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  This was not very nice.

  A pipil operator would, of course, be aware of this danger and would therefore be alert to the signs of imminent and fatal “brain strain”. The subject's face muscles would tense, the eyes would narrow and breathing would become forced and rapid. Easy to spot if the operator was paying full attention to the condition of his victim, but not so easy if he was distracted, not to say engrossed, in some other, possibly pleasurable activity. Doggerbat had to be quick but he also had to be damn careful. And adept. And he had been. And practice had made perfect. He hadn't lost a single victim yet whether during playtime or on one of the rarer occasions when he'd actually been using a pipil on Lysaars' orders. He really was good.

  Sadly, Renton was unaware of the exceptional level of Doggerbat's expertise and just how lucky he was to have such an experienced pipil handler at his disposal.

  Renton certainly didn't feel lucky at all. He felt bloody scared.

  And he felt progressively more scared as their route led them even further away from the realms of Spazum where there were some people about, and into Spazum's huge subterranean warehouse, where there were no people at all. Instead there were just vats, seemingly thousands of them, piled one upon another in rank after rank.

  Fear then rose to alarm when Doggerbat produced a roll of tape from his pocket and applied a great length of it across Renton's mouth. And matters failed to improve when more tape was then used to bind his hands behind his back. And then the whole scary procedure was repeated on Madeleine's pipilled form.

  And now the bound and gagged pair were moving through the warehouse to an area largely free of vats but littered instead with hoists and cranes. Through the centre of this area ran a huge curving channel, a giant “U” stamped into the floor of the warehouse. And at each end of this channel was the entrance to a tunnel, a dark and unadorned entrance. These were clearly workmanlike tunnels, not built to impress but just for a function.

  And Renton knew what this function was. This was the factory's goods inwards and goods outwards setup. The way it took in large loads of bulky raw materials and shipped out its countless vats of paint, its valuable finished products. Those tunnel openings led into a subterranean freight network, a vast matrix of underground roadways that ultimately found their way to Ranamavana's main import/export facility: its fine new spaceport. Under Ranamavana, countless numbers of unlovely, box-shaped barges plied their way backwards and forwards along these dark roadways, carrying all manner of goods and goodies between its factories and the spaceport. And Spazum's shipments in and out were both ideally suited to these heavy-duty cargo barges, barges that operated on the same technology used in Ranamavana's autocabs, the vehicles that had already provided Renton with such a stimulating start to his stay on this world.

  The barges were no more than large open boxes completely lacking in anything that might qualify as an interesting feature - like a control system. That aspect was taken care of by a subfunction of the spaceport's BIG computer, which looked after the navigation of all sub-freight traffic in the network. When you pressed a couple of buttons on a console in the Spazum warehouse, your loaded barge would slide away under BIG's direction to be slotted safely and surely into the flow of other barges beneath the city. And deliveries were similarly organised and manipulated by the spaceport's massive brain.

  Renton wasn't aware of all of these aspects of sub-freight logistics and their control, but he already had a fair idea that he and Madeleine were very soon going to have a more intimate knowledge of the system than they would welcome. They were probably going to become the first people ever to be shipped as cargo through the tunnels. He was correct.

  Madeleine was led to the leading box barge in a line of these vehicles that rested in the “U” shaped channel. It contained thirty-five identical cube-shaped vats, arranged five across and seven along, to fill the open box shape of the barge completely. The vats were the colour of ripe bananas. Thirty-four of them were sealed with similarly coloured square lids locked into place with a simple manual lever device. The thirty-fifth was open and contained a pile of scruffy looking blankets.

  Madeleine was helped into this vat by Doggerbat, and with some difficulty she curled up on the blankets. There was very little space in the vessel and her hands were still bound. Then the lid of the vat was slapped into place and locked tight. Renton could only imagine what her feelings must be: her brain screaming against her body's willingness to comply - and now in complete darkness.

  And what about his own situation? Well, it was hardly ideal. And he could certainly do without this control thing. Surely, he thought, it must be withdrawn soon. He wasn't, of course, aware of the unpleasant deadline aspect of pipil power, but he was becoming ever more aware of the signs of its impending arrival. He felt his face muscles tensed and stretched and there was a weird tightening in his head. And both sensations were becoming acutely disconcerting…

  Doggerbat spoke. 'She can breathe. There's a hole in the lid. Same with yours.'

  He was pointing to the second box barge whose thirty-five green vats were packed tight in together - in the same formation as their yellow counterparts. Thirty-four were lidded. One was open.

  'Well,' thought Renton, 'I hope he's as economical with his control thing as he is with his conversation.'

  The sensation in his head was now becoming more apparent by the second, and he realised that as well as tense face muscles he now had eyes that were closing to just slits. And his breathing was strange. And he was sweating. A lot. Perspiration, it appeared, was unaffected by pipiltry. His hands were now disgustingly clammy and his scalp prickled as beads of moisture oozed between his follicles. On top of everything else, his hair was now going to become horribly unkempt in that sticky, patchy sort of way that he really hated.

  And everything was going so slowly! Everything was taking an age. It felt like a lifetime before he was finally stepping into his own appointed vat and another lifetime before he had finally nestled down on his own set of rags.

  The inside of his head now felt really peculiar. Something was about to happen in there. He knew it. He tried to open his mouth to scream. But as the lid above him was clamped shut and he was plunged into darkness, the sensation in his head disappeared. Within a split second. And the urge to scream was gone. He had his brain back and he had his body back. Not that he could do much with either - except think of Mad - in the same scared-as-hell situation.

  18.

  Madeleine was definitely not enjoying herself. Despite her innate love of excitement and “intensity”, there were simply far too many aspects of her present situation that were just plain wrong.

  Embarking on an excursion to God knows where, and against her will, was certainly very wrong. But even worse was the manner - boxed up in a plastic container. She deeply resented being imprisoned in this way. And add to that the discomfort of being bound with tape, a slightly runny nose that was causing her to sniff continuously, and a half-on, half off, heavy floral jacket, which was annoyingly ruckled around her left boob, and the wrongs really mounted.

  And perhaps worse than all of these was the smell. It was predominantly a sweetish, resinish smell but overlaid with something much worse. And it appeared to emanate from the blankets she was lying on. Madeleine had never smelled anything quite like it before and never wanted to again. A little part of her mind even hoped that the threatened unremembering might extinguish the “print” of this pong.

  The blankets in Renton's green vat were equally odiferous. However, unlike Madeleine, Renton knew that he'd made the acquaintance of this smell somewhere before, but quite where, he just couldn't place. Then it came to him. It was tropical bat b.o. It really was a dreadful smell, and certainly not the smell one would have chosen as a travelling companion in a small plastic vat. How, in heaven's name, thought Renton, have some old warehouse blankets on Ranamavana got themselves mixed up with tropical bat niff? It was a mystery he never solved.

  Bat b.o. was probabl
y near the top of Renton's own list of what was wrong with his world. Discomfort, fear, anger and a little hurt pride were on the list as well. And of these, it had to be admitted, fear was at the very top.

  It was a fear that evolved, a fear that developed with the progress of his incarceration. For when the immediate fear of some sort of pipil-induced injury was dispelled, its place was taken by the fear blended with panic that comes with being bound and gagged. But Renton became used to this state of affairs really quite quickly, and soon the greater fear returned, the fear of the reason for their confinement. And then his barge moved off - to follow Madeleine's through the subterranean channels - and another fear moved centre stage. It was one born of his having to share a moving platform with a rather large tonnage of liquid filled vats, a deeply distressing, not to say terrifying, experience.

  These barges did not offer what, under any circumstances, could be called a refined performance. They were not equipped with state of the art engineering. No, instead they relied on primitive, bog-basic, take-it-how-you-find-it, autocab technology - at its most unpolished. It was rough and ready technology, good enough or just about good enough for the carriage of freight, but quite inadequate to cope with passengers - and with the tiresome sensitivities of passengers. The result was a method of transport, the description of which borrows heavily from a vocabulary of words such as lurching, veering, swerving and swaying. And to be an unauthorised user of this transport in the company of a heavy liquid cargo was to be scared shitless.

  At each lurch, at each sway, Renton could feel the enormous weight of the thirty-four other vats pressing mercilessly at the sides of his own passenger-vat. Its walls groaned. He could feel them distorting under the huge pressures being exerted. There were sharp screeching and duller grating noises as the filled vats moved first a couple of millimetres one way then a couple the other, their enormous mass straining to achieve some fundamental law of motion as the vehicle beneath them careered on its way - and then lurched and then swayed even more.

  And this terrifying behaviour of the barge seized Renton in a classic pincer movement. Indirectly it instilled a feeling of sheer fright into his brain through its effect on the cargo, and more directly it produced a nausea in his stomach. And the bat stink didn't help either. Renton therefore now had a fear so powerful that it blotted out all other fears. It was the fear of being crushed and at the same time choking on his own upswallow, trapped in his throat by the tape on his mouth.

  His body was covered in a film of sweat.

  The barge continued to race along, swaying between the walls of the tunnels for what seemed like forever. It was nightmare stuff. But more multi-sensory than most nightmares. He could taste the acid in his stomach. He could smell that dreadful bat niff. He could hear noises that threatened death by crushing at any second. And he could feel the pummelling of every bone and every muscle in his body as the dreadful vehicle tossed him around in its flight through the dark. And against the blacker darkness of his prison he could project every nightmare image you could imagine. And he did. He saw terror and anguish in all their dread forms.

  And still the mad ride continued.

  And continued.

  Renton knew he was going to die. He just knew it. He'd gone yards past the end of his tether, and all he could do was give up…

  Then he felt an almost imperceptible deceleration in the barge. So small, it barely caused a shift in the cargo.

  But he did think he'd felt something.

  And he had done.

  Madeleine's barge and his own had just entered the approaches to the underground belly of the spaceport where the BIG computer imposed a marginally more modest speed limit, something that was necessary to allow the oversized bricks to negotiate the tight turns in the spaceport warehouse.

  They were nearly “home”.

  Madeleine's banana racer led Renton's green machine into the vast openness that was the cargo hall of the spaceport, a giant version of Spazum's own, with rank upon rank of “U”-shaped handling channels off the main channelway. At number 17 of these, it swung neatly through 90° to leave the main drag. And within just seconds it had come to rest.

  Two seconds later Renton's own barge commenced the same manoeuvre into channel number 19. And one second after that there was a thundering collision as it failed the test imposed on its sister barge and rammed head on into the channel wall - just at its entrance. Wear and tear and too many years of service had loosened its already sloppy technology to the point where it just couldn't manage. And the result was inevitable. And the thud that accompanied the collision was the grandmother of all thuds. It easily submerged the grinding noise of thirty-five vats pressing themselves closer to the point of impact - and even the sharp popping noise as the lid on his own vat shot up in the air…

  The six vats directly behind Renton's own, decelerating at a rate infinitely greater than scheduled, had imposed a force that might have failed to crush his mostly empty vessel, but that did manage to distort its walls - to the point of lid popping. Renton's backside engaged the front wall of his vat at big-bruise speed, but it was now an open vat, no longer a prison.

  The lid landed in the centre of the other vats.

  Next, the barge retreated purposefully from the wall at the channel entrance, made a slight adjustment, and moved slowly into the handling channel and stopped. Even when something that the BIG computer instructed to happen ended in failure, it had the power to put things to rights, helped on this occasion by the virtual indestructibility of the errant barge. It could iron out little creases like this without any problem at all.

  And without anyone knowing.

  There was simply no one around to witness the failure or its correction. It was, after all, rare to see anyone in what was essentially an automatic handling environment. And there was certainly no one around today. No one to go to Renton's aid and no one to see his head emerge from his vat some twenty minutes after his little bump - some concussion of the bum, general shock, acute weariness and then nervousness having conspired together to delay his appearance by this generous time.

  And then, worst of all, no one to applaud him when, just a few minutes after that, he released himself from his bindings - by rubbing them on the rough edge of the vat.

  But he couldn't have everything. He was now tapeless, his experience with this horrible barge thing was over, he was alive - and he was free! And that was enough.

  He re-secured the lid on a still more or less square vat and then began to walk towards the barge of banana-coloured vats. Better see how his fellow traveller was getting on. See whether she'd flipped her lid or not.

  19.

  'Well, my friend, we'll soon discover whether you have a particularly large problem or whether you should merely be flogged for what you have done. Or should I say for what you have not done?'

  'But, Mr Lysaars sir,' whined Doggerbat, 'I didn't…'

  'Yes, yes, you didn't think it necessary to drug them for their little trip to the Ennovator. And you're sorry, you're very sorry. I assure you that you will be the sorriest you have ever been, Mr Doggerbat sir, if those two have managed to raise an alarm and have attracted someone's attention.'

  'There's never anyone around in the freight area,' said Doggerbat hesitantly. 'Even if they could make any noise, I can't see anybody being around there to hear them.'

  'You Doggerbat, can't see anything. That is why, Mr Doggerbat, you have stepped into this particular pile of number twos. You are blind and you are stupid, eh?'

  Lysaars scowled at Doggerbat and ended this less than fruitful exchange with an abrupt command. 'Remember, I'll do any talking.'

  They were approaching the end of a corridor, which led directly onto a walkway above the spaceport freight area. As soon as Lysaars had discovered that Doggerbat had relied upon tape rather than drugs to restrain their packaged prey, he had ordered a hover to get them to the spaceport as quickly as possible. On the way over he had divided his time between abusing Doggerb
at and his mother and contemplating the sort of disaster that could overtake all his hard work if the schmuck and the girl had been found.

  Renton had just arrived at the side of the barge with banana coloured cargo when he heard steps on the walkway. He glanced up and saw two figures approaching. They were hurrying. But at the same time they were very obviously searching for something. They would move twenty metres along the walkway, then stop to check on the warehouse floor. And then move on again.

  'It's them,' he said to himself. Then Renton remembered that light travels in straight lines, and that if he could see them, then physics would guarantee that they could see him. He dropped to the ground and scurried off to a nearby stack of packing cases. They announced that they contained “More Magic from Ebbedebben, the home of Great Garden Furniture”. But Renton didn't notice.

  The footsteps were now very close. They stopped and Renton heard Lysaars' voice. It was unmistakeable.

  'There they are. There's the yellow lot. And look, the green lot's there as well. Come on, you dolt. You may be in luck. There's no one around.'

  'Well, I did say…'

  'Shut up. Just get down there.'

  Renton investigated his immediate geography. If he stayed where he was he would certainly be able to hear what Lysaars and Doggerbat had to say and he would even be able to take a peek at them if they did anything on Madeleine's barge. He might not be in the best position if they found that his own vat was empty and they then started to look for him, but he'd have to worry about that if it came to it. He waited for their arrival.

  'Go and look at the green one. Check that the lid's still on. I'll look at this one.'

  Renton peered around the corner of his mound of magic garden furniture and saw Lysaars moving slowly along the barge. His head was moving from side to side as he scanned its cargo. And then his attention was caught by his helper.