Cold Fusion (15 page)

“I’m afraid it isn’t all that interesting.”

I smiled, glancing around the peaceful room. “No time like the present to start boring one another with our stories. Anyway, it’s that or come out with me and start sawing wood. What happened to your mum?”

“She died when I was very young.”

Shit. That’s it, Mal—step right onto the poor bastard’s corns.
“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I don’t remember her at all. What would you like to know about my father?”

“Anything. I met him once, you know, on a school trip from Kerra. He seemed like a nice bloke—patient, anyway, with the hordes of little hooligans running about on his lawns.” I hesitated, remembering what Alfred had told me. “A lot of people think my dad’s a good guy. They can put on a good front sometimes, can’t they, and not be half as nice behind closed doors.”

“Oh, my father was the same on both sides of the door. He was kind, and an excellent teacher.”

“But you’re not upset about losing him. Look, I don’t want to be ignorant when I ask you these things. Is it…?”

“You’re wondering if it has to do with my Asperger’s. The fact that I don’t grieve for my father.”

I was blushing, embarrassed. But I did want to understand. “I suppose so. I mean—do you?
Can
you grieve?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been sharply condemned for my lack of reactions in the past.” He stirred his tea, propped his chin on his hand and looked at me thoughtfully. “You don’t seem inclined to do that.”

“What, over losing a father? I’d react to losing mine by dancing in the streets. So I’m not really in a position to criticise you, am I? I’m just trying to imagine how it would be to lose someone kind. Someone good on both sides of the door.”

“To answer your question, I don’t feel as if it
is
any lack or malfunction in me that causes me not to grieve. My father was a brilliant man, and his whole purpose when I was growing up—once he saw that I was capable of learning—was to transfer to me everything he knew. He did that. He taught me the whole theory of cold fusion, and he gave me everything I needed to work on putting it into practice. And I did, and so I can’t feel the lack of him, you see. Everything he was is already inside me.”

“There must have been more to it than learning and teaching, though. He must have loved you, to do all that. And you must have—”

“Are you asking me if I’m capable of love, Mallory?”

Yes. Yes, I was. It was suddenly terribly important to me, and I didn’t know why, and it wasn’t any of my business. I got up, grabbed Aunt Lil’s big black teapot—something else the scavengers had left behind—and took it to the stove for a refill.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I growled. “I don’t think I’d know love if it bit me in the arse, so how am I gonna judge you about it?” I swirled the kettle around. We were getting through the store of dry wood already. I’d have to start work on the uncut supply in the shed, or the Glen of the Snowdrifts would claim its first two victims of the winter. A serious house on serious earth, where you paid for every flicker of heat with raw labour. I thought about Spindrift, briefly pulsating with arcane nuclear forces, inexhaustible light at the flick of a switch. “You’re capable of plenty as it is,” I said, cheerfully as I could. I’d raised the subject of human affections, but I was glad to have come up with a subject change. “We should see if Lilian left behind some jam jars and bits of old wire, and you can recreate your experiment here. We could sure as hell use it.”

“I couldn’t.”

I had to be careful what I said to him. He’d put down his tea and was watching me anxiously, as if I’d set him a task and he was afraid of disappointing me. “I’m kidding, you loon. I know you need a proper lab and all the right gear.”

“It isn’t that. Everything depended on the cathode metal I was using at Spindrift, the calderium. It’s incredibly rare, and the last of it was destroyed in the fire.”

“Oh, shit. Really?”

“I’m afraid so.”

I sat back down opposite him. His brow was creased, but he seemed more concerned about my reactions than the loss to the planet. He was such a bloody conundrum. How much of his brilliant invention had been nothing more than an intellectual game to him, a means of amusing himself in the laboratory? “Wow. And nothing else but calderium would do the trick?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps, but it would take years of research to adapt the deuterium feed to another type of metal. I don’t know if that can be done.”

“Well, if anyone could do it, you’re the man. If it takes years, then so be it. Or…” My mind was racing. I’d shored up a whole crumbling mess inside myself with the idea of cold fusion and the business of protecting its inventor. “There’s got to be some of the calderium left somewhere. Your great-grandfather discovered it on the estate, didn’t he? I bet we could find more.”

“Even if we could…can you understand? I’ve worked for years on this. Now it’s all been wiped out, I…” He looked around the grim little kitchen as if it had been the dining room of a cruise ship on a bright Mediterranean sea. Then his attention settled on me again. His expression didn’t change. To my astonishment, he reached across the table and brushed his fingertips over my hand. “I’d like to give my time to other things.”

He had all the time in the world. If anything, I thought he was a bit younger than me. He could give decades to his calling and still be rich in years, still raise a family or take up hobbies or whatever his strange spirit was prompting him to do. I was about to point all this out to him when my whole body gave one great shuddering response to that fleeting caress of my knuckles, and the wild idea flew into my head that I might be one of the
other things.

I reined myself in sharply. He was a self-confessed beginner when it came to human interaction. His arms around me last night, his embrace on the Spindrift dunes, this touch now—all were the clumsy gestures of a child, or a well-disposed alien who’d read about the needs of my species in a book. I couldn’t set too much store by them. Certainly I couldn’t ask him to follow through on a promise he wasn’t aware he was making.

I’d been silent too long. His appreciative half-smile faded. “Of course that might alter things for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You went to all these lengths to protect the scientist, the man who was going to change the world. If I can’t, or I don’t
want
to, where does that leave me?”

Sorrow for both of us rose in my throat. I’d been hoping to carry him off as a trophy to Peace Warrior. No point in denying that. But things had changed, and now what I wanted more than anything was to drive out the blank desolation from his eyes. “It leaves you stuck halfway up a mountain with me,” I told him roughly. “Bloody hell, Viv. What did you think I was gonna do—chuck you out into the snow?”

“Not that. I thought you might feel differently, though.”

“Every new thing I find out about you makes me feel differently, though mostly it’s just confusion.” I levered myself to my feet. I went round the table and stood by him for long enough to give his shoulder a cautious squeeze. “Even if I know you’ve retired, there’s at least one mad bastard out there who still thinks you’re a threat to civilisation as we know it. So I’m going to be keeping as close an eye on you as ever. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He was detaching again, withdrawing his feelers. I was learning more about him—one emotional display didn’t necessarily lead to another, or indeed to anywhere at all. The effort exhausted him. I’d have to hold him open like a frightened oyster to get more, and the idea of forcing him was repugnant.

“Come on,” I said, taking his jacket off the rail by the stove and holding it out to him. “If we don’t get these windows fixed and a good stock of firewood laid in, it’ll all be academic anyway. The weather’s gonna finish what Alan Frost tried to start.”

* * * * *

The wind had sculpted the drifts so nicely outside our front door that I decided to leave them as they were, an undisturbed advert of vacancy for any interested passersby. Only the winter was at home here in Glencathadh cottage. Still, we needed to be able to get about between the outbuildings at the back of the house. Viv’s hands were much better this morning, and my offer to do all the heavy work myself had met only with an impatient frown, so I changed his bandages, gave him Aunt Lil’s woodcutting gauntlets and set him to work digging paths.

I floundered through a waist-high drift to the woodshed. Barely a yard shy of the door, I slipped and went facedown in an explosion of sunlit white. I must have imagined the ripple of laughter that followed this pratfall—when I righted myself, swearing, Viv was innocently bent over his task, head down. I allowed myself a moment to admire the compact shape of his neat little backside in his jeans, and the way the wind tugged his curls underneath his woollen cap from Loch Dubh, which he’d obediently put on and worn for me. Then I turned my whole attention to our survival.

There was a rhythm and a beauty in hard manual graft. I’d forgotten it, but I set one of the cuts I’d chopped last night on the tree-stump block behind the shed, and the first few slices of the axe blade reminded me. There’d been days with Peace Warrior when I’d had to slog my heart out over hull repairs and scraping barnacles, but there’d been a lot of sitting around as well, waiting out bad weather in harbours. Those had been the times that had brought Alan Frost out of the woodwork, a shadow across the table where I’d been reading or hopelessly trying to write. A warmth beside mine as we strolled on the deck, and then after more weeks of this than I could count, a muscular force in my bunk with me, turning me to face the wall, silencing me with a hand across my mouth.

I shivered and almost took my foot off with the axe. I needed to be calmer in order to find the Zen of splitting logs. I went back to the length of pine I’d left on the sawhorse, tightened the straps and started sawing. Ice-laced resin filled my lungs, making my nostrils tingle. After the first few back-and-forth strokes of the blade, Alan Frost quit banging away at me in my memory’s cabin and I began to hear the thump of my heart instead. One step, two. Systole and diastole, God’s own music, the bass beat for every song on Earth. Warmth spread across my back like sheltering wings. Viv would be gorgeous in that kind of action, wouldn’t he? Holding me from behind, moving to the beat of life. That fantasy was safe enough, could remain in the realm of the sweet impossible. It blended in my head with the healthy, useful squeeze and stretch of muscle, with the regular thump of stove-length wood slices onto the sawdust-strewn floor. He’d be such a beautiful lover.

I straightened up, sweating, grateful for the icy wind that came blasting through the shed door to quell my erection. I had enough cut pieces now to fill a basket, and the sooner I got them into the house and drying by the stove, the better. I loaded them into the wickerwork pannier and hefted it.

Viv was nowhere to be seen. He was a hell of a worker when he got going—I now had clear passage back to the house, and a route had appeared in the direction of the garage as well. In typical Viv fashion, the edges of each track were precision cut, ninety degrees from the top of the snowdrift to the ground. Maybe the angle hadn’t pleased him, and he’d gone round the side of the garage to try for a straighter run. I shook my head, smiling, and lugged my burden into the kitchen.

No amount of firewood in the world was going to warm this place through unless I did something about that window in Lilian’s room. I gathered up the toolbox and plywood Viv had found. In the pleasures of shaping pieces of wood to fit the broken frames, wrapping them in the plastic from Jenners and nailing them firmly into place, I forgot everything. Words flew up from the impact point of hammer and wood, words like sparks beaten out of glowing metal on a forge. I wasn’t even sure what they were—sounds that meant labour and shelter and the blood-basic joy of sealing my home against the cold. They flew around me with the racket of the hammer, bouncing off the walls.

Time passed. Through the last broken frame, I saw a cloud veil the face of the sun. I wedged the last piece into place, cutting out daylight but stopping the leaching wind. Unease settled round me, and the strange feathered word-birds fell lifeless to the ground. Where the hell was Viv?

The question instantly conjured all the impossible fates that could have overtaken him while my back had been turned. While I’d forgotten him, unforgivably let down my guard. I dropped the hammer and ran out into the snow. I could see round the side of the house that the drifts were unmarked between here and the road, but what if someone had come down through the pinewood that shadowed the house to the north? If Alan had somehow trailed us here from Spindrift? I was about to yell Viv’s name when footsteps crunched on the slope above me and he appeared at the top of his own clear-cut track. He was walking slowly, deliberately, as if having to give thought to every step.

“There you are,” I called in relief. “Are you okay?”

“Yes, of course.”

He wasn’t. I was beginning to be able to pick up nuance in that cultured brogue. I ran to him and caught him as he stumbled. He was colourless, his breath rasping in his throat.

“What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?”

“Fine. Just ashamed for you to see how unfit I am. I dug for too long.”

I slung his arm over my shoulders. “Why didn’t you stop for a break?”

“I thought I shouldn’t have to. I’ve spent my whole life in a classroom or a lab, Mallory. This is what it’s made of me. Can you see why I might want…?” He broke off, coughing. “Why I might want something different?”

“Yeah, I see that.” I set off with him towards the house. “I wasn’t gonna lock you up in the cellar, was I? Come in and have a rest.”

“I can’t. There’s too much to do.”

His legs gave. I grabbed him hard. “Whoa. What were you digging—a bobsleigh run to Ben Nevis?”

“Only a little track. I want to finish it.”

“Later.” I hauled him up the back steps and into the kitchen, where thank God the temperature was now inching up to something bearable. I deposited him on a kitchen chair and ran to shove Lilian’s ancient sofa closer to the fire. It was like moving a stone coffin, but fear gave me incentive. The clawed wooden feet grated on the flagstones, and muscles popped in my spine. “Right, you.” I leaned over him. “Come and lie your skinny arse down here for a minute, and you can tell me what’s wrong. This is more than just being unfit. Are you ill?”