On average the walk from his flat to the station, door to door, took Parry half-an-hour. That morning, with few other pedestrians to circumambulate and no traffic to wait for at junctions, he managed the journey in two-thirds of the time.
Only a handful of the day-shift had bothered to make it in, and most of them were congregated, along with some remnants of the night-shift, around the wallscreen in the recreation lounge. Parry had had an idea that it might be, to say the least, a slow day, but he quickly discovered that there was in fact nothing to do at all. No calls were coming in, other than from citizens who assumed that the police, being authority figures, must have some explanation for the golden giants. There were no domestic emergencies occurring or crimes beings committed anywhere. And so Parry, having helped himself to a cup of tea from the vending machine, sat down with his colleagues to watch the continuing news broadcasts, which had displaced all other programming.
Everyone in the recreation lounge had a tale to tell about what they had been doing when they had first heard about the creatures, and there was, quite properly, plenty of speculation as to what the beings were and what they were after, but for the most part Parry and his colleagues stayed silent and let the television do the talking. Anxiety was evident on one or two faces, but by and large Parry thought that everyone else in the room was feeling what he was feeling. It was too embryonic an emotion to be given a name, at least not yet, but if allowed to grow and develop unhindered, it might just conceivably be called hope.
Around eleven, the prime minister stepped out into Downing Street to deliver a statement. He said nothing that the US president and the Russian premier and the president of the EU and China’s First Lady and the secretary general of the UN and even the mayor of London had not already said, namely that the situation was being monitored closely and that so far there was no apparent cause for concern. He added that the country’s armed forces were on emergency standby, ready to respond if “developments should prove disadvantageous to national security”, and concluded by saying that he intended to remain in touch with other world leaders and would take no action precipitately and without the full and unified consent of the international community.
This was met with some scorn by the assembled company.
“Typical,” sneered a DI, rolling his eyes. “It was the same when the crops went. ‘Everyone says there’s nothing to worry about, so there’s nothing to worry about.’ That wanker doesn’t have an idea of his own in his head. He probably wouldn’t know he needed to take a shit if his advisors didn’t remind him.”
“Well, you’ve got to admit he’s better than the last one, isn’t he?” said a constable. “He didn’t listen to anybody. Everyone kept telling him we needed sea defences, and what happened? ’Bye-bye, East Anglia!”
It was this same constable who, minutes later, proposed a trip out in a squad car to look for one of the creatures. Two of the curious (in both senses of the word) beings had been sighted in Hyde Park, another one at Kew Gardens. He asked if anybody wanted to come along with him. Parry was surprised to find that his was the only hand raised. Everyone else appeared content to experience the event through the medium of television rather than at first hand. Perhaps it seemed more real to them that way.
Driving along the South Circular, Parry and the constable passed several groups of citizens who had had the same idea and were out and about on creature-seeking expeditions. The mood of the groups was boisterous, like that of people on a scavenger hunt or a pub-crawl. Near Vauxhall Bridge they encountered one lot who seemed to be less rowdy and more purposeful than the rest, and Parry observed that one of them was carrying a portable radio. He tuned the squad car’s shortwave to several different news stations till he found one which was broadcasting a live commentary phoned in by a man who was tracking one of the golden giants through Battersea Park. The constable hit the accelerator, and moments later he and Parry were hurtling past the Dogs’ Home and pulling up in front of the gates at the park’s south-eastern corner.
They found the creature and a handful of onlookers – about a dozen of them all told, including the man with the phone – at the Buddhist shrine that stood halfway along the park’s northern perimeter, directly adjacent to the Thames. The creature was circling slowly around the monument, seemingly unperturbed by, or unaware of, the attention it was drawing. The constable, who was the officious type, the type who thought a uniform gave you a licence to throw your weight about, ordered the onlookers to stand back and not crowd the creature – unnecessary advice, since everyone was keeping a good, wary distance from it anyway. Parry, meanwhile, separated himself not just from his fellow policeman but from his fellow humans, edging sideways until he was in a position where the only animate object in his line of vision was the creature.
His first direct, unimpeded, unmediated view of a Foreigner...
Seeing: the brightness of the day, the whiteness of the shrine, the rippling shimmer of the creature’s garments.
Hearing: the nervous shufflings and murmurings of the onlookers, and the man with the cellphone still quietly, urgently narrating.
Feeling: the cool, light wind on his face and a heart-quickened trickle of sweat running from one armpit down the side of his ribs.
Tasting: a nervous, electric tang on his tongue, mingled with the lingering savour of his recent cup of tea.
Smelling: the grey leaden odour of the brimful river and the simmering, carbonised pungency of city air.
Whenever he recalled that moment, it was as a combination of all these five impressions, his senses working like the instruments in a quintet, eyes and ears carrying the melody, skin and tongue adding harmonic layers, nose providing the underpinning bass tones. It was as though the memory was imprinted not just in his brain cells but in his entire physical structure. He would never – could never – forget it. Nor would he ever forget the emotion evoked in him by the creature, the spiritual product of the pan-sensory concert. It was a feeling quite without precedent in his life, a feeling of being suffused with utter, unvanquishable gladness.
Everything is going to be all right.
The creature, its appearance, its behaviour.
This I understand. Everything is going to be all right.
And he knew that this was a moment he would look back on as pivotal in his life. Even as he was marvelling at the Foreigner, some small part of him was telling him that he was never going to be the same again. A new phase was beginning for him, right here, right now. He could sense his past detaching itself, pulling away like a train from a station. The worst of him was aboard that train. All the stupid little jealousies and desires, the ambitions and the frustrations, the vices, the vexations, all the petty, lazy traits that had accreted to his character over the years like mud on a tractor tyre, lumbering him, encumbering him – he was shedding them. From here on (and this was not a vow, simply a statement of fact) he was going to be a different man. A better man. In this creature in front of him, this meandering, inexplicable golden-robed entity, he sensed transformation. He sensed metamorphosis. He sensed himself, not as he was, but as he could be.
And then the Foreigner disappeared. Just like that. It did not precisely vanish; rather, Parry happened to take eyes off it for a moment and it just sort of slipped away, unobtrusively. One moment it was there, and then it was no longer there and seemed to have been absent for quite some while. When Parry asked members of the crowd if any of them had seen what had happened to it, they all said the same. They were not aware of it leaving, only aware that abruptly, without their noticing, it had left.
And this, it would turn out, was how Foreigners always came and went – silently, unobtrusively, without anyone noticing.
When you considered the Debut, as Parry was doing now, you could not help but find it remarkable that events passed off so peacefully that day. Given the general volatility of the world at the time, things could have gone horribly wrong. The military in one of more fractious and unstable regions of the globe
could have launched pre-emptive commando strikes against the golden giants. Panicking, paranoid civilians could have turned vigilante and done the same. Anywhere, it was possible that uncertainty could have bred fear and fear bred violence against the visitors, and then doubtless the Foreigners would have turned tail and fled, departing en masse as suddenly and mysteriously as they had arrived, having decided on the evidence of indigenous population’s initial response to their arrival that this planet was too backward and barbaric to warrant further visitation. For a while, without realising it, humankind underwent a kind of test. The choice was hostility or hospitality. And the Foreigners’ beauty and apparent benignity notwithstanding, the fact that the people of Earth chose hospitality was something to be lauded. Indeed, for a species with a history of almost invariably taking the wrong path instead of the right, to have displayed such wisdom and self-restraint was little short of miraculous. Somehow, when it really counted, humankind found in itself the collective will to behave responsibly. And somehow, in that crucial hour, it earned the right to continue and survive and prosper.
All this would become apparent in retrospect. But during the Foreigners’ first hours on the planet, most people were conscious of just two things: that the question of whether humankind was alone in the universe had been answered with a thunderous, resounding NO, and that as a result, whatever the immediate future might hold, nothing would ever be as it was before.
For some, no other explanation than this would be necessary to account for the spate of improvements that followed, once the shock of the Foreigners’ arrival had died down. Now that humankind knew for sure that it formed part of an immeasurably bigger picture, it simply could not continue with its internecine struggles and its plunder and despoliation of its home-planet. And so, all at once, warring factions began suing for peace. Treaties were signed, truces declared, statutes proposed and enacted. International debts were cancelled. Technologies were shared by the richer countries with the poorer. The trade in arms declined, the trade in alms boomed. A great constructive effort was made to change.
Parry himself was of the opinion that the provision of proof that humankind was just one race among many was indeed part of the reason for the worldwide outbreak of common sense, but he was also of the opinion that the principal reason was the Foreigners themselves. In the presence of such sublime creatures, anything less than the noblest behaviour seemed a crime.
It was a tenet he adhered to firmly, and came across nothing to contradict, in the ensuing months. When it was decreed that the term which was most commonly used when referring to the creatures, Foreigners, was to become their official nomenclature, he considered this to be an appropriately dignified and inoffensive choice. When it became apparent that Foreigners were chiefly attracted to ocean shores and beautiful architecture and warm climates, he thought this fitting and heartening, since the humans they met in those environments would be at their happiest and most congenial. When the Japanese commenced construction of a city designed specifically to appeal to and accommodate golden giants, and several other nations announced their intention to follow suit, Parry greeted the news with approval, because it seemed a considerate, altruistic gesture. And when the UN decided that these new resort-cities needed some kind of nominal police force, Parry was among the first to submit an application to join.
He had never once regretted the decision.
Until, perhaps, now.
Now, when he was sitting on his balcony in the pre-dawn chill, filled with the unnerving certainty of imminent misfortune.
And what could that misfortune be? What else but that the already messy and convoluted shinju investigation was about to become even messier and more convoluted? His subconscious had noted the three-day interval between the first two shinjus, had extrapolated from this fact that a third, if it was going to occur, would have occurred last night and be discovered today, and had imparted this information to him in the form of a dream he could not remember and the lingering sense of impending disaster that he was still feeling.
And if there was a third shinju, and it came exactly the same number of days after the second as the second had after the first, then what?
Then he would have little choice but to abandon his belief (his hope?) that the deaths and losses were not double murders. Such regularity of timing would be stretching coincidence too far. He would have to accept the unpalatable truth that there were killers on the loose in New Venice, and that the killers were in all likelihood Triple-Xers.
In one way, that would make his life easier. In another way, it would make it more complicated. It would mean he would at last know for sure in which direction to steer the investigation, but it would also mean he was faced with the task of finding two or perhaps three individuals in a city with a population of several tens of thousands – an ever-changing roster of inhabitants who flitted in and out of town, leaving little trace of their comings and goings beyond a name at Customs. The proverbial needle in a haystack.
The flow of steam from the teapot spout had diminished to a faint, dispirited thread. Parry wanted to reach out and pour himself a cuppa, but found that he could not rouse himself to move. Despite the chilliness of the air and the hardness of the chair, he was feeling oddly languid and comfortable.
He closed his eyes and opened them, and the sky had lightened. He closed and opened them again, and the sun was just clearing the rooftops. He wanted to stand up and go indoors, but his eyelids descended again, and then suddenly he was warm and there were boats on the canal and people out on their balconies and the sun was well above the rooftops and beaming brightly.
Morning. Day.
He was still conscious of the sense of foreboding, but it had diminished considerably. What had seemed intense and portentous during the cold and dark and stillness of the small hours now seemed, in the warmth and brightness and bustle of full daylight, foolish and false. If he had had a bad dream, then that was all it was – a bad dream.
He had just about managed to convince himself of this when the telephone rang.
His joints were stiff from his having slept outdoors, sitting upright. He creaked and limped and winced across the living room. He slumped at his desk and picked up the receiver.
It was Avni.
It was the bad news he had been expecting.
It was worse than he had been expecting.
32. Treble
FORTY MINUTES LATER, a far-from-happy Parry was being admitted by a far-from-unhappy van Wyk into Room 707 of the Hannon Regency in New Venice’s North-West district.
Had he been in a more objective frame of mind, Parry might have discerned a certain irony to the situation, namely that it was almost a direct inversion of the situation at the Amadeus six days ago. Then, it had been he presiding calmly over the scene of a shinju, with van Wyk intruding intemperately into the room and drawing startled looks from Dr Erraji and a pair of mainland criminalists as they unpacked their equipment and prepared to get down to work. Now, the roles were reversed, and van Wyk was the calm presider, Parry the intemperate, criminalist-startling intruder.
Irony, though, is usually lost on those whom it disfavours, and almost always lost on someone whose mind is seething with emotions such as indignation or anxiety.
In Parry’s case, indignation and anxiety.
No sooner had van Wyk opened the door to his knock than Parry strode into the room, ready to demand that control of the scene be relinquished to him immediately. Unfortunately, in his forthright haste he neglected to prepare himself for the room’s Foreign-scale proportions. All at once the world loomed large around him, and he faltered and staggered and had to reach out for the nearest wall (closer to hand than it appeared) in order to anchor himself. As Van Wyk leaned behind him to shut the door, Parry swayed. His head swam. He felt about a metre tall.
As though from far away he heard van Wyk saying, “Parry, you look pale.” There was a sweet-sounding, almost paternal note of concern in his voice. “Perhaps you’d better
sit down.”
Parry waved the suggestion away. Squeezing his eyes shut, he imagined an even larger room, with a chest of drawers higher than his head and chairs that had to be climbed into and a bed like something out of a fairy tale, fit for several kings at once.
(The Foreigners, he thought fleetingly, make children of us all.)
Once he had the image of the larger room firmly established in his mind, he reopened his eyes, and clear-headedness was restored, along with awareness of his own correct proportions.
He peered at Erraji, then the criminalists, then van Wyk, all of whom were looking solicitous, all but one of them genuinely so. He knew he had just fumbled his best and perhaps only chance for gaining the upper hand. Everything about the situation here was to van Wyk’s advantage, and he had hoped that by storming in and blustering he might be able to catch the Afrikaner off-guard and outmanoeuvre him, and now that hope, thanks to one moment of carelessness, was gone.
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