Corvus

  The pepper spray was burning a hole in Laura's pocket. 'I take it you know Zach is with me,' she said. 'Haven't you spoken to him?'

  'He's busy chasing phantoms.'

  'What?'

  'There's no one here.'

  'Max—?'

  'Your brother's fine, don't worry.'

  'But that video . . . the simus . . .'

  'Simus can act as well as sapiens. Even young ones like Max.'

  A short silence.

  'You know about Max?'

  'It's my job to know. Just as it's my job to protect them.' He waved a hand towards the auditorium. 'So let's save Zach further anxiety. The formula, please.'

  'Given this little charade, how am I supposed to trust you? You wear fancy togs, you sport fancy gadgets, you drive a fancy car, and from what I've heard, you've got a very fancy shot at the top of the corporate food chain.'

  For the first time she saw a flash of real anger cross Fabio's face. 'Don't equate me with Fulgur!'

  She crossed her arms in a stance which would have reminded herself of her mum, had she been looking. Big Mamas come in all shapes and sizes, and whatever else he was, Fabio was Human Resources, someone who saw himself as both connoisseur and mercurial seer, fundi of high-potential startups. Those green eyes of his began to gleam.

  'Where I come from, we don't hurt children,' he said. 'You can trust me because Zach does. Because the point of this exercise is to free the simus from Fulgur's tyranny, eventually to find a workaround for the genetic defect. Because our interests, yours and mine, coincide.'

  'Maybe.'

  'Laura, it's a rare and wonderful privilege to witness a major paradigm shift. Believe me, right now I wouldn't be anywhere else in the scheme of things.' There was no mistaking the fervour in his voice. 'I would never—never—do anything to endanger a single simu.' The almost manic passion of the man. 'You're very young to be a leading actor, and younger still to be an agent of transformation—a fundamental transformation of human life. But it's what Zach wants.'

  She nodded, discomfited by the tightness in her throat, the proximity of tears.

  'Perhaps I'd best show you.' He indicated his wrister. 'Be prepared for a shock.'

  'More shocking than resurrection from the dead?'

  She met and held his gaze. 'You've changed,' he said almost grudgingly.

  Annoyed at herself for wanting his approval, she became testy. 'Zach isn't the only person chasing phantoms.' Let him beg a little for it. 'You, dear Fabio, need to reprogram your Ouija board.'

  'My what?'

  'Wow. You mean there's actually something I know that you don't.'

  'Plenty, I daresay.'

  Damn those eyes! 'Then plug this into your motherboard: there's no serum.'

  'Quite a wicked roll you're on. Under the circumstances.'

  'I'm not joking.'

  He heard out her explanation, then muttered what could only be a colourful phrase in Portuguese. 'The wily bastard,' he added.

  'Who?'

  'Your dad. Jesus, it's always the quiet ones.'

  Without further preamble he played his fingers over his wrister, which by now was making her insanely curious. In an instant, however, the present was forgotten, jolted into a sort of retrograde amnesia by the panorama which unfolded before her, a panorama at once utterly alien and achingly familiar, though glimpsed only for a split second at the smouldering ruins. It was as if she were gazing upon a vision of all the selves she was and could have been, laid out in light. Shock didn't begin to cover it. Nor could she know that this was a baptism very like the immersion Lev would give Zach from a tent in the midst of a blizzard, his however a living singularity in sound.

  Later she wouldn't be able to guess how long she stood there, the narrated self of before and during and after compressed to infinite disorder. Gradually she became aware of Fabio's voice, at first distant and watery, then growing stronger as she began to surface.

  'Consciousness is fundamental to the cosmos, and indistinguishable from it. It's always a matter of concern when a sentient race seems bent on self-destruction, as localised as the event may be initially. Your physicists are just beginning to understand the concept of entanglement.'

  'Who are you?' Laura repeated in a whisper, still awed by a cognitive overload approaching the seizure threshold.

  'In all essentials I'm as human as you. Beyond that there's no answer I can give you which would make sense, not in your language, not without the mathematics. Sometimes, of course, there have been references to angels and the like.'

  'Please, whatever you do, don't tell me that my grandfather's right after all!'

  His sultry laugh. 'Religion is the infancy of self-awareness. What an impatient lot you homo sapiens are.'

  'You mean—'

  'I mean that Zach, and the simus generally, must be protected, and nurtured, or humans will find themselves in an evolutionary deadend. Not for the first time, need I add, on your world.'

  Laura's disorientation was ebbing. 'Yeah, we learned about the Neanderthals in school. Some people think they were smarter than us.'

  'Have you seen pictures of those metal branks once used to bridle slaves and heretics and scolds?'

  'A kind of iron mask?' Laura asked, puzzled by the apparent irrelevance of Fabio's question.

  'Intelligence takes many forms. Sometimes it can be a cage—a stifling, torturous, inescapable mind cage—just like such primitive devices. Believe me, smart, even brilliant as you sapiens can be, you need the simus. They're your future.'

  'Then what about Mateus? Was he really your brother?'

  There was no answer.

  'Fabio?'

  'Fabio?'

  Where had he gone? Her sight now close to normal, Laura caught a glimpse of shadows at the periphery of her vision, caught shadows and whispers, then felt certain she was being watched, but when she shone the torch into every corner and alcove of the lobby, aim wobbling, pulse jumping, the only oddity she found was a vintage zoetrope, still intact, affixed in a niche not far from the staircase. But no Fabio.

  If no one was here, she could call out for Zach.

  She didn't call out for Zach.

  She did, however, refresh her memory, and for one canted moment saw him as she'd first seen him—late for class, leaning into the wind, indifferent to the sheeting rain as if it were no more than planes of grainy light, unsmiling. He lifted his head and his eyes passed over her. 'Look at that,' Olivia breathed, clutching Laura's arm. He stopped—she now realised that he must have been able to hear—and regarded them. Olivia preened at the library window, too self-absorbed to catch the sudden lash of sleet in his eyes before the shutter closed.

  In the long Arctic to come it would have devastated Laura to see their colour darken almost to crow-black, clouded by pain.

  As she made her way towards the theatre doors, steeling herself for the unlikely, the improbable, surely the impossible, she heard, or thought she'd heard, keep telling him—words now so intimate that the threshold between hearing and remembering and confabulating, between herself and the other, seemed as elastic as nilas, that thin, transparent crust of sea ice which bends rather than fractures under pressure. If she repeated the words fast enough, they flowed into one another like frames of a film. Or she could drawl them to a near standstill, so that each sound loosed itself from its auditory moorings. Upon immersion in freezing water a mammal undergoes a powerful autonomic reflex, the diving response. Vital signs—breathing, heartbeat, peripheral blood circulation—diminish to a near-death state.

  Keep. Telling. Him.

  Her dad had been the one to test the ice on the pond before they were allowed to skate. 'I've seen totally unnecessary fatalities during my stint in A&E,' he'd explained. His ardour for exactitude impelled him to add, 'Sometimes, though, we'd get lucky. If you're young and fit, and especially if you keep your head above water, you can survive hypothermia for up to an hour. Once, a boy's arms froze to the ice, and we managed to resuscitate him. B
ut don't count on it. Usually, you die.'

  Zach, do you hear me? I'm not going to let the ice have you. No matter what it takes.

  *****

  Laura couldn't put it off any longer. Her stomach cramping, and her mouth beginning to fill with spit, she placed her ear against the narrow, almost non-existent gap between the double doors. There was nothing she could make out, certainly no murmur of voices. Her own breathing seemed exceptionally loud. With her free hand she patted the bulge in her pocket like a talisman. She'd decided not to go in brandishing a pistol. Keep something back for the last length, Janey always insisted.

  Laura swallowed, tightened her sticky grip on the torch, cautiously pushed the right-hand door open no more than a finger's breadth, and listened again. Still only silence. In just such a silence she'd found two rows of corpses lined up like inflatable dolls. In just such a silence the screen had burst forth with an impossible silent movie. In just such a silence a dead Fabio had appeared behind her in the lobby. She would torch this place herself once she and Zach (and Max?) were away.

  After a quick glance over her shoulder, she nudged open the door and sidled through, her beam wavering in sync with her qualms. Perhaps it would have been best not to advertise her presence after all. She paused, nervously scanning the rows of seats. As before, the torch fell short of adequate, its light swallowed by the rococo folds of darkness. There was a stale, yeasty smell to the air; a morning-after smell. Her sense of walls breathing, cramped limbs stretching, was very strong, and into her imagination came a brazen rumble of laughter. Told you before, better know what you're doin'. The past, sugar, never lies down meekly.

  Laura moved forward towards the top step, the memory of those haunting, silenced faces never more substantial. She'd glimpsed them in dreams, sometimes. Sometimes she'd caught sight of them from the corner of her eye. But over the years she'd become adept at ignoring what she didn't want to think about, didn't want to remember. Sometimes.

  Max wouldn't end up like the boy they'd found in the factory.

  Perhaps because she was afraid—or just perhaps—she was suddenly seized with the desire to thumb her nose at this stupid theatre and this stupid world and all the stupid, insane, incomprehensible, pointless deaths stretching generation upon generation back to a troupe of flea-bitten apes. She descended several steps, aimed the torch at the blank screen, and with her right hand in the shaft of light, formed a deliciously grotesque shadow puppet.

  'So there!' She giggled, waggling the hooked nose.

  A large bird swooped from above to peck at the nose. It missed and struck Laura's temple, a hot, sharp, staggering blow. With a cry she dropped the torch, which rolled out of sight. Not that it would be missed: to the stinging slap of a saltwater breeze, the raw smell of gutted fish and rancid blubber, the screen came to terrifying life. Keep telling him. In a split second Laura's thoughts crossed the stimulus barrier to forever, vivid images of Zach flashing before her eyes.

  *****

  They faced each other in the gloom of the projection booth, where Fabio had tracked Zach. Any equipment had been stripped out long ago, leaving truncated cables, split tubing, and jagged holes to attest to haste rather than regard. Despite the observation window, oppressive dark red walls and a low ceiling shrunk the proportions of the room, though it was in fact much larger than standard for a time when cinema owners were anxious to cram in as many viewers as possible into an auditorium. Flakes of paint and chunks of plaster lay in untrodden dust, the way an ancient burial chamber is no longer of interest once plundered. Several times Zach eyed the overhead projector ducts, unable to shake off the feeling of being watched through mammoth binoculars, and made no objection when Fabio switched his pencil torch to full power.

  'Where's Max?' Zach asked angrily after hearing out Fabio's brief explanation.

  'At my flat gorging on pizza and crisps and some arcane delicacies like marshmallow almond-crunch liquorice ice cream, if I've got that right. All the stuff his mum won't buy. I set him loose in the aisles—virtual, mind you—of my favourite online grocery.'

  'You're out of your fucking skull! There was no reason to stage this farce.'

  'It's worked, hasn't it?' Fabio grinned his grin. 'Come on, a few hours of anxiety are a small price to pay for the formula. I wish it could always be this easy.' He sneezed once, then twice more. 'Jesus, this room is dusty. And look at you, nearly naked and shivering. Let's find Laura and get out of here before you catch a chill. Has she got the formula, or have you left it in a pocket?'

  Hugging himself, Zach rubbed one bare foot along his calf, but the friction generated little warmth. Of a sudden the streaks of dirt on his leg, the clump of dust hanging from his big toe, the sartorial elegance of his paisley silk boxers—the irony of Fabio's machinations—struck him as supremely funny, and he thumped his foot to the ground and began to laugh. 'Formula? What formula?'

  'What do you mean?' Despite the note of confusion in Fabio's voice, there was something, the sideways flicker of his eyes, the timing maybe, something Zach couldn't put a name to, but something, which stirred his disquiet. Then he caught the flash of light in the observation window, OK, Fabio had merely seen it first.

  'That's a torch,' Fabio said. 'Laura must be down there.'

  They crowded before the dingy pane of glass, almost opaque with dirt and fly specks. Distastefully Fabio brushed the desiccated corpses from the narrow sill. 'Where do they all come from?'

  An instant later he was shoved aside. Zach drew back and made a fist. The glass shattered as much from the impact of his cry as his blow. 'No! Laura!' Then, knuckles bleeding, he catapulted from the room. Fabio moved to the broken window and gazed down at the scene below, a smile on his lips. By the time Zach reached the auditorium, the future would have vanished without a trace. And even if he'd glimpsed a figure, he'd have seen what his mind told him to see—an attacker with a large backpack, maybe a cape. Yet no marks or wounds, the kind of puzzle Zach himself might have appreciated under other circumstances. In preparation for an emergency call, Fabio removed his mobile from a pocket and turned to leave. He didn't want Zach wondering at the delay, though there was really no need to hurry.

  *****

  Laura watches as Zach kneels by her sprawled body. How beautiful he is, those magic eyes, that hair, the tender arc of his back, she finds it hard to breathe. Watches as Fabio comes dashing up. Watches as Zach tries to find a pulse. 'She's not breathing. Oh god, she's not breathing.' Watches as Fabio shakes his head. 'I'm sorry . . . so fucking sorry . . . What happened? All I saw was a flash of light.' Watches as he flips open his mobile and keys in a number, touches Zach's shoulder, speaks. Watches as Zach bends to begin artificial respiration.

  'Come on, Laura,' Zach says, 'breathe. Just breathe. We're getting help.'

  Laura is still watching when she feels the first feathery touch on her face. She holds out an arm. It's beginning to snow, light snowflakes which soon thicken and obscure the screen.

  Chapter 48

  'You are here to become that Corvus,' the birdman says.

  Zach shrugs off his hood, the wind slicing through his jaggedly shorn hair as though determined to bareblade him. He misses Stella terribly; get real, she'd have told this creature with an earthy laugh. It's easy to picture the flash of her scissors, clipping the overzealous wings.

  Pani thrusts his chin forward like a stolid little wooden nutcracker, the Christmas ornament sort. 'Mr Bird,' he says, 'what's an avatar?'

  'Pay no—' Zach says, but the birdman interrupts. 'One of your spirit selves. Come, I'll show you.' At a flick of his wrist, the dragon pillar reproduces a solemn, mussed-hair, chipped-tooth likeness of Max, vivid as ever despite the amnesiac snow. Zach grabs for Pani, who wriggles free to run across the circle and press his face against the ice. Surprised, 'It's not cold at all.' And then, excitedly, 'I can hear him!'

  'Pani, don't,' Zach says. 'He's not real, it's a trick.' Moving to draw the boy away, he stops, not at the whisper of a remembered
voice, not at the unfurling of wings, not even at the birdman's raised hand, but at the change in Pani himself.

  'He's calling me,' Pani says.

  'No!' Hastily Zach steps backwards, hoping that this will reverse whatever has been set in motion. But as the air around him glitters, Pani continues to fade. 'Pani, look at me! Pani!'

  For a moment it seems to work. Transparent as frost on glass, Pani throws a glance over his shoulder, then fetches halfway round. Ice can carry sound with astonishing clarity, even over great distances.

  Play your music, Zach.

  A gust of wind blows loose snow across Zach's face, obscuring his vision with the dazzle and sting of a prism ground to fine powder. Through a prickle of tears he sees the snow rime to Pani, rendering him as delicate as wind chimes, as fine-blown as a crystal bauble. Indistinct now except for his fiery, speaking eyes, he makes no attempt to speak, but the supplicating notes of a clarinet tremble in Zach's ear.

  'Don't—' Zach breaks off, fearful, as he's always been fearful, of a future riven by fearful symmetry. After a moment he ventures a hesitant 'Pani,' then falters once more. He's right to fear. Pani is shaking his head, colour and texture returning to his skin, while Max, a grieving and lonely and vulnerable Max, is beginning to waver, waver and dim.

  Let It Be

  'Weigh your choices carefully,' the birdman says.

  Oh yes, carefully. Fulgur uploads carefully selected participants in the rehabilitation trials, each a volunteer with full parental consent. All other individuals a facilitator will encounter are modules carefully designed and programmed for verisimilitude.[1]

  Zach chooses not to wring the birdman's neck, most carefully. After brushing phantom hair from his eyes with a small, bitter laugh, he scoops up a handful of snow for one last snowball, but the crystals are too cold to compact. Without taking his eyes from Pani, he lets the snow trickle from his hand. He lets it trickle until the boy is gone, leaving only a memory to shimmer against the outspread wings.