Dirk glanced at the couch, lowering his voice to reply, as if for fear of controversy. “Agreed,” he said. “And Yellow – he remind me of a cat. He sit on a lap, but don’t do much else. Grey, he loner. Agree with you dere.”
Manfred nodded. “Don’t tell Joanna that. She’s reductionist science, yeah? Behaviour, facts, theories, testing, lots of damn testing. She don’t go a bundle on guesswork.”
“I notice,” said Dirk, smirking. “You got your hands full with dat chick.”
“What about your bi?”
“Violet? Nah. Stupid one.”
“We thought he was the caring bi. He went straight for Blue when Blue was shot.”
“So? Big ol’ elephant, she help her calf if it hurt. Don’t mean a thing.”
Manfred nodded. “Then it’s Orange and Indigo we’ve really got to watch.”
“Yep. And Blue.”
“Blue? Why?”
“He got da half arm. It make him think – scarred by life.”
Manfred stifled a chortle. For a moment he saw how he must appear to Joanna. Nodding, he said, “Well, I guess all views are valid here until disproven.”
“Dey certainly are. Blue and Violet – dem two real friendly.”
Manfred nodded. He had observed that the pair kept close by each other, as they had done since Blue’s arm was shot off. “No anthropomorphising,” he told himself as he cracked open more eggs.
~
A week passed with no confirmed use of language. Manfred began to wilt under the stress. Dirk chain-smoked cheroots, and Pouncey had to set up an extractor with an exit pipe leading up to the rubble-strewn roof of the apartment block. Joanna watched, watched and watched, with all the patience of her chimp observing days.
Then, one evening, with Pouncey out scavenging and Dirk asleep, Manfred heard something in the middle apartment – Dirk’s. He heard voices.
For a moment a list of possibilities scrolled through his mind: wi-fi radio; AI alarm clock; old television; burglars. But the voices were high-pitched and seemed inflected like old Oriental animations.
He put his ear to the apartment door.
Voice one: “Dirk bed. Manfred big room. Pouncey Portland.”
A second voice: “Joanna big room.”
First voice: “Joanna big room. Manfred room. Joanna room.”
It had to be the bis!
Manfred felt his throat constrict with shock, with awe, as he envisaged in his mind’s eye what could be happening in Dirk’s room. He’d left Dirk asleep – surely the man was still snoozing. If he was watching this, he would have found some way to alert the others.
Manfred pressed down on the door handle, as slow and quiet as he could, but there was a clink and at once the voices stopped.
He heard rustling, then: “Door. Handle.”
The second voice said, “Door, handle.”
Was that first voice teaching the second voice? Or had the bis noticed the handle moving? Manfred held his breath – they must not hear him. Either Indigo was teaching Blue or the other way around.
“Door. Corridor.”
“Door, corridor.”
Manfred shut his eyes as the dilemma reached fever pitch. He was desperate to see what was going on, but he dared not interrupt the flow. What he was hearing could be the time-lapsed, superfast acquisition of English by one bi from another; and if that was a social endeavour, as they all suspected, him beating the door down would gatecrash the lesson in the worst possible way.
He stood back. Thought for a moment. Dirk carried a NearRange Texter – they all did, gifts from Pouncey to be used in emergencies. He tip-toed down the corridor then took his out from his jeans pocket, flicking it on, typing, DIRK WAKE UP! QUIET! then sending it out.
He walked back to Dirk’s door. The Texter would have beeped. The bis would hear that, but they had heard the noise before, and hopefully would ignore it.
He put his ear to the door. He heard a grunt, then a cough.
Then Dirk said, “Yes!”
CHAPTER 19
The boat, Hound was pleased to observe, carried only the old man. It floated fifty metres out from the plastic tide line. There were no locals nearby – it was only an hour after dawn – and the sun hung low over the ocean to the east. Hound put his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Can you come in any nearer?”
The old man waved at them, started the boat’s engine then approached to a distance of ten metres. “You will have to wade over, monsieur, mademoiselles.”
This they did, clambering into the boat with his help. He looked happy, even serene, as if the tetchy haggling of the previous day was all forgotten. They stowed their rubber plas spheres in the back of the boat, then sat on wooden benches dressed with old leather car seats.
“Man, am I glad to see you,” Hound said.
“The pleasure is mine too. Who are these?”
“This is Anita and this is Catherine.”
The old man bowed. “I am, as you say, le Diable.”
Hound gestured at the old man with a thumb. “A comedian, ladies, like I said. Fire up the engine, grandad, let’s head outa here before the gulls arrive.”
As the old man flicked fingers at the boat’s nex hub, Hound checked their appearance. They wore nondescript clothes and broad brimmed straw hats to hide them from satellite watchers. A long boat trip might be deemed unusual by nexus computers. They could be spotted, watched. Anthropo soft might become involved.
The old man glanced over his shoulder. “You wear the summer hat anglais, mademoiselles.”
Leonora replied, “I burn easily in the sun.”
“Oui!” the old man said, laughing. “I have heard that before!”
Hound shrugged. This was all part of the cut-and-thrust of banter, he and the old man both wishing to prove themselves the superior wit. The open, sarcastic quality of the comments reassured him that the old man was genuine.
For a while they all sat in silence, watching the waves churn up behind them then fade to a pale, choppy wake. Refugee camps dotted the seashore. Jellyfish feeding on African nitrate blooms choked some areas, which the old man steered around.
“La méduse, she is not to be entangled with,” he said.
Hound nodded. Though Leonora and Tsuneko – and indeed le Diable himself – seemed relaxed, he could not afford to let his guard down for a moment. This trip carried a small risk.
The sun rose high. Seagull flocks swooped in off the sea, heading for Francophone refugee camps. The boat engine acquired a reassuring hum as the angle of incidence of the sunlight increased. The boat sped up.
An hour east of Bejaïa, Hound noticed something. He stood at the back of the boat, raising, lowering, then raising his spex. Leonora noticed him, and came to investigate.
“What can you see?” she asked.
“Check it out,” Hound replied. “Thought I saw a bit of an echo on the surf.”
“An echo?” Leonora said.
“An augmentation delay – between real and nexus image.”
Leonora tried the spex trick, but saw nothing. “It all looks simultaneous,” she said.
Hound tried again. In his spex, the wavetops appeared a fraction of a second delayed, giving the merged vision a distinct after-image. “That’s odd,” he said.
“It is just a nexus artefact,” Leonora said. “They hypothesise that the nexus has a diurnal rhythm, don’t they?”
Hound nodded. He had heard that theory too. “At night, and in Europe – man, then I’d expect there to be a delay in representation. You can understand that. The computers go a bit inefficient ’cos power’s low and most people are asleep. Latency, they call it. But this is daytime. In Africa.”
“Why would it be your spex only?”
Hound glanced back at the old man. “Sometimes if you pull a feed off someone’s spex without them knowing, the spex can’t process everything in real time. Minuscule delay. But human brains are good at noticing a delay like that. We see it as a visual echo.”
/> Leonora looked frightened. “We’ve been spotted?”
Hound replied, “Most likely an Algerian computer wondering why we’ve chartered a boat trip. State police, maybe. Can’t be too many private boats on the Med right now. Don’t panic.”
Leonora nodded. “Locate the pull source. De-spex if you have to.”
“Can’t afford to,” Hound replied, “not on a trip like this.”
Leonora sighed, concern plain in her face.
Hound turned his back on her. In truth, he was a bit freaked out. The last time he’d noticed an augmentation delay was one night chasing crims on motor bikes in Cairo, when the ancient, creaking, bureaucratic nexus almost fell over from excess realtime info pulls. But this was different. Sun up, everything worked at max efficiency.
He felt a tiny shiver pass down his back. This situation was weird.
He whispered in their ears, “Spex off,” then went to stand beside the old man. A quick nexus query would see whether the info pull off his spex had a diabolic source.
It did not. It was extra-local.
Hound frowned. He did not have the time to design, then build and launch a probe into the nexus to locate the source.
He pulled the ladies’ hat brims low. Leonora’s face went pale. She received the message of that gesture loud and clear.
An hour later they arrived at Bejaïa. The augmentation delay receded, then vanished. At the eastern edge of the harbour they disembarked. Hound handed over five coins. “Nice knowing ya, dude,” he said.
The old man nodded, a look of relief on his face. “Peace be with you.”
Hound turned, escorting Leonora and Tsuneko into a shadow-strewn alley. There would be a market nearby – he could smell spices, leather, rotting food.
“Time to hide for a while,” he said. “A nice, covered market, that’s what we want. Man, and some coffee.”
Hound sought covered passages, then found them; they led into the butt end of the local market, slippery with rotting vegetables, grease and worse. The sun twinkled down through the rococo plastic twirls of the alley roofs. In a caf they found seats at the back, out of sight, where they ordered coffee and bread rolls.
“We safe?” Tsuneko asked.
He shrugged, then nodded. “Probably,” he said. He looked around the caf. A few of the locals had already clocked their rubber plas spheres. “Except we look like tourists,” he added.
“What about a station lock-up?” asked Tsuneko. “I heard a soltrain just now.”
Hound pulled a map to his spex, saw that the railway station was two streets away. “Let’s do it. Man, then scram. Already the locals will be broadcasting reports of new tourists to the local crim lords.”
He followed the spex guide to the station, paying cash for an ultra-secure compartment. Their stuff was safe now. But he still felt vulnerable. Bejaïa was huge compared with Annaba, where he had not been concerned about muggings. This city was different. He felt violence in the air. He could almost smell the gangs.
“We need to find a more… salubrious joint,” he said. “And quick.”
Leonora stood up, her coffee half finished. “After you,” she said.
They departed, walked on for a few streets, then halted. Utilising a nexus reference guide he worked out which parts of the shoreside city were best avoided.
“Look,” he said, pointing to an LCD map on a cab rank platform. “The district that the charity is in ain’t too far off. Quiet residential area, it seems. Let’s get a taxi there. Save time, save muggings.”
They paid cash to drive a kilometre or so, then hurried out into a local date palm park, standing beneath the fronds to avoid satellite eyes.
Hound pointed. “There,” he said. “I can see the roof of the charity building. There’s a big white stork perched on it. See?”
Tsuneko nodded. “What now?” she asked.
“Get a bit closer. Reccie the place. Wait ’til sun down.”
Tsuneko’s eyes flickered as she checked the time in her spex. “A couple of hours,” she said. She pulled her cotton lite around her body, then zipped it up. “Cooling down.”
Again Hound pointed. “See that old shed on the other side of the park? Probably a solbus shelter. We’ll doss there until dark. Man, I need to do some serious nexus work.”
They followed his instructions to the letter, both of them aware of the heightened security issues he now faced. A couple of the local cats came to investigate them. Tsuneko played with them awhile, but Leonora was too nervous to relax.
“You two get some shut-eye,” Hound said, nudging the cats out of the shed with one boot. “This is gonna take a few hours.”
His main concern was not the local police, the local crims or even the local madmen – his concern was Aritomo Ichikawa. An augmentation delay in broad daylight was too weird to ignore. He had to take some time to investigate it before the final stage of the mission.
First port of call was spy glitches. He used various perspectives to investigate the park, the surrounds, the city: authorities, police, local hackers, even a brat gang dealing in ketamines, who used the park as a handover location. Nothing. At least, nothing obvious. The park sent out a nul result. He then pulled a resume of his trip from Annaba, but here he had to be careful. If he pulled an entire trip resume, an observant nexus spy would notice; so he pulled the last couple of hours. Nothing.
Still he was not satisfied. He demanded an explanation of himself for what he had spotted.
He stood in the shed doorway and looked out over the gloom-shrouded park. On the railings he noticed the remains of old wi-fi aerials. He hacked into their admin portal, then ran a park scan.
There! A device. A single flicker of red in the sea of green.
But the park was empty of people. All he could see was date palms and railings around the perimeter – just grass, low bushes and a few piles of fast food packaging visible inside. Yet all three of the operational wi-fi modules detected a low level signal.
Quick as he could he arranged for a cam check. Various buildings stood around the park, some occupied (lights on, people shutting curtains), some of them dark. All of them had security cams sprouting from their eaves. These he used to instigate a sixty second patrol, so that his virtual eye viewed the park from every external angle. Nothing. He had expected to see a figure lurking behind a date palm, a shadow by a dustbin. But nothing. Just another nul result…
Okay. Time for a risk. He’d have to use ultra-precise positioning.
The nexus was based on geography, modelling where everyone and everything was. He took the electronic signature of the signal and GPS pinpointed it. There! Twenty metres south, maybe three or four west. Something lurked amidst the shadows.
He took out his flechette gun; armed it. Then he performed a deep analysis of the signal, concealing his actions by linking it to a PD-monitored armed robbery taking place a few blocks away. The spy device – whatever it was – was listed as new. Less than a day old. That was not good news. But then he spotted that it had never been re-set since manufacture. No Japanese professional would risk such an oversight, because of the possibility of old data – ‘new’ so often meant ‘reconditioned’ in the tech market. This result suggested a local crim and a genuinely new device.
He hesitated. He had to get out into the park and use his eyes.
He crouched down, moving forward step by step. The light was going – a while after dark. Distant police drones echoed as the armed robbery was busted. A distant helicopter sent whup-whup noises through the air.
He moved forward. Bushes lay close. In them, he saw a cat.
He froze. The cat stared at him. He was no cat-lover, but without hesitation he made clicking noises with his tongue against his teeth, held out one hand – slowly – to entice the cat. It stood still.
He stopped moving. The cat approached, centimetre by centimetre, until it was a handsbreadth away. Hound pounced.
The cat went limp. He’d expected it to screech and scrabble, but i
t flopped. He grabbed a pair of wire cutters from his belt bag and chopped off the collar. He dropped the cat, and it ran off at top speed.
In his hand he held a collar from which a sphere the size of a marble hung. He magnified the markings with his spex: Silent B/Z/600 T-X.
Some kind of spy module. A local gang lord, no doubt. How the hell had that lord managed to train a cat? He dropped the collar and stamped it into the ground. It smashed into fragments.
~
“So you like cats, do you?” he asked Tsuneko when she woke up.
They were not amused by his nocturnal tale. “Was it Aritomo?” Leonora asked. “Could it have been Aritomo?”
“One in a thousand chance. A million. No way would Aritomo use a factory-set spy module. I mean, we know he likes cats, but, man, that’s ridiculous.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Did I say sure?” Hound replied. “No, I said one in a million. Listen to me. Imagine you buy a computer, or a mem store. What’s the first thing you do?”
“Reformat it.”
“Why?”
Leonora shrugged. “Viruses. Old information.”
Hound nodded, then pointed to the shed entrance. “Sorry if you slept badly. Man, it’s cold. But now we’ve got to see where Zeug is.”
Leonora nodded. “Then talk him out of whatever he’s doing.”
“That’s your job,” Hound replied.
He led them along back alleys to the street on which the charity building stood. He looked. The stork remained on the roof.
“That’s… interesting,” he said.
“Check it,” said Leonora.
He raised a hand. “Shush. You hear something?” He isolated the image of the stork in his spex, then enlarged it. “It’s squawking.”
“Hound, they do squawk,” Leonora said.
But Hound had seen this trick before. “Big, slow, simple animals,” he said. “Much easier to fake than a chimp or a corvid.”
“What d’you mean?” Tsuneko asked.
“I don’t think that’s a real stork. Do you?”
Leonora shook her head. “Analyse its noise.”
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