The Witches 3

Always hungry for experience she copied herself off a number of times. Her copies, feeling similar urges, did so too.

Her copies' personalities and preferences are also much like hers, crowding out her rivals and consigning those who prefer them to marginality and obscure eccentricity.

But being mere copies, the copies do express a continuum of similarity rather than utter authenticity. But somehow this is more frightening that nearly the same sentiments are expressed in the same way by near-identical women in variations of the same clothes (as decided by the copies who have infiltrated the fashion industry): an observer not knowing the origin of the copies might begin to suspect some kind of mass brain-washing.

While you were sleeping

With stealthy tentacles the small octopus pulls itself across your carpet. Moonlight and streetlight leaks in bands onto the carpet through the blinds and the octopus matches these with the chromatophores in the skin of its tentacles and pulpy body. It edges round a discarded 'National Geographic', your bedtime reading, as yellow always makes it itchy.

You change position in the bed with a thrashing of bed covers and creaks from the mattress: the octopus freezes for tense minutes until it is certain you will not rise. As you begin to snore once more it completes its timid progress towards your bedside chest of drawers.

Slowly the octopus drags the bottom drawer open. Inside nestle your socks, paired up and drowsing. It reaches in and takes two socks from different pairs. One of these it stealthily adds to your partner's sock drawer. It puts the other in a ziplok baggie and stuffs it into a pocket on its ninja-suit.

On its way back out the cat-door the octopus takes out a small clipboard and adds a notation to the form on it with a stub of pencil. Only four more to go this night.

Redshirt chihuahua orchid blues

"The first day on the job they gave me a red t-shirt. I thought this was a bit weird but not too worrying - I didn't expect to meet mortal peril in a garden shop.

" But then I met the greenhouse. The owner, my boss, Mr Harbinger, was a mad horticulturalist with a passion for orchids. I found out on my second day that he had cross-bred some particularly ruthless South American specimens with chihuahuas and ended up with an armed insurrection. The hybrids had formed a pack and taken control over the bottom end of the greenhouse and were not letting anyone, particularly Mr Harbinger, in there. No one would have minded except the controls for the site's watering system was in there, so once a day, someone had to go in to turn it on. As the new hire that muggins was me.

"I have to say, all cliches aside, the red t-shirt gave me a fighting chance. I heard them rustling among the agapanthuses as soon as I went in. As I forced my way deeper into the humid green gloom I knew they were all around me, setting up an ambush for me. Finally I saw one - bug eyed, purple flowered, evil as an audit, tail-roots wagging. Some kind of sixth sense told me that I was meant to see this one, and that the rest of them were circling round behind me.

"I slowly took off my red t-shirt without breaking eye-contact. I was gambling that the monsters still had enough dog in them to 'FETCH!' I tossed the t-shirt one way and pelted off the other. I didn't stop to see what happened to the t-shirt but I heard it all right, and I'll never look at fruit salad the same way again. I got to the faucet and turned it full on, then stampeded back to the door as fast as I could.

"The other assistants were impressed I made it out. Mr Harbinger docked my first pay for the cost of the t-shirt, which I think is a bit unfair."

The Witches 2

She used to collect dolls. Specifically, she used to collect her brother's GI Joe dolls and put them to uses that they were not originally designed for. She thought it was funny that they were half the size of the Barbies her mother gave her. Somehow that seemed right.

She still collects dolls. These ones are taller on the outside at least.

Mirrors in the sky

Arhenius raises towers. After lengthy preparation with geomantic tomes and the intricate use of spider-fine pencil-lines and crystals, he attends a prepared site and begins his incantation. The genii of the city arrive along his predetermined leys. They crystallise into a drab cocoon of steel and board that often get brightly decorated by the punk advertisers.

Arhenius stands in all weathers, patiently incanting, for several months as the tower grows slowly skywards. Within the cooon heavier orange genii lift great beams out of the earth and bind them. Smaller, faster green ones finish floors, fittings and wiring before sealing the structure's surface with mirrored glass. Finally the genii carefully remove the new tower's cocoon and dry its sleek new skin with drafts from their beating wings.

Where once was horizon and sky there is now a tower of shadow and reflection: from one side the sky is made infinite; from the other the sun is exiled. At night the tower lights up its guts in fluorescent glory in the hope of attracting a mate.

Arhenius often has to be lifted out of his incantatory coma (and well-worn hollow in the ground) by the genii as they leave the new tower. He stretches massively, cracking joints, and regards the tower with paternal satisfaction but hopes never to see it again. He loves his towers but he detests their tenants. They put his towers to uses he did not incant into them. They deform them, rearrange their organs, maintain them shoddily, leave them to moulder. Sometimes they ask Arhenius to return to fix their ailing buildings' woes and Arhenius always marvels at the gap between the perfection of creation and the vicissitudes of existence.

But there is another reason why Arhenius dislikes visiting his children: as he prepares each incantation, and as he recites it and causes the tower over a course of months of glorious creation, he is striving to touch the Divine. The moment of completion is a moment of blindness made of pride and exhaustion. Only a few more months' perspective and recovery allow Arhenius to see where his children are flawed, perhaps even beyond the tenants' abilities to tell. But Arhenius can tell. And he hates it.

Arhenius could not live in a tower he had caused. When his friends ask him why he still rents, he shrugs and changes the subject.

See the sites 2

Just north of the city centre, in a neighbourhood of ramshackle cottages being slowly assimilated by apartment blocks, there is a traffic roundabout by a park. By day the park is deserted. By night it is the haunt of the walking dead, their eyes white, vacant and hungry, with tracked scars upon their forearms. Cranky old pine trees shroud the park in resinous gloom no matter the time of day.

The roundabout is lit at night with dim orange lights that give it the sense of being in a fire-cave, except that it is always unreasonably cold there, never warm. It is at the site of the oldest crossroads in the city. A circle has replaced the cross but the underlying energy is still the same.

Twice a year, on the ancient festivals, a faerie cavalcade passes through the roundabout between thither and hither. Typically mortal witnesses are blinded by the riders' splendour and sent into a cloying sleep from which they wake in their own beds, unable to remember how they got home.

In recent years, however, the cavalcade has not passed by at all and its place has been taken by the Wild Hunt. Now witnesses do not make it home at all.

Work lunch

The restaurant bustled and steamed; inscrutable waiting staff shuffled full plates to the tables and empty, smeary plates the other way to the kitchen.

It was a farewell: Owen from Systems was going on to better things. The entire suzerainty of the EL2, Matt Silverback, was assembled to do him honour, even though most of them barely knew him at all. Owen was one of the quiet ones.

Indagari ended up sitting next to Owen, near one end of a table. As the guest of honour Owen might have demanded a place at the centre of the group but that wasn't his way. It was the way of the banditos, the posse of techies who shared interests such as beer, cars and Xbox games, and inevitably shared work social occasions like this one with only each other. Some found it tough to be be excluded from their group but that wasn't really their intent: they weren't a clique, more of a default setting.

SIlverback had brought wine for everybody. Largesse. Conspicuous consumption. An open bottle of merlot had ended up in front of Owen. He turned to Indagari and asked, "Would you like some wine?"

"I never drink... wine," Indagari quoted.

Owen looked startled. "I should have known."

Indagari was also startled. "So odd, to meet a Kindred spirit so late in the piece."

"Damn Obfuscate."

See the sites 1

On the southern outskirts of town there is a factory that manufactures things that nobody wants. Part of it is a printery responsible for the bales of junk mail that appear in your letter boxes, as well as government forms. Other assembly lines produce spurious samples, traffic cameras, those spikes they use to stop pigeons roosting under bridges, and Volvos.

From the outside the factory is nondescript, concrete blocks floodlit tacky orange at night, beyond a sagging perimeter cyclone mesh fence. Featureless trucks deliver the factory's products to the rest of the city at all hours of the clock.

Inside it is another matter. The workers on the assembly lines, amid the machines, are children and youths, abducted from the city's central bus interchanges at night, and blinded especially for the factory's purposes. They are chained to their workstations and fed once a day on MacDonalds hamburgers. Their swift pallid fingers work for fourteen hours at a time. They do not dream.

When they grow too old and big for their workstations they are taken shambling away to a shed at the back of the property, still crabbed over from their years of toil, and humanely killed. Their bodies are recycled, dried and kibbled for use as cattle feed. Their overalls are washed and then given to their successors. Nothing is wasted.

The factory's purpose is not production but consumption.

Overheard 1

"Begmon Thaum, thou art a blaggard. May thy precious parts be shrivelled by the cold of days and turn into apricot pits, and may thy mandom become a runcible spoon."

A great day for caring

"Excuse me, have you heard about 'Save the Nudibranchs'?"

Arioch's mind was dragged back to the present. Idle daydreams while walking through the piazza shattered: here was a conversation. The questioner was a dishevelled, dreadlocked man, Irish by the accent, hippy by fashion sense, prominently carrying a red plastic clipboard that bore a 'Save the Nudibranchs' sticker. Arioch had to concede the cartoonish nudibranch depicted was somewhat winsome.

"Of course," replied Arioch, no stranger to conservation.

"Then you're aware that 75% of nudibranchs are endangered by over-hunting, and most end up merely being liquefied for use in the shoe polish industry."

"I was," Arioch replied dutifully, waiting for the clip-board bearer to get to the point and ask him for money.

"And you'll know then that since sandals became fashionable, over 90% of shoe polish merely goes crusty in the tin, so the nudibranchs are dying in vain to support an industry that no one wants."

Arioch glanced at the clip-board bearer's thongs and toes blue with cold without comment.

"Did you know then that only twenty ducats a month will ensure the survival of one species of nudibranch by allowing STN to buy up hunting rights?"

"I did not know that," observed Arioch, now sure where this was going. "And where do you get such riches?"

"Well, I was hoping that you could help me with that. Just fill in this sponsorship form with your bank details and you too can be the saviour of the little guys."

Arioch smiled politely, but the smile did not reach his eyes. "How much of my subscription will actually go to saving the nudibranchs?"

"Why, all of it!"

"Oh? STN has no business expenses?"

"We're a government-supported organisation. Our overheads are very low." This was impressive - Arioch was normally one-nil by now. The Irishman was well-trained.

"And you? You're working for free?"

The clipboard twitched. "Well, no. I get paid to do this."

Arioch nodded. "So it's not so much 'Save the Nudibranch' as 'Save the Student-backpacker?'"

"So you'll sign up? There's a monthly newsletter." The clipboard waved with cheeky optimism.

"I'll think about it." (Arioch-speak for 'Not in Hell'.) Arioch nodded in dismissal and turned to walk away, annoyed that the daydreams were irretrievable.

"We have a website!" called the paid nudibranch-fancier.

Twenty metres later: "Hey there? Can I ask you a question?"

"You just did."

Arioch always cared more for logic than causes.

The Witches 1

She writes the names of men she wants to ensorcel in magic silver pen on the tips of her stiletto heels. When she walks the click click click of her progress pierces their hearts through with unutterable longing.

Currawong

The City of Witches has been a stranger to rain in the last few months. The desiccating grey fingers of drought have stroked her hills to dun and clay, and plucked down to dead branches her trees. It's been colder, which has blunted drought's seduction, but the earth can hold onto its maidenly virtue for only so long.

But down from the mountains, the crazy-eyed black-white currawongs have come. They have mad yellow eyes, ever seeking food discarded or eggs unattended. The currawongs are not thieves but bandits. They take by force, stealthy where possible, brutal were necessary. They tell themselves that they had no choie, that they are the victims here. They warble insanely to each other, boasting of their exploits or mourning for the innocence they vaguely recall they once had.

They brought the winter rain with them, down from the mountains. Misty curtains ebb slowly through the dark-stained trees and huddled suburbs, through which the currawongs gyre and hunt. They misplaced the sun. But the rain makes everything but currawongs slow, vulnerable, and they feast. Birds of mad winter rain and melancholic cold, it is their season: currawong.

Traffic alert 1

A truck carrying a load of invisible ink crashed today on the Hume Highway outside Goulburn. Police are looking for the scene of the accident.

Mi huevo su huevo, or I'll have to hurt you

Arioch said, "I've noticed that you crack your breakfast egg at the pointy end."

Indagari replied, "I do. So?"

"But you must realise that the government, in reflecting the aspirations of ordinary imaginary people, holds that boiled eggs are to be breached at the broad end, in accordance with custom, and in remembrance of the sacrifice the chooks make to bring us our daily googs."

Indagari was confused. "I still don't see your point."

"You have to stop!" Arioch persevered. "Pointy ends, I mean. It's immoral."

"How?"

"Custom. Tradition. Our society is built on the lawful penetration of big ends. Anything else leads to anarchy at breakfast."

"Anarchy at breakfast." Indagari did not sound convinced.

"That's right. A complete break-down of all the institutions we hold dear. The collapse of the economy. Children selling sexual favours to each other in the streets. It could happen here you know. The only reason it doesn't is because we have uniformity in our ovophagy!"

"That's stupid. How can my preference for little ends end civilisation as we know it?"

"Well, what if everybody thought like you?" Arioch asked hotly. "If nobody considered their duty to society before their personal whims and preferences?"

"Then at least we'd get some peace at the breakfast table."

"...Pass the fucking toast."

"White or wholemeal?"