The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘May I put my hands down?’

  ‘Keep them out of your pockets.’

  Thaniel crossed his arms and paced to try and keep warm. Now that he was waiting instead of walking, the gunshot wound hurt a lot more. It was a blessedly short wait before the soldier came down and unlocked the gate.

  ‘He says you can come in.’ The soldier watched him curiously but didn’t say anything else.

  The door at the base of the tower opened and a smart man in a suit leaned out. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting in the cold; we’ve had a few people try to wander in lately – ah – you’re not from the Ministry?’

  ‘Says everyone I ever meet,’ Thaniel said. When he stepped over the threshold, the air smelled of metal and damp like before, but now it had a steel-string hum in it. It was dim inside from the frost that clouded the small windows. It had made fantastic patterns, like pine trees.

  ‘Oh. Half and half?’

  ‘Yes, but citizen and all.’ It was parachuting across the face of the obvious truth, which was that there were moon rocks more Japanese than he was, but sounding right counted for much more than looking right.

  ‘I see. How curious. You know, I thought you were a ghost.’

  ‘I saw plenty on the way in.’

  ‘Yes, yes; very clear in the mist, aren’t they. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Tell me how you’re getting on, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.’

  ‘I was told I had wholly free rein,’ the man frowned.

  ‘Well … Tokyo is on fire.’

  The director bristled, but then nodded. ‘Yes, of course. Naturally I don’t have an enormous amount of time to spare; you don’t mind being briefed by one of our scientists? You’ll get on. Foreigner too.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Thaniel, wondering how long he could keep it up. It was ridiculous, but they had no way of checking who he was; if he didn’t lose his nerve, it would be all right. And he only had to hold his nerve long enough to find out what they were doing. With any luck, it would only be about twenty minutes.

  The director led the way down a flight of wooden stairs, below ground, to a broad, heavy door clad in rubber. From beyond it leaked a sound, deep and thrumming, and purple. When he opened it, the door swung on hydraulics, too heavy to move by hand, and as soon as it was open, the purple noise was everywhere.

  Thaniel only knew what a generator looked like because Mori had one at home. Theirs was small, easy to take apart. This one was a hundred feet high. The heat it gave off was so intense he had to take off his coat. A lance of static snapped out and touched his sleeve. It made him jump and he expected a horrible shock, but it was only a breath on the back of his hand. He felt a bit wry as Six’s voice in his head reminded him that you only got a shock if you touched a charged object, not just static.

  The electricity flickered at him again as he moved away from it, following him, and, for all he knew what it was, he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a sort of bright animal, trying to work him out.

  Although they were indoors, it was snowing.

  It wasn’t until he rubbed his sleeve that he realised the white particles weren’t snow but chalk. The air tasted dry from it, and, when he looked down, there was a thick layer on the floor. They had made perfect powder footprints in it, and with each step, it puffed. It was falling in curtains from great fans turning ponderously in the roof.

  Standing there, he could feel the bulk of the steel tower above him. Static brushed at him again, very gently, though the noise it made was infernal. He wanted suddenly to get out. Deep under the floor somewhere was that earthquake-purple thrum. It made him nervous even after he reasoned it was just the water moving through the dam, and perhaps other machines buried under the generator.

  He didn’t see the ghost at first. It was crisp and perfect, but despite all the chalk, still only as solid as a moonbeam.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ he said quietly.

  ‘Extraordinary, isn’t it?’ the director said. ‘We have no idea. But it wanders in and out, so its territory must have been fairly small.’

  The ghost was a monster four times the height of a man. It had a cruel thick beak and a birdish look, but though it had glorious long tail feathers that swung right round the generator, it didn’t have wings but strange, small forearms and claws. It was pacing gradually to and fro, looking at far less substantial shapes that might, at a stretch, have been trees. As they watched, it stretched right up onto its hind legs and reared up to snap at something. At its full height, its neck stretched up, it must have been upwards of fifty feet tall.

  ‘Here be dragons, hey?’ the director said, pleased. ‘Anyway, I’ll leave you with Baroness Matsumoto.’

  Thaniel spun and then had to keep a vice on his expression. He recognised her well before she turned around. She managed to keep her face completely neutral when the director pointed him out. She came towards him on the very edges of her shoes, like she was tightrope walking, to keep from exploding chalk dust all around herself.

  He felt like he’d swallowed a mouthful of sand. He’d forgotten how frightened of her he was. It wasn’t the kind of fright that came with ghosts, or being made to jump. It was an unpleasant background tang, just like the taste of the electricity. She was the only person in the world but Mori who knew why they had got divorced.

  He tried to keep his expression friendly and to stave off the unpleasant truth, which was that she was the worst possible person he could meet here. Not only could she have him thrown out straightaway for illegal nosing about, she could smash him to pieces with an accusation that would send him to an asylum.

  She shook his hand as if they had never met, smiling. ‘Keep pretending you don’t know me. Someone’s always watching. Understand?’ She said it in a bare whisper.

  ‘I understand,’ he said, and had to rearrange what he thought of her and the world.

  ‘I’m afraid the director didn’t tell me your name?’ she said, over-politely, at normal volume.

  ‘Compton. I’m from the Ministry.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Compton. I’m Grace Carrow. What do you need to know? Apart from what on earth this lizard thing is. We don’t know. It’s very, very old, though. Millions of years. Someone has an interest in prehistoric flora and apparently that fern over there hasn’t existed since the Jurassic.’

  She was no different. She was little and sparse, and she still had short hair, though it was in a sleek neat bob now, and she had the glow of someone very well kept. Because her dress was grey, she could have looked like a governess from a distance, but close to, it was beautifully made. The creases were too white; chalk dust.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ he whispered.

  ‘A progress report,’ she said loudly. ‘Yes, of course. Come up to the office with me.’

  She led him out of a side door that looked like it belonged in a bank vault. She sealed it after them and nodded him up a tiny narrow staircase with its own door, which she thumped shut as well, and then sagged.

  ‘Thank Christ,’ she breathed. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to turn up for months.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have to believe me. I didn’t know it was about Mori til we got here, and then it was too late. We’re stuck up here. They’ve got our papers, they lock the gates, there’s no way down. The guards shot the ornithologist when he tried to escape. I mean an ornithologist, Christ’s sake! He was studying owls!’

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ Thaniel said quickly. ‘Mori’s here?’

  ‘No, God no, they wouldn’t risk it. I don’t know where he is, but they have him somewhere. I’ll show you. How did you find this place? Did Akira ask you to come?’

  Akira – Matsumoto, of course. ‘He reported you missing. Tokyo’s gone mad, there’s electricity everywhere, everything’s on fire – everyone thought it was something to do with the volcano, so I came up to see if it was erupting, and then I found all the ghosts and a monk who said there were scientists up here�
� what did you say about Mori?’

  ‘This is all here because of him. It—’ She glanced up, because someone had opened another door at the top of the stairs and footsteps were coming down. ‘Come up, I’ll show you,’ she said, falsely bright again. Another man passed them and nodded. ‘Dr Shirakawa.’

  ‘Mrs Matsumoto,’ he muttered.

  She made a brittle effort at wry. ‘I think the university only sent me and not the head of department because they knew it was shifty,’ she explained.

  ‘Morons.’

  She laughed. ‘Entirely,’ she said, and clipped up the stairs. After the bizarre testing room, the little stairway was ordinary. It had a grey carpet, and the edges of the steps were lined with fresh strips of linoleum.

  At the top was a gallery office whose window overlooked the chalk-dusted testing floor. A few people were there, but no one paid them any attention; they were watching the testing floor, making notes, beside bulky things wrapped up in rubber and mounted on tripods. Cameras. The room was full of other devices too, but Thaniel couldn’t have got close to naming most of them. Something that might have been a telescope was pointing out the window, but it was made mostly of cardboard, and wires flooded around one side. There was something complicated going on with paperclips and scavenged bits of clock. On a desk in the corner was a weird mutant of a microscope with a lightbulb burning underneath it. It might have been going for a while, because there was a smell of hot metal coming from that direction.

  ‘Damn,’ Grace muttered, and slung a tea-towel over the lightbulb. ‘People keep using it and leaving it on.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m trying to see if it’s possible to see ether particles – it would help a lot – but normal microscopes don’t have anything like the magnification. I’m focusing down electron streams instead of visible light … no, it’s boring, you don’t care,’ she finished, and then scuffed her hand through the back of her hair and scanned the ground as if her thoughts had just rolled off in different directions. ‘Sorry. I’m going to bits; nobody up here believes in sleep. I was going to show you …’

  She went to a filing cabinet and took out a heavy folder. The hum of the great generator was low and nagging in the background.

  ‘Every day all through January,’ she said, very low, ‘we sent information requests to a research facility whose location we don’t know, via the Home Ministry. Every day, we received answers to the requests of two days before. These are the records.’

  Thaniel looked down the page she had opened. It was a zebra-striping of telegram transcripts pasted on black paper. She cleared aside odd bits of mechanisms and cardboard stencils to make room for them to lay out some of the pages.

  Q: Please place the Subject in total darkness. Set out in front of him three coloured sheets of paper. Allow nobody, including yourself, to tell him which colours they are. Ask him to identify the colours. Is he able to do so?

  A: No.

  Q: How does the Subject respond to the THREAT of corporal punishment if it is a) fully intended and b) unintended.

  A: a) Subject reacted as though I had removed his first two fingers, although I hadn’t yet picked up the chisel. Subject assured me in no uncertain terms that he would make me kill myself before too long.

  b) Subject didn’t register that he was being spoken to.

  Q: Please place the Subject in a vacuum, with breathing apparatus, in total darkness. Is he able to predict how many times you mean to tap his hand?

  A: Yes. We’re not doing this one again. He got a match into the room and set the oxygen tank on fire. I no longer have the use of my eyebrows.

  There were pages and pages, double-sided. Thaniel turned them over, not breathing. The final page was from the end of January. The transcript only reached halfway down the page.

  ‘They stopped,’ Grace said quietly. ‘We’ve had nothing since. I tried to ask why, but the Home Ministry only told us to make do with what we have.’

  He lifted his eyes slowly, because they felt heavy. ‘What’s it all for?’

  ‘This place was built,’ she whispered, ‘to discover what Mori does, and to reproduce it. I’m not even meant to know his name. He’s just Subject A in all the official communications.’ She flicked a glance towards the big window, but the men there still weren’t paying them any attention. ‘But it must be him. When did you last see him?’

  Thaniel shook his head slightly and turned back to the beginning of the folder. The first date was the second of January. He clenched his hand when his eye caught on ‘chisel’ again. ‘Christmas. Grace – why the ghosts?’

  ‘Mori remembers the future. He can tell you what it looks like, what it sounds like.’ She coughed. It sounded bad. She must have been breathing chalk for weeks. ‘So we knew there must be visual information to be had. We knew that any perception of future events must be happening at faster than light speed, and – God, you don’t care,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘What we found very quickly is that if you electrify the atmosphere and introduce a fine medium – chalk, sugar, flour, smoke – it will outline imprints. You know what the luminiferous ether is. Immensely fine, subtle substance that permeates everything, and through which light moves.’

  ‘Like sound moves through air.’

  ‘Well—’ She looked pained, then seemed to let it go. ‘Yes, fine. It turns out light makes prints on it. The ghosts are light fossils. The marks made by visible light on the ether. Which is like the bedrock of the universe. Unmoving, but like real bedrock, possible to imprint.’

  ‘But how is that anything to do with …’

  ‘If you can have past ghosts,’ she said softly, ‘and if you can have a clairvoyant who recalls every possible future, then there must also be future ghosts. We’re trying to find a way to see them.’

  ‘Christ,’ Thaniel whispered.

  She nodded, very slight and tight. ‘I’ve been trying to say we haven’t got enough data to produce them,’ she said softly. ‘But – we have.’

  He looked across. ‘What?’

  ‘Someone else here is going to realise …’ She shook her head. ‘I’ve been sending everyone down as many wrong tracks as I can, but I can’t keep doing it. You have to find out where Mori is and get him out. I don’t think anyone else can stop this now. Imagine Count Kuroda with the ability to accurately tell the future. It would be the last weapon human beings ever built. And, once they have the ability to do it, they’ll kill Mori. I never thought I’d be scared of that, but at least he’s sensible.’

  ‘But the telegrams stopped coming at the end of January.’

  She nodded fractionally. ‘Perhaps they’re moving him, perhaps someone decided after the oxygen tank incident that it wasn’t safe, perhaps he’s refusing to cooperate.’

  ‘Or he’s dead,’ Thaniel said. He felt like his logical facility was ticking without the rest of him. The rest was in a sealed cork chamber, screaming.Chisels. Vacuums. And he’d let Mori walk into it.

  ‘I hope very much that he isn’t.’

  He swallowed. ‘What makes you so sure they’re close to finding future ghosts?’

  She leaned down over the table as if she were poring over one of the documents, and nodded for him to do the same. He did, and she put their heads close together. When she spoke, it was barely audible, even so close.

  ‘Because you can already see them.’

  The director breezed in then. ‘Ah, Dr Matsumoto! Looking after our guest, I hope?’

  ‘Certainly,’ she said brightly. ‘I thought I’d show him the ice caves. Good show down there.’

  ‘Excellent, excellent,’ he said, and went straight to the scientists at the window, who he plainly thought were more important.

  At the foot of the stairs was another door. It led to a deep cellar room full of huge machinery. Beside an enormous steam engine, whose belly glowed red and waved a gorgeous heat everywhere, there were stairs again. They led down a subterranean tower, bricked roughly all around like the inside o
f a well. It went deep, lit at insufficient intervals by bare electric lights. The heat didn’t even reach a quarter of the way and soon it was freezing. Thaniel followed Grace. The way the hem of her skirt trailed on the steel steps was hypnotic after a while.

  ‘Ice caves?’ he asked when he was sure no one else was here, and that nobody could hear.

  ‘Ghosts are easiest to see in a place that sees very little traffic in the way of living things,’ she explained. Her voice echoed blue, up and down. ‘And we’ve only got owls down here. Owls are – well, I’ll show you.’

  When they reached the bottom, there was a long, narrow corridor, only just wide enough for one person. It put Thaniel strongly in mind of a mine. The walls were raw rock, seamed with iron. The iron was warm. He couldn’t hear the generators anymore, or the thunder of the dam. They were somewhere below the waterfall now, perhaps even below the river beneath.

  More steps down, uneven and rough-hewn, and then suddenly they came out on a brand new wooden gantry that still smelled beautifully of fresh cedar.

  They were in a low, broad cavern, where ice curtained the walls. It had formed huge stalactites, which glittered blue by the glow of the lightbulbs someone had hung on string from the gantry rails. There were thick pillars of ice on the ground too, as tall as a man. In the middle of it all was a deep pool. The water was so clear it didn’t look like water. Rocks lifted from the bed. No weed, though, nothing. Just tiny fish. Thaniel was still looking when a grey owl soared down and snatched one from the surface. It landed on an ice pillar and blinked at them.

  ‘Before they started building generators or anything like that,’ Grace said quietly, ‘they had a whole team of people researching old stories about anything that could have been – whatever Mori is. There’s a good few. Fairytales mainly. There’s a winter king who leads people to their deaths in the woods, or death gods who mark out particular people, or half-devil figures who you can make pacts with for unnatural good luck. The stories are all remarkably similar. They all seem to describe a person, and not an actual god. They’re all tricksters – you never get what you expect from them. And, they are always attended by owls.’