It starts raining. You retreat to the shelter of the cabin.
“The nomads.” You don’t know why you keep thinking of them. It must be the rain. “Where will they go?”
“They came from the south-east.” You can’t tell how he knows this. Perhaps he recognised their clothes. He watches the rain streaming down the window. “You’ll head west. What a shithole.”
There was something you meant to tell him. A piece of information you had been holding back until the right moment. When you try to remember it the rats have been there first. There were four special sites: Mosk, Sver, Spad and the other one. The one your instructors talked about wistfully. It was an optimistic time.
You listen to the rain beating on the roof. You remember the day-long downpours when you’d sit by the dormitory window and watch the yard outside slowly flood. In Spad you lived five levels down and could tell when it rained from the gurgling in the pipes. If the rain was heavy enough the pipes would shake. Too heavy and they burst. The crater is what happens when there is nobody to make repairs.
Mosk, Sver, Spad and the other one.
Abruptly the rain stops. Riemann climbs out of the vehicle and waits, impatient, for you to join him. “Are you able to walk?”
“I think so.” But you stumble a little. Either the ground beneath your feet is unstable or your ankle is. “Where do you want to go?”
“The crater. There’s a path I want to try.”
“They won’t be there.”
He grunts and marches to the edge of the crater, glancing up at the sky. When you catch up with him all he says is “Do you think you can walk down that?” He points at a track zigzagging down the slope about half a kilometre away. It looks as if it’s been fashioned deliberately. Nomads looking for shelter in the lower levels. Or salvage. There may still be intact structures underneath the rubble, perhaps even one you’d recognise.
“They won’t be there.” It looks steep. “If they were here wouldn’t we have found a transport?” That was what you’d been about to say. You came back in a transport both times, from one zone to another. A chamber large enough to hold over two hundred people. Twelve switches, a precise sequence.
You remember the walk home. A week’s provisions and a tent. It took you ten days, or ten days is the number you now remember. You know you were alone but your memory includes other girls who can’t have been there, walking beside you. They don’t talk. They’re superimposed from some other memory.
You follow him down the path. It’s steeper than it looked. You descend slowly, leaning back, one hand on the ground for support. Ahead of you, Riemann has found an opening. He waits for you to catch up. “Recognise this?” He pulls aside some waterproof sheeting, revealing a corridor which becomes pitch-black after a few paces. He turns on a torch. “Well?”
It’s a bare concrete tunnel wide enough for two people to walk side by side. The light of the torch doesn’t reach to the end. “There were lots of tunnels.” You’re out of breath. “They were all the same.”
He walks quickly. You try to keep to his side. There’s smell of stale water that gets stronger. “I used to work in Tunnel Clearance,” he says. He shines the torch at the walls, looking for signs, messages. “We spent most of the time on the surface.”
“Clearance?” You remember the pictures you were shown as a girl: the stacked bodies; uniformed, faceless men. “Clearance means murder.” You stop walking.
He wasn’t listening. “Are you good?”
“Clearance. We were shown the pictures.”
He’s puzzled, then he laughs. “I know the ones you mean. They’re old. They were taken before Two East broke away. Those people were already dead. Do you know what killed them? Cholera. The bodies had to be removed and destroyed. That’s how clearance started. We’d come to tunnels like this and… You wouldn’t believe me anyway.” He pulls you forward, his grip on your arm gentle but firm. “I knew good people who worked the Tunnels. I had friends. Do you know why we had military training? In case we met your people.” He pulls you until you reach an opening in the wall, a doorway. The door has gone, probably long since used for firewood or as part of a makeshift roof. Beyond it the corridor widens to a room about twenty metres long. Halfway across it is a waist-high concrete slab. “What is this?”
“A checkpoint.” The air is thick. You lean against the slab until the dizziness passes. “You would have had to show papers. They won’t be here.”
“You needed papers?” Riemann is amused.
“You have your signatures. Aren’t they the same?”
“They’re not the same.” He steps round the slab. There’s another opening in the wall just after it, another doorway without a door. The room where the guards would have sat or slept. “They worked in teams of six,” you say. “Two on duty, the rest in reserve.” Two to watch the checkpoint, two to sleep, two to watch the guards… There would have been bunks against the wall, lockers for the guards’ weapons. Now the room is empty. Anything usable has been taken. “Bodies.” It’s just occurred to you. “There are no bodies.”
“It was twenty years ago.” Riemann shines his torch into corners. “What did you expect?”
“Bones. Rags.”
“They must have known what would happen. They’d have tried to run or taken shelter.” There’s a metal door still in place at the end of the room. “Behind something like this.” Riemann hands you the torch and pushes against it.
You think of striking the back of his head with the torch and walking away. You decide not to. You will need his help getting out of the crater.
It’s the second time you’ve decided not to hurt him. That time in the empty shop with the pin gun: what would have happened if you’d fired? The memory comes back vividly: the locals, the box on the glass counter with the blade resting next to it. Nothing would be different, you realise. You would still be here. But if you hit him now, if you manage to hurt him… Then what? He doesn’t live to go back to the 21st. You don’t meet him because you’re not there to arrange the meeting. He doesn’t take the box and ask if you’re contaminating their stockpiles. He doesn’t tell you about Alexander Metzger. And then what? You don’t think about what he tells you. You return home a failure. Perhaps you don’t even get home, but remain in the 21st, running errands for Picon. You die there, pretending to be an extemp, and the only sign you lived is a name on the Memorial Wall. And then what? You don’t find Metzger. You don’t recruit the network. The Number City stockpiles are untouched. The Number Cities continue to grow. If you strike the back of his head with the torch, what happens? Would you blink and find yourself back in the safe house in the early 21st or in a barracks in the Eastern suburb? Or would you be dead from work in the insect factory? Do the Number Cities find another excuse, or does your city give up and rejoin them? At the airport he’d invoked a principle. What was it called? You’d looked it up afterwards. A principle, and another word. An. Anterior. No. Anachronist. Ever heard of the Anachronists?
“Nobody’s been through this for a long time.” Riemann gives up on the door. “But that’s where the bodies will be, on the other side.” He rubs at the dirt on the wall as if still hoping to find a message. “It’s probably better we can’t open it.”
“The self-consistency principle.”
He wipes the dust from his gloves. “What?”
“It’s all that’s keeping you alive.”
He shakes his head. “They shut themselves in and thought they’d survive.” He’s grim. “They’d have been trapped when everything collapsed. How long do you think they lasted?”
You can’t kill him. He has to live. His mission has to succeed. If he fails they won’t trust him to travel again. If he doesn’t travel… “They won’t be here.” You remember what you meant to tell him. Mosk, Spad, Sver. “I know where they’ll be.”
An der Wien
At the top of the building we find a circular room with a dirty glass ceiling. It looks like a mess hall: there are woode
n tables and chairs folded and stacked against one wall, and, facing them, what looks like a service counter, beyond which is another room that might have been a kitchen. The exterior walls are of the same dark material as all the other structures we’ve seen.
And above the ceiling is the sky. It’s overcast: there are pale grey clouds moving overhead. We can hear the wind. We stare for a while at the sky, then at each other, grinning with relief.
Edda climbs over the counter to investigate. I take out my handheld. Nothing. “Atmospheric conditions,” Erquist says. The clouds are still scudding overhead. I take two chairs from a stack and sit on one of them, resting my leg on the other.
Edda returns from the kitchen carrying a cardboard box. “There are some rings at the back that seem to use gas. There were bottles in a back room. If the seals haven’t perished they may be usable. There’s damp in one of the storerooms, so there must be water pooling somewhere. And these.” She opens the box. It contains slabs wrapped in silver foil with black lettering. She hands one to Erquist, who stares at it for a few seconds. “Cyrillic. The only word I can make out is protein,” he finally admits. He tears open one corner, sniffs at what it reveals and breaks off a crumb. He places it on his tongue as if it’s tonin and swallows. “It doesn’t taste rotten.” He stands up. “Show me these rooms. If there’s a water tank and gas we might be able to boil water. We can eat this if we have to.” He follows Edda. As soon as they’re out of sight, Li leans in. “What did your friend tell you? You can tell me now. Nobody’s listening.”
“Li…”
“Do you think we’re here by accident? We could die here,” she whispers. “Wherever here is. Whenever here is. They won’t come for us. We’re not pioneers. We’re not the Richardson expedition. We’re travel reps.” She seems exhilarated. “How’s your leg?” She rests her hand on the foot. For a moment I think I can feel something.
“It’s nothing. Brink had typhus.”
“And he had the cure for typhus. I’m not trying to depress you, Spens, but we have to face facts.”
She’s wrong about Brink having the cure for typhus. There was no Archive for Historical Medicines back then. The only treatment was to keep clean, drink boiled water and wait to sweat it out.
Now isn’t the time for a history lesson. “They might not come for us.” We can hear Edda and Erquist talking, probably having a similar conversation. “But they’ll come for them.”
Erquist finds a water tank. He’s not happy about the colour of the water. “It might be rust. Or there’s algae of some kind. Still, as long as we sterilise it thoroughly…” Edda finds pots and pans, cutlery, dishes and bowls. “At least,” Li says, “we don’t have to make implements out of rocks.” Because she doesn’t have night vision or bone-and-muscle augs she volunteers to cook. Edda searches the rooms below us. Tables and chairs, she reports, empty cupboards. “There are other rooms but the doors were locked. I’ll check tomorrow.”
“It’s getting too dark to do anything,” Erquist says. “We should try to sleep.”
We think we’ve had about four hours of daylight, which could mean it was late afternoon when we arrived. It’s cold, but not as cold as the sunless lower levels. We sleep on the floor under the blankets we brought from the apartment block. Tomorrow, Erquist says, we will see if we can find a way of providing heat and if it’s possible to get outside. It could be a few days before they come for us. “The calculation may not be precise. We did lose the link. They’ll have to estimate… But Hayek won’t give up easily.”
I’m woken by my foot. It presses against my stump as if fixed at the wrong angle. Overhead it’s beginning to get light. Edda, beside me, is still asleep. Li and Erquist have settled in different corners of the room.
When I walk my stump burns. This is only temporary, I tell myself. Brink had typhus. I must remember to remove the foot before I sleep. I limp to the counter. Li is already in the kitchen, watching a deep pan over a small blue flame. “I’m making breakfast,” she says. “I don’t know if it’ll be edible. The problem is measurements. I don’t know if one of these bricks is supposed to feed ten people, a hundred, or if it’s meant for cleaning ovens. It’s definitely add to taste.”
Edda says, “Did you boil the water?”
“Boiled, filtered and boiled again.”
“It’s like eating mud.”
“You’ve eaten mud?”
“It tastes the way mud looks.”
“It doesn’t have to be delicious,” Erquist says. “We should be grateful to Li for trying. And it should only be for a few days.” He spends the rest of the morning walking slowly around the room while looking up at the glass ceiling, occasionally standing on a chair to get a closer look. He raps on the walls, searching for concealed panels, and becomes increasingly dismayed. “It’s just glass,” he says. “Toughened glass. I thought it might be photovoltaic, but it’s not connected to anything. It just sits there.” He sounds astonished at how the builders could have missed such an opportunity. “They had travel. They must have had the technology for that. I would expect them to have made some use…”
Erquist’s mood is so disturbing even Li feels compelled to cheer him up. “At least they used something transparent,” she says from the kitchen. “And it isn’t broken.”
“I know.” Erquist is not consoled. “We should be thankful for that. But it was still a missed opportunity. Poor management of resources.” He realises this is the wrong tone for a representative of the Happiness Executive and spends another half-hour half-heartedly poking at the wall.
On the next level down Edda finds a locked service door. Behind it is a flight of stairs leading to a heavy steel plate welded to where a door should be. I push against it and it doesn’t move.
“I don’t think this was to stop people.” Erquist runs his hand down the wall beside the door. He doesn’t find a hidden panel. “I suspect this was here to keep out animals.”
Edda is sceptical. “A locked door would have done that.”
We leave her in the dark, working with a cutter. Back in the mess hall Erquist admits he finds the sound of the wind disturbing. He will sleep in one of the lower rooms. When he leaves us to look for somewhere suitable Li says, “The hierarchy is reasserting itself.”
Edda calls that she has removed the barrier to the surface. Because I limp Erquist and Li get there first. The wind is not as strong as it sounded from inside. We’re on a dull mid-brown plain blotched with clumps of coarse vegetation. There are mountains in the distance in one direction. “Do you think we could walk to those?” Li asks.
“You could.” I take a few careful paces. In the other direction is a level plain that stretches to the horizon. There are no other visible structures, no indication apart from this that there’s a small town below the surface. Erquist returns from a slower walk around. He still can’t find a signal or fix a location. Later, Li stews some of the weeds. “I was wrong,” Edda says. “This is what mud tastes like.”
In the afternoons I listen to the recording of the concert. 22 December 1808, Theater an der Wien. I stop the recording before the music starts and replay the sounds of the audience. Am I among them? I’d have a box to myself, and get there early so I don’t stand out. The recording includes footsteps, the creaking of furniture, a murmur of talk with the occasional distinct phrase or single word and, towards the end, the sound of an orchestra tuning up, preparing to play an evening of new music.
I should have gone to more concerts in the 21st. But after a while you get used to the idea that the pianist will be able to play the whole étude without making a mistake, that you have a choice of string quartets, that their amateurs, for all the inauthentic style, are better than the nearest we have to professionals. I remember one concert in a church, a young native, my age or younger, playing piano sonatas by a composer I’d never heard of: Ustvolskaya. I don’t have any recordings of Ustvolskaya’s music. I don’t know if any survived. I may have to go back to the 21st to hear it again…<
br />
Edda looms over me. Her hair is wet, her face scrubbed. “How’s your leg?”
“Fine.” I’d taken half a painkiller earlier. I need to make them last.
“Let me see.”
She removes my boot and unfastens the straps that hold the prosthesis in place. “That doesn’t look good.”
We eat the powdery protein in the mornings. With the hot water it is somewhere between a soup and a paste. We eat the stewed weeds in the evenings. At midday we allow ourselves half an energy bar each. That way the supply should last us another two weeks. The bars are the high point of our day. Li makes a ceremony of dividing them up; we’ll be sorry to eat the last one. Edda suggests we should have half a bar every other day in case the rescue takes longer than expected. Erquist is sure they’ll have come before we use them all. Li says it’s already taken longer than he expected. “Not much longer,” Erquist says, and goes back to his room. We have adopted pre-industrial rhythms: we wake when it is light and sleep when it is dark. I have vivid dreams in which I can run.
Li keeps coming back to Cantor and Riemann. Edda eventually told her what Cantor had said. She was cautious: she made sure Erquist was in his room, and even then took Li outside and warned her never to tell anybody else. “Did Riemann know Cantor was there?”
“Not this again.” On some days Edda joins in. On others she gets impatient. “We don’t have enough information. We can look it up when we get back.”
“If we get back. We might not be meant to get back. Perhaps they broke the link deliberately. They wanted us lost. Think of it.” Li speculates. “They didn’t want you to tell anybody what your old school friend said. That’s why there was a Millie with Hayek. They were making sure he didn’t ask. That’s why they kept us in a room until it was time for us to go…”
“But we’re not lost. We landed at a place with a zone.”
“As good as lost. This could be City Two East territory. Maybe they won’t come for us.”
The Tourist Page 27