Corvus

  'You're still thinking too literally.' Lev laughs in his old way. 'But you're learning.'

  Zach clamps his mouth shut. He is not going to ask a ream of foolscap questions. Lev holds out his hand for the clarinet.

  'You know, I prefer homo musicus,' Lev says.

  'What?'

  'There's a universal music that underlies all cognition. Among other things, this instrument is a very sophisticated translator whose task is to render itself superfluous.'

  'Simus hear differently than sapiens, translation's impossible. Unless you're talking about other forms of life?'

  'Ears aren't anything more than channels. The mind generates hearing, seeing, tasting, feeling . . .' Lev taps the clarinet. 'Music precedes language. Your scientists have yet to discover that music is deeply quantangled in neural structure. Without music there's no consciousness. Even emotions are essentially musical.'

  'Does that mean the deaf can be taught to hear?'

  'You've told me about Max, haven't you?' He holds the clarinet aloft. 'Play.'

  Zach reaches for it, but with a sweep of his arm Lev propels it towards one of the pillars. Zach braces himself for an impact. Instead, each of the columns reverberates with a different tone overlaid with subtly fluid intratones.

  'Go on,' Lev says.

  Zach stares at the clarinet, now embedded in one of the pillars. 'You don't need it,' Lev says.

  Zach shrugs and closes his eyes. It takes him a while to quieten his mind, but then he begins to picture his Buffet in his hands, its body as familiar to him as his own. He fills his lungs and belly with air. Its mouthpiece moulds itself to his lips, warm and a bit tremulous. At first there is only the first tentative tremolo which far out in the middle of the sea could mean nothing or everything, which is a mere echo of a note, an audible shiver on the surface of the water, but which slowly and inevitably begins to build, gathering momentum, becoming now a line of melody, now a movement of Laura's sonata. As the piano adds its voice to the rising sonority, the music surges ever wilder ever louder ever closer to the icebound coast.

  It's beautiful, Laura says.

  Zach flounders, swallows a mouthful of brine. The roaring in his ears syncopates into an erratic heartbeat, and when he opens his eyes Lev and the columns have disappeared.

  'Laura?'

  The windy hissing of burning oil, bitter in his nostrils, is his only answer. Wearily he settles himself on the edge of the sleeping platform without touching the clarinet, which is lying exactly where he left it before the meal. Should he be unnerved? Or just relieved? His eyes pass over the meagre possessions of the family who have given up their privacy for him—the all-important kudlik, a large kettle, some battered dishes and utensils, a coil of rope hanging from a length of caribou antler, skin sacks, a spear. And in the alcove where the platform meets the fur-draped wall, an item even more unexpected than the clarinet.

  Zach goes over to examine it closely. Feeling a bit light-headed, he drops to one knee and rubs his eyes, which are beginning to smart from a faint smokiness in the air. His fingers are drawn to the creamy ivory.

  A length of narwhal or walrus tusk, he can't tell the difference. The upper half of the figure delicately worked, its grain and glow evoke living skin in the same way a Michelangelo statue breathes and sweats and pulsates with freshly oxygenated blood. But like the Captive Slave the carving is only half finished: a woman's head, arms, and torso are struggling to emerge from the tapering piece, struggling to escape the restraint of tusk. Her hair lies in a long plait along her back, so finely sculpted that each strand seems combed in place. Zach runs his fingertips over the lower half—smooth and polished, with a small lift to the tail. Perhaps finished after all. Another fucking seal, he thinks savagely, but never the right one.

  'Nashuk will tell you the story just now. I've asked her to bring you something hot to drink, something to help you sleep.'

  Caught off guard, Zach glances round to find Uakuak standing in the entrance.

  'Would you like to come in?' Zach rises gingerly, but the dizziness has passed.

  'Just for a moment.' Uakuak takes a seat on the sleeping bench and gestures for Zach to join him. 'I don't sleep much any more, but my wife insists that I rest my old bones.'

  'In my world, men half your age don't have your strength and stamina.'

  'My spirit grows restless. I've had a good life, and there's not much I regret, but one thing I would have liked is to travel to other worlds. Alas, I don't have your shaman's gift. My soul will do its journeying soon enough, though.'

  Zach is quiet while he struggles to find a measure of truth, not just courtesy. 'Many in my home believe as you. I wish I could.'

  Uakuak's scrutiny lasts till Zach is on the verge of getting up and moving away. The old man asks gently, 'Who is it you've lost? Your wife? A child?'

  Zach is silent, staring at his hands.

  'The dead stay dead, Zach, there's no changing the past.' The quiet words of a man who has no need to prove anything. 'There is only another past, separated from us by a thin layer like young black ice. In dreams we may catch a glimpse beyond the darkness, while a shaman sees further into these realms. And there are so many realms, far more than stars in the sky, drops of water in the sea.'

  And far more clichés where they've come from, the old Zach would have thought. Yet snowbound though he is, this wily hunter would have far less trouble understanding quantum theory, if properly explained, than most of Zach's own classmates. Quantum reality is counterintuitive to the average sapiens. Countless times in physics class he's heard them ask, how can something's nature become fixed and definite only when it's observed? And even more often, what do you mean by random? Science is supposed to be able to predict an outcome, that's what science does.

  Science used to: drop a Newtonian apple and it fell in a predictable time with a predictable velocity through a predictable trajectory. But now science deals in probabilities and nonlocalities and emergence and Wu's Qlions. And still without an adequate unified theory to consolidate general relativity and quantum mechanics. Cosmic reality eludes even the cognoscens mind—and might always, if the Purists have their way.

  'The worlds to which the spirit travels are real, as real as your own,' Uakuak continues. 'It's only natural to be afraid. Shamanic journeys are dangerous, and the journey to the White Seal the most dangerous of all.'

  'Please believe me, Uakuak. I'm no shaman. My people use special tools to make many things'—he can't bring himself to repudiate their lives—'and many distant journeys, but nothing remotely supernatural.'

  Except, of course, that these aren't lives, or shouldn't be. Till now Fulgur has only uploaded test participants in the rehab programme, plus a few volunteer research subjects. Everything else is background: programmed modules for verisimilitude, like a sophisticated version of gaming avatars.

  Uakuak laughs, then places a hand on Zach's forearm. 'Tools can't teach us how to live. There is no distinction between natural and supernatural, least of all to our true senses.'

  'If I'm a shaman,' Zach asks, 'then why don't I know how to find the White Seal?'

  'Tomorrow while we hunt, the women will ready a cleansing bath, afterwards you will fast and rest and, if it's your practice, take some of the tea Kiviuk, our shaman, prepares from the plants he himself collects and dries. No one will disturb your solitude. In the evening we will join our music to yours, our drumming, and Kiviuk will guide you till the White Seal appears.'

  'And if she doesn't?'

  'You have already heard her calling, haven't you? So Lev has told us.'

  Damn it, he should have known! Cautiously, 'Lev visits you?'

  'A fine shaman from the far south. Whereas you, he tells us, are angatkuqpak. A shaman's shaman.'

  Yeah, Sean would have been proud of him. This time he curbs his wee daft cognie tongue.

  Chapter 35

  Fulgur headquarters is located on a substrata of Jurassic oolitic limestone, deposited after the breakup
of Pangaea when sea levels rose a good 200 million years ago. Fossilised dinosaur bones and footprints have been found throughout the region, where swamps and salty lakes remained once the seas subsided again.

  Andrea Frechen, principal architect for the complex, sleeps very little. She's known for her eccentricities, particularly her habit of driving to the site of her current project in the middle of the night and walking round for an hour or more. It soothes me, she tells the security guards, but any laughter isn't malicious, for she's always been well liked.

  Aware of the importance of the Fulgur campus, no one was surprised by the young architect's frequent visits. And it was Frechen who, one rainy November night during the early stages of construction, spotted what turned out to be an almost complete skeleton in its prehistoric resting place, along with well-preserved if puzzling tools. In contravention of the right of sepulchre and in a move that she will never be able to explain satisfactorily to herself, she disinterred the bones without calling in the proper authorities, first hiding the remains in her 4 x 4, then in an outbuilding on her private property. An archaeologist would cheerfully sacrifice his right arm for a glimpse of the skull alone, which Frechen isn't trained to recognise as neither sapiens nor Neanderthal. Nevertheless, she has been prescient enough to safeguard the find, and in time it will surface and cause an upheaval in thinking about human evolution. Lev, of course, could have saved everyone the trouble.

  *****

  At the sound of overboiling Laura wrenched herself back to the present. Zach wasn't in the kitchen. She rose, and after an instant of light-headedness, went to deal with the soup. The air in the room had the feel of half-congealed aspic, transparent but slightly clouded; gelatinous. Just lifting the stockpot and wiping down the hob filmed her forehead in sweat, and she leaned on the worktop to catch her breath. She debated whether to finish laying the table, but the trip to the fridge for butter seemed only a fraction less daunting than a clean dive from the 10m platform. She must have been awfully ill to tire so easily. Slowly she made her way through the flat, her hand on the wall, her legs wobbling and near to buckling, her thoughts trailing like exhaust from an airplane.

  The door to the bathroom was ajar. Laura leaned against the doorjamb; she could see Zach washing his hands at the basin. His hair, no longer bound in a ponytail, fell forward to screen his face. He didn't look up, and at first she thought he was merely concentrating on the task with his usual intensity; it always thrilled her to watch him clandestinely, and even now, when she could barely stand, his presence felt like a secret hoard of sweets: the best ones wrapped individually in metallic foil, so that you couldn't cram them into your mouth all at once; each with its own signal pleasure—the orange, filled with tangy cream; the blue, with the heady bite of a liqueur; the green, concealing the crack and crunch of praline; and her favourite, the gold, bittersweet chocolate wrapped round a rich ganache centre. She'd once kept a collection of the papers, which she used to make a collage for a school art project—how could she have forgotten that airplane, resplendent as a stained-glass bird in full sunlight, soaring like the spires of a cathedral above tiny leaden earthbound figures? She wondered what had happened to it; for the longest time it had hung in the passage like all of their drawings and paintings.

  Zach rinsed the soap from his hands. The water still running, he ran his fingers through his hair. The water still running, he hunched over the basin. The water still running, he picked up the bar of soap, stared at it for a moment, and put it between his lips. He took a bite. The water still running.

  'Zach!' she cried. 'What are you doing?'

  He jerked round, the soap slipping from his hands to the floor. Laura could see the white froth on his lips.

  'Spit it out, you idiot,' she said, launching herself towards him. When he made no move to do so, she grabbed his arm and reached for his mouth. He swallowed, gagging a bit.

  'Oh god.' She shook out his toothbrush and filled the tumbler with water. 'Here,' she said, thrusting it towards him, 'drink it.'

  He backed away. Backed right up against the tiled wall where it met the shower, then dropped to his haunches and covered his head with his arms as though anticipating a blow. Laura knelt in front of him, water sloshing over the lip of the plastic beaker and dripping onto his jeans. She wasn't much steadier herself.

  'Please,' she said.

  Permafrost eyes, but at least he was looking at her. With her fingertips she wiped the soapy residue from his lips, then held out the water. He drank a few sips.

  'They made you watch,' he said.

  She set the tumbler down on the floor. With a fierceness that bordered on anger she gathered him close. He shuddered, but after a few minutes his arms encircled her. His jumper smelled faintly fruity, the wool like a good salad oil, maybe a walnut or light olive. It was terrible to hold him and not know what to do. Though elegant as ever, he was dreadfully thin, and it felt as though he'd slip from her grasp at the slightest misword. Why wasn't it enough to love someone?

  'I was terrified they'd kill you,' she said.

  'They will, but not yet.'

  'Maybe this Janu business . . . I don't know, maybe it doesn't have to be so political, so in your face or something.'

  He laughed without humour. 'You ought to read more history.'

  'Yeah, you've said.'

  His arms tightened, and she stiffened involuntarily, the phantom limb of his rage threatening to seize her hair. She choked back a cry, but too late. A sound like the wind in the dark alley of her throat. He caught his breath, at once released her. His face paled. They stared at each other in silence till Laura rose to her knees, bent forward, and gripped his shoulders. She kissed him, first lightly, then sharing the lingering taste of soap.

  'They raped us both,' she said.

  *****

  Zach brought their bowls of soup to the living room, where Laura had stretched out on the sofa at his insistence. She was feeling mildly feverish again, and though her hunger had vanished, she made herself eat several mouthfuls before laying aside the spoon. But she drank the sweet milky tea and even asked for more.

  'I'll ring my dad,' she said.

  'I don't think you're well enough to leave yet.'

  'You're very busy. I'm just in your way.'

  A lopsided smile. 'I've needed to catch up on my reading anyway. And practise clarinet.' He gestured towards her bowl. 'Eat some more.'

  To accommodate him she swallowed another spoonful. Then she leaned her head back against the cushions. Perhaps she slept for a while. The room was dark when she opened her eyes to the childhood memory of a blanket being drawn up to her chin, tenderly; of a hand stroking her hair. 'Tell me another story,' she murmured, then came properly awake at his soft laugh.

  'Sleeping Beauty?' he asked, still tucking the blanket round her shoulder.

  'If you promise to kiss me.'

  His eyes glittered in the light from the passage as though he were the one with fever. 'Do you know how many times I've imagined making love to you these past five days? How many times I've come imagining it?'

  'Come closer.'

  He bent and brushed his lips across her forehead.

  'Closer,' she said.

  'No.'

  He moved back and sat down on the couch table, folding himself inwards like a fragile origami sculpture—exquisite, complex, easily crushed.

  'Why?' she asked. When he didn't answer, 'I won't see him any more.'

  Zach looked down at his hands. 'It would still be rape.'

  'What?'

  'You're ill. And you're not ready.'

  'Isn't that for me to decide?'

  In response Zach stood, crossed the room to his desk, and switched on the lamp. Though the sofa was comfortable, Laura shifted to her side to ease the stiffness in her neck, her hips; to see him better. The light cast the hollows of his face in relief, like a high-contrast photo.

  'You're way too thin,' she said.

  'Would you like me to read to you?' He was ho
lding a slim volume which fell open to what must be a favourite page. His every gesture as spare and graceful and consummate as the couplet of a ghazal, he ran his forefinger over the paper, and for a moment Laura fancied that he was writing something of himself into the text.

  'I really ought to go home,' she said.

  A whisper like fading ink. 'Stay.'

  'Till tomorrow?'

  She could see the book trembling. 'Zach, please talk to me.'

  'I'm not a good person to be with.' With a brittle smile he shut the book. 'Not a safe person. You're much better off with someone like Owen.' He turned so that she could no longer see his face.

  Slowly she sat up. 'Is that why you left me?'

  'I don't leave people.'

  Now she made an exasperated noise. 'Could have fooled me.'

  He whipped round, his voice splattering her with gall. 'Do you have any idea, any idea whatsoever, how vulnerable you make me?'

  So that was it. Laura clenched her fists under the blanket, glad that her face was in shadow. 'I'm sorry I've put you in danger. I'll ring my dad.'

  'Fuck it.' He strode across the room to tower above her. 'I want you to stay—to stay tonight, to stay tomorrow, to fucking stay for as long as you can bear to be in the same room with me, but I'm so afraid. Not for myself, damn you, otherwise I wouldn't be doing any of this. For you, for how they could use you—will use you.' He plunged his hands downwards in a gesture of such eloquence that Laura wondered what the movement for despair in sign language might be.

  'So why am I still here?'

  'Your parents weren't easy to convince.' His sudden grin. 'Must have been my fatal charm, I reckon.'

  'I didn't mean my parents. And it's hardly your charm I've fallen in love with.'

  A long silence.

  'You know why you're still here,' he said.

  'Then tell me.'

  *****

  A very rare virus, her father explained next day, then questioned her about her contact with animals. By then she'd remembered Jasmine, but though he dismissed the cat as a source—'biosafety measures at Fulgur's containment labs outstrip the most stringent of international standards, nobody does it better'—she could tell there was more to it by the exchange of glances between Zach and her dad. She was too tired to argue with them, and both, in their different ways, could be ridiculously stubborn.