Prologue
Bretigny
Castaway
Waiting for the Man
Cassita
Like 10,000 Jewels in the Sky
Mr Mynana
Taurog
The Party at the End of the World

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Castaway

"For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?" ~Luke 9:25

Louie winced and licked his lips, tasting brittle chalky dust. He was lying face-down on a sandy surface and could feel the sharp grit of it against his cheek and between his fingers. His head ached terribly. He slowly opened his eyes, and at first his vision was blurred and uncertain, his surroundings an indistinct series of rouge smudges. Gradually, a red landscape beneath a pale pink sky came into focus - a wind-carved vista of dust, rock, hill and outcrop.

He vaguely remembered that they had been lost and that there had been an accident. Wincing at the pain in his head, he squinted and looked around for the bus. In doing so, the memories came crashing down on him. From the pit of his stomach, a slow roll of panic and horror began to build, rising upwards, faster and faster.

When it reached his mouth, he would scream.

At the last moment, a new thought came into his head and, unexpectedly comforted, he realised that he must be hallucinating. He'd hit his head when he had fallen climbing into the bus, and soon a doctor would give him some medicine, the visions would go and would be replaced by concerned faces. Perhaps his mother and father would be there, and Ray too. All would be well.

He looked around, rubbing his forehead to try and release some of the tension of his headache. The view remained still and unchanging. It seemed likely that some new element would insinuate itself into his hallucination soon - something even more fantastical than this strange landscape. He hoped it wouldn't be zombies. He'd once had a dream where his parents had turned into shuffling corpses, and had pursued him through his house, school and, oddly, a factory making pianos.

Something was beginning to worry him. He'd never hallucinated before, but he'd always assumed that if he did it would be mostly like that dream, and dreams never really made sense - rooms led to the wrong places, things shifted, nothing was consistent. He looked at the horizon, at the unchanging contours of the land. He looked at the ground around him and saw the grooves and scrapes left by his body as he had lain there. He picked up a handful of the gritty soil and let it fall through his fingers, each grain distinct and of itself. He tasted the dust on his lips and inhaled the odd metallic smell of the air.

Eventually, needing to pee, he stood up and undid his flies. When he had finished, he watched his urine disappear into the ground and, as the sour smell of it reached his nose, he realised that this was not a dream or hallucination. This was real.

Panic rose in him and, all else forgotten, he howled out in pain and terror.

Later, his throat sore and torn, he curled up in the dust and cried as the sky darkened from pink to a dark red and eventually black. Exhausted and miserable, he slept. His dreams were not pleasant.

He woke to a pale rose dawn, chilled to the bone, with his breath lightly frosting in the cold morning air. The weight of yesterday's events sat in his stomach like a leaden ball, and at first he could barely move against the sullen mass of it. Slowly, curiosity and the need to warm himself overpowered his inertia, and he rose to his feet and began to look around as he shivered and rubbed his hands together to warm them.

He was in a bowl-shaped hollow - wide but not deep. Above its rim a landscape of hard-packed, red rocky desert stretched to the horizon. The sun was still low, but it looked larger and darker than Louie thought it ought to be. In addition, a brownish odd-shaped moon was setting behind him, craggy and irregular, its surface marked with splashes of white and grey.

Louie stared and wondered just exactly what was going on.

Around the hollow, large rocks stuck up from the desert floor. He walked to the nearest of these across a terrain that was firm and hard beneath a surface of loose grit and sand, and climbed up and looked outwards. The landscape stretched flat and monotonous to the horizon in nearly every direction, punctuated by a few isolated outcrops which the wind had shaped into sharp-edged sculptures. Only to the west, away from the rising sun, was there any variation - a series of low lumpy hills that rose upwards from the plain. Nothing moved except a light wind.

Louie climbed back down, sat with his back against the rock and hugged his knees to his chest. The sun had risen clear of the horizon, but the sky was staying a determined pink - if anything it was becoming redder.

He thought about the strange sky, the large dark sun, the odd moon.

"I'm not on Earth," he said, and gave a single barking laugh at the absurdity of just hearing the words spoken out loud. "I'm not on Earth," he said again, but it didn't sound any more reasonable the second time than the first. He looked around, half-expecting someone to be there with whom he could share the joke.

Louie felt a growing sense of disorientation - a stumbling descent into panic. Everything was too large, and he felt himself shrinking and dwindling in the face of it. "No," he said quietly to himself. "No."

He concentrated on breathing, clenching and unclenching his fists, savouring the sharp stab of nail against palm, and slowly the feeling of helplessness began to recede. It didn't vanish by any means, but the respite gave Louie the chance to think clearly again and decide what he should do next - more as something to focus on rather than any expectation of a definite plan.

The first thing that came into his head was that he was going to need water soon. He wasn't thirsty yet, but Louie knew you could only survive without it for about three days, and his best guess was that he had another two days at the most to find something to drink.

He looked around, but the dusty plains offered little in the way of an easy solution. He sighed. It was tempting to just give up, to curl up in a ball and pretend that he was going to be rescued. Maybe he would be. As calmly as possible, he went over his options. They seemed, essentially, to come down to two:

He could do nothing and hope to be rescued.

He could do something and hope to be rescued.

In his mind he labelled the first option "certain death" and labelled the second option "slightly less certain death".

Louie looked around again, trying to remember everything he knew about finding water. To the south, fifty yards away, the land dipped a little and there seemed to be a faint green mixed in with the harsher reds and browns. He trotted over for a proper inspection. Closer up, the green disappeared, leaving no sign as to whether it had been really there at all. Still, it was definitely a dip - a long narrow trench that meandered through the plain for a short distance before vanishing. He walked to the centre and began to dig with his hands but, after a few inches, the loose grit gave way to a hard rocky layer that he could make no impression on, and all was as dry as dust.

Louie abandoned his attempt and looked towards the west, where the hills bulged up from the surrounding desert. Perhaps there would be water there, running off from the heights. If not, then at least he could climb to the top and have a look around. On the other hand, if rescue was a possibility, then shouldn't he stay where he was? Wasn't this the most likely place for help to arrive?

Louie thought for a while, and then made his way back to the hollow where he had first woken up. He began to build a tall, fairly wide cairn on a patch of empty ground, gathering flat slabs of stone and slowly constructing a steep pyramid of rock, layer by layer. The raw material was strewn all over the plain and it didn't take as long as he'd expected before he'd created a sizeable mound. Finally he added a line of rocks in the sand, pointing towards the hills, and one hill in particular that looked a little higher than the others.

Louie began to go through his pockets. He didn't have much - in his jeans were a few coins and his keys dangling from a Mario-shaped fob, and in one of his fleece pockets was a plastic bag left over from a packed lunch. He finally found what he was looking for in the other pocket - a small unused notebook and a cheap black biro. He lay down on the ground and wrote a short note in neat block capitals, taking care to avoid his normal ragged scrawl.

My name is Louie Gage. I live at ------, London, England. I'm fourteen years old. I arrived here a day ago. I'm setting off for the hills in the west to look for water. I'm going in the direction of the line of stones.

Then he added the date, tore the sheet from the notebook, folded it and placed it carefully under one of the rocks at the top of the cairn. He hunted around on the ground and selected a pale, soft piece of stone, and used it to draw an X where he'd hidden the paper. The stone wasn't as good as chalk, but it was fairly effective nevertheless.

Louie went over to a large boulder. One face was fairly flat and, using his chalk substitute, he wrote the date and his name, and then added Ray's underneath. He looked at the clumsy lettering for a while and then added the names of the others from the bus, one by one. By the time he'd finished, the rock looked like a gravestone. He wondered if he would ever come back here again.

Louie packed the chalk into the pocket of his fleece and set off for the west, leaving a broken trail of dusty footprints behind him as he went.

The hills had looked fairly close but, after an hour's walking, they seemed no nearer and the cairn had disappeared from sight behind him. Every now and then Louie would gather a few large stones and mark his path. The ground was firm beneath the thin layer of grit and sand, and he kept up a good pace.

Patches of green, like the one he'd seen before, were occasionally visible ahead or to the side, but they would invariably fade back into the desert as he drew near. In the middle of what had looked like a particularly rich area, he picked up several rocks and inspected them closely, but no matter how hard he stared at them and squinted into the cracks, he could see nothing to account for the faint green tinge he'd seen on his approach. He scraped a finger across a surface and then examined it, hoping to have trapped something under the nail. Nothing.

As he walked, he found himself thinking about Ray. Just simple things for the most part - a shared joke, a trip to the cinema - but he couldn't stop images from the bus from creeping in, of his friend screaming and dying. Seeking a distraction from both the pain of the memories and his growing thirst, he turned his mind once more to trying to figure out where he was and what had happened to him.

Could he be on Earth? It didn't seem likely, but then the alternative was pretty unlikely too. Louie looked at the knuckles of the hand that he'd grazed when he'd fallen in the bus. The scrape was still fresh. If he was still on Earth then in a very short space of time the sky had gone red, the sun had grown and the moon had turned into something resembling a rock-bun painted by a small child with a very boring set of felt-tips. He wondered for a moment whether whatever had happened on the bus had done this to the whole world, but that didn't make any sense either. This landscape was old - it had been formed over millennia, not hours.

He was not on Earth.

What about Mars? Mars was red, so it had that going for it. He was also pretty sure that it had an odd-shaped moon. However Louie was fairly sure that Mars didn't have any air - or at least not enough to breathe. He also had a feeling that Mars had much less gravity than Earth, but as far as he could tell the gravity here was about the same. So - Mars? In or out? Louie knew one star constellation by sight - the plough - and he had no idea whether you should be able to see that from Mars or not. He would look for it tonight.

Okay, next question - how had he got here? That, he decided, was easy. Whatever had happened on the coach had somehow transported him here, and he was fairly sure that it had happened pretty much instantly - at least from his point of view, since he still had that graze on his knuckles. He was also pretty sure CERN must have had something to do with it.

He wondered for a moment whether they might have done it on purpose. He thought of Clara Lahr, the woman with the salt and pepper hair, and he thought of the terrible scenes on the bus. He kicked at a stone and watched it skitter away from him across the dusty plain. An accident, Louie decided.

Louie thought it very unlikely that he'd be able to figure out much else beyond that. How had he got here? CERN had zapped him here. By accident. End of story.

He reached the hills in the middle of the afternoon. They were rockier than he'd expected - huge, curving hummocks, like gigantic animals. The range gained height quickly, and it looked like a difficult climb.

He built a small cairn to mark the spot where he'd arrived, and looked to the north and south, along the base of the range, searching for some sign of open water. Nothing. He didn't think he'd ever been this thirsty in his life. He looked up at the summit. His original idea had been to wait until the following morning before tackling the ascent, but the possibility that he might be able to spot a source of water from the top was just too tempting.

The climb was not easy, and his first attempt almost ended in disaster. The hills were a mammoth jumble of smooth, steep-sided boulders, and initially Louie tried to make the ascent by navigating the narrow trenches that ran between them. The trouble was that he couldn't see where he was going. Worse, the channels were increasingly rubble-choked, and, after nearly breaking or twisting his ankle for the second time, Louie realised that this approach wasn't going to work. He rested for a while, massaging his foot, counting himself both lucky and stupid. He had just started to make his way back down to hunt for an easier route when an idea came to him. The trenches were narrow enough for him to shin his way to the top of one of the rocks, and from there he was able to look around. He saw that, with care, he should be able to find a path along the crests of the blocks rather than the valleys between them. It would involve some jumping across gaps, but it didn't look impossible. The main point was that he could - for the most part - see what was ahead and plan a route.

It was hard work nevertheless, and not without risks - one slip or a mistimed jump would send him tumbling several feet onto the rocks below, and he would be lucky to escape without serious injury. As he climbed, the sun slipped behind the hills and the sky began to darken as late afternoon gave way to early evening. Louie almost didn't notice - all his concentration was fastened on the task in front of him. The boulders shrank in size as he ascended, which made the jumps easier and less risky, but it also meant that there were fewer opportunities to just walk along the tops of them for extended periods - now it was just jump, step, pause, jump. It didn't take long for his legs to ache and his heart to race. It would have been easier and faster to let his momentum build and help him along, but he didn't dare risk a fall.

The crest arrived unexpectedly. He'd been concentrating on where to place his feet, and had just been beginning to grow concerned about the failing light when he found himself facing the setting sun. There was no higher to go - he'd made it. Now he looked out over the western plain, able to see it for the first time.

The view was not what he'd hoped for - it was almost a mirror of the desert he'd already trekked across. No trees or grass or animals, no standing water, no seas. Louie's heart sank.

The only novel feature was a cliff near the horizon, like a fracture running across the land. As he looked at it and considered how far he could see from this altitude, he realized that it must be very high - two or three thousand feet was his best guess.

He wondered how far away it was. Not that it really mattered - it looked impossible to climb even if he could think of any reason to try. Aside from that, there was nothing - just dust and rocks. Death by dehydration was beginning to look like a very real possibility. Actually, Louie thought, it was looking pretty much a certainty.

He sighed and stared back towards the east, to his arrival site. The only thing left that he could think of was to head back there and hope for a rescue while slowly dying of thirst. It seemed so unfair. Everything he'd done had just been a waste of time. His parents wouldn't even know what had happened to him, or where he was or how he had died. Tears pricked at his eyes, and Louie felt that if he started crying he might not be able to stop. He pinched the skin on the back of his hand as hard as he could, wincing at the pain, digging his nails in until he drew blood.

The sun now slipped behind the distant cliff. The top of the hills were fairly flat, and he scouted around for somewhere to settle down for the night. He chose a spot, kicked away some loose stones and tried to make himself comfortable.

He lay awake long after the sun had set, watching the strange constellations shift across the sky, vainly searching for the plough, and waiting for the moon to rise. One bright star, sitting low in the west, winked and flashed, and he had nearly fallen asleep when something about it began to bother him.

Why was it staying in one position when all the other stars near it had moved - swinging across the sky as the planet turned?

Louie sat up. The climb had been tiring and it took him a few minutes to understand what was going on.

The star wasn't a star and it wasn't in the sky - it was on top of the cliff.

It was a light.

Louie was wide awake in a moment. He stared at the distant spark, willing his eyes to resolve some detail that would tell him exactly what he was looking at, hoping for some proof that he hadn't made a mistake, dreading some sign that he had. Could it be a moon? What about some natural source - a crystal or something?

His thoughts went round and round. There was nothing to look at but the light, and his mind took that single point and created huge edifices of hopes and fears from it.

He forced himself to calm down, to stop speculating, and think about what he actually needed to do. The first priority, he realised, was to try and mark where it was so that he could find the same spot in the day. There was also the possibility that it might suddenly go out, so he worked quickly, hunting around the crest of the hills until he found a relatively flat rock about the size of a dining table. Carefully he drew a line with the chalk, lining it up with the light like the sites of a gun, so that he could look along it at the distant point.

Satisfied that he could do nothing else until the morning, Louie lay back down to rest, but the distant glow kept drawing his attention, as he wondered what strangeness it shone upon, and to what purpose. He was desperately tired, but his mind kept coming alive in fits and starts, like a badly-timed fireworks display.

Eventually, exhaustion overcame him, and Louie fell asleep in the middle of a thought, curled up like a comma.

He woke just before dawn, his mouth clogged and sticky with thirst. For a moment he worried that the light had been a dream, but his mark was still there. He ran to it and squinted along the line at the distant cliff. In the murky semi-darkness he could see no sign of where the light might have come from, nor of anything that might serve as a landmark. Maybe, thought Louie, when the sun rose there would be something. He looked behind him and could just see the edge of it beginning to climb above the eastern horizon.

The shadows of the surrounding rocks had begun to stretch westward when Louie had an idea. He faced along the chalk-line and carefully observed his shadow. It fell a little to the right - not much, but he reckoned that if straight forward was twelve o'clock, then the shadow was pointing at one o'clock. Now he had an approximate method of checking his direction. It wasn't perfect, and it would only work in the morning, but it was better than nothing

His next problem was going to be working out the exact direction he should take when he reached the plains. The morning sun was blocked by the hills and didn't reach there, so his shadow would be of no help. Eventually, as the day brightened a little, he spotted a large boulder that had rolled a little way out from the base. South of it, a smaller rock had done the same. If he drew a line from the far edge of the large stone to the near edge of the small one and set off at right angles to that, then he should be on roughly the right heading.

The climb seemed a little easier on this side of the hills and he was nearly at the bottom when he came to a sudden stop. There'd been a sudden coolness in the air passing his face, gone almost as soon as he noticed it. For a moment, Louie thought it had been his imagination, but then it came again. He couldn't be sure, but it had seemed to come from the left, so he moved cautiously in that direction.

He'd been making his way down a long, dusty saddle of rock - broad but steep-sided - and he now shuffled on all-fours to the edge. It was a good twenty feet to the bottom - a rubble-strewn alleyway, overhung on both sides - and climbing down wasn't an option. Up ahead, however, the alley narrowed as the two sides converged into a ragged V, and the climb there looked fairly straightforward, as a tumble of boulders and slabs had piled up at the choke-point, creating a rough slope.

A few minutes later, he reached the bottom with a new scrape on his arm, but otherwise in one piece, and he caught his breath while he looked around. The sky was now only visible as a meandering strip, and the overhanging rocks created long corridors of shade and shadow running away from him on either side. Above all else, Louie noticed the dampness in the air - a refreshing coolness that made his thirst more cloying than ever - and he began to move along the ravine to trace its source. He was growing more and more convinced that he was in a dried-up watercourse. He could see lines of sediment etched onto the passage walls, marking the water's high point, and the bed was gouged with potholes, each filled with a clutch of pebbles and stones. But the potholes were bone-dry, and he began to worry that the water was long gone, and all that he was sensing in the air were a few lingering traces. Louie was just beginning to wonder whether he should start digging a well when he reached a looping bend in the channel. Rounding it, he could see where the rock making up the outer wall of the curve had been gouged and undermined by the now-absent river.

Then he saw the cave - a wide, low-roofed slit, like a barely-open eye, and no more than half his height - and he made his way quickly towards it and peered in, shivering in the palpable chill rising from inside.

At first he could see little, but slowly his eyes grew accustomed enough to the dim light for a few rough details to emerge. The passage was a fairly smooth slope of bare rock, but strewn with chunks and drifts of debris. Just before it faded away into darkness, Louie got the impression that the cave was gaining in height, as the roof drew away from the floor, although both were still heading down. Louie slipped inside and shuffled his way forward until the ceiling was high enough to allow him to stand almost upright in a crab-like stoop. In truth, he wouldn't have tried to stand fully upright even if he had been able. The ground was uncertain - either slightly slick bare rock, or a jumble of loose rubble - and the last thing he wanted was to end up tumbling forward into the darkness.

The light behind him was comforting, but he was still essentially blind. Slowly, however, he began to catch glints and shimmers from the void below, and realised that he was looking at water. With all caution forgotten, he quickly clambered downwards until, suddenly, he found himself slipping out of control and, a moment later, he was plunged into an icy pool. He rose to the surface, disorientated and gasping with the shock of both the cold and the suddenness of his immersion. He had no idea which way he was facing and, for a moment, he felt a wave of panic, lost and weighed down by his clothes and shoes. Then he glimpsed the light from outside, dim and seemingly miles away. Of the cave mouth itself he could see nothing, hidden as it was by the uneven course of the passage. Nevertheless, he gratefully splashed and scrambled towards the faint glow, and soon felt rock beneath his feet, and a moment later he hauled himself out of the water and back onto dry rock.

He crouched there, his knees drawn up to his chest, shivering uncontrollably, his teeth chattering manically, and his icy, sodden clothes clinging to his body. "I only wanted a drink," he said to the darkness, before kneeling down near the pool's edge, and scooping up mouthfuls of the frigid water, resting whenever his teeth began to ache too much.

Finally satisfied, he gratefully crawled back up the tunnel, shuffling to the side where there was better purchase. He emerged into the light again with a sigh of relief and stripped off his freezing clothes before laying them out to dry in a strip of sunlight. Then, wearing only his underpants, he jumped around and rubbed his arms to warm up.

When his shivering was finally under control, he began to wonder about what to do next. As far as he could see, there was no reason to change his basic plan - to head towards the cliff and the light - nor any reason to delay. What he would like would be some way to carry water with him.

After a moment's thought, Louie went and retrieved the plastic bag that he'd found in his fleece. It was full of small holes and tears and, if he'd tried to fill it with water, it would have been empty in seconds, but that wasn't his plan. Instead, he went and grabbed his t-shirt from where it was drying, and stuffed it into the bag before making his way back to the cave. From there, he retraced his route down to the pool's edge. Now that he was no longer shivering and the pool was still again, the darkness and silence pressed in on him with unsettling solidity, with only the occasional ripple of dim light or a stealthy drip of water to break the oppressive weight of it. Louie shivered, and told himself it was the chill in the air before taking another long drink. Then he dunked the t-shirt in the water until it was drenched, and then shoved it back into the bag. Somewhere, far beyond any hope of sight, on the other side of the pool, there was a clatter and splash of some minor shift of rubble. Or at least so Louie hoped. He had wondered occasionally if there might be any wild animals around. It hadn't seemed very likely in the barren wastes he had travelled through up until now but, down here, it was a much more uncomfortable thought. He made his way rather too quickly back to the entrance.

He took a few minutes to catch his breath, and then dressed in his rather clammy clothes - minus the t-shirt - and then made his way back along the gulley until he could climb up onto the crest above. There, he took a few minutes to make a cross with his chalk, and then he piled up a few loose slabs to make a shallow pyramid. He looked back at the top of the hills and did his best to remember the view. If the cliff turned out to be a waste of time, then he wanted to be able to find his way back to water.

Once done, he resumed his descent to the desert floor, and soon stepped off from the last of the rocks and strolled out towards the two stones he'd seen from the peak. He looked out across the plain. The cliff had dropped behind the horizon as he'd descended, and the only thing he could see was an apparently unending landscape of barren earth stretching away from him, seemingly forever. The bag with the t-shirt was hanging over his shoulder, and a steady drip-drip of water was oozing from it and running down his back. He lifted it above his head and caught the trickle in his mouth rather than let it go to waste, and then checked his direction. There were still several hours of daylight left. With no reason to wait, Louie headed out onto the open plain and began the long trek towards the cliffs and the light.

He rested in the late afternoon, but was reluctant to delay his journey more than absolutely necessary. Apart from anything else, now that he was no longer thirsty, his hunger was becoming intense. Louie couldn't recall ever going without food for even a day, let alone two. The cliff still seemed to be hidden but, as evening fell, a bright star appeared just above the horizon ahead - a star that, this close, was clearly not a star at all. It was the light. He'd made it.

Louie picked up his pace and raced on through the darkness.

As the night gave way to a dim pre-dawn, the cliff materialised out of the gloom. At first it seemed more like a ghost than a real thing, and Louie sensed rather than saw it, but slowly it became a distinct, solid shape.

It was the most intimidating thing Louie had ever seen. It wasn't the height - he was fairly sure the Alps had been taller - it was the suddenness of it rising straight up from the desert floor, and the width, stretching out of sight to the north and south. Any notion Louie had of climbing it was very quickly dropped.

The light on top must be near the edge to still be visible this close. Not that Louie really needed it, since a long line ran down the face of the cliff like an arrow. As he drew closer, the line resolved itself into a wide pipe, dumping something onto the plain, and a large mound was piling up against the cliff face.

Louie walked on - slower now, and wondering what he ought to do next. The mound didn't look very climbable, and anyway the pipe seemed to stop someway above it. Then a second pipe became visible - thinner than the first and a mile to the left, and running all the way to the bottom. He headed towards that.

He reached it around midday. This close up, the cliff was unnerving to look at, towering over him in a dizzying ascent. The pipe, a dull metal tube a few feet across, went straight into the ground, and was anchored to it by a wide base. As Louie approached, he could hear a low thrumming sound that got louder the nearer he came. Closer still, it became a deep roaring vibration that he felt through his feet. He climbed onto the base and laid a hand on the pipe, feeling a low throb against his palm. Louie held his ear against it and heard the rush and flow of moving liquid.

He looked at the mound piling up below the larger pipe. The furthest edges of the skirt were only a few hundred yards away, and the whole thing seemed to be a loose jumble of broken rocks and debris. He watched it for a while as small areas slid and shifted, spilling down the sides, rattling and chinking. One rounded slab came down on its edge like a misshapen wheel, faster and faster. At the bottom, it didn't stop but skipped off across the plain before finally toppling over some distance out. It all seemed dangerously unstable and he was relieved that there seemed to be little point in trying to climb it.

Louie turned his attention back towards his current location. The base he stood on was raised a little above the surrounding plain, and he searched it carefully for any openings or controls. The only thing he could find was a faint circular groove that might indicate some sort of panel, but he could see no way to open it.

Louie dropped the bag containing the still-damp t-shirt and examined the pipe, but found little that was helpful. It wasn't entirely featureless - two thin rods ran up it on either side, and every few yards a brace secured these to the main body. If the gap between the rods and pipe had been a little wider, Louie might have contemplated trying to climb up, using the braces like the rungs of a ladder, but it was far too narrow for his feet. Besides, the gap between each brace was further than he could reach. A few cautious experiments showed that climbing would be virtually impossible, even if the distance to the top hadn't been quite so far.

Louie walked back a few paces and squinted upwards.

"Hello," he shouted. His voice seemed pitifully quiet when set against the distant summit of the cliff. Louie decided to find a suitable stone to bash against the pipe. Maybe he could attract attention that way.

There was a sudden roaring sound, and Louie jumped and gave an involuntary cry of shock. The roar grew and grew in volume, and then debris started pouring out of the mouth of the large pipe, clattering and thundering onto the mound below. He watched for a few minutes, waiting for his heart to stop pounding. Eventually, the tumult of rubble slowed and died, and soon only a few minor landslips and a cloud of dust showed that anything had happened.

He turned away, looked back to the top of the cliff and nearly jumped out of his skin. He staggered backwards and fell off the metal base onto the ground below.

Louie was no longer alone - a watcher was clinging to the pipe and staring down at him through a strange lop-sided eye. Louie swallowed and stared back.

The newcomer was a rough sphere about the size of a big dog, made of dull brown and black metal plates. The 'eye' that was watching Louie - a large cylinder holding a constellation of lenses - was attached to one of the plates. As Louie watched, the cylinder turned with an audible click, rotating to a new orientation.

Attached to another plate was a box-like object that served as the hub for a collection of a dozen or so odd appendages. Most of these were articulated limbs of various widths and lengths, but one was a rather alarming tentacle that flicked and moved constantly. Some of the attachments were currently employed in holding on to the pipe.

Taken as a whole, it looked like a cross between a tank, a spider, and a large beach-ball, with a bit of octopus thrown in. Louie wondered whether he was looking at a robot or something wearing some kind of suit. Or maybe whatever it was just looked like that, suit or no suit.

The thing was several feet above him, holding onto the rods that ran down the side of the pipe using four of its appendages. Louie stood up. "Hello?" he said.

"qb lbh erdhver rzretrapl nffvfgnapr," said the thing.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand," said Louie. He pointed at his ear and then shrugged to try and convey his meaning. The thing continued to stare at him.

"qb lbh erdhver rzretrapl nffvfgnapr," it said again after a short pause.

"I'm sorry..."

"qb lbh erdhver rzretrapl nffvfgnapr."

Louie pointed to himself and then at the top of the cliff. "I want to go up there."

"qb lbh erdhver rzretrapl nffvfgnapr."

"No, I..."

"qb lbh erdhver rzretrapl nffvfgnapr."

"Yes, erdver reztrap nerfnaper," said Louie, in a vague approximation of whatever it was the thing was saying, "but..."

The thing jumped from the pipe and landed on the platform just in front of Louie with a loud clang. The attachments it had been using to hold onto the pipe apparently served as its legs as well. The next moment, the alarming tentacle whipped forward and wrapped itself around Louie's chest before he had a chance to react.

"v jvyy pneel lbh hc gb gur gbc," said the sphere.

Then it flexed the tentacle, lifting Louie clear of the ground with apparently no effort whatsoever, spun round and began to walk back to the pipe. When it reached it, it began climbing up, holding the struggling and terrified Louie to one side.

It was very quick - scuttling up the pipe rather than climbing. Flexible pincers at the end of each arm gripped and released the rods with a repetitive ticking sound, moving almost faster than Louie could see.

He was held firmly, but not painfully, and could breathe freely despite the grip of the tentacle. The ground was already some way below and getting further away with every passing second. They were already level with the top of the mound of rubble to the right, and would soon be level with the opening at the base of the larger pipe.

Higher and higher they went. There didn't seem any point in struggling now - rather the opposite - so Louie just held onto the tentacle and concentrated on breathing.

Like the rest of the thing, the tentacle was made of metal. The closely fitting rings that gave it its flexibility felt slick and cold in Louie's grip. He was becoming more and more convinced that what held him was a robot of some kind. There were narrow gaps between several of the plates that made up the main body and, between these, Louie glimpsed an internal structure of cables, wires and rods. It certainly didn't seem to be alive and, if it was a suit, whatever was wearing it would have to be very small.

Louie realised that he'd left the bag with his t-shirt behind, and he glanced down at the ground before very quickly looking up again. He tried not to think about what it would be like if the robot let go of him suddenly. The top of the cliff was already surprisingly close. They should reach it in just a few minutes. Louie could only wonder about what he would find at the top.

He looked out over the plain. From this high up, the view was incredible - a vast desert of sand and rock and hill laid out like a map, and coloured with swirling reds and browns and those odd patches of green. In the distance, he thought that he could see the hills he'd climbed. Looking at the horizon, he could even see the curve of the planet. Louie was surprised to find himself smiling.

Louie heard the rhythm of the robot's ascent slowing and, looking up, he saw that the summit was only a few seconds away. The pipe took a sharp turn and, as they reached it, the machine swung over the lip and round in a smooth motion, carried on for a few yards and then climbed off onto the ground. Louie was lowered and released. He had made it. He was at the top of the cliff.

A few hundred yards away, a cluster of buildings stood in front of a distant range of low hills. Some were large, square blocks, others were more complex structures, latticed with pipes and ducts. Louie had to admit that it all looked pretty ordinary. Apart from the pink sky, if someone had showed him a photo of it and told him that it was an oil refinery or something on Earth, he'd probably have believed them.

"sbyybj zr," said the robot.

It turned away and quickly moved off towards the buildings and Louie went after it. The place was silent and seemed deserted apart from his rescuer, who waited for him in the shadows under an overhead tangle of pipes. When Louie drew close, it turned and led him further in. Louie followed it along alleyways and around bends until they emerged onto the plain on the far side. There, set apart from the other structures, was a low six-sided building, sitting on a wide stone apron.

"fgnaqneq rzretrapl raivebazrag punzore," said the machine. Without ceremony, it scuttled off the way it had come, leaving Louie alone.

He got the distinct impression that the robot thought his arrival was a bloody nuisance. "Sorry - and thanks," he called after it, before turning back to the building where it had left him.

It didn't seem to fit with the rest of the place. The main complex had the used, beaten look of a factory, but this was like a bunker or a small army post. It was fairly low, flat sided and flat roofed, and painted off-white. On the sides that Louie could see, there was a green circle emblem with a wavy line running through it.

Jutting out from the main part of the bunker was a square annex with a door set into it. Not knowing what else to do, Louie went up to it and knocked. He waited a few minutes but there was no response. A large lever was set into one side, and he took hold of it and pulled. It lifted neatly, like the handle on a walk-in fridge, and Louie felt something unlock with a clunk and the door swung slowly towards him. The interior was in darkness.

"Hello?" he called. There was no answer.

He pulled the door further open to let in some light and peered inside. The faint smell that greeted him reminded him of the chemistry lab at school - partly medicinal, but with a sulphurous undertone as well as other, less identifiable, odours.

"Hello?" he said again. He stepped inside and let his eyes grow accustomed to the dimness. The short corridor ended in another door that stood open and he made his way towards it and peered into the main part of the building. There were no windows, but enough light reached in from outside to see a large chamber partially filled with a jumble of indistinct shapes.

He looked for a light switch. There was a small blank panel by the door and he cautiously touched it. A series of vertical tubes set into the six corners of the room began to glow softly, and the jumble resolved itself into a series of scattered boxes of various sizes and shapes, as well as a number of odd machines. Along one wall, a panel of screens and controls began to flicker into life.

Louie had thought that coming across civilisation would have made surviving less complicated, or at least involve a bit of ongoing assistance. He hadn't really expected a room filled with impenetrable devices, a stack of boxes, no help and no instructions. Louie walked further in, making his way cautiously towards the nearest of the machines.

By chance, it was one of the simplest - a large L-shaped box with a valve and a shallow cradle set into the arm. A fairly straightforward tap projected from the side. A large empty bottle nestled in the cradle.

Louie moved on.

The next machine was just odd - a wide round platform with a thick column rising from the centre. He tentatively touched the round base with his foot to no particular effect. Cautiously, he placed more weight on it, and finally stepped onto it with both feet. He wondered what would happen if he touched the pillar and was tempted to try, but in the end his wariness won out and he stepped off, leaving the column untouched.

The largest and most complicated looking of the machines was next. It was a wide, squat cylinder that came up to Louie's chest. Set into the top was a concave bowl, and attached to the sides were a series of smaller cylinders. A column was mounted above it on a series of braces, and was further connected to the main unit by a series of pipes and tubes. A panel, studded with controls, was mounted on the front.

The final device was a rectangular box. There was a large hole in the front. At the back of the hole was some kind of handle, and there was another smaller opening lower down, and that was it. Louie couldn't even begin to imagine what it was for.

What was going on? Why had the robot brought him here? He could only assume that this place was meant to help him in some way - which implied that these machines could help him too. He took another look around the room. On the other hand, for all he knew this place was just a store room, and the robot had just dumped him here to get him out of the way.

Louie turned his attention to the array of boxes. There were about two dozen of them, varying in size, but all made of the same rigid material. Each had writing on the sides - or what he assumed was writing. Clasps held them shut, and Louie unlatched the nearest - a box about the size of a small fridge - and opened it. Inside was an arrangement of cannisters, each one slotted into a cradle.

Louie went over to the machine with the recessed bowl where he examined the cylinders attached to the sides. They were about the right size for the canisters in the box. The tops had hinges and lifted easily, and he peered inside and saw that the bottom had a valve. Okay, he thought, so the contents of that box probably went inside this machine, but what for?

He opened further boxes and found further mysteries - glass rods like spaghetti; multi-coloured sponges; a black dust. One contained a batch of bottles the same size and shape as the empty bottle on the L-shaped device.

He hefted one out and onto the floor. There was a simple valve, and he pressed it in and let a few drops of the liquid trickle onto his fingers and lifted them to his mouth. The smell warned him just too late and he licked his fingers to find that they were coated with what tasted like petrol. He spat it out.

The other tanks in the same box all had an identical series of printed characters on their side, so he began to open other boxes of the same size. After two tries he found one whose contents at least smelled like water, and he took a cautious sip to check.

Louie looked around. He was becoming more and more convinced that this place was some kind of sanctuary, and could help him if he could only understand how to use it.

He carried the bottle of water over to the L-shaped machine, removed the empty tank, and slotted the full one in place. Louie had no idea what the machine actually did, and was tempted to just drink the water directly from the bottle. It seemed an awkward dilemma - was the water bad and the machine cleaned it, or was the water fine and machine bad?

Louie decided to try a couple of cautious mouthfuls from the device and then wait and see. He twisted the tap, and water flowed out. Louie caught some it in his palm and took a sip. It tasted fine, so he bent his head down, twisted the tap again, and took a short drink.

Then Louie took a look at the panels and screens that were set into one of the walls. He didn't want to press anything, and the displays were meaningless. One set of characters changed continuously, but apart from that it was a series of displays that were all incomprehensible.

He went back outside.

The main complex was ahead of him, the low hills behind. He was standing on a slight slope he realised - the land ran slowly downhill from the top of the cliff, so that the base of the hills was slightly below him, and the other buildings slightly above. He sat down with his back against the wall next to the door. It was now late afternoon. Evening was still a few hours off, but the sun was behind him and he sat in shadow. He watched the buildings for a while, looking for signs of movement, but all was still. Whatever the plant was designed for, it didn't appear to be doing it at the moment. Something dug into his side, and he felt in his pockets and pulled out the two stones he'd bought with him, as well as the bags and the pen. He nearly threw the stones away, but felt that as he'd carried them this far, he might as well keep them for now. He took them inside with the other things and placed them on top of one of the boxes. His stomach still felt okay, and he decided to risk it and have a proper drink. Maybe if he filled himself up with water he wouldn't feel so hungry.

The problem of finding something to eat was not resolved, although he felt the answer was close - probably to do with the large machine with the cylinders. He decided to go and try and find the robot or some other help, and see if he could work out how to get some food.

He walked up the shallow hill to the main set of buildings and began to search, listening out for any sounds, and calling out every now and then to attract attention.

He eventually found the robot by a pair of tall narrow containers, like over-sized scuba tanks. It seemed to be checking a series of pipes that either led in to or out of them. It rushed from pipe to pipe, tapping and knocking on each one, and occasionally giving one or other a tentative shake. Louie couldn't help but feel that it ought to calm down a bit, and in his head, he christened it the fuss-bot.

"Hey," he called to it. The fuss-bot paid no attention. Louie went closer. "Hey," he called again, a little louder this time.

The thing turned around, and Louie could have sworn that it sighed.

"I need your help," said Louie, pointing at himself and then at the robot. "I need food." He pointed at his mouth and then his stomach, and then back at the direction he had come from. "I can't work the machine."

Louie began to walk back the way he had come, beckoning the fuss-bot to come with him. The robot looked at the containers, and seemed to think about it for a moment before following.

Back in the bunker, Louie went over to the machine with the cylinders. "How do I make this work?" He pointed at the machine and shrugged his shoulders.

"lbh zhfg vafreg n trapneq," said the fuss-bot.

Louie went over to the boxes and began to drag a one of the canisters over to the machine. "Do I put these inside?" he asked.

"lbh zhfg vafreg n pneq svefg."

Louie opened the lid of one of the containers and tried to lift the canister to place it inside. The robot became agitated and used its tentacle to pull the canister from Louie's grasp. It placed it on the ground and then pointed to the machine with the two holes.

"hfr guvf gb perngr n pneq vs lbh qb abg unir bar."

Louie went over and inspected the larger hole. He pointed into it. "You want me to pull the handle?" he asked.

"vg jvyy perngr n pneq onfrq ba lbhe ahgevgvbany arrqf," said the fuss-bot.

Louie reached into the hole and took hold of the handle. He glanced at the fuss-bot to make sure that he hadn't done anything to worry it, and then pulled.

At that point, everything happened rather quickly. A series of clamps shot from the walls of the hole and slammed onto his hand and arm, locking it in place. A moment later, he was subjected to an unpleasant electric shock that seemed to have no intention of stopping. The good news was that he was soon distracted. The bad news was the distraction consisted of several very sharp thick needles being thrust into his arm. The pain was intense, and Louie screamed blue murder while trying as hard as he could to pull his arm free. It would not budge. At this point, a new sensation started to spread along his arm and flow into the rest of his body. Louie had thought that things couldn't get any more painful. Unfortunately he was mistaken, and he now found that, as well as the electric shock and the needles, he had been given a blood transfusion consisting of what he could only assume were angry wasps.

The fuss-bot, oblivious to the pleas, curses and insults that Louie was hurling at it, gave a contented little beep and left.

The process continued for nearly an hour. The electric shock remained consistent although Louie had to admit that the needles got a little easier to bear - especially when he could persuade himself to stay still, since any movement tended to lead to them grinding against bone. The angry wasps ebbed and flowed, sometimes mild, sometimes strong, never pleasant. Finally, after a brief intensification of pain as they gathered again in his trapped arm, they died away. It felt like a blessing from heaven. A few moments later, the needles and clamps retracted and Louie fell to the floor, nursing his sore and bleeding limb and sobbing with shock and exhaustion, shaking and helpless.

He was just beginning to recover when, twenty minutes later, the machine gave a low chime and something clattered into the lower hole. Louie looked in. A small square card of white plastic was sitting there. He looked at it for a few minutes before nervously reaching in and lifting it out. He looked over at the large machine - specifically at a narrow slot in the front - and went over to it. The card looked the right size. Louie pushed it in. The small screen on the front flickered into life, and then a series of a characters appeared in four distinct rows. Louie studied them carefully and then went and inspected the cylinders in the boxes.

It took him some time to find ones with matching characters. Eventually, he found three, but the fourth defeated him. Looking more closely at the display, he saw that the missing one was highlighted in a different colour. He checked the other boxes, and found the characters stencilled to the outside of the container holding the odd sponges.

He lugged the three cylinders back to the machine, opened some of the tubes and hefted them in before closing the lids. He filled a fourth tube with a couple of handfuls of the sponges. The machine vibrated and hummed. Louie watched. A thick liquid began to drip into the bowl from the section mounted above it. He sniffed it. A strong sweet yeasty smell filled his nose. He dipped a finger in and licked it. It tasted as though someone had mixed marmite with very sweet honey and shredded some strong fatty cheese into it for good luck. It seemed delicious. Louie scooped up as much as he could with his hand and began to shovel it into his mouth, leaning over the bowl and grunting with pleasure. After ten minutes of gluttony, he gave a satisfied burp. His stomach felt sore from the sudden rush of food after so long without, and he supposed he might have just poisoned himself, but Louie didn't care. More of the stuff was still dripping into the bowl. Louie pulled the card from the slot and the flow stopped.

He had food, he had water, he had shelter. He'd found a sanctuary. Louie dashed outside to find that the sun was beginning to set. He whooped and ran onto the plain, kicking up dust and sand in a wild dance.


Next Chapter - Waiting for the Man