Tigerman

by Nick Harkaway

  ‘And are you so amazingly rude that you will argue with me?’ Perfect fingers spread on her chest – the nails were like spots of sherbet against her shirt – and her face took on an expression of cartoonish shock. ‘Me? A senior scientist and de facto diplomatic representative of a major power?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Mmph. Practise! And practise also answering your phone!’

  The Sergeant belatedly took out his handset and inserted the battery. A moment later it chirruped and informed him that he had a message. Inoue rolled her eyes.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Meh. I have business here. The Portmaster has impounded my equipment out of malice. Even now the finest Japanese technology is getting covered in fish scales and salt water in his wretched hovel and soon millions of dollars of sophisticated hardware will be nothing more than dust.’

  Beneseffe sighed. ‘It’s not impounded,’ he said. ‘It’s just not unloaded. There’s a backlog.’

  ‘Piracy!’

  He rummaged, produced a clipboard. ‘Sign, please.’

  Inoue scribbled on it.

  ‘She writes obscenities in Japanese,’ Beneseffe confided woefully to the Sergeant. ‘It’s worse than dealing with your boy.’

  ‘He’s not my boy,’ the Sergeant said. Not yet. And: I thought you didn’t know him. But if the Portmaster was silent on that topic it was in obedience to his own obligations, and those were to be respected – at least while there was still time to look elsewhere.

  Beneseffe snorted and made a gesture of resignation. The world was insane, and it was particularly vindictive towards Portmasters who were just trying to get along. He took the tea tray and retreated to his office. ‘It was nice to see you both,’ he said firmly, and shut the door.

  Inoue took the Sergeant’s arm and clamped it firmly in hers. She was muscular and bony. He felt, to his confused embarrassment, what might be a fraction of one breast against his upper arm. If Inoue was conscious of this proximity, she gave no sign. ‘You are very hard to find, Lester.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Pfah.’ She smiled. There were tiny lines around her eyes, and he realised she was older than he had thought: his age, rather than ten years younger. He had assumed she was a prodigy. Well, she was: an academic powerhouse, the boy had affirmed after a sequence of nested Internet searches which apparently told him everything he wanted to know. A top-banana brain! But not an alien. Just regular brilliant. He wondered what it must be like to be regular brilliant, if she noticed how slowly everyone else thought.

  He looked over at her, saw concern tighten her lips. They were a sort of silvered purple. He didn’t think she was wearing any make-up; that was just the colour of her mouth. He had never spotted it before, but he hadn’t met all that many Japanese women and didn’t generally make a habit of staring at their lips. He didn’t generally make a habit of staring at Inoue’s, actually. He wondered if she had noticed and decided that she hadn’t.

  ‘I would actually be grateful if you would visit with us today,’ Inoue said. ‘We have a little situation I think maybe it would be good for you to come and see. In confidence.’

  ‘I can come now,’ he offered, ‘if that would be good.’

  ‘That would be ideal.’

  It would take him out of Beauville, and he would see how the world looked to someone who wasn’t the boy, which might be a good idea. He felt a flash of guilt, and put it aside. It was sensible, not wicked. He had responsibilities and it was the grown-up thing to do.

  ‘I was sorry about your friend,’ Inoue added abruptly. ‘Shola. I liked him. He was a rogue.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Sergeant said. ‘Yes, he was.’ It was like a toast. Perhaps it was the accompaniment to that brief exchange at the funeral, long delayed.

  Inoue decided that he would drive her to the Xeno Centre. Someone else would drive her car. That was what interns were for. The Sergeant, who hewed to a similar understanding regarding corporals, nodded gravely and opened the door for her.

  She climbed into the Land Rover and he was immediately conscious of how crappy it must seem, how messy and battered, and how it stank of fuel. He climbed in and was about to apologise when Inoue amazed him by putting her small feet up on the dashboard, pressing herself into the seatback. ‘VROOOM VROOM!’ she yelled, and when he looked at her in absolute amazement she cracked up, her feet pat-patting on the plastic, and made urgent gestures with her hands: let’s go!

  He took the Land Rover up out of Beauville and over the Iron Bridge towards the lowest of the passes which would afford them access to the far side of the island and the Xeno Centre. It was a spectacular drive, and the Sergeant reserved it in his off-duty hours for moments of significance. He had no desire to come here one day, between the old volcano and the plunging gorge of Mancreu’s white Lucretia River, and feel that he had seen it all before. To be jaded by this view would be an admission of something wretched he could not name. Inoue was appropriately silent, but in a companionable way, and they passed the first half hour in mutual appreciation of the world all around. Finally, as the Land Rover ducked down into the treeline and the view was obscured by pines, she glanced over at him.

  ‘What boy?’

  For a moment, the Sergeant did not understand.

  ‘The Portmaster said I was worse than your boy.’

  He grunted. ‘There’s a local kid, he hangs around. We’re friends.’ He was wary of discussing the friendship with an outsider, a female.

  ‘The one who was at Shola’s, when it happened.’ There was almost no discernible pause as she decided how to say it. He nodded assent, finding that her inquiry had not felt like an intrusion.

  ‘Smart kid,’ Inoue said, sucking air between her teeth. Not poor kid, he noticed. It was an expression of respect rather than pity, which was exactly right, and his reservations faded abruptly away. She would get it. She had a perfect ear for the way things were done. The way they had to be done.

  ‘Yes. Very.’

  ‘Do you have children of your own at home?’

  ‘Never found anyone. Or no one ever found me, maybe. I’ve moved around. Perhaps the right girl was out there and she kept turning up after I’d gone. Married someone else. I’m thinking . . .’ Jesus, was he going to say it aloud, to Inoue? When he hadn’t even asked the boy? It seemed so. ‘I’m thinking I might try to take him with me, when it’s time. I can’t offer him . . . Well, I don’t know what I can offer him. A home. A place. A friend.’ It seemed like very little. Probably there were richer people, couples, who would take a prodigy like the boy, get him into Cambridge or Yale, pay his way. And maybe an American passport was a better thing than a British one. You couldn’t become president if you weren’t US born, of course, but you could be a state governor, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or you could found an Internet company and become a billionaire. Or both. Why not? He tumbled down into himself, brooding. ‘I suppose it won’t work out,’ he muttered. ‘But you’ve got to try, haven’t you?’

  Inoue, staring straight out into the wilderness, nodded once.

  ‘Trouble is, I don’t even know if he’s got family. I can’t find out who he is. I mean, I ask him and he sort of waves it off. He doesn’t think he’ll ever leave. And I don’t want to say, you know, “come with me” and have him run for the hills because he’s got a mum on a farm in the shanty. Which he might.’

  Still with her eyes towards the horizon, Inoue said: ‘Describe him to me.’

  The Sergeant shrugged, both hands on the wheel. ‘You saw him at the funeral.’ But not close up, he realised, and she’d hardly have taken special notice. ‘Dark hair, high cheeks, green and brown eyes. Mid-brown skin. Thin. Twelve years old, maybe more. Very bright – I mean, much more than I can really get to grips with.’

  ‘Hands?’

  ‘Long fingers, dirty nails, not too much in the way of calluses.’

  ‘Long fingers, like crazy long? Or just narrow?’

  ‘Narrow.’

&nb
sp; ‘No arachnodactyly. Okay. When he walks, does he look a little like Charlie Chaplin?’

  The Sergeant had never thought of it, but there was a particular amble the boy had sometimes, like a sailor’s swagger or, yes, like Charlie Chaplin. ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Hip structure. Keep going. Epicanthic folds?’

  ‘I don’t know what that is.’

  ‘This!’ She touched the corner of her eye, the line of the skin.

  ‘Yes. A little.’

  She nodded. ‘When he speaks Moitié he sounds equally happy with French and Arabic words?’

  ‘It all comes out the same. Not French or Arabic or anything. Just Moitié. When he speaks English—’

  She tutted. ‘Everyone here speaks English like the movies.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well. For the record, race is a superstition derived from the clinal distribution of characteristics. But Mancreu is not big and it is not homogeneous and if I had to guess I would say one of his parents was from a mountain family – old island people, that’s why his Moitié sounds that way, so integrated – and the other maybe a more recent arrival. And almost all of the mountain people – even when they move to Beauville – they christen their children at the Chapelle Sainte Roseline by the river, because Sainte Roseline has governance over evil spirits. And mountain people always have a lot of evil spirits.’ She grinned. ‘My grandmother is from the mountains. You would not believe how many ghosts you can get in a very small house.’

  He stared at her. She raised her eyebrows briefly: Over to you. Go and make it happen, or don’t. He wondered if she dealt with all problems in the same way, this rapid reduction to a hinge point, and whether she ever found the clarity made things more difficult rather than less.

  ‘Thank you, Kaiko,’ he said.

  ‘You’re welcome, Lester,’ she replied.

  She spent the next hour pointing out strange mutations. Twice, she stopped him and plucked a small sample of plant life. Nothing on Mancreu, the Sergeant began to realise, was quite the way it should be any more. They passed through an abandoned farm and she stopped him again to look at wheat, then took some of that, too. She wore stiff gloves made out of something space-aged and shiny. ‘Impenetrable to parasites,’ she said sternly. ‘You should get some.’ He sighed – of course, that story would be well known by now – and nodded.

  Inoue softened her reproach with a smile, then bent to peer at another growth. He realised that she was talking to herself, proposing and dismissing courses of action, and felt flattered. He was seeing her in her most professional self. It was intimate – this was what made her Inoue – and it was oddly familiar. She saw things which were out of place and gathered them together in her mind to understand what made them so. It was not unlike what he had done in half a dozen bad places, reading the valleys and the weather and the movement of sheep: soothsaying with bullets. He found himself watching her skill with professional appreciation as they made their slow progress across the island. On the fourth and final stop he even started to spot things for her. She smiled again, with approval.

  Then they arrived.

  The Xenobiology Centre was a cluster of white geodesic domes and extremely engineered circular housing, fast to assemble and durable, but easy to pack up and transport. It bloomed from the rubble and grey sandy soil about three miles from the boundary fence of the old chemical plant, its back against the foothills. The white material was spotless, so that the whole facility looked eerily new and fungal. They had even landscaped it, with small trees and a gravel drive with parking.

  Inoue’s team parted in front of her without fuss. They did not ask why she was bringing a clumping great sergeant into their hideaway. They didn’t ask anything at all, which as always suggested to him that they knew their jobs very well and were very professional people. They nodded to Inoue and to the Sergeant and got on with what they were doing, although in one case that seemed to involve drinking Coke and playing some sort of game involving elves. Inoue tutted. ‘Ichiro,’ she growled out of the side of her mouth. ‘A genius. I cannot come up with enough jobs to keep him busy, so I permitted the other interns to assign him their extra work.’

  ‘But he’s not working,’ the Sergeant said.

  ‘No,’ Inoue sighed. ‘He established a trading floor for basic tasks and cornered the market in coffee-making futures, and then the espresso machine very mysteriously broke down. So he is a task billionaire. He has calculated that if the others do all his chores and nothing else for seven thousand years, they will be free of the debt. And now he only works when something scientifically interesting is going on.’ She glanced at him. ‘Does this happen with soldiers?’

  The Sergeant had been thinking of the boy, and wondering if he and Ichiro knew one another, and if they did, which of them acknowledged the other as the master. Or perhaps they were mortal foes. He shrugged. ‘Something like it, yes.’

  ‘And what do you do?’

  ‘I let it be known that I do not approve.’

  Ichiro grinned at them, overhearing. He tapped the screen, and the elves were replaced by rows upon rows of data. He took his feet off the desk and leaned in, fascinated. Inoue nodded. ‘So long as the others have time for their academic work, I just keep him in information,’ she said, ‘and he is easy to live with. Come.’

  Inoue led the way to the central desk, a round mica bench covered in paper and computer terminals which always made the Sergeant think of King Arthur, and leaned down over a keyboard. He kept his eyes to the front, looking over her back at a framed picture of a marmot on the wall so as not to appear interested in her bottom. It was small and well defined.

  ‘Lester,’ she said, drawing his gaze downwards to the screen.

  On it was something he recognised as a false-colour image, a scan of some sort to which the computer was adding tints to differentiate shapes which otherwise would be indistinct. In his world that usually meant a night-vision camera, and a covert operation. This was different, all branches and fronds, blue and purple at the edges and angry red at the centre. He realised he was looking at the Mancreu Cauldron, a resonance image of the volcanic well from which the Discharge Clouds came, and there was really only one reason why she would show him that.

  ‘There’s a plume building, Lester,’ she said. ‘A very big one. I think they will finish this. I think this will frighten them.’

  Around them the room was quiet. He wasn’t sure if it was quieter than it had been or if he was imagining it because it ought to be that way. He nodded, and then it occurred to him that he could ask her the big question about that, and she might actually know the answer, might tell him.

  ‘Will it work? Blowing up the island?’

  ‘No,’ Inoue replied. ‘It will scour the surface and if we are lucky a tectonic shift will seal the vents. But the bacteria will survive. That’s what they do. They already live in an extreme environment. They are protean. And it is possible that the vents will not seal and the bacteria will get into the sea. Again. So far they have not done well there, but that can change. If the chambers discharge directly into the ocean floor, for example, over time . . . And the radioactivity will increase the likelihood of mutation. It is a very bad plan.’ She sighed. ‘Waiting and learning would be much better. But you can’t tell governments that, it is not a good soundbite. And they don’t like it when science doesn’t give them what they have decided it should say. They have a sort of . . . a tame team, here somewhere, who tell them stories they do like. I may . . . I may have to say something anyway, although it will make me not popular.’

  She moved her hand through the air. In someone else it would have been a vague motion, but Inoue’s most unconsidered gestures were precise, so her fingers traced a sharp little arc, twisting like wingfeathers. ‘Lester, when this gets out it will be bad. The island people believe they are ready to hear this, but they are not. And I think they will need you, but I think you are not ready either. Are you?’

  He ought to say yes, of cours
e, but he needed to find out about El Hierro. And the boy, the evacuation plan: that wasn’t done, either, not halfway done. And there were places on Mancreu he still hadn’t seen. He should run the Lucretia River path again in the sun, it was amazing. He’d have to find ways to stay in touch with people. With Beneseffe and even Kershaw. With Inoue.

  Outside he heard the sound of a car, high and snarling. It made him think of kids doing handbrake turns in a supermarket car park back home. He’d been one of those kids, actually. Never very good at it, but you had to show willing. If this was nostalgia, he was bad at it. He contemplated the end of Mancreu, newly real, while whoever it was roared around and around outside, mowing the lawn or cutting down a hedge in an endless grinding whine, and then they slowed down and he could speak, but realised that he didn’t know what to say.

  He didn’t have to. Inoue was looking over his shoulder, and when he followed her gaze he saw a line of quad bikes, expensive toys for bored footballers on their estates along the A13 out of London to the coast, and on them a line of grubby men with scarves on their faces. An actual masked gang. When they had his attention – his, in particular – they revved their engines again and roared away, leaving Madame Duclos’s dead, fat dog on the bonnet of his car.

  The Sergeant ran outside and realised that he was waving his arms and shouting ‘Oi!’ and that this was not, on the face of it, the best response. An authoritative military bark would be more to the point, a ‘Halt or I’ll open fire!’ though he did not know whether he would. He did have a weapon – since Shola’s death he had quietly added a small side arm to his kit, in a discreet holster which sat directly against his leg and could be accessed through the open-ended pocket on his right side – but getting it would require that he stopped running and if he stopped running they would be out of range. He shouted ‘Oi!’ again and knew that he really had to stop doing that because it made him sound like an old fart waving a newspaper, but at this moment that was probably all he was. The dust choked him, and then the enemy had retreated, tactical objective achieved. ‘Fuckers! It’s just a bloody dog! And it’s not even a proper dog, just an old lady’s floor-ornament. It never did anything to you!’