You’ll be next, Pearl, I thought. I was too angry to fly. Damn Filippe for not believing me. A man was dead and a quetzlcoatlus was roosting smack in the middle of a city and I’d been left to cope on my own.
I looked up at the crags. Rain fell in my eyes. I started climbing.
With the dogs surging either side of me I pulled myself over boulders, scrambling across patches of grass, up into the darkness and the wet. I found one of Two Phones’ phones lying on a tussock. It still worked. I slipped it into my pocket and opened my senses. I could feel movement inside the old granite that had been heaved up from our mother’s breast to lie now in moonlight like spilt milk. He was hiding in stone. Dr Sorle, or the quetzlcoatlus, or both.
‘Where are you, Dr Sorle?’ My voice came out in gasps. ‘Come out. I want to talk to you.’
Nothing. Not even a heat signature. Rain began to fall in earnest, and my fingers went numb and failed to grip the rock. I stood up in a patch of long grass surrounded by boulders, and that’s when I saw movement. A hot blur of a man, sliding off to the left.
I threw myself forward and tackled. He gave a harsh scream, and I winced at the thought I’d attacked an innocent dog-walker. We hit the ground; then his lithe body twisted beneath me and he threw me off. Dr Sorle dragged himself away from me and put his back to a tall rock, holding the briefcase behind him like a child trying to hide a box of cookies. His voice cracked as he said, ‘I am not your enemy.’
The dogs had arrived from off to my right. They charged him and he shrank back, now holding the briefcase above his head. It must have been heavy from the way his arms were shaking from the effort of it – or was he afraid of the dogs? The white apparition of my own breath rose up before my eyes and blew west.
What was in that freaking briefcase? He obviously thought I knew.
‘I want Bethany back. Immediately.’ I sounded so confident, but already I was considering the likelihood that Bethany had already met the same end as Two Phones. I mean, Jeff. I realised I didn’t even know Jeff’s last name, nor the names of his family who would now never know what ending he had come to.
Dr Sorle was looking at me with . . . I don’t even know what it was. A composure bordering on serenity. In this gloomy old place he looked like a monk of some undiscovered religion.
Not that I was fooled. I didn’t take him at face value, because he was not as he seemed. And the briefcase, rain-smeared and scuffed with its locks safely shut, it was not a briefcase. It was a piece of my essence.
‘There are two of you,’ I said. I was remembering Marquita’s words to me in the hotel room, and an ache for her absence sprang up in my body. ‘I need to know which one you are. Lemme see you walk.’
I called the dogs to me and he took a few steps, straining under the weight of the briefcase. There was a slight drag to one leg.
I sighed. Dr Sorle.
‘Let’s just put the briefcase down and talk,’ I said.
He lowered the briefcase until it rested on the ground. Then he set it flat on the wet grass and sat down on it. His trouser leg rode up in this position, exposing a diamond-patterned sock. So much for being dangerous.
‘I’m sitting on it because I am afraid of what may come out of it,’ he told me, misinterpreting the line of my gaze. ‘When you threw me out of the plane, for example. And just now.’
I stopped breathing. There was a ringing in my ears.
‘Tell me what you remember about the plane,’ I said softly.
‘You went berserk.’ His voice cracked. ‘You took it from me and swung it right through the ceiling.’
‘I know that part. What then?’
‘I was sucked out of the plane. I fell. The case came open. It’s been open before, at Austen Stevens’ home. But I didn’t open it that time.’
‘Who did?’
‘The other one. It is as you say. He can come into my body and control me.’
My first thought was the Resistance.
‘How. How does he control you?’
In an instant his eyes became like blades.
‘He . . . he . . . he fills me up from inside. When it first happened I lost consciousness. Now I can sometimes remain present. The things he does are ugly.’
I could taste the bitterness on his tongue. Too close; I pulled back. That’s not how the Resistance operates. When the Resistance guides a person, it’s just a hunch or a small impulse. Always towards kindness. No possession and definitely no kung fu whatsover.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘The case came open as we were falling. You know that I came down after you, right? I was trying to catch you.’
‘I saw you pass me. The case was flapping open and I thought . . .’
‘You thought?’
‘I thought, man, if I am dying then I may as well try and get inside. To where they went. Because it can’t be any worse than hitting the ocean at terminal velocity.’
‘That makes sense,’ I said. I just wanted him to continue.
‘So I grabbed it with both hands and I put my head inside and then I seemed to turn over somehow.’
He stopped.
‘Don’t stop. What then?’
‘Can’t say. When I regained consciousness I was hundreds of miles away. And wanted by the police internationally. I had to cut my hair. I had to hide.’
He was on the verge of tears.
‘Tell me the whole thing,’ I said. ‘I know you were educated on a Pace scholarship. But why did you go to work for Austen Stevens last year? You’re an orthopaedic surgeon. He had cancer. What was the point?’
‘About Pace. People think I was bought but this is untrue. I took the offering but I did not forgive. I thought about what to do with the opportunity. I went into orthopaedics, maybe because of the surgeons who put me back together after the land mine. Ultimately I wanted to go back to Kuè, maybe to my own family on the river, or maybe to Imo where my foster mother lived. I wanted to practise medicine there. But then I met Ayeisha and her roots are in America. So we settled there.
‘In my mind it was only temporary. I spent many years building my career and my reputation, sending money back, bringing my family over for education. I became my own man – more than my own man, because I was with Ayeisha and we were blessed with two daughters whom I love beyond imagining. With them I was as close to happy as I have ever been.’ He paused, and the pause lasted long enough to load a cannon.
‘And then he contacted me.’
I knew who ‘he’ must be, but I had to hear myself say it. ‘Austen Stevens.’
Dr Sorle nodded.
‘He offered a large salary – the sort of money that naturally makes anyone suspicious. He said he had come to regret his actions in the delta. Time had shown him he was wrong. He showed me his medical reports; his illness was terminal. He showed me his will. There was a substantial bequest intended to make amends in my community – to be administered by me because he trusted me not to steal it or lose it in speculation. It was more than Pace ever paid.
‘I already knew he had resources because in my youth Pace Industries used to bring me back in holidays to work security on the ships. Stevens had been skimming for years; he had clever people to help him with his money and he’d created a web of shadow assets that gave him considerable power, not just financially but politically – if the two can ever be separate.
‘There was only one condition. I had to take care of him until his death.’
Dr Sorle’s words stopped.
‘This was a kind of torture for you,’ I said. ‘Like twisting the knife, after the killings in your country. The sickness.’
‘He was messing with my head,’ Dr Sorle said. ‘What was I to do? A part of me wanted to walk away utterly, put it all behind me. I had chosen to live a small and meaningful life. I had chosen to build something real and I thought I was at peace with that choice. Until he came walking in with his money and his desire for forgiveness – or so he said.’
‘So you decided to work for him.�
�
‘Yes. I treated it as a test for myself. That even if it sickened me to look after him, I would hold my own humanity paramount. And at the end of it was this promise, something on a scale I could never do myself, money that I could carefully administer. I made plans for how to use it. Who to deal with. How to make this project work for the whole community. But I think you can see where this is going.’
‘He tricked you?’
Dr Sorle made a glottal sound, as if engaged in a small struggle.
‘People will say I had a psychotic break. That I could not hold the tension inside me and I snapped. I might have believed that myself, had it not been for you.’
‘Glad to be of service,’ I said. ‘You didn’t have a psychotic break. You have another self. An alternate path, if you will. He would have been you, if things had gone differently.’
Dr Sorle shook his head. ‘That can’t be so. During the bad times as a young man, some of my actions lay heavy on my heart. But I was never a murderer of innocents.’
‘You were at Bethany’s house. You opened the briefcase there, didn’t you?’
‘I was there, but I didn’t open the briefcase. He came. The other one.’
He was trembling. I studied him. I saw Dr Sorle in his human beauty, and filling the great space behind him I saw another intelligence, calculating and obscenely vast. A deathstar of a mind.
He stood up. I stood up. He was holding the briefcase in his right hand but I was on his left.
‘Where is Bethany?’ I said with an effort.
‘I. Don’t. Have her.’
I threw myself at him, knocking him over.
I don’t know why I did it. Reasons are just the thoughts we retroactively apply to explain what we do. Most people don’t act out of reason. They act by instinct and then try to justify what they’ve done. I’m no different. I tackled him. The dogs came running, barking, growling, as Dr Sorle and I struggled. He was a handful, but no match for me. I broke his grip on the briefcase and took it from him. The whites of his eyes gleamed, and his breath was hot.
‘I have no wish to quarrel with you, Pearl,’ he whispered. ‘Give it back at once.’
He didn’t move. I hefted the briefcase. It was about as heavy as half a motorcycle.
‘How did you get this through airport security?’ I gasped, panting. ‘I’m surprised the plane could take off at all.’
‘Sometimes I think I want to destroy it. You don’t know how I pray for the strength to restrain myself.’
‘Something ties you to it.’
‘You will see,’ he said. He stood there, a simple animal. Breathing. I could feel the heat and moisture coming off him. Suddenly I understood how completely unable to escape his situation he was. He couldn’t step up outside himself. He couldn’t step down inside himself. He was stuck right where he was, with his mind beating on the walls like a butterfly with eyes on its wings. He was stunned that I didn’t buy his pose, because he didn’t know what I know: that there was exponentially more of him just on the other side of his perception. The eyes on his wings were real. He was an iceberg.
‘Give Bethany back safely. At least tell me where she is. That’s the only way I’d be willing to help you deal with Pace.’
He sighed. ‘I told you, I don’t have any hostages. I don’t know what he did to her.’
‘He.’
The briefcase weighed so much, I swear my right arm was already a couple of millimetres longer than my left. I passed it to my other hand, swinging it like it was a kettlebell.
‘The other self.’
‘Yeah, well. Pass on a message to your alter ego. This thing belongs to me. He has stolen it. I’m taking it back.’
Then I turned and sprang off the rocks.
Post-Event Adjacent Reality Launcher
I flew. I was stunned and hurting in parts of myself that I hadn’t even known existed. I clutched the briefcase to my chest and it didn’t seem to weigh anything at all. You are mine, I thought. We are together now.
There had been a suspended moment when the briefcase opened and Dr Sorle was replaced by the quetzlcoatlus. In that moment I had an experience as thin and sharp as a papercut. When you get a papercut sometimes you don’t start to bleed right away. It’s like your flesh is shocked and forgets to part even though it’s been cut open.
And you wonder if you imagined it but you didn’t. The pain follows you at a slight distance, and in just this way the memory was following me. As I flapped awkwardly with my seldom-used wings, as I breathed hard and then glided, giddy with my own erratic motion through the air, the papercut started to catch me up. I passed over houses and pubs and cars and the tram line, through the rain-salted cold air of October’s dark tea-time, and the visions flew alongside me. A flock of visions of my home.
As I banked to the west and glided over the Haymarket the papercut overtook me and I saw it all again, a slowly unfurling impression rich in detail and uneasily different to anything on Earth.
In the place where I come from there are nested functions. Deep-throated fliers, some with curved beaks and some straight. Some have bright crests and some have modest heads whose feathers lie smooth as glass; some are headless. Which is a shock. They sit with claws warping around furry luminous threads stretched taut across the sky like telephone wires. With fat bellies and ruffled feathers they survey the ruin, clever eyes scanning what is below. Some flap slowly; others hover and flit. They have woven this place from the wreckage of metal structure, from the scrambled desiccation of life forms reduced to dust and rime. From silicon and gold. The birds sift through the detritus with their beaks; I believe they transmute some of what they find into the threads. I don’t understand how this is done.
With clever beaks and wingtips the beings who made me compile masks made of human skin, made of feathers, made of biological circuits: mitochondrial turbine engines and electron pumps. Their masks are made of darkness pregnant with radio, the slow deep turning of long wavelength light. They wear these masks and they hop around a ragged fire that drinks up the foreign atmosphere.
They wear these masks when they turn their beaks to the sky, where the plasma field shudders and sparks with the impact of more debris, where wreckage of worlds collides with the shield of the sky.
Their nights are numbered. They have no days.
They are calling me, calling with a sound like black-backed gulls lost inland. I can hear home in their voices.
I want to go to them. I want to feel that mud between my toes. I want to feel the distant charge of that plasma sky. The roaring silence seems too close sometimes, as though in my sleep I could accidentally fold up and disappear into an HD drainage grate in the cosmic scheme. Who would miss me? No one here even knows who I really am. Least of all my self.
Long ago my bird mothers used to grow creatures in their gardens powered by magnetic gradients. Now they make baskets. They make garments and shields. Three of them are making a boat. The boat is crafted of sumac and resin from a colonial organism two degrees of abstraction removed from these here parts. It’s woven of nano-infused clay and Fourier synthesis. One of my mothers carves the molecular faces of fire deities into its bows with his razor-edged beak.
‘Mother,’ I say to him. ‘Where will you sail this boat? You can’t take it past the plasma shield.’
‘Come home, Pearl,’ he replies, looking at me with one eye. ‘We need you. Come while you still can.’
When I look back at my mother I don’t know what I’m seeing. I want so badly to learn. With their clever toes the bird mothers put together the inescapable, one layer over the other. Carefully limning the edges of the containers with a lick of spit. Sometimes they could pass for people.
Especially when they wear the skin masks.
Sometimes they could pass for builder robots. Sometimes they could pass for clouds or tissue paper in a shoe box. I can shine through them. I can rumple them. I can forget about them if I let myself. I don’t let myself. These bird mothers are
all I have. The mud of their nests is made of life stories.
I can smell Kisi’s childhood on their breath. Who else have they eaten alive?
When I was hijacked, they were distressed. If there had been a chat session between them it would have gone something like this:
LADY GOD I:
Thing got out.
VA:
Is the plasma field OK?
HORSEBIRD:
Of course. But Thing has taken the Post-Event Adjacent Reality Launcher
VA:
That’s not good. I knew we shouldn’t have modified Thing. It’s so risky.
HORSEBIRD:
The alternative was death by attrition.
VA:
So now it’s just death.
LADY GOD I:
We can crunch ourselves and go out as seeds.
VA:
Like I said, death.
HORSEBIRD:
How much time have we got?
LADY GOD I:
The uncertainty is wider than the time frame itself. Maybe enough time to load. Maybe not.
VA:
Can’t see the point in loading. There’s nowhere to hatch the eggs.
HORSEBIRD:
Let’s see how the PEARL reacts to theft. It may surprise us.
LADY GOD I:
Prepare the nest. It’s all we’ve got left.
Not Nevis
I was only a couple of miles away from Holyrood when I remembered the dogs. Reluctantly, I tore myself from the information that was now fizzing through my consciousness. I had to turn round and labour my way back through the soft rain to Arthur’s Seat. I alighted on the rough dead grass not far below the point where I’d taken the briefcase off Dr Sorle; there was no sign of him now, but it was possible he was still up in the crags. I was braced for a fight but not seriously worried. The only reason Kisi Sorle’s waveform had been able to steal my launcher in the first place was because his pattern had been stored inside me and I hadn’t seen the hijacking coming. Back then he’d had the advantage of surprise. He didn’t scare me now – at least, not as a human being. Whatever bigger intelligence I’d sensed just beyond him was another matter.
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