by Debbie Moon
‘Nice work, Fitch.’
‘You think?’ She frowned at the now useless shoe, shrugged, and tossed it over the wall. ‘You owe me one fucking big explanation, my love.’
‘What a pleasant young lady,’ Harchak murmured, trying to shift sideways, out of the puddle.
Jude stepped back, careful to keep her weight evenly balanced, the knife poised to meet any attack. ‘Yeah, Club Andro just can’t get the staff these days.’
Fitch swore liberally in Korean, but her hand closed lightly on Jude’s shoulder anyway.
Feeling Fitch’s eagerness to shelter her, protect her, Jude wondered how she’d missed it last time.
But their future fallings-out were the least of her problems right now.
Harchak had made it to his feet, hands raised in surrender. With the club’s shimmering neon behind his captors, he was having difficulty focusing on them. ‘So? What happens to me?’
‘I don’t want to fight you, Harchak. I’m letting you go – no punishment, no ransom, and I don’t expect any more trouble from you. Deal?’
The old man shook his head in disgust. ‘That’s the trouble with you government types. No ambition. Let alone greed.’
‘I haven’t finished yet.’
Harchak turned his watery stare upon her, surprised and impressed.
This had to be it. The way to change her present. To stop Harchak sending another team after her – it had to be him that had got her thrown out of that window, why else would she be here? And all she needed to do to change that was to say –
‘I’ll take your offer. If I ever get any information on the subject you mentioned, I’ll pass it on to you. Pay what you think it’s worth. I doubt I ever will hear anything, but…’
‘Deal.’
And as simply as that, bang, the problem is solved. The vendetta wiped from the record, Harchak’s mad curiosity satisfied, my plunge from a skyscraper just another byway in my cluttered memory, another false turning that I reversed back down and then obliterated.
I love my job.
‘All right, go. Before we all catch pneumonia.’
Fitch slipped an arm around her waist as she watched Harchak stumble off down the alley; and despite everything she knew now and hadn’t then, Jude couldn’t find it in her heart to object.
Room Eight was one of the club’s socialisation rooms – illegal in a building without an Authorised Bordello licence, and consequently, cleverly disguised as a storeroom by three crates of empty gin bottles placed in the corner.
Quite how the management explained the necessity for a four-poster bed, bath and shower complex, and a holographic open fire projection with genuine zebra skin rug in every ‘storeroom’ had always eluded her.
Fitch brought a pot of coffee up from the bar, and a bottle with a couple of shots of brandy left in it, and Jude wrapped herself in the quilt and watched her clothes steam dry on the radiator.
‘Good thing you came along,’ she conceded, playing along with the echoes inside her head, following the lines of remembered conversation, letting the past repeat itself. ‘I wasn’t getting along too well alone.’
Fitch smiled and Jude had to smile too, watching the fake firelight play across her face, revealing a tenderness she tried unsuccessfully to hide.
‘So,’ she said, ‘what was all that about anyway?’
‘Harchak had heard something…’ Jude shivered at the memory. ‘Some lunatic Club Andro rumour about ReTracer research. Wanted me to feed him information on it.’
‘And if Warner and all your GenoBond buddies find out?’
‘If this is true, then they’re the least of my worries.’ She gulped at the coffee, relishing its bitter sting. ‘It’s not true. It’s technophobia, silly skiffy-TV paranoia. So it doesn’t matter, because I won’t ever have to do it.’
Fitch threw herself onto the bed, settled herself with her back to one vast oak post, her face shadowed by the brocade curtains. Jude watched her blow on her coffee, sip it, grimace. Trying to reconcile the comforting familiarity of her every movement with the bitter revelations of their last encounter. Trying to see Fitch as she used to, before she knew.
‘Jude?’
‘Mmmmm?’
‘Nothing. You just seem – a long way off.’
‘I was just thinking.’
Laying a hand on Jude’s bare knee, Fitch took the coffee cup from her and set it aside. ‘You shouldn’t think, you know. It’s bad for you. Scientists have proved it. Especially when there are so many better things to do with your time…’
She could stay here for ever. The fire, the bed, the brandy. Fitch. If there was a way to freeze time, to live forever in a single moment of joy, Jude would choose this day, this moment.
But there wasn’t. And when she returned to her present-past, this moment and all the other moments would still be lost forever.
I hate my job, she thought, and ReTraced.
Forward to her present. She’d fixed it now, surely, she was released –
Air rush, vertigo, terror. She was still falling.
Sick with terror, Jude let herself slide back into the past.
TWO
Geno Bond HQ, three weeks ago
‘I really wish you’d reconsider that, Jude,’ Warner sighed, settling himself comfortably with his immaculate shoes on the edge of the desk. ‘It’s a golden opportunity. Moving to the country could be the beginning of a whole new lease of life for you.’
Jude smiled.
Easy one this time.
Welcome to July 2nd. Nice bright summer’s day – a rarity now, whatever the Public InfoBroadcasts said about climate stabilisation. She’d arranged to meet Fitch after an early shift at Club Andro; the evenings were long, they’d go down to the Wharf to drink coffee at that crazy Australian’s bagel stall and watch the kids testing their handcrafted sailboards, only a hundred apiece, all designs available…
Warner was watching her across the desk, fingers pressed together in a gesture that was supposed to indicate deep thought.
’You know I’d go insane in a Hurst, Mr Warner.’
‘You’ve got it all wrong, you know. You’re thinking clean living, fresh air and exercise, early to bed. They are human beings, Jude. They do have music and parties – yes, and alcohol and drugs and whatever…’
‘Yeah, yeah. I’m not stupid enough to believe the newscast image. I just couldn’t live anywhere that… small. And crowded. Every apartment in every building occupied. It wasn’t like that even when I was a kid in the Bankside.’
‘No Hurst holds more than five hundred people. Mostly fewer. And think of all that open space, Jude. Grass. Trees. The sea, even. No broken glass and twisted metal, no ugly piles of crumbling concrete.’
Jude grinned. ‘That’s the other thing. Green is not a natural colour for a landscape. All that vegetation gobbling up the oxygen, it just can’t be healthy.’
‘I think you’ll find that vegetation is a net producer of oxygen.’
‘Whatever.’
Warner sighed, admitting defeat. ‘Your loss.’
‘I think not.’ She sat back in her chair, sipping cautiously at her steaming coffee. Espresso, black. Despite the considerable resources at his disposal, Warner never served anything else.
But then, Warner was that type. Straight down the line; nothing added, nothing taken away. Some of the others, the ones who broke the rules but weren’t smart enough to hide it, couldn’t get on with that. Jude preferred it. You always knew where you were with Warner.
Mostly on the wrong side of the desk, taking the orders and apologising for the unavoidable, but that was life.
His coffee might be fearsome, but he did have the best view in the whole GenoBond building. Panoramic, right across the north of the city. The broken husk of the PO tower foreground, the green smear of one of the parks behind it. Framing the distant greenery, a jagged tumble of roofs and low rise blocks, splattered red and yellow and purple by tarpaulins and folk art. Everything the
city had to offer was out there, hidden from the world below: hand-thrown pottery drying on parapets, children’s toys abandoned in the sun, a colour-splash of marigolds or potted lavender on a gravel balcony. A face, a voice, a snatch of music from a badly-tuned guitar. A life.
Warner sat with his back to it, blinds half drawn. He’d probably never even noticed.
’And since when have you been so eager to get me out to a Hurst?’
Warner shrugged. Casual as you like, but she wasn’t convinced. She’d seen too many casual shrugs from Warner that had turned out to precede suicide missions.
‘We consider it prudent to start shifting our resources away from the cities. No rush, things have been pretty stable so far. But once the infrastructure really begins to give way, gang warfare’s liable to flare up again, there could be an anti-government backlash… Anything might happen. We can’t entirely guarantee the safety of anyone remaining in the city, not over the long term.’
‘That’s not what the Government promised during the Migration, now is it?’
He must have caught her devil’s advocate tone, because he smiled, a little. ‘We promised that anyone who chose to stay behind was fed and kept safe from full-scale conflicts. But we didn’t promise that for their children and their children’s children. No promise is open-ended. We’re just closing it down a little sooner than people may have expected.’
’You should have gone into politics, Mr Warner. You’re wasted here.’
‘Oh, politics is far too messy for my liking. I’m more the Phantom of the Opera type. Manipulate from behind the scenes.’
He laughed, to tell anyone who’d bugged the office that he was joking. Jude wasn’t sure whether to be convinced or not.
‘Now you come to mention it,’ she said, after a grimacing swig at the coffee, ‘there is a certain physical resemblance.’
‘Cheek. I paid a fortune for this one. Famous Arctic explorer. Rugged, dependable and quietly sexy, or so the marketing says.’
Jude shrugged. ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t know.’
So far, everything was going just the way it had before.
Never mind. Plenty of time. The moment would come, and she’d notice it and act.
‘Anyway, the Hursts also need the protection afforded by ReTracers. There have been odd attacks by environmentalists. Banner-waving and sabotage, nothing serious so far – but that’s just luck. Sooner or later, the HardGreens will hit something serious.’
‘Like a reactor, yeah. And do I want to be on duty at one of those when it blows? I think not.’
Warner laughed. ‘Jude. If you were beside the reactor when it blew, you’d skip back and stop it blowing. Net result: it would never have blown in the first place. That’s the whole idea, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but…’
‘You are so superstitious.’ He sat back in his leather swivel chair, running a hand through his bushy hair as if to show it off. An old gesture, borrowed from the time when keeping your hair into your fifties was your achievement and not a regening clinic’s.
’So, what’s today’s exciting assignment?’
He spared her an exasperated look. He seemed to have this idea that she didn’t take her job as a high-level government employee seriously enough. ‘VIP minding. There’s a Green Urbanites bash in the Park, some festival or other. A couple of German businessmen want to take a look at this quaint ritual, and the Government have decided to ensure that they don’t get thrown in the Serpentine or anything.’
This wasn’t the job she’d received, first time round.
Not a problem in itself. A lot of things could have changed between living a given day and re-visiting it. Other ReTracers’ actions had a knock-on effect, for a start. Rarely enough to change history, but sometimes enough to shift the details of a conversation, change the routine of a working day. And her own changes to the past, at Club Andro, could have had totally random effects upon every day of her life since.
In fact, that was one of the best parts. Living a life that was constantly shifting, where the past was never quite the same twice. Learning to smile when your memories didn’t match someone else’s, because you’d been there twice, or more, and seen all the different permutations, all the possibilities.
‘It should be fun,’ Warner was saying. ‘Someone of your Luddite leanings should feel right at home.’
‘I’m not a Luddite.’
‘If you say so. Though I hear some of those SoftGreen girlies are pretty free with their favours…’
‘Just one problem, Mr Warner. I’m – not operational today.’
Not operational. Polite departmental euphemism for, ‘Actually, sir, although I’m forbidden to give you the details, I’m already in mid-ReTrace and the me you’re speaking to is from some indeterminate point in the future.’
Outside, a hawk dived into the pigeons on the adjoining roof, triggering an eruption of feathers and shrieking, flapping escapees.
Warner tipped the chair back onto two legs, resting his shoulders against the wall, and looked at her.
Wondering, she could be pretty sure, whether he could risk trying to break the Recommendation.
It would be so easy, wouldn’t it? To ask for a stock market tip, a political scandal to sell to NewsTV. To ask if your sick grandmother was going to recover, or just whether you should buy that new suit now or wait for the sale.
They’d catch you, of course. If it took them ten years, or a hundred, somewhere down the line they’d catch you. And someone would ReTrace back to warn a colleague who’d ReTrace back to warn another, until the knowledge caught up with you, backwards through time.
Until one day, about 30 seconds before you would have asked the question, the ReTracer you were about to ask would pull a gun and blow your head off for no apparent reason at all.
‘That’s fine,’ Warner murmured, studying Jude’s face as if he expected to find some kind of vital clue there. ‘I was going to send Schrader with you anyway. Speaks German. He can handle it on his own. Or you can tag along, have some fun. We’re not exactly overworked today.’
Leaving her the choice. Because only she would know what she was here for, what she was searching for.
And even then, she’d only know when she found it.
‘Yeah.’ Jude watched the sun break through a smear of cloud above the shattered roof of St Pancras. ‘You know, I might just do that.’
The Park was a single heaving mass of people.
The official car dropped them across the road, where they were slightly less likely to attract attention – or the traditional bombardment of mud and rotten vegetables for squandering resources and polluting the atmosphere with a private vehicle – and they crossed the empty road to the Alexandra gate in silence.
The two Germans, Hinke and Beck, hadn’t actually spoken since Warner introduced them in the GenoBond car park, twenty minutes ago. On his advice, they’d removed their suit jackets and grudgingly replaced them with shabby PlasMacs to hide exactly how expensive their hand-stitched silk shirts were. They didn’t look happy about it.
Considering that this was supposed to be their idea of fun, they didn’t look happy at all.
Jude looked sideways at Schrader. With his brutally cropped blond hair, a grey shirt buttoned to the neck, and that permanent scowl, he could quite easily pass as a third member of the negotiation team.
Which left her, in a KENSAL PUNK BOYS T-shirt and old jeans, looking like a hanger-on, a streetbird, or simply a complete idiot.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Schrader muttered. For the first time in a dozen or so glancing, ill-tempered encounters, Jude thought he looked nervous. ‘The entire city must be here.’
The fence had been turned into a billboard, hung with damp cardboard signs advertising everything from lab-grown piata crystals (Instant Improvement In Karma Is Guaranteed) to certified organic cannabis. In the few gaps between signs and posters, someone had woven stems of lilac, drooping now in the mid-morning sun.
In
side, every inch of ground between the gate and the Serpentine had been seized by an invading army of stallholders, streetcorner preachers, hawkers, ladybirds, mollys, and every other variety of the great urban unwashed. It sounded like a riot and looked like an explosion in a colour-blind designer’s clothing shop. Jude found herself suddenly terribly sure she didn’t want to go anywhere near it.
But she was still walking, propelled by fear of embarrassment and the cluster of bodies at her back, and the crowd seemed to be expanding out of the park to meet her in a fog of bad deodorant, ganja smoke and perfume.
At the gates, a woman dressed as a tearful clown pressed a leaflet into her hand. ‘Official day of mourning for the planet, come and do your part.’
A sudden surge of escaping children – pickpockets, probably, off to unload their haul – swept them apart. Tiny fingers plucked at her pocket and withdrew, foiled by closures keyed to her fingerprints alone.
Welcome to the Claustrophobia Express, move right down inside the car please, we’ve plenty more to squeeze aboard.
Hinke, the short one, pushed his spectacles further down his nose and squinted over them at the crowds. ‘Your Green Urbanites, I presume.’
‘That’s right,’ Schrader chipped in. Jude got the feeling he was setting things straight now, before she could step in and ruin them for him. ‘SoftGreens, the media call them. They advocate anti-technology, back to the land policies, but they’re still quite happy to take government food rations and barter vouchers.’
‘As are most of your people, it seems.’
‘Only those who, for some misguided reason, choose not to participate in the new society we’re building in the Hursts.’ Schrader smiled thinly at the seething crowds, as if pitying them. ‘We continue to provide their basic needs, but we can’t justify providing all life’s little luxuries here, at enormous cost, when a full and meaningful life is available to them in the Hursts, any time they wish it. If they choose to reject that, well, that’s their choice, isn’t it?’