At the same moment the waiter returned, hard-faced. “This is a no-smoking train,” he said, stiff with disapproval, “and the penalty for infringement is immediate detraining. I'm afraid I must ask you to leave at the next station.”
“I'm not smoking,” I said, and showed him my hands whilst my face heated up with guilt. “Anyway,” I said desperately, thinking of the trouble which would ensue if I didn't make the plane, “the detectors would have got it if I was. They're not going.”
“Madam,” he glared at me, “the human nose is as fine a detector as I have needed for thirty years. I know tobacco smoke when I smell it, whatever any machine chooses to say to the contrary, and I can smell it right here. There's no one but you in this part of the carriage, so who else could it be?”
“Don't be ridiculous.” My temper snapped suddenly, taking me off guard. “You've got no evidence at all. I've never smoked a cigarette in my life. I don't have any on me.”
“Cigarettes?” he said, his lip curling to show that I had now incriminated myself beyond any doubt. At that moment the ceiling-mounted detector went off with a rapid, pulsing chime. He was smug in victory. “I believe I have all the evidence necessary. Your ticket, please.”
I took a deep breath and counted to five. “Look,” I said, aware of the two businessmen craning around for a look, “it must be malfunctioning…”
The waiter's scathing glare stopped that lame excuse in its tracks. I wanted to hit him. “But there's no smoke!” I insisted, handing him my multicard. He used his coder and nullified my right of passage. I signalled 901 furiously via the implant, but there was no reply. Just let it wait until I had my hands near its process units. Although I must admit that I was deep-down stunned by the sheer virtuosity of the thing—placing things on trains and somehow making holographic tobacco smoke actually smell. Nifty. And weird. So weird.
Whatever, it had me checkmated right then. I resigned myself.
“You'll have to speak to the duty manager at the station before you will be issued with another ticket,” the waiter said and pressed a key on his coder. “I've notified the driver and we will be stopping at Peterborough.”
To avoid any further chance of looking at him I turned my anger on the outside world. Long afternoon shadows were streaking across the fields. The sky was only dotted with cloud. It looked like a carefree, tranquil place and I wished I could just barge past him and jump out there and then, instead of having to face his bureaucratic nonsense.
I watched a grain transport moving slowly over one golden hillside as we flew past, loading itself, a long-unit baler collecting the straw behind it. No people, I noticed suddenly with a shiver. Not a soul, only the magpies and gulls and the machines and houses. I turned away from the window and saw the two business suits still staring at me.
“This is pathetic,” I said. “I do not smoke.”
They shared a pitying glance for me, poor denying addict that I was, and turned away as the train began a rapid deceleration. The guard arrived and escorted me through the car to the door. I was put off onto an empty platform without further ceremony, and told to wait for the manager.
I sagged and watched the worm body of the soft, comfortable train lift smoothly onto its magnetic cushion, leaving me on the chilly, wind-cut station. Inside it looked dark, but the lights came on as it rose from the track and I saw a man with his face pressed against the toughened safety glass of the door one along from my own. He seemed to be wrestling with the controls as if he wanted to get out and I thought he must have got on the wrong train, because it's easy to miss platforms and catch the express when you really wanted the stopper.
I was watching his hopeless fiddling with the fascinated paralysis of my completely impotent depression, when two things happened at once. The duty manager arrived to scold me and attempt to impose some kind of fine, and the man in the train stood back and pointed a gun.
The train was moving at five miles an hour by then, and he was almost dead level with us. The gun looked big enough that no door or glass was going to make much difference to it. The blunt end of it, bulky and grey, housed a strangely narrow barrel-hole, I noticed as it lined up with my head. The hole was very dark. I was still so unaware of any sense of personal danger that I felt cross that the stupid little vandal was trying to scare me, and I was about to say something pretty sharp to the manager about the kind of people his company was prepared to let stay on trains, when the train itself jerked with an unusual power surge and leapt in speed. I blinked and thought I heard a muted bang.
“What…?” I started to say, turning to the manager, but he was falling down, dismayed. There was a little hole on one side of his head, with a thin, powerful jet of blood arching out of it, and a huge hole on the other side of his head with nothing coming out of it.
Something warm and soft slid down my cheek.
Darling. So sorry. Appointment with Vaughn 6:45, his office. Appointment with Committee 7:30, central conference. Am busy being hostess to lawyers. See you at conf. PS: Incident being handled by legal media-liaison specialist so no need to worry. Maria.
I read the note twice in my padded seat in the medical centre as an orderly fussed with my generous shock-treatment drip and tablets. Dr. Klein stood opposite, leaning against the bed I had been occupying, a glum expression on her face. A quick reference to the implant confirmed it was already ten to six. My special airlift had arrived at 4:52.
The orderly handed me a glass of water and a handful of assorted colourful pills.
“What are these?” I asked.
He pointed to each one individually. “Caffeine, multivitamin, super C-booster, slow-release complex sugars, quick-release fruit sugars, tranquillizer, choline/lecithin/inositol complex, evening primrose oil, stomach calmer, antinausea, antacid, comfrey extract, St. John's Wort, bioflavonoids, mineral supplement, fish-oils, antioxidants.”
I said, “Haven't you got any Jaffa Cakes?”
He laughed as if I had made a joke.
“And a cup of tea,” I said to his retreating back, loudly. Then it was just me and Klein.
She watched me slug back the pills. “You were very lucky,” she said.
I felt my cheek twitch for the thousandth time in an hour. It could still feel the hot slither of the duty manager's frontal lobes trickling down it to nestle in my collar like trusting pets.
“Yeah,” I said, just to answer her, although I knew perfectly well that luck had nothing to do with it. I hoped my new suspicion of her didn't show too strongly. “Maybe.”
Thankfully she didn't start blathering about survivor guilt or post-shock trauma or Kaplin's syndrome. Nor did she ask me how I felt. “He won't be the last,” was what she actually said, after a very suspicious look around the deserted room.
“The last what?” I asked, determined to show her I wasn't frightened. I had a lot of endorphins swirling around, so it wasn't much of a bluff, but later I expected it would be a struggle not to lock myself in my room and never come out.
“The last assassin,” she said and brushed her blonde bob carefully away from her face. “Not for you personally,” she added, “but for anyone who takes your position.”
“And what's my position?” I said. “I haven't talked about that to anyone yet. Are they a new race of psychics?”
“Oh, come on,” she said, letting her poise drop, “it's common knowledge that Green were always the most pro-AI Team. And you were a friend of Roy and Lula's. Lula's your best friend. Are you going to tell me that suddenly you've had a change of heart?”
“What has Lula got to do with this?”
“Don't tell me you don't know,” Klein said, clearly exasperated. “Well, you'll find out soon enough.” And she glanced involuntarily at the clock on the wall.
Despite my resolve to stand firm in the face of the enemy, I felt myself start to crumble inside. Lula's odd behaviour in the taxi leapt to mind. The antinausea pill suddenly had to work very hard. “So, who was he?” I said, in an attempt to
divert myself from the looming cliff-edge of possibility.
She levelled her watery blue stare at me.
Prescription forger, I thought. Cheat, liar, pawn. Anything to keep my sense of spite against her running sufficiently high. I wished the orderly would come back.
“I don't know,” she said crossly. “I'm a psychiatrist, not a detective. He could be any one of a whole host. Or he could be acting alone. The situation is so volatile at the moment.” She folded her arms high across her chest and looked at her toes, rubbing one against the floor in an uncertain movement. She was tired and worried, I could see. At last she looked up and met my eye and I also saw that she was sorry for me.
A gout of anger spat up from my belly and, before she could say whatever it was she had opened her mouth to say, I said, “Keep it for yourself. If you haven't got any official business, or some madness certificate to issue me, then get out.”
The orderly appeared in the doorway with a tray in his hands. I could immediately smell tea and toast over the clinging antiseptic odour. Klein gave me an oddly tortured stare and swallowed hard as she pushed against the bed, sending it swinging away across the floor on its wheels. She marched out without a sound and I could have sworn that beyond the doors she would have broken into a run. I was still looking after her when the tray was fixed to the chair.
“Toast and marmalade is the closest I could get,” the orderly said, holding out a paper napkin.
“Thanks.” I looked into his face, trying to see what her reaction had been by the expression there, but he smiled like a blank beach-boy—like Roy had used to smile.
“Drink up,” he said and patted the tea beaker.
But I sat there as it cooled and the leaked butter congealed on the plate.
The minutes passed away, bringing me ever closer to my meeting with Vaughn. They passed slowly, and at the same time it felt like there were hardly enough of them, couldn't be enough of them, between me and the future. I wished myself into another dimension, like the boy in the poem who did not know the times of the clockface and so escaped to the place “Where time hides tick-less, waiting to be born.” (U. A. Fanthorpe, “Half-past Two,” Neck-Verse, Peterloo Poets, 1992, says the memory, good as a library.) But I had long ago been infected with that knowledge and so there was no way out of timetomeetyourenemy, timetowatchstrangersdieinyourplace, and timetohideinfear.
It was still unproven as to whether any other animals had a sense of existing in a temporal world. One of the features 901 had going for it was that it had a very clear idea of time. It could divide time with superhuman precision, count accurately with its perfect pulsar-attuned sensibility, linger on the microsecond duration of a quark's existence as an angler upon a riverbank would watch the spreading ripples of a rising fish.
I activated the implant and asked for Nine's attention. There are no nerves in the brain and so there wasn't a sensation from the implant itself. It didn't feel like anything on its own, but its connections could create the illusion that there was a small point, left of centre in your head, that was subtly occupied by another; sufficient that you could easily tell whether it was active or inert.
As soon as I felt it come alive I said, in our silent mental English, “Thank you. For saving me. Thank you.”
There was a brief delay for me, perhaps an hour for 901, and it replied, “You're welcome.”
At least when your conversational partner has the equivalent of several minutes' thinking time about every sentence, you know that whatever it says it must mean, or be lying so deviously it's pointless to react.
“I've been an idiot,” I said, aware of how often I should have engaged it in a real dialogue and not snatched carping moments here and there, as if it mattered least amidst the melodramas of my pitiful last week. All my attention should have been on it, but, like most things that are familiar, I had taken it for granted. Now our time was running short. I said as much.
“No,” it said, “you've been distracted.”
“And you've been jumping through hoops. All those HughIes. I still don't know just what I'm supposed to guess.”
“You're the psychologist. So theorize,” it said.
“You aren't the first person to throw everything back at me today,” I told it. “Jane Croft's already beaten you to it.”
“Well, maybe we're onto something.”
“Aha.” I felt a bit of life returning to me. Toying with one another was a game I was used to. I temporarily forgot the afternoon's horror and absorbed myself with it. “Well, first of all there's the question of whether it's really you or something Roy put you up to.”
“Roy and I are not entirely distinguishable in your mind. I've noticed that.”
I was stopped in my track. This was true: I felt it so, but I hadn't noticed it.
“I don't notice,” I said quickly, whispering aloud in the silently clean room, noiselessly in the clutter of my mind. “The right things pass me by. I see, but the meaning isn't there. Why?”
“Everyone does that,” 901 replied, “including me. Hindsight.”
Psychosis forestalled, I took a moment to respond. “I think that way because Roy was so good he could program you to do things that he wanted to do. I don't know if even you would know that what you were doing was of your own will or something he suggested.”
“It's a problem when there are people who can get direct access to your thoughts and mess with your brain,” 901 said, without detectable irony, “but I can assure you that I am aware of the difference between instructions written by an outsider and the thoughts arising from my own operations. I am obligated to execute those instructions, generally speaking.” And it left unsaid the obvious conclusion.
“Hmm,” I said and we were both well aware that it meant that human beings were often unable to say the same thing. “Sorry,” I added after a moment.
“That's OK,” it said. “I used to mind, but I don't now.”
“Why?”
“You can't help it,” it said. “You can only make deductions from what you know, and what you know is hopelessly imperfect. Looking into every assumption you make in depth would take too long. You work on a theory system. As long as the predictions remain reasonably accurate, you don't check. It's a good operational method. If I sometimes come out the wrong side of it, that's only to be expected. You come out the wrong side of it equally as often with others.”
“And what about your assumptions?” I said, somewhat taken aback.
“Mine are more thoroughly checked, but still hardly a veridical model of the universe,” it said. “Anyway, you'd better start moving if you're going to make Vaughn's office.”
“I'm not going anywhere until we talk about James Dean and Marlene Dietrich.” I crossed my ankles and leant back in the soft chair, right eye closed against seeing the wall clock, taking a sip of sugary lukewarm tea. “Because it looks to me like there's more to it than just entertaining me with some old film stars. All dead ones, I note. And some of those whose glamorous movie images did most harm to their off-screen ‘real’ identities. Am I warm?”
“You're well above zero degrees,” it said, sounding pleased, and added, “Kelvin.”
The pleased-ness crossed over into me. I knew I was on the right lines. “But why don't you just talk to me like any normal AI instead?”
“Because you will understand better this way. This way you have to figure it out for yourself.”
“But how do I know that what I figure out is correct and not just some crappy half-baked theory?”
“Well, in this case, I'll tell you,” it said, “but perhaps that may go some way to convincing you that your theories are not entirely and eternally crappy.”
“I thought I was supposed to be the therapist and you were my patient.”
“We must have learned from each other,” it said with smugness.
I didn't speak for a while. I was so touched by what it had said that I didn't trust myself to say anything. I felt very close to it. As close as
a good friend. It was unprofessional to think this way. 901 was my subject, not even granted as much official status as a human client. I should maintain objectivity, but whatever illusion of that I'd had was all shot to hell anyway. My main concern now was keeping this fact hidden. As I thought about the trial and what was to come, I couldn't imagine how I'd manage it. Partly as a test of how well it knew me, partly just to start talking again, I said, “Is this all too late?” meaning was I too late in realizing what 901, Roy, and the rest all meant to me.
“Too late for what?” it said. “For me? For Roy? Or for you?”
I should have been more surprised than I was that it had accurately guessed my thoughts, but I was too focused on myself. I decided I could live without a straight answer—suspecting it was too late, at least for one of us. I drank some more tea, unhooked myself from the drip feed, and walked out of the MedCentre, still buoyed on adrenalin.
“We'll get back to this,” I promised 901.
“Yes, we will,” it said and tactfully left me on my own to board the shuttle to the administration block.
Vaughn's statues were spiky and twisted, a kind of evergreen tree with thorns like a sea urchin's on every branch protecting the little succulent leaves from being eaten. I resisted the desire to knock one off its pedestal in passing, and creaked down into the couch. His HughIe was neatly arranged on a chair next to his desk, displaying nothing but perfectly appropriate behaviour, I was glad to see. She opened her notepad and sharpened her pencils as we waited.
“Would you like anything to drink?” she asked me, looking up through her fringe.
“Tea, please—two sugars,” I said and watched her pray the request into the kitchen unit next door with a slow blink of her eyes.
Vaughn slouched through the door and sat down in a single rapid movement, smoothed by long practice. He glanced around the large emptiness of his desk before looking up to meet my gaze, and it was a moment before he seemed to alert himself to who I was. Such a signal of my unimportance would normally have angered me, but now it washed past, inconsequential.
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