"I see," said Bedevere, thoughtfully. "And what would happen if you did manage to . . .?"
The hacker grinned. "G.o.d only knows," he said. "Probably the world would come to an end. Who cares? Come and have a coffee."
He led the way to a little lean-to propped up on the side of the pillar, where a small group of people - more hackers, presumably - were boiling a kettle over a fire of what Bedevere recognised as thousand-dollar bills. The hackers grinned at them and waved.
"Hiya," said one of them. "Grab a mug, sit down, help us blow up the world."
Over a mug of truly awful coffee - Bedevere learnt later that it wasn"t coffee at all but an ersatz made out of deutschmarks steeped in radiator oil - Bedevere tried to find out a bit more about their new hosts.
The hackers, it turned out, had been here almost since the beginning. They were, in fact, dissenting shareholders, who had refused to accept the recommended offer when Atlanticorp was taken over by the present holding company Lyonesse (Atlantis) plc . . .
"Lyonesse?" "Bedevere asked suddenly.
"Who else?" replied a friendly, red-faced hackeress. "Been in charge around here for - what, getting on for eighteen hundred years since the big takeover bid. We were all on the wrong side, of course. We held out for the rescue package offered by the White Knight-"
"Thought we had "em, too," interrupted a large, hairy hacker with a lot of scars on his neck. "Got it referred to Monopolies, full investigation, the works. Then they mounted a dawn raid." He shuddered.
"We"re the ones who got away," went on the hackeress. "Most of us didn"t, though."
Bedevere tried to look sympathetic. "Killed?" he asked. The hackers started to laugh.
"G.o.d, no," said their guide. "Atlanteans don"t die. We"re all companies, see, and you can"t kill a company. You can only wind it up." He made a horribly expressive gesture with his hands. "They"re all up there somewhere," he said, "in the Receiver"s Department. Being wound up."
The hairy hacker nodded. "We calculated the other day," he said, "that if you attached a propeller to one of them and let him go suddenly, he"d probably fly from here to Jupiter before he ran out of-"
"Ah," said Bedevere. "So, er, what is it exactly that you"re hoping to, well, achieve?"
The hackers gave him a funny look.
"We don"t want to achieve anything," said their guide, after an uncomfortable pause. "b.u.g.g.e.r achievement. We want to get our own back on the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Pity, really," he added.
"We"re into impotent resentment, mostly," explained a thin hackeress. "We harbour grudges, too, but mostly we resent. That and a bit of conspiracy."
Bedevere was thinking. "This White Knight," he said. "Anybody I"m likely to have heard of?"
The hackers looked at each other. "Come to think of it," said the guide, "that"s a very good question. Anybody here know who . . .?
"It was a consortium," said the red-faced hackeress. "An international consortium negotiating a management buyout."
"No it wasn"t," replied the hairy hacker. "It was the original shareholders on a rights issue. They issued a Declaration of Rights. I"ve got a copy of it." He patted his pockets. "Somewhere," he added.
"You"re both wrong," broke in a tall, freckled hacker, "it was a market-led refinancing programme backed by the Bank of Saturn."
"It was the Martians. They were trying to break into the oxygen-based lifeform market, and they wanted a way round the tariff barriers . . ."
"I always thought it was us," said a small, dumpy hacker, The others stared at him, and he went bright red.
"Anyway," said the guide, "it was them. Have some mare coffee?"
"No thanks," said Bedevere. "Anyway, there was this takeover, and these people - the Topsiders, you called them - they took over?"
"Absolutely," said the guide. "They had new sorts of magic, you see. New ways of making the gold do what they wanted. We were decimalised."
"You mean decimated."
"I meant," said the guide grimly, "what I said. Anyway, that"s enough about us. What can we do for you?"
Bedevere kicked Turquine quickly on the shin and then smiled.
"Actually," he said.
Chapter 5.
The last tourist had long since gone, the bookstall was closed, the curator had locked up. The place was empty.
Well, almost.
In the back room - in his day it had been a sort of secondary scullery - the immortal remains of William Shakespeare sharpened a pencil, licked his lips and turned over a handbill about guided tours of Warwickshire.
Amazing, he said to himself, the cavalier att.i.tude they have towards paper these days. The nerds. They only use one side of it, and then as often as not they screw it into a ball and chuck it on the floor. He sighed as his insubstantial fingers smoothed the paper out. Don"t know they"re born, the lot of them. In my day, he muttered under his breath, you wanted to write something, first you had to get a sheep, then you knocked it on the head, peeled off the wool, sc.r.a.ped the thing down with a whacking great knife . . . Made you choose your words that bit more carefully. But now . . .
Uncharacteristically, he hesitated for a moment before getting down to work and looked around him. This had always been a good room for writing in, he remembered; which was just as well, seeing as how it was the only one he could ever get any peace in. Then, of course, the fact that it was only just big enough for a man to sit down in and close the door had been a problem. Now, it didn"t matter very much.
He shook his head. Youth, he said to himself, ah, youth! You can stuff it.
A quick glance at the clock reminded him that time was getting on. Not that he"d ever had difficulties in meeting deadlines; far from it. Still, they"d been most insistent, and he had been in the game too long not to know that you"re only as good as your word. He lowered his head and, his lips moving rhythmically, he began to write.
Scene Four, he wrote. The Rovers Return. Bet is checking the mixers while Alec puts the float in the till.
Well, yes. Structurally speaking, the situation demanded it, and these days, of course, you didn"t have to bother about giving them time to change the set. You could have any scene you liked. Have a scene at the North Pole next, if you wanted to. Long live progress!
Bet: Jackos"s late again.
Alec: He scratched his head and thought hard. There was something about Alec; perhaps he hadn"t yet got the voice properly fixed in his mind. It just wasn"t coming; the true Alec hadn"t yet come to life. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully and tried to think about the motivation behind the character. Here we have a man, he thought, apparently successful, in the prime of life, happily married, popular in the community. But something is lacking; and that which should accompany old age (honour, love, obedience, troops of friends) he cannot look for . . .
Ah! Gotcha.
Alec: (snorts) Typical! If he spent less time supping ale down the Legion and . . .
Just then, there was a faint but distinct noise from the old back parlour, as of somebody walking stealthily in the dark and barking his shins on the firedogs.
Burglars!
It had to be burglars. n.o.body else was likely to be about at this time of night. He bit his lip, screwed his courage to the sticking point and reached for the poker.
If you"re hunting burglars through a deserted and darkened house, it helps to have been born there and to have spent the last four hundred years haunting it. You tend to know the more important facts about the place, like where the chairs are. You aren"t liable to walk straight into a . . .
"Sod it!" he howled, rubbing his toe and hopping up and down. "What b.l.o.o.d.y fool put that there?"
There were sounds of hurried movement from the back parlour, and a sliver of light appeared under the door. Voices, speaking urgently and low. More than one of them.
In situations like these, one has a choice. One can seek the bubble reputation, even in the cannon"s mouth. Or one can hide in the grandfather clock.
There was a faint oath as something insubstantial but fragile collided with the pendulum, and then the door of the clock swung shut, just as the back parlour door flew open. They have their exits and their entrances, you might say.
A woman was silhouetted against the light; a tall, slim woman. Light flashed on a loose coil of golden hair. Behind her, the shape of a man loomed ominously. Inside the clockcase a mouse, searching for a light supper for herself and her nest, b.u.mped into something she didn"t recognise, squeaked in terror, and started to climb for all she was worth, until she banged her head against the escapement, staggered, and darted back.
For the record, the clock struck one. Life is full of these little coincidences.
"h.e.l.l"s bells," said the woman testily, "is it that late already? Come on, we"ll leave it for now. Time we weren"t here."
It was difficult to tell from inside the clock what was going on; there was a series of bleeps, a whirring sort of noise, and then a sort of peculiar ringing. Then the sound of tiny rollers feeding something. Then another bleep. Then silence.
After about five minutes of the silence, the door of the grandfather clock swung open and nothing emerged carefully from it. This time he was properly dematerialised. Like the man said, discretion was the better part of valour.
A brief investigation showed that the funny noises had indeed come from the back parlour, which the tourist people used as a sort of office. The room was empty, but the strange white machine that sat by the telephone was winking its little red light at him. He sat down on the desk and looked at it. It was the thing he always thought of as the paper-wasting machine, in that during the day, whenever it was used, the tourist people were always complaining about bits of paper not feeding in properly and getting screwed up. A crying waste.
Just then, it bleeped once more and started to churn out a little slip with some numbers on it. He waited until the rollers had quite finished, shook his head sadly and pulled the little slip clear. You could get ten or twelve lines on that, if you wrote small. He folded it neatly, switched out the light, and went back to the scullery.
Transmitting . . .
The Queen of Atlantis, Managing Director of the Lyonesse group of companies, stepped out of the fax and walked briskly towards her office. Behind her came her seven personal a.s.sistants, carrying the luggage.
The Queen sat at her desk, kicked off her shoes and looked through the sheaf of While-you-were-out notes that had gathered like a drift of wind-blown leaves in her absence. Some she put to one side, the rest she distributed like a sort of Royal Maundy among her PAs.
"What"s this?" she demanded. "Unidentified transmission from - where? I"ll swear that woman"s handwriting is getting worse."
"Stirchley, Your Majesty."
"Stirchley . . ." The Queen bit her lip and pondered for a moment. "What"s at Stirchley, somebody?"
The PAs looked at each other for a while, until the faint tapping of long nails on the leather of the desktop goaded one of them into action.
"Nothing, Your Majesty," he said. "Or at least, nothing much. We maintain a small transmitting station there as part of the network, but it"s never used."
The Queen swivelled round in her chair and smiled at the unfortunate spokesman. "Well," she said brightly, "somebody"s been using it recently, haven"t they? Perhaps you"d be awfully sweet and find out what"s been going on."
The PA blanched, bowed swiftly and hurried backwards out of the room, and his colleagues heard the sound of hurried footsteps climbing the stairs. The Queen, meanwhile, was looking at a security report and frowning.
"Listen to this," she said. "Apparently, someone"s been duffing up the cashiers while we"ve been away. Fancy! And what"s more, two intruders were put on deposit but escaped. I didn"t know it was possible to escape from deposit. One of you" - she swept the remaining PAs with a smile like a prisoncamp searchlight - "be a dear and look into that for me, will you?"
The smile stopped at the second PA from the left, who set his jaw, swallowed hard and dashed away. That just left five of them.
"Honestly," the Queen was saying, "one pops out of the office for five minutes and everything gets into such a tangle! Who was duty officer, someone?"
A PA consulted the register. A name was mentioned. The PA was ordered to be an angel and have a quiet word with him. Trembling slightly, the PA hurried off. It"s a filthy job, he said to himself as he went, but somebody"s got to do it.
"Otherwise," the Queen said at last, "everything seems to be in order and running nicely. Good. Perhaps now we can get down to some work. My briefcase please, someone."
She had just started dictating a long memo about unit costings when the door flew open and the PAs reappeared. In defiance of some of the leading laws of physics, they all seemed to be trying to stand behind each other. The Queen looked up.
"Well, boys?" she said, smiling at them over the top of her reading gla.s.ses. "Any luck?"
"Um." The PAs had had an informal ballot, and the loser had been elected spokesman. "Not as such," he said. "At least, we do seem to have found out who the intruders are, but not where they are. Not," he said, and his voice withered like a daffodil in a furnace, "strictly speaking, that is. Or at least, we think there"s a chance they may be ..." He gulped and pointed at the floor.
The Queen took off her gla.s.ses and nibbled one earpiece thoughtfully. "Go on," she said. "You were saying who these people might be."
"Um." A small globe of sweat bounced down the PA"s nose. "We, um, did a credit search on them while they were on deposit, and they seem to be a couple of, ah, knights."
"Knights?"
"Um."
"Knights," enquired the Queen, "as in Arabian, or knights as in shining armour?"
"Knights as in shining armour, ma"am. Bedevere and Turquine, Your Ma-"
There was a tiny brittle sound, caused by the snapping of the earpiece of a pair of dainty gold-framed spectacles. "Dear me," said the Queen, "how extremely tiresome."
"Yes, Your M-"
"Drat."
"Yes, Your-"
"And in the . . . in Thing, you say?"
"Yes, urn..."
The smile, bright as the oncoming headlights to a dazzled rabbit, flicked from one pale, drawn face to another and finally came to rest.
"Be an absolute sweetheart, one of you," said the Queen, "and go and fetch them."
"It"s not fair."
By way of emphasis, the lantern swayed violently, revealing a narrow spiral stone staircase. A worn brown chain running up the central column provided the only handgrip. It was spooky.
"Shut up."
"Yes," replied Iphicrates, senior a.s.sistant a.s.sistant to the Queen of Atlantis, but why"s it always us, for crying out loud? It"s not as if she hasn"t got about fifty thousand other b.l.o.o.d.y gophers who could-"