Part 18 (2/2)

Something squeaks nearby.

The Intelligence feels a shape brush against its foot against Travers's foot encased in soft animal skin. It reaches out its will, temporarily abandoning its aged host.

It feels itself inside the new shape. A hairy little body with a long febrile tail and a tiny racing heart. The little creature stops, terrified by the sudden enforced blindness of the invader. The blind Intelligence revels in the creature's heightened sense of smell vividly and colourfully pungent.

The creature squeals and rolls over and over, all but bursting apart from the monstrous existence inhabiting its tiny form.

The intruder loosens its inner grip, allowing the puny creature's instincts to scurry it forward. From its newfound whiskers, it senses the narrow crack that the animal enters. At home in the acrid darkness. The presence feels rough wood and mortar below the creature's paws and then something smooth, unnatural, fed with a charge of electricity.

The Intelligence abandons its tiny host and enters the cable, surging along it, a long finger of thought stretching thinner and thinner. It remembers this place and seeks the tinny voice at the end of the cable.

'Victoria! Victoria!'

It hears startled reactions below: 'What are they on about?'

'This is Piccadilly Circus, isn't it?' 'Nah, change at Green Park for the Victoria Line.'

The address system gives a burst of hysterical demonic laughter that echoes away into the tunnel. 'My strength is returning.'

The Intelligence gives a leap of imagination back into the well-tried and hateful prison body of Travers. It needs him now. There will be no more waiting.

A nearby voice is saying, 'Come on, old man. You can't sit begging here.'

Travers's shoulder is gripped by a human hand. He is being pulled upwards. Flat circles of metal are being pushed into his palm.

'Here you are. Take your money and push off.' Travers, old and worn out, is grunting in confusion.

'Come on,' says the voice. 'Don't you have a home to go to?'

With a rush, the Intelligence takes full possession again.

Travers gives a bearlike snarl. His stick lashes out and strikes something hard.

There is a scream from nearby.

The stick swings wide, searching its way, dragging blind Travers behind it.

Victoria's conference with the Chancellor was part of her daily ritual. First the office was darkened and she would sit in contemplation before the screen of her monitor.

Concentrate relax concentrate...

Increasingly it became important to gather her inner strength before they spoke, if only to withstand his rages. As it was, he often left her weeping. The Chancellor was old, a reclusive hermit, driven by a great will that would one day provide the greatest revelation to them all. Victoria never saw him. He spoke to her through disciplines inlaid in the New World computer, his creation, which the students nicknamed the Omputer. He spoke from somewhere distant and unknown, but with such intense conviction that when she heard him, she knew nothing else. He held the key to the future and she was chosen to help him.

Relax concentrate relax...

He had shown her how to pilot her mind from perception into imagination and rise out of her body; to project herself into other etheric states; to see the world in overview, from a witch's-cradle of thoughts.

Contemplation, however, had its drawbacks.

'Thinking again?' her father would say. 'Too much of that and you'll forget how to talk.'

She had achieved so much, but was she content?

No. Contentment was as much a fallacy as perfection. Yet they all strove for it.

She was driving her thoughts, concentrating. Then thinking of blue, deep infinite blue. Drifting back again. Back, back into dream memories.

Eastbourne holidays. Watching the sailing-boats with her mother and collecting sh.e.l.ls and starfish on the beach when the tide was out. The wind blowing her bonnet into the sea from the promenade and the fisherman who fetched it back and got thrupence from her father for his trouble.

Sunday dinner with boiled leg of mutton and caper sauce.

Stewed greengages with egg custard. Cook in a fl.u.s.ter when Disraeli the spaniel stole the vanilla blancmange. Mother taking camomile medicine for her poorly stomach.

It always ended in sadness.

Suppose they had fled the house near Canterbury? She and her father. Away from the horror and cruelty of the Daleks who imprisoned her there. Brutal monstrosities, forever screaming orders at her and pus.h.i.+ng her to and fro while they engaged in their horrible experiments.

Where would they have gone? Back to London? Or even Oxford? Would she have married? Would she be running her own household, bearing a baker's dozen of children and having two dozen more grandchildren playing around her skirts? Would that be fulfilling enough?

The modern world had become almost unrecognizable.

Moral codes that had been strictly dictated by Victorian society were now more and more in the domain of the individual. Even so, her students were devoted to their studies.

Perhaps too much. There was little of the wildness that seemed to dominate society at large. She was almost glad when one of them did rebel a little. That was why Daniel Hinton must be cared for.

The world still frightened her by the speed with which it changed. She was forced to rely on Christopher for guidance.

She didn't like him, but he was single-mindedly brilliant at organizing and promoting the university. Even if the results were strange, she trusted him because the Chancellor said he was the best man for the job. In modern terms, Christopher had the twentieth century sussed and she was left on a shelf in the antiques market. If only he didn't lunch lunch quite so often. quite so often.

Her privilege was to liaise with the Chancellor. Her task was to find the thing he craved, the vital Locus that had been missing for over twenty-five years. His voice had lately grown more fierce, his endless demands more wearying. The staring white eye of the monitor, his blind eye, burned out at her as his harsh whisper echoed into the shadowy office. The voice dislodged other sounds that scattered around it as he tore angrily at the injustice of the sacrifice he had made. The suffering was great for those who sought Enlightenment. Only she could offer consolation.

'The Locus must be recovered now!'

He was bad today. Ranting accusations at her. It was as much as she could do to stay calm. She was on a knife-edge. 'I gave you my word. Soon.'

On an impulse, she reached for the box on her desk. It was a surprise and a relief to see that the silvered globe was back in its place, although she could not remember how it had returned.

The voice gave an almost inhuman groan of pain. 'You know nothing of this blind, empty outer darkness where I am bound... It is unendurable!'

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