Sudra quaintly described them as "Redoubts"-but n.o.body seemed to understand, least of all, perhaps, Sudra herself, what she meant by this word. Amy and Arthur laughed, simply for the sole reason that they felt laughter still within themselves and they didn't want to waste it before it expired as one of their possible human reactions to events. "Redoubts" in itself was not a funny word. On the other hand, the word "Cote" was written on one broken brick wall that they were now pa.s.sing-almost as if this were the last sign of the city proper. Not written so much as scrawled in a clumsy attempt to follow a trend that was already very fashionable in the city itself: graffiti, tags, pieces... all now lost in these initial stages of a thin-topped underground. A mine with the mere vestigial veneer of a break-even point between upper and lower.

I cannot now remember to what Sudra once referred when using the word "Redoubts", but it does cause me to wonder yet again who let go of whom on the edge of death's cutaway when Sudra plummetted to her own abrupt cutaway. Who saw what in whose eyes? They both held each other's wrists. Did Amy let go... or did Sudra let go when she looked into Amy's eyes-flimsily disguised by tears of fateful surrender-only to see someone other than Amy behind those same eyes?

Amy was distraught. I could hardly comfort her, as she wailed and wailed into the sleep period. Susan, surprisingly, for a bereaved mother, was quite calm, as if she had been released from a burden of bewitchment-as if what Amy had carried behind her eyes had been pa.s.sed off to Sudra in that critical moment of broken wrist-links. Or Sudra's own shadow-which I had never noticed-was a stronger shadow than even Amy's shadow. Indeed, once that Amy had recovered from the initial shock, she seemed to enter a new strobe period, without the necessity of us others having to strobe in tune with her own strobes. She became distant, detached, finally re-attached, but calmer. I felt as if a suicide bomb must have exploded inside Amy's head and she had survived it by simple virtue of being strobed-out of existence at the instantaneous moment the bomb ignited itself.

It is difficult to dwell on the repercussions of Sudra's death. Indeed, I can't recall Arthur's reaction in any way whatsoever, but it did inevitably mean Amy spending more time with him in alternations of sibling rivalry and sibling bonding. Susan was stoic and-if I say so myself-so was I. And we now need to address the circ.u.mstances of our arrival in Agra Aska. "Ever look to the future", my Dad always said when he was alive. I always replied, in boyish pique, to his great astonishment, that such a tenet was a veiled threat, because futures often blighted pasts. That's perhaps why I was destined to become mixed up with 'hawling', but then of course that word had not yet channelled its way down the generations to me in that period of my childhood (as it was later to do).

Agra Aska is now not at all what it was like in the distant strobe-era spoken of elsewhere, when John Bello and Joan Turner became young lovers to the backdrop of Ervin's shriving-and of the political war-machinations that surrounded David Binns, Dictor Wilson, Robert Orwell, Chesterton and The Archer-Vicar. Today Agra Aska is blander, albeit still maintaining the now famous Straddling Cathedral and the Balsam River trading business. It substantially thrives on the Angevin cream that it mines from the Core-an export hawling business that will play a large part in the future of our campaign. So, yes, this is a mining city that has settled within its own strobe-history as near to the earth's Core as it is possible for any civilisation to be positioned in such a city-shaped formation, i.e. in the manner of the more distant cities of Whof.a.ge, Klaxon and London-but, despite this infrastructure, still maintaining a conveniently short direct two-way filter to the Corecombs of the Megazanthus itself. By the way, I've just mentioned London and this city (established at sea level directly above the man-shaped man-city whence I and my party derived) is rumoured to harbour the domed cathedral of St Paul's that was the original template for Agra Aska's straddling version which, in its turn, is a vast structure that possesses the ornate and iconographised religious thoroughfare (aisle?) along the roofed bridge between two Babelline towers. The Balsam River torrents below this 'bridge', its relentless current leading to the tributaries of Abrundy and Tiddle.

The under-surface or floor-division between London and its strobe-twin city beneath it (i.e. man-city with Dry Dock and covered market) is a mere lightweight ceiling or carpet... or, rather, mere symbols of these things, in gossamer arcades of nothingness, barely differentiating between the two cavities or air-s.p.a.ces that harboured each city. However, I a.s.sure you, the sea 'unlevels' do also help to maintain this division.

Having said that, I am minded to give my own personal impressions of Agra Aska as we emerged from the last earthen cutaway and viewed the 'half-sky' Coremoon settling above its silver pinnacles. We all heard a distant lonely flute. And a dog yapping. I hate dogs. Sudra would have been delighted. We knew it was a city, and indeed Arthur, with his over-extended left ear, could hear more than us-as city-life surely thrummed beneath us. Oh, by the way, I also spotted the 'shipwrecked' Drill lodged on a crag escarpment that bloated unnaturally from one of the Cathedral's Babelline towers. But more of that later.

What I wanted to say, really, was that, for me, Agra Aska is the sea. It's strobing in and out of existence so fast, beyond the scope of flickering eyelids, that it appears to be a swaying creature of waves. Even the buildings are waves and the river just another channel of current, criss-crossing other such channels at the culmination of forces that make me believe in a ghost of a pier which I watch shimmer more slowly in and out of existence. Of course, all this might have been just my imagination.

Edith and Clare were in the fort holding the city. They were dowager twins and had spent most of their formative years living inside one of the city walls-the tallest part of wall that had become so tall the local residents called that bit of the wall a tower. The city was not completely surrounded by walls-otherwise that area of the city outside of the walls could not have been called a city at all. There were gaps in the wall for throughways to the two airports on both the eastern and western arms of the city-but the gaps were closing up with growth of brick as well as of foliage/weeds, although common sense would indicate that it was only plant material growing because brick generally didn't grow. Brick is more p.r.o.ne to crumbling. The aerodromes were derelict so the throughways were moribund. Other gaps in the walls around the inner city were customarily found to the north and south-but these, too, seemed to have narrowed, but this time the narrowing was simply imagination, because everything using the gaps had widened.

When the dowagers eventually disembarked at Agra Aska-faced with an undignified long-skirted clamber down one of the Babelline towers of the Straddling Cathedral-they certainly felt suspicious they hadn't actually travelled anywhere but had been confidence-tricked by means of a 'U Turn' within Inner Earth or some sleight of compa.s.s prestidigitation regarding the tricking of the Above, the Below and the Across. The compensation, however, was that Agra Aska represented an oblique, if opaque, home from home-where all gaps went missing. Indeed, the whole of Agra Aska seemed to have landed within a blind spot so that they had to keep turning their heads to avoid not seeing it at all: and in the process saw only the legs of Clare (if you were Edith) or of Edith (if you were Clare) rather than any breathtaking views of their new home city that the descent of disembarkation would otherwise have entailed. It was rather like going into a bare room with bare floorboards, then imagining that if you took up the floorboards nail by nail you'd discover a carpet laid neatly underneath them.

What they did particularly notice was the temperature, the feel of the air, the Aska Agran ambiance. It was not as cold as they feared from what they had been told of the increasing cold the further Coreward one travelled. The legends circulating among the surface cities represented the other extreme, i.e. that the Core was red hot. Captain Nemo had indeed explained to them when they first signed up for the holiday that an effective blend of two legends prevailed. One legend that it was molten Angevin. The other that it was frozen Angevin. With the benefit of mixed myths, therefore, one could survive anything. He had laughed leaving the dowagers to fathom out what he had just explained. But it all seemed to make sense now. The Core itself could be seen spreading with a creamy consistency (outward from their fast diminishing blind spots) across half the sky, here more moon-like than sun-like, the quirk of refraction making it more yellow than white, followed by a blend of both colours when proto-incidence kicked in later during the natural diurnal process of Agra Askan sky systems.

Edith and Clare were the only Drill travellers who enjoyed an official welcoming party. A young couple, hand in hand-an emblem or living symbol of the love and affection that depicted the Agran Askan optimum ideal of existence, an ideal celebrating the beneficial hindsight effect of the curatively legendary times when the original young lovers in this city had had to endure one h.e.l.lishly onerous quest as well as the religious shriving of their private parts in the process. Edith and Clare had arrived-partly in ignorance but partly knowing they would be using their trained counselling skills to further this ideal, and Mike (who had often acted as a radio phone-in agony uncle on the surface) would be supplementing their skills with his own special skills wrung from a mixture of hawling experience mingled with a semi-conscious self-condemnation for his own wicked thoughts and desires. The mixing of myths was the optimum, good and evil alike, used in the war against evil. The dowagers wondered if Mike's stony path to his own Road to Damascus (or Road to Agra Aska!) had by now reached culmination. They could not yet see any sign of him or his party-expecting them, as they did, to appear duly shriven by the underfoot dangers of Inner Earth's deepest pot-holing together with the hair-carpets on their backs. But they remained confident that they would soon arrive and bolster the dowagers' own efforts to gather themselves to the tasks in hand. Any Angevin smuggling could be left to the others. That was merely a by-product of the mock-holiday, one the dowagers could safely ignore-although they wouldn't decline any of the profits once they returned to the surface!

The young Agra Askan lovers (now called Hataz and Tho) led them by the hands towards the Core, lit from behind by a now wildly yellow innersky exploding into a balloon shape not dissimilar to the Augusthog icon or flying-pig kite glimpsed before in their travels. Followed by the quickly fading ghost of the Megazanthus itself with wings stretched between two infinitely distant horizons. The ladies would need their own brainwrights, to be sure, as they continued to fathom the real reasons for this their increasingly complex presence in an increasingly complex Agra Aska-all lies and dreams forgotten... at least forever.

The intense primary colours of each of the individual swellings or plumes of flame, their sprays, cascades and visible thunderous suicide-bombs were so sharp-etched, sharp-edged, they seared to the very optic fuse of one's eye. The wide shiny blue sky faded by comparison. Some of the colours were not colours as such but various shades of black, many being utterly black slices or slashes or sheets of black fire-accentuating how bright the daylight's backdrop of sky had become.

Dognahnyi turned from his window and, after sweeping his curtains together upon their silent runners, he felt relieved that his room had become relatively subdued: protected against the outside's sharp relief: now a room with an atmosphere more fitting for the conference he was conducting with John Ogdon-sitting, as Ogdon was, in full feminine regalia, beneath the painting of the man with the salacious swan.

Dognahnyi: Celebration, but celebration for what, Hilda? Tell me that.

Ogdon: That the man-city is at last united?

D: (barking) Excuse the cough. It's my way of laughing. Well, the city is certainly stirring.

Even as he spoke, the building trembled, moving the waxen blooms of flame to and fro in their holders.

O: Man-city is something we've lived with. We thought the Ancient Father built it that way in the shape of a figure, but have you noticed?

D: I know what you're going to say. Something about me being a Barker?

O: Sort of. The man-city is gradually burying itself like that legend of watery Venice. You recall? Rubens painted it. But what I was going to say is that few have ever noticed (and I think I failed to notice it till recently) that our city, our man-city, is all there is. There is nothing beyond the airport arms.

D: Or beyond its other extremities? No geography except itself. You would have thought with helicopters we could have sussed that out before now. Doh!

O: You can feel it in the feet. We are sinking. The city is sinking. It wants to join some cosmic battle within Inner Earth.

D: That's a bit romantic. By the way, is your-what do you call it?-your alter-nemo on board the Drill? That Drill they called 'The Hawler'?

O: Yes, disguised as a shy businessman. Even the Captain's been kept in the dark about that.

D: Are there such things as shy businessman?

O: (Laughs, then barks in mockery of the other.) D: Well, what about the other party? My beyoootiful recruit got rid of the bewitched Sudra. That creature-if she hadn't fallen-would certainly have queered our pitch. There would have been confusion galore of alter-nemo and alter-alter-nemo otherwise! Yet, I'm unsure if the shriving is complete. We need full penitence of all party-goers before we can set in motion the plan for widening (by strength of love) the sluice-gates of Angevin towards the huge mouth that yearns for the white slimy flow down its twitching throat.

O: That's a strange way to describe shortening the supply-line!! (Barks loudly).

D: There's only one possible fly in the ointment.

O: The Megazanthus?

D: Hmmm. The Megazanthus is a loose cannon, true. We don't know whether it yet has its own alter-nemos. Like G.o.dspanker or Azathoth. No, Og, what I was really referring to is the simple need for an unhappy ending. That should clinch everything. The ultimate paradox. It's not easy to bring off such a required tension, a tension from the tension of identical opposites... especially with Mike Wa.s.sisname working in another direction completely. So, yes, without our own version of tension, the whole Angevin mine will spectacularly implode and, even with the help of man-city, we'll all end up in Queer Street!

O: I'm working on it, Dog. I am providing the ending. Not Mike Smarta.r.s.e!

Amy, once she had finished carpet-sweeping, turned over the vacuum and emptied what it contained. Not only flies fell out but hairs from a cabbage.

Amy was now hoovering the carpet of our Quarantine Quarters in Agra Aska. The Askan authorities had decided-a bit late in the day-that both visiting parties should be held together in camera, to ensure no leakage of disease or, indeed, of dream from the surface. Hataz and Tho, the emblematic pair of young lovers from Agra Aska (and young lovers in actual fact) were also necessarily quarantined in the same room as us-bearing in mind that they had already come into skin-to-skin contact with the dowagers, Edith and Clare.

The room was an ornate one-and windowless-decidedly stuffy compared to the startlingly panoramic vistas that had first met us in Agra Aska. The room was eerie, too, in a nice atmospheric way, but an atmosphere soon to turn jaundiced, when anything haunting the room turned out to be more insidious than it was cosy, as any hauntings of that room were soon to do in all connotations of that thought. Yet, none of us (the room's inhabitants) had suspected what fear truly was until the hauntings of that room made themselves plain... making themselves plain, but not without losing their dubiously inherent quality of mysterious eeriness.

Still, none of us would yet know true fear until the later endgame was upon us, an endgame which hung above us like a slowly eroding cliff or impending cutaway of Inner Earth. That would diminish the Quarantine room's hauntings to a handleable perspective, by comparison.

As we were earlier trooped-in Indian file-within the portals of the room's entrance, many of us gave a wistful look at the crippled Drill squatting like a giant's disused toy upon one of the Straddling Cathedral's craggy towers. Many Agra Askan sightseers were staring moon-eyed up at it, shaking their heads. The members of my own pot-holing party gave versions of their own shriven glances at the Drill, equally as bemused by its sight as the locals were.

But, once inside the room, the wide-screen sights of Agra Aska themselves diminished to a fast-receding full-stop in the same way as an ancient TV would once disperse its black-and-white picture... upon someone switching the set off.

Captain Nemo seemed strangely diminished, too, outside the jurisdiction of his Drill. He slouched into a corner seat and sat there staring mindlessly at whatever transpired.

There had been no mutual welcoming between the two parties when we all started to interact within the room. Our meeting up in such strange circ.u.mstances was taken for granted and we started conversations as if we were finishing them.

Edith had initially been tearstruck by the sight of her two offspring, Amy and Arthur. They had been lost as small children and, despite much searching by the authorities, never found... eventually a.s.sumed to have wandered off into the Northern coalfields of the city's Head region, from where few ever returned. She hugged them, made a low-breathing comment into her son's ever-fattening earlobe cavity-and then withdrew, taking matters for granted, as the others seemed to do. This was part of the beginning of the room's hauntings: i.e. low-key reactions to high-key events.

Amy had grown into a fine physical woman, but Edith left unsaid her own suspicions of what or whom actually lived inside her head. Amy meanwhile cleaned the carpet with an automatic sweeping motion-a tangled tussle of an affair, as the carpet was mostly long-shanked with what looked like human hair. Some patches had been crew-cut which made the sweeping easier.

She later started polishing one of the paintings. One had a gilded frame but not much to speak of within its margins. A haunting of an image that was as faded as the flock wallpaper around it. However, the aura of the room's general ornateness maintained itself despite the tawdriness of individual furnishings.

Clare retained a hands-on affection for Edith. Neither Amy or Arthur recognised Clare from childhood days as their headteacher.

"What's your name?" asked Clare, suddenly turning to one of the two young Agra Askans in love with each other.

"Tho," replied the girl.

"Hataz," replied the boy, simultaneously, even though he hadn't been addressed.

"Quaint names," said Clare, almost for Clare's own ears, if not Edith's.

The two lovers seemed just as subdued as the rest of us. Perhaps we knew the exact nature of the room's hauntings before such hauntings made themselves plain.

Greg and I were seen talking in a desultory fashion. We knew we were mutual alter-nemos-and when such individuals met, they often had empty conversations, and this was no exception. A shadowy businessman from the Drill's Corporate Lounge took no heed of what we said, because he knew he would learn nothing new by so doing. The other businessmen were busy disappearing into their own shadows, by sidling towards corners of the room that were not any of the more usual four corners of the standard cube-s.p.a.ce that the room apparently was. Human-coning was another expression which brought back memories to some of them, but not to others.

Susan was the least subdued. She now found Beth rather unsatisfactory as a sister, the latter having lost much of her grit. Susan had always depended on Beth's get-up-and-go when they were younger and here, suddenly, Susan was (uncharacteristically) the only one in the room with any vestige of creative impulse. Even I felt jaded. What was more, Beth hardly reacted to the news of Sudra's death. To Susan, it felt like pummelling a large slime punchball that was too heavy to swing.

The hauntings perhaps were that there were no hauntings in the room. Meanwhile, one of the gilt-framed paintings started to emit a whiney pathetic klaxon, of which n.o.body, including me, showed awareness.

The two dowagers-in undercurrents of recitation-spoke aloud parrot-learnt excerpts from Marcel Proust's Du Cote De Chez Swann-and there was also much promise of them sharing their literary pa.s.sions with the others, should there be periods during the Quarantine when there would be time for all of us to kill.

As to food, there were 'cold numbers' in bowls, numerical shapes of indeterminate flaccid cooked-meats in an unwarmed reconst.i.tuted form.

Once Amy had finished the housework, we all started looking for beds.

Ogdon spotted a face in the bar mirror opposite, a face that wasn't his own. There were tears running liberally down its cheeks. The face spoke: "Help me, I'm Greg. Please don't let me be Mike. I know it's easy to confuse us but I'm the one who's on board the Drill. I once worked in waste management as a lorry-driver. Mike was the office worker. I'm desperate to be real, but only if I can be me, me, Greg. Because I am Greg."

Ogdon's own eyes were also filling up, feeling helpless to help. There were too many people who needed to become their real selves. It was difficult enough for Ogdon to hold his own mind together.

"I'm Greg," continued the face opposite. "Help me, I'm Greg. Help me to be Greg. And not Mike."

It was a ghostly chant or intonation. And Ogdon threw his gla.s.s across the bar and it smashed itself before it smashed the mirror and all the mirror's contents.

But he still heard the plaintive, haunting voice: "I'm Greg. Please don't let me be Mike."

And now the face was scratched and freshly scarred as if it had been dragged through a hedge backwards.

In times of trial, solutions presented themselves in odd disguises and even created thoughts many would never have dreamt of thinking as thoughts in more ordinary times. The hedge itself had almost helped their descent of pa.s.sage: a far cry from hindering it as they originally expected-but woe betide if they should need to climb back up through it, whereupon it would surely turn upon them with a vengeance.

Being inside that Quarantine room was worse than any hedge-shriving-but we were eventually evicted one by one, having proved our 'purity' through dream-detector games and obstacle courses controlled by klaxon or tannoy. We also had to kill the 'mole', before the last one could emerge from the room. And this was by a daily vote. Hardly a game. More life and death, I'd say. I was sure the 'mole' was Amy-for obvious reasons. But, by some quirk of semi-alliances or double-bluffs, it turned out to be Captain Nemo who was the 'mole'-Captain Nemo (aka Dognahnyi, according to Beth) whose blood was eventually on all our hands. In fact, he and I were the last ones quarantined in the room whilst all outside surveillance had been withdrawn (we'd been a.s.sured)-so it's just between him and me what actually happened.

Nemo's blood may have been metaphorically on the others' hands, but I had his blood-literally. But I'm not admitting to that. I quickly draw a veil of denial over such matters. I effectively retract my own overblown omniscience on that score. I even clip the wings of my omnipotence simply to avoid a Horla's shame. And I trust Ogdon turns a blind eye, too-wherever Ogdon now is, if he exists at all. It's probably just him against me, now. Ogdon against 'Mike'. Or possibly just me. Endgame impends.

In the covered market area of man-city, Ogdon remained alone amongst those known to the authorities by actual name. The rest of the citizens were at best nameless or, more likely, nemonymous. Ghosts, if they exist at all, don't exist as such: but float in inexplicably verifiable shades of non-existence barely beyond the threshold of sound or feeling. Other than Ogdon, any residual souls left in man-city-who felt the vague sinking feeling that often accompanies the beginnings of anxiety, later fear and finally terror-were such ghosts bordering on lies or dreams.

And the stirrings of clockwork driving will-powered machinations beneath the Dry Dock and covered market gave the impression that the city's airport arms were beginning to whirr, almost spin, like sluggish propellers. And huge angel-shaped wings of earth flew upward in mountainous slab-cascades on each flank of the body politic or body civil, as the city's cantilevered sous-centipedes of diggers started to delve a far more awesome shaft than a million Drills (in the shape of 'The Hawler') could or would ever have been able to excavate so as to make room for their communal pa.s.sage downward toward Inner Earth.

Ogdon sat in his deserted pub-surrounded by smashed gla.s.ses and toppled barstools. His teary face was in his hands. He couldn't actually believe what he was doing. Yet, relentlessly, automatically, he was man-handling a huge key in the pub floor, ensuring the ma.s.sive tessellations of clockwork remained taut, on a hair-trigger of sprung power-to drive the city ever downward. It seemed appropriate that a pub turned out to be the powerhouse, not only of drunken small talk or wild boozy brainstorming, but also of the more momentous or eschatological concerns of mankind-put into ratchetting motion by this morally-neutral hawling process of unbelievably gigantic proportions. Yet Ogdon sobbed, as he began to stroke the ape in his lap.

Endgame rampant.

As we emerged into Agra Aska, the relief from claustrophobia was tangible.

The sky was still halved by a scimitar of Corelight, like an overripe sun that had bloated beyond its capacity to shine through clouds like a yellowmanker custard.

A vast winged angel-icon on splints floated overhead and we guessed this was just a tethered kite-symbol or a free-agent balloon-emblem that pre-figured the real angel-thing itself-when the doors of the Core eventually opened to reveal the Megazanthus swagged in its mucus strands of rancid cream. But like telling lies, guessing was only one minor stage further along the spectrum of truth.

Amy put her hands over her ears. I couldn't understand how the silent image we all watched could have caused such a reaction. Perhaps she heard something that we didn't. A metaphorical Sunne Stead within her own brain? Or, as she told me later, the sound of a robotic machine cranking into ignition but so well-oiled it tip-toed, just as she tip-toed herself in the shoes she had managed to salvage from Sudra's stowaway mini-wardrobe that Sudra herself had secretly carried all the time, as it turned out, during her rite of pa.s.sage with us through Inner Earth.

Beth slouched to a distant seat by the Balsam River to watch the trading-barges in their resplendent flag finery and drape-carpets. She remained confused by the incriminating nature of Captain Nemo's ident.i.ty as the 'mole' or 'burrower'. Yet, confusion was at least a stage further on the truth spectrum most of us had not even approached!

Edith, Clare, Greg & Arthur were taking holiday snapshots (with the help of Tho and Hataz) of the Straddling Cathedral. They took each other in smiling poses. Arthur even stretched his ear to its fullest extent, as he stood saying 'cheese' in front of a statue of a former Agran by the name of Chesterton III.

But where was Amy now?

Endgame not quite so rampant, after all... yet.

I had deliberately and voluntarily brainwashed myself-by a neat lie technique invented by a certain wing of the man-city Authorities, not a lie-detector as such but more a lie-fixer or a lie-fictioner-to believe that Mike was my real name.

In our eventual hotel room in Agra Aska, on one wall was a series of large hinged maps on top of each other, maps which I lifted to show Greg (my alter-nemo)-as a demonstration of Nemonymous Navigation leading to Nemonymous Night then Nemonymous Numinousness (Numinosity)-including any financial interchange which, after all, remained the vital end result of everything that went with the Angevin trade.

On a second wall was a reproduction of Rubens' Ma.s.sacre of the Innocents. On a third wall was another painting, by an unknown artist-depicting an unknown youth (not dissimilar to Hataz) who had a large white swan sitting on his lap... a foundling fondling the long neck as the swan itself acted rather salaciously.

The fourth wall was bare but sporting central curtains on a silent runner, mis-implying there was a window behind them. In the distance, I could hear some of our Agra Askan fans chanting. Since the shenanigans in Quarantine House, we'd literally become hotel-bound celebrities, a fact which was more than most of us could bear, even though, paradoxically, we'd been trying all our lives to seek out such celebrity for ourselves!

Amy did a spot of cleaning now and again to keep her hand in. She yearned after the state of her prior ordinariness more than any of us.

Eventually, there came the day when we all made our first close encounter with the Core itself. Or what we had before loosely named the Core, later-labelled as... well we've not reached that point yet.

I say all of us, but we left Greg behind as ceremonial rearguard. He said goodbye to Hataz and Tho because, as part of the first encounter with the Core, we were due to deal with their carefully-nurtured symbolic young love and-not so much 'sacrifice' them but rather tender them to the 'caring arms' of the Core itself, a ceremony only such initiated celebrities as us could carry out every generation or so. Human Coning to the Nth degree. We'd been given a very instructive and well-crafted black-skinned book ent.i.tled The Nemonicon about it all-much to the delight of Edith and Clare. The prose was Proust perfect.

The Core was at the top of a peak within a neighbouring lightly-valed cavity to that of Agra Aska itself, and you could see the Core (from Agra Aska) as almost a rounded half-sky of beige- or yellow-coloured light, but then the nearer you approached the more it became the whole-sky and an unknown colour... by contrast, however, strangely diminished (yet still relatively huge) when we were right up close to it at the highest point of the peak. The veiling effect of proto-incidence, perhaps. Or so our book hinted.

I was the first gingerly to touch the shimmering skin of the Core. I saw within a giant sleeping form of an angel, breathing in tune with some strobe rhythm that was relative to the reality of the 'angel' rather than our own reality. It was half bird, half beast, I guess. Its mane was an underlay or weave of feathers vestigially carpeted by patches of yellow fur and an archipelago of raw underskins or red meat. Yet this vision of its nature was unclear through the Coreskin. Its vast furled wings were lifted from time to time-in its evidently dreamful slumber-to reveal millions (I say millions, but there may have been more or there may have been less) of naked human beings in eternal carnal embrace (I guess eternal, judging by the book's further hints). An interwoven s...o...b..ry population of white, brown and black limbs and torsos of flesh, but their heads (and thus ident.i.ties) mercifully hidden by the nesting techniques of the 'angel'. Stub of pencil: The produce of this Arthurian mix of human substances within the Core was dependent on the incubation/chemical process of the 'angel' itself.

We all kissed Hataz and Tho farewell before pa.s.sing them through a breach in the Coreskin.

And distantly we heard the voices of Agra Askans in a chorus of: "Wonderful, Counsellor!"

It was awe-inspiring.

Before leaving the site of our first encounter with the Core, I looked down towards the lower nipples of the Core sac, where the Letting Agents (again mentioned in the book) were siphoning unrefined wads of Angevin cream into wide-mouthed pipes-and onward, via arcane hawling procedures based on creative gravity, I guess, to the earth's surface. Except, as I wasn't to know at that stage, there was n.o.body then on the surface. The game was surely up, even before we knew about it. But confusion often brings the most unexpected clarity. I did not cross bridges before I came to them whilst I kept my own cards close to my chest. The others seemed to be quite out of their depth.