Corvus

  Even with blindsight he would sense if Laura were here, which doesn't stop him from peering behind the toadstools for a discarded towel, a pair of jeans, her trainers or socks. The yellow rubber ducky with motorcycle helmet she'd given him for a razz only proves that his memory is still intact. He picks it up, squeezes it, recalls how she laughed at the expression on his face at the awful squawk: 'An authentic biker's mating call, they swore at the shop. Or my money back.' The cave is warm, and he removes his mitts and cap and then his parka. When he reaches for her pendant, hunger swells within him, within and against and despite, its pressure compelling. Why does he always have to tremble?

  After the funeral he bought himself a small handbuilt raku pot, misshapen and costly, whose torn mouth gives it the appearance of having been pounced on and chewed by a dog at the leather-hard stage. Most people would dismiss the pot as worthless, unable to see that its fragile beauty rests in its very imperfection, not least the contrast between the lustrous metallic blues and the crazing lines typical of raku firing, which is so unpredictable that pieces may explode from thermal stress.

  His skin feels hot underneath the chain, on the verge of crackling. And still he is shivering, always shivering: shivering when her fingers played over the touchpad of his tattoo, as if entering a code to unlock his innermost self; shivering when she kissed his back, shivering when she brushed his hair, brushed and plaited it. In those moments he heard nothing, not even the gun which his neurons fire whenever there is silence. Semen is the body's own morphine for the disease of time.

  On impulse he digs out his pocket knife, tests its edge, and whets it on the nearest rock, then loosens his hair from its leather tie. He lops off the plait of white and black hairs, and twists it round the seal, then drops the whole back over his head. It may be that Fulgur is arrogating his memory to its incomprehensible, and probably reprehensible, ends. It may be that Lev is merely some fancy bit of programming, determined from the very outset of the run. It may be that quantum entanglement of mind is an illusion, and Laura will no more hear him than the god to which her grandfather prays. Zach shuts his eyes and hugs his ribs; his shivering is getting worse.

  'Laura,' he whispers, 'just this once, that's all I ask.'

  Who is he fooling?

  To fail now might well mean to fail forever. He passes his gaze one last time over the interior of the cave, over the objects he's furnished it with, as if to fix their thingness in his mind, then closes his eyes, brings his hands into position, licks his lips, and draws upon tactile memory. If every formation and every candle and every detail is perfect, why not this? Don't speak, he tells himself, afraid of the incantatory power of words themselves, which make and unmake in equal measure. Not in some primitive magical sense, but as interface between the amorphous white stuff out there and stellar dendrites or capped columns or needles, the beautiful yet impossibly fragile snow crystals of science, called forth only to melt away at the touch of your tongue.

  No, don't speak, Zach. And above all, don't look. It may be that, like Eurydice, Laura belongs to the dark.

  His embouchure forms automatically, his right thumb tenses to support the clarinet's weight, his other fingers flex above the keys, the reed welcomes his lower lip. Into his mind comes the memory of their second visit to the cave—his last, he'd sworn not to go back and transform it into a shrine to perfect happiness, perfect harmony, to that one perfect glissando, as fluid as the milky flowlight from candle and wall and pool which drips from Laura's skin when she clambers out and comes to him and lays her fingers on his wrist so that he stops playing but not the Gershwin which plays on and on her lips and will forever play in the cave of memory.

  which

  'Laura.'

  darkens as if

  'I've dreamt of you.' She lifts his hands one by one and kisses them gently. 'Angatkuqpak. Shaman of shamans.'

  the candles are guttering

  Unerringly she finds his tattoo, then her tongue meets his, and her forefinger strums the thickened vein in his cock.

  in a chill draught

  A low moan, and he opens his eyes to drag himself back from that cyanic precipice, that rhapsody in blue which is lethal to his concentration. At once the music is gone, above the sound of his harsh breathing there's only the keening of the wind, the crack and grate of the distempered ice. Lev is wrong, Zach can't do it on his own. Better the silence of the deaf than this strident lament: he blocks his ears but the tinnitus of his renegade blood merely amplifies his agitation. Time is an echo chamber with walls of bone. Which tone in a piece of music—which chord, which rest—is now? His mind is haemorrhaging ambient dread, is there internal bleeding oh god breathe there's so much noise just breathe just

  With a cry Zach snatches up his parka. Shuddering with cold, he yanks it over his head. 'I told you to stay put,' he rages, jamming his arms into the sleeves. 'You bloody idiot. Why the fuck couldn't you listen?' He seizes the discarded knife and grabs a fistful of hair, wrenches it taut enough for his eyes to water, and hacks it off; another hank, then another. 'Damn you!' Slashing faster, he nicks a finger and howls. Moments later, he cuts himself again. Without bothering to staunch the blood he drops to his knees, letting the knife fall from his fingers, and begins to sob, a sound as raw as dying.

  Except that death is inaudible, its diapason beyond even the cognoscens range.

  Chapter 41

  Obediently, the lift halted at the third floor. Zach stepped into the corridor, his eyes travelling from the familiar security doors to the ID card in his hand to the lens of the prominent surveillance camera. Mockery will get you nowhere, Jiao would say in a voice whose chilly menace had hovered over their days like a winged omen. Zach saluted the camera with a military gesture, then gave a tired laugh. Nowhere was exactly where he'd like to be.

  'Where the fuck have you been?' Andy snarled as soon as Zach entered the prerun room.

  'Randall insisted on seeing me.' Zach barely acknowledged Fabio, who ought to have explained. There was no other reason for his presence.

  'I'll fetch Charles.' Andy limped away without a glance at his console, a sure sign his departure had been pre-arranged.

  And sure enough, Fabio plunged into a rapidhit cross-examination which only ceased when Zach sank down onto a bench adjoining the neural imager and gripped his head as though it were too heavy to support without manual assistance. In the silence which followed, the carrion past smelled so sharp and rank that it brought tears to his eyes. 'Knackered,' he said in response to Fabio's frown. In a few days it would be Ben's birthday. Without a grave there could be no graveyard lilacs to sweeten the spring. The owlie's all rained and broken, Zach, can't you fix it? Not an owl, a crow, but don't touch, it's full of germs, must have been a cat.

  This would be a good moment for a footnote, to explain how whole futures came into being in Zach's struggle for compass. Qliworlds quantise even as they are born—or before, to translate Wu's third theorem into a simple conjunction. In one Zach will have chosen Laura, in another loneliness. The mind is a reverberant space like the great cathedrals: time hewn from mute bone. Wu, of course, will not turn out to be wrong, merely one of the great sapiens visionaries. Confucius' teachings are still contemplated, Shakespeare's plays performed, Gauss' proofs admired, Darwin's works read, Bach's cantatas sung. Levian causality admits of an infinite variety of organised complexity, unlike fledgling cosmologies. Time, Lev will tell Zach, is the strangest, the subtlest, the most beautiful metaphor of all.

  'Perhaps it's time to move to the next level,' Fabio said.

  'What?' Zach lifted his head, but his eyes were remote, his face like a clock which has stopped.

  'We're ready for serious networking,' Fabio said. 'A lot of people are starting to watch you very closely. And a lot like what they see—the power to inspire, the fierceness, the foresight and ideas and imagination, the mystique. This is it, this is the now-or-never moment to sell you big time as the newest new thing. Everyone is sick to death of the old pol
itical models. You're hot, Zach, you're the start-up in someone's garage that's going blow the competition away. I've been negotiating with Bender, I think he'll be willing to take a leave of absence from Netwind if you talk to him, he's viewed a couple of your meetings but he wants a one-on-one to assess things for himself. Not just the wow-factor, but your smarts and guts and staying power. And mostly whether he can trust you.'

  'Bender's an entrepreneur, someone who's built a mammoth social networking site. Sure he's a wizard, but what does he know about politics?'

  'You've got to be sudsing me. No funds, no politics. You can't power a movement, any kind of movement, without cold, hard cash—and plenty of it. Bender understands money and he understands the new media. We're going to do grassroots the Netwind way: online, friend to friend to friend, quid by quid.'

  'So now I'm viral?' Enough of a smile to suggest Fabio's campaign was working.

  'Not every virus is pernicious.'

  Zach glanced down at his hands. Pernicious . . . vicious . . . malicious. What was it about certain word clusters? Did they carry their own sort of virus? Seditious Janus. Ambitious Fabio. Capricious universe. And he himself the most noxious of all, tainted, infectious, contaminating anyone he'd ever cared about. And Laura called him superstitious?

  'All right,' he said. 'But I need your help first.'

  Fabio held up a warning hand while he adjusted his wrister.

  *****

  After a terse summary of what had happened in Randall's office, Zach subsided into silence for a moment, then did what he'd promised never to do. Better to risk Max's ire (and trust) than his life.

  The room was too small for pacing. On Fabio's second pass in front of the console, he knocked over a bottle of water, which by some miracle of engineering failed to shatter, though it fizzed and sprayed a small amount on its descent. Zach might have snatched it up to hurl at the neural imager, the soundproofed walls, the past; Fabio nudged the bottle with his foot and watched it roll under the washbasin. And watched it. When he finally retrieved it, he made an attempt to twist off the cap. An offer of help would be no help at all. Zach waited till Fabio positioned the bottle carefully on the ledge above the basin, turned on the tap, and ignoring the plastic tumbler, drank from a cupped hand, then plunged his head under the gush of cold water. Ten seconds, twenty. Zach rose and fetched the towel from the rack, laid a hand on Fabio's shoulder, waited again. By the time Fabio was ready to dry his hair, any sign of anguish had been wiped from his cheeks; not from the depths of his eyes, however.

  'A telepath like Mateus?' Fabio asked.

  'Yeah.' Zach reached for the towel. 'Bend down.' Zach began to rub Fabio's head as if he were a child, were Max. With a muffled sound—half sob, half bitter oath—Fabio groped for Zach, and they embraced. Fabio dug his fingers into Zach's back. Clumsy at offering comfort, Zach found himself muttering a few words, stroking a shoulder blade, an upper arm, allowing himself to be clutched in bleak need. The first kiss came as a surprise; the second, coupled with dismay at Fabio's erection. It was rare for Zach to be at a loss in an encounter. Why hadn't he seen it coming?

  Gently, as gently as he could, Zach disengaged himself. 'Fabio, listen, I'm sorry, but I can't . . .'

  'Haven't you ever made love to a man?'

  'Of course I have, but this is different.' He tried to smile. 'You know how messy sex can get when people work together. And imagine what it would be mean if the media—if the Purists—got hold of it.'

  Hair still dripping slightly, Fabio stooped for the towel. He took his time over the job, emerging apparently unflustered, and unembarrassed, from its rough folds. 'It's her, isn't it?'

  Zach shrugged.

  'What the hell do you see in her? OK, she's a looker despite those swimmer's shoulders, and I admit she's got a certain Lolita charm, but you're a cognoscens, you're headed for great things, you're Corvus, for godsake.'

  'That's enough.'

  Fabio plucked the towel from his shoulders, straightening them as though fit to bear the weight of mightiest monarchies. 'One day a wife may be a political necessity, but it's hardly a priority at this stage. And when, she'll have to be an asset, not a liability. You can't possibly imagine that Laura'—the towel, tossed aside, slid from the bench to the floor—'that Laura . . . come on, you're worth fifty, a hundred of—'

  'That's fucking enough, I said!'

  'OK, OK.' Fabio held up his hands, candour plainly mistimed. 'Forget it, my mistake. I'm not being fair, I don't really know her, I apologise. The stuff about my brother threw me, I wasn't thinking straight. Now let's figure out what to do about Max.'

  They didn't have much time; Andy would have to hide every minute under a steganography payload: time is data. Their discussion, stilted at first, each prickly, each weary, circled round and about, the ice thin where Laura was concerned, the water icy. Neither of them believed Randall was bluffing. Neither expected he would be patient. Neither could guess exactly what he knew, but it was imperative (or at least good sense) to assume he knew something. Neither thought a scandal—supposing one could be staged—would stop the Fulgur juggernaut for long; there was a hungry, clamouring queue of Randalls to replace him. And Zach was adamant. 'No way I'll betray a cognoscens. If it comes to it, I'll go underground first.' But even while speaking, he pictured Laura as a pawn or hostage; alternately, Laura spending her life on the run. 'And I've already decided this is my last run.'

  'We're not ready to break with Fulgur,' Fabio said. 'Not yet, anyway. We need their backing, their money. And then there's the little matter of your serum. Litchfield's serum.'

  'Serum or no serum, I'm through with their damned Fulgrid and their damned uploads. Let them assign me to the kitchens. Better still, bog duty. Nothing like the sound of flushing water to refresh your mind.'

  'Don't worry, Litchfield will add a mind-altering substance to your serum. Or strychnine.'

  'No luck with another source?'

  'No.'

  'So you think we ought to tell him?' Zach asked.

  'That wimp? No way he'd risk his own scrawny neck.'

  'Come on, they're his kids.'

  'And his neck. He's so risk-averse I bet he wears a life jacket in two centimetres of bathwater,' Fabio said. 'Tepid bathwater.'

  'The quiet ones can fool you. Look how long he's kept Max's secret, that's not the actions of a coward.'

  Fabio shook his head, on guard not to capitulate too quickly.

  Zach, however, was already convinced. 'He loves his kids. With the right approach, he'll help, I'm sure of it. Any decent lab will be able to produce enough serum once they're given the molecular portfolio. It would have happened long ago if Litchfield hadn't engineered a self-mutating drug.'

  'So what if he's Nobel Prize material. I've studied his profile. Don't take offence, but just because he's Laura's dad . . . I mean, it's understandable that you're trying—'

  'Nonsense! Trust me on this one. He'll do it.'

  'I don't know . . . maybe . . . You're right, though, that if we can break Fulgur's stranglehold on the serum, we'll be in a much better position to negotiate. And Litchfield's undoubtedly easier to manipulate than Randall.' He glanced at his wrister to conceal his smile. A simple strategy, but it worked almost every time. People love to persuade you of your own ideas.

  'You've just given me an idea,' Fabio said.

  'What?'

  'There might be a way to ensure Litchfield's cooperation. Look, I need some time to think it through, do a bit of checking. Not to mention that they'll have Andy transferred to sanitation—on one of the outstations—if you don't start your prerun damn soon.' It was Fabio's sang-froid, so at odds with his fiery Latino looks, which unsettled most of his colleagues. They could never quite tell when he was making fun of them. 'In fact, I'll be obliged to do it myself.'

  'Don't worry about Andy. He was hacking before he was out of nappies. From what I gather, he rewrites the stego manual every couple of months.'

  'Fulgur issues a manual
?'

  Zach laughed. 'It's so well concealed that only he can find it.'

  *****

  Her neck stiff from holding it high the entire day, Laura let herself into the house. Max had loped off to football practice, and she could hear the sound of her mum's viola from the spare room. She needed to collect some of her gear before the meeting, and then do a bit of shopping. It worried her how little Zach had been eating. In sleep his hipbones looked as if they'd tear through his skin at a touch, and though he was beautifully muscled in that understated simu way, an image of the Tollund Man from when they'd done the Heaney poem in school had insinuated itself last night into her consciousness and wouldn't be dislodged. Something like two thousand years ago he died, hanged in sacrifice to the old gods. It was the eerie tranquillity of his face which haunted her, its distinctive features preserved by the bog as though he'd lain down to sleep only yesterday; how he'd apparently accepted his fate without a struggle.

  In the kitchen she located an old lasagne pan which her mum used for extra wooden spoons and eggwhisks and skewers, for all the odd bits and pieces which like your tarnished bangles and tattered friendship bracelets you didn't need any longer but were loathe to discard. As she was filling some dried oregano into a plastic container, the music broke off, and a few minutes later her mother appeared in the doorway.

  'What are you doing?' she asked.

  'I'm going to make a lasagne.'

  Her mother's eyes rested on the container in Laura's hands. 'Haven't you looked in the oven? I've already prepared a fish flan.'

  Laura lowered her eyes and shrugged. There was a short silence.

  'It's for him, isn't it?'

  Laura propped the packet of oregano against the pot of early daffodils on the kitchen table but it fell over, scattering most of its contents across the clean surface. Laura felt herself tense, but instead of raising her voice her mum turned and left the room. Quickly Laura swept the dried herb into a small mound with the edge of her hand, then went to the cupboard for a storage jar.