Flashback sb-2

by Ian Hocking

  ~

  After dawn, he found a half-buried object. It was blackened and smelled of carbon and aeroplane fuel. He read the words ‘olls—Royce’ on its side. When Cory grinned, his lips tore, but the blood did not leak. He touched the engine. It cooled as Cory warmed. His automata, revitalised, set about their repair work. Ice-split cells were thawed and reconstructed. His Achilles tendons were reattached. New sinews wove. Metabolic by-products were quarantined, passed into the blood, and set free by his lungs. A circle of snow melted around him. He felt the water impregnate his tissues, load them, buoy his life. He reached again and drew a finger along the flank of the engine. Cory stroked a line of soot beneath each eye and felt the distant pulse of the smart matter. Four hundred metres away, perhaps five hundred. He held out his hand and the cane—clean, perfect, undamaged—flew into his grip. He walked west.

  ~

  By the fourth day, he had exhausted the energy inducted from the engine. He came to a valley crowded with ice columns. He passed among the frozen army without a sound. He slept at the base of one and expected to die.

  On the fifth, he collapsed against a rust-red boulder on the bank of a great, milky river. He awoke when a day moon was visible in the sky. An arriero, a muleteer, was leaning forward with a canteen. He put it to Cory’s lips. Cory knew to take a sip, no more.

  ‘Bueno,’ said the man. ‘Mi nombre es Evaristo, el mismo nombre que la ciudad.’

  The translation came as Cory watched the white-and-brown hills. He turned back to Evaristo, opened his left hand and, with a frostbitten finger, brushed the leather of the palm.

  ‘Tómelo,’ said Evaristo. He gave Cory a shaving of paper and a pencil with a knife-hewn nib.

  In Spanish, Cory wrote, My plane crashed high on the mountain. Where am I?

  ‘La Vega de los Flojos.’

  The meadow of the lazy? Cory smiled.

  He wrote, Which country?

  ‘Chile, Chile.’

  Cory vomited the water onto the slush. Icons slid into his vision, flashing, urgent with alerts; his body had exhausted its fuels. The automata petitioned him to kick-start repairs using the life energy of the arriero, but Cory fired back a veto.

  His right hand gripped his belt. Five days before, in the lounge where he had waited with the other passengers to board Star Dust, it had been flush with his abdomen. Now it was loose. He twisted the belt to expose inset gold sovereigns. The arriero looked from the gold to Cory. His rough-skinned hand pushed away Cory’s and reset the belt. He shook his head. A stream of Spanish left his mouth.

  The translation came seconds later, as though the sound had travelled miles.

  ‘I do not think you will live, my friend. If you die, I promise to bury you with your gold. But I am a poor man. Perhaps you will offer it a second time, when you are well.’

  Cory wrote, Thank you.

  The arriero nodded. He turned his head and made a puh-puh sound.

  A horse took lazy steps towards them through the scree.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Regensburg

  His last word, scree, left a hole in the air, a dead zone. Jem sat with her arms on her knees. She was exhausted. Saskia’s features were shadowed, and as she moved, a new light struck her eyes emerald. Wearily, Jem followed the shaft to a brightening window: dawn.

  ‘You should not have travelled in time,’ said Saskia. ‘You were not strong enough.’

  Jem looked at her. Saskia had been dead and broken on the cot. Now she scanned the room with command in her eyes. This, Jem decided, was once more the unstoppable woman she had encountered in Berlin. She remembered the smile as they waited for the rendezvous with Wolfgang: that businesslike tug of her gloves.

  Cory glanced at his broken gun. ‘It took strength to come down that mountain.’

  ‘You gave up to the mountain.’

  ‘I did not.’ His voice had a petulant edge. ‘I survived it.’

  ‘The mountain was not Tupungato. The mountain was Jennifer’s newspaper.’

  His eyelids fluttered. ‘Look, if you–’

  His words trailed off as Saskia reversed her gun and placed it on the table. At this, the inspector raised his eyebrows and looked at Jem. Hrafn and Danny exchanged a similar look of alarm. Jem reached for the weapon but stopped, unsure of Saskia’s plan.

  ‘Take the gun, Jem,’ said Hrafn. ‘Quickly.’

  ‘There is no point,’ said Saskia flatly. ‘No-one in this room is fast enough.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said Danny.

  ‘He can kill us all,’ said Saskia. ‘Though he will not.’

  Danny looked at her. ‘Pleased to hear it. Why not, Cory?’

  ‘Honestly? I can’t think of a reason.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  Saskia stepped towards Cory. Her eyes dared his. ‘You know that the Cullinan Zero is fiction. You feel it. And you feel my certainty.’

  ‘So you can control your physiological responses,’ Cory said. ‘Join the club. Perhaps I should remove all doubt by ripping the information wholesale from that little device in your head.’

  ‘I have safeguards that will lesion the traces before you can gain control of it.’

  ‘Ichor or no ichor, Saskia, it would be the end of you.’

  ‘I know. Think quickly.’

  ‘I have twenty minutes. No rush.’

  ‘Why twenty?’ asked Duczyński.

  ‘There is a police helicopter approaching from the south-west,’ said Saskia. She kept her eyes on Cory. ‘It was tipped off by an anonymous caller.’ She frowned. ‘Cory, you’re looking for doubt, but you already have it. Jennifer did not lie to me. How would I know to fabricate a story that so closely resembles yours? Think. Do you have any recollection of your wife on the day you crossed? Keep thinking. The day before? Part of you knows that she never existed. Listen to that part. You are, in some ways, a victim. If you kill us, you do so on the basis of a lie. That I will not accept.’

  ‘Now, you will accompany us,’ said the inspector, straightening his back, ‘to Berlin. There you will face charges of murder and attempted murder.’

  Cory laughed.

  ~

  Jem felt the quickening of her tears. She envied Duczyński the drive that rallied him against a problem, when the outcome—their deaths in this little hut—was as certain as the impact of Star Dust on Tupungato, or DFU323 against Bavarian soil. She wished she could spit cock-sure comments at Cory instead of bending her head and crying.

  The sobs came silently at first, then with greater intensity. She wondered whether it made Cory think about the human cost of his plans or if it merely distracted him. But she cried and nobody spoke. She cried until a hand touched her head. Jem looked up.

  ‘Don’t cry, mein kleiner Schlumpf.’

  As Saskia stroked her hair, Jem remembered cutting Saskia’s on a balcony in Berlin, lifetimes gone.

  ‘Well, you had me at ‘Guten Tag.’’

  ‘Take my hand.’

  Saskia blinked slowly. With that, Jem wondered if the last tasks of the ichor inside her were complete. Had Saskia risen, fully now, from the dead?

  ‘Cory,’ Jem said, ‘I have something to say.’

  Cory did not reply. He stared at her, waiting, until Jem reached into the coat Saskia wore. It was Danny’s coat. She took the Hänsel doll from the inner pocket and, under the thoughtful gaze of Cory, lay him on the floor. The doll wore Lederhosen and a velveteen hat. His cheeks were rosy and his feet were bare.

  ‘Listen,’ Jem said. ‘A couple of years ago–’

  ‘No,’ said Danny. His face was drawn tight. ‘Not now.’

  ‘A couple of years ago,’ she repeated, ‘when I was finishing my degree, I began to experience panic attacks. Until that point, life was normal. I worked at a hairdresser’s for spending money. I had a wide circle of friends. I went to the pub, did student voluntary work, and generally enjoyed myself.

  ‘The last, big panic attack happened on a Saturday morning in February. That was the attack t
hat ended it all. The trigger was something banal: the redness of the fire escape door. Whether it was the colour, the shape, or what it represented… I didn’t know. But I completely flipped out. It was serious enough for friends to call an ambulance. The paramedic thought I was putting it on.

  ‘Eventually, Mum and Dad sent me to our GP. He had last seen me as a sixteen-year-old gobshite demanding the pill. Now I was back, staring at the floor like a little girl, while Mum explained that it was best if I saw a therapist. Mum is big on therapy. The GP agreed. I spent the next week in bed. I didn’t talk, watch the television, or shower. I hardly ate. Late at night, walking around the house, I had a third panic attack in the attic bedroom that used to belong to Danny.

  ‘You know, I thought the therapist would have a room lined with books, antiques, and a tropical fish-tank. But she worked from home and we talked in her kitchen. She listened to me describe the circumstances of my first panic attack. She asked me what the door reminded me of. I told her about the red door in my brother’s attic bedroom.’

  ‘Jem,’ said Danny. His obvious pain brought her out of the story for a moment, and she became self-conscious. What was the use of talking? Did they think she was foolish? But the faces of the men, and of Saskia, diminished her fears. Each was focused on her.

  ‘Over the next weeks,’ she continued, ‘I got deeper and deeper into the programme. At the therapist’s request, I wrote about the bad memories of my childhood. Five weeks into the therapy, she told me that I showed all the symptoms of an incest survivor. She directed all our discussions towards the red door. I didn’t know what it represented. I drew it, wrote stories about it, and went through word-association games designed to unlock it.

  ‘Finally, she began to hypnotise me. I remember the first session. It was difficult, but she congratulated me on my susceptibility to the procedure. By the second session, we had found the key that opened the door. Or so I thought.’

  Danny had crouched at the wall. His head was on his knees. He looked like a child told to make himself tiny.

  ‘Go on,’ said Cory.

  ‘In the memory, I was twelve. It was a summer evening. Thundery. I went up to tell Danny that Dad had agreed to take us to a theme park that weekend. I remember crashing into Danny’s room, bursting with news. It was empty. Our house used to be a mill, and the rooms are long and low. The red door was just the entrance to the attic, which was stuffed with Dad’s old sports gear—a leather cricket bag, a bundled tennis net—and unwanted wedding gifts. There was a clearing in the middle of the attic space where Dad planned to lay down a model railway.

  ‘That night, a high-pitched tune was coming from behind the attic door. I opened it. Danny was sitting next to a cardboard box. He wore shorts and flip-flops: his summer outfit. He was dangling two puppets into the box as though it was a theatre. Hänsel and Gretel were dancing to the tune played by the music box of our grandmother. The tune was ‘I call to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ’—Bach? I remember how his expression changed when I closed the door. From contentment to surprise to something else. I saw… an erection in his shorts.

  ‘Then I awoke from the hypnosis. The therapist demanded I finish the story, but I left her house and never returned. I walked home and wrote a letter to my mother describing how Danny had systematically abused me. Then I went to his old room. Danny was at university in Durham, but there were some clothes in the wardrobe. I cut the sleeves off his shirts. You know, like a divorce. Later that night, I turned up at the house of my Uncle Barry in York. He let me stay on the proviso I called Mum. I didn’t. I left for London in the morning. I got a sweeping job in the second salon I walked into, and restarted my life.’

  She looked hard at Cory.

  ‘And when did you suspect the memory was false?’ he asked.

  ‘At first, I didn’t. Perhaps because I had destroyed my family with that one letter, I almost required the memory be true. Otherwise it was pointless. I was pointless.’

  ‘Jem…’ said Cory.

  ‘In my memory of the abuse,’ she said, ‘the dolls were puppets. Marionettes, I mean: they had strings on their arms and legs. But the actual dolls we played with were not, and never had been, marionettes. Danny could never have played with them in the way I remembered that night.’

  ‘It took me years to find him,’ said Danny. He spoke to his shoes. ‘Mum had given our toys to a kid who lived up the road. His parents sold them in a car boot sale. Eventually, Hänsel showed up on eBay. He was one of a kind, you see.’

  ‘I have other memories, I realise now,’ said Jem, ‘of playing with the dolls in the field behind our house. They never had strings. But even when Danny rediscovered Hänsel… Memory is like a second person in your head; a companion who guards your experience. And jealously. Memory tells you stories.’

  Jem watched the face of the killer. Her memories, even false, were still her own.

  ‘I remember sitting beneath an oak with my wife,’ Cory said quietly. Jem could hear the distant buzz of a helicopter. ‘We were at the edge of a cornfield. I proposed to her with a ring that had belonged to my grandmother. She was your age, Jem.’

  ‘Maybe that memory is true.’

  ‘Catherine was there on the day I crossed the bridge back to 1947. There were three of us in the prep room: me, Catherine, and Freddo. Freddo was my second. He would replace me if something went wrong, just as I had replaced Jackson. I asked him to excuse us, and he left Catherine and me facing the mirror. She told me I looked like a southern gentleman in my white suit. She told me that my mission would save people like my sister, who had died of the cholera. She told me that my mission was everything, and she understood, and she would wait.’ He shook his head. ‘God, I had to find Harkes.’ Cory looked at Saskia. ‘Three weeks before I crossed the bridge, there was an incident involving David Proctor.’

  Saskia’s reaction startled Jem: she stepped forward. Cory nodded, as though this confirmed his perception of her. Did he now believe that Saskia was telling the truth? And Jem too?

  Jem asked, ‘Who is he?’

  ‘The father of Jennifer Proctor, who sent me,’ said Cory. ‘There were thirty of us in the team, and though David was never officially part of it, he was our doddery old Brit, our mascot. Our work—the work of the project—involves the manipulation of gravity. David fell into one of the spinners and died instantly. It cast a shadow across the team. A couple of weeks into the routine enquiry behind the accident, an independent investigator found evidence that David had arranged to meet someone the night he died. Jennifer, his daughter, had turned into management central since his death. The first time I met her, a couple of years before, she was already a tyrant, but the older members of the team kept telling me what a wonderful person she was, deep down. Those folks started to leave, though, and their positions were filled by people like Jennifer: driven hard-asses. When Jennifer found out that the inquiry had uncovered a potential murder, she couldn’t sleep. Literally. She downloaded illegal scripts to override the safeties on her automata. She was wide-eyed for a week. At the end of it, she took me aside. She called me their best operative, which was probably untrue. I was a greenhorn. The most naïve. She said that the inquiry had uncovered an Islamo-fascist conspiracy to undermine the Confederacy. Her father, she said, had been on the brink of exposing a mole inside the project, and had been killed as a consequence. Our specialist in entanglement, a flashy character called Patrick Harkes, was missing, and she was certain of his guilt. I don’t understand the first thing about carbon entanglement, but it was the key, according to Jennifer, to tapping energy from a nearby universe and would, in one heave, pull the Confederacy back from the brink. It would usher in a new era of cheap energy. But Harkes had stolen the one element we needed to make the focusing technology work: a large diamond, bigger than any ever found.’

  ‘The Cullinan Zero,’ said Saskia.

  There was a rustle of simultaneous movement. All eyes in the room found all others. Cory looked at the scar on his palm. P
yrene.

  ‘Keep talking,’ said Danny.

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about my wife in the green room shortly before I made the jump. When I look back across the years to 1947, I can’t imagine another scenario in which I would have tried so hard to succeed. I searched for Harkes on three continents. I hunted him for sixty years. All the while, my goal was my wife. Even now.’ He paused, and his eyes searched the ground. ‘Jennifer was uninterested in the rebuilding of her adoptive country. She was always in the game for the knowledge, and to see what her technology could do. She wanted to join Newton and Einstein. That is, until her father was killed by Harkes. Then she wanted revenge and she reached for the nearest tool. Me. In her drive to spend every second on the project, I think Jennifer pushed herself into psychosis.’

  ‘Whereas,’ said Danny, ‘you’re just a charming eccentric, like Proctor.’

  ‘I don’t ask you to understand, Mr Shaw.’

  ‘If you’re going to kill us, you could at least make the effort. Come on. You’re bonkers, aren’t you?’

  ‘Danny,’ warned Jem.

  ‘When you look at us,’ asked the inspector softly, ‘do you see… marionettes?’

  Cory’s eyes had narrowed.

  ‘Saskia,’ he said, ‘you tried to save that aircraft even when you knew it would crash. Why? What’s your secret?’

  ‘I’m human. It’s what we do. What’s your secret?’

  Cory sighed. His breath flowed white.

  Something changed in the air of the hut. Jem could not, at first, define it. Coldness, yes. Numbness. Then the details of things—the greenness of Saskia’s eyes, the slight downturn of Cory’s mouth—grew indistinct. A sudden weakness gripped her neck and her head lolled forward. This shocked her into panic. Was the room filling with gas? Was it carbon monoxide? She looked at Cory. His expression was businesslike. There was no sign that he was affected. As Jem’s sense of the world narrowed to a trickle, she watched Saskia coil for a punch that never came. Cory pushed her lightly and she fell to one knee.