Go down inside it, she said. The hiss of her breath told me go in – as if I had tiny cameras in every cell. As if I know the way. There are vast intermolecular spaces, there are nuclear engines generating the strong force.
Could I sail there? In my small leaky boat, could I?
Go on, Pearl. Don’t be afraid.
I pushed until sweat sprang up in my pores. I rooted myself to the ground, lined up joints and ligaments, recruited muscle. I gasped for breath and pushed and I honed myself down. I slid like a fish into the gap between light waves and flowed into the molecular structure of the tree. Most of it was empty and I can incorporate myself into the emptiness. I am the smoke of thought. I filter through the years, the accumulation of wood and memory.
It’s very curious. I can detect in the cellulose tiny insertions, irregularities so subtle that at first I think I must be imagining them. The cellulose has strings of highly structured carbon running through it, and the carbon tubes have been doped with HD gates, and the pattern of doping has a code, and the code unlocks something that has been hidden in these primeval molecules.
It comes to me in glimpses and flashes, all sensation and scraps of mathematics.
I’m in the Cretaceous but I’m touching parts of the universe that are inconceivably distant. There is a presence here in HD, an intelligence that is so big I can at most be a lifeboat to its vast ship. It has left fingerprints, echoes of itself that spiral updimension and touch the future in places that ordinary space can’t reach. I’ve sensed it before. But here, here in the depths of history, the sense of a deeper intelligence is much stronger than anything I felt pushing metal at Dubowski’s.
Something ineffable has been sown into these biological structures.
I don’t dare think what I think. It’s almost as if this wood remembers the future. As does the soil. And one day this tree and all of this world will become crude oil in the ground and, when it burns, the ghosts will speak to the boy Kisi who will assume they are his ancestors.
But they’re not his ancestors. His ancestors haven’t been born yet. The waveforms trapped in these Cretaceous molecules are not local to Earth.
How did I get to Dubowski’s? How did I find my way there, and what was I before that happened? Or is that my ending, and am I now ravelling upstream, fighting the tide? There’s a sophisticated HD structure here in this wood. Who put it here, and when, and how?
This business in the tree, it’s made of the same stuff as my wings. The same mystery, folded to implication, to silence. And it’s calling me. Could I climb inside this cellulose and project myself across vast spaces? Would I find my way home?
I want to. So bad. I want to stretch for it. And I’m afraid. The tension of opposites sings behind my eyes.
* * *
A hoarse cry broke the ambience of the forest and scared me out of my reverie. Adrenaline sizzled on my skin. I moved away from the damaged tree, looking overhead for the source of the sound. I had an aggressive headache. Sweat was dripping off me and my biceps were trembling after the exertion. I could hear animals moving in the forest, feathered things that were noisy in the leaf litter.
Something large on the wing passed over the forest, calling with a surprisingly musical voice. The bottom of my stomach dropped out when I glimpsed the underbelly of the quetzlcoatlus. I scrambled up the hill, following the direction of its flight.
By the time I got up on the rocks, light was failing. Judging by how quickly the sun went down, we were somewhere much closer to the equator than Edinburgh. The forest was full of deep shadow and even the open swamp had a bluish look to it as I came out on the rocks at the top of the hill. The wind brought nocturnal cries and a strong smell of vegetable decay. The sandstone here had been sculpted smooth – by water? – and was now bare of vegetation but heavily scored by what might have been claw marks.
‘You finally made it.’ It was a man’s voice, bubbling with mucus. Somewhere behind me. I whipped around on my heel, looking for the source of the voice. Even then I almost didn’t see Austen Stevens. He was propped up against the bole of a giant angiosperm, clad in thin pyjamas that seemed unspoiled by his adventures. The oxygen mask was on the ground; the tank lay aslant among the root system of the tree.
The old man coughed. When I went over to him he bestowed on me a weak yellow smile.
‘Let’s talk turkey,’ he said.
Turkey
Austen Stevens’ voice was thin and it seemed to struggle to reach my ears but, like sound under the sea, it also came from everywhere. I didn’t want to know him, not this way or any way. I had no choice.
‘I will have my way,’ he rasped. ‘I knew you would come.’
The gluttony of him. I ought to take him in my teeth. Snap his neck. It would be so easy.
I could feel every contour of him: evasive, cunning, self-righteous, blind. Soft and failing and afraid and determined to stay alive. For all his ugliness, he was still human. Far from the best, but not the worst either.
And even if he had been the worst, what could I have done? Snapping necks isn’t my M.O. Saving is, as loath as I may feel to save this one. It’s what I do.
‘I want to live,’ he tells me.
Everything wants to live, I say. Even things that think they don’t, deep down, they do. You don’t get to decide if or when you’re born. You didn’t. I didn’t.
‘The place you come from. They have the power there to fix me. It’s already underway.’
He couldn’t know this. He only knew what bullshit Kisi had spun him. But Kisi knew. What if it was really true?
‘Your money was stolen,’ I told him. ‘The technology you think is going to save you will never exist, not the way Kisi told you, anyway. The deal fell through.’
‘You can save me, kid,’ he says. ‘I always knew you could. Ever since I saw you in the sky.’
‘It was a scam,’ I said.
‘Kisi thinks it was a scam. But how? I’m here. You’re here. You have the power to renew my life. Him I never trusted. But you. When I saw you there, in the sky, with those beautiful wings . . . I knew you were real. And here you are. You came for me.’
I sat back on my heels.
‘Why would I want to save you?’
‘It’s why you were sent to Earth. You have to take me away to the future. I paid.’
Now I’m stuck. And this is how these guys operate. I’ll never be able to understand it. Here I am giving it away, my energy, my compassion, my strength. And dude wants to sell my own love back to me at a price. Everything’s a fucking commodity.
‘There’s no way to be sure that any amount of money could build the Resistance now that the original plan has been changed,’ I said. ‘Nice try for playing on my human sympathies, though. Someone I loved is gone because of a piece of embezzlement. Who orchestrated that?’
He laughed. ‘Nobody has to orchestrate Murphy’s Law, sweetheart. One thing I’ve observed in my time is that you can always count on shit going wrong.’
I tried to look past the greasy Venetian blinds of his eyes. How little meaning there is in the eyeball: reactive pupils, dodgy blood vessels, rime of tear-duct scum, sure thing; but as for expression or soul windowhood, not so much. The whole notion is false, a lazy supposition. Sure, OK, maybe some summation of facial movement characterises the neighbourhood of the eye and sets it up for its role as chief actor in a person’s face, but all of this is indirect. Implied. If you really look in someone’s eyes you don’t see the eye. This other trick happens where you see a Reisman sum of everything but. It’s a trick.
Stevens was puckering. Some absence in him tugged at me, a sinking-inward as to a sump like the chemical badlands he created. That’s fanciful, I know. Maybe I just saw the decay of age and the algorithms of selfhood that were starting to harden up into parody.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it, kid? Here I am. A fossil, among the stuff that will become fossil fuel. It’s quite an irony. I can’t say I regret having the chance to fly, thoug
h.’
‘It’s not for me to decide what to do with you,’ I said. ‘That’s up to Dr Sorle. He is the one you promised money. He is the one whose life you ruined.’
There was a silence from him. In the space where his thoughts had been I could now hear a rushing noise, a blurring of inputs that reminded me we were in the briefcase, travelling, all the while rolling down some invisible escarpment towards a tideless sea. Felt like we were skating down the diagonal of the diagonal of infinity in Hilbert’s hotel, our hypothetical skateboard racked up on one edge like we were daredevils. He was the devil and I was the dare.
As I waited for his response, a reek of decay began to rise from the swamp, bringing wavering bands of heat that shook the sky. It brought me the smell of Austen’s ancestors and of their deaths, stories gusting on the air of this place inside the naugahide briefcase outside the world.
How long had he been here? The oxygen in this atmosphere was rich enough that I could understand how he was getting by without it. There were puddles of water in the hollows of the sandstone. Maybe he had dragged himself to them. I couldn’t understand why no predator had taken him. The spire of rock that had drawn my attention was one of many similar formations; the land here was a strange mixture of upthrust rock, forest, and flat swamp. We were in a larger depression in surrounding hills, and it seemed as though the water had no outlet from this valley. I could see where there must be deep gorges under the surface of the marsh, but no water flowed. Shadows were forming now. The downgoing sun showed a little of its disc through a furore of cloud, and there was a hint of relief now from the wet torpor of day. At last I felt like I could get a good breath of air. Violet shadows appeared under the pterosaur’s mottled wings as it spread them, and the breeze carried its musk to my nostrils.
I began to think he had expired. It was so quiet. But even as I began to dare hope he was gone, his words came to me, blandly predictable.
‘It doesn’t matter if IIF was a scam. You’re here, and you’re real. If you take me with you I’ll give Dr Sorle the money I promised him.’
‘I’m not taking you with me.’ The irony was that I could no longer take him anywhere. Where would I take him? Into the HD gateways in the trees? Who or what had seeded the cellulose of this time and place with HD gates? Not the Resistance. So who? And how could I be sure of anything when I was now inside my own component, my launcher. Or was it inside me?
Austen Stevens coughed himself into what must have been a state of exhaustion. I think he drowsed off. Large insects were active and they kept coming for my blood. I let my wings out to keep them back. Felt like a horse swishing flies.
It occurred to me that I was waiting for him to die. It was as though nothing could change until he was gone. What does it mean to sit with the dying? Is he contagious? All that failure, all that ending, all that clinging – I can’t catch it, can I?
Of course not, Pearl.
But I’m afraid of him.
He goes on breathing. I don’t know how not to walk down his pathways any more than I know how not to smell the fabric-softener on his freshly-washed pyjamas. Lavender for the man who has robbed and killed unchecked because it was all just a contest; the thought offends me almost to the sickpoint in my back throat.
I watch myself. I am jockeying his life, I am inhabiting his slackening tendons and blood-starved nails. He is so sure he is all right. Never a tyrant; instead, a visionary. I could rip him apart with my bare hands and he wouldn’t understand why. He would only understand that he had lost the game.
Just when I thought he wouldn’t speak again he said, ‘I’ll give you the bank codes.’
A very passable Glendronach
Gunther’s place isn’t a real airplane hangar, it’s just a huge old corrugated steel barn with a vaulted roof and a cruddy cement floor on which a thin layer of muck was left to dry. In the one dry corner are a hosepipe, an electrical outlet, and a stack of pallets. Two pallets have been laid out nearby, and on them are stacked some amplifiers, a keyboard, and a partly-dismantled drum kit, all strapped down under quilted wraps. The building sports holes in the roof and at the joints of the walls, so that there are drips and damp patches. In the middle of the barn slumps an old harrow with hanks of mouldy straw hanging from its teeth.
Alison leaves you here (‘in case anything funny happens’ she says gracelessly) and goes into the house. You work out your exits and possible hiding places. You don’t like the way the barn is set in the bracket of two steep hills. Even in middle age you can run; but you don’t want to deal with a helicopter and the ground cover here is nonexistent: there is heather, and there is gorse, and there are miniature birch trees no taller than you are. Like a hobbit forest. You’d have done better in the city.
You watch the approach to the property through a rusted joint in the side of the barn. It’s all dead quiet. Twenty minutes later Alison comes out carrying a mountain of blankets and a rucksack. She hands you a sandwich and an energy drink, then starts packing you a survival kit.
‘If they come, I’ll stall them. You can go up the back of the valley and into the glen. There’s proper woodland there. I’m packing the basics you need. Over the other side of the ridge is a pub called the Red Lion. I’m going to bring Gunther’s old motorbike over there in the morning. It’s the best I can do.’
You take up your vantage point at the slit. The tyre on the van is going flat. The sky droops with moisture, distant clouds bleeding their dark grey edges on to the hills. You can hear a helicopter approaching.
‘Here we go.’
Alison goes out to the practice van and comes back carrying a big wooden tackle box. You see her stop, shade her eyes, and watch the helicopter approach. It flies over at some speed and disappears over the line of hills to the north.
She comes in whistling. She sets the box on the floor and rummages.
‘It’s a military helicopter. They do training runs over these hills all the time. Don’t be surprised if you see F-16s, either.’
You find it hard to stay still. The helicopters bring back memories of the militia. And you know how easy it is for Pace to buy whatever it wants.
‘In all likelihood I won’t get out of this alive. It would be better if they’d just shoot me down. I don’t want to be used anymore. By anyone.’
‘You would really take death over being used?’
‘I would.’
‘Right. There’s a very passable Glendronach in Gunther’s office,’ she says. ‘I’ll just go fetch it.’
‘If it’s anything like that stuff in your glove box, I’d rather have a Diet Coke,’ you say.
‘Lucky for you my hearing is going with age. I’ll be right back. Don’t change into anything bigger than a breadbox.’
When she comes back with the whisky she offers you the drum stool and takes a bale of mouldy hay for her own seat.
‘Waiting is the hardest thing anybody can do,’ she says, touching glasses with you. ‘There’s nothing quite like it. Sometimes it’s also the bravest thing you can do.’
Your whole body shudders when you drink the stuff. Alison laughs at you, then takes a sip herself. She closes her eyes.
‘That,’ she says, ‘is a near religious experience.’
‘I’m not feeling it,’ you say. She points to what’s left in your glass.
‘Try again.’
You look into the whisky. So innocuous-looking. Stained water.
‘Why are you doing this?’ you ask her.
‘Why are you?’ she fires back, like it’s a ping-pong match.
You sigh.
‘Because I’m easily provoked. If I’d walked away from the offer Stevens made me, I’d have always wondered. And do you know what I think? The very first time it happened to me, the first time the other one . . . of myself . . . took me over, it was right before Stevens came to me with the whole “I’m dying, I want to make a deal” business. Knowing what I now know, I think he . . . the other me . . . went to Stevens with this crazy
offer of immortality, and I think he told Stevens exactly what to say to me to get me to do it.’
You didn’t know you thought that until you heard yourself say it. You throw back the rest of the dram the way you would a friendlier drink, and it still tastes terrible. And you laugh.
‘And if that’s true, I guess you could say I inflicted this whole thing on myself.’
There’s a long silence. Rain is falling on the corrugated roof of the barn. It’s a sound from childhood and it belongs with the smell of wet leaves and pepper soup, remembered uyayak; the barn and the whisky are all wrong.
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ you say to Alison, who is staring at you like you’re an optical illusion she’s trying to figure out.
She stalls by pouring another round.
‘When you get to my age,’ she says at last, ‘you feel like you’re just trying to hold on to what you have while it slips away. You realise you’re supposed to be grateful for this, but I’m not. I feel like there’s something I missed first time round, and now there aren’t any do-overs left.’
You both drink. You’re getting used to the foul taste now.
‘All these years, the oil has been my teacher. It showed me which way to go. Maybe not directly. But there was always information for me, if I listened. I turned my pain into knowledge. I turned my anger into work. And when Austen Stevens tried to control me, I knew that he couldn’t. I used him right back. The man who grew up in the simulators, he’s nothing like me. He can walk in my muscles but he doesn’t understand me.’
She touches glasses with you.
‘The bodies, Dr Sorle. If you really do know where they are buried, that’s got to be worth something to someone.’
You study the liquid in your glass. You can almost smell the engine exhaust from the outboard that you used to bring clients to the onshore facility. The handshakes. The exchange of favours. Some are in government now. Some are dead. Some are sunning themselves in Marbella and their children are skiing in Switzerland. Pace made a vast fortune in Kuè and the company never even missed most of what was taken. It was all that fat.
Occupy Me Page 18
