Diversifications

by James Lovegrove

  The vulture thought circled.

  Slowed.

  Damn it.

  The firefighters kept their hoses at the ready, just in case. Emergency vehicle lights flashed brilliant blue off building façades. A paramedic team loitered by their ambulance, nothing to do. The crowd of onlookers remained. An extinguished fire was still a fire. Maybe it would flare up again.

  Someone in the crowd was staring at Stoneham. He noticed her all of a sudden. The instant their gazes met she turned away; tried to shrink in among the bodies around her. Immediately he was running. Barefoot over granite. The crowd saw him coming and thought he was crazy. He battled through their ranks. Come here! Where are you? I saw you!

  But the elfin girl had disappeared again. It was dark. The mill of people. He stood no chance of finding her.

  He was the city’s police commissioner, polite but pompous. A bushy, self-important moustache. One of the most artless comb-overs Stoneham had ever seen, as if the man knew about his baldness but was not altogether sure how to deal with it. Chubby. Dark-green uniform with epaulettes. He was one of Verradon’s top-ranking functionaries, and a bureaucrat through and through.

  In Furstlant, the country of which Verradon was the capital, they spoke a dialect of English, a distant cousin of the language. Conversation with the commissioner was therefore stilted but possible. The commissioner was appropriately appalled—“appalt”—by the fire at the Grant Roial. He expressed regret that a distinguished traveller such as Mr Stoneham should have had his belongings incinerated and, if this was not being too melodramatic, his life endangered. He promised Mr Stoneham that everything would be done to ensure that such an incident was never repeated. But as for this girl …

  “Zis girl.” The commissioner again studied the sketch artist’s impression, drawn according to Stoneham’s description. As close a resemblance as any artist’s impression could manage. “Yuh huv proof zat she iz rezponzial fuh ze fire?”

  “No, not exactly. But I know she’s been following me. I’ve seen her before. Twice.” (Three times?) “And I don’t believe she’s a Fogg.”

  “If not uh Fogg, zen …?”

  “Then I can only assume she’s after me for a reason. And not a good reason.”

  “She iz uh Fix.”

  “I can only assume so.”

  “She deliberally wantz to Zlow yuh.”

  “All the way back to zero, if she can.”

  The commissioner sat back. Licked a thumb. Sighed. “If zis is suh, if she iz not uh local, zen I um at uh limit tuh what I can do. Uh Fix is beyont muh jurisdickle.”

  “But if she’s still in Verradon you can find her, arrest her.”

  “Azzuming she zet ze fire, whuch wuh do not know she dud. And azzuming she is ztill in Verradon, whuch is unlikelial.”

  Apologetic, straightforward, intransigent, the commissioner spread his hands and shrugged at Stoneham. We are both important men. Men of stature. But in these circumstances what can one do?

  Should have known it was no use. Should have know it would be a waste of time. But at least he had tried.

  In a bar just around the corner from the police headquarters, Stoneham reviewed the situation.

  He was wearing clothes borrowed from the manager of the Hotel Charldon, to where he had been transferred in the small hours of this morning.

  He had a small amount of local currency, also borrowed from the Charldon’s manager.

  He was Slowing. Could feel it—like a drug wearing off.

  And he had a Fix on his tail.

  For some reason he had been targeted by one of those attention-seekers, those human anchors. Probably because he had been so close to Continuum. That made him big game. A scalp worth hunting. The girl would bring him to a standstill if she could, if he let her. Down through the levels till he was back where he had started seven years ago. And then she would crow about it to her cronies, and squeeze every drop of notoriety she could from it. I stopped a Fogg. It was a challenge to them. Sport. Envy played a part, too. You had to have money to be a Fogg. Stoneham had accumulated millions, starting out as a hedge-fund manager, helping make others rich, then using the skills he developed, the market savvy, to make himself rich. His wealth was all his own work. He had begun with next to nothing and built it up into a very substantial Something. But that made no difference to certain people. You had money: you had to be brought low.

  The girl had been reconnoitring. Had posed as a whore in Prihody Mishkarov (the soldier an accomplice?). As a holidaymaker in Karakuchon. Perhaps she had been dogging him before then but he had not spotted her. Last night, at the Grant Roial, she had finally acted. Or maybe the stomach virus he had contracted—maybe that had been her doing as well. A drink, a piece of cutlery contaminated with a bacillus. It was not beyond the realms of possibility.

  He mulled the problem over, sipping at a glass of yeasty Furstlant beer. But really he was not mulling. What he was doing was nerving himself up for the inevitable.

  It took guts to Slow on purpose. It went absolutely against the grain. It felt like disobeying a parental edict—don’t touch that pan of boiling water, don’t go into the medicine cabinet. Instinct rebelled. Physiology rebelled. Choosing a downmarket destination actually induced nausea in Stoneham. Travelling there was no better. He arrived at San Barciño in a cold sweat, with a lump in the back of his throat that he could not swallow down. Once this had been a spectacular city, you could tell. Vibrant. Twenty-four-hour. Now: lost and old and succumbing to crime and vermin. A cloud settled over Stoneham’s soul. Things were only going to get worse.

  Palgray. Like every superannuated British seaside resort rolled into one, perched at the edge of a vast, leaden inland lake. Bursts of liveliness here and there, but the closed-down shops and restaurants outnumbered the open, and the residents outnumbered the visitors.

  Fantolo. It nestled in a jungle, it belonged in a jungle. Creepers wrapped over stucco. Scarlet geckos darting up and down walls. A trillion biting and stinging insects in the humid, whining air.

  Tabur. Situated high on a featureless steppe and scoured by winds all day and all night. There was no building sufficiently free of chinks that the icy blasts could not get in. There might be a corner of a room here, a hearthside there, that afforded sanctuary and warmth—but invariably it had been commandeered by a local.

  Staltenburg. Here a revolution had recently taken place, a military coup which, while broadly welcomed by the populace, had yet to prove itself as an unequivocally positive development. No one knew if the generals could run things in any less corrupt a manner than the politicians they had ousted. Thus an atmosphere of uncertainty, a harried feeling of Have we made the right decision?

  Prihody Mishkarov again. Christ, this place again.

  Tortorena. A neon-lit, drug-fuelled inferno. Fabulous if you were nineteen and your idea of fun was three days without sleep, drinking till you puked then drinking some more, dancing yourself into a pharmaceutical frenzy in eardrum-splitting discos, catching a venereal disease.

  Gentuba. On this island you could get knifed for looking at somebody the wrong way. Signs in the hotel lobbies advised staying within the hotel compound; eating only at the hotel restaurant; going on sightseeing tours only if accompanied by a hotel-approved armed guard.

  Stoneham downshifted, downshifted, and soon every form of transportation he took was a potential deathtrap. Every car grumbled along on perished tyres. Every train swayed like it was going to tumble off the rails at any moment. Every aeroplane was a triumph of prayer over gravity. Every boat was a Titanic waiting to happen.

  At last, somewhere in the upper reaches of the lower levels, recognisable names began appearing in the travel brochures. Sometimes they were distortions of the familiar: Mokvow, Las Vehas, Attens, Baiying, Conberra. Mostly they were familiar: Berlin, Oslo, Acapulco, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Christchurch.

  And finally, there it was: London.

  A grey morning at Heathrow as Stoneham disembarked after an elev
en-hour flight from somewhere not unlike Delhi. He felt coarse, rumpled, gritty. His eyeballs too large for their sockets. A customs official who looked like she had never smiled in her life inspected his passport, then fixed him with a contemptuous stare. What kind of Fogg was he, to be down here in London? What kind of loser? She all but flung the passport back to him.

  “It is good to see you again, Bob,” said McWilliam, “but I don’t really understand what you expect me to do.”

  Stoneham rubbed his stubbled chin. “Stop her, Chris. I don’t know how, but just…stop her. Get her off my back.”

  The Fogg Society Bureau was located just off the Strand. A five-storey terraced building, thin like a cigarette. Inside: low lighting and flock wallpaper, oak panelling and shelves of leather-bound books, in the manner of a Victorian gentlemen’s club. McWilliam’s office looked out onto a theatre and an Italian restaurant. On the wall hung a large framed photo of Julian Vernon. Long gone. The first man to gain Speed. The first man to vanish into Continuum. Between which pioneering feats he had founded the Society. A rallying point for other individuals like him: the very wealthy, those seeking something new, something more, something sublime.

  McWilliam tapped his fingers on his spotless desktop blotter. “That’s easy enough to ask but impossible to do. You can’t just send cops after her. Nice if you could, but even if the law was on our side, which it’s not, proving malicious intent is…You don’t need me to tell you any of this.”

  “She must have come from this level, though. If we could somehow find out where she lives.”

  “The Epping Forest solution, eh? Send the boys round?”

  Stoneham shook his head, acknowledging the unfeasibility of what he was suggesting.

  “I suppose what I could do,” McWilliam said, “is ring the Fix Fund and beg them politely to call her off.”

  “Think that’ll work?”

  “Not a hope. I can tell you now, their reply will consist of two single-syllable words, the second being ‘you’. But if you want me to all the same, I’ll do it.”

  “What I want is …” Stoneham’s eyes were burning. He had not realised how near to tears he was. Pure frustration. He growled: “It’s not fair, Chris! It’s not fucking fair! I had it in my reach. I was this far from it.”

  “Continuum?”

  “I’m certain of it. I could feel …” It was hard to put into words. “Like I was dancing on the very tip of the world. A short sidestep, and I’d be off. Everyone around me seemed to be in slow motion. Everyone seemed to be locked into a predestined course. No choice about anything. But I wasn’t. There was infinite possibility for me. I was breaking free. A few more days, a few more hours even, and I’d have done it. I swear.”

  “I believe you.” McWilliam looked wistful. “I do believe you, Bob. And I think the only answer is to keep trying. If you were close once you can get close again. You mustn’t let this girl stop you. If you allow her to fuck things up for you, other Fixes will join in. Blood in the water. You’ll never be free of them. There’ll be more hotel fires. There’ll be bomb threats that cancel flights. Tickets that go missing. Your name erased from passenger manifests. Double-booked seats. Bogus cab drivers taking you to the wrong airport. Bribed customs officials waylaying you on technicalities. Your life will become a nightmare. But at the moment there’s only one of them after you, and you can beat her. I know you can. Just stay ahead of her. Out-think her. Buy tickets to two destinations—that’s a useful trick. She can’t follow you to both places. Check into two hotels, use a false name. She’ll have a harder time finding you. You can trip her up just as she can trip you up. I have confidence in you, Bob. You can shake her off if you really want to.”

  It was good to hear. It was no less than he had expected of McWilliam. It gave him a small fillip. But it was not the only reason he had returned to London.

  Joanna’s ashes had been sprinkled over a corner of the garden of remembrance at the Green Lawns Cemetery just outside Guildford. A tree had been planted there in her name. A silver birch, now twelve feet tall, whitely spreading its wings. There was a brass plaque on a small concrete plinth set into the ground at its base: JOANNA STONEHAM.

  The sun was out. Dappled leaf-shadows danced on the grass. Stoneham stood, head bowed. For a long time after Joanna’s death he had wanted to believe that somehow she was here, in the soil, in the silver birch, the atoms of which she had been composed infusing this spot, constituting a presence. He knew better now. Joanna did not exist any more. But here, nonetheless, was the last point on Earth she had physically touched before dissipating into nothingness. Here, if anywhere, was her spirit.

  Speed was what killed her. Not Speed. The other kind. The normal kind. Velocity. A car travelling at sixty miles an hour along a road slick with rain. Some moron of a driver who lost control coming round a bend, crossed the median line, collided head-on with Joanna in her Volkswagen. The Volkswagen’s steering wheel embedding itself in her ribcage. Six days on life-support, bathed in the green glow of monitor screens, as though under water, softly drowned. On the seventh day the doctors left it up to him. There was no hope for her. They had done all they could do.

  It was not as simple as turning off a switch. It was simpler. He only had to nod.

  “I haven’t been running away from you, Jo,” he told the birch, the grass, the sunlit air. “Maybe it looks that way but I haven’t. I couldn’t stay, that’s all. The world was too small after you’d gone. Too full of reminders. If I’ve been running anywhere, it’s in the opposite direction. Not away from but towards.”

  He half-expected to hear someone say amen.

  He and McWilliam met again, this time at the Italian restaurant that was visible from McWilliam’s office. Over spaghetti vongole McWilliam said, “I hope you won’t be annoyed but I got in touch with the Fix Fund anyway.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I got through to Weatherall”—Jon Weatherall, managing director of the Fund, a former student radical who, in middle age, had evolved into a sharp-suited and urbane establishment gadfly—“and after putting up with several minutes of bullshit from him I convinced him to talk straight. He doesn’t know her.”

  “Or says he doesn’t.”

  “Or says he doesn’t. But I think I believe him. I described her to him the way you described her to me. Instantly he said, ‘She’s not one of ours.’”

  “You didn’t tell him about…about me?”

  “Of course not.” An injured tone. We’re old friends, aren’t we, Bob? You think I’d do that? “I referred to ‘a member of the Society’. I think Weatherall and I have an understanding. A bit like spymasters during the Cold War. Both playing the game. However …”

  Stoneham peered across the small table. There was a half-emptied Rioja bottle between them, a long-stemmed rose in a vase, a tea-light.

  “You probably shouldn’t have Slowed back down here, Bob,” McWilliam said. “They do keep an eye on the Bureau. The Fixes. They’ve probably seen you go in and out.”

  “So?”

  “Like I said yesterday: blood in the water. They’ll have scented that you’re in trouble.”

  “I’d better be careful then.”

  “You better had. Perhaps you should consider ––” McWilliam stopped himself.

  “Giving up?”

  “Or postponing starting again, at any rate.”

  “No way. I can beat them. You told me so.”

  The conversation moved on. They talked for a while as experienced travellers will, swapping anecdotes. Escapades had. Places stayed. Weirdoes met. Then, as the dessert course arrived, tiramisu, McWilliam said: “You really came close?”

  “I don’t know. I could have imagined it, I suppose. I mean, how do you tell? No one who’s found Continuum has returned to give the rest of us an authoritative description, and those who’ve got close all talk about it in different terms. All I can say is I’d never felt anything like it before in seven years of hard travelling.”


  “Have you ever had a religious experience?”

  “No.”

  “I always imagined it would be something like that.”

  “You’re lucky,” McWilliam said.

  “Possibly.”

  London was clogged. Stoneham—full belly, somewhat drunk—breathed in the old fumes, the brown stench of centuries of human industry. Car horns tooted, buses growled, cyclists whizzed by. It was dusk. Tomorrow: Gatwick, and it would all begin again. He stopped on Southwark Bridge. Leaned on the parapet. The Thames rubbed along below, bumping at its banks. Pedestrians trod to and fro behind him. He watched them out of the corner of his eye. Was he a Fix? Was she? Were the whole lot of them after him now?

  He was culpable only in retrospect. Innocent until fate had proved him guilty.

  He had taken a room at the Savoy. He walked there now, a little unsteady on his feet.

  The next day: Gatwick. And it all began again.

  Even as he clambered up through the levels, it was hard to dispel the impression that he was being pursued. Every fellow passenger was a potential Fix. Every delay, however minor and ultimately inconsequential, seemed part of some larger, orchestrated plan. Faces recurred time and time again around him, or seemed to. He saw a man with a highly distinctive hat at no fewer than three different locations. He saw the hat, anyway; the wearer might not always have been the same man. There was a hugely overweight woman, too, who was a fixture at a number of hotels he stayed in—but then hugely overweight people tend to look alike. There was the skinny chap with sallow cheeks and reptilian eyes who kept staring at him across the aisle of a train carriage. The man’s expression was inquisitive, insinuating. Eventually Stoneham got up and moved to another carriage. Later, the man moved to that carriage too. Stoneham changed carriages again. Then there was the married couple with the teenage son, an obnoxious brat who whinged and whined throughout the length of a bus trip. This trio reappeared a few days later on another leg of Stoneham’s travels, a ferry crossing. The teenage boy was still whinging and whining. A married couple—Fixes? Unlikely. In fact, ludicrous.