The Immortals

by Leo Brett, Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Xalia was old when the Pyramids were built. Xalia was a woman when Gaza was an untouched coastal plain. Xalia was a woman when Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees. She was not alone. There were others like her. Human, yet more than human. Some were good. Others were evil. Others, like Xalia, still retained some human qualities. Even a goddess can fall in love and when she does Time and Space become meaningless. Xalia was prepared to go to any lengths to accomplish her strange purpose. What of those who got in her way? What of those who opposed her? Could Martin Slade resist the advances of a goddess? If not... what would happen to a man who was loved by an Immortal? What happened to those who tried to save him?

Release date: September 30, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

AS fairgrounds go it was quite a place, decided Martin Slade. It was a long time since Martin had been to a fair. He supposed, looking back over a desert of years, the last fairground oasis had been visited when he was a child. Was it really as long ago as that? He asked himself the question again. Was childhood as long ago as that? He had to stop and think before he could remember how old he was—thirty-two. Thirty-two and he was thinking like an old man!

He was a tall, rather sparse individual, his hair was an earthy-black which once used to crinkle with great naturalness. His eyes were deep set, his face rather thin, and inclined to be on the lined side. Some of the lines were character—at least Martin liked to think so. Other lines owed their origin to worry…. Maybe, he decided, as he made his way past the carousel, he did too much worrying and not enough relaxing. Maybe that was how the lines had got there. His friends—he paused in midthought—maybe acquaintances would be more accurate, said he would be an old man long before his time. Maybe, reflected Slade, I shall do just that.

He drank in the fairground with his eyes. The first thing that met his gaze was the flood of lights, and his ears were assailed by the blast of music. Was that hellish noise really music? One pop tune at a time, he didn’t mind. In fact he rather enjoyed…. But when they blared at him from all angles it was a bit much! One at a time the Top Ten were good entertainment, but when not merely the Top Ten but the whole Top Twenty, and maybe even the whole Top Thirty, came at you simultaneously, well that was more than flesh and blood could stand. At least it was more than his flesh and blood could stand. However, music was one of the things that made a fairground a fairground. The tunes, he thought had changed a bit, changed more than a bit. That was a question, he thought, as he wandered around the stalls, that was a big question. Was it that the music had changed really? Or was it that his ability to take in new perceptions had changed?

In his early teens he had been a great frequenter of fairgrounds. At thirteen he had thought they were magnificent; at fourteen they had been exciting places inhabited by giggling females of about his own age and in whom he was just beginning to take an interest; at fifteen they had been somewhere in which he could show off, in which he could excite gasps of admiration by his daring ability to ride on any machines, irrespective of whether they zigged, zagged or swirled; whether their motion was circular, horizontal, perpendicular, or a combination of all three.

He had been on dive bombers and octopuses—or should it be octopi? He wasn’t quite sure. He had been on whips and jerks, and things that swung, and things that left a man pinned to the wall by a floor that descended from beneath. And as he had ridden his rather ancient, pre-war motor-cycle away from the fairground in those distant years, as an enthusiastic sixteen-year-old, he had wondered just what it felt like to be a ‘Wall-of-Death’ rider.

Memories flooded back as he continued threading his way between the stalls. Life had not turned out that way. Martin Slade had not become a ‘Wall-of-Death’ rider. Martin Slade had become an insurance clerk…. He was a very successful insurance clerk, maybe if he waited long enough and worked hard enough he would finish up as an underwriter. The old joke of his office was ‘Will I get to be an Underwriter before I become ready for the undertaker?’ Insurance man’s humour, he told himself. Every profession has its specific jokes. Insurance men see such a lot of the statistics of mortality and human tragedy that they have to have a singularly brilliant sense of humour if they are to survive at all in a profession which is a highly exacting one, as well as providing a man with statistics which cannot be any other than depressing. No matter how favourable statistics may be, when those statistics deal with death, misfortune and accident, no matter how good a ‘risk’ may be, technically speaking, the very fact that it exists has a dampening effect upon the mind of the man assessing it.

Martin looked up and began counting the lights, then he was doing swift mental calculations. His mental arithmetic had developed to a point where it bordered on genius. With fifteen lights per slat, ten slats per stall, fifteen stalls per row, and seventeen rows in all, then the arc lights over the top of the stalls, and the flashing decoration lights to be taken in as an additional calculation, and each of which was probably equivalent to 7.4 small stalls … figures danced up and down in his mind, lights and figures. His subconscious threw him up a pattern of illuminated dancing figures. He thought if he had been an artist it might have made an interesting motif—but he was not an artist, he was an insurance man, and right now he had taken time off from a singularly difficult piece of work to relax his mind. The strains of the fairground had attracted him and he had found himself wandering towards it without any particular idea of what he was going to do when he got there. It was one of those impulses which are incalculable; it was the very same incalculable impulses, and the incalculable things, that happened in a rather strange and incalculable way to Martin Slade, and two billion other human beings, that made his job as an insurance man so singularly worrying at times.

On his left as he wandered was a stall bearing the proud legend, ‘The Old Firm, established over forty years, Mrs. Googly’s rock’. Mrs. Googly was a jolly looking woman of late middle age. She had a pair of enormously bright ear-rings that matched her eyes. Four twinkling flashes of light—two eyes and two ear-rings—seemed to rivet themselves on the Insurance man’s face. It had been ages since Slade had bought any sweets, he wasn’t a sweet eater, yet somehow those glittering confections beckoned like little imps of temptation, inviting him to coat his teeth with stickiness, to the dismay of the dental profession, but to the delight of the taste buds on the tongue. He fished in his pocket and found a two-shilling piece and bought himself half-a-pound of Mrs. Googly’s home-boiled rock. As he sucked it he wondered if he spent too much time worrying about what the dental profession thought about the effects of too much sugar on the teeth. No doubt they were right, but at the same time there were compensations of a sensory nature. The change from his two shilling piece was rapidly burning a metaphorical hole in his pocket. There was a dart stall nearby. Martin Slade fancied himself as a flinger of darts. He picked up a set of arrows and looked at their bedraggled flights. It seemed that these feathered friends had seen better days, he thought to himself. It was sixty or over to win. After his first throw, in which he got a brace off the board and one in the ‘11’ he got the hang of the flightless missiles, dropped in a pair of nice double tops and bent the wire with the third. That was one prize voucher. He did it again with treble ‘20’ and a ‘5’, then gave it a treble ‘19’ and a ‘17’. There was a bored-looking female of indeterminate age, wearing a bedraggled grey mackintosh and artificial leopard-skin boots with fur linings. The artificial leopard, not to mention whatever strange animal had borne the fur, must both have been mangy, he decided with a wry grin. It seemed pretty obvious that the dart stall did not pay … he felt sorry for the attendant. He thought back to the fairgrounds of his youth and how well they had been patronised. It had been almost impossible to get on them on Saturday night in the season. But now…. He looked round, there was a fair crowd, admittedly, but it was a mere handful of survivors compared to the olden day crowds with which his memory kept haunting him. It made him feel sad, almost nostalgic.

There was something nice about a fairground, thought Martin Slade as he had a shot at some packets of cigarettes which had to be knocked off shelves with corks. Then he moved along and fed enormous plastic ducks with little round balls, which dropped in turn into numbered slots. The little plaster prize he had won at the dart stall seemed lonely in his pocket. He continued feeding balls into the mouths of plastic ducks until he won a tin ashtray to go with his little plaster ornament. He moved on slowly to the next stall. Here for 6d you could pull a string and were guaranteed to win a prize every time. Somehow it seemed unsporting, even though the prizes were not of any great value. One or two of them were, and it did just cross Martin’s mind that those might, by some strange stretch of imagination, not be connected to any string that was available to the audience.

As he watched one or two other passers-by try their luck he saw that his original suspicions had been wrong, for a seedy-looking youth, with a black jacket emblazoned with a skull and cross-bones, won a very nice-looking imitation cut-glass fruit bowl, which was certainly worth a great deal more than 6d. Martin bought himself 6d-worth of string and pulled. He got two 2d. tubes of sweets in a gaily-coloured little cardboard wrapper. Ah well, he thought, the man’s got to live, and after all two-pence isn’t very much to charge for the privilege of pulling one of his strings! It was a gaily-coloured, brightly lit tent. There was a coconut shy next door and Slade spent 3/6 before he finally dislodged one of the hirsute nuts. It wouldn’t go in his pocket and he carried it around in an almost unnecessarily obvious way. He carried it with the pride of the head-hunter, a young head-hunter, who has just returned from the chase with his first gory trophy.

A little further along was an amusement arcade, a cul-de-sac of slot machines. There were some wonderfully old fashioned ha’penny in the slot machines; a couple of one-armed bandits were doing a brisk trade, and an old man who ought to have known better, in Slade’s opinion, was peering avidly at ‘What the Butler Saw’. Martin moved on past the slot-machine alley.

The next of the stalls was a .22 rifle range. Martin decided on ‘5 for a bob’ and dislodged 4 small and almost incredibly shot-up table tennis balls from a jet of water. He felt quite elated, but he would have been more elated still if he had been able to make his 5th shot count. He decided to have another bob’s worth and this time knocked five derelict glass sauce bottles off their hooks at the back. In a world which frustrates us on far too many occasions, in the world of civilization, red tape and so-called culture, it is very comforting at times to be able to hurl little leaden projectiles at glass bottles with the aid of gunpowder or cordite. Martin replaced the gun rather regretfully and walked on to the corner of the fairground which had always fascinated him most in by-gon. . .