An elevator.
“We’re going to risk it,” Ilena announced to the shuttle.
The control panel was simple; Adamson had stayed in hotels where the elevators gave him more trouble. It went down, and they could feel gravity returning, or at least something that felt a lot like it. The centrifugal force of the rotating spindle. When he turned his head, he noticed the difference: an odd, niggling feeling in his sense of balance. They came out in a room full of windows, huge panes of flawless glass from floor to ceiling. And beyond those…Ilena caught her breath, awestruck. She said something that sounded Russian, and very, very impressed.
The space station was hollow. A landscape of metal stretched out before their eyes, covering the whole of the inside surface of the spindle—houses, roads, and lakes sprawled beneath them, climbing the walls in a gentle concave curve that reached above their heads. A rolled-up world of shimmering steel, an alien planet obeying an utterly unfamiliar geometry. Sure, when you went down there, wherever you were walking there was ground “below” your feet; you would always have the feeling you were standing at the lowest point of a valley, but one that closed neatly overhead.
“An ark,” Adamson heard himself say. Right as he said it, he knew that this—here, now—was the high point of his life, the moment he would talk about until the day he died. “An ark in space. All we have to do is come aboard.”
There was water; there was air to breathe. People would be able to live here; they could inhabit this artificial world, unfamiliar though it was. And because people could get used to anything, they would also get used to being able to see every spot on their world at any time, being able to wave up at their friends in the next village just by raising their eyes.
Ilena sighed. “It will be a problem getting enough soil up here for agriculture and livestock. Or do you think there are machines here that make food?”
Adamson looked at her, downcast. Of course! Suddenly he understood what troubled him about the view before them, what he hadn’t been able to put his finger on until that moment. There was nothing alive up here. No animals, no plants, not even soil. Which was only logical, since if there was one thing he had learned about during his time as the utterly unmotivated head of space colonization, it was the soil problem. The stuff that just lay around in the fields back home—brown stuff, black stuff, common clay; the stuff that plants, bushes and trees grew in—was anything but simple. Quite the opposite. Arable soil was a highly complex system of minerals, organic detritus, and microorganisms, the product of life, death, and decay.
And he also understood why there was nothing like that here: because the nano-assemblers couldn’t build it. They could make computer chips of unprecedented fineness and precision, and their building materials had the most astonishing properties: they could make paper tissues or diamond rings—all that was child’s play. But the nanites could not build a living cell. It was beyond their powers. Highly complex processes were at work all the time in living cells, continuously unfolding at dizzying speeds; proteins were being produced, toxins and waste products removed, and so on. They could not be built up atom by atom. It would be like trying to build a motor running at full throttle.
Granted, life was made up of the same atoms as the nonliving world, but it had to grow into its patterns; that was the only way life could arise. It was a completely different approach from the one the extraterrestrial nanites took, and completely different from the approach Hiroshi Kato had taken for his own research. The nano-assemblers may be a perfect tool in their own way, but they had their limits.
“What he didn’t say on the video,” the secretary of defense said during a special session of the National Security Council, “is that he could just as easily destroy the world if he wanted to. This technology is a weapon like no other in all of history. Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, Hiroshi Kato is the most dangerous man who ever lived. We have to detain him, no matter what the cost.”
Everyone around the table nodded. Nobody said otherwise.
“Okay,” the president said in the end. “Do what you need. And keep me informed.”
Nor was he the only head of state who received such advice and who gave such an order. Within a few days of Hiroshi’s speech going public, every secret service in the world was after him.
Every secret service, and someone else, too…
LONELY ISLAND
1
The chemotherapy was dreadful, the worst experience Charlotte had ever had in her life. They gave her something for the nausea, of course, and of course she felt nauseous all the time anyway, miserable and weak, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
When she lay in bed with the intravenous drip in her arm, it was as though an enemy were pouring through her veins, a demon from primeval times in liquid form, an ancient enemy from the days when the cells themselves had first taken shape and had to fight against the toxic corrosion of the world around them. Exposed to the poison for hours on end, she felt as though she had been hurled back to the very origins of life, the beginning of time, and that she was betraying her own body. She felt like a fortress that had surrendered to some primordial enemy, opened her doors, and cast down her weapons before it. Brenda came and tried to console her, to offer her support; but then at some point Charlotte couldn’t stand to have anyone else around, not even Brenda, and had to send her away so she could be alone with herself and her demon.
The first time the endless hours were finally past, when Thomas came and picked her up, she felt like an angel or a spirit, a creature of light sitting next to him. She raised her hands again and again, astonished each time to find she was not transparent.
“I don’t know whether it’s the right thing to do,” she said while Brenda cooked her a light broth, the only food she could imagine keeping down. “It feels so…wrong.”
“It’s a chance though, Charley,” Brenda replied desperately. “Just look at it as your chance.”
She thought about this. A chance. How many chances did she need? How many chances had she already had? She seemed to have missed them all. Why would it be any different this time of all times?
The next morning all the hair still left on her body began to fall out. She only had a few patches on her scalp anyway, but when she got out of the shower, even they were gone. Her pubic hair fell out in clumps, and when she dried her face, parts of her eyebrows and eyelashes stayed behind in the towel. Three days later she was as hairless as a baby. She stood in front of the mirror and felt that she was looking at a shopwindow dummy. The doctor was surprised and told her he hadn’t expected that to happen until the second dose of treatment. But then again, every patient reacted differently. And the hair would all grow back; she needn’t worry about that.
“I’m not worried about my hair,” Charlotte said. I’m worried about myself. But she didn’t say that out loud. One look at the doctor’s face, lined by a lifetime of worry for others, and she knew he understood without her having to say it out loud.
Besides, she had her mother to worry about her hair on her behalf. She kept calling and trying to persuade her to come to Paris, where she knew some wonderful wigmakers. Wonderful! The idea that she would be able to take a transatlantic flight in her condition was farfetched enough, but the thought she might do so to buy a wig was absurd. Her mother wouldn’t be put off, though. Her calls became a form of torture for Charlotte.
The days passed. She would get up with an effort in the morning, drained by every move she made, exhausted even when she tried to rest, and worn-out before evening came. She still felt wrung out, like an old dishcloth, when the next dose of therapy was due.
“Maybe you’ll cope better with this one,” said the female doctor who greeted her this time. “It happens in a lot of cases. The patients get used to it.”
But not her. The second dose was the same nightmare—only much deeper.
A week later Brenda knocked gently a
t her door. “Charley?”
Charlotte sat up with a start. She had been sitting in her armchair, trying to read, and had nodded off. “Yes, what is it?”
“Sorry. I didn’t want to wake you. It looked as though you were—”
“No problem. Really. I…it’s a dull book.” She set it aside.
Brenda hesitated. “Say—listen, you’re good at languages. Do you think you could translate something for a friend?”
Charlotte looked at her oldest friend. Only then did she notice Brenda was getting her first gray hairs. Strange how you could go through life and never notice things. Was she good at languages? She got by, that was for sure. But to translate? “I’ve never done it,” she said. “I don’t know whether I can.”
“Would you give it a try?” Brenda took out a sheet of paper, a letter written in Spanish. “It’s a divorce case, I’m afraid. One of Tom’s colleagues who married a Frenchman. He’s a racing driver, if you can believe that. And now he’s causing trouble for her; nobody knows why.” She passed her the letter. “Anyway, she needs this in French.”
So she tried. Since Charlotte needed to hear things aloud to understand them, she shut herself away in her room to read the letter out loud to herself, to hear the sound of the words and the meaning behind them. The legal details required precise translation that took all her concentration. The world around her faded away, time stood still, and she forgot her own body, her weakness, her fears. There was only the letter and the words. She wrote them out, corrected herself, crossed them out, and wrote some more.
Something changed inside her during those hours. When she eventually looked up, she felt a peace she had never known before. At first she listened, amazed, since it seemed to her that a machine had been humming away softly in the background this whole time and had only just fallen silent. But then she understood that there had never been any machine. She herself had fallen silent for the first time in her life.
She looked around, gazing at the window, the wooden desk where she sat, the bed, and the hand-embroidered bedspread. They were all simply there. Objects that someone had made once upon a time. They had been there before her, and they would still be there after she was gone. She, Charlotte Malroux, would die. That was how it was. Her journey would be over soon. And all in all she had nothing against ending her journey here, in Buenos Aires. She wouldn’t do any more chemo. She would simply live out the days that were left to her.
When Charlotte had finished translating the letter and brought it to Brenda in her room, her friend looked at her in surprise, seeming to see the change she had undergone.
“Could you help me to find a room somewhere in town?” Charlotte asked.
They finally settled on Belgrano. It was a safe part of town for a woman living on her own and not far from Núñez, where Brenda and Tom lived; if she needed any help, one of them could be there in an instant. That was the condition Brenda imposed before she would let Charlotte go.
She took a room in a house that belonged to an old couple who usually rented to students. The old woman was from Germany and was delighted to have the chance to dust off the French she had learned at school. She soon learned, however, it would be easier to stick to Spanish. The house lay on a quiet, treelined street far enough from the Avenida Cabildo to be free of traffic and noise, but close enough for Charlotte to be able to do all her shopping on foot—for the time being at least, and only if she stuck to what she really needed. But that was what she wanted: from now on, she would stick to what she really needed.
The best thing was that her room was on the ground floor and had its own deck, where she could sit and look at the garden as it slowly succumbed to the wilderness. It was a sight full of secrets. She decided this was where she would spend most of the time that was left to her. The room was furnished, and most of the furniture was fine. There were some pieces she didn’t like, though—the great big black wardrobe of aged oak that didn’t go with the rest of the room; the desk, which was too narrow; the mirror, with its pompous gold frame—and she persuaded the landlords to let her replace them with other pieces at her own expense. She spent a few days going through furniture stores, antique dealerships, and street markets looking at items and considering their merits and was astonished to find that it didn’t tire her out at all but instead invigorated her. She arranged for transport and wheedled and flattered the delivery men until they had placed her new white wardrobe exactly where she wanted it, with the bookshelf right next to it. Then she painted one wall in a shade of peach she had fallen in love with. She hung new drapes and bought far too many houseplants in colorful pots. For the first time in her life, she made herself a home.
“It looks wonderful!” Señora Blanco marveled when she saw what Charlotte had done with the room. Charlotte just smiled; now that it was all done, she found she had a terrible headache.
The next day she went to see Dr. Aleandro again, who looked at her with his careworn expression and explained it was the tumor. It was growing again, he said, and pressing harder on her brain. Was she quite sure she didn’t want to…?
“No,” said Charlotte. “I’d just like something for the headaches.”
He prescribed her tablets that came with a list of possible side effects longer than her arm. They helped, though. After that she made sure she never overexerted herself. When she went out for groceries, she always lay down to rest for half an hour afterward. Later she discovered an ice-cream parlor that served excellent espresso; from then on she always made sure she stopped there to rest. This was the last summer she would live through; if she couldn’t eat ice cream now, then when?
That stillness, that silence within her, never left her now. When she was out and about, she looked at the people scurrying by and felt she had already departed. Most of them were in a hurry, many of them looked unhappy, hungry for something they felt they didn’t have, irritable. None of them seemed to know they were alive or realize what an extraordinary thing that was all by itself. Charlotte watched them indulgently, for she remembered all too well she had been the same way.
At last, she began to write letters, to old friends, to former lovers, to everyone she felt she still owed an explanation or at least a few words. She wrote to Gary at his old address in Belcairn, because she didn’t have the one in London. She told him how she was and told him she often found herself thinking of the way they had met in Moscow, and of that evening under the bridge in Istanbul. She told him how his devotion to his work impressed her, how much she admired his integrity when he had bought the fake harpsichord. She told him she had loved him while it lasted, that she was happy to have known him, and that she wished him and Lilith all the best.
She wrote to Adrian to thank him for leading the expedition. He was the only one who wrote straight back, a long, deeply felt letter saying just how sorry he was to hear her news and wishing her the best. She cried when she read it but had to laugh when she read the postscript saying he also sent greetings from Morley, who had unfortunately fallen off a ladder while rearranging his bookshelves and now had a complex fracture in his forearm, meaning his handwriting was even worse than usual at the moment.
She even wrote to James. It was a hard letter to write, and she took several days over it. In the end she let him know she had always suspected he was having affairs on the side—that a woman always feels such things—but that she had turned a blind eye and told herself it was nothing to do with her, that he had to get it out of his system. She also said she realized how stupidly she had behaved, that she knew now she had been indulging him, encouraging him almost, because he always dropped the other girls and came back to her, and that had been a cheap way for her to feel good about herself. She wrote that she was sorry she hadn’t set down clear ground rules right from the start, and that since she hadn’t, it was her fault, too, that things hadn’t worked out between them.
When at last she tried to write a letter to Hiroshi, she foun
d she couldn’t. There was so much to say, and nothing at all. Every attempt to put her feelings into words ended up in a tangle of broken sentences she didn’t understand herself when she reread them. Why had they never been a couple, as he had once wanted so much? They had always been close, and she would almost have said they were more like brother and sister than lovers, but she knew she had always felt that urge as well, like an itch. She didn’t understand it, and so the letter stayed unfinished after countless false starts.
“Yes, that’s her.” Coldwell nodded and handed the photo back to James. “She was with him in Hong Kong that one time.”
James felt his jaw grind—a nervous tick he could do nothing to stop these days. “And why was she there? Did he say anything?”
Coldwell shrugged his massive shoulders. “All I heard was the inventor would be bringing his muse along. No idea what that was supposed to mean.”
“His muse?”
“Do you know the woman?”
James scratched his chin with the edge of the photo. “Yes. Yes, I do. And I also know where she is at the moment.” He put the picture back into the file. “Kato will turn up there to see her at some point, sure as night follows day. Get your people together, and go wait for him.”
April was drawing to an end and with it the long summer in Buenos Aires. The weather forecast had promised a few more fine days and then rain and cool temperatures. Since it was to be her last summer, Charlotte spent as long as she could outside every evening. She sat on her deck, wrapped in a blanket, listening to the birdsong and to children’s voices in the distance, looking at the leaves on the trees that were already beginning to turn, and thinking. Often she would fall asleep there—the painkillers she was taking now against the pressure in her head made her even more tired than she would have been anyway.
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