To Indigo

To Indigo
Tanith Lee
www.sfgateway.com


Enter the SF Gateway …
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.


Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Part 1
One
Two
Part 2
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Part 3
Ten
Eleven
Part 4
Twelve
Part 5
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Part 6
Seventeen
Part 7
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Part 8
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Part 9
Website
Also by Tanith Lee
About the Author
Copyright


As when a prowling Wolf,
Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,
Watching where Shepherds pen their Flocks at Eve
In hurdl’d Cotes amid the field secure,
Leaps ore the fence with ease into the Fold:
Or as a Thief bent to unhoard the cash
Of som rich Burgher, whose substantial dores,
Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault,
In at the window climbs, or ore the tiles;
So clomb this first grand Thief…
Thence up he flew, and on the Tree of Life,
The middle Tree and highest there that grew,
Sat like a Cormorant…
Paradise Lost
Book IV
Milton


1
Breaking in was easy. Although of course, I had been thinking about it, and how to do it, for some time. Really the arrangement was very slipshod. I mean with the flat. And from what I had been told recently by him, it seemed to me anyone could have done something similar, someone with a grudge – or a fear – against or of him. I laid my plans such as they were over the weekend, and made my ‘move’ on Monday. Which is far too alliterative a phrase, but there, it’s a fact. Basically in my own little way, I went in for the kill.
My own little way. And that sounds like Lynda. “You do like to have your own little way,” she used to tell me. Not, you notice, my own way. My own little way. “Go on, then,” Lynda used to say. “You just do what you want. It’s no good me arguing…” (“My arguing” I used mentally to correct her with a sort of dry shiver), “you’ll just have to have your own little way.”
Did I have my own little way with Lynda? Now and then, I suppose. But that is another story.
When I got to Saracen Road, I stopped a moment and looked over at the park. It was summer. It still is. I wasn’t really looking at anything over there, just taking my bearings. He had spoken about the park and the trees. It was as if I had to be quite sure they were all really there. And they were.
So then I checked the parcel.
This was my masterstroke. At least so I thought then.
It comprised a sturdy manila envelope measuring approximately ten inches by twelve and a half – and was far too stout to go through any ordinary letter-box, especially after I’d packed it full with old newspaper cut to size. I had stuck on the anonymous printed label. I had also placed a quantity of stamps on the thing, then lightly rubbed them with an ink-pad – as if they had been smudgily franked. I’ve had enough such mail in my time.
I didn’t think anyone could trace this to me. But then no one, hopefully, would need to see it beyond a cursory glance, if that. After which I intended to remove it, along with myself, from the scene of the crime. On the other hand, if someone insisted on accepting the parcel, no crime could occur. It wouldn’t matter. Perhaps not much would.
As for myself, there was my disguise. I’d finally done what he had often told me to do, which was to shave off all my thinning hair. Instead I had grown quite a thick moustache in the space of three days. I’d bought a T-shirt too, black, and put on my tired old jeans that look like every other ageing man’s tired old jeans. Oddly, shaven and moustached, I thought I looked two or three years younger than my allotted fifty-fifty-one. There were the smart sunglasses too, somebody else’s forgotten pair I’d swiped from the unmanned counter at Smiths those months before. A crime already, we perceive.
Did I look like a thug? No. Five foot ten, skinny, with my hunched shoulders, narrow hands and feet and nose – I wasn’t bruiser material.
I crossed the street. It was a quarter to twelve, noon.
Nearly time for You and Yours.
That was not what was thumping from the terrace of houses. A selection of rock or pop CD’s were mutilating the still just morning air. Which was as he’d told me as well. He had said his particular terrace-house of flats, 66, Saracen Road, was a noisy place that