The Extremes

by Christopher Priest

  Later she began to feel cold, so she dragged on her robe and found her hairbrush where it had fallen on the carpet. She sat on the side of the bed pulling the brush idly through the tangles and curls, staring at the wall, dissatisfied with herself, thinking about Ken Mitchell, remembering Andy.

  The two men existed with equal prominence in her consciousness, unfairly but undeniably. For the first time since Andy’s death, her feelings about him had been changed by meeting someone else.

  Progress towards the rest of her life had begun.

  But as she went back to bed, and lay down under the covers, she felt a terrible sense of misery, and a belated but real betrayal of the man she had loved innocently and truly for so many years.

  ‘Sorry, Andy,’ she muttered. ‘But I needed that. Shit, I needed it.’

  CHAPTER 24

  They had parked their satellite van next to her car again, and it loomed massively over it.

  Teresa paused at the hotel door, trying to see if the van was in use. She knew that although Ken Mitchell and his colleagues sometimes drove the van away, more often than not they used it as a mobile office where it stood. Today Teresa saw the satellite dish was in position, aligned on somewhere in the sky. At once she ducked back inside the building. Her efforts to extricate her car would inevitably draw her to their attention.

  She decided instead to walk up to the ExEx building on the Ridge; the weather was fair, which gave her enough of an excuse, and it would be a chance to see some more of the town at ground level. Anyway, she had had something in mind for a couple of days and this would be a good opportunity to try it out.

  She walked down Eastbourne Road towards St Stephen’s Church. On this crisply cold morning, with the usual traffic edging noisily past, the shops open and a few pedestrians going about their business, it was easy to imagine the chaos that Grove’s outburst must have caused on that afternoon. The traffic here would have been brought to a halt by the vehicles that had piled up in the vicinity of the hotel, but the people in the cars would probably not yet have found out what was causing the delay. Teresa could visualize them sitting with their engines idling, waiting for what they must have thought was a temporary traffic hold-up ahead to be cleared. Those people would have presented easy targets to Grove. Six people had actually died inside cars in this short stretch of Eastbourne Road, but many more were wounded. The rest managed to scramble out of their cars, or found cover until Grove had passed.

  Teresa reached St Stephen’s Church, which was on the corner of a road called Hyde Avenue. This was one of the alternative traffic routes up to the Ridge, bypassing the narrow streets of the Old Town, and Teresa herself had already driven along it several times on her journeys to and from the GunHo ExEx building. Next to the church Hyde Avenue was an attractive road, with good houses and numerous trees, but further up it was lined with estate houses and a few industrial sites. Near where it joined the Ridge, the elevation afforded glimpses of the view across the town, and out to sea, but there were better vantage points and better panoramas in other parts of the town.

  Looking at her town map Teresa had noticed that a series of footpaths and alleyways ran between the houses in this part of Bulverton; they were known locally as twittens. With a few road-crossings taken into account, the twittens provided a continuous network of paths behind the houses. Teresa had worked out that she could probably walk most of the way up to Welton Road and the ExEx building by this route.

  She crossed Hyde Avenue. On the opposite corner was a tandoori take-out restaurant, and between it and the adjacent building was a narrow alley that led to one of the twittens. The alley was bounded by the walls of the buildings on either side, and overhead by the floor of an upper-storey extension of one of them. The alleyway floor was made of stone flags; as she walked through the metal-tipped heels of her shoes set up a clacking that echoed around her. The traffic noise from behind was quietened by the enclosed space.

  Almost at once, in the half-light of the alley, she began to feel giddy. An all-too-familiar display of brilliant but unseeable flashes began in the corner of her eye, and she paused, overtaken by a rush of familiar despair. She should have known that this was a day when a migraine attack was more than possible: she had hardly slept during the night.

  She paused, resting one hand on the wall at her side, looking down at the uneven stone floor, trying to rid herself of the nausea. She wondered whether she should give up her plans for the day, return to the hotel for one of her pills and try to sleep.

  While she stood there, undecided, a series of shots rang out in the street behind her.

  The sound was so close she instinctively ducked. Between shots she could clearly hear the quick, efficient clicking of the mechanism of a semi-automatic rifle, a sound that in spite of everything continued to fascinate her.

  Teresa looked back: she could see a stationary car framed in the rectangle of daylight. A wild imagining came into her mind: cars were already backed up along Eastbourne Road while a new gunman prowled, firing at will.

  She hurried back towards the road, scraping herself for cover against the rough bricks of the alley wall. Momentarily dazzled by her return to the bright cold sunlight, Teresa put her hand up to shield her eyes, and tried to see what was going on. She stood in the entrance to the alley, careful not to step out into the open. Vehicles coming down from the Ridge along Hyde Avenue were passing through a green light at the junction with Eastbourne Road, and turning left or right. Their engines and tyres made the usual loud noise as they accelerated away along this narrow, built-up street. There was no sign of panic, or of anyone carrying or using a rifle.

  While she watched, the lights at the intersection changed, and traffic began moving off in the other directions. The car Teresa had first seen framed in the entrance to the alley moved away with the others, the driver glancing back at her with a puzzled expression, no doubt wondering why she had been staring at him so intently.

  Still on her guard for the presence of a gunman, or more alarmingly a sniper, Teresa stood warily in the entrance to the alley, watching as the cars and trucks went by. The incident profoundly puzzled her: she was obviously mistaken, in the sense that no one appeared to have been firing a weapon in the street, but the sounds she had heard were so close at hand, and so familiar and distinctive, that she knew she had not imagined them.

  When a couple more minutes had gone by she decided to continue with her walk, but the incident had made her nervous. As she came out from between the two buildings—the path continued with wire fencing on either side—she looked from side to side in case her imagined gunman had moved round so that he was behind these houses and able to see her. Where the twitten turned right-and-left between a junction of gardens, Teresa looked back. The path through the alley was clear, and she could glimpse the traffic on the main road still moving past normally.

  Then she looked up.

  There was a man on the roof of the house next to the restaurant.

  Teresa immediately ducked down and moved into cover, even as she realized that he was no threat to her. She looked back. He had fallen, and was lying head down across the sloping tiles. His foot had been caught by a joint between two scaffolding poles, and was preventing him from sliding any further. He had been shot several times. A stain of dark blood spread out from his head and chest, down the tiles and over some of the planks on the scaffolding.

  Teresa felt her pulse racing, her head thumping, her hands trembling. Conflicting instincts ran through her: to call out to the man, to scream aloud, to run away, to shout for help, to dash across to the scaffolding and try to find some way to climb up and reach him.

  She did none of these. She simply stood at the junction of the path, trembling with fear, looking up at the dead man on the roof.

  The sirens of emergency vehicles were approaching, and Teresa could hear a man’s voice amplified and distorted by a bullhorn. A helicopter was weaving overhead, about half a mile away towards the Old Town. There was another
rattle of gunfire, more muffled than before.

  Teresa hurried back down the path, and ran through the covered alley. Moving traffic was framed in the sunlight ahead. As she emerged into Eastbourne Road she saw a woman walking towards her, pushing a stroller with two small children inside.

  ‘A man!’ Teresa shouted, but incoherently, because she was short of breath and she found it difficult to form words. ‘On the roof! Back there! A man on the roof!’

  Her voice was rasping, and she had to cough.

  The woman looked at her as if she was mad and pushed past her, continuing on her way. Teresa wheeled round, looking anxiously for someone else who could help her.

  The traffic was rolling by as normal. There were no emergency sirens, and no helicopter moved overhead. She looked left and right: in one direction the road curved away towards the railway bridge, in the other it became indistinguishable as it wove through the clustering of old red-brick terraced houses and concrete commercial buildings on either side.

  She looked again at the roof of the house where she had seen the man.

  From this position at the front there was no sign of him, and none either of the scaffolding. That was another mystery: from where she had first looked, the scaffolding was built as high as the chimney stack, spreading across to the front of the building. It should be visible from here. She went back through the alley, hurried along to the place where it turned, and looked back.

  The man lay at his steep angle, trapped by the scaffolding.

  Close at hand, swelling terrifyingly around her: gunfire, sirens, amplified voices. In the square of daylight, glimpsed through the alley, nothing moved.

  Teresa put her hand up to her neck, feeling for the valve.

  CHAPTER 25

  Teresa had by this time browsed through the catalogue of scenarios often enough to be able to find her way around quickly, but the sheer extent of the range of software, and the complexity of the database itself, still daunted her.

  The sense of unfolding endlessness lent her a wonderful feeling of freedom, spoiling her for choice. Each time she clicked on a new selection a range of apparently limitless options appeared; every one of those itself opened up innumerable further choices; each of those led to further levels of choice, endlessly detailed and varied; and each of those choices was a remarkably complete world in itself, full of noise, colour, movement, incident, danger, travel, physical sensations. Most of the scenarios were cross-referenced or hyperlinked to others. Entry into any scenario gave her a magical sense of infinitude, of the ability to roam and explore, away from the constraints of the main incident.

  Extreme reality was a landscape of forking paths, endlessly crossing and recrossing, leading somewhere new, towards but never finding the edge of reality.

  Today she made her selections, trying to calculate how much real time each of them would use up, and how long in total she could remain inside the simulations. She had learned, although reluctantly, that she should be sparing with her time. Too much ExEx in one day exhausted her.

  She confined herself to three unrelated scenarios, and selected the option for repeated entry as required. Two of the scenarios were the sort of interdiction set-ups she was used to from her Bureau training, but which for all their sensory engagement were beginning to bore her. However, she was already thinking ahead to her return to the office, knowing that Ken Mitchell had probably made trouble for her. Some interdiction experience while on leave might count a little to her advantage, if advantage were needed. But her growing feeling of tedium was real, so for her third ExEx she decided to try an experiment: a short scenario which depicted a major traffic accident, the point being that the user had to learn to anticipate and avoid the accident.

  After she had made this last choice Teresa continued to browse through the catalogue. She wanted something different, something that carried no risks, no responsibility, no censure. Gun incidents and traffic accidents were not the sum of life’s experiences, she decided. There were other affairs of the mind and body she would like to experience vicariously, especially those of the body.

  She was in a foreign country, alone, largely unknown by the people around her. She wanted a little fun.

  She had no hesitation in going to the material she wanted to try, but she did have misgivings about the staff here knowing she was using it. The thought of doing it made her throat feel dry with anticipation; the thought of being observed or noticed doing it terrified her.

  Before making her selection she therefore turned to the User’s Operating Manual lying on the bench next to the computer, and looked for the chapter on security.

  The manual had been written by a technophile genius, not a human being, and like many works of its kind it was difficult to read and follow. However, with determination she gleaned the reassurance she wanted: the user’s choice of scenario was coded and identified. This was primarily intended for the programming of the nanochips. By default it was information that was available to the technical operator, but the user could alter it if privacy was required.

  To activate security measures, the user should select the following option…

  Teresa selected the following option, then made her final choice of scenario. The fact that it was shareware, as she realized at the last minute, gave her an extra edge of anticipation.

  She waited while the ExEx nanochips were programmed. Half a minute later a sealed plastic phial was delivered to the desk by the peripheral, and she took this through to the ExEx facility, eager to begin.

  Teresa was a gendarme on night patrol in the immigrant quarter of the city of Lyon; it was January 10, 1959.

  Her name was Pierre Montaigne, she had a wife called Agnès, and two children aged seven and five. A steady rain made the cobbles gleam; doorways to clubs and restaurants were lit with a single bulb over the lintels; the streets were a noisy chaos of fast-moving traffic. Teresa was trying to think in French, a language she did not know. With an effort and a flaring of panic, she forced herself back to English. Everything was in black and white.

  From the start, she recognized a difference: she had more choice, more control, in this scenario. Indeed, as she joined it Pierre Montaigne came to a sudden halt, practically falling forward. Her partner, André Lepasse, was obliged to turn and wait for her. Teresa immediately relaxed her influence over the man, and the two gendarmes continued their patrol.

  They reached a small, unpretentious cous-cous restaurant. It had an unpainted door and a large plate-glass window steamed up with condensation. Over the door, a hand-painted sign said: La Chèvre Algérienne. Montaigne and Lepasse were about to walk on, when someone inside the restaurant must have noticed them. The door was thrust open, and an exchange of shouts took place with two men, one of whom appeared to be the proprietor.

  Teresa and her partner pushed their way roughly into the restaurant, where a man had taken a young woman hostage and was threatening her with a long-bladed knife. Everyone was yelling at once, including Lepasse. Pierre Montaigne did not know what to do, because she could not speak French.

  Teresa remembered LIVER.

  Berkshire, England, August 19, 1987. She was Sergeant Geoffrey Verrick, a uniformed traffic policeman, passenger in a fast-pursuit patrol car on the M4 motorway, fifty miles west of London.

  A call came through from Reading police headquarters saying that a shooting incident had taken place in the Berkshire village of Hungerford. All units were to proceed there directly. Maximum caution was advised. Officer in charge would be…

  Teresa said to the driver, Constable Trevor Nunthorpe, ‘Hear that, Trev? Next exit, Junction 14.’

  Trev put on the blue strobe, headlights and two-tone siren, and traffic ahead of them began to clear out of their way. The Hungerford turn-off was the next one along, and five minutes after the first call had come in their car was speeding down the slip road towards the roundabout at the bottom.

  Teresa said, ‘Give the Hungerford road a miss, Trev. Go right round.’

&nbs
p; ‘I thought we had to go into Hungerford, Sarge.’

  ‘Go round,’ Teresa said. ‘Take the Wantage exit.’

  Leaning the car over on its nearside tyres, Trev swung it through three-quarters of the roundabout, then followed the A338 north towards Wantage. As a result they were heading directly away from Hungerford. The traffic again swerved out of their way, or slowed down and pulled over to the verge.

  Another message came through, urging all available units to get to Hungerford as quickly as possible: the gunman had killed more than a dozen people, and was still at large, shooting at everyone in sight. Teresa acknowledged, and confirmed they were responding.

  ‘What’s the idea, Geoff?’ said Trevor as they drove at high speed the wrong way through the scenario. Fields and hedgerows and gated drives flashed past. ‘This isn’t the way to Hungerford.’

  Teresa said nothing, watching the landscape through the window at her side, blocking out the intrusive banshee whine of the siren, looking out at the sky, the trees, the endless vista of summertime England. It unfolded around them as they sped along, urging her on to the edges of reality.

  Then there was a jolt, and reality was tested to the point of destruction.

  As the scenario lurched back, Trev abruptly jammed on the brakes and the car slowed awkwardly, nosing down and sliding at an angle across the dusty road. They had arrived in an instant at the Bear Hotel at the bottom of Hungerford High Street, where a police line had been thrown across the road.

  They parked their patrol car, then walked round to the luggage compartment at the back, where the bulletproof jackets were stored. Teresa and Trev pulled them on, then went to work in Hungerford.

  Teresa, disappointed, remembered LIVER.

  Copyright © GunHo Corporation in all territories

  There was an electronic buzzing until the words faded. No music, though.

  Teresa was driving the curves of Highway 2, north of Los Angeles, through the mountains; it was May 15, 1972. The sun shone down into her open-top, the radio played the Mothers of Invention, she had her girl curled up affectionately beside her.