Corvus

'I'm not religious,' Zach says. 'I mean no disrespect, but it's not what I believe in.' And I'm certainly not anybody's medicine man.

  'The universe is indifferent to your belief, my son.'

  Silence falls, a silence in which Zach hears the wash of their breath against a perilous headland. There is only a single mast to which he might be lashed, but he himself has splintered it. He sculls into deep water, smoke-wreathed minutes pass while he slips further and further from shore. The light is cool and blue like ice. Then Pani shifts on his haunches and hums a few notes. Sound can travel far in the high Arctic, and hunters learn very young to pay attention to anything out of the norm. At first the sound is no more than a vibration along Zach's skin, as if a tuning fork had been struck against his ribs, against the hull of his fragile skiff. Skin is permeable, and the transformation to note takes place beneath the skin, or in the skin itself. 'Your skin is singing,' Laura said. Zach closes his eyes to see her better, but there's no resisting the melodic line Pani has cast. The boy has a good ear.

  'And the seal?' Zach asks.

  'She bestows her spirit to return with you,' the old man says. 'That is the nature of renewal.'

  A single tone, sustained but faint, so that Zach glances round to see if the others have heard. Pani is staring at the clarinet. Sensing Zach's scrutiny, he looks up. 'Please will you make it sing?'

  Again the younger man raises his hand, but this time Zach stops him. 'No, it's fine. I'm happy to play for him.'

  Zach gives the boy some children's songs, classic rock, a little jazz.

  'And the song you were playing when we came?' Pani asks. 'It's very beautiful.' He repeats a fragment of the melody in a clear, true, still unbroken voice.

  'You have a feel for music,' Zach says.

  'This son of mine is forever drumming and singing, even the women's throat singing.'

  Zach laughs. 'They used to say something like that about me, too.' He addresses Pani, curious if the instrument will respond to another. 'I'm sorry, that song isn't finished yet. But would you like to try my clarinet?'

  'Oh yes, please.' He looks guiltily at the older man. 'If Grandfather permits.'

  Within a short time Pani teases a simple tune from the clarinet, then embellishes it with all the signs of a real affinity for improv. Perhaps it's easier for a child to establish a rapport with Lev's instrument, perhaps it's got something to do with his upbringing. Wunderkind isn't a word sapiens like to use for those who don't belong to their own little tribes, but Zach is no sapie. He knows musical hunger when it lifts its head and howls.

  'Astounding,' Zach says to Pani's father. 'Your son is very gifted.'

  'Don't puff him—'

  'Angu, a stranger may not understand our ways, seeing envy where there is only a father's love and legitimate concern.' Uakuak interposes, a man of some diplomacy; a man of authority. To Zach, 'No one doubts my grandson's hereditary promise. The spirits will choose.'

  Pani launches into a last tune on the clarinet, his dark eyes gleaming mischievously. Slowly Zach turns to regard the boy. It must be a coincidence, mustn't it? Why shouldn't Mishaal or one of the other programmers happen to fancy a folksong he'd taught Max, who took to humming it slightly, but maddeningly, out of tune?

  'You'll bring your clarinet?' Pani asks when finished. He gives his father a cheeky grin. 'Grandmother says music is the best lure for the White Seal.'

  At Zach's nod, Angu offers him the item concealed in his hand. 'An amulet. Carry it at all times.'

  'To prevent harm?' Zach asks, careful not to smile.

  'To help call your soul back from its journey,' Uakuak answers. 'I'll not deceive you, my son. The White Seal is very seductive, and sometimes men prefer to remain with her in the spirit realm.'

  The trinket, not surprisingly, is a seal carved in ivory.

  *****

  Zach lingers behind with an eye to suitable carving material. To break off a table leg seems reasonable till he considers its club-like appearance and, moreover, its suggestion of reckless impetuosity. A perfectly good table in exchange for a child's toy? If there's any spare wood or bone at the hunters' camp, he'd like to show the boy how to whittle a simple flute or recorder. The duets he and Sean used to play, Pani would love that. (Just Pani? Admit it, Zach, you've been getting a bit lonely, musically speaking.) At school he'd even fashioned a series of end-blown flutes complete with mouthpiece, rather like small keyless clarinets, but he couldn't imagine what to use for reeds on the ice.

  Sweeping the torch in one final, slow, reluctant circuit of the iglu, he thinks of all the leave-takings there have been in his life, most undertaken without any real sense of finality. You never believe things end, do you? One day you'll go back. One day your mum or dad will defy all reason and all evidence to come for you. One day you'll build that snowman . . .

  And the worst is, he does go back, again and again and again, till he's carved a story out of hardpack snow which will melt in the first good thaw. Like this iglu, he thinks grimly. It's not just the monkeys who have to be dragged from the slushpile of their ice-palace dreams. And what the fuck is the matter with him anyway, wanting to teach a cyber shadow to construct a clarinet? About as sane as chiselling it from ice.

  Swiftly he slithers from the iglu. Pale light is rimming the horizon, with stars glittering through broken cloud overhead. In a few days the sun will rise for the first time. There's hardly any ground wind, and Zach can see the small party gathered round two canoes moored on a natural jetty of ice about 100 m distant.

  Chapter 33

  The fountain was never turned off, and Laura had always meant to ask her father how they prevented the water from freezing. Tonight it flowed gold-shot red and green in keeping with the Christmas season, one colour from each of the dragon's twin jaws, and Laura couldn't help admiring the skill with which an illusion of flame was created. Shivering in the icy wind that even Fulgur engineers hadn't succeeded in controlling, she stepped back to avoid a sudden gusting of spray and grumbled to Max, 'Couldn't we have talked somewhere warm?'

  Instead of answering, Max swung his head like a hunter searching for signs of prey, except there wasn't much predator in his running nose and thin, hunched shoulders and bright red cap, nor his coin-sized pupils. He turned to peer behind them, his eyes gleaming like a cat's in the streetlight, and for the first time, from that angle, Laura saw a glimmer of the cognoscens deep within; the lustrous ore, not the counterfeit surety of an alloy.

  'Have you got any money for a taxi?' Max asked. 'I'm scared of snugs.'

  'If Zach's in danger, I'm not going anywhere.'

  Again the darting glances, one shoulder raised as if to fend off a blow. Laura grabbed his arm.

  'Will you tell me what's going on before I leave you here to freeze your pygmy walnuts off!'

  'They're big enough!' he retorted heatedly.

  Blokes! Never too young to bristle when you dissed their todgers. Useful, though, when you wanted to prick them into action. She crossed her arms. 'I'm counting.'

  'Come on, then.'

  In the bus shelter he leaned against the glass wall to catch his breath, little puffs of vapour fleeing from the sound of his panting. Ashamed of herself now, she patted him clumsily on the shoulder—a habit she was picking up from Josh. As long as she didn't start scratching her balls when it seemed no one was looking.

  'I don't know what to do,' Max finally said. 'Maybe we'd better talk to Dad.'

  'You still haven't explained.'

  'It's sort of muddled, but there's someone in the building whose thoughts are dead kank. Like nothing I've ever come across.'

  Her hand still ached. 'A cat?'

  'Zach's told you about the animal stuff?' She nodded, leaving the details for another time, it was Zach who was important. But Max carried on without further prompting. 'No, they're OK. I hate what's being done to them, and most of them don't live very long, and I can only hear a couple of them anyway, but they don't hide their thoughts, which aren't simple at all. They
don't care very much what people think of them. People are the stupid ones, mostly.'

  'Then a simu?'

  'I'm not sure . . . maybe . . .' He closed his eyes for a few seconds and appeared to be listening. The cold had rouged his cheeks like an old woman's clownish makeup, highlighting rather than disguising the chalkiness of his skin. '. . . maybe not a true cognoscens. Dad explained it to me, it's a quantum thing. That's why distance doesn't matter. But I ought to be able to hear better. I can't even tell if it's a man or a woman. They've done something scary to him, to his mind. Or hers.'

  'What's this got to do with Zach?'

  He wiped his nose on his sleeve. 'I told you, it's not very clear, but I think she's trying to warn me. They want me, or someone like me.'

  'And Zach?' When tears filled his eyes, she finally realised what Max was too scared to say. 'They're going to make Zach tell them about you.'

  She rummaged in her pocket for a tissue, then stamped her feet and clapped her hands together, which were beginning to numb. When she tried flexing her fingers, her glove chafed Jasmine's scratches. Underfoot there was no snow or ice; she stepped outside the shelter and scrutinised the well-lit carpark to give Max a chance to wipe away his tears. For the first time she took in, really took in, how immaculate the tarmac was. Where were the mounds of dirty snow, the patches of ice, the grit for traction? This place: it was creepy the way you numbly accepted Fulgur's latest surreal fantasia, as though toilets that played Oh Come, All Ye Faithful when you sat down, and Do You Hear What I Hear? when you flushed, were perfectly ordinary—rather quaint, actually, in comparison to the red-and-green-striped toilet paper embossed with metallic gold stars. But Zach, she reminded herself, wasn't colour-blind. No one led Zach, with or without a blindfold. Not unless he chose to be led.

  'How make him?' she asked, wheeling round. 'What are they going to do to him?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Then use that braintapping trick of yours.'

  'I'm not stupid! I've already tried that, but I can't pick up anything. Zach has no information, none of the simus do. Maybe only a few people know, and they're not good senders, or maybe they've figured out a way to keep anyone like me from hearing.' He took a raw breath. 'Laura, how can Dad work for them? For people like that?'

  For people like Fabio, she thought, people who elicit foolish revelations with the ease of a hypnotist. People with slick talk and slick offices and even slicker gadgets; with silk shirts and slick, silken kisses. 'Was Zach . . . I mean, the things he said, was he thinking them?' She sped past Max's silence. 'You know what I mean, don't you? That he doesn't want to—' He was shaking his head, but she couldn't brake now. 'Max, you've got to tell me.'

  'I can't do that to Zach,' he whispered, tearing his eyes from hers. 'Please don't make me.'

  *****

  While Laura was debating with herself, mustering all the reasons, and their cousins and great-aunts, why Max ought to cooperate, and coming up with a very bare family tree, so moving on to how to tap her brother for syrup—just where to drill the right hole—and while Max himself had walked behind a parked car to pee—no tree trunks in sight—the sirens began. Laura was all for rushing back into the main building to search for Zach, but Max did his listening for a moment, then demurred. 'He's OK, he's left.'

  But Max was wrong, an hour later reminding her—almost apologetically—that he couldn't tell much about location unless a person happened to be thinking about it. The party-goers were herded outside to a safe distance, most of them half drunk, and not a few high as noctilucent clouds over the poles, and glowing nearly as much in the dark. Some of the children were frightened, but others seemed to find it a good lark. On the way to search for their parents, Laura overheard one eight- or nine-year-old boy announcing loftily to the others, 'It's a game. Watch, there'll be a Fulgur helicopter landing soon, with Father Christmas and a sack full of presents for us. My dad works in PR, he told me.' Max rolled his eyes at Laura, then exclaimed and pointed to the left, hunching his shoulders again. Their mum's face was incandescent with rage, grotesque under the circumstances.

  Grotesque under any circumstances: a bomb could only rearrange her features to advantage, I'll do it myself if she says one word, one fucking word about Zach.

  Laura's mum grabbed her arm and dug her fingers into the layers of fabric hard enough to leave a bruise needing cover-up for a week. 'Where have you been, you stupid idiot.' Hissed directly into Laura's ear, her spite as obscene as some bloke's slurping tongue. 'Snogging that auger?'

  Laura wrenched her arm free, her hand throbbing. Shoved her face into her mother's. Raised her voice, raised it good and loud, then raised it even louder. 'Go on. Wallop me if you must. Pull my hair. Pinch me. But don't you ever call him that—not ever again, do you hear. He's worth a hundred of you, you bitch.'

  Her mum went white and raised a hand to strike, then caught the stares of those standing within earshot and fell back a step, hurriedly smoothing her hair with the raised hand. She smiled a shellacked smile which fooled no one, least of all herself. 'Poor girl, she's overwrought, it's been too much for her,' directed at a woman her own age who dropped her eyes and looked away.

  And her dad?

  Molly, that's enough now.

  scuttled away, that spider, but still shuddery behind the toilet smelly like wet knickers please mummy i'm sorry please

  hauls her out by her hair, shakes her

  screams

  shut up, don't you dare cry, SHUT UP SHUT UP!

  Molly, please, the child's terrified.

  I'll show her terrified. Disgusting filthy girl.

  Her dad dropped his eyes, watery from the cold, and looked away. The wind lifted his thinning hair. They'd been herded outside without a chance to collect their coats.

  'I've still got them,' Laura said.

  'What are you talking about?' her mum asked. 'Got what?'

  'The pink knickers with the butterflies.'

  Clearly at a loss, her mum shook her head. After an interval just long enough to raise Laura's hopes, old sugar-coated hopes, her dad cracked a rigid smile. His memory for figures was phenomenal, and he could still recite whole swatches of school poetry. As a little girl she'd loved to listen to him reciting My Cat Jeoffrey, he always acted out the licking and claw sharpening and cameling his back, the cork catching and spraggling upon waggling. 'You're my kitten,' he'd said, 'just like Jeoffrey': 'For he can tread to all the measures upon the music. For he can swim for life.'

  A doorframe splintered for a pair of knickers: no special feat of memory for her dad.

  'We were worried about you,' her dad said, putting his arm round Molly's shoulders.

  *****

  There were in fact three helicopters, but the Fulgur dragon didn't land until the bomb was disarmed and removed and the infiltrator, in shirt sleeves but fired by his slogans, whisked away. With the children clustering round Father Christmas, the cold and fear forgotten in their excitement, the guests were given the go-ahead by the police to return to the party. Those without the prospect of a gold-wrapped parcel embossed with the Fulgur logo made their way into the lobby with alacrity, rizzy nerves and speculation no longer heat enough, and most were scurrying, they hoped discreetly, to reach the bar ahead of the others. A TV crew had arrived, with reporters tapping the crowd for a pint or two of gossip. Laura hung back, snagging Max's arm, and they were about to slip away to ring for a taxi when a second TV van pulled up, followed by several press cars in convoy which disgorged journalists. Max stared at them with a look she was coming to recognise, then began to move towards the building.

  'Where are you going?' she asked.

  'Don't you want to hear what he's going to say?'

  'Who?' Laura asked.

  'Zach.'

  *****

  And all at once, Zach was everywhere. He spoke at public meetings, was interviewed on TV, gazed at Laura from websites and newspapers, began his own blog. Laura had difficulty understanding how a popular movement
could combust almost overnight from the seemingly dry rags and odd scraps of society, but Fabio had made it clear enough that there was nothing spontaneous about his plans. And Zach was turning out to be a very charismatic public speaker, damn him. 'Simus are not your enemy. Your enemies are pollution, and dwindling resources, and hunger, and disease. And fear—mostly fear. Don't be afraid of us: we want what you want, a good life lived peacefully. Together we can work towards solving our devastating problems. Together we can remake our lives, and our planet. Together we can move out into new frontiers. I too have dreams . . .'

  The Janu numbers were still small, but already raising alarm in some quarters. When Laura convinced Owen to attend an open debate at the university right after Christmas break, she was surprised to find that the lecture hall, while not overcrowded, was only half filled with students; there were young couples, several with pouched babies, there were pensioners and burly labourers and women with signature silk scarves, there were suits; oddly, however, there were no simus except the lad winging Zach, whom he introduced as a medical student. Zach's other companion—chaperon?—was a thirty-something Fulgur psychologist from Ghana, slender and soft-spoken, adversary of the Big Mama school of therapy, and genuinely funny; she had the audience laughing and whistling and clapping when she told a story about a rooster, a prostitute, and a panel van full of stolen computers. Fabio was nowhere in sight.

  Laura did her best, but Owen couldn't reveal what he didn't know, and it was tricky to get any information from her dad. Fabio's too old for you, he'd said when she tried the gorgeous-hunk gambit. Fabio, it was obvious, wasn't a corporate drone like her dad, and he seemed to have a conscience. But you could never tell with fanatics. Had he made use of what she'd told him? If the stuff she'd turned up on the net was accurate, his dead brother had been a simu. Everyone knew about Latinos and family. She'd expected Fabio to be here tonight. He ought to have been here tonight.