A Quantum Mythology (23 page)

‘You think he was psychic?’ du Bois asked, somewhat sceptically. He reached down and dipped a finger into the residual blood around the bowl of Songhurst’s hollowed-out skull. Grace grimaced as he brought the finger to his mouth and tasted it. She took her phone out of her pocket, downloaded a number into it from her mind and dialled it with a thought. Du Bois appeared to be concentrating on the taste of the dead boy’s blood.

‘Doctor Agarwal? My name is Grace Soggin, I’m involved with the Songhurst investigation.’ She paused as she listened to the response. ‘I’m sure the chief superintendent will vouch for me. I have a bit of an odd question for you. In your case files you say that the presentation of the auditory hallucinations was non-traditional – that Alan thought he could hear others’ thoughts …’ Another pause while Grace listened. ‘I appreciate that, Doctor, and you’re absolutely correct, I’m not a mental-health professional, but did Alan ever correctly guess what you were thinking?’ There was a longer pause this time, and at one point she rolled her eyes. ‘Okay, Doctor, thank you.’

‘Thought he was faking the auditory hallucinations, and instead had a talent for cold reading?’ Du Bois asked.

Grace nodded. ‘He was starting to come around to the idea that Alan was delusional, paranoid, but not schizophrenic,’ Grace told him. ‘Enjoy your taste?’

‘If there’s S-tech or anything else in his blood, it’s so diluted I can’t find it. You’re thinking he was a real psychic?’

‘According to the doctor, he was frequently frighteningly accurate in guessing what people were thinking. Do you know what the Ganzfeld experiment is?’

Du Bois sighed. ‘Hold on.’ He concentrated for a moment, wishing he could use the comfort blanket of his phone to read/assimilate the information. ‘An experiment utilizing what is, effectively, sensory deprivation to test for extrasensory perception. It’s the closest thing to empirical evidence of psychic phenomenon.’ He sounded unconvinced.

Grace looked at the body. ‘We got everything we need here?’ she asked.

‘We can wait for the police forensic team to identify the tools he used.’

‘Then let’s get out of here,’ she said as she left the room, slamming the door behind her.

Du Bois caught up with her in the corridor. ‘It’s different this time,’ he said quietly.

She turned on him angrily. ‘Is it? I see some psycho hurting people again, and I tell you there’s something driving this, something we can’t see. Hawksmoor didn’t just go mad – something he found in the architecture, in the geometry, drove him that way.’

Du Bois regarded her for a moment, worried. She had been a normal person when Hawksmoor started his Geometry of Violence experiments. She was caught up in the middle of it. A street-fighting hard girl, she’d been looking to protect her ‘family’ – the other gang members, beggars, thieves, prostitutes. She must have gone back and researched what happened. He wondered how she’d obtained clearance. Her dwelling on it made him uncomfortable, but on the other hand, he could understand why she’d want to know what had happened to her, and to those around her.

‘And you think something’s driving him?’

‘What’s he want a psychic’s brain for?’

‘If he
was
psychic. Or maybe Silas just thinks he was. Like—’

‘I do?’

‘That isn’t what I meant.’

‘Here’s the thing, though,’ Grace said. ‘Nobody, anywhere, has suggested that Songhurst was psychic. Galforg advertised in the newspaper, she had a website. Everybody just thought Songhurst was some mad kid.’

‘He’s widening his search parameters,’ du Bois said.

Grace nodded. ‘And the closest thing to a connection we have is the psychic link, whether it’s real or not.’

That, at least, du Bois had to agree with.

They walked across the car park towards the Range Rover, bathed in the flashing blue lights, ignoring the unhappy looks of the local constabulary. Du Bois stopped.

‘What?’ Grace asked.

Du Bois started heading back to the building. Grace followed, reluctantly.

‘He’s learned to circumvent our tech,’ he said.

‘So?’

‘We’re too hung up on it. Too used to everything being easy and convenient. We forgot to do something.’

‘What?’

‘Look.’

It was mid-morning. They had been searching for more than ten hours when they found it. It was just the two of them, moving out from the mental health facility in an ever-widening spiral. They’d used the police to form a cordon to try and minimise local residents fouling up any evidence.

The River Rea passed close to the back of the facility and they had been searching the banks. Grace’s spike-heeled boots were hopelessly fouled, and not even augmented reactions had stopped her from toppling over more than once. She couldn’t shake the feeling that du Bois was enjoying her discomfort more than a little, particularly when he offered to help her up.

‘Over here,’ du Bois said quietly, kneeling down in the undergrowth close to the river’s muddy bank. Grace struggled through the mire towards him.

‘You know there’s not much opportunity to learn to hunt growing up in Spitalfields, Mr Lord-of-the-Manor, sir,’ Grace muttered. Du Bois just smiled. Grace crouched and du Bois pointed out the boot-print. ‘What makes you think it’s him?’

‘Right length of stride, anachronistic boots and they lead to the hospital.’

Grace glared at him. ‘You mean you backtracked them here?’ she asked. He nodded. ‘So why have I been skating around in this fucking mud, risking falling into the fucking river?’ she demanded.

‘Mostly for my amusement,’ he told her. Grace opened her mouth with an angry retort. Du Bois cut her off. ‘That’s not the point. The point is that the tracks lead from – and to – the river.’

‘He’s moving around using the river?’

‘Well, he did this time. Birmingham has more miles of waterway than Venice. Pretty much the whole city is close to water, one way or another.’

‘If he was in the water he’d be soaked – we’d have seen his tracks in the hospital.’

‘What would happen if we fell in?’

Grace knew that the intelligent clothing they wore would either repel or expel the water, wicking it away from the skin.

‘Where the fuck’s he getting this tech from?’ she muttered, but she
knew the answer. From the same person who had helped him escape. ‘So we seed the fish?’

‘In that water? We’re better sticking with the rats, and you’re going to need a proper pair of walking shoes because we’ll have to keep looking the hard way.’

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’

Du Bois just smiled at her.

He rose out of the clammy, oily water and pulled himself easily onto the muddy bank. The water practically fell off him and he was dry by the time he stood up. It was unpleasant and undignified travelling this way. He had reduced himself to the level of some river-dwelling bogeyman in a child’s fairy tale, but it served his purpose for the time being.

The leather doctor’s bag hung across his back on a strap. He took it off and grasped the handle. As soon as he did so, he knew that the glass slides in the bag’s sealed interior were secure.

He turned to walk towards his hideout and noticed the semicircle of dead rats surrounding a small tree growing out from the base of a graffiti-covered red-brick wall.

‘Hello, my darling boy.’ The woman who climbed down from the lower branches of the small tree was clad in layers of frayed and ragged cloth. Her hair was matted and filthy and she smelled horrible. She was leaning on a thick, staff-like stick.

‘You weren’t there a moment ago,’ Silas said. He didn’t like this at all. His left hand was already reaching inside his coat for one of his knives.

‘Oh, darling boy, believe me, I have always been here.’ She nodded towards the mud on the riverbank. ‘And you want to be careful about the tracks you leave.’

Silas glanced down and saw his boot-prints, irritated that what she had said was correct.

‘What do you want? How did you find me?’ Silas demanded.

‘You’ve got a little cup, haven’t you – a horn, a trinket? It’s a toy, nothing more. I know what you really want.’

‘And what is that, hag?’ Silas demanded. Her filth offended him. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to soil his knife on her.

She smiled at his words. ‘You think that’s an insult but I know where hags come from, and they’ll steal your breath and strip the flesh from your bones with their teeth. You’re the child of cannibals, little one, and I know what you tasted on the Hellaquin’s mind.’

Suddenly Silas was more interested, and even more disturbed. His eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘And why would you tell me anything?’

‘Because them that’s got it have lost their way. Because a bad man wants it for no good.’

‘Some would say I’m a bad man.’

‘You’re just a warning. Besides, you’re blood.’

17

A Long Time After the Loss

The Monk stared at the image projected onto the airlock wall.

‘Why?’

‘It’s him, or Negrinotti. The rest fit his pattern of going for the most difficult jobs, the biggest pay-offs. Those two are the only ones with anything significantly different about them. It’s either that or he’ll try for a Citadel.’

‘Could he have the resources for it?’

Benedict/Scab’s cold, dead eyes met hers. His head and torso were still hanging from the support sling. He didn’t dignify the question with an answer.

‘What about a cloner?’

‘For what? If you saw Vic with him then he’s already got access to cloning facilities.’

‘Would you clone the girl?’

‘Yes, if I thought it would benefit me, and if I could. In fact, what I don’t understand is why he
didn’t
clone her and sell you all copies.’

‘We would have checked, of course, but that does suggest he can’t clone her.’

‘Which takes us back to …’ Scab nodded at the image on the wall.

‘It doesn’t matter – the Consortium would never let us near him.’

‘If only you had access to an intrusion specialist like—’

‘Negrinotti, yes, but even so. There’s a reason that place is a prison.’ The Monk shivered slightly.

Talia had almost crept into the yacht’s large, open-plan lounge area. It was bathed in the blood-coloured light of Red Space shining through the transparent hull. Scab was sitting in the centre of the lounge, slumped in an armchair, naked, sunglasses on, a smouldering cigarette between two fingers.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, leaning against the wall. He didn’t answer. She suspected he might be on a heroin nod, or just ignoring her, again, but then the crimson glow of Red Space lessened as the hull became opaque and started to show what she assumed passed for news footage in this age. It displayed something that looked like a kind of slowly spinning, polygonal beehive made of what appeared to be plastic, inside a huge cavern that she guessed was a hollowed-out asteroid. Parts of it were burning, other parts had been destroyed. Heavily armed aircraft hovered around it. There were no captions to explain what was happening.

Another image showed a number of figures in armour that resembled a high-tech version of what she thought knights used to wear. They were led by a human with two heads. One of the heads was that of an ugly, completely bald human. The other looked like an idealised machine version of the human head. The armoured figures were carrying a still-living torso and escorting a heavily restrained multi-limbed figure. The torso looked a little like Vic if Vic had been larger, more heavily armoured, more insectile, spikier and had his limbs removed. The other figure was female, Talia thought, but she had no idea where she got that idea. It was smaller and had eight limbs, like a spider rather than an insect. Both the ’sect and the arachnid didn’t so much look badly hurt as badly damaged, and both of them were more machine than biological.

‘Where’s that?’ Talia asked, more for something to say than actual interest.

‘The Solitude Hive,’ Scab said.

Talia was little the wiser, though she guessed by the use of the word ‘hive’, and by the way it looked, that it was a place where the insect people lived.

‘You have spider people as well?’ she asked, looking at the restrained eight-armed female. There was a long silence.

‘It’s an arachnid augment, she’s a princess ’sect. A worker-caste ’sect who’s had a gender change.’

Talia nodded, as if any of it made sense to her.

‘Have you seen Vic?’ she asked. The silence stretched out. ‘So what’s happening?’ she eventually asked when she realised he wasn’t going to answer her previous question. The ash fell off Scab’s cigarette and was absorbed by the carpet as he brought it to his mouth and took a long drag.

‘The two-headed guy is called Crabber. He’s a media whore who leads a bounty crew. The other ’sect is General Nix. He’s warrior caste, a war criminal. The princess ’sect is known as the Widow. She was Nix’s second-in-command, an immersion-warfare specialist. Crabber’s crew have just taken him down.’

She could tell that her questions were irritating him but something Scab had said struck her as strange.

‘In this day and age, how do you become a war criminal?’ she asked before she realised she didn’t want to hear the answer. Scab told her anyway.

The
Amuser
had come in with the Consortium naval squadron from one of the larger military contractor companies. There were two heavy cruisers, four light cruisers, a screen of eight destroyers and numerous smaller craft from corsairs down to fighters. Needless to say, Mr Hat had to ask permission to join them in Red Space. His employer’s influence must have been remarkable indeed as the naval squadron had allowed him to accompany them, although they kept multiple weapon locks on him at all times.

Mr Hat had wondered if this was all because of Scab. Had they come to the same conclusion? If so, what did they expect to accomplish with a naval squadron? It wasn’t how Scab worked.

He was further impressed by his employer’s influence when Suburbia agreed to his request to see one of the prisoners. He had been of the belief that mostly they didn’t do that kind of thing. There were too many secrets locked in too many heads in Suburbia.

Nolly Berger finished his breakfast and kissed his wife. She smiled at him, but she was distracted as she was getting the children ready. As he did every morning, Nolly wondered what they had done to end up here.

He went out of his front door, just like he always did, then walked down the drive to the ground car and climbed in. It was a bright, sunny day. It was always a bright, sunny day. All along his street of identical detached houses, his neighbours were doing exactly the same thing, though each was slightly staggered so they could make use of the transport network as efficiently as possible.

‘Where to today?’ the habitat’s AI asked, accompanied by the sound of canned laughter.

‘Work, please, Al,’ Nolly said cheerfully. Inside he was screaming, and he wanted to tear out his own tongue. There was more canned laughter. It was funny because it was where he always went, and the AI, who they all called Al, which was also funny, knew that.

The car slid out onto the road and drove itself towards work, along with the rest of the all-but-identical cars driven by the other inmates. He knew that on each of the three non-window segments
of the cylinder habitat, a similar scene would be playing out in every residential street.

In many ways, that was the worst thing about the cylinder habitat – the three window sections, which let in sunlight or showed space. They revealed the darkness outside. Occasionally they would see a pulsing red slash in space as the prisoner transports bridged into the system. He was sure that Nolly wasn’t his real name, just as he was sure he hadn’t always been human. He glanced up through the windscreen and felt the familiar vertiginous sensation as he looked at the other two inhabited sections. Boring streets, set out in boring grids, each the same as the next. They had malls but no town centres. There were light-industrial and business parks where they all worked within neatly landscaped grounds.

The only break he ever got was when one member of the family was chosen to flip out and torture to death the rest of the family. Then they would be cloned and have to go back into the program still aware of the violence, feeling resentment towards whomever had done it. Last time it was little Suzy. He still remembered her sitting on top of him, playing with the kitchen knife. He would hate her if he didn’t fear her so much.

Suburbia was based on pre-Loss punishment media – twisted parodies of a perceived idyllic existence. There was no law-enforcement presence because none was needed, and if an inmate did manage to break their programming, there were incredibly efficient S-sats to deal with them. They were all good, law-abiding citizens until their houses were sealed and one family member was programmed to hunt the others. After their murders they were downloaded into newly cloned bodies the following morning, so they could wash the blood off the walls and pretend that everything was okay. More than that, he worried about when it would be his turn to brutalise his family. He didn’t think he’d been a violent criminal.

There was no attempt at rehabilitation. It wasn’t even incarceration. It was designed to do one thing, and one thing only: torture inmates who had pissed off the great and the good of Consortium space.

Nolly arrived at work praying for death. His mouth hurt so much from the fixed grin. He shared inanities with the unconvincing automaton-torso receptionist, which incurred more canned laughter that made him want to weep.

Seated at his desk, he pointlessly moved data around and talked to people just as inane as him on antiquated audio-communication devices. He accomplished nothing; he produced nothing. Initially he wondered if the work was modular, and all of them incarcerated on Suburbia were somehow parts of a greater whole – number-crunching some giant computation, perhaps. Now he was sure they were just going through the motions, doing busywork designed to remind them of the ultimate pointlessness of their existence. They were incapable of suicide.

‘Nolly, old buddy.’ Geoff’s plump and affable head appeared over the office partitioning. Nolly was sure he could see the look of desperation on his boss’s face under the painfully fixed smile. He wondered who Geoff had been before and what he had done to piss the Consortium off this badly. ‘Hey, how about that local sporting fixture?’ Geoff asked. There was more canned laughter. It was funny because, unlike all the other ‘men’ in the office, Geoff didn’t really like sport. He was a little effeminate, because that was funny, too, but when the time came he still had a wife and two kids to murder, just like the rest of them.

‘Uh, which one, Geoff?’ Nolly asked. Nolly eyed the stapler and wondered if he could get it to his eye before the control protocols took over, but he knew the answer. He didn’t think this was a normal thought that normal people had. Geoff’s painful-looking smile grew wider and more painful-looking. There was more canned laughter. Nolly suspected that parts of this nightmare were viewed in some kind of media format within Consortium space.

‘There’s somebody here to see you, in the back office,’ Geoff told him. Even through the rictus smile, Nolly could see the jealousy. He could practically hear Geoff’s thoughts. He was thinking that he’d worked hard to get promoted, to find himself the butt of everyone’s jokes. Why couldn’t he go to the back office? Why couldn’t he be destroyed, or released?

‘Okay, Geoff.’ Nolly stood up and headed towards the nondescript door that led to the back office. Beads of sweat appeared all over his face.
Is this it?
he prayed. His hand gripped the handle and turned it.

The door opened into a long corridor with another door at the end of it. He had a strange feeling that the walls had just finished shifting in his peripheral vision. He stepped forwards and closed the door after him. The corridor smelled of some kind of cleaning product. He started walking. Excitement and hope building in him, he began to increase his pace. Pain lanced through his skull and the corridor tipped. He tried to grab the wall but failed and found himself on the floor. He could taste vomit in the back of his throat, the pain was so extreme. The pain didn’t go, just subsided enough that he was functional again. He tried to stand up, but he wasn’t supposed to have legs. He turned to one side and threw up the nutritional breakfast that had been lovingly prepared by the prisoner locked inside his ‘wife’. He managed not to throw up on himself. He started pulling himself along the floor, avoiding the vomit, towards the other door.

He could remember who he was, what he was and what he’d done. He reached for the door handle.

Nolly half-crawled, half-flopped into the room, looking up at the odd figure sitting on the other side of the table in the utterly nondescript room. It was a diminutive lizard in a very tall hat, body tucked under itchy-looking blankets in a strange wheeled chair made from a material Nolly didn’t recognise.

Nolly managed to pull himself up into a chair on the near side of the table as the small lizard watched. Nolly could imagine few things more alien and uncomfortable than sitting in the hard plastic moulded chair.

‘Would you prefer I call you Mr Berger, or the Alchemist?’ the lizard asked. Nolly reached for him but the small lizard recoiled, hissing in distaste, forked tongue flicking out between his teeth.

‘Please,’ Nolly begged with an unfamiliar larynx. ‘You have to get me out of here.’ His tears dripped down onto the pitted surface of the plastic table.

‘If you help me with my inquiries, that is a distinct possibility. What can you tell me about Woodbine Scab?’

Nolly stared at the lizard. Slowly, pleading desperation was replaced by a look of anger bordering on fury.

‘That fucking vicious, vile cunt!’ Nolly spat. ‘He did this to me. He caught me! It’s his fault I got sent here! We weren’t doing much harm. It was the people’s own choice.’

‘I am, of course, familiar with your crimes—’

‘Crimes! Crimes? I wasn’t doing anything different from what everyone else was doing. Know why the debt relief on my bounty was so high?’

‘Because you used to be part of the Church?’

‘Because I used to be part of the Church!’ Nolly slammed unfamiliar hands down on the table and almost slid off the chair. He recovered himself and pointed at the lizard. ‘I’m in this … fucking
hell
to deny me to the Church, and all because the Consortium can’t break Church conditioning!’

‘Indeed.’

‘See, I probably knows what they want to knows, but they can’t get it.’ He tapped the side of his head and slid off the chair, the lizard’s eyes following him as he did so. He continued watching as Nolly pulled himself back up into the chair. ‘I shouldn’t be in this body, it’s not right,’ he muttered.

‘Why would Mr Scab wish to break you out?’