Janus (12 page)

A map appeared on the screen. South America, his mind said, as if this was another psych test. Other pictures followed, and his mind laboured to keep up. Mountains, it said . . . Andes? Snow. Cold. With part of his mind that hid from the verbal testing game, he felt her presence next to him. Highway. Airport runway.

Blue-helmeted troops poured from transport aircraft, were shown driving through streets lined with blackened ruins, then setting up road blocks, searching buildings, directing traffic around a crater at an intersection.

Peacekeeping, his mind said. Martial law. Revolution.

Chaos.

Name? Jon Grebbel.

Nationality?

Residence?

She brushed against him in the dark, her skin chill and damp.

Name? Jon Grebbel.

Occupation?

Occupation?

Dark. All dark.

One hand to clutch in the dark.

Afterwards, in the knot of people fastening coats and filing out of the Hall, they found time to talk.

“Did it strike you the same way?”

“Having trouble understanding what was happening? Yes, like—”

“—like a garbled stream of memories.”

“Like trying to listen to a talk, I was going to say, when everyone’s whispering around you.”

“Only the whispers were inside your head.”

“Maybe there’s a block against understanding what we were then, maybe we’ll never be able to get it back.”

The crowd was dispersing. Paulina and Louise had slipped away.

“It was uncomfortable in there. I was—scared, I think.”

“We both were.”

“Are you sorry you came, then?”

“A bit. No.”

“Neither am I.”

They walked slowly down the empty street.

“I may have found a new job,” he said, “substituting for your friend.” He described his visit to the lab that morning. “And this evening, I spent an hour practising on some of the equipment. Do they know what happened to her?”

“They don’t know a damned thing. Those leaflets, the other morning, and that missing woman at the start of the show tonight . . . We were lovers, Barbara and I.”

“I thought so,” he said, and abruptly risked asking: “‘Were’ or ‘are’?”

“I . . . don’t know. There’s so much going on, and I don’t even know what’s inside my own head. I feel I’ve let her down. I always feel that. I have to find out what happened to her. She had something to do with the leaflets, I found evidence at home. I haven’t told anyone yet. If you can look at her computer files, can you see if there’s anything among them that looks like a clue.”

“Yes, I’ll try,” he said. “What about Security?”

“I don’t know. They were reluctant to go and search for her yesterday. Their priorities didn’t allow it. And if she was involved in something they’d call subversive . . .”

“So you’d be on your own. I’ll see what I can do to help.”

“Yes. Thanks.”

They followed a path, staying close together, not saying much. Behind them, the street lights went out, all together. Above them, the sky was still flushed pink and mauve.

“It’s late,” she said. “They use the lights to remind us it’s officially midnight. We’d better get back.” They turned. “I almost forgot. One of our staff is having a get-together tomorrow night. You should come—give you a chance to meet people. I’ll give you the address. Have you got something to write with?”

“No. But tell me anyway. Trust my memory.”

She laughed, and gave him Chris’s address.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he said.

“Maybe we will at that.” She found herself giving him a genuine, uncomplicated smile. “See you tomorrow.”

Everyone called it the Factory, though it was actually a cluster of low buildings ringing a structure like a circular barn. It was where everything that had not been shipped to Janus for reasons of cost, convenience, forgetfulness or security was reinvented, imitated or faked. And it was where everything—whether crated in shockfoam, chromed and slick with grease, or put together from spare computer chips and parts of an arc welder—went for repair and maintenance.

Freya ran the Factory. She was a small, round-faced woman, with wide, innocent-looking eyes in the face of a fading seraph. When Elinda went to the service counter, Freya herself was examining a circuit diagram with a man, and apparently counting on her fingers. “Give it another afternoon,” she said to him. “If you can’t come up with anything by then, I’ll tell them we don’t do voodoo without a blood price.”

She turned to Elinda. “Sorry to keep you. I’ve got to get back in the shop in a minute, but maybe I can help you while Peter thinks about his homework.”

“Actually, I’ve got a question rather than a technical problem,” Elinda said. She introduced herself and pulled out the leaflet Larsen had found on the cafeteria table. “I’m trying to trace where this came from.”

Without giving too many details, she explained about Barbara and said she was looking for any clue as to what had happened to her.

“Medium, or message?” Freya asked. “We deal in hardware and technical information, mostly by request in triplicate, with signatures in precious bodily fluids. I like to think what messages we give out are more reliable than what you’ve got there.”

“I was thinking of the medium. The ink or the paper—is there a chance you could identify either of them?”

Freya examined the leaflet. “One copier is much like another, and we don’t have a monopoly on them here. In principle, we could set up a little forensic investigation. But to get us to do it for an unofficial request, you’d have to have something we wanted pretty goddamned badly in return, and you don’t look as though you do. Five or ten lab days’ worth? No, I didn’t think so. Let’s see. The paper might be a better bet than the ink. We don’t turn out that much white paper, and it sounds as though there was a fair number of sheets in this run. Try Raul Osmon, down in Hut Seven. He runs the paper mill. He might remember something.”

Hut Seven gave out the smell of strong chemicals and the sound of orchestral music. The first Elinda assumed were needed for bleaching. The music stirred something within her, uncomfortably, but eluded her memory. Even after the darkness outside, the interior of the hut was dim, leaving her with an impression of grey, galvanised tanks like large bath tubs and bulky machinery with hoppers and pumps. Working on a machine part was a squat man with brown hair straggling over his eyes.

He straightened up as she came in, and she recognised him as the part-time technician who worked in Barbara’s lab.

“Why, yes, hello,” he said. “Aren’t you the friend of Ms. Evans? I’ve seen you there, haven’t I, often enough to remember your face. And how can we help you now?” His eyes were pale and deep set, under almost invisible eyebrows. He looked to be in his late thirties. “Raul Osmon, that’s me. Always glad to assist.”

Elinda brought out the leaflet and repeated her request. He took the sheet to a desk in the far corner. When he sat and switched on an angle lamp, he saw that she had remained by the entrance. He beckoned. “Come. Come. Sit here. You like Rachmaninov?”

She picked her way between the machines and the arrays of tools in meticulous rows where repairs were evidently continuous. She realised she had been beating time to the music. “Is that who wrote it?” she said. “I didn’t recognise it.”

“The third piano concerto: Kusinov and the Montreal symphony under Feinstein. Just before the assassinations. But I can see you don’t remember. Does that mean you’ve lost music along with everything else? Dreadful, dreadful.”

“Perhaps I’d never heard it before.”

“No, no, not you. You’re a musical person. I could tell as soon as I saw you. A young woman like you—let me see your hand. There, very fine, very strong. But not large—a real woman’s hand. You’d be a string player—a violinist for sure. Not a violist, scraping away buried in the depths of the orchestra. And never a bassist, heaving that black coffin about like a vampire. You might have played the cello, I think: I can see you have dark soulful stream of song within you. But I think the violin is yours. You were meant to soar above the herd, to point us toward the light. Or maybe you were a soprano.”

“I don’t sing,” she said brusquely. “I don’t like singing.” In a different mood, she might have found this line amusing, but now she was getting impatient. Before she could stop him, he was off again.

“My own hands,” he said “Unfortunately, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is strong. Not weak. Never think that the flesh is weak. It has its own intentions and it can enforce them. Look at these hands. Good for nothing but the bass drum. I might as well hope to play the violin with a pair of shovels. But strong. Yes, strong. I’ll look up my recording of the violin works for when you come back. Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn. Perhaps the Brahms, the Beethoven. Yes. String music for your next visit.”

“In the meantime,” she said heavily, “can you help me find where this paper came from?”

He rubbed the sheet between finger and thumb. His hands were large, his fingers thick and blunt, the nails surprisingly clean and well-trimmed. Holding the paper against the light, he peered at it, then sniffed it delicately. “I don’t keep samples from earlier runs, you understand,” he said. “There just isn’t the need for that sort of record-keeping. Otherwise I’d probably be able to match this up straight away.”

“It’s from here, though?”

“Oh, yes, yes. Can’t you smell the resin? That’s not terrestrial pine, that’s local. And I believe we have the manufacturing monopoly right here.” He chuckled once at his joke and glanced at her. “And the texture—didn’t you notice the surface? That’s since we started the new sedimentation bath, three, no, four weeks ago. And I’d smell the sulphite if it was the first batch we did then: we had dreadful trouble with the bleach that week. So that narrows it down to two runs.”

“And who were they for?”

“One for Dr. Henry’s office. One to the histology lab. I delivered it myself.”

“Thank you. That’s very interesting.”

“Perhaps you’d like to see how our little plant works?”

“I’m afraid I’m short of time. You’ve been very helpful,” she told him, as convincingly as she could manage. She wanted to curse aloud :
Of course
Barbara could have taken the paper from her lab. Elinda tried to persuade herself it had been worth checking, a long shot that might still produce a clue.

“Next time—violins,” he said, following her back to the entrance. Then he went to a hand-operated press, and took the handle in his blunt fingers. His forearms bulged, and water spurted from the press like rain.

Elinda’s boots clattered on the wooden floor in the school entrance hall. A group of ten-year-olds dressed in anoraks came running out of one of the doors and burst past her into the floodlit Square. They ran around the tree in the north-west corner, staying clear of its overhanging fronds and even of its artificial shadows. Their shouting made her want to scream at them to be quiet, but she swallowed the urge and followed the sign pointing to the craft room.

Along the far wall was a partly coloured Mercator projection of Janus. Two large areas of their continent were painted orange and labelled
Cinnabar Sea
and
Firestone Cordillera
. In the corner beside the map, beyond two trestle tables covered with pots of paint, brushes, and small clay figures, Jessamyn was standing beside an easel with a brush and palette in her hands. Her hair was tied back and she was leaning a little towards her canvas; if she saw Elinda from the corner of her eye, she gave no sign. Nor did she turn when Elinda let the door close firmly behind her.