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by degrees, and actually by choice. She took a correspondence course in postality. She postalled herself up.
    “I trusted you all to do the right thing,” she tells fifty years of governments, lined up and sheepish in her mind, “I believed you’d get it right. And you!” she adds, to the electorate, “You lazy, venal, self-deluding … ooh, if you were my children, I’d …” But this brings her up short. None of them is her child. No sons or daughters for Edie Banister. Just Bastion, and the faded love of the one whose trust she has betrayed for half a human life. Betrayed in the name of stability and security. A few decades of calm, she reasoned at the time, and the world would set itself straight.
    But somehow it all went wrong instead. The onward march of progress has wandered off down a dark alley and been mugged. The Berlin Wall and Vietnam; the Rwandan Genocide, the Twin Towers, Camp Delta; suicide bombings and global warming; even Vaughn bloody Parry, the little suburban nightmare who lived just around the corner, who killed and killed and no one knew because no one bothered to find out. Edie Banister had given her loyalty to an empty throne. There was no progress. No stability. There was just the question of whether things happened far enough away.
    The Parry thing had been the end of her comfortable certainty. It began, according to the broadsheets, in a new allotment patch in some midway town called Redbury. The council had at last untrousered the cash and purchased a stretch of green once part of a railway siding, sold in Thatcher’s time to make apartments and studios for wealthy buyers who never showed up. A vegetable competition was mooted, and organic food for the locality, and a sense of community and all the other things Britain no longer did because finance was cheaper and faster and the housing market made money out of nothing. And then they turned the first spadeful and it was over beforeit began. A grinning corpse, wrapped in a tartan blanket, and then another and another, and the burg of Redbury had a serial killer to call its own.
    Edie could not help but notice that when Vaughn Parry tortured a prisoner and buried the corpse seven inches down in sandy soil, he was a monster, but when the same thing was done at the behest of her own government in a cellar overseas, that was an unfortunate necessity.
    Well, perhaps it was. But if so, the world which made it necessary could go hang.
    She had taken for a while to going out every night with Bastion, walking the streets and staring up at the houses and offices of a city she wasn’t sure she knew any longer.
Mad Old Edie and her eyeless dog, side by side in the London fog
. Yes. Mad, in the American sense. And, alone in the vast encyclopedia of “furious of Derbyshire,” Edie Banister had the power to make a difference to everything which was infuriating her. A mysterious difference, whose precise nature she did not understand, but whose originator swore would rock the world and unravel the darkness of a thousand years. A gift of science to a world of horrors.

    On a Tuesday evening, with the sound of the BBC World Service (soon to be discontinued) in the background, she got a pen and a piece of paper and wrote down a flow chart of her personal revolution. An item to be acquired, and a man to put it where it must go. These in turn would entail disguises, forgeries … but not so many as that. More a confidence trick, really, than a covert operation. All at arm’s length, of course, because there could be consequences, and because her name might still trigger alarms in places which must remain oblivious just a little longer.
    And now, looking at Joe Spork’s business card and stroking her eyeless dog, she thinks about those consequences and feels like a cow. She has webbed the young Spork into a muddle of almighty proportions. It was necessary, if distasteful, and ultimately he will be fine. Once they look at things seriously, they will see