by John Meaney
There was a tray ready, the porcelain tea-pot with a gaudy cosy. Rupert poured strong-looking tea through a sterling silver strainer. He added the milk for her, just a soupçon, and handed it over without sugar. Trust him to remember how she took it.
‘How’s Brian?’ she asked.
‘Shivering in Trondheim.’
Which could mean frying in Tangiers or sitting downstairs at a desk: his once-temporary transfer to SIS had long ago turned permanent. He had never attempted to be Carl’s father, which was just as well: everyone knew that Carl had been sired by Jack Woods, Lieutenant RN, deceased.
For spinster read widow.
‘I wondered’ – with her, Rupert rarely spun things out – ‘whether you had seen much of AMT lately.’
His voice sounded languid, but the signals he transmitted were always what he wanted others to read. The real Rupert Forrester was buttoned up inside; she wondered if Brian ever saw that man.
‘I’ve been to Manchester a few times,’ she said. ‘The Colossus there, even the Pilot ACE, are far behind the Eastcote setup, but we’re starting to struggle. You know that the Americans are going to dominate the computer world if you don’t let civilian BP veterans talk about it. In a couple of years, we’ll have lost our lead. Plus,’ she added, ‘we need Alan full time, not the short-term visits he’s been putting in.’
Turing had been GCHQ’s chief liaison to the Americans.
‘You’re singing to the choir, Gabby. Our lords and masters don’t agree.’
‘Right. And?’
‘And what, precisely?’
‘Come on, Rupert. It’s a travesty. Alan’s no security risk. He was totally open with the police when he reported the theft. That’s how his homosexuality landed him in court, but that’s precisely why he was never open to blackmail in the first place.’
Unspoken: Rupert of all people had to sympathize.
‘Men like … Alan,’ he said, ‘are accepted more than ever these days, by ordinary people, though that’s not saying much. Accepted by men who served alongside queers in the war.’
The pejorative had an ugly tone in his mouth, immediately covered up.
‘But there’s paranoia blowing through the corridors of Whitehall’ – he gestured at the door – ‘and he damn well should have known better, the stupid bastard. I can’t do anything for him.’
‘If you can’t, then who will?’
‘No one, that’s the point. You probably won’t know this, but your senior directors—’
‘Offered him a permanent post,’ she said. ‘Five thousand a year, cheap at the price and academia’s loss. So for God’s sake, why can’t we have him?’
‘Because the world’s insane, which is why you and I have jobs in the first place.’ He stared at the window, and asked it: ‘Have you read Forster?’
‘Captain Hornblower? One of Carl’s favourites.’
‘I meant E.M.’ He faced her again. ‘As you well know. He said he hoped to have the strength to betray his country before his friends. Ignore the abstract in favour of the tangible, I expect he meant.’
‘So I take it RO never considered him,’ she said, meaning the Recruitment Office.
‘Unlikely. I was hoping you’d do a courier job for me. Be my legman.’ He smiled his Etonian smile. ‘Legwoman.’
From a drawer he took a cream-coloured envelope. Only the best stationery for the privileged few.
‘It looks thin,’ she said.
‘There’s a cheque inside, farewell payment for services rendered. Drawn,’ he said, ‘from a slush fund that does not exist as far as the grannies are concerned.’
For grannies read accountants.
‘Made out to whom?’
‘To A. M. Turing, old girl. To the man who did more than any other individual, apart from maybe Winnie, to save this bloody country from the jackboot.’
The envelope was light in her hand.
‘Is there a message to go with that?’
‘Yes.’ Just for a moment, something burned in Rupert’s eyes; then the glacial mantle was back in place. ‘Tell him, we hope he enjoyed his holiday in Norway.’
The Lyons Tea House establishments were ubiquitous, and while Rupert these days would not be seen dead in one, Gavriela rather liked them: warm and moist, with steam escaping from the polished urns, the chatter of young mothers taking their children out for a treat – a glass of orange squash, a soft round doughnut crunchy with sugar – and men of all sorts reading newspapers while they drank their tea. Also, the company had designed and built their own computer, the LEO, operational for the past two years, which made them smart people, or so Gavriela thought.
On her way here, she had seen no mobile spotters; but a watcher already in place would be hard to detect, except by being too good: an absence of vibration from someone who looked capable. She sat waiting and watching, tea in front of her, picking up nothing untoward.
Alan came at the appointed time, bought tea and McVitie’s at the counter, and brought his tray over. His eyes, the same shade of startling blue as Oppenheimer’s, remained fastened on her as he sat, scraping the wooden chair into place.
‘Nice to see you again, Gabby.’
‘Likewise. Have you been following the news from Japan?’
‘Mesons? Yes, interesting, isn’t it?’ With an almost-smile: ‘Even I know you’re not here to talk physics.’ He pulled his jacket down, tight against his chest. ‘What do you think? Am I developing gorgeous teats or what?’
He let go, and his clothing fell normally, making his bust less obvious.
‘God, Alan. I … Oh, God.’
Not calling on the divine, but expressing inarticulate sympathy.
‘Organotherapy, they call it,’ he said. ‘Sounds so scientific, doesn’t it?’
‘Like eugenics.’ She was trying not to cry. ‘And about as palatable.’
People like him had gone to the gas chambers, alongside people like her.
‘Everything is subject to causal laws,’ he said. ‘By definition of being inside the light-cone of creation. Vacuum being weightless, you see, it must expand at lightspeed.’
‘I thought we weren’t going to discuss physics.’
‘I’m just trying to make sense of people.’
‘Talk about lost causes,’ she said. ‘Listen … The message is, hope you enjoyed your holiday in Norway. Spoken by someone who looked like he was chewing a lemon, by the way.’
‘I don’t need a computer to decode that one.’
‘Oh.’
‘The terms of my sentence are quite explicit. If I’m abroad with a friend, outside the borders of this country, certain restrictions on my behaviour do not apply. Except that my body remains filled with oestrogen, not conducive to romance, shall we say.’
‘But it means they’re keeping you under surveillance,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t get the significance.’
She was careful passing the envelope, not knowing who might be watching now.
‘Call it recompense from a friend,’ she added.
Terming it an apology would be insulting. This was bad enough.
‘I saw some runes over there,’ he said.
‘Ruins?’
‘Runes, in Norway. In a museum. Saw a buckle with your name on, like this.’
He took a propelling pencil from his inside pocket, and drew on the envelope:
Gavriela had never studied the archaic symbols, never learned them as far as she could remember; and yet the word made sense.
‘How did you know?’ she said.
She had been Dr Woods, not Wolf, at Bletchley Park.
‘I’ve seen so much. Maybe I really am a security risk, the way they say.’ He slipped the envelope inside his pocket, as if it had been there all along, with his pencil. It was nicely done. ‘I probably won’t see you around, will I?’
‘Probably not.’
She let him go first, then headed for the ladies room. There, stairs led down to a side entrance; she let h
erself out, walked past a stack of crates, and checked the alleyway. No one expected her to be a field operative; but the annual streetcraft course was mandatory, and her memory of wartime Berlin always made the exercises vivid.
By the time she crossed the High Road and doubled around the block, her expectation had been that Alan would have disappeared. But he had stopped to chat with an Evening Standard vendor under the Tube overhang – KILBURN STATION rendered in white against blue – and as he went inside, just for a moment Gavriela thought she saw a shadow within shadows, a darkness descending to follow her lost friend; but the memory that made her shiver went all the way back to a graveyard in Berlin, to the man who saved her then met her family, but terrified her whenever she remembered.
‘You know, Jürgen,’ Ilse had said that night. ‘Never mind Erik. You and Gavriela could be brother and sister.’
Perhaps it was the situation, the senseless official sadism visited on Alan.
He can’t be here.
She went into the Tube station, bought a ticket, and went down. But the sucking, dust-laden wind was the aftermath of a departing train, and the platform was empty.
For Jürgen read Dmitri. Or paranoid imagination.
SIXTY-FOUR
THE WORLD, 5568 AD
It was coming, the storm. Down below, where the strange, damaged craft with its soft-skinned inhabitants interrogated that other Seeker – now unconscious – they did not seem to understand the build-up of flux all around, to levels that Seeker had never experienced.
He wished he could formulate a rescue, snatch the one like him from these alien things – so like people, yet with skins so soft and squishy instead of shining silver – but he was one person and they had weapons: witness the captive’s fate. That other being, with wings and carapace of metal, had crept inside the craft, trembling and clacking as it moved. Seeker thought that the natural flux levels were affecting it; surely, then, it could sense the disturbance hurtling this way at immense velocity?
Perhaps the blackened craft was too damaged to move. Though he had never seen such a thing, Seeker had experienced the Idea of one; observing it in reality was nothing special.
Closer now, the coming chaos.
His shelter was as secure as he could manage: overhang, rock on one side, a small boulder on the other, which he had been able to push and tug to a more snug position. Soon it would be here, flux raging strong enough to tear apart minds, flinging grains of ferrous sand with force enough to strip flesh, to flense ordinary people, never mind the soft intruders below.
But they had their prisoner, that other Seeker, blackened and wounded.
Almost on them, the edge of it.
Yet something was happening, something that tore and twisted at ambient flux in ways that had nothing to do with the advancing storm; so Seeker dragged himself out of the shelter and peeked over the ridge, hoping they were too busy to spot him.
Light of sapphire blue shone from their eyes – impossible, for light entering the eyes is how people see – but it was happening. And now the glow became lines, stretching towards the captive Seeker, heading for his eyes; and then they made contact, those blue arcs converging; and then their prisoner shivered and the blueness snapped out of existence.
This was abomination.
Seeker could not sense the aliens’ thoughts, sentient though they looked; but his fellow Seeker down below was resonating with strangeness, with vortices of incompleteness whirling through his skull. It was the non-thoughts, the aspects of cognition missing from his radiating mind, that stood out for Seeker. For those partially formed thoughts needed to be complete in order to exist, as surely as flux must always loop; and if they did not complete in the captive Seeker’s mind, they must complete elsewhere: in the minds of his soft-skinned captors.
A single mind existing in a formation of bodies.
Appalled, Seeker could only hunker down, hoping that the new conglomerate could not sense him – he had not tried to mask himself from the captive’s perceptions – then realized his concern was irrelevant, because glittering sand was spraying against surrounding rock, and the edge of the storm was upon them. He hid beneath the overhang, cowering, hands over forehead and eyes squeezed shut.
**I cannot.**
Twisting flux tore the thought out of him; yet the intention remained.
Another Seeker needed him.
He had experienced only Ideas of heroism, never the actuality. Then he pushed that thought aside – a ridiculous flux-knot, torn away by the storm – and told himself to do what was necessary. Skin hurting with sand-spatter, he pulled himself up to the top of the ridge as before, already finding it hard to think, here at the storm’s edge; then he squinted his eyes open, staring into the sand-blizzard and trying to see.
They had fallen back, the soft-skinned ones: ripped red by the flensing sand.
**Good.**
While that abomination, the Seeker-that-was, struggled against the storm, pulling himself finger’s length by finger’s length towards the vessel’s hatch. It was hard to watch, and Seeker did not try. Instead he hauled himself forward, pulling against the storm’s force, crawling downwards with all the exertion of an upward climb, fingers digging into sand that thumped and rippled with inductive effects, skin burning with the wash of flying grains.
Down below, the Seeker-that-was had spotted him.
Incoherent flux tumbled this way. Torn by storm vortices or distorted from human thought because of what they had done to him, Seeker could not tell. The Seeker-that-was had been weakened by his violent capture or subsequent torture; and while he raised his arms to try controlling the storm-flux, to use it as a weapon, he was too weak and the vortices spun past, barely grazing Seeker’s skin.
And then he was close enough to act.
Storm-smash and vortex-tear.
**Spin in. Hold in!**
All his strength to fight against the rage.
**Hold in, damn you!**
Fight against the hammering flux, tidal waves of chaos strong enough to lift them up, to throw them far, but he had to hold it, control, and force the other to do so too.
**Curl it in!**
Pulling back the flux; repairing the vortices of thought; closing them off and making them whole within themselves, not running through others.
**Tighten the curl, that’s right.**
A tiny light of humanity amid the pain.
**That’s right! Fight it. Haul it in.**
The captive began to fight back, with part of his mind at least: joining his strength to Seeker’s instead of opposing it. Still the flux remanence, induced by the aliens in the captive’s mind, was strong; Seeker concentrated, howling with effort to direct the hysteresis, pushing it, restoring the mind to what it was; and then some critical point was reached and they broke apart, falling to the ground.
Whirlwind sand all around.
Cutting sharp, battering hard.
**Which way?**
**Climb there.**
Together, helping each other, neither sure of who he was, knowing only that this chaos required their joint escape, they heaved and screamed and struggled like primitive animals, climbing to shelter from the storm. And then they were out of it, the worst of it, staring at each other and laughing.
**Seeker.**
**Yes, Seeker.**
They clasped forearms, then squeezed further into the shelter, because the storm was still intensifying, with stronger flux to come.
They retained consciousness long enough to sense what happened to the alien craft. Making no attempt to rescue the humanoid crew exposed on the ground – cut by the storm, surely they were dead already – the metal-winged alien (and any others that might have been on board all along, not revealing themselves) caused the damaged craft to come to life, its powerful engines thrusting down, rising up into the vortex of the storm.
Rising …
And then the full power of flux fell upon it, flinging the craft against a ferrimagnetic cliff, smas
hing the alien thing to shreds. Both Seekers could sense the shards flying through the storm; then random chaos heightened to maximum strength, and holding on to their own thoughts was near impossible, all distant perceptions closed off by the storm.
Finally, finally, it was past.
**Thank you, Seeker.**
The one who had been captive passed out. Wounded but freed, Seeker thought he would recover. Perhaps they would both return to explore beneath the sands, for surely this other Seeker also had sensed what lay beneath, incarcerated for so many generations.
Then Seeker, too, slipped into sleep, and dreamed with flux curled up inside his head, inducing no resonance in his companion: a very private dream, and a strange one. For in that dream his body was transparent, like living glass; and he was on a world that was not this one; yet he was not afraid.
SIXTY-FIVE
MOLSIN, 2603 AD
Closer and closer, the sky-cities moved to Conjunction, their trajectories coming together despite the vagaries of air currents, even the occasional macro-vortex. The strengthening or loosening of political ties and commercial interests were as important to the final configuration as the altitude of laminar flows or the lift capacity of this city compared to that. Not counting D-2 and a handful of other urban babies, nine hundred and twenty-seven cities were coming together high above the Amber Spot.
Condensing from a planet-ranging patternless spread to a globular formation, shrinking inwards to a predetermined centre, they came at leisurely, controlled velocities. There would be no single city at the configuration’s heart. Instead, the core must form itself first; then the other cities could begin to attach themselves, building the formation outwards in concentric shells.
Gaggles and flocks of cities, drawing together.
First Popper, Dubrovnik and Dalton formed a horizontal triangle, extruding vast, thick spars to join themselves together. They would be the middle tier. Later the spars would hollow out, granting intercity access; but while the joining was in progress, they remained solid.
Above them, another triangle formed, these three pulling themselves closer together, creating a tighter, smaller shape. Then Cohenville-Feynmanton-Gaussburg floated into place, above Popper-Dubrovnik-Dalton, and rotated to a forty-degree offset. Spars grew at angles to fasten the two triangles together. Soon after that was done and tests confirmed the structural integrity, the Whitton-Strossville-Aéroparis formation floated underneath, rotated into position, and fastened itself to the cities above.
