The Final Nexus – Chapter Eight

The Final Nexus – Chapter Eight

-----------------------------------------------------

The next day was Saturday, so we didn’t have to get up quite so early. In fact Sam woke me up rather earlier than I would normally have got up on a Saturday: to him this was just another working day, and his body clock was telling him that he ought to be out of bed by now and on his way to breakfast.

“No, you haven’t,” I told him, sleepily. “It’s Saturday, so breakfast isn’t until eight o’clock.”

“What’s ‘Saturday’ mean?”

”It means it’s a rest day. Here we work for five days and then have two days to rest. So we haven‘t got to get up for at least another thirty minutes.”

“Oh. So what are we going to do for the next half hour?”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” came Declan’s voice from the other bed.

“I already have,” said Sam. “Let’s snuggle some more.”

And he wriggled up close to me and put an arm round me, and I didn’t mind that at all. Based on what he had said when we had been in his hideaway cupboard at the farm I half expected him to want to do more than cuddle, but perhaps he was inhibited by the presence of Declan, as he seemed perfectly content just to lie close to me.

Eventually we dragged ourselves out of bed and went to breakfast (and this was Sam’s first disappointment with his new world: somehow a roll and a cup of coffee didn’t match up to the eggs, sausages and bacon that constituted the normal breakfast in Amesbury), and after breakfast I showed him round the rest of the house. After that he wanted to make a start at learning Arvelan, so I asked Peter and Godfrey if they had any suggestions about books or other material that might be useful.

“No,” said Peter, “but I bet Rob and Erik can help.”

Robert and Erik were the last two members of the household. They were eight and nine respectively and so were thought to be too young to spend much time with – and definitely too young to join in with the sex games. But Robert hadn’t known any Arvelan at all until he was orphaned a year ago, and so Peter was sure he would have some books written for beginners. And so he did.

“I’ll lend them to you,” he told me when I went to ask if we could use them. “But you have to let me and Erik help to teach him. We always get left out of stuff, and this way you’ll have to let us join in for once.”

So they all put their heads together and came up with a plan: Erik and Rob would start him off, teaching him the Arvelan alphabet and how to count and tell the time in Arvelan, and everyone else would try to come up with lists of vocabulary based on various themes – food, travel, clothes and so on. Declan would help by providing a mental image of each item on the vocabulary lists. And I would provide translations into English if all else failed, though I wasn’t going to be around to do that after lunch because I had an appointment with Aarnist. At first Declan wanted to come with me, but I didn’t think that was a good idea.

“We know Irfan’s going to be there this time,” I said, “and we don’t want him rumbling you if it can be avoided, because you’re my only chance of getting away through another portal. As long as he doesn’t know about you he won’t do anything to counteract you – like stationing one of the Konjässiem with the scientists, for example. If he did that we’d never be able to escape. So I need you to stay out of sight while Irfan’s around.”

“Yes, but… I mean, last night I was able to nudge a bit to make sure Aarnist didn’t lock you up,” he said. “I didn’t have to do much because he was leaning towards trusting you anyway, but it might be different today if Irfan is there.”

“Yes, but you couldn’t do anything to help if he is,” I pointed out. “You’d just get yourself noticed, and that wouldn’t help either of us. I’ll be all right: Aarnist still needs me at the moment – and, like you said, he trusts me, more or less. You should stay here and teach Sam how to read Janet and John, or whatever it is, in Arvelan. I’ll be back for supper, I’m sure.”

Actually I wasn’t sure at all, but I didn’t see the point in bringing Declan to Irfan’s attention, and so I got on the bus alone to make my way back to Stonehenge. I was feeling nervous as I walked from the bus stop to the huts, and when I got to the door I felt more nervous still, because Irfan was there waiting for me.

“You look guilty,” he greeted me.

“You’re a Konjässi,” I said. “Everyone looks guilty to you.”

“That’s because everyone I see usually is guilty,” he replied. “You’d better come in.”

He took me to the interview room. Aarnist was already there getting the camera ready.

“Ah, good afternoon, Jacob,” he said. “You’re early. Good – let’s make a start. Sit down… Right, just tell us exactly what happened since you went through the portal. We’ll stop you if we have any questions along the way, and when you’ve finished we’ll ask you some more if there’s anything you haven’t covered. Just wait till the light comes on, and then start like you did last time with your name and so on. Ready? Go.”

So I told the camera who I was, though this time I gave my address as the Home in Sarutaale rather than the school in the capital. And then I told my story as completely and as accurately as I could, suppressing only the way in which Declan had immobilised the director and telegraph operator when we left the farm. Oh, and I didn’t bother telling them about what we had done on the train or what Sam and I had done in his basement hideaway, either – that was definitely none of their business. And obviously I omitted to mention that Sam had come back with us.

Afterwards they had quite a lot of questions about the Marxists’ level of technology, their military capability and so on, and I answered as best I could – though because I had no more wish to see the Arvelans attacking the Marxists than I did vice versa I made a point of saying that there was apparently a high level of co-operation between the various European states, including Russia, and that I thought that an attack on one country would probably bring the others in as well. Or, at least, that’s how I interpreted the director’s remark about the Europeans powers now working in ‘fraternal co-operation’ with each other.

The whole session took most of the afternoon, and when finally they ran out of questions Aarnist turned to Irfan.

“Any worries?” he asked.

“No,” relied Irfan, grudgingly. “As far as I could tell, every word of that was true. Maybe you were right – but I still think he’s not entirely to be trusted.”

“Oh, come on!” I said, doing my best to sound annoyed. “I came here freely and I’ve told you everything I could find out about that world, and that’s a lot better than the information you’d get from simply sending the probes in. I could easily have just gone straight back to the Home last night – after all, for all I knew you hadn’t even missed me. But instead I came here to tell you everything I knew. What more do you want?”

“You really wouldn’t like what I want,” said Irfan. “It’s true that this time you decided it was in your interest to come and talk to us, but if what you told us about your friend is true you didn’t have a lot of choice but to come back, did you?”

“Well, I could have brought Dec back but chosen to stay myself,” I pointed out. “They might not have been too happy about it, but I’d still have been there myself to answer their questions, and I think they’d have understood that I didn’t want to see my friend killed. And at least they’re not planning to ship me back as a slave to a place where I’ll be dead within a couple of weeks of arriving. Surely it would have been much more in my interest to take my chances with them, rather than with you?”

“So why did you come back, then?”

“Honestly? Because, although I think I could have made a life for myself there, I’d still prefer to be able to go home. That wouldn’t be possible from that world, but if I keep my part of the bargain and help you to identify Torth – and if you keep yours, of course – at least I have a chance of getting home from this one.”

I could see Irfan thinking about that.

“All right,” he said, finally. “That seems to be the truth, more or less. But I’ll be watching you, understand? Step out of line just once more and you’ll be under lock and key for the remainder of this operation, no matter how long it takes.”

So I was allowed to walk back out into the outside world, and very relieved I was about it, too. I had no doubt that Irfan meant what he said, which meant that we’d have to be very careful about choosing our next portal: probably I’d only get one more chance.

I explained this to Declan when I got back to the Home – I found him studying on his own in our room. Sam was apparently off somewhere learning Arvelan.

“Then perhaps it would be better to let some time go by,” he suggested. “If we let them open five or six more portals there’s got to be a possibility of them finding one where there’s a good chance of you being able to travel back to one of those other Nexus places you told me about. Obviously it would be better still if you could get back to your own world, but unless Aarnist is completely stupid that’s one portal they won’t reopen while you’re around.”

“Couldn’t you ‘persuade’ them to?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. There are five or six scientists there, plus the slaves – and we’d need them to be there to move the lintel-stones – and I don’t think I could deal with that number at once. And that’s assuming Aarnist and the other coppers aren’t there too, of course. It’s one thing to persuade them all to look the other way for five seconds while we slip through a portal that’s already open; it’s another thing altogether to get them to open a portal especially for us. And it won’t be enough just to go through it, because Aarnist will know where you’re heading and come after you the moment he finds out that you’ve gone.”

“Well, I don’t have to go back home: I could just head for Southampton and try to get on a cross-channel ferry. But I’m pretty sure I don’t have enough money for a ticket… no, you’re probably right – we’d do better to just nip through a different portal while they’re not looking. The problem is finding a good one.”

“Not really. That’s another reason for leaving it for a while – after they’ve done some basic exploration they’ll know a bit about each one, and I should be able to persuade the bald guy to tell me about them. Then we’ll know which one to choose.”

“If they leave them open.”

“True. But we’ll worry about that later.”

“Dec… you don’t have to come with me next time, you know. You’re safe here, and I don’t want to risk anything happening to you, like nearly happened this time.”

“I know. But I think I’ll chance it. After all, my life here isn’t exactly awash with excitement, is it? Maybe there’s a world out there that worships boys with wheels!”

“And maybe there’s one that worships nerdy Jews with glasses, but somehow I doubt it. Oh well… I think I’ll go and look for Sam. Thanks, Dec.”

I went upstairs to the twins’ room, but it was empty, so I went along the corridor to Godfrey’s room, and here I found Sam, though he wasn’t working on his Arvelan: instead he was playing video games with the twins, Godfrey and Peter. When I walked in he was watching Godfrey roundly thrashing Peter at some sort of martial arts game.

“Hi, Jake!” he greeted me. “I love these games things! They’re incredible!”

“Aren’t you supposed to be studying?” I asked.

“Well, yes, but… we sort of got distracted. But I’ve learned the alphabet and the numbers, and I can write my name now, so that’s a start. And Erik’s going to test me on it tomorrow. He says if I don’t get it right he’ll have to beat me.”

“You’d better get it right, then,” I said. “You can’t let a nine-year-old beat you. Have you had a go at this yet?”

“No, I’m still watching to see how the controls work. I’m going to play the winner of this game.”

The first time I’d used the console Godfrey had slaughtered me, and he duly slaughtered Sam, too, though Sam was still obviously enjoying himself.

“I’ll just have to practise,” said Sam, standing up and handing the controller to Clovis. “It can’t be that difficult.”

We stayed with the others until supper time, and after supper we went back to our room. I suggested to Declan that he try to understand what Sam and I were saying to each other by following our thoughts – “It’s good practice,” I added. “If you can communicate through thoughts you won’t find yourself too stuck next time you’re in a world where they don’t speak Arvelan.”

“I’ll try,” he said. “It’ll help if you both speak slowly and try not to let your minds wander away from what you’re talking about.”

“So,” I said to Sam, “have you really learned the alphabet and the numbers, or were you just saying that so I wouldn’t drag you away from the games?”

“No, I’ve learned them. I think. It was quite fun, really: Erik was pretending to be a real school-master and threatening to spank me if I made any mistakes. But he thinks I ought to go to school with him and Rob on Monday, because the school has proper machines to help you learn – I didn’t really understand it, but there’s a sort of machine that has voices inside, or something. Anyway, Erik says I’ll learn much faster if I use something like that.”

“He’s probably right,” I said. “But it’ll mean going to the little kids’ school, at least to start with. Do you think you could survive that?”

“I expect so. And once I’ve learned the basics I’ll be able to come to the older kids’ school with you and Dec, won’t I?”

“Ah… not exactly. See, Dec studies here – he has a tutor come in to help him.”

“Oh, right. Is that because getting to the school is too difficult in his chair?”

“Partly. And it’s partly because he’s special – he learns stuff that only his race studies. And as for me… I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be doing. Probably I ought to go to school, but I only got here during the school holidays and nobody’s told me yet what I’m supposed to be doing. But it’ll be boring staying here all day, and I’ll have to leave Dec in peace so that he can have his own lessons… so I suppose I probably will go to school with Godfrey, Peter and the twins. Especially as Dec reckons we should leave it for a while before going back to try to find another portal.”

“Another… why? What’s wrong with this place? Why do you want to go somewhere else – this world looks great to me!”

“There are things about this world that you don’t know. It certainly isn’t safe for me here, and probably it wouldn’t be safe for you to stay too long either. See, officially I’m still a slave, and since you haven’t got anyone to look after you or any means of supporting yourself they’d probably want to make you one, too. You’ll be all right if they think you have a proper address and so on, and as long as you’re staying here you should be okay. But it would be a lot safer if we can find another world. What I really want is to get back to the place I’ve been living for the last year and a half. You’d really like it there – it’s safe, the place where I live is really nice, and they even have space travel. I’ve even got a sort of friend there from another planet. He gave me this.”

I went and got my bracelet from my bag. I hadn’t been wearing it since I left the Elsass world because I didn’t want to risk losing it, and of course Kirk’s alert button wouldn’t work outside of that world either, but I was still carrying it with me.

“I think they must have made it specially, because only a human could wear this. Tammids don’t have wrists – they’re sort of like giant termites, or something.” And I went on to tell Sam about my trip to Kiruna.

“So you’ve actually been in a space-ship?” he said. “Then I definitely want to get to your world! I’ve got to try that!”

“Me, too!” put in Declan, which suggested that he was following the conversation successfully. Of course he could generally understand me because even when I was speaking English it was apparently possible for him to see a sort of simultaneous Arvelan translation in my head, as well as picking up visual images, such as my description of a Tammid.

“If we ever get back there I’ll certainly ask,” I promised them.

At bed-time I said that I would sleep with Declan that night. Sam seemed disappointed, but I said that it would be fairer if we rotated, since that way nobody would feel left out. And I was aware that Dec was all in favour of this idea – in fact I suppose it’s entirely possible that he put it into my head in the first place. Still, I didn’t think it was a bad idea at all, even though it meant that one night in three I would have to sleep on my own while Sam slept in Dec’s bed.

By Monday morning I had made up my mind to go to school, both because I wanted to know more about this country, and because (as I had told Sam) it would have got very boring just sitting around reading while everyone else was in school. And so I went with Peter, Godfrey and the twins to the secondary school a mile down the road. I explained to the school secretary that I normally lived in Laztaale but that I was staying in this area for the foreseeable future, gave her the phone number of the Home and said that if she needed any further information she should contact High Captain Aarnist, who was currently based at the monument known locally as the Cursed Circle. Flashing Aarnist’s name about seemed to do the trick, and I was soon officially on the books. I thought that back in England it would have taken weeks to cut through the bureaucracy, but here there was no such problem.

I said that my schooling had been a bit erratic recently and that I would be happy to start in a class below my age group, adding that I knew Peter Larsson, who I was sure could help me out with getting to know the school. And I was duly sent to join Peter’s class.

This was a much smaller school than the one I had belonged to in England – the Arvelans appeared to believe in small classes and small schools, as there were only twenty pupils in my new class and only five hundred in the entire school. And it didn’t take me too long to settle in, even though there were several subjects which I didn’t know very much about – history, in particular.

By the end of the first day I’d decided that I liked this school: the teachers seemed patient, the other kids were basically okay, even if some of them did make remarks about my glasses, and Peter went out of his way to be helpful whenever I found myself floundering. I hoped I wouldn’t have to stay here too long, but until a suitable portal presented itself I thought I would be happy enough here. And when I got back home I found that Sam felt much the same.

Dec and I had given him a letter of introduction explaining that he came from a small community in north-west Germany where they usually only spoke a local dialect (this was our explanation of English) but that he could get by in mainstream German. His parents, worried about the unrest between Germany and Arvel, had decided to get him out of the country and had therefore sent him to stay with his cousin (me) for a while until they could arrange to move to England permanently themselves. And it seemed to have worked perfectly.

“There’s a teacher who speaks German,” he told me, “so I was actually able to talk to someone. I told her that Rob and Erik had taught me the Arvelan alphabet and numbers, and she said that I should work on my own for a few days to build on that. And she showed me this amazing machine – it’s got a window, like Godfrey’s games machine, and some little padded things that go over your ears, and it talks to you In Arvelan and German.. And writing comes up on the window, and you read it aloud, and if it’s right a little bell rings and another word comes up, and if it’s wrong it makes a sort of clonking noise and then a voice comes on and reads it how it’s meant to sound. It’s really good!

“Anyway, Erik wants me to go and do a test to see what I learned today, so I’ll see you at supper.”

After supper I’d expected us to go back to our room, but instead Sam led me upstairs.

“After I’d done my test with Erik I went exploring,” he told me, “and guess what I found?”

“I give up,” I said.

“I’ll show you,” he said, carrying on up to the top floor. “If you go past the bedrooms you come to this door here. It looks like a cupboard, but it isn’t. Look!”

He opened the door, revealing that there was a ladder behind it.

“And if you go up – come on! – you come out here.”

‘Here’ was an attic. It was a bit dusty and there were a few cobwebs, but it had a proper floor and enough room to stand upright. There were some boxes, cases and a few items of old furniture at the far end, and Sam had already retrieved an old upright chair and put it in the middle of the floor.

“See?” he said. “We’ve got a new hideaway. We’ve got a light and a chair, and if you pull the ladder up nobody can interrupt us. If we clean it up a bit it’ll be perfect. What do you think?”

“I think you’re a genius,” I said. He was right: this would be a really good place to get away from everyone else once in a while – I mean, I liked the other boys a lot, but they were all in the habit of just walking into each other’s rooms without knocking, which would be highly embarrassing if you were doing anything you shouldn’t be.

We went back to the ground floor, found the cleaning cupboard, borrowed a broom and some dusters and spent the next hour or so sweeping and dusting and getting rid of the cobwebs. And then we thought we ought to check that the chair was strong enough to take both of us, so we pulled the ladder up and closed the hatch.

“We’d weigh a bit less if we took our clothes off, wouldn’t we?” commented Sam.

“I suppose we would,” I agreed.

And so we got undressed and sat down the way we had back in Sam’s basement in Amesbury. And the chair showed no sign of collapsing, though we agreed that it would still be better not to take the risk of adding the weight of our clothes.

“What we really need is an old mattress,” he said, resting his head on my shoulder. “There must be some in a place this big. We’ll have to nose around.”

“Or we could just ask,” I suggested. “If I say there’s a spring digging into me I expect the manager will replace my mattress, and then all we have to do is to watch and see what he does with the old one.”

“Good idea! Now, let’s see: last time I think we did this.” And he took hold of me and started to stroke me. “And you were doing it to me, too,” he prompted, and so I did. And it felt really, really good.

“Do you want to hear something funny?” he asked, after a few seconds of this. “You know how alike some of the Arvelan letters are – like ‘T’ is the same as ‘D’ but with an extra stroke? Well, I keep getting those two mixed up, and I’m not used to there being a separate letter for ‘TH’, either. So I didn’t pass Erik’s test. And so he spanked me. All right, it didn’t really hurt, but he says next time I mess it up he’s going to make me take all my clothes off and be spanked in front of everyone. And while he was spanking me his thing got hard – I could feel it, even through his clothes and mine. I don’t think those two are quite as innocent as Dec seems to think they are.”

“Serves you right for being a bad student,” I said, grinning at him. “How did you understand that bit about spanking you in public, though?”

“They mimed it – pretty well, actually. I got the message, anyway – I’ll make sure I don’t get it wrong again.”

“Pity,” I said. “It’d be funny watching you get spanked in the altogether.”

At that he grabbed hold of me and twisted sharply, and I had to apologise before he would let go.

“Some friend you are,” he said.

“I know you’d do exactly the same if it was me.”

“Well, maybe. Or I could do something much nicer – like this, for example.”

He started to rub it steadily.

“How does that feel?” he asked.

“It feels like this,” I said, and I started to do the same thing to him.

“Oh… that’s… special,” he breathed. “Please don’t stop.”

So I didn’t. I wasn’t going particularly fast, but it took very little time before he was writhing around.

“Do you want me to stop?” I asked.

“No! No, it’s... I’m almost… aaahhh!”

A couple of little jets of colourless liquid spurted from him, which I thought not bad at all, considering that he still had no hair. I held on until he told me it would be all right to let go, and then he leaned forward and kissed me gently.

“Thanks, Jake,” he said. “That was perfect. And now it’s your turn.”

And I have to say that ‘perfect’ was a pretty good description of what followed. Again, it didn’t take long, and the resulting eruption seemed to go on for ages – I thought that Stefan would be impressed: I could probably mark several Nexus Room doors now. And I decided that he and I were going to have to try this position as soon as we got back together, even if the results were a bit messy.

I actually didn’t feel guilty about him this time: I was sure he would understand that Sam was special, and that it was better for us both to have someone to be close to, rather than trying to survive alone. And of course I’d share the benefits – such as the discovery of this new position - with Stefan as soon as I could.

Sam kissed me once again and for a couple of minutes we sat hugging each other. Then we got up, cleaned up using one of the dusters, got dressed and went back to our room.

“I know what you’ve been doing,” Declan greeted me. “Was it good?”

“It was wonderful… can you really tell?”

“Oh, yes. You’re both sort of glowing.”

“You don’t mind, do you?” I asked, a little anxiously. “We weren’t trying to make you jealous or anything.”

“No, of course not. Though if you want to let me join in occasionally I won’t object.”

“I expect we can manage that. But in return I want you to keep Godfrey at bay for a week or so – he wants to inflict all the bad forfeits on Sam, and I don’t want him to just yet. I’m not sure how much Sam knows about sex, and I don’t want Godfrey going overboard and making him do anything too horrible until I’ve had a chance to find out what he knows and to prepare him a bit for what he doesn’t.”

“Fair enough – we won’t play cards for at least a week, then. And when we do I’ll hold Godfrey back a bit if he looks like overdoing it.”

The rest of the week went by without incident. I didn’t actually need to ask the manager for a replacement mattress: when I mentioned it to Declan he told me where the storeroom was, and then I was just able to go and help myself. And having a mattress in the attic made it even better. While we were borrowing the mattress we took a pillow and a couple of blankets to go with it: it wasn’t cold in the attic at all, because the insulation was in the form of padding topped by reflective sheeting fixed to the beams, rather than the traditional fluffy stuff under the attic floorboards that we used in my birth world, but having a couple of blankets meant that we could stay naked for a long time without getting even a little bit cold.

When we went up to the attic after supper on the Friday I asked Sam how much he knew about sex.

“I know what you have to do if you want to have a baby,” he told me. “And I know about… you know, rubbing it to make it feel nice. Why, is there something else I ought to know?”

“Well, there are some other things you can do,” I said. “Some of them are a bit surprising, so I thought perhaps I should tell you about them now, because otherwise it’ll come as a bit of a shock next time we play cards with Godfrey and the others.”

“Why? What sort of card games do you play?”

“Strip ones, but with forfeits. Godfrey chooses the forfeits, and he’ll want to shock you by giving you things to do that you’ve never done before… of course you don’t have to play if you don’t want to. Nobody is going to mind if you decide that you’d prefer to stay out of it.”

“No, I’d like to play – it sounds like fun!”

“Then you need to know about a couple of things. For example, you know it feels nice when I rub it for you, but it feels even better if I do this…”

I spent the next ten minutes or so teaching him everything I knew about oral sex, and he took to it with enormous enthusiasm; insisting on doing it to me to see if he’d understood the technique. And I have to say that he had understood it: he did an incredible job. When I said I was getting close he did pause long enough to ask if it would be safe to allow me to shoot in his mouth, but when I assured him that it was he got on with it with fervour undiminished. And although he didn’t have Stefan’s technique or his understanding of when to stop to prolong the experience, for a first effort it was extremely impressive. And when I returned the favour and took him all the way he said it had been the best feeling he’d ever had.

“So you won’t mind if we have to do that with an audience?” I asked.

“Not really, no – as long as everyone else has to do stuff, too. Of course, I’d prefer to keep it private, but then we can do it in private every time we come up here, can’t we?”

“I’m sure we can,” I said.

“Great!”

I decided that further lessons could wait: I was confident that I could persuade Declan to keep Godfrey from going beyond oral sex, at least with Sam, for our first game at least.

But something happened to postpone our cards for a while: when we woke up on the Saturday morning we found it had been snowing overnight, and obviously getting out in the garden for a snowball fight was more important than merely playing cards. Erik and Rob were able to join in with this, and even Dec could throw a mean snowball, provided that Sam or I made them for him. Snow-related activities kept us occupied for most of the weekend, although our attempt at building an igloo was entirely unsuccessful. It was fun trying, though.

The snow continued for most of the following week. It wasn’t enough to stop us from going to school, which the twins in particular said was a pity, but it did make break times more interesting. And by the following weekend Godfrey had caught a really bad cold and didn’t feel up to doing anything, so that was another weekend with no cards.

The snow had disappeared by the weekend after that, but by now it had been three weeks since we had returned from the Marxist world and I thought it would be a good idea to go and find out how much progress the scientists had made: maybe by now they had some promising portals for us to choose from. So after lunch on the Saturday I caught the bus up to the monument together with Declan, Sam and the twins.

We approached the circle carefully: one glimpse of a Konjässi and I’d have suggested that Sam take Declan off out of sight while I made enquiries on my own. Dec’s battery had arrived a couple of days after our return, so he was self-sufficient again in that respect, but I didn’t want a Konjässi getting too close a look at Sam either: I was sure it would immediately be apparent that he wasn’t from this world, and that would be sure to start a line of questions I didn’t want to get into.

But the only people in the circle were four of the scientists and a trio of slaves, so we simply made our way up to the control stone, where they were working, and said hello.

“Ah, Stone,” said Gordiss. “Come looking for another world to scout out for us, have you?”

“Well, I’d be happy to do that as long as Aarnist says I can,” I said, surprised that it should even be suggested. “Why, have you found one you want investigated?”

“There are two or three, but no, I wasn’t being serious. Though I understand you brought back some useful material from World Fourteen. No, for the moment we’re just using probes, though there might well be worlds out there where your language skills could be useful. I expect they’ll want to send you with a proper escort next time, though. We wouldn’t want you to get lost, would we?”

And that suggested that Irfan had been talking to him, as well as Aarnist: I didn’t think they’d let me go through any more portals unless I was escorted by a platoon of cops. Of course, Declan would probably be able to solve that problem…

“So what have you found since we last spoke?” asked Declan.

There was a moment’s silence, which I took to indicate that Declan was in the process of persuading Gordiss to tell us things he normally wouldn’t.

“Come over here,” said Gordiss, leading us to a trestle table that had been set up behind the control stone and turning on the computer that was sitting on it. “We’ve got ten portals open now… that is, openable, because some of them have been closed again. You’ll understand why in a moment. If we go around the circle from Arch One, World Two is the one you saw us open last time, where there’s nothing but grey dust. World Five is one where there is a very high radiation count – we think there was a nuclear war there. We closed that one again straight away. World Eight is the one where your friend Stone comes from – that one has to stay closed, by order of the High Captain.”

“Told you,” said Dec, quietly.

“World Twelve is the one where there’s a war going on – that one is closed, too,” continued Gordiss. “Fourteen is the one you went to, and we closed that one to stop the people in that world from finding it. In Sixteen there’s a temporary problem with the weather – at least, we hope it’s temporary: there’s a very strong wind, almost hurricane force. Our probe was destroyed within ten seconds. We’ve closed that one to let the weather settle.

“Nineteen is interesting: it has a proper civilisation like our own, with a full transport infrastructure including air travel.”

That sounded very hopeful: at the very least it sounded as though I should be able to get back to the Vosges in that world, provided I could get hold of some money.

“So it’s almost the same as the world I come from?” I asked.

“In a lot of ways, though we’ve sent a number of probes through, and it would seem that the primary language is German, not that gobbledegook they speak in your world.”

“Ah. I don’t suppose you have any images from the probes, do you?” I asked.

“Of course. Wait one moment…”

He fiddled with the computer, and after a few seconds a film began to play. At first it just showed fields passing below the camera, but then the probe had reached a town – Salisbury, I thought, judging from the quick glimpse I got of a tall spire. It headed on towards the town centre, and at one point it passed over a public building of some sort that was flying a flag.

“Stop!” I said. “Can you back up slowly for a few seconds? A bit more… yes, a couple more frames… right. Thanks – that’s what I thought.”

The flag was a swastika. It seemed probable that this was Stefan’s world, and that made it virtually useless for my purposes: even though I knew there was a portal between that world and Kerpia in the Vosges – or there would be, once the Kerpians got around to reopening it – the chances of a Jewish kid with no papers being able to get there were tiny, and they became even tinier if he was accompanied by a disabled boy with no papers, even if that boy was a Konjässi. I wasn’t going to risk my life on Declan’s ability to make people obey him, especially since he couldn’t speak German.

“I’d advise against going into that world,” I told Gordiss. “They have a very efficient military, and they don’t like foreigners.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll pass that on to Aarnist.”

He turned off the film and returned to his list of portals.

“World Twenty is the primitive society I told you about before,” he said. “There appears to be little or no technology, just a nomadic society with few inhabitants. Twenty-six is the Ice World where everything is frozen solid, and Twenty-Eight looks inhospitable, too: we can’t see a lot because it seems to be constantly night-time, but it’s very cold and we haven’t found any life. And that’s it. As you can see, most of the worlds we’ve seen so far aren’t all that useful in terms of obtaining advanced technology, though some of them could be exploited for mineral wealth, I imagine. But there are still another twenty to find – assuming that every arch goes somewhere – so there are sure to be some more advanced worlds out there somewhere. And of course we haven’t found the reptiles yet, either.”

I thought it possible that the radioactive world could have been the reptile world that Torth originally came from: we’d left that one in the midst of a nuclear war, after all. But it wasn’t the one he’d gone to, and that was the one Aarnist wanted to find.

None of the new worlds sounded as if it was any good to me, either: only Stefan’s world had the sort of transport links I needed to cross the Channel, and I certainly wasn’t going to risk going there. So we said “Thank you” to Gordiss, promised to check back in two or three weeks’ time, collected Sam and the twins and headed back to the bus stop.

“We’ll just have to wait a bit longer,” I said. “I just hope they don’t find the reptile world too quickly, because I really think going into that one and making demands would be a big mistake. If Aarnist does that we’ll probably all get shot.”

On the bus journey home I thought a bit about the new worlds Gordiss had found. It seemed strange to me that less than half of them were actually inhabited, and only three – mine, Stefan’s and the Marxists’ – had anything approaching a modern civilisation. From what we’d seen on the Hub computer, almost all of the worlds the Kerpians had discovered were inhabited – that’s why the discovery of the empty Green World, with its mineral wealth that was ripe for exploitation, had been such a big deal. So why were things different here? I suppose the scientists could just have happened to find all the uninhabited worlds first – and of course the one affected by radiation had almost certainly been inhabited, at least until recently. But perhaps the monument was called the Cursed Circle for a good reason: perhaps most of the worlds it led to were cursed.

And that brought me back to the origins of the monument: why exactly had the original builders stopped using it? I was starting to wonder if they’d opened a portal to something really bad, like a plague-infested world or one containing venomous or disease-carrying insects, or something like that. And if that was the case, there was a danger that sooner or later Gordiss and his colleagues would open a portal that would be far better left closed. I resolved that we would definitely have to get out of this world as soon as a suitable destination world became available – and this time we would have to make sure that they closed the portal after us. That way we would be safe if they did subsequently open the wrong portal.

On Sunday afternoon we finally got around to playing cards. Sam was amazed by Declan’s ability to guess what the cards were – we hadn’t explained in detail how the director and telegraph operator had been immobilised, and although he’d been told that Declan was of a different race to the rest of us, he hadn’t been aware of quite how different he was.

“I wish I could do that,” he said. “It’d be really useful – I’d never lose a game of cards again… hang on, is this how you won the game we played on the train?”

I translated this for Declan – Sam was still speaking English, though he could at least manage some basic phrases in Arvelan by now.

“No,” Declan replied. “After all, being able to see the cards doesn’t really help when you’re playing that sort of game, does it? If we’d been betting on the hands, of course, that would have been different. But that’s why we only play games of absolute chance when we’re playing for forfeits – that way I can’t cheat.”

We played a standard strip game to start with, and once the first person was naked Godfrey began dishing out forfeits to anyone who lost a hand having already lost all his clothes. I’m not sure whether Declan had actually spoken to him or if he was applying some sort of mental control, but today Godfrey was rather more restrained than he had been the first time we had played. He started out with some solo forfeits, then with manual ones on one another, and only after that did he move on to oral activities. By the time we stopped for supper Sam had been made to suck Declan and Godfrey, and he and I had been made to do each other at the same time. And it felt amazing: I knew that Declan was enhancing things for us, but that didn’t alter how incredible this felt.

To finish things off Godfrey fucked Peter. Sam was positively goggling at that, because it was completely new to him, but he didn’t say anything – at least, not right then. Once Godfrey had finished everyone got dressed, though Declan asked me to take him to the bathroom first: he could generally manage on his own, but he found it easier if someone helped him by supporting him as he moved from his chair to the throne.

“Sam enjoyed himself, in case you’re worrying,” he told me. “Obviously I helped things along as usual, but he was having a great time even before I did anything. He’s going to fit in perfectly here… yes, I know you’re not planning on staying, but it doesn’t look as if we’ll be able to leave just yet, does it?”

“I suppose not. But I want to be out of here before they find the Grey world, Dec: I really don’t want to have to go there surrounded by a lot of gun-waving coppers. I don’t think the Greys would like that at all.”

After supper Sam took me up to the attic

“Do you play that sort of game often?” he asked, once we were lying comfortably on the mattress.

“Yes, I think so. I haven’t been here that long myself, remember,” I said.

“Good, because it was magical – I don’t think I’ve ever felt like that. Obviously it’s nice when you and I do things up here, but somehow that was even better, and when I got excited at the end it seemed to go on for far longer than usual. I definitely want to do that again.”

“Me, too,” I admitted. “Some of the way we feel is down to Declan, though. He doesn’t just do mind-reading to see what card you’ve got – he can actually change the way you feel. His people are really quite dangerous, because they can force you to do things you don’t want to, too, although Dec isn’t exactly an average Konjässi… that’s what they’re called, by the way. I’ll get Dec to demonstrate later on. But it means he can make nice feelings into incredible ones, and when we play sex games he always tries to make everyone enjoy it as much as possible. That’s why the games are so much fun.”

“Oh. I was wondering about what Godfrey and Peter did at the end – I thought that it must have been really bad for Peter, but while you were taking Dec to the toilet I asked him, and he said it was wonderful… I had to use the dictionary to ask him the question, but ‘wonderful’ was definitely the way he described it. They both really like doing that. So I wondered… maybe you and I should try it?”

“Well… I don’t think so,” I said. “See, I have a proper boyfriend at home, and he’s the only person I’ve ever done that with. It wouldn’t feel right doing it with someone else.”

“Oh,” he said, and his disappointment was obvious. “But you might not see him again for ages – in fact you might never see him again at all, unless things change at the monument. And I’m sure he’d understand…”

“Maybe he would, but I still don’t think I should. But I’m sure Dec will do it with you if you ask him.”

“It wouldn’t be the same,” he said. “You know I really like Dec, but… well, you and me, it’s sort of special. You’re really the only person I’d want to do something like that with. Will you at least think about it? Please?”

I sighed. I’d managed to hold out against Nicky when he had come on to me in the police cell in Sélestat, but this was going to be a great deal harder. I hadn’t really known Nicky very well at the time, but by now I knew Sam a lot better, and I really liked him, too: he was bright, happy, enthusiastic and, above all, extremely attractive, what with those green eyes and the freckles and the big smile... If Stefan hadn’t existed I’d have said ‘yes’ like a shot. And he was right to say that I might never get back to either my birth world or to Elsass: as things stood I had a far better chance of getting shot by the Greys or being sent back to my death at the school in Laztaale.

“Please?” he said again.

“Well… all right, I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Great! Thanks, Jake!”

He hugged me and kissed me on the cheek, and I realised that my life had just become even more complicated…

---------------------------------------------------------------

So Jake's having fun, but really he's not getting any closer to finding a way home. And what effect is Sam going to have on Jake's relationship with Stefan?

You'll have to keep reading to find out, but if you want to make any comment about the way things are going you can do that by writing to me: gothmog@nyms.net is still the address to use for the next three weeks or so, and I'll make sure the new address appears at the end of next week's chapter (if I have it by then).

Copyright 2011: all rights reserved. Please do not reprint, repost or otherwise reproduce this or any part of it anywhere without my written permission.

David Clarke