Chapter 1

EARLY MOST MORNINGS Dave climbed up to this isolated spot on the hill and brought small offerings to leave in the shrine of St. Clive, the patron saint of real-estate agents. Today what he'd brought was, so far as he could make out, part of a swimming-pool cleaning device, a sort of large, plastic, sucking lobsterish thing.

He laid the thing down carefully and stood back to admire the effect.

The shrine was just a small heap of rocks, really, with a little array of things that had got dug up from time to time. There was a remote-control garage opener, something that was probably part of a juice extractor, and a small, illuminated Kermit the Frog. The pool-cleaning lobsterish thing was a pretty good addition, and he arranged it so that its two feet of broken ribbed plastic tubing hung down like an elephant's trunk over Kermit.

His morning trips up to the shrine were partly just to amuse himself, but also a chance to be alone and reflect on things. This whole place had started just as somewhere to fool around by himself, but it had rapidly turned into something kind of bigger than he meant, and he needed somewhere to get away from it all and think about things. Sometimes he'd even worry. When he was worried he would start to giggle slightly, and when he was really worried he would start to hum old Carpenters tunes till the worry went away.

But today he wasn't going to worry. Today he was going to have fun. He unslung the canvas bag he'd brought up with him and dropped it on the ground for a moment.

From up here, the view was stupendous. Lush forest surrounded DaveLand in every direction, forest of extraordinary richness and diversity, teeming with life and colour. Through it wound the river Dave, which then meandered on through the hills till it met, five hundred miles away, the immense ocean, which, until recently, he had called the Dave Ocean, but which in a fit of modest embarrassment he had now renamed the Karen Ocean. He had always thought that Pacific was a really dumb name. He had been on it. It wasn't Pacific at all. He'd fixed that.

DaveLand itself was now a pretty impressive affair. Astonishing, really, when he thought about it. He brushed his hand through his lank hair and stared out at it, suppressing a very, very small giggle.

DaveLand lightly covered about ninety acres of hillside, with new outcrops already beginning to appear on nearby hills. Beautiful homes. Much more beautiful than any of the ones that his imaginary St. Clive would have sold or even understood. None of your split-level ranch-style crap with stupid conversation pits that anyone with half a brain would probably kill themselves rather than converse in. Dave's houses were of a different kind altogether.

Apart from anything else, they were smart houses. Just simple stuff, like they faced the right way. They had glass in the right places, stone in the right places, water in the right places, plants in the right places, so the air moved through them properly and was warm where you wanted it and cool where you wanted it. It was just physics. Most architects didn't know any physics, he decided. They just knew dumb stuff. In Dave's houses, prisms and fibres moved sunlight where you wanted it. Heat exchangers took heat from the food in the fridge and gave it to the food in the oven. Simple. People went into Dave's houses and would say, "Hey! This is really neat! How come other people don't build houses like this?" Answer? Because they're dumb.

And telephones. Dave had given people here much neater, smarter, altogether more fabulous telephones than they'd ever had before. Now they wanted television as well, which Dave thought was pretty dumb in the first place, and monumentally dumb in the circumstances; but that in turn had been a pretty interesting problem and Dave, of course, had solved it. But Dave had solved so many problems that he had inadvertently created a new one. DaveLand was now a community of nearly a thousand people, which made him kind of responsible. He hadn't expected to be responsible.

He pulled up a bunch of long grass and swished it around fretfully. The early-morning sunlight glinted off Dave's Place. Dave's Place was easily the largest and most gracious of all the buildings in, well, in the world. It ringed the summit of the hill opposite with elegant sweeping white stone walls and seeming acres of glass. The summit itself was laid out as a Japanese garden. Streams ran down through the house from it.

Just beneath Dave's Place, on the same hillside and contained within the same security compound (he couldn't believe he had to have stuff like security compounds now; and forty—forty—of the nine-hundred-plus inhabitants of DaveLand were now lawyers) was The Way of the Nostril.

The Way of the Nostril was probably the single smartest thing that Dave had ever thought of. Even he, to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart. It was the single reason that all of this was here, and it had become the single thing that made Dave hum old Carpenters tunes most, except maybe the lawyers.

The sun was now gleaming brilliantly over all of DaveLand. It was pretty neat, Dave had to admit, but he also had to admit that he had kind of liked DaveLand when it was just his own funny stupid place to come to because only he was smart enough to get there. But one thing had led to another, and now all this. Here he was, only twenty-five and already beginning to feel like he was almost thirty.

Well, screw all that. Today he was going to have some fun. He picked up the large canvas bag and slung it back over his shoulders. Sam would have a fit. The lawyers would go nuts. Good. He turned and climbed farther on up the hill. The hill was called Top of the World, and was named after the tune by the Carpenters. One of the great things about having your own world was that you could just go ahead and like the Carpenters on it.

The hill got pretty rocky and craggy higher up, and Dave had to do a bit of rock-scrambling to get to where he was going.

Within about twenty minutes he was pretty hot and a bit sweaty, but he'd made it to the top, or at least the last significant flat bit, a solid slab of deeply rutted rock on which he sat, and dumped the bag. He gathered his breath for a few moments and then started to unpack it. He pulled out aluminium struts, he pulled out orange strings, he pulled out little purple sheets of Kevlar.

After about ten minutes of assembly the thing was ready, a large, gossamer-winged insect of a contraption. The scraps of Kevlar strung between the struts of the frame were surprisingly small and oddly shaped. Dave had worked out that most of the cloth used in conventional hang gliders was redundant, and had got rid of it.

He examined the assembled frame systematically and satisfied himself that it was all as it should be, that it was Daveworthy.

He looked out nervously, but only just for a moment. He was going to do it anyway, so it was dumb to be nervous. Carefully picking up the hang glider, he carried it out to the edge of the rock, till he was standing on a ledge looking out over the whole extent of DaveLand. He noticed with satisfaction that although his glider looked like nothing more than a kind of drying frame for silk bikinis, it was very stiff and he had to pull it forcefully through the air to move it.

Copyright © 2003 by Terry Jones