Starlight Dreamer

Peter F. Hamilton

A short story published in New Worlds 4, edited by David Garnett (1994).

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The sky was washed with gold and crimson streaks when we walked into the glade, tall ivy-clad oaks around the perimeter dowsed in a pinkish hue from the sinking sun. Fuchsia and her sister fairies skimmed through the air, dragonfly wings blurring. Their sparkly contrails were twisted into impossible loops as they chased purple emperor butterflies around the foxglove spikes. The flock saw us, calling out happily in their high musical voices without interrupting their lightsome sport.

There were twelve of us hunting the elf prince. The Black Spitfires, we called ourselves, dressed in our black leather jackets and navy-blue jeans, heads crammed loosely into a variety of military-surplus helmets, optic-booster eyestrips wrapped round our faces. Trying to come over the part, major league lads out looking for trouble, rather than over-hyped teenagers lost in a power combat fantasy. We bristled with hardware; fhermo knives, Enfield magnetic barrel rifles, we’d even dared to take our treasured cache of laser-targeted Sony plasma pulse pistols out of their hiding place. I was loaded down with a dozen electronic modules clipped on to my webbing belt, readouts plumbed directly into my eyestrip. Half of the image pumped down my retinas was obscured by bright blue digital displays. The inertial compass coordinates were going crazy. Surprise surprise.

‘Hey, Fuchsia,’ Russel called. ‘Come here, my darling.’ He held out a gauntleted hand. There was nothing surplus about his gear; full anti-impact armour, with an energy dissipater web woven into the carbon titanium composite. The devil’s own space marine.

His visor was open, and he smiled a counterfeit smile as Fuchsia came to hover trustingly in front of him. She bobbed up and down in the air. As long as his forearm, she was so exquisitely beautiful, so fragile. I had holograms of the flock on my bedroom wall, taken that first day I saw them, over three summers ago, by far the loveliest of all the folk to wander out of the realm of the first forest.

‘Russel,’ Fuchsia trilled. ‘So silly, clad in iron furs, in sunlight time. Hot Russel, shed your silly furs.’

‘Where is she, Fuchsia?’ he purred.’ Where’s Kathy? Tell me, my darling.’

‘Not here. Not here.’ Fuchsia shot straight up, spinning round and round for the sheer joy of it. I could watch the fairies play all day; I would even put up with their teasing to do it.

Fuchsia arched over, and zoomed back into the middle of the glade to join her sisters. They started to giggle.

Russel snapped his visor down. ‘Take them out,’ he said.

And so we did. Because Russel was seventeen and our leader. And because the way he was freaked he would have turned his plasma pistol on anyone who disobeyed.

Ruby targeting-lasers raked the glade, followed by an incandescent horizontal rain of fizzing plasma pulses. Fairies screamed in bewildered terror as they were torn apart in mid-air. I saw one hit by an Enfield harpoon disintegrate into a plume of pink fog. They fell en masse, thudding to the ground, thin streamers of blood replacing their cometary sparkle.

It was the first time we had used our weapons, the waking smile of the beast within.

When it was finished Russel walked into the middle of the glade. Fuchsia had survived. Don’t ask me how. She was sitting on the shaggy emerald grass, with another fairy, Marigold, lying across her lap. Marigold was dead, but Fuchsia kept stroking her forehead. Like me, I suppose, she couldn’t believe what we had done.

‘Get up, get up’ she kept saying, tiny tears twinkling on her porcelain cheeks. ‘Lazy thing, we’ve the day left to play. Fly and sing, Marigold. Fly and sing.’ Fuchsia’s two right wings had been scorched off by a plasma pulse. The remaining two fluttered uselessly every few seconds, buzzing like a fly hitting a window pane.

She looked up when Russel’s shadow occluded her.

‘Tell me where Kathy is,’ he said.

‘Marigold won’t play any more. Lazy Marigold.’

Russel lifted his boot and stamped down hard.

We moved on deeper into the forest.

*

To be a Black Spitfire you had to live in the Makings, a govproject housing estate on the outskirts of Balford. It was a forty-year-old cluster of ground-coral domes set in a square kilometre of parkland, planted over a regressed district of twentieth-century houses. Our parents weren’t rich, most of them worked on regression teams, sweating away on the awkward dirty jobs that bitek and cydrones couldn’t quite handle. Switching the country back to its pastoral prime, shovelling up the filth left behind by previous generations.

There were other kids in Balford, but they couldn’t join the Black Spitfires, no way. They lived in the old houses preserved at the town’s heart, little grandee palaces of stone, brick and slate, where the winding streets are cobbled, and red telephone boxes stand on most corners. They didn’t have the attitude, with their flashy expensive day clubs, and their sports teams, and their themepark trips; every minute organized and taken care of. Mummy’s darlings, every one of them.

We roamed free, us Spitfires, our only obligation a fortnightly trip to the govschool for a didactic laser-memory imprint. I was focusing on science subjects, hoping to make university grade when I reached sixteen. Mr Talbot, our assessment officer, said I would do it easily, something in my neurone structure made me an ideal receptor subject, I could absorb the photobyte courses with very little dataloss. I was already twelve levels higher than the other Black Spitfires my age. The original impressionable youngster, Mr Talbot called me.

My grade meant I was in charge of our illegal equipment. OK, it wasn’t that illegal, a wonky clone vat, a programmable molecular filter we used to synthesize mild hallucinogens, unlicensed network receivers, and all the guns we dug up. But we thought it was pretty spicy stuff. It gave us something to congregate around, a kernel of identity.

Balford didn’t have anything else to offer us. A market town in an age when markets had ceased to have meaning, it had become a rural dormitory for professionals and govworkers, visually idyllic, and macro-boring. It sat in a broad rolling valley, surrounded by the south Devon forest.

England’s forests had been the first stage of regression after bitek made farming obsolete, and starships started to syphon off the surplus population to the colony worlds. The south Devon forest was ninety years old; oaks and ash mixed in with fifty other deciduous species. Traditional trees, yearning for what was. It extended northward from the coast, right up to Dartmoor, spreading east into Dorset, and west over to Bodmin Moor.

The trees began a hundred metres beyond the Makings. We had explored the paths and glades and pools and streams our whole lives. They had been put there for our entertainment; gloomy and mysterious in winter, bursting with life and colour in summer, more of a home than Balford had ever been.

We accepted what we found in there without question. Glimpses of the smaller forest folk accumulated until they lost any surprise. As we grew up, we would extend our territory a little deeper each year, seeing more and more of the forest community. The gnomes, pixies and fairies belonged there as much as we did.

Then in the spring of my fifteenth year, Prince Yannareth and his entourage came riding out of the first forest.

*

‘We heard the hinterland forest growing again, and came to see for ourselves as why this should be, after so long a barrenness,’ Sendiryki told me.

Sendiryki and I got to be good mates that summer. Both of us the same, in a way. Both of us the dreamer. Same dream even, that one of far off places. He was a typical elf, towering an easy thirty centimetres over me, and at one metre seventy-five I’m no slouch. Yet for all his size, he weighed nothing; he could race over a meadow without bending a single blade of grass. He wore a green and yellow tunic, as soft as deerskin, which made him near-invisible in the forest. He was young too (for an elf, anyway). But then they all looked like hundred-year-old teenagers.

‘How can you hear a forest growing?’ I asked. It was a sultry day in June, when the air was clotted with pollen from the wildflowers. We sat on the fringe of the forest, looking down on Balford, while bumble-bees droned between the honeysuckle and the hollyhocks.

‘The song it sings became a chorus to the melody of the first forest,’ Sendiryki said.

‘First forest, that’s where you live?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you came for a look at our forest?’

‘My prince is young, he has a restless tune singing in his blood.’

‘So do you,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘And so do you.’

‘Yeah, you’re right there. I want to join a scoutship after I qualify; explore the galaxy, discover terracompatible worlds.’

‘You mean worlds where you can live?’

‘Yes.’

‘Such a strong song, Michael. I envy you.’

‘When I make captain, I’ll take you along.’

‘To sail amongst the stars.’ There was a wistful tone in his voice. He rolled on to his back, and looked at the sky as if he’d never seen it before. ‘The stars above the first forest are not as yours. But we have our seas. They sing a long chorus of enchantment to me.’

‘Are you going to be a sailor, then?’

‘ Yes. I will build such a ship as the world has never seen before. And maybe one day you will sail with me, Michael. A voyage to end all voyages.’

‘I’d like that. Remind me to take you windsurfing some time.’

‘Windsurfing? I would like that?’

‘Yeah, you’ll like it.’

Tourists one day, and tourist guides the next. All of us. We had nosed around each other for the first few days, kings of strut. Spitfires venturing near the elven’s woodland camp, Yannareth’s entourage stealing up to the edge of the forest to look out at Balford. But contact, acceptance, that was down to Russel and the prince in the end.

One of my photobyte history courses incorporated images of old Cold War summits; leaders meeting on neutral territory, carefully diplomatic. That’s what it was like, the same softly softly quality. Testing and probing. They talked, then they sat down on boulders beside a stream, and started to smile, then Prince Yannareth laughed at something Russel said. After that, they were inseparable, you couldn’t forge a stronger friendship.

*

It was Sendiryki who taught me to ride a horse. I hate to admit it, but for sheer exhilaration it knocked my electrobike for six. He also showed me the strength in the water that flows from the first forest, scooping it up out of an icy stream in a shallow goblet made from the palest gold I’d ever seen.

‘A tirkrih,’ he said. ‘A seeing chalice. It has been in my family since the time of Ardwen.’ He recited a lilting incantation over it.

When I looked at the surface of the water, I could see a pallid reflection of autumn woodland wreathed in serpentine coils of fog. Some of the trees were shattered, broken spears lay on the ground.

‘Where is that?’

‘Another place, another age.’ He gave a sad smile. ‘Try again.’

I saw a misty glimpse of a palatial white-coral castle festooned in garlands of bright flowers, pennants flying from high turrets. Hundreds of elven rode across the greensward in festival. The sky was the clearest blue. ‘Your home?’ I asked. It was achingly beautiful.

‘The hall of Yannareth’s sire. And beyond that, lies the sea.’ There was that wistful tone again.

I took him home when my parents were out, and showed him how to use the home terminal. We spent hours accessing govcentral data cores, reviewing scoutship planet survey records. I made a mental note to load up a holowafer with images for him. He could take it back to Yannareth’s camp and look at all the bug eyes to his heart’s content.

We spent one day at the beach, Sendiryki’s first sight of the sea. I found him some pink and blue Bermuda shorts and a baggy T-shirt with a hologram of the horsehead nebula, and we left Balford at dawn, riding down the crumbling old tarmac road on my electrobike.

Rounding the last comer as we emerged from the south Devon forest was like a theatrical spectacle. The blue water suddenly there, stretching out for ever. Sendiryki clutched at me in something almost like panic. I heard what he heard then, the song that the waves and the gulls weave, the siren call, drawing us forward.

Plymouth had been almost completely regressed; apart from the resort club above the shore there were only a few old stone buildings, which served as museums. We walked over the rolling ground that had been a city, Sendiryki looking more lost than I had ever seen him.

‘Such decay,’ he said mournfully. ‘And you say it was occupied less than a century ago?’

‘Fifty years. But it’s meant to be this way,’ I said. The land around us was cockpit country, steep mounds covered in reedy grass, stubbled with small gorse bushes. ‘These used to be blocks of flats. The regression teams have various species of cloned macerator algae which they spray on all the old buildings; there’s one for glass, and one for concrete, another for brick. The skyscrapers wind up looking like foam sculptures. It takes a couple of years, but the whole structure eventually crumbles away into sand.’ We reached the top of a mound, and I stamped my foot on a bare patch of marly soil. ‘Of course, there’s an awful lot of junk immune to the algae. We come out here and dig sometimes. It’s amazing what you can find.’

‘Did your ancestors really hate this world so much that entire kingdoms abandoned it?’ Sendiryki asked.

‘Some of them did, I suppose. We were in a bad state around the time starflight was perfected, you see, pollution and population pressure had shot the environment to hell. There was a big Fresh Start movement; you know, cut free from the mistakes of the past, that kind of thing.’

‘I would not enjoy a land where such turmoil lasted for centuries, yet you rejoice in it. How strange a song men sing. Why with all the powers at your command did you not heal your own world?’

‘We have now, more or less. Population was one of the biggest problems. And the stars were an easy solution. A lot of transportees were in voluntaries: dole conscripts, criminals, anti-gov protesters.’ I didn’t tell him about the weapons cache we’d found, digging in an old office block. Russel said it was probably left behind by an anti-expat group. The Sony pistols were less than thirty years old. Not everyone went peacefully. ‘England’s population is down to eight million now. Govhousing says that’s just about perfect for us.’

‘Millions!’ Sendiryki exclaimed in bemusement. ‘So few!’

‘It means we’ ve got room to grow the forests again,’ I pointed out, laughing as we ran down the slope together.

Sendiryki did get to windsurf after all. I hired us a couple of boards from the club, and spent the afternoon teaching him in one of the empty coves further down the shore. Talk about a duck to water. I wound up paying an overdue penalty. He just wouldn’t get off.

*

Kathy arrived at the start of August, the daughter of a regression team supervisor who moved into the Makings. We didn’t have girls in the Black Spitfires. Oh, we went out with Makings girls, kissed them when we went on trips to the beach, spied on them sunbathing topless. But they weren’t Spitfires. Not before Kathy.

She was sixteen, with hair so fair it was almost white. Her legs were as long as any elf s, and her smile shamed the sun. The first time I saw her I thought she had come from the first forest; she was unearthly, divine.

I fell in love with her. All the Black Spitfires fancied her, but that was just puerile adolescent lust on their part, in my case it was the real thing.

I never stood a chance. Too young. Besides, she was Russel’s. He made that quite clear from the start, and for some unfathomable reason she responded in kind. But I didn’t stop loving her just because of him.

Sendiryki was full of sympathy, if a little short on understanding. ‘What of your plans to explore the night void?’ he said. ‘Would she be able to travel with you in your metal starvoyager?’

“That’s years away,’ I protested.

He grinned. ‘Such a shallow song, Michael. Is your love so thin, then, that it would not last those years?’

‘Of course it would last!’

He sang me a song of noble lovers torn apart by some war, or black witchery, or cataclysm - something bloody morbid, anyway - how they didn’t get together again for centuries, and how the reward for all that faithfulness came in the elf version of heaven. ‘Now that is a love you should aspire to, Michael.’

Like I said, short on understanding.

The only time I could talk to Kathy alone was when we all trooped along to the govschool for a laser-imprint session. Russel didn’t go, he had been playing truant for seven months, saying he knew all he needed to to work on a regression team. I don’t suppose it occurred to him that regression was nearly over, that without a job he would be in line for involuntary transportation.

I told her of my giddy dreams as we walked through Balford’s stylish Victorian streets, the future I’d mapped out for myself amongst the constellations. The words tumbling out in a frenzied, probably incoherent, gush, so eager was I to impress her. She would nod at appropriate moments, in turn telling me how she intended to qualify as a bitek designer. Neither of us made any mention of how this would be compatible with Russel’s simplistic idea of the future.

I never did understand the attraction she felt for him. Russel was a dead end, a recidivist stuffed full of bravado. Strong and charismatic enough to lead a bunch of gullible teenagers, but that was the sum of him. I even started questioning the point of the Black Spitfires, it was beginning to seem like playacting to me. A mockery of true rebellion. I didn’t want to fight govcentral; govcentral built and operated scoutships.

The two of us were ambling back from govschool one evening at the end of August, when Brendan made a pass at Kathy. He was standing behind the flaky brick wall that ran around the town’s compact park. A tall, slender twenty-year-old wearing a dark trench coat and matching trilby; his skin was so white you’d think he was an albino. I couldn’t see his eyes, they were hidden behind a biker’s visor, a glossy black strip with streamline contours, covering the middle third of his face. Brendan was the leader of the Shadowhawks. We’d noticed them a couple of years back, about five or six of them, older than us, always in their trench coats. They never even acknowledged we existed. Posers all. I think someone said they lived in govproject houses on the other side of town. Each evening they would come to hang out in the old baptist chapel on the edge of the park.

‘We’re having a party tonight,’ he said as we drew level. ‘Open invitation for a girl like you. It’ll be a lot more fun than anything your kiddy friends get up to.’

‘No thank you,’ Kathy said sharply.

‘Where’s your fire? You’ve got to find out what real life is like sometime. I could show you tonight.’

‘I know all about real life.’

She moved a fraction closer to me. I risked a glance at the ramshackle yellow-stone chapel fifty metres behind Brendan. The Shadowhawks were lounging around the open door, trench coats flapping in the warm zephyrs that prowled the gloaming, biker visors tracking us like radar. I hadn’t realized there were so many Shadowhawks these days. Easily a dozen.

‘Oh, I don’t think you do,’ Brendan smiled, thin waxen lips parting to show needle teeth. ‘You just hope so. Real life isn’t about hope, it’s plain survival. And I’m an expert.’

‘I’ll manage on my own, thank you,’ Kathy said.

‘Sure you will,’ he crooned. ‘Tigress.’ He thrust his head back and started to bark like a mad dog.

Kathy slipped her arm round mine, and we rounded a corner. ‘Run,’ she hissed. And we did, all the way up the gentle slope to the Makings, Brendan’s eerie howling laughter chasing us the whole way.

Kathy persuaded me not to say anything to Russel. It was just as well, the Shadowhawks had me worried. Theirs was a presence that added an unwholesome tone of menace to Balford’s somnolent streets. I couldn’t help thinking life was sweeter in the days when we were less than nothing to them.

If the Shadowhawks were the downside of Balford, the elven were the boost we needed to convince ourselves life was worthwhile after all. Kathy was as dazzled and awestruck by them as the rest of us. Her face

Well, I suppose she looked like me the first time I saw the fairies.

I remember the time Russel introduced her to Prince Yannareth. The prince bowed deeply, taking her hand and kissing her knuckles. ‘You are truly the flower of your race,’ he intoned solemnly.

She blushed and her cheeks dimpled, flattered by the attention. Yannareth had that effect on people. All the elves were wondrous, but he had an unmatched grace; it was that nobility which set him as far above them as they were above us.

Russel swaggered about, ridiculously self-important. By royal decree, his girl was the most desirable in two worlds. Not bad going for a nobody.

The inseparable duo became the inseparable trio.

*

A week after my tangle with Brendan in the park, the Black Spitfires and the prince’s entourage clubbed together and went to the Stomping Mary gig in Southampton. The Stampers were a tight seven piece mood fantasy band, very hot, preaching their quasi-anarchy message along with the usual raw sex. Gods to anyone under twenty, rich or poor.

The Tube to Southampton took quarter of an hour, and I spent the whole time thinking malicious thoughts about the shock Sendiryki was going to get when they started playing. He thought someone accompanying a harp with a flute was pretty racy stuff.

The gig was in a grassy amphitheatre carved into a hillside on the west of the city. We all trooped in together, us Spitfires in our black jackets, the elven in borrowed, ill-fitting clothes.

The Stampers walked on stage, and twenty thousand adolescents roared in welcome. The elven joined in, for once swept along by our world’s song. They smiled incredulously at each other, that look which says you know you shouldn’t, but it’s great fun anyway.

The band struck up. Omni-directional sublim stacks on either side of the stage, like giant crystal pillars, began broadcasting. Hard synth rock slammed into my ears, and sequerced photons slipped along my optical nerves, tickling the secluded response centres in my brain. And I was suddenly this wild metallic-skinned pterodactyl streaking through interstellar space, wings ten kilometres wide beating against thin gusts of hydrogen atoms. I swerved around shimmering comets, rolled lazily over lonely tumbling asteroids, falling endlessly down the gravity slope. There were planets ahead, gas giants with their rings and colourful moons. I dipped and weaved and gyrated above the cloudscape’s ocean-sized stormbands, pale phosphorescent borealis serpents swam like fish shoals amid the darkside cloud peaks. I left it all behind, flying inwards, towards the bright call of the sun. All around me, space was filled with the triumphant cry of my kind, black wings aglitter as we beat our way towards the warmth. And there, gliding above the thermals of the corona, I found a mate. Necks entwined, wings outstretched as one, we soared I in the fountaining solar flares, surfed along the arching prominences, spiralling around and around. Free and invincible, lords of the cosmos. It was me, all I ever wanted to be, my soul’s song.

Sendiryki was laughing, his eyes inflamed. ‘Such danger! Such joy!’ he cried above the crushing music. ‘Oh Michael, why did you never tell me? Are they real? Are they creatures your star voyagers found?’

‘No. The Stompers make them up. They make it all up.’

‘What crazy minds you have. Oh to be mortal man for just one day. To know such beautiful insanity, such liberation.’

The one sour note of the evening came from Russel. Like every time, he wanted to go a step further than anyone else, so he infused one of the hallucinogens the filter churned out. I saw him later during the gig, crashing out alone, dancing in fractured jerks to a beat no one else could hear.

That was when I saw Kathy and Prince Yannareth dancing together, a graceful old-fashioned partnership. I turned back to the stacks, immersing myself in a grand ballroom of elegant people, men in dinner jackets, women in demure gowns, slow waltzing in time to a poignant ballad. Looking round again, Prince Yannareth’s arms had encircled Kathy, she was resting her head on his chest, smiling gently.

After the gig Sendiryki and I hiked up to the cafe at the top of the amphitheatre hill. We ordered some beers and sat outside in the balmy night air, watching the spaceplanes slide in from the other side of the sky. Their swept delta heatshield underbellies glowed a deep orange against the smiling summer stars as they sank down towards the city’s spaceport.

‘You humble me, Michael,’ Sendiryki said slowly. ‘Amid the insensitivity of your changeful world is a grandeur I could never have conceived.’

‘You’ll find what you’re looking for out there on your sea.’

‘Perhaps.’ He tilted his head up again, silver-glitter eyes dark with longing.

*

It was Anton and his big mouth that did it.

We used an old stable block to hang out in; it was at the back of the Makings, surrounded by a thicket of hawthorns, which is probably why the regression team missed it. But we fixed up the roof, and added some solar cells to power our gear.

He charged in late one afternoon, looking as if he had run all the way from the coast, face red, chest heaving. ‘I saw them,’ he yelled. ‘Yannareth and Kathy, they were having it off in the forest. God they never even saw me they were at it so hard. Hey, do you reckon it’s true about the elven having one as big as a horse? I mean, boy, you should have heard her squealing!’

We looked at him, every one of us, disconnected from time, numbed and secretly terrified.

He looked back at us, grinning savagely. ‘What?’ Then he turned as Russel rose to his feet, coming forward out of the corner he’d been brooding in. Anton’s elation drained away, replaced by real fear.

‘Where was this?’ Russel asked in a dead tone. He had infused something, and that filter really was way too old to reproduce the delicate molecular strings contained in the narc-programs. I could see the tiny capillaries in his eyeballs had turned sallow.

After that there was no hope left. None at all.

*

Brendan was sitting on a boulder just outside the forest. In his trench coat and trilby he seemed like a denser concentration of the shadows cast by the first rank of trees. The biker’s visor eclipsed most of his long, ivory face, but the visible skin seemed preternaturally bright amid the gloom which lurked in the valley that afternoon.

We marched up the side of the valley towards him, all of us silent. Russel’s rag-tag army of vengeance. Our weapons didn’t seem to bother Brendan terribly. If anything he was condescending. The corners of his mouth turned up in what I took for a smile.

Russel stopped level with him, hesitant in the face of such urbanity. ‘We’re going to get Kathy back from the elven,’ he said. ‘Do you want to help?’

‘It looks to me like you have it all under control.’

‘It could be one of your girls next.’

The derisive smile broadened. ‘I doubt that. I doubt that very much indeed.’

‘Thanks for nothing.’

‘Your fault for trusting them.’

‘Come on,’ Russel commanded us; he started off towards the forest. Most of the Black Spitfires hurried to keep up. I lingered.

Brendan gave me a wolfish grin, like he already had the world sewn up. If I could just have seen his eyes then, I might have known what he was about, but all I could see was a little image of myself bouncing back off the shiny black mirror surface of his biker’s visor.

I admit it, Brendan’s innate freakishness spooked me. I went off after the others before he could start that demented laugh again.

*

The news of our obscenity spread out from the fairy glade, a distortion in the forest’s quiddity, racing on ahead of us like the rippling air of a heat shimmer. Forest folk were fleeing from our marching boots. The grass rustled beside the path, alive with small fast bodies outpacing the hares. Russel would let off a shot every now and then; I don’t think he hit anything.

It was our own enmity that corrupted the forest’s song. Sendiryki had taught me to listen to the harmony, the way the wind slid through the branches, the sigh of flowers, blending together in concord. Now we intruded on the flow, an unsavoury dissonance. I could hear the trees shivering from the chill of our passage. Yet we were still on paths familiar from early childhood. Our territory.

Russel marched on down the path, heedless of any subtleties. Of the two forces, he was still the easiest for us to follow.

The tufty grass at our feet became darker; choked with tough twines of sorrel and clumps of nightshade. Solemn ash trees gave way to lighter birches clad in long, dusty braids of ivy. Their girth was enormous, tops hidden behind huge boughs; starsparks of mellow sunlight filtered through the slowly shifting leaves.

I knew the path we walked down was taking us in the right direction, even though I couldn’t quite recognize it. Sendiryki once said there are many paths through the forest, and the straightest are often longest of all. I think he was right.

*

I’d always found the elven camp a gorgeous place to behold, echoing the finery of medieval pageantry. It was set in a grove of copper beech trees, their vast boughs swaying overhead. The prince’s entourage had pitched their blue and green tents in a circle where they were dappled by topaz sunbeams. Cooking fires used to burn in the middle, adding to the festival atmosphere.

But now the fires were out, and the elven stood in a protective semicircle, bows in hand, except for Prince Yannareth. He stood at their apex, clad in silver armour inlaid with golden arabesque symbols that shone of their own accord.

I found Sendiryki’s eyes on me. All we could do was stare hopelessly at each other across the camp.

Kathy stood behind Prince Yannareth, dressed in a long, flowing gown of green and white, lovely and remote, like one of the women in the Stompers dance fantasy. She was on the verge of tears.

‘Come on, girl,’ Russel said. ‘You’re coming back with us.’

‘Lady Katherine makes her own choices,’ Prince Yannareth said equably.

‘Oh yeah?’ Russel took a step forward.

There was a sharp ringing sound as the prince drew his sword.

‘Stop it,’ Kathy said. ‘Russel, there’s nothing left for us. Go home. All of you, go home, please.’

‘Nothing, eh?’ Russel said. ‘We’ll see, Lady Katherine. Now you come with me.’

‘I think not, Russel,’ Prince Yannareth said. T am truly sorry this has happened, for your company is one I treasure. But Lady Katherine is not your chattel.

Russel looked round at us, sneering cockily. ‘Go get ‘em lads.’ He aimed his Sony straight at Prince Yannareth, and fired. So brazen and ignoble, forcing the issue.

Prince Yannareth was already bringing his shield up. The plasma bolt hit the mirror surface and broke apart, static tendrils shivering across the heraldic crest.

Targeting-lasers stabbed out, and that deadly barrage of plasma pulses strobed across the short distance between us, finger-sized darts of purple-white lightning. I heard the Enfields humming as they slung their harpoons. The elven answered with a flight of arrows.

Anton cried out beside me, stumbling, an arrow shaft protruding from his thigh. His thigh! I’ve seen elven pierce a bird’s eye in mid-flight.

I aimed my pistol a metre over Sendiryki’s head and squeezed the trigger hard. Three elven had fallen, tunics smouldering from the holes blasted by plasma bolts. One had been hit by a harpoon, his right arm hanging in tatters, blood splattering his chest. Five of the tents were ablaze, horses screamed in panic, pulling against their tethers.

We were suddenly running at each other, yelling wordlessly. Someone somewhere was blowing a hunting horn, its brassy notes reverberating around the grove.

Sendiryki and I charged into each other, the impact throwing us to the ground. I felt his long arms tighten around me, and hugged him back. We rolled about listlessly in the grass. Breath burnt against my constricted throat.

‘They duel,’ Sendiryki whispered. And I looked up.

Russel and Prince Yannareth advanced towards each other, heedless of the wrestling couples thrashing around at their feet. Russel’s visor was down; sharp emerald laserlight flared from a cylindrical module on the side of his helmet, sweeping across Prince Yannareth’s helmet. Brain-raper photobytes, designed to tapeworm into a mind and rip rationality to a bleeding husk, to lovingly smother you in your own insanity. I know, I wrote them for Russel.

Prince Yannareth swayed backwards as if buffeted by a squall. He clasped his sword in front of him with both hands, aligning its tip on Russel. His voice screamed out, strange twisted words, wretched with pain.

Russel was laughing, his pistol directing a barrage of pulses towards the prince. They hit the silver armour, sending out small fierce sprays of molten metal. Tiny black craters bloomed across the prince’s breastplate, each blow punching him back. But still he held the sword steady.

And then he finished his agonized chant. The blade of his sword ignited with a searing iridescence. A cyclone of diamond blue light lashed out from the tip, engulfing Russel in a lurid clawing nimbus.

Russel shuddered violently, arms and legs spasming. He let loose an animal groan, livid with suffering. I could see his armour’s hexagonal dissipater web burning a radiant crimson. He lurched across the grove towards the prince, a tormented fire elemental, footprints scorching the verdant grass to withered ash, pistol spitting its condensed lightning bolts.

They met head on, their battle cries merging into a single incoherent howl. Sword and pistol clattered aside. Over and over they tumbled, thrashing like beasts. Russel’s thermo blade chewing long gouges on Prince Yannareth’s armour. The prince’s bejewelled dagger prising at the neck seal below Russel’s helmet.

Then the forest wailed, a hideous wounded keening that went on and on. It was us, I knew it, our violation was too great. Our fault. Our guilt. Our shame.

A wind rose from nowhere, hurtling through the grove. Those of us standing mutely around our battling captains were forced to our knees by its vehemence. The copper beeches quailed before it, their boughs creaking with distress.

‘The paths,’ Sendiryki shouted above the clamour. ‘The paths are sundering.’

Russel and Prince Yannareth abandoned their fight as the ground quaked.

‘Ride,’ the prince called. ‘We must ride back.’ He staggered to his feet. Scarlet blood was seeping out of his armour. ‘Katherine!’ The anguish in his voice pierced my heart.

She moved towards him.

‘You bitch!’ Russel yelled. He was on his knees, clutching at one arm where the anti-impact armour had blistered.

‘Don’t go,’ I called after her. Useless, I know, but love is never kind. ‘Can’t you see, Kathy, they alter nothing. Nothing! In ten thousand years everything in their land will be exactly as it is now. That’s not living, not for us. We change, we have a life.’

‘We have pain,’ Kathy said. She reached the prince, and clung to him, the two of them stumbling back towards the horses.

‘Kathy!’ Russel screamed. But she never looked round. Not once.

The elven were rushing about, chasing and gentling their skittish horses as the nightmare wind churned around us. The wounded were helped up into their saddles; the dead were turning transparent, becoming glass effigies. A multicoloured jewel glowed within each of them, throwing out prismatic light. Then they began to fade away, as ephemeral as dewdrops.

‘Go,’ I told Sendiryki. I took a holowafer from my jeans pocket. It was the one I’d loaded with a catalogue of bug eyes. I thrust it into his hands. He stared at it numbly, his youthfully ancient face wet with tears. ‘Go on. Go!’

A rose gold light was rising behind the camp. A sun broader than ours, yet lacking the harshness, reaching bravely for the dawn, sending phosphorescent beams streaking through the first forest.

Sendiryki embraced me, whispering in my ear. Then he was gone, racing feet carrying him across the grove to his comrades with a speed to rival the birds.

They galloped off into the first forest, down a broad avenue of ancient gnarled oaks whose thick buttressed roots and arching branches formed a tunnel that stretched out for ever. I shielded my eyes against the tangerine corona shining so strongly above the misty treetops. That was the last time I saw them; a line of eerie black silhouettes poised on the crest of the world. One with his hand held high in a wave.

*

I often return to the forest by myself, walking the familiar paths and animal tracks, visiting the glades and brooks I know so well. The wind still steals through the branches and leaves with the stealth of a questing lover, but it kindles no song, and the glades lie empty apart from the butterflies and the squirrels.

There are no Black Spitfires either, not any more. The police took our guns away when we came out of the forest, but our brotherhood had died before that, laid to rest beside fair Fuchsia.

I have a girlfriend now, most of us do. I suppose it’s an improvement.

The Shadowhawks prosper at our expense. There are more of them these days, Russel foremost amongst them. And I’m afraid to walk down Balford’s streets after dark. They gave Anton a savage beating last week; he’s still in hospital.

So I come up here to the forest where they have yet to venture. Sometimes I will catch a glimpse of phantasm figures through the trunks, or imagine I do. A girl with flaxen hair, wearing a green and white dress, her prince standing proud beside her, his arm around her shoulder as she cradles their infant child.

Sendiryki’s final words live on in my mind. ‘The night void and the sea merge beyond the horizon,’ he said. ‘I will look for you there.’

I don’t think so. Not any more.

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