by Ken MacLeod
‘Good night, Nick.’
‘Good night, Mummy.’
She hugged him a little harder than usual, breathing in the smell of his just-washed skin. Off he went, Max trailing him, both waving from the doorway.
‘Night night,’ she said, waving back.
Hugh came back about ten minutes later and joined her on the sofa.
‘Ach,’ he said. ‘I’m tempted to pour a dram. But I won’t.’
He waved towards the screen. Hope leaned forward and chopped her hand down, turning the television back off.
‘ ’Scuse me,’ she said. ‘Something we’ve got to talk about.’
She told him about Fiona’s visit. He listened in silence until she’d finished.
‘We have to go,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow night.’
Nick was having none of it.
‘Grandpa’s chin is scratchy and his house smells.’
‘But he’s very kind to you,’ Hope said, cutting toast for eggy soldiers. ‘And Grandma Island is lovely. She’s so fond of you, and she’s such fun.’
‘Not as much fun as Granny Abendorf.’
Hope wasn’t sure if this was Nick being stubborn or loyal. She decided to make light of it.
‘Well, Granny Abendorf is fun, yes, but she doesn’t live in a big sprawly house on a hill with the sea down below and lots of sheep and cows around and eagles and seagulls in the sky, does she?’
‘It rains all the time and the house is smelly.’
For answer, Hope flicked up the weather forecast on the big screen in the living room, and pointed Nick to it through the knock-through. ‘That’s Lewis up at the top, see? And it’s sunny today.’
They sat down at the kitchen table. Hope munched her cereal and Nick dunked his eggy soldiers. Then:
‘It’s still smelly.’
‘Oh, for – look, Nick, it’s just cooking. And peat smoke.’
Nick wrinkled his nose. ‘And fish.’ He pushed away the remainder of his breakfast. ‘And wet things.’
‘All right, fish and washing. But you soon don’t notice smells, and it’s nice in other ways.’
‘I’ll miss my friends.’
Lower-lip tremble. Time to move fast.
‘It’s only for a little while, and you can talk to them any time, and you’ll have lots of exciting things to tell them when you come back, and you’ll make new friends while you’re up there.’
‘Can I take Max?’
‘Of course you can. Now let’s get you ready for nursery.’
Nick slid off the chair and ran to the hallway for his jacket, apparently cheered up. He got it on after several attempts, proud of his new accomplishment, while Hope packed his lunch.
‘I’ll tell all my friends we’re going to Lewis,’ he announced, as they headed out the door.
Uh-oh. That could be awkward. She couldn’t tell him to keep it a secret – like all kids at nursery and in primary school, Nick had been solemnly warned against any adult at all telling him to keep secrets. Nothing was more certain to get social services on the case than a whisper of secrets.
‘I’ve had an idea,’ said Hope, climbing up the steps. ‘Let’s not tell them until we’re there, and it’ll be a nice surprise.’
15. The Stornoway Run
Hugh cycled to work as usual, in a cheerful mood. Last night the hot rush of his anger and protectiveness had turned Hope on, and she’d dragged him off to bed almost before he was ready, and they’d had hotter sex than they’d had for a while. Every so often his mind went back to it with a reminiscent smile.
The weather was sunny and not too warm. The leaves and grass along his route had a gloss to their green. As he whizzed along Camden’s back streets and canal banks and along the edge of Regent’s Park he sometimes glimpsed the whole scene as a vast, broken woodland, the forest of London. It was like when as a lad he’d seen from the hilltop how the landscape of Lewis wasn’t moor and field and bog with outcrops of rock, but a gnarly mass of rock with a thin overlay of peaty soil. The vision of the city as a forest uplifted him. It was almost utopian, and within it he felt the bike’s smooth engineered wooden frame and handlebars as an extension of himself.
On top of that elation, he was cheerful because the Ealing job was about to finish. The timing had worked out well, right to the half-day – he only had a morning’s work left. Ashid still had work to do, and Hugh had a waiting list of clients for renovation work, so he could easily have stuck around, just up the street. But at noon today he’d get his cash in hand, and tell Ashid he was taking a short holiday.
He also felt cheerful about leaving London for Lewis. The reason was one he could have done without. But if you looked at it the right way, it appeared positive. He didn’t care what Hope decided. He just wanted her to make her own decision, without social services and the Health Centre breathing down her neck. He’d never understood her objection to the fix. It annoyed him sometimes. That, he now realised, was one reason why he felt so cheerful. One way or another the matter was going to be resolved.
‘You see the future,’ Hope had told him, in a mutually exhausted moment last night. Then she’d explained. Tachyons and rhodopsin, good grief. Just as well she hadn’t brought that up in her latest confrontation with Fiona Donnelly! A gene for hallucinations – now that would have convinced Donnelly to back off! Aye, right. Even if there was anything to it, there was no way he was seeing the future. What sort of future had barbarians in it? If he was seeing anything real, it was people from the Dark Ages. Far more likely he was… maybe not seeing things – meaning, seeing not things but figments – he was convinced there was something objective behind it, though not necessarily what he saw. Which, to any outside observer, meant hallucinations. He was glad Hope had more sense than that science girl, Geena. Strange woman. There had been something odd about her intensity. Something she wasn’t letting on. She hadn’t told him why she was so interested. That query had been diverted by the stuff about police stops, at the end. More emotional than you’d expect.
Hugh made the connection with what Hope had told him about what Fiona had said so abruptly that he almost lost control of the bike. Geena had recently been questioned about Naxals. Of course, of course! And it hadn’t been one of the usual stops, the ones that she and Ashid had shared a nervous laugh about. She’d probably been hauled into the back of a van. She might even have been tortured. No wonder she was upset!
No wonder, also, that she had such a strong interest in their case. It went beyond the kind of curiosity that made sense for someone in her academic field – well beyond. Hugh thought he could understand why. For her it would be a kind of revenge on the state. A revenge of the weak, underhand and indirect, and therefore all the more dangerous and unpredictable.
That meant he had to be wary. For one thing, Geena might be using him, though he couldn’t see how. She might have been radicalised by her experience, and actually become a Naxal sympathiser herself. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened, not by a long chalk. For another, the state’s surveillance system might be even more sensitised to her than Fiona Donnelly’s demonstration had suggested.
Hugh already had a travel plan. It had come to him the moment he’d decided they had to leave. Now he had to complicate it a little.
At noon Hugh pocketed a few thousand pounds from the house developer, said goodbye to Ashid and wheeled his bike up the road towards Ealing Broadway. He selected a quiet alley between two boarded-up houses, took out his phone and called his father.
‘Oh, hello, Usdean,’ his father said. He sounded as if he was chewing something, then swallowing. Probably caught having his lunch. He was obviously outdoors. Hugh could hear the wind past the mike. ‘How’s things?’
‘Oh, fine, fine,’ said Hugh. ‘You and Mam?’
‘Bearing up, bearing up. What brings you to break radio silence?’
‘Och, Dad, it’s only been two weeks since—’
‘Yeah, yeah, just winding you up.’
‘Anyway, seeing as you ask, me and Hope and the boy were thinking of popping up to stay for a bit, if that’s OK.’
‘OK? It’s brilliant! When can we expect you?’
‘Maybe tomorrow or the day after? Thing is, we decided at the last minute, kind of, and just to save a wee bit of dosh on a non-advance fare we thought we’d hook a lift on a—’
‘Oh, sure, the Stornoway run. Give me a minute or ten, and I’ll tab you a code then fix a pick-up. Mid-evening suit you?’
‘Anything after, uh, eight or so.’
‘Aye, fine, no bother at all. Most of the overnight rigs pull out at ten, so you’ve got plenty of time.’
‘Ah, thanks, Dad.’
‘Just give us a bell when you’re on your way.’
‘Will do. See you soon.’
‘If we’re spared.’
And with a dark chuckle at that dour caveat he rang off.
Hugh stuck the phone in his pocket, mounted his bike, rode to the junction and turned left into Ealing Broadway. He rode west, through Hanwell, where he had to dodge goats, children, and driver-controlled motor vehicles, and into Southall, a welcome relief of neatness, colour and neon, its streets purring with bikes and autopilot electrics. The pavements bustled with men in suits or drab cotton salwar kameez, women in bright silk salwar kameez or saris. The only jarring note was the police presence. Hugh could see two foot patrols along the high street at a glance, and he could imagine the drone patrols he couldn’t see overhead. The borough hadn’t suffered the tidal wash of population, in and out, that its neighbours had over the past decades. It had remained a solid, respectable place, its only problem being that most of its population had Indian roots and continuing connections – business, political and personal. This made them doubly suspect: linked with the other side in the Warm War, and at high risk (as the phrase went) of recruitment or radicalisation by the enemy of both sides, the Naxals. The feeling of being watched from above tensed the back of Hugh’s neck.
A flicker of shadow passed over him. He glanced up, and saw a hang-glider about sixty metres overhead, its flight path along the line of the street. It seemed far too low, an emergency landing or a collision with a rooftop inevitable. Hugh glanced in his mirror, stuck out his left arm and pulled in to the side of the road, putting one foot down on the pavement. The hang-glider, now about a hundred metres further on and five metres lower down, wheeled, soared as if on a thermal updraught, and flew back towards him. Nobody else – not even the pair of cops a block away and almost beneath its path – took any notice of it. As it approached, Hugh clearly saw its frame of struts, like the finger bones of a bat, and the pilot’s blue face and fur waistcoat and boots. The eyes were goggled, but Hugh felt their gaze meet his for a split second as the glider passed above him. His head whipped around. The glider banked, vanishing over the rooftops.
Hugh looked around again. No one had noticed, though one or two people on the pavement were giving him puzzled glances. As he checked over his shoulder for traffic before pulling out into the road again, he saw out of the corner of his eye another flying object, this time moving across his line of sight. His gaze locked on to it and he felt his mouth open. Moving through the air, not far above the rooftops, from one side of the street to the other, was a contraption so weird that it was as if his brain was telling him that both it and the hang-glider were definitely hallucinations. It was a small airship, its glistening balloon distended in odd places like some enormous inflated pig’s bladder. The gondola slung beneath it was quite clearly a longboat made from cured animal skins stretched over a wooden frame. Three men, in hooded robes like those of monks, sat one behind the other in it, laboriously propelling it across the sky with long sweeps of what looked like elongated fans mounted on poles, which they moved like oars.
Hugh watched it out of sight, shook his head as if to clear it, blinked, then cycled on until he spotted an electronics shop. He pulled over, locked the bike to a lamp post and went in. A bright, cluttered cave, most of whose customers at this time of day were smartly uniformed schoolchildren on their lunch hour. Hugh bought the cheapest and most breakable (in every sense) computer he could find, and made a point of paying by cash. Ten minutes later he sat down in a café with a tall glass of lassi and a bowl of saag paneer, for which he paid by cash, and used the new computer to check out flights east. After a good quarter-hour of poking around, he made a provisional booking for three seats on a flight the following morning from Gatwick to Prague, putting down a non-returnable deposit of two hundred pounds from his bank account.
As he stood up and shifted the empty glass and bowl on to a tray, the edge of the tray nudged the computer off the table. When he picked it up, the screen was cracked, the resolution clouded.
He muttered under his breath, laid the broken device on the tray, and returned the tray to the counter.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as he handed it across, with an indicative downward glance. ‘Could you dispose of the computer for me? Piece of junk.’
‘No problem,’ said the guy behind the counter. He took the computer off the tray, placed it under the counter, and put the tray with the dishes on the rack behind him. ‘I’ll recycle it later. Have a nice day!’
‘You too. And thanks. Good afternoon,’ said Hugh, and left.
He unlocked the bike, wheeled it across the street, mounted and set off for home. As he rode, he wondered if he’d done enough. If he was under heavy surveillance – no. But otherwise, if it was all still being neural-networked by the bots, one travel plan would be flagged as real, and one as a laughably obvious diversion. The trouble was, he had no idea which.
It was a summer evening like one of those Auden had imagined for after the revolution, with light traffic and loud sound systems standing in for the bicycle races and exploding poets. Hope walked along East West Road with her guitar in its case slung from her shoulder. A big backpack, with smaller bags stacked perilously on top, was strapped to a collapsible two-wheeled trolley, which she trundled in front of her. Hugh, with a frame rucksack on his back, led the way. Nick, with Max on his shoulders and carrying a token knapsack, scampered alongside him.
The lowering sun was getting in her eyes a bit, so she had her glasses on. Local situation reports, summarised from police radio chatter, social and mass media, and radio-station call-ins, scrolled in the bottom left-hand corner of her shaded vision. Nothing much was happening: a traffic snarl-up at Highbury Fields, a street scuffle out in Muswell Hill. In the bottom right corner a black app, patched from Hugh’s phone, traced the slow progress of the truck on which Hugh had hooked a lift. Right now, it was negotiating the one-way system at King’s Cross. With Holloway Road about ten minutes’ walk away, they were in good time to meet it.
The trolley wheels juddered and bumped on the uneven pavement, each jolt giving Hope a split-second advance warning of where to place her heel, and each lurch making her grab for one of the upper bags. It didn’t seem right that at this time in history, cracked and tilted flagstones should be a nuisance, but icy winters and rainy summers did their work regardless: freezing and erosion, two of the implacable processes that James Hutton had, with a wild surmise that had led him to search for and find the rocks that demonstrated it, held to account for the whole history of the Earth. No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end…
A bag slithered. Hope caught it and stopped to sling it and another two awkwardly on her shoulders, and pressed on with a surer step. She must, she thought, look a bit oppressed, trudging along like this behind the men of the house. In this instance she preferred walking behind, because it let her keep an eye on them.
Minute yellow flowers drifted down from a tree she passed under, around which a peculiar smell, like honeysuckle but with a sharper, almost aniseed note, hung like a vapour. The flowers, or perhaps floating seeds, looked like tiny cogwheels. It bothered her that she didn’t know enough to identify them as natural or synthetic. If for any reason she never returned from this flight, or holiday, or a
dventure, she would always regret not having done more with the back garden. She’d planted a few rose bushes and a clump of sunflowers, but most of her effort in the garden had been a holding action against its return to the Thames Basin’s local version of the climax community, slightly contaminated by stray syn bio weeds.
Her mind returned to what Hutton saw, the slow cycle of erosion and uplift, and she found herself wondering about whether it might be possible to tell if Hugh’s visions showed the past or the future, according to whether or not synthetic biology plants featured in what he saw. It needn’t even be in the landscape, in the visible biota. It could be some scrap or trace in a garment, a tool or a jewel. A whole new discipline rose in Hope’s imagination: psychochronobotany.
She laughed, and hurried on forward to where Nick and Hugh stood at the corner of Holloway Road, waiting to cross, silhouetted against the sunset sky.
The lorry came up Holloway Road, quiet on big fat tyres, a cab up front and a long container trailer behind. When it was about a hundred metres away, Hope watched its icon on her glasses brighten and begin to flash. Hugh stepped forward, waving his phone like a hitch-hiker. The truck slowed, indicated, and pulled in as close to the side of the road as it could get, the cab just beside the waiting family.
Hugh’s thumb twitched on his phone, and the side door of the cab swung open. He scrambled up the ladder, hauling his backpack, then turned around and reached out for Nick as Hope handed him up. Hope passed up her guitar and bags, folded the trolley, and climbed into the cab. Hugh was in the driver’s seat, Nick in the middle, both strapped in. She reached to slam the door, but it swung slowly shut by itself, closing with a muffled thump and a firm snick, like a bank vault.
