I woke up, yawned, and turned over.

A few moments later two things struck me: firstly, I could move again, and secondly, I was alive.

I sat bolt upright in the bed. I was back in the apartment. Sunlight was streaming in through the open window, casting a warm golden glow over the sand and the water-rippling walls, and shining off the bathing pool. It was quite possibly the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

A quick inventory revealed that my limbs were working fine, all the sensation was back in my fingertips, I was breathing normally, and—fairly obviously—I could see again. For the first time in longer than I cared to remember, there was no headache. I felt fine. In fact, I felt a lot better than fine. I felt euphoric.

At this point I became aware of distant voices coming through the window, and the occasional far-off grumbling of an engine. I got up and padded over. It was a fabulous morning. The Pacific rolled away towards the rising sun, luminous blue and golden against the opalescent sky. It glittered and sparkled like a field of precious gems as the swell broke against the rocks and fell back.

The horizon was littered with the sharp, black shapes of warships. As I watched, a distant jet cruised past far out, circling the island; and then, with a deep hum, a massive silver block glided past, patrolling the shore. A Builder spacecraft. It trailed behind it a continuous squall as the air closed behind its huge bulk and tore up the sea.

I dressed, and then deliberately sat down and had my morning coffeeoid. Then I hurried downstairs.

To my surprise, there was noone waiting in the Foyer, but when I went outside and wandered around to the beach, the fresh breeze ruffling my hair, there was a small group of people clustered there, arguing and gesticulating dramatically. As I approached, one of them saw me, and they all turned round and fell silent; and then a large green shape pushed through them and bounded towards me, Black following a little more sedately. She enthusiastically knocked me to the ground and started licking my face. I laughed, hugged her tightly, and then tried to get her off me so I could breathe again.

The Builders, all humans, looked depressingly like something out of a bad space opera; military figures in white and grey uniforms, oddly cut, and braids. None of them spoke English. The apparent leader, a young man with dark skin and an engaging grin, slapped his chest in a salute and then ostentatiously put out his hand, which I shook. He spoke.

“He says that he is Ruminavi,” Green translated. “He says that he sees you are well. He says that yesterday you were not well. He says that you were slight dead. He says that he well-ed you.”

“Thank-you,” I said humbly. His grin widened.

“He says that that was not difficult. He says that if you were to die then you will not say of the Big Ship.”

I made a small bow. “I would be delighted,” I said.

“He says that he not say English,” Green said as he continued. “He says that he that says English comes. He says that he comes now or in one tenth or two tenths hours.”

As if on cue, Ruminavi suddenly stiffened, held up an apologetic finger, and muttered into what seemed to be his wristwatch. And then he scanned the sky, and pointed. Descending steeply and moving fast, shining in the sun, was the small silver block of a little ship.

It dived towards the sea, pulled up sharply, and wallowed severely as it passed dangerously low overhead. We all turned and watched as it headed towards the landing pads, and then apparently changed its mind and circled back to the beach. It crunched into the rocks, disgorged a single passenger, and then rose vertically and silently into the air and departed behind the Hotel, flying noticeably more smoothly.

“My dear boy,” Calvin said as he strode towards me. “What have you been up to?”

I stared at him.

Calvin rattled off something in fluent Builder to Ruminavi, whose grin faded. They talked for a while as I stood nearby, feeling excluded and extraneous. Then Calvin talked to Green, and even asked Black some questions—I never even knew he spoke Builder.

At least he turned to me. “We must talk,” he said.

As we walked along the coast path, he was silent for a couple of minutes before finally speaking.

“When I got back to Ty-mawr and found the pocltic gone, I knew you’d done something rash. I never realised it would end with, with, this.” He gestured at the island, the sea, and for all I know the entire planet. “Why, the societal ramifications alone would be epoch-breaking. And when you consider the economic impact—”

“Calvin,” I said, interrupting. For weeks I had been thinking of the perfect retort to make when I finally ran into Calvin again. Of course, the words had evaporated from my mind. He looked round.

“Calvin,” I repeated, “why don’t your ships have ignition keys?”

“The shed was locked,” he said mildly.

I didn’t quite know what to say to that.

“I’m rather afraid I’ve been out of commission,” he continued. “Someone made off with my only communications device. The first I knew that you had found your way back was when when I saw fuzzy pictures of a Scavenger ship descending towards French Polynesia. Give me quite a shock, I can tell you, and I knew there was only one person I could blame. I was just lucky a task force had spotted the Scavenger and followed it here. How on Earth did you manage to persuade a Scavenger to drop you off here, anyway?”

“Scavenger?”

“Big ship. Claws. Carried the island.”

“Oh,” I said. I felt myself tensing up again, but then realised that the shadow of the light creature was entirely absent from my mind. “I, er, talked to the pilot.”

“The pilot?

I briefly described my encounter. He looked shocked.

“Well. That… well.” He scratched his beard, a mannerism I know only too well. “Rumi said you had been ill. My boy, you weren’t ill; you were god-touched.”

“I’m sorry?”

He sighed. “That creature of light you saw was a god. Not a literal god, you understand, but the term fits as well as any. A being from… do you know anything about embedded logical systems?”

I shook my head.

“Let’s just say they come from another dimension, then. The Scavengers bind them into their ships as control mechanisms… when you had your, shall we say, conversation, you passed through an area of space time under the god’s complete control and it was a little clumsy when it was manipulating your brain.” He shrugged. “They have trouble understanding our world. Your entire nervous system was badly damaged. Gone untreated, you certainly would have died.

“In fact, you were lucky you didn’t run into any more of them. Those ships carry twelve. If you had, you would have died then and there.”

“Oh,” I said faintly, and swallowed. “So it was nothing to do with the fish, then?”

He looked non-plussed. “What fish?”

“Never mind.” A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Look, before we continue… what’s going to happen to Green and Black?”

“Who?”

“The sealin. Um, the two aliens.”

He snorted. “Sealin. Good name. Well, if they want, we’ll lend them a ship to get home, but it’s really up to them.”

“They’re not prisoners, then?”

He stopped walking. “Prisoners?”

“Well, what with the war…” I said, suddenly uncertain.

“War? What war?”

“Um, the sealin were fighting you on that planet… weren’t they?”

He gave one incredulous snort of laughter. “At war? Us at war with the atlocé? Good heavens! We wouldn’t stand a chance! Whatever gave you that idea?”

“But,” I said, feeling increasingly foolish, “the planet was definitely under attack?”

He thought. “Would you perhaps be referring to the terraforming adjustment? The atlocé colonists needed a substantial amount of energy added to Garden’s planetary dynamics to increase the albedo, and they contracted out to us to do the work.”

“But the storms? The abandoned island?”

“Well,” he said, looking decidedly miffed. “It went a little wrong and we had to evacuate. Not our finest hour, I must admit. We had to return most of the atlocé’s money.”

“And Gurglecough? What happened to Gurglecough? It was dead!”

He began to look increasingly confused. “Gurglecough? What is… oh. Yes. Very droll. We call that one Cinder. Of course it was dead, it’s always been dead. It’s a useless ball of rock. What made you think something had happened to it?”

“The, ah, the traffic control system wasn’t working…” I ventured.

“Ah,” he said, suddenly enlightened. “Yes. The pocltic was still on its old autopilot program, wasn’t it? That explains why you ended up here—well, on Garden. No, the only reason that Cinder had a traffic control system was that it was being used as a proving ground for some new space drive systems. Which, I might add, we bought from the atlocé, who are considerably more advanced than we are.” He snorted again. “At war. Good heavens.

“The reason why you didn’t see any traffic control systems,” he continued, “is that the Cinder operation was a complete success and we shut it down months ago. Now, look, you’ve obviously got everything completely the wrong way round. Be a good fellow and start from the beginning. I suspect we’ll be both far less confused that way.”

A couple of miles later I finished. We walked silently for a time.

We were just passing the stacked disks building, which was bustling with activity; a couple of the little ships—pocltic, Calvin had called them—were ferrying equipment up and down the ramps. As I watched, the two ships pulled away and landed, and the people gathered round and looked up at the top of the pyramid expectantly. With a faint crackle and an electric snap, a brilliant shaft of light shot up out of the pyramid, stopped a few hundred metres up, and then unfolded into a vast dish of fine glowing threads. There was a cheer.

Calvin noticed me studying it. “Radio telescope,” he said shortly. “I don’t think I have ever heard a more bizarre story in my entire life,” he continued, shaking his head. “You nearly got yourself killed, oh, four or five times. You’ve been lucky, my boy. Very lucky. And your stunt with the god…” He shuddered.

“Well, you survived unharmed, although you did seem to have a pretty miserable time the last few days,” he said cheerfully. “And we got a lot of good out of it. We thought we’d have to write off this place.” He waved his arms around at the island. “Bit of a surprise having it transplanted to Earth rather than being on Garden, but it’ll definitely come in handy. And we never even knew the Scavengers were in this part of space…”

He looked down at me and smiled. “And there’s another thing. If you ever find yourself getting a bit down at the mouth, think on this: your trip through the bowels of the Scavenger ship probably saved the world.” He saw my expression and his smile broadened. “Not Earth, or even Garden. But if the Scavenger had landed this island on their home world, the results could have been catastrophic. The quautli, there,” and he gestured towards a bird-thing, passing by with a mouth full of rotting Garden sea life, “they eat anything. The Scavengers are sessile. The quautli would have, quite literally, eaten them alive. But Earth doesn’t have anything to fear; your seagulls are easily their match.

“Look, I must get back,” he went on. “I’m the only one on this planet who speaks English and Nahatl. I’m sorry, speaks them fluently. Your atlocé friend is very talented, you know. But I must make a call to the United Nations and… try… to make some sort of explanation for all this.

“Heaven knows what you want to do. We’d be perfectly willing to ferry you back to Southampton, but I have a feeling that you’d be spending quite a lot of the rest of your life being interrogated if we did that. Besides, I’d imagine you’d find your old job rather tame after your adventures, eh?” He laughed. “So I’d recommend you hang around here for a while. Plenty of room. You’d be useful, too.”

I thought about it as we walked back to the Hotel. Despite what Calvin said, those little ships were certainly nimble enough to sneak me in under radar. I could show up for work tomorrow, make up some story about getting drunk and sneaking on board a cargo ship to Peru or something, take some holiday in lieu… the idea of getting back to my old routine had a certain appeal.

But what would I be giving up? This wonderful island. A place in history. A sense of being in the centre of things. Being able to do something that actually mattered. I’d always wanted to change the world; now I could. And there were the things I still needed to find out: why there was a god in the Observatory. Why there were humans living off Earth, for goodness sake.

But there was that old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. Perhaps what I really needed was a normal life.

And besides, there were my friends.

As Calvin, Ruminavi, and the others continued to argue, I wandered down to the two sealin. Sorry; the two atlocé. They had drifted down to the water, probably bored of discussions of Earth politics.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello,” Green replied. Black was sniffing the water suspiciously.

“Calvin says that they’d be more than willing to take you back to Garden,” I said. “What were you planning to do?”

Green translated for Black, and they talked briefly.

“Earth is interesting,” she said. “It smells interesting. The sea is interesting.”

I sat down on my rock as one of the big ships cruised overhead, blocking out the sun. Compared to the Scavenger’s ship, it was merely extremely large. Far off a flight of helicopters cruised past. “Garden was interesting, too.”

She looked at me, and put her head up and sniffed the air. “Garden is mostly dead. It will be alive. It will not be alive this year or next year or the year after. It will not be alive ten years from now or twenty years from now. It may be alive one hundred years from now.”

She looked at me again. “Earth is alive now. I will remember Earth.”

The ship passed on, and the sun shone again. “You’re going to stay? You and Black both?”

“Yes.”

“Wonderful. Don’t you have a family, though?”

They talked. “Yes.”

“Won’t your children be wanting you back?”

“They were made ten and twelve years ago,” Green said, blinking at me. “I was made twenty years ago. The children have children.”

I radically adjusted one of my mental images. “I think Garden’s year is rather longer than Earth’s.” I tossed a pebble at a nearby bird-thing, which was messily disembowelling a dead mollusc of some kind. It ignored me completely.

“How long have you been on Garden?” I asked idly. “Calvin said you were colonising.”

“Black and I were made at Garden,” she said. “We have not left Garden. This is the first planet that we are on that is not Garden.”

I smiled. “I’ll have to show you around Earth, then. It’s worth seeing… hang on a minute.”

I got up, jogged up to where Calvin was. He looked round.

“Green and Black have decided to stay,” I said. “They seem to like it here.”

He nodded. “Well, that does simplify matters.”

“I just wanted to know,” I went on. “Are they likely to react to Earth’s sea? It does seem to have killed off all of Garden’s sea life.”

Calvin shook his head. “Doubt it very much. Even if they did, the medical facilities here would sort it out, no problem.”

“Excellent,” I said, relieved. “You know, I have the oddest feeling. Do you think they might want to settle down here? Start another colony?”

Calvin looked at me oddly for a few moments, and then a broad smile broke out.

He leant forward. “My dear boy. I don’t think that’s likely,” he said. “They’re both female.”

He patted me on the shoulder, grinned, and strode off towards the landing field, convoy in tow.

I stood there for a few moments. Then I went down to my rock, took off my shoes and socks, and paddled my feet in the Pacific.

[transmit]

[disconnect]

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