TWO THIEVES

Chris Beckett

Chris Beckett’s seventh story for us is a glittering tale of two avaricious and adventuresome thieves and the dangers they encounter. The author’s latest novel, Dark Eden (Corvus, July 2011), takes up the short story of the same name (first published in Asimov’s, March 2006). It will look at the society that has developed on the sunless planet Eden, five generations on. Readers can find more information about Chris and his writing at www.chris-beckett.com.

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Two thieves stood glumly at the railings of a ship, watching their destination slowly transform itself from a blemish on the horizon, to a toy island with a single green papier-mâché hill, to an actual place that was no longer “there” but “here.” Dockhands waiting for the ropes, seagulls squabbling on the quay, weeds poking up between the flagstones: it would all be “here” for a very long time to come, if this place’s reputation was anything to go by.

“Oh crap,” muttered Pennyworth

He was short, bald, fat, and prone to sweat. His friend was slight and wiry, with a pockmarked face and shock of almost vertical ash-blond hair that made him look a little like a toilet brush. Their full names were Penitence Worthiness Gestas II and Surefaith Solicitude Dismas III, but Pennyworth and Shoe were what they always called themselves.

Shoe looked out at the settlement’s score or so of stone buildings, the vegetable gardens, the lighthouse. He looked down at the faces looking up from the quay, strangers, but soon to become all too familiar. He ran his hands through his spiky white hair and gave out a groan of despair.

“Dear God, I swear I will die of boredom.”

The police had ambushed their gang in a jeweler’s shop, acting on a tip-off from an informer. Three gang members were shot dead in the firefight. Another was wounded and died two streets away from loss of blood. But Shoe and Pennyworth were old hands and knew, or thought they did, when to play the game and when to throw in your hand. They’d surrendered themselves at once, expecting perhaps eight years in jail, with time off for not resisting arrest.

But this time they’d got the calculation wrong, for when the panel of judges was reminded of their long records of extortion, pimpery, house-breaking, drug dealing, and deceit, it decided the time had come for Last Resort.

“What?” the two thieves bellowed in dismay.

Up to that point they had been off-hand and nonchalant, as if the trial was a matter of indifference to them and they were keen to get on with more important business. Now they both leapt howling to their feet.

“We never wanted to rob that shop in the first place!” protested Shoe. “We were set up!”

“It’s not fair!” cried Pennyworth, “You let other people have another chance!”

But the judges bowed to the court, and gathered up their robes, and filed out to their chambers.

“Gentlemen,” said the voice of the ship’s captain over the PA system. “Please pick up your things and disembark.”

A couple of dozen prisoners trudged down the gangplank onto the quay, some surly, some silent and alert, some trying to make light of their situation with jokes.

“It doesn’t look such a bad place,” observed a tiny timid-looking little man, glancing anxiously at Shoe.

And he was right. With its pleasant stone buildings, its blue sky and sea, its wheeling gulls, Last Resort looked more like a fishing village or holiday retreat than a penal settlement. Even the warders checking off their names on clipboards were informally dressed and could almost have been tour guides or couriers. For this wasn’t so much a place of punishment as a place of quarantine, a place where inveterate offenders could be sent indefinitely when they showed no sign of changing their ways, not for purposes of vengeance but to prevent them causing further distress.

“Not such a bad place if you like doing sweet nothing,” grunted Shoe, turning to one side to spit.

“Greetings everyone,” called out a tall white-haired man. “My name is Humility—Humility Joyousness Fortunas—and I’m the governor of Last Resort. It may sound an odd thing for a prison governor to say, but I sincerely hope that your time here will be interesting, pleasurable, and rewarding.”

No one had ever escaped from Last Resort, for it was on an island surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of open ocean, one of the remotest places on the planet. But (as the governor now made clear) the regime there was far from harsh. They’d find their accommodation plain but comfortable, he explained. They were free to roam, and they’d have plentiful opportunities to work at trades, or to study, or to engage in sport and the creative arts. There was even a unique opportunity to take part in the excavation of an archaeological site.

Not all the prisoners were grateful or impressed.

“Who wants to make pots?” growled Pennyworth. “Who wants to dig up bloody old stones?”

He and Shoe had lived their whole lives in the seamy underbelly of a city where you could walk for a whole day and still not come to its edge. All their notions of what was exciting and fun were formed from that experience. They’d lived for the whiff of violence, the heady joy of getting one over on some foolish sap, the sound of gunfire, the thrill of the chase, dodging and diving through crowds and honking traffic. But here the cry of seagulls was the loudest sound, and you could see the island’s only hill at the end of its single empty street.

“I’ll die of boredom,” Shoe gloomily repeated.

“I wouldn’t have bothered to lay down my gun if I’d known this was coming,” said Pennyworth. “I’d have kept on shooting till they put a bullet through my head.”

A few days later, the two thieves were riding in a bus along a bumpy coastal track, carefully avoiding looking out at the great blue ocean glinting with sunlight, for fear they might find themselves enjoying it.

“So what is this dump we’re going to anyway?” Pennyworth asked one of the other prisoners, a large toothless black man who was sitting across the aisle from them.

The black man shrugged.

“A settlement from the Old Empire or some shit like that.”

“What, and we have to dig it up?”

“Yeah, but the guy in charge is really soft. You don’t have to do much.”

Pennyworth snorted.

“Why do they want to dig it up anyway?”

“Find out what it was for,” the black man said. “Or some shit. No one knows apparently.”

“Or gives a crap,” said Pennyworth.

The black man laughed.

“Yeah,” Shoe said, “but you never know what we might find, do you? It’s amazing what people pay for that old shit.”

He’d once been involved in a scam involving some fake Old Empire artifacts, and he knew. It was why he’d suggested to Pennyworth that they choose this work over, say, potting, or working on the colony’s single farm.

They came to a picturesque ruin on a slope above a rocky shore, some three kilometers from the main colony, with diminutive trees clinging picturesquely to its crumbled stonework.

As they alighted from the bus, the young officer in charge came rushing to greet them with his hand outstretched.

“Gestas? Dismas? Welcome to the Place of Wells, my friends! My name is Gravitas but most people just call me Officer Graves. Well, I am always down a hole in the ground!”

The two thieves declined to smile.

“I think you’ll really enjoy this work,” Graves continued undaunted. “I know the site doesn’t look much at first but it’s one of those places you really fall in love with, once you get a feel for it.”

He believed that archeology was the key to human wisdom, and was determined that it should be the delight and consolation of everyone.

“What once stood here looks to have been a square building with a flat roof. A large building in terms of length and breadth but only a single story high. You see the walls here? And here? The top of the roof was paved to make a flat terrace—you can see a few bits of it left round the edges—and the terrace was completely enclosed with a colonnade. There’s just that one single complete arch still left over there, look. Almost the whole roof has collapsed into the rooms below, as you can see, and what we’re doing now is removing the remains of it to see what lies beneath. It’s very exciting because we really have no idea.”

Not much excitement was evident, however, in the faces of Prisoner Gestas and Prisoner Dismas. Officer Graves gave a small sigh. “One note of caution,” he went on. “We really don’t know what function this place used to serve, but we do know they had some mighty advanced technology back in those days, and played with materials and forces that we no longer understand. Wear these radiation counters at all times, and if they ever start to bleep, or if you come across anything that seems in any way odd, do please report back to me before going on. It’s for your own safety. I really don’t want anyone to come to any harm here.”

Shoe and Pennyworth shrugged and spat and grudgingly shoved the proffered counters onto their belts, and Graves led them to a part of the site where a shaft of some kind had been filled up with rubble. Some four meters of this debris had already been lifted away. Now Graves led them down into the shady hollow and, under his direction, the two thieves reluctantly began removing more loose stones and putting them in large bins for removal later by crane.

“People say that this dig really isn’t very important compared with the big ones on the mainland where they are finding all those wonderful artifacts,” Graves enthused as they made a nominal pretense of working. “But we don’t know what it will throw up, do we? And we won’t know until the whole dig is done. I think you’ll find it a fascinating place. All digs are, like books of secrets waiting to be read.”

“Wow,” said lean-faced Shoe in a flat, bored, sarcastic voice.

Graves blinked and looked momentarily hurt—the thieves’ surliness was starting to wear him down—but he was a man with a determinedly positive outlook on life.

“We look up the stars today,” he said, “and we know their names and we know what they’re made of, but for all practical purposes, they might as well be lights projected onto a screen. It was different for our ancestors at the time of the Old Empire. When they looked out at the stars, they were looking into a vast cave of delights going back and back and back, a cave through which, in some way we no longer understand, they were able to move freely—just imagine it!—bringing back strange beasts and fabulous wealth and wonders that we can only dream about.”

He glanced hopefully at Shoe and Pennyworth. Both were gazing into the distance with the determinedly vacant expressions that people and animals wear when they are keeping their minds entirely blank until such time as they are needed.

“And yet,” Graves doggedly continued, “technological prowess is only part of what we lost when the Great Calamity brought down the Empire, and I would say not the greatest part. What strikes me most at these sites is the architectural grace, the calmness and at the same time the playfulness of that wonderful civilization. Again and again we find details, flourishes, ornaments, whimsical little touches, that seem to serve no purpose other than to give delight, or raise a smile, or serve as food for thought.”

He glanced again at the two thieves and finally resigned himself to the fact that he might as well be talking to the stones.

“Anyway, it gives you a good appetite, that’s for sure,” he said a little sadly, “all this digging and shifting rocks in the open air, with a nice sea breeze to keep you cool.”

Pennyworth turned to the side and spat.

“So are there any questions, lads?” asked Graves, making one last effort to force cheerfulness into his voice.

A seagull screeched. The ocean sighed.

“I’ll leave you to it then,” Graves concluded. “Have fun. Lunch will arrive back at the sorting area at twelve. Just come over and find us when you’re ready.”

Shoe and Pennyworth grunted, watched him go, and then slumped on a slab of rock and lit up cigarettes.

“A fascinating place,” Pennyworth mimicked. “A wonderful book waiting to be read.”

He put two fingers into the back of his mouth as if to make himself gag.

“What a dump,” he concluded.

“Yeah,” agreed Shoe, “what in God’s name made us pick this job?”

After half an hour of this sort of talk, boredom finally drove them to interact at least a little with their surroundings, and they chucked a few stones at each other. Then they set up a bit of ancient marble paving slab and lobbed more stones at it until it split in two. Finally, when they couldn’t think of any other games, they began picking up rubble and dumping it into Graves’ bin, settling in spite of themselves into a slow rhythm that was certainly more pleasant than doing nothing at all, though both of them would have strenuously denied it.

And then, after about half an hour of this, and to their great surprise, Pennyworth’s counter began to bleep.

“What the . . . ?”

Before Pennyworth could finish the sentence, Shoe’s counter went off as well. Both men laughed loudly.

“So are we going to go and tell that Graves guy?” asked Pennyworth when they had recovered from their hilarity.

“Are we, shit!” said Shoe. “This might be something interesting.”

Pennyworth nodded and tried to turn off his counter. Unable to find the switch immediately, he lost patience with the thing and silenced it by banging it repeatedly on a rock.

“Piece of shit,” he growled.

“You dick, Pennyworth,” said Shoe, turning off his own device. “The switch is right here on top. Where it says ON/OFF.”

“Yeah, well,” grumbled Pennyworth.

He poked the switch, found it no longer worked, and tossed the counter aside.

“Come on then,” said Shoe. “Let’s just find out what this is.”

They shifted some more stones, this time working at a speed that would have delighted Graves, and finally reached something looked like a circular lid, about a meter across, made of shining and untarnished metal.

“It’ll be locked, or rusted up underneath,” Pennyworth said glumly. “Then we’ll bloody well have to go and get help.”

“You never know,” said Shoe, tossing aside a cigarette and kneeling in front of the lid with his fingers under the edge.

Pennyworth joined him with a sigh.

“One—two—three,” Shoe said, and they both lifted.

Against their expectations the lid came away quite easily, and they found underneath it a well. Which explained why the site was called Place of Wells, of course, but that was not what was on their minds just then. The thing that struck them was what they saw inside it. For there was no water in that well, nor was there the dark echoing space you expect in a well that has dried up. There was—nothingness.

Of course the human eye doesn’t see the essence of things, but can only detect light or its absence, and you might argue that what was visible there must therefore have been amenable to description in such terms. But it didn’t seem like that to them. There was neither light nor darkness down there. There was no surface, solid or liquid, rough or smooth. There was just nothing.

“Holy crap!” intoned Pennyworth.

Shoe turned his radiation counter back on. It was bleeping away so fast that it was pretty much giving out a continuous screech. He listened to it for a moment, then laughed.

“Sweet!” he exclaimed.

Others might have worried that the radiation would do them harm, but to these men danger and uncertainty felt like home.

Shoe and Pennyworth hadn’t known it, but their counters were connected to a monitor back at the sorting area that Graves checked at regular intervals. He had picked up that they had detected radiation and, running and scrambling across the ruins, he now reached the broken wall at the top of the shaft and looked down at the two of them standing there on the edge of the well, with Shoe’s counter still giving out a continuous plaintive screech.

“Hey guys,” he called out softly in what he hoped was a calm, kind voice, “you’re going to need to back off from there.”

He squatted down so that only his head was above the wall, in order to minimize his own exposure to whatever force of nature was pouring out of the well.

“Take a couple of steps back,” he called, “mind you don’t trip on the stones, and then come up here and get behind this wall with me.”

Shoe and Pennyworth looked up at him peeking fearfully down at them. Then they glanced back at each other, and laughed.

“What is this thing then?” Shoe asked him.

Graves made a further effort to control his voice.

“Not sure guys, but it looks like you may have come across some sort of spatial gateway. We’ve never come across a live one before. But never mind that for the moment, eh? Really guys, I’m not kidding. It’s a lot of radiation we’re all soaking up right now. I need you to step away from the edge and then we really ought to get away from here.”

Gateway? They had no real idea what Graves was talking about, but “gateway” sounded like a way out. Shoe looked at Pennyworth. Pennyworth nodded, and, with a defiant yell, both of them jumped into the well. The last thing they heard was Graves yelling “No! Don’t!”

After the first quarter-second or so, they didn’t experience themselves as falling. In fact they found they were already standing on smooth, solid ground. There had been no jolt of impact at all, but they were aware of a sharp change of temperature and light intensity and a feeling that they had become slightly heavier. Wherever they were, it was much cooler than the dig at the Place of Wells, and it seemed to be night time, although, once their eyes had adapted, it was certainly not pitch dark.

“Bloody hell!” said Pennyworth.

They stood under a starry sky on a wide platform perhaps a hundred meters square, paved in checkerboard style in black and white marble. A colonnade ran round the edge of it, with an urn containing an olive tree in front of every third arch. Beyond, there was a sandy desert.

The air was completely still. The silence was absolute.

Then Shoe gave a low whistle and pointed at the sky.

Shoe and Pennyworth weren’t so big on moons, for the moon back in the city had been at best a pale smudge above the brash electric lights, and there were always brighter and more vivid things clamoring for attention all around. So moons weren’t things they’d ever really paused to think about. But they did know, all the same, that there was only supposed to be one.

And here. . . . Well, it was regrettable, but it couldn’t be avoided. Here there were three of the things shining down.

Standing there side by side, their mouths gaping foolishly open, they both felt an icy shiver of almost superstitious terror. It was the animal dread of the inexplicable and the unknown. One moment on Earth, on an island in the middle of the ocean. The next moment: this.

“Oh crap,” murmured Pennyworth.

“Yeah, I know,” said Shoe.

“We’re on another planet, aren’t we?” Pennyworth whispered.

Since Shoe didn’t reply, Pennyworth answered his own question, addressing himself to the three cold moons themselves.

“We must be. Another bloody planet. What are we going to do?”

The moons, of course, had nothing to say on this point. Their sole contribution to the story of the two thieves was to illuminate the scene and to provide incontrovertible evidence that this was not the planet Earth. And Shoe also said nothing. He sniffed, and spat, and then began to walk across the wide platform to the colonnade.

“What are you doing, Shoe?” moaned Pennyworth.

Again Shoe declined to answer.

“Talk about out of the frying pan,” Pennyworth complained as he hurried after his silent companion.

He caught up with Shoe as he reached one of the archways. They looked out over the planet surface, turned and looked back at the artifact on which they stood, then looked out at the planet again. The checkered platform, strewn here and there with blown sand, was raised some three meters above the surrounding desert. A flight of marble stairs led down onto the surface, its lower steps half-buried in sand.

And this was a proper desert. Some deserts have cacti growing in them, or shrubs, or tufts of yellow grass, or even small trees. But there were no features at all in this one but rocks and stones, each with its overlapping set of faint moon shadows.

“We can’t cross that,” said Pennyworth

“No,” said Shoe, finally breaking his silence. “And anyway, the whole place might be like that for all we know. You can’t cross something if it hasn’t got another side.”

“We’ve had it, haven’t we?” groaned Pennyworth.

Shoe shrugged and began to walk round the edge of the colonnade, noticing, now that they were close, that all the olive trees in their urns were dead. The twigs were gray and had long since lost their bark.

Reaching the corner of the colonnade, they turned and continued along a second side of the platform, passing another flight of stairs that led down into the sand.

“Maybe we should have listened to that guy,” said Pennyworth. “What’s his name? Graves.”

“What?” said Shoe. “That drip? Nah. Never. Start doing what men like that tell you and you might as well be dead anyway.”

They turned along the third side.

“Hmm,” said Shoe.

Like the other sides, this side had stairs going down from it, but they didn’t lead directly onto the ground but onto a subsidiary stone floor, also paved in black and white marble, a little below the current ground level of the desert. A wall protected it from being overwhelmed with sand, though blown sand was still building up on the flagstones, and especially in what had once been an ornamental pond in the middle, where it had partly buried the dried bones of carp. Two huge urns, one on each side of the pond, held the brittle white skeletons of substantial trees.

Pennyworth and Shoe ran down the steps. They found that the stone floor opened into a hall underneath the raised platform they’d been walking on. The hall was a hundred meters long and twenty wide, its floor paved once again in black and white, its walls and ceiling very smooth with a faint decorative design of swirling organic shapes carved into them. Two thick columns like tree trunks stood in the middle of the long space, holding up the platform above. Away from the light of the three moons, the cavernous room was illuminated only by cube-shaped objects set at intervals into the walls that gave off a low pinkish light. Some of the light cubes were dimmer than others, and some were at their last ebb, not really illuminating anything at all, just glowing and flickering like old embers. A few had died completely.

“I don’t like this place one bit,” Pennyworth muttered, and, even though he spoke quietly, his voice seemed to echo right up and down the hall. “It’s like a museum or something.”

“Yeah,” said Shoe, “but if there’s going to be a way out, it’ll be somewhere down here, I reckon. Think about it, Pennyworth. That well back at Last Resort was way down below that old ruin.”

The odd thing about the hall was that there was nothing in it, and no doors off it either, other than the one through which they’d entered. But right in the middle of it, between those two fat columns, was the balustrade of a descending spiral staircase.

Shoe and Pennyworth leaned over the balustrade and looked down.

“Yes!”

Pennyworth’s triumphant cry echoed from the stone all around them and up and down the stairwell.

Shoe gave a triumphant hoot and kissed his fellow-criminal wetly on the cheek.

“Piss off, Shoe, you pervert,” protested Pennyworth, laughing and pushing him away.

The staircase wound straight down into the ground, dimly lit by more of the glowing cubes to a depth equivalent to four or five stories. There was a single landing half way down. But none of these details were of any interest just now to the two thieves, for down at the bottom of the stairs they’d seen just what they’d been hoping for: another well, like the one they’d uncovered at the archaeological dig at Last Resort. Even from five stories up they could see the same mysterious absence within it, neither a surface nor a gap: neither light nor dark, neither rough nor smooth.

Shoe smiled broadly.

“Lead on my friend,” he said.

“We did it!” said Pennyworth, setting off down the stairs at a run. “We are the best, you know that, Shoe? We found a way out of Last Resort, and now we’ve found a way out of this dump too. We are the best.”

“Where do you think it’ll take us this time?” asked Shoe.

“Who gives a shit? As long as it’s somewhere that’s not here.”

“Yeah,” said Shoe, “or back in Boringsville on Last Resort.”

But on the landing halfway down, deep below under the surface of wherever this empty planet was, he stopped and grabbed Pennyworth by the arm.

“What?” demanded Pennyworth impatiently, wincing at the sound of his own voice echoing up and down the stairwell.

They had been surrounded by silence ever since they arrived on that checkered platform, had heard literally nothing at all in their whole time here except for the sounds they made themselves. But down here, where every breath and footstep echoed and re-echoed from the silent stone, the stillness seemed even more intense. You really had to make yourself speak, for it felt dangerous to break that stillness with the rough echoey self-conscious sound of a human voice.

“Look,” said Shoe, “a door.”

“What?”

Pennyworth glanced, without curiosity, at an archway that led off the landing into a corridor. It had writing over it in the old, cursive script, quite different from the spiky letters that shouted from billboards and illuminated signs in the city where they’d grown up.

“You ran straight past it,” Shoe said.

Pennyworth looked at him incredulously.

“Of course I bloody ran straight past it, Shoe! There’s one of those well things at the bottom, remember? Who gives a shit about anything else in this place?”

“May as well check this out while we’re here, surely?”

“Why? What’s the point?”

“There might be something here we want. We’d be nuts not to have a look.”

“I guess,” Pennyworth reluctantly acknowledged, rubbing his bald head. “I don’t like this place though. It’s like . . . Well, it’s like people were here a long time ago and . . .”

Shoe laughed mockingly.

“Afraid of ghosts, Pennyworth, my old mate?”

“Nah, of course not. It’s just that . . .”

“Well okay then,” Shoe interrupted and he passed through the arch. The corridor was cut into the rock rather more roughly than the hall or the stairwell, so it had something of the quality of a mine tunnel, and it was lit at intervals with the same glowing pinkish cubes as the stairs. The time was clearly approaching when all these underground structures would sink back into total darkness. Every fifth or sixth cube here was already guttering or entirely extinguished, and one of them gave a final flicker and expired just as they were walking past it.

After ten meters or so, a large chamber opened up on the right. Its whole floor space was stacked with plastic boxes, piled untidily on top of each other, perhaps put there by someone in a hurry, or perhaps disordered by previous intruders rummaging through them.

Pennyworth immediately ran forward to check them out.

“Holy shit!” he breathed “Look at this!”

“Diamonds!” murmured Shoe.

Diamonds! Every box they looked in was full of diamonds. Diamonds in their thousands, diamonds in their tens of thousands, were all around them.

Pennyworth shouted with incredulous laughter.

“Bloody hell, Shoe! We’ll be rich!”

Shoe smiled wryly, running his hands through jewels.

“Worth pausing on the stairs then was it, mate?”

“Too bloody right, my old buddy. Good job I’ve got you to knock some sense into me.”

They stuffed their pockets to bursting point. Then Pennyworth took off his shirt and tore two holes in the shoulders. He tied up the ends of the arms, stuffing them both with more diamonds until they bulged, then put the shirt back on with his arms through the torn holes, so that the shirt-arms dangled in front of him like bloated extra limbs.

“You dick, Pennyworth,” said Shoe. “You look like you’re wearing some dumb octopus suit or something.”

For some reason, Shoe’s initial elation had faded slightly, but Pennyworth was far too excited to notice or care.

“Who cares what I look like?” he retorted. “This is my future I’ve got here. This is my bloody future.”

He rubbed his shiny head.

“Now let me see. How am I going to carry more?”

He had an idea, hesitated, and made a decision.

“Damn it,” he said, “I’ll do it. We’ve all done it when we’ve had to hide stuff in prison, haven’t we? I can shove six big diamonds up my arse, and swallow half-a-dozen little ones too.”

“Whatever turns you on,” said Shoe with a slightly distant laugh, and he went back into the corridor.

Pennyworth wasn’t joking. He whipped down his breeches at once and winced and grunted as he shoved stones up himself, his eyes bulging and streaming. Then he picked out a handful of little diamonds, gathered what saliva he could in his dry mouth as lubrication, and swallowed them one by one, gagging as each one went down. Finally, he heaped up a box of diamonds with gems from other boxes until it was piled high, and picked it up to carry with him. It was quite a weight.

“At least take a box, Shoe!” he exclaimed, waddling uncomfortably out into the corridor, with the heavy box in his arms and the bulging octopus arms dangling down his front. He was in obvious pain. His eyes were watering, and he walked gingerly. Diamonds, after all, are hard and angular things.

“Yeah, I will,” said Shoe. “But later. I’ll pick up a box on my way back past here.”

Pennyworth stared at him, dismayed.

“Way back? Aren’t we going straight to the well now?”

“Hurts to walk, huh?” said Shoe laughing. “That’s your problem, buddy. I want to see where this leads.”

“Come on, Shoe, my old friend,” Pennyworth pleaded. “Don’t fool around, eh? Let’s just get down to that well.”

But Shoe shook his head and insisted on carrying farther on along the corridor.

“I’m not fooling around. Remember what you said when I wanted to come along here? If we’d done what you wanted then, you’d never have found all this, would you?”

“Yeah, okay, but . . .”

Reluctantly, Pennyworth conceded, picking his way painfully along behind Shoe, still for some reason clutching his box of jewels and still wearing his diamond-packed shirt, though he could have put both of them down and come back to them later.

At the end of the corridor there was another archway, this a very narrow one, leading to some descending spiral steps, very steep and narrow, and quite crudely cut into the raw rock.

Shoe examined the writing engraved above the arch, and noticed it was the same as the inscription over the entrance to the corridor.

“Your heart’s desire,” he read out.

“Crap,” said Pennyworth, laughing. “You don’t know what it says. That’s not even written in our language. It’s not even in our letters.”

He shook his head.

“Sorry, buddy, nice try but I’m not going a step further. You go down there if you want to. I’ve got my heart’s desire, mate, I’m holding it now. I’ll wait for you up here.”

Shoe shrugged and climbed down the narrow stairs. At their foot, the equivalent of two stories down, he reached a small but pleasantly proportioned room, its walls and ceiling decorated with a fine tracery of stone in an abstract pattern vaguely suggestive of vines and seashells. In the middle of the room, and filling up a good proportion of its floor area, was a circular pool of still water. On the far side of the pool was a stone seat like a throne. Cubes in three of the four corners of the room gave out gentle pinkish light. The fourth light cube had died.

Suddenly aware of how weary he was, of how long a journey his life had been, and how long it might still be, Shoe felt an overwhelming desire to go and sit in that stone seat and rest. Never mind Pennyworth waiting up there with diamonds shoved up his rectum and diamonds like a yoke round his neck.

“More fool him,” muttered Shoe. “He can wait.”

“Shoe! Shoe!”

The voice came at first from far away and he didn’t take much notice of it, just noted it, and frowned slightly, and turned back again to his own quiet thoughts, which darted back at once into the silent and peaceful and endlessly absorbing chambers where they had been so happily engrossed, like fish released into a stream.

“Shoe! Shoe!”

Now, annoyingly, the voice was close by, coming not from some remote place but from just across the small space where he was sitting.

“Hey Shoe! What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”

With a start, Shoe looked up and remembered where he was. He saw fat Pennyworth standing in the doorway of the room, still laden with his heaped box of stones and his ridiculous octopus arms. Sweat was running down the bald man’s face, which was a caricature of outrage and incredulity.

“What are you doing? “ bawled Pennyworth, too angry to remember his unease about disturbing the echoey silence. “I’ve been up there all this time, trying so hard not to crap these diamonds out again that I’ve got a cramp up my butt, and you’ve not found anything at all, have you? You’re not even looking for anything.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry,” said Shoe, indifferently. “I didn’t notice the time passing.”

“You didn’t notice the . . . I don’t believe I’m hearing this! We’re stuck in the middle of a desert on some godforsaken planet, in case you’d forgotten, and here you are sitting around like . . . like some old guy in a movie sitting on his veranda in the sun. I could hit you, Shoe, do you know that? We want to get away from here, remember? We’re on an alien planet!”

Shoe reluctantly stood up.

“You should try sitting here,” he said, “It . . .”

“I haven’t got time for a sit down,” interrupted Pennyworth (for whom, it must be admitted, sitting down had every reason to be a particularly unappealing idea).

He eyed the water. “Might just wash my hands though. They’re a bit shitty.”

“Don’t you dare touch that water,” snapped Shoe.

Pennyworth frowned.

“Why shouldn’t . . . ?” He shrugged. “Oh suit yourself. If you want to act all weird, be my guest. But let’s get going to that well.”

“So what were you looking at anyway?” asked Pennyworth, after he had completed the painful ascent from the room with the pool and they were making their way back along the corridor toward the landing.

“I sat in the chair and I looked at the water, and . . . it was just peaceful. It was like I . . .”

They were approaching the room full of treasure and Pennyworth interrupted him.

“You going to pick up a box?”

“I guess.”

Shoe went into the room and absently tossed a few extra diamonds into one of the boxes to top it up.

“It was like I remembered something,” he mused, “like I remembered something really obvious which I keep forgetting. I remembered . . . Well, it’s hard to explain but I remembered that everything is . . .”

“Tell you what,” said Pennyworth, “we should carry a few boxes to the well down there, stack them up and come up for more. Then we could chuck the extra boxes into the well before we go through ourselves.”

“Uh. Yeah, okay. What I’m trying to say is that I remembered that everything is fine, you know? There’s no need to . . .”

“Are we going to move or what?”

Shoe picked up a box. As they made their way back to the stairs, he opened his mouth to try one more time to explain again what he had seen down there, but then changed his mind. It was obvious that Pennyworth wasn’t listening or interested or capable of hearing. But, more than that, he sensed that the simple act of trying to put it into words would dissipate the experience. With every word you spoke about a thing like that, the less you knew what it was you were trying to say.

“Now all we need,” said Pennyworth, panting and gasping, as they set down the boxes beside the well and headed back up the stairs for more, “is to get to a place that isn’t Last Resort and isn’t a desert. Anywhere with people in it will do. Anywhere with people in it, my friend, and you and I are going to be rich.”

Pennyworth was so excited about this prospect that he seemed to have temporarily forgotten his discomfort, though Shoe couldn’t help noticing, as he followed his companion up the stairs, that Pennyworth’s breeches were now soaked with blood. The dark stain had spread right across the seat and halfway down one thigh.

“I’m going to get a bloody great swimming pool,” Pennyworth said as they reached the room full of treasure. He was so short of breath that his words came out in short bursts. “A bloody great swimming pool with . . . with underwater lights and a bar and . . . and all of that . . . And twenty bedrooms . . . And a high wall . . . And one of those big metal gates with my own guards minding it . . . And I’m going to have a wine cellar, and drink wine that costs . . . that costs more than its weight in gold, if I feel like it . . .”

They picked two more boxes, headed back toward the well.

“Maybe I’ll buy my own . . . my own football team or something, to have a bit of a hobby . . .” Pennyworth went on as they headed down the stairs again, though he could hardly find the breath.

“Yeah,” he wheezed as they reached the well again, “and I’m going to get myself so . . . so many women . . . so many pretty woman. Actresses. Models. A different one every day . . . And every night of course.”

“Right you are,” Shoe said distractedly. “Now let’s jump into this thing and get it over with.”

Pennyworth looked at him in horror.

“No way!” he panted out, wincing as he carefully lowered his second box to the ground. “We need more boxes! We need two more at least.”

Shoe shook his head.

“We need to go,” he said.

“No, Shoe! Not yet!”

Pennyworth’s plump face was pale with blood loss and slimy with sweat. His hands were shaking.

“Man,” said Shoe, “you should really see yourself.”

He dropped the box he’d been holding into the well. The nothingness sparkled and hissed as the treasure fell through it.

Pennyworth looked up the stairs and then back at the well, his glistening face knotted up with strain. He ran his tongue round his lips as he struggled with the conflicting pressures of greed and pain. But he didn’t have the energy to argue any more. He looked longingly up toward the landing, but finally, wincing, he bent down, picked up a box, and tossed it into whatever lay beyond that surface that wasn’t really a surface at all.

Shoe picked up his other box. He too glanced up the stairwell, thinking about the room with the pool that he’d never see again.

“Are you ready?” he asked Pennyworth, who was now standing in a small puddle of blood.

With a grunt of pain, Pennyworth picked up his remaining box. Again he ran his tongue round his lips and he looked sadly up the stairs one final time. Then he turned to Shoe and nodded, and they both jumped.

The harsh white sunlight hurt their eyes and at first they could see nothing but its overwhelming glare. But they could feel the heat of a tropical sun on their skins immediately, and smell the city smells of sewage and sweat and rotten vegetables. And they could hear the shouting and screaming of a hysterically excited crowd.

They were standing in a market square strewn with diamonds and bits of plastic box, and all around them men, women, and children were jostling and shoving and screaming abuse at one another as they scrabbled on the worn paving slabs for the precious stones.

“Holy crap,” breathed Pennyworth, whose glistening face was now gray as a corpse’s.

Quite nearby, a tall woman with a baby on her back stood up, triumphantly clutching a single diamond in her fist, and glanced in their direction. The baby was screaming and screaming, but she was oblivious to it. Her hard, bloodshot eyes darkened as she saw the new arrivals with their piled boxes of jewels. There were four bloody scratches on her right cheek.

“Get them!” she shrieked.

The actual words were unfamiliar to the two thieves, who knew no languages other than their own, but the meaning was very plain. Immediately the woman started to run toward them. A few other people reluctantly lifted their heads, saw the two thieves, and took in the implications. And then there were more shrieks and more people looked up. In a matter of seconds half the crowd was heading straight for them.

“Throw it down, Pennyworth,” yelled Shoe. “Throw down the whole boxful and run!”

He hurled the contents of his box out into the crowd, followed by the box itself. Pennyworth gaped at him for a moment, then looked back at the faces rushing toward him, crazed and murderous with longing. He swallowed once, then flung out his own box just as the tall woman with the scratched face was almost upon him. Yet again there were diamonds everywhere. The crowd screeched as it took in this second helping of instant wealth, as plentiful as the first lot that had appeared out of nowhere only a few minutes previously. Everyone dived to the ground, snatching and snarling and clawing. The boxes were torn to shreds in moments. Dodging pedestrians and rickshaws, the two thieves ran.

They had run for the length of just one block when Pennyworth fell to his knees with a sob and threw up copiously, immediately afterward scrabbling in the vomit for stones.

“I’ve got to crap,” he whimpered to Shoe, “I can’t hold on any longer.”

His foolish octopus limbs dangled into his stinking sick. Passers-by turned to stare at them. Rickshaw drivers beeped horns to try and make them look round.

“Well, crap yourself then, Pennyworth. We need to move.”

Shoe looked back the way they had come. Any moment now, he knew, the diamonds on the market square would be exhausted and the first hungry outriders of the crowd would start to come after them.

He pulled his sick companion to his feet, and put an arm round his shoulders to hold him up, trying not to breathe in too much of Pennyworth’s spreading stench, but gagging all the same. He looked down the streets to the left, the right, and straight ahead, weighing his options with the speed and detachment of an experienced professional, and made a decision to turn to the left, where the road looked busier and more winding and easier to hide in.

But a second or two passed between taking the decision and acting on it. “There’s probably another well buried under that market square,” he found himself thinking during that brief lacuna in time. And he remembered what Officer Graves had said about the Old Empire and its playful mysteries strewn out across the stars, and it seemed, in that moment, to make sense to him, so that he could understand why Graves cared about such things. And then, with a sudden pang of loss so sharp as to bring tears up into his eyes, he recalled the room with the pool, and tried to bring back into his mind what he had experienced there.

But his thoughts were interrupted by harsh shrieks of recognition coming from the direction of the square. He tightened his grip round his foolish friend and gave himself back to the moment.

Copyright © 2010 Chris Beckett