hair, ever a mark of her mood, now surrounded her like an swarm of angry bees that some rash interloper had stirred with a stick -- as if, in its disorder, it had been acting as a reservoir for the entropic increase she'd banished from her frantic quest to arrange her own thoughts. At least, metaphorically. In practice, the halo was an efficient heat trap, which worsened her frustration, which made her hair frizz and billow out even more, trapping more heat: a classic positive-feedback loop. A part of her said that she should do something about her hair and break the cycle, but she had always drawn back. It was a part of who she was: were she to tie it back, as some people at the Institute had sometimes suggested (all those, Jack said, who didn't know her any better!) she'd be tying back her brain. And cut it off for the summer? Unthinkable. She'd be a different person altogether.
    So she sloughed off her sandals instead, placing her bare feet squarely on the cool flags beneath the table, a sink for the heat from her body. The sensation calmed her, the feeling of being rooted to the solid earth. She took time to stop what she was doing, to breathe deeply, in and out, and to listen to the sounds of the house-timbers creaking and stretching in the mid-day heat, the chirp of crickets in the garden. She felt better. She could now think things through in a state approaching equanimity, if not quite reaching it.
    The first fruit of her meditation was the decision to put the accounts aside. In any case, she had reached a point where she was going round in circles and the figures were flying off in all directions.
    First the mysteries of the village.
    Now the accounts.
    Surely, she thought, no obstacle could fall beneath her feet if she tried to get a few simple things together for lunch? But when she'd looked around for bread she remembered that she hadn't managed to buy any, a result of the inexplicable, unprecedented closure of the boulangerie. It was too late to start baking; and anyway, if she had, the heat in the kitchen would become intolerable. But it was summer, so there were always tomatoes and cucumbers and lettuces in the garden, waiting to be harvested, so she thought she might make a salad instead. She put her sandals back on again, collected her sunhat and basket and headed through the arrière-cuisine to the back door.
    August had always been a low month at the farmhouse. Apart from a few forays to the potager, where she now collected the warm, ripening tomatoes, it had almost always been far too hot to work outside for much of the day. Although work at SSM took place underground, most of the staff at the Institute usually took the whole month off, so everything went into a kind of sleep mode anyway. The weather of the past few years had emphasized this: from the end of July to early September, noon temperatures climbed into the upper forties, and everyone was reduced to a helpless torpor. The birds were too exhausted to sing, let alone fly. Butterflies and lizards basked on the farmhouse walls with impunity, Les Horribles too vitiated to give chase. Only the crickets and grasshoppers chirped gamely on, stalked by the frogs, who could always retreat to their pond to cool off. So, whatever else one might have felt, and however the world outside did its best to buffet her off course, August was a good time for quiet, deliberate housekeeping.
    And so it had been, she thought, stooping with her clasp knife to cut some cucumbers from a vine that now sprawled exuberantly over the hot, crusted ground. Except for the worries that Jack had started to bring home from the Institute about ten days earlier, that people who'd gone away on vacation had failed to return; that an extraordinary number of staff had phoned in sick and were not heard from again; and that everyone in the Institute seemed to be doing three jobs to cover for people who could not be contacted. The Accounts Department had been especially badly hit, he explained, which is why nobody was answering her emails (Jadis felt a little ashamed of herself for pestering them).
    And, most disturbing of all, that three people returning from vacation had died, because the three separate aircraft on which they had been travelling had fallen out of the sky.
    It was then that Jadis recalled thinking, on her round only that morning, that the village had been more muted than usual, even for La France Profonde in the height of summer. That the Mairie had been shut for the month was no surprise; that the boulangerie had been not just shut, but locked and boarded up, without notice, definitely was. The boulangerie was open every single day of the year and had been so for as long as she could remember. To find it closed, without even a notice on the door, seemed like an affront to the laws of the Universe.
    Nonplussed, she had gone next door to Le Sanglier D'Or. Over coffee under the awning on the terrace - a favourite stop, where she and Jack had breakfasted on their honeymoon -- she'd asked Sandrine Pasquier, the burly, matter-of-fact former farmer's wife who'd run Le Sanglier D'Or for the past fifteen years, if she knew why the baker had done a bunk. Although Sandrine had never been renowned for cosy chats, she had been more than usually communicative, as if she'd had troubles to share. She even broke her own formerly inflexible commandment and joined a customer at a table, as she now did with Jadis.
    She'd been to a lot of funerals lately, Sandrine had said, sometimes for people who'd died for no good reason and were in fact in the peak of health, leaving families and children. If that weren't tragic enough, these enforced absences made it very hard for her to run a business -- especially when usually reliable staff kept vanishing with no good excuses and didn't come back, and when the brewery, usually so punctual, could hardly be bothered to send supplies as regularly as it promised. And so, Dr Markham, if she didn't mind, she would love to talk, but she had a hotel and a café to run, and although not too many people came into the bar lately, those that did were always thirsty. Sandrine stood up and disappeared into the darkness at the back of the bar, pretending to busy herself with glasses. Jadis noticed that the bar was currently completely empty, the tables shining in expectation of custom that might never arrive.
    So Jadis had once more braved the Sun's relentless photonic assault and picked her way across the scalding cobbles of the Place Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, taking refuge in the nave of the church. It smelled of cool stone and beeswax: shafts of hot light blasted through the high windows, picking out motes of chaff and dust. It was utterly, sepulchrally silent. Despite her almost total lack of religious conviction, she felt that ordering her thoughts here would be as effective as anywhere else, so she tried to piece things together. And here, in the church, she had always felt the reassuring if mostly absent shade of her old friend, Domingo. She felt he'd approve of the line of thought she felt she should now undertake.
    She found a pew near the front of the church and looked towards the altar, but her searching, brown gaze was now cool, and directed to yet further distances, with the same intense intelligence that many, over the years, had found both enthralling and frightening.
    Absences without leave - from the Institute, from the boulangerie, from the Sanglier D'Or. And from what Sandrine had said, not just absences, but deaths. The two concepts became conflated in her mind: given that there had been so much unexplained absence, so much inexplicable death, the two just had to be connected. But she had, as yet, too little information to go much further than that. So the scientist in her did what it had always done best, breaking down the problem into its fundamentals, trying hypotheses on what scant information she could assemble.
    Even though it was August and people were absent anyway, the numbers of deaths she knew about seemed anomalously high. To be fair, people did tend to die more often in this alien heat, but the victims were the traditionally vulnerable - the sick, the elderly, the very young. But Sandrine Pasquier said that she'd mourned people carried off in their prime: add one to the anomalies. Jack had implied the same, with his tally of absent and possibly deceased working-age staff at the Institute: therefore, add another. And August was not a time when the traditional complaints were in circulation - the colds, the influenza, the hypothermia of their now typically Siberian winters. It was too hot, and people were dispersed, not huddled up in small spaces breathing one another's exhalations: and so, add a third. The anomalies were stacking up towards statistical significance.
    But all of this was local. Could this be something that had struck Gascony in particular? Contamination of the groundwater? An unrecognized contagion spread in truffles or confits de canard? Unlikely. Such things had happened, of course. Every few years there was some scare or other that constrained farmers to keep their flocks of ducks and geese indoors, or force people to watch the water they drank, or the food they ate. Bird `flu' in 2007 and again in 2013, anserine spongiform encephalopathy in 2021, or - as had happened only last year - an epidemic of botulism traced to a local cannery. But if such a pestilence had been unleashed, she thought she'd have heard about it by now, from market-trader gossip. Yet there had been not a word of anything, and market traders being what they are, there would be no possibility of a cover-up. In any case, the scientist in her had no time for conspiracy theories.
    Ah, but it wasn't local, was it? There had been those air crashes. The ones that had carried off three Institute staff. In her mind she carefully reviewed the cases that Jack had told her about. There had been three separate aircraft, but the cause of the crashes was always the same - the pilot had died during the flight. The aircraft were all small, with no co-pilots or backup systems. But the key fact, she thought, was that the flights had all started in widely dispersed locations. One from Bucharest, another from Stavanger in Norway, the third from an aerodrome just outside the charmingly but improbably named village of Little Snoring, on the Norfolk coast. More mysteriously, she could find no mention of any specific cause of death. And her newsfile searches over the past few days had thrown up other instances from locations as far-flung as Western Australia (a mining transport), Denver (a commuter shuttle) and Ukraine (a crop sprayer). Again, she could find no mention of any specific cause of death. Why?
    However, given that she had no clue about precise causes of death, neither in the cases of the crashed aircraft, nor - she suddenly realized - in the swelling mortuaries closer to home, she had no reason to link any of them. Except one: Occam's Razor, the age-old germ of the scientific method that said that when faced with a choice of disparate causes to explain a set of events, one should always consider the simplest option first. In this case, that all the deaths had a single cause.
    It was then, in the cool peace of the church, that her mind transcended the obstacle: the precise cause did not matter, but that there was a common cause there could be no doubt at all. Why? Because the news websites that told her all about the air accidents all pointed to a remarkable hike in accidents of all kinds, all over the world - whether in cars, trucks, trains or just generally -- together with an unprecedented level or workplace absenteeism. She had been right, then, to equate absence with death. Each spike on its own was remarkable, but all of them together? The gears of the sharp-edged analytic engine inside her head meshed smoothly and illuminated deep ruby lanterns of statistical significance. What, she asked herself, was going on? For that, as yet, she had no answer.
    So she picked up her empty shopping bag, put on her hat, and walked out into the blinding sunshine like a Hollywood star leaving a cinema into a wall of flashbulbs.

    Later, her basket now full of new potatoes, chives and salad vegetables, she walked back across the scorched lawn and into the welcoming cool of the arrière-cuisine. She took off her hat and washed her face and hands at the tap at the Belfast sink. The water came from their well, but it was running low: it was murky, dark and tasted of soil. She wondered if it would last until the crackling thunderstorms that inevitably blew in during the second week of September. Last year, it had been a close thing, and they'd got by on fruit juice and raids to the wine cellar. Jack had unearthed a lovely bottle of Cahors, and they'd taken it to the Spinney to watch the last sunset of August together.
    How long ago it seemed - Tom hadn't yet gone to Cambridge, and Shoshana hadn't arrived in their lives. She wondered what they were up to now, and with all these thoughts about death and air accidents circling like vultures inside her skull, she had become anxious about them in a way that she hadn't before. Yesterday she'd read a newsfile reporting mass cancellation of flights, airlines going broke, airships being mobbed, general panic in the travelling public. So even if Tom and Shoshana were safe, how on Earth were they going to get home?
    Thinking of Tom and Shoshana and wondering what they were up to, she took the basket of vegetables through to the kitchen. Her laptop still displayed a snarl and a squirl of figures from the July accounts, but a flashing icon betrayed the arrival of three new emails. One was from Jack - he was on his way home for lunch, be home in twenty, looking forward to a siesta. But there was no word from Tom or Shoshana. To be sure, Tom was so laidback as to be practically horizontal, and was completely hopeless about keeping in touch. There had been just two emails from Shoshana for the whole time they'd been away. The first was a chatty note to say that they'd arrived in Israel safely but after a hell of a journey, and that Avi had met them at the airport and sent his love.

    What a funny man he is,

    Shoshana had written:

    So much like Tom, together they look like two retriever puppies playing a game.

    Jadis thought back fondly to Avi in Cambridge when they were all so young, and Tom as a boy, and to Fairbanks. Where had all the years gone?
    The second was very much terser and scattier, and had been sent when she and Tom were evidently drunk, after they had cut short their time with Avi and were going to stay with a friend of Shoshana's in Tel Aviv, if her friend would only answer her goddamn phone. At that, Jadis had sent a stern email to Avi demanding to know what happened.
    His reply - at least three days overdue, she thought, censoriously -- was the second email now winking at her. She'd expected it to be full of his usual mischievous and rather patronizing macho bombast, saying that he always thought her a babe, or sex-on-a-stick, or whatever, all of which had once been faintly amusing but now seemed rather silly and more than a little tired. The email she read, however, was quite unnervingly different. Subdued and cryptic, it had troubled her.

    I have shown Tom and Shoshana the Battle Cave I told you about yesterday and the revelation disturbed them

    he had written. Jadis could understand why. Avi's descriptive email and his hypothesis to explain the cave, an over-the-top yarn of blood and death and conquest, was quite lurid enough to have given anyone sleepless nights. To have seen the cave itself must have been overwhelmingly horrible: but even so, she thought, it was not at all like Avi to have come over all gothick, like that lurid old pulp fiction Jack liked to read when he thought she wasn't looking. Avi's latest note continued:

    However do not worry. T and S are fine but it is clear that they need a break. In any case I might be called away on urgent matters elsewhere.

    But it was the last part that had haunted her. It sounded like a valediction. Which, as it happened, was precisely what it was.

    I have encouraged T and S to enjoy themselves, to see as much of my beloved homeland as they can, while they can. There is no more time to waste. I am not sure when I shall be able to write again.

    Her eyes had begun to sting in anticipation of what came next, its finality.

    You and Jack have always been to me like a mother and a father and always an inspiration. When I needed it, you were always there with your kindness and your help. Shalom, Avi.

    She sat back, motionless and unmanned, staring at the cursor blinking at the end of Avi's signoff. Not quite knowing how to reply, or even if she should, she browsed the newswires and discovered the startling news that the Pope had collapsed during his open-air mass in Israel, and that he might have died. Death? Absence? Which was it? Either someone had died or they hadn't. Why couldn't people just make up their minds? Jadis thought back to the vagueness over causes of death in all those air accidents; the gears in her mind whirred into renewed life; the significance level notched higher.
    The third message, as if on cue, had come from that other Titan of her Dream Team. That Avi should have been in any way cryptic was surprising; Domingo, however, was full of complex allusions she was sure she'd missed. This example, however, was the very pinnacle of mind-boggling obscurity.

    My dear Jadis - the trip to the Holy Land has not gone entirely according to plan. I have some news you should know but it must wait until I can see you in person. I shall have business in Rome but will get to you as soon as possible thereafter. Suffice it to say that Mr Richards can no longer play Mr Micawber. You and Jack are ever in my prayers as always - D.

    Just who the hell were Richards and Micawber? Actors? Estate Agents? Undertakers? She wished people would take the time to say what they meant. Even Domingo. No, especially Domingo.
    In a state of exasperation now close to fury, she pushed aside the laptop, rose, set a pan of water on the hob, cleaned the dirt from a handful of potatoes and threw them in as if they were hand grenades. Then she started to chop the rest of the vegetables with such expedition - and mental distraction - that she was lucky not to have cut herself.
    She failed to notice another message, newly arrived in her inbox. And also that Jack had arrived, his steadying arms now around her waist, his breath on her cheek, reassuring. Every particle of the suppressed rage that had been surging through her body disappeared into the ground in an instant, like the guilty shadows that flee into the corners of a darkened room when a door is opened from an illuminated hallway. She closed her eyes as he kissed her neck.
    "Darling Jack..."
    Jack was quiet, increasingly beaten down by the pressures of mundane administration, with less and less time for roaming the wilds. But the farmhouse was a haven for him as it was for everyone else. To embrace Jadis from behind, to feel her taut-strung animation, the sway of her hair, was instantly restorative. She turned in his arms and rested her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes seemed slightly troubled, downcast.
    "Snow Queen...?"
    "Time for lunch!" she said, shaking herself free briskly setting the table. She explained her worries to Jack, as they ate: her unnerving trip to the village, and her feeling that things didn't make sense - unless there were a single cause for the general tide of disappearance and death. She waved her hands as she ate, as if she were conducting an orchestra. Her colour rose when she talked Jack though the uncharacteristically odd emails from Avi and Domingo, pulling the laptop round to show him. Jack's eyes darkened when he'd read Avi's sombre message, but he made no comment.
    "Who are Richards and Micawber?" Jadis asked him. "Any idea?"
    "Ah, yes!" Jack laughed. "Mr Micawber is Keith Richards' name for his favourite guitar. A vintage Fender Telecaster, I think."
    Jadis looked at him in wide-eyed wonder. "How...? Did you ...?"
    "Oh, you know, just one of Domingo's little jokes," he replied. "You never listened much to the music he and Avi used to play at Le Dig, did you? I think they always turned it off when they saw you coming. Brown Sugar was one of Domingo's favourites."
    "And all this time, I never knew! Amazing..."
    "But I can state an unfair advantage. I believe that the Stones were due to kick off their a world tour in Israel, at Tel Aviv... er ... about now, actually, given the time difference..." Jack suddenly froze, his face ashy white.
    "Darling Jack, are you...?"
    Jack got to his feet. "Oh, shit -- Holy fucking Christ on a bike - why had I never thought of it? That's what I meant to tell you but it flew out of my mind. We've got to get in touch with Tom and Shoshana, because the war has started - I just heard it on the car radio - suicide jet attacks on Tel Aviv..."
    Jadis would have been startled almost into witless terror by this news, except that it was now her turn to calm Jack, rising to her feet to pull him down. So he told her what he'd heard. Early this morning -- the morning after the Pope's `indisposition' ("that's how they put it on the news") several Khalifa jets had struck Israel. One had hit Masada in the Judaean desert, but two had struck Tel Aviv, one scoring a direct hit on the Ramat Gan stadium on the day the Stones were due to play.
    "Now I can see what Domingo was on about," said Jack. "But none of this registered at the time, because the lead headline was how one of the jets demolished the Great Pyramid. Demolished. I mean, what harm had it ever done to them?" Jack's eyes were full of the vengeance of archaeologists. "After what they did to Petra. If I could ever catch one of these bigots, I'd ... I'd..."
    "Jack, what about Tom and Shoshana? I'm worried. They could be anywhere. How are they going to get home? What with the airlines in such a mess?"
    "Jadis - have you tried to phone them?" Jack was stern.
    Jadis admitted that she hadn't. She didn't want to come over the overbearing mother. But she tore her eyes away from his, ashamed that she hadn't even thought of it. How could she? She looked shamefacedly at the laptop before them, and, as if twiddling her thumbs, opened the last email. It was Shoshana's cry for help.
    "Oh, Jack, look..."
    They read the text together. "I think she'd hurt," said Jadis. "Or concussed. All that stuff about `charity' and `kindness'". She turned towards Jack. Her voice was edgy: "What shall we do? What can we do?"
    His answer was thoughtful and deliberate, as if he remembered something that he'd put away in a safe place long ago, and only now recalled where it was, and what he could use it for.
    "The header code will give the exact location of Shoshana's phone, and when she sent this message ..."
    He looked more closely at the message, pecking at the keyboard with his forefingers. "Ah yes, there it is... and she sent it, what, less than twenty minutes ago."
    Jadis, now desperate: "But what's the use of knowing where and when, if we can't get to them?" Her conscience reeled, her shame at her own laxity. Tom could always look after himself, but in her mind she'd thought that In Israel Tom would depend on Shoshana - and she, Jadis, had promised to help Shoshana in any way she could. To fail her now would be insupportable.
    Jack looked slowly up at his wife's fiercely smouldering eyes, meeting them with his calm grey gaze.
    "Jadis, I think we can. Or someone can."
    For into Jack's mind came a memory, almost twenty years old, of a kind and mildly eccentric man with novelty dinosaur braces, unflinching faith in their abilities, a bottomless pocket that had supported them ever since - and a very fast private jet. And as he explained all this to Jadis, the great thing about the jet was that it was a drone, and so would not fall from the sky.
    Jack pulled out his phone and dialled a number he'd almost forgotten existed. A private number that Ginsberg Wang, at their one meeting, said he should call only in dire straits. "Think of it as your private genie," he'd said.
    And so it was that Shoshana's phone bleeped with a message from Jack that said:

    Message received. Do not move from where you sent it from. Magic Carpet is being sent for. We love you both -- J&J.

    Jack turned to Jadis. "It is all set. Tom and Shoshana are at Ben Gurion. GW will send a hyperjet to pick them up from some private airfield in Greece. They should be arriving in Toulouse tomorrow, at dawn."
    Jadis flew into his arms, all hot tears and gratitude and a feeling that Jack had absolved her of her carelessness. Jack, wondering if the GW jet was still stocked with Islay, suggested that she join him for his siesta (a recent innovation to escape the afternoon heat), pointing out that one wasn't obliged to spend it fast asleep. Not all of it, anyway. Her eyes brightened into a smile he recognized from their Cambridge days, long ago.
    "We'll have a long wait until morning," he said. "We shouldn't spend it each alone."
    At sunrise, Tom and Shoshana were greeted by Jack and Jadis and a brand new day free from pain. Jadis could see that they were both suffering from profound shock. Tom, cut and bruised everywhere and evidently dazed, fell mutely into the arms of his mother as if he were a small child. He missed not being able to see her. A limping Shoshana just cried and cried despite her best efforts to stop.
    Jack and Jadis manoeuvred them into the back of the jeep, swaddled them in blankets, and drove off as silently and stealthily as their magic carpet had been, if only a tiny fraction as fast. When they arrived at the farmhouse, the passengers were asleep in each other's arms.

    Chapter 17

    (August-September 2034)

    The cry is still, "They come!"
    William Shakespeare -- Macbeth

    For Avi, the Last Battle started when the army Jeep squirled and wheeled to a right-angled stop on the hot tarmac in front of the Technion, temporarily pitching up on the nearside wheels against the kerb before bouncing back to a halt.
    "Get in. Now. Do it!" yelled Rivka. Avi climbed in beside her.
    Or perhaps the Last Battle - the first skirmish, anyway - had come a few days earlier. Oh yes, that was it: in their kitchen, the evening before he'd seen Tom and Shoshana off to Tel Aviv, when Rivka had told him of the latest intelligence intercept - that when the Khalifa invaded Israel, they'd head first for Mount Carmel.
    "But why? I guess there's some strategic importance, I guess..."
    "Oh, for sure, Big Boy," said Rivka, lighting an Alia and resting her broad backside up against the worktop. God, he loved those hips. But why did she have to smoke that Jordanian shitweed? When he'd tried one he felt like his scalp had rotated ninety degrees with respect to the rest of his head and he'd wanted to fall over. "But what they want is you."
    "Moi?" Avi smiled and pointed to himself theatrically, but as he opened his mouth to speak again, his face darkened.
    "Aha! The penny dropped!" cackled Rivka, exhaling two streams of pungent smoke. "Professor Stud doesn't just think with his balls, no?"
    "No. Perhaps not." He moved towards her, putting his arms around her, steadying his nerves by earthing himself to the ground through her curvaceous warmth and the magnetic lustre of her hair, but his mind was far away. The Buddhas of Bamiyan. The statues at Petra. If there was one thing on which the Khalifa refused to compromise, it was the continued existence of - or even any memorial to -- any religion that antedated its own. And there was nothing more ancient than the religion of the Neanderthals, the Cult of the Moon Goddess.
    "For sure, they didn't mention anything too specific to begin with," Rivka continued. "I mean, it was all the usual boring shit about `paving the road to Damascus with the skulls of Jewish children'". The old ones were the best, thought Avi. They'd been saying things like that since at least the 1967 war. "But buried in all that dismal crap - believe me, baby, I had to listen to hour after dreary hour of it - the words Malkeinu and Muhraka did come up rather often". Muhraka was the Arabic name for the part of the Carmel massif that stood above the Battle Cave. God, he'd thought that the Battle Cave was a closely guarded secret. This was precisely what he'd been afraid of.
    Then came that fearful morning of the suicide jet-bomb attacks on Tel Aviv and Masada. But the direct hit on the Great Pyramid was the one that stuck most in Avi's mind as he'd arrived at the Technion, the shocking news still on his car radio. He supposed classes would now be cancelled. Later, when she'd picked him up in the jeep, Rivka tried to reassure him that the suicide attacks were, ironically, far from deliberate. She had known this, because the technoids in her department had hacked the telemetry. Okay, sure, they might have looked like suicide attacks, but the crashes had resulted from some kind of pilot error, possibly connected, she said, with this strange new disease called POP, but she hadn't been sure about it. That one of the jets had hit the Pyramid was an utter fluke.
    "Accident or not, they'll milk it for all it's worth," insisted Avi, as they bounced along towards Mount Carmel. "They'll say was a deliberate part of their Year-Zero policy, and no pre-Islamic artefact, however ancient or treasured, will stand in its way."
    Rivka turned to him. "My thoughts exactly, Big Boy. Exactly." Her coal-black eyes blazed with furious excitement.

    The truck was full of equipment and supplies for a last turn round the Battle Cave, an emergency mothballing operation: to seal it against assault in the hope of reopening it later. The idea was to blow up the back end of the SSM-lite, filling the ravine that led downwards to that bone-choked tartarus. They had infra-red night goggles, plastic explosive and all the trimmings, and - just in case -- a load of hand-grenades, a bunch of standard issue uzis with plenty of magazines, a few nano-uzi machine pistols and even a couple of RPGs.
    "I got thermobaric heads. Fuel-air explosives. Ka-fucking-boom! Never know when you might need `em", said Rivka. "So I signed out as much as I could. If the bastards scored a direct hit on us now, we'd be absolutely, completely, gloriously fucked!"
    "But Rivka ..." Avi gasped. "Fuel-Air Explosives? In a cave? Full of bones?" The noise and shrapnel would be unimaginable.
    "Oh poor baby!" she mocked. "If you like I'll go back for face masks and ear defenders! And a change of diapers in case you shit yourself!" And then, more seriously. "But we have no more time. We have to hurry. I didn't tell you when we got up, because what you had done to me in bed had made me lose my mind." Avi knew that Rivka had always found the prospect of warfare and imminent death a huge turn-on. Hence the orgasmic prospect of using FAE-loaded rockets in what was, even in the loosest sense, a confined space. "And also because I heard just now" - she tapped her earpiece - "that the Khalifa Tenth Legion has crossed into Israel. Just south of Deganya."
    "What?"
    "You heard, Big Boy. I know. Crazy. No air superiority. Thirty per cent down because of this POP thing. And our jets will probably pick off a lot more. But you saw what they'd got lined up in the desert. There are so fucking many of them - wave after wave -- that it probably won't matter. So the plan is for us to dynamite your cave before they do, and get the hell out, yes? We'll go to my office and see what the Boss wants, and take it from there." Avi was too stunned to argue.
    The jeep shuddered to a halt between the two prefabs, outside the steel shutter that led to the cave. Avi and Rivka jumped out of the cab. She ran round to the back, jumped under the canvas and busied herself with the equipment. Avi looked around nervously, expecting to see a platoon of Khalifa troops cresting the hillside as he watched. Catching his breath, he realized they'd have forty-five minutes, tops, before they'd have to get back down the mountain and into Haifa. He got a couple of headlights from the machine shop. They'd need them, at least to begin with: he hadn't turned on any of the cave illumination systems.
    "Who the fuck keeps filling this vehicle with watermelons?" came Rivka's muffled voice from inside the truck. Moments late she jumped out and handed out kit.

    They each had night-vision goggles, a pair of uzis and magazines in easy reach, a rocket launcher and rocket rounds. They tucked nano-uzis into belts or boot tops where they could find spaces. Feeling rather like a walking arms dump, Avi picked a kit bag full of the explosives they'd need to blow up the cave - Rivka took another bag, this one containing hand grenades. Finally, they strapped on their headlights and Avi rolled up the shutter. Just before crossing the threshold, they paused, and Rivka turned to him. She was wearing an expression of tenderness, of softness, that even he saw only in their most private moments.
    She reached up to him and kissed him very slowly on the lips. Pulling back, her eyes burned as she said, "this will be a close call, soldier. Let's hope we can get away before the cockroaches arrive.
    "And if they catch us in there while we're at it - well, we won't be able to hear ourselves think, so I'll say it now. I love you, Big Boy. And I always will. You're amazing. No... no... no.... don't fucking cry on me, you idiot!" But Avi's tears ran full into the long, glossy hair of his wife of twenty years, this difficult, irascible, foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, argumentative, violent - and yes, he had to admit, very sexy woman.
    Jadis had started it, but she'd only ever be on a pedestal, a guiding star, like the Statue of Liberty. But it was Rivka who'd been woman enough to make him into a man.
    "And I love you," he said - "and let's go." So turning on their headlights, they took each other's free hand and stepped forward to their doom.
    A few minutes later they had reached the ravine at the back of the upper cave. Placing the charges was more difficult than they expected. They'd had to use step-ladders to place them on the roof. Avi knew that there were at least two or three long ladders hanging around in the excavation, but finding them took precious minutes. Even then, it was sometimes hard to find a crevice in which a wedge of the putty-like material could stick. Rivka wished she could have got hold of some of the new nanostructural explosive that moved and flowed like quasi-intelligent amoebae, covalently bonding itself into place. However, the explosive they had would be good enough. It had been radio-tuned to detonate by remote control, hopefully when she and Avi were in the jeep and flying back down the mountainside.
    It was not to be. The marching feet were already in earshot. Retreat was no longer an option: Avi scrambled down the ladder, doused his headlight and flashed up his night visor. Rivka did the same and, picking up their weapons, they scrambled as quietly as they could down the ravine path and into the Battle Cave.
    It was totally dark. At first, the night visors gave them nothing to go on, but a process of intelligent adaptation had picked up just enough photons to steer by. As fast as they could, they jogged down the main pathway until, about a thousand yards out, they started to pant and sweat from the weight of their weaponry. Rivka had always been fighting fit but now wished she'd cut back on her forty-a-day Alia habit. They decided to dodge along a small path that diverged from the main way, between two mounds of shattered bones. They clambered up the mound facing back the way they'd come. It was hard doing this in the dark, but thankfully some of the bones had been glued together with a thin coat of stalagmite and didn't crumble and clatter as they'd tried to climb them.

    Once at the top, they lay flat on their stomachs, laying out their weapons, and realized their mistake. They wouldn't be able to shoot from a single location as they'd be picked off instantly, especially if they used their rockets - the flares would be a dead giveaway. They'd have to dodge and weave. Fire and move, fire and move, hoping to create enough noise and confusion that they'd be able to slip behind enemy lines and escape. Yeah, right, Rivka thought - right past dozens, perhaps hundreds of soldiers in a cave mouth not ten feet wide without getting noticed. Like, that's really going to happen.
    She whispered to Avi: "Are you sure there's no back door to this place?"
    "We've looked and looked," he replied, "and we haven't reached the end, though the GPS says that about a kilometre beyond our furthest point, it should come above ground. Trouble is, we've gone round the outside and surveyed the point where it should emerge - and it doesn't."
    "No way out?" She asked.
    "No, none."
    "Just making sure." She clasped his hand once more, just as they heard shots ring out. "Fuck it," she said (this time in Arabic). "They must have picked us up. But we can at least take some of the bastards with us." She groped in a pocket for the radio detonator, armed it and pressed the stud. There was a terrific, rolling boom, a flash and a blast wave that almost buried them in fragments of bone and rock. Avi found himself spitting out shards of cannibal Neanderthal and brained human children, forty-three thousand years dead.
    Rivka's detonation had pinched off all but the first few Khalifa troops, successfully sealing the cave against further assault - and all but the remotest chance of their own escape.
    He couldn't see her face, but Avi was convinced that his wife was stoked to bursting on adrenaline. He could smell her musky sweat - this gave him a huge hard-on, and he laughed out loud. Her voice became sharp and imperative.
    "Fire at will, soldier."
    His last words to her were "Yo, baby! What a way to go!"

    The red blobs now popping up in their night visors told of about twenty or thirty Khalifa troops converging on them. The first shots winged and whizzed past their ears as they each loaded thermobaric rockets into their shoulder launchers. Avi fired first, into a group of soldiers scaling the mound towards them. His view exploded into white-out, a rank smell of petrol and charred flesh. Wow, he thought, good for Rivka: anti-tank weaponry on exposed infantry at close range. Nothing exceeds like excess. Another blast came when Rivka aimed hers at another pair who were advancing up at them from the other side. He barely heard her demoniac shouts above the racket.
    More machine-gun rounds pinged at their feet, raising dust and shards of bones from a battle that had raged here more than four hundred centuries before. The Neanderthals would have loved fuel-air explosives, he thought, as a bullet lodged into his shin, fracturing it. He gasped with the pain and sank to his knees, not without letting another rocket whoosh towards his assailant. It skimmed just inches over the cluttered surface of the ground before exploding in a star of white edged with red, dismembering three or four Khalifa troops as he watched. In his night visors he could see their flat red images disaggregate, fly off in all directions, cooling. He had to admit it, his mind groggy, the Khalifa infantry were crap at guerrilla warfare. Perhaps they could afford to waste human lives.
    He lobbed a hand grenade down the slope, just to make sure, and then pulled out two uzis and started firing. The more he fired, the slower the firing rate seemed, as if the bullets were moving in slow-mo, like in the movies. He had just managed to eject their spent magazines and reload when another two bullets slammed into his chest, lifting him clear and dropping him down onto his back, into a bed of bones right by Rivka's feet. The bones danced as more bullets found him. He thought that she hadn't been hit yet, by some miracle. Could only be my Rivka! His last sight before his eyes closed forever was of his wife, blasting away with an uzi in each hand, and a post-coital smile on her face, hair flying. What a girl! Lets her uzi do the talking! Three times a night! Matinée on Shabbat! My Rivka. Rivka. Faye. Primrose... Domingo (Domingo always and forever!) ... Jack. Last of the Red Hot Palaeolithic Lovers. Hair flying. Jadis, behind her hair. A sharp pain between his eyes and his head was thrown back, breaking his neck. It had always been Jadis. Shema Israel, Adonai... And then nothing.

    What became known as the War of the Last Days was intense, destructive and short. The suicide air strikes that had hit Tel Aviv, Masada and the Great Pyramid were soon revealed to have been mistakes in an opening salvo that had gone badly wrong. But the Khalifa pressed on with a massive ground invasion, supported sporadically by long-range artillery and missile bombardments. Now wary about using piloted aircraft, Khalifa commanders launched conventional ballistic missiles from silos in Kazakhstan, Dagestan in the North Caucasus and what had once been called Chinese Turkestan. The temptation to use their more-than-respectable stock of nuclear warheads was restrained by the Imams, who reminded the commanders that the Holy Places would be useless if reduced to radioactive rubble. As for Israel's civilian population, however, they did not care: although given the smallness of Israel, and the proximity of most of it to Holy Al-Quds, the commanders were advised to limit the megatonnage.
    And so, on the day that Avi and Rivka fought their last in the Cave of the Last Battle, Haifa and Tel Aviv were reduced to smoking ruins that glowed only mildly in the dark. Total countrywide destruction was averted by Israel's own strike forces, which holed several Khalifa warships in the Mediterranean and Red Seas, and by retaliatory missile strikes on Damascus, Amman and most of all Baghdad, capital of the Khalifa.
    But the most immediate worry was the wave after wave of hardened Khalifa tanks and ground troops that swarmed into Israel from all sides, destroying everything in their path. They rained by parachute down from Ha-Golan, poured in from Lebanon and Egypt and crossed the Jordan by amphibian into Galilee; they established footholds in despised GazaPalestine - seen as a cowed client of the Zionist Entity, and thus worthy of more thorough despoliation - and they pushed into the coastal plain, and towards Beersheva and the Negev. They absorbed the terrific loss to IDF low-level bombing with fuel-air explosives, to tankbusters armed with depleted uranium shells, and even the mysterious plague, by sheer weight of numbers. They threatened to overwhelm Israel within two days, but the weight of the plague picked up, and from the increasing disorder of Khalifa operations, it became clear that the pestilence had sunk its teeth into its military command structure.
    The desire to crush the Zionist Entity, great as it was, had been overtaken by even more pressing problems closer to home. Within weeks, almost sixty per cent of the population of the mighty Khalifa - from Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east, from Kazakhstan and Bosnia in the North to Sudan and Zanzibar in the south -- had succumbed to Postembryonic Oolithic Petrosis.
    Not that anyone had any idea of this appalling statistic as the green and black tide broke on heavily defended Jerusalem like a storm surge, before falling back and fading into the dust. News pictures of the scene showed a relentless firestorm, pillars of cloud and of smoke, the only centre of peace and clarity the Mosque of Omar, the Dome on the Rock where Mohammed had ascended to heaven, and arguably the most heart-breakingly beautiful building on the planet. Not a few people compared the scene with the famous photograph of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London, defiant amid the blitzkrieg.
    And then everything stopped, as suddenly as it had begun.
    Israel pulled itself out of the wreckage, nominally the victor, but in reality, broken and almost inviable. Almost three million people in Israel and GazaPalestine had fallen to the Khalifa: even without this, around forty per cent of the population would have been wiped out by POP in any case. Jerusalem itself, sacred to so many, held its golden head high above the carnage and ashes. The survivors, including Prime Minister Seamus O'Shaughnessy, did their best to pick up the reins where they'd left off: but within a few years it was clear that Israel had been blown back to the days when it had been Palestine under the decadent and unravelling Ottoman Empire: a picturesque and largely unpopulated malarial backwater in which the Holy Places were maintained, as much as possible, by small and largely inoffensive religious groups.
    Eight months after the War, O'Shaughnessy was only too pleased to welcome the embassy of the newly crowned Khalif of Baghdad, suing for peace and friendship and access to the Holy Places. The young ruler did not arrive by plane, or even airship, but in a camel caravan that had taken two weeks to traverse the desert. The luxury hotels atop the Mount of Olives always had the best views of Holy Jerusalem, but they were now bombed-out shells. Instead, the Khalif and his court pitched their tents in the Garden of Gethsemane, letting their camels graze amid the groves of trees so ancient that some could have spoken of Jesus and his disciples. As if from a scene straight from the Old Testament, O'Shaughnessy had come to the Khalif's tent for the ritual pleasantries, in which both parties decided to end the longest and cruellest enmity in the history of the human race.
    And so, amid the general economic collapse as a once-modern state regressed to the near-medieval, the Rabbis of Safed picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and continued to debate the more obscure passages of the Talmud, much as they had for centuries. The Druzes of Carmel, although depleted, came out of hiding. Monasteries of a wide variety of Holy Orders renewed and resumed their contemplation of the infinite, and many new Houses were founded. The inter-denominational bickering over space in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre continued as much as it always had. And Moslems continued to worship at the Al-Aqsa Mosque and within the eternal loveliness of the Mosque of Omar.
    Traders in the suq sold freshly-pressed orange juice and halal meat, carpets and coffee, leatherwork and silver, much as they had done for years beyond count. That fewer sold mass-produced tat to gullible tourists was a testament both to the shortage of tourists and of mass-produced tat. In short, Levantine life went on much as it had before the twentieth century had arrived to interrupt things, a disorderly conglomerate of religions in one Holy City.
    But with one difference: only a minority of the monks, worshippers and traders appeared to belong to Homo sapiens.

    Not that much of this would have been evident to the residents of the farmhouse at Saint-Rogatien in mid-September, 2034, as autumn broke in sheeting thunderstorms. The house, in a spume of constant rain, was a haven of befuddled peace for some of its tenants, and anxiety for others.
    The loss of staff at the Institute had been so severe that Jack found it impossible to continue, and he decided to mothball it, laying off most of the remaining staff - many of whom seemed relieved to go. Souris Saint-Michel was also shut up, indefinitely: an inevitable decision given the sudden plunge in tourist visitors. The last act was the removal of the Sigil - as they'd begun to call the eclipse inscription - now housed under a tarpaulin in the barn.
    No administrator likes to be the last to turn off the lights, but Jack faced the additional problem that contacting the GW Foundation in New York to discuss the Institute's new financial arrangements was proving impossible. There was as yet no answer from New York, and after the favour he'd asked in August - to rescue Tom and Shoshana -- he didn't want to impose on Ginsberg Wang himself. At least, not yet.
    But Jack always had a way of putting his own wryly positive spin on things, and as the September rain continued to cascade down the study windows from broken and overloaded guttering, he looked up at Jadis over the pile of teetering paperwork, and reminded her that the absence of new discoveries in the foreseeable future might give her the chance address the formidable backlog of findings yet to be described.
    "Think of it as a sabbatical," he'd said, putting his feet up on the desk, his arms behind his head.
    Jadis looked up from some mending - she'd given up trying to wrestle with the increasingly erratic cybersphere - and smiled over the rims of her reading glasses. She had now taken to wearing them for close-up work, and they made her eyes look even larger and more owlish. Jack thought the general effect quite charming, and invariably made a point of saying so, because he loved what always happened next. Ah, the way she raised her arms to pull her hair back behind her head. The face was a little lined, the hair less lustrous than it was and streaked with grey - but there he was again, just twenty or so, and this girl had breezed into his supervision class a little late, and had never left.
    "Now you've finally got up to date on the accounts..." he continued, keeping his deeper feelings to himself. She threw a book at him and giggled as he fought off the assault. Unperturbed, he went on: "you might start that big general monograph you've always talked about."
    Her expression clouded. "Oh, you're right, as always, Darling Jack. But I've a feeling that whatever I write will be slanted on way or another by the Sigil. So, I need to describe that first - and I daren't. Not yet."
    "What's stopping you, Snow Queen? The world has many more things on its mind right now. Amid the general brouhaha, some bizarre, possibly alien and definitely indecipherable message written before humanity evolved would hardly register."
    Jadis tried not to rise to Jack's gentle taunts, other than to flash a teasing yet stern glance at him, magnified by her glasses. Hamming it up, he pretended to have been pierced through the heart, but he overdid it and fell backwards off his chair, disappearing below the level of his desk. She climbed out of her own chair and helped him to his feet. There followed the routine succession of near-telepathic reassurances and pleasantries that couples of a certain age always exchange when one suffers some trifling injury. These over, they paused and looked at each other for a long moment, both knowing that before they could publish the Sigil she felt she needed Domingo's approval, though she could not really explain why. Domingo had advised her to keep quiet for the moment, and so quiet she had kept.
    She wondered when or if she might hear from him again. The weird message about Micawber and Richards had been the last. As for Avi, she'd given up sending messages and given the short but brutal war, she now feared the worst. The news wires had been increasingly patchy and out-of-date, even on those increasingly treasured occasions when she could get a connection, and when there weren't power outages. However, all sources had all been quite clear that a plague of unknown origin had swept through the Middle-east. There had been speculation that this was the same disease that had carried off the Pope - but without Domingo's input, she was unable to corroborate these suspicions. However, she did wonder if the plague that seemed to have brought the Mid-east war to an abrupt and merciful close was the same thing that had afflicted so many of her neighbours. Occam's Razor said that it might, but as always she had as yet too little actual evidence to go on.
    Whatever its cause, the plague was slowly forcing her, with everyone else in and around Saint Rogatien, to fall back on a more restricted, ancient and homely existence. Getting to market was becoming difficult, partly because supplies of fuel were sporadic, and also because the markets themselves were thin. If the traders hadn't disappeared or died, they, like her, had been marooned for lack of fuel. She became more reliant on her own efforts on the potager and in the kitchen, and aware that she needed to store or preserve excess produce, or trade some with her neighbours. Jack fenced off an area of the yard and Jadis got a few chickens, advertising eggs for barter at the farmhouse gate. They were beginning to run out of things they could get no other way - things like soap, and salt. Milk was almost impossible to obtain. She decided to get a goat. Maybe two. And a cow.
    Jack, like Jadis, was also thinking ahead, to the coming winter. He had a hunch that the already unreliable electricity supply would get no better, and might even cease altogether. So he commissioned their old electrician friend Laurent Gaspard to install as many solar panels on the farmhouse and barn roof as he could, as well as a wind turbine on the western elevation of the house, to catch the prevailing winds. Gaspard said that trade in such items was booming and presented Jack with a huge bill - which Jack honoured with a credit transfer drawn on the GW account. He thought it wise to spend as much as he could on capital investment before the world banking system froze permanently for the winter, along with the pond, in (he estimated) early November.
    As it turned out, he was only a little too optimistic. The world's banks collapsed on Hallowe'en, from chronic lack of staff to maintain its electronic systems. It picked up again the following spring, but only after incalculable damage, riots, mass looting and millions more lives lost in cities all over the world. But by then, Jadis and Jack had had their jeeps wired for electricity, resupplied by their own generating system, and could at least keep a refrigerator, deep freeze, computers and a few electric lights. Jack asked Gaspard what would happen when the world supply of light bulbs ran out. Gaspard gave that most expressive of gestures - the Gallic Shrug - before revealing that he was buying up as many candles and matches as he could lay his hands on. Jack made arrangements then and there for a year's supply, managing to talk Gaspard down to a reasonably favourable discount.
    That the world of the farmhouse was beginning to contract around them meant a great deal more domesticity for Jadis, who consequently did not make her customary rounds of the village every single day, breaking a habit of more than a quarter of a century. When she did, she found that the Mairie had failed to reopen after the summer. The boulangerie remained closed (she reminded herself to locate a source of flour), and was soon followed by the Sanglier D'Or as Sandrine Pasquier gave up the struggle and left with no forwarding address. The church went through several temporary priests as each succumbed in turn to the plague, and it was eventually abandoned: people had to conduct funerals without clerical supervision, as well as digging the graves for their loved ones. Many fields were left unharvested, many houses abandoned. That so few had burned down or had been looted spoke to a pestilence that struck criminals as well as their more honest brethren.
    The nature of the plague itself was still elusive. Families of the victims were dead-eyed with horror and grief so that Jadis felt she could hardly inquire. However, she began to amass scraps of gossip about how victims were locked in tetany and were literally eaten up by a wave of blackness that spread across their bodies. The rumours about what happened next were even more unbelievable. But Jadis had noticed that the coffins in the frequent funerals marching to the swelling graveyard at the top of the hill were rather small, even for the corpses of children.
    The reason why details were so hard to obtain was, simply, fear. Initially, the houses of victims were as shunned as medieval pest-houses, in case the disease could be contracted by close contact. As a precaution this seemed wise, as nobody knew how the disease was transmitted. But from what Jadis knew of epidemiology, it seemed sporadic, striking everywhere at once, with no sign of any particular pattern of spread. However, it did seem to occur most often within families, and its effects varied enormously from place to place. Even though it had exacted an enormous toll in their corner of the world, Gascony seemed to have emerged from the plague relatively unscarred, at least when compared with many other parts of southern France. She'd heard that the coast in particular had been badly hit, and that Marseilles and Montpellier and many other towns were all but deserted. Toulouse had been much less stricken, and a few places such as Carcassonne had been hardly affected at all. Jadis was at a loss to explain why.
    Nevertheless, she thanked whoever-it-was who might be flying around above the clouds that the Angel of Death had yet to point his skeletal finger at the farmhouse itself. But with no clear understanding of its rhyme or reason, the worry was always there, at the back of her mind.
    Jack and Jadis had the additional worry of Tom and Shoshana, both of whom remained dazed with shock. In the absence of an easily available physician, Jadis had managed to bandage Shoshana's wounded ankle, and was thankful that there seemed no obvious physical injuries that would have called for hospital treatment. Doctor Makeba was almost never available, and Jadis wondered when her longtime physician would perish from overwork, if not from the plague.
    Not that the injuries weren't serious enough. Tom, lacerated and bruised all over, had evidently lost his sight. So much was clear from what Jack and Jadis could infer, because Tom himself had not said a word since his arrival. He wandered around the house and garden as sure-footed as ever, but seemingly without comprehension, and was often found curled up like a baby in odd places. Jadis wondered whether she should keep him indoors in case he wandered off and got lost. She hesitated, because whatever part of his mind Tom had lost, he seemed to know that this was his home. He refused to sleep alone, and would either curl up in Shoshana's embrace, or attempt to climb into bed with Jadis and Jack.
    Shoshana was neither blind nor mute, and at times appeared quite happy and even chatty, but her mood would lurch without warning into black depression. She'd be with Jack and Jadis before the fire, Tom asleep in her lap, burbling amiably away, but would stop in mid-sentence, eyes staring straight forward, blank and dull.
    Jadis was almost beside herself for the first week, until Jack calmed her: Tom and Shoshana were suffering, quite understandably, from some kind of post-traumatic stress reaction, and they would presumably get better, in time. In any case, Jack said, they ought to contact Cambridge to tell them that one student might not be returning for his final year, and another might not be arriving for her first. Getting through to Cambridge was as difficult as it had been to anyone else, and after a while they gave up trying.
    Eventually, in the second week of October, when the air was growing chill, they received two postcards from the University - one for Tom, the other for Shoshana - to say that `owing to circumstances beyond its control', it would be closed until further notice, but that all courses would be resumed when such notice might be given. The postcards had no signatories; were scuffed and battered; and, from the evidence of the postmarks, had taken four weeks to arrive.
    Jack and Jadis had no way of knowing that the ancient University city that had brought them together, in which they had first loved and courted, was now almost completely devoid of human inhabitants.

    As autumn advanced, Tom and Shoshana slowly began to emerge from beneath their personal rain-clouds. Tom began to speak again in the middle of October, and confessed to his mother that his eyes were playing tricks on him. He'd be happier, he said, if he'd be either blind or sighted, but this kind of in-between state was driving him demented.
    He struggled to describe what he was seeing. His best attempt (so he said) was that his vision was a hybrid between regular, normal vision - though heightened in some way he couldn't begin to address - and the kind of geometrical, kaleidoscopic patterns you see when you close your eyes and rub them. And this was just it: normal objects in the everyday world were accompanied, more or less, by a train of dancing, psychedelic after-images. Jadis could hardly begin to conceive what this might be like, except that it must be like seeing the world through one of Domingo's more actively hideous shirts. In any case, whatever Tom's new conception of the world might be, Jadis felt it orthogonal to her own, and hoped for his sake that Tom would learn to live with it.
    What he kept to himself - partly, though not wholly through his inability to describe it - was with his new eyes, Shoshana looked even more fascinating than she had before. Every person he saw now seemed to be surrounded by a coruscating, electric aurora, and he soon worked out that this was not some objective view, but deeply conditioned by his own feelings. Jack glowed with green reassurance; Jadis with maternal love, a sparking, purple corona edged with ferocity and possession.
    But Shoshana's aura blazed brightly enough to eclipse and consume all else, in colours beyond the range of normal human vision.
    And there was more: he could now sense the flow and pulse of blood beneath her pale skin, alert to every microseconded nuance of her mood, arousal or depression. He hardly knew how to begin describing this to Shoshana, so he did what he always had, which was to replace words with demonstrative action. In perfect tune with every beat of her body, he could make love to her in ways that left her breathless. He hardly needed to touch her, let alone penetrate her: it seemed like he only had to wave his hands around her, like a conductor with his baton, describing some pattern in the air, and she would be brought instantly to a state of profound orgasm that would last for hours.
    Not that she did not want him to emphasize his skill more physically, for she loved to be caressed and kissed as much as ever, and (of course) the yeasty-buttery texture of her skin, the allspice-cinnamon smell he raised from it when he ran his fingers across it, were powerfully arousing for him.
    The new intensity they had discovered meant that he was larger and harder for her than he had ever been, which pulled her in two emotionally: she desperately wanted to be filled by him, but the after-effects were increasingly painful. Mostly, she insisted that she ride on top, so she could adjust herself to be minimally uncomfortable. He always enjoyed this, lying back and glorying in her curves, her aura an excited yellow-bronze around her full hips and golden thighs: he was always amazed by the softness of her neck, her shoulders and her hair, and the richness of her breasts, streaked with rose; and the hugeness of her indigo-velvety nipples. When she climaxed the room was filled with pink and violet streaks of joyful self-annihilation. But he noticed that when he came inside her, her aura darkened to deepest ruby edged with black and lined with lightning bolts. He had no idea what this could mean.
    And, just once, her body and the air all around it radiating a playful fur-edged magenta, she insisted that he stop pussyfooting around and penetrate her firmly from behind. He tried to be gentle, but she pushed herself backwards onto him, parting her buttocks so that he was as fully inside her as possible. Kneeling behind her, he dusted his hands lightly across her shoulders, around her breasts and hips. Without his moving inside her at all, she came in glorious waves of deep crimson rapture. Her vagina and cervix squeezed against him in exhilarated response, forcing him to come. But the instant he did so, she stifled a scream and her aura switched off, like a light -- just for an instant, before resuming its glow, a subdued, funereal amethyst.
    Afterwards, when she was lying in his arms, beads of sweat like bright maroon blood on her brow, her salty hair in disorder, a powerful smell of panic-edged musk from between her legs and her aura more or less recovered, he'd asked her what was wrong. She just kissed him, saying something pat, to the effect that she was such a lucky girl to have a man who was so big.
    No, he'd insisted - there was something wrong, he could feel it, he could see it.
    Don't be so sensitive, she'd responded, perhaps rather too tartly. They'd both been through a hell of a lot together, hadn't they? Perhaps she'd been bruised or something in the explosion, maybe?
    C'est possible, he'd said. After all, the effects of the explosion on his own sensory system had been both drastic and alarming. Some as-yet-undetected internal bruising might be expected.
    But he remained unconvinced. He wished that she could get herself checked out by a doctor. He didn't say this, however, as even the most basic doctoring was currently very hard to come by. A psychologist with a sideline in gynaecology would be quite out of the question.
    Shoshana knew more, but even then was very far from the truth. She had felt it the very first time he came inside her, as if her womb had been sprayed with acid. At first she had put it down to the self-destructive attitude she'd had to sex. She saw it all now: how her wretched, violent life at home, at a time when she was discovering her own sexuality, had led to her to expect pain as well as pleasure from the sex act - as if she was a slut and she deserved it.
    But the pain had become worse, not better, when she had found Tom, and the haven that was the farmhouse, and she began to suspect that it had something to do with Tom himself. Sex with him was beyond wonderful, but she had to admit that a big cock, fabulous though it was, had its drawbacks, and could, at times, be extremely uncomfortable. But no, she knew that size had nothing to do with this pain. And where the pain had once subsided a little while after sex, it was now a constant, nagging, metallic ache, irrespective of how often or how intensely they made love. She felt that there was something inside her, eating her away from within. Her periods had never worried her greatly, but now they were titanic in intensity and volume, as if someone had poked a garden hoe up inside her and had been stirring vigorously.
    She dared say nothing to Tom. After all, what could she say? But as the weeks passed, he noticed that her aura was beginning to darken. He, too, fretted in silence, for he knew she'd say that it was nothing to worry about.

    Chapter 18

    (December 2034)


    I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
    Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights

    Winter came earlier and was far harsher than it had ever been, ravaging a countryside already weighed down with shortages, tragedy, disorder and death. The residents of the farmhouse were as well prepared as they could be for the blizzards that they knew would strike by the end of November, working hard to lay in as much winter store as possible.
    For Tom, working with his hands had proved excellent therapy: he and Jack were out from dawn until dusk, shoring up the roof and filling cracks, stripping down and maintaining the generators, mending frozen pipes and hauling firewood. Shoshana joined Jadis in the domestic department - preserving and bottling, drying and blanching, making and mending. But it was clear to Jadis that the relentless work did not have quite the restorative effect on Shoshana that it evidently had on Tom.
    First, she had lost weight. She was not the round and rosy girl who had first jumped so confidently from the jeep that April, so enchanting Tom. Her cheeks had hollowed, making two great fiery saucers of her eyes, and if Jadis hadn't known better, she could have sworn that Shoshana had aged ten years in as many weeks. Although she tried to hide it - and the effort had been heroic -- her pert sassiness had been traded for something mournful, almost spectral. If Jadis had to summarize it in a phrase, as she did to Jack one candlelit evening in the second week of December, when the weeks-long snow storm had subsided leaving a starry, dead-white calm - it was as if the girl had had all the stuffing knocked out of her.
    What was so infuriating, Jadis said, was the fact that Shoshana never complained but soldiered on regardless, brushing away any inquiry, spurning any offer of help, wearing a smile and not counting the cost. To Jack, it recalled another brave and defiantly self-reliant girl he'd once known who'd been through similarly life-changing events, insisting that nobody should bear the burden but she herself, regardless of her actual capability. How like Jadis, he thought, not to have made that connection. But what he said was that Jadis shouldn't worry -- Shoshana had been through a great deal.
    "But so has Tom," replied Jadis, "and look how he's bounced back. I do wish she'd talk more. She knows I'm always here, you know, to talk."
    "Don't hold it against her," advised Jack. "We all have our ways of coping. And remember, we know Tom. Shoshana could be a new person every day, and we'd never know which one was for real."
    Jadis made a noise signifying total lack of conviction as she turned once more to her mending, and noticed, as if for the first time, that the saggy old sofa seemed rather a long way from the hearth, and that she missed a hearthrug beneath her feet.
    "You know what:" she said. "We could do with another dog."
    Jack laughed. "I see - in addition to the menagerie we have already acquired." Over the past month and a half, Jack and Tom had converted the old field lab in the barn into accommodation for two cows, three goats and a horse, all of which now grazed, weather permitting, in three otherwise abandoned fields close to the house. An outbuilding was full of chickens, and the ducks and geese that now roamed the garden often fought running skirmishes with the Horribles, and, more often than not, winning. The ragged gang of piratical cats soon learned to keep well away from the geese, with their sharp beaks and long, roaming necks that gave them a quite extraordinary reach. In the absence of anything like silage, locating fodder and bedding for this expanding ark had occupied many scarce daylight hours - though the several abandoned farms round about provided rich stores of maize that could be made into animal feed. Jack thought that one of the fields he was now `minding' would have to be sown with maize next spring, assuming they could find seed.
    "Oh, Jack, I know. But I still miss Fairbanks. I once thought that to replace him would have been sacrilege, but perhaps ten years might be thought a decent interval."
    Jack smiled again, but said nothing more. So Jadis had understood, after all: Fairbanks had been part of her own therapy, long ago, and had been Tom's childhood companion. Perhaps a Mark 2 version could offer some support to Shoshana. In any event, getting a guard dog would be a good idea. And a gun, too. The general lack of people had meant the woods were full of boar and deer, which would be useful. But if local gossip were anything to go by, there were also wolves. And there were worse things that Jack had seen for himself.
    There had been some odd types roaming around lately - mostly sad and sorry refugees from the cities, trying to sell scavenged items. But some, Jack was sure, were also looking for places to plunder, to take by force. And a few of these people were very odd indeed: people with long, white, shaggy coats, hammering on the door at all hours and making all sorts of eccentric demands and showing very long teeth if refused.
    The clock ticked away a few more seconds, and then, as if on cue, the kitchen door succumbed to a thunderous battering. They both stood up with a start and raced into the kitchen.
    "Who is it?" Jadis shouted, lighting a candle on the kitchen table and reaching into the drawer for a long knife.
    "A very old friend!" replied a muffled but instantly recognizable voice. Jadis sighed with relief and Jack threw open the door to what looked like a giant snowman. Domingo, shaggy, snow-maned and heavily bearded, swept into the kitchen: sloughing, in one single movement of surprising grace -- a vast ankle-length woollen greatcoat, moleskin waistcoat, mittens, scarf, broad-brimmed hat, balaclava and a rucksack the size of a Shetland pony. Underneath it all was the big, toothy smile that always brought the sunshine, and (noblesse oblige) a Hawai'ian shirt, if rather faded and torn in places, worn over thick corduroy trousers and a pair of boots, each one the size of an amphibious landing craft.
    "My dearest friends," he said, shaking a small drift of snow from his beard, "I apologise for the ... er ... smell," - he did indeed smell rather strongly - "but would you mind if I stayed for a night or two?" Jack thought Domingo, with his abundance of long, white hair and beard, looked a cross between a character in Easy Rider and Santa on steroids. He asked the visitor if he'd like a glass of whisky, and without waiting for an answer, disappeared into the cellar. Jadis smiled as if she were a little girl and this was the best Christmas present ever.
    "Oh, you silly man,", she said, "we've missed you like anything" - they had had no contact with him since his email from Israel that August -"and you know you can stay here as long as you like." As if willing him to stay forever, she hugged him like a small limpet hugs a vast, black, barnacled boulder. The top of her head hardly managed to brush his chin, and her slim arms wouldn't quite meet round his substantial girth. "Middle-aged spread," he admitted. "Not that you and Jack have been so afflicted."
    She looked up at him with shining eyes, which darkened and sharpened as she remembered something. "I've been meaning to ask you, Domingo .... What's all this about `Mr Micawber'?"
    He paused as if he'd suddenly remembered something, reached into his abandoned overcoat and pulled out two objects. One was a sawn-off shotgun wrapped in oilcloth, concerning which Domingo made no comment. The other was bulkier and floppier: wrapped in sheepskin and fast asleep was a golden retriever puppy, perhaps three months old.
    "Jadis, meet Micawber. Micawber, meet Jadis. Happy Christmas. I rescued him from a house that was abandoned. I'm afraid his mother and littermates had died. He followed me unbidden, walking all this way with me until he tired, so I stowed him in my pack with my socks, until he got cold. Or perhaps the smell revolted him. So I ... uh ... translated him to my overcoat pocket with my ... er... armoury. He is a gun dog, after all."
    "Domingo... How could you have known? We were only just talking about it..."
    "Ah, well, sometimes one ... ah... just knows. Goes with the ... er... calling. Now, where are the young people? Are they here?"
    Jadis explained that Tom and Shoshana were asleep, and, when Jack had returned and had also been introduced to Micawber, for whom accommodation was swiftly found in an old cardboard carton by the kitchen stove, they made tea and filled glasses with whisky. While they drank, Jadis had given a brief account of Tom and Shoshana, their traumatic experiences, dramatic escape and subsequent troubles. Domingo's eyes darkened when he heard that Shoshana had not been well and seemed to be worsening.
    "I expect I'll see them in the morning, then," he said.
    Jadis suddenly remembered that Domingo would probably be very hungry, but before she could do anything further, the big man shambled over to his up-ended rucksack and (as if it were a sackful of toys) pulled out another parcel, roughly folded in a red-checked tablecloth of summer-picnic cliché. He unwrapped it to reveal a vast pork pie, a round of local farmhouse cheese as big as a car tyre, and two large loaves.
    "Tolerably fresh and relatively unsquashed" he admitted, "and only slightly nibbled."
    Jack and Jadis were awed and stunned. They had gotten out of the habit of having Domingo in their lives. Domingo thought that their pause was of a more active variety: "Benedictus, benedicat," he said, before fetching plates and refreshing the teapot. Jadis was cast back to their very first meeting when this titan (black-haired, then, rather than snowy grey) had barged into her kitchen and had made her lunch before she even knew who he was.
    It wasn't long before Domingo started to flag. His surprise arrival was, he said, the much-wished culmination of a long journey, which he'd be pleased to tell them all about, but only in daylight.
    "Some of my tale is rather ... uh ... grim," he said, yawning widely. So Jadis rushed around in a foamy fluster after towels and soap and bedding and warming pans and showed Domingo to a room that had once been his very own quarters, long ago. There was a wash-stand and even an unvarnished oak prie-dieu that he'd bought in an antiques market at Seissan - in another world, it seemed. He was asleep and snoring not ten minutes later.

    It took Jadis rather longer to find sleep, given the unexpected arrival of her old friend after such a long absence, and not only that, but a friend who had brought Fairbanks resurrected, just as they had been talking about him, and wasn't that a strange coincidence? She tossed and fidgeted next to Jack, who, lying supine, said "well, he did say he'd come as soon as he could.
    "And given that he presumably had other things to do ... and the journey must have been difficult ... and it is Christmas..." his voice faded, and he yawned, as if in sympathy with Domingo. But she was stirred, jumpy, and wouldn't be quietened so easily. She turned towards him, and nibbled his earlobe, and slid one hand down between his legs. Without a word he responded - not mechanically, nor habitually, but simply because he knew the moods of his wife's body better than he knew his own. He buried himself beneath the covers, seeking her breasts and raising them into greater wakefulness, and, with one hand, stroking her between her thighs, which she spread gleefully, willing him on. Her legs were as lovely and long and slender and smooth as they had always been, since she had been a young girl, he thought, half in dreams of dells and bluebells.

    Across the hall, Tom woke to find Shoshana's aura blazing in a decadent sickly orange splendour. Realizing that she was not in his arms, he looked down to see her crouched over him, licking his penis with fierce concentration, and trying to swallow it as if it were an ice cream melting faster than she could consume it. The sensation was incredible: her tongue and her lips, combined with the skittish, skittering movements of her fingers, the swish of the ends of her hair wafting against his sensitive skin, the way she would push herself upwards and rub him between her breasts, and then lick him again: but she seemed urgent, as if she was in some great hurry, almost deranged - and he was worried. Once she knew he was awake, she seized his right hand and pushed it between her legs, pressing his fingers deep into her as if she were seeking for something lost long ago and forgotten, but which now desperately needed to be found. Tom's fingers told him that she was engorged, distended, her wetness slick on her inner thighs: but his senses rebelled. This was all wrong, she smelled somehow acrid, like charred meat: and that all the time he'd taken in the summer to calm her was unravelling before him.
    "Oh Tom, fuck me, hurt me," she begged, her voice fractured.
    He sat up, moved to the edge of the bed, her kneeling next to him: he shook her hand free from his arm, and took her face in his hands. Long streaks of tears stood on her cheeks but her wide eyes seemed empty.
    "Shoshana, I love you. I don't want to hurt you. Not now. Not ever."
    She paused, as if she was about to say something more - something explanatory - but kissed him instead, her tongue violent inside his mouth, her hands on either side of his face, gripping his hair. Her aura was now a migraine fractal swirl of deep orange and magenta, like some crazed disco lighting, surrounding the bright ultraviolet of her open eyes. She pulled away from him, sighed and looked at him, and after a long moment said: "yes, I know," and her voice was filled with the keening hurt and regret that to Tom spoke of some kind of imminent, eternal parting.
    He lay down again, pulling her next to him, her head on his chest:
    "Sois gentil, we have all the time in the world." But her body thrummed with suppressed urgency, as if the very opposite was true, that the world might end at any second. He wove his hands through an aura now strobing epileptically, alternating hot pink and greenish-black obsidian, and somehow he knew that if he made her come this way, with his hands, it would still not be physical enough for her. She knew this too, parting her legs for him as widely as she could. Inside her, moving very slowly and gently, he felt her nails gouging his shoulders, gripping and releasing him in time with an aura pulsing between the baleful red glare of an imminent supernova and the uttermost blackness of space, and when they climaxed, it was together. At that moment she thrust herself up at him in a dreadful convulsion and, once again, as he expected - as he had feared - her aura switched off, and he sensed, to his horror, that her heart had joined it in oblivion.
    A moment passed like wheeling centuries until her eyes flickered open again: she sat up and remained there, still, in his arms.
    "Tom," she said, blankly, with no sign of her earlier passion, "I feel so unwell. I ..."
    Either it was his eyes or it was Shoshana herself, but her aura had remained completely absent and she seemed like a helpless, featherless, blind squab, marooned in a nest long abandoned by its parents. Tom pulled the covers over them both and cradled her in his arms. As she subsided into sleep, a filthy orange-brown haze, like street lights seen through an icy smog, slowly seeped into the air around her. Tom stayed awake for a very long time.

    The next day, after the family had returned home from their various morning chores, Jadis convened what she called a lunchtime `house meeting'. Unusually, this was to take place in the sitting room, rather than the kitchen that had traditionally been the venue for all such convocations. But Domingo had wanted to tell a story, the implication being that it would be a long one, so she wanted everyone to be comfortable. And this is how she saw it as she stepped into the wan, grey shafts of light through the two, tall windows that overlooked the snowbound front yard, laden with a tray of tea (an increasingly scarce and special treat), new bread and wedges of Domingo's cheese.
    Jack had cleaned and stoked up the fire: Micawber, instantly at home despite his small size, had settled on the hearth as close to the embers as he dared, imperiously displacing two Horribles, who scowled at him from behind the curtains.
    Domingo sat at one end of the sofa, in trademark aloha shirt, his hair combed and tied at the back with what looked like bailer twine. Jack, chivvying the flames with a poker and patting Micawber with his free hand, thought Domingo looked more than ever like an ageing rock star. He half expected to see a Harley parked outside.
    Shoshana rose to help Jadis with the overloaded tray, but she seemed ungainly, awkward, and looked absolutely terrible: her skin, once the colour of smooth, pale honey, was greyish and blotchy, the rose in her cheeks shrunken to two carmine spots beneath her heavy eyelids.
    "Shoshana, are you...?"
    "Oh, don't worry about me, I'm fine. Just didn't sleep too well, that's all."
    She smiled at Jadis but only for an instant, as if she could hardly afford any greater effort: and then, turning her face away, making a great fuss and business of sorting out plates and slices of bread, before sitting - subsiding - on the sofa next to Domingo.
    Domingo's much greater size and weight meant that Shoshana couldn't help but collapse on top of him, but his proximity seemed to have an energising effect, so that she now smiled more broadly.
    The single tiny light of Shoshana's being - the one that that floated, lost, like a pale skiff in a vast and benighted swamp heaving with gigantic, submerged monsters - was intensely grateful for the reassurance of Domingo's presence. She hoped that she'd be able to get him on his own, to share her increasingly ill-concealed burden of pain and distress. A wish granted, for just before Jadis entered the room, Domingo had looked down at her, rather in the manner that Mount Olympus might incline its head to a sheep picking its way across its lower slopes, and said that he'd still like to have the `little chat' they hadn't got round to having last time, if she didn't mind. He'd like to get to know her a little better, he said. Shoshana would have jumped for joy, had she the energy: instead she smiled weakly, her dull indigo eyes fluttering anywhere and everywhere but at the hulk by her side.
    Tom rushed in, late, having caught up with what Jack had self-deprecatingly called `seeing to the stock'. He murmured an apology and sat down next to Shoshana. Jadis warmed to the infinite and minute concern that her son had for the girl, but it was a pleasure mixed with worry. She had not said anything, not even to Jack, but it was in Tom's concern for Shoshana that Jadis saw that the girl was, somehow, slipping away, and that she - Jadis - was completely powerless to stop it.
    If Domingo as Mount Olympus were a only metaphor for Shoshana, it seemed disconcertingly real for Tom, for whom the big man was cloaked in a mountainous aura denser and more complex than anything he'd ever seen. If the aurorae that appeared to track Shoshana's every move formed a florid, fluctuating and extravagant shroud for the girl at its centre, Domingo's was so constant and thick that he could hardly glimpse the man beneath: a misty cloak of velvet black streaked with steely grey, the shimmering folds parting here and there to reveal jags of deep purple and sapphire, a cloud of silver at the summit, generating long electric blue lines that filled much of the rest of the room. Tom was awed, as if an archangel with a flaming sword had stepped into his bedroom.
    As they finished their bread and cheese and topped up their tea mugs, Domingo started his story.
    "What I have to tell you will seem somewhat ... ah ... startling," he began, "but I can make no apologies for that. For I think you should know. And, if I am honest, I should know, too."
    Domingo paused, as if he were about to launch some great manifesto, which would have to be announced here first for him to have the confidence to make it real, in the only place he really thought of as home.
    "My good friends, we live in a world that has changed. We can no longer hang on to the past. And despite all our discoveries here which, in some ways, have caused people to change their views about things, I had not realized this until fate dealt me a rude blow in Israel this summer. As you know, I was by way of personal assistant to His Holiness, Linus the Second. I say was, because His Holiness has now been gathered in. Or so I believe, at least, for all practical purposes."
    It was true then, Jadis thought to herself. Or, at least, the ambiguity of the news wires told no more than the truth.
    "And, as I suspect you know, His Holiness was to give an open-air mass at a large sports stadium near Tel Aviv. The Rolling Stones were going to give a concert there the following night, and I had been hoping to attend, but - ah, well" His eyes misted over in memory of a mildly disreputable folly of his youth.
    "His Holiness gave a creditable account of himself, though he had been overtaxed and overtired, or so I thought. I was watching from offstage, but to my shame, I had got so ... er ... carried away by the proceedings that I did not immediately notice that he had collapsed. Or perhaps my eyes refused to believe what they had seen. Until, that is, a stretcher was wheeled straight past me towards the loading dock. I gave chase and accompanied him in the ambulance to the hospital. His Holiness was alive and barely conscious, and just got greyer and greyer, despite all the heroic efforts of the ambulance crew. Nothing they could do had any effect, and as the body of His Holiness became ever stiller, the crew whirled around him in what seemed like a blur of panic..."
    Domingo paused to catch his breath, then, aware that he could not let his emotions get the better of him, to cloud the account of the subsequent, terrible events.
    "And so it was that without any idea of the precise ... er ... nature of the ills that had befallen my superior, he was placed in an isolation cubicle. I was, I regret, not permitted to administer any last rites, a circumstance which I deeply regret - and which caused me, I have to say, considerable distress -- although I can understand why it had to happen."
    Domingo now began to choose his words carefully. The room became shill as a dark cloud draped itself over the pale sun, casting the room into drear monochromatic shadow in which all its inhabitants became indistinct blurs.
    "The body of His Holiness was at first quite still. But then he started shaking uncontrollably and quite ... ah ... violently, waving his arms all about, so that he had to be restrained with manacles. Then, it appeared as if his muscles contracted into a kind of tetany..."
    Jadis started, as if in recognition.
    "... throwing his jaw open wide and locking it in place. The isolation cubicle was soundproofed, so I could not hear if he was making any sound, although it looked - I was watching on a TV monitor -- like he was screaming. But then - oh, then - his body shook with such power, as if he was possessed, that his arms ripped free of the manacles ... severing both his hands."
    Jadis gasped and paled, her own hands flying to her mouth. Jack embraced her from behind, more to steady himself than to comfort her. Tom put his arms round Shoshana who looked up at Domingo, her expression unfathomable until her brow creased minutely, as if she were reacting to some inner pain.
    "It was then that the final, awful, transformation started. A small patch of black appeared at his throat. This spread quickly to envelop his whole body in a black shroud, but that was not the last of it. The shroud was active, alive. It contracted around him, more and more, until by the time it had stopped, His Holiness was nothing more than a sphere, quite black, of about this size." Domingo brought his hands forward, indicating a sphere about the size of a bowling ball. Or a human head.
    The sun now peered from behind the bank of ragged clouds that had obscured it. Although it was late morning, it hung low in the southern sky, a shaft now piercing the window-glass to illuminate Domingo's hands, as if they were the only things in the room.
    "After that, things moved rather ... ah ... quickly. The plan was that His Holiness would stay in Israel for two days as a guest of the Prime Minister, an old friend of his. I was going to get time off and perhaps see Avi. Sadly, that was not to be." He stopped, as if looking in the middle distance, and then turned to Jadis, pre-empting her next question: "my dear Jadis, I have no news to report. Our old confrère has not answered any messages, and what with the destruction of Haifa and the millions who died in the conflagration, I can only fear for him - pray for him." He left unsaid the possibility that Avi, like the Pope, might have succumbed to this dreadful new disease.
    How fate has a habit of laying one low: Jadis recalled how her Dream Team had gathered on the sunny back porch in 2011, twenty-three years before. Of the eight guests at her dinner table, six were now dead. Roger McLennane, aged seventy, was driving far too fast in a Lamborghini when he suffered a massive stroke and drove into the back of a petrol tanker, which exploded. Marjorie, unable to live without him, much as she tried, found a bottle of barbiturates and swallowed the lot. Primrose and Faye in Tibet. Avi, almost certainly, in Israel. And Mathilde had once told Jadis how, one day, she had woken up in a bed soaked and dripping with the blood pumping out of her poor Eric's every orifice, the first - and last - symptom of the Naivasha-6 virus. Which left Mathilde herself who, as far as Jadis knew, was still in Cambridge, in a University that had shut down until further notice. And Jadis knew then that she'd had the temerity to have wished them all well, if only in her mind, as if grant such fortune were in her power. And the horrible irony was that she and Jack had sailed on regardless, unscathed, apparently unchanged, forced to live with the consequences.
    Jack, who had lived through it all with her, looked up and saw her darkened mind, interrupting it with a glance both stern and tender. No, Snow Queen, he seemed to say, the fates fall where they will. You cannot organize the whole world: it has to look out for itself. In any case, it's not like you to go round thinking in this morbid fashion. She looked back at him in resignation, calmer, if not fully at peace.
    "I had to make several decisions rather quickly," Domingo went on. "I gathered the last remains of His Holiness including his hands, directed that they be put on ice in a sterilized medivac container, and I left, before anyone could stop me. Exit, pursued by a storm: I had swept out of the Holy Land within three hours, on the Papal hyperjet.
    "When I arrived in Rome," he continued, "it was no picnic, either. I found that the plague had struck there, too, with some violence, and the city was close to erupting into anarchy. I did the best I could, holed up in Saint Peter's with what was left of the College of Cardinals, a crowd baying outside, people left and right just ... uh ... condensing, right there, in the square. I saw Cardinal Fratellini, a close friend, collapse - implode -- in blackness before my eyes.
    "As for His Holiness, my colleagues (those that remained) and I could not at first decide what to do for the best. Was His Holiness actually dead? None of us was sure, as there has, of course, been no exact precedent. But even were he alive, we were sure that he would be incapable of office, and after many hours of debate we decided to proceed with the deliberations we'd need to... oh dear, am I boring you?" He looked up at Jadis. She now knelt down in front of him, clasping his hands which were still half in the air, still describing the shape of the absent Pope.
    "Domingo, please go on," she said.
    The man had clearly been brooding over his tale for many lonely hours, lost in a blizzard. It was no surprise that he sometimes appeared to be talking to himself.
    As if sensing his uncertainty, the still unquenched spirit inside Shoshana recognized another soul searching for harbour, and prodded its wavering host to press closer to his side. To have seen any person crushed, folded up like that, in such agony and terror, must be beyond imagining, she thought. How had she and Tom managed to avoid seeing the sights Domingo had seen? Jack and Jadis for that matter, in a village that had seen so many deaths since the summer?
    "Oh, well, I shall be ... er ... brief. My fellow cardinals appeared to look to me for guidance, because, I suppose, I had the ear of His Holiness. They asked me what we should do."
    Jadis' heart sang towards him: the real reason, she guessed, was because Domingo was intelligent and resourceful, and as he had neither a handsome face nor an elegant frame, he had been forced to become a good listener rather than seek any glory for himself. He had been a friend to her and to Jack, to Tom, Avi and (if she'd let him) Shoshana, and presumably to many more.
    "... and so my advice was clear. Given the times, that we should all take some time off for reflection, so naturally I wanted to come here. I apologise for my sudden arrival: as you might appreciate, it is now very difficult to ... er ... phone ahead. And there was another thing I needed to do. Even though the hyperjet could have had me here within an hour, I decided to take the slower road, for I wanted to see for myself how the land lay.
    "You will have a good idea of course, that the world is in a state of some ... ah ...disorder, but this is hard to appreciate for those of us who spend much of our lives cloistered up in St Peter's. In those rooms we Cardinals shuffle to and fro, admiring the Michaelangelo. But, you know, ars longa, and vita brevis, or words to that effect. I felt a need - a duty - to stay close to the ground. I set off on the twenty-sixth of September, which just happens to be my birthday."
    Jadis was bemused by this, and realized that in all the years she'd known Domingo, she had no idea when his birthday fell, or even how old he was. He had always seemed ageless to her, and he was, of course, an expert in avoiding questions that he thought pried too closely into his origins or early life. He'd dropped hints that he came from Spain: but that was it. That he'd vouchsafed the date of his birth was a revelation.
    "I have been travelling ever since," Domingo said. "By bus, by train, and mostly on foot, trudging the highways and watching the world fall to bits around my ears. I was nearly robbed three times, hence the ... er ... gun. Cities are no place to be, and the countryside is full of anxiety and horror. I have slept under hedges, in barns - following the example of the excellent Dr Corstorphine!" Domingo's eyes sparkled. Jack, standing by the fire, bowed low, pretending to doff a non-existent hat, as if he were in a pantomime. But it had been a long time since Jack had roamed the woods and fields alone, waiting for the landscape to call to him.
    "Domingo," said Jack: "what's your assessment of the spread of this plague? Jadis and I, well, we've thought about it, and it doesn't seem to be anything normal, you know, contagious."
    "That's my feeling exactly," replied Domingo, "but it does vary markedly in severity from place to place. Northern Italy has suffered greatly. People were falling like skittles as I left Rome, and by the time I reached Milan it was quite deserted. Turin was a little better, but as I moved westwards, I met refugees from Liguria who said that Genoa was a ghost town and a haunt of demons and werewolves. An exaggeration, I suspect, but one gets the drift.
    "Matters were worse still as I continued my westward course. By the time I reached the Côte D'Azur the plague seemed to have passed, leaving absolutely nothing behind. Nothing. I remember a fortnight at the end of October when I saw not a living soul, during which I visited Nice. There was nobody there at all - except for a few black spheres, which I took to be the last remains of ... er ... people. I was very tired then, and footsore, and hungry, and I needed a holiday. So I checked in at the Hotel Negresco and availed myself of its elegant hospitality as the only guest, and even then, distinctly self-service, may the Lord forgive me. I ate well and enjoyed two or three tolerable nights' sleep: barricading myself in, of course. On the first night there were sounds that woke me in the small hours I should not like to describe, even here, and in daylight. And so the next day I found a supplier for the chasse, not entirely looted and ... er ... armed myself.
    "I am glad I did, for I regret that my shotgun has seen close-range use. For as I continued westwards, across the Rhône, there were more people, and that's when some of them tried to relieve me of such small things I possess. But I am happy to say that there are parts of south-western France that seem hardly to have been affected at all. You will be surprised to learn that Gascony has been only mildly stricken, and in parts of the Languedoc and towards the Pyrenées the peste is only a rumour.
    "But on the whole the picture is terrible. I am sure it will get better, but it will need help. When I return to Rome, or what's left of it, I shall advise my colleagues that whoever assumes the Throne of Peter should spend as little time in it as possible, but go out and about to see what can be done. Without wishing for a soapbox here, I'll make a case that what we need is a new kind of approach, crossing the papacy with the old Friars Mendicant, a sort of Portable Vatican. I do wish Avi were here to keep me up to scratch on my Hebrew, for he had a wonderful phrase that meant `mending the world', as if it were our ordained function, that really said it all."
    "Tikkun olam?" This from Shoshana, who looked straight up at Domingo as if she were a tiny polar-bear cub seeking approval at the feet of its immense father.
    "Yes, Shoshana, that's exactly ... er ... it." Domingo looked down at her proprietorially, and Jadis was pleased and relieved to see how the girl's face changed, as if the sun had fallen on it, or that she'd shed a shabby old raincoat to reveal a shimmering ball-gown beneath.
    Having now reached the end of his story, Domingo asked whether anyone might mind were he to take a turn round the village? Footsore he might be, but Micawber needed exercise, after all, and he felt he needed to call in at the church. A professional visit, you might say.
    "When you get there, you'll find there's a vacancy," said Jack. "`Mending the World' might start rather close to home, if you've a mind to start right here."
    "It is as I feared - and, I confess, for shame, secretly hoped," sighed Domingo. He would be the priest at Saint Rogatien again. At least for a little while. He thanked them for their attention, rising to help Jadis with the plates and mugs. Tom and Jack had to hurry outside again for another seemingly endless round of farmyard chores. Jadis always had plenty of other tasks to keep her busy, so it was Shoshana who asked whether she might accompany Domingo on his short trip up the ancient hillside. A little voice inside her told her that this opportunity must not be wasted, for it would never happen again. She asked the little voice how it could be so certain of this, but it gave no reply.
    To begin with, she felt a little embarrassed even talking to him, as if she were undressing in public, or something. Not that this ever embarrassed you before, a new voice inside her said, replaying a picture of a school-bus bacchanale. She waved it down: that's ancient history, she insisted. I've changed. And with that, her nervousness ceased. But the new voice persisted. What did she think she was doing, a nice Jewish girl, talking over these things with this strange (very strange) man she hardly knew, who, in case she hadn't grasped this fact, was a Catholic priest, noch? She interjected that it really rather depended on what one meant by nice, and, moreover, whether in the context of her own particular early experience, at least, this bland epithet could ever sit next to Jewish, until another voice joined the internal conversation. This was the first voice, that had told her to hurry.
    And then her own thoughts reigned: she had, if she were honest, no qualms whatsoever about baring her soul to this man. Not because he occupied a unique position, in the family circle but not of it, that afforded both knowledge and objectivity; not because he was (she had to admit) far more articulate than Jack, or Jadis, and certainly more than Tom (not that she loved him any less for it); and not that he was a man trained and used to keeping secrets. But simply because he was a good listener. And there was something else, too. That despite everything, their many superficial differences, she felt that she and Domingo had a communion of experience which, for her part, she had never felt entirely happy discussing with anyone else, at least, not fully.
    So, sitting together in the front pew of the freezing church, their breath forming damp clouds in front of them, she told Domingo about the trauma of her early life. How the humanity of religion had been sapped by ritual so rigid that one could no longer see God (yes, she. She! -- talked about God). Of how she'd found greater humanity among those who wore their religion more lightly, or even - she meant no offence - not at all.
    So there. She'd told Domingo everything. Everything. About her Mum and Dad, and Howie Levinson. About Avi and her trip to Israel. Most of all, she told him about Tom, and her love for him, not sparing her most intimate secret, that when she and Tom made love, he scorched her inside; and that the pain of it was cumulative, and now so great that she felt she could hardly stand. Yet for all that, she still smiled, for she very much did not want to hurt Tom, or put any stain on Jadis' act of charity and help, in that she had been offered a new home, away from all that stuff. And there she sat, still, waiting for Domingo's judgement.
    Domingo had never, to his knowledge, cried, and he did not do so now, but her experience resonated so strongly with his own that he told her things he'd sworn he'd never share with anyone but his Maker, who knew it anyway. How he was found as a baby abandoned in the open gutter of the starving, hilltop village in southern Spain - abandoned, because he was thought too deformed to live. How he was taken in by the blessed Sisters who, while they had undoubtedly saved his life, had given him a ridiculously inflated name as if in mockery of his humble origin, and told him constantly that whatever the Lord might think, that he was such an ugly little boy. Indeed, they relished every opportunity they had to reinforce this opinion, especially in front of the other children, who spurned him, kicked him, and teased him - until he grew to be a lot bigger than they were, and was able to retaliate in kind. After that he was left alone, and the Sisters could pack him off to a monastery as soon as they decently could.
    He glossed over the agonies and humiliations of his novitiate, but noted how, in his mind, the strictures of religious observance did sometimes make it hard to see God.
    "And this, my dear Shoshana, is how, in spite of all appearances, we two are so much alike," he said. "As you know, a long time ago, Avi Malkeinu and I were great friends, working with Jadis, here at Saint-Rogatien. Like you, Avi found it hard to see God, and I remember our having a very similar conversation. That ritual gets in the way. I found it hard to put this into a succinct ... ah ... sentence at the time, but Avi helped me out. It was something he was taught long before, by his grandfather, he said. That there was once a famous rabbi, who said that the ritual is neither here nor there. The important thing was love, because - what was it? Ah yes - because `everything else is commentary'. It was a Rabbi Akiva, I think...?"
    "It was Hillel," said Shoshana, finding herself smiling, embracing the big man by her side.
    "You see! I knew you'd know. And rabbi ... er ... Hillel was quite right, and so are you."
    But, he noted, looking directly at her: that just because the ritual hides God doesn't mean that God isn't there, or that he doesn't care. It was because of this knowledge that despite the abuse he'd suffered all his life, he had embraced the Church, finally, with gladness. And it was because of this same knowledge, he said, that he found Judaism so full of contradictions, which he found fascinating.
    "How so?" she asked, her eyes closed, nestling up against his warmth.
    "Avi asked just the same questions. I see it like this. That there is more to the Jews than having a covenant with God: they are, in truth ... ah ... defined by it. So how is it that Judaism demands every perfection of ritual with no demand made on the supplicant that he has faith? If he has not faith, how can he be a Jew?"
    "I used to have a lot of rows with my stepfather about this," said Shoshana. "My goodness, did we have rows. But I can see now, that he was only trying to do right by the ritual. He'd say that if you walk the walk for long enough, then you'd learn to talk the talk, and then you'd find yourself believing in God without knowing it. You had to have the ritual to invoke God, my stepfather said. Of course, being a stroppy teenager, I said that you had to have all the marching up and down just to convince yourself that God existed."
    Domingo was silent for a spell. He could see it was logical, but to him it was logic, inverted. And yet both views - faith before ritual, and ritual before faith -- led to the same place.
    She continued: if God exists, if God cares, then how can it be that God tolerates such suffering? The suffering that you - we both - have endured? The suffering of everyone in the war, this plague? Ah, he replied, he doesn't. But the fact remains that although God has a plan and a design for the Universe, he has, nevertheless, granted each one of us the gift of free will. And, yes, our actions are indeed free, because without freedom, we cannot fairly be judged; and without freedom, God's ultimate design might not be revealed, for if it were otherwise, he'd have thrown his own game, in which case everyone's lives would have been lived to no purpose. The Universe would be stripped of meaning.
    But, she said, I did not will this pain. And your Pope did not will himself into that dreadful fate.
    This is true, he admitted. Some people would have you believe that all is explicable through belief, that God can be second-guessed: that we can know what God wants. But in reality, faith is not so different from science, properly construed. There are many things that we do not, and perhaps cannot understand.
    "God is infinite, Shoshana, and we are infinitesimally tiny. The deeds of God may seem kind or cruel to us, but they are, in a formal sense, incomprehensible. The most we can do is strive to improve our world, and if our circumstances box us into a corner, we have to ... ah ... accept them."
    "I cannot do that," she said, firmly, her insides gripped as if within the teeth of a black steel vice. She shook, and started to sweat, but Domingo's grasp stopped her falling to the floor.
    "My poor, sweet child," said Domingo, partly to her, partly to himself - that she should suffer so. "But you must."
    "Why?"
    "Because you have no choice."
    She looked up at him, questioningly.
    "It is the tragedy of our human state, Shoshana. Animals meet their destiny without being aware of it: acceptance does not come into it. But we - we human beings - know what's coming, and yet despite free will, there comes a point where we cannot avoid our fate. It is at that point that we exercise the last option we are given, as part of the privilege of humanity - that we choose to accept our fate. Even though no other option is available."
    Shoshana pulled herself up, now sitting on Domingo's lap as if she were a small child. To Domingo, she weighed almost nothing, as if she weren't there at all.
    "And if we don't? If we don't accept?"
    "There are two things that make us human," he replied. "The first is that we can see God. The second is that we can love. I think that the two are one and the same, and they are both related to acceptance. And I see it in you. Tom's love has done this thing to you, and yet you have already told me that you accept it - for love. Truly, you know more about God than I do."
    She said no more. So he picked her up in his arms, called for the dog, and tramped slowly through the snow back to the farmhouse.

    She sat in the same place a few days later. It was Christmas Eve, and Domingo, dressed in threadbare vestments he'd found in some cupboard somewhere - over which he wore his greatcoat - was performing the ancient rite of the Midnight Mass. Tom sat to her left, Jadis, and then Jack, to her right.
    They were not alone. Horses, carts, bicycles and a few electric vehicles jostled in the Place Etienne Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, and the church was full. People for many miles around had heard that Father Domingo had returned, and that even after all their troubles, the horror of the past year, that Midnight Mass would be celebrated in the church on the ancient hill. Father Domingo had done many good works in his tenure at the church, twenty years before, the village elders had said. It was no surprise, a man like that, that he went on to greater things. But he had been missed. And it was only proper that he had come back. It was as if normal service had resumed.
    Before the service, people greeted one another, embracing, crying, for all the world as if they had emerged from some collective nightmare, and that the future would be brighter. The church was washed a honey yellow with the glow from dozens of candles. Perhaps there is something to be said for ritual after all, Shoshana thought to herself, as a first step in tikkun olam.
    Not that she could repair herself, at least not directly. For as soon as she had stopped fighting, she knew two things.
    The first was that her sickness was a hideous inverse of the plague. On the outside, she was fresh and new, uncorrupted. On the inside, her entire body cavity was stained black. Her heart pounded in a black epicardial soup; her lungs strained within a cavity hardening like brittle charcoal. She managed to hide it from Tom, but her urine was black, and she was now coughing black blood.
    The second was that she felt no pain. Only joy.

    Jadis and Tom had noticed how much better she'd seemed. To Jadis, Shoshana had stopped shuffling around like a penitent, and had rediscovered the spring in her step. The colour had returned to her face: her skin glowed the colour of soft summer sunshine. To Tom, this glow extended to a renewal of tenderness instead of ferocity, calmness instead of desperation. The evening before, they had made love as if for the very first time: her love had a sweetness to it that he would remember for the rest of his life. And through it all, she was cloaked in a bright electric mantle of butter-yellow, fringed with the sienna of cinnamon.
    Shoshana, however, looked straight ahead at the fluid movements of the priest, and realized that Domingo had unbarred the gates for her, so that she could now see God, radiant. And God was calling to her - `come'.
    Credo in unum deum, her soul replied: Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad.
    God knew everything, patrem omnipotentem, melekh ha'olam, and all we had to do was to trust him when he said that there was a purpose in being, because all the rest was commentary.
    She did not know why, or to what end, only that her life had meant something. It had not been for nothing, and because she had lived, the world would be different. Avinu Malkeinu, aseh imanu tzedakah v'chesed v'hoshiyainu, she begged him: dona nobis pacem.
    And her prayer was answered.

    Tom turned round then. He noticed, first, that her face was radiant as if reflecting the last rays of the setting sun, and filled with utmost peace. And second, that she was dead.

    Chapter 19

    (June 2053)

    And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
    Matthew 16, 18

    The church bell clanged noon. "Class dismissed --"
    In truth, the six youths had begun to gather their things and rise several seconds before Jack had spoken, and had started to file towards the door of the classroom, what had once been a ground-floor office in the Mairie. Summer was here, and even if there weren't already plenty to do on their family farms, teenagers could always find many reasons to bunk off in the sunshine. Not that they weren't interested, far from it. But education was just one among many things on offer in a bustling farming community, and was often considered an optional extra.
    "Doctor Jack," the whippet-thin, sandy-haired Serge had asked: "what was it like, here at Saint-Rogatien, when you first arrived here with Doctor Jadis?" The weasel-faced youth had assumed the mantle of unelected leader of the village school senior class. He was by far the smallest, but he made up for it in boldness.
    "Yeah, Doctor Jack," the other five chorused, each one a hulking monolith like the others: "what was it like?" It occurred to Jack that they were all boys. He hadn't seen a girl in his senior class for - what? - at least three years. But he never tired of telling them how different things were just half a century before, just as they never tired of hearing his stories of what they called the Old Days. It was something they invariably demanded at the end of morning classes, and they listened with absolute fascination, if not in complete silence. It didn't stop them jumping up as one when the bell went, even if he were in mid-sentence. But that's just teenagers, Jack reasoned.
    So they listened, rapt, as he'd told them how the world was once absolutely heaving with people, who travelled from place to place in trains, like we do, although their trains weren't always hauled by coal-fired steam engines, like ours. To this, incomprehension - the closest rail station was Blagnac, a day's fast gallop away, and none of the boys had ever been more than six or seven miles from where they'd been born. But they were intrigued that people felt the need to rush around all the time when there was so much to do right here. What interested them more than trains was that people in the Old Days had also driven around in things called cars that hadn't needed horses to pull them.
    "Or cattle," joked Patrice, the butcher's son, pointing to Marcel Lecroix - by far the biggest of the lot - whose even bigger blacksmith father plodded around the district on an enormous cart hauled by four oxen, a vehicle that occupied the entire width of most of the lanes it travelled along at a top speed of two miles per hour. They all laughed, even Marcel, and in the subsequent high-spirited fisticuffs they might have forgotten Jack entirely had Serge not said "but Doctor Jack - tell us again about the planes."
    So Jack had told them of a flight he'd made in a plane back from a city called New York in a place called America that had taken less than three hours, even though it had crossed the ocean. What is a city? Where is America? Is it further than - say - Marciac? What's an `ocean'? Why was the York `new'? What was wrong with the old one? Can you really have a machine that flies? How fast did it go? Oh, said Jack, more than a thousand times as fast as Lecroix père's ox-cart. And this was the best part - it had no pilot. The boys were stupefied by all of this. Drone hyperjets (or indeed any aircraft, however humble); any habitation larger than a smallish town; any number more than a couple of dozen; and geography beyond the nearest market square: all might as well have been science-fiction to them.
    Either that, or a recollection of history so remote as to defy comprehension: of the Romans, say, or the Egyptians, or even the makers of Saint-Rogatien's hillside, or the buried city of Souris Saint-Michel. But if that were the case, Jack reflected, putting on his broad-brimmed hat and picking up his things, he was in their eyes just as much of a fossil as these ancients. A living fossil: a holdover from a past age. And that was the real reason that the boys found it all so absorbing - testimony from the horse's mouth. Given that so many people felt so little need to read anything, oral tradition had once more come to the fore. The storytelling urge that had dominated human discourse for most of human history, in which the past few hundred years of literature was, to take the longest possible view, something of an anomaly.
    After calling in at the boulangerie as Jadis had asked, he ambled the quarter-mile down the lane to their back gate. The back lane had once been neatly tarmac'd, but the asphalt skin had long since worn away, and the long line of grass and buttercups between the two wheel-made ruts had spread across the entire width of the lane. Erosion had deepened the lane, too, so that for much of its length it was a gully between two high verges, a cool and grassy corridor. In winter, though, it became an impassable, icy torrent, stripping much of the soil and vegetation: this was the only thing that stopped the lane becoming completely overgrown and impassable. Walking with his long, measured strides, Jack remarked to himself with pride that he could still do it, still walk tall. But he missed roaming the countryside, and wondered when it was that he had stopped doing so. Perhaps it would be time to venture abroad and see the world once again - see how the effects of the Plague had changed things.
    Any dispassionate observer would have seen in Jack a neat, distinguished elderly gent, albeit with a lean frame essentially unaltered since youth, if thinner and greyer. Yet apart from Serge, all those boys in his class were taller than he was, and wider, and the eldest was only thirteen. They all had hands like steam-hammers, and a couple of them had rather ferocious-looking teeth. He had to confess, it sometimes made him nervous. Taken together, they were of a type fundamentally different from his own: a new breed. In that case, he really was a living fossil.
    What saved his class - and all the other hulking villagers like them - from a general sense of ominous brooding, was a generally happy-go-lucky demeanour which tended to throw all that suppressed violence into perspective: even if that, too, could go a little overboard. He remembered a few weeks ago at dusk wandering down this same lane to find one of his recent graduates, trousers round his ankles, humping away at a girl dog-fashion, right in the middle of the road. Jack, being a product of a certain era and upbringing, edged carefully past the grunting four-legged mass while pretending not to notice. Just as he was tiptoeing away, and imagining that he'd got past scot-free, both girl and boy offered a cheery greeting - "Hi Doctor Jack, how's it going?" - as casually as if they had been reaping, rather than sowing.
    When he'd got home after that incident he'd been irritable and buttoned-up until Jadis had wheedled it out of him, and once she had, she'd teased him unmercifully, that what irked him more than the fact of conspicuous fornication in the street was his own embarrassment at having witnessed it.
    "And anyway," she'd said, putting down the chicken she had been plucking and turning to him, a feather-flecked hand on his chest, "we used to like that sort of thing, once upon a time? Didn't we?" Framed by a mass of unkempt hair, her eyes smouldered with memories of long ago. The Spinney. The Nest. And, well, perhaps not so long ago. Maybe a couple of weeks, in fact. In their orchard. Yes, he'd said, but we wouldn't have done it in public - would we? No, perhaps not, she replied, eyes sparkling -- but it was the thrill that one might be discovered that added to the frisson.
    But that's just it, Jack said - this routine coupling could have no frisson if the participants were plainly quite unperturbed about being discovered hard at it, in broad daylight, in the middle of the highway. To this, Jadis had no answer. Later on, in bed, she reflected that the thrill of sex in the open air made the privacy of the act all the more precious.
    In that moment she realized how much that privacy meant to her, how much Jack meant to her, and how jealous she was of his attention. In which case, she could not find it in her heart to understand how two people who loved each other could have sex in full view of other people and not mind. She laughed to herself at a joke Avi had once told - that the reason people didn't have sex in the street in Tel Aviv was that people would stop and criticize their technique. This, she reasoned, was a joke made by Jews in self-acknowledgement of a tendency to pry and to gossip. But it wouldn't be funny at all if people really did have sex in the street, would it?
    If Jack were some kind of relic in the eyes of the villagers: and if this label were meant kindly, as a mark of respect, then Jadis' status was more ambiguous. Busy as she was trying to keep the farmhouse running, she rarely ventured outside: even her ritual morning round had fallen into decay. To the villagers she had become remote, but more than that -- a figure unattainable in theory as well as in practice. For as the only woman for miles around who could pretend to any semblance of an education at all, let alone higher learning, Jack suspected that she was increasingly seen as a bearer of occult knowledge, a witch, even: an impression deepened in recent years as she had been called upon to serve as a kind of unofficial village doctor. To many villagers, especially the younger ones, Jadis' name was mentioned rarely, and with awe, as if her name itself bore invocative power, either to heal or to destroy. Only Serge dared refer to her by name, as `Doctor Jadis'. The others would go to some lengths to avoid intoning these sacerdotal syllables, using some circumlocution as `Madame Jack' or `The Farmer's Wife' or just `The Doctor'.
    Jack accompanied her, as often as he could, on late-night mercy missions to tend the dying, or to bring new life into the world. She seemed quite unaware that her careless use of the French that they'd both learned half a century ago was seen as impossibly quaint, ornamented and antique against the increasingly loose local patois that Jack had been accustomed to use as a teacher and occasional Mayor -- an argot that seemed to have grown up since the Plague. That, together with her piercing eyes, her flying, silvery-white hair and artless, animated manner, rendered her a creature apart, a shaman, a priestess. She seemed not to notice that their neighbours viewed her as some kind of demiurge. Not that Jadis wouldn't be amused by it - no, she'd think it was an enormous joke - but that the knowledge might, in the end, disturb her, make her change her behaviour, so that she would become yet more reclusive. And this would only make matters worse.
    The irony was that Jadis really was the guardian of occult knowledge, and it had been preying on both their minds of late. This was the Sigil, still covered by a tarpaulin in the stable, now buried under a stack of hay bales and a writhing disorder of tack, buckets and other farmyard paraphernalia, all but forgotten. But he and Jadis were getting no younger, and they'd have to unearth it someday. Jack had a feeling that their life's work together would never be complete until they had plumbed the Sigil's mysteries. The problem was that now the machinery of high-tech academia had more or less fallen away, all they could possibly do was just look at it, as they had before, with no hope of further progress or insight. Just describing it seemed somehow inadequate. Having therefore no idea of the direction that research into the Sigil should take, they had no real idea where to start, and so, as is often the case with such problems, it was shelved, put aside, in the face of other, everyday concerns.
    And then there was the Plague itself.
    It had occurred to Jack quite recently how rarely this event was mentioned nowadays, how little it seemed to influence their lives, as catastrophic and cathartic as it had been for anyone who had lived through it. His contact with the younger villagers should have told him, however, that all his students had been born after its passing, and, to them, the Plague was as mythical a part of the Ancient World as cars and planes. And those villagers who had experienced the summer of '34 at first-hand - an ever-decreasing number -- tended not to dwell on it, for its reminiscence rekindled memories of agonizing death, multiple bereavement and two or three years of grinding hardship that had claimed many more lives, through epidemics of lesser diseases, violent confrontation and bald starvation. Like veterans returning from the Western Front, they sought solace in living from day to day, piecing together a mundane, quiet life as best they could, and, most of all, not looking back.
    He passed the field-gate and pushed it shut behind him, his mind a swirling disorder of all these and other memories and impressions. He thought about those contrivances called cars, and that his students were right - they really had been the most unbelievable things. In particular, he thought about a day that he and Jadis had raced off in one of these selfsame contraptions, so he could show her Souris Saint-Michel for the very first time, setting in train a series of events that would lead them to the Sigil. It had been forty-two years ago to the very day. For today was Jadis Markham's seventieth birthday. The baker, an immense shaggy-haired woman called Amélie Foucault (why was everyone immense these days?) had baked a surprise birthday cake. Jack suspected that this was less a present to a regular customer than a ritual offering, to ensure fertility or a good harvest. But he kept these thoughts to himself.
    Apart from the inviolate sanctuary of the Spinney, most of the garden had been given over to cultivation, now just beginning to come into fruition. They'd just enjoyed the last of the asparagus - a hard crop in their clayey soil - but one of which they were particularly fond. They were harvesting the first strawberries and gooseberries, making sure that they preserved at least as many as they ate. Shoots of young maize and squashes were just getting into the swing of having been transplanted from the greenhouses, and fresh green cucumber vines were essaying their first trails across the dry ground. The dark masses of potato plants rose knee-high: Jadis had already dug up the first of the earlies, egg-sized and golden, a welcome, succulent freshness that contrasted with the husks of the last of the winter store. It looked like a cornucopia of such easy plenty: but Jack knew (because his own back told him) that it had been the product of a half-century of toil.
    The potager gave on to the herb garden with its billows of sage, lavender and rosemary, and then the orchard. He passed through the ranks of mature apple and nut trees, each one shading a kinetic retinue of chickens, ducks and geese, all involved in a constantly shifting stand-off with one another, the goats and the ever-present horde of Horribles. Rounding the eastern end of the house and into the front yard, he saw two horseman making their way up the long drive. One was small and stocky, with a long, grey, hooded travelling cloak, riding a neat palomino mare. The other, in contrast, was as enormous in height as well as in girth, enveloped in a billowing scarlet cloak, and riding an impressive dappled-grey percheron stallion of a size commensurate with its rider. This rider's hood was thrown back to reveal a bushy riot of snowy hair, silver against scarlet: a cross between a medieval knight and Father Christmas. Both riders wore long black boots, bandoliers and carried guns in long, leather saddle holsters.
    Jack saw that they were, respectively, his own son Tom; and his old friend Domingo, whom the world of the past two decades would have now recognized as the ineffably remote figure of His Holiness, the Vicar of Christ. And yet here he was, in Jack's front yard. Truly, had the villagers known that Jadis entertained the Pope to tea, their heads would probably have exploded. But at least (Jack laughed inwardly at the thought) she'd never be burned as an agent of the Devil. Not with God on her side.
    "Tom, look!" the Earthly Representative of the Divine Majesty called to his companion, on seeing Jack, "we are undone! We are caught red handed!" Then, to Jack, "We had meant our visit to be a complete ... er ... birthday surprise."
    Jack smiled. He could hardly imagine a less conspicuous entrance. The two horsemen plodded into the yard: Jack held their horses while they dismounted. Domingo patted the percheron and embraced Jack enthusiastically, before asking if the Lady of the House were At Home. He shambled to the kitchen door without waiting for an answer, his cloak flapping behind him. Presently Jack heard sounds of glad welcome from within, Jadis' sharp, excited voice a counterpoint to the rumbling bonhomie of the ever-welcome guest like summer lightning across a wall of cloud.
    Tom, hanging back, took his turn.
    "Bonjour, Papa," he said, his face hard to read. "I'll just get these two settled, may I?"
    "Of course, son, if you can find room in the stable."
    "Thanks" - Tom smiled, weakly. He pulled the saddles and panniers off the horses and led the beasts away. Jack followed him, ostensibly to help settle the horses, which would need rubbing down, feeding and watering, but really to reassure his son with his presence. Tom had not been home for a decade, and now seemed nervous, as if he couldn't decide if the farmhouse really were home for him, and afraid of any conclusion he might reach. As it was, neither said anything. Tom had always been reticent, a trait that had sharpened with age. Jack, likewise, found it hard to parade the usual clichés that crowded his mind on such occasions - `great to see you', `it's been a long time', and so on - and so ended up saying nothing. In truth, both men preferred it that way.
    But as they walked towards the house, both smelling very strongly of sweaty horse, Tom said to Jack, as if in a flood, long suppressed -
    "Papa, I'd like to stay here for a while. I need a rest. To refocus, and to think about things. Maybe write. Let's call it a `sabbatical'. The Fellowship has agreed. I have been working too hard, they said. So I am here. I hope you and Maman won't mind. But I do not want to spoil things ..."
    "Tom, you don't need to ask." Jack looked at Tom: he was still young, but at thirty-nine he hardly seemed to have changed since his twenties. Only his eyes had aged, and the skin around them; and his general demeanour had somehow become wizened and shrunken.
    Not, thought Jack, that this was such a great surprise, in the circumstances.
    In the Spring of 2035, Tom got his summons to complete his studies at Cambridge. The Plague had passed, and the University had somehow managed to scrape itself together, if only on a war footing. It was just what Tom needed. Shoshana's death had floored him completely, pitching him into an active and sometimes violent depression. He had once again ceased talking altogether, and would wander off and be found - meditating, it seemed - half-clothed, in the middle of roads, impervious to the curiosity of passers-by. When it was impressed on him that this behaviour was unacceptable, he took to spending long hours sitting in the church: which had been fine while Domingo was still in residence, but the priest had to leave at Epiphany, to journey back to Rome as quickly as he could.
    After that, Tom would sit in the church alone, mute and quite still for hours at a time, whence Jadis had to fetch him at sundown, sometimes after long and difficult persuasion. Jack and Jadis did not know what had taken the girl from them, and Domingo could offer no opinion. But whatever it had been, Tom had blamed himself.
    After almost three months Jadis had reached the end of her tether.
    "And does Tom think it hasn't affected us? Affected me?" she'd shouted at Jack, venting her frustration at her inability to intervene. So Jadis spent hours with her son cradled in her arms like a broken doll.
    It had taken the invitation from Cambridge to waken Tom from his stupor. The last thing he said when he boarded the train after the two-day buggy-ride to Blagnac was not a goodbye, but an apology. He was sorry, he said, for all the trouble he'd caused. His last memory of his mother had been her smile. Don't forget Tom, we'll always love you, no matter what. Always her smile, and her dark eyes.
    The train journey was long and bitter - the stormy ferry crossing to England even worse - but Tom made the firm decision that it would represent a bridge between the past and the future. That Shoshana wasn't coming with him was a knife in his guts, but he'd just have to get over it. Hanging nauseous over the taff rail of the cross-channel ferry, he realized that since Shoshana had died he had lost the capacity to see the aura of anyone. Looking up, he realized it was not entirely true - this passenger was picked out in a faint puce - or was that just his sickly face? No - that passenger there, that girl, she has a halo of blue and gold. But it no longer seemed easily to him: he had to work at it. Not that he tried very hard, because he soon had many other things to occupy his time.
    Back in Cambridge he threw himself into his work with a ferocity that surprised those of his classmates who'd also escaped the Plague. More surprising was that he no longer joined them in drinking sprees and girl-chasing expeditions, even though these were more muted anyway, given the general chaos and the imposition of a strict and increasingly monastic discipline on all students. Monasticism had initially been a temporary response to the crisis, but like all temporary solutions, it had acquired an inertial permanence, for the survivors derived comfort from strict regulation imposed from above, a haven from the chaos that had recently disrupted their lives. To Tom, cloistered by candlelight in his room, he felt he had to work doubly hard to make amends to his mother, and in memory of Shoshana, who had never got the chance.
    He graduated top of his class that summer, but there had been no-one to greet him on the parched Senate House Lawn; nobody to take him for coffee or walk with him along the Backs; nobody to declare their love or propose marriage. The prospect of travelling home was just too exhausting to contemplate, so he started immediately on the college fellowship he'd been offered.
    The college was an amalgam of several pre-Plague ones, now re-established on strictly ascetic lines, and known as the Petrine Fellowship. Even though there was no specific religious allegiance or division along gender lines, the head of the college was not called President or Master but `Abbot', and the Fellows swore vows of silence (at least while not teaching) and celibacy (whether teaching or not). The reasons and mechanism for the Plague had remained an intractable mystery. However, the view in many quarters was that the Plague had been, if not a punishment for our sins, then a warning against committing any more. Both vows suited Tom, as they relieved him of the responsibility of enforcing them on himself. If he were not travelling for research purposes, he had taken all his meals in college, the only sounds being the minimal susurrus of knives and napkins and the slurps of several species.
    He drove himself, often working until dawn and taking only an hour's nap before resuming his daily duties. He hated the thickets on the margins of sleep where he might dream of times past. The time when they'd made love the day before she'd died. After a while the sensation dulled until it was alike an abstract, a postcard received from someone else. But he could never quite shake off the reverie into which he was plunged each time he passed a baker's window and caught the yeasty smell of new-made loaves.
    By the time of his most recent visit home, to celebrate his mother's sixtieth birthday, he was a rising star in the field of comparative anthropology, specializing in hominid religious practice. He had written an influential paper on Tibestian coming-of-age ceremonies, the research for which had taken him once again to Jerusalem, a long and wearisome journey by train and steam-packet. He'd hated every minute of it: apart from Jerusalem itself and a few religious enclaves in the Galilee, Israel had become a wasteland, either barren yellow desert or stinking salt-marsh, where the sea had encroached on the ruins of the cities along the coastal plain. And because every time he paused from work, he saw Shoshana's deep blue eyes against the yellow-brown mountains.
    He'd taken his frustration and hurt out on his students, who came to see him as a tyrannical martinet, much given to withering sarcasm. Matters had become much worse recently, with the admission to Cambridge of members of a hitherto unrecognized species of hominid, in addition to the thirteen already in residence.
    People who regarded themselves as broadly belonging to Homo sapiens still made up more than half the student body, but there were sizeable minorities of Tibetan and Mongolian Almai, Afghan Kaptars, Sasquatch, Pendek and the two known species of Sulawesian, to which could be added a smattering of Tibestians and Menehune and a few others even more obscure, but which Tom made it his business to get to know, at least for background. For example, he'd become good friends (inasmuch as he was any longer friends with anyone) with the Lucasian Professor at Trinity, widely regarded as a genius in transfinite hermeneutics and the first Laotian Annamite to appear in Cambridge. Barely three feet tall and covered in golden hair so thick he never wore clothes, Professor Alexander Beetle ("my little joke", he said, "my birth name is hardly pronounceable by anyone, even me") he looked more like a mobile mop-head than a human being, but had, Tom thought, an unmatched delicacy of spirit.
    But the new hominids were different again, and to a degree that Tom found offensive. He became convinced that they existed for the sole purpose of humiliating him. After many long, lonely hours of meditation in his cell, Tom had distilled three reasons why he found these new creatures so particularly discommoding.
    The first was that they were horribly gregarious. You could never get one of them on its own when you could have - say - four or five, all shrieking together. This made one-to-one conversation impossible and turned teaching into a travesty. Tom had tried to tease them apart for supervisions, but they never let him. He'd remonstrated with their colleges; the colleges cited counter-complaints that Tom's efforts to separate them had infringed on their `sovereign rights as hominids', so Tom would have to put up with it and teach them, and God help him if his charges felt the slightest whim to complain again.
    The second resulted from the first - that these creatures felt that they had the licence to behave any way they chose in his classes. That they were sexually demonstrative was no particular surprise. Many hominids thought public sex no more shocking than, say, kissing, or even shaking hands (indeed, the Taimyri thought shaking hands a much greater solecism). So lascivious behaviour and even casual sex in lectures was pretty much the norm, even in Cambridge. No, it wasn't that - or at least, not very much. It was that these creatures tried to importune him, three or four of them at a time. At first it was verbal taunts and catcalls he could ignore. But then came the awful feeling during supervisions that he was being watched rather than listened to, as if he were some prey item being stalked by a hungry pack.
    Recently, there had been a couple of occasions when he'd been physically jostled and even subject to situations which could reasonably be regarded as sexually compromising, though he knew too little of these creatures to know how much of their behaviour had ritual content. And worst of all, he had succumbed. This kept him from complaining to the University authorities. He might have done so had he been aware of any other academic similarly exposed - but he was not. So perhaps it was just him.
    The third was their name. All hominids had some proud if unpronounceable name denoting their mythic and divine heritage. These had no such thing, or if they did, they obstinately refused to tell anyone. Instead, they insisted on being known as `Jive Monkeys'. To Tom, this was the last straw, and the fact that finally convinced him that these creatures were here to get at him personally.
    After a while Tom had had enough and had agreed with the Petrine Fellowship that he take a sabbatical. In any case, his mother would be seventy and it was high time he went home for a spell. But still he hesitated. There were memories, which, even nineteen years later, had a skin so thin that it might be broken.
    It so happened that Domingo was passing through Cambridge on one of his occasional visits, and finally talked him round. Indeed, the priest had said, he, too, deserved a short holiday, as he was about to take a momentous decision and he wanted to meditate on it. The farmhouse was always a good place for reflection, and he had (he said) another reason for visiting the farmhouse in particular, aside from it being Jadis' birthday. Tom knew that Domingo loved to tease about secrets in his keeping, and so decided to let him spin his web without comment. But Domingo suggested that they travel to France together, and this appealed to Tom, for whatever else one might say, Domingo was always good company, talking so freely that it absolved him from most conversational duties. They could go first-class on the Chemins de Fer de Saint-Christophe direct from Cambridge to Blagnac via Saint Pancras and the newly re-opened Channel Tunnel, said Domingo, and then hire horses at Blagnac.
    "We could creep up on the farmhouse: take it by surprise!" he had said. Really, sighed Tom, Domingo did love his dramatic flourishes.
    Domingo had promised Jack and Jadis to keep watch on Tom as much as he could, to be a kind of guardian angel. But he had his own reason for ensuring Tom's health, and, where possible, his happiness - and that reason was guilt. It was he who had brought Tom as a baby to Jack and Jadis, a baby who had proved full of unexpected medical surprises that he, Domingo, was only just beginning to fathom. But even then, Shoshana's confession about Tom, that his love for her was slowly killing her, came as a shock for which he felt partly responsible. And so, he felt, he'd had the blood of an innocent life and the thought of another damaged soul on his conscience. Such was the heaviness of his heart when he finally arrived back in Rome in the early spring of 2035.
    The Eternal City was in serious danger of belying its name. By the time Domingo had reached the Vatican, Rome had been all but abandoned. Substantial parts of it had burned down, and most of the rest had become an eerie ghost town, made more sombre by its vast, ancient ruins. By degrees, the remaining members of the College of Cardinals reassembled, and the election to choose a successor to the lamented Linus was a muted affair that passed unnoticed outside the echoing confines of the Sistine Chapel.
    It soon became clear that he himself was the leading candidate - perhaps the only candidate. His guilt, he felt, would hamper him, so he entered the lists with extreme reluctance, but his colleagues were adamant that he alone had the vision and energy to undertake what would very likely be the most difficult and thankless Pontificate of modern times. The Church had been thrown back to the early Middle Ages, and it would take a churchman of rare devotion to reignite the spark. The Cardinals had liked Domingo's radical ideas, of taking the Church into the world, rather than waiting for the world to journey to the Vatican. Who'd want to come here anyway, they had said, to this grim mausoleum where walked only the shades of death and agony?
    His first task was to choose a name. His real name was out: there had never been a Pope called Dominic, and he didn't want to set a precedent. In any case, his name had been wished on him as a kind of mockery, and this was his one chance to select a name that would sit better with his own desires, his own mission. The effort of examining name after name, only to reject each in its turn, prompted a certain frivolity, a personal trait that endeared him to his colleagues, who reasoned that humour would have survival value in the current crisis. So it was in this mood that he had given some thought to Pope Pongo I: a name fitting for a Primate, he thought, cheekily -- until decorum intervened.
    In his youth, Domingo had been much impressed by the Blessed John Paul II who, like him, had been an outsider with an unwieldy birth-name. But as a name, `John Paul' didn't seem to suit, not least because he couldn't help feeling that any true successor would have to be called `George Ringo'. Jolting himself back to seriousness, he reasoned that nothing much else grabbed him. `Benedict' implied a doctrinal conservatism that he didn't much like; to name himself `Gregory' seemed unhealthily self-glorifying; and `John's were two-a-penny. He knew it was just vanity, but he thought he needed a name that would signify difference, a new start, and yet with reverence to the Church in its youth, faced with many trials but full of vitality and potential. Something more encouraging, he thought.
    His fascination with the more ancient byways of Church lore came to his rescue - emboldened by the choice of his predecessor, naming himself after the second Pope, after Peter himself. He chastised himself for shame for not wanting to be called Linus III, but his feeling of wanting to break with the recent past proved the stronger impulse. In the lists of Popes from antiquity he found Eusebius, an obscure pontiff who ruled for a turbulent summer in 309, or perhaps it was 310, and later sainted. The word meant `pious', which was unexceptional enough. The Church at that time, in the dying days of the Roman Empire, had been riven by dispute about the conditions under which lapsed Christians, driven out of the Church following the persecutions of the Abominable Diocletian, should be readmitted.
    Eusebius was all for readmission and forgiveness - the predations of the Roman Eagle were hardly the fault of those persecuted. His opponents had other ideas, and in any case, they had the mob on their side. Faced with imminent anarchy, the Emperor had had little choice but to exile the mild Eusebius and the agitating antipope Horatius. Eusebius was sent to Sicily, and was dead from starvation within a year. When matters had calmed down, a contrite Church brought his bones back to Rome. More than once had Domingo visited the crypt housing the Saint's remains, and had taken to heart the epigraph written by a successor, Damasus, detailing in eight lines virtually everything known about him.
    The benign ecumenism of Saint Eusebius appealed to something deep in Domingo's nature. But the archaeologist in him warmed to the ancientry and obscurity of his inspiration, and that so little was known about him. On that score, Domingo could have chosen from a host of half-forgotten saints, as had his predecessor. So why Eusebius, and wherefore Calixtus, Telesphorus, Anicetus or Soter? The clincher was that 26 September, the Feast of Saint Eusebius, happened to be Domingo's birthday. That settled it.
    And so it was that Papa Eusebius Secundus, Episcopus Romanus, took up his mission, his status as the first post-Plague Pontiff being his most unwelcome distinction. Like his ancient namesake, Eusebius's first task was to reunite his depleted and dispersed flock, and do so with love, whatever the cost.
    He began by issuing an informal edict to his Cardinals - to leave the Vatican behind, to go out into the world, and to heal it. Were anyone to ask him why his own efforts were always that bit more painstaking, more heartfelt than those of his colleagues, he would, of course, have denied it. But his heart told him that he was driven by a need for atonement. He did it, he told his God in long penitent hours, for the sake of a young girl who had been offered the one thing she most needed in the world, the one thing that makes us human, and in her acceptance had been betrayed by it - and yet in the end she had been full of forgiveness.
    For the next decade and a half, Pope Eusebius travelled the length and breadth of Europe, founding and fostering new monastic orders. In ancient times, he said, monks had kept the flame of civilization alive by copying the works of the ancients. The modern world had more practical needs. So the first order he founded was the Society of Christophorines, whose devotion would be to the power of steam. Their religious duty was to build and operate steam engines to pump much-needed water; as well as locomotives, ensuring that the Iron Horse crisscrossed the continent, keeping trade flowing and maintaining a basic standard of living for what remained of the population.
    The next body he created was the Order of Saint Adelard, whose task was to run the great nuclear furnaces of France, to maintain at least a minimum standard of electrical power. Domingo's critics were few, but some said that electricity, let alone nuclear power, was the work of Satan. Such accusations always triggered a mental juke box usually so deeply buried that he had forgotten it was there at all. And so it was that his inevitable response was "So what? The Devil always did have the best tunes", as Mick and Keith serenaded his mind's ear. Their advice was, usually, to Paint It Black.
    The Pope travelled much further afield. His first voyage lasted almost two years. It started in May 2039, and after an Atlantic crossing beset by storms and pirates, took him to the ruins of Rio de Janeiro, whence he hopped northwards to the Caribbean and eventually Florida. The Americas in general had suffered greatly from the Plague. Central and South America had been reduced to a thin skin of trading ports around an almost wholly deserted interior, reverting to jungle and wildlife and, if the lurid folk-tales he learned from the one-eyed buccaneer he'd met in a Cayenne bar were worth anything - far worse things. Demons. Monsters. Anthropophagi who carried their heads beneath their shoulders, and who knows what else.
    Things got worse as he travelled north. The East Coast of the United States and Maritime Canada had been completely deserted. New York was a ruin as impressive and as lifeless as the Circus Maximus, waves breaking against the stained glass and tarnished steel of the skyscrapers as Manhattan, like Atlantis, slowly sank. He heard that things were slightly better westward, and that the largest population centre in North America was Aberdeen, Washington, the administrative capital of the Shasta, a loose federation of Sasquatch tribes that extended from California to Alaska.
    Taking ship once more across the Atlantic, he was briefly marooned on Lanzarote when his steam-powered yacht had not only run out of coal, but had also lost its mast. A second ship, similar to the first but marginally less decrepit, took him to Dakar and around the Guinea coast to Lagos. He had hoped to see the Bishop of that city, who had been an old friend.
    His wish was vain, for Africa was, if anything, far worse than the Americas had been. In truth, his heart had forewarned him of this. The population of Africa had been in decline for decades, suffering the consequences of disease, climate change, shamefully poor governance and general neglect. The Plague had hit Africa with the impact of a wrecking ball on a rotten watermelon. Apart from a very few widely dispersed coaling stations clinging to the fetid and malarial coasts, no human being survived in sub-Saharan Africa, as far as he could tell - none at all. Africa, once the birthplace of Homo sapiens, was now witness to its extinction. That was not quite the same as saying that there were no people, but such hominids that might have existed were too widely scattered to contact. All that Domingo could do was ensure that each coastal station had a contingent of Christophorines before returning, by slow degrees, to Europe.
    The steamer limped back up the coast until it reached Mauritania and the first signs of the Khalifa. The Plague had struck the mighty Islamic Empire hard and had ripped out its heart, claiming more victims than anywhere but sub-Saharan Africa. All that was left were sleepy coastal villages, and the rare, languid camel train that would penetrate the nearer oases. Climate change had struck these, too, so that the entire Sahel and Saharan Interior had now been abandoned to the white-hot erg.
    It was when the Papal Barque crossed to southern Spain that Domingo noticed how crowded Europe had seemed by comparison with Africa. Andalusia, the region of his birth, had been the among least affected of any part of the world, with fewer than one in ten people falling victim to the Plague. Life continued pretty much as it always had. Still, the Pope easily resisted the temptation of scaling the mountains to the village where he had spent his earliest years. Instead, he embarked once again and crossed to the ancient port of Ostia and arrived in Rome in April, 2041.
    Some of his brethren among the Cardinals had travelled even further than he had, and had equally interesting tales to tell, sitting and praying in the hollow remains of St Peter. The Plague had cleaned out a swath of steppe from Russia and Central Asia through to Mongolia and northern China, and had been patchy in India. But the story was quite different in South-East Asia, from the Yangtze southwards through Indochina and the Malay archipelago to northern Australia, and outwards into the Pacific. The Orient was, according to one roving Cardinal, a necklace of hominid diversity like nowhere else in the world, almost like a world in itself. New species of hominid seemed to be emerging constantly amid the sorry, lingering remnants of Homo sapiens.
    And so, hardly as he'd disembarked from the last one, Domingo set off on another, even longer voyage, eastwards through the Mediterranean and across the Black Sea to Georgia, the Colchis of the Argonauts where the Caucasus meets the sea. Thence northwards, across the Kazakh steppes until, after many adventures, he passed the Dzungarian Gates and into the vast, windy desert that northern China had become.
    Turning south again, he found that the Cardinal had been right. To cross the Yangtze was to enter a different world, a land where hominids ruled. In streets and markets and temples and palaces from Kunming to Kuala Lumpur he counted at least twenty different kinds of hominid, from the tiny, golden-furred Laotian Annamites to the fearsome Khong, the twelve-foot-tall, black-skinned, red-eyed trolls from the Burmese highlands. In the Indies the hominids mixed freely together in a permanent state of festive riot, a constantly shifting network of alliances made and unmade, with hominids of all kinds and colours parading the crowded streets of the vibrant, revitalized cities in a never-ending array of dazzling finery. But always, at the bottom, was Homo sapiens, reduced to a near-pithecanthropine state: the menials, the servants, the sweepers, the untouchables, the unseeables.
    The anarchic brilliance of the Indies was such that Domingo wondered if he'd ever be able to form any kind of coherent memory of it. He was thinking along these lines as he leaned on the rail of the S. S. Venture as it puffed out of Batavia on the first leg of a voyage that would take him to Egypt and thence Europe. He looked round and discovered he had company. It was the Captain, who introduced himself and invited Domingo to dine with him in his cabin.
    "The Plague was the best thing that ever happened round here," the Captain said, placing a well-chewed pheasant bone on a silver salver before it was whisked away by a stooping human.
    The Captain spoke in an entirely new kind of pidgin, a mixture of English, Chinese, Bahasa and a dozen other tongues. But despite its rich heritage, it was a remarkably simple language to learn and to pronounce, as it had been lashed together rather quickly to suit a wide variety of tongues and vocal chords. Domingo found it rather euphonious and had picked up the rudiments within a few days.
    Domingo looked at the Captain, in a way calculated to invite further confidences: "how so?"
    "Well, look at it this way. Here we all are, the underdogs, pushed into all kinds of holes and corners, and then - wham! - the tables are turned, are they not?"
    Domingo had to agree that they had.
    "And it's good riddance, too. Look what a good thing we've got going. All of us. The boot is on the other foot, for sure!" The Captain raised a glass to Domingo: "cheers, Your Holiness! Welcome to a brave new world!"
    It was then that Domingo noticed the Captain's eyes, set in a broad, brown face. They were large, with green irises that almost covered the white sclera, and with oval pupils. He remembered seeing another face like that once. Much smaller. Looking up at him from a swaddle of blankets. He hadn't seen Tom since Shoshana had died.
    Towards the end of April, 2043, Tom returned to his cell to find much of it already occupied by a huge, weatherworn but otherwise familiar figure, long white hair tied back in a bandanna, barrel of a body clothed in a vibrant pattern of hibiscus, white on purple. All of a sudden he was a tiny child gambolling in the farmhouse yard, recognizing Domingo mainly by his smell - it never varied, his smell, and it smelled always of comfort and security and reassurance. Tom smiled - he remembered that he used to do that a lot more often when ... when ... oh, never mind.
    "Domingo, I have missed you." He hadn't realized how much he'd missed his mentor until he'd said it. It was as if a lost part of his life had returned.
    "And I have missed you, Tom. We have some talking to do, you and I."
    Soon after that meeting, the two of them had turned up at the farmhouse, to toast Jadis on her sixtieth birthday. Now another decade had passed, and they were here again, in the place that both of them would ever call home.
    The party was not lavish, but it lasted well into the late evening, with much talk and wine and more talk, as can be understood by people suddenly reunited with long-lost children, parents and dear friends. There was even a cake, a present from the village boulangerie.
    The revels eventually came to rest in the sitting room, Jadis curled on Jack's lap on the same, desperately sagging sofa; Domingo in a cat-ripped easy chair and Tom cross-legged at his feet and in front of the hearth, looking silently into the flames that were the sole source of illumination. The scent of burning apple-logs filled the room.
    "We have been putting two and two together, Tom and I" Domingo explained, his dark shape punctuated only by the two points of light that were his eyes. "But we're not sure what the answer is yet."
    Jadis sat up: "Oh, Domingo - do you have to be so mysterious all the time?"
    General laughter. Tom turned round.
    "My sentiments exactly, Maman, exactly", he said, playfully punching Domingo's knees.
    "Not at all!" Domingo protested. "It is hard not to be ...er ... mysterious when one is not even sure which two and two must be added, or even if they should."
    "Jack," Jadis asked, looking up, "say something to this silly man, would you? He is making absolutely no sense at all!"
    Jack just smiled and looked down, tousling his wife's hair, saying nothing except in their private language of touch and subtle nuance: give him time, Snow Queen, you know that Domingo always gets there in the end.
    What he actually said was: "who'd like some Armagnac? I believe I still have a couple of bottles of the good stuff left."
    Jadis sat up and hit him over the head with a cushion, whereupon everyone laughed some more, and Tom rose to help his father find a candle for a trip to the cellar.
    After a long pause interrupted by the smoking crackle of the apple wood, Domingo said with sudden seriousness: "Jadis, I apologise for this long absence..."
    "Don't be silly, Domingo, I'm sure you've had lots to keep you busy." Jadis now lay curled on one side on the sofa, looking at the fire, her eyes bright coals from beneath her hair's shawl.
    Speaking almost to himself, Domingo said: "Since I last saw you, all those years ago, you know, with Shoshana..."
    Jadis did not move, but had Domingo looked closely, he'd have seen her eyes moisten.
    "I have travelled far and seen a great deal of the world," he continued, "and although many lives have been lost, there is still some hope for it. It is, however, a very different world from the one we've all known, those of us who've ... er ... been in it for any length of time."
    "You mean us old pantoufles?"
    "I speak only for myself, my dear Jadis!" said Domingo. Jadis suddenly realized that Domingo must have been - what? - seventy-three years old. But apart from the dishevelled rock-star hair, he looked entirely ageless, like a mountain range appears to the goats and goatherds who trace its gullies and ridges for generations. "The world is still wonderful," he continued:
    "In a sense it is renewed and we must take heart from that. There are relatively few ... er ... human beings in it, though. If you went to eastern Asia, you'd think it a different planet entirely. But I have come to love it, despite - no, because of - these differences. I find them somehow ... uh ... invigorating."
    "Where is this leading?"
    "Well, it's like this, my dear Jadis --" Jack and Tom had now returned, with a dusty bottle and four assorted glasses.
    "What's like what, my dear Domingo?" asked Jack, putting down the bottle before turning to riddle the fire. Tom picked up the bottle, poured four generous measures and handed them round. The sharp, prune-like aroma from the brandy combined with the general ambience of apple-wood to make a scent more reminiscent of Christmas than Midsummer. It made the room feel cosier, Jadis thought, thanking her stars that these three men in her life - the ones she'd always loved most -- were all, at last, assembled in one room. And on her birthday, too. She sat up to allow Jack to resume his seat, and then moved closer to him, like a cat, in his lap. I should hate to lose any of you, she thought, but if Jack went, then I should simply vanish - pouff! - like a puff of smoke.
    "Well, Jack, what is it like?" Domingo challenged, while raising his glass. Tom resumed his perch on the hearth, looking back at his father. Jack suddenly felt the focus shift to him. He thought for a long moment.
    "I know what you mean, Domingo," he said. "I see it all the time, when I am teaching - trying to teach - some of the village teenagers. They speak a different language ..."
    Jadis laughed. "Don't they always?"
    "But it's not just the language, it's them. Have you noticed," - this to Jadis - "that people in the village are so huge these days? I thought it was just us getting old, but you know, I'm convinced it isn't."
    Jadis closed her eyes and let Jack stroke her hair.
    "I have an idea. An explanation," said Domingo. "Like all such things you have to travel half way round the world to see what's right in front of you at home. The Plague seems to have spared the hominids. In all my travels, I have seen no case of a hominid falling foul of it. Only humans seem to have been affected, and many have still been spared, thank the Lord."
    "It is true," said Tom. "Cambridge students are still mostly humans, but the academics are now almost all hominids. But the humans have changed too, don't you think, Domingo?"
    Jadis felt that with Tom's entrance, he and Domingo had become a kind of comedy double-act. She knew that Domingo had visited Tom several times in Cambridge, and that they had - in Domingo's words - `starting to put two and two together'.
    "I think Jack has his own answer to that particular ... er ... question", replied Domingo.
    "But I am not sure that I do," said Jack. "Sure, they have changed. People are bigger. But why? Perhaps they eat too much. Don't take enough exercise ..." But as he said this, he knew that he was wrong. People had never eaten so healthily, nor had had such exercise, as they'd had in the past ten years, since they had been forced back to the farms. And he remembered other things, other than size. The teeth. And the sex in the street, not twenty yards from their back gate. Light dawned.
    "Well, I'll be blowed."
    "Hmmm?" Jadis stirred.
    "The plague didn't take all humans indiscriminately," said Jack, "only those without some admixture in their genes of something else, something ... older."
    "That's precisely it, Jack," said Domingo, "and I only realized it in the Far East when I saw the pitiful state of Homo sapiens in that part of the world. Over there, the earliest modern humans displaced the last remnants of Homo erectus. There was some admixture, but very little, and - I'd imagine - very little that was ... uh ... viable. But it was enough to get a few Homo erectus genes into the gene pool. And, fifty thousand years later, those modern humans with enough of this ancient DNA were spared the Plague. They are rather sorry and few, and easily cowed by the abundance of hominids."
    "And here," said Jack, the light of the fire in his eyes, "we have a similar story, but with Neanderthals. How could I have missed it? They were here for an eternity before modern humans, especially in Gascony. Those who survived the Plague must have had a sizeable amount of Neanderthal blood in their veins." He thought of the hulks in his classroom. Their teeth.
    "That would account for a great deal. The ancestors have come to claim their own."
    "It is true," said Domingo: "the builders of Saint-Rogatien live here once again."
    Eyes closed, head on Jack's lap, Jadis heard it all. Somehow she was not surprised. She thought of Avi, and how he'd had a Hebrew phrase to suit a moment like this. What was it? Ah yes, this was it - avoteinu v'imoteinu - forefathers and foremothers, implying a skein of continuity unbroken into the deep past.
    The pause in the conversation lasted longer than ever, as they all gazed into the dying fire, lost in their own thoughts. It was, eventually, Domingo who spoke.
    "Might I change the ... ah ... subject?"
    The brooding reverie broke like a bowstring on a hot knife. Jadis sat up.
    "Yes ... of course."
    "Well, Tom and I still can't make two and two add up," said Domingo, "and we think we know why. It's the Sigil. Neither of us have seen it for almost twenty years. Have you done anything with it? Published?"
    "Of course we haven't, Domingo," Jadis said with a sigh. "We couldn't - wouldn't -- do it without you, or without Tom. But we have no labs any more. No institute. And we don't know where to begin."
    "Ah, well," said Domingo, "now that Tom and I are here for a while, we might turn our minds to it, mightn't we?"
    Jack and Jadis looked stunned. They knew that Tom had planned an open-ended sabbatical, but wouldn't Domingo be due back in Rome, sooner or later?
    It was then that Domingo dropped his biggest bombshell, a secret not known even to Tom.
    "It's like this," he explained. "Rome is not what it was, even after twenty years of restoration. My colleagues and I have decided ... well, I have decided, and they have kindly agreed ... that the Basilica of Saint Peter, while it is a pleasant place to visit, is not really convenient for living. So we've made it into a museum. So people can enjoy visiting it, and offering a welcome stream of ...ah ... revenue. That way, everyone is happy."
    "But where will you go?" asked Jadis, anxiously: "Won't you have any kind of base?"
    "Of course I will, my dear Jadis. I should like to move the ... er ... Holy See to my spiritual home. That's if you'll have me. Super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam. Or words to that effect."
    "You know the answer to that, you lovely, silly man," Jadis replied, closing her eyes and subsiding once again onto Jack's lap, as if hosting the Vatican at her kitchen table was the most natural thing in the world. Jack and Tom worked hard to stop themselves bursting into hysterical laughter.
    Much later still, Jadis rolled over and spooned Jack from behind. "Thank you for a wonderful birthday," she said, sleepily.
    "Oh, I think you should thank Tom and Domingo for that," said Jack. "It was as much of a surprise to me as for you."
    "No, not them," she said. "I wanted to thank you for my present."
    "Hmmm? What was that?" They had long ago given up the habit of birthday presents.
    "This," she said, pulling him round into her arms and kissing him, and when she'd finished, burying her head in his chest. They lay there, like that, for a long time, forging a link with eternity, for when he'd said once again that he loved her and had fallen asleep, she replied -- I love you too, you silly old Lion - so very much. Her love for him no longer scared her, neither did it hurt. And the landscape over which she flew in thought was now completely familiar, every herb and every crevice. But in his arms she would forever be a teenager.

    In a small room across the hall, Domingo rose and unpacked a leather satchel which until recently had bobbed by his side, on the flanks of the percheron. He spent some minutes in hopeless contemplation, and then knelt at his old oak prie-dieu. He prayed, first, for guidance.
    Then, for strength.
    And finally, with silent fervour, for forgiveness - for forgiveness in advance, for what he was about to do next.
    For withdrawing from the leather satchel a wooden box lined with the deepest blue velvet; for opening it; for removing the brown and weathered skull roof folded within.
    For grasping a handful of herbs and dried flowers from inside a pouch of soft cloth; for placing them with great care within the upturned skull.
    For taking a lighted candle from his bedside and setting fire to the herbs. And as the smoke rose, for chanting words hardly heard for millennia, far more ancient than Agnus Dei, but having much the same intent.
    Bless us, Holy One, All High. Who took up the sins of the world, qui tollis peccata mundi.

    Chapter 20

    (March, 2053)

    If the laws of the Universe are kind, they will never be found.
    H. P. Lovecraft -- The Shadow Out Of Time

    The Yahoo cruised uncaring above the woes of the world, looking instead upwards, at the stars, as it had done for many years beyond its scheduled expiry date. It mapped, and patiently, it recorded. Doppler wobbles of distant suns, each suggestive of a planetary system. And, by focusing its well-spaced and extraordinarily acute eyes, it took pictures of the planets circling other, closer primaries. Each vague, suggestive and pixellated, but planets nonetheless: each another, distant Earth.
    Twenty years earlier, it had been the capitalized -- acromymized -- YAHOO, the Yerkes Automatic Heliospheric Optical Observatory. Such is the hubris of scientists that this was now generally unremembered, and the YAHOO was now just Yahoo. It had been launched on a pair of giant Ariane IX boosters from French Guiana four years before the Plague, and was just getting into its stride when that Earthly pestilence swept away most of the engineers who built it and the scientists who had hoped to profit from its data.
    Although a combined NASA-European initiative, most of the mission specialists had been based at the GW Astrometry Institute just outside Cambridge, and received feeds directly from what was actually a matched pair of spacecraft, placed at widely separated Lagrange points in the Earth's orbit. They were coordinated to act as one gigantic interferometer, a single telescope mirror more than a hundred million miles across - capable of detecting planets the size of the Earth around nearby stars.
    An outsider would have hardly noticed, but apart from a blip in the late summer of 2034 - the Plague Year itself - data streaming down from the spacecraft were routinely received and managed. Only the personnel had changed. Over the years, most of the scientists had been quietly replaced, as they had left or died, by others equally capable, but who were, in addition, members of the Order of Saint Adelard. Long before, the Yahoo had attracted the close personal attention of the man who would one day become Pope Eusebius. So even had he not wanted to visit Tom in Cambridge from time to time, Domingo would have had ample reason to have called on his faithful band of astrometers.
    He was doing so now. Thanks to the digital ministrations of the Chief Astrometer and his colleagues, Yahoo's image-enhancement software had been upgraded to allow not just the detection, but the rough mapping of Earthlike planets out to several dozens of light years, together with spectroscopic detection of atmospheric constituents, including - potentially - oxygen and water, the signs of life.
    This raised a number of theological problems for the Pope, who suddenly realized that his own staff were in real danger of discovering life elsewhere in the Universe. To document the Lord's Creation was in itself a laudable aim. But Domingo had yet to work out a formal response to the discovery of alien beings, and was as yet unready to answer even the most obvious challenges that his flock would face were alien life actually discovered. Consider: would Christ have died for the unknown and possibly repellent residents of - say -- Epsilon Eridani Twelve? Would death and resurrection mean anything at all to any immortal hive-minds that might dwell on Canopus Six? Would any evanescent plasma beings that happened to float around Zeta Cancri even require salvation?
    After many hours of prayer, thought and consultation, Domingo came to realize that the situation was just Undique humanitas all over again. It had been hard enough to convince Homo sapiens that other hominids were as deserving of Divine love as humans themselves. If anything, the hominids tended to be narrower and more prejudiced than humans had been. So how would the world react were he to stretch Undique humanitas to encompass any intelligent life in the cosmos?
    He realized, tentatively at first and then with greater enthusiasm, that for all its early trials, Undique humanitas had actually worked. He had never shied away from a challenge, and he would not do so now: if Giordiano Bruno had been forgiven for positing a plurality of worlds, then there should be no reason why intelligent life on Earth was any more deserving of love than were it to occur anywhere else. Why is the Universe here, he was fond of asking himself, if only so he could laugh at the rejoinder - why, where else would it be?
    Once he had resolved that particular issue, he became as excited as any schoolboy at the possibility that life might be detected elsewhere in the cosmos, and looked forward keenly to meeting the Chief Astrometer who, he had said, had some potentially interesting news. It concerned the discovery and subsequent characterization of a system of planets around Lacaille 9352, a star in the Solar neighbourhood so nondescript that earlier searches had largely ignored it.
    "Tell me about your new star - your Nova Stella", said Domingo on a warm day early in the spring of 2053. Domingo could hardly resist a joke, especially not one in Latin. Father Tikko Bray, the Chief Astrometer, being schooled in the history of his craft, had the wit to understand it. How like His Holiness, he thought, to put one at one's ease with a little shared learning, his Little Secrets.
    "Hitherto there has been little to tell, Your Holiness. Lac 9352 is a dim, red-dwarf star, about half the mass of our Sun but very much dimmer, not quite a dozen light years away from us. Despite some early interest in possible planets, it somehow dropped off the menu, as it were, what with one thing and another. I have another interest, of course, your Holiness..."
    "Which is...?"
    "I'm sorry to say it concerns the Sin of Pride. The star is too dim to be seen without a telescope, for all that it is relatively close in space. It was not known to the ancients, but instead discovered by one of ours. De La Caille was an eighteenth-century astronomer and Man of God, Your Holiness. I number him among my distant relations."
    "In that case, Father Bray, ego te absolvo. Please continue." That twinkle again, of star-like eyes beneath the brooding nebulosities of the Papal brows.
    "Of course, Your Holiness. The star has two planets much like our own Earth. One orbits at around the same distance from the star as the Earth from our own Sun. But being as the star is so dim, this planet is frozen and lacks any atmosphere we can detect. The other, however... yes, the other, orbits much closer in, rather like Venus or Mercury. It is -- well, it's ... interesting." Bray could feel a slight increase in tension. He was well aware that the discovery of alien life was of special interest to the Papal ears.
    "Interesting? In what way?" The twinkle condensed to twin steely points.
    "Well, Your Holiness, it's too early to say precisely, with any confidence. For all that the stellar system is relatively near to us in space and the star itself intrinsically dim, the planet is small and rather close to its primary for us to get a pure signal, untainted by stellar influence. Yet we have signs of an atmosphere rich in hydroxyl radicals. This, as Your Holiness is well aware, means water and oxygen. We think there is appreciable nitrogen, too. We have some rough images - very rough indeed, I'm afraid - suggestive of surface features that rotate with the planet. If I may..."
    Bray pressed a remote, and a grainy image of a rotating, alien world appeared in the air, just centimetres above what had until recently been a portrait of the late, lamented Linus II. In the dimness of the blood-red star, the blues of the ocean were deep purple, almost black: the greens of the continents dark and sombre. Scaphes of white ice rode the polar regions.
    Even to Domingo's untutored eye, it was clear that these masses moved in tune with the planet's rotation.
    "So they are not clouds or atmospheric features..."
    "That's correct, Your Holiness. The planet appears to have separate continents and oceans. But as you can see, in some ways it is not very Earth-like. Lac 9352 isn't our bright, yellow Sun. The planet's year is very short, some 55 days, and the proximity to the star means that the planet is almost tidally locked, so that the days are very long indeed. A day on this planet would take more than a month."
    "And yet, Father Bray, and yet. The day is separate from the night, and the water from the land. What price the additional Days of Creation? Or has it stalled? Did this Eden go ... ah ... awry?" That twinkle again. Gloria in excelsis.
    "As to that, Your Holiness, we cannot yet say. However, this is the best candidate for Earthlike life we've yet seen in twenty years of searching. The presence of oxygen speaks greatly towards the presence of some kind of plant life, in which case - if one might speculate - there might be birds of the air, things that crawl, and so forth. But any more than that, well, that would be beyond the evidence."
    And so it was that Father Bray and his colleagues continued their work, warmed by Papal approval. Further meetings followed, in which the astronomer-priest and his employer reviewed further progress on the Lac 9352 system, such as it was. Images were improved, but not by much; further data came in, adding decimal places to numbers that were already accurate. But there was, as yet, no further news of birds, or fish, or whales, or of things that crawl. Creation had, indeed, stalled. Father Bray was beginning to think of moving the search to other candidates. As he himself had reasoned, even in our sleepy corner of the Galaxy, the sky was teeming with stars, brimming over with planets, all furnished by the Creator for his exploration.
    A few miles away, Professor Tom Markham Corstorphine of the Fellowship of Peter was preoccupied with more corporeal concerns.
    Morgana had been the first of the Jive Monkeys he'd been able to distinguish from the mocking, menacing collectivity. Perhaps it was because she was slightly taller than the other two, whom she held somewhat in thrall. Other than that, they had all looked identical: very long, shiny black hair, big, accusing green eyes, and skin the colour of polished teak. Telling them apart had been essential if he were to impose any kind of order, to ask each questions individually during supervisions that veered crazily to the edge of anarchy. And they made that job as difficult as they could.
    He did wonder why the three of them bothered to come to supervisions at all - none of them seemed to care a hoot about Tibestian religion, or the ceremonies of the Tungusi Kaptars. Except that he knew why. They hung on his every word, like cats ready to pounce on a hapless rodent, for any suggestion of sexual innuendo, at which they would all hoot with laughter and, increasingly, direct unwelcome suggestions at him personally.
    He squirmed when he recalled the disastrous discussion about circumcision among the Tibestians. Unlike all other Jews, who circumcised their sons as tiny infants, Tibestians waited until the Bar Mitzvah at thirteen - when they did it in public, using a hot blade of polished obsidian, without any kind of anaesthetic. Now, he just knew that any suggestion of genitalia would have them in fits so loud that the lecturer in the class next door would remonstrate with him afterwards, and even as he opened his mouth to speak he wondered why - why - he hadn't skipped that part of his notes, and gone on to something less controversial.
    In the event it had been worse. Much worse. After the predictable disarray at the mere mention of penises, Morgana had looked him in the eye and asked "Have you been circumcised, Professor?" And before he had managed to collect himself sufficiently to respond, the others had joined in: can we look at it? Oh, please. We must take a look... it's research... and before he could do anything, they had pinned him to the desk and had started to pull off his clothes... I bet he's got a big one ... oooh, he has... we'd like to get our teeth into that... and despite his efforts to fight them off... they hard started to take off their clothes, too ... he was starting to panic, to feel sick ... and, despite himself, to become aroused ... redoubling their interest ... so that when he screamed, the lecturer from next door arrived with several worried-looking students to witness what looked like a gang-rape in progress, although it was not, by then, clear who was raping whom, or if it wasn't just an orgy.
    After that Tom flatly refused to teach any Jive Monkey, threatening their colleges with criminal proceedings if they insisted. The colleges responded with counter-charges of racism and breaches of hominid cultural rights, implying that Tom had put them up to it, inflaming them with talk of genital mutilation, leading them on.
    It was then that the Abbot had called him in and very gently suggested that Tom do his best to get to the end of the academic year and then take some time out, a sabbatical. The only reason that he had not lost his fellowship, the Abbot implied, was that Tom had friends in very high places. His parents. And places higher even than that. But he'd have to keep teaching the Jive Monkeys.
    That evening, after he had dined alone and disconsolately in Hall and had returned to his cell, he heard a soft knock at his door. It was Morgana.
    "Go to hell."
    "Look, Professor Corstorphine - Tom -- we're... I'm... well, we heard what happened, and..."
    He was amazed she'd managed to sneak into the college past the Porter's Lodge. "You heard me. Leave me alone."
    "... well, we're sorry. We didn't mean... I want to explain ..."
    "I'm not hearing any more," he said, and shut the door in her face. But her expression, just a split second before the door closed --- somehow sorrowful, contrite, but with a barely controlled inner indignation -- gave him pause. And it was more than that. It was her aura. He realized that it pulsed in dark colours indescribable to human vision. And that no aura had blazed brighter than a candle flame for him since Shoshana had died. Without wondering to ask what this might mean, he knew he just had to see it again, to know more. He pulled the door ajar, and within an instant she was inside, and in his arms.
    Morgana was a mote at the centre of a great ultraviolet mandala, and it was then he noticed for the first time in his life that he, too, had an aura that matched hers, interlacing, interacting, filling his soul with golden radiance. It was the most glorious sensation imaginable. This must be how Shoshana had felt when he waved his hands through her body field, too ... Shoshana ... but it was too late now. Too late to turn back, even if he could. For now there was more than radiance: there was communication. He felt that someone had started talking to him in a language that he hadn't heard before, but which he felt he had understood all his life.
    Her lips on his were like red hot coals, her tongue a solar flare inside his ready mouth. Each frenziedly unbuttoned the shirt of the other, and it was then that he became conscious of her brazen non-humanity, and it was beautiful.
    Beneath her perfect, brown breasts, each finished with a prominent, ebony nipple, there was another smaller, breast, with its own nipple, and beneath that, a still smaller breast... she had ten teats in all, paired, five each in two tracks that ran down her front, each path curving outwards towards her hips. It was weird, he knew. But he had never seen anything so exotic, so ... lovely. Her green eyes flashed at his, defiant, and he read each nuance of her slit-like pupils as if it were speech. Now do you see? That's why we made such fun of you. Because you are one of us, and you refused to admit it. Worse, refused to admit your manhood. If you'd only known, you'd have shown us and serviced us all --each one of us in her turn, in front of the others, according to her rank --before talking to us. It would only have been polite, to grown women, such as ourselves. That's how we acknowledge dominance. Then we would have listened to you. We would have been quiet as lambs. But instead you ignored us. Insulted us. But I for one, as the senior female, am prepared to forgive, on behalf of us all. If, that is, you observe the Proper Forms. And with that she raised the hem of her long skirt.
    She wore no underwear. Between her legs, up as far as her navel, and almost from hip to hip, she was richly, outrageously furred. Not the sparse springiness of pubic hair, but fur, long and luxuriant. He hesitated, so she kissed him again, and with one hand unbuckled his belt and reached into his trousers. He had already hardened to beyond the point of pain. She weighed his balls in her hand as dispassionately as if she were judging fruit in a produce show, before running her fingertips along the underside of his shaft and squeezing the end, sharply. The pain was agonizing and wonderful.
    "Tom - please..." she said, as if any acquiescent girl, but her eyes said something different, imperative: now, you know what you must do, to command my respect, and that of my subordinates.
    With that she turned away from him and knelt on Tom's narrow bed, flipping her skirt up across her back and pointing her exposed backside at him, in accusation, in challenge. Her hair fell forward around her shoulders, exposing a single raised ridge of sharp, black hairs, running down from the nape of her neck to the small of her back, like the clipped mane of a pony. Even from this angle, he could see the tufts of fur between her legs, and that she was hugely engorged, to an extent far greater than would have been possible for any human female. He realized that for her, coupling face to face would have been extremely awkward. Her aura now enveloped her like two bright violet wings: he saw that it radiated from within her body, and that her swollen vulva was its bright centre, its conduit, gushing torrents of white-hot radiation towards him. She was like a flower, marked with lines and arrows that only the bees can see, arrows pointing to the hidden stores of nectar.
    He climbed onto the bed behind her to do her bidding, and drove into her. He felt himself swell even more to fill her, and her tissues responded, ring-like waves of hot, liquid pressure squeezing him and letting him go, compressing and releasing, and always drawing him inwards. The more he thrust, the more their twin auras danced in the air as one pulsating thing, until he became one tiny point inside her ready to burst. But he found he could not. He became bigger and fuller, tighter and more painful and pulled ever deeper inside her, until he thought he'd pass out, when her aura said You May, and he exploded in an actinic fury of golden-tinged purple and then velvety blackness.
    He had no idea at all whether she too had climaxed. For without a word she rose, dressed herself and left without looking at him, her aura following her like a deep, inky cloak. As the door closed behind her it said: I am content. Honour has been satisfied.
    For the remainder of the academic year, the three Jive Monkeys would be as demurely attentive and studious as he could have wished.
    That evening, however, Morgana left him eviscerated. For as much as he glowed with sexual satisfaction that crowned anything he had ever experienced, he felt he'd been emptied, used. Not only had he betrayed his vows, he'd betrayed the memory of his love for Shoshana, who had loved him too - unlike this creature, whose attentions were solely concerned with the niceties of the etiquette of ritual. Not of love, but of duty.
    When, some hours later after he'd bathed and dried and, still unsatisfied, bathed again; when the wash of hormones inside him had passed, he brought back the language of her eyes and her aura, when it had said that he was one of them; that he could not deny his origins. His soul rebelled: he was a human being, no more, no less, and not a hominid.
    But was he? He knew that he was not Jack and Jadis' biological son, that he had been adopted. He had never sought to investigate his origins - and why should he? The farmhouse had been his world, self-sufficient and bounded by a love he now realized he'd taken for granted. Yet Morgana's argument had still made visceral sense. The instant bond he'd felt; that despite its utterly alien character he had still grasped each precise tic of her body language; and that their auras had actively interacted. Even more, the act had seemed so natural, so easy, despite the strangeness of her anatomy. There had been no thought that he might have been too big for her, as there had always been with Shoshana, and all his girlfriends before that. On the contrary, he fitted inside Morgana like a key in a lock.
    He remembered that he, too, had a stiff ridge of black hair running down the back of his neck. He recalled, with a pain that now brought ears to his eyes, how Shoshana had loved to run her fingers along it, delighting how each stiff tuft of hair bent under her touch and immediately sprang back. Shoshana...
    No, another part of him protested, more loudly as it knew it was weakening, he could not be one of these things, these ... Jive Monkeys. The thought was too horrifyingly outrageous. Bien sûr, it's a shock, the rest of him reasoned. But you liked it, didn't you? He realized that he had.
    To the outside world, however, he would continue to paint himself, resolutely, as a human being, in the hope that he would, one day, convince his soul. After all, there were important parts of him, held with iron affection, that he would not relinquish. A human being he would remain.
    The morning after Morgana's cathartic visit, Tom was roused from a miasmic dream in which Shoshana had stood before him like a doll in some kind of dirndl, and he was shooting at her with a small-calibre pistol. The bullets disappeared into her long skirts and she was yelling at him angrily -- "get yourself an eyeful, mister! where you gonna find knockers like these, eh? Where?" - squeezing her magnificent, snowy-white breasts over the top of her bodice and thrusting them at him, flaunting them ... and not just one pair, but five, each with a gorgeous raspberry nipple surrounded by a broad pink areola. Then the Shoshana-thing had turned round, lifted her petticoats and thrust purple, monstrously protruberant genitalia at him.
    Surfacing to the sound of rain pummelling his small window-pane, Tom knew this could not have been. He had known every warm curve and silken surface of his girl. He still remembered and treasured every moment - and especially on that final night -- when she had sighed and spread her pale, fleshy thighs for him, wafting him with her musk, allowing him to kiss each intricate and intimate fold between, while his hands, separately, massaged her breasts and belly and hips; and she, with her fingers running through his hair, sweetly undecided whether to push him to pleasure her further, or to lift him up, to kiss him, and urge him to sink within her to find glorious release. But if she'd been fitted out, like Morgana had been, with some kind of baboon's arse? No way - that was a machine optimized for one thing: routine, peremptory, contractual copulation, and that was all. No scope there for intimacy, for foreplay, for love. The thought of it revolted him.
    A rough shake to his shoulder. The college servant, while utterly silent, was clearly determined that Tom should wake up, and once he'd pressed the letter into Tom's hand and indicated a cup of herbal tea on Tom's nightstand, the young novice, in robe and cowl, left - walking backwards to the door, crossing himself as he did so.
    Tom sat up abruptly in bed. He felt terrible. His limbs were sluggish, obeying only with sullen reluctance his commands to stir themselves, as if they were schoolchildren on a Monday morning. His throat was dry, and his head pounded to what felt like the opening ceremony of the international festival of gong-makers. His eyes groggily focussed on the envelope, which bore only his address. The letter inside was from Domingo, in his neat, precise hand and as full of mysteries as ever, but with an uncharacteristic spike of urgency that brought Tom instantly to his senses.
    My Dear Tom,
    he read:
    It is time that we talked about the Sigil. We have put it off for too long, I fear: matters have lately progressed in an exciting but possibly unwelcome direction and we are in danger of being overtaken by events. I think it of over-riding importance that you should be fully informed of these new developments. Please come the instant you receive this letter to the GW Astrometry Institute. A hansom will be waiting for you at the Porter's Lodge. I shall greet you on your arrival. In haste -
    The previous evening at around midnight, about two hours after Morgana had left Tom in a state of anguished and fretful disarray, Father Tikko Bray received some disturbing news of his own. That Lac 9352, the small, distant object on which weeks of attention had been lovingly lavished, had literally winked out of existence.
    Within twenty-five seconds of receiving the paged message Father Bray had dressed, in the total darkness of his cell in the GW compound on the Madingley Road. Muttering snatches of Vespers as he ran across the yard to Mission Control, he found that two colleagues had already arrived, and were already busy with the monitoring equipment.
    "We first noticed an unusual darkening on the planet's face," said Father Frederick, the older of the two, a grizzled astrometer who had taken Orders late in life.
    "But it wasn't our instruments," added Father Jonas - a much younger man, very pale and thin with a huge mop of untidy dark hair - " we were calibrating their spectrophotometry against a target star the whole time - the darkening was really happening, as we were watching, and ..."
    Frederick: "And yet the darkening wasn't even, the same all over, there were huge variations on the planet ..."
    Jonas: "... like something was casting shadows on it..."
    Father Bray's eyes darted from Frederick to Jonas and back again:
    "Hold it!" he demanded. "Not so fast! Whatever it was, it's nothing to do with the planet. These shadows, or whatever, came from the star. We already know the star is variable..."
    "Yes, Father," interrupted Jonas. "But not all that variable. And certainly not so variable that it vanishes altogether. We got that, too. Here, look at these pictures from the wide-field camera."
    A wide monitor, integrating images from Yahoo to present a picture of what the Lac 9352 system would look like from a few light-hours away. Or, rather, two pictures. Yesterday's had the star, a small and sullen disc, the planets as smaller, star-like points. Today's had nothing - nothing at all, apart from the background of stars. If the planets were still there, they could not be seen, but that the star itself had disappeared was unarguable. Bray muttered a profanity too low for the others to hear.
    "There's more?"
    "Yes," said Father Frederick. When we saw that, we looked back at the logged recordings and pinpointed precisely when the star vanished. Then we studied them in closer detail and strung them together to make a kind of time-lapse movie. We think it's extraordinary. We don't know what to make of it at all. That's when we summoned you, Father."
    "Thank you", said Bray. "You may play the film now."
    When it ended, Father Bray sank into his padded Mission Control chair, dark eyes staring from a bloodless face.
    "I think I should call His Holiness," he said, before rising hurriedly to find a toilet cubicle, wherein he was violently sick.
    He had composed himself early the next day, when His Holiness Eusebius Secundus arrived, dripping wet from the Spring shower now sheeting down outside, and accompanied by a man who seemed his opposite in every way. Where the Pope was extravagantly enormous, Professor Tom Corstorphine was neat and compact; where His Holiness was floridly expansive, his companion was unusually quiet. He looked ill, actually, and Father Bray wondered why he was here at all.
    "Professor Corstorphine is a good friend of mine," the Pope explained, answering the unasked question. "He may also have an interest in what you are about to reveal, I think."
    Father Bray beckoned to Father Jonas, who keyed a remote to a holographic panel against one wall of the control room. The room lights and the other monitors dimmed, giving Tom and Domingo the impression that they were floating in space, looking down on the great red disc of Lac 9352. Although a midget compared with the Sun, it was still a star, and all stars are mighty indeed when seen at close quarters. At first it seemed much as it always did, like a roiling mass of angry tomato soup, with the occasional cluster of dark spots and a few flares and prominences.
    "We're seeing it in enhanced visual, with a little of UV read into the blue end", noted Father Jonas. "Now, watch closely." A time code and other data flashed by in the bottom right-hand corner of the image - what they were about to see would take less than ninety seconds to elapse.
    The first sign of anything odd was an added dullness to the stellar North Pole (to the bottom of the picture) that slowly built up in intensity and definition, until it looked as if the whole north-central sector of the star was in deep shadow. Another, similar shadowing soon followed on the eastern limb (to the left of the picture), joining and fusing with the northern shadowing until it looked as if the entire bottom-left-hand-quadrant of the star had been occulted, or eclipsed. Except that the eclipse only deepened, and was joined by several other spots of darkness on the remaining, unshadowed parts of the star's face.
    After a minute the star was completely black, but evidently still existed, from a few remaining, fitful flares, and the fact that it masked any stars behind it. But then it appeared to break up, its black remains fragmenting against the still darker blackness of space, until - after the full ninety seconds - absolutely nothing was left. Lac 9352 might as well have never been.
    The Trans-Europe Express burst from the Sangatte end of the tunnel, dragging streamers of acrid, ashy smoke which it would not shed completely for several miles. In a private compartment near the front of the train ("being the Pope has its privileges!"), Domingo pulled open a vent. Curling scuts of soot flew in, soon replaced by fresh air.
    "Steam trains in the Channel Tunnel - what mad pursuit, eh Tom?" Domingo laughed recklessly, offering the basket of croissants to Tom, who refused. "They used to be powered on gasoline. Or was it electricity? But steam! It has taken the Christophorines fifteen years to upgrade the ventilation, and still it's like pea soup in there. What struggle to escape! What pipes and ... er ... tunnels?"
    Tom permitted himself a half-smile and poured coffee for both of them. Since leaving Cambridge they had talked relatively little, and nothing at all of the monstrous revelations at the Astrometry Institute. That a star - a whole star - could disappear before their very eyes, literally dismembered, by - what? The whole thing was just too stupefying to contemplate.
    And then something stirred in Tom's mind - something that he had forgotten for twenty years. Not surprisingly, as it had been blotted out by the subsequent trauma in which he and Shoshana had narrowly escaped being atomized in the War of the Last Days. A tall, thin, freckled seminary student called Fearon Brimstone, who'd mentioned something about disappearing stars, and the Astrometry Institute, and his theory that there was something Out There ready to `bite us on the bum'. Haltingly, he explained all this to Domingo.
    "So whatever it is," Tom concluded, "this phenomenon has been known about for some time. Why did nobody hear about it?"
    "I know the work to which you refer," replied Domingo. "And there has been much of a similar nature published before and since. The first report of a disappearing star - disappearing, that is, in unexplained circumstances, and leaving no trace - was in 2011, I think."
    "But ..."
    "But why has nobody taken any notice?" Tom nodded. "Because," said Domingo, there was no way to explain it, no mechanism. And phenomena without mechanism tend to just lie in the literature until someone can come along and tie things together."
    "What we saw - what we have just seen - I understand that this is the first close-up, real-time demonstration of this - thing - in action?"
    Domingo nodded and sipped his coffee, not taking his eyes off Tom, sitting opposite him, the darkness of his travelling cloak making his face look paler and more drawn.
    "I believe, Tom, that the star was destroyed by the coordinated action of alien beings. I can think of no other, natural explanation, and neither can the Chief Astrometer."
    "So it should get noticed now, shouldn't it?"
    "I very much doubt it," said Domingo, "because what would we have done? Replaced complete ignorance with something that strains credulity to the limit!"
    After that they were silent for a long time, lost in their own thoughts. Domingo felt himself chastened. Be careful what you wish for, his thoughts declaimed. He had earnestly hoped that, one day, alien life would be discovered that he could welcome into the Fellowship of Christ. But that such beings could exist whose purpose was to consume stars - well, that would require some modest reflection. But then, he reasoned, he'd made a fundamental error, of assuming that such alien life that one could detect across the gulf of space must, by virtue of that detection, be intelligent. These star-swarming behemoths had not intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, had they not intellect to begin with. They were no more rapacious predators than the ichneumon wasp whose young devour the living meat of their hapless caterpillar hosts from inside.
    Tom's mind, to be fair, registered little but shattered amazement. The discovery of vast entities that swallowed stars formed a resonant, gothic backdrop for the newly ignited personal battle over his own nature: a battle fought in sodden marshes of metallic despair that left him cold, cheerless and utterly exhausted.
    The Trans-Europe Express thundered across the flatlands of Normandy, the bright Sun climbing above a bank of woolly grey clouds. Tom gazed at it, flying in the eastern sky, as they passed Chartres. He was grateful that it was still there, and wondered if great black shapes might, one day, be converging on it from out of the depths of space. His blood turned to ice: he turned to Domingo, and noticed for the first time how old he looked, how lined his face, and wondered if he, too, felt the same horror.
    Suddenly Domingo spoke, breaking Tom's reverie: "You know, Tom, as I mentioned, we really should have another look at the Sigil."
    "I haven't seen it since before the Plague struck... I'd be hard put to it to recall it in detail. To draw it, for example."
    "The same goes for me, Tom. And that's why we must see it anew. Too much has happened, in both our lives, and we need our memories ... ah ... refreshed."
    Domingo explained that lately he'd been obsessed with the Sigil's three circles, and wondering if they had anything to do with the final fate of the Plague victims.
    "It seemed too great a coincidence," he explained, "that the circles in the Sigil are almost exactly the same size as that of end-stage Postembryonic Oolithic Petrosis. I started wondering whether the Sigil was some kind of document of this disease striking in early times, or maybe a prophecy."
    Tom was quick to spot a flaw in the argument - "but Domingo, what about the crescents, and the radiating lines?"
    "I know, Tom, it's futile, but I can't help thinking about it. Mind going round and round in circles, and circles can never be squared." In his heart, Domingo realized that the image of his predecessor, being crushed into that straitened compass, in unspeakable agony and mortal terror, had branded a flaming circle on his soul.
    But he now recalled, as if it had happened to somebody else in a long-vanished age, of a discussion around the farmhouse table. It must have been in '34, just before the Plague, because he remembered Shoshana's pale face and wide blue eyes when she said of the Sigil's makers that:
    "They wanted to ward them off, at all costs... to find a way of chasing the dragons away ... "
    "Domingo?"
    "I'm sorry Tom, and doubly sorry: it was something Shoshana said. We were all at the farmhouse, talking about the Sigil and the Chinese legend that eclipses are caused by dragons. And how Shoshana said that the Sigil could be an expression of that same impulse. To chase the dragons away."
    Domingo looked across at Tom who looked utterly crushed. He had wanted to discuss Shoshana with him, to ease his burden, but the confidentiality of his office forbade it, even with the man who would be the closest he'd ever have to a son. It tore at his great heart that he was impotent to quench the bereavement that Tom still felt - the guilt that could not be borne, would not be assuaged.
    "In which case," said Tom, his voice flat to the point of seeming cynicism, "Shoshana was closer than any of us knew." And that would be some small crumb to show that she had not died utterly in vain, a mote in this pitiless cosmos.
    "And again, in which case," his eyes flashed at Domingo in reproach that was close to rage, "What would have the plague to do with it - with any of it?"
    "Why - nothing of course!" replied Domingo, as if he'd been slapped. But he then hesitated, as if he had reached a conclusion in undue haste. "But, my dear Tom, please forgive me. I know I have erred - deeply and gravely - but I can only offer to help to make amends."
    "I know, Domingo. I apologise." Tom was determined to allow Domingo no quarter. He would rather focus his pain on somebody else than open up, because he was convinced that the latter course would expose his being to an overwhelming tide of guilt and shame that would destroy him. He was human. But if he were human, how had he killed her? But if he weren't human, how could he have loved her? But, on the other hand, if he were human, how could he have found sex with that alien thing so horribly magnetic? His mind spun crazily in futile circles of its own.
    Domingo looked closely at Tom: "my old friend, I believe that each of us in his own way, has reached an impasse."
    Tom looked dejectedly up at Domingo from the banquette opposite, his eyes streaming. Domingo parted his arms fractionally and without further encouragement, Tom crossed the compartment and sat next to him, burying his form in the elder man's enveloping scarlet cloak and sobbed silently. Domingo was cast back to the time when he bore Tom proudly to the arms of his adopted mother. Why? Was his impulse pure? Was it to ease Jadis' burden of childlessness or, more to gain her approval, to bask in her sunshine? If the latter, it would have been a grievous error.
    Domingo wished more than ever that Tom would take him into his confidence. But perhaps Tom had not experienced enough for him to realize that acceptance is the wisest course. Not like Shoshana, who died untimely and cruelly, but at peace.
    Part of the problem - not that it was a problem - was that unlike Shoshana, Tom had grown up in an atmosphere of unconditional love, which exacted no tribute. In such a situation he might have felt that no spiritual journey was required of him, because he could live his entire life in Eden. Pity, thought Domingo, that happy lot falls only to creatures without souls, for which the notion of love is meaningless, and for which acceptance requires no struggle.
    "But whether the Sigil has anything to do with the Plague or not," Domingo said, more to himself, for Tom had fallen asleep in his lap: "we must go back to the farmhouse and see it again." For the farmhouse, he continued to himself, is not just a sanctuary for both of us, but contains two of the most nimble minds I have had the fortune to encounter in my long life. Minds that once achieved fame on the remarkable intuition of one, and the penetrating insight of the other.
    Like their discovery, Domingo thought, these two minds have been idle for far too long. That is the reason why we must go home: to crack the code. For we may not have very much time.
    He looked up at the Sun and realized that a dozen light-years is a mote in the eye of the Creator. No, not very much time at all.

    Chapter 21

    (June 2053)

    Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
    Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
    He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
    Look'd at each other with a wild surmise
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
    John Keats - On first looking into Chapman's Homer

    First, they had to work out how they were going to study the Sigil in reasonable comfort. The day after Jadis' birthday party, they opened the doors to the stable to assess the upcoming task. It was greater than any of them had anticipated.
    When the Sigil had first taken up residence, the barn was a well-lit laboratory, with clean concrete floors, polished benches and plenty of lighting. The intervening years had not been kind. The concrete floor was still there, of course - scrubbed daily by Jack and whatever help he could get, in the course of mucking out the cows and the pony, and now Tom and Domingo's rented horses. The percheron seemed to occupy about half the space all on its own and looked distinctly cramped and unhappy.
    The lighting had lasted as long as they could keep the solar panels and wind turbine in adequate repair, but an accumulation of wear and tear had meant that such of it that was left worked at best intermittently. In any case, the scarcity of light bulbs rendered as superfluous any efforts to keep the panels in trim. But light bulbs could now be obtained from the Far East, albeit at great cost, so now the machinery would have to be mended - another job to add to Jack's endless list of Augean tasks. The lab benches had been scavenged when more immediate uses for valuable slabs of hardwood had seemed more pressing.
    The Sigil itself, a coffin-sized block of granite too heavy to move without the lifting gear they no longer had, was buried underneath an accumulation of farmyard clutter. Just getting close to it would demand an excavation almost as archaeological as the one that had brought it to light in the first place.
    Even without this impending dig, there was no way they were going to get close to the Sigil unless the livestock were put into one of the fields more or less full-time. Now summer had arrived there was no reason why this could not be done. But it took another week for Jack and Tom to renovate a crumbling storm-shelter for the animals close to the field-gate, where they could be fed and watered, freeing up the barn once more.
    Tom reflected that the farm was slowly slipping into general dilapidation as his parents got older. But even a day here at his home had cheered and freshened him, blown away some of the brooding disquiet of Cambridge. Perhaps he could extend his sabbatical more or less indefinitely. Working here alongside his parents, putting the farmhouse to rights, had always been a source of immense satisfaction for him.
    Domingo, on the other hand, seemed to chafe at the delay and added his mighty frame to speed the work as much as he could. But while Jack and Tom were busy, he took the opportunity of a trip to the village to assess the logistics of moving the Vatican to the hilltop. Jack reckoned that he could probably take over the top two floors of the Mairie. His own duties as village schoolteacher teacher and sometime ex-officio village headman barely occupied two ground-floor rooms of the cavernous, crumbling, once-handsome pink-stuccoed building.
    And so, several mornings later he and Jadis took a turn around the village. The thought of resuming her daily walk in Domingo's company filled Jadis with so much excitement that she practically bounced up and down with the eagerness of a little girl promised a trip to the funfair. It took her back to days of contentment long ago, when the then black-haired Domingo had first appeared in their lives.
    Not that there was any chance of a tranquil wander, just the two of them talking, without interruption. The village itself saw to that.
    Their first stop was the Sanglier D'Or, still a café of sorts, but now more like a tavern from an earlier age, the village's centre for news and gossip. Always bustling with life, its clientèle included a motley assortment of travellers from far and near - from tinkers to mendicant friars -- pumped by the regulars for tales and ballads and word of things happening far away. News of Domingo's arrival had reached the Sanglier long before he had, so he and Jadis found the bar packed with spectators. Indeed, these now spilled out into the Place Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, to make a welcoming committee fit for the return of a conquering hero.
    "It's the Pope! The Pope and the Doctor! Make room! Make room!"
    On hearing this general acclamation, Yvon Rossignol, the latest innkeeper of the Sanglier, made his corpulent way to the front of the throng.
    As a relatively recent arrival, Rossignol had hardly ever seen Jadis, and the news of the Pope's arrival had been coloured by stories of how, as plain Father Domingo, he had pulled the village together in its moment of crisis almost twenty years before. If the tales he'd heard were to be believed, Jadis was a white witch, a priestess of great power with the uncanny ability to restore life, whose healing arts had touched every family in the village and for many miles around.
    "She brought my twin sons into the world," recalled one bright-eyed patron, whose account was typical. "Breech births! My Bernadette nearly died, a goner for certain, but the Doctor brought them into the light and saved her life, too! And all my sons and daughters after that!"
    Left unsaid was the general assumption that she had some direct line to the core of the earth, and was in mysterious communion with the long-dead ancestors of them all.
    For some years Jadis wondered at the source of the eggs, the hams, the produce, the bunches of flowers and especially the small dolls made from wheat stalks left anonymously by her kitchen door. After a while it had dawned on her that these were presents for services rendered. It never once crossed her mind (as it had Jack's) that these were votive offerings. She had turned into her own cave-painting.
    And our Father Domingo, said the locals - our Father Domingo, mind -- has become the Pope himself. And he's here, in Saint-Rogatien! Where the Doctor had mended the ills of the village, rumour had been current for some time about how Domingo was doing the same to the rest of the world.
    "Truly, he is a master of the fates of us all," a hooded and grizzled Christophorine had said one night, sipping a foaming pint of ale, recounting inflated tales of Domingo's travels to a rapt audience of locals.
    "He is that - nothing less," said a colleague bearing the cross and lightning-bolt blazon of the Blessed Order of Saint-Adelard, his face scarred with radiation and chemical burns that would have been the signs of sorcery were they not carried by a man not so plainly touched by holiness. "They say he has been to the ends of the Earth ... and beyond," he declaimed dramatically, raising a pastis. "He meets the creatures of Satan head-on, they say, and faces them down!"
    Rossignol's first sight of the old friends, as they crested the hill and walked slowly into the cobbled square, did not disappoint. The Pope was a giant of a man, his bearded face framed by a long, snow-white mane, his hood thrown back, his scarlet cloak lifted into a swirling train by the gentle breeze, a chasuble richly decorated with a splendid design of red and green parrots, beautiful dark-haired girls with floral head-dresses, and muscular young men riding great blue waves on yellow planks. If this really was the Pope himself, he knew how to make an entrance.
    The woman who walked so confidently next to him despite being hardly more than half his size, seemed at first a pale shadow, in her long, grubby grey coat, floral skirt, sandals, market bag and floppy straw hat. But he could see that hiding behind her flowing grey hair was a face of fierce intelligence, concentrated in two large, penetrating eyes. He would not bear that gaze too long, Rossignol thought. She had the kind of eyes that could see right through you, if you'd let them. Perhaps cast a spell on you. But when she smiled, she seemed like the freshest village girl.
    When Jadis and Domingo found the village all out to greet them, Domingo laughed heartily. It always did Jadis a power of good to hear him laugh, and she laughed too - but when she saw the crowd, she took off her hat, lifted her arms and gathered her hair on the top of her head. Rossignol gasped as the lithe slenderness of her figure. This white witch must have been a captivating beauty, perhaps not so long ago. She looked - what - seventy? But she moved? Ah! Like a girl at her first dance.
    Rossignol now found himself at the front of the crowd, pushed before the two dignitaries. Standing up to his full height of five-foot-three, he bade them welcome in the gravest voice he could muster, and bowed as low as his globular frame would allow. Domingo bowed even lower in response, his nose almost touching the ground, and the crowd hooted with mirth. Domingo helped the innkeeper to his feet, and fearing he might have made fun of him, embraced him like a brother.
    "My good innkeeper, I thank you - and as I have the pleasure of so many ears at once, I have something that might prove of interest to all." The crowd hushed in an instant.
    "Now, I would not wish to discommode any of you, my old friends. But although I have traveled to many places, I have always thought of Saint-Rogatien as my true home. Ever since I first arrived here in ... er... when was it, Jadis?"
    Then the woman spoke for the first time. She looked up at the huge man, smiling at the Representative of Christ on Earth if she were indulging a pet dog, and talking in the kind of French that his grandma would have found quaintly antique.
    "Verily, methought `twas twenty hundred and nine."
    "My old friend and colleague Dr Markham is quite ... er ... correct," continued the Pope, whose French, while in the high style, was at least this side of medieval. "I first came here ... ah ... forty-four years ago. It was different world back then, eh?" General laughter.
    "And I love this place so very much that I have chosen to make it my home again: et que sur cette pierre je bâtirai mon Église!" Deafening roars of approval."Now, my friends, I would not wish to keep you from your errands. However," - he looked over the crowds to count several hoods and cowls - "I should very much appreciate the offices of my Christophorine and Adelardian Brethren, and the good Priest of the Parish, if I may..."
    And so Domingo was carried off to organize the Vatican in exile: Jadis felt slightly deflated. She did not wish to have coffee alone, so she went to the boulangerie and chatted with the Amélie Foucoult's daughter Camille, exchanging a half-dozen fresh duck eggs for two new loaves. Jadis reflected that Camille, a strapping girl of nineteen, was the first child she'd brought into the world, with inexpert midwifery, that first, bitter winter after the Plague had struck. Jadis complimented Camille on the excellence of the birthday cake she'd made for her.
    "Why, thank you, Doctor," blushed Camille, as if Jadis had blessed the bakery with a spell for its continued success. She leaned forward conspiratorially and, asked, half-whispering: "Is he really ... you know ... the Pope? You know, from Rome?"
    Jadis confided that he was.
    "But Rome must be so grand compared with our village, mustn't it Doctor?"
    Jadis confessed that she'd never actually been to Rome herself, but for all its reported refulgently grandificent omnipulence (Camille found the Doctor hard to understand sometimes, she used such long words) the Pope had always thought Saint-Rogatien a much nicer place. And so they parted in mutual satisfaction, the one with bread for the next day and a feeling that her first patient hadn't turned out so badly; the other with the vague sense that she'd touched the hem of greatness.
    Ten days after Domingo and Tom's arrival, the barn was now clear of animals. Jack and Tom fixed the solar panels and turbine as well as they could, but in the end they had to call on professional help. Laurent Gaspard, the farmhouse's regular electrician, had escaped the Plague, but had perished in the dire winter that followed when, up on a church steeple fixing a lightning conductor, he'd slipped on an icy tile and had fallen to his death. It was his son Pascal who now carried on the family business. A basic electricity supply now existed thanks to the ceaseless efforts of the Adelardians, though its coverage was nothing like as extensive as it had been before '34: so Pascal Gaspard could afford to be only a part-time sparks. These days, he was really only interested in breeding beef. Jack managed to tear him away from his beloved herd of prime Limousin to get the barn lighting at least partly functional again. This meant a great deal of cursing, trying to source components (not just light bulbs) and digging holes in the adjacent field, tracing buried cable and patching the places where it had been gnawed through by dormice.
    After that it was only a matter of shifting the detritus of decades to disclose the Sigil. Straw bales that were once stacked ceiling-high were shifted to the other end of the barn, lifting clouds of floury, sour-tasting dust, quantities of owl pellets and the desiccated corpses of unidentifiable small mammals that the Horribles had stored for rainy days that never came. Jadis was amused and delighted at the quantity of objets trouvés that were unearthed in the process, including her favourite border fork (mislaid, '48); a basket once used by Micawber, the dog (discarded after his death in a road accident, '41, but which Jadis could never persuade herself to cast onto the bonfire) and - amazingly -- several boxes of very dusty but still functional light bulbs.
    The first day of July was scheduled as the day when the tarp would be removed, and the Sigil revealed. The day was fiercely hot from the moment the Sun broke the horizon: the family attended to their chores as quickly as they could and then broke for breakfast at eight o'clock. Then it was to the barn. Not a word was spoken, and the tension rose with every step they took across the egg-fryingly hot yard, the remaining fragments of weathered tarmac already starting to soften and bubble.
    For Jadis, the feeling was uncannily like that she'd had when the Sigil had first been discovered, in the deep shaft beneath the cemetery in Souris Saint-Michel: that each time she'd covered it up and returned to it, she'd half-hoped that it would not be there, or have turned into something else.
    Domingo's feelings could be summed up as an angular disjunction of hypotheses. His mind was so full of the many different ways he'd sought to explain the provenance of this object, and the diverse theological implications implied by each, that he hoped he'd be able to see the Sigil simply as it was, unadorned by his preconceptions.
    Jack had thought relatively little about the Sigil until recently: he'd been far too busy with the mundane matters of organizing the farmhouse and the community of Saint-Rogatien to concentrate overmuch on science. Lately he wondered if his avoidance hadn't been deliberate, and, rather despite himself, he was beginning to wonder whether he'd become a little superstitious about the thing.
    As if, he thought, it had been the Sigil that had called him to Souris Saint-Michel, or even to France in the first place, even before he'd got his doctorate: the long-sought focus of all his desires, the grounding for all his instincts. No, that wasn't it. His trip to France had been to give Jadis some space while she completed her finals -- hadn't it? But what if it were a mixture of both - moving away from Jadis as he had been drawn into the orbit of the Sigil? He knew that this line of reasoning (if it could be dignified as such) was entirely ridiculous.
    But it could have been worse even than that: that the Sigil that had tugged on his soul from his earliest youth, when he'd walked the Pennine Way with his Dad and first felt the landscape start beneath him, like the struggles of a caught leveret felt through a poacher's sack. It wasn't the Sigil's fault that he'd been born in the North of England, rather than Gascony. If he'd been born in Tarragona or Timbuktu, he'd still have been drawn here - pulled by the Sigil in its quest for its own revelation. In which case the Sigil had had nothing in particular to do with Jadis, except inasmuch as she'd also been snared, right from the start, by Jack's unconscious quest. No wonder, then, that he felt his boots snag and drag with each step he took closer to the barn. The distance from the kitchen door was hardly twenty metres, but it could have been twenty miles, or twenty parsecs.
    For Tom, inevitably, memories of the Sigil were tied up with those of Shoshana. He had only ever seen it in her company, and she had been party to the last serious discussion that anyone had had about it. As for the Sigil itself - the bald, physical reality of it - he had no particular memory or expectation.
    The barn was dark and cool after the yard. Jack pulled the doors open and disappeared into the sharp shadows to switch on the lights. The interior was flooded with a soft yellow radiance more like that of mellow eventide than bright early morning. Jadis imagined she'd turned up for a barn dance a little early, and half expected people to barge in after her, with musical instruments, barrels of beer and strings of flags and fairy lights.
    Under the lights, strung on chains from the gnarled and cracked oak beams high above, the floor was bare except for a trestle table, four chairs of assorted sizes and types, and a few oddments kicked into corners that nobody had got round to clearing up. And, at one end, the Sigil, under its blue tarp.
    The four of them stood over the shrouded rock, each waiting for the other to make the first move. Jadis could hardly believe that they'd worked themselves up into such a state. She was convinced that they'd been feeding off one another, and that had each of them been alone, they'd have simply marched in and pulled the tarp away.
    "Well?" she demanded: "Are we going to wait here all day? Some of us have things to do!" And at that she stepped forward and dragged the cover, slowly, off the Sigil.
    She turned back towards the stone. No, she thought - it's still there. It hadn't gone away, as she'd secretly hoped. The grey rock was about the same size and shape as a coffin, its sides and ends dull and rough. Only the top had been polished smooth, and if you looked very carefully indeed, you could just about discern the faintest tracery of engraving on it. After a minute or two, the whole pattern would become evident, and you'd see the three perfect circles, the crescents, and the fine, straight lines that radiated outwards from the central circle to the corners and edges of the bordered inscription. Funny, she thought, it was the unnatural smoothness and flatness of the rock that had first drawn their attention. The inscription itself had only become apparent a little while later, so fine were the lines in which it had been wrought.
    Domingo bent closely over the surface and found himself tracing the lines with his fingertips. The line's edges were almost as sharp as newly cut paper. He wondered at the remarkable evenness with which the inscription had been drawn, and with that, began to imagine a startling possibility. That what they were looking at was not something individually hand-crafted, but mass-produced. And if so, why stop at just one? For the moment, he kept these thoughts to himself.
    For Jack, hanging back, it was the stone itself, rather than the inscription, that resonated most strongly with his sense of what belonged in a landscape, and what didn't. This lump of grey granite most definitely did not belong. Granite was highly atypical of the geology of Souris Saint-Michel, and those few pieces they'd found in the ancient subterranean city could be traced to a number of localities at some distance from the site. The rock that constituted the Sigil itself had remained, maddeningly, untraceable - at least inasmuch as they'd managed to do any serious mineralogy on it before the Plague had struck. Had the Sigil woven threads through his whole life just to bring him here, only to leave him mystified? He felt that a dead end was not be the answer. It had to mean something, but what?
    "Domingo," asked Tom, in a voice so quiet that it was barely audible, yet which quavered with an emotion hardly controlled: "would you mind stepping back, I ..."
    "Yes Tom, of course... of course," replied the big man, standing up straight and turning round to look at Tom, whose eyes now blazed with an alien radiance.
    "C'est incroyable. Incroyable!" Tom fought to catch his breath, his face bathed in wonder and terror. Domingo moved towards him in case - he thought - Tom might fall. "Non, Domingo, I'm sorry, I'm okay, really ... I'm okay."
    "What is it, Tom? What can you see?"
    In truth, Tom could hardly describe precisely what he had seen on the stone, except that it was so completely unexpected that he was temporarily winded with shock. When he'd last seen the rock all those years before, it was just that - a stone, with the feint, elegant lines of the Sigil inscribed on it. But sometime between now and then, either the Sigil had changed, or he had. For when Jadis had pulled back the tarpaulin, it was as if she'd uncovered a bank of bright ultraviolet runway lights that blasted into the backs of his eyes.
    Squinting, he saw that the radiance was not general, but coincident with the lines of the Sigil. For him, and him alone, the pattern was etched in lines of purple fire that cast everything else into shadow: the contrast was so strong that this alone was all he saw, freed from its rocky matrix.
    But as he watched, the pattern lifted from the rock and tilted towards him in space. It grew, unfolding into something altogether more complex, drawing him into a new realm of sensation in which the barn, Domingo, his parents, and even his own body, were shadows out of time. The Sigil that evolved before his astonished eyes was to the etching on the rock as the finished mansion is to the architect's floor plan.
    The central circle rose from the dim rock and grew into a violet sphere before his eyes. It seemed to fill his vision. The violet softened to pale blue, and then to yellow, as the sphere contracted to an apparent size of around a meter in diameter. Flares and prominences shot out from its surface into a turbulent, million-degree plasma. The sphere rotated before his eyes, like a giant, hot globe. It was a star. Tom could have sworn that he was a disembodied spirit, floating in space above the stellar corona.
    And then it was joined by two other spheres, rising from the circles to right and left. Like the central star, they developed from an incandescent violet, although their fates were different. The star on the left condensed to a sullen red, like a pool of magmatic sludge. Tom thought of Lac 9352, the star whose terrifying fate he'd seen for himself. The star on the right also condensed, but the purple turned to an icy blue-white of an almost unbearable brilliance.
    For a while all three blazed before him - red, yellow and blue-white - rotating, spitting out sparks, disgorging rivers of plasma into one another's orbits to create a dazzling, multicoloured aurora. And then the stars on the right and left turned black: he could see spots on their surfaces that spread like hideous cankers hundreds of thousands of miles across, until the stars were eclipsed, each one giving vent to a final coronal blast of such power that would vaporize planets -- before they vanished. The spaces they had once occupied were blacker than their surroundings, traversed only by a few stray and lonely photons. Floating above the voids, Tom thought that if only he were able to glance directly into them, he'd see dark tunnels that stretched forever. Except that shapes began to move within the blackness itself, still darker than the pitchy voids they inhabited, writhing angrily like maggots squirming over a rotten corpse.
    "What do I see, Domingo? I can see the pits of hell opening up beneath my feet."
    The dark shapes climbed out of the stagnant pits where stars had once stood, rising like two horribly fluid, ebony cobras, until they fragmented into smaller, black shapes that moved in formation towards the central star, from right and left. The shapes were much smaller than the stars, and their precise forms were hard to make out. But the formations in which they moved were all too recognizable. They were crescents, like the two crescents in the Sigil. They fell on the central star like piranhas on a tethered goat, diving into its surface, breaking it up into shredded masses of livid orange fragmented by black fissures that looked hair-thin, but which could have accommodated the whole Earth ten million times over. Within minutes the central star had disappeared, and all that was left was yawning, eternal night.
    Disoriented by the sudden and complete blackness, Tom staggered and fell backwards, bumping into Domingo. Trying to stand, he turned, vomited violently on the floor, and, tripping over his own feet, caught his head on the edge of the table with a crack. He toppled like a falling tree. By the time he'd reached the floor he was out cold.
    He awoke to an intensity of pain that made him wish he were dead. He was vaguely aware that it was evening.
    "Darling Tom, it's me," said Jadis, her voice seeming simultaneously close, and yet coming from a great and wintry distance, as if she were calling to him from across a frozen, snowbound field.
    "Maman? I'm sorry, I don't feel so well." Jadis saw her son's face turn green and whisked the bowl into place just in time for him to be sick in it, after which he turned over and slept solidly for thirty hours.
    He was still feverish when he awoke two mornings later, but he felt well enough to sit up on the sofa in the sitting-room, when he told them all what he had seen. Jadis and Jack were aghast. Only Domingo seemed to understand, but perhaps that was because he had also witnessed the destruction of Lac 9352. Tom could understand why they'd be so shocked, but what puzzled him more than anything else was that none of the others had seen the visions he'd witnessed. When it became clear that all they'd seen was the naked Sigil on the rock, he became irritable, then angry. The last thing he said was that if everything he did prompted people to make fun of him, he wouldn't give them the benefit of his company, and went to his room.
    Domingo, Jack and Jadis met in worried conclave in the kitchen late that evening. They'd all had very long days, and, much against their better judgment, were forced to leave Tom to his own devices. Jadis had worked hard with the animals and in the garden. Tom felt well enough to do some weeding for an hour or two in the late afternoon, but would exchange no more than a sullen monosyllable and did his best to keep out of Jadis' way - a fact that distressed her more than she was prepared to admit.
    Jack had spent the day mostly in the village. He'd had a class to teach, and also to welcome the visiting Mayor of Seissan who had come to bask in reflected Papal glory. There had been a seemingly unending stream of such people over the past couple of days, when Jack's mind had become a helpless, torpid mass with Tom at its centre. His son had seemed so terribly unhappy: the communications they'd had from the Petrine Abbot explained some of it, but the essence of the problem was clothed in characteristically Cantabridgian circumlocution. And as Tom was unwilling to say any more, Jack felt tied, helpless - literally, unable to help. As for Domingo, he spent much of the time in deep discussion with his expanding retinue of monks, making seemingly endless plans for moving people and equipment to the old Mairie, and yet all the while worrying about Tom. What was to be done, if he wouldn't talk? What could be done?
    "Jack, Jadis, we must do our best to excuse Tom," Domingo began. "He has been under the most incredible strain at Cambridge. What with all that ... ah ... business with those East Asian hominids, and the destruction of the star we witnessed together, at the GW Astrometry Institute, I rather think he has had enough. Our homeward journey together was rather ...ah ... fraught. He is consumed with preoccupation; he will confide in no-one, yet it is plain that coming back here has brought back memories of Shoshana, for whose death he feels responsible."
    Jadis's eyes were pools looking into space.
    "Oh, my poor boy," she said, and hurried from the room. The two men could hear her small, confident steps fading across the hall, and the creak of the treads as she climbed the stairs. Jack and Domingo remained as silent as expectant fathers outside a maternity ward, barred from the secret ministrations of women. Presently, Jadis returned.
    "He's locked the room, but all is quiet. He's asleep. I managed to peep through the keyhole. Don't worry, Jack, he's breathing. I'll go up again later and ..."
    "But what was all that about disappearing stars?" Jack asked Domingo: "Is that ... true?"
    "Yes, I rather think it is," said Domingo. "This must go no further than this room, but I have a strong feeling that Tom's interpretation of the Sigil is the correct one, whatever one might think about the manner of its ... ah ... communication. He and Shoshana were quite correct - it is a warning. There is something in space that consumes stars, and it is not very far away from the Sun. I dread what the next few years might bring. You might as well know, but I am arranging with my more technical brethren to wire up the Mairie so that we can be in real-time broadband contact with the GW Institute in Cambridge." He laughed, nervously. "So if we are in for the End of the World, we'll hear about it here first. We owe it to ourselves to be prepared spiritually, even if there is nothing practical that can be done. And that, my oldest and best friends, is what most worries me about Tom. He is boiling with anxiety, but bottles it up inside, with no ... er ... release valve. Confession has a value that goes beyond the perfunctorily religious, I think.
    He paused, weighing words in his mind before speaking:
    "Shoshana was worried about things, too. She'd had a rotten life before coming here, and then it got worse, because of what was ... ah ... eating her inside. She told me about it, too - or as much as she was prepared to - a little while before she died. And I believe that when that moment came, she had achieved some degree of ... ah ... equanimity."
    Silence reigned while the ghost of Shoshana Levinson took its place at the table and then, with a sigh, evaporated.
    "I never knew...", Jadis said.
    "I am sorry, Jadis," Domingo replied, "but I am honour-bound to keep confidences ... ah ... confidential. In any case, were I a doctor, as you seem to be nowadays, I'd recommend that sleep is probably the best medicine, at least for the present."
    "Yes. Let Tom sleep," said Jack. "It's clear that he needs it. Heavens, we all need it."
    Jadis, unable to sit still, rose again to boil a kettle.
    "Domingo," she asked amid the flurry of cups and jars and spoons, "did Tom really see all that - what he says he did? Was it generated by the Sigil? Or did he imagine it all?"
    "It is very hard to say. We have, I think, two options. Either Tom's account was brought on by his own mental strain, amplified by having witnessed, with me, the destruction of a star. Believe me, the experience of seeing an entire star dismantled in less than two minutes is every bit as cathartic as you might suppose. The other option is that Tom saw something external and real that we didn't: which in the end, boils down to much the same thing."
    "But we don't always know what Tom is seeing, do we?" said Jack: "Remember how he was blind until he was six? But we never even knew about it, because he seemed to get around without vision?"
    Jadis put three mugs of hot tea on the table.
    "And wasn't he blind again when he came back here? After they had escaped from Israel ... and then..."
    "Jadis?"
    Her face lit up with revelation. "Yes! He really did see what he says he saw! He did!" She leapt up, all excitement. "Don't you remember, after he and Shoshana came back from Israel and he regained his sight? How he said that everything had an `aura' about it. Perhaps that's what he saw in the Sigil - an aura that only he had the ability to see, an aura that contained real encoded information."
    "But Jadis .... how?"
    "How should I know, Darling Jack? How should I? It's an artifact, perfectly crafted by creatures with advanced technology, and buried for millions of years. We have absolutely no idea who made it. If there are dragons that eat stars, perhaps the Sigil was left here by little green men with three legs. Who knows what it can do? What properties it might have? Honestly, perhaps the Sigil is a dragon's egg! The deeper we get into this, the more glad I am that we never published the thing."
    "No, that's not what I meant. Well, only partly. What I meant was how Tom could see these things, but we couldn't?"
    "If the things he saw were real, not just symptoms of stress, well ... I..." her brow furrowed, her large eyes crossing slightly in inward concentration. There had always been something about Tom, from his earliest years, but she could never put her finger on it. She looked up. "I don't know, Jack - I really don't."
    "Well, in any case," said Domingo, perhaps a little too breezily, "it rather puts paid to another idea I discussed with Tom: that the circles in the Sigil somehow represent the end-stage of the Plague."
    Jadis shuddered.
    "We talked about it on the train. Tom was quick to point out that this idea doesn't account for the crescents and ... er ... lines. Especially now we know that the crescents are equivalent to the dragons of Chinese folk-astronomy - if we accept the evidence of Tom's remarkable eyes."
    Jack sat up and looked at Domingo with a curious expression of concentration, as if he were reaching for something only just out of mental range. If he'd had antennae, they would have been humming.
    "Domingo," he said, "I don't think you should throw that idea away quite so quickly. I know it seems ridiculous, if you'll pardon me, but, you know, it makes a kind of sense."
    "How so, my dear Jack?"
    "As to that, I have absolutely no idea. None whatsoever." The pieces in Jack's brain clicked into place. "I shall have to sleep on it."
    Jadis finished her tea. "Sound like the cue for turning in. Domingo - would you pass me those cups, please?"
    Domingo stood up. It struck Jadis then that he looked distracted, utterly worn with care, showing every hour of his seventy-three years.
    "Domingo, are you okay?"
    "Me? I'm remarkably well, thank you, Jadis, when all things are ... ah ... considered. However, I have some unfinished business with my maker. Good-night!"
    Domingo would be kneeling at his prie-dieu until the early hours, pleading for guidance. His prayers were becoming increasingly ragged, desperate even, as he tried to solve all the mysteries that crowded his head at once, each clamant for urgent attention and immediate resolution. What were the dragons? Were they coming this way? What was the Plague? And what was the source of Jack's hunch, that the Plague had a connection with the Sigil and the appalling events depicted therein? And, while we were on that subject, were those events history -- or prophecy? And who had composed the Sigil? How had they come by all that information? What was their purpose of leaving it here? Were there others? And why now? Why? None of it made any sense at all. At three o'clock in the morning he awoke to find he was still there, kneeling, uncomfortably chill, his hands clasped together, his back aching, his legs full of cramps. His knees were acutely painful, both from the pressure of his weight, and because his blood had pooled around them. He struggled to his feet, crossed himself and hobbled painfully to bed. He had fallen asleep even before the sharp pins-and-needles sensation in his legs had subsided.
    Across the hall, Jack and Jadis were under the covers, each one enjoying the familiar warmth of the other, the sanctity of the darkness and their own thoughts, and yet each wishing the other would break the silence. They, too, had unfinished business. It was Jadis whose resistance broke first.
    "Jack ..." she whispered, "what are we going to do about Tom?"
    He turned towards her and pulled her head into his chest, running his fingers through her hair, caressing her cheek. Her skin was dry, soft and warm, perhaps a little too warm, and he could feel that she was tense. He felt her lashes flicking and flittering against his fingertips as her eyes moved this way and that, searching for reasons, for answers.
    "I don't know. Just keep on showing him that we love him, I guess, and by being patient. He seems so, well, I can't think of the word."
    "Alienated?"
    "Yes, alienated." They parted, and Jack sank onto his back, looking up towards where the ceiling would be, were he able to see anything at all. Human eyes naturally crave the light, and faced with gloom, Jack's created a show of tiny auroral sparks that danced before him. Perhaps Tom had seen something similar, albeit grotesquely magnified. But Domingo was right - if it were only Tom who had seen the dramatic display of cosmic carnage, how would the rest of them know if it were real or not?
    "I wish I knew how to get to him, Jack, to get my little boy back: but he's somehow buried himself under a shell."
    "But he's not our little boy any more, is he? He's a grown up. Maybe he needs space and time to sort it all out by himself."
    Jadis continued, as if she hadn't heard. "There was poor Shoshana, no-one knew how or why she died, and obviously he blames himself ... I can understand that, but really, these dreadful things happen ..."
    Jadis had felt Shoshana's loss keenly, too, mainly by virtue of her own impotence to stop whatever it was that was slowly killing her. Domingo's revelation about her last days had brought it all back. But that was past, and Jadis' emotion was now more empathy for her son than grief for someone long dead and who could no longer suffer. For Tom, any effort to break with the past, however strenuous, seemed to run into a roadblock.
    "He seems to be having such a dreadful time in Cambridge with these ... these ... what are they called? Boogie Bunnies?"
    "'Jive Monkeys'", Jack laughed, quietly. "I know, they sound like they should be rather fun, with a name like that."
    Jadis remembered hominids who had seemed `rather fun' on the surface - quite comical in fact - which on closer questioning turned out to have eaten your friends, but only after torturing them in the most degrading and dehumanizing ways.
    "Well, whatever they're called, I think they need teaching some manners," she said.
    "But that's the point, Jadis. They said the same thing about him."
    "And then watching a star being eaten by more aliens. No wonder he needs a rest."
    "As do I, Snow Queen, as do I", said Jack, pointedly. But he could tell that she was in one of her moods where although she was over-tired, still taut as a bowstring, she would remain quite unable to sleep unless she'd resolved some inner conundrum. She sat up and looked back at the shadow where he lay. He heard the swish of her hair against her shoulders.
    "But I don't understand it, Jack."
    "Hmmm?"
    "Why doesn't he understand these Jive Monkeys? Tom's an expert on hominid cultural differences. An authority. He's practically written the book on it. So why did he fail to understand these ones, in particular?" She sank down again, onto the bed. "I just don't get it."
    Jack said nothing. But the cogs and wheels in his mind meshed again, and found purchase. As usual, Jadis was way ahead of him.
    "I've always had a feeling about Tom, you know, that he's one of a kind. More than just all that business with his eyes. He was always so alone at school, quiet, reserved. But he was happy, wasn't he? I just wish he'd talk about it more. Let it go. I hope he knows that whoever he thinks he is, we'll still love him, no matter what."
    And, thus decided, she turned over and fell asleep. Jack was still awake when she had begun, very softly, to snore.
    Jack nodded off a little while later, subsiding into a half-dream in which everyone seemed perfectly ordinary until you saw their green, cat-like eyes.
    In another room, Tom woke from sleep to find that the bump on his temple had gone down a bit, and no longer hurt quite so much. He'd made little sense of the dream whose shreds were now dissolving like mist before sunrise, but the last image had been of Shoshana. They were together in the lake, their first date, and he could still feel the heat of her lips and the pressure of her bare breasts, buoyed by the water, as the two lovers clung together in the slowly lapping waves. In his dream he imagined exploring down the front of her bikini bottoms, but as his fingers brushed against the first curls of hair, she opened her eyes, which got larger and larger and bored into him accusingly. No, Tom, NO, they said. You're not going any further until you get yourself some menschkeit. Pull yourself together! Her eyes turned from blue to purple, blazed like stars, and then became two black holes that covered first her face and then, like an expanding burn in a photograph, the entire scene.
    Tom sat up abruptly and then quickly wished he hadn't. His head started to throb again. Bien sûr, he might feel confused, conflicted, angry even, but he had no right to take it out on other people, and especially not here. Part of the problem was that he really did want to talk, but apart from his natural tendency to say as little as possible, he was afraid of exposing too much of what he was convinced was his own guilt, and this itself was conflicting.
    Another problem was that he felt, now, that he'd been spoiled: perhaps just a bit too lucky. Shoshana had had to fight to get to the farmhouse, the end of a journey that she had almost paid for with her life, several times over: a fare that had been - finally, cruelly -- collected. And he had lived his whole life here, cost-free. The Shoshana in his dreams had been right. Even if revealed to no-one the potentially debilitating anxiety about his own identity, he really did have to pull himself together. To grow up. And as he made that resolution, he imagined Shoshana looking down on him with love, her eyes blue once more; her wide, full lips parting in a smile to reveal her crazy, loveable teeth, her soft hair falling down over her honey-coloured curves. Yes, he said. Shoshana, I shall do this for you, so I can continue to merit your affection.
    So, that was that, then. But there was an important, practical aspect to all this. After an absence of a decade, he noticed that his parents had suddenly become elderly. They were as fit as any septuagenarians had a right to be, and probably a whole lot fitter, but he felt that the effort of the farm was becoming too great, and it was beginning to slip away from them. He would prolong his sabbatical indefinitely. The University could hardly complain - he was, after all, right on top of Souris Saint-Michel, for all that nobody had actually visited it for years. And there was the Sigil. With what he now knew about stellar extinction (his mind was already pacing out the problem in scientific terminology), it was time to write it up. He would ask Jadis about it in the morning. He felt that they had to get on with it, in case they were ... how did Domingo put it? Ah, yes -- Overtaken By Events.
    As he slid into sleep, he realized that those three words could describe his whole life. At every turn, he'd been prey to external influence, buffeted around like a rag doll in a hurricane. Shoshana had arrived, blowing him off his feet. She'd departed - likewise. And then they had both been blown off Masada, and then there had been the whole stomach-churning episode with the Jive Monkeys in which he had been a follower, when he should have been a leader. Enough! He was almost forty years old. It was time he took control.
    It was the following evening that Jack and Jadis ambled up the back lane, hand in hand, towards the village square. It felt like years since they'd done this - just to go out, simply for the pleasure of it, with no particular errand in mind or appointment to keep. But Tom had said he'd settle the farm down for the night, so why didn't they take some time off? Jack felt a sensation of blissful relief, of a load slipping off his shoulders, whose weight he'd hardly noticed until it had been removed.
    They found the Place Etienne Geoffroy almost deserted. The silent, old buildings under a rich blue sky of almost alien clarity looked like a cityscape by De Chirico. The boulangerie had closed for the day, and most of the Sanglier regulars were still hard at work on their own farms. In fact, when they wandered into the shade of its cheerful blue-and-white striped awning, they saw that they were the only customers. Yvon Rossignol was happy to attend to their every need - which was a herb tea for the Doctor, and a pastis for Doctor Jack.
    "My pleasure! On the house! We don't see you much these days. Busy on the farm, eh?"
    "Ah! But things are going to change, Yvon," said Jack: "my son Tom is back and is showing signs of wanting to take over. Respite for an old codger like me. I have to say it's welcome."
    "Change, eh? Let's drink to the younger generation!" beamed Rossignol. The clash and clang of pans within betokened the arrival of Madame Rossignol in the kitchen. The innkeeper's face turned dark and anxious. "Please excuse me," he said, waddling into the shadows - "duty calls!"
    The two of them sat there at the round, rust-pocked café table, wistfully remembering the first time they'd sat there, on their honeymoon. Each replayed the moment in their mind: Jadis felt her eyes moistening. She'd been pregnant. Funny, she'd almost forgotten that, and how much she'd enjoyed it -- the feeling of pride, at a life growing inside her. The irony bit her now, that she spent most of her time away from the farm attending the births of others, and yet she'd never borne a child of her own. She became conscious of an ache in her lower abdomen, a sympathetic echo of times past both sweet and bitter.
    Inevitably, her thoughts turned to Tom, who had, it seemed, decided to emerge from beneath his long, black cloud, and who just that morning had volunteered himself to write up the Sigil for publication. Although she felt a rueful pang at this, she was grateful, for she knew now that she'd never get round to it herself. Not any more - it was not just the farm, and village life, but that she'd got out of the habit of thinking along academic lines, and she was easily distracted. Damn it, she cursed herself, it's because I'm an old woman! The true source of her pang, then, was the recognition and acceptance of her own mortality. As long as she'd kept putting off writing up the Sigil, she'd had a ticket to forever.
    "Drink up," said Jack - "I have something to show you."
    Hand in hand - for they were on their honeymoon, once again - they left the café's shade and ventured into the scorching afternoon heat. They picked their way carefully across the worn, sun-drenched cobbles to the sanctuary of the churchyard gate. She knew where he was leading her. Past the ranks of well-tended graves (so many more than they had been then, almost half a century before); past the welcome, fragrant shadows of the giant yew trees; to the limestone parapet on the other side. The view seemed hardly to have changed. But in those days the vista had been one of morning, and the sun had been at their backs. It now hung before them like a great blood-red ball, bruised on the Earth's western rim.
    Jack reached out for her hand, although his eyes were fixed on the far horizon. She could feel the tension running along his fingers like electricity through a cable. "Somehow, Snow Queen" he said, "somehow, we have to make sense of it all. We can't just leave it all to Tom. Not that he couldn't do it, far from it - but because we are responsible."
    He thought back to that horrific night when they'd seen that yeti, interviewed on the Zenge show, confessing to the murder of Faye and Primrose and their friends, and when Jadis begged him to understand what they'd unleashed on the world. If it hadn't been for Saint-Rogatien, the way it changed everyone's understanding of history, the hominids might still be hidden, and Faye and Primrose and many others might have lived to climb other, greater mountains.
    And if it hadn't been for Jack's feeling that something unusual stood here, a gigantic monolith from an almost unbelievably remote antiquity, none of that would have happened. Souris Saint-Michel might still have been a dusty footnote to the career of a long-dead cleric. Domingo might not have come into their lives. And if it hadn't been for the fact that he could never quite articulate his intuitions, Jadis' life might have drifted away from his own. Their first date at Clare May Ball might have been their last. There'd no Nest, no accident ... no Tom.
    Rainstorms. Brainstorms.
    Jadis stared straight ahead, at the sinking star. She wondered how many more times she'd see a sunset. Indeed, she wondered how many more times there would be a sun to set. Or to rise. The ancients had spent a great deal of time, thought, ritual and bloody sacrifice in an effort to guarantee that very thing. How we arrogant scientists had laughed at this naïve presumption - that anything humans could do might influence the majestic clockwork of the heavens in any way, or be influenced by it. And yet the Sigil had been a product of a science presumably far greater than theirs, seemingly designed with that very end in view - to propitiate the Gods, to keep the stars from going out.
    Jack had had this insight too, she knew, affirming Domingo's wild surmise that the Sigil and the Plague were connected. But as he had with his sense of the landscape long before, he had no way to constrain or articulate it. Jack had needed her then. And he needed her now. It could be that the world needed her. How far she had come, Jack thought, from the green girl on the Senate House lawn.
    The Plague and the Sigil. The Sigil and the Plague. Circles, circles. Let's just look at the facts, she said, and take an appropriately long view.
    The Sigil had been buried three and a half million years ago, which we archaeologists thought was a fantastically long time ago. But we'd been used to time in a few tens of thousands of years, maybe a few hundred thousand, a million at a stretch. So this was way beyond our experience. However, in the language of stars and galaxies, three and a half million years is insignificant. On the largest scale, that of the Universe, we and the Sigil exist at what is, for all practical purposes, the same moment.
    So far, so good. Now, consider this: human beings evolve at more or less the same time that the Sigil is deposited, and again, at around the same time, a Plague arrives that destroys most of them. It's funny, she says, nobody has ever found any kind of infectious agent for Postembryonic Oolithic Petrosis. All we know is that it is specific to people who can claim to be Homo sapiens, with relatively little genetic introgression from other hominids. In fact, we know so little about the disease that we can't even tell if the victims are `dead' in any sense we'd understand the term.
    "Perhaps they're listening to us talk, right now!" said Jack. Even though the sun was on their faces, they both shivered: the graveyard was full of Plague victims, brooding in their caskets. "That is not dead which can eternal lie," he murmured, "and with strange aeons even death may die."
    "Hmm?"
    "Just something I remembered from my student days, tramping the hills. An old Lovecraft story..."
    "Oh, you silly man!" She turned to look at him then, her dark eyes glistening with that mixture of love and exasperation one can only ever find in couples married for so long that each knows - and tolerates -- every wrinkle and foible of the other.
    His eyes twinkled in response. He knew that Jadis hated anything that smacked of the Gothick. She couldn't understand, she said, how anyone could derive enjoyment from scaring themselves witless. But he kept half a shelf in the office to indulge his secret vice, and sometimes, when he couldn't sleep, he'd carry a candle to his creaking recliner and, feet up on his desk, take another midnight stroll along the Rue Morgue.
    They now held each other close in the cooling air: a breeze from the distant Bay of Biscay was making its way across the land, leaching out its warmth. Shaking the hair from her eyes, she looked up at him and said: all we have now is a correlation. No, not even that, a coincidence. There's too much we don't know, she said, rehearsing just some of the possible unknowns.
    Are the dragons munching their way through this corner of space alone, or are they found more generally? Does their activity change with time? Are there more Sigils? Domingo thought there might be - and if someone found one in the Cretaceous Period among some tyrannosaur eggs - well, that would seriously weaken the link. And, taking the long view, is the Plague unique to humans? Maybe there's some unknown animal reservoir, or a virus, or something. The trouble is, she says, nobody knows, and since the Plague, nobody has had the means to find out.
    As they watched, the sun sank behind the distant hills, and just as it disappeared, it shot a shimmering curtain of rays upwards, dressing a few shreds of otherwise nondescript clouds in a rich array of pink and gold. Jack and Jadis stayed a little longer to admire the display, then turned and walked homewards.
    "I know it's just a coincidence," sighed Jack, as they walked down the lane, their field gate coming into view as darker blur against the deep blue of night, "and, yes, you're right. Perhaps Tom was right, too, to dismiss Domingo's wild surmise. It's just, well..."
    Jadis had known him long enough to recognize the signs, or to know that Jack's hunches were always worth following to the end. She turned to him again.
    "Jack - tell me."
    "No, it's probably just silly, for all that it's been niggling me for years."
    "What has?"
    "Oh, all right. But it's more to do with the Sigil itself, rather than any connection with the Plague. Funnily enough - well, not funny really, but ... well, it's all to do with Tom's eyes. You see, I'd seen eyes like his only once before. It's only in the past few days that I've made the connection."
    It was now fully dark and the summer stars had begun to appear. Vega, Deneb, Altair. Jadis looked up at Jack - his head was a silhouette against the wheeling sky.
    "Jack...?"
    "You remember just after we opened up SSM and I flew off to New York?"
    "Yes - you finally got to meet Ginsberg Wang."
    "Well, it's him. He had eyes like Tom's - big, green, cat-like pupils. And then, when Tom came into our lives, I thought I'd seen eyes like that before, but could never place them. Well, it's all clicked. After all these years! And just think about Wang. You remember when dear old Roger first told us about Wang, and that he'd set up two institutes?"
    Jadis said she had. She remembered that she'd been pregnant at the time. How much had happened when she was pregnant. She missed it. Oh well, too late now. Far too late. But she snapped back to the present, and jumped into Jack's argument.
    "I remember - one for landscape archaeology, the other for astrometry. And everyone was puzzled by the choices..."
    "Yet in hindsight," Jack continued, his confidence building, "they shouldn't have been, because Wang had always publicly said that he backed `The Future'. And what two, precise things are we having to study now? Interesting, eh?"
    "I see," said Jadis, her voice soft but with an urgent edge to it: "if it hadn't been for Wang's choices, we'd never have found the Sigil, nor known about stellar extinctions. Jack, that's amazing. It's been in front of us the whole time, all these years. How could we have missed it?"
    "But there's something else, too, Snow Queen. Something that only I could have known about, because he told me at our one meeting. I remember it like it was yesterday. He told me that our work - yours and mine - was of `the utmost importance', and - get this - that `it might even save the planet'".
    Jadis felt that Jack was talking more to himself than to her or anyone else in particular, for in two minutes he'd said more than he usually did in a whole day. This meant that he was really on to something, his mental bloodhound hot on the trail.
    "Ever since I've been wondering how digging deeper holes underneath France could ever do anything to save the planet," he said. "But now there's the Sigil, and the links with the disappearing stars, and somehow it all fits in together. I'm sure of it."
    "And the Plague too?"
    "Yes, Snow Queen, that too. God knows how or why, but yes ... that too."
    They were now at the back door that led to the arrière-cuisine. In the deep shadows, Jack's eyes sparkled like polished coals.

    Chapter 22

    (November, 2055)

    Shortly before I left the Other Earth a geologist discovered a fossil diagram of a very complicated radio set. It appeared to be a lithographic plate which had been made some ten million years earlier. The highly developed society which produced it had left no other trace.
    Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker

    Her face showed nothing but blissful peace within the halo of her long, dark hair. Lying flat on her back, her neck was in a brace, her body rigid in a frame. The paramedic had seen many accidents worse than this, but it always distressed her to see victims so young. Worse still, pregnant. She thought of her own two young children, both at school and happily ignorant of the abandoned carnage that occasionally troubled their mother's working day.
    Escaping from the reek of the burning car, the police, the fire engines, the crowds of people and the general mess attendant on all road traffic accidents, the paramedic and her colleagues wheeled the gurney into the relative peace of the ambulance. The driver switched on the sirens and the blue-and-yellow-check van screamed southwards towards Addenbrooke's hospital. Once inside the vehicle, the patient was briefly jolted into consciousness and emitted a small, urgent sigh, as if she were asking for something. The paramedic turned to look at the patient's face, barred with blue from the flashing lamp reflected through the window. She was amazed, having been convinced that the girl was dead. But then, as she looked, the patient opened two large, hazel eyes, which looked directly at her for an instant with frightening penetration. A moment later, the gaze softened, looked inward: the patient mouthed just two words before grimacing with pain and retreating once again into a coma.
    "Darling Jack..."
    The paramedic had not wanted to look again at the bruised and bloody mess between the patient's breastbone and thighs, masses of purple wool from her sweater mashed into a field of destruction against which her face made an even more poignant contrast.
    Later, in the operating theatre, the surgeons had done their best. Dilatation and curettage is upsetting enough even when the mother is healthy. When the mother has suffered from multiple ruptures to her spleen, pancreas, liver and intestines, and is clinging to the slender web-strings of life, it is more like emergency field medicine. The uterus looked like it had been shredded, like a basketball run down by a combine harvester. Stitching it up took some hours. Luckily for the patient, one of the surgeons was currently on sabbatical from Los Angeles and arguably the world's leading expert in the treatment of gunshot wounds to the abdomen. It is possible that he saved her life. Her baby was already dead, however, having taken the full force of the impact as the patient belly-flopped onto the bonnet of the car. During the course of this very complex procedure the third-trimester fetus was removed, one piece at a time, its remains swabbed out and discarded.
    One would not have expected the surgeons to have removed every scrap of misplaced tissue, every particle of detritus that had penetrated the patient's body, and they did not. They can hardly be blamed for that, given the circumstances. Indeed, they were as overjoyed as anyone else when the patient went on to make a good recovery from her injuries. But some damage, while it seems invisible, can be long-lasting. Cells from the lining of the ripped placenta had buried themselves in the uterine wall, beyond immediate detection. In the course of time, most of these were flushed out by the patient's immune system. A few, however - possibly not more than one or two - fused with host cells, making tiny inocula of chimaeric tissue, each an intimate pietà of grieving mother and dying child, sculpted on a subcellular level.
    It is now known now that women, as they get older, often become chimaeras, each one bearing patchworks of cells in unconscious memory of each one of the children they have borne. Although scientists continue to see this as a conundrum in itself, theologians have come to regard it as evidence for God's compassion. This phenomenon was hardly known in those days, when the patient was recovering from her trauma. So she never knew that some tiny protoplasmic scraps of her never-to-be born child lived on inside her.
    Try as they might, chimaeras cannot always obey the rules, and after fifty years of effort a small colony of such cells finally broke free. Eluding the ever more placid sentries of an ageing body, they declared independence, and, finding no resistance, they started to send out new colonies throughout the harlequinade that was the re-patched, re-healed and re-sealed endometrium. They meant no harm. That's just what they did.
    And so it was that in November, 2055, when Jadis was in her kitchen pickling the last of that year's cucumber crop, she felt a sudden stabbing sensation in her belly. It was if someone had kicked her, hard.
    Her mind went into a sudden giddy swirl, and just for an instant, she thought she was outside, in a walled garden. Instinctively she glanced down and saw her frayed jeans where she had expected to witness a thin, viscid trickle of maroon blood running in a determined line across the white field of her inner thigh. Pulling herself together, she put down, with great deliberation, the pan of hot vinegar she was holding, and sat carefully at the kitchen table until the pain had gone away.
    She had been conscious of a dull pain there for - what? - it could have been a couple of years, even. But she had dismissed it as a sign of ageing, and paid it no further attention. Only now had it intruded into her life and mind with such brutal force. But she would dismiss this pain, too, as a symptom of the same incurable disease. Who was it who once said that the most you can expect in advancing age was to wake to a day free from pain? "Well, whoever it was," she said to herself, "they were right." She continued with her task, despite the fact that her mind kept wandering, so much so that she frequently came to senses to find that she had stopped, motionless, gazing at everything and again, at nothing. The cells inside her continued to breed.
    She reflected on the pain as she continued her work. It dawned on her that it had grown steadily alongside the increased tensions in the farmhouse that had surrounded the seemingly endless, futilely circular arguments about the publication of the Sigil. That the pain had finally broken out to stand before her explicit, conscious scrutiny mirrored the plain fact that matters had now reached an impasse, in which the three men in her life wanted her consent to publish the paper that Tom had diligently drafted: but she had refused, without compromise. The more they pleaded, the more they pestered, the more she hardened her heart. But why, a part of her asked?
    Two years before, when they had revealed the Sigil with such ceremony, she had happily consented to Tom writing it up for publication. No, her soul cried in response -- not, never `happily'. Her acceptance had, in fact, been both provisional and grudging, and something that had troubled her, being a tacit admission of mortality, of declining powers, of failure. Such an admission, tacit or otherwise, would have represented a violation of her very nature, for inside she felt she was still a young woman. It never horrified her to see her hands and face as brown and lined, because she had always assumed they'd belonged to someone else. Furthermore, she had never allowed herself to fail at anything, for, to her, failure was an abnegation of the self, and on that point she would never give any ground at all.
    Not that she would ever have couched her attitude in these precise, formal terms, either to herself, or to the outside world. On the contrary, she had focussed her anger and frustration into the sharp beams of logic. She could not just drop the news of the Sigil onto the world free from context, as she kept on saying to Tom during a period of what had seemed like several weeks over the summer, in which he had harried her constantly. No, she said, it would look ridiculous, as if they had arrived from nowhere to say they had discovered Atlantis. The Sigil could not be published, because they had no idea who could have made it, and why it was there - and that was that.
    Tom's habitual response was that the chances of answering either question were utterly remote, as she well knew: and therefore that he might as well not have bothered drafting his report. In which case she might have had the grace to have made this clear before he'd even started. Tom would often finish this line of argument by stalking out of the room in search of some hard physical activity on which to vent his frustration and anger.
    At this point Jadis had always bitten her lip, as if wanting to say something more. Tom (if still in the room) always pressed her to spit it out, whatever it was, and have done.
    Matters had come to a head when the three of them were sitting down to supper - it had been in September, just a couple of months earlier - and Jadis and Tom had started to circle each other in the same weary dogfight. Jack simply pretended it wasn't happening. He had told Tom quietly, many times, to back off: Jadis would come round eventually, in her own time. But Tom seemed compelled to harass his mother, the compulsion growing as Jadis became more entrenched and - as Jack had begun to notice - thinner and more drawn, her figure awkward and hunched where previously it has been loose and carefree.
    "But why, Maman, why? Why can't we just publish it, get it done, move on?" Tom had said.
    "You know very well, why, Tom, and please don't whine." She pulled herself up abruptly. She had never talked to Tom like this, not even when he was small.
    "I just don't understand," said Tom, "I really don't. It's such a simple thing. Describe the artefact. That it is an artefact nobody can doubt. We note the age, for which we have incontrovertible evidence. C'est tout. We need not even speculate about what it all means, if you don't want to."
    "No, Tom, no. And why don't you understand? All those years ago, she ..."
    This was the tipping point.
    "She? Who?"
    Jadis hid her eyes beneath her hair. Jack could see that she was trying to look anywhere but at Tom or himself. She was cornered. No way out. Her answer came slowly.
    "It was ... Shoshana. In the first week she was here, I asked her, and she ..."
    "Maman, how dare you... " Tom was a picture of a cold rage.
    Jadis couldn't pull back now. Sensing a weakness in the cordon that surrounded her, she went for the kill.
    "Yes, Tom, Shoshana. It was Shoshana. Remember her? Shoshana said that before going public, we needed to know more about who made it. It was plain enough to her, and she was a schoolgirl with nothing more than native common sense. Something that some people seem to have lost. Some people who should know better."
    "This really is the limit," said Tom. His face was white with anger, his green eyes flashing. "You know," he said, in a tone calculated to wound, "I think I might as well just publish the thing under my own name and have done."
    "You will do no such thing!"
    "All right! I'll publish it with your name on it! The lead author!"
    "Tom, the answer is still no." She gripped her belly and drew a long, anxious breath. "We have to know more about its makers before we can legitimately say anything. Otherwise it looks like a joke... a very, very sick joke. And do you want to make fun of us -- of me?" She had wanted to apologise for raising an old ghost, but the argument had now gone too far. Tom pushed away his plate, snorted contemptuously and went for the door. Looking pointedly at Jack, he said:
    "If you want me, I'll be in the shelter, settling the horses." The Sigil, now effectively abandoned once more and with winter approaching, the barn had returned to its accustomed use.
    Jack helped Jadis clear and wash the dishes in absolute silence. Even from a few feet away, he could feel the pain and rage envelop her like a fetid cloud. To an extent, he agreed with Tom. They should just write it up and have done. After all, he and Jadis were getting old; it was important unfinished business; and, resignedly, he just wanted to clear his desk.
    At first - years ago -- he had felt that Jadis had been quite right in her insistence that one could not publish the Sigil without any idea of how it got there, or why. But as the years passed with that question still unresolved, and perhaps without any realistic hope that it ever would be resolved, he was coming round to the view that they should simply publish the Sigil, report its age, and leave it at that, just as Tom suggested.
    A datum for others to explore in the future. A mystery to solve.
    So Jack screwed up his courage and just told her - maybe Tom's right, publish the inscription, report the date, nothing more.
    "Jack - I can't do it, I, I just can't."
    "Sure, of course, I agree. But it's not an ideal world and we won't be here forever. We should really put our spin on it before anyone else comes along when we're dead and gone and does a hatchet job. You were there when it was uncovered. You deserve the credit."
    "Jack ..."
    "In any case," he continued. "Tom's right. What does it matter who made it? You can't have all the answers at once."
    "Oh really! There's no need to be quite so patronizing," she replied with some asperity, not looking at him, concentrating on the dirty dishes in the sink. Jack ignored her barb and tried another tack.
    "Anyway, I think we owe it to Ginsberg Wang and the confidence he's always shown in us. I have no idea if he's even still alive. But I have a very strong feeling he'd have approved. Roger, too."
    "Jack, that's not fair. It really isn't."
    Jack decided to say no more, because he knew he'd hit home. In the last analysis, he felt, the Sigil could have been what the whole story had all been about, from the very beginning: the Institute, perhaps even their being together. And he knew that Jadis, in her heart, knew this too.
    They said nothing further about it until they had gone to bed, and they'd heard Tom come back inside and lock up. In the darkness, she felt that it didn't matter whether she met anyone's eyes or not.
    "Jack, I'm sorry about what I said to Tom..."
    Jack said nothing for several seconds.
    "Jack?"
   "Well, I rather think you should apologise to Tom... not me."
    Silence. Jack could feel that Jadis wanted to say something more. The anonymity of darkness was setting her free.
    "Jack, really, I know you and Tom are both right. Publish the thing as an announcement and, as Tom says, move on."
    "Hurrah." Jack's tone was quietly sarcastic. It did not suit him - never had - but he was getting better at it as he got older.
    "Jack, don't. Please don't make this any worse. It's just ... well ..."
    "Hmm?"
    Slowly she tried to explain what had been haunting her, the reason for her reluctance. She might - might -- be prepared to live without having to identify the makers if the message of the Sigil could somehow be decoded, in a way independent of its origins. They'd had Domingo's eclipse theory, and then Tom and Shoshana's suggestion that it was a warning, and, finally, when they had unveiled the Sigil, Tom's shattering, apocalyptic vision. And then there was Jack's quiet insistence that the Plague had something to do with it. The problem, she said, was twofold.
    First, which option should they choose?
    Second, how could their choice be substantiated?
    "But why don't we just lay out all the possibilities and leave it for someone else to worry about?" asked Jack.
    More silence.
    "We could do that, of course," said Jadis. "But..."
    "But?"
    "Oh, hell: it's all about Tom. It all comes back to Tom and what he saw in the Sigil. That's the most graphic evidence any one of us has ever had, but only Tom was capable of gaining it. Nobody else has - or can. We really need to put it in, but how on Earth can we? And how do we - I - ask him about it? After everything that's happened?" At last, Jack understood. To an extent, the matter boiled down to dreams and visions, and an offence to Jadis' scientific sensibilities. He turned to wrap her in his arms. She squirmed slightly, as if finding it hard to get comfortable.
    "So, Jadis, really, what you're really worried about ... what it all boils down to is ... is reproducibility."
    She laughed: "Darling Jack - what would I do without you?"
    "Much the same as you'd have done otherwise, I suspect."
    He noticed that her laugh had faded to a kind of gasping pant.
    "But I wish Tom wouldn't keep on at me all the time. It's making me tired, Jack. So very tired. And..."
    She had fallen asleep in his arms. She had always been slim, but her skin had once draped smoothly and softly around her bones, like the pelt of a cat. Now all he could feel in his arms were sharp angles. "Jadis? Snow Queen?"
    But she snored on, floating above the landscape of her life in a blue sky in which she herself was a cloud. She soared effortlessly above patchwork fields and knotted mountains, the swish and swags of great rivers and the carpet of forest. Quite suddenly, and for the first time, she found she'd floated far enough to see the sea. She gasped with unwonted vertigo as the landscape fell away in great white cliffs and she was over the ocean far below. The sun glinted in half-moons on the wave-crests.
    After two years of hard work, Pope Eusebius had made the top two floors of the Mairie into his Portable Vatican. The upper floor contained a very small flat for himself (what he called his `Official Residence', given that he spent many nights in his old quarters in the farmhouse), and a chapel for the use of his staff. The floor below contained two small offices staffed by Christophorines, and a laboratory, no bigger than a large cupboard, which - thanks to the Adelardians -- contained direct broadband links with the GW Astrometry Institute in Cambridge. It was as far from the glories of Rome as possible, but that's the way Domingo liked it. He could keep in touch with his Cardinals and Bishops remotely in a constantly convened virtual consistory. It was, he thought, an excellent and efficient way of working. And what he spent an increasing amount of time doing was watching the stars, as more and more of them winked out.
    "News is not good," Father Tikko Bray had said by telephone one afternoon in the early Summer of 2055. "Ross 248 and 154 have gone, Your Holiness. But you already know about those. But Wolf 359 seems to have dropped off our screens, too. These ... things ... appear to be converging on us, from all points in the Heavens."
    "I understand, Father Bray," replied Domingo, thoughtfully. "However, I believe that Lac 9352 remains the only star we've had the misfortune to have watched actually in the act of disappearing."
    "Yes, Your Holiness. But that was two years ago, and several light-years further out."
    There was a long pause.
    "But now you have so much more data, Father Bray, and the case of Lac 9352 needs to be set in ... ah ... context. You understand that I can hardly put my name on a paper, much as though I'd like to. But let's look on the bright side. By not being directly associated, I can remain free to establish context in a manner that can be construed by those sufficiently charitable as ... er ... independent."
    "Your Holiness?"
    " But I think it high time that you and your colleagues wrote something up. I really do. I think it might prove extremely helpful."
    The world carried on in general ignorance of a note that appeared in October on an Adelardian-run astronomy preprint engine by T. Bray and colleagues entitled `Systematic stellar extinction in the Solar Neighbourhood'. Domingo had a printout sent down to the farmhouse, marked for Jadis' attention. Having not had a reply for some weeks, he called round himself.
    It was November, and he found Jadis far from her usual state of animated business. Instead, she was seated at the table, gazing into space, surrounded by pans and jars and half-pickled cucumbers and the tang of vinegar. There was a seam of pain in her face. She was clearly miles away, and before she knew it, Domingo was pushing a mug of tea into her hands. She shook the dreams from her head, smiled and looked directly at him.
    "Domingo?"
    "The same. Now, Jadis, what's the matter?"
    "Oh, you know, everything and nothing, much as usual. And especially Tom. And what to do about the Sigil."
    "Publish it, of course." The words slipped out fractionally faster than he had intended.
    "Oh not you, too." She stood up and turned away. She was about to launch into a tirade, but stopped herself, turned back and sat down again.
    "Jadis -- I passed you an astronomy preprint from the people at the GW Institute in Cambridge. About how more stars have been disappearing, and how the ... er ... dragons appear to be approaching our particular corner of Creation."
    "I know. I read it - thank you, Domingo. I apologise for not thanking you earlier. It's just ..."
    "It is hard to take in, I admit. I prayed long and hard about it, to overcome what I felt was a feeling of utter denial. But it is useless to resist, I feel. We can only pray for equanimity and ... uh ... acceptance."
    "Acceptance? Of what?" Jadis had been taken aback by Domingo's urgency, his hardness, and that he had cut her off in mid-sentence, which was something he had rarely done before - and also puzzled by what sounded like directionless theological prattle, which he never indulged in much either, if he could help it. He looked up and saw her puzzled eyes. Taking her hands in his, he said:
    "Acceptance of the end of the world. There. I've said it." Jadis sat motionless, unable to comprehend what her friend had just told her. "This is why you - we - really should publish the Sigil. Don't you see? The pattern we see in space is recorded in the Sigil. Documented."
    She smiled weakly. He wasn't sure whether she had taken any of this in.
    "Tom..."
    "Jadis, you need not worry about the ... er ... eschatological aspects of Tom's vision. Not now ... now that we have proof."
    "No? What? No, that's not what I meant. It's just that I ... it's ... I don't feel particularly well, Domingo. Do you mind? I am not sure I can really talk or think about all ... well, all this, just now. Is that all right?"
    Domingo thought she looked pale, her skin like beige parchment, making her brown eyes stand out all the more. Strange: until now, he'd never noticed that she'd aged, and quite considerably so in the past year.
    As he tramped back up the hill to the Mairie in the teeth of a strong autumnal westerly, bringing with it the detritus of leaves and maize stalks, rain, and the faraway smell of the sea, he wondered whether acceptance would come fast enough before an end which he felt was inevitable. He'd have to summon his Cardinals here, to Saint-Rogatien, for what he was already calling the Council of the Last Days.
    To an extent, he felt, it was a moment for which all clergymen prepare throughout their ministries. From the Pope down to the humblest shaman -- and there were many times when Domingo felt more akin to the latter than the former -- the function of any priest is to guide his flock through the great transitions of life: birth, marriage, death. The imminent death of the whole world should be the same thing, only on a greater canvas. Really, just a matter of administration and logistics. He felt he ought to be comforted, that his own religion had detailed prescriptions for this very eventuality. And yet, and yet, no novice, no seminarian ever feels that it will be they who has to preside over the millennium, the rapture, the Last Days. He felt that if he didn't keep moving, keep busy, the responsibility would crush him. That, and the terror of utter helplessness. How similar he was to Jadis, he thought. Perhaps that's why Jadis looked so distracted. When he finally crested the hill, musing on Jadis' condition, he was met by an anxious monk in the hooded robe of the Adelardian novitiate, hurrying across the rain-slicked cobbles.
    "Your Holiness," he said, bowing low. "I am requested to ask you to telephone Father Bray immediately. He has some urgent news."
    Later that same evening, Jack saw the compost bucket in the corner of the kitchen full to overflowing. Tom had been busy with the stock all day. Jadis would normally have emptied it, but this evening she'd seemed more than usually absent, lost in thought. When asked what was wrong, she'd bitten her lip and turned away, shrugging off his glances, the touch of his hand. It concerned him, but the immediate problem was hefting the weight of peelings and other kitchen detritus down to the far end of the garden. He was astonished by the weight of it, and relieved when, after much puffing and heaving through the chill of the evening air, he'd upended the contents onto the compost heap. Placing the bucket carefully on the ground, he stretched himself upwards. He could almost feel his strained back muscles and bones clicking back into place. That, initially, was not the cause of his delight. For, looking up at the cold, high northern sky beyond the spinney, the night now washed by the rain into an unmatched clarity -- he saw a shooting star. The briefest flash at the corner of his eye, and it was gone.
    Now, he thought to himself, that's interesting. It occurred to him that in all their years at Saint Rogatien he'd never seen a single shooting star - not one. As he paused to consider this, he saw two more, much brighter this time, and then a whole shower. For several seconds, the whole sky was streaked with the silent trails of incandescent interplanetary debris, before fading rather quickly to nothing. Jack's eyes had by now accommodated to the bright show, so now he was plunged into darkness. This in itself did not unnerve him. He stood quite still, staring at the sky, waiting for the stars to come back into view, one by one.
    Jack loved the stars. In his youth and early manhood they had been his constant companions as he tramped the hills and vales. Now, in his old age, living in a village in which artificial light was a rarity, they had become his friends once more. He turned to face the south, and saw the familiar figure of Orion march high above the roof of the farmhouse. Rigel, deep red Betelgeuese, Bellatrix, the remarkably bright haze of the Nebula where new stars were, even now, being born. Further up he saw orange Aldebaran, and the exquisite ice-blue points of the Pleiades.
    Looking downwards once more across the belt of the Hunter he found a bald patch of sky that looked like it shouldn't have been there. Perhaps he was a little rusty? But no, Orion was in the same place, and the other constellations, and all the stars shining evenly from a sky so clear that he could pick out the Milky Way from horizon to horizon. He was worried, disoriented, and fought to quell a tiny tendril of panic.
    No, start again.
    That old stargazer's trick. Tracing Orion's belt downwards and leftwards ... but it was true. The Great Dog has closed its Eye. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, had vanished. Jack felt his legs go numb. He sat down abruptly on the upturned compost bucket.
    Domingo walked to the phone, his mind sparking premonitions of disaster even as an Adelardian technician spoke briefly into the handset, passed it to him, and left the room, bowing. Domingo waited until the light-oak door had shut with a click before speaking. He sat a plain wooden chair at a desk before the curtained window, three small flat-panel monitors on standby in front of him. The only other light was the golden glow from a pair of candles in a sconce on the wall behind him, throwing his own face into shadow. Yet this simple room was wired directly into the GW Institute in Cambridge, and through that, the Yahoo spacecraft. From his Portable Vatican, Domingo had eyes in the sky.
    "Father Bray?" He was surprised at the nervous tremor in his voice.
    "Your Holiness." The Chief Astrometer's voice seemed crackly and very distant. Domingo became conscious of how warm the small room was, how oppressive.
    "You have ... er ... news?"
    "Yes, Your Holiness," the Chief Astrometer cleared his throat. Perhaps he was as nervous as Domingo. Or maybe it was just the static on the telephone line. "I pray, first, that Your Holiness is seated?" Domingo assured him that he was, and that he was anxious to hear the latest information from Cambridge. He hoped his demand did not sound too hoarse, too peremptory.
    "Very well, Your Holiness. It's like this ... the star Alpha Canis Majoris disappeared sometime in the early hours of the morning, Greenwich time." Silence on the line. Domingo was absolutely stunned. "Your Holiness?"
    "Yes, thank you Father Bray, I heard you."
    "It is the first naked-eye star to have been, affected, as far as we know." To call Sirius a naked-eye star was a typical astrometric understatement. Just nine light-years away, it was - had been -- the most splendid jewel of the night sky and the fourth brightest object in the heavens, after the Sun, the Moon and Venus.
    "Did you ... ah ... capture the process in action?" Domingo wondered how much more disturbing the destruction of a large, blue-white star such as Sirius would be, compared with the disaggregation of the red dwarf Lac 9352 that he had witnessed.
    "I'm afraid not, Your Holiness. But it's definitely not there now, and neither is the neutron-star companion, Sirius B, and ... oh, Your Holiness, something's just come in. Please allow me a second ..."
    "Of course, Father Bray." Domingo heard, faintly in the background, the exchange of sharp, excited voices. He could not quite make out what they were saying. Father Bray came back on the line.
    "Your Holiness - I have just now heard from Cardinal Signorelli." Domingo knew that his indomitable Cardinal and his airship-borne expeditionary team were in northern Australia, searching for an unusual and very secretive tribe of hominids called the Potkoorok. "The Cardinal's news is extraordinary," the Chief Astrometer continued. "He says that Alpha Centauri has disappeared." Domingo felt that no further surprises were possible.
    "What - all of it?"
    "It seems so, Your Holiness... and I must apologise once more for a short delay while I ...?"
    "Of course". More hurried background exchanges. Pops and clicks on the crackling line. Domingo waited for almost a minute until Father Bray returned.
    "Your Holiness - I apologise once again for the delay - yet I have now managed to corroborate Cardinal Signorelli's observation with real-time data from Yahoo. The central pair of stars -- Alpha Centauri A and B - well, they've definitely gone. We cannot see Proxima, either, and have to assume the worst." Proxima is - or was - the lonely outlier of the Alpha Centauri triple-star system. It had another distinction, too. At just over four light-years away, it was the closest star to the Sun. Domingo could hear his heart pounding: he steadied himself against the edge of the desk in case he fell.
    "Father Bray," he said, "I guess that it is fair to assume that we are ... er ... next."
    "Pray for us, Your Holiness. Pray for us all."
    "Yes, of course. I understand. And please convey my deepest thanks to your redoubtable colleagues, for continuing in such circumstances." He took a deep breath, gulping for air. "But before you go, Father Bray, I should like to know one further thing."
    "Your Holiness?"
    "I suspect you have a fair idea of the distribution of these ... er ... dragons, in space, no?
    "Possibly, Your Holiness, but they are very hard to see. They can be detected from very slight gravitational effects, and lucky occultations of background stars, so one assumes that they are made of a very dense and dark material. There have been some reports of cometary activity in the Oort Cloud, which suggests that they are quite close, and ..."
    "Please, Father Bray, I do not wish to halt your disquisition, which is most ... ah ... interesting. But can you estimate when these beings will be in the vicinity of the Sun?"
    "My sincere apologies, Your Holiness. We have been discussing this very thing in some depth ..."
    "And?"
    "Our best guess is that the path of the closest group of dragons will intersect the Sun in five months time. If we were pressed, and strictly off the record at the present time, we'd say between the first and the third of April next." Domingo could hardly believe his ears.
    "You know, that date..."
    "Yes, Your Holiness. I do."
    "May God bless you, Father Bray. You may go." The Chief Astrometer offered the customary response and the line went dead.
    Domingo sat quite still for a very long time, quite unable, at first, to assimilate what Father Bray had had to tell him. The nearest, brightest stars to the Sun all gone, and the dragons now nibbling the outer reaches of the Solar System itself. But what struck him more forcibly than anything -- even more than these cataclysms - was the timing. No, surely not. This had to be a coincidence. Had to be.
    He looked up towards the curtained window, and even though his face was entirely shadowed by the candelabra, he felt the warmth of light on his face. Escape from bondage. Hope. And resurrection. Slowly at first, and then with increasing conviction, he pieced it all together.
    Tom dreamed that he was looking at the Sigil again. The pattern was picked out in yellow flame against a charcoal-black background. As he watched, the flames burned down into the rock as precisely as any laser cutter and it fell to bits, a crazy three-dimensional jigsaw of angular blocks. Tom tried to spread his arms around them all , to stop them tumbling to the floor, but they just kept falling, falling with a regular rhythm, knock, knock, and more and more, until he pulled himself through the surface tension of wakefulness to hear a gentle knocking on his door. It was his mother, with a cup of tea. For an instant, still shedding the shreds of sleep, all he saw was a cloud of hair, and thought it was Shoshana, and then - flinching - Morgana - until his mother looked up through her hair and he knew it could only be her.
    "Maman ..." He sprang from his bed to take the teacup from her: it looked like it had become somehow awkward for her to carry. Tom was struck that she looked terribly old, and ill.
    "Tom - thank you. Thank you so much." She sat down on the edge of the bed, a small sigh escaping like the wheeze of an ancient accordion. "Tom, I apologise. For everything. Of course you can publish the Sigil. I won't stand in your way. No longer."
    "Maman - why? After all this time, you ..."
    "Please, let's not have a post-mortem. Suffice it to say that Jack has convinced me. And Domingo, too." The rest came out in a confusing tumble about disappearing stars, bringing Tom smartly back to his disquieting experience at the GW Institute, of watching the death of Lac 9352, echoed by his vision of the Sigil. Even so, he found it hard to take in that Sirius had disappeared. Yes, Jadis had said, Jack had appeared wild and breathless at her side in bed last night, having seen it - or rather not seen it -- and could hardly get the words out. She had to cling to him, to calm him: she had never - never in her whole life - seen him as agitated. But anyway, Jadis said, she would need no further convincing, and so perhaps she was being small - petty, even - to hold things up any more.
    "Maman, surely not."
    "You know, it's not that I don't still have serious reservations about the whole thing." She looked straight ahead, as if Tom were not there.
    "Hmm?" Tom sipped his tea.
    "Yes. For, you see, it resolves nothing." She looked round at Tom: "we are still no closer than we ever were to understanding who made the Sigil, or why. Not really. It might as well have dropped from the sky. Although I have some ideas. Guesses, really." She coughed. It was a hollow, dry sound.
    "Jack has been on and on at me about coincidences - how odd it is that Ginsberg Wang funded two things that seemed as disparate as an archaeology unit and an astrometry unit and, my goodness, what should we find? Quelle surprise, but the Sigil and disappearing stars, and that they are somehow tied up together. What a coincidence it seems! But Jack has an idea that the Plague is all mixed up in it too, which I'm not sure about and ..." She looked directly at him, into his eyes, unflinchingly, as if he were not her son, but a zoological specimen. Tom suddenly felt cold and pressed his hands round the tea mug.
    "Maman? What is it?"
    "Look, Tom, I know we haven't always got on recently, and I desperately don't want you to take what I have to say the wrong way. Really."
    Tom was silent. He felt that whatever was coming next would be another shattering blow, and that his mother had backed him into a corner with some species of emotional blackmail.
    "Tom, you never met Ginsberg Wang, did you? Not even in all your time in Cambridge? And even though you were our son, associated with one of his largest and most long-term projects?" Tom admitted that he hadn't. "Well, I never met him either - but Jack did, and he said something very odd to me, just the other day. That he reminded him of you. That you and Ginsberg Wang had the same eyes. And, Tom - please don't mind this - everything has come down to your eyes, and how you see things. Ever since you were a little boy, when you couldn't see anything. And now, with what you and only you saw in the Sigil. You have a gift, you see - a gift that I think Ginsberg Wang had, too, which is why we - that's Jack and me - set this whole thing up in the first place. But you weren't related to him, were you?" The question seemed rhetorical.
    Tom thought of auras, and how, despite himself, his own aura had meshed so compellingly with Morgana's. He shuddered, and his voice was strained and sharp. "Maman, where is all this leading?"
    "I'm sorry Tom, I don't really know. Everything these days seems just beyond my grasp." He eyes lost their sparkle for an instant as she appeared to gaze inward. "You may as well know. Well, I'm just getting old, I suppose." Tom put down his cup and moved forward on the bed to embrace her. He was shocked at how little there was to hold. She continued, as if he wasn't there.
    "The fact is, Tom, someone made the Sigil, and we haven't really thought much about them. We've always had the excuse that because the Sigil was the only sign that its Makers existed, that we couldn't possibly make any headway. But that's not true. We can say something -- even if we cannot prove it. Which is so frustrating, but there it is." He felt the tremors of agitation course through her body.
    "If we can say one thing about the Makers, it's that they already had a very advanced technology, far in advance of anything on Earth - any hominid -- that might match it for another three million years at least."
    "D'accord."
    "So either the Makers were hominids - or they weren't. So which is it? What would you choose, Tom?" She turned directly to look at him.
    "I ... well, I'd have to say that a hominid would be the most likely option," he said, nervous in the spotlight beams of his mother's eyes. "But if so - if the Makers were hominids - they must have raced ahead of their fellows. We've always thought that the latest common ancestor of all hominids - including Homo sapiens - lived no earlier than six million years ago, when the chimp lineage diverged, and..."
    The penny dropped.
    You see, Tom, you see?" said Jadis, picking up on Tom's argument. "That whenever we've `always thought' something always tells me that we've `always thought' wrong - made the wrong assumptions." She cast her mind back to Jack's conviction that the landscape of Europe had been tamed and shaped for a million years, a fact that was as plain as day to Jack despite the fact that everyone had `always thought' it was a wilderness. "So what if the Makers weren't hominids, but something else?"
    "Aliens?" Tom was incredulous. "You mean to say that they really were little green men? Maman, you've always pooh-poohed that idea."
    "Well, yes, as a matter of fact I don't think they were aliens. Even though we now have proof that some kind of alien life exists - in these dragons. Because I think that the Makers were trying to speak - to send messages - using signs that we humans can interpret. But even so, we humans aren't the intended recipients." She paused. He felt that her emaciated form was bracing itself for a final spurt, as if in the teeth of a gale that might blow her fragile form apart. He held her closer, to steady her.
    "Maman, don't worry, I'm here."
    "Tom, it's you, don't you see? The Sigil spoke to you. Now, know this - that you are my son, and so you always will be, no matter what; and that I have always loved you since Domingo brought you the path through the snow on Christmas Day, no less, wrapped in swaddling clothes just like the baby Jesus. And I love you now, despite everything. And I'll love you until the day I die, which I fear will not be long."
    "Oh, Maman..."
    "Tom, hear me out. Domingo is always droning on about acceptance. He told me something about the end of the world being nigh or some such, which I did not accept until Jack told me about Sirius. The dragon things are coming this way. So now I accept it. The world will end sometime sooner or later, because the dragons are coming to eat the Sun. The Sigil was a warning about the dragons - but it was a warning for other eyes than mine. It was written by the Makers for the Makers. And you are the only person I know who saw that vision.
    "No matter that you thought we were making fun of you, we - me, your father, Domingo - we never doubted the truth of that vision for an instant. So, really, you are the very best person to describe the Sigil. So now it's your turn to accept something, Tom - that the Makers have something to do with you. That you might be one of them. Whatever species you belong to, Tom, it has a history longer than any known hominid. There, that's all: I don't think I can say any more." She collapsed into his arms, gasping for breath.
    Tom saw a fleck of blood on his sleeve. It was the tiniest spot imaginable. But it was there.

    Chapter 23

    (April 2056)

    Fortunately this early philosopher left descendants; and from these arose, in due course and by means of a series of happy mutations, a race of large-brained and non-simian creatures whose scanty remains your geologists have yet to unearth, and catalogue as an offshoot of the main line of evolution.
    Olaf Stapledon - Last Men in London

    The herd moved on through space. Most of the time it grazed on stars that were rich in carbon and other complex atoms, but which were otherwise small and dim. On the other hand, the recent consumption of several powerful energy sources had stimulated rather than sated - radiation in abundance, but these young, bright stars had been of relatively low metallicity. The white-dwarf star orbiting the biggest and brightest of the young blue-hot stars had, however, been a real treat for those of the herd that had got there first.
    But what the herd wanted most were stars that had both size and reasonable metallicity, somewhere in between the abundant but small M and K-class dwarfs, all brewing elements for billions of years, yet each with its own savour, like stationed salt-licks for migrating cattle; and the O and A-class giants, too young and hot to have acquired much in the way of complex elements. Main-sequence F and G-class suns were most prized - neither too hot nor cold, neither too rich nor too poor. As if they were some galactic Goldilocks, they drew the herd like a magnet.
    The herd sensed a suitable star in the path of its current somewhat haphazard migratory route and converged on it from all corners of space. By the time it reached the star's Kuiper Belt the herd numbered approximately thirty thousand individuals.
    Not that any member of the herd would have thought this way, or even thought at all. Although some of the inhabitants of a pebble orbiting close to the star had named them `dragons', they were more like sheep, cattle or even whales, grazing mindlessly on the fruits of galaxies and nebulae, as indolently as were they plucking berries from bushes, or sifting krill from the sea.
    Perhaps even to have thought of them as living organisms might have been to have stretched a point. Generated during the inflation phase of the Big Bang, each member of the herd was a dimensionally complex knot of space-time whose linear dimensions were consequently hard to estimate. But whatever its exact size, a dragon (for want of a better word) exerted a disproportionately large gravitational field, while radiating no discernible energy whatsoever. Had astronomers but known it, the herds of dragons that cruised space made up a considerable portion of the non-baryonic dark matter from which the Universe was thought to have been constituted. In practice, a dragon was a mobile black hole with a hunger that could never be assuaged.
    By January, 2056, the dragons were observed to have destroyed Neptune, Saturn and Jupiter. Now so close, the aliens were discernible (against a luminous background) as individuals, in the way they had not been during the remote observation of Lac 9352. Domingo would never forget the image of a swarm of black specks swirling around the King of Planets like a mockery of a shrouded gossamer ring, before a column of them plummeted like a spearhead into the Great Red Spot. It only took a few moments for the rich russets and browns of the planet's cloudscape to be drained of colour; only a few more for the giant planet to implode and disappear into nothingness, as if it had never existed.
    By the early Spring, rumours of the end of the world were in general currency. The great cities of south-east Asia erupted in flames before settling down to sullen acquiescence. Hominids in isolated corners of the world worked themselves up into a frenzy of sacrifice. The people of Europe, after south-east Asia the next most populous part of the planet, were suddenly on the move, even though there was no chance of escape, as all parts of the Earth were doomed equally. It is likely that they were spurred on by the meteor showers of extraordinary frequency and intensity - now, as they ever were, harbingers of doom.
    As the rumours spread from house to house, from refugee to monastic hospitaller to mendicant friar, it became clear that the last of all harvests would be gathered in at Easter, and as time passed, the rumours became firmer and more consistent. The world would end some time mid-afternoon (Greenwich time) on Easter Sunday. Messages came from the Holy See at Saint-Rogatien that this was a sign of hope, given that the evening before was the first night of the ancient Jewish festival of Pesach, celebrated with a ritual meal. Among Christians this would always be indelibly associated with The Last Supper: the last meal Jesus took with all his disciples before his death, and now the last meal that the peoples of the Earth would take with their families and friends before - before, well, who knew what? The end seemed almost certain, but the messages emanating from the Vatican were of expectation, not resignation.
    Throughout the winter, clergy had been gathering at Saint-Rogatien and finding accommodation where it could. Their number was swelled a thousandfold by people from many miles around - people who wanted to hear the words of His Holiness Pope Eusebius, some time before the end. A tent city sprung up in still-snowbound fields; carts and caravans congregated in corrals under snow-laden trees. As the land thawed during late March, more and more arrived, until the farmhouse was an isolated eye of peace in the maelstrom of people. Only a very few were agitated. Soapbox cranks and false prophets were far less frequent than one might have imagined, given the imminent apocalypse. Indeed, most of the migrants seemed to be at peace, and all were waiting for the promised outdoor mass on the morning of Easter Day itself, when the Pope, it was said, would address the crowd from the roof of the old Mairie opposite the church on the hill. In the meantime, there was a mess of people, all clothed in the slick brown of muddy slush; the screams of babies; the whimpers of children realizing that they would never go home; the press of beasts; the wild parties and bacchanalian festivals of people who had nothing more to lose; the queues for scarce food and stinking, hastily dug latrines amid the mired ground.
    A harbinger of doom came on the very last day of March - Good Friday. The destruction of most of the outer planets had scattered moons and other small bodies like grapeshot all across the Solar System. Although much of the débris was yet too far from the Earth to have reached it since the dragons had laid waste the outer Solar System, the gravitational ripples were felt much closer in, disrupting several Earth-crossing asteroids. Meteor showers were a nightly occurrence. Several objects had already made close approaches to the Earth, although none had actually made contact.
    The first object to hit the planet was Mnemosyne, hitherto an utterly insignificant Earth-crossing asteroid, which struck the wide and empty North Pacific at a relatively shallow angle. The sea boiled, and the consequent tsunami inundated the coastlands from the Philippines to California.
    The second impact, later the same day, was closer to home. This was another tiny Earth-grazing asteroid that had long troubled the Astrometry Institute on account of a long series of projected near-misses: the object was very small, but regularly approached the Earth within a few ten-thousands of kilometres. The gravitational disturbances from the outer Solar System had tipped its orbit just enough to raise its probability of Earth impact into the red zone. As the Sun set on the last Good Friday, Mercury-May-Taylor-Deacon (or, more properly, Minor Planet #100,039) plunged south-westwards across southern France and made landfall at the ancient Episcopal seat of Urgell, just across the Pyrenées in Spain. The impact had the explosive yield of a small nuclear bomb. Urgell itself was obliterated in an instant.
    Within seconds, the superheated blast wave had ridden up the valleys of Andorra, atomizing everything in its path. The mountain wall shook and crumbled, but in the main stood firm, protecting Saint-Rogatien from the worst effects of the blast and the subsequent shower of white-hot rocks: yet an incandescent wake had been painted across the vault of a sky which looked like it had been split in two. The southern horizon was utterly black, a field against which the mountains could be picked out in ominous relief that made them look unusually close.
    There were other changes, too. The strange gravitational eddies, slipstreams and wakes created by the passage of the dragons through the Solar System set up tidal stresses in the fabric of the Earth itself. The ground seemed to grumble from constant low-level earthquakes. Over the past two or three months the unquiet Earth had occasionally erupted into cataclysm. The Pacific Circle of Fire was alight: the last remnants of Tokyo and San Francisco had tumbled. Iceland had burst into flames and split asunder. Mount Tiede in Tenerife had slid into the Atlantic, dousing the already sodden Eastern seaboard of North America with a twenty-metre tsunami. Most of the world's dormant or recently active volcanoes were now active once more, their exhalations contributing to the spectacle of the final sunsets.
    Those with sharp eyes had noticed that the Moon, too, had changed. It had begun to vary in size through its cycle, as well as in phase. And those with yet sharper eyes than that noticed craters and rills never before seen, riding on the Moon's eastern and western limbs. The Moon had been shaken in its orbit: the lunar dark side would not be dark for much longer. Comets, earthquakes, volcanoes and impacts, signs and portents written across the face of the heavens. There was no longer any doubt that the Last Days had arrived.
    The evening following was the Last Supper, celebrated both quietly and loudly, gladly and sadly, with acquiescence and with terror, in a thousand campfires around Saint-Rogatien, and in homes and hovels and caves and towers across the world, as the Sun set for the last time. What with the bolide impacts, meteor showers and volcanic activity loading the atmosphere with dust, the final sunset was more spectacular than ever before. The great orange ball of the solar disk, magnified by the richly refractive horizon, sank through massed and palatial ranks of deep red and purple clouds and, as it finally vanished, launched penetrating streamers of saffron yellow above it to the zenith, painting in gold the undersides of the cinnamon cloud-banks.
    Jadis watched from the door of the arrière-cuisine, propped on Tom's arm. When the Sun disappeared behind the church, she sighed and looked at her son. His own expression was hard to read: Jadis thought it might have been awe. But what Tom actually saw was always impossible to know - like trying to describe colour to a cat.
    "Let's lay the table," she said.
    Very little further was said as Jadis, Jack, Tom and Domingo ate their simple, final meal, of bread and cheese with some of last year's pickles and - a treat - the first stems from this year's asparagus.
    Domingo had blessed the meal as he had done many times before, in happier and less contemplative times. He had spent the day at the Mairie and alongside the parish priest, assisting at several services in which the congregation had spilled out of the church, into the square and down the adjacent streets; ministering, comforting and blessing a constant stream of supplicants, and helping as much as he could. He should have been exhausted. Instead, he was fired up: his eyes, almost lost beneath shaggy grey brows, shone with a mixture of eager anticipation and uttermost terror, the kind of expression normally seen in a small child invited to dive into the pool from the high board. He couldn't sit still, and his chair creaked with a thousand tiny squeaks as he shifted his bulk first this way and that. He kept stealing glances at Tom, as if in solicitation for a friend who had to reach an uncomfortable decision; and also at Jadis, who now seemed very sick indeed.
    Jadis didn't know what to think. The pain in her insides was now so great that connected thought was very difficult in any case, but those thoughts she did actually manage mostly left her angry and frustrated. The world coming to an end? What was one meant to think of that? How ought one to react? Regret? Happiness? Horror? She was even less prepared to give any quarter whatsoever to the illness that was now plainly eating away at her. On his many visits to her bedside in recent weeks, Domingo had blithered on about `acceptance'. That alone would ease her pain, he said; his mind - had she known it - on Shoshana's last hours, so many years earlier. She thanked him for his kindness, but said that his visits were cheering in themselves, whatever he said: and that she wouldn't know what to do with such abstract concepts anyway.
    Her one spark of hope came from Jack, who said and did very little, but who was always there, especially in the long and increasingly interrupted nights of the past two or three months; who would hold her fragile bones close and stroke her coarsening hair, and rekindle half-buried thoughts of matters long past when her flesh had been young and full and incorrupt, to the extent that she had been quite capable of engendering more life within it. Had she any tears left to shed, she would have cried long and hard for that, for her childlessness was now her single greatest regret. In idle moments she found herself blaming Tom for this - and this shamed and horrified her. So she clung to Jack all the harder. Were Jack to die or disappear, she thought, there really would be no need to go on living, whether one were in an infinity of pain, or none. Really, she thought, nothing had changed - for it came back to her as clearly as it had been yesterday, when she had been revising for her finals while Jack had made his first visit to Saint-Rogatien - not that she had even known its name then - and the pain of his absence was a bitter hunger. Rather like the pain she felt now, except that not even Jack's arms could ease it.
    As for Jack, he was mostly worried about Jadis, of course, against which the end of the world would always come a poor second. At dinner, he would reach over to her and squeeze her hand - small, bony and hot, like the body of a goldfinch - just to reassure himself that she hadn't vanished - or died. Whenever he touched her she seemed to be energized, becoming the centre of the occasion, bright-eyed, excited, animated. But he was distressed that there was no means of easing her pain, and even if there were some palliative, he was not sure she'd have done anything more than ignore it. To have acknowledged help would have been to admit that she was gravely, even terminally ill, and this might have made matters worse, not better. As with all things, it was usually best to let Jadis achieve equanimity on her own. However, he did wonder, were she to die, what he'd then do. He suspected that the farmhouse would revert to being a place like any other, and not the centre of his world as it had been for half a century. And once the centre had been torn out, he imagined himself an ant from a colony whose queen had died, wandering hither and thither without direction until he met his own random fate.
    Tom had completed his paper on the Sigil a few weeks earlier and had sent it to Nature, courtesy of one of Domingo's computers. He had received an acknowledgement, but nothing more, not even a polite yet curt notice of rejection: not even the offices of that august journal were immune to the death of the Solar System. Tom viewed all this with resignation. He was glad to have got the thing off his desk - off all their desks - and in any case it didn't much matter now. If the world were to end, he was glad that he'd meet it here.
    He reflected that his world had ended so many times already, and his reaction to each event had never been a credit to his own soul. His world ended first when he'd gained the gift of sight, and he had had to adapt, painfully, to the new world of light. Yet he had never trusted it fully, so that when Shoshana had arrived, ending his world for a second time, he had had to adapt all over again. And then there was Masada. And Morgana. And the first viewing of the Sigil.
    And then - then - there had been Shoshana's death, for which he felt himself responsible though he could not work out precisely why this should be, even though he flagellated himself constantly in an inexhaustible (if now tolerably well-hidden) black pit of remorse. Tom felt that he had already died a thousand deaths, like the coward he felt himself to be. And yet, from all this it seemed clear that ends were never as final as they first seemed, but were in the great scheme of things better regarded as transitions. In which case, perhaps the end of the world would not be such. But no, he thought, he had seen what had happened to Lac 9352: his only course was to compose himself with as much dignity as he could muster. For Menschkeit. For her sake.
    Amid all this, Tom was still trying to make a further accommodation, to the conversation he'd had with Domingo, in which wave followed thundering wave of revelation, so that Tom had felt as scored and bleached as a plank of driftwood washed up on a tropical shore. So much, he had thought, for taking back the reins of one's life.
    Tom had just bedded the horses into the stable, locking the door carefully behind him. What with the volume and press of people in the district recently, one couldn't be too careful. He looked up from the padlock and was startled to see Domingo's great bulk close by. Domingo apologised for making him jump.
    "We have long tried to put two and two together, you and I," he said.
    Tom looked into the older man's face, questioningly. It was richly lined, where one could see past the thick white beard and moustache, but the brown eyes were as deep and as wise as the bones of the Earth. The eyes lit up again as he continued: "I have a problem which I cannot solve alone, Tom. I'd value your help."
    Tom was torn. On the one hand, he loved and trusted Domingo as a father. On the other, as sons and fathers might, he felt himself in constant danger of being trapped by the older man's guile, his greater experience, especially if he, as the younger and greener, were approached on the pretext of needing help, as if he were the wiser of the two. Domingo had done it again - here was an occasion when Tom could hardly have denied him. So Tom suggested that they talk it over, whatever it was, in the Spinney, where they could be quiet, and enjoy the slanting rays of the afternoon sun through the branches and boles of the trees. They sat on an old split-log bench of Jack's ancient devising, mossy and split after the ravages of many winters and summers.
    "Domingo?"
    "Yes. Tom." Domingo swallowed, as if he were going to ask a favour from a superior that he didn't expect to have granted. "I wish to ... er ... solicit your understanding, and also, possibly, your forgiveness. Concerning your origins and circumstances, and my part in them."
    Tom was shocked, but not - if he were honest - entirely surprised. He thought he knew what was coming, and imagined that Domingo had cooked up whatever-it-was with his mother, perhaps as a last wish, a last attempt at final reconciliation, before the end. He thought he'd get his retaliation in first.
    "Domingo, I'm sorry, but I have been through all this with Jadis. How I have something to do with the Makers of the Sigil. I understand that you wish to make it up to me, but really, there's no need." He rose to go. Domingo placed a restraining arm of Tom's elbow as he did so.
    "Please, Tom, indulge an old man in the last days of his life - of all our lives." His voice was stern. "I do not think you should have anything to lose by listening, and by listening, my heart would be eased somewhat." Tom sat down again and tried not to look like a sulking teenager.
    "I offer no more excuses for the following," Domingo began, perhaps slightly more pompously than he'd originally intended. "If it pleases you, just think of it as a story. Some of it comes from the evidence of my own eyes. Rather more comes from my own travels in the Far East, together with the recollections of some of my colleagues. And some, my dear Tom, comes from you."
    "Yes, Domingo. Of course." Again, Tom tried not to sound as if he were humouring his old mentor. He rather thought he had failed. Domingo cleared his throat.
    The Sigil-Makers, he explained, were not aliens - but neither were they hominids. Their own origins lay back during the Eocene epoch more than fifty million years ago. In that remote period, the Earth was as warm and lush as it had been during the reign of the dinosaurs. The Eocene world was an Eden, a jungle of riotous life from pole to pole. Indeed, the subsequent history of the world could be read simply as a tale of steady yet inexorable decline.
    If the Eocene marked the high fortunes of any particular group of animals, it was the primates, which evolved rapidly from small squirrel-like forms into a range of creatures like nothing seen since. Palaeontologists had long appreciated the diversity of Eocene primates, while acknowledging that only a tiny fraction of all those species that had ever lived had been preserved in the fossil record. Eocene primates colonized every niche that forests had to offer. There were primates that spent their whole lives flitting along the sunlit uppermost canopies of forest trees, never venturing into the mazy arboreal dark below. Indeed, some of these primates learned to fly and, for a while, competed with the bats. There were other primates that dug downwards and lived wholly among the tree roots, like moles. Some of these became elongate, naked, blind and limbless, and might have been confused with snakes or even giant worms. There were still others that took to the high sea, their hind limbs replaced by an elongate body terminating in a broad fin. Thus it was that in the same order of mammals, animals evolved that were the closest the real world ever got to fairies - and dragons - and even mermaids.
    And there were some primates who colonized that most evanescent of niches: intelligence. The Makers evolved from just such a lineage of primates, remotely akin to what would become the nocturnal tarsiers of Borneo, although they gradually evolved an appearance almost indistinguishable from that of modern humans. This was no more than the well-known phenomenon of convergence, in which unrelated creatures, through the adoption of similar lifestyles, come to look similar to an uncanny degree.
    Over a relatively short period several more-or-less related species of Makers had appeared, flowered and become extinct, but by forty-five million years ago one species alone survived. This species erupted into a massive, world-girdling civilization that tamed the Earth to an extent that dwarfed the greatest achievements of Homo sapiens in the twentieth century. In short, it transformed the world beyond recognition. This civilization and its sequelae ruled the Earth for the next fifteen or twenty million years, against which the span of humankind looks trifling indeed.
    Tom thought about the wilder and grislier excesses of Avi Malkeinu's tall tales, but chose not to draw that comparison aloud. Instead, he wondered how evidence for such a great and temporally extensive civilization could have remained unknown, even given the well-known roulette of fossilization, in which most species on Earth evolve, live out their spans and die without ever once troubling posterity with even a single scrap of bone or tooth robust enough to stand the test of deep time.
    Ah, said Domingo, but the Makers did leave their mark -- in the very face of the Earth, in its denudation and wholesale alteration. It was the Makers, not the climate, that cut down the Eocene jungle. But once they had started, the climate did indeed begin to alter, and if it were not for the Makers, the Earth's climate would not have declined as severely as it did.
    "It is ironic, is it not, that Jack's recognition of the Neanderthal civilization that shaped Europe a million years ago was itself but a reshaping of a world that had been civilized for almost fifty times as long? Because, without the Makers, there might have been no Ice Ages. This was what nearly derailed the Makers' greatest plan."
    "Their ... greatest plan?"
    "Homo sapiens. Yes, Tom, you looked shocked. And I apologise for my small dramatic ... er ... flourish." Domingo explained that nearly everything he had to say was pure guesswork, for all that it fitted the evidence. "A civilization that lasts as long as twenty million years must - must - venture out into space. So if the Makers weren't aliens themselves, they probably encountered several extraterrestrial forms, over a very long period."
    It was during this star-faring phase that the Makers learned of the dragons from other species, or even discovered them for themselves. It became apparent from their researches that a biological solution might be engineered to combat the dragons, and that this would take a very long time indeed. But millions of years are easy to a civilization as ancient and stable as that of the Makers. The task was to select a strain of primates and set in train a course of evolution that would produce a species that could combat the dragons in some unspecified way when they next arrived in this sector of space.
    "Don't ask me how, Tom - I really am on ... er ... thin ice, here. And, unfortunately, as so often happens, the Makers' plans gang aft agley at the last minute."
    "Like mice and monkeys, maybe?"
    Domingo laughed, chose to ignore Tom's attempt at gentle skepticism, and went on. Listen carefully, he said: this is the interesting part.
    By around ten million years ago, the final civilization of the Makers was on its last legs, fragmenting into smaller and mutually hostile factions. Their experiment had been going well for some time, but as a result of this internecine strife and discord, the Makers created not one clear lineage of dragon-slayer but many - the hominids - and it was not at all clear, even to them, which if any of their several biological protégés would be of any use. So, knowing that they might not survive long enough to oversee their Grand Projet, they created the Sigil as a warning--a prompt - for any hominids that might survive.
    Tom recalled his mother's compelling argument.
    "Yes, Domingo," he said, "or it might have been there to warn any of the Makers' own descendants. Those that might still have existed."
    Domingo breathed a small yet audible sigh of relief, spurring him to carry on.
    "Yes, Tom. And that, I believe, is exactly what happened."
    And so Domingo continued his story, painting a picture of a civilization now so decayed that its products, perhaps the rulers of the Solar System, or of more than one, came to live humbly among the hominids, the products of their technology -- mingling with their own creations and writing themselves out of history.
    Or, perhaps, not quite.
    And who are these remnants? Which of the many known species of hominid is more than it seems at first?
    "They are the Jive Monkeys, Tom - no, now, don't start, I suspect that this is not a complete surprise to you given what you already know, and your ... ah ... recent experiences." Tom sat back, trying to drive from his mind the horrible yet fascinating image of Morgana, and more than that, of him and Morgana together. But why should he continue this futile denial? Why not just accept it as a fact of life and move on? For he knew, finally, that Domingo - and his mother - had been correct.
    "And, Tom, this is why I have asked you for your time tonight, and have been so rudely ... ah ... insistent. For I have felt your pain over many long years. It seems that you are of a greater lineage than any of us, and we've forced you to ... er ... slum it."
    "Domingo, don't..." Shoshana's blue eyes filled his sky, as soon as he had taken off his shades to see.
    "But I'm afraid I must, if only - selfishly - to ease my own mind, my own heart, before the end. For it was I, as you know, who brought you to this hearth and home, to comfort the childlessness of a good friend who'd had an accident that meant she could no longer bear children - your mother. And know this, Tom, she loves you with the tenacity of a lioness. That is why the past few months - years - have been such a trial for her. And you too, I suspect."
    Tom nodded.
    "The fact is, Tom, that you are a Jive Monkey, and neither you nor I knew it. Just like, I suppose, those with whom you've had such problems in Cambridge. I must apologise for that, too, for it's my fault. I didn't know it when I rescued you from that massacred village in Borneo forty-odd years ago. I could have - should have -- made more inquiries, I know, but Jadis was desperate, and ... well... we didn't really know anything about hominids in those days. In retrospect, I guess, we should have seen it. But it is, perhaps, the curse of a species that has inherited the Earth, to see itself in every face, no matter how different it looks. Had we known your true nature, Tom, it would have explained many things that perplexed your parents, and, I have to say, me."
    "Such as?"
    "Well, Tom, in short, it's your eyes." Tom heard his mother speaking, but Domingo's voice carried a greater authority and knowledge than hers. For Domingo had been aware of his own perceived failure and had been engaged on a long and penitential research effort, if not in atonement, then at least to understand. "One thing I have discovered is that Jive Monkeys are habitually born blind, but a certain altriciality of development means that they cannot see at all until they are around five or six years old. At this stage the Jive Monkey visual system is remarkably similar to that of a human, apart from an unusually shaped pupil. But the visual capacity increases with age as new banks of rods and cone cells develop in the retina, permitting a fair degree of sensation in the infrared and ultraviolet..."
    "Domingo, please, stop, please ... I ... understand," Tom begged. "And I forgive you." Domingo put his great bear-paw of a hand on Tom's stubby brown fingers.
    "Thank you, Tom. Thank you."
    "But there is more, isn't there, Domingo? Shouldn't you be telling me more? If I am a ... a ... Jive Monkey, then aren't there consequences - from any liaison with a human?"
    Domingo wasn't shocked - far from it. This could have been the confession, or at least the expiation, for which he had prayed for many years. On the other hand, he did not want Tom to be upset by any further biological revelations. And there was, of course, the obligation of secrecy that he still had to maintain. All he could say, in a small voice, was:
    "I expect that there might be, Tom - there might. But, I ... honestly, I do not think I can say any more."
    Tom could have sworn he saw a single tear well up in a wrinkle in Domingo's left eye, overspill the lid, and run down a line in his weathered cheek before disappearing into the eaves of his coniferously forested moustache.
    The time for raging was long over. Shoshana's soft, deep blue eyes, starred and flecked with violet, looked at Tom from out of the setting sun and, with a sudden flash of hardness, demanded that he be a mensch. This father-and-son game was not over. Not just yet. So Tom placed his free hand on top of Domingo's.
    "Domingo, my forgiveness still stands." He smiled. Domingo nodded his thanks like a penitent. "But there is a question I must ask you, too."
    "Tom, name it."
    "Your stirring tale was of humans and other hominids as `dragon slayers'. Did you mean that the Makers' long quest was to produce a species that could kill these things? The same creatures that we two, with our own eyes, saw destroy Lac 9352? Even when they - the Makers - could not?"
    "Yes, Tom, but that was where the ice was at its thinnest ... I didn't ..."
    Tom interrupted, his voice spiky and sharp as if chasing down a logical quarry before a roomful of hesitant, frightened undergraduates.
    "But that's just it, isn't it? The whole business with the Jive Monkeys, though it concerns us closely, is a side-show. But if the Makers were star-farers, why couldn't they have just blasted the dragons out of space with ... oh, I don't know ... ray guns?"
    "Tom, I'm afraid I don't know..."
    "... and yet you mentioned humans and other hominids as `dragon slayers'. You were quite specific about it. But no species on Earth today can launch anything more than a firework, and the dragons eat stars for breakfast and kick planets around like footballs. So where are these valiant Saints-Georges, when we need them?" He rose to go, muttering that he'd promised to help his mother with the supper. That thought, too, struck him with a pang - she looked so frail, and yet defiantly denied the very suggestion of infirmity. Almost as a parting, Parthian shot, he turned again to the older man, still seated.
    "And what's more, Domingo, Homo sapiens, which I expect was what you were getting at, has only just avoided extinction, and that by the narrowest of margins, effectively ruling them out of contention..."
    He stopped, quite still. He felt the blood drain from his face, and his knees weaken. He sat down again next to his old - his oldest friend. "Domingo - I must apologise. It's the Plague, isn't it? There's a connection, and ..."
    "I believe so, Tom. Or, rather, I hope so. I know you shot down that idea long ago, and you were right to have done so. But Jack thought there was a connection, somehow, and if it weren't for Jack's iron whims, neither of us would be here discussing all this, here, now."
    "But ... how?"
    "I have no idea, Tom. None whatsoever. All we can do now is hope. And pray."
    As he had done on so many nights of late, Domingo stayed up all night, praying and thinking. If not kneeling at his prie-dieu - in which his knees had now worn two great craters - he was pacing the confines of his narrow room in the farmhouse. On this night, he consoled himself with thoughts of the ancient midnight antiphon, on this, at the very darkest hour before the dawn.
    Cum rex gloriae Christus infernum debellaturus intraret ...
    He thought again of the transitions that marked men's lives, and how he and his fellow priests were only the gatekeepers. Did they have a responsibility to be reliable guides to the world beyond?
    ... qui tenebatur in morte captivus ...
    His teaching insisted that they had, for scripture was quite clear on the nature of the next world and the terms under which it could be entered. He remembered how Avi had often needled him about this: the Jewish conception of the after-life, he had said, was necessarily vague, for who could say anything about a country whence none had returned? And yet, Domingo had countered, the Jews did not deny the conception of afterlife outright - and there was, after all, one who had come back from Heaven, to show everyone else what it was like.
    ... advenisti desiderabilis quem expectabamus in tenebris ...
    In that he had complete faith. But attendant on the incarnation and resurrection there had been salvation, too, and for that he prayed his hardest.
    ... te nostra vocabant suspiria te large requirebant lamenta ...
    Even then, he could not entirely dispel Avi's teasing empiricism, for it had resonated with him, too. After all, had he not been a scientist in his younger days, a cleric, certainly, and yet one who had been taught, even encouraged, to question received wisdom? In his thirst for more knowledge from the GW Institute, despite its dreadful implications - was he not a scientist now? In that spirit, he had felt his mind increasingly drawn to the images of blood-spattered horror twenty years earlier when he had stepped into the isolation ward, deaf to the pleading of poor benighted Dr Al Hajj, to scoop the spherical remnant of Pope Linus the Second from beneath the gurney, and to insist on an appropriate container.
    ... tu factus est spes desperatis magna consolatio in tormentis.
    The flight time of the Papal hyperjet from Israel to Rome had been less than an hour, and yet Domingo recalled it having been the longest hour of his life. Running from the storm as the fury of the Khalifa broke on the Mediterranean shore, he had sat in air-conditioned even peace, with the sealed box at his side. He recalled the touch of the erstwhile pontiff. The sphere had been hard and smooth - smooth enough to be slippery, almost as if it were alive. Handling it, he felt as if he were trying to restrain a wet and writhing otter, or a newly caught fish. When he had finally got a grip - with an awkward combination of hands and sleeves and forearms - he noticed that the sphere was noticeably warm. This was, perhaps, to be expected, in a corpse which until moments before had been alive. But not after several hours and days had elapsed, when, still just as warm, the corpse was buried with due ceremony. At the time, Domingo had been puzzled by this: but many other concerns had pressed on his time and his mind and he had put his perplexity aside.
    It was only lately that Domingo had begun to think that the Plague represented a very strange kind of death indeed, perhaps much less final than the phenomenon usually associated with that stygian scythe: more, then, of a transition. Billions had been swept away in the Plague. Billions of agonized finality, each one initially in circumstances all its own, and yet ultimately all exactly like Linus the Second, in that the final product was always the same - the black spheres, each featureless and identical in size and colour with every other.
    He'd seen clusters of them on his travels. A dusty square in deserted Nice with these ominous matt-black Plague spheres instead of the smaller, graven chrome pieces of petanque. Banyan trees in the East Indies, with collections of black spheres rolled calmly against their bases. Whole towns in China, utterly deserted but for the spheres, lying in the streets, in shops, in homes.
    In recent weeks he had often cause to recall a curious line of Jack's whose derivation he could not quite place, and which Jack, skittishly, wouldn't reveal: `that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die'.
    All over the world, these black spheres were brooding. Waiting. But for what? Domingo earnestly hoped that if his intuition - and Jack's - was correct, that their condition was transitional, not final.
    And that they would not take much longer in choosing their moment.
    Tom, like Domingo, could not sleep, either. Curiously, he felt, his insomnia had nothing to do with the promised cataclysm. The end of the world was far too stupefying a concept for him to even begin to imagine. He supposed that most other people felt the same, which was why there had been so few disturbances in the tents and campsites around the village. If one had no idea what to expect, not even in one's worst nightmares, it was pointless even to worry.
    So why insomnia? Reason urged that he be at peace -- finally, having scrambled after many hazards to a high, clear summit of equanimity, long desired, often denied. After all, he had achieved some kind of reconciliation, however provisional, with his mother, with Domingo, with the memory of Shoshana, and even with his own identity. And, as he always was these days, he had been running the physical side of the farm more or less single-handedly, and always went to bed in a state of welcome physical exhaustion.
    At about four a.m. he gave up even pretending to sleep. Perhaps he'd go downstairs and make himself a cup of tea, and take it into the garden. It had been his traditional routine in Cambridge when the cramped confines of his cell closed in on him - to take a midnight stroll around the cloisters, the rhythm of his steps resonating with the waves of sleep. That is, until the pressure of work and other matters had become too much for him. But that was then. He rose, dressed and went downstairs.
    He put the kettle on the range and, while it was heating, walked through the arrière-cuisine to the back door. He did all of this in darkness, as he always had, without thinking: against the pitch interior of the shuttered house, the night sky was a brighter curtain of slate-blue. He walked out on to the terrace - the same, had he known it, where Jack had first announced Souris Saint-Michel to the Dream Team.
    The Earth grumbled and groaned beneath his feet, as it had done for several weeks. The constant infrasonic rumble had become an accompaniment to their lives so constant and persistent that most now chose to ignore it, despite the threat it represented: that their small, fragile planet was trying to hold its course despite being tossed on a sea of unexpected and occasionally violent gravitational cross-currents.
    But there was something else, too - something that only Tom could see. That the planet seemed to be generating its own aura, an aura that pulsed to the rhythms of the titanic forces now stressing the crust.
    He saw it first on the edge of the potager as a faint blue-white glow against the near horizon, and traced it towards him as an illuminated network of thin lines that criss-crossed the terrace beneath his feet, as if they were phosphorescent sea-worms, and he were standing on glass. His eyes followed the glowing lines back to the potager, where they met other networks and formed greater branches and boles across the garden, through the field gate, and up the back lane to the village square. Picked out against the yellowish haze of the western horizon, he saw the luminous trunk join others moving in from other directions, and they all converged on the graveyard behind the church where the trunks fused into something like ball lightning, making strange dancing shadows and silhouettes of the looming yews and cypresses that shaded that part of the cemetery, on the very peak of the ancient hill.
    And then there was an almighty crack like thunder, followed by a sustained roar, as the graveyard buckled and erupted. A shaft of unbearably bright light stabbed upwards from behind the trees, broad and straight, like the blade of a great broadsword, fading only by virtue of its increasing distance. Tom saw it taper to a point and vanish above his head, at the zenith.
    From the kitchen, the kettle whistled like a cock-crow.

    Chapter 24

    (April 2056)

    For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
    George Eliot - Middlemarch

    Disturbed by the stresses in the Earth in which many of them had been interred, the spheres stirred into renewed life. Not that they were really dead, for Domingo's intuition had been correct, as had been the suspicions of the massed ranks of scientists in the Khalifa who had tried to probe their secrets and failed. Were anyone left to appreciate it, it had been ironic that every one of those scientists had ended up as a sphere himself, united with their former enemies in a single, headlong rush to the zenith, as insistent as the migration of glass-eels from the Sargasso Sea.
    Had the scientists managed to break open a sphere, they'd have been disappointed. For beneath the thick shell was nothing more than a gluey, protoplasm-like substance, its monotony broken by a few roving amoebocytes. This should not really have been a surprise, for the insides of a pupating caterpillar are similarly featureless, with no immediate, visible clue to the glorious transformation about to take place, when the cells within grow and divide, and something emerges as glorious as a butterfly.
    Such clues as there might have been would have been genetic. It was a wonder to the genetic pioneers of the twentieth century that the same genes that create a caterpillar also produce the butterfly. But there was a greater wonder still: that the genes of those human scientists held the key to a similar but quantitatively more profound transformation. This was the culmination of the work of geneticists of yet greater wisdom, working when the continents of the Earth were arranged rather differently.
    These now-extinct geneticists had long realized that the language of DNA is as subtle as one that might be created by classifying the ephemeral, evanescent curls of wood smoke. Nature had transcended the apparent simplicity of the genetic code, written in an alphabet of only four letters, to create a means of communication of almost infinite nuance, in which meaning was almost wholly dependent on the context in which the DNA is translated by the microscopic machinery that reads it - and which is in turn created by that selfsame DNA. For who can tell the meaning of any given string of DNA simply by looking at it? Without the infinite recursion of context, it might be the autobiographies of the archangels, a complete history of the future - or have no meaning whatsoever. In this ambiguity lies flexibility, for the DNA might be the instructions to make either a caterpillar or a human being - or anything in between. All living organisms contain genes that are substantially the same as in any other given organism. In the great scheme of things, relatively little separates the genetic complexions of humans and butterflies. It is the context that matters. Fragments of the same genes can be shuffled, placed against new neighbours, forced to form new and unexpected interactions - and generate new meanings.
    So had these ancient geneticists shaped human DNA, such that when given the correct signal, the human form would rearrange itself into a new shape of apocalyptic power, as far from the human as might be imagined, and yet (these geneticists having a keen sense of the aesthetic) in the most perfectly simple and primordial form. A sphere, blacker than their own cat-like fur, itself a left-over from their heritage of nocturnal predation. And also a metaphor for the end of the Universe. Or its beginning.
    Although the spherical shells were resistant to anything the Khalifa could throw at them, they were not uniformly unquestioning barriers. For there was one, further signal - just one - that could penetrate them. That signal had now been received. The genes within the spheres rearranged themselves for one last throw, in a way analogous to the gavotte in which the genes in the human immune system rearrange themselves to create antibodies, customized to fight any conceivable infectious agent. The analogy was, however, remote, for this rearrangement manipulated the shape of matter itself, opening tiny doors into the heart of the cosmos, puncturing the fabric of time and space.
    All across the world, the spheres responded to the call. As Tom saw it in the early hours of Easter Day, the spheres engaged in their own spectacular resurrection, hurling their brilliance towards the zenith point. And so it was elsewhere, from the deserted villages of China to the abandoned game of petanque that Domingo had visited. The radiance split the sky above submerged New York, and the desert oases of Africa. The shade of Linus the Second broke free from his tomb and joined the downed hyperjet pilots of the Khalifa in one final flight.
    After the destruction of Jupiter, the plague of dragons had jarred the Yahoo from its focus. But had it been able to have turned its fantastic binocular gaze on the Earth at that moment, it would not have seen a quiet, blue-green planet, but a star: the centre of innumerable incandescent shafts radiating into space. Once out in space, the rays gathered, as if they were so many geese finding their bearings before the long voyage home; swayed, and turned at last towards the beleaguered Sun.
    Just before sunrise, Domingo realized, once again, that he had fallen asleep where he had been kneeling. Struggling to his feet - the pins and needles shooting up and down his legs - he shook his head clear, padded across the hall to the bathroom and washed his face clear of the last shreds of night.
    Haec dies. This is the day.
    He felt he should be rejoicing, but his heart was overwhelmed with dread. Have faith, he thought to himself. Faith. He swallowed, and calmed himself with a series of long, deep breaths. How peculiar, he thought - he had never before considered the matter, but for the first time in his life he actually felt old, as if his usually boundless energy were ebbing away into the ground. Faith, he told himself.
    He shuffled downstairs, praying that each creak of the polished wooden staircase wouldn't wake the other inhabitants, and left the house by the back door. He drove wet swathes in the long, dewy grass, yet to be warmed by the dawn. Pausing to unlatch the field gate onto the back lane, he looked anxiously up at the sky. It was a deep blue, like the velvety interior of a wooden case one might use to keep, for example, silverware. Or, perhaps, an upturned skull roof slicked with the millennial deposits of burned herbs. His eyes darkened. Hope, he felt, really ought to spring eternal.
    A few stars could still be seen in the west, but they were fading rapidly. He turned now to the east, looking across the fields, and saw the Sun crest the horizon. He was about to sigh with relief - but caught his breath. For the sky did not lighten. It remained the same, deep, saturated blue of the late hours of the night, as if he were viewing it through a polarizing filter. The Sun seemed larger than normal, and was clearly visible as a disk against the strangely dark sky. He had the briefly vertiginous sense that he had woken up on another planet and now surveyed an entirely alien sky. Reassurance, such as it was, came in the form of a few high, red cirrus clouds, the only blemish on the clear lapis bowl of the heavens. If not another planet, then, he felt he'd walked into a fresco by Giotto, the hagiography of Saint Francis, or some such. He decided to take heart from this comparison. Haec dies quam fecit Dominus exultemus. Today would be the day he would meet his Maker. One way or another. He set his face against the Sun, turned westwards once more and hurried up the hill to the square.
    Jadis awoke with a start just before sunrise, imagining she heard a creak on the stairs. She was immediately assaulted with a pain so overwhelming as to be almost unbearable. It was not just her insides, this time, but every single joint, every nerve in her body.
    "Jack ... Jack?"
    "Mmm?" Jack stirred from his own uneasy dreams.
    "Would you be a love ... and make some tea?"
    Without a word Jack swung out of bed and padded out of the room. The dawn was just peeping through the southward window in the hall, the window that looked over the courtyard. It struck him, first, that no birds sang, because although the Sun had clearly risen, it still felt dark. Not that any thoughts of apocalypse entered his head, for his mind was now wholly occupied with Jadis and, he was almost certain, her terminal illness. Frankly, she was slipping away from him, a little further each day. With each new dawn she was thinner and more fragile, and he felt helpless to intervene. The first step in curing an illness is always to admit that something is the matter, and Jadis simply refused to do this, or even discuss it. But perhaps it was now too late for that.
    In the kitchen, he found a half-filled kettle, still warm. He was not the only person in the house who'd had a troubled night, then - but it was Easter Sunday, and Domingo would presumably have left early for the traditional offices that started at midnight. He brought the kettle to the boil and filled two mugs. As they cooled, he ventured just outside the back door to cut some mint for their tea . Real tea, like the thick Yorkshire brew his Dad always liked - was a rare treat, saved for visitors. While he was in the back yard, he cut a sprig from the abundant hemp that had seeded itself just outside the back door a few years before, and now formed a curiously twining vine up the wall. Funny, he never knew hemp could climb like that. Neither he nor Jadis had ever been enthused by recreational drugs, and neither of them had ever smoked: but it was an attractive plant, so they just left it. But if Jack put some in Jadis' tea and added enough sugar, perhaps she wouldn't notice: at the very least, it would stop her constantly wanting to throw up, not that she ate very much these days, anyway.
    The great ball of the Sun was now a degree or two above the eastern field, but the sky was as deeply blue as ever, the colour of cornflowers, or a child's painting. He felt, rather than heard, a crack like a distant gunshot, but coming from beneath his feet: the Earth, too was waking up to greet the new and final day.
    Haec dies. This is the day.
    Having cut the mint and marijuana, and with the leaves in hand, Jack stretched in the new warmth. The night had been no worse than usual. Jadis had talked a great deal in her sleep and had woken up twice, disoriented, sweat beading on her brow, her eyes huge and frightened in her thin face. In between these episodes he'd had a very ancient anxiety dream that he'd had rather a lot of late - the one in which a much younger Jadis sunbathed on a tropical beach, while he swam in the sea and got caught in a riptide, Jadis ignoring his frantic cries for help.
    The kitchen welcomed him again with the cool dark of the waning night. He stirred the leaves into the hot water and added some sugar.
    He really ought to have felt aggrieved about the whole thing, that Jadis could let herself die with no consideration for his feelings in the matter. But that was just it. Jadis had this over-inflated sense of duty that extended to not being a burden on anyone else, taking self-sufficiency to an extreme. As far as Jadis was concerned, either she wasn't ill - or she was ill, but she would get better if the symptoms were ignored for long enough. It never crossed her mind that this course of action might - would -- destroy her in the end.
    He smiled, but with great sadness, because it was this relentless self-reliance in the face of all advice or evidence that led to the car crash that led to Tom, to ...
    For many years he wondered whether, had Jadis reached Addenbrooke's, their baby might have been saved, or if she'd have miscarried anyway? He recalled Marjorie McLennane having made the same point, not long after the accident. Great heavens! This was more than fifty years ago, so why brood on it now? Well, it was something to do with the Plague, and something to do with Domingo, too, but he couldn't work out what. In short, it was this: the farmhouse, it seemed to him, had always seemed utterly changeless. Even when the world rushed and swirled around it, as it had lately, the farmhouse always remained inviolate. A magic space. But the Plague had honoured no such boundaries. When they realized that the Plague struck Homo sapiens exclusively, he started to wonder. Tom, they knew about. Domingo? Jack wasn't so sure. Jadis? Well, not all humans got the Plague, so perhaps she was in the lucky minority.
    And himself? Ah, himself.
    He had been a child of the Pennines, and, as far as he could work out, the Corstorphines had lived in that part of England's spine known as Upper Teesdale since time immemorial. And, Jack thought, maybe even earlier than that. He did wonder why he'd had such a keen feeling for the bones of the land. Perhaps, he thought, a smidgeon of Neanderthal blood ran in his veins, enabling him to recognize the landscapes of his longfathers where others could not. If so, then -- oh, then - no child that he fathered on Jadis would ever have been viable.
    He gathered up the mugs and headed upstairs. As he climbed, he was seized with an awful premonition, that he would push open their bedroom door to find that she had died. He stopped to catch his breath, putting the mugs down on a bookshelf in the upstairs hall.
    Domingo arrived in the square to find it already full to overflowing with people. The press of supplicants, the hands thrust out to him, the pleas - demands - for blessings; he heard them all, but after a short while they merged into a constant stream, like the sound of the sea in his ears. He made his way, slowly, to the church, where he'd assist the priest in some of the Easter offices. He made a point of not looking back at the slowly rising Sun, although he felt its welcome heat on the back of his head. Every other person, however, was gazing at its saffron disk riding in the unnaturally blue sky. Watching, open-mouthed, and wondering.
    The rituals of Easter were usually of great joy to him. He realized, now, before the church heaving with a sea of people, that his previous comfort had been little more than the smugness of children who enjoyed a bedtime story they had heard already a thousand times - because they knew the ending. Today, the solemnity of the antiphons and psalms seemed hardly more than a sham. In this unnervingly detached frame of mind, he wondered what the first Easter had been like, when Christ's disciples were convinced that their Lord was going to die a nasty, slow and, above all, certain death: and the genuine joy when the Resurrection -- beyond hope or expectation -- was made plain, even to the doubters.
    That first Resurrection morning, he thought, has less in common with the way we came to celebrate Easter, with its ending already known, than with the rituals of the ancients, who made bloody sacrifices to ensure that the Sun would rise the next day: because they were gripped with a terrifying certainty that this would not happen were the proper forms not maintained. He thought of the Aztecs, and he thought of the Neanderthals of Mount Carmel and, closer to home, atop the Great Pyramid at Souris Saint-Michel. And, more than ever, of his own likely ancestry in the mountains of Andalusia, that had bequeathed him an ancient human skull. The Easter they were celebrating right now had that same frisson of terror, of uncertainty. Part of him knew that the world would end today, in a few hours. But another, the greater, still hoped for some form of Divine deliverance. Easter was so close to Passover, as he and Avi had often discussed. We were slaves in Egypt, as Christ had explained at their own Last Supper, but the Lord saved us, with his mighty hand, with his outstretched arm. Although he found it hard to engage in the offices themselves, his prayers were as heartfelt as ever.
    After Jack had left the room, Jadis slowly and painfully sat up in bed, swinging her legs very carefully over the side. When the giddiness had ceased and the spots before her eyes had cleared, she looked down at her knees, and all of a sudden she realized how bony and blotched they looked. Her arms, too. Indeed, every part of her. She felt truly, utterly, horrible.
    Trying very hard not to be sick, she rose, very carefully, to look for her comb. This had always been an important part of life - sitting on the edge of her bed and combing her long hair. It had been the last thing she had done before sleep as a little girl, even after saying her prayers: and, more or less, the first thing she did when she awoke. It was an important ritual she'd enjoyed throughout her life, especially when Jack helped, even as her dark brown hair had turned to grey.
    She'd be damned if she were to stop it now, just because she felt ill. It was odd that she'd thought of herself as a little girl just then, for that was a part of her life she'd not recalled for many long years. The comb she had now was the very same cheap plastic faux-tortoiseshell comb that her mother had given her. By complete chance, it was the only relic from those lost years she still possessed, and, remarkably, it had not lost a single tooth despite the daily punishment to which it had been subjected. Her mother had given it to her - when? It was the morning after that dreadful argument she'd heard her parents having downstairs when she was lying in bed. She had been about fourteen then, already long and leggy and beautiful and frightening potential suitors with her volcanic intelligence and a gaze so penetrating that it made the boys feel that they had come outside with their flies undone.
    She couldn't remember what the argument had been about: from upstairs, she could not make out the words. It was notable for two things. First, that her parents never had arguments. Not ever. And second, that her father had walked out immediately afterwards. Her mother had passed the comb to her, distractedly, just after breakfast the next day. To be sure, her father had returned a week later. After that the argument was never mentioned, and they - she - never looked back. Well, hardly ever. For all practical purposes, her parents' marriage had been as solid as the Earth, but a part of her felt that it had cracked that night, from top to bottom. She wondered if she had retained the comb as some kind of unconscious memorial of that event. Less consciously, she felt that this rupture was what had driven her ever afterwards to succeed by her own lights. Not just because that was a noble aim in itself, but because she would never allow herself to let anyone down.
    At the root of her being, it was what had made her stick to Jack with unconcealed ferocity, no matter what. They had been lucky, she thought. Apart from Jack's many absences in the field when they were young, there had been nothing to disrupt their partnership. If her parents' marriage had been a broken vase stuck together with glue, however expertly, her marriage to Jack had never even been chipped.
    Until now. She refused to admit to herself that she was gravely ill, despite the evidence to the contrary. Should she not always stick to the evidence? Sure, she might be ill, but if so, she'd get better, one day. But the longer she was ill, the thinner and weaker she became, and the prospect of being well again seemed further and further from her grasp. No. She could not allow this to happen. She was vaguely aware of Jack's disquiet, but she was not striking this pose for her own benefit - she was being so intransigent for his sake, because she did not want him to worry. So why was he worried, the silly old lion? Surely, he knew her better than that. But perhaps he didn't. Then again, perhaps he was right to be worried. These thoughts circled round her aching head until she became dizzy.
    She thought she'd left the comb on the bedside table, because this was where she'd always left it. But if so, she could no longer see it. Perhaps it had fallen on the floor. She slipped to her knees on the floor beside the bed. The twin impacts on her knees shot up her thighs like lightning bolts, and she just stopped herself from crying out. Gingerly, she lay down full length on the floor to look under the bed, but her comb was not there, either. Where had it got to? It was then that she realized that she was immobile, quite unable to get up. She started to cry with the frustration of it.
    The procession made its way out of the packed church and into the square. The noon Sun rode high before it from its lapis vault. The crowd parted -- inasmuch as it could -- for Domingo, the parish priest and the lines of Christophorines and Adelardians as they made their way across the square to the Mairie. The crowd surged forward once again, right to the Mairie's iron railings.
    Once inside the cool of the building, Domingo thanked the priest and his brethren. He believed that the time of judgment was imminent - and whatever happened, he said, he prayed that God would be with them all. They bowed, and left, taking up stations in the well-kept front yard of the Mairie, just inside the railings, a peaceful haven of ordered paths, box hedges and bay trees.
    Domingo was alone again. He was relieved, but also frightened. Loneliness is a not a natural state for human beings, which is why enduring it had always been a test for people of faith. It was appropriate that in this last office - the last one of all - that he was not only alone, but that all eyes should be upon him. He thanked God for the opportunity that had been presented to him, that he should be in this position of command. He saw himself at that moment against the cosmos, and was humbled. Just one old man, alone, to present the eulogy for the world.
    Painfully, he climbed the stairs to his private apartment on the top floor. Painfully, because despite the almost proverbial strength he'd enjoyed throughout his long life, he felt at last -- as he had this morning -- that age was beginning to tell. He was seventy-six, and his considerable weight was a strain on his knees, already bruised from his frequent vigils. He sat down to catch his breath and offered one last, small prayer for strength.
    It was his favourite psalm, which he murmured under his breath, over and over like a mantra, as he went back into the hall and found the small winding stair that led to the parapet on the roof of the building. Nam et si ambulavero in medio umbrae mortis, he gasped with deep and unsteady breaths as he negotiated the steep and tightly curving staircase: non timebo mala, as he reached the parapet and looked down - how far it was! Quoniam tu mecum es.
    Domingo was no stranger to making speeches - indeed, he had always quite enjoyed it - but now his mouth was dry, and nothing seemed to come out. The crowd saw his great, robed figure on the parapet, and fell silent. There was no wind, even the birds of springtime were silent. It was as if the world waited on Domingo's next words. But all he could say was what was in his mind at that moment.
    "My friends... although we walk together in the valley of the shadow of Death, we shall fear no evil, for the Lord is with us."
    And then the sky boiled.
    She must have blacked out, for the next thing she remembered she was in bed again, beneath the sheets, with Jack looking down at her, his brow furrowed.
    "Darling Jack, it's me ... I couldn't find my comb, and ..."
    "Hmm? Why, it's right there, on your bedside table. Where you left it."
    "Oh, really? I thought ... Perhaps I was confused... I thought..."
    "Let's prop you up," he said, "and I shall comb your hair. Would you like that?"
    "Oh you silly man! Of course, I would!"
    So he gently lifted her into a sitting position on the side of the bed, propping her up with pillows so she wouldn't fall back, or sideways. He took the comb and began to tease her hair with long, easy strokes. She closed her eyes and, at first, she saw all those combings past, all together, at once. But as he combed, she relaxed and began to make out each event separately. Of course, when they were younger, it had all been ever so erotic, and they had often ended up back in bed, which only made her hair all the more disordered. She laughed at that now. These days - and for many days before that - it was simply one of those silly rituals that bonded them together. Something they liked to do because ... well, because.
    Part of the reason Jack liked to comb her hair, he had said once (well, actually, a lot more than once), was because it was an inherently futile act, which tickled his sense of humour. She had the kind of hair that would never stay in one place for long, and that, said Jack, was one of things that had first turned him on when they'd first met. Ah. She'd been a teenager then, and the comb had come with her to Cambridge, the first time either she, or the comb, had lived away from home. How soon after that she'd met Jack, and then - immediately, it had seemed - her home had always been with him.
    The spheres formed a cohort of billions, but in the dimension they now inhabited, they were but one vast, linked entity, as if each sphere had been a macroscopic quantum object, an instantiation of a single thing, a crystal with innumerable facets. From the human perspective, they were no longer spherical, but formed a shape impossible to describe except in purely formal terms, and even then only with mathematics not yet discovered by human beings.
    In words, the description would only be a mess of contradictions. In one sense, they united to form a point of infinitesimal size but infinite density. In another, they linked up to form a new, larger spherical shell, this one large enough to surround the Sun and the entire volume of space out beyond the orbit of Venus.
    In yet a third sense, the effect of the spheres was to twist time and space into a series of recursions of infinite curvature, linking every instant with all the others that had ever been, uniting every point with all the others that there ever were. In this way they recreated, in solar orbit, the moment of the Big Bang in the instant of inflation that had expanded it from a singularity to the size of a human fist. The dragons were sucked into this vortex and translated to the very beginning of time. Even in such exotic circumstances, matter and energy had to remain conserved: in destroying the dragons, the spheres had only ensured their regeneration.
    She leaned back against him, and made her way to the very edge of sleep. How odd - she no longer felt any pain. None at all. She had to admit it was a blessed relief, and she now realized quite how uncomfortable she'd been for the past year, or more. Oh dear, she must have been most disagreeable to everyone around her. Especially poor Tom. She hoped they'd all forgive her.
    Ah, but her mind was wandering again, and she was a cloud floating over the calm and open sea. How far it stretched, in all directions, with the yellow Sun shining down on the peaceful waves from a deep blue sky. She wondered when she'd make landfall, but she could see no sign of an island, even a reef. She kept on like this for some time, and was vaguely aware that the sky had changed colour, from blue, to gold, and then to blue once more. This time it was the clear blue of any other Spring day. She idly wondered whether they should get the early potatoes planted.
    But what was this? She heard a noise, a continual rumble and crash from the distant horizon. As she drifted towards it, she realized that the sea had an edge, and the water was pouring over a cliff in long ribbons, plunging towards a fathomless depth of spume. She looked up, then, and it was night, and the stars had begun to come out.
    "Darling Jack..."
    The world whined and wheeled, and was silent.
    At the very moment that Domingo finished speaking, the dark blue sky fell to pieces. Fractal lines like lightning bolts split the heavens from horizon to horizon. More lines joined them, until, after a few moments, the entire sky had turned a uniform golden colour. Domingo looked up and gasped - as did every person in the square below. All thought was lost at the wonder of it. When Domingo had recovered his senses, he felt that they really had been transported into a fresco by Giotto, to a time when art was just waking from the Middle Ages. A moment before perspective had been achieved, when there was in effect no distance at all between any object in the Universe, when Man and God were at one and at peace, and all skies were golden.
    The phase of gold lasted for a minute or two, just long enough for everyone in the crowd to have turned round to gasp in astonished awe, before it faded, to be replaced by the clear, pale sky of springtime, the yellow Sun gazing down as it had for billions of years, and as it would for billions of years to come. The birds sang again, as if they had experienced no more than a momentary interruption. Domingo's spirit soared - his God had heard his cry in the wilderness. His prayers had been answered.
    Tears coursed unasked down his lined face. He stretched out his arms once again, to the sky and to the crowds.
    "Et misericordia tua subsequetur me, omnibus diebus vitae meae," he roared: "Et ut inhabitem in domo Domini in longitudinem dierum."
    I shall enjoy your mercy for all my days, and I shall dwell in your mansions of glory for ever.
    And the crowd roared back: "Amen!"

    Epilogue
    We wonder, -- and some Hunter may expressWonder like ours, when thro' the wildernessWhere London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guessWhat powerful but unrecorded raceOnce dwelt in that annihilated place.
    Horace Smith -- Ozymandias
    From the Private Journals of Eusebius Secundus, Episcopus Romanus.
    This may well be my final entry in these journals before I leave, finally, to take up my long-vacant throne. I have been reluctant to do this for many years, having formed a strong attachment to this old place, but the College of Cardinals has become more insistent of late. The Eternal City thrives once more, they say, but cannot truly live without its Supreme Arch-Episcopal Adornment (their words, not mine). In any case, I might not be long for this world, having almost matched the impressive longevity of the great Gaston de Bonnard, in which case I really should move back to Rome while I still can, so that my succession might be managed without too much fuss and bother: and in case I am tempted to climb one of the magnificent apple trees that Jack planted, long ago. Even so, once in Rome after so long a spell at Saint-Rogatien, I'll feel like an exile on Main Street. Perhaps, then, it might be appropriate to reflect on some larger matters, before I go.
    The world changed irrevocably, in the Spring of '56, as everyone is now aware. However, as a new generation grew up in ignorance of the Plague, a further has risen to maturity that would gasp in disbelief were one to say that the Solar System once had more than twice as many planets as it has now. Once we had assessed the damage, as it were, we found that Mercury had vanished, in addition to the giant planets consumed by the dragons.
    Venus moved closer to the Sun: its clouds boiled, and its hellish surface was once again exposed. Mars, also, moved slightly closer, and was devastated by asteroid impacts. Its great volcanoes surged into life after perhaps a billion years of sleep. That, and the additional impact of two comets, shrouded that Harbinger of War in the mantle that Venus had shed, and its surface is now hidden from us. Some say that when the clouds part - in one year or in a million -- Mars will look like another Earth, with blue skies and open oceans, and, perhaps, the blessing of life. Apart from that there are a lot of rocks about, until one reaches lonely blue Uranus.
    But we should be fools to cry: our Earth has been spared major devastation, although her orbital parameters have changed a little. My old friends the astrometers in Cambridge tell me that the shape of the Earth's orbit is a shade more eccentric, the tilt of the axis a few shavings of a degree greater, and the Moon is marginally further away from us. This might explain why the Moon is now to be seen fully in rotation, and why the summer weather is in general hotter and more oppressive than it has been for many a long year, and why the winters, while mercifully brief, are very cold indeed. But that could an old man talking: an old man often tempted to take his winter holidays at Nice, where is he once more a guest (albeit now one who settles his accounts) at the Hotel Negresco.
    What has been the cause of much perplexity is that the year has shortened by about a third of a day, which - what with the antics of the Moon - has made calculating the date of Easter a matter of some contention, still unresolved. Cardinal Bray implores me with some urgency that my first task when I get to Rome must be to convene an ecumenical conference on this very issue: probably before I have a chance to unpack, if he has his way.
    Whereas I acknowledge that a return to Rome will be a blessing, in the end, it shall tear my heart to leave the house in which I now reside. I well remember my first visit, when I had the good fortune to have met Dr Jadis Markham, who became my closest friend and, I have to say, my confessor. Jadis died at the very moment of God's victory, and I am confident that she sits close to the throne of the Almighty. After her death, many people wished to view her body and pay their respects, for there are many in Saint-Rogatien and the adjacent communes who would not have lived but for her ministrations. She lay in state, as it were, at the church, before Jack, Tom and I buried her in the Spinney, which was her favourite place on this Earth. I still sit there by her grave, on Jack's old bench, on occasion, when I wish to think through some particularly knotty point of theology, and I can still hear her voice whispering through the trees - `oh you silly man, it's like this'. And the problem will have been resolved.
    Jack's mortal remains now rest beside her in this quiet spot, of course. After Jadis died, he felt he could no longer continue, as he said he saw Jadis in every tree and every hillside, in every country lane and on every horizon. His confession to me was perhaps a little private and unguarded, for he spoke with feeling and at length of Jadis as a young woman, full of vivacity and charm, and their early days together. This is how we all should like to remember her, for that is when I first met her, too. Jack went back to Cambridge, with Tom, and spent two more years as an Emeritus Professor before he died, and his body came back here. Tom resides in Cambridge still, himself now a distinguished Emeritus Professor, and we are in occasional correspondence.
    Jadis told me once, that her devotion to the health of her neighbours was a kind of penance for what she had unleashed on the world. She said that she knew it was ridiculous - if not presumptious to an outrageous degree - but she felt that had she and Jack not unearthed the Sigil, then none of this would have happened: the Plague, the dragons and so on. I confess that I was inclined to dismiss this, until a curious incident not long after her death, when Jack and Tom were making the house ready for my installation. I happened to be a witness to the event, for I was helping them to arrange matters, as they had kindly made over the house to my stewardship.
    We had assembled in the barn to essay a general clear-up, and found the Sigil, of course, concealed under its tarpaulin, as it had been since Tom had described it and written his paper for Nature which - thankfully, in the light of what happened - was not yet published. The three of us discussed what might be done with the ancient artefact, and soon reached the decision that it should be transported back to Souris Saint-Michel, and stored in the old Museum there. In the course of this discussion we removed the tarpaulin, more for old times' sake, to look at the curious inscription. You may imagine our surprise when what greeted us was the bare, smooth surface of the rock. No trace of the Sigil could be seen. It had vanished, as if it had never been.
    Tom's immediate task was to withdraw the paper from consideration at Nature, and this was swiftly done. Without the publicity that would have then ensued, the existence of the Sigil was known to remarkably few people, of whom only Tom and myself are now alive. Perhaps it is better that way.
    Nevertheless, in the weeks following that peculiar event, Tom, Jack and I spent many evenings discussing its significance. First: was the Sigil real, or had we imagined the whole thing? The latter choice implied some kind of collective delusion, which did not strike us as likely, even taking Tom's peculiar experience of the Sigil into consideration. But if the Sigil had been a real object, then Jack and Jadis' ideas that the Plague and the visitation of the dragons were not coincidental, but connected, must have had some bearing in fact. The Sigil had been a warning - just as Tom and Shoshana had thought -- and it had done its work, specific to the times in which we then lived, and not for all times or circumstances.
    Several rather unpleasant implications might follow from this idea. First, that the Sigil was more than a simple notice of the approaching dragons, but that its providential uncovering had somehow triggered the Plague. After all, the Plague had no known, proximate mechanism, and even today, none has been identified.
    In addition, it is salutary to note that the event that swept billions away, but which in the end saved the Earth, was triggered by the slenderest chain of events. I was not aware quite how slender they had been until Jack had explained them to me. Were it not for the excavations at Souris Saint-Michel, the Sigil might never have been found. But before Souris, there had to be Le Dig at Saint-Rogatien of which I was a part, and that would not have been possible had not the work been funded by the prescience of the Wang foundation; and, in turn, had it not been for a morning in Cambridge long ago when a teenaged Jadis had walked into Jack's class five minutes late, with her hair (as Jack put it) in a state of disorder which he found pleasing, to the extent that he married her. But for a nail in a horseshoe, it is said, the kingdom might fall. Were it not for the long hair of a lovely young girl, the same fate might have befallen an entire planet.
    It occurred to Tom that there was another even more chilling possibility. That the Sigil was more than a warning, and more, even, than the trigger for the Plague - that it had been an interstellar beacon that actually drew the dragons towards us. For millions of years, the Makers and the Dragons had played a great and shadowy game. Homo sapiens had not been the sacrifice - it had been the bait.
    Another issue which occurred to none of us at the time was this: given that the Sigil had been physically inscribed, how had it then been removed? This is the least explicable of all these thorny issues, and so I shall not attempt to discuss it further.
    In consideration of all these matters, I must own - despite my earlier shameful insistence to the contrary - that Jadis was right to have held out against the publication of the Sigil, and for this and many other reasons to which I have alluded, I pledge myself to her memory. I have given instructions to my successors that the farmhouse be consecrated to a new order which I'm thinking of calling the Sisterhood of Antiquity (the terms of reference for which I am now devising) and that her grave -- and that of Jack, too -- be maintained and revered in an appropriate manner.
    Despite the mysteries surrounding the Sigil itself, more can perhaps be said concerning the role of Homo sapiens in the Plague and the subsequent apotheosis. I am fond of considering this by way of an analogy. It has long been known that species can exist happily in one form until transformed into something quite other by the threat of a predator. For example, I have observed, in the garden here, how aphids persist in a wingless state for many generations, until a predatory ladybird appears. Then, a most remarkable change happens - the aphids suddenly develop wings, where none had been before, and fly from danger. My Adelardian colleagues tell me that this phenomenon has long been known to ecologists, and that the chemical stimulant secreted by the ladybird has been identified that effects this startling transformation. In the same way, it was the approach of the dragons - whether mediated by the Sigil or not - that caused the Plague, transforming the human race into a form that could effectively neutralize the threat.
    Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra, and quite right, too. Libera nos a malo, we asked, and you answered our prayers, sending, through long aeons of evolution, through the careful pruning of natural selection, a saviour who would, indeed, deliver us from evil. How could anyone ever have doubted it?
    I shall close this entry with two confessions.
    The first relates to the reason why I did not succumb to the Plague. To explain that, I must needs sketch some details of my origins which have hitherto remained unrecorded. It is known that Neanderthal Man lived in Europe until at least twenty-one thousand years ago, and that his last redoubts were in southern France and Spain. It is a fact universally acknowledged that it is never possible to isolate the last ever occurrence of a vanishing species - particularly if the species concerned does not, in fact, vanish. For the Neanderthals survived in the high Sierra Nevada of Andalusia, albeit latterly as a despised and rarely seen minority in remote and almost inaccessible villages. It occurred to no-one that they were anything other than human beings, even if of a primitive and debased kind.
    The Neanderthals hung on through the Roman occupation and the barbarian invasions, and were tolerated - and even prospered - under the Khalifa. It was then, in the Kingdom of Granada assailed by Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile, that the last references were made to Neanderthals as something other - as inhuman. It came to the ears of their Catholic Majesties that the Emir Muhammad employed `Demons' as bodyguards, and this was used as a pretext for invading the Kingdom in 1492. Of course, what with the persecution of the Jews in Spain at the same time, and the sensitivity of the Inquisition to anything at all that smelled of the alien, the retribution was both swift and terrible. After that date, no further reference is made to the Neanderthals, and it was therefore assumed that they had become extinct.
    But as my old friend Jadis often said, it is the things that everyone assumes to be true that tend to be the most egregiously erroneous, and this was certainly the case in this instance. For I now believe that I am one of these Neanderthals, of almost pure stock. I was long unsure of this, but thanks to the progress of medical testing, I am now absolutely certain. In which case, it is a nice irony, is it not, that one of a race deliberately persecuted by the upholders of the Holy Church should rise to become its Earthly representative?
    It is of some interest to me why nobody throughout my long life has suspected my origins, even those closest to me, whose daily occupation was the study of Neanderthal bones and artefacts. In my childhood, of course, nobody suspected anything other than that the only extant hominid was Homo sapiens itself. In which case, as a child I was seen not as a member of an ancient race but a deformed example of humanity to be reviled. And after that, ecclesiastical vestments tended to distract attention from the Man within. That, and if I might say so in the confines of these pages, a fondness for leisurewear that maintains in vividness what some might say it lacks in style.
    Finally, to my last confession, a matter which, even after all these years, I have some difficulty in setting down on the page. It concerns Tom, who was not a human being, but a scion of that most ancient pre-hominid race that created not only the Sigil, but Homo sapiens and all the other hominids as a way to rid the cosmos of the scourge and pestilence that were the dragons. This in itself is not as well known as it might be, primarily for lack of direct evidence. Yet Tom, to his great credit, accepted his nature after a long and difficult struggle.
    But it was my fault alone that I did not see any of this in advance, and that because of my sole negligence - a deficiency made worse given my suspicions of my own non-human origins - I made a grave mistake. That is, to have allowed him to have been raised as a human being, and to have been thought of as one.
    For shame, I know now a great deal that is both fascinating and highly distasteful about Tom's race, the people that call themselves `Jive Monkeys'. Much of it I found in my journey to south-east Asia long ago, that region bursting with hominid life, in which the Jive Monkeys number among the least conspicuous for all that they - or, rather, their ancestors - created it all. Very few of these facts were ever revealed to me directly, but only as shabby hints and innuendo, in bars and hotels and rickshaws from Singapore to Manila. However, ignorance is in itself no excuse.
    The clearest answers I obtained from the Jive Monkey whom I knew best, second only to Tom, an individual of great character whose table I shared over a long journey from Batavia to Port-Said, namely the Captain of the S. S. Venture. It is better, they say, to be hung for a sheep as a lamb, so I shall be as frank as allowed by my memory, the likely brevity of my remaining life on Earth, and the fact that these diaries will, I trust, remain private. This is what the Captain said - that Jive Monkeys have a secret weapon against their human oppressors, those who sought to exploit them in every bar and backstreet hovel from Bangkok to Bandung. "No girl she do jig-a-jig with one of Me Monkey too long," he said - "because we come killer toxic and deadly!"
    From this and other clues, I learned that it is a consequence of their own biology, that through the remorseless logic of natural selection, their promiscuous mating habits led to a phenomenon called `sperm competition' in which semen slowly poisons the females, shortening their lives, reducing their capacity to produce offspring from too many competing males. Jive Monkey females have to an extent evolved defences against this. But females of other species, in general, have not. To be brief, for a human female to have sexual relations with a Jive Monkey over a long period will condemn her to an agonizing death. Shoshana Levinson, who was the love of Tom's life, was definitely human, and it is Tom's tragedy that he thought he was, too. And it is my great sin that I did not realize this until far too late.
    Fiat misericordia tua, Domine, super nos. Humanity as a group billions strong was sacrificed that we all might live. But I suspect that few of them demonstrated the love, generosity of spirit and acceptance shown by just one young girl. I pray earnestly and constantly for peace on her soul, and hope that she can forgive me.
    This is the final entry in the journal. A later hand reports that His Holiness died peacefully in his sleep on the journey to Rome, on Ascension Day (Old Style), 2076.

The Sigil

by Henry Gee

The Sigil

Henry Gee