The Boy on the Bridge

by M. R. Carey

  In the streets, now, he walked with slightly more assurance. Beacon was growing older along with him. Curfews had been introduced, and a hard-labour farm for people guilty of breaches of public order. Greaves carried Alice and Ged and Coraline and Grimnebulin in his head, along with the captain, and talked with them when the external world became problematic. But that happened less and less. He had found out what happiness was, and therefore was able to realise that he hadn’t been happy up to now.

  He stopped going to school, gave up his bed at the orphanage. He laid out a bedroll on the floor of Dr. Khan’s lab each night, and stowed it in a corner each morning. Rina’s presence became his peace. Her voice told him ceaselessly—whatever else she might be saying—that he was home.

  Greaves’ memory is eidetic and perfect, a complete record of his past to which new information is added at a steady rate of one second per second. It isn’t possible for him to forget. But sometimes when he remembers his mother (her hands washing his face, her face smiling down into his crib, her body cooling beside his on blood-soaked gravel) she has Dr. Khan’s face. His brain has performed a semantic substitution between two nearly identical signs.

  So if there were a feasible way to give her what she wants—a promise that he will not expose himself to unnecessary danger—he would do it. He would very much like to offer her that reassurance. But he can’t.

  Because unless he can find some new insight in the remaining months of the mission, the mission will fail. Unless

  Middle level:

  Unless the girl is what she seems. Different from the human baseline and from the hungries. New. Fitting into a space whose shape I can’t define yet or even hypothesise. And that’s good. That’s very good. If known factors permit of no solutions, any solution must come from a space beyond what is known.

  Focus.

  The priorities haven’t changed. It’s only that the list of variables has lengthened. Lengthened in a way that shows promise.

  Top level (but is it the top level any more, or is she?):

  Summary of environmental factors found to inhibit or retard the spread of the hungry pathogen.

  NONE.

  Greaves pauses, staring at the word with the top of the pencil pressed hard against his lower lip. There are thousands of pages of mission logs and experimental notes in the double-reinforced filing cabinet underneath the lab’s main centrifuge, but their substantive findings can be factored down to that single word. Dr. Fournier’s team has studied, tabulated and graphed the effects on the hungries of temperature, sound, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, relative and absolute humidity, light (duration and intensity), presence or absence of fifty-three trace elements in air and soil, thermoperiod, acidity and alkalinity, macro- and micro-nutrients and the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field. They have done this both through their own sampling and through extensive study of the specimen caches left for them by the crew of the Charles Darwin.

  The hope was to find an inhibitor. A weakness they could seize on and weaponise. If the pathogen was adversely affected by any of these things, Beacon and its inhabitants could adjust accordingly. They could make themselves as inhospitable an environment as possible for the disease to take root in.

  But Cordyceps is robust and hardy. Its onset and progress are the same in every case. Human tissue suits it well, and anchors it against all trials and tribulations. Human blood nourishes and waters it.

  Which, as far as Greaves can see, leaves only two options. One is to synthesise a vaccine or a cure, and the team are nowhere on that. He has seen Dr. Akimwe’s reports, knows that they’re years away from a means of countering the infection or guarding against it.

  The other option is what he has been working on all this time: behavioural observation of hungries in the field. He is trying to build up a map of how the fungus shapes and repurposes the mammalian brain. A human body is not the environment Cordyceps was originally designed for, however much it has made itself at home there. It started out as a parasite on insects. So perhaps the fit isn’t perfect. Perhaps it’s loose enough that he can find an exploit—a behavioural trigger that will make the hungries damage themselves or swerve away and find some other prey.

  Middle level:

  Was she real?

  He hates to think that thought, let alone write it, but he doesn’t flinch because you can’t rule any hypothesis out until you’ve disproved it.

  It has occurred to Greaves before now to wonder about his own sanity (defined as the accuracy of the assessments he makes of the world around him and its processes, of the men and women around him and their behaviours, and of course of himself as separate from all of the above, a unique system that he observes from the inside). He knows his brain isn’t like everyone else’s. He is painfully aware that people in general take pleasure from things that terrify him, are afflicted by things that fascinate him. On the whole, he has learned to live with those differences. But suppose they are indications of some deeper difference that amounts to damage? Dysfunction?

  To go mad, to lose your mind, which is the only thing that’s really yours because it’s really you … That would be an inexpressibly terrible thing. And at the same time it would be nothing, because you yourself would be unable, from within that damaged state, to recognise or reflect on it. Greaves considers this paradox. He is afraid of something that may already have happened.

  No, he is afraid of its consequences. Of the queasy, unsettling possibility that he has lost touch with reality and can never re-join it.

  He is sure that the anomalous girl was real. Almost. Almost sure. She had the fearsome clarity of a hallucination, but still …

  A thought occurs to him. He undoes the buttons on his jacket, pulls up his T-shirt and examines the flesh beneath. In one small area, roughly ellipsoidal, with a long radius of three centimetres and a short radius of two, his skin is yellow deepening to blue. He is bruised in the place where she touched him. Where her heel kicked off from him.

  Greaves nods, satisfied.

  Top level:

  The hungries have night behaviours and day behaviours. But all my observations have taken place during daylight. The use of thermal sensory organs or organelles for hunting by night was confirmed by Caldwell et al in the third and last of their WHO reports. The absence of a normal sleep cycle has been argued by Selkirk and Bales. But the evidential base is slender. A few hours of observation in each case, from a camouflaged hide whose armour and defences restricted vision and kept the hungries at a distance.

  To see them at night, up close, might yield valuable insights.

  But Greaves can’t lie, even to himself.

  If I go into Invercrae, and if she’s there, I might find her. Study her in situ, in her habitat. Further observation of behaviours, esp feeding. Possibly find some clue to where she lives. If successful in this, tissue sample from shed skin or hair cells might be obtained.

  Of course, leaving Rosie at night exposes him to a new set of potential dangers. Moving in a nocturnal environment will be slow and difficult, while at the same time it will be easier for the hungries to locate and hunt him.

  It’s time to test the suit.

  10

  The day’s work being over, the doors closed and the perimeter defences up, the soldiers and the scientists are free for an hour or two to do as they please.

  Dr. Fournier is in the engine room. He has let it be known that he uses the twilight hours to write up reports that he has no time to address during the day. As mission commander, he has a great many reports to write, and some of them are of a sensitive nature, so he has given orders that he should not be disturbed at these times. He plays classical music—mostly Wagner—on a portable CD player so old that Dr. Sealey says its continued functioning can only be explained using a new branch of physics. The CD player belongs to Dr. Penny and it used to sit in the lab until Dr. Fournier requisitioned it—hence Drs Akimwe and Penny having to make their own entertainment a cappella.

  The sou
nd of the music, though soft, is enough to cover the sound of Dr. Fournier’s voice. He is speaking into a radio set given to him by Brigadier Fry before the Rosalind Franklin set out from Beacon. He was given the set so that he could report on the actions and the conversations of his crew, with a specific focus on Colonel Carlisle. But there was seldom anything new to say. Only that the colonel was doing his job and trying not to speak to Dr. Fournier any more than he had to.

  And now there is nobody to listen. Since the cockpit radio went out nine days ago, the doctor’s hand-held receiver has been silent, too. The airwaves are empty. Rosie is a bubble of meaning in a void of … of the absence of meaning. A void devoid of …

  He tries again. “Dr. Alan Fournier calling Beacon. Dr. Alan Fournier calling Brigadier Fry. If you can hear me, please answer. Dr. Fournier calling Beacon.”

  Colonel Carlisle reads a biography of Napoleon, one of the three books he brought with him when he came on board the Rosalind Franklin. Mulholland’s account of the emperor’s life is often partial and poorly researched, but Carlisle appreciates his declamatory style. Truly, he reads, the years that witnessed Napoleon’s fall were fruitful in paradox. The greatest political genius of the age, for lack of the saving grace of moderation, had banded Europe against him: and the most calculating of commanders had nonetheless given his enemies time to frame an effective military collaboration.

  Without hubris (he knows he is no genius) the colonel looks in all the volumes he reads for echoes and precursors of his own mistakes. He has seen Beacon go from an armed camp to a proto-republic, and then he has seen that precarious democracy dismantle itself again. Now it is standing on the brink of something truly horrible and Carlisle is four hundred miles away on nursemaiding duty—having resigned his commission as an act of principle and then taken it up again on direct orders from a superior who promised—in exchange—to leave him be and raise him no higher.

  Now the colonel is wondering whose trap he fell into: Brigadier Fry’s or his own. Possibly the answer is both. In any event, he has traded power for a clean conscience and ended up with neither.

  Mulholland again: An overweening belief in his own powers and in the pliability of his enemies was the cause alike of his grandest triumphs and of his unexampled overthrow.

  Overthrow is a nicely judged word. It suggests a wrestler being flung to the mat. That only happens when you move outside your centre of gravity. Your enemy can’t throw you if you have your feet firmly planted.

  Which Carlisle himself never did have, of course. He is not a politician. He’s not even somebody who weighs his words. But he is, in the end, a conformist. A man whose centre of gravity can’t easily be found because he has never taken the time to work out where it is he wants to stand. He only knows his limits when he actually meets them, in the world.

  As, for example, in his last face-to-face conversation with Brigadier Fry seven months ago, just before the gates opened and Rosie passed through them on her outward journey. He was trying to make the brigadier understand why the machinery of democracy is important, even if in some ways it makes Beacon run less efficiently rather than more.

  The brigadier listened sober-faced to his argument—which was about checks and balances, safeguards and redundant systems. Her own position was that these things were luxuries that came with security. You could afford to think about redecorating your house only when you could be absolutely certain that the roof wasn’t about to fall in. Her politicking illustrated this perfectly. She had demanded that the Muster—Beacon’s military—be granted a fixed proportion of the seats on councils and committees, including the so-called Main Table where overall policy was decided. Then she had expanded that wedge until the Muster was the single biggest voting bloc. Now she was questioning the legitimacy of having any civilian presence at all on boards that decided on military matters.

  Fry listened politely as Carlisle made his case and then she corrected him, punctilious to a fault. “You think I see democracy as irrelevant, Isaac? I don’t. Please don’t think that. When humankind was in the ascendant, when we ruled the world and the whole of creation bowed down to us, democratic institutions worked and nothing else did. The dictatorships were the sleazy corners where people were poor and miserable and governments were parasitic. Back then I bowed to civil authorities and I followed orders and I never once asked myself if there was something I was missing. Democracy made sense.

  “But when the plague struck, that all changed. It changed for ever. You know what I see when I’m sitting at the Main Table? I see frightened sheep trying to decide which way to run. And if we put the sheep in charge of the farm, then we’ll all of us die and the grass will grow over us. I don’t intend to let that happen.”

  “Where is the Muster in this metaphor, Geraldine?” Carlisle had asked her. “Assuming you’re not sheep, what are you? Shepherds, perhaps?”

  “If you like.”

  “But shepherds only keep sheep safe until it’s time to slaughter them.”

  Fry’s lip twitched, a movement of anger that she suppressed. “We fight and we die for these people,” she said. “Every day. And then they turn around and tell us to do the same thing on a smaller budget. With fewer soldiers. It’s grotesque. Have we made mistakes? Yes, we have. But everybody in Beacon owes their lives to us and they put us on a par with waste disposal and street clearance.”

  There was a pause. A silence that Carlisle failed to fill. He could have said: Your mistakes—our mistakes—killed thousands of men, women and children. They thought those planes were coming to save them and we dropped white phosphorus on their heads. We burned them alive.

  So why didn’t he? What kept him sitting there in dead silence when he could see her hiding those hideous deeds away in a box labelled COLLATERAL DAMAGE?

  The same thing that had made him resign his commission instead of denouncing Fry and standing against her. He had too much respect for the frameworks of authority, was too afraid of the harm that comes when they’re shaken. Sometimes they needed to be shaken. Sometimes they needed to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up. He had never seen himself as the one best qualified to do that; never quite found enough sand to draw a line in.

  Still, he felt himself reaching a limit. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could convince himself that doing nothing was the lesser evil.

  And Fry knew him well enough to see that change coming. Probably she was aware of it even before he was. Certainly she timed her intervention perfectly.

  “I have a new mission for you,” she said, handing him the papers. “Top priority. It will take you away from Beacon for a while, which might be the best thing for all of us.”

  Carlisle reached out his hand.

  He took the papers. Abdicated yet again.

  There is a knock on the cockpit’s open door. With no regret, the colonel abandons the contentious past for the unfathomable present.

  It’s Lieutenant McQueen. “Poker game, sir,” he says. “The men were wondering whether you’d join us for once.”

  Carlisle hesitates. In all his previous postings, he spent as much time with the soldiers in his command as he could. He is fully cognisant of the importance of knowing his troops and being known by them. The emperor held it as a maxim, Mulholland asserts, not to trust his weight to any bridge he had not personally tested and assayed.

  But the look on McQueen’s face irks him. The lieutenant barely troubles to hide his contempt, which he will bring with him into the game. Every hand will become an index of the greater, unspoken antagonism between them. Their mutual dislike will curdle the atmosphere and sap the morale of the other soldiers, which is already ebbing steadily.

  They stare at each other for a cold second, each acknowledging the unspoken agenda. And why is it still unspoken after all these months of enforced proximity? Carlisle has no idea. He was sure when they left Beacon that there would be a flare-up, a rebellious act or word that would discharge the lightning. But here they are, seven months later,
with the storm still building.

  “I think not, lieutenant,” Carlisle says evenly. “Thank you for the invitation, but I believe you’ll be better able to relax without a senior officer present.”

  “Yes, sir,” McQueen says blandly. “Of course, sir. Enjoy your book.”

  Which he wasn’t managing to do even before the lieutenant’s intrusion. He tries again, but still can’t find the right mood of scholarly detachment. It melts in the universal solvent of recent memories. With a sigh, he sets Mulholland aside.

  The rear-view mirror gives him a view along the flank of the vehicle. He can see the mid-section airlock and the Greaves boy sitting in it, writing furiously with a stub of pencil so short it doesn’t show between his pursed fingers.

  Is he still a boy, at age fifteen? Dr. Khan argues that he is some kind of savant, but Carlisle can only ever see Greaves as the wide-eyed, silent child who made the arduous journey from London to Beacon wearing a single unchanging expression of shell-shocked wonder and dismay. Clutching a toy or doll of some kind. Not hugging it to his chest or trailing it along behind him the way Christopher Robin dragged Pooh Bear, but holding it clenched in both hands like a talisman that he could raise, at need, against the world.

  Probably as efficacious as anything else, the colonel thinks.

  11

  Lieutenant McQueen returns to the game.

  “Just the five of us,” he says. “His majesty is wanking off over his war porn again.”