Twenty

‘Do you think she’s going to negotiate?’ Pyrgus asked. There was a time when he’d have known the answer – he and Blue had always been close – but things had changed since she became Queen. She still looked like his little sister (most of the time) but there was something in her that had suddenly grown up. She’d become serious and a little hard. He wasn’t sure he liked it. He certainly didn’t understand it.

‘I don’t know,’ said Gatekeeper Fogarty.

‘Do you think she should?’ Pyrgus pressed.

‘Yes,’ Fogarty said without hesitation.

‘I thought you said you wanted to attack the Nighters, deeah,’ Madame Cardui put it.

They were walking together in the grounds of the Purple Palace, along with Madame Cardui’s orange dwarf Kitterick, who had long proved himself the soul of discretion; and was, in any case, their best security in troubled times.

‘Not sure I do,’ Fogarty said. ‘I was just making a point about oracles.’ He walked in silence for a moment, then said, ‘I know you sent her to the Spicemaster, Cynthia, but Blue’s impressionable. Hasn’t learned to take things with a pinch of salt yet. And, of course, she hears what she wants to hear. Things are tricky in the Realm just now. I don’t want her making decisions on the advice of some spook.’ He scowled. ‘What are you grinning at?’

‘Take things with a pinch of salt. It’s such a colourful expression, deeah.’

‘Common enough in my world,’ Fogarty said shortly, but his expression softened. Pyrgus watched the exchange with interest. Fogarty said, ‘Even if your oracle told you plainly You’ll squash Hairstreak like a bug, that still isn’t a green light. You have to remember what Blue asked. “What will happen if.” Telling you what will happen if doesn’t mean you should do it. Maybe we will win if we attack the Nighters, but maybe we’ll still win if we negotiate; and with a lot less loss of life.’

‘You were impressed by General Vanelke,’ said Madame Cardui, not unkindly.

‘Yes, I was,’ Fogarty admitted. ‘I lived through one war in my own world. That’s where I got the scar and lost the toe. Damn lucky to keep the leg at all. Knocks the nonsense out of you, that. War’s not noble, not “an extension of diplomacy by other means”.’ His voice reeked with scorn. ‘War’s a mess. Usually started by some idiot who doesn’t have to fight. It’s the poor grunts on the ground who pay the price.’

‘I didn’t know you’d been a warrior,’ said Madame Cardui.

‘Warrior my arse!’ Fogarty sniffed. ‘I was just a miserable Tommy. Wouldn’t have joined up if they hadn’t made me.’ He glanced away from them both and glared into the middle distance.

Pyrgus asked, ‘Did you tell her she should negotiate?’

‘Yes,’ Fogarty said. ‘I had a word just before we left.’ He was still lost in his memories, for he added incomprehensibly, ‘Churchill said jaw-jaw was better than war-war.’

‘Do you think she will?’

Fogarty glared at him. ‘You asked me that.’

‘Yes, I know. But maybe we should be, you know, trying to make her.’

Fogarty gave him the benefit of a cynical look. ‘Did you ever manage to make your sister do anything?’

In point of fact he hadn’t, not even when she was little. He’d no doubt Blue loved him, but obedience wasn’t in her vocabulary. All the same, he didn’t like the way things were going.

In answer to Mr Fogarty’s question he said, ‘No, I didn’t. But I think I know somebody who could persuade her.’

‘Henry?’ said Madame Cardui, and smiled. Pyrgus nodded. Madame Cardui said, ‘Does he know she’s in love with him?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Pyrgus grinned. He’d been feeling good about Blue and Henry for a while now. He liked Henry.

Mr Fogarty stopped to stare at the distant horizon. ‘Glands,’ he muttered.

‘Don’t be so cynical, Alan,’ Madame Cardui told him crossly. ‘If you can’t fall in love at their age, when can you?’

For some reason it warmed Mr Fogarty enough to make him grin a little. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

Pyrgus said quickly, ‘Do you want to send for him, Mr Fogarty? Or should I translate and get him?’ He quite fancied another trip to the Analogue World, even if he couldn’t spend much time there.

But Mr Fogarty said, ‘Mightn’t need to.’ He glanced from Pyrgus to Madame Cardui. ‘You two got a minute?’

Since he’d translated permanently to the Faerie Realm, Mr Fogarty had moved into Saram na Roinen, the House of the Gatekeeper, an official residence that comprised a large lodge and some outbuildings on the edge of the Purple Palace gardens. As Fogarty opened the door, Pyrgus noted he’d wasted no time in turning it into a tip, but he led them straight through and out the back, then down a short path to one of the outbuildings.

The stone structure had once been an ornitherium, but the high latticed windows had been boarded up and all the external perches removed. Even the antique listening booth had been taken away. On the inside, only the vaulted ceiling remained of the original fittings. The rest had been gutted out and replaced by … replaced by …

Pyrgus blinked. They’d been replaced by Mr Fogarty’s shed! Pyrgus remembered it from the time poor old Hodge mistook him for a mouse. But this was the original writ large. There was enough junk to fill a merchant’s store and the workbench in the centre was enormous. Pieces of machinery were strewn all over it.

‘It’s something I’ve been working on,’ Mr Fogarty said with enthusiasm. ‘Any of you lot ever seen Star Trek?’ He shook his head. ‘No, of course you haven’t – must be getting senile.’ He ushered them inside and closed the door. ‘It’s a television programme we have back home. You can explain television to them, Pyrgus – you’ve seen that. Star Trek’s about space travel. They have a star ship and a thing called a transporter. It’s just fiction, but that transporter got me thinking.’ He moved towards the bench. ‘The way it works is you beam people about the place, down to the planet, back to the ship, whatever, and the thing is, if you’re on the ship, you can lock on to them down on the planet and beam them aboard.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘You see what I’m getting at?’

Pyrgus shook his head.

Madame Cardui said, ‘No …’

Kitterick said, ‘I presume, sir, you feel there may be something in the process analogous to our portal technology, but possibly improved.’

Pyrgus blinked.

‘Exactly!’ exclaimed Fogarty. He focused on Kitterick. ‘It’s matter transmission, of course. You scan somebody down to his constituent pattern and beam the information to the destination where he can be reassembled using local atoms. The problem’s always been what to do with the body.’

‘What body?’

‘The body you scanned at this end. And you have to do something about the body, otherwise you’d be in two places at once. You can see why matter transmission never became a commercial proposition. Imagine an airline that had to kill off each of its passengers to get them to their destination. You’d be ceiling deep in corpses by the end of the first week.’

‘And no one else would wish to travel because of the smell,’ Kitterick said blandly.

‘Are you taking the piss?’ Fogarty frowned.

‘Indeed not, sir. Please go on.’

Fogarty relaxed his frown as the earlier enthusiasm flooded back. ‘Thing is, if you introduce a portal you solve the body problem. You don’t have to beam information any more, you can beam the actual atoms. With the portal in place, that doesn’t require any more energy.’

‘Mr Fogarty,’ said Pyrgus, who hadn’t understood a word, ‘what does this have to do with Henry?’

Fogarty nodded towards a small box on his workbench. ‘That thing there’s a prototype of a Mark II portable transporter. It doesn’t just open a portal like the ones I made before, it lets you lock in on a target and pull them through it.’

‘To here?’

Fogarty frowned. ‘In theory.’

‘Does it work?’

‘I haven’t tested it yet.’

After a moment, Pyrgus said, ‘You mean you could lock in on Henry and translate him to your ornither—to your shed? Here and now?’

‘Could give it a try,’ said Mr Fogarty.