Art Pact 263 - Shallow Talk

At the edge of the beach, staring up at the land, stood a heavily-armoured fish. It was lying in the shallows, huffing air over its gills and trying to breath. The air was incredibly cold, and every time the fish gaped its mouth it felt a shock of ice passing through its mouth and throat. It was unsure whether the air was doing anything for it - it was still alive, but every minute or so a larger wave washed up the shore, pushing warm water over it.

"Is it working?" called a voice from further out.

"Not sure," gasped the armoured fish.

It shifted awkwardly from side to side, evening out the pressure on its fore-fins. Its actual fins were splayed out on the sand, the weight of its body (not inconsiderable) taken by the heavier bones further up the limbs. It flapped its tail, pushing it a few millimetres further up the sand. It had been doing this every so often for the last few hours, pushing itself an infinitesimal distance with each Herculean effort, and it had got far enough that most of the time only the tip of its tail was in the water. The further it went, the harder it became to move one still further. It knew that there should be some way it could move its tail to press against the sand, but it could not figure out how to do that and stay upright on its fins.

"You're still alive, right?" called the voice.

"Yeah, I'm still alive."

"How about you call it a day and come back?"

"No, I think I'll stay out here a while. You go on, you know? Don't bother waiting for me."

"It's all good," said the voice. "I'm not needed anywhere else, not in a hurry, you know? I can just wait here for you to get back. Take your time."

"Oh, I will. I mean, really. I might never come back, do you understand? So if I'm not back in-"--it tried to calculate how long it could stay out of water if the trick with the air didn't work. The answer was depressingly low. "If I'm not back in an hour, say, you can assume I'm gone."

"Okay," said the voice. "If you're not back in an hour I'll just swim away. I'll be gone, so if you come out here and you want to find me for whatever reason, you'll have to come looking for me. I won't be here any more, so..."

Lying bastard, thought the armoured fish. It considered its options. First of all, it could give all of this up as a bad job from the start. Just swim back out to where the voice was and accept that whatever was going to happen was going to happen. Second, it could continue its futile struggle up the beach and asphyxiate. Third, it could do the most likely thing, the thing it expected of itself and it was clear that the voice expected of it: it would hold out as long as it could, then turn around and swim back out to sea in the full knowledge that the voice wasn't gone, that the voice was in fact hiding under a rock somewhere nearby, waiting to tear the fish to shreds the instant it came back. Not the most appealing of outcomes. In fact far from it - probably the least appealing. The fish itself had attacked and eaten many other fish in its time, and although it felt no guilt about it, it was aware enough to know that it had not been exactly a pleasant experience for its victims. There had been thrashing about. There had been blood. There had been anguished cries for mercy from the food-fish, and terrified yelling and farting from the food-fish's relatives and shoal members. Altogether an unpleasant experience if viewed from the perspective of the killee rather than the killer. The thought of beaks or teeth or whatever it was the voice had at its disposal for the rending of flesh was enough to make the armoured fish shudder violently with horrid anticipation.

Still, the fish had had a good life, it thought. It would have liked to have spawned a little more, but then didn't everyone think that? That was the purpose of life, after all, and it would have been ridiculous to think that it was somehow above everyone else. No, it was just a fish, doing what fish did. Swimming, feeding, spawning, and then, eventually, dying. There was no way to escape that fate, any more than there was a way to fly up into the air and out of the world altogether.

As if mocking the fish, a black dot zipped past a foot above its head. It stopped, well out of reach, flapped a set of complicated-looking wings each smaller than the smallest fin on the fish's body, then zipped away along the beach before the fish could react.

"Bugger me," said the fish, staring after it. A thought crossed its mind. Perhaps there was a way out of this, after all. "Hey!" it called out. "You still there?"

"Yes, I'm still here," said the voice.

"Okay, good. I'm after some advice."

"What?"

"Advice, you know? I'd like your opinion on what to do. Should I stay out here, or should I come back? I mean, it's a long way up to the top of the beach, you know? A long time. I'm not sure I can make it. But I mean, it's worth it, right?"

Sometime long - a tail, a tentacle? - breached the surface a little way out into the bay and slapped down again violently, flicking up a little spray of water.

"You want me to decide for you?" said the voice, coming from roughly the same place where the unidentified limb had appeared. The armoured fish wondered whether it was a threat - it was a pointless threat if it was, of course, since there was nothing at all appealing about the idea of returning to the bay to be eaten.

"Well, I don't know about decide. But I mean, if I come back there, I'll somehow feel that I've failed. But on the other hand, the chance of me succeeding in getting up the beach seems pretty low. It's failure to the front of me, failure to the back of me, right? I need to know whether the risk is worth it. Actual failure or psychological failure, right?"

"I suppose so," said the voice thoughtfully. "I mean, you can always think of it not as failure, but as a stepping stone to a greater thing, right? You can know whether the approach you took was good or bad, you can refine your approach, think about things, what to try on your next attempt, right?"

The armoured fish knew that it would not be getting a next attempt. But the voice, it thought, must be assured of its success.

"I guess," it said. "I mean, that makes sense. I come back out there and regroup, and work out how I could have done things differently. I mean, I suppose I would have stopped that thing from laying eggs in me, for instance."

"There you go- wait, what did you just say?"

"Oh, there was a thing - like a little animal, actually up in the air. It came down on my back a minute ago, I'm pretty sure it laid some eggs back there. I'll come back in and then everything will be fine, right? There won't be any problems with my back, will there? No problems that you know of?"

"I'll - uh, I have to go," said the voice. "Good luck with that!"

Limbs flailed out of the water and pushed out to sea quickly. The armoured fish waited a few minutes, then began to turn itself back to the waves.

Art Pact 262 - Tombs

"This is all very well," she says to me, brushing the sand out of her hair, "but it's not really getting us any further in there"--she gestures towards the opening to the crypt, which is still covered by the carved stone block.

"Look. Do you really want to go in there?" I ask.

"Of course I want to go in there. It's the whole reason I came here."

It's not the whole reason she came here, and I know it. And she knows that I know, and I know that, of course, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to tell you. But we haven't yet crossed that line, the line where she admits to me that she came here to seek revenge as well as fame, and I admit to her that I know that, that I've known it all along, that anyone who met her during her voyage has a good chance of having worked it out too, that it is, as they refer to them, an open secret.

"I came here to get my place in the department by being the first person into the tomb and by getting some photographs that will go in textbooks hundreds of years from now," she says gently. "I didn't come here to piss about with side excavations and dodgy monoliths."

"'Don't get too focused on means and forget your aims'," I quote, which she responds to with a disgusted face and a dismissive wave of her hand. "No, listen. You want your place in the department, it doesn't matter how you get it. This will get you it, I guarantee. Well, actually I don't guarantee, but I mean this is better than going into the tomb. Safer, more interesting. Your dean wants a steady source of donations to keep the department in professors and undergraduates for years to come, right? This will have him sitting pretty. This is a gold-mine of research right here, you've got hieroglyphs, you've got artifacts, you've got the whole shebang. Just give up the idea of going into that damn tomb!"

Before I finish the sentence I know I've chosen the wrong word. Her face, which has been relatively open to my argument, sets into stone the instant the words "give up" leave my mouth. There's no telling Nur to give up. She's not the giving up type. She's not the type, even, to forgive someone easily for suggesting she might give up. Once upon a time I would have tried to infer something about her upbringing, her school days or home life by this, but that sort of thinking bit me in the arise when it came to Michelle, and I have learnt not to speculate so far beyond the bounds of the information I have.

"I didn't mean give up," I say quickly, putting my hands up. "I meant postpone. We can come back to the tomb, of course, but the tomb is going to be there for a long while. Everyone knows about it, and in all these years no-one's been able to get inside. But this stuff is-"

"Let me just stop you there," she cuts in. "When we met, on the boat, you promised me that you could get me into the tomb. You said that you'd discovered something that would make it easy, that all I needed to worry about was providing the equipment and the funding. Well, I've done that. Here's the equipment you asked for, and I distinctly remember handing over what seemed like quite a lot of funding at the time. Hmm, let me think"--she cupped her chin between finger and thumb, and stared up into the sky with a mock pondering expression--"yes, it still seems like quite a lot of funding. Are you telling me that you cannot, in fact, get me into the tomb?"

"Well, I mean-"

"Don't tell me what you mean, say something that actually means the truth."

Her expression is now way beyond mockery - she's no longer poking at me verbally to goad me into action, she is actually genuinely angry at me, angry in a way that I've only seen her be before in the matter of her father's death. I realise that she's close to lumping me in that great category of grudges she has in her head: obstructions to justice. Once I'm in there, I'm dog meat.

"Look, we can get into the tomb," I reassure her. "We can get into the tomb."

"Get us into the damn tomb, then."

"It's just a little more complicated..."

It is a little more complicated, but not in any way I can tell her without bursting the bubble. We can get in there easily enough if we have something from the new dig site. I was just hoping to be able to tempt her from her current destructive path by one of the other baubles that we'd uncover on the way to the important one. Perhaps I should have been more up-front with the information in the first place, let her know all along that what she needed for getting into the tomb was in the antechambers and let the lure of the antechambers themselves work to drag her off her path.

No, that would never have worked. On someone as single-minded as Nur? No. She would have marched straight through the place without so much as an interested glance left or right. The quest for vengeance has grown inside her to such a monstrous size that it's blinkered her to everything. If she stumbled across a way to bring her father back from the dead I doubt she'd even notice it, so warped has her judgement on this matter become.

"Simplify it for me," she growls.

"Okay, okay!"

I tell her about the keystone. She's skeptical - perhaps something in her senses the trap that I had just been thinking about, that it might be enough just to walk her through the potentially fabulous discoveries in the antechambers - but her expression begins to thaw slightly. I describe roughly where I think it is (this is more of a lie, since I have only the vaguest idea, but I put in sufficient certainty to give her hope, sufficient fuzziness to buy me some time at the other end), and slowly, slowly, she seems to have forgotten about my slip of the tongue earlier. Now she has a straightforward path ahead of her - we go into the antechamber, we find the keystone, we open the tomb, and after that...

"If you'd just told me this in the first place we could have been down there already," she says, pointing into the tomb. Which is precisely why I didn't tell you, I think, because the longer we're out here and not in that damn tomb the safer we'll be and the better I'll feel.

"I wasn't certain before," I lie. "I mean, there's a lot of space around here, I wasn't sure I'd be able to find the antechamber that easily, that's why all the equipment and the money, you know? It wasn't a done deal."

"Well," she says, "it's a done deal now. Good work, old man. I'll get my kit together and we'll start inside in about half an hour, okay?"

I nod, sadly. There's an old saying - Chinese, I think: "If you dedicate yourself to revenge, first dig two graves". Well, I think to myself as Nur begins to walk towards the tents, just look at that tomb:

There's room inside it for thousands of graves. 

Art Pact 261 - Winnowing

When there were just three of them left, Rama's composure began to slip. It stared to its left, at the ragged hole in the earth where Cospid had been, and its outer tendrils writhed with a nervous energy that caused them to brush against Laxi.

"Stop that!"

Rama said nothing.

"Stop that!" Laxi repeated. "Stop it this instant!"

"Sorry," said Rama, its voice shaky. "It's - look, maybe I was wrong. Maybe this is something bad."

"We told you that," called Polis.

"I know, it's just-"

"Cospid told you that," said Laxi.

"I know, I know. Where's Cospid gone? One moment it was there, the next moment: nothing! I didn't expect that. I thought there'd be some warning. I thought I'd see something."

"I thought you said there was nothing to worry about."

Rama twisted back to look a Laxi, bowing down with an expression of shame.

"I thought it was lying, like it always did."

"I can't believe you," said Laxi. "Always thinking the worst of the world, but you have to let your petty short-sightedness get the better of you on this one. You heard Cospid? We heard it too, it didn't sound like it was lying."

"Oh, you don't know it like I do. You're fine, you've got Polis over there buoying you up all the time. I've got you on one side of me with your relentless logic and Cospid on the other side of-" Rama fell silent for a second. "I had Cospid on the other side of me," it said slowly, "feeding me improbable bullshit all the time. It told me it could move, can you believe that? It said it could pull itself out of the earth and walk around and about. Bloody hell!"

"What? What?"

"Oh, that is... That's just wrong. We're going to die," said Rama.

"What is it? What can you see?"

The ragged hole where Cospid had been had suddenly vanished, filled-in in an instant with the loose soil that had surrounded it. A few seconds later a straight pole had appeared in it - a dry white thing with a sheen of green which Rama recognised for what it was: bone. It was bone, carved and shaped into an unnatural line, a thin cylinder of material which rose straight out of the ground and flared out only a touch at the top to support a pair of almost invisible lines, like ultra-fine tendrils, that stretched off to either side further than Rama could see. It was obvious to Rama where the bones had come from: They were Cospids, torn out and fused into this mockery, this ghost of Rama's quondam neighbour. Whatever horror Cospid had been talking about, it had if anything understated the situation.

"What can you see? What's going on?" Polis called.

"Uh... nothing," said Rama. "Nothing at all. It's just I was overcome with grief."

Cospid had been an itch in Rama's skin ever since they were children. They had been further apart then, of course, but Cospid had always had a loud and screechy voice, and it had been particularly vocal all its life.

"I wish I'd been where Polis is," Rama said quietly, so that Polis couldn't hear.

"Well of course you do," said Laxi. "Polis is going to be the last one to go. It's going to outlive the two of us. Not by much, of course, and it's going to be a bloody boring few hours it has left with no-one to talk to, but..." it fell silent for a moment. "We're really going to die, aren't we?"

"Yes," said Rama.

"Fuck. I thought we'd live long enough to spore, at least. I'm not greedy, you know? I just wanted there to be a point to life. You land as a seed, you grow, you spore, and that's the cycle done. You've kept the tendrils growing. Your life wasn't, you know, in vain. That's not too much to ask, is it?"

"Not too much, no," Rama agreed. It looked nervously over at the dead artifact. "I suppose you could say that if a bit of you lived on, that would be something, right?"

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, nothing. Ignore me."

"I don't want to ignore you," Laxi said. "You might be gone when I stopped."

Rama couldn't stop its tendrils from shaking now. It didn't want to think about what had happened to Cospid, but that seemed to be all there was in the world. Just Cospid's ghost and the two horrid tendrils snaking off further than the eye could see. Were they reaching out from the afterlife? Or to it, desperately trying to pull back and reunite the pale white ghost thing that was all that was left of Rama's neighbour? Rama shuddered violently. One of its major tendrils whipped out and collided with the outer halo of Laxi's tendrils, but to Rama's surprise Laxi did not withdraw, but caught it and held onto it.

"I wanted to be where Polis was because I thought it would be the best of both worlds," said Rama quietly. "Not because I would be the last one alive. I never knew that would even be a thing. I thought we'd all die together, perhaps after sporing, you know?"

"Yeah."

"I wanted some quiet, but not to be out in the middle of nowhere like a solitary. I thought that if I was where Polis was I could have quiet when I wanted it and I could talk to you when I didn't want it. Polis always seemed so calm, I thought it wouldn't have mattered if it had swapped places with me. It would have been able to put up with Cospid's nonsense." Rama laughed, bitterly. "You know, I think that's what so annoyed me about Cospid saying it could move around. I wished that was a real thing. I wished we could pull ourselves out of the dirt and I could have just swapped places with Cospid, easy as anything. It was like Cospid was mocking me."

"You know.. perhaps Polis wouldn't have been quite so relaxed if it had been in your place. If what you say is true, I mean."

"It's true."

"What's this about me?" Polis called.

"I was just saying you might have been different if you'd grown where Rama is. You know, there but for fate go I, and all that? There's a thing."

"Oh, yes!" said Polis. "No doubt!"

Its cry echoed across the landscape. In the far distance they could hear the sound of perchers flapping away from the tendrils of the hidden villages. Rama wondered if those villages too were suffering from sudden disappearances. They'd never seen the people who lived there, of course, but Rama had always imagined that those people must be arranged in a line just as they were. How could one live any other way? A group of people could be all bundled together like primitives, but how would one not go mad with the constant voices?

It looked back at the dead remains of Cospid.

"I want you to promise me something," it said to Laxi.

"Of course."

"When I- when I vanish, don't look at me. I mean, after you see that I'm gone. Turn away. Look at Polis until your time comes. Or maybe your time won't come. Look at Polis until you spore and die, in that case. Just don't look back my way."

"Why?"

"Um, I just want you to remember me the way I am now, that's all. Just promise me."

"I promise," said Laxi.

Art Pact 260 - Plane in the Ice

We carefully retreated across the ice and viewed the scene from a distance. The "plane" was stuck at a forty-five degree angle, its tail about twenty feet in the air. It looked like a whale that had breached the surface and then become stuck somehow.

"I don't think it's a plane," said the older of the two women.

"Of course it's a plane," I told them. "It was flying."

"It was flying alright, but that doesn't make it a plane. Birds fly."

"Superman flies," said the younger woman, giggling.

"Well it's no bird, and it's no superman. So that only leaves a plane."

"No, boy," said the older woman harshly. "There's all sorts of other things. Especially up here in the north."

"But it's a plane," I said. "Just look at it! It's made of metal and everything."

"Funny looking plane, though."

She was right. It was funny-looking. It was more of a cigar-shape than the usual tube of a plane, and the wings were strange. Rather than sticking out they were just curved stubs. Perhaps there had been larger parts to the wings that had broken off.

"That's an American plane, then," I concluded. "Their planes are all strange shapes. They got them stealth bombers, you ever seen one of them?"

The younger woman nodded, the older one shook her head.

"Well they're about as strange as anything. No knowing what an American plane might look like. It might look like a whale, or a robot, or a spaceship."

"Hmmm. Might look like a spaceship," said the older woman. "But I think that actually is a spaceship."

"Don't be crazy. That looks nothing like a spaceship. Where's its rockets?"

"Ugh," said the older woman, rolling her eyes. She stood up, leant into the wind, pulled her hood down and began to trek back towards the crash site.

"Hey! Where are you going?"

"Back to take a closer look."

"It could be dangerous!"

"It could explode!" called the younger one, who'd stayed back with me. The older woman stopped in her tracks, turned round, and yelled as hard as she could - just hard enough that we could hear most of what she said before the wind whipped the sound away.

"...already have explod... ...plane, there will... ...survivors!"

"She's right," said the younger woman, after a few seconds of thought. "We should see if anyone's survived." She clambered to her feet and set out after her companion, leaving me in the lee of the huge block of ice. I hesitated. There was no-one around to see, and since our meeting had been by accident there was no likelihood of me ever bumping into the two women again, but rumours have a nasty way of flying around and finding their intended target no matter how little information they contain about him. If I let them go off and stayed behind myself, people would assume that I was some sort of coward. I could talk about explosions and ice cracking and other dangers until I ran out of words, but the fact of the matter was that the two women had gone back to the crash without so much as a second thought, and if I wasn't brave enough to go with them I was going to look bad. I pushed up against the ice and stepped out into the wind.

It had got worse during the few minutes we'd been talking. It came in powerful gusts that were heralded by a sort of low whistling from the edge of the ice, so that every twenty or thirty steps I had to stop and brace myself when I heard that alarm. When the sound stopped I had maybe a second before a big gust of wind hit me like a wave, stripping the warmth out of me in an instant.

"Hey! Hey!"

The wind was too strong for them to hear me - with them moving away, at any rate. The old woman must have had lungs like a whale to have been able to shout back to us. I was catching up with them, but not nearly fast enough to get to them before they reached the plane, and sure enough the old woman reached the crashed machine before I was even halfway there.

The wind was too strong for me to keep my eyes on them while I struggled across the open waste of the ice, but I found them sheltering in the lee of the crashed plane, the older woman running her gloves hands over the surface of it while the younger one stood back a little, a nervous look on her face.

"It's warm!" the old woman shouted at me as I got out of the direct blast of the wind.

"Warm like it's on fire?"

"No, just warm like a person! Here, feel!"

Quick as a flash she grabbed my left hand, dragging it onto the surface of the plane before I could resist. She was stronger than I'd expected, too - even when I was touching the metal I couldn't pull away with the effort I was willing to put in (by which I mean I could probably have got away by throwing myself backwards, but that would have looked a bit desperate).

To my surprise, though, she was right. It wasn't freezing cold, like metal should be after being out in this weather for quarter of an hour. But it also wasn't burning, as I'd expected it to be if it was one fire inside. It was, like she said, the same temperature as me - well, as I was inside my furs. My fingers were cold, even inside my gloves, and they could feel the comfortable warmth of the plane.

"Strange," I said.

"Very strange."

"Could be radioactive," said the younger woman. We both turned to look at her. "You said it was American, right? Could be radioactive. They use that in their submarines-"

"This isn't a submarine," said her companion.

"I was going to say in their submarines and their spaceships."

"They've got atomic spaceships?"

"No, no. Listen. The radioactive rocks give off heat, like warm heat. Then they've got machines that turn that into electricity. This could be the same thing."

The older woman looked dubious, but she let go of my hand and took her own hand off the shiny metal surface.

"Why hasn't it got any writing on it?" she said.

"What?"

"No writing. Planes have got writing all over them, even the secret ones. I've seen them at the base."

"What base?"

"Pituffik."

"Oh."

"They've all got writing all over them. This doesn't have any writing."

It was true. Now that we were at a better angle, I could see that the plane's silver surface was unblemished. It was shiny - not mirror-like, but more like brushed metal. From this angle I could also see that the wings were sort of like chunks of a circle. In fact, the wings were just the right size that if they were one solid block that went through the fuselage it would almost certainly have been a perfect circle.

"Do you still think this is just an ordinary plane?" asked the older woman.

"I never said it was ordinary."

"You know what I mean," she said. "Do you think this is an American plane, or do you think it might be something else?"

I stared at the shiny metal object. I couldn't see any evidence of engines, yet it had clearly not just been thrown - before it crashed, it had definitely been flying.

"Maybe," I said cautiously. "Maybe something else."

Art Pact 259 - Tunnels

"I hate tunnels," she said, her body rippling with disgust. I pushed past her, peering into the darkness. There were tiny points of light inside, tiny points that I could just about see if I was not looking directly at them. I tried to catch them sidelong, but they really were just indivisible atoms of light, impossible to place as distant or near. I moved aside, sat on the ledge and scratched at my tail nervously.

"I'm not fond of them myself," I told her. "Although I am a little surprised about you. Aren't you - I mean, don't you live in a tunnel or something?"

She rolled her head slightly so that more of her eyes were facing me - an unusually Tillian expression, one that I hadn't thought to see from a Polypede.

"I live in a warren," she said coldly. "A barbarian lives in a tunnel."

"What's the difference?"

"You might as well ask what the difference is between a house and a cave."

"But that's - I mean, you have to build a house from nothing, and it's-"

"Never mind," she said, turning back to the tunnel. "You'll just have to come and visit my home town some day."

The thought of going to a Polypede town was even less appealing than going into the tunnel, and thanks to my unfamiliarity with their expressions and tones of voice I couldn't even tell if Poppy was having a joke at my expense. I frowned, shrugged off my backpack, and started to go through it for the flashlight I knew I had somewhere.

"I was being serious," she said. "You should come."

"What, and be eaten alive?"

"We're not barbarians. We wouldn't eat a guest. Ha ha, that was a joke."

I stopped my rummaging.

"Oh. Uh, wait - what? Is it a joke that you wouldn't eat a guest, or is it a joke that you would eat anyone who wasn't a guest? I'm confused."

"Oh, on my last two feet! The joke is that everyone thinks we eat people, but we eat fungus. No-one would eat a living thing, the very idea is disgusting."

"Well not that disgusting..."

"Very disgusting!" she said, curling up her body tightly. A ripple of disgust travelled along her segments, causing each pair of feet to jerk in turn. "Could we please stop talking about such things and get back to the work in hand. We have to go into the tunnel. I hate tunnels."

I started searching again, and my hand closed on the cold metal cylinder that was the flashlight. The batteries still appeared to be good, and I pointed it into the dark opening. It was rock-sided, carved out with hand tools if I was any judge of the pattern of rocks. With the light on all the little pin-pricks of light were invisible, and I was no wiser as to whether they'd been further down the tunnel or right at the entrance. I took a few steps inside, and heard the sound of Poppy unwinding and scuttling after me. She made no effort to come along side, content to hang back.

The tunnel had, I thought, been made by a Tillian. It was wide enough for me to stand up in, and sloped down at a comfortable angle. Seven or eight Polypedes could have walked down it at once, perhaps more if my suspicions about Poppy's ability to hold onto the ceiling were correct. She didn't confirm it by her actions, though, simply gliding along the path behind me. Her legs made a sort of drumming noise as she walked which echoed oddly in the cylindrical tunnel.

"Say we find this box," I said.

"Yes. We will find it."

"Okay, but what then? I mean, do we bring it out, or do we attempt to open it where it is? Did your guru or whatever have anything to say about that? Is it going to be hard to carry? Is the box going to be intrinsically valuable, or just what's in it?"

"No, he didn't say any of that. Just that I should find the box. Perhaps it will be obvious when we get there."

"I don't like not having a plan," I said. "It's - I just don't like it."

"Well then you must find life in general a terrible tribulation," she told me. "You have to learn to relax and take things as they come."

"That sounds like a rather passive philosophy. We have to prepare for a hunt, we can't just do... whatever it is you do. What do you do, if you don't eat meat?"

"Ugh, I thought we weren't going to talk about eating living things."

"Sorry. But I mean, what else is there? Do you go out and look for fruit?"

"We farm, obviously. Mushrooms, groundberries, that sort of thing."

"You eat mushrooms?" I made a disgusted face which she could not, of course, see, but I think it was obvious in my voice.

"Yes we eat mushrooms, of course. You needn't sound so horrified. Imagine what we think about you."

"I-"

"You can't, of course, because you think that we eat people. Well, you will just have to start practising that sort of sympathy. You can go back to your towns - or your caves," she added, with an acid tone, "and tell them what we really eat. Then perhaps this ridiculous rumour will come to an end once and for all."

"I guess," I said. Up ahead I could make out sharp spikes hanging down from the roof of the tunnel. They looked disturbingly like fangs, and I picked them out with the flashlight. Just stalactites. "But isn't it something good, that rumour?"

"Good? What could be good about it? It's insulting."

"Well, I guess, although it's not - is it really insulting if it's just-"

"It's insulting to say that we're like mad barbarians who would eat people, yes. Move on."

"Okay, okay."

We reached the stalactites and the floor grew bumpy with tiny conical hillocks, no more than a few inches tall, which I guessed must be stalagmites growing up to join with their descending brothers. I turned the light towards the floor so that it would be easier for Poppy to wind through the little field of bumps - a mistake, because I walked straight into a stalactite that I hadn't seen, and the shock knocked me flat on my tail backwards. If Poppy hadn't been paying close attention I would have ended up sitting on her head, but she was quick enough to rear away from me.

"Ow!"

"Are you alright?" she asked. I rubbed at my snout. Fortunately I'd been looking down when I hit the rock, so that the blow had fallen across my forehead and not directly on the end of my nose. I thought I would probably have a hefty lump there, but the injury didn't feel too bad. My tail and legs, on the other hand, had taken quite a shock when I hit the floor, and my back felt as though I'd been punched in the spine.

"Yeah, I'm... I'm fine," I said weakly, carefully rolling so as to be able to walk my hands up the tunnel wall and get myself upright again. "Just a bit of a shock, that's all."

I let go of the wall and tried out my legs for a second - which was about all I got out of them. My left leg crumpled under me, pitching me sideways. I was only able to avoid crashing down again by clinging onto the stalactite that had floored me and then letting myself slide gently to the floor.

"Now you know why I hate tunnels," Poppy said.

Art Pact 258 - In The Heat of the Day

"Oh, this is intolerable!" the major blustered. He waved at the cloud of flies that attended him like a halo, succeeding only in dispersing them for a few moments before they regrouped again into their holding pattern. Frobisher could see that one of the insects had made a daring landing on the very tip of the major's ear, and was dabbing cautiously at the skin there with its proboscis. It was a brave creature - there had been many a larger animal that had wanted a piece of the old soldier, and Frobisher had seen an array of them strung up on the man's wall at the hunting lodge. One, in particular, came to mind at that moment - a rather surprised looking elephant whose head took up the greater part of the north wall between the two windows that overlooked the gardens. It seemed to have been killed in a manner entirely unexpected to it, judging by the look on its face, as though it had stumbled in upon its wife in the middle of a sordid affair with a kangaroo, and having then attempted to dispatch the cuckolder with its own boomerang it had been unprepared for the weapon to curl around mid-flight and return to strike it fatally in the rear. Of course, such fanciful thoughts bore no connection to the truth of the matter - that being that the creature had been shot at blank range by the major and then stuffed by a taxidermist who was not, perhaps, at quite the very height of his art, but it made Frobisher feel a little better about accompanying the old man to think that the elephant had died in some purely natural manner and had then simply been acquired. The brutal truth - that the major was a murderer of our four-legged friends on a grand scale - was simply too much to bear for long. There were only so many hours that Frobisher could spend convincing himself that the past was a different country where the customs were alien and the attitudes towards the sanctity of life considerably more flexible. He could tolerate such behaviour only to a certain degree, and then he of necessity fell back on more whimsical methods, fooling himself about the quality of the man he was accompanying in order that he himself might rest more peacefully at night and not be haunted by the vengeful spirits of the veritable menagerie of the deceased with whom he shared the house.

The major, unaware of the insect that was even now attempting to make something of a meal of him, tugged at his collar and fanned himself ineffectually with his open hand, trying at the same time, it seemed to Frobisher, to shrink back so as to cram his generous body further and further into the meager shade allowed by the parasol. He had become steadily pinker through the course of the morning, and now, in the full heat of the day, he had begun to resemble a lobster that was slowly wising up to the fact that it was being boiled alive. A distressing red colour had begun to creep across his sparsely-covered pate, although its blotchy nature led Frobisher to believe that it was a heat rash rather than the onset of sunburn. Frobisher had been called upon very specifically by the major's physician to watch out for the slightest hint of sunburn and call an end to the morning's expedition, although how he might persuade the major into any course of action (or in this case inaction) against his will was a mystery to Frobisher. The doctor himself had never, so far as Frobisher was aware, been able to persuade the major to change his lifestyle in any way that would materially benefit him, and it seemed exceptionally optimistic, given that fact, that he should expect the far less qualified Frobisher to succeed where he had so frequently failed.

"I wonder," Frobisher suggested, "if it might not be a better idea to have some of the locals build a hide for you."

"A hide?"

"Yes, a hide. A covered-"

"I know what a hide is, for God's sake. What I want to know is why you think that my mission would be improved by building a structure in a single place when all of my plans are arranged around mobility and the opportunity to follow on of the creatures should it present itself."

"Well," said Frobisher. He was unsure quite how to proceed, but he looked at the insect - still perched on the major's ear and sucking away at it quite happily - and realised that if a creature like that was not afraid of the major when he might kill it without a second thought, he should at least be capable of speaking to the man in the capacity for which he had been hired. "I think that until the animal turns up you're doing a lot of sitting in one place anyway. Since the locals aren't doing anything much at the moment and you're paying their wages, we might as well have them erect something here just in case you have to wait a significant period of time. Anything that gets built we can abandon when the time comes to follow your quarry." If the time comes, he thought, since he was still extremely skeptical about the existence of the creature.

"Humph. Well, I suppose I am paying them," said the Major. Frobisher was not too surprised to hear that that was the reason that the old man took most seriously, although he was a little surprised about how unsurprised he was. Had he somehow decided that the man's chief motivation in this wild goose chase was money? Frobisher understood well that a creature so improbably would be a terrific money-spinner if it should turn out to be real - the major would get book deals out of it without a doubt, he would be able to name his price for speaking engagements, and if nothing else he was unlikely ever to have to buy his own meals ever again - but was that his primary motivation? Had it been the motivation behind his relentless slaughter of more quotidian beasts? Frobisher thought not. There had been a solid streak of glory-hunting behind it, and no doubt he had sold the rest of the animal when he kept their heads, but the major had spoken of the old hunts as though they were personal tests, as if they were things that he had had to do to prove something to himself (or possible, Frobisher thought, to the spirit of his father - the major was wont to invoke the old man when lambasting Frobisher, and he wondered sometimes if he were not actually hearing the echo of some dressing down that the major had received himself as a young man).

"I could have them start in the morning," Frobisher suggested. "If all goes well we'll be on our way before they have the skeleton in place, but as they say, plan for success but prepare for failure."

The major raised an eyebrow.

"They say that, do they?"

"Uh, yes. Well, I mean not often, but it's a known aphorism."

"Really. Well I suppose if it's well known then it must be true."

The major shifted uncomfortably in his chair, then raised up his left hand. For a moment Frobisher thought it was all over for the fly, but the insect's reactions were faster than the old soldier's. The major scratched at his ear furiously, but the fly was gone even before the shadow of ancient fingers fell over it. Frobisher watched it spiral away into the cloud of its compatriots and found himself breathing a sigh of relief on the little animal's behalf.

Art Pact 257 - Signals to lovers

Everybody knows that you hang a blue dress in the window to signal your lover. It doesn't have to be a blue dress. Not if you're a man. Then you can use a pair of blue trousers, or a blue shirt (which is probably preferable, a shirt really being a short dress in a way - what, you hadn't thought about that? Wear a shirt that's a little too big for you, or a shirt that fits around your neck if you have a big neck. You'll soon see how dress-like the shirt is when it's dangling around your thighs). You put a blue dress (or a blue whatever) in your window as a signal to them, so that they know that you're missing them, or thinking about them. It's an invitation to get in touch - perhaps literally, perhaps figuratively. You might see a blue dress hanging in the window of your lover's house and decide to give them a call. Then the blue dress could mean: my husband is out, now is a good time to call me. Or it might mean something completely (well, not completely) different, like: my husband is back, I can't call you but I'm thinking of you and missing you. Or your lover might not be married, and she puts a dress in the window to say: look, I know we had our differences last time we saw each other, and I know it can't be easy starting a new job on the other side of the city, what with the commuting and all that, but I wanted to see you and if you had some time maybe you could give me a call and we could meet up in that coffee shop on the corner, you know, the one you like, they do a great hot chocolate there and even though I'm a little jealous of the way you look at that one waitress I know it's just harmless and you do really love me and I'll let it go.

That's blue clothes. I don't know why blue. You can argue about which signal came first, which colour. I suppose that the first signal to be chosen was the important one, because it constrained all the signals that came after. You know about waving white flags, right? You wave a white flag to signal surrender, because that's - I don't know, maybe it's the colour of peace. Which seems a bit dubious to me, because it's the colour of ghosts. What's it saying, that there will be peace when we're all dead? I mean, that's likely - it's very likely, because the chief number one cause of strife on Earth is people, that's for sure. Also, is it racist? Like a black flag is for bad things - anarchists, pirates and the like, and the white flag is for peace? I guess you know, if you have to ask if something's racist you already kind of know the answer, but that's a hard one for me to call.

I'm getting off the point. The point is this - that flag, if it got chosen first, is the constraint that all other flags have to work under. No country's army can have the white flag now, no matter how much they want it. It could be Greenland! Greenland should have the white flag, because there's nothing there but snow, right? It would be a perfect flag for Eskimos or Inuit or whatever other tribes live there. But they can't have it because it's already spoken for, everyone understands. You'd see the Greenland army coming towards you and think: well, we've won this war. Here comes the enemy, and they're surrendering already. Perhaps the soldiers from the army would be confused themselves: are we fighting here, they'd say, or what? What's going on? Despite the fact that the white flag is perfect for them, they can't have it. They have to have something else. They can't have a tricolour, because the old-world European nations stole all of them already. That's a done deal. So they have to have some kind of new faux-heraldic thing. A polar bear in a field of red, or whatever they say. That would make an intimidating flag. You'd be in no doubt that they'd come to fight if they were marching out under a polar bear surrounded by blood. The polar bear could have an AK-47 in each paw, too (just the front ones, I mean), that would put the cherry on top. Seriously, have  you seen how many flags in, like, Africa and the middle east have AK-47s on them? Mr. Kalashnikov would be so proud. Or horrified. I don't know which. I read that he writes poems and stuff, and that he's pretty grim about the AK-47 being used everywhere by terrorists and so forth. Seems to me like I guess he's maybe not so onboard it being on flags. Oh well, it was a good idea. The army of Greenland will have to work out their own flag.

I'm not even sure if Greenland has an army.

Anyway, that's the thing! Maybe blue was the first signal, or maybe, just maybe, the choice was forced upon lovers as a reaction to preexisting signals, like maybe green makes more sense as a flag of love (it doesn't, on account of jealousy being green for some weird reason, but just run with me for a moment), but if people had already started hanging green clothes in their windows as a signal that they needed dental treatment, then clearly the lovers would not be able to hang green clothes as a signal to their boyfriends and girlfriends without being pestered by legions of wandering dentists.

You know what, ignore that. Sometimes you just let your ideas run away with you and then you realise that you've invented a world in which itinerant dentists are roaming the streets, hoping to get a little work on the side from someone passing by with a cavity. Tinker dentists coming door to door.

Anyway, so - not green, but red. Hang a red dress in your window, we all know, and that's a signal to your enemy. That's saying: watch your back today, because I am going to be everywhere and nowhere. I'm coming to fuck your shit up, or whatever. You could hang a red shirt in your window to say to the guy who's always knocking over your dustbin that you've got your eye on him, that you know what he's up to and you won't stand for it any more. That's if you've got the world's lamest enemy, obviously, I mean who would give two shits about their dustbin getting knocked over, right? But that's the status of enemies in the world today, it's all so impersonal. Everyone's got these trivial little enemies that are just, like, their bosses and so on, but the real enemies, the guys that are going to kill you, that are going to take your stuff and steal your lover and all that, just ruin your life or end it, they're people who you have no idea who they are. They're the countries, they're the terrorist organisations, they're the multinational corporations with their pollution. They're apathy and greed and hatred, things you can't point to.

It's so easy to make a little guy your enemy to block that out, but that's the way the world defeats you, you see. So that's why I hang a blue shirt in my window as a signal to my girlfriend, but I drape a giant red canvas across the roof of the tower block - that's my signal to the world, to all those faceless enemies.

Does that answer your question?