Sons of the Crystal Mind (Diamond Roads Book 1) (18 page)

“Have you found anything else out?”

“Not yet. I’m still going through Dad’s mission files.”

“Can you make sense of them?”

“No.”

“Nor I. Will you tell me if you do?”

I hesitate.

“Just think about it,” he says.

“All right,” I say. “But what is the New Form Enterprise? New Form of what?”

“Humanity.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Will you join us?” he says.

“I’m not sure.”

“Then that is all I can tell you.”

I nod. Jaeger watches me.

“You can trust me not to say anything about… anything,” I add.

“Not even to Harlan.”

“Agreed.”

Jaeger Darwin stands and so do I.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Think about joining us,” he says. “You would be extraordinary.”

I feel my face get hot and look away.

“Goodbye,” I say.

I hurry out and don’t look back.

25

Harlan gets up from an incongruous purple armchair as I walk out of the elevator. He smiles at me understandingly.

“All right?” he says as the Basis dissembles his chair.

“I-I suppose so, yes.”

“Meeting Jaeger for the first time is always intense.”

Harlan sounds fond of Jaeger although he is clearly scared of him.

“I’m reeling inside…” I say.

“He can do that,” Harlan says.

“I’ve got to see Ursula.”

“She’s still asleep. I checked.”

I shake my head and then shake it again.

“I want to go home,” I say.

“I know.”

I go to speak but losses and revelations crowd in and I can’t…

“I understand how you feel,” says Harlan. “I’m an ex as well.”

There is a long pause. He reaches over and gently closes my mouth with his forefinger. My teeth click together.

“Drink?” he says.

“Are there any bars in the Outer Spheres?”

“Not exactly.”

Harlan takes my hand and leads me along the corridor past groups of NFE operatives until we reach a ramp. Harlan doesn’t slow as he strides up and I match his speed despite our difference in height. We emerge inside a transparent dome on top of the NFE assembly, where a generously upholstered sofa grows out of the floor. I sink gratefully into it.

Outside, the terrible silent beauty of the Outer Spheres invites me to fill its emptiness with dreams but only nightmares come: people frozen in giant coloured shapes, people in the floor just before they’re taken apart, people in flames… I close my eyes to block it out.

When I open them I’ve slept for two hours.

“Better?” Harlan says beside me.

“I am,” I say. “I don’t know why, but somehow… yes. Better.”

I get up and stretch. Harlan watches, which I like a lot. As I wander round the dome Harlan takes off his jacket to reveal a blue t-shirt that’s actually faded. A few necklaces of gold, rope and bits of runic bone encircle his corded neck. His clothing and adornments seem earned, as if lesser objects have been swept away by ceaseless violence and adventure. I sense his being here is a pause in some greater journey that will soon resume.

We have left the huge walls behind to drift through a long empty corridor. Its ceiling is a mere five metres above the top of the dome, which seems inadequate protection against such vast and terrifying stillness.

“You’re spending a lot of time with me,” I say. “Haven’t you got missions to go on?”

“My lady before my cause.”

“I’m not your lady.”

“Ah. Well, you do love someone else.”

I stare down at him.

“Who?” I say.

“Ursula.”

“Of course I love her, she’s my sister!”

“Not your biological sister.”

“That doesn’t matter!”

“I think it does.”

I struggle to understand for a moment and then the implication hits me.

“That’s an awful thing to say Harlan,” I say, hot-faced and upset.

“Your life is absorbed by hers. You obsess over her.”

“That’s my job,” I say. “Was. Was my job.”

“I’ve seen the way you look at Ursula,” Harlan says. “I wish you looked at me like that.”

“Then you shouldn’t have betrayed me.”

“I didn’t betray you.”

“You… Well. You sort of did.”

He leans back, slips his hands behind his head and watches the gloomy ceiling glide past.

“Have you ever found another woman attractive?” he says.

I try and remember; anything to get him off the subject.

“When I was younger I was, you know, curious and… nothing happened you understand…”

“Perish the thought,” Harlan says. “What did she look like?”

“Tall, pretty.”

“Dark-haired?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Long, straight dark hair?”

“Yes,” I say again, surprised.

He watches me.

“Oh, I see…” I say.

The dome seems to shift. Swaying, I reach for the edge of the sofa and lower myself onto the edge of it. I think back a few hours to when I held Ursula in bed. A dark part of me rejoices that she needs me, that she is mine alone. I feel sick with guilt.

“It’s all right,” Harlan says and I love him a bit more for not judging me. “Your sister is beautiful and charismatic. I can understand why you love her the way you do.”

“I thought I had it worked out.”

Harlan laughs.

“People thought they had it worked out with the Blanks. Look what happened there!”

Despite myself I laugh with him and he puts his arm around my shoulder. I want him to hold me tighter but instead he sits by my side like a friend and presently gifs us both a drink. I sip and feel slightly better. Harlan watches, amused.

“Only in Centria do people still booze,” he says. “You people and your traditions.”

“You can’t say ‘you people’. You’re an ex yourself.”

“My parents were really,” he says. “I was too young to remember.”

“They threw a little boy out?”

“They’ll throw anyone out. You don’t get to rule Diamond City by being nice,” Harlan says, a trace of anger in his rich voice.

As he lets go of me and leans back I remember Jaeger’s description of the Guidance. They don’t sound quite human. I finally sense the contempt forcing that churn of people out of Centria’s front door and the paranoia behind the recs everywhere. For all his troubling ambiguity the man beside me feels closer and more familiar.

“Who are you Harlan?” I say.

Harlan gazes into his glass.

“My parents were brokers,” he says. “Pop was ambitious but not good with people, which meant that although he was great at what he did he never really got anywhere. Ma was the other way around so they complemented each other.

“Pop was an idealist. He believed that Centria should be more of a force for good than it was. Unfortunately, he wasn’t important enough for anyone to care. So he decided to make them listen.

“He overvalued a patent, to change your tongue shape of all things. He created a network of people to buy into it, traded related products against each other and made a fortune, which he proceeded to give away to some kid farm in MidZone.

“Then Pop told Gethen Karkarridan about it, like he was going to teach that fucker anything about dodgy finance. I think they marched Pop out before he had time to tell Ma. My earliest memory is my parents shouting at each other outside some big round building, which must have been Centria.

“Pop quickly found out that doing good for Diamond City is a lot easier when you’re safe inside an enclave. He had some kind of breakdown. All I remember of him after that is this ragged loon following me and Ma around. Then he just disappeared. I know he’s dead because Ma got his kilos but we didn’t see it happen.

“She had to use Pop’s kilos to trade with but being a broker is much harder without Centria behind you. Ma had to work all the time just to keep us fed and when she wasn’t working she drank.”

He puts the glass down and glares at it as it’s absorbed.

“We lived with different men, all of them idiots and some viciously so. It was as if she was punishing herself for still being alive when Pop had gone. I think the only reason she bothered was because of me.

“One of these… men went too far with her and-and then I got Pop’s kilos and hers as well. I was seven. I never found the bastard who did it. Any time I need to kill anyone I pretend it’s him.”

“Any time?”

“If you grow up in the Outer Spheres you kill a lot very early on Charity. I was a sub-human, as the richer citizens of Diamond City like to call us.”

He smiles at me. I feel my face redden.

“I had a feral childhood,” he says, “mainly alone and moving fast. I spent enough time in kid farms to pick up the basics but always ran away, usually when the place changed hands.

“One day I had a few people with me. I don’t know where they came from, why they wanted me to lead them or where they thought we would go. I suppose Ma’s looks helped, along with Pop’s ridiculous idealism.

“And… I accepted who I was. Many subs don’t; they think their lives are a mistake but I felt my identity was valuable even though most people considered it worthless. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” I say.

“It’s easier to make money when people follow you, so I made money. Then I made more. I finally realised why Pop failed: he thought the rules meant something. And, Charity, they don’t. This whole place is proof of that. I don’t mean you can just ignore the rules but you don’t have to be trapped by them either. You need wit, determination and you need to know what you’re good at, because everyone has at least one gift. Mine is-”

“Seduction.”

“Yes.”

“What’s mine?” I say.

“I don’t know. I think it’s probably to do with resourcefulness but… It may also be that your complexity is the truest reflection of our world in anyone I’ve ever met.”

“I think you’re trying to seduce me.”

“I’m not,” Harlan says.

“Not what? Trying or seducing?”

“Do you want to hear my story?”

“Go on then.”

Harlan shifts as if making himself comfortable and then he shifts again.

“Eventually I got rich,” he says. “I moved into MidZone but there was no let-up in the constant fear and tension. I could never stay in one place for long because by then I had a lot of enemies.”

“What was it like?”

“It was like being alive and dead at the same time.”

“That sounds awful,” I say.

“In a way. But it was also incredible. If you know the second you’re living through might be your last you become so aware it’s almost supernatural.”

“What happened to your enemies?”

“They-they’re all gone.”

He hesitates.

“I beat them because of everything I knew, everything I understood about Diamond City. It took time, money. Friends.”

His energy, usually so inspiring, seems a bleak thing now as if he has led me somewhere dreadful.

“I remember when that part of my life ended,” he says. “I stood in a street between two MidZone sectors, where it was noisy and mad. The last man who wanted me dead had just gone into the floor and I had a hole in my leg that should have stopped me standing but didn’t.

“Then, thanks to some oddly appropriate timing, everything around me went quiet. I stood in the silence and knew that was it: I had survived. In the same instant I also realised to do so I had committed terrible… I’d…”

Harlan hesitates and swallows, his eyes haunted. I take his hand and he grips it.

“Although I walked away from that spot I’ve never walked away from that moment,” he continues. “It created change in me. Instead of just surviving I wanted to do good. Unfortunately I didn’t know what it meant.

“I did what I could for people, especially the ones who came with me from the Outer Spheres. I also sought learning, culture, refinement; everything I thought Centria would have given me. This went on for years; it was like an evolution. One day I simply came to the end of it, like I’d reached a plateau. What was I meant to do now?

“And then Jaeger found me. It was in some MidZone penthouse full of vacuous beautiful people, feeling worse than I did in the Outer Spheres where at least my life had purpose. The room was packed but Jaeger had a big space around him. And his eyes! It’s like he was more than human…

“He sizes up your soul and I wanted my soul sized up because I wasn’t even sure I had one. We talked and he asked me to join the New Form Enterprise as an agent.”

We sit quietly for a while.

“What is the New Form Enterprise?” I say.

Harlan rubs his cheek thoughtfully.

“It isn’t a cult or even an army,” he says.

“Really?”

“It’s got elements of both,” he says. “But in fact the NFE is an idea, a means to enable the last people alive to deal with our circumstances.”

“Sounds a bit vague to be honest.”

“Everyone is in stasis down here Charity. It can’t last. We will simply die out if we don’t establish a sustainable way to thrive.”

“How does Jaeger want to do that?” I say.

“Only he knows.”

“That’s trusting.”

“There’s an element of faith.”

“Well, yes Harlan, and for all we know the Basis really is a god called the Crystal Mind.”

“I don’t mean faith in that way. The NFE is an evolving philosophy, something I’m part of and am helping to form.”

“Jaeger is generous like that then is he?”

“I’ve seen Jaeger do incredible things,” says Harlan, “and with him I’ve found such truth.”