Eminent Domain

by Carl Neville

  Please note: citizens of some countries may face testing and legal sanctions on returning home. Be advised that the PRB bears no legal responsibility for problems subsequent to the visitors departing the PRB. For a list of Countries and Recreational Pharmaceuticals that are currently prohibited please click down to the Pill Bars FAQ section.

  The weak sunlight coming in through the net curtains half woke her, and as she rolled over her mind was filled with images from the night before. Erotic images that it took her a further step up into full wakefulness to realise were not memories but imaginings. Perhaps anticipations, time getting scrambled, half awake, remembering things she hadn’t done yet.

  She took a sip from the glass of water beside the bed, smiled at the joke that went around among older students who had already visited. PRB, The Party Republic of Britain. The beer was strong, much stronger than she was used to, and even the pills she had taken at the night’s end, washed down with a pint of some kind of bitter herby tonic, left her feeling a little hungover. Another sip of the slightly odd tasting water, she glanced at the clock beside the bed, 8:30.

  Well, last night had been a…

  Holy shit. Had she kissed…?

  Dominic?

  She had a vague memory of being in some shadowed corner in a series of tunnels under the central station, some tremendously loud music spangling the damp, secretive air, making it shine and crepitate like moonstruck tin.

  Or was this… part of the dream, or the drugs? What was that? She had certainly felt, well, disinhibited, and Dominic was, well, charming. Had he kissed her? She could feel a sense-echo of the impress of lips against hers, but whose? Perhaps it was a stranger. Anything else she might have done?

  A familiar tap at the door. Shit. She knew who that was.

  Sure, come in, she said.

  Tom’s face appeared tentatively around the edge of the door. Morning, he said, the saucer then a white china cup appearing, seeming to float there. Tea?

  She nodded, tried to both avoid his eyes and assess his attitude at the same time.

  Great.

  He put it down on the bedside table and they both looked at the ornate cup and the tiny quantity of dun-coloured liquid it held. Jennifer insisted, he said, the best crockery for the guests, all that.

  Well, that’s really sweet, she said. He seemed normal.

  How are you feeling?

  A little groggy. You?

  Not terribly well. But I have just the thing for that. A cup of Special T.

  She smiled, he lingered. I’ll be down in a few minutes, she said.

  Oh sure, he said.

  The tea gulped down, a quick shower and she told herself, Well, Tom seemed unconcerned, and besides maybe kissing people in tunnels on your third night in a new country was no big deal here. As she dressed the smell of food came wafting up the stairs. She spent a little longer than usual on her makeup, which was light anyway, and in choosing her outfit.

  The half eager, half hesitant tap at the door.

  You decent? He asked.

  I like to think so! she tried to joke back through semi-gritted teeth, and when he didn’t come in and she could sense he was flustered, said less ambiguously, Sure, come on in.

  So sorry to interrupt, sorry to say this, but we have been invited to stay for dinner and… he was half obscured by the door.

  Come in, all the way in, she said. He sat on the end of the bed. So, I have accepted, pending your approval of course, I don’t want to assume too much obviously, I mean it will throw us out, we were supposed to be going up to London tonight, but Alan is on his way back. So, I thought we might stay for dinner.

  OK sure, sounds great, she says, relieved at the prospect of spending time with a broader section of the PRB.

  We will have to leave pretty early tomorrow actually to make sure we are up in London in order to see everything we need to.

  Sure, what time?

  Looking like around 6:30, he said with an apologetic smile.

  Wow that is early.

  Well the itinerary… He produced his ROD. We’ll have to wait and see what we have been allocated as a form of transport. Nothing leaves until it’s 90 percent full, all private or commercial vehicles must rideshare. We have very good intercity cycle paths but that really does require longer than we have. If we are lucky and can get a train, we should be there in about forty minutes, station to station. We still haven’t replaced the Birmingham-London route with Softrail yet, it’s a question of calculating the longer-term benefits.

  How do you get transport info?

  You don’t need to worry about that. I’ll book everything.

  Yes… it’s sweet of you to have planned so much, but I also really need to know how to get about a little more independently.

  Oh yes, I just thought, you were very kind to me when I was in the US and I thought…

  No, I appreciate that, but I need to be able to be a little more spontaneous too.

  OK, he said, should I change the itinerary then? But you want to go the Circuit? I mean equally we don’t have to.

  Yes.

  And I have arranged this meeting with Gillespie. And then in the afternoon…

  Sure. I’d just like to spend some time drifting about, getting the feel of the place, you know?

  Should we still go out to the farm on Monday? I mean it’s not really a farm but…

  Yeah sure. she said, felt a twinge of remorse, wanted to make him happy. He has tried hard; his heart is in the right place.

  Alan Bewes is smoking a pipe, a huge bowl burnished through years of use packed with great clods of damp tobacco. She is trying to concentrate on what Jennifer is saying but the fascination of the pipe and the horror of him lighting up such a monster in the confined, already stuffy drawing room, the pre-meal, mid-meal and post-meal drinks along with the cognitive workload of deciphering the accents has her spacing out more than a little. British accent on the heavy-set guy next to her? No, focuses. Ah, Russian?

  Alan takes some matches out. Wow, long ones, don’t see those often back home, pipe matches. He strikes one, an accelerating rasp and flare, a huge starburst of lemon-light against the teal glow from the coal fire that bounces dimly off the heavy teak furniture and scatters sparks across the crystal glasses and silverware. The match goes in, his cheeks hollow, the flame gutters and surges once, twice, takes on a bluish hue, match extinguished with a wrist flick and a gently rippling pillar of ash grey smoke unfurls upward, flutters and broadens, disperses.

  Trippy. Maybe all the Dev and numerous other pills she has swallowed have backed up in her system, maybe there’s something laced into this delicious beer she has been drinking, deep burnt toffee aftertaste, rich and expansively bitter.

  Candlelight has deepened the shadows, brought out everyone’s bone structure, they couldn’t look more handsome, Dominic especially, she’s sure it’s doing wonders for her too. She half laughs to herself. It’s been a head trip so far, the PRB, man. An emotional rollercoaster. He is hot though. Yes, the beer has gone to her head, sure enough, and she has no idea why they have got the fire blazing away. She shifts in her seat, extends her legs, tries to get a little eye contact going, but he seems totally engrossed in the conversation.

  Too hot, dear? I feel the chill, permanently, Jennifer says. Mind-reader. Open the window, I shall go and put a jumper on.

  Oh no, please don’t, Julia is about to say, but spry and sprightly Jennifer is already halfway to the door.

  She tries to focus back in on the conversation.

  Don’t think I can take it all in, she says out loud.

  No problem, Tom says. There’s a block on the ROD’s recording capacity for some reason, must be our important guests but, lowers his voice to a whisper, I know a way to get around it.

  PRB 2003701 ROD: Private Cache/Block-Block Activated A Conversation around the Dinner Table, Part 1/4

  Bewes (D): Are you so pessimistic about the people’s ability to manage their own affairs?

&n
bsp; Squires: No but nor am I so optimistic that I believe all things are best pursued through transparent, democratic means. I believe it will be a blip, a failed experiment, that the populace will soon discover it has little taste for making life and death decisions and that it would prefer an element of life to be closed off, a separate domain. In the meantime, I suspect this democratic adventurism will prove highly damaging.

  Bewes (D): Adventurism is a rather…

  Squires: In time of peace the warlike man attacks himself. While we are still split into two domains, we need our warlike men. Even then, when we are one domain, one universal domain of peace, no doubt we have invested all our faith that the warlike will just wither away. But loath though some may be to admit it, it seems that we still thrive on antagonism, on imagined wrongs and oppressions, there is nothing we welcome so strongly as sense of injustice that someone, somewhere must be responsible for whatever we still lack.

  Bewes (D): We have had too much peace, lost the martial spirit? Is that it?

  Katja: 09/04/2018 11:07

  A long pause. What do we know about Crane?

  Is this a general question or…? You mean departmental information. So, should I look at that? Katja asks. I’ll have to go to the Passocon, she says.

  Barrow nods.

  She doesn’t bother to sit down at her desk. Wonders why Barrow can’t do it himself and is sitting instead, Passocon on his desk, gazing out of the window still, but then she checks herself — who is she to question the motives and protocols of someone as experienced as Barrow? She is having difficulty reading his body language, perhaps a cultural problem, the guardedness of the PRB’s older citizens maybe, and he is, she checks a file, forty-eight, but looks younger in some ways.

  She waits as the system brings up files on Crane, especially slow today, she hasn’t experienced such delay and lag in the rest of the Co-Sphere, the PRB seems particularly bad in that respect it’s true, and she worries how much that must hamper the investigation as it goes forward. Then she checks herself again, perhaps it’s deliberate, a commitment to slowness, a refusal to constantly update and upgrade, to be forced to participate in the information wars that the Americans have imposed on them, perhaps it’s just as one of the boys from SSF4 told her yesterday when he was setting up some of the Passocons and she commented on how old they looked — we are happy to take what the Russians hand down to us.

  The file is still being searched for, should she sit down? The moment she does it will appear and she will just have to get back up again. How long will it take? She clicks on the estimated time icon and it responds with Time unknown. This isn’t the optimum use of her time or her skills, and she glances across at Barrow who is still sitting gazing out of the window. She sits, might as well, sees the hands on the clock icon circling and never settling, perhaps she will sit here forever watching it go round and round, slightly hypnotic. She feels a little fuzzy today, should have had a microdose of Dev perhaps to sharpen her up? Some Special T. It might make her less nervous around Barrow.

  She senses him looking around now. A little impatient, she unplugs the Passocon and carries it through into Barrow’s office, resting it on her left forearm, they are heavy here.

  Barrow

  It has a lock on it, Katja says. LOCKED: SQUIRES

  Why would Crane’s file be locked? Barrow asks.

  I don’t know. It’s a big file, she says, in five parts, all locked.

  Barrow stares just slightly past her, brooding, becomes aware of a rising buzz growing more insistent, his patch telling him to rest for some reason. He taps the ten-minute delay button, rolls his shirt sleeves down, thinks back, didn’t he have them all under surveillance at one point? McFarlane surely, but also Crane, inevitably as part of that loose group. Surely he must have seen Rose then too, on the periphery of meetings and events, she and Crane were lovers. He toys with his ROD. Is he a jealous man? Is he a man who investigates others in order not to have to turn his questions back on himself?

  He picks up the phone and presses the button for Squires’s office, grows quickly impatient at the engaged tone and decides to go down there instead of sitting here while they ignore his call. Let me go and check if I can get physical access, he says.

  He threads his way through the desks and into the set of offices across on the other side of the building, knows where Squires’s office is instinctively somehow, though he has never been there before, and is surprised to find Squires’s secretary already standing outside the door with one hand behind her back, holding the handle and pulling it tight into the frame, eyebrows raised in anticipation.

  Barrow slows. How do they know he is on his way? His movements must be being tracked.

  I need access to files that have been locked, he says.

  Locked files are inaccessible to anyone but SSF1, she says.

  Why Crane’s file? he asks. He assumes they have logged his attempt to access it. She glances to one side, seems to weigh up how much she can say. Is she being spoken to through an earpiece?

  She presses her lips together. I don’t have the necessary clearance to be able to answer that question. You don’t yet have the necessary clearance to be able to access it.

  Rose

  At the window in the old flat. Sun on her face, tired eyes closed.

  Her daughter was conceived on a mattress on the floor of this very room. Crane with his panicked eyes and his long limbs, his preternatural pallor, the big window open. They made love all through that sleepless summer night, from the secretive moon and its whispered promise of the eternal on through to a weak dawn wash of pearlescent light and the full sun’s call, a call they were too tired to answer. Nothing left to do but drift to sleep in the daylight and bask in the warm exhilaration of all the youth they still had left to squander. Perhaps that day she dreamed just this moment when she would stand here twenty years later, trying to reach back somehow through the maze-like layered hush of those wasted years to gently ease her thoughts in another direction, push her life onto a different path. She dreamed herself daydreaming back about herself and all to no avail, and perhaps as she slept somehow she heard drifting in from that future…

  …a child’s laughter. She looks across to the creek glittering in the sun, a group of adults and kids strolling. One day, not long after that evening, they found Crane wandering along there confused, seemingly unable to find his way back to the flat they shared, mumbling to himself. He was saying Paula over and over; they thought he had taken something but of course it was an early tremor of his decline. He went into therapy at the Institute of Applied Neuroplastics, where he learned to repopulate and stack his cognitive functions in other areas. She closes her eyes, lets the sun soak into her face, how one teeters for a long time at the top of the slope and then the violence and disorder of the descent. She would wake at night sometimes and find he was missing, go out to look for him, call Goodridge from the neighbouring flat or Gillespie if he wasn’t in one of the early versions of the Canteens that were springing up in the occupied factories on the east side of the river, too out of his mind on the crude moonshine pharms of the time to be of any use. After a while they realised he was following a particular route and could find him easily enough as he circled some centre that was invisible to them, with a distracted, haunted expression on his face, pursued or in pursuit they could never tell, trying to find the red thread that would lead him back, some loose fold in the night that he could slip behind, through to the horrors and the consolations of the world he’d fled.

  The known, how we cling to it.

  Yes, she didn’t want to care for him, to have to be that, his carer. She wanted only a conflagration, unchecked desire, ruinous expenditure, and so, a sudden fit of coughing rattles her hand up to her mouth, here she is now herself a ruin.

  Post-parturition Maternal Attachment Disorder. P.P.M.A.D. Pee-Pee MAD. That was the joke they made to show their sophisticated scorn for the messiness and triviality of childrearing, the reluctance some felt i
n giving their child not away, no, but to, to the collective, to the community, to the forging of the new Universal subject.

  What if she’s dead? What if she died young, within a few hours of her donation, and all this time…? She will send a message to Firetrace asking only that. A binary question, a binary answer and then she will know and that at least may be a…

  Comfort.

  Lewis

  She has learned to follow D7’s lead, though can’t quite yet understand what she has picked up on. At a break in the housing she stops, and circles. The suspect has been through here, D7 is agitated. Circling more quickly now, telling her the trail is recent, and she bends to pat her, looking around discreetly, following the dog’s lead.

  They wind round together, looping back on themselves, D7 following the invisible threads through the underpasses and the parks, the sprawling housing estates and improvised markets, the temporary accommodation, the factories and workstations, around the deep cool moat and the underpasses that radiate out from the central shopping centre then up through a series of ramps down which a gaggle of children are racing in improvised go-karts into the watchful arms of the adults seated at the bottom. The inside of the shopping centre is quieter and cooler, almost hushed, long green-grey corridors of shops and quiet cafes, D7 zigzagging between them as Lewis trots behind her, keeping her eyes down, trying to remain as inconspicuous as possible. She raises them on a sudden impulse and sees a book shop: Tlön Books, is this the one, didn’t Katja mention something about this place or is that just some memory-impression she has picked up from her somehow? D7 has sensed her sudden interest and has stopped in front of the shop too, a series of trestle tables outside with a sign that reads HELP YOURSELF! above them.

  She pauses as D7 ambles on to take a drink from one of the bowls left out along the central concourse. Help yourself? That’s right, it means: feel free, another strange expression, means, take one, doesn’t it? She scans the books, lined up in neat rows. There is one her hand is immediately drawn to, a book of Greek myths, something she wants to read again, the story of the Medusa. She pushes the shop door open and the bell rings distantly, seemingly off in another room somewhere, causing the person seated at the at the other end of the table to look up unsmiling. He has his back to a display case filled with books, their covers, colourful with skulls on them, facing out. She hesitates.