Marcher: The Author's Preferred Text Read Online Free PDF Page A

prosecutions of Zone-based drug traffickers), or DSI(P) 032/7 (the requirement to cut in half the number of burglaries committed by Zone residents in non-Zone areas), or DSI(C) 045/3 which was about increasing the number of Zone children on ‘maltreated children lists’. (Or was that reducing the numbers? Did more on the list mean that more children were being maltreated, or did it mean that the system was detecting maltreatment more efficiently? The instructions kept changing! The definition of progress was constantly being revised!)
    ‘ Igga ,’ said Ms Richards, handling the word as if with tweezers. ‘Remind me, what is it supposed to be ?’
    They had entered another airlock-like security door that led to the DSI Constabulary wing of the building and were waiting for a policeman to come and let them through.
    ‘I suppose you could say it’s a representation of the multiverse,’ Charles said, ‘the universe of universes if you like, constantly dividing and branching out. It’s thought the word comes from Yggdrasil , the world tree of Norse…’
    But here the custody sergeant opened the door.
    ~*~
    ‘This is the information we’ve got so far,’ the sergeant told Charles, after Janet Richard had headed back to her office to look for the e-mails she’d failed to read. ‘These two gentlemen were pulled in at about 8 o’clock this morning by patrol officers doing a random stop-and-search. Neither of them could produce valid ID and both of them resisted the officers when requested to…’
    The Sergeant talked anxiously on, but Charles had listened to so many spooked-out policeman telling these stories, in so many different custody suites, in so many DSI offices, in so many different Zones, that he pretty much knew after the first few minutes what the Sergeant was going to say. His mind wandered, and he found himself turning over in his mind that meeting he’d had with the young woman at the party at the weekend.
    He hadn’t thought about the encounter all that much, but it occurred to him now that he’d liked her a good deal more than anyone he’d met for rather a long time: she’d been sharp, she’d been pretty, she’d had wonderfully lively, restless eyes. Yet he felt he’d blundered, failing even to register her name and launching off into his usual dreary defence of his occupation, instead of simply engaging in conversation, or even asking her something about herself. Why is it, he wondered, that when I like a woman, I find it hard to let her speak? Rosie, his last real girlfriend, had told him at the end that she couldn’t live anymore in a hall of mirrors with a man who saw nothing but projections of himself.
    He’d been troubled by these thoughts on the way back from the party. And back in his small Montpelier flat, turning away from his mirrors, he’d tried to deal with his agitation by reasserting his commitment to his strange choice of profession. He’d taken out a notebook kept specifically for such thoughts and written the word ‘ Marcher ,’ at the top of a page. He didn’t know exactly what the word meant, but he was thinking vaguely of the Marcher Lords, who used to rule along the Welsh borders, not so very far away, and he had an idea in his mind of a lonely caste who guarded frontiers, so that the people further in didn’t even have to think about the dangers that lay beyond. That was how he’d chosen to see himself. Yet it really had never occurred to him before Susan’s party to wonder why this particular role, out of all the possible roles in the world, should have been the one he’d settled on.
    ‘Marcher,’ he had written. And then:
     
    Let us put on armour,
    Let us wear breastplates of polished bronze,
    And cover our faces with ferocious masks.
     
    Let us be pure. Let us accept the cold.
    Let us foreswear the search for love.
    Let us ride in the bare places where the ground is clinker
    And the towers are steel…
     
    At the time he’d been rather pleased with