[Sequoia]

by Adrian Dawson

  I looked toward this man for a time, watching his shoulders gently rise and fall as he solemnly looked down at his feet and wondered for a time if he was asleep. It wouldn’t have surprised me one bit (the standard unit of both computational information and level of surprise) given the trite service the KRT Senior Partner of Religious Affairs had delivered at the bland, angular, non-offensive and non-denominative plinth.

  As an aside, KRT’s SPRA is a man apparently well-versed in the funeral services and proceedings of over twenty religions, and you really do have to ask yourself why a seemingly benign scientific corporation would actually need be ready for that many. Worrying, isn’t it?

  But then I saw the man in front look up, take just a moment to stare at the massive screen showing Rachael’s non-smiling company badge image, and sigh. Eventually, my curiosity opened Schrödinger’s box wide and flat-out killed his cat. I simply had to ask…

  I stood, somewhat wearily, and walked slowly down. He was in the very front seats, three from the central aisle and so, rather than immediately fill his view, I chose to invade his personal space from a rather acute angle. He was a young man, slightly younger than me anyway, and I was about to ask his name, but he spoke first.

  Slowly. Softly…

  “How beauty is excelled by manly grace, and wisdom, which alone is truly fair.”

  And he left it at that.

  My eyes narrowed and I’m pretty sure I felt my lip curl. Poetry is not my thing, not at all, but I had read the odd book. Very odd, in fact, because I really didn’t ‘get’ a word of it, but I figured I knew a bit. Enough to get by at a party perhaps, were I the type of guy who attended parties where poetry ever cropped up in conversation.

  Or were I the kind of guy who attended the parties where conversations ever cropped up.

  “Keats..?” I asked. I felt confident.

  He didn’t look up, and his voice remained soft. Thoughtful. “Milton, actually. Paradise Lost.” He paused. “It seems somehow… appropriate.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “But I don’t know your…”

  “Milton,” he replied. He voice was refined, definitely American but almost English in its delivery. He seemed like the kind of man who could recite poetry all day long and many - Rachael included - would rest their heads on the back of their hands and just… listen. He stood to shake my hand. “Milton Grady. I worked with Rachael. Before Cardou.” He looked back to the screen. “Lovely, lovely girl.”

  He was a slightly odd looking kid, old before his time and with a face more akin to a professor than a scientist. His dark brown hair was swept directly backward over his head as though he spent his spare time testing hair gel in a wind tunnel (I worked in Aero, don’t forget) and he had a thin face with quite severe features: the kind of man who would probably feel the need to schedule in a smile.

  He even wore a waistcoat. I mean, seriously… a waistcoat. In tweed.

  “I’m…” I began.

  “Peter Strauss,” he said, knowingly. “I did not see much of dear Rachael of late, but I do know that she loved you very much. Words travel fast.”

  “I loved her too,” I said. “Very much.”

  “Good,” Milton replied. “For a life without love is indeed a life wasted.” I widened my eyes, pursed my lips and lifted my shoulders expectantly. I wasn’t even going to attempt this one. “Milton,” he said eventually, scheduling a slight smile just for me. “Me. I just made it up.”

  I smiled back, then I too turned to study Rachael’s image. It wasn’t her best when it was on a small digital badge so it sure as hell wasn’t her best when shown huge on an 8K screen. It didn’t capture who she was at all. The Rachael I knew had less severe hair, dyed jet black and set in a bob. She also wore a lot more make-up when she was out of school - dark and somewhat odd make up. She loved the whole ‘Goth’ thing, and I loved her for it. Rachael was girl who wore ‘weird’ as a badge of honour. Here, she just looked ‘normal’ and, to anyone who knew her, Rachael Garlens was anything but normal.

  “So you wrote the other poem as well?” I asked. “The first one?”

  He laughed loudly and, oddly, it was good to hear laughter in this place. “Good lord, no,” he said. “That was John Milton. A true, true genius. My mother was…” he pondered his words, “well, let us just say that she was ‘a bit of a fan’. By a twenty-one year process of continued osmosis, I guess that has made me one too.”

  I still couldn’t work out why he had chosen to stay behind longer than the others. Even courtesy had left about ten minutes ago, following decency out of the door whilst sobbing gently on the shoulder of good manners. “Were you and Rachael…?” I was feeling slightly jealous and I could not figure out why. I guess selfishly I wanted this day to be about her and me, not just her. Or indeed other people she knew. Because I didn’t just miss her, I missed who I was around her. I missed us.

  Milton didn’t look like the kind of man Rachael would go for but then… neither did I. Not if I’m completely honest.

  He pulled a face. “Not really my type, old boy.” Thick brown eyebrows dropped low. “If you know what I mean..?”

  “Ah, right…” I said. Then I paused, because I didn’t really know what he meant. At all. Then I widened my eyes. Because suddenly I did. And I know I widened my eyes because felt it, and I wish I hadn’t. “Ahhhh, I see… you’re…Right!” I may have blushed. I’m a bit of an idiot, really.

  “Rachael worked with me in neutrinos,” he explained, continuing unabashed and in his usual slow, measured tones. “The things your cPad uses.” He flicked his fingers dismissively toward my jacket. “Remarkably bright, very talented and supremely witty girl. And, as I am sure you are aware, extremely beautiful. Yes, our Rachael really was a quite remarkable young lady.”

  Our Rachael? My Rachael. Mine. But I nodded. She was. Very. And she was indeed witty. cPads (or celpads) were the thin notepad-like slivers of metal we kept in our pockets that acted as phones. Of course, having no audio/visual systems of their own they simply used BT5 to send the relevant audio or video to embedded ear pieces or - and this is my weapon of choice - fo’glasses - a pun on info, glasses and ‘faux’ given that, in these days of cheap laser surgery, few people who wore fo’glasses actually needed glasses at all, myself included. Innocuous as they looked I wasn’t wearing mine right now but again, that was not down to the respect of not wanting to receive any messages during the service, as I could have just flicked them to off, but rather because I missed the jokes, many of them desperately filthy, that Rachael used to send to them day in day out, even from France. Somehow, just to wear those glasses at her funeral seemed too much like a betrayal.

  Neutrinos, meanwhile, were the particles through which a lot of information was now sent around (or through) the globe. Primarily because neutrinos could pass through absolutely anything: windows, doors, walls and yes… the earth itself. They just never stopped. They have mass, apparently, but that mass is tiny even by the standards of subatomic particles and has never even been measured accurately. What I did understand was that neutrinos do not carry electric charge, which means that they are not affected by the electromagnetic forces that act on charged particles such as electrons and protons. Instead, they are affected only by the weak sub-atomic force of a much shorter range than electromagnetism, and gravity, which is relatively weak on the subatomic scale. Therefore a typical neutrino passes through normal matter almost completely unimpeded. So, what the neutrino team (of which Rachael was once a member) managed to achieve - many years ago and according to a KRT press release I once read) - was to develop a system using subatomic markers that fooled receptors into believing that a particle was indeed positively or negatively charged when it, quite simply, wasn’t. Using this, they created a binary information communication system that could travel at speeds approaching the speed of light which would never, ever hit a brick wall. They called it bin/n or, to the man in the street, ‘binnen’.

  As Milton himself had said: words tr
avel fast.

  Like many profitable fields before it, KRT had used binnen and various other waveless technologies they had developed over the years to sew up the cellphone market in no time. I was aware that Rachael had spent a couple of years on the neutrino team before joining the sequence team - hell, we all bounced around - but she and I rarely talked about work because there were way too many other fun things to do. I sure as hell didn’t know any of her colleagues.

  “Does anyone know what actually happened out there?” I asked. Security, especially given what the press reaction would be if this got out, was extremely tight. The whole ‘Sequence’ thing was very side-level (as many things within KRT were) and so I suspected that around 99.999% of the people within KRT, people such as Milton, would know absolutely nothing about it. I sure as hell wasn’t allowed to discuss it.

  But I had to ask, because Rachael was the woman who loved to live and I knew very little about how she had actually died.

  Milton pursed his lips. “No more than the memo,” he said. He looked to me. “You got the memo?” I nodded. I had, through my glasses, at 08:16 that morning. He shrugged. “Something went awry, as things often do when one pushes hard against an envelope, and there was a…” he searched for a suitable word, one that did not imply sudden death in such harsh terms, “…reaction. No-one is permitted near the site at the moment, not even the French, especially in light of our beloved leader’s demise the very same day, but from what I hear it is just that now: a site. Very little remains, I am sorry to say. Relations with France are obviously not good, that much I do know. I feel we are about to find ourselves neck deep in one hell of a mess, and it will be anything but diplomatic.” He paused, perhaps remembering that Rachael’s own parents were French. Whilst I would love to fool myself into thinking that she desperately wanted to do the same job I did, or that she was ‘into’ the same kind of cool things I was, I knew damn well that her lineage was the real reason she had taken the Cardou gig. It was so that she could get to see her family at least once in a blue moon. They rarely travelled themselves, not even to this.

  “I really am exceptionally sorry, old boy,” he said. Softly, like he meant it.

  I nodded. “Me too.”

  “I should away, back to my neutrinos,” he said, with a deliberately reluctant smile. He took one more fleeting glance at the screen then looked back to me one more time. “They’re funny little buggers,” he said, dry as a ship’s biscuit, “They do not stop for anyone.” I laughed gently.

  “Thank you for coming,” I said. “From Rachael. And me.”

  “There was no keeping me,” he said. “Like I say, she was a quite remarkable young lady and she will be missed by all whose paths she crossed.” He took another moment to look me straight in the eye; more serious this time. “Now, if you need anything, or I can be of some service, you need only ask. She would have done the same for me.”

  He looked like he meant it.

  “Can you bring her back?” I asked, lamely. I was half joking.

  He placed a hand firm on my shoulder and smiled a consolatory smile. “That I cannot do, sir. That I cannot do. But anything else, anything at all, you be sure and let me know.” He held the hand there for a few more moments before it slid gently away.

  I smiled back. “Thank you.” And I too looked like I meant it.

  Because I did.

  TWO

  Thursday, September 13, 1643.

  Le Couvent de Notre-Dame-de-la-Merci, Couiza, France.

  In the fading amber light of a summer evening, far warmer than many which had preceded it, Marie Thibeault dipped the next item of rough, dirty clothing into the trough for a few moments before dragging it, dripping and heavy, onto the darkened stone. Picking up a brush with blistered fingers she scrubbed hard for as long as her arms could bear the effort and then paused for breath and wiped her brow. There was no sweat, but her skin was clammy and warm. As she washed she dreamed, primarily of a boy she had spied when she had ventured to trade supplies in Couiza. He was tall and handsome with rugged features and deep-set eyes sitting intensely under a thick set of brows. Like she, he was in his late teens, she figured; only just growing into his true adult skin, but she was certain that it was going to very fine adult skin indeed. Firm and taut and...

  Sister Marie was becoming aware that she did not actually want to be a nun.

  As she dreamed and washed and dreamed some more a distant, repetitive clopping and rattling sound, previously masked by the coarse bristles against an even coarser material, caught her ears and she looked up. As thoroughly as she had attempted to scour the garments, her eyes now scoured the path beyond the trough.

  Slowly, through a distant veil of mist that seemed to inhabit the marshlands on even the warmest of days, three shapes came into view. They were stretched at first, ethereal almost, but eventually they filled out like well-fed piglets. Horses, and with them, riders. Over the distant stones of an ill-formed track, one of the horses could be seen towing a heavily laden and crudely built wooden cart which rattled and creaked as it fought a hard fight to keep a grip of everything that had been dumped upon it.

  Almost under her breath, she said: “Ils sont ici!” Then, slowly, she dropped the brush. It splashed loudly into the water as realisation dawned and she rose to her feet, a smile forming. With barely a thought, she turned and ran breathless through the wide doorway behind her, the heavy oak already open. Her thin steps and skittered slides echoed the full length of the tiled corridor as she cast her evening vows to the wind and shouted to anyone who might hear. “Ils sont ici! Préparez! Préparez! Nourriture! Rapidement!”

  The makeshift and somewhat sporadically furnished convent, under the command of elderly Sister Margarita, occupied the whole of the north-western wing of the increasingly downtrodden Chateau des Ducs de Joyeuse; the side which directly bordered the banks of the River Aude. Lying deep within Cathar country, the Chateau had been constructed relatively recently; having been completed in 1550 by Jean de Joyeuse, Governor of Narbonne and Lieutenant General of the Languedoc. As a result, the stones had yet to fully age and, were it not for the vines which crept like death around its walls, it would have looked as though its life could be measured in weeks, not years. The chateau had lain empty, however, since it had been besieged in 1577 during one of the many wars fought between the Protestants and the Catholics. In the early 1620s, following their own persecution and displacement, the nuns had been granted temporary refuge there by the Joyeuse family, acting both as housekeepers and moral guardians for the area until the Duke’s descendants saw fit to return. With further acrimony building daily between France and Spain, and the Chateau sitting so close to the border as to divide even street-level opinion, that could yet prove to be some years away.

  The thick walls were typical of many which had been built over the preceding centuries in the Languedoc and Cévennes regions. Wide cylindrical towers on each of its four corners had each been offered a sparse and disparate arrangement of tall and wide windows, as well as low conical roofs of red tile which offered stark contrast to the lighter stone which held them aloft. The structure as a whole was almost completely symmetrical in all directions and, in the centre of that symmetry on the south-eastern wall, a large pitted rustic doorway - the doorway through which Sister Marie had just disappeared like a kitten scalded - led through the southern quadrant to the austere Renaissance courtyard. It was here where the sisters - in the absence of Marie suddenly casting a frantic series of echoed yelps of delight - chose to find their moments of heavenly-imposed solace.

  By the time the once-shod, battered hooves clattered to a halt on the levelled stones which bordered the Chateau, Sister Margarita had already firmly chastised Marie for her annoying enthusiasm, banished her to the kitchen to aid with food preparation and was now waiting with a warm smile and three of the more sedate sisters to greet her returning guests.

  William Clopton, permanently accompanied on such journeys by two armed guards of the King
himself, dismounted and gave orders that the horses be stabled and fed before the men took food themselves. They would hammer new shoes come morning.

  Only then did he turn, somewhat abruptly, to his host.

  “The girl we brought to you...? She is still here..?” His voice seemed to have been whittled sharp, his eyes showed the weight of a long trek and too many nights without sleep; his shoulder-length hair and usually pristine beard were now ragged and dishevelled, but his words, as ever, were clear and carried the firm purpose and authority his position so often demanded.

  Sister Margarita’s awkward grasp of English, combined with a thickly-colloquial Franco-Hispanic accent, made her reply sound comically strained. She could see a seriousness in her guest’s expression that she was unaccustomed to, especially in a man who had been so genial with every word delivered in over half a dozen visits in as many years.

  “Of course.” She looked a little shocked. “I fear she has nowhere else to go. But..?”

  Clopton held up a hand gloved in once-fine leather to silence her. “I need to see her. Immediately.”

  The glove was sodden with mud from the journey and a fair amount of that thick, black mud had found its way as far north as his face, his beard thick with clumps. Margarita mused that he was as splattered with dirt as the children of the nearby village when they returned from kicking a pigskin at each other on a wet winter’s eve.

  “You wish not to bathe, or perhaps take food, before you…?”

  Her turned to face her. Calmly. “Immediately.”

  Decisively and feeling no need to await further invitation, he strode through the doors and along the corridor which had so recently been echoing to Sister Marie’s excited gait. As Margarita followed as quick as she might, the terracotta tiles and rough plaster walls threw fresh the percussion of soft, hurried moccasin into a beat of sturdy, purposeful boots. The speed with which they now walked was far quicker than the ageing Margarita would have liked and, as she hunched her long habit, her expression demonstrated as much.