The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  A few moments later, having run the gamut of a half-dozen eager souvenir vendors, Parry entered the seafront premises of a well-known international car-hire firm. The clerk on duty, a slim, limpid-eyed North African woman, was efficient and helpful, and in no time at all Parry’s passport card and credit card had been swiped and he had leased the use of a Volkslied coupé for the day.

  “And do you have an itinerary planned, sir, or are you just going to go where the mood takes you?” the clerk asked.

  “El-Ghaita hum farm. There and back. That’s it.”

  “Really? El-Ghaita? How unusual. You’re the third person this morning. It’s not normally such a popular destination.”

  “The third person?”

  “I had a couple come in, about an hour ago.”

  “A young man and a teenage girl, travelling together?” It wouldn’t be such a coincidence, would it? After all, there were only so many car-hire agencies in the port that Reich and Cecilia could have visited.

  “That was them.”

  Parry’s next question elicited a puzzled frown from the clerk. “How did she seem to you? The girl?”

  “She seemed ... fine. Smiling. Perfectly normal. Why?”

  “No reason. I just know them.”

  But he was glad. If Reich had anything sinister planned for Cecilia, Cecilia did not know it yet. It could, of course, be the case that Reich had nothing sinister planned for her at all and that this trip they were taking was just what it appeared to be, a tourist jaunt. Reich might not know that Parry was on his tail again.

  None the less, there was something worming away in Parry’s belly, a feeling without form or name, something that was a little like anxiety and a little like dread.

  Out in the car-hire agency’s backlot, a score of vehicles waited in the sun – saloons and multi-passenger transports mostly, perched lightly on their axles, their profiles sleek and streamlined apart from the bulbous roofs (designed that way to provide sufficient headroom for Foreigners, who, though they themselves never drove, did sometimes go on road-trips with Sirens and private tour guides). Parry’s Volkslied coupé was by far the most compact car present, and consequently the fastest. The standard output for a comp-res engine was around 40 kilowatts, and no automobile manufacturer had yet worked out a way of putting more power than that beneath the bonnet without the engine becoming unviably large and, perhaps more important, piercingly noisy. Speed, therefore, meant less weight, and the Volkslied, with its stripped-down interior, molybdenum-alloy bodywork, negligible suspension and legal-minimum engine soundproofing, was capable of up to 85 k.p.h. That was why Parry had chosen it, and he was especially pleased by his choice when he ascertained from the clerk that Reich and Cecilia had hired a Merbecke-Bentzon tourer, a boxy four-seater, comfortable but far from racy, which could manage 70 flat-out with a tailwind. There was no chance the Volkslied’s speed advantage would enable him to catch up with Reich and Cecilia before they reached the hum farm, but he could at least whittle away a portion of their head-start.

  The clerk switched on the Volkslied’s ignition and, while the battery busied itself building up a charge, invited Parry to sit behind the wheel so that she could go over the controls with him, showing him which switches and stalks did what. It had been years since Parry had driven a car, and when the time came for him to shift out of neutral and guide the Volkslied out of its parking space and onto the main road, he did so in a gingerly fashion. Having grown accustomed to boats, which were subject to their own particular set of laws of momentum and inertia, it took him several minutes to get the hang once again of a vehicle that didn’t bank when it turned a corner and didn’t suffer from rear-end drift and could stop dead at the touch of a pedal. The first kilometre of his journey, from the rental-agency backlot to the slip-road that fed onto one of the lesser inland highways, was slow, erratic going, and on one occasion only the alertness of another road-user averted a collision. By the time Parry was on the highway, however, his confidence had grown and he felt comfortable taking the Volkslied up to 70 k.p.h., 75, 80, and soon above 80.

  With velocity came renewal of purpose. Rigid and still within the Volkslied’s air-conditioned cabin, Parry gripped the steering wheel and kept the accelerator flattened and let the two-lane highway of sun-faded tarmac carry him, kilometre by dusty kilometre, towards his objective.

  The highway was edged on both sides with loose scree, parallel margins of overlap, neither road nor desert but something in-between. The red landscape that spread around it was rough and ragged and hard-baked, flat all the way to the horizon on the left, flat as far as the foothills of a distant mountain range on the right. There were outcrops of scrubby bushes, like clumps of burnt hair on singed skin, and cacti that had grown into poses reminiscent of soldiers being strafed with gunfire, canted backwards, arms outstretched. There were groves of apple and olive trees, planted in rows, and every now and then Parry would see a camel wandering beside the road, browsing, apparently unowned. He passed the shells of petrol stations, lost to rust and uselessness, and – with increasing infrequence the further inland he went – awning-covered stalls manned by cloaked and turbaned North Africans who would stand up as the Volkslied approached and beckon to him, begging him in a masque of imprecation to stop and buy their wares: fresh fruit, locally-made trinkets, bottles of water or soft drink. Sometimes he spied villages huddled in the middle distance, connected to the highway by rutted tracks. A line of electricity pylons strode alongside the road, shouldering their load of cable. The sky was vastly blue.

  He had not entered another country so much as, it felt, another medium. An environment as sparsely-populated and given over to soil as New Venice was densely-inhabited and given over to water. Arid where New Venice was irrigated. Empty where New Venice teemed. And onward the Volkslied glided, and soon there were no more petrol stations and villages and stalls and camels to be seen, only desert, the pylons, and the unmoving mountains with their marbling of snow. The highway was almost exclusively Parry’s. Every once in a while he overtook, or passed coming the other way, a bus or a container truck. Otherwise he was on his own, one man inside a cooled car-shaped capsule, encircled by emptiness. He pressed relentlessly on.

  Shortly a road sign appeared, its message conveyed in both Arabic and English:

  El-Ghaita

  20 km

  Beneath was the NACA logo, a white silhouette of the upper half of the African continent with the alliance’s acronym banded in blue across the middle in Roman script and the ornate Arabic equivalent.

  Twenty kilometres. Roughly another quarter of an hour.

  The feeling that was worming away inside Parry began to writhe with greater urgency, as if, though still formless, it sensed that some kind of confirmation of its reason for being might be drawing near. The desert was becoming rockier and more rugged, and it had been a long time since Parry had seen another vehicle, or indeed any sign of civilisation other than the highway itself and the pylons. Of the latter, there were several lines now, stitching across the landscape, near and far, many of them converging and running alongside each other companionably, their cables dipping and rising repeatedly. The sun was immense, burning all shadows away. The only sounds Parry could hear were the huff of the Volkslied’s air-conditioning, the rubbery thrum of tyres on tarmac, and the comp-res battery’s constant dual-pitched whine.

  The final remaining kilometres counted down, and now there were more power lines than ever, marching in from all across the region, drawing together to their point of origin like strands of a gigantic metal spider-web. Then Parry got a glimpse of something dark and huge and shapeless hunkering on the horizon, quivering in the heat haze like a mirage. Closer he drove, and the mirage resolved itself into buildings, a good twenty of them, each like a gigantic aerodrome hangar, laid out in a grid pattern across a hundred hectares of desert.

  He arrived at a junction signposted with the hum farm’s name and turned off onto a narrower, less well-made strip of road which bu
ndled bumpily along, its unevenness little mitigated by the Volkslied’s unforgiving shock absorbers. A chainlink perimeter fence came into view, demarcating the hum farm’s limits. Road and fence joined up and, side by side, shared a course.

  Half a kilometre on, the first of the hangar-like buildings loomed, and Parry saw a white car parked at the roadside, next to the fence. A Merbecke-Bentzon tourer.

  He braked and pulled in behind the Merbecke. Its rear window sported a sticker identical to the one in the rear window of the Volkslied, showing the car-hire agency’s name and logo. There was no one inside.

  He killed the engine and got out of the Volkslied, entering a breezeless, ferocious heat. As the whine of the engine faded, a faint, intermittently rhythmic buzzing reached his ears, like the drone of bees contented in their hives. The sound of the hum farm, the sound of energy being produced and reaped. He walked over to the Merbecke. There were footprints in the roadside dirt, leading from the car to the fence. One set was large, made by a man wearing boots with a thick corrugated tread. The other set was smaller, and the pattern in them was that of the sole of a woman’s trainers, incorporating a brand-name imprinted repeatedly in the dust. At the fence, the footprints were scuffed and overlapping. There were more of them, also scuffed and overlapping, on the other side.

  It had been Reich’s idea, no doubt. Instead of continuing on to the hum farm’s entrance, he had stopped the car here and suggested to Cecilia that they climb in over the fence. Parry could imagine him telling her it would be more fun this way. They wouldn’t have to join one of the boring official tours. They could take their time looking around and not have to listen to some over-informative guide droning on about output levels and charge manifestations and other such technical blather. And he could imagine Cecilia, reluctant at first, being persuaded to go along with the idea. It would be exciting, wouldn’t it? And what was the worst that could happen to them if they were caught? They would be thrown off the premises. No penalty was imposed for trespassing on NACA property, since it was generally considered that most people were responsible enough and sensible enough not to do so. In fact, for this very reason, security at hum farms and other such places was next to nonexistent. You might have a couple of uniformed guards on patrol. Other than that, nothing but a fence like this one, a token gesture, barely four metres tall, less than twice the height of the average man, with no barbed wire on it. A barrier even a less-than-agile person could clamber over without much difficulty.

  Yes, Parry could see Reich talking Cecilia into sneaking in over the fence with him. He could see it happening quite easily.

  He could also see Reich forcing her to. At gunpoint, or maybe knifepoint, or simply with the threat of physical violence. He could see Reich turning on her as he stopped the car, his mask of affability slipping away, his voice hardening, his smile as cruel as cancer. This is where we get out, little rich bitch. We’re going for a stroll.

  He knew what Reich was capable of. He had shot a Siren at point-blank range, pushed another off a balcony, slashed the wrists of a third and written on a wall in the man’s blood. Savage, premeditated, cold-blooded murder.

  He also knew that there was no good reason for Reich to kill Cecilia. No good reason for him to harm her in any way.

  The thing in his belly shifted and slithered uncertainly, not wanting to be what it was, longing to be anything other.

  The footprints continued beyond the fence, two sets side by side, traipsing across the gravelly red dust towards the nearest hum-farm building.

  Parry reached up, inserted fingers into the chainlink, and started to climb.

  45. Snare

  CLOSE TO THE building, the bee-like drone deepened to a low, dense throb that you could not only hear but feel through your skin. Every few seconds, the comp-res array reached a cyclical frequency-peak and there would be an especially low pulse and the dust would shiver and dance on the ground. Parry remembered the last time he had visited El-Ghaita, shortly after the hum farm had come onstream. The place was somewhat dustier now, the buildings no longer gleaming in their newness, but otherwise little had changed. He remembered feeling an excitement that bordered on wonder. A safe, clean, neverending supply of energy! Now, as he approached the building, he felt only dull anxiety, an empty, metallic-tasting unease.

  The footprint trail left by Reich and Cecilia led to a large personnel-access door. Parry grasped the lever-handle, pressed down and heaved. The door, heavy with soundproofing, rolled reluctantly open, and immediately the throb increased to a loud rumble, pouring out from the doorway. He entered a kind of antechamber, a bare rectangular room painted entirely in vivid green. On one wall there were pairs of orange ear-defenders hanging from pegs, beside which was a notice in several languages, the text preceded with a drawing of hands twisted in WARNING and followed by a drawing of hands clenched in GRATITUDE.

  Danger!

  Unprotected exposure to array is hazardous

  Ear-defenders must be worn at all times

  Sound advice. Parry took a pair of ear-defenders for himself and slotted them over his head. They were a snug fit, almost painfully tight. Once they were properly in position, the rumble was muffled to a grumbling murmur. He noted that two of the other pairs of ear-defenders were absent from their pegs.

  At the opposite end of the room lay a set of swing doors fitted with safety-glass portholes. Parry walked over and glanced through one of them. The wire-latticed pane was dusty and what lay beyond ill-lit. He could make out nothing except a few smeary flashes of light. He pushed the door and side-stepped warily through.

  Size.

  Space.

  Power.

  In the dim illumination provided by frosted skylights set into the rib-reinforced roof, six huge comp-res cells stood, one ranked beyond the other in a row reaching all the way to the far end of the building, a distance of some three-quarters of a kilometre. The cells’ paired crystals, each of them the size of a three-storey house, were mounted on wheeled flatbeds that could be pushed or pulled along tracks by means of oiled pistons as thick as sequoia trunks. All the pairs were resonating madly, shivering in mutual frisson with their partners, their multifaceted contours blurring, defocused by vibration.

  At the centre of each cell hung a conducting rod, a long, tapering stalactite of metal suspended from a lofty gantry. Light-forms played around the rods’ spherical tips – branching crackles of static mostly, every now and then amoebas of lambent plasma that would wriggle and flow then dissipate, and sometimes pinkish-blue halos that would form around the entire tip, brighten, then pop like punctured soap-bubbles. The air smelled of electricity, of burnt-out fuses, iron filings, and shivered so intensely with the density of sound being given off by the array that it became thick and watery, almost tangible.

  Parry took all this is at a glance – impressive, but not why he was here – and then began scanning for Reich and Cecilia.

  No sign of either.

  He started to move. Heading right, he proceeded past the first comp-res cell. He kept to the side of the building and peered around him as he went, on the alert for any activity that was not the shimmer of the crystals or the glowing writhe of a charge manifestation. He was only too aware that he was restricted to a single source of sensory input. Rendered effectively deaf by the ear-defenders, vision was all he had to rely on, and so he stared around him owlishly, almost scared to blink in case, in that split-second of sightlessness, he missed something.

  He had gone almost half the length of the building when he glimpsed, to his left, movement. A person. Someone all the way over on the other side of the array, passing across the gap between two of the cells, heading the opposite way from him. He thought he had seen blond hair, but was not sure. He backtracked hurriedly.

  Through the next gap between cells he caught sight of the person again. Striding swiftly, purposefully towards the exit. Tall and leather-trousered and carrying a canvas rucksack on his back. Even with his head partially obscured by ear-d
efenders, still unmistakably Guthrie Reich.

  Breaking into a run, Parry reached the first comp-res cell and the antechamber, then turned right, traversing the width of the building. His plan was to intercept Reich, heading him off before he reached the end of the array. He was deliberately not thinking about why Reich was on his own. He was deliberately trying to ignore what that might mean.

  He came around the corner of the array, expecting to see Reich walking towards him.

  No one in sight. Reich was gone.

  Slowing his pace, Parry proceeded past the first cell. Reich had been here. Definitely. So where the hell was he?

  A flicker at the periphery of his vision, and then Reich was standing directly behind him, holding a hunting knife up to his throat. Reich had spotted him. Reich had ducked behind the comp-res cell. Reich had him at his mercy. The power to bring about his death was in Reich’s hands.

  Parry knew then that it was over. He waited, almost impatiently, for the cut – the cold kiss of the blade through his skin and flesh and throat, the hot rush of blood.

  Not even fifty, he thought, absurdly. And then: Carol. Someone’ll have to break it to poor Carol. And Anna.

  The knife remained in place, but the cut did not come. Gradually, the blade moved away from his neck. He watched it, a wicked half-smile of stainless steel, glide out past his right shoulder. A hand clamped on his other shoulder and he was turned around.

  Reich stepped back three paces, the knife still out and pointing towards Parry. He motioned with it, indicating that Parry was to stay where he was, not move a muscle. Then, slowly, deliberately, he lowered the knife and tucked it into his trouser belt. He took his hand away from the hilt and, in another mime, showed Parry how swiftly he could reach for the knife if necessary. One quick, clean manoeuvre, like a gunslinger going for his six-shooter. Watch out, was the gist of this dumb-show. No sudden moves, or the knife would be out again, fast as a blink.