by Simon Morden
“How well did he know my daughter?”
“Pretty well, I guess. They hung out together: them both being foreigners was maybe a reason.”
Jessica cleared her throat. “I think he wanted to know her a whole lot better.” Alan raised his eyebrows at her, and she scowled back. “It’s a girl thing to notice the vibes. He acted differently around her to when he was around me. I was a friend; she was someone he wanted to be more than a friend.”
She stopped as the waitress reappeared with bottles and glasses and a pitcher of water balanced on her tray. She dealt out the coasters like a card sharp and got everyone’s drinks right without prompting. Somehow she guessed that Petrovitch drank his whiskey straight up, and it was Newcomen who needed the water.
Newcomen winced once when she bent forward to push Alan’s bottle of beer over to him, and again when she placed the shot glass in front of Petrovitch. When she’d gone, he glared.
“You kicked me.”
“You were staring at her chest.” Petrovitch cracked the seal on the whiskey and poured himself a generous measure, then slid the bottle down to Newcomen.
The agent splashed a little spirit out, barely enough to wet the bottom of the glass, and topped it up with water.
Petrovitch shook his head and raised his glass. “Na bufera!”
Without knowing what they were saying, the others joined in the toast. He hid his smile behind his glass.
“Where were we? Jessica?”
“Jason would look at her, at Lucy, when she was busy with something. You know, like when she had her head in something electronicky, or when she was doing the math at the whiteboard, or when she was halfway up a ladder fixing an aerial thing. He’d look at her that way you look at someone when you don’t want them to know how much they mean to you.”
“She didn’t notice, did she? She broke his heart and she never realised.” Petrovitch poured himself another finger of whiskey. “That’s my girl.”
“I’m pretty sure he wasn’t the only one. But I think he had it the worst.” Jessica stirred her half-melted ice cubes with her straw. “I guess she didn’t know the effect she had. Some girls do that innocent act, in order to attract the guys. Your Lucy didn’t act.”
“Considering some of the stuff she’s done, it’s a wonder she turned out sane, let alone innocent. What did Jason do when he found out she was missing?”
“We were junking burnt-out circuits,” said Alan, “and someone, can’t remember who, stuck their head around the door. Said Lucy was out of contact. The next thing I knew, he’d gone, and had left a note with the Dean saying he’d taken some days off.”
Newcomen hunched over, deep in thought. “There was a snowstorm. Lucy wasn’t actually reported missing until three days later, when the plane from Eielson made it out there.”
“We found out about that on the Monday, but Jason was long gone by then. I thought at the time he’d be interested in the news, but I had no way of reaching him. I didn’t realise that he had a thing for Lucy.”
Jessica put on her ”stupid men” face and poked Alan in the ribs.
Petrovitch brooded, while the others looked on. Eventually he asked: “Anyone else been asking questions?”
Alan shrugged. “Not of me, or Jessie. Maybe some of the tenured staff, but none of the students. We talk about it sometimes, but when we ask the faculty, they say Jason’ll come back when he’s ready. They don’t say anything at all about Lucy.”
“I’m really sorry, Dr Petrovitch,” said Jessica. “I got to know Lucy a bit: not many girls in a physics department, I guess. I asked her once if she minded all the things that they said about you.”
Petrovitch drained his glass. “What did she say?”
She fixed him with her dark eyes. “She said you were the best dad a daughter could wish for. I know you adopted her and everything, and that you’re only a few years older than she is: that was a really cool thing you did for her. I really hope you find her soon.”
“Yeah. So do I.” He sighed. “Thanks for talking to me, and I hope everything works out for you two. Keep your grades up: smart kids with qualifications go places that other kids can’t. And if things get rough, the pair of you might want to give the Freezone a call. We’re always hiring.”
Alan and Jessica looked at each other, wearing expressions of surprise and fear.
“Even if being together is what you want most of all in the whole world,” continued Petrovitch, “you still have to be useful to somebody else. Vrubatsa?”
Alan nodded nervously. Below the table he was holding Jessica’s hand.
“Right, Newcomen. Time to go.” Petrovitch grabbed his hat and set it on his head, then dragged the bottle of whiskey towards him and hid it inside his open coat.
While Newcomen laboriously dressed for the outside, Petrovitch paid the tab.
When he came back over, he pulled his gloves on, then the mittens over the top. “Remember not to look up or around as we pass through the door,” he said, and led the way into the below-freezing night air.
Out on the pavement, Petrovitch stamped off into the night, leaving Newcomen to skitter along behind. His half-silvered contacts made it almost impossible for him to see where he was going, and he kept on running into street furniture.
“Wait up,” he called, but Petrovitch was in no mood to slow down. He was angry and sad in equal measure.
Eventually Newcomen drew level and peered blindly at the shorter man. “What? What have I done wrong?”
“You’ve singularly failed — again — to understand what it is about your country that I hate the most.” Petrovitch stopped to fume. “Take those lenses out. You look ridiculous.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Then suffer. I don’t care.” He turned to go. “You really are the most useless sack of govno I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting. Do something for yourself for a change. Anything. You’re a grown-up. When I think of all the things I’ve done, then look at you…”
“No one ever asked me to do the things you did.”
“But you never even did the things you were asked to do.”
Newcomen pulled off his mitten and stuck his gloved finger in his eye. The contact peeled off and dropped to the hard, rutted ground. He did the same with the other. “I’ve done everything I’ve been asked to do.”
“Otlez’ gnida. I had to put a bomb in your chest just to make you care about finding Lucy.” Petrovitch jabbed his mitten hard against Newcomen. “Everything good that you do is dragged from you while you complain.”
Newcomen took the risk of batting Petrovitch’s hand away. “I’m not to blame that the world doesn’t work the way you want it to.”
“Yeah, well. It should do.” He started to walk again, dipping down and grabbing a handful of snow. He squeezed out a snowball and launched it against a left-turn sign. The sign bent, and shards of ice whipped through the air with the speed of ricocheting bullets.
“You’re foul-tempered at the best of times, but what’s got into you? Is it what those kids said about Lucy?”
“Or is it the fact that they hadn’t had the opportunity to say it before? Maybe you don’t think that Jason Fyfe’s parents deserve some answers about what’s happened to their son. They’re sitting at home, worried sick that their boy’s not coming back, and they don’t even know why. Are you going to tell them? Would you even know, if we hadn’t sneaked in here under the radar to ask the questions that no one else has either the wit or the inclination to ask? No, no, you’re not going to tell them.” He shrugged his shoulders at Newcomen. “I’m going to have to do it because no one on your side gives a shit. Thanks for that. Terrific.”
“You think he’s dead, don’t you?”
“I know he’s dead. He went after Lucy, and because Lucy mustn’t be found, he was disappeared. And no way am I saying that until I’m absolutely certain it’s true. Pizdets. This whole thing is drowning in a sea of pizdets.”
Newcomen caught up wit
h Petrovitch again, putting his head down against the wind. “You’re going to tell me what was up with those kids too, aren’t you?”
“They’re not kids. He’s twenty-two, she’s twenty-one. I’d saved the world twice by that age, and that’s not a job for kids, is it?” They were back on the road out of town, heading towards the house and the hidden plane. “How are you on Huxley?”
“T. H. or Aldous?”
“Brave New World. The genetic underclasses, as represented by little Jessica, don’t really have much of a future in the society you help maintain.” Petrovitch dug his hands into his pockets. It was getting colder by the minute. “Jessica’s parents didn’t get her assayed. They didn’t grow her in a tank. They managed — as humans have for tens of thousands of years — to produce a bright, good-looking girl. Bright enough to make it to university on a scholarship. Alan’s parents, however, like your parents, selected him, tweaked his genes and grew him in a vat of carefully monitored nutrients. Imagine how they feel, spending all that money only to face the prospect of their grandchildren being just plain normal.”
“It’s a shame, for sure. But they’ve invested a lot in their son. You can’t say that his parents shouldn’t know about the company he’s keeping. It’s their right.”
“His genetic inheritance is not their property.”
Newcomen pulled the collar of his coat down and knocked off a shower of ice. “It is. That’s basic commercial law. If the boy’s parents have forbidden him to marry her, they’re committing a crime if they, you know…”
“Fuck, you mean.” Petrovitch spat the word out.
“Have children.”
“You don’t need to get married for that to happen.”
“You do in this country.”
“Yeah, because if you do otherwise, your foetus is a copyright violation.” Petrovitch’s hands came out of his pockets again, and he started to wave them around. “Yobany stos, you don’t even pretend you’re created in God’s image any more. You’re made in some recombinant technician’s idea of Homo superior. Short-term advantage over long-term gain.”
“Sorry?” Newcomen was utterly baffled.
“What makes us strong is our genetic diversity. While you’re busy making yourself practically perfect in every way, you’ve forgotten that’s how evolutionary dead ends occur. It’s not who fits their niche best. It’s who fits most niches best. Adaptability, not specialisation.”
“I don’t see you doing much to ensure the survival of humanity.”
“I’m making sure your gonads freeze and fall off before you get to spawn, aren’t I? The future will thank me.” Petrovitch growled and kicked at a lump of snow that had fallen off the roadside levee. “And I’m building a star drive, so past’ zebej. I’m doing what I can.”
“Uh-huh,” said Newcomen.
Petrovitch rounded on him. “I’m this close.” He showed Newcomen the narrow gap between his thumb and fingers, showed it to him right up against his nose. “The maths is simple. It’s the engineering that’s ludicrously complicated, but it’s only just out of reach. When I get there, I’ll give it to the world. Free. Except your lot: we’ll ban you from going anywhere. The rest of us will travel to the stars and it’ll take days, not centuries. We’ll spread out, carrying the virus of life with us, and we’ll have seeded the universe with the possibility of consciousness for as long as there is space and time.”
“And how long is that?”
“Maybe another ten billion years. Depends on whose model you buy into.” The cold was getting to him: he could feel it in his metal and his bones. It was time he stopped arguing, no matter how much fun it was. It was time they both went inside and got some sleep. “Alan and Jessica? They can come with us. They can have as many children as they like and they’ll be light years away from anyone who says they can’t.”
He turned away, towards the house that promised shelter. Then he turned back to Newcomen. He grabbed the front of his coat and pulled him down until they were face to face.
“You know something? You used to be brilliant. The whole country from sea to shining sea. You did some really shitty things, but you also gave us miracles. You built rockets that went to the yebani Moon. There are spaceships you launched that are out of contact with the Earth because they’re simply too far away. You cured diseases, you made movies, you invented and thought and created your way to most of the Nobel Prizes ever awarded. You were giants. You made our music and you wrote our books. You had Lincoln and King and Feynman. The world lived and breathed you, whether they liked it or not.
“Then along came Reconstruction, and you started going backwards. Pif and me beating you to the Grand Unified Theory, two kids with nothing more sophisticated than pen and paper, was just a symptom. You were ruined long before that. Reconstruction meant you gave up being daring. That’s what I resent the most: that you let me down before I was even born.”
He released Newcomen, and batted out the creases on his chest. “The Freezone are here now. We’re going to do what you don’t have the yajtza to do any more. I just want my Lucy to be part of it too. I promised her. I promised her, and I’m not going to let her down.”
23
Petrovitch kicked the bedstead. “Come on. Breakfast.”
Newcomen’s face emerged from inside his sleeping bag, lying on the bare mattress. “What?” He blinked and squinted as the single naked bulb above his bed grew in luminescence.
“Breakfast, I said. Recommended calorie intake is around ten thousand for an Arctic environment, so unless you like snacking on bars of butter, I’d shift your arse into the kitchen.”
“What time is it?”
“What am I? Your wristwatch?” Petrovitch kicked the bed again. “Use your link. That’s what someone who belongs to the Freezone does.”
Newcomen rolled around in his bag, wriggling like a great grey maggot. Eventually a hand appeared at the neckline and worried the zip down a fraction.
“I don’t belong, though. Do I?”
“And yet you have a link. There’s a riddle to start the day with.” Petrovitch left him there and went back to the stove. His frying pans were heating up nicely, and one advantage of seeing in the infrared was that he could tell precisely how hot they were.
He retrieved a cardboard box from the fridge — a massive American thing that looked like a chrome coffin — and opened it up. If the store had got his order wrong, he was going to look a complete mudak.
But here were strips of bacon and minute steaks, a tray of a dozen eggs, a block of lard, a loop of blood pudding, hash browns, links of pink sausages, and at the bottom, a tin of corned beef with its own key.
He became absorbed in the ritual of making, banging a battered enamel coffee pot on to a spare ring and feeding more wood to the ever-hungry furnace. Soon, things were frying, and the smell drifted out into the hall and down the corridor.
Newcomen staggered through and slumped at the kitchen table. “So what time is it?”
“Six thirteen. We have a lot to eat and a long way to go. Six hundred k. North.” Petrovitch opened enough cupboards to track down two plates and some cutlery, which he dealt out on to the work surface. “And a full day’s work ahead of us.”
“We don’t even know what we’re going to find when we get to wherever it is.”
“Deadhorse. Of course we don’t. That’s why we’re going. We can do only so much remotely. We can look from the sky, we can listen and measure and track and record. But we have to be there, too. Do you think Alan and Jessica would have responded to a couple of messages left on their usual dropboxes? Considering his parents are desperate for them to stop bumping uglies?”
“Oh please. I haven’t even got a cup of coffee yet.”
“Yeah, sorry about the poor service. We don’t have a woman in the house to do the cooking for us.”
“Just, just.” Newcomen rested his forehead on the warm pine tabletop. “Don’t start.”
“Hah,” said Petrovitch triumph
antly. He started banging the heavy iron skillets around to free the food within them. “Make yourself useful and find some mugs.”
Newcomen dragged himself from his chair and started opening doors. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any milk.”
“I don’t have any sugar, more to the point. I’ll cope, and so will you.”
Using a metal slice, he started to divide the food more or less equally between them. Newcomen found two china mugs and reached for the coffee pot. Petrovitch slapped his outstretched hand with the slice.
“Ow.”
“The coffee inside is boiling. Any reason why the handle is going to be any colder?” He threw an oven mitt at him and carried on lifting and turning.
By the time he’d finished, the plates were piled high and it was barely possible to carry them the short distance to the table.
Newcomen drew his knife and fork towards him. “Am I going to be allowed to eat this without a lecture about the decadence of my country or a list of my own personal faults?”
“Yeah, okay. Though ‘my own personal’ is tautologous.” Petrovitch twirled his fork through his fingers and back again to his grip. “Dig in while it’s hot.”
“I hate you,” said Newcomen.
“I don’t care.” He stabbed a sausage and held it on the tines while he ate first one end, then the other.
“And there’s no oh-jay.”
“Yeah, I never heard Armstrong or Aldrin refusing to take that one small step because they didn’t have juice for breakfast.” Petrovitch picked up a hash brown, and regretted not ordering mushrooms. “You’ve fallen so far, so fast.”
Newcomen jabbed across the table with his knife. “I thought you said you weren’t going to lecture me.”
“So I did. Prijatnovo appetita.”
Petrovitch worked his way through his food methodically, one ear to the news reports from around the world that his agents had selected. Each one came with a commentary from Freezone analysts, whether they could confirm or debunk it, and if the Freezone collective was involved in any way. They had virtual fingers in lots of the pies, from co-ordinating food distribution in Mindoro to transparent accounting in Namibia. The naked newswires poured into his head, with a slew of additional information: blogs, pictures, biographies, historical background and future trends.