Michael Moorcock - A Cure for Cancer

The sound of his footsteps was like that of a huge pendulum, regular and ponderous. He came to the locked door at the end of the aventue and took a key from his pocket, turned it in the lock, opened the door and descended the stone staircase, lighting his way with his torch.

Climbing downwards for half an hour he at last reached a tunnel which led to another door. Unlocking this, he came to a room containing a small power plant. He crossed to the plant and depressed a lever.

The plant whispered and then hummed softly and steadily. Lights went on. Jerry switched off his torch, passed through two more empty chambers until he came to a fourth room which was lined on three sides with cupboards that had mirrors set into their panels. The cupboards had been imported from Sweden nine years earlier. The mirrors were more recent.

The room was carpeted with a deep, red Russian rug. On it stood a couch draped with white mink covers and yellow silk sheets. It was unmade. Against the wall near the door was a neat console operating a series of small monitor screens and micro-tronic indicator boards, all slightly archaic in design and function but still in good working order. Jerry had not been here since he had left the seminary.

Sitting on the couch, he tugged off his block-heeled boots; he removed his jacket and his shoulder holster and dropped them on the floor, pulled back the pillows and touched a stud on the control panel set in the low headboard. The console activated, he lay and watched it for a bit until he felt up to visiting the morgue.

The room had become unfamiliar, yet a lot of things had happened here. The Shifter gateways had been erected, the earliest prototype of the machine had been built, the Web completed and, of course, those ridiculous books had been written.

It had been a rapid development really, from priest to politician to physicist, but it had been necessary and, he supposed, inevitable.

He was drained. He smiled and shrugged. Perhaps he had better visit the Web before he went to the morgue. It was still very cold in the room. It would take a while for the place to warm up.

This had been. his grandfather's complex. originally, before the old man had moved to Normandy, and his father had inherited it, passing it on to him. His father had built and stocked the morgue, too.

He got up shivering, opened one of the mirrored panels and stepped through into a well-lit corridor with four steel doors on each side and another steel door at the end. He rested his palm against the fourth door on the right and it opened. A peg behind the door supported a clean black car coat. Jerry put it on and buttoned up. The schizophrenia had been bad at first, his father had said. He had been lucky not to inherit the worst of it.

There were ten drawers set low into the far wall. Each drawer was labelled with a name. Jerry opened the first drawer on the left and looked down into the eyes of the pale, beautiful girl with the tangled black hair.

He touched the cold skin of her breasts.

'Catherine...'

He stroked the face and drew a deep breath.

Then he bent down and picked her up, carrying her from the morgue and back to the bedchamber with the console.

Placing her in the bed, he stripped off the rest of his clothes and lay beside her, feeling the heat flow out of his body into hers.

His life was so dissipated, he thought. But there was no other way to spend it. « 'Catherine...'

She stirred. He knew there could only be a few seconds left.

'Catherine.'

The eyes opened and the lips moved. 'Frank?'

'Jerry.'

'Jerry?' Her perfect brow frowned slightly.

'I've got a message for you. There's some hope. That's the message.'

Her eyes warmed, then faded, then closed.

Trembling with a terrible cold, Jerry began to cry. He staggered from the bed, fell to his knees, got up and lurched from the chamber into the corridor, pressing his frozen palm against the first door on his left.

The door opened stiffly, almost reluctantly.

Jerry leaned against it as it closed, peering through his blurred eyes at the rustling machine before him.

Then he flung himself at the singing red, gold and silver webs and gasped and grinned as they enmeshed him.

Why was resurrection so easy for some and so difficult for others?

When he had filed Catherine again, Jerry whistled a complicated piece of Bartok and returned, radiant and replete, to his cosy room to look at himself in the mirrors.

Time to be moving; moves to be timing.

He opened a cupboard and regarded his wardrobe. The clothes were somewhat theatrical and old-fashioned but he had no choice. His nearest wardrobe to Oxford was now in Birmingham, the only major city in the area which had not needed cleaning, and he had never fancied Birmingham much at the best of times.

He selected a military-style green jacket, a suede shako with a strap that buttoned under his chin, matching suede britches, green jackboots and a shiny green Sam Browne belt with a button-down holster for his vibragun. A short green pvc cape secured by a silver chain over one shoulder, and the ensemble was complete.

He left the little complex and closed the door behind him.

Shining the torch up the stone staircase he climbed to the top and opened the surface door. Then, stopping at each and winding them up, he walked back down the avenue of long-case clocks. The gallery was soon filled with their merry ticking.

As he strolled away from the Ashmolean towards the carpark of the Randolph Hotel, he heard the clocks begin to strike nine o'clock.

He started the Phantom VI and turned the car into the Broad, switched the taper to Nina Simone singing Black Swan, and lay well back in the driving seat until he reached the Western airlock which he passed through without difficulty. He blinked as he broke into the bright, warm morning.

Soon he could see Milton Keynes.

The new conurbation rose out of the greenish ground mist, each great tower block a different pastel shade of pale chrome yellow, purple, gamboge, yellow ochre, chrome orange, vermilion, scarlet, red (ost), crimson, burnt sienna, light red, cobalt, cerulean blue, turquoise, ultramarine, prussian blue, mauve, leaf green, emerald, sap green, viridian, hookers green, burnt umber, Vandyke brown, orange (ost), ivory black and grey (ost).

Entering the quiet streets of the great village, with its trim grass verges and shady trees, Jerry was filled with a sense of peace that he rarely experienced in rural settlements. Perhaps the size of the empty buildings helped, for most of them were over eighty feet high, arranged around a series of pleasant squares with central fountains splashing a variety of coloured, sparkling water or with free-form sculptures set in flower gardens. There were terraced gardens with vines and creepers on the buildings themselves and the air was full of butterflies, mainly red admirals and cabbage whites.

Jerry drove at a leisurely pace until he came to the middle of the conurbation. Here were the main administration buildings and shopping arcades, the schools and the play areas, and here were parked the armoured vehicles, the tanks and the helicopters of the advisory force. Neat, newly painted signs had been put up and it was easy for Jerry to park his car and make for General Cumberland's headquarters in the tall, domed building that the planners had intended for the town hall and which now flew the Stars and Stripes.

As Jerry climbed the steps, a detachment of unhappy marines broke from the building and surrounded him with a ring of sub-machine guns. 'I was hoping I'd find Frank Cornelius here,' Jerry said mildly.

'What you want with Colonel Cornelius, boy?'

'I have some information for him.' A faint shock ran from the left hemisphere to the right of Jerry's brain.