‘Has…has anyone been sent to find Mr Ffogg and bring him in?’
The sound of pouring liquor signalled the end of the conversation before it had begun.
Icara thought she saw a faint judder as she watched Frome. She stood up slowly, afraid that the carpet would become the City lake beneath her feet, and swallow her into its depths. Maybe that would have been better than losing her job. Frome did not turn around from her mini-bar, where she was mixing a whisky-and-something with all the focus and resolve it took to rule an empire. That glass tumbler could have been the whole world. Icara did not exist.
When she thought back over the meeting Icara wasn’t sure if she had spoken at all. Maybe the voice had been in her head.
The next thing the ex-Inspector recalled was the slam of the heavy door behind her. And Louis’ face, peering at her from below a disturbingly rigid haircut that met and merged with thick kohl eyeliner. The eyeliner flicked perfectly. An incision of black. As sharp as Louis’ tongue.
‘I hope your meeting with your grandmother went well, Miss Swansong. Helena always appreciates visits from family. Do come and see us again soon.’
The ‘Miss’ grated.
‘It’s Inspector.’
‘Was, Miss Swansong.’
Inspector. Yes, she realised, it had been.
‘Oh, by the way, she said I should give you this.’
A red envelope. That would be the severance pay.
Icara took it, knowing that with it she was flushing her career down the toilet. There would be no walnut-lined office. What would there be? What could there be, without the Bureau?
The bruise on her forehead throbbed.
She could feel the other Bureaucrats watch her and pretend that they weren’t looking as she walked to the elevator. Some of them even stepped out of her way. As if disfavour was contagious. They were probably right to be afraid. Frome’s wrath could spread, like the fire at Lot 458.
Somehow she made it back to her office. She switched on the strong, white striplight. The beige and magnolia interior lit up at the sight of her. The walls morphed into ‘Light and Fun’, one of the customisable themes designed to make you feel at home. The kitten sprayed vanilla scent.
Icara had practically lived in this office for the past four years. Now, she slumped in her office chair, and it welcomed her into its PVC hug. The tears came again. Hot. Indignant. All they did was fan the flames of misery. This place was all she had. It was all she had invested in. There was nothing but the Bureau. Frome, of all people, should be able to see how much she cared, and value the feeling.
She walked over to the glass wall that overlooked the Temple and Memorial Square.
There was no other place for her in this City. Where would she go? What would she do?
She tore the red envelope into pieces. How dare Frome do this to her? When all she had wanted to do was clean up the Bureau, make the City a better place. All she had done was follow orders. Anyone would have been duped by the clean-up team.
The digital marker with her name on the door had already been reset to blank. The walls were morphing into regulation green, ready to receive a replacement. iRemember might be forever, but the Bureau building was quick to forget.
They couldn’t erase the calendar at least. She would leave it behind. It would remain there, with its tail defiantly raised.
A pathetic voice in her head that the Inspector barely recognised as her own was saying things like: How could the Bureau not want me? How could the Bureau not need me? I cared about it. And it just throws me away? Like an empty Tranquelle packet!
She couldn’t quite believe this was happening. The euphoria of coming back home had been so quickly replaced by whatever this ridiculous misunderstanding was.
She would have to leave soon. They would doubtless deactivate her access-all-areas professional iRemember account, change the passwords. Like changing the locks. Frome was less forgiving than an angry spouse; there would, thought Icara, be no coming back from this.
***
Somewhere in the streets, shrouded by the urban environment like an ant caught between sheets of soggy newspaper, Lucian Ffogg was also waking up into an alternate reality. And it wasn’t the good kind where Lethene grew on trees and he was the head of a Bureau which ensured that everyone was left alone. Always.
At first, he felt like himself. He woke up, unwell and groggy after what he thought was a bad night’s sleep. As usual, the first thing he remembered was the day he had lost Emily. Then the day he had been ejected by the University. Then his mother’s funeral. At the Alta Vista point. A peripheral place – not really part of the City proper. The little white graveyard with a picket fence that had made death seem palatable. Clean, at least. The pastor had lowered the little, pale wood coffin into the ground. And had switched on the screen so that the pre-recorded message of Frome commending a loyal citizen to the arms of Scientifically Proven God could play. Lucian hadn’t even been able to cry.
Other than that, his head felt wonderfully empty. Airy.
He recalled the explosions of the hangars and wondered, briefly, without panic or terror, what he was going to do now that Lot 458 was no longer operational.
If, he reasoned, it is no longer operational, then, where am I?
There was a vaulted ceiling above him. The room he had woken up in smelled like a wine cellar. Cellar did not bode well.
Fear crept up on the dazed CMO slowly. Like frostbite, it went for the fingers and toes first. He realised that he could not move them. He couldn’t move his head either – not right, not left. It was as if he was in an enormous plaster cast.
And then he heard a brain cell whisper. It was a memory that would not decontaminate. It would not go away...
...Two enormous front teeth chewing on a chicken leg that might as well be a sparrow leg. You think you’re a special one, don’t you? Nasty laughter. Sewer laughter. In your rustling robes. You’re talking about opening another mine, thirty metres north of the Tranquelle Belt. You tell me the mineral is crucial to improving Tranquelle production. A bumper crop. As if I didn’t know. In the no-mine zone. You don’t think anyone will notice. Which I know means you’ve done it already. This City is hungry. Like you.
And all I can think, as I sign the contract you’re pushing towards me with your greasy finger, is how there’s only four minutes before I climb back into the pill and only fifteen minutes before I clamber back into the soft green leather. Pull on the visor. Feel my body stiffen, then become light, like the bubbles in your champagne. That’s nineteen minutes before I don’t have to feel a thing. And I can slip under the skin of the state. I can slip into the prom dress. I can relive someone’s first kiss. I can live it all, all over again. And make everyone’s mistakes. Just not my own. Not the ones that end in the State Dining Room of the Glitz, with a greasy index finger on a contract with the seal of the Temple in the bottom right-hand corner...
He knew it wasn’t his memory. But it refused to leave. It lingered, like a lonely retiree. As if it had been waiting for someone to listen. A storm cloud. It made him sick with grief, and sleepy. And it made his head ache.
Perhaps I am not Lucian Ffogg, but someone else. Someone much less happy. Who hates contracts.
Before he could resolve the puzzle that waking had presented him with, a pain like bullets punch-burrowed its way from his cervical spine and out through his left temple. He chased tiny black beetles across his vision. Finally the little scarabs overwhelmed everything. He blacked out again.
‘I have put a stop to the use of underhand intelligence methods, so common in Drawbridge Era. And have created a hundred new ones.’
Helena Frome, The Apocryphal Dinner Conversations
Three months after Fromemass. They were wrapped in Lucian’s bed, as closely together as the stalks in a good old Belter stew. But Emily was distant somehow. Lucian
had the feeling she wasn’t really listening to him, as he went on and on about a new researcher at the lab who was constantly looking over Lucian’s shoulder.
‘He watches everything I do. I feel like he’s just waiting to steal something from me.’
She ignored him.
That’s probably because she thinks I’m being completely mad, thought Lucian. But I’m not. He’s watching everything I do. He’s always there. He says it’s because he’s eager to learn. Where did they find such a graduate student? Shouldn’t he have already done all the learning he was going to do? Wasn’t he here to research?
She didn’t say anything. She just lay there.
Lucian could feel a row brewing, a gentle tingling in the pit of his stomach. Anxiety.
‘You’re not even listening to me, are you?’
And there it was. She gave him a withering look, got up, dragged the duvet off him, and walked off.
‘I’m going to shower,’ she said.
It was the first thing she had said all morning.
Lucian couldn’t put what he felt into words. Expressing himself had never been his strong point. He wanted to tell her that when she spoke to him like that, or didn’t speak to him, that she was making him die a little inside. She might as well have said: ‘I’m going in there to wash you off, you disgusting little man.’ She hadn’t said it. She probably didn’t mean it. But it made him feel horrible. And instead of expressing himself, he lay there, cold, newly denuded of duvet, and watched the leg hairs on his shins spring up and down. Feeling stupid. Feeling entirely stupid and inarticulate. And possibly worst of all for a fully-grown man in a fully-grown relationship, missing his mother.
And then there was an exquisite moment in which she smiled at him, from across the room. She flicked her hair back from where it covered her collarbone. Lucian watched the gentle curve of the bone under her skin. He loved her. He loved her to the bone.
She smiled, walked over to him, and planted a hot wet kiss – one on each eyelid.
That’s when he knew he was dreaming. For he could perfectly picture the skin, the hair, the smell of Emily. Ungraspable, ethereal Emily. He could see her face. It was the most vivid dream he had had in thirty years. She was really there. The full memory of her. And he didn’t want it to end. Not now. Not ever. He would happily move in here, living life in an infinite loop, a Möbius strip of déjà-vu.
He hadn’t been able to picture her for thirty years. All he could remember with absolute, brutal clarity was the night she disappeared behind a pillar, a mnemonic Lot’s Wife. And she could have been his. Wife, that is. Only he had never been allowed to ask her. Life had gotten in the way.
But here, in this dream, where Emily had kissed his eyelids, had shown him more real affection than he ever remembered, life was no longer in the way. Nothing was in the way. He didn’t care if he never woke up.
Everything in this dream was perfect. He got up from the bed, as he recalled he had not done that day, and walked around the room. Touching things. Everything so real. He had an impossible feeling of having ripped through the fabric of the dream, to find it was wrapped around a gift: reality. And Emily, really there, wrapped in a duvet. Forever suspended between bed and shower.
He ran towards her, grabbed her by the waist and held on tight.
‘I missed you,’ he said. And he felt his Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he tried to hold back thirty years of missing somebody. She was so young and beautiful. She couldn’t possibly understand. And knowing that she was inside the head of an old, lonely man would only upset her.
She didn’t say anything.
Lucian breathed in deeply. He could smell the sweet, almond smell of Emily.
‘Don’t let me wake up. If there is a Scientifically Proven God, and there must be, for he is Scientifically Proven, I will die right now, and this will be my last thought, my last perfect experience.’
Of course, it isn’t wise to make capricious demands of a Scientifically Proven creator...
...Lucian woke up, back in the strange purple room with the vaulted ceiling.
The room was devoid of life, apart from a delicate spider, its delicate web and a form that was coming towards him. A shadow like a waft of Tranquelle. A mirage in the desert.
Thirty years seemed to snap together like an elastic band breaking. Lucian thought he was losing his mind. This time for real.
There, on the threshold of the purple room, arms akimbo, was Emily. Her hair had become a little grey at the temples, true. But it couldn’t be anyone else.
‘Hi Lu,’ she said. The husky long vowels that encircled you. You felt them before you heard them. Like a sonic boom.
Lucian had the sinking feeling experienced by nervous flyers.
Turbulence was coming.
***
The Superloop had stopped to pick up passengers. As if it was any other day. Almost without thinking about it, as if her hands had behaved on their own, Icara found a Tranquelle vape in her coat pocket. She continued trying not to think about what had just happened as she watched the city flash beneath her like embers falling away from the comet tail of the Loop. One last ride. The glorious, warm, glass interior did not make the clinging, cold feeling go away. In the tube, you could feel inertia pinning you to the floor. Ten minutes later, she found herself stepping out again, in the cold, orange light of the underground walkway that led to her apartment block.
Her shoes echoed as she made her way down the long concrete corridor. She sounded like the echo of a typewriter. She had seen one of these in the Accounting Museum. She wondered what she was typing. It must have been something very sad. ‘Inspector Icara Swansong wandered down the concrete corridor, alone in the dark.’ Like the beginning of one of the True Crime series that ran on the Tranquelle packets. One of the series she could have been watching in the bath. If this was a normal day. If the world hadn’t collapsed, like an uninsured lung in the General Hospital.
It was not a normal day.
Her personal elevator closed its doors. Icara shut her eyes and felt more tired than she could ever remember. Yellow light played on her eyelids. The mirrored interior threw infinite replicas of the Inspector – ex-Inspector, now – out into space. She imagined the curve of the lift shaft as a coffin. For her career. For her happiness.
The lift went up for a long time. There was a long way to go.
The City State, Frome’s metropolis, was full of high-rises. The buildings poked up into the artificially created atmosphere, dangerously close to the dome that protected them from the corrosive cloud that sometimes wafted in from the industrial zones in the Tranquelle Belt. It was a place in a straitjacket. Though Frome had insisted that the straitjacket have options when it came to zips and sleeves. Society in the City flowed in two distinct streams. One stream carried information, expensive shoes and the Superloop. The other stream carried airborne diseases, bills and pay-monthly subscriptions to iRemember.
Icara had always belonged in the first stream. With the other Government employees in their hydrophobic green suits, and their long umbrellas; she knew of the second stream by association only. iRemember and her Bureau work had allowed her to walk in the skin of the stream that flowed without knowing what it was missing, because they didn’t have the passwords to the iRemember files that would tell them. But plugging in to the feelings of the have-nots for half an hour, with an uncomfortable visor on, is different to knowing what it means when these feelings will go on and on. Day after day. Until they stop because of a choked-up artery, or because someone has choked you and stolen your arteries to sell on the very lucrative underground meat market in the Sub-Urbs.
Icara lived on the top floor of a very expensive apartment block. So the elevator elevated that day, going ever so slowly, as if Scientifically Proven God wanted to show her how far she had to fall. And was being heavy-handed about it.
Fro
m Icara’s balcony, you could hardly see the walkways that smelled sour, wet and cold. The Sub-Urbs. They spread underneath the skin of the city, like rabbit warrens. And in these warrens crime lurked. Sometimes it whispered sweet nothings. Sometimes it sprawled openly in the street. Or stuck a knife in your ear. If you were lucky.
State employees had a different kind of luck. They lived in identical buildings. Their balconies looked out only to look back in – seeing each other’s interiors. Behind glass speckled with incessant artificially generated rain, faces melted, hair and clothes smudged, the world became a fishbowl full of impressionistic brushstrokes of colour.
The rooms of Icara’s apartment were atmospherically lit, spacious and faintly smelling of artificial vanilla – like all the rooms in all the blocks in all of Frome’s city. Looking around the place, there was not a great deal of personal paraphernalia. If it had not been written that the flat belonged to Icara Swansong – on the doorbell, on the deeds, on the pages of the Land and Property Ownership Register kept by the Brethren – no one would ever have guessed.
Icara arrived just as airborne streetlight drones filled the sky outside with their muted orange glimmer. The lift doors opened straight into her bedroom. Somewhere a robotic sphincter released the smell of cookies, to welcome Icara home. As the windows began to darken, the walls automatically started to glow.
After such a horrible day she should have been glad to be home.
She should have thrown herself with all her weight onto the sofa, torn off her green suit.
Instead she walked gingerly into the kitchen, feeling like an alien presence. On a planet that belonged to robotic kitchen appliances and sentient soft furnishings. A planet on which she was no longer working for the Bureau.
She did sit down eventually. The silence of the apartment around her rang in her ears. She felt small and tired. As if someone had wrenched her stomach out of her. And now she was empty. A Tranquelle packet with all the pills pushed through the casing. Empty blisters. Rustling aluminium against plastic. She turned on the wireless. The speakers beeped and began playing her favourite Tranquelle jingle. She needed something stronger than the vapes tonight.
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