“What about Mrs. Croft?” I cut in, not really interested in hearing what he had tried, since I could imagine all too well how stifling the twins must have felt that life; not allowed to ask questions, not allowed to know things.
“She, Lula, believed as I did,” he said with such emphasis that I knew he was lying.
But my composure was broken by what he had said. Lula?
“I'm sorry,” I said, “your wife's name was Lula?” Something very small inside my mind clicked into place.
“Yes,” he snapped. “She used to be a scientist when we met. Macrobiology. She did everything in her power to come in line with the word. But she was weak with the children. She encouraged them to learn, when she knew it could only lead to heartache. I tried reasoning with her about it, but she was stubborn. She lied to me and gave them lessons in secret—even though she knew they were wrong.” I thought I detected a note of uncertainty in this unlikely character study he was making, and at the same time I knew that this woman could not be the same as Lula White. My Lula was young enough to be her daughter, but there was no family resemblance. Lula was not a common name, though. It was too much of a coincidence for Roy to know two. And he never mentioned the connection. But Roy couldn't have given Lula White her name, either. Names, names…I had to concentrate to stick with the moment.
It was obvious that the abbott had come to his own terms with whatever the family situation had been. It was pointless to carry on trying to find out Roy's true character from him.
“And do you believe that this code really is the Logos?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “What else could it be?”
I didn't have an answer. Poor bastard, I thought, but maybe I should be saving my sympathy for myself. Croft had God after all, the internalized friend and guide who never leaves.
“You'll be on your way, then,” I suggested.
“Eh?” He glanced outside. “But it's almost dark.”
“Yes, but the moon is full, and the snow is bright,” I said. “You'll have no trouble finding your way.” I got up and held out his coat.
I might pity the man from one viewpoint, but I wasn't about to share my pleasant little cottage with him, because from another I hated his cheap and stinking innards. He had good enough clothes to make it back all right.
At the door he paused, his hand on the jamb as he tucked the diary into his pocket. “I was sorry to hear about your brother,” he said.
I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything. When he was gone I shut and bolted the door and closed the internal shutters against the bright night. Maybe his Green counterpart would call before morning, maybe not. Maybe they would fall on him like a pack of wolves and seize the book before he reached his car, tearing him to pieces.
At least I knew now that Og was wrong to be jealous of Roy, and that Roy hadn't hated mechanics on principle, but out of a very real personal betrayal. He'd betrayed himself to make a masterpiece, only to find nobody appreciated his intent. It was the kind of trick you didn't want to repeat in life, but had he? Was this Source game a masterpiece like that one, which backfired on its too-clever master? Perhaps the game, like the Source, had too many parameters to predict its outcome. Whatever the case, I was no longer angry at Roy. I stretched my right hand out and stroked the soft cover on the comic book, before packing it away with the rest of my things in the rucksack. There was no point in loitering here any longer, pleasant and paid for as it was. I had a strange, mad idea about where I might find my final turnabout answer, and I would set off there first thing in the morning.
I left a nightlight on and got into my sleeping bag on the small cot. I put a call through the implant into the exchange, and from there asked for a connection to any public information server. I checked out the name Lula White. They weren't the same person. Lula Croft's maiden name was Bartoli, and her death certificate was on file. Of the several Lula Whites on record, they were all fully documented citizens—including my Lula, from Sevenoaks, aged twenty-six, parents both deceased, current address unknown.
I logged off, pulled the bag over my head, and went to sleep with the knife open and ready under my pillow.
My call to the exchange told Manda Klein where I was. She arrived before dawn on a silently driven four-track and abandoned it fifty metres shy of the cottage, lights on low, as she approached the door. I heard her footsteps crunching the snow with cotton-wool compression—it set my teeth on edge even in my sleep—and got up to put the lights on and open the door. I didn't know it would be her. I half thought she should have been fired, but was rather pleased to find she must have got the jump on Vaughn after all.
“Come in,” I said.
“Thank you.” She took off her parka and hung it on my chair. “I tried to call you at home two weeks ago. Your parents said you weren't talking.”
I ignored her unspoken question and said, “I'm glad it's you that came—not a stranger.”
She raised her eyebrows. “My plan worked. Yours…?”
“I didn't have a plan, Manda,” I said. “I was in a plan. It's a different thing.” So she had come about the diary. I suspected they would have sicced somebody onto it. It was too juicy a chance to pass on.
Klein smiled at my correction and sat down in the chair. I took the window ledge again. It was cold and our breath misted in great billows. I didn't put the heater on in case she got thoughts of staying.
“We know about the diary, what it is and what is in it,” she said. “Since it was a discovery made on Company time and hardware, we have the intellectual copyright. I've come to ask you if your raid on the abbey was a success…but then—” she looked at the gloves she was holding in her hands, two puffs of sheepskin “—I think I know the answer to that one. It was stuck in part of the suit. That's why you were hitting it in the lab.”
I nodded. “You're too late. Abbot Croft has already been and taken it.”
“Ah.” She smiled, and showed no sign of disbelieving me. “Well, never mind. I'm sure he can be negotiated with. Unless you have the Source code?” She looked at me, her face curious and kind. I found it hard to see her as my enemy. Probably that's what she wanted me to think.
“You can have it,” I said, and told her what it was and how useless it was as well. She listened at acute attention, her own implant recording us both, and when I had finished she sighed and shook her head.
“Very good,” she said, a tone of admiration in her voice. She laughed quietly, a person who does not like to be overheard in any kind of outburst. “I came here to tempt you back to work for us, to tease the information out of you with job offers and cash and big prospects.” She glanced around the room and then at me. “But I think these are all irrelevant to you now. Am I right?”
“You're always right about me, Manda,” I said.
She let the dig pass. “Did you realize you were calling me by my first name?” Her smile deepened. “Yes, we are not in the same position as we once were. That's good.” She mused for a moment and then changed her tack, prompted by an inner reminder. “And so, is there truth in these rumours about Roy, that he gave the nanomachines to the Green tech groups? The ones that went missing from the Texas Site.”
“Why should I tell you?” I asked, yawning. I was prepared to tell her. But then again, I was no longer certain of the answer. I used to think that Jane had as good as told me that those creatures were loose, in people's carpets and gardens, but now I thought they were more likely somewhere far more purposeful than that.
“No reason,” she said lightly, “but perhaps we might make a little trade. A gesture of goodwill. A closing ritual.”
“Name your terms, then,” I yawned through the words with difficulty. Part of it was show. Mostly it was just exhaustion.
“I came here not just for the Company, but on a little personal mission of my own.” She toyed with the gloves and studied them as she spoke, serious and engaged in the moment quite fully, concentrating, her features soft in the glowing wall li
ghts. I felt warm towards her, no matter what my mind suggested might be afoot; she gave off such a strong vibration of strength and honesty. “I signed you out of the hospital as a Reverted dischargee. I signed the implant off the records as a meltdown job. As far as the Company is concerned, it does not exist and you are no longer of any interest. Of course, I also added sufficient information to the employee records that if you never work for us, then you will never work for any other AI corporation again.” She made a small downturn of her mouth here, a concession to her responsibilities and bad news she didn't want to tell.
She looked at me and I shrugged.
“Well,” she said and held the gloves firmly. “You're still using that implant, and that's how I found you. It will take me constant effort to keep this knowledge from your old friends in Core Ops, even with the help of the old state JM, now out of the museum and powered again. And if you have it—” she smiled “—then you have free access to a great many things, don't you?”
“I hadn't thought about it,” I said.
“But one day you will.” She regarded me steadily. “So in exchange for that…the Company is under heavy investigations by the UN and it has decided that, pending the results, it will bid for independent nation status. There are many wars within the ranks to be fought at this time. So I want your assurance that you will not use that hardware against the Company, or against any interests you may think of as mine. You'll never work with AIs, and you'll never work high-level Ops again—anywhere. And you'll never betray this.”
“And if I don't agree?”
“Then I will have to go through a number of unpleasant channels and force you to surrender Company property. Look, Anjuli—” she smoothed the gloves “—I've no quarrel personally with you. If you continued to refuse surgery, I wouldn't force it. You could work again with Augustine on the suit projects and those AIs—if you like. You can start today. It's much more difficult without you. Nobody has had experience of Armour like you have. And there are so few good AI psychs.”
I thought it through. “No thanks,” I said. “I'm tired of being the hammer or the nails in your big box of tricks. But if you mean what you say, there is something you could do that would make it worth my while.” I decided not to mention the Shoal at all. I didn't want to draw any attention to it.
“Oh?” She was really interested now, and not in an intrusive way. Maybe she did like me.
“Stop the civil case against me. I'm broke. And maybe you could replace some of the stock in the shop.”
“Stock?”
“Bicycles,” I said. “My brother used to make and repair bicycles. It's a family thing. I'll be doing that now he isn't here, and since the house is already sold you'll have to buy me a new one.”
She thought about it hard: I could see the muscles in her hands tense and her jaw moved side to side. “Difficult,” she said, “but not impossible. I'll try.”
“Then we're agreed?” I noticed she never made any mention of Ajay. On this point she didn't need to. Her sympathy was written on her face and in her movements. And the way she said, “Yes, we are agreed.” She stood up and slipped the gloves on, shrugged into the heavy parka. I walked her the three feet to the door. As I opened it, she took a datacard from her glove and handed it to me. “Augustine's new laboratory contacts,” she said, and left it at that.
Now that it was time for her to leave, I found myself wishing she wouldn't. I could smell the sweetness of her perfume, and her presence had been more like a soothing balm than an interrogation.
“You know,” I said, quiet and rather embarrassed, “all that you've managed: your plans, your—what is it?—cynicism, the fact that you see through things, but keep yourself right in there, I admire that—really. I wish I were more like you.”
She looked at me from the soft-fur surround of her hood, still smiling and deeply amused. She lifted her right hand and gently patted my cheek.
“But you are.”
And with that she stepped back into the snow and clumped patiently to her waiting vehicle, its lights blooming up as she approached, and almost blinding me with the sudden gold and orange OptiNet sign that came alive on its flank.
I shut the door, got back into my sleeping bag and had the last hour or two in peace, drifting between sleep and wondering if she could possibly be right.
The cemetery where Roy's grave was located was a big place, the lower slopes already dotted with the fast-growing forest, which tree planting instead of monuments had provided. I got out of my taxi at the gates and started the long winding march up—at dawn. A crackling, frosty dawn hazed over the glittering snow, its soft lemony light throwing giant shadows across the ground. I'd not been able to sleep much and I was tired, but the cold and the brightness woke me up.
As I rounded the long hill turn which took me into his section I stopped to look at the view. I was admiring the dales as they fell slowly towards the city's curling peaks when two older ladies walked past me on their way down to the little coffee shop beyond the gates, flowers or remembrances delivered.
“…shockingly tasteless,” one was saying to her friend as their heads bowed close together. They nodded a greeting to me and went on.
“You see, Rachel,” said the friend. “Now you know what all the fuss in the local news was about. I hope they make them tear it down and put a nice bit of hornbeam in, instead…”
I already had an inkling of what they might be talking about as I turned around, but seeing is believing. What had grown on Roy's plot was worth seeing, and you could see it from quite a distance. As for believing—I could only let my jaw hang in astonishment as my mouth tried to organize a smile, and my heart squeezed itself tight in a confusion of self-consciousness and wonder.
It had to be the world's smallest cinema.
That said, it wasn't the world's plainest. It was about one and a half storeys high and completely covered every last millimetre of his allocated plot—a triple, but even so, hardly much in excess of five metres by three. White marble, and designed in the manner of a fabled Eastern palace, it gleamed with golden domes and abstract art-deco and Arabian detail in jewelled colours. Against the snow its whiteness was creamy, even more so in the softly yellow winter sun. It was like a mirage for the snowblind.
As I walked closer I saw there was a door, facing the path, a double swing-door, gilded, beside the tiniest of ticket booths. Above the door its name was resplendent in more gold: The Orphée. For Orpheus, who went into the underworld and came out, looking back to lose everything he loved. Not like Thunder. Had he known how it was to be?
But a cinema for me.
Slowly I walked up to the booth. My breath misted in front of me as I stared through the glass pane, with its rosette of holes for a speaker grille. Inside sat a capuchin monkey wearing a smart white tuxedo, with a tiny black armband on his sleeve. He was clockwork. Behind him, on the billing list, the day's showings were marked up on letterpress board. Casablanca, it said, but no time was given. There was a hole in the brass plate of the booth where a token was obviously supposed to go. I watched my breath spread out on the glass a few more times, but couldn't see any tokens. Experimentally I gave the doors a press with my gloved hand. They didn't move.
I took a walk around the plot to examine this tomb more closely, trying hard to keep welling frustration at bay. It was a beautifully made piece of kitsch, for all that the old ladies had said. The marble was lightly veined with pink—now that I was close enough to see—and carved smoothly for its inlays of lapis-lazuli, emerald, and ruby which marched around the borders of each wall in arabesques. A round tower at each corner was topped with a gold dome. I squinted up at them, brilliant against the sky. The pitched roof between them was also white. Coming back on the shady side, I noticed many footprints in the snow. People had come eagerly to inspect it, pausing often to try the doors and paw at the booth. A couple of childish handprints marked the glass and the bronze plate. The doors opened inwards; I tried heaving against them wit
h my shoulder, but it was no use. All I got was a sore shoulder.
I racked my brains, trying to remember any idle chat or handing over of coins, but there was nothing. I wondered if I could trigger the mechanism using my knife, but when I looked closely at the slot I saw that someone had already had the same idea, to judge by the gouges, and it hadn't worked.
I put my rucksack down on the ground on the sunny side of the construction, and sat down, leaning back against the wall to have a think. The more recent infills were still lumps of raised ground around it. No sign yet of a rush of growth in their mouldering hearts. They rested in peaceful rows like a platoon of poleaxed snowmen beside the hard labours of Roy's stolen station-lab nanytes.
I got a chocolate bar out of one of my pockets and ate it, thinking about the attempt I had made in the Shoal to build a copy of Rick's Café Americain. But Roy couldn't have known I would do that. Today's screening meant something else.
I mulled it through. At one time I wouldn't have been able to rest until I had a theory in place, but now there seemed to be all the time in the world. If I had figured things out right at last I didn't think I'd be here alone too long. If I was, then I'd rent a room on this side of town and keep coming here until the person I was expecting finally showed. For the time being, there was nothing left to do but wait.
I licked up the crumbs of my chocolate from the wrapper and folded it away in my pocket. The sun rose higher and the light became more harsh, but warmer. I shut my eyes and basked in it. I must have dozed off for a while because, the next thing I knew, I heard the crisp sound of boots breaking the skin of the snow and a shadow fell over my face.
“Need a hand up?” said her voice, full of humour held back ready to burst out, a real audible joy in seeing me there.
I put my quivering right hand up to shield my eyes and squinted up at her short carroty hair, like an orange halo, the strong pale hand held out open towards me.
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