Nick said, subdued, “I never heard that expression before.”
“What’s happened?” Stan demanded. “Where the bloody hell are we?”
“Whinmore Bus Station, I think,” Nick answered politely. “We’re in one of those long shelters where people are supposed to queue.”
Nick was correct, of course. We were wedged halfway along the thing, and the only good part of the situation I could see was that the bus station was pretty well deserted. It was around eight o’clock on the Saturday before Easter Day. In a town like Wantchester, that probably meant that the last bus had left half an hour ago. But even so, I felt it was all too much. I put my face down on the steering wheel.
“Then I can’t see us getting out in a hurry,” I heard Stan say. “We’re in too tight to open the doors, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” Nick agreed. “And there doesn’t seem to be anyone about at all. Would it do any good to shout?”
“Don’t try it. They’d wonder how we got here,” Stan reproved him. “And it will take heavy cutting equipment to move us. Since it’s Bank Holiday on Monday, I shouldn’t wonder if we aren’t here till Tuesday.”
“Oh, surely…?” Nick said, not used to Stan’s lugubrious style of joke. “Couldn’t Rupert just go back into another world and then come out on Earth again in the right place?”
“That he couldn’t, lad,” Stan said. “You have to be moving to make transit, see. If you’re not moving, you get stripped.”
Which was possibly what our killers hoped would happen, I thought. I sat up. “What I’m going to have to do, Nick, is to force these two sets of railings apart, and stretch the roof with them, until there’s room to drive out of here.”
“Oh,” said Nick. “Er. Rupert – who is the invisible person in here?”
“It’s Stan,” I said. “Stanley Churning, Nick Mallory. Stan used to be a top jockey and a Magid, Nick, before he was disembodied.”
“Er,” Nick said again. I could feel him decide that it might be impolite to ask if this meant Stan was a ghost. He settled for “Pleased to meet you.”
“Same to you,” said Stan. “Cheers.”
“Yes, and now shut up, the pair of you,” I said, “and let me get to work on this bus shelter.”
There was instant respectful silence. I worked. Hard work, too, and I was weary. I set the principles of growth upon the sets of metal rails. I showed them how life started among minerals not so different from theirs, how it came from small beginnings and took force and direction, and suggested the direction that their growth might take. Then I turned to do the same for the rippled plastic roofing. And as I did so, because of the way I was working with growth and force and life, I had one of those moments that Ted Mallory and his fellow-panellists claimed not to have. Ideas, thoughts, explanations, notions, hit me and drenched my mind like the surf of a huge Atlantic roller. Rolled me over among them. I went down at first, and then sprang up and rode the wave with growing and enormous excitement. Everything I knew about what had been happening today assembled itself beneath me, as if the pieces had been lying around hoping I would see them and put them together. And I thought I knew what was going on, and why. As I reminded the lifeless chemicals of that roof of the small beginnings of life, I was sure that I did.
There was complete silence from Stan and Nick, while I worked and thought, thought and worked, but to my surprise, as I set the suggestion of a forest canopy upon the plastic, I heard the faintest of mutters from Maree, and a very slight stirring. Either there was more life to her than I had realised, or – which was more likely – I had managed to set the principles of life and growth on her too.
Finally I finished. I sat back. “This is going to take about half an hour to work,” I said. “I think it’s talk time.”
Rupert Venables continued
“Stan first,” I said.
“Me?” said Stan. “Mother of pearl, why me?”
“Because you know about centaurs,” I said. “Tell me if I’ve got this right. I’ve been told centaurs are incredibly loyal. If they’ve sworn friendship or made a contract with another person, then they won’t ever let that person down.”
“We-el,” said Stan. “Yes. Roughly.”
“So what happens if they have equal loyalty to a centaur and a human?”
“The centaur always comes first,” Stan said. “Racist lot. They’ll let a human down in favour of another centaur any day. Mind you, so would we, the other way round, if you think about it.”
“OK,” I said. “What about loyalties among themselves?”
“Always family,” Stan said decidedly. “They do
n’t go for chiefs and kings and so forth. Don’t have them really. But they’ll do anything for a relative, and the closer the relative, the more they’ll do. The difficult bit is the way most of them don’t pair up for life, the way humans do; so they’re always hard at it watching whose son has a child by whose daughter and working out if that gives them a family obligation to the child. They call themselves cousins when they do. A lot of them waste half their time following bloodlines. Bore you stiff with it. ‘I’m his cousin but not hers.’ All that stuff.”
“What is the closest family obligation?” I asked.
“Mother to child,” said Stan. “Next to that, it’s a man-centaur to his sister’s children, then a woman-centaur to children she’s sure are her brother’s – not so easy to be certain of that, you see – and then you get sisters and brothers, and then what we’d call proper cousins. Father to children he knows are his comes trailing in sixth place. He’ll always look after his sister’s kids before his own.”