Стивен Бакстер - Phase space

But this was surely the end of the world she had known. The play was over, the actors removing their make-up, the stage set collapsing - and human history was ending.

I guess we'll never know how we would have turned out, she thought.

Now the peculiar daylight shone through the fabric of the walls, as if they were wearing thin.

'Oh, shit,' Mike said. He reached for Saranne.

Cornelius folded over on himself, rocking, thumb in mouth.

Malenfant said, 'What's wrong? Isn't this what you wanted?…'

The wall dissolved. Pale, disorderly light spilled over them.

Kate watched the baby's face. His new eyes huge, Michael seemed to be smiling.

In the bowels of a ship that would never sail again - mourning our friend Sick Note - Lightoller and I sat cross-legged on the carpet of a disused Turkish Bath, and listened to John Lennon.

'Fooking hell,' said Lightoller. 'That's "Give Me Some Truth". It was on the Imagine album. But -'

'But what?'

Lightoller, he says now, knew there was something different about the cut from the first chord. It might even be true. That's Lightoller for you.

'Typical Lennon,' he said moodily. 'He goes whole bars on a single note, a single fooking chord. Manoeuvring around the harmonies like a crab. But -'

'But what?

'Where's the fooking echo? Lennon solo always drowned his vocals. This is clean and hoarse. Sounds more like a George Martin production.'

Not very interested, I was staring at the ceiling. Gilded beams in crimson.

We never knew how Sick Note had managed to blag himself quarters on the ship itself, let alone the Turkish Bath.

It was a whole set of rooms, with a mosaic floor, blue-green tiled walls, stanchions enclosed in carved teak. Queen Victoria's nightmare if she'd been goosed by Rudolph Valentino. As Lightoller said, Sick Note must have been the best fooking porter in this whole floating fooking hotel.

'Of course,' Lightoller was saying, 'it's plausible they'd have used this. Lennon offered it as a Beatles song during the Let It Be sessions in Feb '69. It was the way they worked. They were trying

out songs that finished up on Let It Be and Abbey Road, even their solo albums, as far back as early 1968 -'

'Who would have used the song for what?'

'The Beatles. On their next album. The twelfth.'

Compared to Lightoller, and Sick Note, I'm a dilettante. But I'm enough of a Fabs fan to spot the problem with that.

I said, 'The Beatles released eleven LPs, from Please Please Me through Let It Be.'

'You're counting UK releases,' said Lightoller.

'Of course.'

'And you don't include, for instance, the Yellow Submarine album which was mostly a George Martin movie score, or the Magical Mystery Tour album they released in the US, or the EPs -'

'Naturally not. So there was no twelfth Beatle album.'

'Not in this fooking world,' said Lightoller mysteriously.

John sang on, raw and powerful.

Oddly enough, Lightoller and I had been talking about other worlds even before we found the album, in Sick Note's abandoned quarters, deep inside the old ship. You have to picture the scene.

I suppose you'd call it a wake: twenty, thirty blokes of indeterminate age standing around in the Cafe Parisien on B Deck -loaned by the floating hotel's owners for the occasion, all tumbling trellises and ivy pots and wicker chairs - drinking beer and wine we'd brought ourselves, and looking unsuccessfully for tortilla chips.

'Morgan Robertson,' Lightoller had said around a mouthful of Monster Munches. 'Who?'

'Novelist. 1890s. Writes about a fooking big Atlantic liner, bigger than anything built before. Loads it with rich and complacent people, and wrecks it one cold April night on an iceberg. Called his ship the Titan -'

'Spooky,' I said dryly.

'In another world -'

'Yeah.'

Lightoller is full of crap like that, and not shy about sharing it.

But I welcomed Lightoller's bullshit, for once; we were, after all, just distracting ourselves from the fact that Sick Note was gone. What else are words for, at a time like that?

Bored, morbid, a little drunk, we had wandered off, through the ship, in search of Sick Note.

We had come through the foyer on A Deck, with its huge glass dome, the oak panelling, the balustrades with their wrought-iron scroll work, the gigantic wall clock with its two bronze nymphs. All faded and much scarred by restoration, of course. Like the ship. Like the city outside which we could glimpse through the windows: the shops and maritime museums of Albert Dock to which the ship was forevermore bolted, and the Liverpool waterfront beyond, all of it under a suitably grey sky.

I said something about it being as if they'd towed the Adelphi Hotel into Liverpool Bay. Lightoller made a ribald remark about Sick Note and the nymphs.

We had walked on, down the grand stairway from the boat deck, along the corridor where the valets and maids of the first-class passengers used to stay, past the second-class library and the third-class lounge, down the broad stairs towards steerage.

The second track was, of all things, 'It Don't Come Easy'. 'Ringo,' I said.

'Yeah. Solo single in April '71.'

I strained to listen. I couldn't tell if it was different. Was the production a little sharper?

'Every Night', the next track, was Paul: just McCartney being McCartney, pretty much as he recorded it on his first solo album.

'Sentimental pap,' I said.

Lightoller frowned. 'Listen to it. The way he manages the shift from minor to major -' 'Oldest trick in the book.'

'McCartney could make the sun come out, just by his fooking chromatic structure.'

'I'll take your word for it.'

'And it's another track they tried out for Let It Be. And -' 'What?'

'I think there are extra lyrics.' 'Extra?'

The next track was quiet: Harrison's 'All Things Must Pass'.

Lightoller said sourly, 'Another Let It Be demo. But they were still keeping George in his place. First track he's had.'

The playing was simple and exquisite, little more than solo voice with acoustic guitar, closer to the demo George had made of the

song in his Beatle days than his finished solo-album version.

I didn't recognize the next song, a Lennon track. But it got Lightoller jumping up and down.

'It's "Child of Nature",' he kept saying. 'Fooking hell. They tried it out for the White Album. But Lennon held it back and released it on Imagine after the split -'

Now I recognized it. It was 'Jealous Guy'. With different lyrics.

'Fooking hell,' said Lightoller. 'This has only appeared on a bootleg before. And besides, this is no demo. It's a finished fooking production. Listen to it.'

That's Lightoller for you. Excitable.

We had reached the alleyway on E Deck that Sick Note had always called Scottie Road. You could tell this was meant for steerage and crew: no carpet, low ceilings, naked light bulbs, plain white walls.

We worked our way towards the bow, where Sick Note had lived the last years of his life.

'Sick Note would never go down to the engine rooms,' Lightoller reminisced.

'"Reciprocating engines",' I said, imitating Sick Note. '"A revolutionary low-pressure turbine. Twenty-nine boilers."'

'Yeah. All nailed down and painted in primary colours to show the kiddies how a steam ship used to work. Not that they care.'

'No,' I said. 'But Sick Note did. He said it was humiliating to gut a working boat like that.'

'That was Sick Note.'

Away from Scottie Road the ship was a labyrinth of rooms and corridors and ducts.

'I never could figure out my way around here,' I said.

Lightoller laughed. 'Even Sick Note used to get lost. Especially after he'd had a few with the boys up in the Smoking Room. Do you remember that time he swore -'