Yellow

I started working with the Bureau of Economic Affairs at the beginning of 1945 A.H, reporting directly to a supervisor called Kern Slandyn. In theory the BEA was responsible to the second chamber of the Resource Management World Government and fell under the authority of Imran. In practice, Mohamed Janjua, the cunning old Bureau chief exercised a high degree of independence and prior to the crackdown of 1954 he had a very free hand in determining policy.

My first mission was to London, once one of the old national capitals of a region called England but now operating under franchise as a Disney City. It wasn’t performing particularly well. Old England had suffered badly when the mid-Atlantic conveyer shut down leaving it to cool in relatively icy seas. Tourists from North Africa preferred to visit the warmer climes of Rome or Athens when they wanted their cultural fix. Berlin, Paris and London barely ran at a profit.

“It’s very provincial here,” Kern told me. “England has a high proportion of what you might call the more “orthodox” faithful and there’s also a significant Christian minority. The local government has to be sensitive to all the religious sensibilities. You won’t find much of that laissez-faire secularism you’re used to in Nouakchott. Be careful what you say and mind you don’t offend the locals.”

I took Kern’s warning seriously and for three months I was scared to do much of anything outside my official role. In any case, my work kept me busy. I had a very junior job checking tax records against the revenue stream. There was some travel involved but mostly I was based in a small office on Leman Street near one of the eastern entrances to the City.

Outside my windows I could see the heavily reinforced and fortified train tracks heading to the convict towns of Great Essex and Great Kent. Tall, electrified fences marked the border between the subsidised interior and the poverty-stricken “free zone” outside the jurisdiction of the Disney City corporation. Local City guards patrolled these fences. On first sight, their bright red uniform caused me to momentarily mistake them for Zed men but on closer inspection the gold thread in the red cloth and the civil issue night sticks distinguished them. Later I learned that the guards were called Beefeaters. Their uniform was a stylised version of the traditional dress once worn by the soldiers at the Tower of London, an ancient fortress and popular attraction within the park that was only a few minutes away from my office.

One chill morning in mid-November I had an afternoon’s leave due, and I chose to explore the city interior. A thin blizzard of pure white snow was adding a desultory clean topping to the dirty slurry that had built up on the pavements from the previous week’s fall and was now midway between deciding whether to melt or to refreeze. I made my way to St. Mary Axe, in the shadow of the great phallic symbol of the old Swiss RE building. Then it was on to Lime Street, passing the Lloyd’s towers glistening beneath inoperative mid-21st century facet shields. Both buildings were still minor tourist attractions despite the dereliction of much of the surrounding area.

There were only a few visitors in the city. I’d felt the need for fresh air but now I began to regret my decision to brave the bleak streets, wishing I’d chosen to take the Tower Hill underground instead. The freezing air was slowly but inexorably sucking the warmth from my marrow. A group of men passed by on the opposite side of the street boisterously singing some popular song. They might have been drunk on alcohol but from the violet flush suffusing their skins I realised they'd been popping Fly, one of the more notorious drugs in current circulation. No one knew where it came from, but it was pushed throughout Europe and America. It reputedly caused euphoric flashbacks and odd fusions of memory and awareness and it was dangerously addictive.

I shivered as a scruffy youth in a black coat with an old-fashioned high collar sensed my hesitation and thrust a thin slip of green paper into my hands. The snow speckled the page as I read it.

“Trusters Middle England Theme Rally at Trafalgar Square, 19th November 2507”, it said in big bold type. Then in smaller print underneath, “Come and hear the arguments for yourselves. Marshall Dearing, Conan Mark, and Richard McCraig. Entertainment from North Sky, the Xform Acrobats and House of York. Guest werm speakers from the High Rewglade trading combine and the Malaquon greater government. Licensed market in North African and Asiatic exotics until 6:30. Off world produce from beyond the Bubble! Switchback rides from Oxford and France. Fun for all the family! Terms and conditions of employment apply to park staff under licence order 1674a.”

I’d forgotten about the Trusters Rally, although we’d all been briefed about this particular example of local political theatre. I decided to go.

Trafalgar Square had all the accoutrements of a medieval marketplace. Under the terms of licence 1674a the gathering was designated as a 13th century theme day and the city staff were dressed in character. Dark woollen tabards and cloaks, leather britches and the occasional linen head dress were the order of the day. The few genuine paying tourists weren’t obliged to dress for the occasion and looked oddly anachronistic in the crowds jostling between the stalls. Hawkers, peddlers, and buskers plied their trade wherever there was room. The rich smell of suckling pig steamed into the cold air above a roasting pit. A pair of sleek falcons tethered by thin leather straps brooded patiently atop a wooden perch. They studied the flocks of pigeons circling round the central monument, a statue standing on a fluted stone column, with an unblinking yellow eyed predatory interest. The soot blackened stones of a low fountain wall circled the column, over which a vaulting wooden stage had been erected to make a platform for the main speakers. It was decorated with silks and bunting cut to look like the stand in some royal tournament of chivalry as imagined by a clichéd Virtuality director.

And yet for all the mock history this was, after all, still a genuine contemporary political occasion. I found this odd and rather distasteful, even though I knew that it was the way that all the Disney Cities organised themselves. They had a fine balancing act to perform. They employed so many serfs, guides, maintenance, and support staff to keep their cities running that they were always a major factor in the local economy. In this depopulated land, London had less than one percent of the inhabitants it had once counted upon at the peak of its growth, but it was still the major power centre and as such the Disney corporation effectively controlled the country in all but name. Here, as elsewhere, for reasons of labour relations they felt obliged to tolerate a degree of political expression. Yet the political expression, within the city must also conform to the corporation’s needs. It must be dressed up and sanitised for the paying public. And hence this dual-purpose medieval fair, an unholy cross between a play, a rally, a market, and an entertainment.

The Trusters were a loose alliance of commercial and political interest groups, broadly in favour of liberal interstellar cultural exchange and free trade. I knew that they were campaigning for the alien enclaves to be expanded in order to bring about a freer flow of inter species communication. It was expected that colonies in the Werm, Viwodian and Thinderin spheres of influence would reciprocate. And there was the perennial question of the Limitation which I suspect they thought (wrongly in my opinion) might be modified in the near future. They had other political ideas as well, but it was this tenet of theirs about the correct relationship between humankind and the Contemporary races which had earned them their name.

And by extension, where there were Trusters there were Doubters. The Doubters were cultural isolationists. Some were religious zealots who quoted from the Texts of the Limitation, claiming that it was an act of blasphemy to enter into the politics of heaven. They had chosen to apply a complex creed of moral and cultural interpretation over the simple demands of the Limiters. Most people didn’t take this kind of thing seriously. But there were other types of Doubters - trade protectionists of various colours, economic concentrators, land gangs and simple xenophobes.

I had no strong feelings one way or the other. Many of the Trusters seemed to represent grubby commercial interests whilst large sections of the Doubters appeared only to be reacting with poorly justified visceral emotion, none of which made the slightest difference to the validity of their arguments of course but it made me weary of them. I was interested in seeing any aliens though.

The crowd was good humoured and at first the rally passed off peacefully enough. I bought a highly spiced kebab and wandered round the stalls eating inelegantly, enjoying the variety of goods on display and the strangeness of the situation. The trouble didn’t start until late in the afternoon when I was thinking about leaving. It was growing dark. Some of the official employees were carrying torches burning with a crude mixture of pitch and tar and an orange flickering of scant warmth bounced off the darkening snow.

The werm were speech singing – a syncopated atonal warbling, amplified subtly from the stage and translated in quiet undertones by speaker drones and into netware neural pieces. I didn’t think it was anything particularly controversial. On the contrary, the content of the speech just seemed like the usual platitudes of interspecies co-operation and the Universal Good. But the content was of less interest than the fact of the speech. It was still unusual to see any of our Contemporary galactics mixing in public gatherings. The crowd were more interested in the outré appearance of the Werm, their long lean stature and the ribbed tubing of their multiply articulated pale beige limbs where they emerged bare from the cuts of their gold metal work cloaks and the gaps in their long purple satin scarves.

Some were more interested than others – hostile even. A nasty undercurrent of orchestrated heckling had started; a prelude to something worse. Then Doubters were storming the stage. It had to be premeditated and it seemed to catch the security forces off guard. I gaped openly at this archaic and increasingly violent protest. Placards were swung and poles ripped from the stalls for use as makeshift weapons. But now the werm were being hustled from the stage – a lean white-haired woman, in her forties wearing a grey jump suit pushed ahead of a tight band of diplomatic troupers. Zed men were beginning to pour into the square as frantic bystanders hastened to leave it. I’d left it too late to escape the jostling crowds and found myself on the edge of an advancing wedge of government heavies, ring fencing the agitated werm and thinderin. I didn’t know if it was a Pasteracht attack or something more serious. Not that it mattered. My only goal now was to avoid being trapped between the rioters and the forces of law and order and in that I was unsuccessful. Three men in chain link tabards burst through the protective cordon and grabbed the leading werm, pulling the creature roughly towards them. I scrambled and tripped backwards over a low wooden bench, falling behind a stall and grabbing the awning which ripped ponderously. The security chief fired a standard issue tranquillising dart at one of the attackers, but it simply bounced harmlessly off the pseudo medieval costume. For a moment it looked as though they might escape but then the Zed men arrived. Lying prone on the icy ground I watched with relief as the ensuing tussle moved away from me. And then I saw it. A long chain of memgems, glittering crystals of aqua green and royal blue that shone with dying piezo electric sparks in the snow.

If it hadn’t been for my long-term interest in werm culture, I wouldn’t have understood their significance. They were crude devices for memory and emotional storage, long since superseded in serious work because they were too fragile and inefficient but highly valued still as family heirlooms – antiques in effect. I’d seen a memgem necklace before in Nouackchott and I knew it had to be reconnected quickly. I staggered through the snow, scrabbled for the stones and unintentionally took the next step in my peculiar career.

---

Dreams and memories are dangerous unless I can control them. Dangerous here above all places. I wake slowly and put the past behind me, knowing that I will need to resume the struggle to master it later. I must concentrate on the needs of today. Outside my memories Trafalgar Square is only a tomb, sealed in a mountain of plastolithite on a planet far, far away…

We meet for breakfast in the village hall beneath wooden crook beams cut from some gnarled black jungle hardwood. It’s dreary outside; a constant sodden drizzle weeping into the sea from dirty grey clouds. It’s cold in the early morning too, although I know we’ll get the full tropic heat later. The climate of this part of Silusia-Alpha has no exact analogue on Earth. Inside the airy interior of the hall it is dry and relatively light and warm. Yellow filaments bent into triangular loops and attached to sconces in the wall give out a soft and sympathetic glow. Long wooden tables and benches provide a place for human pilgrims and bilachai acolytes to eat. Rahelo and his wife set out dishes of sweet red pamaloy fruit, raisins and corn scones, boiled turtle eggs and plates of thin golden pancakes. The thinderin, of course, eat elsewhere.

After breakfast we are obliged to sit around and wait for our guide. We’ve no idea when she will show up. The thinderin are running the show here and we do what they say.

One of the twins has a news portal linked to some service in Rillyon. She is perusing it idly – nervously even. She’s making me nervous. At last she grows bored with it and offers it to me. I take it gratefully for something to do. I’m not really interested in the local gossip – it’s tuned for the readership of the human colonists but there’s still a great deal of bilachai politics for which I lack the necessary background. There’s some recent reports from Earth though. The editorial tries to make sense of the constant ebb and flow of the power struggle between Their Majesties. Now it seems that a new element has been added to the complex equation. He’s a civil servant by the name of Achmed Shankar and he’s been propelled from serving as a technical aide to becoming a political force in his own right. It seems he’s leading a considerable faction who are unhappy with the insular and prescriptive nature of Their Majesties government. It’s not exactly a political party but the editor speculates that it might become one - if Earth ever chose to allow political parties, that is. They’re sceptical about that on Silusia Alpha. They don’t seem to have much time for Their Majesties one party Resource Management World Government.

I’m just getting interested in this article when a rush of sentient damp vegetation tumbles into the hall. Time to return to the Temple.

---

Today our thinderin guide confides her name. Like all seed labels it is a long genetic ascription, lacking the dignity of the names they choose for their mature personalities. It is complex and hard to remember.

“But you may call me Willow,” she says. “There is no shame in meeting your Chromatic Need”, the guide continues. She speaks to us all as we toil up the hill to the Temple entrance. I suspect she is disturbed by the distressing progress of this pilgrimage. Maybe she has merely detected something competitive in our attitude towards these meditations. If so, it is hardly surprising, given the terms that the thinderin set. Are they really so utterly ignorant of human motivations, or do they play a deeper game?

We learn that Dywhyiss was a pyrophobic. She’d seen her home reduced to smoke and rubble when one of the regular Savannah ‘Ash Storm’ events (which the Blue Home firemen use to control kippa grass), skipped over a water trench and ran out of control. Apparently, her mother and father were caught unawares and burned to death in the flames. All this had happened many years ago when Dywhyiss was only a toddler but naturally she still bore the mental scars. Now she too, was in the care of thinderin root counsellors in a temple hostel.

“Remember that you are here to learn,” Willow says. “Learning will involve a confrontation with your Chromatic Need. We can determine what that Need is for each one of you and then negotiate a successful resolution. It is perfectly honourable to face the Chromatic Altar with humility and acceptance, whatever the outcome of the meditation.”

I feel like a naughty schoolboy caught talking in prayers. Nevertheless, I do not want to meet my Chromatic Need this time.

We pass through the Dome of the Great Prism, walking on to a chapel at the far end raised perhaps a little higher than the one where our orange meditation took place. Inside it looks much the same. The same hard, low stone cut seats, the same altar. We are ready.

The fourth meditation is Yellow. It is this meditation which brings home to me how perfectly precise the Chromatic altars are. The yellow is the yellow of sunlight - sunlight of the precise hue that shines on Earth. Ah…, I think, the thinderin know what they are doing. The pilgrims seem to sense that they are being toyed with; perhaps teased a little. Surely this is the ultimate race memory, for in all the nuclear furnaces that illuminate our colonies there isn’t one without at least a subtle shade of wrongness. The yellows are too bright and white or too dim and orange. Human eyes have not adapted to the wildly varying intensity and spectral patterns of strange stars. Here we have the perfect buttermilk yellow, bright, and unyielding. I know it well of course but wonder how many of the others have experienced true sunlight on their flesh and in their eyes. As it turns out the answer is at least one.

This is an important meditation for me. It is the first where I begin to understand the techniques for riding the narratives inspired by the altar. There is a trick to it – like learning to fly or to swim. In the red and orange meditations I was simply awash in emotions, struggling to stay afloat and thrashing to the surface only by dint of enormous, wasted energies. I didn’t catch the central theme until Willow explained it to us afterwards. Now, however, I begin to see the way of it. I know how to apply my thoughts to go where I want it to go. The other pilgrims haven’t reached this point yet, but I feel their efforts to comprehend all around me just as I could first hear them breathing in the darkness of the black meditation. One of them is in difficulty. I move across our shared communal mind space, shouldering aside another pilgrim in my path with clumsy mental muscles. I feel like a shark. I am the first of our pilgrim band to discern the way that structure and images evolve from the uniformity of the Yellow. I am the first to really see what is before us all. I am curious and perhaps I am dangerous.

The pilgrim in trouble is Edulon-602. With my newfound skills I won’t need Willow to tell me about his Chromatic Need. I see it in front of me and I know that it is an open wound in his memory and imagination. At first the details aren’t clear. I don’t yet have the skills to work with them. But the essence is plain.

We are in a desert. Mobile yellow sand is a whispering echo of harsh and clear sunlight. These are the yellows that have been given a sympathetic birth in the radiance of the yellow meditation. The sand blows over the flat pan that frames a scrubby little oasis, then out onto a mixed expanse of arid rocks and scalloped dunes. Three old and battered general dynamics Land Ramblers are parked by the muddy pool, their flat shoes burnt umber and black, their chrome surfaces scoured matt and their once clear plastic wind canopies scratched into a murky translucent grey. Five tall figures pace anxiously between the vehicles and a tall flapping tent, erected at the edge of the water. They are wearing white linen robes and cream net facemasks to shield their mouths from the choking sand. Each robe has an embroidered flash at the shoulder with a stylised black viral macrophage design depicting an organism invading the bloodstream of Gaia. I recognise the marking immediately although I’ve never seen these people before. They are a Pasteracht cell – part of Their Majesties’ Disloyal Opposition, the Official Terrorists, and formal targets for the Zed Men.

I hadn’t guessed that Edulon-602 once belonged to the Pasteracht but it is plainly the case.

“What do you think Ricky? Worth a chance?”

It’s a woman bundled behind the robes. She’s talking directly to me. Ricky and Edulon-602 are one and the same. There’s a jump in the nature of the playback and I’m momentarily shocked with a dose of recognition and guilt.

My words so far have been inadequate to convey the quality of this drama. I must try harder. It is important to understand the true nature of these meditations. They are not like some Virtuality Replay in a complex in New Lincoln or Trandrabar. The meditation is both less than that and more than that. It is less because the sensory details are not so sharp. I don’t have the precision in sound, smell, vision, and touch which might be expected in a top-quality Virtuality theatre. To that extent I feel blinkered; cheated of the ability to apply a comprehensive objective interpretation of the scene that unrolls before me. But I do have an additional channel of emotion, which feeds strange and direct into the back of my mind. This is something no Virtuality company has ever achieved. It is unique to the meditations and if it were available to purveyors of entertainment it would open a whole new and hazardous dimension in art. As I am carried along by the presentation Edulon-602 is offering to us, I feel as though I am swimming against a strong tide. I can move against the flow but only with enormous difficulty. It is somewhat akin to dreaming but with an added awareness of my own identity. I review the memory, but I do not experience it with the totality of immersion, which would drown me if it were my own dream. Instead, I accept the interpreted story, feel the sentimental corruption and understand the emotional aspects in a new and direct way.

Edulon-602 used to love this woman who calls him Ricky. This comes over to me as a fact on the emotional channel without any ambiguity. He used to love her, but he doesn’t love her anymore. In fact, he hates her. That is why he is planning her betrayal and the betrayal of the rest of the Pasteracht.

“We have to go for it,” he says. “We won’t have another opportunity as good as this one.”

They walk towards the tent and under the flap into a darker space free from the blowing sand. It is a luminous green island of humming concentration; close, hot, and feverish, where military monitors cast their glow against the canvas walls. There are two Pasteracht inside the tent.

“Movement patterns nominal,” says the young man sitting in front of the largest bank of screens. He’s in his early twenties; thin, angular, and competent. “There’s no sign they suspect anything.”

“We have to do it cleanly, Jude,” the woman says. “Remember what happened when the Madagascan operation got botched? We don’t want that. We’ve had too many failures lately!”

“Then Their Majesties should think about beefing up our weaponry and command and control systems, shouldn’t they?” a third man remarks in a rather sulky voice. He’s in his late thirties with cropped close hair and a pock marked face.

“You know that isn’t how it works,” Jude says.

“Isn’t it?” the man replies. He coughs and spits. “I thought that was exactly how it worked. Or how it’s supposed to work. We’re Official Terrorists after all.”

It seems I’m about to witness an internal argument about the politics and ethics of the Pasteracht movement. The sulky man is a pessimist, but it turns out that he isn’t as sceptical as this Jude character.

“Sure. We’re the Official Terrorists, but you don’t think we’re here only to sharpen up the Zed Men, do you? That might be the official story, but we all know better.”

Jude gives the word ‘official’ a decidedly unpleasant resonance. In the green light his high cheekbones cast cynical shadows across smooth olive skin. He’s a man after my own heart.

“What do you mean?”

The older man coughs again. He’s become belligerent now. The Pasteracht are all on edge. They’re nervous about the coming mission and so they’re tearing apart a little and starting to fray at the edges. Jude presses on.

“We keep the Zed Men keen and sharp. We exercise Gaia’s immune system. Bully for us. That isn’t why Their Majesties support the Disloyal Opposition. We’re here to be scapegoats. We’re here to take the fall for the Resource Management World Government when it fails. You think the aftermath of the Madagascan operation was a failure, do you? A failure for us maybe, but not for Their Majesties! Not when they had the justified slaughter of the evil Pasteracht by the noble Zed Men to offer. What a great story that made in the media!”

“Jude! Michlov! Stop it!” the woman shouts. “We’ve got a job to do.”

Jude turns and stares at her for a long moment, considering. “You’re right Ella,” he says at last. “As usual.”

“And remember, it’s just a job,” Michlov mutters, wanting the last word but not getting it.

“Then at least I might get some job satisfaction today,” Jude finishes. “I’m only happy when a Zed Man is a dead man.”

Ella and Ricky leave the tent. How did he find himself on Escaloda, light years away from this place of sanctioned terror and pathological mind games with a new name and number tattooed across his skull? I don’t know but I think I’m about to find out. The two Pasteracht struggle through the gritty air towards the leeward shadow of the nearest Land Rambler where a tall figure shields a cigarette and flashes them an instant sharp smile. I get another jolt on the emotional channel. Ah, ha, I think, knowingly.

“How are you darling?” the tall man says to Ella. “Nervous?”

“Not if you’re here Ian,” she says and lowers her facemask to give him a kiss.

Ricky stares studiously at the sand and puts some overcooked jealousy back on the boil. It’s the hot variety with plenty of curry spices in it and he’s trying hard to keep his mouth and stomach from blistering. As a neutral observer, even I’ll grant that Ella’s reply is a little too saccharine sweet and the cliché is hard to swallow. Can this woman really hold such an unconditional sentiment? Then I remember again that this isn’t a Virtuality Replay and I’ve no idea how much Edulon-602 has corrupted his memories to fit his desires. I know enough to understand the gist of it though. I’ve just witnessed the key moment when Ricky decides that he isn’t turning back. In truth I’m rather disappointed with our fellow pilgrim. So that’s his motivation, is it? Just a bit of good old-fashioned sexual jealousy.

“Sunset is an hour away,” Ian says. “We’ll give it half an hour after that and if Jude still hasn’t found any anomalies we strike.”

We cut forward into darkness. Edulon-602 has gifted this involuntary exposition to our collective meditation and his denouement follows with all the grim inescapability of the original events.

“Check weapons”, Ian says to the Pasteracht. The weapons come out for inspection in a small pool of red light. They all carry knives and small arms, but Jude and Ricky have the only heavy-duty weapons; standard issue screamers and point six electro convulsive interrupt shunts. The screamers are harmless and the shunts trigger attack logs which are easily counteracted by basic defence software and backup power supplies. That’s only to be expected. The Pasteracht are official terrorists after all. They get their funding and equipment from the state just like the Zed Men. They’re sanctioned to kill people because people are expendable, but infrastructure and equipment isn’t so cheap. Their Majesties use the Pasteracht to hone the Zed Men, but they don’t want to damage valuable Resource Management World Government property in the process. So, when the Pasteracht go on a mission like this, they plant screamers instead of bombs and they stick to low voltage shunts. The screamers and shunts alert the authorities to the damage a real, unofficial terrorist might have inflicted if only there were any such terrorists in reality. Zed Men get executed when a screamer goes off. This is called ‘cleansing the planetary bloodstream’ and ‘training the immune system of Gaia’ in the ecologically perverted language of the world government.

I note Jude’s nervous energy and eagerness to be about the job. In Ricky’s memory it makes a pungent emotional contrast to his reluctance and fear. Jude seems to be relishing the opportunity to humiliate his formal enemies. This can only arise from some deep-rooted personal enmity. It leaves him in the peculiar double bind of a cynical fanatic, simultaneously appreciating the deadly political trap of the game of terror but addicted to it for his own private reasons. Hatred of Zed Men is common on the Earth and not just amongst the Pasteracht. The exact reason for Jude’s hatred of Zed Men, however, must remain a mystery to me. He is not the one supplying the material for this meditation and his emotional channel is not accessible in the Temple of Chromatic Enlightenment. Instead, we pilgrims must learn what we can from Ricky. Ricky the jilted lover. Ricky with the guilty secret.

Over the sand dunes is the target. Through Ricky’s senses I smell the salty tang of sea air where this desert of land meets a rain-shadowed ocean. A black complex of bent tubes and fractionating columns looms ahead. Three green lights wink on and off to warn airships away from the tallest towers. It is a solar powered desalination plant, pumping irrigation water into underground pipes buried beneath the sand. A small military communications station is attached to the water factory and excess power from two giant sun ovens is bled into the veins of a skein of electric cables running southward along the coastline. This is quite an important local piece of infrastructure.

The Pasteracht approach the perimeter fence.

“Not here,” Ricky says in an anxious whisper. “We have to cut away from the active cameras in the spot I mapped out.”

“He’s right,” Jude hisses. “Ricky tagged the surveillance pattern this afternoon. We go where the Zed Men won’t be patrolling, remember?”

“Sorry,” Ella says. She’s shaking. “I guess I am a bit nervous after all!”

They walk a few hundred metres northward and she produces cutting equipment and starts to make a hole in the metal chain links.

It’s obvious to me that this little venture is doomed from the start. Not only are the hapless Pasteracht sporting outdated weapons, but they are internally divided, and they have a traitor in their midst. They are fools to contemplate this mission against the Zed Men. I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on them, though. After all, I have the enormous advantage of hindsight. I know Ricky has passed the point of no return. And I have a pretty good idea that this wouldn’t be a meditation unless it was going to end in disaster. It seems to me that all the chromatic meditations are pretty much driven by the power of hindsight.

The Pasteracht scramble through the fence and start to make their way to the nearest building. That’s when the Zed Men spring their trap. In real life this must all have happened quite quickly, but in the meditation, it is slowed to the pace of Ricky’s perceptions and expands into an intricate tapestry of death and destruction.

The Zed Men spring up from the sand. They have been lying concealed in underground Faraday cages which rise like one-man elevators to form a ring of twenty or more troops completely surrounding the would-be saboteurs. Five bright white arc lights spotlight the Pasteracht when they are at their most vulnerable out in the open. The Zed Men are in full military uniform wearing their infamous red and gold battle suits with the stylised buckles in the form of white blood corpuscles. The Zed Men have their weapons drawn already and they begin firing even before the last trickles of sand have fallen from their bodies.

I feel Ricky’s bust of adrenalin as he fumbles for the switch on a screamer and triggers it. The toy bomb screeches and flashes its fake detonation in bright warning yellow. One of the Zed Men turns to aim at him, and an agonising bolt of neural energy shocks his body into paralysed immobility. He should have been terrified but perversely I sense only relief amid the pain. It takes me a moment to work out why. Then I realise that the screamer is a prearranged signal to identify the traitor to the Zed Men. Ricky has been frozen out of the combat for his own protection. A much worse fate awaits his erstwhile comrades and one that he is now forced to witness.

Michlov has turned back to the fence and slips round the ring of Zed Men. He’s the nearest to the back. He grabs the metal and is instantly shocked by the powerful voltage the Zed Men have switched into the barrier. It throws him back and his body jerks in mid-air as two rounds of razor sharp flechettes dissect him. I’ll give the Zed Men something. They’re nothing if not professional. The Pasteracht don’t stand a chance.

Ian tries to draw his gun. He doesn’t even get to raise it before he’s down in a fountain of blood. Jude has a bit more luck. At least he gets a couple of wild shots off before the Zed Men finish him with a clinical burst of concentrated fire. But Ella’s the last to die and she does so right in front of Ricky. He can’t move his eyes away as she struggles across her lover’s body and stares at him with the wounded look of a puzzled puppy dog kicked by a psychopathic thug. Ricky doesn’t even know if she suspects him at that final moment. But he’s obviously dwelt on this a lot, and he tries now to find the answer for the thousandth time. That’s why he came here. He wants to relive the memory in a more vivid setting as if by reviewing it again for the last time he can get an answer. And he wants something else; something even more impossible. He wants forgiveness from a dead woman who may not even have known of his guilt before she died.

Edulon-602 can’t take much more of this. The meditation is falling apart under the strength of his emotions. But there’s time for a last image. The guard captain of the Zed Men approaches him and pats him unsympathetically on the back with false camaraderie. Ricky’s still paralysed and winces with the pain.

“Don’t worry mate,” the guard captain says. “We’ll have a new identity on a new planet for you. Never let it be said that the Zed Men don’t look after their own.”

He winks at our pilgrim and the meditation finally collapses.