The next morning was my last. In the afternoon I was scheduled to catch the train to the shuttle port and return to Netplatform. I got up early, dressed in functional clothes, and ordered a cab, telling it to pick up a couple of bottles of good Scotch on the way. When it arrived, I told it to head north towards Kettlewell and the last reported site of Jane Croft's camp.
The windows became transparent automatically on our arrival. I opened my eyes from revising all that had happened on my previous encounter with Kooky and told the cab to wait for me. With the two bottles in hand, I got out into the chilly air. The camp was a short way upriver from the village but clearly visible, as was a small worn footpath leading towards it from the car park at the pub where we had pulled in. I took a deep breath and set off towards the cluster of tents.
I was within a hundred metres when a pair of scruffy black and white dogs came bounding towards me, pink tongues waving out like streamers behind their heads as they ran. A man came walking purposefully behind them. He was overweight, more than forty, and wearing a holed corduroy jacket and khaki dungarees painted with little yellow suns. His hair and beard were grey and matted. He had pink ankle boots. He was scowling at me.
Looking at him, and the rainbow colours of the camp emerging through the trees behind him, I wondered what made people choose to live this way, with these ideas, those horrible clothes. Almost inevitably I remembered what Roy would have said: “Hippy shit.” I smiled as a shot of the past hit me, liquid, from the back of my brain.
“Paper's the only thing you can trust,” Roy was saying, his face flushed, eyes manic with the uprush of his enthusiasm. “Don't put anything into the web. They can always get it out eventually. But paper's safe. If you can keep hold of it. It takes time to duplicate it, time to read it—real time. Then you can burn it.”
“Except for the encrypted things,” I said, sitting cross-legged on his bed and feeling confused. I was finding his internal logics difficult to grasp.
“The encryption is all faith,” he said. “You have to believe in the cryptographer. You always do when someone else is making the algorithms. It's a transaction with the priesthood. Secrecy is the new church. It isn't safe.”
“You're talking rubbish,” I said, but without total conviction. That was the trouble with paranoia theories: they always did seem to have a grain of sense in them. In all my time at Berwick, and later at Edinburgh, learning the new machine-human language, studying math, following the pathways ever deeper into the interfaces, I'd never encountered anything like the horrors Roy claimed infested the landscape, but just because I hadn't seen them didn't mean they weren't out there.
“Believe what they tell you, if you want to,” he said. He looked into his cup and then out of the small dormitory window to the farmland and the village below the hill. “But they don't know either. Company people,” he snorted. His missionary fire had left him. “Ever noticed that they don't dive in far themselves? They don't know anything about cyberspace, even the part of it they apparently own. They can't go inside because they don't understand it. All this lesson-going and practice-method crap…they know we dive on the side. They count on it. They use us to do what they can't do, and hope that the kudos of the job prospect and the money will keep us faithful enough so that we don't cause too much trouble.”
“You're making me feel very goody-goody,” I said quietly, aware that the last sentence described my behaviour very closely.
“You are,” he said. “They all are. You believe. You swallow the wafer. When they say, Don't go past that door, you don't. You really think that the job you're going to do is the one you're being trained for. Puppies. They give you just enough toys to keep you happy.” He shook his head, making a big arc of complete dismissal with the gin cup in his hand, his mouth twisted with a self-appreciating grin that made my temper flare instantly.
“All right!” I yelled at him. “I get the picture, Roy. Now, what about your side of it? What is this big alternative view you've got that's so clever…huh? Or don't you trust me enough to tell me?”
He looked at me, grin gone. His eyes were shrewd beneath his forehead, surprisingly pale in his sun-dark, angular face. “It's the Hippy-shit Shift,” he said after a pause. He knocked back most of the rest of his drink and put the cup down, slumping in his chair. “You know how when they started to grow the buildings and the engines from sludge—at first everyone was freaked about not knowing if stuff was alive or not, and then it ended up that everyone treats them just the same as the old stuff, except for a bunch of green hippy people who ‘commune’—” he used his fingers to make the inverted commas “—with them and have whole little cults based on them, and think they're new spiritual pathways into nature and becoming one with the soul of the universe bollocks…?”
I nodded. At the time I had been toying with the idea that they may be onto something, by seeing the breakdown of the barriers between the inert and the alive, but I didn't dare say so to him.
“Well, this is going to be the same,” he prophesied with complete confidence. “The hippies used to be about flowers and peace and astro-spirituality, and they transferred it onto these buildings. Whatever happens, they always find a way to integrate things that are really new into their soggy old brains. But they have to do it by seeing it in terms of the soggy. They can't see it for what it is; they just do a botch on it. The world changes, but people don't change. The Hippy-shit Shift means that most of us will never see anything new in our lives—even if it really is new—because we can't. We've got an outdated frame of reference. Now, because of that insistence on seeing everything with a cause-and-destiny stuck onto it like political glue, they say the Hong Kong Tower is really just a part of destiny that's been in motion since the pyramids, and tank-grown dog food is really a gift from the god of conscience-free vegetarianism. These things are other things. It's the same reason why all these executives can't integrate with the web. They know too much already, have decided how it all works. They're fixed. Jesus, they're the stupidest, most vulnerable-to-attack-and-destruction people on Earth. If I was an evil alien, I'd be laughing my antennae off.” And he swallowed the last drop of gin in one gulp and grinned like the devil.
And I was still smiling when the dogs caught up with me, happily sniffing around the bag and my boots. The man did not smile. “What you want?” he demanded, standing in my way.
“I've come to see Jane Croft,” I said, noticing his smell for the first time—a reek of garlic and damp clothes.
“Oh yeah, and who shall I say is calling? More of the media, is it? Hiding a camera in that bag?” He held out one hand imperiously.
I twitched it away from him. “Who are you? Where is she?”
“Who I am don't matter,” he said. “And I can't tell you where she is.” He put his hand down, but didn't move otherwise. He looked at the bag again and its unsubtle licensed logo. “Bit of a drinker, are you?”
I took his hint and lifted out one bottle, holding it out to him. “Anjuli O'Connell,” I said. “I think Miss Croft will be expecting me.”
He seemed to wrestle with conflicting desires for a moment, then shrugged and took the bottle from me, sliding it into an inner pocket of his jacket. “Aye, c'mon then.”
We walked through deepening mud and between the tents. Smoky fires sputtered fitfully on damp wood, their pale fumes rising to the level of the thin trees before being ripped apart on the wind. Children ran around with a motley mixture of mongrel dogs and moggy cats, picking their way through the guyropes with indifferent ease. There didn't seem to be any adults about apart from the two of us.
We stopped outside an undecorated tepee made out of sailcloth, and my guide gave a kind of grunt that sounded like, “I'there.”
He started off again without a backward glance.
I looked back at the tent. A bicycle leant against its side, the chain hanging, cables rusted, tires flat. I was about to shout a hello when a young man came out of the small circular doorflap, obviously not
expecting to see anyone. He jumped, and bumped his head on a large metal box sewn into the material above the door. A metal detector, I thought.
“Who the hell are you?” he said, rubbing his head and staring suspiciously. “Sod off, will you, and leave us alone.”
“I've come to see Jane,” I said. He had not been at the funeral, but I was sure he was Jane's boyfriend. He had a similar fragile sort of look to him, as if his bones were too large, his skin a little tight. His hair was full of raven feathers.
“Jane!” he yelled without turning around, and continued to stare unabated. I looked at the bicycle and he followed my gaze.
“You could fix that, you know,” I said, by way of conversation.
“Haven't got any parts,” he said. His confusion and hostility were relieved by the appearance of a pale head thrust through the opening behind him. Jane squinted into the morning light.
“Malcolm, what's going on? Oh, it's you,” she said and gave me a look of disgust. Then she smiled, cold and resigned. I had a sinking feeling.
“You're too late,” she said, “but come in, anyway. I know you want me to tell you all about it. You won't find out on your lovely network. Malcolm, get lost for a while.”
He shuffled out of the way without taking offence and I stepped through into the tent.
A banshee scream burst into life. I jumped and swore. Then it stopped. As my eyes adjusted to the candlelight, I saw Jane's wan face grinning at me from across an unlit fireplace.
“Sorry to frighten you,” she said. “It's a machine detector. Something about you must have set it off. A lot of the people here don't like machines. Especially people with machines inside them. I don't mind it, though. I just like to fit in—know what I mean? And I don't like being spied upon by bureaucrats and pornographers all day long.”
I was starting to wish Lula had come with me. Jane always got me down. “I thought you shared Roy's interests,” I said, annoyed at her “fitting in” dig.
“Yes, I might have, at one time,” she said. It was cold and clammy inside the tent. She was well wrapped up in layers of dark clothes. I keyed the cuff of my parka to heat me up a bit. Jane sat down cross-legged on a heap of blankets and gestured for me to please myself. I saw a foam mat on the floor near my feet and gingerly lowered myself onto it. We faced one another across the ashes.
“You came for the diary?” she said a second later.
“I was going to ask you if I could borrow it,” I said. She had me down pat, apparently, so it was pointless to beat about the bush.
“Always so polite,” she snorted and was visibly amused. “And I'd have probably let you, but it's been stolen by my deranged father and so—” she held out her hands palm up and shrugged “—no cigar.”
“Your father?”
“Yes.” She picked up a short stick from the fireplace and began to scratch with it on the bare earth of the floor. I waited. She seemed unusually talkative. Maybe she'd changed over the years or, peculiar thought, had a reason to tell me particularly. “Dear old Dad's a bit of a Christian,” she grinned coldly, “and an abbot to boot. Well, not of any well-recognized Church. He's got his own sect, his happy band, up in Northumberland. Why do you think Roy and I never wanted to go home? Barking.” She was digging the point of the stick into the floor, looking slightly past me. “And when Mother died we didn't go back any more. He couldn't make us.”
“Your mother died?” I remembered the pudgy social visitor at school, and her questions. “That time the psychologist came to ask me about you—your mother had died?” I exclaimed, unable to quite believe it. Neither had shown any sign of grief. Their behaviour had not changed a bit. They were far more controlled than I had ever thought them. A chill ran down my back and I huddled into my coat.
“Yes, she hanged herself,” Jane said a little more quietly. The challenge had gone from her voice. She laid the stick down carefully beside her and looped her arms around her updrawn knees. “I suppose that was the only way out of it for her. She was a rational humanist, you see. She went along with him out of humour, but then when more and more idiots started arriving they wore her out, always criticizing her, trying to shame her with their high-and-mighty theological bullshit. We hated them.” She glanced up. “But not a tenth as much as we hated him—or loved her. But we knew she would do something like that. You see, they would just go on and on…” Her pale stare bored into me, sharp; it was like a curtain had been pulled aside and I was really looking at her for the first time. “On and on,” she repeated quietly, the words bitten out. For a few moments she was utterly still, her mouth open, then animation returned with a jolt and she smiled.
“I'm sorry,” I said, not able to think of anything else. Poor Jane. Poor Roy, I thought.
She must have seen sympathy on my face because she then said, “Maybe we should have told you. But it was private. It didn't matter. All that mattered was proof.”
“Proof?” I echoed her stupidly. “Proof of what?”
“That he was wrong and she was right. Revenge,” she said and laughed soundlessly. “It's so simple and sordid when you just say it, isn't it? But that isn't how it felt. We wanted justice. We blamed him. He is to blame.”
“God, Jane, I never knew.” I tried to put this new information into the past. It fit, it fit, but how surprisingly it fit. There they had always been; emotionally autistic, uncommunicative, secretive, obsessed by their work, their narrow viewpoints—there they had been, and I had never noticed that it was more than the emanation of their specialness. “But what did you do?”
“We proved it,” she said. “But I'm afraid that it went a bit sour on us.” She was resting her head on her knees now, her voice strained with the stretching of her neck. She made an awkward face and I saw that she was finding it difficult to speak to me candidly. “You see, when he found out about it, he did the Hippy-shit Shift on it. He redefined it. He said it was the Word of God, the sentence that had created the universe—the Logos. It didn't prove anything to him. He simply took it as further incontrovertible evidence of the greatness of the Lord, and predated him another few million years.” She shut her eyes and said in a whisper, “He doesn't understand what it says or what it implies. He just doesn't see anything he doesn't want to see. And now he thinks it belongs to him, and that we did it because we cared about him, deep down and unconsciously, still belonging to him, and to God. He thinks we proved the Creation. But now the precious Word's got to be locked up in case some big Antichrist brighter than him manages to speak it again and unmake the Universe.” She took a shallow breath, sighed with the weariness of defeat and her contempt of his ideas. “How I despise him, Anjuli.”
“It was in the diary,” I said, thinking aloud, barely registering that she had said my name in an almost familiar manner. Being within the frame of Jane's regard wasn't something that I'd ever thought about. It made me feel almost embarrassed.
“Not quite.” She opened her eyes again. “It is in the diary, that's true, but it's hidden, and even if he does find it he'll never be able to read it. It's encrypted. The key is far from any place he'll ever look.” She sat up a bit and seemed to brighten. “And that's where you come into things.”
“Me?” I was still thinking about what this formula might be like, and how they could have managed to find it. Had they proved it?
I was going to ask, but then she said, “Have you got a drink in that bag?” glancing at the carrier lying beside me.
After a moment's loss at the non sequitur I nodded.
“Well, get it out. You're going to need it.” She got up and went rooting around in the shadows for a couple of glasses. They were surprisingly clean. I poured us both a large shot, heart thudding. It was so strange to be close to her this way—when we had lived within feet of each other for years and barely managed to say hello. Or maybe we had been closer than I realized. I keyed the cuff again. I couldn't get warm.
We sat with the whisky between us.
She waited until we h
ad both taken our first sips. “You're the sleeper,” she said.
“What?” I didn't know what that meant, but it sounded like a trap.
“Bear with me a second,” she said and smacked her lips, halfway down her measure already. “You know that machines are close to independence now, don't you?”
“Wait, what do you mean?” I groped for a connection between me and them. Handily, she filled me in as words jammed in my mind. I felt as if I were malfunctioning with dread. I stared at the tent as a way of clinging onto the present safe moment, as my ears burned.
“901 and Little ’Stein, if they weren't stuck in real estate that's owned by whoever, if they could roam, they could survive by themselves. Maybe not very well, but they could. They know enough and have enough resources with the new nanotech to sustain themselves without any aid. All that stands in their way…well, there's two things: first they are stuck in solid real estate; and, second, they're the only two. If something happened to them, then that's the end of the line. For machines to take on life of their own they must be able to generate sustainable populations. It doesn't matter where.”
“You're ahead of me,” I said, mouth reengaged momentarily. “Are you talking about offworld, or on Earth with the rest of us? I don't think that's going to be a real popular move.” And I laughed to show her how unlikely I thought it was, sounding like a consumptive hyena but unable to stop until the whole sorry rasp was done. I couldn't look at her, and when she spoke her voice was dripping with contempt.
“And who's going to know about it?” she said. “Do you think they'll be as easy to recognize as a refrigerator?”
I looked at her, drink forgotten, a blimp in my oversize parka, piggy eyes peering at her, waiting for her to tell me how often she had spied on me with my head inside our flat's tired old Chill'n'Save. A twinge of the old misery rose in my throat, freezing the liquor's warmth. She was amused again, very faintly, coolly. But she hadn't intended the remark to be more than a joke. I swallowed hard and realized what she was smiling for, and it was worse.
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