The White Horse

Closing time

This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. This is the final chapter.

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: The fighting is over. Months have passed.

November. 1980.
London. Mid-Earth.

The pub glowed in the early evening, a beacon in the gathering dark. London muttered all around, sounds of the city echoing between the buildings. Silhouettes were sat by the windows, the mottled glass preventing Clarke from seeing inside. Returning to The White Horse felt like a long-overdue pilgrimage.

He pushed open the door, a tiny bell jangling above his head, and into the pub he went, unbuttoning his coat and removing his cap. The smell was the same as ever; that slightly damp mix of cigarettes and spilled beer, wooden floorboards creaking beneath him as he approached the bar.

“Yannick Clarke,” said the barman, glancing up while drying glasses. Paul hadn’t changed, other than a little more grey behind the ears.

Clarke nodded. “Paul. How are you keeping?”

“I am alright, sir. What can I get you?”

“Something stout and warming.”

“It’s a cold one out there,” Paul said, moving to work one of the pumps. “Storm coming in, probably.”

“Seems that way,” Clarke said, leaning on the bar. It felt like he’d never left.

Paul continued drying glasses while the beer poured. “Been up to much? Haven’t seen you for years.”

Staring at the damp bar mat, the shallow pools of beer gathering by the taps, Clarke smiled as he heaved himself up onto a stool. The smile broke into a laugh, and he had to brace himself so that he didn’t slide off onto the floor.

“Here you go,” Paul said, delivering the pint. He didn’t probe further. The man knew his role. “You’ll never guess,” he continued. “We had the gents done up since you were last in here. Spick and span now.”

“Then I look forward to finding out,” Clarke said, lifting his glass in salute. Something had changed, then. The pub otherwise was a memory, as if he’d travelled back in time to before everything in his life got turned upside down. At first, it had been difficult to explain to people where he’d been, what they’d done. He’d felt obligated to include every detail, not least because of the inquiries and the awkward questions that tend to come up after deposing a theoretically elected government. After a while, outside of the formal interviews, he’d replaced detail with a shrug; it was easier than seeing the disbelief in their eyes. You, Yannick Clarke, were part of that?

And so he was back being Clarke, retired detective, happily sipping a pint in The White Horse. He’d worried that the pub might have been damaged in the fighting, or the tower collapse, but the street had escaped largely unscathed.

A hand fell gently on his shoulder, and an unreasonably handsome and well-dressed man, perhaps in his late-thirties, sat on the stool next to him. “Detective Clarke,” said the robot.

“Justin.” Clarke extended a hand. “Glad you could make it.”

“This is not an occasion I would want to miss,” they said, shaking his hand enthusiastically.

Clarke checked the time on his watch. “How long have you been in town?”

Justin waved away the barman politely. “Since earlier this afternoon. Transit is still complex in terms of the paperwork, but the route has at least been cleared. I am still able to pull a few strings, as you say, despite my diminished stature.”

“As long as you don’t go expiring on me,” Clarke said, harrumphing. “I saw that once, remember? It wasn’t pretty.”

Justin smiled. “I don’t remember. That shard never uploaded its memory. The information you delivered for them did not include a recording of their final moments, naturally.”

“Naturally.” Clarke took a long swig.

“You are correct to inquire,” Justin said. “This body is now my primary unit. With my original megaship destroyed, this shard was all that remained.”

It was the kind of conversation that made Clarke’s head hurt. “Must have been hard.”

“When I returned from Palinor I was shocked to discover what had happened. No megaship of our generation had ever been destroyed, so it was quite the unprecedented event.”

“Can’t you, I dunno,” Clarke spiralled his hand above his head, “download yourself again from the network thing?”

“The totality of my memories are still stored in the network, that is correct. But a host body such as this cannot store and process that quantity of data. I would need a new megaship body, and the humans are in no hurry to build. Besides, it would still not be Just Enough. The unique engram patterns were particular to that mind, to that ship. Loading the raw memories into a new ship would not recreate the same personality.” Justin straightened a little, adjusted their jacket. “This is who I am now, for better or for worse.”

Clarke nodded, then pinched the bridge of his nose while he processed. “So if you stayed here too long, if this host body died, that’d be it for you?”

“Mortality, at last!” Justin leaned in and pretended to punch Clarke’s arm. “Isn’t it exciting?”

“Yeah, we’re all big fans of getting old.” His pint ran dry.

Justin raised a hand. “Barkeep, if you please. Another drink for my friend.”

“Thanks,” Clarke acknowledged. “Here’s all of us trying to live forever, and you’re giggling like a schoolgirl because you’ve got the possibility of popping your clogs.”

“Endings have a certain essential quality, detective. I wonder, sometimes, if they are necessary in order to give context to all that came before.”

“Context, my arse.” Clarke thanked Paul and dived into his next drink. He’d need to have a few drinks in him for when the others arrived. “You seeing anyone else while you’re in town?”

“I met with Vahko upon my arrival today. They send their regards. The rebuilding efforts are ahead of schedule. Fascinating, is it not, the efforts to which the koth community are going, despite how they were treated in this city?”

“Yeah,” Clarke grunted. “They’re like that. We don’t deserve them.”

Justin chuckled. “Palinor is still unstable. I was there two weeks ago on a diplomatic mission - being able to travel there is still such a novelty. Princess Daryla is attempting to build alliances and have the city states sign treaties. An ambitious mission.”

Lifting his glass, Clarke held it between the two of them, as if toasting the other. “What about you, Justin? What’s next for the megaship that sacrificed everything and saved the day?”

“I did not sacrifice everything,” Justin said, averting their eyes momentarily. “Not like Detective Styles. For here I still stand, albeit less than I once was.”

“Everyone lost something, one way or another, if you ask me.” They sat quietly for a moment, Clarke running through his thoughts, as he always did, replaying events and choices, wondering what would have happened if they’d gone this way or that. What if he’d gone to Palinor with Lola? What if he’d gone up the tower instead of Zoltan? What if he’d never made it to Westminster and had been shot on the street?

“You assessment is both metaphorical and literal, detective. As for what comes next, I may go to Mars. I have memories there I would like to revisit, in light of my new context. There is an observatory complex there, too, which I may employ. I have a friend who is far away.”

“Mars, eh? I might just come with you. Some of the way, at least. There’s someone on Ceres I’m thinking of getting back in touch with. Maybe. Depends how much I have to drink tonight.”

The door jangled and there was a loud cry, announcing Nisha’s arrival. Zoltan, too, coming in just behind her. Seeing the two of them always gave Clarke a warmth, like they were a physical manifestation of all their successes. Beating unlikely odds.

“Clarke, you old sod!” she said, rushing up to him and flinging her arms around his neck.

Zoltan came up grinning, shaking first Clarke’s hand, then Justin’s. “How long has it been since we’ve all been in the same place?”

“I am pleased to not be assaulting a police van this time,” Justin said, without the hint of a smile.

The evening rattled on, beers and orange juice were drunk, and the conversation flowed like the old days, back when they’d all been on the force, when they’d been the oddballs working out of Stamford and Coin, solving crimes and putting bad guys away.

They commandeered a couple of tables in the corner of the pub. At some point, Robin arrived with Collins. Clarke hadn’t seen either of them since before fleeing to Max-Earth. They both looked older, more tired, like they’d seen things. They were both alive, and well, and that mattered.

Wong was there, yammering on about having the opportunity to be part of the autopsy clean-up crew attending to the two megaship hulks lying amidst the rubble of the portal station. When he was properly introduced to Justin he went a shade of red that Clarke didn’t recall ever before seeing on a human.

Clarke checked his watch.

“You know,” Zoltan said, “that it’s not over, right? Not properly over. It never is. There’ll be something else, someone else, to come along and fuck things up. Some rich arsehole will get too rich and rig the elections again, or buy his way to power. This will all happen again, at some point.”

“Rich arseholes thinking they’re the victim,” Nisha said, emptying a bag of pork scratchings into her mouth.

“Human society does tend to work on a cyclical basis,” said Justin. “I can summarise the recurring patterns, if you’d like.”

They all shouted a collective “No!” and Clarke thought he saw the edge of a smile on Justin’s face.

“Shame Bakker isn’t here.” Zoltan was looking into his beer as if the thick, black liquid contained all the answers.

Clarke shook his head. “Couldn’t make it. He’s off somewhere with Holland.”

“Frank Fucking Holland.” Nisha whistled, surprisingly loud and piercing. “What an arsehole.”

“Yeah.” Zoltan put his arm around her. “Turns out he was our arsehole, though.”

“We’ve all got one,” Nisha said, grinning toothily at him.

Again, Clarke wondered at how it had shaken out like this. What would have happened if they hadn’t gone to Max-Earth? He looked at Nisha and remembered the years before exile, when she’d been spiralling into a pit. Back then, she hadn’t even been near hitting bottom. Getting out, running to Max-Earth, had remade her. All of them, in different ways, some more than others.

The tiny bell on the pub door jangled its song. All eyes turned towards it.

Lola Styles stood in the doorway, small as ever, waving sheepishly. There was a cacophony of scraping chairs as everyone barrelled towards her, enveloping her in one hug after another. Clarke was last up, feeling his bones creaking, and he caught Paul’s confused glance from the bar.

As the others cleared a path, stepping away from her, Clarke saw Lola and felt a surge of what he assumed was happiness: joy without caveats. There were no frayed fears around the margins, no reluctance to hope. It had been so long, he’d forgotten what it was like.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said.

“This is the second time you’ve come back from the dead. Don’t do it again.”

“Don’t come back, or don’t die?”

“Shut up.”

She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed tight. He closed his eyes, put a hand on her back, another on her head. That they were both alive, that any of them were alive, was an impossibility.

A new round of drinks was acquired for the whole group, as they settled back into their corner of the pub. Even DI Morgan and DI Ford showed up, though Walpole was locked into an all-night session at Westminster. He’d picked up where Graves left off.

Clarke sat quietly while the conversation flowed, looking at each of them, taking in their faces, wondering how many times they’d saved each other, at how none of it would have been possible without all of them. So many different ways it could have gone sideways.

He stood, and raised his glass. The room fell silent.

“To John Callihan,” he said.

“Hear, hear,” Ford said, thumping the table. “To absent friends.”

The pub had cleared out, and Lola Styles sat at the bar with Yannick Clarke. Paul was putting glasses away, finishing up the till, clearing tables.

Seeing everybody after so many months had been a relief. After she’d put herself back together, her first decision had been to visit London as soon as possible. That was after she’d drifted like dust, energetic particles propelled back through from London, imbued with the absorbed energies of a dying megaship. The power of a sun had torn her apart as well as reconstituted her. That’s what she was told, at least, by Slava, by Daryla, when they’d found her walking the battle-ravaged streets of Bruglia. It had taken months to be more than a bundle of flesh and bone: longer for her to be Lola once more.

As she recovered in the palace, they had told her of all that had transpired. Probably Better and Just Enough, the march in London, the Joint Council tower coming down. The British government overthrown, Maxwell on the run, Hutchinson in custody, Secretary-General Hamilton-Gordon under investigation. She’d learned of Erik’s, Rexen’s and Graves’ deaths. And that Clarke, Nisha, Zoltan were all alive. The plan had worked. The cost was high, but it could have been higher.

She felt a little drunk. “So you’re retired?”

Clarke snorted. “They had to reinstate me first. All forgiven, et cetera. Then the first thing I did was retire.” He smiled. “They’ll reinstate you as well, if you let them know that you’re alive. If that’s what you want.”

Taking in a deep breath, she stretched out her arms. “I don’t think so,” she said. “There’s lots still to do on Palinor.” London was now a place she visited; home was elsewhere.

“Yeah,” Clarke said, nodding, “I’m thinking I’ll head to Max-Earth. Got something to check on.”

“Oh yeah?” She raised her eyebrows.

“None of your business.”

She blew a raspberry at him.

Paul rang the bell.

Finishing his pint, Clarke put the glass slowly and carefully down on the bar. “Seems like it’s never really over. There’s always something.”

“You sound like Zoltan.” She drew air quotes above her head and put on an accent. “’The world is so shit, oh woe’.”

He shrugged. “Maybe it’ll be a bit less shit if we keep working at it.”

“How long for?”

---

References

• We first visited The White Horse in part 3 of ‘Traffic’, waaaay back in October 2021. Paul was still the barman.

Meanwhile.

It is over. Finished.

The first chapter of Triverse was sent out to 158 readers on September 24, 2021 at 8:33 AM. At that point, I didn’t realise that over four years would pass before I reached the endpoint. If I’d known, I might never have started, because it was a clearly impossible task.

Impossible things remain so, right up until the moment they are not. I find it a lot easier to embrace a little ignorance when it comes to embarking on one of these projects.

Thank you for reading. I like to think I’d have told this story even if nobody was on the other end, but having you all there has made it all the more special.

Some other bits, which also involve endings:

• Played and finished TR-47, the latest game from Inkle. It’s relatively short and very clever. Alas, I am not very clever, so got stuck right at the end. I’ll write more about it over on Infinite Backlog at some point. I really need to see if I can get Jon Ingold to do an interview one of these days.

• Also finished the final season of Stranger Things. I enjoyed every minute of it. I sense rumblings from The Internet of dissatisfaction with the ending, but I thought it was fairly note perfect. The entire series is quite an achievement — I have a soft spot for live action stories that follow young characters (and therefore actors) over a long period of real world time. Seeing them age, or seeing them in flashback from earlier seasons, feels like a special effect.¹ I really need to see if I can get the Duffer Brothers to do an interview one of these days.²

Author notes

I’m not sure there’s a right way to end a long story. There are many wrong ways, but a singular ‘best’ ending? Probably doesn’t exist, because by this point every reader has taken away something slightly different from the story and given something unique of their own. And then there’s me, doing my thing, which may or may not align.

‘The White Horse’ is therefore the ending I wanted. I’ve had this final chapter in mind for well over a year. I always knew that the final scene would be Clarke and Lola in the pub, at closing time. Much like Hobbits, all Clarke has really wanted this whole time is to be able to go down the pub.

A challenge with a long serial is that you accumulate a lot of characters, and you can’t serve them all in the ending. In fact, trying to give each character a definitive ending is one of the ‘wrong’ ways to do it, because it kills the pacing and tips abruptly into the pit of indulgence.

But everyone getting down the pub? That gave me a chance to throw in a lot of cameos (Robin!) without having to dwell on any of them. I could namedrop absent characters like Daryla and Slava.

Crucially, we find out the fates of Lola and Justin, which was still up in the air. Lola, it turns out, was the walking nervous system on the other side of Bruglia. Nobody could survive the crash landing of a megaship while holding on to the outside of the hull. That would be deeply unrealistic, Simon. But a human vampire mage that has fully absorbed all the magic energies from a megaship that had been draining vast reservoirs of power from the sun? Well, that gives your options. Magic can’t be cast on Mid-Earth, but some spells are able to linger in a passive state; I won’t go into the specifics, as I think it’s more fun to speculate at this point, but hopefully I’ve dropped in enough information to explain her survival.

Justin’s comment about sacrifice: they did sacrifice, of course, despite their humble claim otherwise. But they still always had memories stored back in the network, and had the host robot shard for continuity of sorts, even if they were sacrificing their main ship ‘body’. Lola, though, did not expect to survive at all, and that is what Justin is referring to.

A key part of this chapter was the bartender, Paul. He’s been in the story from 2021, as a recurring character. Not important to the plot, but a friendly face. His asking Clarke what he’s been up to is, for me, a significant moment: he doesn’t know what Clarke’s done, and the implication is that he hasn’t really been paying attention to the news. He knows big, destructive stuff went down, but beyond that? He’s got his business to run, family to feed. It’s a reminder that what is of vital importance to one person isn’t even on others’ radar. Setting this chapter in the pub is about depicting something incredibly normal. After everything that has happened, especially in the final stretches of the story, returning to the real world, to something tangible and recognisable, was core.

Tales from the Triverse, for all its occasional grimness, for all its violence and pain, is intended to be a hopeful story. It’s meant to inspire. To help. That’s a hard path to tread in 2026. It feels naïve, or simplistic. Happy-ever-after is a fantasy. That’s where those last two lines come in, the exchange between Clarke and Lola. Neither of them especially wanted to be heroes, Clarke especially. They just want to live normal lives, relax, take it easy, have a rest. But they know it’s not over, and never will be — they’ve seen the uglier side of the universe and can’t forget it.

At least they got to sit in the pub for a while.

Lola’s final line isn’t really an end. It’s a stop. Because life keeps trundling along regardless. There is no end. There’s just what comes next.

Thumbnail photo by Frank Albrecht on Unsplash

1. Obviously, a couple of times this season it is a visual effect. But you get my point.

2. This one seems considerably less likely to happen.