I’m standing at the mouth of a very large river, she’d said, at the moment when the future becomes the present; and I’m looking across the land where the water originated, seeing the first fork, and beyond that the tributaries branching away, and then the tributaries’ tributaries, splitting, multiplying, ad infinitum. The far horizon gives birth to a trillion rills, all converging to the mouth, each one the source of a possible destiny. They are the Tau lines, future history. On their way towards me they clash and merge, building in strength, in probability, eradicating the wilder fringes of feasibility as they approach confluence, until they reach the mouth: the point of irrevocable certainty.
She could send her mind floating back along those streams, questing, probing for what would come. The prospect terrified her, he knew. She’d hidden that from the Army, but of course he’d seen it at once. The knowledge cost him; as the one person whose empathy allowed him to see the true extent of that dread he felt protective towards her. He was her involuntary confessor, obligated.
Way ahead of her, at the furthest extremity of each of those streams, where the flow was little more than a trickle in the dust, her death waited for her. She refused to let her mind roam far into any of the possible futures; but even that self-imposed proscription meant she lived with the mortal fear of the streams drying up, one by one, the drought inching towards her; a reality so blatant she’d never be able to shield her eldritch sight against it.
Greg thought of himself sitting in a plane as it began its long fall out of the sky; standing paralysed by fear in the middle of the road as some huge lorry bore down, brakes squealing, unable to stop in time. She had to live with the prospect of seeing that eventuality raising its head every minute of every day. Knowing that it was inevitably going to happen.
So he forgave her for going to seed. His espersense was a heavy cross. He would never have the strength to carry hers.
“Exactly,” he said. “Philip Evans made it back from the grave. Can you see who’s behind the blitz on his NN core?”
“Hmm.” Her mind betrayed how intrigued she was. “I’ll have a look.” She cut a slice of almond cake and began munching, staring up at the ceiling, eyes unfocused.
He sipped his tea, trying to identify the herbs. Rosemary, possibly. The market stalls weren’t particularly choosy what they ground up.
“Not a thing,” Gabriel said.
He didn’t show any disappointment. (Was there some alternative-universe Greg Mandel currently raging at her failure?) The answer did exist. Down one of those Tau lines was a future where he and Gabriel teamed up and successfully tracked down whoever had attacked Philip Evans. But for the moment the distance was too great. She wouldn’t stretch herself that far, not even for friendship’s sake.
“Will you help?” he asked.
She looked dreadfully unhappy.
“No big visions,” he reassured her. “Just cross out probabilities for me, eliminate suspects and dead ends. That kind of thing. I’ve got to interview Event Horizon’s giga-conductor team tomorrow, that’s over two hundred people. Then I’ll probably wind up having to go through the security division’s headquarters staff for the mole. My espersense can’t last out that long. Twenty’s my limit. And that hurts bad enough.”
“All right,” she whispered.
He held up the card Morgan Walshaw had given him. Gabriel stared at it, mesmerized. He could sense the trepidation mounting in her mind. She wanted to soar into the future and find out what it meant. The larger, ever-present dread held her back.
“Afterwards,” he said, “succeed or fail, I’m going to pay for your operation. That’s your fee, Gabriel, that gland is coming out.”
She looked at him incredulously, her mind spilling out hope. Her eyes watered. “I can’t,” she moaned.
“Bullshit,” he said softly. “I’m the one who can’t, I can keep my demons at bay. You can’t. You think I’m blind to what the gland has done to you? You’re getting out, Gabriel, no more living under the pendulum.”
Tears began to roll down her cheeks, smearing the makeup. She twisted round to avoid his eyes, looking out of the window.
He put his hands on the nape of her neck, feeling the solid knots of muscle, massaging gently. “I hate seeing you like this. You don’t live; you crawl from day to day. It’s a miserable existence. Too timid to walk under the open sky in case a lightning bolt hits you. It’s got to stop, Gabriel. No messing.”
“You bastard, Mandel. I’d be nothing without the gland, nothing.”
Outside, the sun shone down on the school’s old chapel on the other side of the garden, its pale stone gleaming like burnished yellow topaz.
“You’d be human.”
“Bastard. Prize bastard.”
“Truthful bastard.”
He turned her to face him. She was suddenly busy with a lace handkerchief, wiping away tears, making an even worse hash of the make-up.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll start with the Event Horizon Astronautics Institute, OK?”
She looked confused for a moment, then gathered her thoughts, entering into that familiar trance for a few seconds. “Yes, that’s a good start.”
“Right, then. I’ll pick you up at nine o’clock.”
“Fine.” She sniffed hard, then blew into the handkerchief.
Greg leant forward and kissed her brow.
CHAPTER 17
A pair of dolphins spiralled around Eleanor, silver bubbles streaming out from their flashing tails, wrapping her at the centre of an ephemeral DNA helix. Playful scamps. She’d come to love the freedom of the water over the last few weeks. Down here, surrounded by quiet pastel light, tranquillity reigned; life’s ordinary worries simply didn’t exist below the surface. Sometimes she spent hours swimming along the bottom of Rutland Water; one small part of her mind checking the long rows of water-fruit rooted in the silt, while her memories and imagination roamed free. Daydreaming really, but this gentle universe understood and forgave.
The marine-adepts had warned her about the state. “Blue lost’, they called it. But she couldn’t believe it was that dangerous. Besides, the reservoir was finite, not like the oceans they talked of, where some of their kind never returned. Swimming away to the edge of the world.
She helped tend their crops three or four days each week; with inflation the way it was, the water-fruit money came in useful. And she could spend the time thinking about life, the world, and Greg, weaving the strands in fanciful convolutions; so that when she left the water behind her mind was spring fresh and eager for the sights, sounds, and sensations of land again. Mental batteries recharged. The world outside that ever-damned kibbutz was too big to endure in one unbroken passage.
She felt a dolphin snout poking her legs, upsetting her balance. It was Rusty, the big old male. She knew him pretty well by now, though some of the others were hard to distinguish. Rusty had a regular ridge of scar tissue running from just behind his eyes down to his dorsal fin. The marine-adepts never talked about it, so she never asked. But something had been grafted on to him at one time. She didn’t like to think what.
They’d brought eight dolphins with them to the reservoir to help harvest their water-fruit. The dolphins’ long, powerful snouts could snip clean through a water-fruit’s ropy root. All of them were ex-Navy fish, their biochemistry subtly adjusted, enabling them to live comfortably in fresh water as well as salt. Greg said that was so they could be sent on missions up rivers. But whatever Rusty had been made to do back then hadn’t affected his personality; he could be a mischievous devil when he wanted to be.
Like now.
She suddenly found herself flipped upside-down, whirl currents from his thrashing tail tumbling her further. The remains of Middle Hambleton spun past her eyes. Shady rectangular outlines of razed buildings rising from the dark grey-green alluvial muck. One day she was determined she’d explore those sad ruins properly.
She stretched her arms out, slowing herself, then bent her legs, alterin
g her centre of gravity, righting herself. A shadow passed over her, Rusty streaking away, beyond retribution. She let herself float upwards.
At the back of her mind she was marvelling at her own enjoyment. She, a girl who couldn’t even swim six weeks ago, even though the kibbutz at Egleton was right beside the reservoir. The marine-adepts had thought that hilarious.
For the first few weeks after she’d moved into Greg’s chalet she’d had a sense of being divorced from selected sections of his life. Apart from the Edith Weston villagers everyone he knew was ex-military; the marine-adepts, Gabriel, that mysterious bunch of people in Peterborough he’d referred to obliquely a couple of times, even the dolphins. They were a hard-shelled clique, one that’d formed out of shared combat experiences. She could never possibly be admitted to that. And the marine-adepts were naturally reticent around other people; it wasn’t quite a racial thing, but they did look unusual until you were used to them. The only time they left the reservoir was to drive their water-fruit crop to Oakham’s railway station.
Breaking through their mistrust had been hard going. The turning point had come when Nicole had finally taken over her swimming lessons, more out of exasperation than kindness, she’d thought at the time. But a bond had formed once she realized how keen Eleanor was, and the rest of the floating village’s residents had gradually come to accept her. A triumph she considered equal to walking out on the kibbutz in the first place.
She could never hope to match the marine-adepts in the water. They had webbed feet which enabled them to move through the water with a grace rivalling the dolphins, and their boosted haemoglobin allowed them to stay submerged for up to a quarter of an hour at a time. But with flippers and a bioware mirror-lung recycling her breath she was quite capable of helping them in the laborious nurturing of the water-fruit. Planting the kernels deep in the silt, watching out for fungal decay in the young shoots, clearing away tendrils of the reservoir’s ubiquitous fibrous weed which could choke the mushy pumpkin-like globes. The marine-adepts had staked out eight separate fields in the reservoir, and earned quite a decent living from them.
Her only real failure among Greg’s friends had been Gabriel Thompson. The woman was so stuck-up and short-tempered Eleanor had wound up simply ignoring her. She suspected Gabriel had a jealousy problem. Always mothering Greg.
She broke surface five hundred metres off shore, about a kilometre away from the Berrybut time-share estate. The sun was low in the sky, and she could see flames rising from the estate’s bonfire.
Rusty’s chitter tore the air ten metres behind her. She slapped the water three times and he vanished again. Some Navy dolphins had been fitted with bioware processor nodes to make them totally obedient to human orders. But Nicole said the Navy had left Rusty’s brain alone. The marine-adepts used a hand-signal language to talk with the reservoir dolphins. Eleanor had mastered most of it, and Rusty nearly always did as she asked. That little edge of irrepressible uncertainty in his behaviour was what made him such fun.
She felt the change in water pressure as he rose underneath her, then she was straddling him, clutching desperately at his dorsal fin as he began to surge forwards. Homeward-bound fishermen in their white hireboats stared with open-mouthed astonishment as she sped past, slicing out an arc of creamy foam in her wake.
Rusty let her off fifteen metres from the shore, where the bottom started to shelve. A flock of panicky flamingos took flight, pumping wings creaking the air above her. She gave her steed an affectionate slap and waded ashore, arms aching from hanging on against the buffeting water.
The familiar claimed her as she walked up the slope to chalet six. Meat roasting on the bonfire, pork by the smell of it. Dusty whirlwind of the football game, rampaging along the side of the spinney. Swapping easy greetings with the few adults milling about. Dogs underfoot, Labradors, who made the best rabbiters. A couple of wolf-whistles following her progress. She smiled at that. Something else she wouldn’t have been able to cope with before.
She wore a one-piece costume whenever she went into the water now. The polka-dot bikini which Greg had bought her was far too skimpy for any serious diving-typical lecherous male. Not that she wanted to change him. Night time with Greg was one continuous orgy, hot, strenuous, sweaty, and tremendously exciting; another fruit forbidden to her at the kibbutz.
The Duo was parked in its usual spot. She was looking forward to hearing what he’d been called away to, the message he’d left on the terminal had been oddly brief.
She shrugged out of the mirror-lung, and plugged its nutrient coupling into the support gear on the veranda.
Greg was inside, dressed in an old purple sweatshirt and shorts, fooling around with the kitchen gear. Whatever he was cooking smelt good.
“My saviour.” She gave him a radiant smile. “After your message I wasn’t sure if you’d be back, and I haven’t got the energy left to cook.”
He slurped a spoonful of the sauce he was simmering.
“Béarnaise, it’s nice, try some.” He held up the spoon.
She took a sip as his other arm slipped around her waist, hand coming to rest on her buttock. “You’re right, not bad.” For a moment she thought he was going to dump the meal and urge her into the bedroom. He always got turned on by the sight of her in a wet swimming costume. And there was plenty of time before she was due behind the bar at the Wheatsheaf. But then she looked closely at his face, and wrinkled her nose up. “God, you look awful.”
“Thank you.”
“Sorry…but, what have you been up to?”
“Do me one favour,” he implored.
“What?”
“Just don’t tell me I look like I’ve seen a ghost.”
“I don’t like it,” Eleanor murmured.
It was long past midnight, the time for honest talk. They were lying on top of the big bed, the duvet crumpled up somewhere on the floor. The heat from making love beneath it would have been intolerable. As it was, they’d left the window full open, curtains wide to let the balmy night air flow around their bodies.
A quarter-moon was riding high in the sky, bathing the room with a spectral phosphorescence. She stretched out on her side beside him, her hands pillowing her head.
“Why not?” There was a certain tenseness in his voice.
“Just don’t,” she said.
“Female intuition?”
“Something like that.”
He wet the tip of his forefinger and began to trace a line from her shoulder to the flare of her hips, innocently curious. “I’m supposed to be the one with the hyper-senses.”
“You want logic? OK. It’s too big. You’re a one-man band, they’re warring armies. They’re out to kill each other, Greg. That security man, Walshaw, said as much. This giga-conductor stuff, it pushes the stakes too high. You don’t know who the other side is, you don’t know who to watch out for. There are an awful lot of kombinates who will suffer because of the giga-conductor. Any one of them could decide they don’t want you interfering.”
“Firstly, I share Julia’s conviction that Kendric di Girolamo is involved somewhere, the mole is his plant. So at least I know one direction of attack which I should be guarding myself from. And secondly, I’m not convinced that it is the giga-conductor which is the root cause of the blitz. Erasing Philip Evans’s memories wouldn’t halt its introduction, not with the Ministry of Defence pushing it. He’s important, but not that important, no matter what he likes to think. I suppose it’s partially conceit. By maintaining that Event Horizon can’t do without him, he’s justifying the expense of the NN core. I’m not so sure. Julia has inherited his drive, more if anything; and she’s bright, she learns fast. She’s just very young, that’s all. No crime. The company won’t fail with her in charge.”
“A personal vendetta extended to wiping a Turing personality program? Come on, nobody’s that obsessive.”
“Don’t you believe it. Philip Evans trod hard on a lot of toes to build up Event Horizon. In any case…”
“What?” She looked at him intently, seeing the confusion on his moonlit face.
“Philip Evans’s memories aren’t just a simple Turing program, there’s more to it. He’s not alive, I’ll grant you that. But neither is he wholly dead. I saw something with my espersense.”
Eleanor stroked his abdominal muscles lightly, fingers dancing as she considered what he’d said. She never quite knew how to interpret his psi ability, it all sounded so vague and mystical, like tarot cards and reading tea leaves. Yet he did have the talent, no denying that. Her father’s horror and fright still returned to her occasionally.
“All right,” she said, “if it is di Girolamo, or someone else, looking for vengeance, they are even less likely to appreciate you coming between them and the Evans family.”
“All I shall be doing is interviewing Event Horizon personnel to find their mole, and seeing if my own contacts know anything about the blitz. There’s no danger in that.” He took her hand and brought it up to his lips, kissing her knuckles. “Look, this is what I’ve been wanting to break into for years. It’s a regular case, just interviews and data correlation, and it pays regular money. I’m not going to touch the hardline side.”
“What do you mean, break into? I thought this is what you did.”
“Part time,” he said. “But this is the second time in a few months that Event Horizon has called me in to sort out their problems. No amount of advertising and PR work can generate that kind of reputation. This could be what I need to make the switch. I could maybe put myself on a business footing, get an office, a secretary, some assistants-hell, pay taxes too. I think I’d like that.”
She moved closer, resting against him, feeling hot sweaty skin pressing into her belly. It was a funny mood he was in; indecisive, which wasn’t like him at all. “I don’t want to change you, Greg.”
He grinned and patted her backside lightly. “Too late, you already have. Don’t you want me to have a regular job?”
The Mandel Files Page 17
