‘Not deliberately, if that’s what you mean,’ said Greg. ‘Maybe he let something slip. But it wouldn’t do any good asking him. I doubt he’d remember. And I couldn’t tell whether or not he was telling the truth.’
She considered that, if Greg couldn’t make sense of her father with his ability – ‘His mind has gone, hasn’t it? I mean, really gone, destroyed.’
‘Julia.’ He held her firmly, a hand on each shoulder. ‘Isn’t it about time you booked him into a clinic?’
‘He’s my father,’ she insisted plaintively. ‘He needs me.’
‘He’s hurting you, Julia. Far too much. You can’t hide that from me, remember? A clinic will care for him properly. You can visit. Hell, you can afford to build a clinic. Put it in a house like this one, he won’t even realize the difference.’
She studied something away to the side of his head, swallowing hard. ‘Maybe,’ she whispered.
‘You should get out,’ he expanded blithely, changing tone, breaking the mood. ‘A girl like you ought to be beating off the boys with a stick. Stay up till the wee hours at disreputable parties. That sort of thing. Do you the world of good. Wilholm is grand to look at, but it isn’t exactly jumping and jiving, now is it?’
‘No,’ she smiled meekly. ‘I’m going away next weekend, actually. A book launch.’
‘A what?’
‘A book launch. It’s a big PR event, lasts for two days, truly swish. Naturally the Evans heir was invited.’
‘Good. It’s a start. Now, what about a boy?’
‘I know someone,’ she said defensively. And the thought lit that idyllic warming core of delight.
They walked out into the furnace heat of a cloudless day. The sun’s glare yellowed half of the sky.
‘Goodbye, Greg, and thanks again.’ She stood very close as he blipped the Duo’s lock. Would he kiss her?
He tugged the Duo’s door open and smiled affectionately, like a doting uncle. ‘Any time.’
Oh well.
She waved at the car until the curve of the drive took it from view.
End GregTime#Three.
She’d have to edit her father out, though.
16
Scorching April sunlight metamorphosed the A1 into a bubbling ribbon of tar, for once reversing the rampant greenery’s encroachment. Nettles and grass were sucked below the surface by sluggish eddies, consumed and fossilized within the black brimstone.
The Duo moved along the northbound carriageway with one continuous ripping sound. Greg drove automatically, trying to make sense of the case. He hadn’t admitted it to Julia, but Kendric di Girolamo had him badly worried. A paradox, she’d said. And she was right. Intuition convinced him Kendric was involved with the blitz attack somewhere along the line, no faint tickle either. But why had the man allowed her to buy him out? Maybe Gabriel would know.
He drove straight through Edith Weston, on to Manton, and turned right, freewheeling down the hill towards Oakham, saving the batteries. A dense strip of rhododendron bushes planted along the side of the railway line running parallel to the road was in full bloom, tissue-thin scarlet flowers throwing off a pink haze as they basked in the rich sunlight. Greg barely registered them; he was worried by the idea of a high-placed mole hidden somewhere among Event Horizon’s staff. The last thing he needed was an opposition that was being fed his own progress reports. Maybe it would be best not to keep Walshaw a hundred per cent up to date. More subterfuge, more complexity.
Dillan Evans disturbed him, as well. Not so much his state, but the fact that he could piece together his father’s particular bid for immortality from the snippets of conversation he’d picked up around the manor. If Dillan Evans could, anyone could. That definitely meant interviewing all of Wilholm’s staff. Another neurohormone hangover to anticipate. Or had Dillan Evans realized because he knew exactly how avaricious and egotistic his father was? That, given that the bioware’s capability existed, he would inevitably spend a fortune bringing it to fruition and constructing an NN core. Either way, it left Dillan as a real monster of a loose end. No messing.
Greg had been surprised how bravely Julia handled her father. Her mind’s peppy sparkle had dimmed severely in his presence, but her outward composure had been beautifully maintained. He admired that kind of dignity.
He even felt a degree of pity for Dillan. It would’ve been so easy to condemn him, but he couldn’t find the scorn. He deserved compassion more than anything; a lost ruined man, cowering in the double shadow of his parent and child.
His sorry state made Julia all the more remarkable – or perhaps not, the best roses grew out of manure heaps. And despite being the end product of a decidedly screwed-up family, she shone like the sun. Embarrassingly so in his presence.
Sighing resignedly at the memory, he drove into Oakham, reducing speed as the cycle traffic built up around him. When Greg was a teenager it’d been a sleepy rural market town, home to nine thousand people. Then the Warming melted the Antarctic ice, and Oakham received a spate of refugees from the drowned Fens. Its population rose to well over the fifteen thousand mark, and all without a single new house being authorized by the PSP county committee. The town became a microcosm of English life, compressed, confined, and frantically scrabbling to adapt to the environmental and social revolutions of the new century.
Greg slowed to a crawl by the library at the end of the High Street. People were dismounting from their bicycles, wheeling them forward into the dense crowd ahead. The High Street was packed with market stalls, but there was just enough space left for the Duo between them and the waist-high piles of slowly degenerating kelpboard boxes which swamped the pavement. Greg grated into the gap with a broadside of horn blasts, and followed a shepherd driving his small flock of rotund beasts, gene-tailored for meat heaviness. The Duo’s wheels squelched softly on the carpet of grey-brown turds they laid on the pitted tarmac.
The buildings on this side of the street were mostly old estate agents and building societies. They’d all closed down in the Credit Crash, and the PSP had requisitioned the empty premises under the one-home law, converting them into accommodation modules. Even now there was little improvement in the housing pressure; council and government were locked in a squabble over funds for a new estate on the southern edge of the town. Entire families had crammed into the makeshift facilities behind the shops’ broad plate-glass windows, the oldest relatives sitting amongst the bleached displays like flesh-sculpture buddhas watching the world go by.
Not all of the old retail businesses had gone under: there was still a hotel, a couple of butchers, a recently de-nationalized bank, and a century-old family gear business that had survived; but most of the town’s trade had been usurped by the thriving High Street market. The stalls were crude wooden trestle affairs, keeping the sun at bay with awnings of heavy cloth, patterned in brightly coloured stripes or loud checks. Animals bleated mournfully in their pens, birds squawked inside cramped wicker cages. Pyramid mounds of fruit were stacked high, every colour of the rainbow. Ranks of skinned rabbits hung from poles, stall owners languidly flicking leafy switches at them to keep the flies off. There were clothing stalls, cobblers, tinkers, gear repairers, distillers with an astonishing array of liqueurs, carpenters, potters, the whole repertoire of manual crafts clamouring for attention.
Three hundred metres and ten minutes later Greg cleared the market and turned right into Church Street, parking outside a little bakery shop.
On the other side of the road was a head-high stone wall, rapidly disappearing under an avalanche of dark waxy-leafed ivy. There was a raised garden behind it, enclosed by buildings on two sides and a chapel on the third. He went through the open wooden gate and took the steps two at a time.
The garden and buildings used to be part of the Oakham School campus, but private education hadn’t lasted six months after the PSP came to power, swept away in the card carriers’ Equalization crusade. And after that the refugees had hit town demanding somewhere to live. The cam
pus was requisitioned as fast as the shops, playing fields given over to allotments.
The school’s Round House was a plain circular building sitting on the south side of the raised garden, three storeys high, and built from pale Stamford brick. Its door was closed and locked. Greg stood in front of it, motionless, waiting. It was a game he and Gabriel played. After half a minute he admitted defeat once again and turned to the small touchpanel set into the brick. He started pecking out the six-digit code for room seventeen.
‘Come on up,’ Gabriel’s voice chimed out of the intercom before he’d finished. The lock buzzed like an enraged hornet.
Gabriel Thompson had been a major in the Mindstar Brigade, possessed of the most reliable precognition faculty ever recorded. She was thirty-nine; only two years older than Greg, but judging from physical appearance alone he would’ve said it was closer to twenty. Her fair hair had already faded to a maidenly pearl-white, flab was accumulating all over her body. She wore a fawn-coloured woollen cardigan and tweed skirt, making her broad and shapeless, a half-hearted attempt to disguise her physical deterioration.
It pained him to see her this way, a prematurely middle-aged spinster. Especially as his mind insisted on remembering her as that neat, efficient young officer in Turkey. A fine-looking woman in her day, idolized like an elder sister.
He was given a moody stare as he entered her room on the second floor; it was one of thirty in the Round House, originally intended to sleep two girl boarders. As a permanent bedsit it was terribly cramped.
‘Typical,’ she said. ‘Only ever visit when you want something.’ Badly applied dabs of make-up made her face shine in the golden afternoon sunlight filtering through the net curtain.
‘Not true. Oh, Eleanor says hello.’
‘I doubt it.’ Gabriel began pouring tea from a silver pot into two bone china cups, all neatly laid out ready.
Rock music from one of the other rooms thumped out a soft bass rhythm in the background, echoing down the stairwell.
‘So what have you come for this time?’ she asked.
‘Philip Evans.’
‘He’s dead.’ She paused for a moment, then her eyes widened in surprise. ‘Christ!’
All she needed was a word, a phrase; extrapolating the future from there. Events closest to her came across strongest. There would be no point in him asking her what was going to happen to someone on the other side of the world, she wouldn’t be able to see them.
She’d described the probabilities to him once, explaining her limits after he’d asked her for some impossible piece of intelligence information when they were fighting the Jihad legion.
I’m standing at the mouth of a very large river, she’d said, at the moment when the future becomes the present; and I’m looking across the land where the water originated, seeing the first fork, and beyond that the tributaries branching away, and then the tributaries’ tributaries, splitting, multiplying, ad infinitum. The far horizon gives birth to a trillion rills, all converging to the mouth, each one the source of a possible destiny. They are the Tau lines, future history. On their way towards me they clash and merge, building in strength, in probability, eradicating the wilder fringes of feasibility as they approach confluence, until they reach the mouth: the point of irrevocable certainty.
She could send her mind floating back along those streams, questing, probing for what would come. The prospect terrified her, he knew. She’d hidden that from the Army, but of course he’d seen it at once. The knowledge cost him; as the one person whose empathy allowed him to see the true extent of that dread he felt protective towards her. He was her involuntary confessor, obligated.
Way ahead of her, at the furthest extremity of each of those streams, where the flow was little more than a trickle in the dust, her death waited for her. She refused to let her mind roam far into any of the possible futures; but even that self-imposed proscription meant she lived with the mortal fear of the streams drying up, one by one, the drought inching towards her; a reality so blatant she’d never be able to shield her eldritch sight against it.
Greg thought of himself sitting in a plane as it began its long fall out of the sky; standing paralysed by fear in the middle of the road as some huge lorry bore down, brakes squealing, unable to stop in time. She had to live with the prospect of seeing that eventuality raising its head every minute of every day. Knowing that it was inevitably going to happen.
So he forgave her for going to seed. His espersense was a heavy cross. He would never have the strength to carry hers.
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Philip Evans made it back from the grave. Can you see who’s behind the blitz on his NN core?’
‘Hmm.’ Her mind betrayed how intrigued she was. ‘I’ll have a look.’ She cut a slice of almond cake and began munching, staring up at the ceiling, eyes unfocused.
He sipped his tea, trying to identify the herbs. Rosemary, possibly. The market stalls weren’t particularly choosy what they ground up.
‘Not a thing,’ Gabriel said.
He didn’t show any disappointment. (Was there some alternative-universe Greg Mandel currently raging at her failure?) The answer did exist. Down one of those Tau lines was a future where he and Gabriel teamed up and successfully tracked down whoever had attacked Philip Evans. But for the moment the distance was too great. She wouldn’t stretch herself that far, not even for friendship’s sake.
‘Will you help?’ he asked.
She looked dreadfully unhappy.
‘No big visions,’ he reassured her. ‘Just cross out probabilities for me, eliminate suspects and dead ends. That kind of thing. I’ve got to interview Event Horizon’s giga-conductor team tomorrow, that’s over two hundred people. Then I’ll probably wind up having to go through the security division’s headquarters staff for the mole. My espersense can’t last out that long. Twenty’s my limit. And that hurts bad enough.’
‘All right,’ she whispered.
He held up the card Morgan Walshaw had given him. Gabriel stared at it, mesmerized. He could sense the trepidation mounting in her mind. She wanted to soar into the future and find out what it meant. The larger, ever-present dread held her back.
‘Afterwards,’ he said, ‘succeed or fail, I’m going to pay for your operation. That’s your fee, Gabriel, that gland is coming out.’
She looked at him incredulously, her mind spilling out hope. Her eyes watered. ‘I can’t,’ she moaned.
‘Bullshit,’ he said softly. ‘I’m the one who can’t, I can keep my demons at bay. You can’t. You think I’m blind to what the gland has done to you? You’re getting out, Gabriel, no more living under the pendulum.’
Tears began to roll down her cheeks, smearing the makeup. She twisted round to avoid his eyes, looking out of the window.
He put his hands on the nape of her neck, feeling the solid knots of muscle, massaging gently. ‘I hate seeing you like this. You don’t live; you crawl from day to day. It’s a miserable existence. Too timid to walk under the open sky in case a lightning bolt hits you. It’s got to stop, Gabriel. No messing.’
‘You bastard, Mandel. I’d be nothing without the gland, nothing.’
Outside, the sun shone down on the school’s old chapel on the other side of the garden, its pale stone gleaming like burnished yellow topaz.
‘You’d be human.’
‘Bastard. Prize bastard.’
‘Truthful bastard.’
He turned her to face him. She was suddenly busy with a lace handkerchief, wiping away tears, making an even worse hash of the make-up.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘We’ll start with the Event Horizon Astronautics Institute, OK?’
She looked confused for a moment, then gathered her thoughts, entering into that familiar trance for a few seconds. ‘Yes, that’s a good start.’
‘Right, then. I’ll pick you up at nine o’clock.’
‘Fine.’ She sniffed hard, then blew into the handkerchief.
Greg leant forward and kissed her
brow.
17
A pair of dolphins spiralled around Eleanor, silver bubbles streaming out from their flashing tails, wrapping her at the centre of an ephemeral DNA helix. Playful scamps. She’d come to love the freedom of the water over the last few weeks. Down here, surrounded by quiet pastel light, tranquillity reigned; life’s ordinary worries simply didn’t exist below the surface. Sometimes she spent hours swimming along the bottom of Rutland Water; one small part of her mind checking the long rows of water-fruit rooted in the silt, while her memories and imagination roamed free. Daydreaming really, but this gentle universe understood and forgave.
The marine-adepts had warned her about the state. ‘Blue lost’, they called it. But she couldn’t believe it was that dangerous. Besides, the reservoir was finite, not like the oceans they talked of, where some of their kind never returned. Swimming away to the edge of the world.
She helped tend their crops three or four days each week; with inflation the way it was, the water-fruit money came in useful. And she could spend the time thinking about life, the world, and Greg, weaving the strands in fanciful convolutions; so that when she left the water behind her mind was spring fresh and eager for the sights, sounds, and sensations of land again. Mental batteries recharged. The world outside that ever-damned kibbutz was too big to endure in one unbroken passage.
She felt a dolphin snout poking her legs, upsetting her balance. It was Rusty, the big old male. She knew him pretty well by now, though some of the others were hard to distinguish. Rusty had a regular ridge of scar tissue running from just behind his eyes down to his dorsal fin. The marine-adepts never talked about it, so she never asked. But something had been grafted on to him at one time. She didn’t like to think what.
They’d brought eight dolphins with them to the reservoir to help harvest their water-fruit. The dolphins’ long, powerful snouts could snip clean through a water-fruit’s ropy root. All of them were ex-Navy fish, their biochemistry subtly adjusted, enabling them to live comfortably in fresh water as well as salt. Greg said that was so they could be sent on missions up rivers. But whatever Rusty had been made to do back then hadn’t affected his personality; he could be a mischievous devil when he wanted to be.