Since I’d been kicked out of the Resistance I’d been wondering why I was still doing this. It was a kind of compulsion to try to help people; but what if they hadn’t asked for my help? Conor was rickety on the inside, intensely strong in some places and perilously weak in others. His addiction had entwined itself around him like a choking vine, but worse than that he was blindingly lonely.
‘It’s a chilly night,’ Alison said to him. ‘You didn’t sell the sleeping bag, did you?’
He wiped his nose and shook his head. ‘I’ve still got it. Could do with a dram, though, if you’re offering.’
‘How about a sandwich?’
‘How about both?’
‘A sandwich, I think,’ Alison said.
* * *
After she’d made Conor a sandwich and argued with him about the whisky and after he’d got angry about that and then apologised and then got angry again, we showed him out through the yard gate to save him climbing the wall. Alison went inside to check the animals one more time. I stood at the front of the practice and watched Conor walk away with his head down, kicking at invisible objects on the pavement and muttering to himself. I wanted so badly to get up inside his brainwaves and re-tune him like a piano. I didn’t know anymore whether I should, and after my failure to open the briefcase I wasn’t even confident that I could.
‘Teacake’s a fighter,’ said Alison, coming outside with me. Conor was gone by now but I was still thinking about him and considering the possibility that he might hurt Alison one day if the addiction got the better of him. ‘So is Conor. His dog died last month. He says he doesn’t want a replacement, but I’m going to find him a rescue dog soon. He does better with a dog, honestly. He used to busk and he did all right for himself, considering.’
I nodded, but now I was thinking about the briefcase with a rising sense of frustration. I felt impotent. If only I could re-install it maybe I’d know what I really was, where I really belonged, and what my mission was supposed to be. Who was I to be an angel to any person when I was a lost soul myself? I was thinking of Bethany, of Jeff, of Dr Sorle. I was mixed up with all of them somehow and I had to fix things but how? What was I even going to do now?
‘Hey,’ said Alison, nudging me. ‘It’s been a shit day. Best if we just go to the pub.’
* * *
Alison’s pub was called the Cock Inn. It was half-full and pleasantly scruffy, and we didn’t have to wait long to be served. We took our drinks to a corner safely out of the way of a friendly darts competition but within sight of the giant screen TV. I couldn’t see the door from my position. Cowboys and spies always sit with their backs to the door, don’t they?
I kept the briefcase trapped between my calves.
‘I’m not a drinker,’ Alison said. ‘Don’t let me overdo it. I have to get up early to check the animals, yours included. I’m normally in bed at this hour. Perils of not being fifty-nine anymore.’
Her manner implied we were confederates in ageing. I didn’t want to touch this, because technically I was only two years old. My hair was showing some grey and my kneecaps throbbed from all the walking, but I didn’t have the experience that Alison did.
‘I’m planning to retire when I find someone to take over,’ she said during her second drink. ‘It has to be the right person, though. I can’t hand the practice to just anyone. My clients trust me.’
‘What will you do when you retire?’
‘Ah, that’s easy.’ She finished her shot and chased it back with a long drink of bitter. ‘Travel. So many places I’ve wanted to see but could never take enough time off. My own children have seen more of the world than I have. Maybe I’ll even go to Raratonga, speaking of paradise kinds of places.’
She winked at me. Then her expression turned serious.
‘I guess you can’t tell me what it’s about, this Ben Nevis business.’
‘It may be something to do with Pace Industries,’ I said carefully. She had no visible reaction to the name, but she couldn’t be unaware of the Austen Stevens news story.
‘Hmm. Raratonga. I wonder if Pace have any holdings there. Can’t find anything much in common with Singapore unless you count maybe a relationship with the British Empire. No mountains. I don’t suppose you can give me any more information?’
‘Not Nevis,’ I said. ‘I wonder if the connection is something to do with Liam. Singapore, that’s connected to him. What about the other places?’
‘I don’t picture Liam climbing Ben Nevis, if I’m honest. Bethany always complains that he doesn’t even use his gym membership.’
‘Ben Nevis is the only Nevis I could think of.’ I got up to buy another round. I really should dig a little deeper in my memory. Maybe there were others. Some town in the American midwest, or . . .
When I came back with more drinks she had her phone out. So much for my archives. She said, ‘Nevis is an island in the Caribbean. So they are both paradises, Raratonga and Nevis. Singapore, not so much.’
And what did they have in common?
Tick. Tick.
I had nothing. But I could feel the briefcase touching the outside of my calf. I drank my orange juice while Alison put down a couple more shots and another half-pint of beer.
I wanted to dissolve into the moment, be part of the bar and the crowd and the air and the alcohol. Not have to think.
News from Mars was in the air. Money problems, as usual. Everyone had an opinion.
‘We have to fund these things,’ Alison said. ‘The space program is the pinnacle of our achievement as a species.’
I shook my head, silent.
‘What? You disagree?’
I shrugged. ‘More than one way to skin a cat.’
‘Yeah? What other way of going into space unless you, basically, go into space?’
I looked away, whistling.
Alison thumped her half-pint glass on the counter.
‘So what are you saying? No spaceships? Why not?’
‘Because spaceships aren’t practical. Would you send a bicycle to Mars?’
‘What kind of question is that?’
‘It’s no dumber than expecting to get to another star system or another galaxy using some version of the rockets you use to get to Mars.’
‘What about a gen ship? There’s a game about a gen ship, isn’t there? Murder mystery, I think.’
The bell rang for last orders. Alison lunged for the bar. For someone not planning on overdoing it, she’d already had five or six units pretty quickly and it showed. I wondered what she’d remember of this conversation in the morning.
‘There are games about unicorns, too.’
‘Unicorns are imaginary! There are real rockets, there is a real space program, and some guys at MIT are working on a warp drive I think. Something about relativity.’
‘Rockets used to be imaginary until someone built one. Everything’s imaginary in the beginning. And unicorns can be built.’
‘Unicorns. Can be built. Uh. OK, I guess you got me there. You’re funny, Pearl.’ She leaned into me and pressed into my shoulder with her finger as though to push me away. She pushed herself away instead, and I had to grab for her before she fell off the chair. She batted her eyelashes and said, ‘Next thing you’re going to tell me you’ve seen one.’
I shrugged. ‘You never know what someone may take it into their head to build.’
Even a dinosaur. Even an angel. Are we that sexy? Maybe somewhere there are hacked trilobites and fungi. I’m starting to wonder. Pterosaurs? Prehistoric frogs?
‘So if spaceships aren’t practical, then what is? What’s the alternative?’
‘Shhhh!’ I said. ‘Listen!’
There was a news report about Austen Stevens’ firm: Invest In Futures Foundation, aka IIF. Receivership, they were saying. Or a hostile buyout. Money was missing. So much money that nobody was saying exactly how much. Austen Stevens had authorised transfers into accounts that were now shut down with no trace of their contents and there were
rumours that hidden offshore assets had also been tapped.
‘We are keeping all avenues of enquiry open with respect to Mr Stevens’ disappearance.
‘Here on Wall Street they’re calling him the Six Billion Dollar Man because he vanished, taking an enormous sum of money with him and throwing IIF into chaos.’
‘Aha,’ said Alison, suddenly very clearly. ‘What do Raratonga and Singapore and Nevis have in common? Offshore money laundering.’
Just as she said this, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
‘Yes,’ said Kisi Sorle in his low, intense voice. ‘They do have this in common.’
You can hear the dead
I stood up, shaking off his hand.
‘Let’s step outside. I don’t want any trouble in front of my friend.’
‘Why don’t we walk your friend home, and then you and I can have a quiet talk?’ I wasn’t listening to the plane of intention that stretched behind his words, cracked and pitted and fuming in places. I was listening to the timbre, the bass fur that shivered the air beneath my feathers.
How was he superpositioning himself on Dr Sorle this way? The resemblance between the two of them really was superficial. He was like an evil twin – if not actually evil, he was everything that Dr Sorle wasn’t. Confident. Arrogant. Hard.
Alison drained her glass.
‘This is very exciting for a Tuesday night,’ she said. I put my arm around her protectively as we left the pub. I was sure he had done something bad to Bethany. I wouldn’t put it past him to take another hostage.
I don’t know what the three of us looked like bumbling along the pavement to Alison’s flat. Two of us were brown and one of us was over six feet tall and a hundred kilos, and it wasn’t the dude. Kisi said nothing, but strolled along with his hands in his pockets as though just taking in the air. I waited for Alison to unlock her door. She went in and then before she shut the door she put her hand on my forearm.
‘I am going to text you in ten minutes,’ she said with the excessive care of the inebriated. ‘I want to know you’re OK.’
‘Lock the house,’ I said as I left. I was pretty sure she’d be asleep in ten minutes.
Kisi Sorle stood right where Two Phones had stood earlier, outside the estate agent’s. I shivered, but I walked over there like I wasn’t bothered.
‘You can’t open the briefcase without me,’ he said. His magneto eyes his banshee soul, the light on his skin always moving and I was angry.
‘I know you’re not Dr Sorle. You just used him. And me. I’m getting sick of being messed around by you.’
He started walking away from Alison’s surgery, gesturing for me to go with him.
‘Where are we going?’
‘We can’t stand here arguing under a lamp post,’ he said. ‘Someone will hear us and call the police.’
‘You wouldn’t want that, now, would you?’ I snorted. But I walked with him. He took three strides to every two of mine.
He said, ‘Did you try to open the briefcase yet?’
‘Why?’ I said sharply.
He smiled. ‘I am the only one who can open it. Biometric latch, nature of the security on it.’
‘But it’s my launcher! Why can’t I open it?’
‘It’s only a part of you,’ he said. ‘And it happens to be a part to which I have the key and you don’t.’
‘Don’t you get how creepy that is?’ I said.
‘It might be creepy if you were a real person. But you’re not.’
I had to look away because I was about to cry and I didn’t want him to see it. I couldn’t let him break me.
‘So, Pearl Jones,’ he said. ‘You have the briefcase, but you can’t get it open. So what use is it to you? Without me, you have no way to get back home. And that’s all you really want, isn’t it?’
I shook my head. ‘You held that over me before and you never delivered. You’re going to send me home? You and whose slingshot?’
He laughed.
‘In the matter of slingshots, you would never believe me if I told you. But if you have reason to resent me for borrowing your launcher you might want to consider the trouble you have caused me in turn. You nearly caused that flight to crash, and you delayed me from reaching my destination. I was on time-sensitive business. I was on a mission.’
‘What kind of mission?’ I said sharply.
‘I am in the process of setting up the Resistance.’
I made some inarticulate noises. ‘The Resistance has been around for centuries—’
‘Because it works with causality and it’s based on the Austen Correspondences which as you may know originate in another frame.’
I recalled Marquita talking about the Austen Correspondences but she’d sounded as if she didn’t have all the information, with all of this ‘technology originating in the future’ stuff. I felt a little queasy hearing the term again in this context. I thought the Resistance functioned by statistical interpolation, but I had to admit it would be more effective if it used higher dimensions to coil back and forth across probability spectra. Crudely put: if it used time travel.
I said, ‘I told you not to play with causality.’
‘I wanted to build something,’ he replied. That low voice like velvet, smoke. Saffron. ‘This is important. This is meaningful. This is a way to make sense of all the suffering, all the ruin, all the pain inflicted on my people and the environment, the land where I was born . . .’
‘How?’ I said. ‘What does your country have to do with the Resistance?’
‘There are technologies out there that you can’t imagine. Some of them are in you. And you have no idea. This man’s money can be the beginning of our species getting access to higher-dimensional manipulations and when it does, past and future will be laid out before us like a map and we’ll be able to move them around, create alternatives, run models . . .’
‘Wait. When it does? What do you mean, when it does? The Resistance is already here.’
‘It is right now. Tomorrow, if these transactions don’t go through, the Resistance may never have been. All of its work could be undone. I came here with a series of authorisations that were meant to move money into a series of nest accounts from which it would filter into the IIF Foundation, which was Austen Stevens’ brainchild created with a little help from me. But I got here late, after the news reports of the violence in New York. I was late thanks to you, Pearl. Forbes lost his bottle. I need to get him to change his mind, or the Resistance will never come to pass. Especially with Pace Industries running after him trying to recoup the money Stevens hid in the islands.’
The islands. Not Nevis.
‘Does Liam Forbes know what you’re really doing?’
‘He knows the investment company is a front. This business of using dirty money to set up a research organisation, it began as a sort of decoy or shell game to see if he could outmanoeuvre the authorities . . . Stevens didn’t really believe he’d live forever until he saw you fly past his helicopter. I was going to give the briefcase back to you as soon as the funds transfer went through. I still intend to. But we’re running out of time, and if the oil company picks up Forbes before the transaction is complete, there will be no Resistance.’
I stopped and put my hands on my hips.
‘So you got rid of Jeff the oil guy. I didn’t like him much, either, but I wouldn’t say he was asking to be murdered. So why did you eat him? From where I was standing it looked like you went not just medieval, but prehistoric, my friend.’
He waved his hands loosely, like it was all a joke.
‘No, no, no. That’s ridiculous. Dr Sorle does not host me willingly, but he has no choice because our waveforms are already so similar. Imagine what would happen if I tried to project myself into another species! I would be . . . untranslatable.’
‘I saw what I saw. But even if I believe that you don’t moonlight as a quetzlcoatlus, Jeff is still dead. You meant for that to happen. And you’ve dragged Dr Sorle into it, too.’
‘What do you care about Jeff?’
‘Killing is killing.’
‘I know what killing is,’ he said sharply. ‘I have seen enough of it. But I was only going to store him in the briefcase.’
‘Store him? In this?’ I swung the briefcase wildly for effect. ‘What kind of briefcase is this?’
‘Surely you’ve worked out what kind by now. It’s a waveform launcher. It used to be yours. Maybe you can explain how that creature got in there.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘I don’t know shit since you stuffed me in that old refrigerator.’
It was a half-hearted rebuttal, but I was still reeling at the idea that the Resistance could go up in smoke at any moment. ‘You knew enough to try to take the briefcase off me,’ Kisi said. ‘As I told you before: your actions endangered not only the passengers but all of the Resistance and its work.’
‘Yeah, I hear I’m a real loose cannon but you’re a saint.’
There was a deeply unhappy pause. Rain began to fall.
‘We have to try to repair the situation,’ he said. ‘Keep walking.’
We kept walking. I was aware that we were going back up into the New Town by the same route I’d driven with Teacake, earlier. My knees were feeling it, going up the steep hill. Cars passed us on the cobbles with a rushing sound. Then he said:
‘You are a recycled piece of junk from a dying civilisation, and when I rose up inside you I found you being picked over by crows. They cobbled you together out of extinct animals and nano-libraries and you were always a fool’s hope. You scanned me when I was only a boy, but you got more than you bargained for because I’m not a person who just lets things happen to them and doesn’t do anything about it. You scan me, I launch you. We’re even. So if you are looking for something profound, don’t. You will only be disappointed. Better to know the truth and then no one can own you.’
‘Why? Why would you hijack me? If you had asked me . . .’
He laughed in a falsetto. ‘Ask? Ask? I shouldn’t have to ask. Did you ask before you took my soul? Did you ask before you spewed thousands of copies of it out across the galaxies, like scattering grass seed?’
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