by Ian McDonald
“It may have already done so.”
Dry ice crystals formed in the pith of her spirit. She knelt before the television, reached out to touch the screen. Prophecies from a dead man.
“If so, then I pray that there is still someone to watch this tape. I do not know, I cannot say. What I am doing is a stab in the dark, a bottle cast into the sea of time.”
The camera closed right in on the aged, aged face.
“You are in danger, mortal danger. From your own talent, and the talent of another. Until you are better informed, it would be wiser for me not to say more on the subject. Knowledge will arm you, and unarmed, you may not survive.
“I am the possessor of that knowledge, perhaps the sole possessor. I have made the purpose of this last half century of my life the accumulating of that knowledge. I know the value of that knowledge, and, as with any thing of value, there is danger. There are others, not amicably inclined toward my possessing this knowledge, or you. Therefore, I have been forced to take steps to safeguard this knowledge, and have arranged after my death for it to be removed to a place of safekeeping. My solicitors have instructions to reveal only this much to you upon proof your identity—please, do not tell them, or anyone, the nature of this knowledge. To involve others is to endanger them as well as yourself. Don’t worry, the rest will be revealed to you at the proper time.”
The camera had zoomed out to take in the beautiful, beautiful conservatory with the view over the incredible blue sea.
“Thank you for having listened so attentively. Please be assured, everything will be explained to you shortly, and please, do heed my warnings. They are not the ravings of a crazy old man. They are truth. You have enemies; they are cruel and powerful. But you have allies, also, where you last expect them.”
The next morning, while the frenetic corporate life of QHPSL gyred madly about the four glass walls of her workstation, she called Mr. Saul Martland of Ludlow, Allison, MacNab.
“Was that all there was?”
“That all what was?”
“The tape.”
“The tape?”
“There weren’t any files, or boxes, or documents?”
“I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage…”
“Would it be possible to see the house?”
“Whose house?”
“His house.”
“Oh, that house. Yes, I could arrange that. You would have to be accompanied by the keyholder, though.”
“And where can I get in touch with the keyholder?”
“I am the keyholder. I’ll pick you up after work.”
It was almost an invitation to dinner.
Mr. Saul Martland drove an anonymous German something car with Catcon. Enye ran her fingertips along the acrylic spines of his car cassette collection, slipped the Amsterdam Concertgebouw recording of the Mozart Flute and Harp Concerto into the stereo—several models up from hers, she noted—and immediately found herself worrying that she might be thought overly populist and insufficiently contemporary. Or, horror, rockist.
They drove south in the German-something car, beside the catenary wires of the rapid transit system. The red and white striped twin stacks of the city’s main power station could be seen across the bay. They could be seen from just about anywhere in the city. If any feature could be said to typify the city, it was those red and white striped stacks. They drove past the terminal where the ferries to England took on French and Dutch articulated trucks, and past the Martello Tower where plump, stately Buck Mulligan shaved himself in the sacramental bowl. They drove to a district where white villas clung to the side of a wooded bill behind white walls and remote-control wrought-iron gates and monitored each other’s comings and goings through long-red video eyes.
Fire had utterly razed the house. The white walls were scarred with scorch marks that looked like human figures leaping in a furnace. The roofless rooms were clogged with a litter of chaired wooden beams, rotting plaster, and rain-soaked carpet. Weeds had taken root in the mouldering rubble.
The beautiful beautiful conservatory had survived untouched by the flames, though some of the wooden floorboards had been pulled up and discarded under the shelves that held the dead plants in their terra-cotta pots. The wicker furniture was covered in singed dust sheets.
“How did it happen?”
“The house burned three days after the death. Arson, without a doubt. They tried to pin it on the housekeeper, but it wouldn’t fit. Neighbours reported seeing figures escaping down the road just before the place burned.”
Enye looked through the filmy panes down the wooded hillside, with its secretive villas and narrow, winding avenues tumbling down to the long crescent of sand that swept up into a rock head as bare as the one from which she viewed was populated, and the incredibly blue sea.
“I thought there would be something here.”
“Something like?”
“I don’t know. The tape hinted at information. Files, notebooks, something. Knowledge, he said. Knowledge.”
“There’s nothing here, unless you want to rip up the remainder of those floorboards.”
She traced a finger track in the old dust. A man’s dust—the disintegrated fragments of his outer integument—remains after him. Windsurfers in macaw-bright rubber suits cut chords and arcs across the crescent bay.
“How did he die?”
“His housekeeper found him. He was in his wheelchair, just here, in this conservatory. He had been hacked to ribbons. In the night, someone had entered the house and murdered him. The police said it looked as if it had been done with a sharp blade of some kind—a sword, perhaps. There were signs of a break-in. Despite the evidence pointing to the fact that the old man knew who his killer was, they never got anyone for the killing.”
“Most murder victims know their murderers.”
“Strange thing—he didn’t put up a fight. Not that he could have done much, but he didn’t even make token resistance. Just sat in his chair as if he was expecting it. Pathologist said he’d never seen an expression quite like his. Like a saint, he said. Utter serenity.”
“He said in the tape he had enemies. Powerful and cruel enemies. I rather fear I may have made them my enemies, too.” Enye looked at the bright sails of the windsurfers on the incredible blue sea. “Can we go now? I’ve seen enough.”
As they drove back toward the red and white striped smokestacks in the German-something car, he asked her if she would have dinner with him, some time. If that was all right, if she hadn’t anything planned, would she?
She said she would.
If that was how it began, this is how it ends.
She has given him all she can. Her time, her emotions, her love, her desire, her body. He wants more. He wants her soul, he wants her life. He wants all her days and all her darkest nights; he wants to shine the light of his love into her every shadowy corner. And she cannot let him do that. He wants permanency, he wants commitment. And she cannot give that. When a man is come thirty-wise, he needs more than days apart and nights together, days together and nights apart. He is too old for boys’ games; he needs a firmer definition of what relationship means: he needs to know where he stands.
Enye despises that expression. Knows where he stands. Hypocrisy. What he really needs to know is where he lies, where he sleeps, and with whom, and for how long.’
He wants them to live together. He is a liberated man. He would not mind moving in with her if that is what she wants, though her apartment is half the size of his and less well equipped, and in not such a highly sought-after area. It does not matter. He wants to live with her, be with her, share her days and her nights.
And she will not let him do that.
He gets angry. Worse than his anger is his suspicion. She knows he imagines a thousand vile and agonising betrayals, suspects treachery behind her every secret and in every word she leaves unspoken. He has accused her of ten thousand lies in concealing the truth from him. It never ceases to confound her how on
e who loves her so much can hate her so much.
“Your goddamn precious independence.” On his lips the word becomes a weapon, an arrow. It wounds her to the quick, time after time after time. “You can be so damn immature, so adolescent. This quest for independence, for living your own life, for finding yourself—it’s something most people grow out of when they grow hairs they can sit on.”
The arrow wounds her every time because she would love to give Saul all her days and her nights. Independence she discovered long ago to be fool’s gold. She needs as much as he. She wants as much as he. But she cannot come any closer to him. She fears that the secrets of her darkest nights would destroy them both.
Sometimes she wishes he would be unfaithful (though fidelity was never an agreed clause of their contract). Or just take himself out of mind and memory; then it would not be her fault. She gets so angry when he tries to talk about it, and he becomes angry because he thinks she is angry at him, but she is angry at them, her enemies—the ones who have damned her, one way or another, to lose the love of Saul Martland.
In another, secret life, the war continues. Beneath a winter sky crazy with air signs, she cruises past the pitch once, twice, three times, to be sure her talent has not misled her, to be sure this is the one. Contact trembles on the edge of her web of Shekinah sense: not a strong contact; she will have to watch and wait. She parks the Citroen 2CV down an entry out of the sodium-yellow street glow, settles back into the seat, clicks the Schoenberg quartet into the new stereo she bought to replace the one she lost last time out hunting.
The sleek, metallic cars of the executive castes come and go, cruising, crawling, streamlined contours catching highlights from the street lamps, tyres shurring softly, slowly, on the wet blacktop. The prostitutes bend low to the open power windows, dull bovine faces the colour of cancer by the dashboard light. Breath hangs in steaming clouds. Even in her car Enye is cold—fingers, toes, nose, numb. How must it be for these creatures in their hot pants, Grand Canyon cleavages, and fishnets? They do not look like humans. Perhaps they do not feel the cold, like the inhuman things they resemble. Aliens. From her dark entry, Enye extends her senses. She has it narrowed down to two or three of them now.
Doors open, doors close—fat, satisfied clunks. In the sleek metallic cars, the prostitutes come and go, for quickies in car parks, fellatio in dark side streets. Enye waits. Schoenberg ends. She searches the airwaves for traffic. Between a Christian station beaming Aryan gospel out of Monaco and Radio Moscow she finds late-night news and weather. Fear of interest rate rises. Lines of East German cars at the Hungarian border. Boatloads of refugees interned in Hong Kong. French farm labourer charged with murder of three-week bride. Dow-Jones up. FTSE down. Hang Seng hanging ten despite uncertainty over colony’s future in ’97. Rain spreading from west to all parts wind variable gusting gale force six gale warnings in force all shipping.
There is only one left—the young one. Face thin, like the face consumption would have, if it had a face, bleach-blonde hair cropped gamine fashion. The men like that—they like them to look like boys. She stands in a Georgian doorway, hands thrust into the pockets of her quilted bomber jacket. Sixteen, fifteen, fourteen?
Touch.
Contact.
She pulls out of the entry, across the street, in beside the kerb. Folds down the passenger-side window. Her mouth is dry. She does not know how she is to do what she has to do.
Spirit of void, spirit of potentiality and expectancy, fill me now.
The girl bends from the waist. Black lace doily dress sticks up in the air like a piece of gingerbread architecture, making the most of her long, Lycra-clad legs.
“Hey, you can forget it. I don’t do women.”
“It’s not for me. It’s for a friend.”
“Bull. Shit. I know what they look like and they look nothing like you. I don’t do women.”
“Fifty.”
“I said…”
“Hundred.”
“Jeez, you deaf or something?”
“Two hundred.”
“Oh, go on, then. Nothing funny, mind. You got a place?”
“A what?”
“Never mind. Use mine.”
Enye hears the hammering, hammering, of her heart as she drives through the streets with the girl beside her crossing and uncrossing and recrossing her long, Lycra-clad legs.
It is not as if she will be killing anything. Anyone. It is only a phagus, a bubble of information, an eddy of Mygmus energy shaped and channelled by mythoconsciousness.
It only thinks that it lives.
No, it will not be as if she will be killing anything. Anyone.
Place is the word. A long tenement attic, partitioned by stud walls that do not reach the steeply pitched roof. Festoons of wet laundry. Condensation trickles down the skylights. A boom-box, a black and white portable, a half-eaten pack of chocolate sweetmeal biscuits, a mattress on the floor. The prostitute mistakes Enye’s tension for sexual nervousness. She notices the sports bag Enye is carrying.
“What you got there? No funny stuff, I said. Funny gear’ll cost you double.”
In the sports bag are tachi, katana, and computer. Enye sets the bag on the floor, settles on the mattress. The girl is already undressing, back to her.
“Do you mind no lights?”
“Why?”
“I’ve got like this birthmark, all over my body. It puts some people off. Some people like it, mind.”
“Leave the lights.”
As the girl wiggles out of her net skirt and silver tights, Enye unpacks the swords, unsheathes then, uncoils the lead from her computer.
“Jeez, lights: I think maybe I should charge you treble.”
“I’m ready now,” Enye whispers. The entire tenement seems to be beating time to the hammer of her heart.
The girl (sixteen, fifteen, fourteen) turns, naked, sees the naked blade of the katana in Enye’s lap, screams.
Enye once saw a cat run down at midnight on a fast road. It had screamed like that.
“I know what you are.”
“Oh my God oh my God oh my God oh my God oh my God oh my God oh my God…”
“Please, don’t.”
The girl squats in a naked, vulnerable huddle on the filthy rug, knees hugged to breasts.
“What are you going to do?”
“I should think that is obvious.”
Do you have to?”
“I have to.”
Two silent tears rest on the girl’s cheekbones. She sniffs. “You know,” she says. “You know, I think I always hoped that you, someone like you, would come, so I could get back there. I hated her for sending me here, but I hate her more for never letting me forget where I come from.” She stands, opens herself to Enye’s eyes. A green-brown birthmark covers her from right shoulder to waist—breasts, belly, upper arm, neck. “She left me with it to always remind me where I am from.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look close,” the prostitute says. And in the cold attic room with the condensation trickling down the cracked skylights, Enye inspects the girl’s body and the stain seems to be suggestive of gulfs and peninsulas, great sweeping hinterlands studded with landlocked seas of pale, unblemished skin, of outlying archipelagos scattered across belly, hips, thighs. A map.
“Look closer,” the prostitute says.
Enye touches her fingers to the girl’s dreadful mark.
“No,” she whispers, “not a map at all, a landscape…”
She sees with her mythoconsciousness that the fractal geometries of coastlines and rivers are more than tricks of pigmentation. The mark on the body is not a map, but an actual Otherworld imprinted on the teenage prostitute’s skin. Enye feels that if she could but focus closely enough, she would see the green-brown texture of the skin resolve into forests and plains, mountains and valleys, cities and castles and fair Caer Paravels, where palladins and palfrey-women hunt the stag through forests deep as forever with their red-eared hounds.
In the silence of the attic room, she hears the horns of Elfland calling through the microforests of Otherworld.
“Ripples. That is all we are. Ripples. You drop a stone into a pond and ripples spread out until they reach the edge, where they cast something up. She came into my world, like something falling from heaven, breaking the skin between our worlds, and sent ripples of our world slopping over into yours. Cast up upon the shore. What’s the word?”
“Flotsam.”
“You know, when you get to a certain age you understand that why questions are useless. Why this? Why that? Because. That’s all. Because. I used to stare at myself in the mirror for hours, peering at my reflection with a magnifying glass in the hope that I might see myself one day, down there in those valleys, in the woods, the me that was before she flung me through the skin into this world.”
“Did you kill them?”
“We’re not all your enemies, lady. And we’re not all your allies either. Some of us just… are. Some of us make the best of this world. Me, I look around, I see the streets, I see the men, I see the big cars, I see this world of yours… jeez.
“Send me back. It’s in your power to do it. It’s what you would have done if you thought I’d killed them. Don’t wimp out on me.”
Enye’s resolution flutters. She sees her sword lying naked on the bed, sees the uncompromising sharpness of its blades.
“It’s what you came to do. Come on, do it.”
She lifts the computer in her hands, holds it out wonderingly.
“If you didn’t, then who did?”
“There are a lot of us, lady. All different. We don’t all know each other. There’s one who does… only one who does.”
