He was struggling with all of his nervous system at full scream in the effort, when to his horror a soft female voice said,
“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry…”
He felt a sensation on his cheek that was cool and hot; breath, lips—a kiss.
The floor under the bed collapsed. Jude's heart broke and he screamed in terror as he started to fall, the orange and red fire-mouth laughing him in, up to the billowing wet steam of its eyeballs.
He woke up.
Street light fell in a yellow band across his feet and lit the room in dim bronze, as still as though it had been cast for a hundred years. He tried to move his feet and they parted. He pushed back against the mattress and sat up. Although he could never have explained it, this time he knew it was for real. The other times had been so unlike reality that he couldn't imagine how he'd made the mistake of thinking they were true. This was a hundred times more detailed, more tactile, and the TV worked and it was showing the evening news and what was more he understood every word they were saying.
But he was breathing hard and he could swear that behind that last dream someone had really been there with him.
Jude touched his cheek, almost scared to, in the place where he had felt the kiss. Nothing. Not even a residual flutter in the nerves.
Then he became aware of how cold he was, nearly as cold as the dead. That woman, she had been kind of familiar, right…but he didn't know anyone like that. He didn't recognize her voice, even though she had spoken straight to him in a way that suggested they were—the first thought that came to mind was lovers. Was he dead and she alive? Could he have made her up or had she invaded his dream, like a psychic spy? His mind had a lot of tricks it could pull. He'd always told White Horse her “visions” were imaginary things but at this moment he wouldn't have said it with anything like the old certainty.
Jude rubbed his face in his hands and looked around, trying to get some bearing on the rest of the day that wasn't muddied with bizarre beliefs in nonexistent women. He was starting to feel better until he switched on the light next to the bed. With the judder of bad brakes his heart ground to a halt.
There was a paper file lying on the vile chintz counterpane, a manila folder of a shape that he recognized immediately as an American office standard.
The sight of it erased every other scrap of awareness he possessed. He stared at it and was too confused to be afraid. The TV changed its show. The room became blue, with soft lights playing across the bed like tree-shadows moving in moonlight. Jude steeled his nerves and reached out to pick up the folder. His grip wasn't too sure, though, and a slew of blue, pink, and white pages slithered out of its guts. He dropped the rest and put the main room lights on. His hands were shaking. The new brightness made him aware that he was naked. He scrabbled to put his clothes on and not take his eyes off the papers. There were photographs attached and he recognized them as personnel documents. He thought they looked like government issue.
His Pad rang with a six-note, the one he'd set for priority incoming. He picked it off the dressing table and looked at the ID. Natalie Armstrong.
On his knees in front of the bed, half dressed and stunned, he answered it straight away, running a hand through his hair and hoping he didn't look too bad, although he must have done.
Her face materialized on screen and, with the familiar ease of people who spent a lot of time talking over distance, she wasn't looking at him, but at something in her hand.
“…Whatever this is and where you got it but it's something I want to know more about and I assume that there's no such thing as a secure line considering the situation, so…I'm sure you know where I live and I'll leave here in half an hour. If you catch up with me, we'll talk then.” As she finished she glanced up at her own Pad camera with a quick practical nod, not attempting the false eye contact that would only have been polite, and then her hand came down and switched it off.
Jude had the impression of a messy, cluttered room around her, that she'd been reading something on a display screen, and that in the hard light of its rays her unique face looked sharp, other-worldly and dangerous. He broke from staring at the empty Pad screen a second later and looked up at the files.
His mind oscillated between Natalie, the file, his dream, and this awful, disgusting, chintz-covered room with its frills and furbelows, tassels and cushions and overblown flowers on every surface surging up at him like tangling thickets of genetically modified people-eating roses. He experienced a sense of disorientation so strong it was worse than zero g. He decided he couldn't stay there.
As fast as he could, Jude started gathering up the papers, stuffing them back in their folder. He put that and the Pad in his case and finished getting dressed in the darkest clothes he had. Natalie was right, he did know where she lived and he was going to get this whole business done and out of the way and go home tomorrow with an answer that would get White Horse off his back. Back to real life. Yes. Definitely.
Jude took the case with him when he left. As he jogged down the steps in his good shoes he thought that he never had to go back, and that made it possible to throw off the whole experience like an old skin left behind. On the damp street his step lightened as soon as he turned the corner.
Dan was glad that Natalie hadn't said anything about the sandwich and that she seemed to be alive as usual when she got home, shoes in hand, at seven-thirty. Therefore he was able to say, as innocently as possible, “That bloke who came for the upgrade thing that wasn't. That was him, wasn't it?”
Natalie stopped halfway across the living room and turned her head. “You'd know that if you'd not had two hours off for lunch, now wouldn't you?”
“Has he got the hots for you then, or what? Is he mad? Did you send the police after him? You know, I bumped into him as he was leaving, because you can't really miss a guy like that, can you now? And I saw him in town—” But he broke off there because to go on might entail mentioning Ray or coming up with some lie, and she was too good at picking the truth out of them. It was almost like a second-sight thing with her. Dan looked down and pretended to glance at the Radio Times that was upside down next to him.
“Where?” was all she said and he knew he'd blown it.
“Just in town. You know. Walking around. Probably sightseeing.” He glanced up carefully and saw that she was losing interest, so it was safe to add, “But smart casual, not in the work suit, and, you know, I often wonder why it is,” and he could lift his head now and grin, “that they issue such awful things as boiler suits for uniforms, I mean, they don't even—”
“It was a BSL-4 suit, you moron.” She started moving again, but at the doorway she hesitated and dropped her bags there. She fixed him with an uncomfortable glance and Dan knew he'd scored. “Did he recognize you? Did he say anything?”
“Yeah, he asked me to ask you if you'd go out with him.”
Natalie nodded, face stony. “Piss off and die, Dan.” She turned her back and disappeared into her room.
“You like him!” Dan singsonged. “Yes, you do! A-ha! At last, the ice queen genius of Yorkshire shows she isn't absolute zero.”
Her head reappeared, “You went to see fucking Ray Innis, didn't you?”
He stopped singing.
“I knew it. You're such an idiot. You know that if you ever give him one sniff of anything to do with work you'll end up in jail for the rest of your life?”
Her voice was pleading despite the gunlike assault of its words. Dan knew he was an idiot, but it was only when she was like this that he ever actually felt afraid. His head seemed full of woolly clouds that needed a focus but weren't able to find it by themselves. Natalie never suffered that. It was pure light in her head, razor-bright. She couldn't understand it. He didn't understand it, he only knew that some stuff helped and other stuff made him forget that he was, despite his ability to do his job, fundamentally dumb in a very important way that meant he'd never make the grade.
“I didn't buy anything off him. I didn't give
him anything.” At least that was the truth. He could say it and look her in the face and not flinch or giggle, but he sounded like a child, even to his own ears. He smiled at her, winningly, “Want a beer?”
“I've got work to do,” she said. “Maybe later.”
“You're always working.” Ah, this was better ground.
“I like it.” And she'd let him off the hook, he could hear it.
“You need more play,” he said, sliding down into a more comfortable slouch. “You need a night out with Mister Mad American, or whoever. Jude the Obscurity.”
“You stick to those pills, son,” she called in her Old West Doctor voice, and he heard her switching her machines on. “Let me do the prescriptions around here.”
“Tea though?” Maiden Aunt.
“Aye, a'right.” Northern Farmer.
Dan was happy as he got up. He knew that if the American had really been mad there was no way the conversation would have got that far. And did that mean he was some kind of agent? Maybe he should mention it to Shelagh Carter after all? But he thought, Nah—if Natalie likes him, then he must be okay. She'd spot a phoney in a minute. Which reminded him…
He took the tea through and set it on her wobbly old desk. “You know what? I saw Knitted Man do something weird today. Funny.”
“Oh yeah?” She used her leg to steady the desk and started rummaging in one of her bags for something.
Knitted Man was Dan's name for Bill, one of the Clinic's chief programmers for the NervePath systems. Although he wasn't qualified in psychology, or any other mental science, his technical skill with the hardware and software was constantly called on as the doctors and researchers struggled to get their ideas down into practical code. He wore a tank-top sweater on many of the cooler days and it was this, combined with his pinkish indoor skin and round body that made Dan think of The Clangers; an old show about a race of knitted aliens who whistled. Bill also whistled when he thought he was alone and Dan had recordings of him taken with the office webcam that could guarantee a laugh with almost anyone else in the Clinic whenever things started to get a bit intense. When work was going well Bill whistled “La Marseillaise,” when badly, snatches of opera, and when things were going really badly he made a kind of slowly repeated “piu” like a finch on the verge of dropping off the twig.
Dan watched Natalie produce a generic disk and jam it into the driver of her personal machine. She seemed not to like it, for some reason.
“Yeah. He left early, said something about going to get some money for his holiday, but walked out of the parking lot towards the Haxby Road end instead, whistling the whole time.”
“I thought you said it was weird. That sounds about normal for our place.” Natalie tapped at the grey keys of her ‘board and flicked on the switches of her graphics processors. As they came up to speed she took a sip of her tea.
“D'you want to know the big news?” she said. “Stages One and Two have now been cross-mapped properly.” She made a face at him that said Ta-DA! and waved her hands in the air.
Dan paused, forgetting the funny story about Bill and the security system, and looked at the gobbledegook that had suddenly cluttered the screen in the terse, efficient Courier font that meant he couldn't read anything properly without putting his lenses in. “Stages One and Two?” He wished he listened to more of what she said. It would make life so much simpler.
“Physical Event Map and Mental Event Map,” Natalie grinned like a maniac and waited for him to get it. He waited. She said, “You know, it means that we've stuck together the real world of physical events like chemicals and electricity and the nonphysical world of mental life. It's the big kahuna. The foundation for a genuine working theory of consciousness. Dan, for fuck's sake! The Holy Grail, man!” Her voice had risen on the last phrases as he'd kept his face straight and now he could grin, too.
“Gotcha.” He nodded wisely.
“Yeah!” She made a fist with her right hand and pumped the air. “That's what you call a goal. It's a game of two hemispheres. The lads is over the moon!”
“You said it was a grail. Now it's a goal.” He gave her shoulders a quick rub as he slipped briefly into Jewish Mother mode. “Goal, grail, schmail. Ishmael! Fetch me a whale. Grail, and still she sits in her room at the little screen, popping her eyes out and not a husband in sight. Oy, why have you sent me such a daughter? The least she could do is put on a dress and try to act normal before her ovaries are withered down like raisins and her face would pass for a dog's bum!”
“Well.” But Natalie was in a good mood. “It's not quite the Grail yet. More a sort of plinth thing that the grail will go on. But you get the idea.” Her graphics cards had revved and produced a slow pair of pictures, side by side, on the screen. As the images built themselves in layers, forming a rough 3-D of two naked brains, she added, “That does sound weird for Bill. He must be feeling the pressure. A week in Malta will sort him out.”
“Yeah maybe.” Dan wasn't sure. But he'd mentioned it and his conscience was clear. “Anyway, you have to come out for at least a celebratory tipple, hon, or the whole thing isn't cricket. What're those?”
“The right one is a sample of Tony Clearwater, the schizophrenic with paranoia who was up the other day for part of the volunteer therapy programme in retracking that my dear old dad is involved in,” she said. “Do you think it looks like this other one here? Just by zone colour?”
What they were seeing was a representation that used different colours for different levels of activity, roughly delineating the pattern of a few minutes' thought. Dan glanced back and forth and rested his chin on the top of her head. “Yeah. Pretty similar. Not over here…but mostly in the temporal lobes and this thingy here.”
“Amygdala,” she said, trying to shrug him off.
“Yeah. Close enough for government work. You should wash this you know,” he plucked at her two-inch tufts. “Makes it an entirely different colour.”
“Good,” she murmured, not hearing him at all. “And not good.”
“Come again?”
“I am going out after all,” she said, spinning around in her chair so fast she almost knocked him over. He grappled with his tea and only burned his fingers slightly.
“Oh, great.”
“Yeah. But on my own.”
“Natalie!”
“I'll meet you. At nine. In…the Black Swan.”
“Why? Where are you going?”
She stood up and started heaving him towards the door. “Go on now. I need time to change.”
“Natalie, what's going on?!” But she wouldn't explain, only shoved him harder until he had to move or fall over. The door closed in his face.
“Nat-ta-lee!” he howled but she didn't respond. He paused. “Will we be eating out or shall I just chew on this six-month-old carrot from the last time anyone shopped?”
“We'll eat,” she conceded. “But you can lick the stove clean as you're waiting.”
He thought, listening carefully, that she was making a call to someone. With his ear pressed to the thin hardboard he could almost make out the tones.
“Dan, piss off!” she yelled. “I can see your shadow under the door.”
Reluctantly he drifted to the sofa and put the TV on. He felt a bit flat and left out of things. Natalie couldn't have a secret life, it wasn't on. It was very unnecessary. He didn't have one. He told her everything. On the other hand, they were going out tonight, so there was that to look forward to. Only a couple of hours to kill. Still, curiosity was a new one and he was finding that it itched him something ridiculous. He could, of course, satisfy himself and follow her.
He could. He didn't have to.
Natalie found a dress too airy, a skirt too girly, and a blouse too much like a secretary's garb so she did a black-leather-trouser-and-shirt thing, stuck midheeled boots on her feet so that she could run if she had to, and found a decently cut jacket to sit on the top that was just about the same colour as her hair. The bootleg software disk w
ent in her inside pocket, Pad on the outside. She checked her face in the mirror and re-lipsticked two shades darker. She only knew one makeup routine, but it seemed to have worked and made her look marginally less peculiar; like someone out of a French film rather than Catwoman's madder, more deformed sister.
With the basics taken care of, and five minutes to go before she'd said she'd leave, what she was doing started to look very dodgy indeed to her. As a precaution she logged a call with her personal datapilot service, Erewhon, leaving a closed message about her whereabouts in case of emergency. It was hard to get a secured line and she was late by the time she managed to scoot out past Dan, who was already into his bathroom routine. At least, as she tugged on the handle of the outside door to close it, there was no rain, only a heavy atmosphere of extreme dankness from the river and a mild scent of rotting greenery. She didn't want to go that way tonight, thought that more populated streets would be better, so she started towards the town end of the road and walked at a good pace. He'd better be on time, or he was going to miss entirely.
The trees overhanging Fulford Road dripped on her as she passed underneath and once her boot skidded on wet leaves, but she didn't slow down or alter course. Natalie strode past the first row of shops and then took a branch path towards Fishergate and the city beyond the walls.
Jude Westhorpe caught up with her as she walked in the darkest part of the way, alongside a church and its close-packed nest of gravestones where the vast shapes of old, nameless trees hung low over the pavements, screening out the street light and cocooning them both in shadows so dark that when Natalie looked back it was as if they had surged together to create his shape, as if he'd not followed her at all but been waiting here under the branches for her, immaterial until she'd come by. She couldn't help giving a shiver of fear and excitement.
Jude walked up to her and lifted a hand to her shoulder. To her astonishment he didn't speak but leaned down and kissed her shock-open, like a fish mouth.
“We're on a date, right?” he murmured in that husky American burr and she realized that it wasn't real, only their cover, for the sake of anyone who might see them there. Her unexpected emotions sank out of sight so fast she felt sick.
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