I’d thought better of searching for Riemann Aldis. Their authorities might not be the only ones watching.
“Good work.” Erquist clears his desk. “Well, after this business with the machete”—he seems to relish the word—“do you want me to organise a room for you in the resort?”
“I’ll stay outside for now.”
“Right. But if you feel you are in any danger… What do you have this afternoon?”
“A walk across the moors. Then a pub lunch.”
Erquist shudders. “That sounds grim.” I know he’s never walked across a moor. I doubt he’s had a pub lunch, even though Restaurant Three in this very resort offers versions of 21st-century meals so you can prepare yourself for the real thing. “How many have booked?”
“Only five.” Our younger clients. We’re not scheduled to have any accidents and the pub has been given instructions about preparing the food. We should avoid allergic reactions this time. “I’m not expecting any difficulties.”
“Good. I’ll talk to Hayek. Don’t look so concerned. I’ll keep it unofficial.”
“I’d rather not involve Safety.”
“You’ve been attacked. They have to be informed. Protocol, you understand. Besides, it’s likely they already know. They’ve probably been watching you since you borrowed the tracker. No, we need to keep Hayek inside the cone on this. And don’t worry: he’s more accommodating than he looks.”
When we first announced our presence to the early 21st the natives had a lot of questions. Their scientists had thought travel was either impossible, or theoretically possible but impractical (requiring more energy than exists in the universe, etc.), or possible in only one direction (I forget which). And the people who weren’t scientists assumed we could pick a date and go back or forward to whenever we pleased.
The reality is different. Yes, it does take a lot of energy (and of course we don’t tell them how much or how we generate it), and, no, you can’t just pick a date. There are constraints. There is a fixed link between here and 2345 (which happens to be the year I left). That’s how the tourism business is able to function; that’s how City One West has two grand pianos. But fixed links are expensive, and you can only have them in periods with a certain technical sophistication. There aren’t any before the beginning of the 21st and none after the beginning of the NEE. If a traveller from 2345 wants to visit anything earlier they’ll need to charter, which requires a lot more energy (and therefore official approval) and has a longer stopover. The further back you go, the longer it gets. If you want to see 1850 the nearest you can get is 1845 and then you have to wait until 1857 to get home (from a well-concealed site in Australia). Some of the 18th-century stopovers are even longer: 1736 in, 1762 back (from Siberia). These are the trips that have to be planned carefully. There are no trained reps or Safety Teams. If Riemann came on a charter it means he has serious backers. To come here on a charter without a signature means they are very serious.
Our client might not be the only reason Riemann is here: she might be second to last on his top secret to-do list. The question is: is she important to us? Is she our problem? That is, is she my problem? Or do we just carry on as usual and leave it to the professionals?
I think about this on the walk (not far but enlivened by exciting rain). When I get back there’s a message: the Chief Safety Officer wants to see me.
The lock on the outer office releases as I approach. Two Safeties are sitting at monitoring desks. They don’t look up as I pass. The door to the inner office slides open.
Hayek Englebrot has a desk like Erquist. He has a more elaborate chair he’s said never to leave. There’s a display screen on the wall to his right, and nine smaller ones in a 3x3 block to his left. 21st tech, and not the latest, but good enough for a tourist resort if you have the right adaptations. His desk has a slight incline, so I can’t see whatever he’s looking at when I walk in. The other ten screens are blank.
Hayek is more than typical Safety: he’s like the platonic ideal of a Safety Officer. Heavy, augmented. His eye tech is definitely not cosmetic. I used to know people like him when I worked in the Tunnels, but only like him, with bone-and-muscle augs and retinal enhancements. Compared to him they were still in the larval stage. Hayek is the mature adult, connected, modified and contemptuous of the merely human. He’s been here ten years and has never left the resort. This isn’t, as with Erquist, through choice. Hayek isn’t allowed to leave, except under very specific and very unlikely circumstances. The natives aren’t supposed to know that people like him exist.
“About our girl,” he says. “It’s interesting.” Girl. He refers to unmodified adults as girls and boys, as if he considers them children.
“You mean you haven’t found her?”
“I didn’t say that.” He gives me his Safety Officer stare, the one where he calculates to the microsecond how long it would take to kill me. Thanks to the Tunnels I’ve had combat training and standard bone-and-muscle augs. As far as Hayek’s concerned they might as well be hair extensions and a manicure. “We can use their communications networks to confirm a signature,” he says. “The problem is without a tracker they’re not very good for finding them.” He explains why: a combination of a tech mismatch and network charges. I understand about two-thirds of it. He summarises: “To find somebody I would have to know where to look. I tried the usual tourist destinations in this city and found no trace. I had to ask the question: where might an adventurous tourist go? And I found her.” Hayek approximates a smile. “She’s in London.”
It makes sense. London has a lot of extemps. They like the romantic thrill of living somewhere that doesn’t survive the NEE. If she’s selling tonin that’s where she’ll find a buyer. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you lost her.” He looks at me with what might be amusement. “And because I don’t want to involve a Safety Team when it’s possible there’s an innocent explanation. Geneva are sensitive about interventions. Also, if our girl is dealing with the locals we might need to speak to them as well. My people are good at what they do, but they can be unsubtle, and they’re not recruited for their languages. You can talk to the locals, and, from what Erquist tells me, your former training hasn’t been entirely wasted. You are the ideal person for this.” He pauses: new information has arrived. “She’s still our client. It would be irresponsible not to take an interest.” This is presumably the defence he’ll offer if it turns out he wasn’t supposed to get involved. He gestures at the large screen which shows a high-angle shot of hundreds of natives in an enclosed, high-ceilinged space, most of them standing still and looking in the same direction. My first thought is that it’s some kind of temple. Then I notice the shops. “Victoria station,” Hayek says. “The concourse. Is that our client?”
A woman, obviously one of us, is walking through the native crowd. She doesn’t look lost or frightened. She seems to be alone. “It could be.”
“It is. Once I knew she was in London I started looking for her face. Geneva allows us access to some of their cameras…” He explains how he narrowed the search: one of those explanations that contains just enough tech detail to demonstrate his mastery. “Now watch.”
He finds a camera at a lower angle. It’s a view from behind; our client stands out, a head taller than anybody else. She’s heading straight for one of the platforms. She passes through the ticket barrier. It’s rare for a Tri-Millennium client to use public transport. They don’t like the attention and the seats are too small. Our client moves with a lot of assurance for somebody who’s only been outside a day. Hayek switches to a view from the platform itself. It’s from a higher angle and she doesn’t look up, but her face matches the hooded woman’s from the coach. Hayek is triumphant. “Is that our girl?”
“It’s her.”
“So where is she going?” Hayek searches timetables: the next train from that platform is heading for the south coast. One of the stops is an airport.
She could be plan
ning to leave the country.
“Interesting,” is all Hayek says.
We watch her board a train. Then, before Hayek can find another camera, I notice something familiar. Limping through the ticket barrier is a squat native in a suit followed by a taller man in a black jacket.
Hayek has noticed my interest. “Do you know them?”
“They’re the ones who attacked me. They asked about signatures.”
Hayek appraises them. “And they can still walk?” The implication is he wouldn’t have made that mistake. “As for the signatures, they must have heard it from an extemp.” He turns to me. “So now what?”
“What do you mean?”
“What should we do?” He fixes me with a look. “Does she need help or has she arranged to meet these people? Do we intervene, or sit back and watch?”
I hesitate, which amuses him. He wants me to know he’d have no doubts: he’s probably been augmented for decisive action. He’s surprised when I stand up. “You’ve found her,” I say. There was a Tunnel principle: if somebody doesn’t come back from a patrol you look for them. I might have become a junior part of the Happiness Executive but I still have the reflex, even if it means I’ll spend the rest of the day following a single client. “You keep watching her. If she gets off at the airport, find out what plane she’s likely to catch. If you can authorise a flight I should be able to reach her destination first.”
“Not bad, Tunnel Boy,” Hayek says. “It’s the beginning of a plan. What will you do when you find her?”
It occurs to me that I’ve chosen the very thing he wanted me to choose. “I’ll think of something.”
He turns back to the screen. Suit and Black Jacket have moved out of the picture. Before Hayek can change the view I notice something odd about the image, a blur, like a thumbprint on the lens. Except this is a smudge that moves. Hayek notices it too. He stares at it, rapt. I can almost hear his augs at work, applying new resolutions and filters. “Interference,” he finally says. “Everything comes through Geneva. There must be degradation.”
“Keep me informed.” I’m already at the door, which, this time, doesn’t open at my approach. It won’t open until Hayek tells it to.
“Have no doubt about that.” The door opens. “I’ll be watching.”
I go back down to the car pool. My plan is to head south and east to the old USAF base in Essex we lease under the pretence we need an air ambulance service. Provided our client isn’t going to the other side of the world Hayek should be able to get me a place on a plane. It won’t necessarily be faster than anything she catches, but there will be less bureaucracy when I land. I should be able to catch up.
Conventional cars, conventional aircraft. Some of the natives used to think that because we travel we must also be able to teleport. There were experiments in the early days, when High Energy Generation was new, but they were soon abandoned. We had other priorities and there are cheaper ways of killing lab rats. So we don’t have teleportation. As far as we know they don’t have it in the 25th. (The 25th pretend to be pious stay-at-homes but we’re sure they’re watching us. Or maybe they’re too busy teleporting to worry about the past.)
They wouldn’t tell us even if they did.
About half an hour later Hayek bips me. “I don’t think our girl is going anywhere.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I’m watching her now. She’s in the arrivals lounge, at a coffee shop. She’s sitting in the open, as if she wants to be seen. I think she’s waiting to meet someone.”
So: no need to go to Essex. “Thanks, Hayek. Keep me informed.”
“You’ll be told what you need to know.”
I’m at least two hours away from the airport. Unless whoever she’s there to see has a delayed flight she could have made her rendezvous and left while I’m still on the motorway. Still, now that Hayek has found her he might be able to keep track. Suit and Black Jacket are unlikely to make trouble in a place with so many potential witnesses as well as armed and jumpy police.
I bip Hayek. “The two following our client, what can you find out about them?”
“I wondered when you’d ask.” Hayek is deadpan. “The one with the limp is Christopher Gurley. He has old criminal convictions for assault and receiving stolen goods, but nothing recent. His younger associate is Wilson Knight. He has a shorter record and a diagnosis of ASD, whatever that means. Those are the current police records. From another source I learn he dies later this month.”
“How?” Briefly I wonder if this is the breach of protocol that gets me sent home. “Who kills him?”
“I don’t know, Tunnel Boy. I’m not Geneva. The police records come from a not-quite-official local contact. The other information is pure chance. It’s a fragment from one of their newspapers, a summary of gang-related deaths a client brought here two years ago. The client was a retired Safety with an interest in this era’s crime. He brought his research with him and thought I might be interested. Of course I added them to our records.” He sounds pleased with his own foresight. “I’ll send you what I have.”
“Thanks.” I’d rather he hadn’t told me Knight was going to die, or had at least sounded less cheerful about it. I hope gang-related means what it says and isn’t a euphemism for murdered by travel rep. I could almost feel sorry for Knight. He’d drawn a machete on me, true, but he hadn’t looked as if he enjoyed the prospect. I’m sure he’d have killed me with the same mournful expression. The information bips to the display screen on the dashboard. It’s illegal to read while in control of a vehicle, but this one has been modified and won’t let me crash. There’s Knight’s record, a series of images marking his progress from scowling fourteen-year-old to impassive twenty-seven. The newspaper fragment doesn’t say how he died, only that he was one of the casualties in “a vicious struggle for territory” that started after another man, his cousin, was beaten to death. Four other deaths followed. I don’t recognise the names or faces. Gurley’s history is longer but with fewer pictures and no convictions in the last twelve years. After that the record stops: Hayek’s police contact and our amateur criminologist didn’t have anything on him. Perhaps he reforms. Or he carries on and his crimes aren’t lurid enough to appeal or the records are lost, along with so much else, when the NEE hits the server farm.
The NEE. It’s difficult to think about. We’ve reduced it to three letters, which makes it easier to say. In my time it’s history: grim history, but in the past, finished, over. The only people still arguing about it are specialists: historians, techs with a point to make, crank theorists and teenagers discovering crank theories for the first time. (Cantor was an aficionado of crank theories. It was hard to tell if he believed them or simply relished the ingenuity that went into their elaboration.) The NEE attracts cranks because we still don’t know how it started. The records start to fragment in the lead-up to it, and the Event itself—or the Events, because it was complicated—are still only beginning to be reconstructed. Before that all we have are the personal testimonies of people who missed the important events. (Their records survive because they missed them.) The NEE is like the accident that destroys the surrounding memories, or the kind of fugue state where you wake up in an unfamiliar building with missing teeth and no clothes. It’s a hole in our history. Proper, sequential records don’t begin again until decades later. That’s the NEE: humanity’s lost long weekend, the near-death experience that persuaded us to reform. Tragic and terrible, but history.
Except the 21st still has it coming. We haven’t told them, of course. They wouldn’t do anything. They don’t do anything. It’s just far enough in the future to be somebody else’s problem.
These are the kind of thoughts I have as I drive. The lorries and cars, the vans and coaches driving between warehouses and retail points, or office to office; businessmen, sightseers, regional managers, the police, thousands of people on this road alone, all working to maintain a system that in ninety years will cease to exist, all thinkin
g they’re at the pinnacle of civilisation.
They are in a way.
It won’t help. It didn’t help.
Hayek sends updates: “Our girl is still alone.”
I drive on. The car has safety modifications, and needs them. Too many of the natives drive like they want to die, or believe they can’t. Still, I like to exercise some control, even if my destination is predetermined and the only choice I can exercise is what to listen to on the radio, in this case the government classical music station, where Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony is followed by a discussion between three natives worrying about the implications for performers of the recordings we released a few years earlier. It was a gesture to show how our interest in the past was benign and that we were willing to share some things as long as they were harmless. I’m curious about what these natives will say. Except for this era’s conspiracy theorists and religious hold-outs and all the contributors to DomeWatch, we seem to be taken for granted. Whatever they might mutter in private, most natives don’t talk about us in official media, so it’s a surprise to hear three of them discussing the impact we’ve had on musical performance. Or, rather, they talk about the recordings without mentioning who made them, as if they’d simply appeared. It’s infuriating. People went to a lot of trouble to make those recordings. Brink and Nakamura, who recorded the 1808 concert, never came back. These natives don’t mention Brink and Nakamura. They don’t mention us at all, as if they’re under some kind of prohibition. Instead they quibble: that there’s only one recording of Beethoven conducting his Second Symphony, and how typical is that of his style? And with the Third, we know he was unhappy with the rehearsals… Oh yes, they agree, the recordings are certainly interesting—the Bach organ improvisations, especially—but they are not definitive. They still leave a lot of room for interpretation…
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