Fantastic Metropolis

I made for the raft, even though it seemed to have tied itself in knots. The limits of the singularity were now only yards away and I think I resembled some elaborate knot myself staring at my own bare backside, afraid I was about to suffer the fate of my self-loving customer, but somehow I crawled on to—into?—the raft and located the switches, bringing the harmonizer on line.

And it worked. My stomach turned over like never before, a jolt that nearly made me pass out, as the raft was shot into backspace like a pip being squeezed. It was the same as the first time, with no midspace in between. But the raft was straight and linear, and all my limbs were in the right places. I gunned the motor and got out of there fast, zooming along the curve of the enormous swirling vortex.

The orange glow faded. I took a minute out to check everything over, especially the dangerously depleted charge rods. While going through the routine, I automatically happened to glance own into the visor of the navigator.

Ant there, would you believe it, was the familiar red encoding of the readout.

The crappy useless thing was working again. An intermittent fault after all.

Want me to tell you about the relief I felt? Ever heard of ecstasy?

Well, that’s the story, or most of it. I had to search for some time before I came in range of a beacon, but when I did I took a calculated risk and headed back to Hawtaw, even though there were nearer stations. There was a reason for that, which I’ll come to in a moment.

The first thing I had to do, of course, was notify the authorities of my lost passenger, an embarrassing disclosure, naturally, and then make polite explanations to the inquiry board which convened, phase ports being no-time-wasted-type operations, that very same day. There’s a strategy to concealing an uncomfortable fact: tell only one lie, and keep to the truth about everything else. So apart from that one detail I came clean about it all. The sandbank stop, how we got lost, the singularity and, most important of all, what happened to my customer in it. The board was goggle-eyed about that last part, but they believed me. Complaining about the way I’d lost my fee helped, I think.

In fact I appear to have made a contribution to theoretical cosmology. A pair of government scientists came to see me a couple of weeks later and got me to tell them everything all over again. I had been right about the singularity: it wasn’t a black hole.

It seems physicists have long wondered why front and backspace don’t become unravelled. Midspace is a separator; it’s not a glue. My talk of experiencing instant transition between the two sides gave them a possible answer: scattered though space at immense distances from one another are singularities of this particular type, which punch right through and act like staples.

So there you have it. Existence is stapled together.

It’s never been found again. The phase-push effect, they told me, might even have been a transient phenomenon.

I asked them how they explained the planetary scenes we had seen appearing and disappearing. That was consistent, they said, and trundled on about how probability is different inside singularities, how almost anything can happen quite spontaneously. The planet surfaces were randomly emerging and dissolving structures, a fast-action mirror to what went on more slowly in the universe at large. Professional types have to have an answer for everything, wouldn’t you say?

And the reason why I had to get back to Hawtaw despite being low on charge: think about it. The one thing I had to hold back, the little lie I had to tell:

‘When did you first notice your navigator was malfunctioning?’

‘Right after we got off the sandbank, sir. I can only imagine the bank’s sudden collapse affected it somehow. It will need a complete overhaul before I go out again.’

‘Did you carry out all the usual checks and tests before phasing?’

‘Yes, naturally, sir,’ I replied, blinking with surprise at such a question, ‘everything tested out fine.’

If it ever got known to the board that I had deliberately taken a passenger into backspace using a delinquent navigator it would be, ‘Hand over your licence, Tony. Get a job in the junkyard, where you raft is going.’ And of course there was somebody who did know. That blackmailing slut Boy Galilee, he of the waxy backside who, apart from anything else, I now couldn’t pay for four charge rods. He wasn’t around when I first phased in. He came to me in my shack next day, by which time my evidence to the board was all over the port and he knew what the score was.

I had just taken my customer’s hold-all from the raft’s luggage compartment and was sorting through his effects out of curiosity. He was an antiquities buff, all right. His favourite period seemed to be the mid twenty-first century, which as we all know was itself an age of nostalgia, absorbed in re-creating the fashions of earlier times. I had found some magazines with lurid covers and was studying one. It was a revival of a type of popular magazine they used to have back in the twentieth century, but modified to incorporate the preoccupations of over a hundred years later. The cover picture was striking , presenting what to the artwork of the time would have been a ‘futuristic’ scene. In the background, a soaring metal city; filling nearly all the sky, a gigantic created moon, improbably close. In the foreground stood two muscular and godlike male figures in the briefest of costume, just straps and weapons belts holding old-fashioned ray-guns. One of them, I remember, was deep blue in skin tone; he was suggestively manhandling the other, the expressions of both of them coming somewhere between heroic nobleness and exalted desire. The magazine’s title was slashed across the top of the page in slanting script: Thrilling Stories of Sodomy and Science Fiction.

Boy Galilee peered at the illustration over my shoulder, his usual simpering smile on his face. ‘Tasty. And what a jolly fellow your customer turned out to be. Quite the pioneer of auto-oral-anal-eroticism.’

I knew what I would have to do to keep him quiet. He’d always been after it, and I’d always held off. Oh Jeez, that awful behind of his, and his back passage as slack as a windsock! It wouldn’t be for the last time, either, with what he had on me. He’d be forever sliding into my shack and reminding me of his ‘favour’. What could I do to make sure it wasn’t too often, I asked myself? In any case I had to find some way of steeling myself to go through with it. So I gave myself a massive jab of phenylethylamine, and spent the whole time thinking of my lovely sweet passenger with the podgy belly and the twentieth-century trousers, gazing now and then at the magazine covers if need be. That way I managed to roger him for a solid six hours, and I’m pleased to report he couldn’t set his bum on a guidance plate for a week. The things you have to do to make a living these days. Shove your head up your arse, Galilee!