The Plenty Principle

by Colin Greenland

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

Synopsis

Following the 'Plenty' trilogy, this book contains a collection of the adventures of Tabitha Jute and her motley crew. Xtasca the Cherub and Saskia are just two of the popular characters featured. This collection is not only focused on Jute and her companions - also included are a wealth of Greenland's other works, including an Elric story. His variety and skill shine through, as he tackles SF, fantasy, horror and more mainstream genres.

Release date: May 27, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 428

Sample

THAT WINTER THE WIND from the mountains was fierce, prowling and shaking all around the house like a great wolf. It scattered the icicles from the trees in the park and licked the thick snow that crested the walls into strange peaks and curlicues. From the window seat in the drawing room I watched it at play: desolate entertainment indeed, but I could not always be reading. When I was alone, and not reading, I preferred to stare from the window than face into the centre of the room like any civilized and sociable person, for the drawing room reminded me of my father.

Father had departed some months previously on another of his journeys. Indeed, he was rarely at home any more; and when he was, preferred the solitude of the study and the laboratory to the company of mother and myself. Yet even in his absence the drawing room seemed imbued with an aura of him. His pipes lay on their rack above the fireplace. Albums of his travels, bound in dark leather, filled two shelves either side, and two glass-fronted cabinets of queer mementos flanked the window where I sat. Neither mother nor I ever sat in his chair.

When the sun shone I would go riding in the park, sometimes as far as the lake, but never off the estate. I would see people, very often, running away or trying to hide among the trees; or little children in rough clothes, staring at me as I rode by. They had stolen in from the village or the farms, in search of shelter, or expecting to find something, I know not what, on my father’s land that they could not find at home. Perhaps they had no homes. Georgei would have driven them off, had I told him. I would never tell him. When my father was absent Georgei was never so assiduous about the estate, especially in winter. Georgei was not so young as he had been.

In the long nights I could hear mother coughing in her bedchamber. I believe now that her cough relented somewhat while father was not there to trouble her, but she was never altogether at peace with it. As the time drew near for his return, however, she grew morose and restless. I would see her from the window riding off through the snow with Sasha panting at her heels, as if she were hunting something; but she came back each day empty-handed. By some common, unspoken consent we did not mention father, nor go down into the cellar.

The day father was due home she could settle to nothing. She strode in and out of the room needlessly rearranging things and continually glancing at the clock.

‘Put on your black velvet, Isa,’ she said, exactly as if I were still a little girl. ‘And for goodness sake tidy your hair.’ Then, when I returned downstairs in the dress she had recommended, she found fault with it at once. ‘One would think you were attending his funeral,’ she said. ‘Well, it must suffice. It is the hour.’

From the bureau in father’s study she took a ring of keys. The ring was small, the keys only two: a large one of black iron and one of brass no bigger than my little finger. She shook them briskly, without looking at them, and went before me down the cellar stairs.

With the longer key she unlocked the door of the laboratory. Within, all was stillness and gloom. The air was stale from long enclosure. I went to climb on the workbench and open the little window high in the wall, but mother stopped mc. ‘There’s no time for that.’

Georgei had covered the cabinet and all the equipment in dustsheets as soon as father had departed in September. Together mother and I pulled them off. Roughly I folded them as mother began to cough. ‘Quickly, Isa, quickly,’ she said, and tugged the great switch that governed the electrical machinery.

Revealed, the cabinet resembled more than anything else a single wardrobe, quite plain but for the small window of black glass set in its door. Already a faint crackling could be heard from inside. When I looked, I saw a tiny tongue of lightning flicker behind the glass.

Mother pulled a chair from the workbench, gave it a perfunctory dusting with her hand, and set it to face the cabinet. The inside of the glass was radiant. I do not know how it should be expressed. It was as if it were frosted with light.

From the shelf above the bench mother brought down the tray that held the decanter and placed it beside her as she took her seat. She righted the little tumbler, poured brandy into it, and drank it at a draught, not looking at me. All her attention was concentrated upon the window of the cabinet, where the glow now sparkled and prickled.

I stood behind her chair. Inside the cabinet I could see something thickening, a form taking shape where there had been none before. I tucked my hair behind my ears and stood up straight, resting my hand lightly on my mother’s shoulder, the very picture of the dutiful daughter. Except at times like this, I was not accustomed to touch my mother.

My father was now complete. The fuzz of light went out abruptly and the glass misted over before his face. He was breathing.

My mother rose, took up the little brass key, and unlocked the cabinet. A strange smell flitted through the room, like soap and salt and violets, all at once. Inside the cabinet my father stood in a trance. His eyes were tightly closed, his hands folded on the scuffed and ancient satchel slung about his neck.

His garb was strange. He had on the rubber cap with wires attached that was necessary for travelling, but otherwise above the waist he was clad only in a rudimentary under garment of some kind, a brief black bodice that left his arms quite bare. There was a lurid design worked on the front of it, altogether barbarous, of a human skull set about with flames and chains. Also he had on a pair of coarse trousers of indigo blue, but greatly faded. Strangest of all, however, was his face. His face was bare. He had lost his great beard and moustaches.

Mother took his hand. He shivered; he trembled. He opened his eyes. He looked straight at me. He opened his mouth, but said nothing. He dribbled.

‘Isa,’ said mother, indicating the tray, though she looked neither at it nor at me, but only at father. I took the upturned tumbler, filled it swiftly with brandy, and gave it to her. She held it to his lips and tilted it.

His eyes rolled as he swallowed. He snorted in a great breath through his nostrils, and sighed gustily. ‘Magdalena,’ he said. His voice sounded stifled, as if by some constriction or obstruction of the throat. He stepped stiffly out of the cabinet into mother’s arms, where he lolled, smacking his lips as the brandy took effect. ‘Isa,’ he said then, gazing into vacancy over my head. He spoke a phrase in a language I did not know, and stumbling out of my mother’s embrace, came lurching towards me. ‘Isa!’ he cried again, and hugged me, crushing me to him, bruising me with his satchel. The chemical odour I had smelled when mother opened the cabinet seemed to emanate from his body, like an embrocation.

I found the intensity of his greeting embarrassing, and then alarming; but I bore it. To my shocked imagination, my father was like a wild animal, intending to devour me. I told myself it was pleasure at seeing me once more.

He was raving. ‘There are women everywhere!’ he announced. ‘More than you could possibly imagine!’ He released me to gesture wildly, waving both arms above his head. I cannot now remember what else he said. While attempting both to calm him and to avoid accidental injury, mother and I paid no attention to his words. He was often thus incoherent on his return.

Soon enough he had put on his brown silk dressing gown and was striding up and down with the glass of brandy in his hand.

‘One surprise after another,’ he said. He paused in his striding to open his satchel, and began to dig around in it.

‘I beg you, dearest, do not tire yourself,’ pleaded my mother. Father dismissed her anxieties with a brisk shake of the head. He did not look at her, but only disturbed the contents of the satchel.

I wondered where he had been, and for how long. The question is not as eccentric as it sounds. Sometimes when he came home he would seem older than I expected, as if he had been away longer than we were aware. By his own account, he often had; though the more he told us, the wilder and more elaborate his tales grew.

He would speak at first of a realm where horses were unknown, and every man travelled by means of a balloon of gas which he wore in a canister at his back and inflated at need by tugging a cord. By the end of the week, the tale would be exaggerated beyond all proportion. ‘Great cruciform ships of steel roam through the skies, swept back and forth across the face of the globe by artificial winds!’

Though mother would never admit such a thing to me, I knew that she deliberately made herself forget everything he told her of his travels, so as not to catch him out inadvertently in an inconsistency, for nothing angered him more than to be contradicted when he was in the wrong. I had adopted the same policy of incurious acceptance; though I would wonder, in bed that night, what he had meant by his exclamation about women.

My father was not a large man. Nevertheless, observing him that cold and uncomfortable afternoon, I thought that if he seemed no older on this occasion of his return, he was yet diminished somehow; and I thought by his shaving. We were clearly not to mention it. It was as if a portion of his power had resided in his beard, like the wizard’s in the fairy-tale.

Perhaps it was I who had grown older.

‘I’m ready for a bath,’ he said. ‘Accompany me. Both of you.’

His very eyes commanded us.

Georgei, like a good servant, had anticipated his master’s wish. Smoke had been rising from the bath-house chimney for an hour. While mother and I assisted one another to unlace our stays, father stripped off his dressing gown and his peculiar costume. I saw that his depilation extended no further than his chin.

In the bath-house he would not rest, but strode about in the steam, slapping his shoulders. His eyes never left us. Mother and I sat mutely on the bench until I could stand this scrutiny no longer. I begged leave and went in to break the ice in the cold bath. Father scorned it. He ran from the door, calling mother to follow. I glimpsed them from the window. He was tumbling her naked in the snow. I heard her laughing and coughing pitifully, while father shouted my name. I ignored him and plunged at once into the icy water.

Having washed and dried myself quickly, I was dressed before my parents came back indoors. I took the opportunity of examining the strange clothes my father had been wearing, which lay discarded in the corner of the dressing room.

The blue trousers were made of stout cotton stuff, such as a labouring man might wear. That they were so faded seemed to bespeak years of rough use and laundering; but the cloth was as new, and stiff with starch. The bodice was a brief, primitive kind of garment that might, but for its size, have been made for the merest child, for it was nothing but two rectangular pieces of smooth black cloth sewn together, all of a piece with two short flat tubes protruding at its upper corners by way of sleeves, and a hole worked for the neck. For all its crude form and hideous embellishment, I thought it would be a light and comfortable garment to wear in warmer climes; yet dare not take it up and try how it might fit me.

After bathing we sat together on the couch in front of the drawing room fire, drinking tea and eating currant bread. The wind had got up again, and was flinging snow at the windows. It only emphasized our comfort, and made us cherish the warmth. My father spoke further, more coherently if no more lucidly, of his discoveries. ‘It is not as I had expected. They do not think of the machine as a saviour. They look upon it as a mistress, to be wooed, to be accommodated. And there are those who disregard her, who enjoy her largesse while insisting that the duty of mankind, the purpose of society, lies elsewhere …’

He opened his trophy satchel and spread the contents in his lap. Mother made a show of polite attention which masked, I knew, sincere disapproval. For years she had been witness to the arrival of such things in her house: curios, fetishes, inscrutable to her and so neither pleasant nor useful, but rather disquieting. My interest, however, was genuine; for now I was relaxed, comfortable in clean, dry clothes and properly warmed inside and out. At such times the fancy is apt to extend itself most pleasantly. Father’s stories might be fact or fiction, but his souvenirs were real enough, I felt: not comprehensible, perhaps, but separate in their existence from whatever interpretation he might put upon them. They spoke to me with silent tongues of worlds where everything was not shrouded in snow and disdain.

Father was nodding, with mother’s arm about him. His eyes were all but closed. I leaned over to examine this latest trove. He permitted me to touch some of it, which I did with gingerly curiosity.

There was a kind of wallet, square and flat, made of a remarkable substance he had shown us before, like glass but quite unbreakable. It was cunningly hinged, and contained in one side a little book of coloured paper, and in the other a silver mirror in the shape of a circle, with a circular hole at the centre. The mirror was small enough to encompass with the fingers of one hand. Father encouraged me to detach it from the case. It was as light as a seashell, and had writing printed on it. Some of the letters were unfamiliar.

There was another silvery item, a wafer of soft metallic foil as thin and pliable as paper, but studded with a double row of discs. To my fingers it seemed that things like tiny buttons were enclosed within the metal. Father’s explanations became exiguous and vague. ‘They have banished all disease,’ he said, distantly, and yawned.

Also there were pictures, more of the highly detailed miniatures on glossy card he had brought back on other occasions. These, reluctantly, mother joined me in examining, while father lapsed into slumber with his head on her shoulder. Foolishly I wondered whether everything in this strange new world was polished and shiny. The pictures seemed to suggest it was so. Everything they showed – the sleek carriages, the glass palaces and aerial pagodas, the subterranean orchards and the men who tended them, clad in their electrical armour – all these marvels were depicted with astonishing precision and fidelity. Yet fidelity to what? For such things never were on sea or land; nor under it, I felt sure. Other pictures, showing scenes of violent death and smouldering ruin, mother slipped under the pile with a wince, and I made no further attempt to inspect.

When the pictures were done, mother rang for Georgei to help her put father to bed. I went to my room and attempted to read; but the poet’s words resisted me, and swam like senseless motes before my eyes. My mind was too full of father’s tales to absorb any other matter. I seemed to see men and women with silver hair, their clothes embroidered with scenes from atrocities, beckoning me into glass chambers to the wild music of invisible orchestras.

I hoped my father would sleep out the rest of the day; but in vain. At six o’clock I was dressing for dinner when, without so much as a preliminary knock, the door flew open and father came striding in. He was still in his gown. I was sitting at the dressing table in my chemise and petticoats, combing my hair. He halted behind my stool, looking at me in the glass. His eyes were full of a fierce humour; his right hand was behind his back. The eternal fear I had so easily forgotten in the warm, peaceful afternoon rose up again and seized me by the throat.

‘What is it, father?’ I asked, as calmly as I was able.

‘They think they know it all,’ he said, intently, but indirectly, as if continuing a conversation we had that minute broken off. ‘They think they see everything. They think the men underestimate them. Well, so they do. So they do, Isa.’

He smiled. There was no humour in it.

‘Indeed?’ I asked. I was capable of no more.

‘It takes another kind of man,’ said father, ‘a very special kind, to understand them.’

He laid his left hand on my shoulder.

‘I understand them, Isa,’ he assured me. ‘I do.’

He squeezed my shoulder.

‘I see them, and I understand them, and I see that they are no different, Isa! No different from you.’

He took the comb from my hand and tossed it onto the dressing table. Then he took a fistful of my hair. ‘Without all this,’ he said, tugging it. ‘But otherwise – no different.’

I cried out, calling for my mother, but she did not come. I suppose she was not in hearing, or was in some way incapacitated. In the glass I saw father bring out from behind his back a great pair of scissors; and despite my pitiful complaints, he chopped away at my hair until it was nothing but ragged ends all over.

Perhaps I should have turned on him then, but instead I retreated into silent tears. In truth I could have clawed his face for my curls dropping like shorn fleece into my lap and onto the floor; but I knew better than to provoke him further. His wild mood was upon him, as so often when he returned from a visit to those other worlds that were the subject and whole source of his passion.

‘Now you look like one of them!’ He stood behind me smiling and staring at me in the looking-glass. Through my tears I thought I resembled no one indeed, unless it were some poor mad lunatic of the village; and I wondered who they were, burning in his memory, that he must perforce disfigure and abuse me so. Were they the ones who had shaved off his beard?

My mother stifled an exclamation when I appeared at table; but she asked no question, nor voiced any protest on my behalf, despite my wretchedness. With her own hair he had not tampered; perhaps she feared to cause him to think of it.

Throughout dinner father drank heavily and spoke in awesome hints of the conduct of war. He spoke not of the glories of the cavalry, nor yet of the courage of the foot-soldier. ‘Two men,’ he said, again and again, ‘two men shut up in a small room underground, watching over the sleep of great engines of destruction. Who are they? Nobody! And on the other side, what? Two more! The same men, it might be. The very same.’ His mood had become sombre again, as if he were appalled at the spectral visions he conjured up for himself. He looked unwell.

His meal unfinished, he pushed away his plate and rose awkwardly from the table. I stared at my food. I had eaten nothing. Father leaned towards me an instant as if to berate me; then veered aside and seized my mother by the wrist. By main force he drew her thus pinioned to her feet and pulled her after him upstairs. In bed that night I buried my head beneath my pillow, but in my mind I could still hear my mother’s cries and entreaties.

Next day, as usual after a day of such exertions, father remained in bed, resting. Mother did not wish to see him. I took up his morning draught on a tray. He lay in his nightshirt against a mound of pillows, breathing noisily through his mouth. His eyes were sunken in sockets black with fatigue. As I set the tray carefully upon his knees and directed his hands to the beaker, I saw that his beard was growing through anew, like a dark shadow smeared across his pale jaw.

His skin seemed clammy, his muscles tense. An unpleasing smell rose from him. It occurred to me that, far from being an idyll in a paradise free of all disease, his adventure had exposed him to some pestilence unknown to us, some more cunning and indifferent plague. He seemed hardly to know me. He drank his medicine with tremor in his lip.

He gave a profound shudder then and at once relaxed. In the grip of his beloved morphia he began to tic and twitch, as if his body were a-crawl with energy.

He was making a tiny noise. I put my ear closer to his lips. He was singing. ‘No loss, no problem,’ he sang, over and over again. ‘No worries, no error, no sweat.’

He looked suspiciously at me. In shame for the ugliness he had inflicted upon me, I was wearing a headscarf, like a peasant woman. Perhaps it confused him. Before I could move away he had taken hold of my arm again.

‘If you knew where I came from – and where I have been –’ he said, hoarsely; ‘if you knew to what sights I have been privy in certain rooms, shall we say certain upper rooms, in the city …?’ He nodded, stiffly. ‘Then, madam, you would not use me so lightly. You would accord me more respect.’

I laid my hand on his. ‘Hush, father,’ I bade him. ‘It is I, Isa.’

‘Isa?’ He furrowed his brow. ‘There is not enough light in here. I thought you were your mother.’

I knew it had not been to mother that he had been speaking, not even in his distraction.

‘Shall I open the curtains, father?’ I offered, as much to get away from the bed as to secure him such comfort as cold grey daylight might afford.

‘Do.’

But while I stood at the window, attending to his wish, he heaved himself out of bed and approached me from behind with a springing step that quite belied his appearance of exhaustion. It seems to me now that he was always coming upon me from behind. He caught me under the arms and kissed my neck. I drew my head sharply from him.

‘Isa,’ he said. ‘My daughter. How fortunate you are not to take after your mother. I can see in you the form of the woman you will be.’

He pressed himself against me, loathsomely. I resisted him. He seemed to have no strength. He released me and fell back against the bed.

‘You will be as good as any son, won’t you, Isa?’ he said mockingly, but with something of his former debility. ‘As good as any son.’

For a moment I thought I was free. I thought his relapse was complete. I was wrong. ‘Except one thing!’ he cried, and once again he came lurching at me.

My nerve broke. I twisted violently from him and fled the room, sweeping the door to behind me. But father had already grasped the edge of the door and was forcing himself through even as I dragged at the handle. He grasped at me. I flinched, let go the handle and ran along the passage with him at my back.

I reached the door of my own room and there turned to defy him on the threshold.

‘How dare you?’ I cried. I tore off the scarf from my head and threw it at his feet. ‘How dare you?’

‘I dare,’ he said, with a grimace. His eyes seemed to start from their dark hollows. He reached for me.

I whirled into the room and snatched up the first thing I seized upon, the stool from the dressing table. I backed away from him, swinging my stool as he came at me, holding it by two legs and trying to hit him with the seat. I should have clutched the seat to me instead, and thrust at him with the legs. I knew nothing of fighting.

Father seized the stool and wrested it from me. He flung it away and came on, his arms spread wide. Now the dressing table was at my back. I could retreat no further.

I put back my arm and felt steel beneath my hand. It was the scissors, the scissors with which he had cut my hair. I caught them up and brandished them at him, jabbing the air.

He seized my wrist, wrenching at me. I dropped the scissors. They fell to the floor between us, open. Father bent for them, and I heaved clumsily at him with my shoulder and caught him on the nose. His head jerked back; he staggered and lost his footing, collapsing and scrabbling for the scissors as he fell. I crouched to snatch them up. He grabbed at me and pulled me down after him; but I had the scissors in my left hand. In desperation I thrust them at him. One blade pierced his nightshirt and struck home in his stomach. It was a horrid, yielding sensation, like stabbing meat with a skewer.

At once, there was blood, spreading across the cloth of his shirt and welling through onto my hand. He clasped his hand to the place, knocking my own hand and tearing the wound. He cried out.

I rose in a strange state of fright. I recall crouching over him: it can have been an instant only, but it seemed longer, far longer. I was thinking I should help him, but I could not bear to touch him.

I ran to fetch my mother; but as soon as I was out of the room, leaving him behind there struggling on the floor, I suffered a change – I know not what to call it, a change of heart, a change of mind. In that pause I seemed to see my mother hurrying to my room and, at first sight of him, drawing away, shouting for Georgei. And Georgei would come, stumping up the stairs, and see to father as best he could, somehow staunching that horrid flow, bandaging it, and returning father to bed. And what then? Would the madness not redouble then? Would the tyrant defied not be twice the tyrant?

And what if he did not recover? What if he died? Would my mother then protect me? Or would she deliver me up to the law? Would she even hesitate?

All these questions occurred to me that instant, in the passage outside my room; and I did not know the answer to any of them. They have occurred to me again, since, frequently, severally and together; and still I do not know.

What I did know, there and then, was that it was in my power to escape them all. I ran downstairs, tearing at the buttons of my dress. From the closet by the garden door I dragged the old boots I wore for skating; and from the dressing room father’s outlandish clothes that lay where he had discarded them. In the laboratory it was the work of a moment to throw the heavy switch and release the electrical power. While it spread humming and buzzing into the machinery, I pulled on the clothes and the rubber cap of wires, and laced my boots; and then, as the strange cold light began to glow behind the little black window, turned the key in the lock and stepped into the cabinet.

Upstairs, my mother began to scream.

 

 

I have always been a great lover of graffiti. In the Oxford English Faculty library the gnomic, witty inscriptions on the toilet walls (FREE THE TVC 15; HAMLET AND LEAR ARE GAY) were quite as enthralling to me as the hallowed texts on the shelves. Later, years of travelling on London Underground taught me to admire the intricate fantastic baroque tribal iconography with which young volunteer artists so generously decorate not only the drab grey rolling stock but also the dreary outer reaches of the Metropolitan Line.

I just wanted to make that clear in case any of them should happen to read the story that follows.

THE STATION IS THERE. You don’t always pass it; only sometimes, going underneath the river. The trains that do go that way don’t stop there. Nothing stops there any more. It is the station with no name.

Probably it’s only an ordinary station, one they closed down for some reason, a long time ago. Perhaps the roof fell in, and hurt somebody. Perhaps people were buried here, under the rubble, for some time, and afterwards no one could bear to use it, so they locked it up and left it.

There is hardly enough light to see by; only a sort of mucky, grudging, dark brown light that filters down from somewhere up above. It looks like the bottom of the sea. You can just about make out the platforms, the exits like low square mouths full of darkness.

As your train passes through, though, the same thing happens almost every time. There is some kind of fault or bump you go over in the track, and the train wheels spark, and at that instant the whole place lights up, stark and lifeless in the cold white glare. You see the bare walls, the locked gates, the shrouds of dust over everything like an abandoned tomb. It’s only for an instant. If you happen to be looking down at that moment you’d never know it was there, the station with no name.

Mark and Kix hadn’t even meant to go that way that night. They had been mucking about up the District Line when this bloke came after them and they had to run. They’d had to jump two trains to lose him, and that had taken them right out of ZEE-5’s territory.

Mark was not happy about that. For one thing, he hadn’t finished his throw, and that always got him annoyed. For another, he didn’t know whose territory this was, exactly.

Kix was laughing his face off, though, as always. Kix always had a good time, whatever. He looked around the car, picking out names they knew. ‘STAC, look! POET! FA-Z!’

Mark didn’t care whose name there was. There was only one name he cared about.

Kix was mad, a crazy man, he didn’t care about anything. It didn’t bother him that they’d had to fall through the doors of a train that was going the wrong way. Mark took things like that personally. He didn’t want to be heading south of the river. He had no business down that way. Anyway, it was nowhere, who ever went down there anyway? No one.

Kix was complaining happily. ‘I was really going good there,’ he was saying. ‘I was just getting the highlights, fsss …’ He imitated himself spraying the ceiling of the train, next to POET and someone’s orange blur that had dripped and run.

Mark was not listening. He had been staring out of the window and seen a flare of electricity light up the station with no name.

He had seen the walls of brown tiles with little veins in them like marble, and the big blank medallions where the station name should be, and the platforms with black spiky railings blocking all the exits. It was dark again now, the shadows pulled in tight, but the light had flashed and shown him the station.

The train hadn’t stopped. There wasn’t supposed to be a station there. There was no station on the map.

None of that bothered Mark