The Extremes

by Christopher Priest

  So she continued to read the paperback while she sipped her coffee at the table. When she realized Amy was waiting for her to finish up, she reluctantly closed the book and went upstairs, thinking vaguely about what to say to the credit-card company, and how to say it in the shortest way.

  As she walked down the short hallway towards her room, card-key ready in her hand, she became aware that someone was standing in the shadows at the far end. A disagreeable sensation of fear passed through her. The man stepped forward. He went as far as the door to her room, then halted. He stood there, waiting for her.

  She recognized him immediately as Ken Mitchell, the young man who had spoken to her before, and the fear dissolved into irritation. She recalled that the last time they had met he had also been in wait for her outside her room.

  ‘Hi there, ma’am,’ he said, with his falsely friendly smile.

  ‘Good evening.’

  She raised the key-card, and looked ahead to the door lock, trying to disregard him. He stood right beside her door, in such a way that if she wanted to go ahead and open it she would have to press past him. She could smell something expensively and subtly aromatic: a tonic lotion, a hair dressing, a body oil. He was wearing a suit, but it was cut in a casual style and made of light-coloured fabric, for informal wear. His tie was straight, knotted neatly, and with a restrained pattern. His hair was short and tidy. He had white, regular teeth, and his body looked fit. He made her crave to ruin him violently in some way.

  ‘I’ve been trying to find you, Mrs Simons. We need to speak together.’

  ‘Excuse me, I’m tired.’

  ‘We know who you are, Agent Simons.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So we have to make you a proposition. We find your presence here in the hotel disruptive. We’ve made enquiries with your section chief in DC and have established that you are not here on official business.’

  ‘I’m on vacation,’ Teresa said, instantly wondering what had been said between these people and her office. ‘Would you please let me pass through into my room?’

  ‘Yeah, but you’re not really on vacation, because you’re kind of running a private investigation into the Gerry Grove case. The FBI say they know nothing about it, and haven’t authorized you in any way. You’re outside your jurisdiction, ma’am. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘It’s none of your goddamn business, and it’s none of the Bureau’s business either. I’m on leave of absence.’

  ‘As I understand the situation, the Bureau remains interested in whatever you do so long as you carry the badge. Anyway, we consider it to be our business. We checked into this hotel on the basis that the place would be otherwise vacant—’

  ‘That’s between you and the hotel,’ Teresa said, already grappling with a feeling of paranoia about what this young man or his associates might have been saying to her office. The last thing she needed right now was trouble at work. ‘It’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘I think you’ll find we have ways to get you out of here.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Teresa, with some private amusement. ‘Not many Americans feel like messing with the FBI.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m a US citizen?’

  ‘Sorry, my mistake,’ said Teresa. ‘Now would you excuse me?’

  ‘We need this hotel to ourselves,’ said Ken Mitchell again. ‘For that reason we have arranged an alternative room for you at the Grand Hotel in Eastbourne. Our company is prepared to pay the costs of relocation, and we request you to vacate your room by tomorrow. We also require you to quit making use of our corporate facilities in Welton Road.’

  ‘What is it with you?’ Teresa said. ‘Don’t you ever listen, or what?’

  ‘I listen, sure enough. But do you? We want you out, lady.’

  ‘Tell me why and I might even consider it.’

  ‘In this case we require the hotel for our sole use. We have a contract with the management—’

  ‘Not as far as they are concerned.’

  ‘They are in error, which will turn out expensive for them if they are in breach of contract. In the meantime, either you leave of your own accord or we will take out a removal injunction against you. It’s your choice.’

  He hadn’t shifted his position, looming unpleasantly close to her door. She was deeply reluctant to make physical contact with him, which she would have to do to open her door, but she reached forward with her key-card to see if he would budge. Apparently, he would not. She withdrew, and stood again a few feet from him, disliking and fearing him in almost equal measure.

  ‘There are other ExEx providers,’ she said. ‘There’s a place in Brighton. You can’t stop me going there.’

  ‘Suit yourself. We’re only concerned with our own corporate facility.’

  ‘Why do you want me out?’

  ‘You’re disrupting our plans. We operate under a software creation licence drawn up within the draft Valencia Treaty, the European agreement to regulate freedom of electronic access. In the US we’d be operating under federal licence: the McStephens Act. You know what that is?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Something clicked in memory then; a training session last year; a subject she hadn’t followed too well; areas designated sanitaire for software development; the right to serve notice to quit.

  Mitchell said, ‘US federal laws have no effect here, so we work under the European equivalent. The Valencia protocols don’t have the same legislative muscle, but applied with full force they amount to the same.’

  ‘Can I see your licence?’

  It snapped into his fingers as if by sleight of hand. She bent forward to read it, and he held it still for her to do so.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you say that at first?’

  ‘Why didn’t you say you were a fed?’

  ‘What about the hotel staff?’ Teresa said. ‘Are you getting them to move out too?’

  ‘No, we need them.’

  ‘Why them and not me?’

  ‘Because they were here on the day of the Grove shootings, and you were not. They have memories of what happened, and you don’t. We’re interested in what they remember, and we’re not interested in your theories.’

  ‘I don’t have theories.’

  ‘Sure you do. Theories are what you’re into. That’s what we don’t want. Your presence is disruptive.’

  Teresa gestured in exasperation.

  ‘You can’t empty hotels any place you want to stay,’ she said. ‘Just because you feel like it.’

  ‘You want to bet on that, Agent Simons?’

  ‘All right, but under McStephens you’ve got to serve notice. Seven days. What’s it with Valencia?’

  ‘You’re sharp, aren’t you? The same. Eight days, in actual fact.’

  He was putting away the licence, more slowly than he had produced it. Teresa watched the precise way in which he folded it, before slipping the slim leather wallet into his rear pocket. He reminded her of an agent she had known in Richmond, a friend of Andy’s. Calvin Devore, his name was. Cal. Amusing guy was Cal, with a big face and big hands, but astonishingly dainty movements. What had become of Cal? Nice guy.

  ‘OK, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll work the eight days’ notice. Back off me, you hear?’

  But she was looking past Mitchell towards the light at the end of the corridor, thinking maybe she would call up Cal when she was home.

  ‘Give me a break, Mrs Simons,’ Mitchell said. ‘Eight days—’

  ‘I might leave before, anyway. Just lay off me until then. OK?’

  ‘All right.’ He glanced away with an irritated expression, but Teresa knew she had scored the point.

  ‘What’s the big deal?’ she said. ‘Why does it matter so much?’

  ‘We don’t need to use exclusion powers every place we go, but crossover doesn’t occur in most places. You’ve got an interest in the Grove scenario that conflicts with ours. You’re into reactional crossover, and we’re into proveniential integrity and line
ar coherence. The bottom line is, we’re licensed to be here and you’re not.’

  ‘What’s reactional crossover?’ Teresa said, having refocused on what he was saying, but struggling to keep up with his flow of jargon.

  ‘It’s the way you trained. What the Bureau uses ExEx for. They operate interdiction training scenarios. You go in there repeatedly, entering the scenarios from different points of view, and that introduces neural crossover. Successive experiences of the scenario alter your perception next time you go in. To us that means crossover, and if it happens while we’re programming it screws the code. What people like you do after we’ve compiled doesn’t matter a damn to us, because that’s what ExEx is all about, but while we’re coding the regressions and memorative accounts we don’t want crossover. It corrupts linear coherence.’

  ‘What was the other thing you said you were into?’

  ‘Proveniential integrity. Provenience is—’

  ‘I know. Or I thought I did.’

  ‘OK, but when we first build the parameters of a scenario, what we seek is a re-creation of the integral whole. We’re talking iterative purity here. We want the past event as it really was, or as it is remembered by the main players. It’s the same thing, in algorithmic terms, as your basic what-the-hell symbolic adumbration. We can fast-track the code from either point, but until then we keep the provenience integral, and at the waterline. You got that? We don’t want false memory syndromics, we don’t want anecdotal reportage, we don’t want post hoc invention or narration, and we sure as hell don’t want people like you coming in and trying to put an interpretive spin on the events.’

  ‘You’re incredible,’ Teresa said. ‘You know that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mitchell said. ‘I’m paid for incredible.’

  ‘Did that actually mean something to you? What you just said?’

  ‘It’s the thing we do.’

  He had barely shifted position while they spoke, and he still bore the same expression of neutral stubbornness, but his undercurrent of menace was dispersing. Teresa thought how young he looked, and tried to estimate his age: he could be—what?—twenty or more years younger than she was? Is this what young people do now? she wondered. In her day if you got an education you left college and went into business, or law, or you joined a government agency, but now you learnt to speak code-babble, relocated to Taiwan, changed your nationality and wrote software for virtual-reality providers. What would she think of him if she were twenty years younger?

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But I don’t see how my staying in the same place as you—’

  ‘Have you been talking to the manager while you’ve been here? Or that woman who works for him?’

  ‘Amy? Yes, of course.’

  ‘And you’ve been asking them about Grove.’

  ‘I don’t see what’s wrong with that,’ Teresa said. ‘It’s what people think about in this town, because they lived it.’

  ‘That’s what you talk about in this town, Mrs Simons. And it’s why we don’t want you here. We know you’ve been talking with Steve Ripon’s mother, the police, the newspapers, the Mercer family, and God knows who else. Also, you’ve been up at our facility running shareware. To build this scenario we need these people’s memories of what happened, and we want them uncontaminated. And everyone else’s too. What you’re doing is all fast-lane crossover, lady, and we don’t want you in town even, until we’ve finished.’

  ‘You’ve made a contract with the town? You going to sue them as well if I don’t leave?’

  He stared at her with his unchanged level expression, but moments later he actually smiled, though briefly. His face was transformed when he smiled. She wondered what he would do if she asked to see his licence a second time; she wanted to see his hands work that way again.

  She said, ‘Let me ask you something. I was up at the ExEx building the other day, and I asked if there were any Grove scenarios. It was like I’d blundered into something. The technician said something about before or after. Then she clammed up.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He was cold and incredible again.

  ‘What do you mean, that’s right?’

  ‘That’s right she wouldn’t tell you. Who was she?’

  ‘No way. You’ll make trouble for her.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ve already done it. I can work out who she was.’

  ‘I’ll bet you can. Look, just tell me what she meant. Before or after what?’

  ‘She was asking you, do you want to see the scenario of Grove before he started shooting, or the one after he started shooting?’

  ‘Why should there be two?’

  ‘We’re working on it right now. This technician was speaking out of turn.’

  ‘Why should there be two?’ Teresa said again.

  ‘Because halfway through his outburst event Grove went to our facility and ran an ExEx scenario. It was aberrant behaviour, coherence-wise, but we’ve got to patch that in to the new scenario. It makes linearity fade like yesterday. It has mega-potential for looping. For the first time ever we’ve got a scenario where someone runs a scenario. You think of the coding that will have to go into that!’

  ‘Where was Grove before he started shooting, and after he left the ExEx building?’

  ‘That was the original question, wasn’t it?’ said Mitchell. ‘Before or after? You’re carrying a lot of theories, and they’re fast-lane crossover. We don’t want to hear them.’

  Teresa waved her arm in exasperation.

  ‘You never give up, do you?’ she said.

  ‘Not until I’ve got what I want.’

  ‘Well, what I want, and what I’m going to do, is to go into my room,’ she said.

  Mitchell made no move; she was still barred from her room unless she pushed past him. Since he showed no sign of getting out of the way, she decided that pushing past him was what she would have to do.

  She moved forward, stretching out her hand and turning her wrist at an angle, to slip the card into the swipe-lock. Mitchell stayed put, leaning against the upright jamb of the door. His face was only inches away from hers; once again she smelt his lotion. It summoned an image of him standing before a mirror, moving an aerosol spray across his torso, staring into a condensation-blurred mirror.

  It stirred something in her.

  His face moved closer.

  ‘What do you do in this hotel, Mrs Simons, all on your own?’ he said softly, almost directly into her ear.

  Teresa felt the quiet words impacting on her, as if they had coned on to a patch of her skin, somewhere beneath her ear, across her neck, a gentle tactile intrusion with almost musical rhythm. The nerve-ends across her shoulders prickled, and she felt her face burning. She turned her head to look at him, and his face was right there. Nine inches away, twelve, staring steadily at her. He was so young; it was years since—

  She concentrated again on the lock, not wanting him to judge her as someone who couldn’t cope with modern electronic technology. She knew the card had to go in at exactly the right angle, otherwise it relocked the door and she had to start over.

  Mitchell spoke again, this time barely breathing the words.

  ‘What’s the story, lady?’ he said. ‘How do you like it done to you?’

  She gave up with the key, took a step back and faced Mitchell again.

  ‘What did you say?’ she said, flustered.

  ‘Why are you here on your own, Agent Simons? You want it, you can have it with me.’

  She said nothing.

  A long silence followed, while he continued to stare at her and she had to look away. All she was aware of was his lean, masculine shape, his clean and well-fitting clothes, his neat hair, his firm body, his distracting smell of expensive lotion, his quiet voice, his grey eyes, his smoothly shaved chin, his precise hands, his youth, his slender height, his closeness and his total unwillingness to back down. He held up one hand, palm outwards, at the same level as her mouth.

  ‘You know what I can do with this?
’ he whispered.

  She replied, quietly, ‘Will you come in for a while?’

  At last he stepped aside to allow her to operate the lock, and she swiped the key-card efficiently, getting it right with the first try, glad not to have to redo it while he was watching, not to have to delay and give herself time to think about what she was doing.

  The door opened to a room in semi-darkness, light from the streetlamps coming in through the opened curtains, and she went inside with Mitchell following close behind her. He kicked the door closed. She threw aside her bag, the paperback book, the key-card and its plastic case, heard them all scatter on the floor. Already she was turning towards him, yearning for him, eager for his body. In their haste their faces collided, cheekbones knocked, lips crushed against each other, teeth grated momentarily. She thrust her tongue greedily into his mouth: he tasted sweet, cool and clean, as if he had just eaten an apple. She tore open the front of her blouse, and pulled his hard young body against her breasts, grappling her hands possessively across his straight back, his narrow waist, his small tight buttocks.

  The fingers of one of his hands rested on the tiny valve in the back of her neck, teasing at it with a precise, dainty lightness of touch. The other hand settled on her breast, as gentle as the mist of an aerosol spray.

  Mitchell left her an hour later. She remained on her bed with the scattered sheets, her clothes, the pillows and covers, heaped around her. She lay on her side, still naked, her hand stretched out and resting lazily where his body had lain just a few minutes before. She thought contentedly of what they had done together, how it had felt, what it had been, the shocking flood of relief it had brought her. She was wide awake, physically rested.

  His maddening masculine fragrance lingered around her: on her skin, on the sheets, on her lips, under her nails, in her hair.