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  'First of all, you didn't make me. And second, how can I be an accessory if you haven't done anything criminal?'

  'It's not that simple.'

  'Oh yeah? Then explain it to me. For godsake, explain something to me.'

  He was quiet for a long time, though he didn't remove his hand. Didn't seem to notice that his other hand was also speaking. Pleading.

  'I never meant for anyone to die.'

  'You're not telling me you did have something to do with the bombings after all, are you?'

  'Of course not.'

  'Then what?'

  He rose to his feet and strode the length of the kitchen, where he snatched up a wooden spoon, whipped round, and smashed it against the edge of the worktop.

  'I can't live like this any more!' he cried. 'I want a life, not one journey after another into nightmare. They have no idea what it's like. What it does to your mind, your dreams.' With his foot he kicked the splintered pieces of wood aside. 'And wouldn't care if they did.'

  Laura had no inkling what Zach meant, but his torment splintered more than wood. Swiftly she went to him. At first his body was remote and wooden, a stranger's, then they were embracing fiercely. There was no gentleness in him now. Together they slammed against the kitchen door, her back catching the handle. She gasped at the pain. His jeans could barely contain him. Yes, she thought. Cunt. 'Tell me I'm a filthy cunt.'

  'God no!' He released her, pushed her from him so that she nearly fell. He stepped back, still breathing hard, his face shaved of all expression.

  'Zach—'

  'Never!'

  He tore open the door, spun out of the cottage, and was away.

  *****

  Without a jacket he wouldn't be gone long, Laura told herself. And told herself, as darkness fell and it continued to snow.

  Chapter 24

  'So explain.'

  Zach, of course, should have known that Lev has his own idea of what constitutes an explanation. And certainly should have guessed when told to set down his mug of tea. After that it's a matter of seconds for Lev to power up his little game. Zach's protest is strangled mid-breath by a roar of sound, and he whips his head round but the sound is here, within the tent, within him, a swithering tumult within.

  too soon, he's not ready yet

  you levellers have no

  Zach raises a hand to his temple, trying to sort out the

  more time with him, time to

  sort out

  why the dogs, they're not

  lunging at our wings till

  An angry wasp shrills inside Zach's skull, seethes and buzzes and shrieks, trapped, ricocheting ever louder as it finds no escape from within. 'Stop,' he mutters. He's going to throw up. He swallows, he closes his eyes, he stumbles to his feet.

  'Sit down!' Lev orders.

  The pressure in his head. He can't bear

  Without a thought for the cold he staggers to the entrance and rips open the zip. Peels back his skin.

  It's not the cold that stops him from vomiting, but the shock.

  'Where are we?' he gasps, as Lev takes his arm and leads him back inside.

  'The first time's the worst,' Lev says. 'Disorienting.'

  'Where are we?'

  'How much maths have they taught you?' When Zach shakes his head, unable to frame a coherent answer—unable even to recall what they've done in the last few lessons—Lev prompts him. 'What about imaginary numbers?'

  'A classic misnomer,' Zach says, his distress easing. 'They're not really imaginary.'

  'And I've already told you, neither is this place.'

  *****

  Zach has never had any doubts about his intelligence, even as a small boy it was his weapon and armour both. Dumb monkeys, he'd spit at them till forced to spit blood. Later on, he learned to guard his mouth as well, so effectively that they never even suspected an insult. But dumb monkeys they've stayed, a mantra he repeats to himself the way others pray or swear.

  'Do you think we're stupid?' he asks Lev.

  'Who's we? Sapiens or cognoscens?'

  Zach is silent for a moment.

  'Both, I suppose,' he answers, reluctantly. Honestly.

  He knew he'd see that glint in Lev's eyes, damn him.

  'A few thousand years of philosophy and pure maths and physics and music ought to do it,' Lev teases. 'And some other fields whose names you couldn't pronounce. That's why I'm so reluctant to explain. Show rather than tell, I believe your writers like to say.'

  'You mentioned imaginary numbers, not me.'

  'As an analogy. You can't count the square root of -1 in the same way you can count mugs or muggles, but it exists. It's real. In your universe you need imaginary numbers to analyse electrical waves, for example, or in quantum mechanics.'

  Zach doesn't fancy the sound of your universe, and says so.

  'Another metaphor.'

  'Metaphors are for literature, not science!'

  Lev gestures towards the tent closure, his voice crisp. 'The ice is out there. It's real, Zach. Not perhaps the two-cheeseburgers-and-a-coke reality you've grown up with, but real nevertheless. A crossing place between universes may be the easiest way for you to picture it.' A laugh. 'Or training ground.'

  The Pace board in Lev's lap emits its own form of laugh, a ripple of UV light which no sapiens would be able to see.

  'What else can that thing do?' Zach asks. And immediately hears the opening notes of the Adagio from Mozart's clarinet concerto. They expand and fill the tent with warm Aegean blue—the colour he thought lost forever—the wonderful watery timbre of an authentic basset clarinet which he's always longed to own. 'One day,' he said, 'I'll play it for you on a period instrument.' Laura smiled. 'One day, we'll swim there together,' she said.

  Nine weeks after writing his only clarinet concerto, Mozart was dead.

  Bella lifts her head and whines, a high skirling tone which raises the hairs on the nape of Zach's neck. The blue light fades, and though the tent is battened tight, a seam of cold air slips over his skin as though an unseen door has opened.

  'That's enough for now,' Lev says. 'You're getting there.'

  'Did you hear it? The clarinet?'

  'Not as such, but it's irrelevant. What matters is that you've heard it.'

  'Don't treat me like an idiot!'

  Lev's grin reminds Zach uncomfortably of his own, when listening to his classmates. 'If I thought you were an idiot, you wouldn't be here now.'

  'Yeah, just imagine, I could be cuddled up nice and warm and cosy with someone who thinks I'm a lampshade or a doorknob.'

  'Or an AK-47.'

  Lev downs the rest of his tea, then goes to rinse the mug in their washing-up water. Dripping, it dangles from his fingers as he crouches over the bucket, suddenly alert. Bella too raises her head and cocks her ears. Despite his excellent hearing, Zach discerns nothing except the susurrus of snow against the walls of the tent; even the wind has ceased its vicious lashings. Nor are there any untoward shadows which threaten the mellow light from their little stove.

  Still, there is something insistent about the near silence, which begins to stretch and stretch and stretch like a balloon, till you become disproportionately anxious that it will pop—for it to pop. Just before Zach can no longer hold his breath, Lev snaps his wrist to shake out the excess water and lays the mug upside down near the stove. He turns to Zach.

  'It's time to leave. I discouraged the first lot of them, but they'll be back.'

  'Are you planning to tell me who they are? And maybe—just maybe, mind you—why?'

  'I could tell you they're fallen angels. I could tell you they're winged humans from another universe. I could tell you they're the incarnation of some madman's agenda. Or your race's overweening will to power. Which version do you prefer?'

  'How about the truth? Frot it, they've slaughtered the dogs!'

  'You're going to have to learn to make your own truth, Zach. That's why I'm here.'

  Chapter 25

  'It's g
etting worse, and we'd bloody well better take some sort of action!'

  Pelly sipped from his glass of sparkling water to keep from smiling. Slade was competent enough as a research head, but the squat toad had no clue about PR, and very little about crisis management. Must be fifty-three, fifty-four already. There was no way he'd ever make it in politics—no charisma, no mystique, no animal magnetism. He could manipulate terrified rabbits like Litchfield, but pit him against someone who understands market dynamics, and he'd go down faster than the crows they'd shot as kids. It would be like asking your grandmother to pitch the latest condom flavours to the rainbow generation. Come to think of it, his, Pelly's,78-year-old granny could probably do a better job of it than Slade.

  The meeting wasn't going well. No meetings called for Monday morning at eight went well. Those who were expected to attend usually fortified themselves in their private offices beforehand—except for Huang and his dour p.a., of course—Pelly's choix du jour washed down with a hazelnut grande, extra cream no sugar. And when traffic was godawful, with a slurp of water from the tap, having just made it past security at a run. 'Where's the fire, Mr Pelly? Left your secretary on simmer?' Wanker could only get away with sexist remarks like that because he was nearing retirement.

  Pelly glanced round the boardroom while several people shifted in their chairs. Slade was always a model of rectitude, never so much as a hell or damn out of him. Even Huang, inevitably deadpan, blinked several times in rapid succession.

  'Perhaps more surveillance devices?' Helena de la Croix suggested. She crossed her legs, and normally the hiss of her sheer black tights compensated for the commonplaces she uttered, the utter fatuousness of her proposals. There was always one at executive level—somebody smart and very hungry, but without the least soupcon of imagination. Even Slade could do better than CCTV, for Christ's sake. But Helena was an asset to Fulgur, and Pelly knew it. Huang knew it. Hell, Fulgur himself probably knew it (and there were those rumours, subterranean as termites, about a radical project he'd initiated before his sudden death). Unless Legal Affairs poached Addison from Cortech, they'd find no one in the entire country with as comprehensive knowledge of international corporate law as Helena. Sometimes Pelly wondered whether a near photographic memory commandeered too many brain cells or synapses or whatever, so that not enough were left over for creative thinking. She was a great fuck, though, and absolutely as discreet as her profession required.

  At a signal, Huang's p.a. clicked through the next slides in the presentation. The images were cleverly arranged. (What else? Pelly himself had done it.) The latest bombing incident, first from a distance, then closer and closer shots, till they saw only a corpse . . . then parts of a corpse . . . then flesh that could have been an abstract mural . . . then bright gore. The sequence interspersed with graffiti in bright gory colours, everywhere in the city, and spreading like a virus: fuck augers, kill the Fulgur transfucks, Fulgur hires terrs, bomb Fulgur not babies.

  'As you can see,' Huang said, 'we have a situation.'

  'Do we really need to worry about some street vandals?' Claire Murphy asked. Most of the others nodded, and the new blimpish bloke with the beard that didn't quite conceal his scars—on loan from Jo'burg, supposed to be some sort of genius with net space—muttered 'storm in a teacup' under his breath. Obviously one of those pathetic sods who could copulate with the cyber world, but not the real one.

  Lopez sat up from his disarming slouch and indicated with a flick of a finger that he'd like to speak. Nobody could ignore those brazen eyes. He'd have made a formidable journalist, even Pelly would give him that, the sort that smiled as he severed your vocal cords with a mellifluous phrase. It was rumoured the Brazilian commanded seven or eight languages; though Pelly's own school Mandarin was a bit rusty, just last week he'd overheard Lopez discussing the latest provincial poetry with Huang, or maybe it was the latest provincial elections. Currently Human Resources, and one of the youngest team members.

  Pelly caught Kantor's eye, the glint in it. This would be good.

  Lopez indicated the screen, and they all studied it once more. A caricatured simu with the ubiquitous Fulgur two-headed dragon emblazoned on his chest, wearing a lit bomb like a cap or turban on his head.

  'I don't believe we should underestimate the potential of underground movements.' Golden Boy's English was perfect, unaccented. 'History has repeatedly shown that they can be very potent indeed.'

  Slade reasserted himself. 'Fabio's quite right to be concerned about the growing unrest. Never ignore the grassroots, I always say. These thugs may start with graffiti, but barricades and Molotov cocktails and burning effigies aren't far behind.' He tapped a forefinger against the side of his nose, a sure sign of an impending witticism. 'I daresay we might find these artists jobs right here at Fulgur—in media or PR, say—where their talents could be put to productive use.'

  'With all due respect, Russell'—there was very little humility in the smile Lopez directed at Slade—'I fear this may be a bit more serious than a few scrawled slogans. And already, at least in part, an internal problem.' His smile broadened. 'A Human Resources problem, you might say.'

  He had them now, of course. Huang nodded to his secretary, who switched to a blank screen and took a seat.

  'Please continue, Mr Lopez,' Huang said.

  Surreptitiously, Keith activated the recorder function on his wrister. Lopez was a daredevil, but reliable; these Insec types were one of Randall's smartest moves. Still, good security work never overlooked any possibility, no matter how remote. And Huang actually believed he was above such measures. Overbearing Asians, think they run everything. It amused Randall to let them switch off in-house surveillance, but he wouldn't be satisfied with a transcript; he always insisted on replaying the sessions for himself. With the new sensors, you could see the slightest twitch, hear the slightest mutter; just about smell their sweat. Orientals never seemed to sweat.

  'I've had reports that some of our own employees are unhappy with the divisions which rely heavily on cognoscens talent,' Lopez said. 'Very unhappy indeed, in certain cases.'

  'Rumours, Fabio?' Helena asked.

  'I'm not going to insult your intelligence by repeating that old chestnut where there's smoke etc., but I will say that I'm fully capable of distinguishing between substantiated and unsubstantiated information,' he said, his voice smooth as vanilla ice cream. The cholesterol hit came later. 'While nothing is gained by being unduly alarmist, we can't disregard the long history of fabricated terrorist attacks, often for political gain.'

  'Such as?' Mfana asked, pawing his beard. He was always touchy about his homeland.

  'Such as the burning of German Reichstag in 1933. Such as the self-inflicted GEL epidemic in the U.S. in the late 90s. Such as what we may be witnessing right now.'

  'No one has ever established that the outbreak of GEL was a propaganda tool,' Helena said.

  'It's unlikely that it will go so far, Helena, but should you ever need airtight documentary evidence for court, Dr Huang knows that he can rely on my sources,' Fabio said. 'The Purists may not be outlawed, but some of their activities are at best questionable, and possibly downright criminal.' His eyes rested for a moment on Keith. 'Fulgur can hardly desire or afford such employees.'

  'Isn't that a matter for Internal Security, or at least the police?' Keith asked with a touch of belligerence.

  Fabio permitted himself another smile. 'It's the responsibility of Human Resources to cooperate fully with government. We all know that the simus are beginning to agitate for a new Human Rights Act.'—a sullen mutter of 'depends on how you define human' from Keith, largely ignored—'It's in fact Fulgur's express policy to support them in this endeavour—within the limits of the law, of course. I liaise regularly with the authorities, who keep a careful eye on simus and Purists both.'

  'Not careful enough, it seems, when people are being blown up,' Helena said.

  'Helena's right, there are simus, and simus,' Keith said. 'My son Tim's in a
couple of classes with one of ours. This Zach is a real troublemaker. Breaks every rule he can, and then some. You know how it is, kids hear things. At least one incident with the police already, a lot of earlier stuff that's sealed. Savage stuff, too. And Tim told me our prize simu was there at the club when the bomb went off. He disappeared right after his date was blown to bits. Hasn't pitched up at school since, the police have been questioning all the kids and teachers. Damned suspicious, isn't it? Anybody else—any decent human being—would've stayed and done what he could to help. Like Tim and his mates did. One of their friends lost a leg, another—Litchfield's girl—has been so traumatised that her parents have had to send her away for treatment.'

  'How sweet. A Purist in our midst,' Mfana said rather sourly.

  'Purist isn't a dirty word!' Keith said. 'I'm not a party type, but if someone talks sense, I listen.' He swept his arm in a wide circle, nearly overturning Pelly's glass of water. 'And so should you. Fulgur needs its simus, but not the dangerous ones—the aberrant ones.' His lips were moist, as though he couldn't swallow fast enough. 'The devis.'

  'The law makes provision for non-sapiens castration,' Helena said. 'In severe cases of antisocial personality disorder, particularly uncontrollable aggression.'

  At once talk broke through the surface calm of the meeting, blisters of claim and counterclaim in a seething pool of verbal mud. Clay and mud have been used since ancient times to draw impurities from the body. Fabio kept his eyes on Claire, whose husband's 'snog blog' was beginning to stray from the indiscreet to the inflammatory. Her salary was decent, but it was her husband's network of sites which gave them the income to finance the country house, the carbon exemptions, the nanny, the holidays abroad; holidays, according to Mfana, which afforded breathtaking views of Table Mountain. A sociologist with a background in political and economic theory—and a father who had one time been Deputy Minister of Finance—she was something of anomaly at Fulgur, though her work in building virtual environments was considered exemplary. Most men would find her sleek, dark elegance attractive; Fabio found her feline. The sort of woman whose nails his mother had manicured. Nevertheless, the sort of woman who had her uses. Mfana was a frequent guest in her home.