by Max Barry
• • •
She returned to the house. She could have sought out Harry’s but wasn’t up to facing more memories. With four walls around her, she felt safer. She scrubbed her hands in a toilet cistern. She sat on the seat and stared at nothing. She felt numb. The word should have been there.
Yeats had probably wanted to put her in exactly this position. He had probably recovered the word months ago, in secret. She had been tracked all the way in, and right now they were moving through the streets, corralling her, whispering to each other guttural words.
But this did not seem right. She did not understand Yeats well, but in her experience, people with power used it. She felt the word was there. She felt that strongly.
After a while, a thought occurred to her. She rose from the seat.
• • •
She went back to the hospital and through the corridors to the emergency room doors. She put her pack against the wall and withdrew a digital camera, which she had found at the house. She had tested its batteries already but took a photo of a fire extinguisher, just to be sure. Then she closed her eyes and pushed through the doors.
She shuffled inside a few steps and raised the camera. Her idea was that this thing really was a word. It was on petrified wood, but the wood wasn’t the important part. The important part was the mark. She pressed the shutter button and felt the flash on the inside of her eyelids. She shifted her aim and pressed again. She would accumulate photos. Most of the photos would contain unbearable things, but in one would be the word. People kept coming into this room and turning into killers, ergo the word was somewhere it could be seen. She adjusted her aim, pressed the shutter for another photo. She would keep taking them until the camera ran out of room. Then she would download the photos to a computer. She would magnify them a thousand times and inspect each picture a handful of pixels at a time. It would take forever. She would see awful things. But she would do it. Eventually, she would find the edges of something that looked like wood. She would know where in the image the bareword was located. She could magnify it a hundred times, until it was too big to see all at once. And she could copy it. The word was not a thing. It was information. It could be duplicated. She could copy it one piece at a time, carve it onto wood so it would be just the same. Maybe she’d get someone to help, so she’d never hold the whole thing in her brain. Then she’d have a hundred tiny pieces, numbered on the back, which she could reassemble. She would have to find a way to carry it safely. To keep it always close. She pressed the shutter again. She was thinking maybe a necklace.
• • •
She came out of the hospital. The air felt incredibly fresh and she gulped at it. She started walking, then running, her pack bouncing on her back. She was clutching the camera. She should stop and seal it in plastic, stash it away safely. But she couldn’t stop. She ran through dead streets and a crow cawed and she shrieked back at it, an insane yodel that wouldn’t stay quiet. She was supposed to be stealthy. They could be listening. She ran, hiccupping and gibbering, desperate to put distance between her and this place, to reach somewhere she could open her lungs and scream triumph like she wanted.
• • •
Yeats trotted up the mansion steps and was set upon by butlers. He’d thought he had lost them at the foot of the stairs, but there were more. One attempted to steer him through the great open double doors and another began gently inquiring if he required refreshment and a third wanted to take his coat. All this was conducted in a low-register butler octave, making Yeats feel as if he was moving through a burbling stream. He allowed himself to be de-coated. A fourth butler seized the opportunity to step forward and brazenly adjust his bow tie. The butler who wanted to infuse Yeats with refreshments positioned himself so that Yeats need only take a step forward for a champagne flute to slide effortlessly into his left hand, but Yeats didn’t know this butler, and in no fucking universe did he allow strangers to insert fluids into his body.
“There’s Spanish,” said Eliot. He had followed Yeats up the steps and was peering into the house. Butlers navigated around Eliot as if he were a rocky prow in a seething ocean, because he was not wearing a tuxedo. He was in a brown suit and beige coat, which apparently Yeats would need to physically pry from his body if he ever wanted to see Eliot in anything else. There was a code, of course. The organization imposed a ceiling on the quality of dress a poet was permitted to enjoy, commensurate with the poet’s level. The point was to address the situation whereby a newly graduated poet realized there was very little in the world denied to him and began to get about in outrageous suits and three hundred thousand dollar cars, drawing attention. And technically the code applied to Yeats. Technically, his entire ensemble should have cost roughly half the price of his current shoes. But Yeats did not follow the code, because he was not a twenty-year-old idiot who required protection from temptation. He was intelligent enough to respect the intent of the code without slavishly adhering to its letter. Eliot, however. Eliot in his last-century suit, his repulsive department store shoes, his wrinkled coat. The most important thing about Eliot was that he wouldn’t break a rule to save his life.
“Are you coming in?” Yeats said. “I believe that some of the delegates have brought advisers.”
“No. I’m not dressed for it,” Eliot said, then realized it wasn’t a real invitation.
“Then I will see you at the office.”
“Russian’s not coming. That’s what I came to tell you.”
Yeats hesitated. The butler with the champagne flute took the opportunity to slide forward and Yeats glanced at him, bestowing upon the butler the terrible shame of having drawn notice. The butler fell away, mortified. “What do you mean?”
“Russian’s doing it via speakerphone.”
“You must be joking.”
Eliot shrugged. “It’s what his people have said.”
“Well,” Yeats said. He prepared for these meetings carefully. He attempted to consider every eventuality. But a speakerphone? Was Russian that afraid of compromise? Was he not aware that employing a speakerphone would broadcast his fear, screaming his vulnerability to every delegate in this house? It was ridiculous.
Eliot was still hanging around, eyeing the swirling gowns and tuxedos inside the room. “Thank you,” Yeats said. Eliot nodded and began to trot down the steps. Yeats felt his mood lifting with each step Eliot took, with each increment of distance added between him and those shoes. Butlers began to swarm, excited by his inattention. Yeats shrugged them off and entered the house.
• • •
Just inside the doors was von Goethe, regaling a glittering circle that included, if Yeats was not mistaken, one senator and two congressmen. Goethe was German, short and sharp-nosed with dark, slicked-back hair. He was wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, which Yeats was sure were decorative. His shoes were fine brown soles. Goethe excused himself from the group and clasped Yeats’s hands in both of his. “Guten Tag, mein Freund,” said Yeats, which caused Goethe’s face to crumple in disgust. “Wie geht es Ihnen?”
“Rather nauseous, after that.”
“I apologize,” said Yeats. “I do not have the opportunity to practice my German as often as I would like.”
“You are forgiven.” This exchange established that Goethe didn’t wish to engage Yeats in German, which was sensible, since it was easier to resist compromise in a learned language than a native one, but cowardly, for the same reason. Yeats was happy to roll with it, in the spirit of the occasion. He wasn’t here to compromise anyone. Also, he sincerely doubted Goethe was capable of troubling him in English. “A fine occasion you have arranged. So worthy.”
“Well,” said Yeats. For the first time he took in the stage, the tables draped in white cloth, the tasteful sign by the podium that declared: A WORLD OF LITERACY. “We do what we can.”
“I was speaking with one of your politicians and he informed me that your government is investing some hundreds of millions of dollars to teach children across Asia t
o read.”
“We do what we can.”
“Read English,” said Goethe.
“Well,” he said. “You can hardly expect us to teach them German.” He clasped the hand of a tall, bronze-skinned woman who had met his eye across the ballroom twenty seconds ago and begun to cross it like a torpedo. “Rosalía, what a pleasure.”
“William,” she said. “I swear, you age backward.”
“De Castro,” said Goethe, casting an eye over her green gown, which was daring when she stood still and practically scandalous when she moved. De Castro offered her hand, which Goethe kissed. “Yeats and I were just discussing his latest plan to seed the world with English missionaries.”
“Surely you see that a common world language would serve the organization’s interests.”
“I suppose,” said Goethe. “But I weep at the prospect that this language would be English.”
“It won’t be,” said de Castro. “It will be Spanish. English plateaued some time ago. It will take more than Yeats’s missionaries to reverse that.” She looked down her nose at Goethe, who stood a foot shorter. “I suppose these things are more alarming to delegates whose languages are in decline.”
“Ah, it begins,” said Goethe. “The traditional German pile-on.”
“Honestly, I admire your spirit. It cannot be easy to watch your language slip into the footnotes of history.”
“It is doing no such thing.”
“Although I suppose you must be used to humiliation,” said de Castro. “German being the second most popular Germanic language.”
“Children, please,” said Yeats.
De Castro turned to him. “Did I hear correctly? Pushkin will be joining us via speakerphone?”
“Apparently.”
“I do hope we don’t need another Russian delegate. They’ve been dropping like flies. Alexander was doing so well.”
“It’s the language,” said Goethe. “Too many morphemes. Inherently vulnerable.”
“He can’t expect to save himself with a speakerphone. The idea is preposterous.” She used a German word for “preposterous,” lächerlich, slightly mangling the first syllable, watching Goethe as she did. So Yeats presumed that de Castro had dropped a little linguistic depth charge there. The entire meeting would be like this: delegates continually probing each other, seeking weakness. It was an inevitable by-product of the fact that the organization was a loose coalition of independent entities; no delegate outranked any other. Technically, Yeats was no more important than al-Zahawi of Arabic or Bharatendu Harishchandra of Hindi-Urdu. This was something he planned to change.
“Let us assume Pushkin has other motives,” said Yeats, “and not waste our time together on speculation.”
“Agreed,” said de Castro. “Speaking of which, William, I was hoping you might be able to end some speculation of my own. Have you recovered your bareword?”
His phone buzzed against his thigh, which was surprising, since everyone who knew that number should have known not to call it. “Sadly, no.”
“How disappointing,” said de Castro, “and, simultaneously, bullshit. William, none of us believe you would allow a bareword to lie in Broken Hill unmolested for almost a year.”
“The concept is extraordinary,” said Goethe.
“We can discuss what you are willing to believe in the meeting,” Yeats said. “Which has not yet begun.”
De Castro glanced around the room. “There is a reason the other delegates have not approached you yet. I imagine it is the same reason Pushkin is not here at all.” Her eyes settled on him. “Do you plan to compromise us?”
“How ridiculous,” he said.
De Castro watched him. Goethe said, “There is no denying you have been making efforts to retrieve it. However, the more time that passes, the more one wonders whether one is witnessing not efforts so much as charades.”
“I do not have the bareword,” Yeats said. “For proof, please note the obvious fact that if I did, I would be using it to spare myself this conversation.” His phone buzzed again. “Excuse me.”
He turned away, plucked the phone from his pants, glanced at the screen, and repocketed it. He gazed into the distance, digesting the words: SIGHTING [email protected] IN 24 POI 665006.
The message was automated, sent by a computer whenever a person of interest—a PoI—was sniffed out by one of the vast number of surveillance systems to which he had access. Because those systems were less than perfectly reliable, possible sightings became messages only when the computer had accumulated sufficiently many of sufficient quality to pass a particular confidence level. In this case, they were informing him of three sightings in the past twenty-four hours, plus one from earlier, which were ninety-five percent likely to be Person of Interest number 665006, which, he knew from memory, was Virginia Woolf.
He returned to Goethe and de Castro. “Frankly,” said de Castro, as if no time had passed at all, “I see little point sitting down to discuss digital interconnectedness and social media when such an overwhelming issue remains unresolved.”
“It is resolved,” he said. “I honestly don’t know what else I can tell you.” It struck him as remarkably suspicious that there would be a Woolf sighting at this moment, in this meeting. He wondered which delegate was responsible.
“You can tell me the current location of Virginia Woolf,” said de Castro. “That troubles me, also.”
“We looked. We didn’t find her. It seems likely she is dead.”
Goethe looked at de Castro. “He claims not to know.”
“William, I hear things,” said de Castro, “from people in your organization, as you no doubt hear things from people in mine. And the most disturbing tale has reached me. In it, Virginia Woolf steals the bareword and brings it to Broken Hill not out of some adolescent fit of pique, as you described, but rather at your command, as part of a test of the word’s effectiveness. Clearly, given the current population of Broken Hill is now zero, this test was a resounding success. Which is alarming in itself, William, for as much as we hold you in the highest regard, we are all undermined by your possession of a kind of persuasion against which there is no defense. But the part of this tale that troubles me most is the idea that Virginia Woolf, as your agent, is out there somewhere, engaged in some activity that serves your purpose. I cannot imagine what that might be. And that makes me most uncomfortable.”
Throughout this, Yeats’s phone had continued to vibrate. He had developed the uncomfortable suspicion that the coincidence of Woolf’s sighting during this meeting might not be due to a delegate. It might be due to Woolf.
“Confide in us,” said Goethe. “We are your allies, William.”
“I do not have the word,” he said. “And Virginia Woolf is dead. Now, I am terribly sorry, but I will not be able to attend our meeting after all. Something unavoidable has come up.”
• • •
He took a chopper cross-town and set down on the DC office helipad. This occupied thirteen minutes. In the meantime, he attempted to coordinate people via his phone. This proved difficult because every few seconds it wanted to tell him about an incoming message, which required a tap to dismiss, and by the time the building was in sight this was what Yeats was spending the majority of his time doing, tapping to return his phone to a useful state. When a computer server became so busy acknowledging incoming requests that it had no time to respond to them, it was called a Denial of Service attack, a DoS. Yeats was being DoSed. He surrendered and put his phone away.
Freed from the helicopter, he considered the elevator but opted for the flexibility of stairs. One flight later, he emerged into tastefully muted lighting. His assistant rose from her desk, mouth opening, full of messages. “Not now, thank you, Frances,” he said, and closed the double doors behind him. The lights brightened in response to his presence. This month, his office was a paean to eighteenth-century feudal Japan: paper dividers, low, simple furniture. On the wall behind his desk a samurai sword hung under lights. Yeats ha
d chosen none of this; it was periodically redecorated in a random style, to avoid betraying personal aesthetics. He planted himself behind his desk and tapped the keyboard to wake his screens.
His predecessor hadn’t used a computer. They had been considered secretarial tools. Hard to imagine now. His displays filled with red boxes. Now that the computer’s thresholds had triggered, it was vomiting up sightings from days ago, even weeks, made newly plausible by more recent data. A voiceprint from a hotel in Istanbul. A woman with matching facial characteristics in Vancouver. He inspected the picture: sunglasses, hat, nothing he would bet on, but the computer liked the cheekbones. A taxicab security photo, grainy and desaturated, from a route that corresponded with what the computer was figuring out about Woolf’s movements. That was Seattle, yesterday. The notification boxes were a moving stream but Yeats managed to snag one with a recent time stamp. It was from the building’s security system. Its confidence level was ninety-nine percent. Woolf was outside, right now.
His office had a balcony. He was mildly tempted to go out and peer over the railing, see if he could pick her out. But that would be risky. That was, possibly, what Woolf wanted him to do. There could be a sniping issue. The fact was, as much as he believed he understood Woolf, she had been missing for a year and he had no idea how she had changed.
His phone chimed. He felt rising excitement and waited until it was gone. “Yes?”
“I’m so terribly sorry. But there are so many people who wish to speak to you, and they’re saying quite alarming things.”