The End of All Songs

"Ah, you find me superficial." He was saddened.

"Not that. Not now."

"Then —?"

"I remain confused, Jherek."

They stood on opposite sides of the pool, regarding each other through the veil of falling silvery water. Her beauty, her auburn hair, her grey eyes, her firm mouth, all seemed more desirable than ever.

"I wish only to honour you," he said, lowering his eyes.

"You do so, already, my dear."

"I am committed to you. Only to you. If you wished, we could try to return to 1896…"

"You would be miserable there."

"Not if we were together, Amelia."

"You do not know my world, Jherek. It is capable of distorting the noblest intentions, of misinterpreting the finest emotions. You would be wretched. And I would feel wretched, also, to see one such as you transformed."

"Then what is to be the answer?"

"I must think," she said. "Let me walk alone for a while, my dearest."

He acknowledged her wish. He strode for the house, driving back the thoughts that suggested he would never see her again, shaking off the fear that she would be snatched from him, as she had been snatched once before, telling himself that it was merely association and that circumstances had changed. But how radically, he wondered, had they changed?

He reached the house. He closed the door behind him. He began to wander from room to room, avoiding only her apartments, the interior of which he had never seen, though he retained a deep curiosity about them, had often restrained an impulse to explore.

It came to him, as he entered his own bedroom and lay down upon the bed, still in his nightshirt and dressing gown, that perhaps all these new feelings were new only to him. Jagged, he felt sure, had known such feelings in the past — they had made him what he was. He vaguely recollected Amelia saying something about the son being the father, unwounded by the world. Did he grow more like Jagged? The thoughts of the previous night came back to him, but he refused to let them flourish. Before long, he had fallen asleep.

He was awakened by the sound of her footfall as she came slowly upstairs. It seemed to him that, on the landing, she paused at his door before her own door opened and she entered her rooms. He lay still for a little while, perhaps hoping that she would return. He got up, disseminating his night-clothes, naked as he listened; she did not come back. He used one of his power-rings to make a loose blouse and long kilt, in dark green. He left the bedroom and stood on the landing, hearing her moving about on the other side of the wall.

"Amelia?"

There was no reply.

He had grown tired of introspection. "I will return soon, my dear," he called.

Her voice was muffled. "Where do you go?"

"Nowhere."

He descended, passing through the kitchen and into the garden at the back, where he normally kept his locomotive. He boarded the craft, whistling the tune of Carrie Joan , feeling just a hint of nostalgia for the simpler days before he had met Amelia at the party given by the Duke of Queens. Did he regret the meeting? No.

The locomotive steamed into the sky, black, silver and gold now. He noticed how strange the two nearby scenes looked — the thatched house and its gardens, the lake of blood. They clashed rather than contrasted with each other. He wondered if she would mind if he disseminated the lake, but decided not to interfere.

He flew over transparent purple palaces and towering, quivering pink and puce mounds of unremarkable workmanship and imprecise invention, over a collection of gigantic prone figures, apparently entirely made of chalk, over a half-finished forest, and under a black thunderstorm whose lightning, in his opinion, was thoroughly overdone, but he refused to let the locomotive bear him back towards the city, to which his thoughts constantly went these days, perhaps because it was the city of his conception, perhaps because Lord Jagged and Nurse worked there (if they did), perhaps because he might study the man who remained his rival, at least until the next morning. He had no inclination to visit any of the friends whose company would normally give him pleasure; he considered going to Mongrove's rainy crags, but Mongrove would be of no help to him. Perhaps, he thought, he should choose a site and make something, to exercise his imagination in some ordinary pursuit, rather than let it continue to create impossible emotional dilemmas for him. He had just decided that he would try to build a reproduction of the Palaeozoic seashore and had found a suitable location when he heard the voice of Bishop Castle above him.

The bishop rode in a chariot whose wheels rotated, red and flaming, but which was otherwise of ordinary bronze, gold and platinum. His hat, one of his old crenellated kind, was immediately visible over the side of the chariot, but it was a moment before Jherek noticed his friend's face.

"I am so glad to see you, Jherek. I wished to congratulate you — well, Amelia, really — on yesterday's party."

"I will tell her, ebullient Bishop."

"She is not with you?"

"She remains at home."

"A shame. But you must come and see this, Jherek. I don't know what Bra

"I can think of nothing I should want more."

"Then follow me!"

The chariot banked away, flying north, and obediently Jherek set a course behind it.

In a moment Bishop Castle was laughing and shouting, pointing at the ground. "Look! Look!"

Jherek saw nothing but a patch of parched, unused earth. Then dust swirled and a conical object appeared, its outer casing whirling counter to another within. The whirling stopped and a man emerged from the cone. For all that he wore breathing equipment and carried a large bag, the man was recognizable as Bra

At length, after an argument, they all crowded back into the cone. The two shells whirled again and the cone vanished. Bishop Castle was beside himself with laughter, but Jherek could not see why he was so amused.

"They have been doing that for the past four hours, to my knowledge!" roared Bishop Castle. "The machine appears. It stops. They disembark, argue, and get back in again. All exactly the same. Wait…"

Jherek waited and, sure enough, the dust swirled, the cone reappeared, Bra

"What is happening, Bishop?" Jherek asked, as soon as the next wave of laughter had subsided.

"Some sort of time-loop, evidently. I wondered what Bra

"What did he plan?" In the confusion Jherek realized he had forgotten to warn Jagged of what he had seen.

"Oh, he was not too clear. Wished to thwart Jagged in some way, of course. Go back in time and change events."

"Then what has happened to him now?"

"Isn't it obvious? Ho, ho, ho!"

"Not to me."

"He's hoist by his own petard — caught in a particularly unpleasant version of the Morphail Effect. He arrives in the past, certainly, but only to be flung back to the present immediately. As a result he's stuck. He could go round and round for ever, I suppose…"