‘It will run to tens of billions, if not hundreds.’
‘So? Taxpayers are a bottomless source of money for governments. And they’re not going anywhere.’
‘As a taxpayer, I object.’
‘Ah, but, Julia, you don’t pay much tax, do you? New Conservative policies see to that.’
‘What about Wales?’
‘I’m sure that if you have a chat with Joshua Wheaton he’ll convince you to see our point of view. Perhaps you could say a few words to that effect when you leave Number Ten, there’s always a lot of reporters hanging around outside.’
‘Tell me one thing, David. Why do the New Conservatives want to hang on to Wales?’
‘A large country is a stable and strong country. Without Wales, we would be weakened, possibly fatally. I have no intention of allowing that to happen, to waste all we have built over the last seventeen years. It would be national suicide.’
‘And you would lose your majority in Westminster.’
David Marchant gave a delicate shrug. ‘If we lose, you lose, Julia.’ The flatscreen went blank.
Going to be one of those days, I think, Juliet, her grandpa said.
Yes. And if I’m not extremely careful, it might be the last.
You should have told him about the alien.
No. I don’t want people like him to make first contact; there’s first impressions to consider as well.
And Royan is the perfect choice for that, is he, girl?
She couldn’t answer.
Julia went upstairs for a shower after the teleconference. Wilhom’s master bedroom was large, with a high ceiling, its windows looking out over the lake. A Paris design house had been contracted for the decoration, giving it walls of royal purple and emerald, a mossy cream carpet, gold fittings, heavy curtains that hung from the ceiling to the floor. A solid four-poster made from oak, with a plain white silk canopy.
On impulse she sat on Royan’s side of the bed and opened the door of his cabinet. Inside she found a couple of bottles of aftershave, comb, a hardback set of The Lord of the Rings, AV memox crystal recordings of black and white films from the nineteen-forties and fifties, a cybofax that must have been ten years old, it was so bulky.
She took them all out and arranged them on the bed, lining them up according to size. Not much of a legacy. She remembered buying him the cybofax, the Tolkien books too, come to that.
Clothes? She slid open the door to his walk-through wardrobe. The biolums came on automatically. Dust filters kept the air clean. She walked between the two rails, her hand brushing along his shirts and jackets and waistcoats, setting them swaying gently. The shoe rack along the far wall was well stocked: cowboy boots, suede ankle boots, trainers, alligator shoes, hiking boots. Some of them hadn’t even been worn. Then there were ties, belts, hats.
She let the styles and colours sink into her mind, seeing him in various combinations. He’d grown into quite a sharp dresser.
But what had he been wearing the day he left? She couldn’t remember. There was no spare hanger.
The wardrobe, the bedside cabinet, they shook loose memories. Not her usual processor indexed recollections, real memories. Human memories. They were twinned with emotional responses. Messy.
She left the cube of clean silence, shutting the door behind her. He hadn’t cared enough about the clothes to take them with him. They were hers as much as the manor and the company. He wore them for her, when he was with her. Plugging into the role she’d given him.
Kirsten McAndrews was waiting for her in the study, sitting behind a terminal on the long central table. A dark African vase had been placed in the middle, full of pale pink rose buds. They gave off a thin aromatic scent.
Julia took her own chair at the head. Open Channel to Selfcores. I want you to run a search through patent office memory cores and see if Clifford has filed anything on the generator yet.
He hadn’t yesterday, we checked, NN core one said.
Well, check again, and assign a monitor routine to keep me updated. As soon as it’s filed I want to know.
I see, NN core two said. Why hasn’t he filed one already?
Quite. By telling people he has the generator data for sale he’s exposed himself to every hotrod and tekmerc in existence running a snatch deal against him, not to mention us and kombinate security, probably certain defence ministries too with these stakes. All he has to do is file it with a patent office and he’s covered.
He ain’t got it, Philip Evans said.
That’s what I’m beginning to think, Grandpa. Which means he’s batting on a very sticky wicket. He must know that if I get to the alien before it squirts him the generator data I’ll make it an offer that’ll be difficult to refuse. Event Horizon has interests in every human discipline. Whatever it wants, I ought to be able to supply it.
Then why didn’t it contact you in the first place, girl?
I don’t know. More to the point, if it is up in New London how did it contact Clifford? That’s something we’ve overlooked. It couldn’t have been a direct broadcast from the asteroid.
We don’t know what the alien’s technological limits are, NN core one said. I mean, how could it get into New London unnoticed in the first place? The strategic defence sensor coverage up there is just as good as the low Earth orbit networks.
Ask Royan, she said bitterly. He’s the expert.
Right, we’ll keep you updated.
Cancel Channel to Selfcores. ‘How is Peter Cavendish progressing with Mutizen?’ she asked.
‘Ah yes,’ Kirsten typed rapidly on her terminal. ‘Problems there. I’ve scheduled a meeting for ten thirty; he said they seem to be stalling.’
Julia allowed herself a moment of satisfaction amid the gloom. Greg was right, Mutizen’s offer was a blind. God damn the Dolgoprudnensky.
Self Cores Access Request.
Expedite.
Sorry, girl, bad news.
What is it, Grandpa?
Victor’s Nigerian office has just called in. Three of the survivors the coast guard picked up from the Colonel Maitland’s wreckage are now unaccounted for. It looks like they sneaked out of the hospital some time last night. Two nurses have been injured, and a porter’s vanished.
Bugger.
One of the missing survivors fits Leol Reiger’s description.
I imagine he would, she said.
Victor is already putting a snuff deal together. Reiger won’t hazard anyone for much longer, Juliet.
He won’t have to, this situation is very close to being resolved, one way or another; twenty-four hours at the maximum.
You’re probably right. Why don’t you call Clifford, see if you can settle your differences peacefully?
I might.
Talking never hurt anyone.
Yes, thanks, Grandpa.
Always here for you, Juliet. And today’s company status review is still waiting here with me.
Oh, Lord. All right, let’s get started.
The sprinklers had risen out of Wilholm’s lawn on metre-high metal stalks, like incredibly thin mushrooms wound with a spiral of flexible hose, pumping out long white plumes of spray. Julia stood by the study’s window, listening to the faint whup whup sound of the water as it left the nozzles under high pressure. Puddles were forming in the indentations left by undercarriage bogies. Water was streaming off the wings of her Pegasus.
Matthew was back in the pool, practising his dives under Qoi’s vigilant gaze. He could already do a forward somersault flip. Julia watched him try a back flip, landing on his side with a big splash, limbs flailing. He got out and tried again. Daniella was just visible in the paddock below the lake, riding her horse. Brutus trailed along after her, tail drooping in the mid-morning heat.
They normally invited their friends round to Wilholm in the holidays. Julia enjoyed the sound of the youngsters rampaging through the manor; they seemed to wake the old place up, breezy laughter blowing out the encroachment of dutiful solemnity. And the games
they played roaming around the grounds gave the security team headaches. The defence hardware and gene-tailored sentinels all had to be reprogrammed to cope. Julia wasn’t about to impose restrictions on the kids, childhood was too precious for that. And the shaggy woods and unkempt fields were a magical kingdom when you were that age.
But they hadn’t asked anyone to visit today; or more likely Daniella had bullied Matthew into not asking his friends, mistakenly believing they’d be helping her.
There was a knock on the door, and Peter Cavendish came in, dabbing at his forehead with a navy-blue silk handkerchief. His face was heavily flushed, pure white hair damp with perspiration.
Julia turned away from the window and gave him a welcoming smile. If it hadn’t been for the fact he was wearing a different suit from yesterday she would have said he hadn’t been home, he certainly looked like he hadn’t slept at all. ‘Sit down, Peter, you look like you’ve been overdoing it to me.’
He slipped into one of the black chairs round the table, sighing gratefully. ‘I don’t understand it, Julia. Negotiating with Mutizen is like wrestling fog. We’ve had our contractual team sitting up with their Mutizen counterparts for eighteen hours solid, and every time we look like we’re reaching an agreement, they throw us a blocker. I’d say they’re deliberately stalling, but that doesn’t make any sense. They came to us, remember?’
‘Yes. But I’m afraid you’re right, they are stalling. They are not in possession of the generator data, nor have they ever been in possession. The offer was purely an attempt to goad me into taking some hasty action.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’
‘I’m sorry. I only found out myself early this morning.’
‘Great. Hell, what now?’
‘Fall back on Clifford Jepson and Globecast. How’s that negotiation going?’
Peter Cavendish tucked his handkerchief back into his suit pocket. ‘Second disaster. We’ve thrashed out a more or less satisfactory contract with Globecast’s lawyers, but it hasn’t been costed out yet. And it won’t be until we submit it officially. We were waiting for Michael Harcourt to come through with the data on the other bids, like you said.’
‘Oh, Lord … Sorry, I haven’t decided if I’m going to take Harcourt up on that yet. It turns out he’s Jepson’s cyborg, so we probably couldn’t rely on his figures anyway. But David Marchant has made a counter-bid for our co-operation, quite a good one.’
He gave her a long look, then slipped a couple of centimetres deeper into his seat. ‘Hell, Julia, I’m not sure if I belong here any more. Nothing stays stable long enough to establish a picture these days. I mean, we get a perfectly ordinary contract finalized. Then it’s not just the goalposts which get moved, we’re not even playing the same game we were when we started. I’ve got to have something that doesn’t twist on me, Julia, a set of values I can depend on.’
She returned his mournful gaze. ‘It’s not us, Peter. We’re not at fault.’
‘Yes, sure, in a perfect world.’
‘Something like that.’
‘But in the mean time—’
‘We do what we can.’
‘OK, Julia, you win.’
‘Just think how the other side must feel.’
‘Some comfort. You want me to go ahead with the Clifford Jepson partnership, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, how high do you want us to bid?’
‘How high is up?’ she murmured. ‘I’ll get the Finance Division to work out what sort of bid we can realistically afford, and commercial intelligence to provide estimates on the opposition’s bids. Then we’ll sit down this evening and decide what to offer Clifford. One piece of good news, I can have Treasury backing any time I want.’ She didn’t mention the price tag which came with it; Peter didn’t need to know. Come to that, would he care about Wales?
‘Right,’ he said. ‘At least that’s something concrete.’
‘Have you managed to bring any of the kombinates in on our side, put in a joint offer?’
He shook his head. ‘Ha, no chance. There’s no alliances in this war. Everyone wants atomic structuring, and they want it exclusively. You should see the Stock Exchange this morning. There’s not a share moving. The floor’s waiting to see what’s going to happen after the bids are in.’
‘Maybe nothing will happen. I have yet to be convinced Clifford Jepson has the generator data.’
Peter Cavendish held up his hand. ‘No. Don’t. I don’t want to know.’ He showed her a plaintive little grin. ‘Win or lose, I’ll be glad when this is over.’
‘Yes.’ Yet deep down in her mind there was an intuitive worry that this would never be over, that this alien was just the beginning. There were a hundred billion stars in the galaxy, each one of them waiting to pounce.
She remembered a newscast she’d seen on one of the channels, years ago; a drought-stricken village in Africa, Ethiopia, or the Sudan, somewhere that had never broken the poverty and drought cycle even in the twentieth century. And by the time the new millennium arrived they never stood a chance. A place where the Warming had killed even the dreams that there could be an end to suffering.
The village had been equipped with condenser mats, sucking precious drops of moisture out of the night air. They were pinned to the roof of every hut, the way European houses wore solar panels; a donation from some grandiose Bible-belt American Church charity. The inhabitants had been dying, now the flatscreen showed her healthy children, fat cattle, vegetables growing in hydroponic troughs. It was an oasis, surrounded by dead land, soil so dry it had long since crumbled to dust; the air was completely motionless, had been for years, a decade-long doldrum zone. There were bones out there beyond the huts; cattle, goats, chickens, bleached platinum-white, half buried by the slowly building dunes, they were circled by the skeletons of vultures.
The channel crew was there because the headman had killed the Church technician who’d installed the mats. A centenarian with wrinkled leather skin, protruding bones, a ragged old loincloth; the embodiment of land wisdom. He looked directly into the camera with cloned black eyes, undaunted and contemptuous. ‘Why have you done this?’ he asked. ‘First you murdered the air with your greed, now you send us machines that bring water from nothing. You have stretched our agony across time. We live on the price of your pity, coins you have cast away. Miserable beggars whose piety and distress is our only weapon. We are reduced to eternal compassion victims. If you truly pity us, give us back our dependence on the weather. Bring back the rain and the wind. Then all men may be equal in our dependency again.’
She had understood what the headman had meant, how he felt. The insulting humiliation of relying on a technology he couldn’t begin to understand, sent as a gift by people he did not know, reducing him and his relatives to little more than chattels. A primitive culture preserved by godlike science, a throw-away act of charity. He’d lost every shred of dignity, his entire existence subject to whims outside his control. Whims of a culture that had wrecked his land in the pursuit of its own comfort. Unforgivable.
Primitive cultures were always assimilated into advanced cultures. Values supplanted, and finally ruined. A fundamental law of nature. And her own genetics laboratories had said the aliens were billions of years more advanced than humans.
Atomic structuring was the condenser mat all over again, and now she was a peasant villager. Greg’s Russian general had the right idea, she thought, the same one as the headman.
The Pegasus dropped smoothly on to the Hambleton peninsula’s mudflats, finishing up at a slight angle, nose pointing up towards the Mandel farmhouse. Julia made a grab for Matthew as the belly hatch opened. ‘Now listen, your aunty Eleanor is pregnant, and that means you’re not going to cause the slightest trouble for her. You’ll do exactly as you’re asked, you’ll do it without complaining, and without arguing. Understood?’
His face transformed itself into a picture of hurt innocence. ‘Mummy!’
‘Is that understoo
d?’
‘Yes.’
She narrowed her eyes.
‘Really,’ he said.
‘All right.’
The groves were alive with activity, people and handcarts, tractors, smaller children running under the trees. Shouts and snatches of song carried down the slope to where she was climbing up the limestone chunks. Smells of cooking and cut grass mingled through the muggy air. Humidity next to the reservoir was wicked. She could see the travellers were all in hats and caps, men stripped to the waist. She was attracting quite an audience.
Oliver and Anita came down to meet them, accompanied by five other kids. Daniella and Matthew joined them, and they all took off towards the field where the cars and vans were parked; two security hardliners in casual clothes trailing along behind.
Three hardliners followed Julia up to the farmhouse, two of them carrying the children’s bags. There was a sixteen-wheel lorry parked in the farmyard. A couple of men were busy loading it with white kelpboard boxes full of oranges. They glanced briefly in her direction as she came through the gate.
Christine drove a tractor in from the groves, its trailer piled high with more white boxes. She waved at Julia, but didn’t get down. Picking was a serious business, Julia reflected. The girl started to back the tractor towards the lorry, grinding through the gears.
Julia rapped her knuckles on the kitchen’s door frame as she came in. Eleanor was sitting in the carver’s chair at the head of the long bench table, three cybofax wafers spread out before her. She glanced up. ‘Come in, you’re not disturbing me. Trying to get some byte shuffling done. Looks like we’ve got a good yield this year.’
‘Thanks for having the children,’ Julia said. ‘I just hated the idea of my problems ruining their holiday.’
‘They’re no trouble.’ Eleanor raised a glass to Julia. ‘Help yourself. It’s only Perrier: if I can’t touch alcohol then you can suffer as well.’
The Mandel Files, Volume 2 Page 40
